Girls in Boys' Cars Read online

  ‘Man,’ Asheeka said, ‘we’re going to have to get off at Cabramatta and go all the way back into the city from there.’ But I knew it wasn’t such a big deal. She liked it, we liked it. Just going somewhere. Anywhere. Asheeka unbuttoned her school blouse so that the sparkly top she was wearing underneath threw light all around the carriage and then she pulled off her school skirt, exposing the short shorts she had on underneath. I fumbled, pulling up my leggings and getting my own skirt off. Asheeka shielded me while I changed my top, showing my old cotton bra to the world that was flying past my window.

  ‘Here.’ She’d packed a survival pack for our escape, a picnic of orange Fantas and rice crackers, and then she pulled out her phone, tuned it to Beyoncé and handed me one of her earbuds. These were the moments I liked best, when it was just us and we didn’t need to be anything for anyone else: Asheeka could quit being the most popular girl in the remake of Mean Girls and I didn’t have to be the dorky side-kick who didn’t know they looked ridiculous with their new makeover. We pulled into a station and I watched two young women get onto the train, too dressed up and glamorous for the dirty grey of the platform they were standing on, clutching their fake leather handbags.

  ‘What will we do when we get there?’ I said.

  In the reflection of the train window behind her I checked the red and blonde streaks in my hair. Asheeka had told me how to do them from a packet you buy at Priceline. She told me I needed them and that I also needed to learn to use those wax strips to do my eyebrows and that I also needed to paint my nails in red at least once every couple of weeks. She said everyone would respect me more if I did these things. She said it like it was a fact, and it was.

  ‘Just be there,’ she responded, taking a long sip of her Fanta like she was one of those old guys at the pub drowning in the relief of the first beer at the end of the day. ‘We don’t need to do anything but be there. You know, it’s the city. We can look at all those shops in the QVB and sit on the steps of the Town Hall and just be there. Better than here,’ she said, looking out the window at all those rows and rows of streets and same-same houses.

  COSMIC RADIATION

  Let’s stay here for a while in those last few weeks of year eleven. I’m trying to pinpoint that one moment that made us have to run but really I guess it was a lot of things, over a long period of time, like all those days of dealing with peak hour in the girls’ toilets after school. There were ten minutes, maybe, between when the bell rang and when the teachers came in and forced you out, ten minutes for everyone to try to adjust themselves for the world outside. All the girls came in looking like this – skirts all the way past our knees and our school blouses buttoned up at the top and at the cuffs and tucked in neatly so that they looked as ugly as they were meant to. Lots of ponytails with bland green ribbons, the only colour the school would allow. Everyone left the toilets looking like this – skirts a little higher, lips a little redder, hair as wild and free as a selfie you’ve taken at the beach.

  That last time the weather was hot and I was looking hot too, according to Asheeka, who was stabbing me with an eyeliner pencil so that she could get my eyes to pop out like two fat brown dates. ‘Every time you do that it feels like my eyelids are on fire,’ I said.

  ‘It’s meant to feel like that,’ she responded, exasperated because she’d already given me that explanation a million times before. She turned to the mirror and held that small bit of space everyone behind her was waiting for. She did it all casual, even though there were so many people waiting. There was a hierarchy to getting to that mirror. The year sevens mostly just jumped up and down at the back, catching a glimpse of themselves every now and then; the less confident waited and never got through. The front, near the basins, was for people like Asheeka who stood there like she just might go ahead and stay there for the rest of time. For Asheeka the world outside was mostly Arnold, so for him she put on lip gloss and eyeliner and brushed her hair until it shone like the surface of a plasma TV.

