Something Special, Something Rare (5 page)

*

It's nighttime. You lie beside me. I cannot sleep, so I write this in my head. You will never read it; by daytime, these words will have been carried away, though I tell myself that, first thing, I will write them down. Our daughters sleep in the next room, three sisters, their legs curling up to protect their hearts. Somewhere in the city are my own sisters. They stand in front of their separate mirrors, putting on lipstick the way Mum used to, smearing the colour on and then rubbing their stretched lips together. Diva Red, Honey Shimmer, Cha Cha Cha.

Mimi is restless. I can hear her turning in her bed. When I close my eyes, darkness swirls. I crouch on the edge of a vertiginous night. When I sleep, I will not dream. But before sleep comes I see her stand up, on her roly-poly legs. She's looking around for me. I hear her faintly – ‘Mummy?' and then again, ‘Mum-me/' – but her tiny voice is swallowed by the forest as mine was. I see her climb the hill, hard work for such stout little legs; she slips back a little, she scrapes her knee. She is brave and does not cry. She makes it over the loose verge of the bank, hauling herself up by the bendy trunks of young trees.

She has to visit with the kanga first, to squat down and pat it with a flat open palm.

‘Mummy back soon,' she says. ‘Nigh-nigh, Kanga.'

She lifts the handle of the car door with both hands. Of course I've left it unlocked – I always do. A tidy child by nature, she pulls it closed behind her. She sits on the seat and slides on her bum to the car floor, and a giggle explodes out of her. She wants to do it again – again and again and again – but it's a lot of effort to get her top-heavy body back onto the seat. Anyway, something on the floor catches her attention, a toy one of the big girls has dropped: small and hard and plastic. A blue-grey cat, quite true to life. She lies down and looks at it, until her eyes blink closed. Nestled inside the husk of the car, like a fairy child scooped into a seed pod, lulled by the silver voices of the bell-birds, she's asleep before I've even noticed that she's gone.

LEBANON

FAVEL PARRETT

My brother and I were watching TV after school. I had a lot of homework to do – to get done – and it was worrying me like it always did, but I did not want to start. Not yet. I just wanted some time to not have to do anything.

My brother turned to me and asked me where Lebanon was. He was in year four and I was in my first year of high school. I told him I didn't know.

‘A man came to talk to us about Peace,' he said. ‘He was from Lebanon.'

There were often talks about Peace at our school. All I knew about being a Quaker was that there were minutes of silence when we were meant to think about Peace, and there was grey. Grey uniforms and grey walls.

I got up off the couch and walked over to the small bookcase that was really just a shelf squeezed in between the chimney and the wall. We had a two-volume edition of the World Book Encyclopaedia. They were brown and black, maybe they were leather, and WORLD BOOK was written in gold letters down the spine. Mum had won them in a raffle and that was lucky because I often needed to use them for homework.

I took down the L–Z volume and carried it back to the couch. I opened it up to the beginning of L.

I read it out loud and my brother nodded like he knew, like he was being reminded of something that had just slipped his mind. There was a map of Lebanon – long and thin and by the sea. There were also a few black and white pictures. One of a giant cypress tree, and one of some ancient ruins with Romanlike columns standing tall without a roof. There was a photo of a smart-looking city with lots of cars and people walking in the streets and bright white art-deco buildings against the sky. One building had a sign on the rooftop that said RIVOLI in huge curly writing.

The caption read –
Place des Canons, Beirut – 1969.

On the next page there was another picture of the city, only there were no cars and no people walking and the art-deco buildings were gone or so altered that there was nothing there to recognise. Smoke rose from missing rooftops and everything was blackened or grey. Everything different. The city had been smashed to pieces.

The caption read –
Beirut 1982: Operation Peace for Galilee.

My eyes scrolled down the page then, down all the columns about all the wars in Lebanon. The Civil War and the War with Israel and the War with the PLO. My brother had stopped looking at the pictures; he stopped looking at the book altogether and rested back against the couch.

‘No one wins a war,' he said, and he breathed in heavily. ‘That's what the man said he had come to tell us. No one wins a war, we just all lose. He showed us some photos of his family and he passed them around and told us they were all gone.'

I closed the book and sat with it heavy on my lap. The TV was still on but we were not watching it. Eventually I got up and walked over to the bookcase. I stood there in the corner with the World Book in my hands and the room was very still.

