Authors: Kelli Bradicich
Chapter Five
Brooke
Waves crashed along the soft sand. The beach was deserted for as far as Brooke could see. In her t-shirt and Tinkerbell underwear, she let the water suck and sip at her ankles. Her head throbbed and with every yawn she felt a tired crackle run through her brain. For a moment she was content to watch David belly flop over the waves, coming up behind them flicking his hair into wild styles.
Bobbing in the green calm, h
e beckoned to her. She nodded and trudged out to him, standing on tip toes as the waves battered her knees, thighs and hips. The wet shirt clung to her skin, goading her to give in and dive.
The water clear
ed the cobwebs from her mind and helped relieve her headache from lack of sleep. Body surfing, David sailed towards her, his face poking out of the waves. She cheered him on, deciding to plunge in and swim out, watching for a wave on the verge of breaking. She caught the first one. He was on the shore waiting for her, and helped her up. Laughing, they played in the waves like seals. No one was there to see them. They were at peace, lost in an alternate moment in time.
It was hard to stop, but exhaustion eventually set in. T
hey dragged themselves up the beach and flopped down on the blanket below the dunes. Brooke smothered herself with sunscreen and offered it to David. He slapped a bit across his shoulders and face.
She settled on the blanket
. Realising she had been looking at him too long, she pulled her gaze away and fixed it on the dry sand at the blanket edge. She let it drizzle through her finger. “Can you believe we’ve done this?”
“We haven’t done anything yet
.”
“But after all this time and planning, we’ve actually left it
all behind.”
David scratched his nose and looked out at the sea
. “Yeah,” he agreed, “But it’s only the beginning.”
“This is what it’ll be like all the time on an island, won’t it?” she said.
“I don’t think they have surf.”
Her
stomach fell.
“Maybe we’ll find a surf beach somewhere,” he said. “Just not all the islands
have it.”
For a moment, the world around them blurred, and the sea gulls and surf faded into the background. David had a way of looking at her, like no one else ever had. It was like he really saw her. And the small smile it came with made it known he loved what he saw. He reached out and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear
, forcing her gaze to hold his. He touched her cheek. And she couldn’t help but feel full, and wonderful, strong and alive. It was like they were caught in the same wave of energy. It was a way of checking in, making sure each other were okay. They both had a lot to deal with. But they always had each other.
Sometimes, it was hard for Brooke to look him in the eye. Love hurt
s when you aren’t used to it. A lot of people don’t know it’s hard to receive love when you haven’t been raised with it. Uncertainty rears up like a burn from deep in your gut, and pushes you back like something putrid, ugly, worth nothing to nobody. Brooke hated that she was always the one who came off cold. But she had to look away first. If David did, it would cripple her. Brooke wished to be brave enough to tell him about it one day. Somehow, it never seemed right. The shallow words and the pitiful ideas seemed straight from victimhood 101. On the surface, David’s life was far worse than hers. He was beaten. It was bad. She saw the bruises. But he knew under the sickness of it all, his Dad loved him. His mum did too. He knew enough about love to show her how it felt, sometimes. In her life, where feelings were rarely shown and her thoughts were rarely known, there was an emptiness that a person couldn’t imagine unless they had to sit in it endlessly. One day when she was really brave, she knew she would tell David this. Her hope would be that he would hear her, find a tiny grain of it to understand and love her all the more for her honesty.
When the moment became too intense,
Brooke pulled a corner of the blanket over her face, playfully pushing David back. She looked out over the ocean. “Can you believe we’re here? Made all these plans for years and years and finally left.”
“
I didn’t actually think we were planning. I thought we were just fantasising.”
She sat up on her elbow
. “As if.”
He laughed and shook his head, “
Who cares. We’re here and we’ve got a long way to go if we stand a chance at pulling off that fantasy.”
David dug in his bag
and pulled out his sketchbook and Faber-Castells.
“Do you know what’s great about all of this?”
“I’m sure you’re going to tell me.”