  I leaned back against the wall and opened my backpack, checking that the books I needed for later were there. When I looked up, Catherine was leaning forward, adjusting the ballerina bun on the top of her head. I stared at her boobs as they drooped down beneath the blouse where too many buttons had been undone. This was all for Asheeka, of course. To piss her off. They were like those videos of peacocks you see, displaying their bright feathers and shaking their arses in each other’s faces when it was mating season. Asheeka flicked her hair back like a knife across Catherine’s face. Catherine turned to her friend and put her index finger across the front of her scrunched-up nose and I remembered Asheeka telling me some story about how Catherine had said she always smelled like curry. Asheeka then applied another round of mascara to her eyelashes and ‘accidentally’ slashed Catherine across her perfectly contoured cheek with the mascara wand.

  ‘Sorry,’ Asheeka said with a casual shrug of her shoulders, knowing she’d won as Catherine furiously pressed the palm of her hand against her face, as though at any moment blood might start pouring from that black gash.

  The fight began with some boobs and ended with some hair and then we were on our way out to the road where there were dozens of girls leaning up against the school fence letting the crisscrossed wires hold them there. Asheeka casually slid herself into the row of girls who were the popular ones: the ones who’d had I rule this place stamped invisibly on their foreheads since the day they were born. There were nods of heads towards her and a little squeeze to her left hand from Lauren of the ever-present blonde ponytail. They didn’t acknowledge me but they tolerated me because Asheeka had told them they had to and that was that.

  Ms Stacey showed up for bus duty and I tried to look away from her before she looked at me but I was too late. ‘Do you really need that much eyeliner?’ she said to me and not to Asheeka or any of the other girls standing there looking like Cleopatra’s doppelgangers. You were meant to either be one of those girls who wears too much makeup or someone who reads books. You couldn’t be both, so I was confusing.

  ‘Just trying some things out,’ I said as she stood there in front of me for a little while longer. Ms Stacey always made it her mission to get me back to my own people – the type of people who would spend all of next year pining after ATARs that were close to three digits. I’d been into that in the past, or at least I’d thought I was interested, but I’d forgotten to turn a lot of things in on time in the last year or so. I just found it harder and harder to buy it, you know, this idea that a mark on a page, a teacher’s corrections scratched in red ink on a white page – that all that stuff really mattered as much as the school kept saying.

  ‘You know the debating team are having tryouts at the start of next year,’ she said quietly and smiled.

  ‘Right,’ I said. But we both knew that debating was never going to save me. I might have liked to read books and have a few private conversations about the world with Ms Stacey and Sue from the porn store but I definitely didn’t have the I-know-everything-about-the-world kind of confidence that kids on the debating team had.

  But I guess Ms Stacey thought I was more saveable than Asheeka. You could tell that Ms Stacey had long ago decided she knew exactly who Asheeka was: her idea of girls like that was as cemented as Asheeka’s arse was to that fence. Ms Stacey walked past Asheeka without comment. I watched a small smile grow in the corner of Asheeka’s mouth as that iridescent blue Ford Falcon pulled up at the kerb and she grabbed the handle of the passenger side door. I followed her lead and climbed in the back, my bum sticking to the leather as I slid across the seat. Asheeka wound down the window and stuck her middle finger up at Catherine as she walked out of the school gates. But all that was unnecessary. Asheeka knew she’d won both the bathroom battle and the one playing out here: she was the girl in the front seat of a car that glittered its way down the street, next to a guy who was attractively a few years older.

  We cruised through all those backstreets with their squat brown-bri
ck 1940s suburban dream homes and their overgrown front lawns and all those skeletons of new apartment buildings overlooking them. The sky above was blue. So blue that it smacked me in the eyes and got me lost somewhere.

  ‘Hey, spaceship!’ Asheeka reached back and slapped my knee as we pulled up outside my mum’s. She was always that person who insisted I come right back to earth where I belonged whether I wanted to or not.

  I opened my mouth to say something to her but I’d forgotten what it was. She was looking out the front window again, sitting still as a statue as I opened the car door. When I leaned back into the car to grab my backpack, I saw Arnold place his hand high up on her thigh, underneath her school skirt, and hold it tight.