‘Is the man going to stay here now?' I asked, and I meant forever. I meant was the man going to stay here in Hobart forever.

But my brother just shrugged. His eyes were back on the TV and he wasn't thinking about the man from Lebanon anymore.

Only I was.

The story was inside me now. I knew I would remember the man even though I had never even seen him or heard him speak. I didn't know if he was old or if he was young, but I would think about him, here, living on this island without any of the people he loved or even knew at all. Here, so far away from home, knowing that he could never return to the place he remembered because it was gone.

J'AIME ROSE

TEGAN BENNETT DAYLIGHT

It was Thursday, and we had a free period before lunch. This gave us time to get to Ben's new house and watch
Days of Our Lives
before coming back for maths. The way to sneak out of school was not to sneak. You walked with your back straight, your head high, and you didn't look to see if you were being watched or followed. You had to believe no one had any reason to stop you.

Ben was short, with brown hair and a face that had been smooth and pretty when we were ten-year-olds. At sixteen he still had the same lush black eyelashes and brown almond eyes, but now he also had acne, and didn't wash his hair much.

Ben had always wanted me, even before we started high school. When we started French in year seven we were asked to write down and then read out loud the things we liked, starting
J'aime.
I can't remember my own list, only Ben's, which ended with
J'aime Rose,
with our special fake French trill on the R of my name. I wasn't really embarrassed. Ben was the sort of boy who could do things like that. He seemed quiet and even shy, but in fact he was clever, fierce and defiant, and he cared nothing for what other kids thought. He was the most entertaining friend I had. He was the only boy I knew who laughed when things were funny, rather than when they were meant to be funny, or when everyone else was laughing.

I had female friends at school, two of them, misfits like myself who read too many books or became spluttery about The Cure. I sat with them at lunchtime, and also with Ben and his friends. We were together as a group if you saw us from a distance, but in fact the girls sat in a circle of their own, on old pieces of sandstone, and the boys sat to one side, on milk crates they'd stolen from the canteen. Our spot was under a fig tree at the edge of the school where the land, briefly, became bush. It was private, neglected. It looked like an old campsite.

Ben and I didn't talk at recess or lunch. Neither of us knew how to cross from one side to the other, and Ben scorned my friends anyway, particularly Janice, whom he'd made cry by saying that the lead singer of The Cure was gay. That was a bad day. Through angry tears, Janice said that Robert Smith had been with his girlfriend, Mary, since they were teenagers. Ben, pretending to disbelieve her, said,
But there's nothing wrong with being gay,
and Janice couldn't deny it, because that was the code she lived by. This was what Ben could do, if he chose – lead you somewhere you didn't want to go, and leave you there.

I called us misfits before. I wasn't quite a misfit. I didn't have the courage for that. Not for me the glories of triple-pierced ears, or a radical devotion to a singer or a style. I couldn't commit to standing out like Janice did, with her black-ringed eyes and hair teased into a dyed dandelion. With her unconsummated marriage to Robert Smith. In this part of my life I was watching, and waiting. I was waiting to be transformed. I would be nobody until someone chose me.

*

I didn't like being alone with Ben, but this time I hadn't been able to think of an excuse.

Ben's father had died when he was six, and recently his mother had got married again, to an advertising executive. Now Ben had a stepfather and a stepbrother. Two weeks ago he and his mother had moved into their house, which was next to a wharf, and overlooked a stretch of river with boats clustered at its shores – yachts, and cruisers, which are like mansions on the water, only streamlined, a mass of architecture pointed at Sydney's bays and private beaches, at its harbourside restaurants.

Two weeks ago, too, Ben had given me an ultimatum. It had happened over the phone. Every afternoon after school, when I'd said hello to my mother and got myself something to eat, I used to sit in the study with my feet up on the tooled leather desk and phone Ben. I could tilt the office chair back and use my legs as pivot, as anchor, swinging myself back and forth as I stared at the ceiling. I'd been doing this for years, it seemed: talking over the day that had just passed with Ben, comparing the idiocies of our teachers, gossiping about the people we sat with, the kids in our classes.

This is what my parents were like when my father came home from work. They didn't wait for us to go to bed to begin comparing notes about their day; they talked over our heads, impatient to exchange impressions. I'd thought that perhaps Ben was meant to be my boyfriend because we had this too, this intense kinship, this shared bounty of laughter. I didn't want to wait much longer for a boyfriend, but something had stopped me settling for Ben.

