Imaginary Foe (9 page)

‘I’M SORRY!’ He drops his hands to his sides and shakes his head.

‘Poor Stan. We’ve come so far haven’t we? Remember our first conversation about dolphins? Things were so
nice
back then weren’t they?’

I don’t answer his rhetorical question.

‘WEREN’T THEY STAN?’

‘Yes.’

He turns and leaves the room.

Note to self: Don’t ever challenge Bruce.

On Sunday I call Steve.

‘You sound like shit, Stan. What’s going on?’

‘It’s nothing. I’m just really tired. I won’t be able to come to band practice today.’

‘Oh, OK. I’ll let the others know. Maybe we’ll just have a hooch session instead.’

‘Thanks, Steve.’

‘Take it easy. Get some rest, dude.’

I decide I’d better call Mike too. I haven’t seen him much lately. I’ve been too preoccupied with Rhonda and now all this other shit’s going down. There never seems to be enough time to just live.

Mike sounds good on the phone. He’s full of sympathy for me. ‘God, Stan, it sounds like you need some time out.’

‘Yeah. Stuff’s going down. I feel pretty drained.’

‘Well, you wanna know something weird? They say it’s gonna rain today. Can you believe that?’

I pull the curtain back and look up at the sky. ‘It doesn’t look like it’s gonna rain. The sky is blue for as far as I can see.’

‘Yeah, I know. But I can feel something. It’s not normal. This weather is whacko, man. The rain has gotta come sometime.’

It’s true. The rain is way overdue. ‘I was gonna go for a ride today. I hope the rain holds out.’

‘Well, enjoy it while you can, Stan. I’m looking forward to the rain. All this sunshine makes me feel crappy. If Dad lets me, I’m gonna crack open a tinnie, sit back under the patio and wait for the sky to open up.’

I picture Mike nursing a can of beer and watching the rain with a contented expression on his face. It makes me feel a little bit better.

I call Rhonda and arrange to go riding with her. We meet at the bottom of my street.

‘Stan, you look awful!’

‘Well, you look beautiful, as always.’

‘What’s wrong?’

‘Listen, a lot of shit has been going down. Can we just ride?’

‘Sure.’

We ride out of town to the flat plains, where you can see for miles around. We playfully overtake one another on our bikes. As we whiz past the cows, they look up at us briefly and then continue eating grass. We go out quite far, the furthest I’ve ever ridden. We’ve probably been riding for about forty minutes when Rhonda slows down and comes to a stop. She places her feet on the ground on either side of her bike and looks around nervously. I stop behind her.

‘I think we should go back. I’m getting a bit scared.’

‘Why, what are you scared of?’

‘Well, anything could happen to us out here and no one would know about it.’

‘Oh, come on! What could possibly happen to us?’

‘Anything! A psychopath could drive over that hill right now and force us into his car.’

I laugh. ‘Not likely.’

‘Some evil cult could emerge from that pine plantation and take us away to brainwash us.’

I snort. But I look across to the pine plantation and it sure as hell looks eerie.

‘We could get abducted by aliens.’

‘Ha! I wouldn’t let any aliens abduct us.’

‘Well, you wouldn’t have any choice in the matter, would you?’

‘What?’ I look down at myself and then back up at Rhonda. ‘You don’t think I could take out an alien?’

She’s the one to snort this time. ‘It’s not that you couldn’t take out an alien. It’s just that it wouldn’t come to that. That’s not how it works with aliens, is it? Being abducted never involves a punch-up.’

‘OK, then, what does it involve?’

‘Well, we probably wouldn’t even realise that we’ve been abducted at first. We might see a strange animal, like an owl, say; then we might feel we’ve lost time and that something peculiar has happened.’

‘Well, that doesn’t sound very scary to me. I think I might actually enjoy being abducted by aliens if that’s all that happens. And I really like owls. They’re freaky looking, especially the ones with white faces.’

Rhonda turns her bike around and walks it over to me. She comes up close and speaks in a soft serious voice. ‘That’s not all that happens, though. Once you’ve been abducted, you start waking up at three o’clock every morning in a sweat and you’re shit-scared but you don’t know why. So you start going to see a hypnotist who reveals to you that you’ve been up in an alien ship where they’ve poked and prodded at you with silver instruments and left weird scars on your body.’

