Ghost Child (14 page)

I didn’t know, but I said, ‘Yeah, I know. They taste funny.’

He said, ‘Yes, but about how they snap you on the tongue?’

Now I was alarmed, but I’d lied myself to the point of no return. I held the foamy pink cracker against my tongue, and felt it gripping.

‘Fun, isn’t it?’

It was. It definitely was. I ate the bowl of prawn crackers and then all of dinner, too. Afterwards, there were chocolate sweets, called After Dinner Mints, served in slinky envelopes. It would never have occurred to me to leave, until finally the woman said, ‘Do you have a bedtime, Lauren?’

A short time later, I moved from the motel. For years
I thought it was because the man had given me prawn crackers; perhaps they were for consumption by adults, like alcohol and cigarettes? I can now see that’s ridiculous. I don’t know why I was moved; I moved a lot, often with no explanation, and while it might seem strange to some people that I ended up in a portable on the Barrett Caravan Park at the age of thirteen, it was no surprise to me or to other foster kids who lived similarly. As long as there were some books – and by now, I had a few of my own – I figured I’d be okay.

The park was as you might imagine. There was a pool, open only in summer and freezing even then; and some playground equipment. Some people had their own kitchens, but most people used the barbecue in the covered forecourt, and washed their tin pans under the tap.

Maybe because I was an older girl, I got a hut of my own. It didn’t have a bathroom so I had to shower in the communal lot. The social worker told me, ‘Wear rubber thongs in the shower. We can’t be responsible if you get a papilloma.’ It’s a disease of the feet. I had no rubber thongs so I went to the shower in my sneakers and pyjamas. Before I got through the doors, one of the other kids rode by on his BMX and shouted out, ‘Watch out for the peephole!’

I put my toiletries down on the tiled floor and searched around the tap holes and the shower head for a hole. I couldn’t find one, but still I showered in my
knickers and sneakers. After that, I mostly washed in the sink.

I lost my virginity before the month was out. A group of young guys, apprentice chippies and sparkies, came onto the site. They weren’t permanent residents; they were working their way up the east coast, where the weather was warm, hoping to get jobs on building sites. I was walking to the showers when one of them called out to me, ‘Hey, spunky!’

They’d made a fire in one of the half-drums that were left lying about. I hung by the edges of their campsite, listening as they talked about football, girls, surfing, cars, pretending to be doing something else, until one of them said, ‘You want a smoke?’

My guess, on reflection, was that he was eighteen or nineteen. They had P-plates on their cars. He wore jeans and a T-shirt. My Prince Charming!

‘Do you live here?’ he said, cupping a hand around the flame of his lighter as I bent and inhaled.

‘Just for now,’ I said.

‘Where’s your folks?’

‘Asleep.’

He said, ‘Your mum and your dad, or just your mum?’

I said, ‘Just Mum.’

He considered this for a moment, then said, ‘Like, near here?’

I said, ‘No.’

He thought a moment longer and must have concluded that I was worth the risk.

‘You must be cold,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you come in the tent? I want to talk to you.’

How can I explain how those words sounded to me? He’d said, ‘
You must be cold
,’ and it sounded like, ‘I care about you.’ He’d said, ‘
I want to talk to you
,’ and it sounded like, ‘Nobody else may have noticed this, but you’re a person worth having around.’

I went into the tent. Straightaway he started kissing me. I kissed him back. The strength of the muscles in his arms intrigued me; the strength in his tongue surprised me.

I said, ‘What’s your name, anyway?’ and he said, ‘Dicko.’

Dicko.
Romantic, no?

He took one of my breasts in his hands. I remember feeling ashamed because my breasts were small and I assumed he would be repulsed. He made a move toward the zip on my jeans. I used my hands to push him away. I had a teenage girl’s shame about my body. I believed, as all girls do, that I was nowhere near as desirable as I should be; that I wasn’t sexy enough for sex.

Also, resisting his advances seemed to be the thing to do. He got frustrated, though, and pushed away from me, saying, ‘Hey! You can’t do this to a guy.’ The change in his tone was immediate, and shocking. He had been affectionate, even loving; now he was angry.

‘You’re trying to give me blue balls,’ he said.

