The Dark Part of Me (5 page)

I stand in front of the cheval with my legs wide apart. There’s music in my head, a throbbing beat which starts slow but gets faster. I swing my hips from side to side,
watching the bones ripple beneath my skin. My naked body excites and disgusts me. Last night, I met a boy with purple eyes.

Mum’s pearls are much smaller than the stripper’s; elegant, rosy buds which shimmer when I hold them up to the sunlight. She says she won’t ever wear them ever again because
they were a present from Dad, but a few times I’ve caught her standing in the mirror with them on.

It’s easier than I thought getting them up inside me. I’d been worried it might hurt but it doesn’t. They sit up there nice and snug as I dance around my bedroom, flicking my
hair and kicking out in my strappies. When I’ve had enough of that, I squat down on the floor, just like the stripper, and fish around for one end. As I pull them out, I pout and wink at the
mirror and lick my lips. I imagine Scott watching me and I feel real bad, real sexy. I wonder what Hollie will say when I tell her I’ve pashed a real guy.

Even though I knew it was the last thing she’d want to hear, I couldn’t resist going round to tell Hollie that Scott was back. Since he’d been away,
we’d slipped back into our old, childish habits of dressing up and doing Shakespeare and pashing in the cave. But with Scott back, all that would have to change. I thought it best to break it
to her gently, or else she’d go all dark and gloomy.

I pulled up outside Hollie’s place, the last on the cul-de-sac which backed onto Mount Coot-tha national park. It sat, all dark brick and wrought-iron fancywork, like a fortress at the top
of the hill. It couldn’t have been easy for her then, all alone in that big, draughty house with Danny locked up and Mr Bailey on business in the States half the time. As I got out of the car
and walked up the steep drive, the bush was raucous with crickets getting loud and arsy as the sun went down. The gum trees quivered in the itchy heat as a crow, big as an eagle, broke through the
scrub, swooping low and glinty-eyed to settle on top of the fence. My heart was tight and bursting with the thought of Scott, but I was sure Hollie wouldn’t be so ecstatic.

Before I met Scott, Hollie and I were inseparable. We did everything together. At All Hallows, the other girls thought we were weird. They used to call us names like ‘The Loony
Lesbos’ and ‘The Dyke Duo’ but we didn’t care. We thought they were all dumb sluts anyway, destined to marry halfwitted men and spawn quarter-witted babies. Whereas Hollie
and I, we’d set our sights loftily high. Hollie wanted a kind, gentle-natured fellow with soft, blond curls and deep-blue eyes who would read her Milton at bedtime and brush her hair. I
fancied a darker, broodier Heathcliff type, who would die for me. Up in the cave, we’d close our eyes and practise pashing for hours, imagining each other as a fantasy lover. We thought love
was like in the movies; all thumping hearts and sonnets and red roses. But that was all before I met Scott. Before I got thinking I wanted a taste of the real thing. From day one, Hollie never
liked him. He didn’t fit our fantasy mould. Once I started going out with him, Hollie refused to see me. It wasn’t until Scott went overseas that we started hanging out again.

I jabbed the doorbell a few times but there was no answer. Hollie slept at odd times of the day so I went around the side, which was always unlocked. I went in through the parlour, filled with
tall palms, gold-framed mirrors and white wicker furniture, and headed up the marble stairs to Hollie’s bedroom on the top floor. Her door was closed. I knocked softly, and when there was no
reply, pushed inside. The room was dim with the crimson-brocade curtains drawn against the western sun. On the dressing table, a single candle flickered, dappling the fairies, goblins and
fire-breathing dragons which stared out from the forest wallpaper, unchanged since she was a little girl. I padded across the rug to her canopied bed but it was empty, the cream-lace spread smooth
without a wrinkle. I blew out the candle and threw open the curtains. The view through the window was too perfect; the top half of a giant orange sun caught between the crimson folds of the Great
Dividing Range. I left Hollie’s bedroom, heading further down the muffled hall. At each door, I stopped and listened, my ear pressed against the heavy oak. All sounds were deadened, sucked up
by the thick carpets, the velvety wallpaper, the mustiness.

At the furthest end of the hall was Mrs Bailey’s bedroom. The closer I got to it, the faster my heart pumped. It was the last place I wanted to go but I had a feeling Hollie was in there.
I stopped at the door first and took a few deep breaths to calm my nerves. I closed my eyes and strained for the tiniest noise. The tick of a clock. The shouts of kids playing in the street.
Nothing. It was enough to send you crazy, the quiet.

My memory of Mrs Bailey is pretty sketchy, but I remember the way she used to stand, tall and willowy on the deck, gazing up at the bush, smoking with her long black cigarette-holder, her dark
hair flying in the warm wind. She seemed to float through the house in her pale, chiffon dresses. Wherever she went she left the same faint smell of cinnamon. She was nothing like your typical
burban mum. She never did tuckshop or reading group and I never once saw her in the kitchen. Apart from her parties, she never had any female company around. She must’ve been lonely with Mr
Bailey often away, or depressed, or maybe, like me, she wished she were someplace more exciting. Perhaps she was just plain old nuts. Whatever, Hollie and I were only six years old the day we found
her.

Danny is waiting for us by the tennis courts. ‘You’re late,’ he grumbles, holding his watch up to Hollie’s face. ‘You’re always late.’
But we run fast and make it to the bus, just in time. Hollie and I are puffing. Danny dumps us at the front and heads down the back to his grade-four mates. Tomorrow it’s Ekka Holiday and
it’s noisy like a Friday. The bus swings out onto Moggill Road. Hollie leans into me, squashing me against the glass.

‘My mummy’s a famous actress,’ she whispers in my ear. ‘She’s being Titania, Queen of the Fairies.’