“Where ever we go, we can openly be friends.
No more hiding it. No more ignoring each other.” She smiled to herself. That would be the greatest part. As they hit their teens, they learnt to hide their friendship from her mother and father and his father and everyone else in town for that matter. The only one that knew was his mother. She was the only one who thought it was okay. His mother wasn’t as caught up in the family war. “We did the right thing,” she said.
She listened to the familiar clinking of the pencils, the rasping sharpener and the paper being flipped over and smoothed. In that moment, everything felt right, right enough to relax. As she drifted, she murmured, “Draw me something. I want to remember this.”
***
David
Back on the road,
David couldn’t help looking down at her. She lay with her cheek nuzzled against his thigh. He wished his jeans were clean. From time to time, he rested his hand on her shoulder, unable to stop his thumb from stroking the downy hairs on her lightly tanned skin. Sometimes it happened without him even realising it.
David felt he could never flaunt his friendship with Brooke in his father’s face. He had in Brooke what his father once had with her mother. Only David couldn’t cross the line with Brooke, for fear of losing her, for fear of dragging her into a life of hard struggle and misery.
When his father messed up for the last time, getting his mum pregnant, he really gave her a chance to get away. But she didn’t go far enough.
S
he married the first man that her father found with a head for the family business. It was the right guy for her family. He’d transformed the family business into an empire. Brooke had a lonely life but it was stable and she could make a future for herself if she was smart about it. Now he was destroying any chance of that by taking her away. He was as bad as his father. Worse, really.
Red and blue lights filled the cab of the
ute. But it was the siren that seemed to wake her. She sat up with a start, her skull connecting with his elbow. “Ah,” he moaned, but more concerned with the rear vision mirror. He swerved narrowly missing a curve.
“W
e’re in trouble,” she said to him. “Pull over.”
“No.”
“They want us to pull over.”
David took the bends, a little faster but still under
the speed limit. The road dropped away to the left.
“We haven’t done anything.”
“Well, let them tell us that. If we don’t stop, we’ll end up on one of those stupid criminal shows.”
“For not
hing? That’s hardly entertaining.”
“It’s probably just the mud on the number plate thing. If we stop now they’ll let us rub it off.”
“It’s clean.”
“Were you speeding?”
“This thing can’t go over 80.”
“God, David
. Stop.”
David fel
t a sweat break over his top lip. His hands slipped on the wheel. “What if they know who we are? If we stop, they’ll drag you back home. Do you want that?” But that wasn’t really what was going through his mind.
“They’re going to catch us.”
“They haven’t shot the tyres out yet.”
“This isn’t a
freakin’ movie David.”
When he saw her grip the seat, he slowed down a little,
but then had to change down gears. They headed up an incline and the road widened into double lanes. In his mind David saw them pulling up beside him, swearing, cursing, telling him he was worth shit and to pull over. He saw himself, flick the steering wheel effortlessly to the left, breaking through the barrier and soaring high in the sky. Before they crashed down the hillside, Brooke would clasp onto him. He would take her with him. There wouldn’t be enough time to ask why. With a pang, he wondered if she was really safe with him, if she should be there with him at all.
With the help of the
mirrors, David watched the police take the inside lane. When they pulled alongside them, he dared to look down on them. The cop in the passenger seat frowned. Beside him Brooke sank down in her seat groaning. But then the police pulled out in front. They cruised up the highway with no sign of stopping.
He let out a sigh of relief. “I thought
it was because I didn’t have my ‘P’ plate,” he lied.
“Is it in the back?”
He gave her a sideways glance. “I don’t have my Ps.”
“
But you said you passed your test.”
“No I didn’t.”
“Last year remember. I gave you the money. You got your licence.”
David
shrugged. “Don’t remember.” He winced when she punched him in the arm, deadening it.
“I paid for it
,” she snapped.
They drove in silence, watching the police car take the curves on the road across the valley.
“I hate the way you lie to me David.”
