Authors: Jessie Cole
It was late and I was still wide-eyed, musing in my bed. I guess I’d often thought of my brothers at night, guessing where they might be, but lately I’d been imagining other things too. I started picturing the city, what it might be like. In my mind it was all tall buildings looming, people scurrying like ants, but if I went down to street level there were coffee shops and bookstores, teeming with life. Galleries and restaurants and all those pretty girls. I didn’t really know anything much, but that was the sketch I was forming. I tried to shake my thoughts away, just a flick of my head, but then I started up imagining my home.
I thought of it with a circle around it, like the ring that forms on the water when you throw in a stone. And in my mind the ring was growing wider. I started thinking what it would be like if the ring spread so it included my town—all the old shops, even the sad motel right on the outskirts. And then if it got a little wider, stretching even more, it would include the sugar mill too, and all those other farms and things farther out that I’d never really seen.
I lay there trying to calculate how wide the circle would have to get before it included the city too. And all the things between here and there that the circle would encompass. All the paddocks and scrub, the houses and cars, the factories and mills. Everything. I kept thinking of those rings, expanding over the water until in the end they disappeared. And then was everything one? It was the type of question that had no answer, or not one that I could grasp.
I wondered about that sugar mill in my vision of trees and farms and hills. I pictured it at night, lit up and eerie, huge metal pillars sputtering smoke into the dark sky. Under my covers the whole thing seemed ominous. Imagining the sugar mill made me think of Hamish and that place between my breasts started up its aching. I pressed there with my fingers, like I had the nights before, trying to soothe myself, release some of the hurt.
There was a tapping at my window then, and I jumped up, thinking it was Anja. Sometimes she’d sneak down in the middle of the night, but usually she just crept inside. The window was too high to reach from the ground outside.
I got up and peered out the glass. It was Billy, holding up a stick. I opened the window a little further so I could poke my head out.
‘Mema,’ he called up, trying to be quiet, ‘you’re awake.’
I had to smile. If I hadn’t been awake his tapping would have woken me. I didn’t want my mum to get up, so I pointed to the door. ‘I’ll come out,’ I whispered down and he nodded, letting the stick drop.
I slipped on a skirt and crept out, down the front steps till I was standing on the grass.
‘Whatcha doing?’ It was a funny enough question the last time he asked. I didn’t answer, just stood there watching him struggle with what to say next. I could hear Blossom shifting around in the laundry, and I didn’t want her to start whining, so I walked away from the house, out of earshot.
Billy didn’t say anything, he just followed.
We stood there in the darkness, staring out into the black. There was a slender moon, and though I could see the outline of the hills in the distance I couldn’t see Billy’s face.
‘How far away is that shack on Old Gordon’s place, do you think?’ I asked, alert to all those feelings I’d tried to shove inside. I wondered if they could come out with Billy. If it didn’t much matter who caused them, if they could be spent with someone else.
‘Don’t know, fifteen minutes maybe.’ I knew he was trying to see me through the dark. ‘Why?’
‘I want to go there.’
‘Now?’
‘Yeah,’ I whispered back, reaching out and taking his hand. He stood there a minute, his fingers in mine, like it wasn’t a development he had planned for. My heartbeat started up, quick and lively, and it made me think that it might work. Maybe I could transfer all that feeling from one person to another.
‘Lucky I brought my torch,’ he said after a few taut seconds, switching it on with his spare hand. And without another pause we set off.
Once we’d entered the shack I knew things would go wrong. Under the beam of the torchlight, we looked around at what we’d found—broken windows and sagging floors. Furniture so damaged it had been abandoned years before even by wild, rummaging children. Pieces of debris, so long forgotten they weren’t even sentimental. Everything was utterly without life.
All the humming in my veins—the deep heat that I couldn’t stop rising inside me while we walked—was dissipating in this place. Glancing across at Billy, I wondered what to do. I knew so little of seduction, the ebbs and flows of passion.
‘It’s no good in here,’ Billy said, dropping my hand. ‘It’s no good.’
I nodded and suddenly felt I couldn’t breathe, like all the oxygen had vanished. I could see Billy’s expression darken, even in the dim torchlight.
