Loving, Faithful Animal (10 page)

It's only just dark. Black plumes of flying foxes spilling overhead like fast ink, but their screeching is lost to the sound system; a lot of industrial yellow electrical cables snaking up through a window into the house. Aiden's house, but he's nowhere.

Fireside, people's faces glow like Halloween masks, orange, blue-black in the shadows. Lani searches for Trina amongst the grim versions of girls she knows but not well enough to talk to, or knows better than to talk to. A little coven of them standing back from the eyelash-curling heat. These girls with hair so sleek it moves like liquid, slips from ties. Eyeing her coolly,
We know what you aren't
, before folding back in on themselves.

The borrowed dress clings to her ribs, and underneath there's her heart thudding like a bird trapped in a box, the way she and Ru had caught a sparrow once, pouncing on it in the garage. Placing their four hands on the shoebox to keep the bird from escaping. The feel of it crashing around beneath, hurting itself. Until quiet. And when they finally lifted the box it was gape-beaked and still, stunned, creamy chest puffing with small quick terror.

Will's hand is pressed between her shoulderblades, his flask pressed into her hand. She swallows—rum—and lets him lead her away from the fire, from the crush of people, music she doesn't know and doesn't care to, spikes of her shoes stabbing into the dirt. Stupid. She takes a deeper swallow from the flask, throws a burning blanket over all of it.

They find him far back from the house, past the rusting husks of old cars and the single strand of wire poked through palings to mean
fence.
Aiden. Way back where the party is reduced to a dull throb under the grass, light through the trees. Holding on to a rabbit rifle, his long dark hair silky as a girl's, but he'd once pulled someone's face down into his knee for saying something like that, and they'd come up with their nose mashed. He's careless with the rifle, swinging it as he would a stick. Picking fruit bats out of the sky like he's pointing out constellations: Orion, the Big Dog, the False Cross …

Will says his name.

Hang on a tick.

The crack of the rifle rings out and a black rag drops from the sky, from its flock. The rag flaps around in the long grass, crying, and then is still.

Nobody says anything. Then Will does: You gonna make sure it's dead, or what?

Nup, hate them things. And when Aiden turns, he sees Lani there.

Sorry, he says. Where's my manners? Holding the rifle out to her, Wanna shot?

She shakes her head. I'll be right, thanks.

You never shot? It's easy but. Go on, I'll show you how.

I'm right, she says again. Just wanted to …

All business, hey? He gives her an oily wink, untucking a twenty from his shirt pocket, and Lani swaps it for a handful of the pills that are meant to keep her father calm.

They're—

Not asking what they are.

Careful, Will says. Don't wanna spend your New Year's curled up in bed …

Bit of it, why not? And his laugh is terrible. She hopes they do flake him out, the pills.

Aiden looks at Lani then, dead on, as though he's heard her thoughts. This shit's not my kind of fun though. Oh hey, sorry about your mongrel bitch. Leaving just enough space there between
mongrel
and
bitch
. She blinks at him, holds his eye half a heartbeat before her own gaze wavers then drops. His boots look flayed, laces gone, tongues lolling.

Nah, truly, he says. His voice gone drowsily gentle, almost pillow talk. Accept my condolences and all.

He's not really such an arsehole, Will says, walking her back up to the house. Or didn't use to be. Shit happens, you know.

Behind them the rifle shots resume. She asks what kind of shit, and Will elaborates—by
shit
, he means skidding out one night on a loosely gravelled back road outside Wallan; Aiden's leg folding under the bike and the exhaust pipe melting right through the skin of his thigh. He means hours unconscious on the bitumen, and blood-poisoning, followed by ever-increasing strengths of painkillers; a steady trading up of opioids—pethidine to morphine to heroin—long after the leg had healed around all its pins, skin left like clingwrap where the pipe fell and lay pressed against it all that time.

They climb back over the single-strand fence. A couple of boys are grappling shirtless in a dry plastic kiddie pool, while their friend stands by shouting through cupped hands, Any takers? Any takers?

How are you travelling? Will asks her.

Okay.

A couple of hours, and if you're not having fun we can pike.

Couple hours. Okay.

