Girls in Boys' Cars Read online

  MINTO STORIES

  Somewhere near Minto we turned off the highway and pulled into a petrol station. The bill for the petrol was $65. I knew I only had $35 in my EFTPOS account. I stood there for a moment, looking at the petrol pump, thinking about that card in my wallet. Up in the sky the sun was a strange orange-red colour.

  I got back into the passenger seat and we drove off. I kept checking the rear-view mirror, waiting for a convoy of police cars, all lights flashing, to follow us. I put my hands together. Clapped once.

  ‘We did it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Drove away without paying.’

  ‘Did we?’ Asheeka had been aching to get to Minto. I don’t think she was thinking about the cost of fuel. ‘Well, I suppose it’s Arnold’s car. They’ll send the bill to him or something.’

  She was slowing down at corners, checking out the street signs, scanning the roads.

  ‘Do you remember where the mechanic was?’ I asked.

  ‘What?’ was her first response. She was squinting, concentrating on the road. We passed through rows of new townhouses and small new apartment blocks as sterile as hospitals. ‘Oh, yeah. It’s on my old street.’ There were still Christmas wreaths hanging slack from people’s doors and windows. The streets were wider than I was used to, the footpaths where kids lazily rode their bikes enormous, but it also felt older, like going back in time.

  Asheeka looked out the window and shook her head. Then she pulled over, got out of the car and started pacing back and forth. I got out too. ‘It’s not right,’ she said. ‘It’s all different. It’s all new.’ She pulled her dress down towards her knees. Her phone started buzzing again in her purse and she pulled it out. We watched it flash the name Arnold across its screen for a while before it switched to flashing Mum. ‘I bet they’re together,’ she said. ‘Taking turns.’

  ‘I didn’t think your mum even liked him.’

  ‘She doesn’t. Thinks he’s beneath me. But you know . . . you know. They’re always ganging up on me.’

  I pulled my phone out of my bag. Just a text from Mum: Are you staying at your dad’s? I could fall off the face of the planet. No one would know.

  We got back in the car. She started the engine again and we didn’t say much. We drove through streets of houses that were so new-looking it seemed impossible that anyone could have ever touched them before. ‘Is this the place?’

  ‘No. It’s in the older bit of the neighbourhood.’ I got the feeling Asheeka might not know where to find the past.

  When we found the streets that Asheeka was looking for things were darker, those rows of houses with their windows boarded up were faded to the colours of old photographs. On the front lawn of one there was the skeleton of a car that looked like it had been set on fire long ago. Out the front of another house there were rosebushes in neat rows that looked like someone still cared for them. Asheeka drove into a cul-de-sac and stopped. She headed towards a red-brick home and down its side. I watched her legs disappear into overgrown grass before getting out of the car and following her. I was tired but not the kind of tired where you could possibly ever go to sleep.

  When I caught up to Asheeka she was standing in the backyard. ‘I can’t believe they’re still here,’ she said, looking at the house and not me. ‘I suppose our family was one of the first to move out but I thought they would have torn them down by now. They said they had to move us all out, that they were knocking them all down, not safe or something to have so much housing commission all together.’

  I walked up to the fence and looked over it. There were the same squares of yards filled with knee-high weeds – the same Hills hoists in the middle of the yard, looking naked without any clothes hanging on them. ‘But they’re still there,’ I said, stating the obvious.

  ‘Yeah, they were in such a hurry to get us all out and now all these houses are just sitting here, like someone forgot about them.’

  We walked through the gap in the fence where the wooden palings had fallen into the garden of another, almost identical fibro box of a house. I kicked at a gnome whose paint had all chipped off. ‘So much random stuff left behind.’

  ‘Yeah, it was like that. I’ve still got this little gold angel statue I found in the bedroom of one of the houses down the street. They just left their door open. I walked in looking for a friend and they’d gone. Took most of the furniture but not the other stuff. Mum would have shit herself if she’d known that me and my girlfriends, all about nine or ten, we looted all those houses looking for girl stuff, miniskirts and lipsticks and bras.’

