Girls in Boys' Cars Read online

  When she had first arrived this afternoon, her black eyeliner was smudged and her hair was in a messy bun on the top of her head. When she was like that, when she had her pouty lips on, that’s when you knew there was something wrong. In those days that something wrong was usually Arnold.

  I could hear Mum in the living room laughing so hard at something on TV she snorted and knocked her glass over. ‘Your mum’s so cool,’ Asheeka said, looking back through the glass doors. She put her hand on my shoulder and, even now, I remember so clearly how cold that hand was even in the heat.

  I rolled my eyes but secretly it was a comfort to me every time Mum was loud because there had been so much silence for so long since she and I moved to this apartment that sometimes it was hard to imagine living in a space that had all those random sounds of life again.

  Closer up I could see that Asheeka’s mascara definitely wasn’t smudged. It was some kind of bruise. A black eye. I knew black eyes because Asheeka was the first person to give me one. I covered for her – that’s just what you do. She’d punched me in the eye with that big ring of hers because I told her that she was too good for Arnold and his crew. Some girls, they just loved the wrong kind of guys. I thought about it later, and I understood that he’d hurt her and she’d hurt me, not that that’s all right, but just that that’s how it is. That time, we got hauled into the principal’s office because Ms Stacey had heard the two of us yelling in the girls’ toilet.

  In that office it was me and Asheeka and Ms Stacey and Principal Spinks and my black eye growing larger and darker between us all.

  ‘What happened?’ Ms Stacey asked with the kind of lifted eyebrows that said, I want you to tell the truth here. And I just said, ‘I fell down the stairs.’ Principal Spinks looked at Asheeka like he too was suspicious and said, ‘Juanita, what happened?’ He called her Juanita approximately half the time because Asheeka and Juanita were the only really dark-skinned students in our year at school and he couldn’t tell them apart. I don’t know why she never corrected him. That time, she just shrugged her shoulders and looked at the floor and I said again, ‘I fell down the stairs.’

  While I was trying to decide whether I should say anything about her bruise, Asheeka’s mobile phone started ringing and when she answered it I could tell it was her mum because she started speaking in her other language. She told me once that it’s all baby talk. That’s all she can speak with her mum because they left their Indian community in Fiji when she was a little kid. Her mum called her all the time when she was out.

  After sitting on that balcony for a while we continued the night by doing what we always did. I found the chips and the biscuits Mum hid at the back of the pantry so that she could eat them when no one was looking, and we headed to my bedroom. Asheeka went through the clothes in my wardrobe and I sat on the bed, trying to eat one biscuit slowly, trying to be thoughtful about it so I didn’t eat the whole pack like I used to. She pulled out this tiny leopard-print dress she bought me for my birthday last year. ‘This is so cute. You never wear it.’

  I looked at it hanging there and took another small bite of my biscuit. ‘The problem is, I can’t pull it down low enough so that it sits, like, low enough down my thighs. I don’t know if I can walk down the street in that and in a pair of heels. I don’t think I could pull it off.’ I’d only been sitting in this thinner body for a couple of years now, this redder shade of lip gloss for even less time. I could never do that stuff right. Not like Asheeka did it, not with that same kind of look that said you were totally, absolutely sure that you were born in the kind of dress that’s so tight it sits on you like a second skin.

  ‘Not true, come on. Put it on.’

  I took off my bathrobe and stood there in front of the full-length mirrors that lined the closet and I looked at myself in my cotton undies and the bra, with no underwire, that did nothing to flatter anything.

  ‘Arms up,’ Asheeka commanded, and I put them in the air and she pulled that dress over my head and down the length of my body. I wished I had curves. I wished I had a lot of things, a bit more height maybe. I looked away from myself and towards the plate of biscuits on my bed.

  ‘Perfect,’ she said as she pulled the hair away from my eyes and put her hand on my lower back so that I had to stand up straighter. ‘Don’t know why you wouldn’t want to be seen in that.’

  And I looked back at myself and thought, yeah, maybe it would be good to be seen.

