Snake Bite

by Christie Thompson

  ‘Forget it,’ I snapped. ‘If you want a root, go ring up your fat little girlfriend. Remember her?’

  ‘Fuckin’ hell.’ Lukey threw his hands in the air. ‘It’s not like that. We’ve crashed out heaps of times together.’

  ‘Ooooh. So you just want a cuddle buddy to rub your little back until you sleep, is that it? Well, fuck that.’

  ‘Why are you having a massive sargasm?’ Lukey narrowed his eyes. ‘What the fuck do you want?’

  ‘Nothing from you, buddy,’ I spat. ‘I don’t need somebody to cry to.’

  We were both silent for a moment. I could hear crickets chirping and a dog barking in the distance.

  ‘You fucking bitch.’ Lukey shook his head angrily.

  I drew a sharp breath and exhaled slowly. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Forget it,’ Lukey said, turning away from me and skulling his beer. ‘Just go home.’

  ‘I said I’m sorry.’

  Lukey half turned and looked sideways. ‘Yeah, I’m sorry, too.’

  I nodded. ‘So what do you wanna do now?’

  Lukey shook his head and muttered something under his breath.

  ‘What?’ I took a step closer. ‘I can’t hear you.’

  ‘I said, I hate this fuckin’ shithole,’ Lukey seethed. ‘I hate my fat fuckhead brother, I hate my dad . . . Ashleigh’s okay . . . but I hate this fucking town and every cunt in it, y’know?’

  I nodded. I knew.

  ‘Except you, Jez.’ Lukey met my eyes then quickly looked away.

  ‘And Laura?’

  ‘I just met her, for fuck’s sake,’ Lukey cried. ‘How the fuck should I know?’

  ‘So you’re just using her for sex, then? Is that it?’

  ‘Why’re you talking about Laura all the time? Who cares about Laura? I’m talking about me leaving this shithole.’

  ‘Serious?’ I ventured. ‘You’re gunna leave?’

  ‘Fuckin’ oath, I’m gunna take off.’ Lukey stared straight through me with a scary intensity. ‘As soon as I have the cash, as soon as I move some more pills, I’m just getting on a bus and going.’

  ‘When?’ I whispered, feeling a little sick.

  ‘After New Year’s,’ Lukey said. ‘I’ll move a heap of pills on New Year’s.’

  ‘Cool,’ I managed to say. ‘I mean . . . that’s good. I’ll probably get out of here, too, one day . . . I’ll get a job and save up some cash . . .’

  Lukey stepped over and took my face between his hands again. ‘Come with me,’ he said.

  My head spun. I wanted to say, ‘Yes!’, but I was hot and dehydrated and still reeling from the intensity of the kiss a moment before. I wanted him to kiss me again.

  I leaned in towards him, but he didn’t meet me halfway and I ended up resting my head on his shoulder.

  ‘Come with me,’ Lukey whispered again and put his arms around me, crushing me against him until I grunted for air.

  I pulled back and half shook my head. ‘Can we talk about this later? I need to think . . . You want to play some Xbox or something?’ It was probably the lamest thing I possibly could have said.

  Lukey dropped his embrace as if his hands had been burned. ‘Nah, I’m probably gunna go to bed soon, hey.’ He pouted, scuffing his sneaker into a tuft of grass.

  ‘It’s only ten thirty,’ I pointed out, glancing at my red plastic Elmo watch.

  Lukey shrugged. ‘Tired.’

  ‘Okay, that’s cool. I’ll see ya later.’ I didn’t want to leave, but I turned and headed for the gate at the side of the house.

  ‘Laters.’

  ELEVEN

  As I walked home I felt irritated, mostly with myself for being such an angry little troll. I walked a little way and then sat down in the gutter and pounded my palm into my forehead and squeezed out a few angry tears. Stupid stupid stupid, I cringed, remembering the harsh words I’d spoken to Lukey. What totally pissed on my parade was that I couldn’t stop thinking that I just wanted to rewind the whole last scene, to the part where me and Lukey were sitting under the clothesline, our hands on each other’s faces, lips touching.

  I cut across our front lawn, dragging my feet, digging in my pocket for the door key. And then I stopped suddenly.

  Oh. My. Fucking. God.

  The front door was wide open, so was the flyscreen, but there were no lights on in the house. I whipped around quickly to check to see if Mum had driven home; her white Toyota hatchback was parked in the driveway. I took a few steps until I was standing just outside the front door.