I didn’t understand. ‘Blue balls, man,’ he said, moving rapidly to release his swollen penis from behind his zip. Stroking it, with a pained looked on his face, he said, ‘It’s an f’en
condition,
man, and it’s cock-teasers like you who give it to a guy. You’re in here pashing, and you’re turning me on, and you won’t let me go all the way, and that can make a guy sick.’

Oh, how men can pretend! And who can blame them? He probably did need, more than anything, to ejaculate, right there and then, with me or into the palm of his hand or the flesh of a watermelon; anything would do. How could I know that, though? Desperate not to disappoint, I put my hands over his penis. It was wet – I didn’t expect that – and there was a smell I didn’t recognise.

‘Pull on it, pull on it,’ he said. He leaned back against another of the sleeping bags. I got onto my knees, but in doing so, looked up and saw one of his mates at the zipped fly-screen door of the tent, grinning at me. I dropped back and pulled a sleeping bag toward my chest.

‘They’re looking!’ I said.

Dicko had been trying to get his jeans off, but flat on his back with the material tight around his thighs he’d been unable to. He got awkwardly and angrily to his knees and punched the face through the mesh.

‘Piss off, will you?’ he said, zipping the tent shut.

‘They’re dickheads,’ he said. ‘They’re jealous. They wish they were here with you.’ His hands were tugging at my jeans, and suddenly, his fingers were inside me. I was startled by the wetness; had not known it was there. He was moaning, ‘Oh man, my balls, my balls.’ Then, in a different voice altogether, ‘You got a franger?’ I shook my head. ‘You on the pill?’ No.

‘Suck me off, then,’ he said. ‘Please, I’m in agony, man.’

It occurred to me that he didn’t know my name. I put my mouth over him. I couldn’t see but could clearly hear the other guys outside the tent, simulating sex, grunting like pigs and falling against the mesh tent in hysterics.

‘Fuck,’ said Dicko, ignoring them. ‘Fuck, fuck.’

I was frightened of what he was going to do in my mouth. I had learnt about semen in school: it was millions of little tadpoles floating in syrup. How would that feel? But it was fine. I gagged but did not vomit. I slipped my mouth off his sagging penis.

Dicko rolled onto his back and stared at the roof of the tent. His friends were cackling outside. ‘Fucking morons,’ he said. After an age he added, ‘Don’tcha think you better go back to your place, in case, like, your mum comes to check on you?’

One of his mates began fiddling at the zip of the tent, saying, ‘Hey, spunky, can you help me out with my blue balls?’ There was a cascade of laughter. ‘Fuck you,’ he said to them.

I heard, ‘Cradle snatcher!’

To me, Dicko said, ‘Get dressed. Come on, you gotta go.’ I didn’t understand his sudden change of mood. I was eager for another of his deep kisses, but when I leaned forward and tried to get one, he shoved me away. He was unzipping the tent, crawling out, not looking behind. I sat back for a minute, confused, then crawled out of the tent, but Dicko wasn’t with the guys still sitting around the fire, shoving each other. He was in the distance, his back to me.

‘You still up for some?’ one of the others said. I felt my face turn crimson. I went back to my demountable. There was a note from the social worker. It said, ‘Don’t wander off!’ I got into bed and spent some time feeling myself, to see what was different. Branches slapped against the tin roof. I heard what I believed to be peals of laughter, although it was probably wind, howling against the windows.

In the morning, I put on my school uniform and some mascara I had squirrelled away from one of the homes where I’d lived, and walked slowly and deliberately by the site where Dicko and his mates had been camped, but they had shot through in the night, worried, I suppose, about the ramifications. I was jail bait, after all. Black coals smouldered in the half-keg. I picked up an empty beer can, one that had been crushed flat underfoot, and put it in my bag. For some years afterwards I kept it, because I thought that it might have Dicko’s saliva on it, and that was romantic to me.

I didn’t tell anyone that I’d sort of lost my innocence. Who would I tell? The girls at school? No. There was a code at school regarding sex: the other girls had long ago decided that it was okay to have sex with somebody you were ‘going around with’ but not with some stranger. I’d be called a slut or a moll, and the only way to avoid it was to stay chaste, or find a boyfriend. And so began a pattern. I would meet a guy and become convinced that he could see something in me that others couldn’t. I believed – every time, despite the evidence – that he’d come to rescue me. We’d have sex, and I’d be hurt and surprised when I never saw him again or, if I did, he pretended not to know me.