“Mum needed the money that week.” He felt the heat rise up his neck. “I didn’t lie to you. You just assumed I
got them. I could drive anyway. It’s a waste of time, farm boys going for licences.”
He saw her eyes scanning the scenery, as though
the hills were her memories of that time, and let her wonder.
“So, why aren’t I the one driving?”
“You can’t handle this thing. And we don’t have ‘P’ plates anyway. So you’d still be breaking the law.”
***
Brooke
The highway was smooth
after recent road works. Still, with its bad suspension, the farm ute bounced along. Brooke had a bottle of pink nail polish pinned between her thighs, desperately trying to paint her nails.
The polish smudged along her thumb.
“Shit.”
She caught David
look at her sideways, then back to the road.
Brooke
gave up. She screwed the lid on tight, stashed the bottle into the drawstring bag that held her collection. It had taken her years to find all the right colours and master a good manicure. The last thing she needed was a rough car ride to destroy her reputation.
She held her thumb up. The sparkles glitter
ed less on her skin than her nail.
“I can’t believe you bought all that shit with you
,” David muttered.
Brooke
rubbed at the smudge, then gazed out the window at a flock of sheep grazing.
“Aren’t you going to fix
your botched nail job?” he snapped.
Brooke shrugged. “I feel sick.”
“It’s from looking down.”
She leaned her forehead against the cold glass window, until the
next big bounce and her temple cracked against it. “The suspension in this piece of shit is shot.”
“That’s not the only thing
,” he mumbled.
“Don’t be grumpy. Life is good, isn’t it?”
Chapter Six
Brooke
“Do you think people in this country pee all over the floor of their loos at home? How hard is it to aim?” Brooke tiptoed around the muddied tiles, eyeing off the toilet. She wasn’t game enough to step into the cubicle.
“Dad peed in a cupboard once. Thought it was the bathroom
,” David replied, cutting tufts of his hair and letting it drop in the sink. “At least these people get the right room.”
Wads of wet toilet paper caked the floor. “Who lives like this? I can’t
stand it.”
“We need a McDonalds. There’s always a clean toilet there.”
“How far away are we from one of those?”
Shrugging, he handed
her some clippers and pulled her over to the mirror. “A number two,” he instructed, drawing an imaginary line around the middle of his head.
“I’m not cutting my hair.”
“I didn’t ask you to cut your hair, did I?” he said, the corner of his mouth arching in contempt. But then, his face softened, he bent over the sink, “A number two please.”
She looked down at the long stray hairs in the sink and noticed all these dark smudges
across the tiles, “Is that blood?”
“
Get your mind off hygiene and fix the rest of my hair, Brooke.”
She noticed the veins pop out of his forearms as he clamped down on the porcelain,
and thought it best to start clipping. It couldn’t be easy sacrificing a head of hair that he spent his days hiding behind for a short back and sides. While she worked, she lifted clumps away from the nape of his neck, noticing raw bald patches. Another injury from last night’s fight with his dad she assumed.
When she was
finished, he looked in the mirror.
“Hang on, the back’s uneven.” She took the scissors from him and cut a careful line. She peered around him and
met his eyes in the mirror. “You don’t look like you.”
David took the scissors out of her hand and lifted the longer bits on top
, trimming it back further. Then he wet his hand, flattening a part in the middle.
“Nah
. You can’t, it’s dorky.”
He ignored her.
“So what are you going to do with yours then if you’re not going to cut it?”
She watched his hair swirl around the sink and
get caught in the plughole, took one look at herself in the mirror, and said, “I can’t go short.” She reached for the comb discarded on the bench, rinsed it under hot water and dragged it through her hair, separating it in two. “Braids will do.”
“That’s it?
Braids?”
“
Cheer up. I’ll french braid. No-one would ever expect me to do that to myself.”
All she wanted was to show him she was capable, ready to live this new life, and more than willing to make it better than ever. If only he wasn’t so down on everything.