Suddenly Ben said, ‘I'm sick of this.'

‘Sick of what?' I said.

‘Waiting for you to make up your mind.'

So it had come. I didn't pretend not to know what he was talking about. I sat up in the office chair, and brought my feet down to the ground.

‘It's obvious we were meant to be together,' said Ben. ‘I know you better than anyone does. I know you better than you know yourself.'

He'd said this before. It made me feel small, and imprisoned.

‘Just give it a go,' he said. ‘See how you like it.'

I didn't need him to explain what he meant. He meant for me to let him hold my hand, to submit to his body, let him tell people we were together. He meant for us to sit apart at lunchtime, kissing.

‘Just give it a try,' he said, and I agreed to.

*

We were not really going to his house to watch
Days of Our Lives.
This was Ben's way of cornering me into sex. Guess how I knew: I looked in the front pocket of his schoolbag. He had two condoms, things I'd seen before but never held in my hand. In their plastic packets they made me think of surgeon's gloves – as though he was preparing for an operation on me. Two weeks of being boyfriend and girlfriend had passed; two weeks of having my neck nuzzled by him in assembly; two weeks of my damp hand in his on the way home from school; two weeks of gaps and halts in our phone conversation and Janice and Vicky looking pityingly at me when I moved to a milk crate next to Ben's at lunch.

If only I had been pretty, I would have had more choices. Ben thought people were fools for not seeing how beautiful I was. I thought only someone very kind could love me, with my round, cheerful face and dark, thick, horsey hair, with my soft stomach and breasts. I dreamed of a pair of scissors that could cut off extra flesh. I would slice away the mound of my stomach. When Ben put his hand there I had to draw breath very suddenly, stiffening, holding it in.

The house was a stack of concrete rectangles with tinted windows looking onto the water. There was a tall security gate with a keypad. Ben pressed the numbered buttons and the gate slid to one side with a shriek of metal, making us check behind us as if we were intruders.

I always take a breath when I walk into a house for the first time. This one smelt of cleaning fluid. We dumped our bags in the wide front hall and went through the cool of the air conditioning into the kitchen. There were two boys, one blond, one dark, a little older than we were, standing in front of the open fridge. There was nothing in the fridge but drink: rows and rows of champagne, aimed at us like missiles.

As we came in the blond boy popped the cork on a bottle of champagne, laughing as it hit the ceiling with its pattern of downlights. Then he put the bottle to his lips and drank and drank, not seeming to mind the bubbles. He passed the bottle to his friend, gasping and grinning at us.

What I remember best about this moment is a sense of the boys' sleekness, their look of good health and pleasure in being; a look that Ben, with his acne and his skinny shoulders, lacked utterly. They were like beautiful dogs, or horses, well-fed and adored.

Ben said, ‘This is Rose.' He pointed at the blond boy. ‘That's Alex. Who lives here.'

‘I'm Rob,' said the other boy, and held out the bottle. ‘Alex's friend. Drink?'

I remember, also, a long moment of Alex looking curiously at me.

There was a TV in the kitchen, but Ben would not stay there to watch, or drink from the bottle of champagne. He led me down to his bedroom in the bowels of the house, the air becoming colder as we descended, and less fresh. His bedroom was a concrete box with French doors giving onto a courtyard that was a dark tangle of ivy. The doors looked as though they would not open. He had all the things from his old house: his stereo, his TV, his boxes of tapes and stacks of LPs. But he had a double bed now, that I couldn't look at, and a poster of Brigitte Bardot on the wall, astride a motor scooter. I stood in the doorway. The smell of his room was already the same as in the last house. Musty more than anything else. Not bad. I could hear Alex and Rob crashing round in the kitchen, shouting with laughter.

‘Let's go back up,' I said. ‘We could get drunk.'

‘With those idiots?' Ben sat down on the bed and patted the mattress next to him. His sheets were new, black and horribly shiny. He smiled at me, and then pursed his lips, a kiss. I shook my head. The inside of his mouth tasted like sandwiches or baked beans.

I crossed my arms tight over my chest. ‘I want to get drunk.'

‘What about
Days?'

‘Come on,' I said and he stared at me, and crossed his own arms.