  ‘Mum?’ I called. ‘MUUUUM?’

  I hooked one arm around the doorframe and ran my hand along the wall inside the house, searching for the light switch, and turned on the front hall light.

  ‘Mum?’ I pushed the front door open a little wider; I was half shaking and I was aware of my full bladder.

  ‘JESUS!’

  The first thing I saw was Mum’s strappy sandals, strewed half a metre apart in the front hall. The next thing I saw was Mum’s bare feet, at angles, underneath the archway that separated the front hall and the living room. My heart leapt into my mouth.

  ‘Mum!’

  Frantic, I kneeled at her side. She was fully clothed, belly down on the carpet, her arms at her sides. I leaned close to her face. I could hear her breathing. And I could smell the alcohol on her breath. Bundy and Coke.

  You fucking useless cunt!

  I collapsed backwards against the archway frame and pulled my knees to my chest and rocked myself back and forth, choking back sobs. Then I realised I must have looked like I was a bad teen actor in a scene from Home and Away or Neighbours or some other lame soap. I cursed myself because this wasn’t a lame soap, it was real life, so I forced myself to get up and step over Mum. I went to the fridge in the kitchen and found two West Coast Coolers, perfect refreshment for a summer night, I thought, not without some irony. Then I went back to where Mum lay and gently unhooked her handbag from her shoulder and eased it out from under her right breast. I took her packet of Benson and Hedges and forty bucks from her wallet.

  Mum didn’t stir.

  I couldn’t stay at the house. I needed out. I needed to go for an epic walk, something I almost never did because I was lazy and blessed with the skinny gene. So I walked and walked, sometimes I broke into a jog, my head down, my legs pumping beneath me until I reached the eastern edge of Kambah, the foot of Mount Taylor. I crossed Sulwood Drive and slipped under the wire fence and climbed a little way up the hill, stumbling over rocks and clumps of yellow grass in the darkness, until I reached a small clearing. Even from this height, I could see the whole suburb, and beyond to the Tuggeranong Valley, in twinkling lights. It actually looked kind of nice at nighttime. Peaceful, and you could fool yourself into thinking every little light was a family in their lounge room, watching DVDs and eating microwave popcorn, laughing and joking. The view in the daytime gave away what a shithole it really was; houses in orange, white and mission brown lining curvy crescents and cul-de-sacs, ghost-grey and green gum trees providing sparse shade. A sunken pit of suburbia surrounded by yellow hills with a giant muddy man-made lake and shopping mall smack in the centre of the Valley.

  Kambah used to be a sheep station before it was turned into a big fat shitty suburban sprawl in the 1970s. There are two dead obvious clues to this: firstly the old Woolshed that has been converted into a family barbecue area (and a place for kids to get mashed at night-time). Secondly, the flock of metal sheep sculptures that ‘graze’ on the hill in front of the Kambah Village Shopping Centre. If a million monkeys tried for a million years they couldn’t replicate that level of tack, I swear that much.

  I read on the internet that most people in Australia live in suburbs. Automatically I got this image in my head of an infinity of square brick houses, wooden and aluminium fences, lawns, gardens, porches, backyard barbecues. What I wasn’t able to picture was the people who lived there. If I tried, I kept coming back to this family I’d seen on an advertisement on the te
lly, I think it was for a bank or a car or something: mum, dad and three kids, a boy and two girls, standing out the front of a house in the suburbs, all smiling happily, their arms around each other. I think they had a dog, too—a border collie with its tongue hanging out. I don’t know any families like that. I truly fucking don’t.

  I reckon people would have been happier back in those times when Kambah was a sheep station, when everyone lived on farms and stuff. They wouldn’t have had telly to show them advertisements of all the stuff they were missing out on—posh cars, Nintendo Wiis, health insurance, life insurance and the latest value meal from Maccas. I look at the suburbs now and the way people live and it’s like, they go to their boring-as-fuck paper-pushing or menial-labour jobs to make money to go to the shopping centre to buy crap that temporarily makes their lives more bearable so they can face going to their boring-as-fuck jobs. So stupid. At least there are heaps of drugs available these days. But even that doesn’t really work. My mum is living proof of that. Sure, she can forget about her problems for a while when she’s pissed, but when she wakes up the next day she’s still a fat single mum working a dead-end job living in a shitty govvie in a craphole suburb in woop woop Australia, but with a pounding hangover to boot. I don’t want to end up like her. I would rather DIE than end up like her.