***
David
“Bacon and eggs with the lot, and pancakes.” The waitress winked as she laid the plates in front of them. “Tuck in.”
David ran his hand through his cropped hair
. She was winking at him. When Brooke cleared her throat and flicked a serviette across her lap, he returned his attention to her.
She stacked her fork with her first bite of pancake
, “She could be your mother,
as if
she’d want to jump you.”
“I wasn’t thinking that.”
“Crap you weren’t.”
“What’s it to you anyway?”
“I couldn’t give a shit. Just eating my hot fluffy pancakes, better than Macca’s,” she said, holding a full fork high, one eye brow raised. “Want some?”
“You can be such a bitch sometimes.”
“I was offering you pancake.”
“Get used to it. Outside of home, we will meet other people. They won’t know me as
David Banks.
They will talk to me. I won’t be all yours anymore.”
She shook her head, sipping on a milkshake.
Maybe, he was right. The last thing she wanted to come off was as a needy, jealous girlfriend. They weren’t even together. “You can look at anyone you like.”
“
That
sounds convincing.”
“You’ve got no idea what goes on in my head.”
He slapped his bacon and egg in between toast and took a huge bite, chewing. He couldn’t work her out.
She ate more of her pancake one handed, playing with the condensation on the silver milkshake cup
with the other. “I want a clean toilet.” She winced inwardly. There she was again,
needy
, even with the change in conversation.
“You really need to cut your hair or dye it or something. The way you are to us right now – you’re a big liability
,” David said.
“I’ll wear a hat.”
“You’re a country
princess.
People will be looking for you.”
“You didn’t seem to give a shit about that this morning while we were playing around on the beach wasting time.”
He nodded. “We were in the middle of nowhere.”
“Giving them all time to catch up and find us.
If that’s what they will do. We’re both old enough to leave home. It’s not that much of a drama. No one’s going to bother chasing me down. What are they going to do when they find me? Stuff me in the back of a police van? Maybe that’s what you want, to get rid of me, so you have absolute freedom. Don’t want the girls thinking I’m your girlfriend or anything. I mean now that you’re free you can have anyone. You’re not
the
David Banks
anymore.”
“And if you stick with me you’ll be doing it tough and you won’t be the pampered
country princess
.”
“Yep
. Absolute freedom. That’s what you want,” she said, pushing her plate away.
He pushed it back to her. “Eat it.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“We can’t afford to waste food.”
She reached down for her mobile phone, and turned it on. “So, we’ll buy some fresh bread and jam for lunch and maybe some more biscuits and apples. I saw they’ve got some groceries where you pay for the petrol.”
David nodded
, sopping up some egg with the edge of his sandwich. He swiped the mobile out of her hand turned it off and pocketed it. It felt hot with information. “I told you not to touch it, unless you want them to talk you into going back.”
She picked up her fork
again and cut into the pile of pancakes, dipping into the maple syrup. “So you want me with you then.” She smiled.
“If you want to be with me.”
“Together then?”
David felt his mouth go dry
. He shifted in his seat,
What am I doing?
“I’m still busting for the loo,”
Brooke said, swapping his empty plate for hers so he could finish her pancakes.
He forced a smile
. “Can’t you squat over the can for the sake of a pee?”
“Yuk
.” She reached back for an abandoned newspaper, opening up to the cartoons. “Are you sure we shouldn’t check for messages.”
“I wouldn’t listen to them if there are any.”
“There’ll be messages,” she snorted. “The question is how many. I’m guessing 36. What do you want to bet, higher or lower? Let’s break it down to texts and voicemail. Actually, no I change my mind, Mum’s more likely to get more satisfaction out of a voicemail. Better to vent with.”
“It’ll do
our heads in. I’ll wipe them. It might be easier not to think about home for a while.”
“I w
ant to know if they’ve worked out we’re gone.”
“
When you don’t appear at the breakfast table, it’s a dead giveaway.”
“What do you think
’s happening?”
“
Will that make any difference to what we’re going to do for the day or for the rest of the week or year?” The phone felt heavy in his pocket.