‘Please.' If I could get him drunk I could get away, and put off the sex. ‘It'll be fun.'

Ben gave a long, weary sigh and got to his feet. I was already out the door. He stumped up the stairs behind me. I was running, taking the steps two at a time – I had a feeling, a superstition, that if I reached the kitchen before he got to the top of the stairs I would be free of him. I swung, panting, into the kitchen and Alex and Rob turned to look at me.

‘I want a drink,' I gasped.

We didn't go back to school that day. As the afternoon went on I got lighter and lighter. It was my dream, I think, to disappear. The more I drank the less substantial I felt, almost coming apart, like a rag of cloud in a breezy sky. I drank and listened to the boys, and didn't speak. Once, just once, Alex came to stand next to me. Then he took my hand, and looked down at me, his eyes as startled as mine must have been. Ben didn't see this. He had given up needling me about getting back to his room and was becoming incoherent, staggering around the kitchen, challenging us to drinking games.

None of them noticed when I took the bottle of champagne I was drinking from and went out into the hall. There was a set of metal spiral stairs leading up a concrete stairwell. The edges of the steps were irregular and the concrete was bare and grey. It was as though the house was not finished, was a shell, and that the family had moved in before it was ready. I started to climb, holding the bottle by the neck. Four floors up and I had reached the single room at the top, which I knew must be Alex's. From it you could see the Harbour Bridge, shimmering in the distance. The sun was behind us now. A breeze had sprung up. I could feel it on my hot face through the open window, and hear the tink of stays from the moored boats. I was drunk; it was a summer afternoon; there was an opening out, a flood of possibility.

I turned back to the room. In one corner there was a cricket bat, on the desk a pile of folded clothes, on the wall a poster with a picture of a red Porsche. There were no books. I finished the bottle of champagne sitting on Alex's bed, and then went down the metal stairs as quietly as I could. I grabbed my bag from the hall, let myself out, skipped through the shrieking gate, pressed the button to close it and was up the street and round the corner as fast as I could go, my heart beating quickly.

I walked home, my schoolbag on my back. The leaves on the trees were bright in the glassy air. There was no one around – there was a lull at that hour, when fathers had arrived home from work and mothers were making dinner. Televisions were on in the front rooms of houses. Perhaps it would be autumn soon, after this long, bright summer. When I got home my mother was cooking in the kitchen with the lights off, the twilight rounding the edges so the room was gentle, soft. She turned and smiled at me as I came in.

In maths on Friday, Ben passed me a note that said
How do you like my new big brother?

I read the note and then wrote,
He could be worse,
and passed it back.

Ben looked, and then covered the note with his hand. I tried to think of something else to write about Alex, but he hadn't struck me as funny, as most things did when I was with Ben. Our friendship flourished in confinement, like maths class, where our notes to each other made us sick with laughing and sometimes caused the teacher to send us out. Then we would push each other in the corridor, stagger against the clapboard walls, knees bent with mirth. But today we did our maths. We did not even pretend to hide our answers from each other, the way we usually did, in imitation of Mary Ann Wilson, who would be dux eventually and didn't want anyone else to share it.

Walking from maths to history, I told Janice about Alex. She preferred punk boys, skinny ones with stick legs in black jeans and winkle pickers, but she understood the appeal of the private school boy. Every girl, even Janice, wanted to be asked to a private school formal, where, we believed, some thoughtful parent would arrange for a party beforehand with actual drink being served, where the boys would not wear pale grey tuxedos with pale blue bowties but proper black ones. Where the boys would be capable, handing us in and out of a taxi, talking to us at the dance instead of getting so slaughtered that they spent most of the night vomiting in the car park. Janice said nothing about Ben.

On the way home from school I walked with Ben as far as his street, allowed him to kiss me and put his tongue in my mouth, and then took the back streets to my house. I liked the quiet, and not having to think about cars when I crossed the road. I could daydream so intensely that reaching home was a surprise; my body had carried me there without me knowing. I told myself a story as I walked, of Alex coming up from the ferry, inexplicably early from his turreted school, liking the back streets as much as I did, meeting me under the arch of leaves. Neither of us would go home. We would choose one of the streets that led down to the river, one that ended in a tiny reserve, we would sit on the bench next to each other and talk and kiss. We would still be there when it was dark.