  I stumbled back down the hill, half sliding down the gravel-dirt path, ducked under the wire fence and crossed the road back into the suburb. My legs were tired. I was torn between not wanting to go home and needing a place to stay the night. At the end of my street I paused and lit a cigarette. Then I walked over to Lukey’s.

  There was light coming from his bedroom at the front of the house so I tapped on the window.

  ‘Lukey,’ I hissed. ‘It’s me.’

  He pulled back the curtains and looked surprised, then guilty. I looked past him to where Laura sat on the end of his bed, lighter in one hand, bong in the other, looking stoned and uncomfortable as she met my eyes. I felt like I was gunna vom.

  Lukey pulled the window open. ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘What’re you doing here?’

  ‘Nothing, man,’ I said. ‘Just seeing if I could crash, but it’s all good.’

  ‘Serious?’ Lukey shifted his weight and glanced over his shoulder at Laura. ‘You could take the couch? You okay? What’s going on?’

  ‘Nah.’ I shrugged, swallowing hard. ‘Like I said, all gee. I’ll catch ya round.’

  I turned and hurried away into the night before Lukey had a chance to reply, but I must’ve half hoped he’d call after me because the sound of his window sliding shut was like a knife in my back.

  When I got home Mum’d moved from her floor coma. I could hear her snoring as I passed her bedroom. I slipped into bed, still fully clothed, and cried until I fell asleep.

  TWELVE

  Cash and Casey rang my doorbell around eleven in the morning a couple of days later while Mum was out grocery shopping at the Village. Cash was leaning against the doorframe, looking as relaxed as a cat sleeping in the sun. He was wearing black jeans and his denim jacket with the cut-off sleeves, bare-chested. Casey stood a few metres behind him, distracted, frantically working her thumbs on her Barbie-pink mobile.

  ‘Wanna come for a swim down the river?’ Cash asked.

  I rubbed my eyes tiredly, but instantly had butterflies in my stomach.

  Casey looked up from her phone and rushed forward, throwing her stick-thin arms around my neck. ‘I got a new fuckin’ CAR! Well, it’s second-hand, but it’s so haaaaawt. Oh, my God, wait till you see it!’ she squealed excitedly, adjusting the straps of her fluoro-pink bikini top.

  ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Let me get my swimmers on.’

  Ten minutes later we were zooming at one hundred and twenty kilometres an hour in Casey’s yellow Suzuki 4x4 convertible down the Kambah Pool road, past cow paddocks and farmland and the golf course that sat next to Glen Eagles Estate, one of the only rich areas in the Valley.

  ‘Yeeeeew!’ Casey whooped as she accelerated faster, a cigarette dangling from her bottom lip, one hand on the wheel and one hand in her purse, rummaging for a lighter.

  Cash turned his head and grinned at me. I was crammed in the back seat, the wind blowing so hard in my face I could barely keep my eyes open. Ahead of us grey-green escarpments rose against a perfect blue sky dotted with white clouds. We rounded the turn and descended into the reserve known as Kambah Pool. The Murrumbidgee River snaked through shallow canyons, providing picnic areas and swimming holes.

  Casey pulled into a car park, slamming on the brakes. The parking lot was half full with families unloading yelling kids and eskies, and teenagers hanging around cars, puffing on cigarettes and looking bored. The smell of smoking barbecues and sizzling sausages floated up from the picnic areas. Heads turned as Casey, Cash and I walked through the car park: Casey in her bikini, lycra miniskirt and wedge sandals; Cash with his punk mullet and denim; both of them with white-blond hair and golden tan. Then there was me, trailing behind, white as Dove soap behind oversized sunnies, a layer of sunscreen, an old red trucker cap, wearing tight black jeans and a black vintage Blondie t-shirt.

  ‘Let’s hike a little way down river. There’s a pretty good swimming hole,’ Cash suggested.

  The river was looking dismal. It hadn’t rained in months. There were a few stagnant pools of muddy brown water, and rocky areas where the river flowed more freely. I remembered coming down to the Kambah Pool when I was a kid and swimming in clear amber-coloured waterholes where you could see yabbies skittling across the sandy bottom. The bushfires of 2003 had wiped out heaps of the bush and even houses on the west side of Canberra, and the river was closed for swimming for years after.