‘You’re scared of me,’ he said, out of nowhere. An accusation. ‘Nothing’s even happened.’
He crossed the room and was out the slumped frame of the door, all before I could even turn. I followed, stumbling through the dark, wondering what I had ever seen in this shack, wondering how I’d created it as some sanctuary in my mind. Billy stood outside in the moonlight leaning against a crooked wooden post, his face in shadow, torch switched off. I could only see the outline of him against the dark sky. Watching his supple body, the silhouette of his jaw, I felt that flicker of heat rise inside me.
Again, I wondered what it was that I was supposed to do with it.
‘Billy …’ It was strange to be standing out in the bare paddocks at night trying to throw myself at a man I barely knew. ‘I …’
I didn’t know how to explain it. All those things I’d seen from the outside for so long but never been within. The slide of a finger against my skin, a breath at my neck. I was perfectly capable of putting two and two together, but lost as to how to actually begin, even there under the cover of night. I willed him in my silence to step towards me, but he didn’t. I wondered if it would always be this way. If I would always be filled with longing and never assuaged. I wondered if all women were like this. Filled to brimming with need, but always left wanting.
‘It’s not that big a thing, Mema,’ Billy said, kicking at the dirt. ‘No big deal.’
I didn’t know what he meant. I could feel my breath inside my chest expanding as though I was only breathing in.
‘It’s not?’ I choked out.
‘Just a bit of fun, you know?’
Even though he kept his face down, I could see in the moonlight he was glancing up at me. Eyes hidden but watchful.
I didn’t know. I knew nothing. ‘Maybe for you.’
‘Who you saving yourself for?’
Hamish came into my mind, unbidden. I closed my eyes, trying to shut out his form.
‘It’s him, isn’t it? The stranger.’
It was as though he could smell my need upon me. I shook my head. It was a private thing. The insides of my mind my own.
‘He’s not right for you, Mema,’ Billy said. ‘It’s all wrong.’
I knew that but it didn’t help.
‘He’s so slick. You know how many girls he’d have up his sleeve?’
I nodded there in the dark. I knew that too.
‘Does he even want you?’
He stepped towards me and I faltered then, needing something to lean on. I moved backwards until the rough wall of the shack was behind me. He stopped a second, watching me, and then he stepped up closer, breaching the gap.
‘I want you.’ He said it real quiet, quiet but sure. ‘And I don’t care about any of the stuff he would.’
I didn’t understand what he was getting at.
‘I don’t care about your mum, all that shit she does.’ I felt myself stiffen but he kept on whispering. ‘I don’t care about Sophie and whatever crap about me she whispers in your ear.’ He was suddenly very near. ‘I don’t even care about your fucking dodgy foot. I
like
it.’
His words were rough and they rubbed against my heart like sandpaper, but in that moment it didn’t seem to matter. I wanted something and I wanted it bad.
‘Billy,’ it was hard to get the words out, ‘I don’t know what to do.’
I could hear his breath in the quiet moonlight. He was right in front of me, holding out his hands and grasping onto mine. His fingers were dry, and I couldn’t help but imagine them as I had before, touching me like I was clay. Even though it was dark, in my mind I could see every black hair on his knuckles, every furrowed line that crisscrossed his brown fingers. It struck me that maybe I’d never really looked at his hands. Maybe all the images I held in my mind had come from some other place. Maybe nothing inside my head was real at all.
Slowly, I pulled my hands from his and looped my fingers around his wrists. The skin on the top of his hands was rough beneath my thumbs but the underside was soft. In my mind I could see his blue veins pressing against his skin. I slid the pads of my fingers along his wrists, trying to learn him with my touch. His face was still in shadow, but I could feel something within him shift. He seemed suddenly kinder. I ran my fingers down the undersides of his forearm, imagining his strength. He juddered a little, but he didn’t pull away.
‘Ticklish,’ was all he said, and I wondered if he was impatient. I wondered if he’d done this all a million times before.
‘I’ve never done it when I’m not drunk.’
I knew I didn’t need to say that I’d never done it at all.