I never mentioned Jacob to any of the men who slept with me, but of course I knew, in the way you just do, that
rumours
about what had happened in the house on DeCastella Drive were rife on the Barrett Estate. Only once do I recall anybody raising the matter with me directly. The social workers didn’t talk about it and neither did the teachers. No, it came up after I’d left Barrett Primary and was in my first year at Barrett High, with many of the same kids who’d been at the primary school with me, but who had only then started to hear and understand the gossip their parents had been trading for years.

I was in the girls’ toilet block. It was a classic of the time: there was a stainless-steel trough, six bubblers, one of which squirted water into your eye. The smell
was typical, too: urine and diarrhoea, masked with antiseptic. The concrete floor had puddles from the morning hose-out. The ceiling would certainly have been marked by those wads of scrunched wet toilet paper we used to throw up there and leave to dry.

A gaggle of girls was hanging by the troughs, sharing cigarettes. It was the custom in those days to keep your packet in your school bag and then, at recess, hand it around and hope you didn’t ‘drop’ too many, or give too many away. If there was only one or two in the packet, we’d share them between us, passing the butt from lip to lip, trying not to be the one who made it soggy. We talked non-stop and I can’t remember any of the things we said.

On this day, one of the girls, a popular girl, Terri, who had already been kept down once and was a year away from her first pregnancy, announced that she had got a bra. She was the first to get one and we – me and the other, flatter girls – were keen to see it. I was still built like a boy, a small boy with nipples that had budded and chafed against my T-shirt. Sometimes there was a mysterious and embarrassing stain in my pants.

Terri was proud of her boobs and her bra but she wasn’t going to show it off for nothing.

‘I’ll show it for a ciggie,’ she said. ‘You girls get me a ciggie, you can see.’

Somebody had a spare cigarette; it was pulled from the packet and handed to Terri, who put it behind her
ear. She was wearing the Barrett uniform – a chequered tunic with buttons down the front – and it had been some time since she could properly close her buttons. Her swelling breasts forced the front of the dress out, and brought up the hem. Make-up was banned but Terri wore it. We all did. Black eyeliner was popular then, drawn around the rim of the eye and along the lower lashes. The teachers would complain, especially when it rained.

‘Wipe that off. You look like raccoons,’ they’d say.

We thought we looked as good as Prince, maybe better. In her too-short uniform with the gaping buttons and her painted face, Terri would have looked like a girl from a Prince music video.

Terri made a production of her great Bra Reveal. First, she chose the girls who would be allowed to stay in the toilet block. ‘Larissa can stay, Lisa can stay, Sharon has to go, and I’m not doing anything while Rebecca is here.’

I wasn’t among those supposed to stay and look, but nor was I banished. Terri told me to stand by the door and keep an eye out for teachers. We wouldn’t have much time: the girls who had been evicted from the toilets had run into the schoolyard, and were telling the boys, ‘Terri’s gonna show her bra!’ Those who weren’t grossed out had formed a group, and were grinning and jostling each other, daring themselves to come closer and get an eyeful.

I kept one eye on the schoolyard. Terri said, ‘Is anyone coming?’ and I said, ‘Coast is clear.’

Terri unbuttoned her tunic and, with one quick movement, pulled both sides of her dress apart. I caught the briefest glimpse of a bra – an impossibly risqué lace bra with purple satin – and Terri’s breasts sitting proud and plump in the cups. It was so lovely, I gasped. What had I expected? A flesh-coloured cloth bra, probably. A bra like those I’d seen hanging on the clothes line at the Christians, with no fancy detail. I’m sure I wasn’t the only girl who was impressed, but the group turned to stare at me.

‘What are you, a lezzo or something?’ said Terri.

I said, ‘Rack off.’

She said, ‘You’re supposed to be watching the door.’

I’d forgotten that. The boys were right outside now, in full holler. ‘Show us your tits, Terri! Show us your tits!’

How it spiralled from there into an argument about Jake, I can’t tell you, but Terri, flanked by some other girls, started having a go.

‘What are you staring at?’ she said.

I said, ‘Nothing. I was watching the door.’

Terri said, ‘You were looking at me like a lezzo.’

Another girl said, ‘She’s a weirdo,’ and another chimed in, ‘She’s one of those kids from DeCastella Drive.’