  PEEING IN SMALL CUPS

  ‘Can you turn around?’ I ask Maree. The answer is no. The answer is no to a lot of things when you’re in a correctional centre. ‘It’s hard to pee when you are looking at me.’

  ‘I know,’ she says matter-of-factly, like I’ve just declared the sky is blue.

  I try to think about rain and waterfalls. I look down at the small cup I’m holding beneath my legs and shift my bum around on the toilet seat.

  Maree wants to do small talk, which is awkward, but I guess you don’t have much of a choice when you’re inside a toilet stall with no doors. I used to like hanging out in the girls’ toilets gossiping, letting Asheeka do my hair. That’s what toilets used to be for. Now they’re for random drug tests.

  ‘Did you read those books I brought you last week?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Like them?’

  ‘Yes . . . No.’ I am tired of saying yes to everything. Tired of being agreeable. I decided to stop saying yes if I didn’t want to somewhere out there on the road and I’m not going to let that go now that I’m here. But Maree looks disappointed. ‘Okay, here’s the thing,’ I amend. ‘They weren’t that bad, real page turners and all but, you know, I kind of miss the stuff we got at school on the outside that, like, made you think in more complex ways.’

  Maree nods. ‘That’s the entire point of why you are here. To think about things in more complex ways.’ She folds her arms like we are in her office and not in the toilets.

  ‘I need something more, like The Catcher in the Rye, but with girls and less phoney people.’

  ‘The Catcher in the Rye,’ she says. ‘Right.’ She rubs her eyes. I’ve aged her again like all the other girls here. ‘If you don’t like the books I bring you, you can just write your own book. I’ve seen you with your head down writing stuff in your room when I walk by. That’s good. Not many readers and writers in here, but lots of stories.’

  I am, at last, distracted enough from thinking about peeing to actually pee. Maree passes me a clear ziplock bag and I screw the lid on the cup and put it inside. Then I wash the result of my bad aim from my hands and follow her towards the common room where I stand with my sample in front of the office, while the person who is meant to take it from me has the longest, longest conversation on the phone.

  Inside the common room several girls try to slouch in uncomfortable metal chairs while watching TV, the memory of couches forever imprinted on their bodies. Maree has left the room and come back with a box and I watch as she selects three girls to join her in the corner. The girls pull out nail files and nail polish from inside the box. This is the reward, Maree has told me, for good behaviour. I’ve only been out of isolation for a few days now. They are easing me in, seeing how I’ll go, if I’ll cause trouble. I’m trying to stick closer to the girls with nice nails because they don’t explode as much, don’t try to trip you over in the bathrooms.

  One of the girls watching TV, Tracey – I recognise her from the lunch line yesterday – turns and half-smiles at me. I go to wave but the hand I try to wave with is holding a bag with a jar of my pee in it. Tracey places her hand on the shoulder of the girl next to her, says something softly in her ear and they laugh and I wonder if they are laughing at me. They had sat together in class too, whispering, smiling like old friends. Then, so quick I wouldn’t have noticed if I hadn’t been standing there, Tracey kicks the girl’s chair out from underneath her in one startling thrust and then turns to me. It is a warning. A message, I guess.

  Sometimes, at times like this,
that earlier me emerges again. She walks into the corner with her bowl cut, eating a biscuit, and flies off somewhere in her head to some scene she once liked in a book. She rises to the surface of my skin. I feel weightless, formless, like I’m out of touch with my own body and I can’t feel the ground and that invisibleness flows through my veins. I close my eyes and I try to imagine I’m on the road again and I’m driving in that hot pink car but the sound of Tracey screaming as a guard drags her back to her room rips me out of my head. When I open my eyes I’m looking at my reflection in the glass and I’m here in the correction centre, trying to recognise my own face again.

  NAN IN A WHITE PLASTIC CHAIR

  But enough about me for now. I want to talk about the people I miss here in the centre. I want to talk about my nan. She spends a lot of time sitting in a white plastic chair on the front lawn of her retirement home talking to people. It is the same chair that she used to spend a lot of time sitting on in front of the house where I grew up with her and Pop and my parents. We kept it for sentimental reasons and also because she was slowly losing her mind and we thought it might bring her back to herself.