She shrugged, sagging
. She propped her head in her hand.
“
Look I’ll go pay and see if I can get some cleaning gear for the toilet for you. I’m sure they won’t mind if I volunteer to do a rough job for them. They might cut us a deal on the bill.”
***
Brooke
She watched in disbelief as the waitress handed him a bucket filled with products,
kissing him on the cheek, before turning back to the line of customers at the register.
God, why doesn’t she just go for the full grope!
“Not enough staff
?” Brooke said to him as he passed her by.
He patted her shoulder
. “Remember all the things I do for you.”
When the door sucked closed behind him, she
sat back and watched the waitress deliver meals and take orders. It was something she considered doing once they’d settled in up north. A fantasy evolved in her mind, where she wore the crisp blue striped uniform, comfortable work shoes and spent her days chatting to the regulars and getting to know travellers. People were always friendlier in holiday places. Everything would work out as long as she and David stuck together. He was all she needed. Even as she thought about him, she felt her breath rattle in her hollow chest.
***
David
At fir
st David sprayed the sinks and toilets, wiping them delicately. With each swirl of the cloth his movements became harder, faster, stronger, larger. Stubborn marks stayed. The walls were caked in blood and shit. The rage began in his gut. His shoulders ached from holding it back.
He filled buckets with steaming hot water and hurled them across the floor and up the walls. Not enough. It was never enough. He could never be enough.
Outside was a high powered hose. Jostling with the swing door, he dragged it in, turned it on. The spray hammered the walls, flooded the floors and soaked him through to the skin. His hair pasted against his skull. It wasn’t the way he wanted to look. It wasn’t the way he wanted to be. It wasn’t him.
All that was left was the mop.
At first he dragged the mop through the lake of water, wringing it out into the bucket. His efforts were small and insignificant. Salty tears pricked at his eyes. His chest shuddered. He kicked the bucket. The mop became an axe.
He stopped, and turned, captivated by the dripping walls. The mop clapped on the tiled floors. He reached into his pocket for
Brooke’s phone. Turning it on, he leant on the sink to read the messages.
***
Brooke
With a bored glance out
the window, she caught sight of David at the ute. Without looking back at her, he climbed in. Black smoke blasted from the exhaust. Her serviette floated to the floor. Knocking several stray chairs flying, she scrambled for the exit.
Hauling
the glass door open she stood in the gravel car park, just in time to see David pull out on the highway. As the dust settled around her, she noticed her bag abandoned at the head of the empty car space.
***
David
David saw her in the rear vision mirror.
She ran into the middle of the highway and stood motionless. As he gripped the wheel, he told himself leaving her was for the best. There was one thing he was sure about. The pain on her face was because of him and everything he had been to her since they were five when he found her hanging from an apple tree in his orchard.
The orchard
belonged to her family now.
***
Brooke
Brooke found her phone in the bathroom sink. The screen was cracked
in the top corner but it was working. The mop was snapped in three pieces and scattered across the floor. A split bucket propped against the door. Brooke wiped the toilet seat and sat down. She dropped her head into her hands and cried. Tightness seized her chest, squeezing every nerve until her body throbbed.
The phone was her only connection to him. But she had to have patience to wait for him to call.
The messages were still there, unread. Her fingers worked as if they weren’t a part of her. The first text flashed before her.
It read
,
call us we’ll come get you both
Yeah right
. Strategy.
She tried another
, davids father dead come home
***
David
David’s eyes searched for parts of the highway that he could make a clean
u-turn. At every driveway and side road, his heart thumped harder and his foot eased off the accelerator. It was a beeping horn or the chugging backfiring ute that brought him back to his senses, forcing him to push on.
***
Brooke
With her bag at her feet, Brooke sat on the log under the shade of the blue gum, counting the cars that flew past,
407, versus the cars that pulled into the station, 46. The sun drew closer to the earth, setting at a size larger than she’d noticed before.