It was irksome, that pause before action, that endless, stilted moment of waiting. I wanted to help him but I didn’t know how. Almost millimetre by millimetre he bent his head towards me. The scrape of his beard against my skin was soundless, but it felt loud in my head. I wished I could see him, then maybe I wouldn’t be so scared. He moved his cheek against mine, tenderer than I’d expected, and then inched his mouth closer until his lips brushed the tips of mine. He breathed my name, a whisper, but the humming in my mind seemed to swallow the sound. I’d lost my moorings and I felt myself gripping his arms.
‘Don’t be frightened,’ he whispered. ‘I won’t hurt ya.’
There was no reason to believe him, but there I was doing just that. He twisted one of his arms free of my grip, slowly, so I wouldn’t get a start, and then he moved his hand across me, in a lingering sort of way, touching me in places I’d never been touched. I was holding my breath, still stuck in some kind of waiting. Hoping against hope that it was worth waiting for. He slid my skirt up, and I stood there still clinging to that one arm. He groaned then and pressed himself against me, and I could feel all his hardness at once.
‘It’s different when you’re not pissed,’ he whispered against my ear. ‘You can feel it more.’
I was glad for him, but I didn’t know if it was true for me, having nothing to compare. I could sense his pleasure, as though through glass, but I couldn’t feel it myself. He tugged his arm free of my grasp and lifted my skirt there in the darkness, pushing my underpants down. I didn’t do a thing to hinder him. He pushed himself against the bareness of me and then he pulled back a little and unzipped his pants. Tussling around, he struggled to get himself free. I tried again to imagine I was the clay and his hands were shaping me, but now he’d gotten this far, he’d stopped touching me, there was only the press of his hardness against me and the rough wall at my back. I let go of something in my mind, something I was holding, and I let his body do its thing. All the tugging and pressing seemed outside me, I floated somewhere above. There was a tearing kind of pain, but I don’t think I made a sound. He’d lost me along the way to the starry night sky. I don’t know how long it took, maybe a few minutes, maybe more. But I knew when he shuddered against me that he was done.
‘Sorry, Mema,’ he whispered, voice all raspy. ‘I didn’t mean to … come inside you. It just … happened.’
What could I say? I’d been around sex long enough to know far better. It wasn’t entirely his fault. He stayed pressed up against me and I could feel his bristly cheek brushing my neck. It was suffocating, that feeling, and I fought the strongest urge to push him away. Finally he stood up straighter and adjusted himself in the dark. Whatever had been between us moments before was gone. My skirt collapsed back down around my legs and I could feel the wet stickiness of what he’d left dribbling down my thigh. I didn’t know where my underpants were and I couldn’t see anything much in the dark. I had a vision of them, abandoned outside the shack, strewn amongst all the forsaken things, and I couldn’t help feeling that if anybody saw them they’d know in an instant they were mine.
‘Maybe we should go to the chemist. Get that morning-after pill?’ Billy said. ‘I could take you in tomorrow, before work, soon as it opens.’
I imagined walking into the pharmacy to ask for such a thing, all those eyes upon me. The knowns and unknowns colliding there in that small-town store. Every face familiar and all of them reflecting back at me who they thought I was. The lame girl needs the morning-after pill. You know, the one with the potter mother? I couldn’t see Billy’s face in the dark, but I could picture it. He was holding firm. I knew it was a brave thing to offer. To take me to the chemist. It made me see he was a certain sort of man. I leaned forward and hugged him then, just gave him a big squeeze.
‘It’ll be okay,’ I said. ‘It’s not the right time.’
I thought of my cycle, when I would bleed, and I hoped I was right.
He stood there holding me, gingerly. ‘You sure?’ he said, but I could sense his relief.
There was no way I was hobbling into that pharmacy, even with Billy at my back. I nodded against his chest. It was comforting, the size of him. His heart beat beneath my ear. After a bit he pulled himself free and I wished again that I could see his face.
‘We better go.’
I shrugged, ’cause in that moment everything seemed fleeting.
‘I’ll walk you home.’
I shook my head, I didn’t need that. ‘I’ll be okay.’
He peered at me in the dark. ‘Alright, but you take the torch,’ he slipped it into my hand.
I nodded. Now he’d moved away from me, I wanted him gone.
‘Well, see ya then, Mema,’ he said, leaning down to kiss my head.