  Some days after school, I liked to sit out there with her. We talked about how she met Pop, or really, because she didn’t quite remember and I had no idea, I constructed the story of how she met Pop. My version was inspired by the opening scenes of Fifty Shades of Grey.

  ‘So,’ I said. ‘You were a young woman who was all beautiful and awkward and fumbly and you walked into this office tower and there was a man, and he was so beautiful and confident it was like you couldn’t speak but you couldn’t stop thinking about him and he couldn’t stop thinking about you and he seduced you by buying you all these nice things and taking you on his private helicopter around the city, and then you moved in with him to his beautiful penthouse in the sky and he was this scarred and difficult but really hot man and you taught him how to love.’ (I didn’t mention the sex bits.)

  She clapped her hands and said, ‘Yes!’ and smiled, and I didn’t know if she knew I was full of shit or if she really believed it. Probably somewhere in the middle, but that was the great thing about being with her. You could pour your heart out or you could make up a story. She didn’t mind. She pulled a shoebox of biscuits out of the trolley she always wheeled out to the front lawn with her and handed it to me. She wasn’t meant to eat sugar but every ethnic in the neighbourhood bought her biscuits anyway. These were the particularly lethal Greek kind that floated in a mound of powdered sugar. I loved them. We both did, and we ate one each, staring at the sun, and I pulled a tissue out of my pocket and wiped the powdered sugar from the corners of her mouth so she wouldn’t get into trouble.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘But this story was about you, no?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The boy. The very very handsome boy.’

  She looked at me and looked confused, like she had remembered something and forgotten it again. She said, ‘The sky is nice today.’ And it was. I pulled my chair closer to hers and put my head on her shoulder and she started to sing a Greek children’s song about a woman patching her husband’s pants. She put her hand on my knee and tapped it in time like she used to do when I was a kid.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘There was a handsome boy, but he’s gone now.’ In truth there’d been a few boys, but they all only ever really existed in my life for a short moment. Sometimes they weren’t even in my life, they were just in my head. Most of them were friends of Arnold, boys who knew what they wanted and how to get it. The type of boys who were hard to say no to. There were a couple of guys I fooled around with and I knew it wasn’t meant to be much but the last one, Jake, was more than that, he made me feel all punched-awake: he was all saggy jeans and Bonds tops and he lived in his own flesh more fully than I ever could.

  A confession: I had always been concerned that I might be a slightly less real person than other human beings, as though my whole life was a series of excerpts cut and pasted from all the books I read in some random order until that moment, but with Jake it was like I had finally pressed through to the other side of something even if it was only for a little while.

  My nan waved again at one of the endless someones she knew driving by and I thought about that last night that Jake and I got together and how, the next time I saw him, he walked towards me and then just kept on walking like he’d never seen me at all. I still saw him sometimes when he was hanging with Arnold and nothing . . . I guess I thought I was seen but I wasn’t. Maybe it was better to stay invisible.

  WRONG SIDE

  I want to return to the story of what happened, a few days after we were hanging at my place with the leopard-print dress. I know I’m jumping around the place a bit here but most stories don’t really go ahead in straight lines. They get jumbled up and you have to untangle them again (just like life, I suppose).

  So, here we go; Asheeka and I were walking down the backstreets through Parramatta to Harris Park. It was hot but we were wearing jeans and shirts long enough to cover our bellies. You can’t really get away with crop tops and all that makeup in the daytime around here, so far from the city, where the boys look hard and don’t turn away.

  We walked slow. Stopped at the skate park. Watched the boys throw themselves down concrete bowls on a few small wheels and then headed past all the holes in the ground where the old houses and squat brick apartment blocks used to be.

  Harris Park was looking like itself: streets and back alleys lined with curry shops and spice shops and old Lebanese guys smoking argileh in front of windows packed with baklava in the cottages that long dead white people built.

  I think it was me who noticed the reflection of the car first in the window of the fruit and vegies shop when I was standing outside waiting for Asheeka to get some stuff for her mum. It was pretty hard to miss, that iridescent blue. I think Arnold must have polished it every day to make it look like that.