*

The year starts easily enough, with the spatter of homemade pyrotechnics, all the amateur firebugs lighting up what they've concocted out of lawnmower diesel and fertiliser or whatever, stuff pilfered from their fathers' sheds. Dogs going berserk for miles, yapping their heads off. Something will ignite, she knows. And it does, but when it does it's nothing drastic, only a bottlebrush tree that someone is quick and sober enough to douse with a butchered garden hose.

Lani watches as the bonfire grows to become as big as a room—you could just about live in it—and on the other side, Aiden is licking up one of her dad's pills from an open palm, catlike, then tonguing it into the mouth of the girl beside him. Nerida. Slacked back in a camping chair, all spangly pink tank top and denim cut-offs, looking dreamy. Too many, already. Who is that dumb? Trina had once convinced her to eat warm wax, swearing that it would line her stomach better than cream, and the little fool had gone for it. Afterwards they'd watched her throwing up Veet-laced bourbon into a patch of hydrangeas, telling themselves they had done her a favour of sorts, that she would probably think again in future … But apparently no, she would not.

Aiden catches Lani's eye across the fire. Flashes her a conspiratory sort of smile, like she's in on something, and she looks away.

She's good at booze. Usually she is. Since year eight, smuggling vodka into class in a Fanta bottle, or a ginger ale bottle, bourbon into cola, whatever she could lay her hand to. Sneaking doses through maths—especially maths—just enough to quiet down the panic and let her drift through, failing calculus in a syrupy haze. Inking brumbies and turbulent rivers of song lyrics across the graph paper, so if Mr K looks up she'll look busy.

But tonight she keeps losing herself, mid-sentence. Coming to amongst strangers, in conversations she can't remember the beginning of. People watching her, impatient, waiting for her to hurry up and spit it out. Each time she feels that trapped bird, feels the bat plummeting from the blue-black sky, from its liquid flock. How it fell. How fast. She feels that falling over and over.

Somewhere, she knows each of these conversations is only starting, or hasn't even yet; a secret about time that she'd pulled down with the nitrous gas. She thinks she might be able to get back and eavesdrop on herself, so that she'd know what to answer now.

You can tell, hey, this kid is saying, too close to her face. A stringy, myxomatosis-looking fucker.

What?

Like, the way the skin is peeled back? Away from the bone? A feral cat won't do that. A fox won't do that.

She doesn't want to agree with him. Not on anything at all. It wasn't like that, she tells him, looking over her shoulder, wondering where Will has disappeared to. Across the fire Aiden is helping that girl Nerida up the back steps. No, not helping. Dragging. She's kind of melted on him, being half-danced half-hauled in a wharfie's waltz that takes her through the screen door. Is that right? Doesn't seem right, but no-one's paying them any mind.

I took a photo once, thought I got it, says the rabbity kid. Dead sure that I had it, but it must've moved quicker than the shutter could. Wanna know what I reckon?

He's blinking fast with pink-rimmed eyes. Like he's a camera himself, snapping everything up. She steps away from him and the backyard tilts. Like that ride at Luna Park—what's the name of it, what's the name of it?—when the floor falls away and you're stuck there to the wall. That's how it is.

Whoa. The rabbity kid reaches his arm out to steady her, but she shakes him off. Her legs are quaky foal legs but she walks on them anyway, stumbling between the clusters of drinkers on her way towards the house.

The bath is a dozen bags of servo ice turned liquid: wet cardboard and floating labels, bottles of beer and cider soaked brandless. Lani fishes a bottle out of the soup, bangs the cap off on the edge of the sink. Swallows slow, tasting nothing. Steam-warped porn mags stacked inside a yellow milk crate next to the tub, stuck open at their centrefolds. Girls with tattoos of butterflies and tiger-lilies flanking their shaved pussies. She flips through them. Everything lying right out like that, for anyone to rummage through. She opens the medicine cabinet on generations of pharmaceutical junk. Rusted tins of pomade and vaseline, oily-labelled bottles that might've been sitting there half a century. Waterbury's Compound. Magic Silver White. Expired condoms and sticky-looking razor blades dusted with rust and greyish powder. A tray of sewing needles with darkened, sterilised tips. Squashed pill packets with prescriptions for a dozen different names. Lani squints to read the pharmacy labels, looking for Aiden, circa bike accident. Not methadone, but the softer stuff. Pethidine and whatever else. She navigates by the fluoro warning stickers—
Do not drive a vehicle, Do not operate heavy machinery
—shaking out a small deck of blister packs.What she wants is a box, innocent-looking; aspirin or ibuprofen. Something no-one would think suss if they saw her walking out with it. Or a soft pack of tissues, that'd work, but there's nothing. She tears strips from the magazines, folds the pills inside makeshift envelopes. These she tucks down into the toes of her shoes, leaning against the edge of the tub and watching the door handle. She stands and tips her beer up for the dregs, then drops the empty back into the meltwater.