  A CAR IS THE THING WITH MAN PARTS

  Another thing we were trying out in those days was driving cars, getting to know the ways that engines turn fuel into movement – because movement got you anywhere but here. A lot of that took place in my dad’s garage where the bricks were leaking mould in the corner and it felt like we had been put into one of the ovens at the Afghani bread shop on the corner. He was refusing to give Asheeka or me any more driving lessons until we learned basic car mechanics so we agreed, temporarily anyway, to sit through his lectures.

  Asheeka did this weird thing she always did where she was semi-flirting with him. ‘I know what to do, Mr Garafano,’ she said, leaning back against that old Holden, whose endless need for repairs was eating holes into his army pension. ‘If it doesn’t work you call the NRMA and someone comes and fixes it.’

  He lifted his head up from under the bonnet where he was wiping down the guts of the car with a rag, so that he could better show us its insides. He smiled that smile, always warm and knowing, and said, ‘What happened to you guys, you know, all that girls doing it for themselves stuff?’

  Asheeka held out the fingernails she’d just had done and said, ‘But my nails, Mr Garafano!’

  In the corner the short-wave radio played the voices of truck drivers and police officers talking about a crash on the highway. Mum had always said Dad was going to get arrested one day for illegally tapping into these broadcasts. It was one of the rules she put down when she started letting him see me alone again. He wasn’t allowed to be listening to the gory details of bodies flying out car windows in the background of our time together.

  I don’t think she was really worried about him getting arrested anyway. I think she was worried about it setting him off. She didn’t want him to spend the rest of his life opening the front door to people no one else could see, people who’d come hobbling in because one of their legs had been blown off by a landmine.

  But I don’t know. I think the shortwave radio grounded him somehow. I watched him as he paused for a moment to listen to something about a break-and-enter and I wondered if there was someone else with him shaking their head in the dark corner of the garage.

  He took a deep breath and started his lesson in his OCD way by explaining the stuff in the front left-hand corner under the bonnet and then moving clockwise through everything else. He pulled the lid off a large plastic tube and handed Asheeka a bottle of blue fluid. ‘This is for the windscreen fluid. You can top it up, Asheeka.’

  Next, he pointed to a yellow ring and asked me to pull out the dipstick, which sent both Asheeka and I into hysterics (because who wouldn’t laugh at a word like dipstick?) and I looked at my dad who was breathing more heavily and I knew he was trying to do that thing he did when he got frustrated: breathing in, breathing out. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘The dipstick. What’s that for?’

  ‘It’s to measure the amount of oil,’ he said calmly and slowly before showing me the markings on the end of the stick that are meant to tell you how much oil you have, and I spaced out listening to someone do burnouts down the street.

  He went through every other part of the engine, carefully pulling things out and pointing. Everything looked too hard and cold, so not like a girl, and I realised that cars were made of man parts – solid and heavy things. Asheeka sat on a stool in the corner and crossed and recrossed her legs and kept her eyes on the guts of that car until it felt reasonable for me to ask again, ‘Do you think you could take us out for some lessons now?’

  My dad folded his arms and looked at us. ‘Don’t know if you know enough about cars to be driving one.’ And I wasn’t sure if he was stalling because he really thought that was true or if he was just in one of those moods again, where he was trembling against his own skin from the inside.

  So I stood in front of the engine and listed off all the parts – cylinder head, crankshaft, camshaft, piston and piston rings, connecting rod, engine valve, timing chain . . .

  When I turned around Asheeka and my dad both had these giant grins on their faces. ‘She wonders why people think she’s a nerd,’ Asheeka said to my dad.

  I’d already failed my Ps twice. Cars just never quite wanted to reverse or go forward or change lanes in the way my hands and my mind were commanding them to when I was behind the wheel. I’d always been like that, able to memorise lots of things. I just found the practical things hard – less easy to memorise and predict. I’ve got head smarts, not street smarts, Asheeka would say.

  What I learned when I was out there on the road is that cars are slippery things that will take you in their own direction and they don’t always listen when you try to insist that you’re the one in control.