  ‘Where did everyone go?’

  ‘I never knew. We all moved out to different places.’

  I followed Asheeka up the back steps of the house that was in front of us. I wondered what she was looking for now. It seemed too quiet for a place with so many buildings. The kind of place where you could get lost in silence. I could picture whole families asleep behind the walls of those houses, unaware that everyone else in the neighbourhood had up and moved out on them.

  I wanted to go inside.

  The back door had a gaping mouth of splintery wood where it looked like it had been kicked in. It was open a few inches. I thought it would creak when I pushed it back the way that doors in old movies do, but it didn’t. Inside, it was just like Asheeka said. Random bits of things abandoned in some kind of hurried getaway to a new life: a pink couch cushion, a cooking pot, a framed picture of someone who wasn’t loved enough to be taken to the next place. On the wall next to the door there were lines and dates written in thick black texta. Someone had grown from the height of my shoulder to almost above my head in a little over a year. Asheeka put her finger on the end of one of those lines, right beside the letter ‘A’.

  ‘See’ she said. ‘There was one point where we were almost the same height.’ She pointed to a line just above it that said, ‘R’. I hadn’t realised until that point that we were actually in Asheeka’s old house.

  In a room at the back there were drawings of Ronny and Asheeka done in crayon on the wall of a wardrobe. I was staring at the place where Ronny had written his name in giant letters behind the cupboard door when Asheeka came towards me with a bunch of odd bits of clothing. She handed me a pair of thongs and an oversized shirt that had ‘Tintin’ on it in big faded letters. I put the thongs on and the shirt over my dress and felt more comfortable, like I could be at home lying on the couch. Asheeka put on a pair of black Nikes. Behind her head there was a smoke-stained floral curtain billowing in a breeze that must have been coming in through the window cracks. She looked, somehow, in the weirdness of what was happening, a bit more relaxed than she had been. She walked through the house, quietly running her fingers over the wall, taking back whatever stories they still had to tell her.

  Minutes later my phone actually started to ring and I was thinking, How am I going to explain all of this to Mum? But when I looked at the number on the screen I realised the call was coming from Asheeka’s mum. I’d forgotten she’d put it in my phone once, adding it to my contacts without asking me. ‘It’s your mum,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t answer it!’ she said in a squealy childish voice, so I didn’t. I really wouldn’t know what to say to Asheeka’s mum but there was a part of me that wanted to talk to someone outside of this whole mess who could tell me to do the logical thing: Just walk on up to the main street, take the bus home, apologise, move on with your life, keep your head down, keep out of trouble. Mum would’ve left very early in the morning for work. Maybe she didn’t even know that I was missing yet. I looked at my phone again. The limited battery sign flashed.

  I stood inside the cupboard and reached up to the space I couldn’t see on top of the shelf and my hand grabbed something there: a small card with a drawing of two kids on the front. Inside it said Merry Christmas. Love Asheeka in letters that were all over the page at odd angles.

  When I found Asheeka again she was in the backyard. She was leaning against the Hills hoist picking at her nai
ls. ‘I can’t. I just can’t be this dirty right now.’

  I watched her tap her foot on the ground in a quick and ceaseless beat and I knew that she was really getting nervous now and it made me nervous too. For some reason I needed to look at my knees. Everywhere they were brown and bruised and I couldn’t remember how they got that way. I had the sudden urge to lie down on my mum’s giant king-sized bed and look out those floor-to-ceiling windows at all the lights in all those buildings and feel like I was floating in the night sky.

  ‘We need to get some clothes,’ Asheeka said, ‘and some shampoo and lots of other things.’ And I knew that she did really need these things, not just as a practical necessity but to get her thinking again, so she could figure out what she needed to do about everything.