I look across to the pine plantation again and feel a little chill go up my body. ‘You don’t honestly believe in all that paranormal hogwash, do you, Rhonda?’

‘Of course I do! Don’t you believe in aliens?’ Rhonda looks at me with raised eyebrows, pleading for me to be a believer like her.

‘Nah. I’ve never really thought about it, though.’

‘Well, how could we possibly be so arrogant as to assume we’re the only intelligent life-form in the universe?’

I shrug my shoulders.

‘I mean, when you consider that our galaxy is one among billions, surely there has to be another planet out there that supports life. And surely on that planet or planets, wherever they may be, some other intelligent life-form has evolved.’

Just then, we hear a shrill cry come from the direction of the pine plantation. It could be an animal of some sort, or it could be human, but neither of us wants to stick around to find out.

‘OK, OK. Let’s turn around.’ I try to hide the panic in my voice. We jump on our bikes and pedal like crazy back to town. After we’ve covered a couple of miles we slow down.

‘What the hell
was
that thing?’ Rhonda turns her head back, checking to see if anything has followed us.

‘I don’t know. But it scared the shit out of me.’

‘Me too.’

We both start laughing. We brace our shaking bodies on our handlebars, trying to stop our involuntary movements. I realise that spending this time with Rhonda has made me forget about everything that’s been upsetting me. I’m filled with gratitude that we’ve found each other. We manage to control ourselves and continue riding at a slow pace. A few fat drops of rain hit the bitumen.

‘What the…?’

‘Mike told me it was gonna rain. I didn’t really think it would, though.’

Every drop of rain that hits the road releases an intoxicating smell. At the same time, the rain is disturbing because it’s so different to the weather we’ve been experiencing. It’s felt like this dry spell was never gonna end. Rhonda and I pedal like mad while the rain falls thicker and faster. It’s exhilarating, riding along, pedalling against the downpour. Rhonda lets out a little scream every now and then but I can tell she’s enjoying the thrill of it as much as I am. We take a small street off the main road and I see a hay shed in the distance.

‘Let’s head over to that shed!’ I yell. Rhonda finds some extra energy and pedals faster with the shelter in her sights. We ride straight off the road and into the open shed. We drop our bikes on the floor, which is scattered with hay. We’re both drenched and out of breath.

‘What are we going to do now?’ Rhonda asks through deep breaths. She looks beautiful. Her hair is plastered to her head and her clothes stick to her body. We look at each other and begin to smile.

‘I think we’re gonna have to wait it out,’ I say. In my mind, I thank the rain. I look around, surveying the shed. Hay bales are stacked high on either side of it. The light from outside shrouds the shed in a comfortable, peaceful semi-darkness. Rhonda takes me by the hand and we sit together on a soft, dry bale.

‘Tell me what’s troubling you, Stan,’ she says gently. ‘It’ll make you feel better. You can’t keep things bottled up inside. It does you no good.’

I stand up and pace backwards and forwards, wondering how I’m going to begin. But then I just do and the words flow. I tell her about the phone call I overheard between Mum and Father Ryan, Mum’s visit to the presbytery, my outburst at the dinner table, Dad’s sad reassessment of his life and how Grandad’s in hospital following a heart attack. I tell her everything, except for the bits about Bruce, of course; as my tale unfolds, she watches me through concerned eyes. When I finish, she holds me close, rocking me ever so slightly in her arms.

‘My poor Stan. My poor, poor Stan.’

I’m overwhelmed by her concern and I feel a deep, deep love for her. ‘I love you, Rhonda. You’re beautiful in every way.’

She pulls back and looks up at me, shocked by my words. Before she can say anything, I kiss her passionately. She kisses me back with an open eagerness. I can taste the rain on her lips. I take her by the hand and lead her to a secluded corner of the shed. We slowly undress each other while kissing continuously.

And so it happens that, on this peculiar day, when the heavens open up and it finally rains, we become adults.

When I was about ten or eleven years old, my sisters and I used to play in an abandoned Nestlé creamery on the edge of town. We lived only a few houses away from the factory, so it had become our playground. The main factory building, a huge brick structure, was locked. It had large windows set high up, so we couldn’t see inside. This made the building all the more intriguing. But there were several smaller outbuildings that we could wander in and out of. They’d been completely gutted by hooligans over the years and, together, had come to resemble a war-torn town. Their walls were covered in graffiti, inside and out. My sisters and I would play hide and seek in the buildings, or pretend that we were at war. We’d jump out at each other through the bare doorways, with imaginary rifles in hand, to take the approaching ‘gunman’ by surprise.