  ON THE 48TH FLOOR

  Summertime: that week after school has finished and the long stretch of summer is about to begin. Asheeka and I used to spend the longest, longest time getting ready even when we had nowhere to go. Those nights, Asheeka would come over and we’d watch the street and plan our moves and talk about boys and Asheeka would give me makeover number twelve hundred and we’d watch all the cars slither slowly down the street like metallic cockroaches from my mum’s apartment on the 48th floor.

  Mum would be a bit glassy-eyed from a few too many after-work champagnes and she didn’t care so much about how thick I laid on the makeup, especially if we didn’t leave the place. She’d have her feet up on the glass-topped table and the widescreen TV blaring some kind of ‘rubbish’, as she called it, and her eyes would flip between the TV and the laptop screen where she flicked through her emails.

  We didn’t talk much, not really talk. We didn’t know how. I’d like to ask her a lot of questions but the things I’d like to ask her are the helium pushing against the surface of an overinflated balloon: so much to say but you know the questions will just lead to more questions and questions and questions with no answers and so it’s just easier not to talk much in any real way.

  This night, a few days after school broke up, Mum remembered she hadn’t made any dinner at about eight o’clock but Asheeka had already put some of those frozen mini quiches and apple pies she kept in the freezer ‘for entertaining’, even though she never really had anyone over, into the oven and cooked them. Asheeka pushed a plate into her hands and we took ours out to the balcony so that she could let hers go cold in peace.

  Me and Asheeka hung over the balcony in Mum’s two old bathrobes as if we were in some five-star hotel in the movies, like we were celebrities waiting for our fans to show up on the road below and wave and hold up signs. I love you Rosa, I love you Asheeka, those signs would say, but no, not today.

  We sat on the two little French chairs beside the mosaic table and watched the lights turn on everywhere between the west and Sydney Tower in the city. Asheeka liked coming here, to my place, because she said it was heaps glam. ‘One day,’ Asheeka always said, ‘I’m going to live in a place like this.’

  I was never so sure about the greatness of that place because it kept my mum working massive hours just so that we could look out through our floor-to-ceiling windows at my father’s crappy one-bedroom rental apartment in its old 1960s block down the road.

  Asheeka was leaning against the balcony, clasping and unclasping her hands. She looked bored. She always looked bored when things made her nerv
ous. She was wearing tight jeans with so many holes very purposely ripped into the denim that they probably provided no more warmth than a mini-skirt. But that’s what was in, so she’d wear it every day – even when it got too cold to be showing off your knees – until something else was in.

  From up in the sky, we tried to find all the things that grounded us. ‘That’s your apartment,’ I said, ‘under the highway.’ Asheeka poured herself another drink from Mum’s fancy glass jug, which we’d topped up with mint from her mum’s kitchen garden, so that we could have that feeling of drinking mojitos at a resort even if we were only drinking water. She walked around the balcony, looking at the ground below, ignoring me, like she ignored most people when they made some kind of acknowledgement of where she lived.

  ‘And your old place is there,’ she said, pointing while she pulled her glass to her lips.

  I looked at it then, for a few minutes: there it was sitting between two new apartment blocks, that lawn where Dad used to take me by the hands and spin me around and around. Now everything around it was being torn down and made new.

  And there was that McDonald’s M on a pole, always looking at you regardless of which way you turned as though it was a giant yellow plastic version of that Mona Lisa painting where the eyes of the lady stare right through you regardless of where you’re standing in relation to it.

  I stared at Asheeka’s sculpted calf muscles. I never understood where she got those from, or the swimmer’s shoulders. I could see the red soles of her heels as she leaned further over the balcony. That’s how you know they’re not Kmart crap, she told me once, because the leather was underneath the shoe, not just on top. She was the only 17-year-old I knew who didn’t shop at Supré. Most of her clothes were like that, bought carefully at online discount shops with money she earned from three evenings a week spent putting the clothes people leave on the Myer dressing-room floor back in their rightful place.