  Somewhere on the other side of the fence a man shouted at his dog. There was the bang and clatter of large bits of metal falling to the ground. We both ran down the alleyway next to the house and back out to the car.

  ‘What happened to the mechanic?’ I asked after a while, but my question got sucked into the air and out the window as we sped along the highway again. Asheeka was driving. Moving forward and forward like the road was pulling her along and she couldn’t stop.

  INSIDE AND OUT

  My dad always said to me that things happen twice, once in real time and then again when you’re remembering them. The first time is how it really happened, the second time is any number of things that might have nothing to do with the way it was that first time. The second time you might be looking at it a different way because you’re pissed off or heartbroken or maybe you just need to imagine it happened differently because you’d fall apart if you admitted to yourself what you really saw.

  Right now, for the first time in the two weeks I’ve been here, I’ve been allowed out into a group counselling session with other girls. I’m watching everyone as they try to walk the tightrope between the real things that got them here and the way they get replayed over and over in their heads.

  ‘Today we are trying to learn more productive ways of dealing with anger,’ Maree says. She’s different in this session from how she is when we’re one on one. She sits up straight and looks around the room, like she’s waiting for the kinds of things to happen that might make everything fall apart. It feels like those AA meetings you see on TV, where every time people turn up they’ve got to focus on learning something else that’s too big and too hard and too much.

  Tamara, a knobbly-kneed sixteen-year-old who looks small enough to be 12 declares, ‘You should just bash ’em. Bash the people who make you angry.’ She smiles politely and folds her hands in her lap and looks directly at Maree, knowing that she’s given the wrong answer. All the other girls are laughing. Maree pulls the elastic band out of the messy knot of mousy brown hair she has tied up at the back of her head, looks around slowly and then ties her hair back again tightly. It’s those small gestures when I think Maree is at her best, the way she can give people space and act like she doesn’t give a crap all at the same time.

  ‘All right,’ Maree says. She leans forward, biting her lip like she is thinking about it. ‘Can we talk about a time when maybe you did bash someone? Can we imagine how we might have reacted in a different way? How might the situation have turned out differently if we had, for example, walked away? Or explained to another person why we were feeling angry?’

  Another girl, I’m not sure what her name is, pulls at the bottom of her earlobe where she would once have been allowed to have an earring. The only girl who responds to Maree’s question is the one with the perfectly manicured red nails with a small orange flower painted on the pinkie finger. ‘I could have,’ she says, and you can tell that she’s working it out as she says it. ‘I could have walked, no, run. I could have run and run and run away. Next time, if it happens again, I’ll just run until I can’t run no more.’

  Some of the girls nod along with Maree and some refuse to stop staring at the ground and I look up to a poster on the wall that gives too many instructions for dealing with grief. I am trying to think back to that moment at the end, before the police came and took me away. What happened, how it turned out, that was our anger, but it was also something more than that. Girls’ anger is a different type of thing from boys’. You have to cram that anger into your body every day. It’s large and it’s loud and it stretches and swells and cracks until it leaks out of your pores. People are always surprised. Girls can have so much anger.

  In the end I needed to destroy something. It was my way of saying, I am here. I shit and eat and breathe. I’m back on earth now and not invisible and there are some things that are pissing me off. And when Asheeka disappeared it was . . . I don’t know what it was. Maybe she just needed to disappear for a while to work out what her story was. Maybe that’s why I have to disappear into my own head sometimes. A girl needs some space. You know? In my imagination she’s always walking, walking barefoot up the same street, that hem of that blue cotton dress doing a little dance in the breeze behind her as the wind picks up and things burst into flames.

  THE FIRST CHARGE ON MY CRIMINAL RECORD

  So, I’m not putting this complaint in the book because I want anyone to think that I’m some sort of criminal badarse, because I’m not really, despite what happened and all, but I do need to say that I thought putting the shampoo-stealing incident as the first on my list of charges seemed really lame when I did so many other much worse things. But anyway, there it was, first on the list, shoplifting and all the places we did it – at least the ones where they had evidence that it really happened.

