just_a_girl (15 page)

Davo’s late to pick me up. I virtually never see him these days. But I want to get a dress for the year 10 formal. He’s become more of a chauffeur than a boyfriend. But it’s handy when I need to get from A to B.

When he finally gets here a bark greets him and I’m glad that mum’s out shopping. Rusty hates Davo now. Can’t even be bothered sniffing him. I know how Rusty feels.

—So, ya ready to go then?

He grabs and pulls me to meet him. As if I’m always ready. To surrender at his feet. No question. Something about it makes me decide. I don’t want to go driving any more.

—Nah, I’ve got other stuff to do. Too late to get there now.

—Why didn’t you just text me so I didn’t waste time coming over?

—Because there are some things you’re better off not texting.

His hair is all flat at the back. It makes him look ruffled and sweet. Trust him to look good today.

I look him in the eyes for the first time. He has no idea. I flick my phone open and scroll back through the messages. Show him the text. I’ve been waiting for this. He starts to walk towards me. I can see his fluorescent brain flickering as he reaches for some lame excuse. I save him the trouble.

—Just forget it, I’m over it. She can have you.

And that works. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen Davo look scared. He’s got nothing to say.

I start to laugh because it’s just so typical. I stand in front and want to push him so he falls onto some sharp object. My words come out in rhythm.

—Who. Is. She. Tell. Me.

But I already know and he knows it. He backs towards the door. Grabs the keys out of his pocket. I follow not wanting him to give up so easy.

—Well at least with her I don’t have to deal with this!

He grabs my arms and squeezes my wrists until they feel like they’ll shatter.

—Look, Layla, she makes a bit of an effort. Being with you is like being with a corpse, you just seem to lie there.

The words settle on my skin and start to tattoo their way in. And suddenly I want to hold his head in my hands. I want to sit on his feet so he can’t go out that door. I see myself tied behind his car as he drives away. Dragged behind and slowly losing my layers of skin until there’s just a rattle of bones.

My face, my muscles, are smooth. I’m embalmed and still. As I hear him walk out. He jabs a number into his
phone before he even starts the car. I bet he gets the right number this time.

Oh Sarah.

I find mum’s vodka in the freezer but I can’t be bothered with the lime and soda. She never drinks so it’s been in there for years. I sit on the couch and I gulp from the bottle. On a mission to search and destroy.

I drink til I laugh then I drink til I dance then I drink til I cry then I drink til I can only stand to watch the TV if one eye is shut then I drink til I’m cuddling up to my new best friend.

The porcelain bowl. Grateful for her cool.

Mum finds me floating in a sea of vodka vomit. My cheek stuck down on bathroom tiles. She says my name loudly. Drags me into the shower. Gives me a burst of cold. I’ve still got my clothes on. She strips them off and dries me roughly. I try to cover up my belly button ring. She puts my PJs on while I’m sitting on the floor. It’s freezing and my jaw won’t stop juddering. In bed she brings a bucket and puts it near my pillow.

—We’ll talk about this in the morning.

Mum gives me the morning to recover. I can barely stand but she offers to take me into the city. To find a dress for the year 10 formal. Don’t know who I’m going with now. If Sarah brings Davo I might become Long Island Layla.

But I know what look I’m after. Black and white stripes like Gwen Stefani. Hair forward with a fringe. A scarf around my head. Red lipstick and stilettos. I don’t really want to look like a skank though. Leave that to Sarah.
She says,
If you’ve got it, flaunt it.
And that she does. My mum says that men like to have something left to the imagination. That you need to create a bit of mystery. I obviously don’t know the same guys that she does.

I’m so over shopping in Penrith. Hello! All the girls will probably be wearing the same dress. The same hair. With those stiff weird curls they get at the hairdresser. A mop sitting on their head. And those grammar guys are so fussy. They probably know the designer before looking at the label. I wonder if Marco would go with me. He lives so far away in Leura. We don’t see each other much now I’ve left the supermarket.

Anyway. We head to Broadway Shopping Centre. Mum’s quiet in the car. But I’m ready and waiting. To block the punches. She manages to hold off until Parramatta Road.

Here we go.

—So, Layla, what happened last night?