One day, I was wandering round the outbuildings, head down, daydreaming away. My sisters weren’t at home that day and I’d walked down to the factory alone. I was singing softly to myself when I heard a noise coming from inside one of the outbuildings. It sounded like the shuffling of feet. I tiptoed closer, being careful not to make a sound on the dusty ground. As I got closer, I heard breathing and a voice that I recognised as belonging to my next-door neighbour David. I couldn’t hear what he was saying but he sounded out of breath and in pain. I ran into the building. David was there, with a girl named Lara who lived a few houses down the road from us. I’d seen her around. She was a tough teenager whom most people my age avoided. David and Lara were partly undressed. They were standing close together, both of them breathing in an unusual way.

David noticed me and yelled, ‘Get outta here, Stan! Piss off!’

I ran all the way home, as quick as I could. I was hurt, because David had always been really nice to me. If he was hanging out with his mates down at the deli, he’d always say hello and ruffle up my hair in a brotherly way. I couldn’t understand why he’d yelled at me. I hadn’t done anything wrong.

After this, I noticed that Lara hung around David and his mates quite a bit. Her best friend Hayley had also joined the gang. David returned to being his usual chipper self, and he always took the time to say hello and have a bit of a joke with me. He never said why he was so angry with me that day at the factory and I never asked him.

A year passed and David got his licence. He bought a hotted up Ford and you could hear him coming from the other end of town. His car was always super-shiny and he spent many a day on his front lawn washing and polishing that big beast. I’d take up position in our sleepout. It gave a perfect secret view of David’s front yard. His friends would go over and help him wash his car or they’d lie back with beers and watch him tenderly clean his pride and joy. Lara and Hayley were often there. One time, Lara and David had a water fight while he was washing his car. You could tell they really liked each other. The days that I spent watching those teenagers seemed to last forever.

But there came a time when it was all over. Mum took me aside one day and told me that David had been driving down our street when he hit a tree and was killed instantly. I was devastated. I looked out for the gang; I’d see them around town every now and then, but it wasn’t long before the group fell apart. Once in a while, you’d see one of them in town. They looked lost as individuals. I wished they could all come together again and muck around like they used to. Wouldn’t that help them get over David’s death? And wouldn’t that help him live on in their memories? I was always on the lookout for Lara too, but word had it that she was spending a lot of time at home and didn’t like to go out that much anymore. It wasn’t until I got older that I realised what David and Lara had been doing together in the factory building that day. Then I understood his anger.

I’ve never really been that aware of the word ‘virgin’ before. But now, in the two weeks following my first time, the word was popping up everywhere. Whenever I hear it, I can’t help thinking to myself that I’m
not
a virgin anymore, which makes me feel pretty groovy. Actually, I feel like a bit of a superhero. I even imagine myself in a superhero outfit with two big Ss on the front. My cape billows in the breeze and a voiceover announces my name: ‘It’s Super Sexman!’ A cheesy 70s music track plays and a slap bass features prominently. I wonder if Rhonda has similar daydreams when she hears the word ‘virgin’. Probably not.

I don’t tell any of my friends about what’s happened between Rhonda and me. I don’t want them reducing the most intimate, amazing experience of my life down to a few crude jokes, as they, being who they are, would inevitably do.

I haven’t seen Rhonda that much in the past few days, which is highly unusual, as we’ve been inseparable. She’s been totally cool since our roll in the hay, but just recently, her schoolwork is taking priority. I can’t help but wonder if she’s using it as an excuse to avoid me. When I do see her, it’s just briefly between classes. At lunchtime, she has extra-curricular activities. It’s meant to be the guy who couldn’t care less whether he sees a girl again after sex. That sure as hell isn’t my experience. Rhonda seems to be the one who doesn’t have a care in the world, besides her schoolwork of course. I decide that I need to make a bold move, to find out whether or not she’s still interested in me. If she’s planning to finish it with me, I’d like to know sooner rather than later. The not knowing is killing me.