Shawn's Law (11 page)

After my third tree, Shawn spotted another unlisted hollow. We turned and made toward the tree, Shawn taking a route to the left of a large eucalypt while I headed right.

“Hey. There’s a cool hill here made from a whole bunch of tiny sticks,” he called.

“No! Get away—”

I was too late. “Argh!” Shawn’s scream pierced the bushland. “Fudge! Sugar! Blooming roses!”

I mentally cringed at his adorable swear words. Even out here in the bush, couldn’t he relax his rules? “Shawn,” I cried in alarm.

I raced around the tree and found him hopping on one foot, trying to brush the biting ants off his shoes. With every hop, he thumped the ground around the ants’ nest, causing more angry insects to rush to defend their home. He was stepping on some of them, and they were communicating their distress to their family, riling the entire colony.

“Crap. Darn. Shoot. Ow—that hurts.”

I grabbed his arm and yanked him hard, pulling him after me and getting him away from the nest. Once we were several meters away, I stopped and turned to get a look at the situation. Shawn was still trying to slap the insects, and they were biting him for his trouble.

I took a look. Yes. Black and red ants with nasty big mandible pinchers on the front. They were big fuckers too—nearly an inch in length. I brushed one off his arm and squished the poor thing. It’s the only way to stop them coming at you. They’re an aggressive species of bull ant and will come back to bite the enemy over and over. Extremely painful and long-lasting, some people have a reaction to the bites similar to a bee sting. And some unfortunate people have an anaphylactic reaction to them. I prayed that wouldn’t happen with Shawn.

I brushed another couple off his legs, earning myself a bite on one hand for my trouble. I drew back in pain. “Fuck.” I hated the buggers. Their bite was sharp and excruciating. I could see several bites on Shawn’s leg and wondered how he was managing. I shook my hand in pain, and stood back to check for more ants.

“Shite, shunt, and Schapelle Corby.”

I rolled my eyes and looked at him. “For fuck’s sake. We’re in the middle of the bush where no one can hear us. You can drop a couple of fucks. I give you permission.”

Together we stomped the last of the creatures, making sure they were very, very dead. I had personal experience of the things coming back to life and going for you again. I moved Shawn to a rock where he could sit down while I looked through my bag for the first aid kit I’d bought years before and never cracked open.

“I don’t want to get in the habit of swearing,” Shawn complained.

I looked up at him in disbelief. “Babe, you’ve just been bitten by about ten ants. You have a right to drop a couple of fucks.”

“I don’t—”

“Just do it. You’ll feel a lot better after,” I promised.

I found the cream that was supposed to help bites and stings and began dabbing it on the angry red marks I could see forming on his legs. “Ow,” he hissed.

“No. Remember? Fuck. Just shout the word a couple of times while I do this.”

I moved to the next spot on his leg.

“Flup,” he cried.

I must’ve given him a look that compelled him to say it, because he sighed loudly and said, “Fine. I’ll say it. Fuck. There. Happy?”

“No,” I said. “You need to yell it three times really loudly before it counts.”

His arm had two bites on it, so I snagged his hand and pulled it toward me. I dabbed the cream on and he flinched. “Ow, that one hurt. Okay, I think you’ve convinced me. I’ll yell it now.”

I nearly slapped him. As if it counted when you had to psyche yourself into swearing. But Shawn had already opened his mouth and was screaming.

“FAARK! FAARK! FAARK!”

I blinked a little as my ears rang with the volume. “Feel better?” I asked.

“Not really,” he admitted.

I snorted. “Next time, try for a little spontaneity. A little practice and you’ll get it right in no time.”

“Okay. Oh, frup. Look at your hand.”

We both stared at the large welt that was forming on the soft skin between the fingers of my right hand. “Fuck, he got me a good one,” I griped. I dabbed some cream on myself and winced. “Next time, babe, if you see a ‘cool hill made from sticks,’ can you please give it a wide berth?”

He looked very shamefaced. “I’ve never seen a nest like that. I’ve only seen ones in the ground where they make a hole.”

I slung my arm around his shoulders and smacked a kiss on his cute cheek, making his glasses skew on his face. “Well, now you know. C’mon. I need to climb some more trees.” I wasn’t angry at him at all. It wasn’t his fault that his father had never shown him a bull ant nest.

I managed two more trees before I had to stop and examine my hand again. It had started to swell and my fingers had spread apart from the inflamed skin. I was having trouble gripping the branches, since I couldn’t make a fist properly. In desperation, I pulled my glove on and left it, hoping the tight fit would keep the swelling down.

I hid the injury from Shawn, knowing he would feel bad about it. Besides, he was bitten eight times and wasn’t whining about it. At noon, we stopped for lunch and I wrapped my swollen hand around the iced drink to try to relieve it. It wasn’t working, and eventually Shawn noticed.

“Are you okay? You look like you’re in pain or something. You didn’t hurt yourself climbing that last tree, did you?”

I grimaced and checked out the bloody scratch on my leg. I’d been favoring my hand on the last tree and slipped, scraping my leg on a branch and bruising my thigh as I fell. “My leg will be fine in a couple of days. But you’re right, I think we should head back. This hand of mine is getting worse, and I think I need to get some proper ice on it.”

“Your hand…?” Shawn looked down in surprise and blanched. “Oh, fuck.”

I noticed he had no problem with the swear word then. “Hmm” was all I could think of to say. My first two fingers were rather puffy and the glove was straining at the seams. I was also beginning to be a bit light-headed.

“Harley?” Shawn said sharply. “I think we should go now. I’ll carry that bag, ’kay? You grab this water and drink it for me. Now which way is the car?”

I was sweating by the time we found my jeep, and the heat was getting to me. My fingers were sticking straight out now, distended to their fullest. I handed Shawn the keys without being asked. I was in no state to drive.