When she says this it seems weird. I realise she never asks me questions. She usually starts in with an attack. I’m so used to the defence wall it’s already up. This is so out of the blue I almost blurt out the lot. The Davo and the Marco. The Sarah and the Mr C. The hurt and the fury. But it’s all such a cliché. My boyfriend ends up with my best friend. Behind my back. End of story. I go for the condensed version.

—Davo and I broke up.

—Ah, that’s no good. How long have you been together now?

—A while ... it was time to move on anyway.

She’s quiet for a minute. Cue complaints about dad.

—I know it’s hard to believe right now but there’ll be other guys out there for you.

Her concern is fake. If she was out of the car she’d do one of those jumps. Where you leap to the side and click your heels together. Like in
Wizard of Oz.

Mum swerves and drives into the parking station. We seem to spend hours driving up and up and up. Trying to find a park. Mum says the carpark’s a double helix. It’s impossible to find your way around. She writes down the floor level, colour and number on the back of the ticket. So we remember where we’ve parked. That’s one thing I’ve inherited from her. Directionally challenged.

I find my way to the top floor. All the designer boutiques. Review has spots and frills and stripes and lace. Gwen would love the clothes. Mum picks out satin numbers in blues and silver. She holds them against my body to check the length. I ignore them and reach for stripy reds and blacks. I wait for her
slut
line when I come out of the changing room. She doesn’t like black and red together. But she nods. It’s tight to just below the knees. Red with traces of black lace. My dress is made for a really curvy girl. So I need a little help in the bra department. But that’s the magic of Chicken Fillets.

I swan about with my sneakers on. Check if I can sit down in it. Do a dance. The assistant dashes over:
That really suits you with your dark hair, but you’ll need some silver stilettos to go with it.
I look over at mum and she nods. We should go shopping more often. I like the new nodding phase. I can’t walk in high heels. So I’ll need to start practising. Mum’s armed with her credit card so we buy the dress.

—You’ll need a jacket of some sort too. It will probably be cold at night on the mountain, even at that time of year.

—No-one really wears a jacket, mum.

—What about a pashmina or something to wrap around?

We head to one of those weird shops down a side section. Hats, jewellery, sunglasses, lingerie, the odd scarf. But there’s nothing that really matches the outfit.

—Maybe we could go up to Katoomba one day and have a look. We’re probably more likely to find something warm up there.

I nod. It seems to be catching.

We mosey to the coffee shop for a lemon and ginger tea (her) and caramel mocha (me). We share a huge slice of mudcake. The headache is starting to clear. It feels like we’re on a first date or something. She’s being all polite. And acting really hard to be interested. I’m trying to fill the silences. With anything I can think of.

—You know when I was up at dad’s. He told me when I was a baby he went all psycho after he had some drugs.

Mum picks at bits of cake in her front teeth.

—You’ve got to be kidding. When did he tell you this?

—Last holidays. He said when I was a little baby. He said he wanted to kill me. He was in my room huddled in a corner trying to stop himself. He said he didn’t think you were around.

She smiles and looks up at the ceiling.

—Where would I have been? There’s just no way. I was always there. I think I would have noticed if your dad was so angry. He doesn’t get mad very often. And he didn’t take many drugs. Not like that anyway. And we had a baby monitor. I would have noticed if he was in your room while you were asleep. Sometimes your dad tends to exaggerate. If something like that happened, I would definitely remember.

We sit quiet for a while. Both wondering where that story came from. And I’m not sure now who to believe.

As we look out into the food court the fluorescent light settles on her. And I see her wrinkles. Just the beginnings of them. Dancing at her eyes. And the way she hesitates before asking for the bill.

And it hits me for the first time. She’s not just my mother. She’s a woman living alone. She’s uncertain of the future. She’s waiting for something to happen. She doesn’t have any friends. She’s shy. She’s beyond lonely.

I let her have the last mouthful of cake.