  It glowed. It was something more than metal and rubber and car guts. It was Arnold, and Arnold was all the shittiest boys in the neighbourhood, and all the shittiest boys in the neighbourhood were that iridescent blue car that made you want to touch it and run for cover at the same time.

  Asheeka came out and we kept walking, and I didn’t say anything until we went into a side street and I could see out of the corner of my eye that he’d pulled over a few metres back. ‘Don’t look. Arnold is behind us.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Behind us. In his car.’

  We kept walking. Boys and girls, the game of it, is a hard thing to understand. I knew they hadn’t been talking since she came over to my house that night with the unexplained black eye. I guess she loved him and didn’t love him all at the same time, something like the love and not love between my parents.

  Asheeka stopped and tied her shoelaces or looked at her phone or adjusted her bag so a walk that should have taken a short time was long. At one point we stopped and sat on the steps at the hairdresser’s and I watched as Asheeka typed go away into her phone.

  He came closer in his car but didn’t say anything. He just drove alongside us until we reached Asheeka’s apartment under the highway overpass. Asheeka casually opened the mailbox with the key on her chain as if nothing weird was happening and we stepped over the broken bike someone had left in the middle of the concrete driveway.

  Upstairs, the inside of Asheeka’s apartment was the opposite of the tired brown bricks on the outside of the building. The walls were a warm eggshell colour and there were pillows and throws and knick-knacks all dusted down and put carefully in their place. On one wall there was an image of Ganesha, on another there was an image of Elvis: it was a family joke because back in Fiji they had called Asheeka’s dad the Indian Elvis because he had this big boofy black hair he used to slick back and because he loved singing Elvis songs. He died when Asheeka was ten and that’s the thing she remembers about him the most, his poufy black hair and the fact that he sang ‘Love Me Tender’ a lot after he’d had a coupl
e of drinks.

  As soon as we shut the door Asheeka’s mum was always there with a plate of things. ‘I don’t know what you eat,’ she said to me every time, as though I came from an alien country. We sat down at the table and she brought out plates of dry curry and pickles and bread and cups of tea and then went back to the kitchen, got a packet of those discount lamingtons you get at Coles and placed six on a china plate in front of me, next to all this homemade food. She said something to Asheeka and the only word I understood was homework, which came up repeatedly in their conversation. She poured me a cup of tea and handed it to me and said ‘homework’ again.

  ‘It’s summer, Mum, the holidays,’ Asheeka said. We were starting to see the finishing line. Not long now and we’d be out of school and into the world.

  Asheeka went to the window and looked down onto the street. ‘He’s still there,’ she whispered to me when her mother left the room and I didn’t know if she was saying it like she was afraid or excited for the attention.

  Her brother came through the door in his work overalls, folded his arms and shook his head at her. ‘Your idiot is in the driveway, just sitting there, looking up. I said hi, but he didn’t say anything, just kept looking up here to our apartment.’

  ‘He used to be your friend,’ Asheeka replied.

  ‘Until he started going out with you. I swear, Sheeks. He’s the biggest douche in the Indian community. Anyone would have been better than him. A Leb, or a white guy even.’

  Asheeka didn’t say anything. She picked up the IKEA catalogue her mother had left on the table and started flipping through the pages so Ronny walked into the kitchen and came back with a carton of eggs. Asheeka pretended not to notice him but I walked out to the balcony and watched as he launched several eggs at Arnold’s car. In response Arnold started honking and everyone in the street came out to stand on their balcony, including Asheeka’s mum, who wrestled the eggs from Ronny as Arnold drove away. And then there was a fight between the two of them, a big one I didn’t understand much of, and Ronny walked off into his room and slammed the door and Asheeka’s mum sat down in front of us, whipping her sari back over her shoulder in the same aggressive manner that Asheeka flipped her hair in people’s faces, and then the word ‘school’ and ‘sensible’ were said loudly and aggressively several times and I grabbed a lamington and shoved it, the whole thing, into my mouth all at once and almost choked as I swallowed.