He talked to me the whole way home, demanding I answer and wanting to know all about my childhood, my travels and my arrests. I didn’t even notice he’d bypassed our suburb until he pulled up in the parking lot of the hospital.

“Huh? Why are we here?” I asked, confused about our slight detour.

Shawn smiled at me, and I admit that I’d have followed him anywhere when he gave me that look. “No reason,” he lied. “Just to check on your hand.”

I looked down at the distorted appendage that was attached to my right arm. “Oh. That’s my masturbating hand. We need to fix this fast. And I forgot to give you your blow job in the middle of the bush. Remind me when we get home, okay, babe?”

Shawn told me later that several people were walking through the car park and heard my comment, but I was beyond noticing them. I just looked at Shawn and tried to keep up with the pain levels in my hand. It took mental strength not to yell and cry from the agony.

Fortunately I was with Shawn, who’d been to the emergency department many times before. He marched straight up to the desk and said, “Hey, Christine. How’s that baby of yours going?”

The pretty young nurse turned and smiled in recognition of my man. “Shawn. How are you? Please don’t tell me your mother has hurt you again?”

“Nah. I have a new person to torture. This is Harley. I think he’s having a bit of an allergic reaction to an ant bite, so I brought him in to see my favorite nurses.”

The nurse looked at my bloated hand and did a double take. “Oh, good one. How long since you were bitten?”

“About three hours,” Shawn replied for me. Christine ushered us into the triage room and cut my glove off. The skin was red and angry from the tips of my fingers to an inch past my wrist. She made a pen mark on my arm to indicate where the swelling was so they could monitor it. Then she pried apart my fingers, and I was shocked at the sight of the pus-filled blister that had formed.

“Ooh, nice and juicy.” Christine looked excited by my injury.

I personally think that Christine’s husband needs to take her out to dinner more often and maybe to a party where she can interact with real people. But that was my introduction to Christine, and it will always stick in my mind. She was ever so impressed that my body could produce something so utterly repugnant, and she took great pleasure in jabbing it a couple of times with her finger, just to watch the liquid that had formed under the skin move around. Shawn tells me that Christine always enjoys his more grotesque injuries. The time he turned up to emergency with explosive gastro she was unimpressed and told him that he was usually the fun patient, but gastro isn’t her idea of a good day.

I’m not sure I’ve met anyone whose idea of a good day is to be vomiting continuously into a bucket. I’m sure I’ll find one one day, though.

Four hours later Shawn drove me home. I was pumped full of antibiotics, antihistamines, and painkillers. My injury had been lanced, cleaned, and dressed. My fingers were still swollen, but the swelling had lessened dramatically. The cut on my face from falling headfirst into a bush had also been cleaned and disinfected, as had the gash on my leg from falling in the tree. In comparison, Shawn, with his eight bites, was fine.

“Why did this happen?” I asked the doctor at one stage. “I’ve had plenty of bites previously.”

The doctor shrugged and said that each person has a different tolerance to bites. Some people were bitten twice before the body decided to react with such vigor, some people were bitten three hundred times. He could only assure me that I would probably have a bad reaction again, so I should be mindful of anaphylaxis and carry antihistamines with me when I went bushwalking.

Shawn ushered me inside my house and helped me sit on the lounge while he made me something for dinner later and fed the dogs. “I’m really, really sorry,” he told me for the fiftieth time. “I’ll be more careful next time. And I’m really sorry I can’t stay and look after you, but I need to get back to Mum or else Lisa won’t sit with her again.”

I told him I’d be fine, thanked him for the sandwich, and kissed him good-bye before he walked home.

I didn’t realize it would be weeks before I saw him again.

Shawn

Avoiding Harley, and strawberry-flavored condom dollies.

H
AVE
YOU
ever looked in the mirror and hated something about yourself? Did you ever wish for beautiful blond hair instead of your normal black? I tried to bleach my hair once because I was sure that blonds had more fun (and a lot more sex) than I was having. I tried the peroxide solution.

My hair turned green.

I tried pretending for a couple of days that I really did mean to dye it that color, but I don’t think anyone believed me. When my hair began falling out in clumps, I had to take drastic action. So I shaved it all off.

I looked terrible, like a chick shorn of its fluff. And I managed to get my skull sunburned the day after. Not only did I have to deal with the itch of the hair growing back, but my whole head peeled and it looked like I had the worst case of dandruff that any person had ever had. I wore beanies for weeks and looked like a total dweeb by sweating through the wool in summer.

But I would’ve gladly gone through that again than suffer the embarrassment of knowing it was
my
fault that Harley was hurt. What sort of person doesn’t recognize an anthill, for goodness’ sake? Here I was thinking he would fall from a tree or get bitten by a snake, and it turns out that a mere ant sent him to the hospital. All because of me and Shawn’s Law.

So I hid and avoided him. I sent him a ton of text messages over the next couple of days to make sure he had recovered, but then, like an alcoholic finally admitting they had a problem, I decided to cut myself off from him, completely.

I didn’t read his messages on my phone. More than about twenty times a day. I swear it.

At four o’clock in the afternoon, I made sure I was somewhere else or extremely busy in my house, where I wouldn’t be watching to see if he walked by. The first day I locked myself in the art room and worked on a novel cover where a poor woman was losing her dress while being ravished by a handsome pirate on the deck of a ship. I try not to think about some of the stories inside these novels. I read two of them in curiosity, and now I’m scared off heterosexuality for life. Weeping folds and pulsing portals are just
not
my thing.

The following afternoon, my avoid-Harley routine involved me digging a hole in the very back of my yard, where I wouldn’t be able to hear the doorbell if it rang. I had a lot more solutions to that four o’clock problem.

Running out of flour and needing it at 3:55 p.m. Funny that.