Coming back down the hall at a shuffle, toes crunched up to make room for the wads of pills, she hears it. This big-animal huffing from one of the bedrooms. The door is cracked open a sliver. If Aiden notices her standing there, he doesn't show it. Doesn't stop, anyway. Keeps up his soft murmuring—hey now, there now, there—as though working to soothe a scared injured thing.

*

All through her life, it will return to her—infrequently, but faithfully—and most acutely in the loose hours of flight. The image of this girl; body splayed across the bare mattress, her face puffed closed, dumb as bread. Lani standing in the aisle of a passenger jet, securing the straps of her demonstration oxygen mask, indicating the light on a life vest, placing the whistle mutely to her lips, miming serenity in disaster. Then a foul, chalky taste at the back of her throat, and there it is. Only a few seconds of it—the damp zebra-print underwear rolled down and cutting into the girl's pale thighs—before the door swings shut, the mind curtaining it again.

Peepshow, she'll think, straightaway clenching her jaw at the comparison, perturbed. Coward, she'll think, for turning away at age sixteen and for not bearing to look now—at twenty-four, twenty-seven, thirty-two—though in truth she'll never be able to call up the scene of her own will.

Once altitude has been reached and the seatbelt signs have blinked off. After the announcement that electronic devices may be used if in flight mode. Once the stubborn meal carts have been shunted up and down enough times, and the horde of passengers are adequately fed and watered, she will slip into a bathroom cubicle, press her hot forehead to the mirror, wonder if she's eaten something bad. All best intentions of bringing real food, fresh stuff, but somehow always the same foil-packaged bomb-shelter dinners as everyone in economy. She'll pull herself back from the mirror, frown at the smear left on the glass and wipe it away with a tissue. She'll arrange the dark wedge of her fringe to hide all the trouble going on underneath, the concern etched there, paint over the tiny white scar on her lower lip in one of the airline's approved shades—red but not too red, not tarty. The jaundiced light ageing her by half a decade. It's under such lights, several timezones from sleep, that her mother appears. Looking out, like some storybook queen, from the treacherous architecture of her own features in spite of the hair dye, the flicks of eyeliner, the brightened mouth.

Lani will buff her knuckles along the ridge of her cheekbone, as though grazing some heat there might soften the resemblance. She'll knot and unknot the rayon scarf at her throat, trying to make it sit right. Rinse at the taste in her mouth with a green sugary wash. Spit. Spit again.

Her mother and the sprawled, benzoed girl; they will continue to find her there, suspended above the Pacific in that long-haul anaesthesia, in a gloaming made of exit-row light. In the slept-in clothes fug of mass slumber. These hours when her own body feels stateless, drifting mothlike from guide light to guide light, between the soft dings that summon peanuts and tonic water, but otherwise beholden to no one person, no one place. Beholden to nothing greater out there than the great dark that holds and keeps the plane. Earth far below, and real life down there with it, the self left unfixed and undefended. And so the ghosts float up, slip through.

*

In the first hours of 1991, she closes the bedroom door. Walks cool and deliberate as she's able, down the hall, heels snagging the carpet. Will is somewhere. She
'
ll find him and tell him—what? Nothing, it's none of her business, and anyway she doesn't want to risk drawing attention to herself. She's tired, they should bail now, enough? She shoves through the screen door too hard, a bottle of clear spirit shattering on the concrete steps.