  Cash, Casey and I marched single file, further downstream. There was a nude bathing area, marked with a sign. From the walking path through the casuarinas, I caught glimpses of old men’s pale fleshy bodies by the water’s edge. I nudged Casey and gestured silently in their direction. Casey clapped one hand over her mouth to smother her giggles.

  ‘Real mature.’ Cash rolled his eyes.

  ‘Take a photo!’ Casey exclaimed, fishing in her beach bag and finding a digital camera.

  ‘Casey!’ I hissed. ‘You can’t take their photo!’

  ‘Not of them! Of us next to the sign!’

  We took turns posing next to the ‘Nude Bathing Area’ sign, Casey puffing out her breasts and pouting, me and Cash pulling stupid faces.

  ‘These are going straight up on Facebook!’ Casey said gleefully.

  We walked for another hundred metres or so and found a small beach near some slow-flowing rapids. Cash ripped off his vest and jeans, wearing only plaid cotton shorts underneath, and sprinted into the shallow water and dived under, then emerged, shaking droplets off his hair like a dog. Casey crinkled her nose.

  ‘I’m going to sunbathe first,’ she said, and spread out her oversized beach towel. She got out the latest copy of New Weekly, a bag of sour gummi worms and a can of Fanta.

  ‘Damn.’ I eyed her sugar stash enviously. ‘I wish I’d thought to bring some food.’

  ‘Lucky I know what a pig you are!’ Casey dug in her bag and handed me a packet of peanut M&Ms.

  ‘You’re the best, Casey!’ I singsonged and threw myself on her for a hug.

  ‘Yeah, yeah . . . You want a magazine, too?’

  ‘Come for a swim, Jez!’ Cash called, perched on a rock on the other side of the river.

  ‘You gunna swim?’ I asked Casey.

  She rolled over and fluttered her fingers next to her eyes. ‘Don’t want to ruin my eye make-up. I’ll just bake.’

  I shoved a handful of peanut M&Ms in my mouth. ‘I’ll be back,’ I told Casey. I stood up to peel off my jeans and t-shirt.

  I could feel Cash’s eyes on me as I waded into the water, carefully avoiding rocks and sticks. When the water was up to my thighs I dived forward and swam to where Cash was sitting.

  ‘Let’s go up the rapids to the next pool.’ Cash pointed. ‘It m
ight be deeper.’

  I shaded my eyes with one hand as I looked up-river. There was a set of small rapids bordered by huge grey boulders separating us from the next waterhole, which was lined with casuarinas and escarpment, inaccessible from the walking track.

  ‘Yeah, okay,’ I agreed.

  We swam against the current to the rapids, and then clambered up the rocks, practically on all fours because they were so slippery. My foot got wedged between two big rocks and I fell forward, banging my knees. I cursed loudly, ‘FUUUUUCK!’ Cash turned around and looked at me, lying face forward over the rocks, the river water hitting my chest and face causing me to cough and splutter. He stuck out his hand.

  ‘Fail!’ he said, laughing. ‘You want some help?’

  I grunted and accepted his hand. He pulled me up and into his body, and wrapped his arm around my waist.

  ‘I’m okay now,’ I said, moving away from him slightly. ‘Just tripped on those stupid rocks.’

  ‘What the hell are you guys doing?!’ Casey screeched from the beach, propped up on her elbows. ‘You’re crazy, Jez!’

  ‘We’re exploring!’ Cash yelled, and grinned down at me.

  ‘Huh!’ I grunted again, my knees still aching from hitting the rocks.

  ‘When we used to come down here years ago the water was so deep you could bomb off rocks and cliffs that were, like, three or four metres high,’ Cash remembered.

  ‘Totally!’ I said. ‘I used to jump off the highest platform at Bombing Rock. My mum would nearly be having a heart attack.’

  ‘You’re a pretty tough chick, hey?’ Cash raised his eyebrows.

  I smiled, all false confidence. ‘I guess not much scares me.’

  ‘You want to keep going?’ Cash gestured up-river.

  We waded upstream, Cash holding out his hand to help me negotiate the slippery rocks, until we reached the next pool of still water.

  ‘Watch,’ Cash said, and climbed out of the water onto a big grey boulder, about two metres above the waterhole. ‘Yeeeeew!’ he yelled as he bombed off the rock, knees tucked to his chest.