‘No, she’s not,’ I say, because my mum doesn’t do anything special like acting in plays or dressing up or throwing fancy parties. My mum just works in an office and cooks
dinner and yells at Dad and worries about me having clean hands.

‘Is too,’ says Hollie.

‘Is not,’ I say.

We keep this up until the bus drops us at the bottom of the hill. Hollie strides ahead in a huff because I don’t believe her mummy’s as famous as Judy Garland or Audrey Heartburn.
Danny talks to me, though. As we trudge up the steep hill, he tells me how his mum is taking him to the Ekka and he’s going on all the scary rides in Sideshow Alley and he’s going to
get the Transformers bag and the Violet Crumble bag and stuff himself on hot dogs and fairy floss and strawberry-farm ice-cream. And I’m getting really jealous because Mum won’t take me
because she says I’ll get sick from all the germs even though I’ve begged her a squillion times to take me just once to see what it’s like.

‘Mummy’s home!’ Hollie yells back at us.

Mrs Bailey’s big, white car is parked on the drive with its windows so black you can’t see inside. Danny uses his special key to unlock the front door and we all clatter inside and
up the marble stairs.

‘Mummy!’ Hollie sings out.

‘Mum!’ says Danny.

There’s a whiff of homemade biscuits in the air but the house is silent. Hollie and I go into the kitchen where there’s a huge plate of chocolate-chip cookies on the counter top.

‘There’re still warm,’ says Hollie, gobbling one down.

‘But your mummy never cooks biscuits,’ I say.

‘She must’ve gone for a walk,’ says Danny, flicking on the telly. Monkey Magic is just starting. I sit down beside him, my mouth full of biscuit, waiting for the bit when the
giant egg cracks and out pops Monkey.

‘I’ll check upstairs,’ says Hollie. ‘She might be having a nap.’ She trips up the staircase, singing the school anthem we’d learnt in music class that day.
‘
Daily we go to our school on the hill. Ready to try hard and work with a will.
’ Overhead, her footsteps pad, dull and muffled along the hall. The monkey intro finishes and the
princess on her donkey and the pig-snout man are wandering through the wilderness. Danny turns to me, his finger pushing up the tip of his nose, and snorts. I laugh, and reach for another
cookie.

Hollie screams. She is screaming. One big, long scream that doesn’t stop. Danny tears off the couch and I follow, flying up the stairs. Hollie’s scream is coming from Mrs
Bailey’s bedroom at the end of the hall. The door is open. Everything slows right down. The cookies gurgle and melt inside me. My legs are heavy, my fingers thick and fat, as I bound down the
hall. And still Hollie is screaming, but Danny doesn’t scream. He doesn’t do anything, but stands frozen in the doorway as I hang back in the hall, not wanting to see what they are
seeing. But something pulls me inside and I’m staring at Mrs Bailey’s waterbed and the blood and the gun and Mrs Bailey’s head all blown up into little red bits on the white,
satiny pillows and on the lovely, purple walls.

Hollie blamed it all on her father. Over the years, she’d convinced herself that he’d been having an affair even though there was no hint of it in the suicide note.
When Mr Bailey was at home, Hollie rarely spoke to him and if she did it was only to call him a liar or a traitor or a spineless, philandering cheat. It was no wonder he kept such a low profile
around the place. He spent most of his spare time locked away in his home cinema watching Westerns or in the cellar tending to his prized collection of Bordeaux.

Sometimes, I wondered what Hollie and Danny would be like if it hadn’t happened, whether they’d be a bit more normal. Every year, just before Christmas, Hollie hosted a kind of do in
memory of her mother, who used to love throwing fancy-dress parties. She wanted to be just like her mum. Often, I’d find her in Mrs Bailey’s boudoir, flopped on the bed reading poetry
or dressed up in her dead mum’s outfits. The room was spacious and high-ceilinged, done out in sumptuous Hollywood glam circa 1986: the carpet white shag-pile; the curtains plush, gold
velvet. One side of the room was fitted with floor-to-ceiling mirrored doors behind which Mrs Bailey’s designer outfits and theatre costumes were stored. Centre-stage was the giant circular
waterbed, piled with fluffy, pink cushions and covered in a glitzy white satin bedspread (the blood dry-cleaned out). On either side of the bed were two black lacquer bedside tables, which gleamed
from Hollie polishing them every morning. On one table there was a steel-stemmed lamp. The other was scattered with Mrs Bailey’s things as she’d left them: a slim volume of Elizabeth
Barrett Browning’s poems; a red silk scarf; a scotch glass with a few sips still left in it; a solid gold zippo; a framed black and white photo of Mr and Mrs Bailey on their wedding day. The
way Hollie used to keep it like a shrine gave me the heebie-jeebies.

I turned the cut-crystal doorknob and pushed inside. The air-con hummed full-blast and it was cold, icy. The curtains were drawn back, but the room was cast in deep shadow. Rubbing warmth into
my arms, I stood, blinking. I looked over at the waterbed. Hollie was sleeping on her side, facing away from me. The tiniest breath quivered up and down her slip of a body. Her boy-hips barely
dented the chintz. She was wearing one of her costumes: a long white muslin dress with a high collar and a row of pearl buttons up the back. Her dainty feet, small as a child’s, poked out
from the hem of her skirt and her thick, black hair cascaded down the side of the bed.

I tiptoed towards her, then stopped. There was someone with her. A man. Hollie had a man in bed with her. She was pressed up against him, one arm flung about his middle. Sweat broke out from
each root of my hair, instantly cooled by the air-con draught. I darted to the end of the bed to take a closer look. The man slept, lying flat on his back with his arms pinned to his sides.

Danny.

Danny. Fuck. It was eight years since I’d seen him.