  I learned how to do a lot of things on that trip, through trial and error. Like the first time I tried to take something when we stopped at a servo. I picked up a packet of Panadol and then looked at the guy behind the counter and then started to sweat and then I put it back and then I picked it up again and then I put it in my pocket and then I put it back again and then I exited the shop when he opened up that little door next to the cash register and he started to walk towards me.

  The first shoplifting charge was listed as happening later that day towards evening. The day after our night at McDonald’s we were headed down towards the south coast near Bulli when we pulled over at a viewing spot where you could look out towards all the beaches we would shortly pass further along the highway.

  It was one of those touristy spots where there was heaps of parking for coaches jam-packed with people who were mad-keen on looking at koalas and crap like that. We used the toilets beside the café and the souvenir shop. Asheeka washed her face five times over and I scrubbed beneath my armpits with a paper towel. Then we both went into the tourist shop where a blonde-haired woman who worked there smiled and bowed slightly, like she had to the eight or so Chinese tourists who’d entered the shop before us.

  Asheeka picked up one of the moisturising creams and pumped a little into her hand. When she was rubbing it in this pimply-faced blond teenager came up and told her that she wasn’t allowed to open it up because it wasn’t a tester. ‘You’ll have to pay for that now,’ he said.

  Asheeka dropped it into her basket with a casual flick of her wrist while staring right into his face so that her silence was filled up with a whole lot more fuck off than anything said out loud could hold. I watched her as she moved over to another shelf and calmly picked up a tube of something else. I grabbed a basket from a pile near the entrance. I picked up a tub of lanolin skin cream and a tube of eucalyptus oil lip gloss (because I knew that Asheeka would like it). I read the ingredients on the back of all of these products, as though I was super fussy, and placed them gently into my basket. Asheeka followed my lead for once as we picked up tea-tree oil deodorant and chocolates with dot paintings on their covers and undies that had images of grinning crocodiles embroidered into their crotches. Every time that pimply shop assistant got close Asheeka turned around and stared at him, as though it was him doing the wrong thing.

  When our baskets were full we were standing in fr
ont of a shelf with reusable cloth bags that had psychotic-looking cockatoos painted on their covers. Asheeka put everything inside one of the bags while that young blond boy stared at us like a kid too scared to talk on his first day of school and I did this – I looked him straight in the eyes and smiled sweetly: Niceness can be really intimidating, people don’t understand what to do with it, Asheeka had told me a few times in school when she thought I was using it as a strategy and not because I just didn’t know how to say no. When we walked out of there, the sensors near the front door went off and the shop attendant grabbed me by the arm and held it tight. Asheeka just kept on walking, walking steadily towards the car like we had every right in the whole world.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I said, and ripped my arm out of that young guy’s grasp. That’s when I suddenly realised that you could get away with a lot of things if you just looked like you had the God-given right to do them. So I switched modes and walked out of there like everything in the world belonged to me. And I felt huge and strong in a way I hadn’t felt in a long time. Maybe ever.

  When we got back to the car, I sat in the driver’s seat and Asheeka didn’t even try to stop me and we both just knew that I’d be heaps better at driving this time just because, at that moment, I had the right to do anything I wanted to do. In the rear-view mirror I could see that a few of the store employees were lined up outside and staring at us. One of them was on the phone. I backed out slowly, precisely. Gave them a wave as we drove away.

  It wasn’t far, the next stop, but the road wound itself around and around in curves and slippery dips that made it harder to navigate than the straight, straight lines we’d had before. We pulled into the parking lot of a beach just near Thirroul and life got a little more magical just for a while among all those waves breaking into the edges of cliffs and the sun skipping off the rockpools. I walked out onto the sand, towards the ocean, and the world smelled like fish and chips and eucalyptus trees.