I shouldn’t be afraid of dying now I’m in the Lord’s care but when I found that lump, I must admit I was, and it’s more about the stress of who you leave behind and I do often wonder why He picks out certain people for survival and lets others go, I mean, it seems so random and all this worry has set me off spiralling down and I don’t have the drugs any more to pick me up, that’s what they do, get you into forward motion before the negative thoughts start clouding over, and now I feel like a run-down wind-up toy and I need someone to start cranking the key in my back, to give me a bit of a start, and you know, I never took much time to grieve for Auntie Jeannie, Layla was little and Jeannie seemed so far away in Melbourne, and she was originally told by the doctor that she had no chance of survival and that the cancer had spread through her body, but she refused to believe it, refused to say the word, and she didn’t even get a second opinion because she was so angry at the doctor, not for telling her that she was going to die, but for giving her no other options, and so she continued to fight for three years and
worked right up until a month before, and she tried as hard as anyone, and it still got her in the end.

It’s hard to believe two sisters could be so different and it makes me sad to remember but when I was growing up I wished they would switch, like in the movies, I’d wake up and Jeannie would be there in the kitchen stirring porridge at the stove and getting me ready for school, because she was one of those people who didn’t have it in her to judge, anything you did was the right thing, the best you could possibly do, and she would listen so attentively with her head slightly leaning to the right and forward as if she was opening an ear just to hear you, and I still wish the Lord could have let her stay on this Earth because she was one of the good ones, I mean, she was one of those special people and you could tell that at the funeral, because it was standing room only and children were lining the walls at the service, and along with sadness there were jokes and that’s the way Auntie Jeannie would have liked it because she had a great sense of humour, she always loved the absurd.

And at the funeral parlour the shock of her with her skin so papery thin and translucent, like her soul had vanished, and I wanted to touch her dark hair to make sure she was well and truly gone and despite myself it was like a horror movie, I kept expecting her to jump out at me and say ‘boo’ and I actually braced myself for it, that it was all an elaborate joke because you’re not used to seeing people lying so still unless they’re asleep, and at the end of the funeral they played Auntie Jeannie’s favourite song,
The Greatest Love of All,
and every time I hear those lyrics I think how brave she was and how she didn’t want to burden us so that no-one got the chance to really say goodbye, because she didn’t let on how serious it was, and that’s how I define positive and I’m so grateful to have had her influence as she was always ready to turn that next corner, wherever it may have led.

He’d let her rest the first couple of days after her plane flight, gradually getting to know her—there was no sense in rushing things and they could honeymoon forever—but in the meantime he had been reading the instructions and assembling her attachments. He really wanted her first time to be special.

Mika’s torso had arrived with a small tuft of straight black pubic hair, above what the instructions called a
love hole cavity,
covered with a small cap like a bath plug, that he needed to remove in order to delicately place the insert that had come with her. When he tried to edge out her plug he’d caught the fingernail of his pinkie and ripped a little tear that made her wince. He turned her face towards him and apologised, giving her a kiss on the forehead. He’d have to be more careful with her soft spots.

Their first time together, he removed his clothes slowly and they had kissed for a long time, but then when he tried to place himself inside her—go slow, go slow—he found
himself stuck. He kneeled on the couch too scared to push or pull and worried about hurting her more. He wondered how many emergency departments had seen injuries like these. He moved carefully to the bathroom and found some massage oil, gently pulling himself out as Mika kept her arms around him. He held her close and asked if she was ready to try again. She was quiet but seemed to squeeze his hand.

Luckily, he had bought a spare insert. He ran it under hot water to get it warmed up and the vanilla bean smell was released. While the spare didn’t quite match Mika’s skintone, this time he could slide all the way in, making him feel enclosed and safe. Again he put her arms around his waist and held them under his own to keep them in place. Her breasts were like resin and sticky beneath him. She gave off a slight but earthy smell of burnt rubber and his hands became tacky and slick as he moved them up and down her back. Her lips weren’t stiff. He kissed her and tilted her head so he could look into her eyes. At the end he fell forwards and buried his face into her hair.

Her shape was so perfect that afterwards he spooned for a while, nestled into the gap between her shoulderblades.

In the few times he had made love with other women, this had been his favourite part, the quiet moments as breaths returned slowly to a normal pace. He hoped it had been as special for her. He held Mika’s hand and looked around his bedroom—the textured indoor plants, tropical fish aquarium, sculptures perched on a bookcase. Lying next to Mika he could appreciate she was one more beautiful thing to look at and touch, a life-sized work of art. He felt that silver serpent of loneliness start to slither away.