Girls in Boys' Cars Read online

  RODEO

  I don’t want to be playing on stereotypes of rural Australia or anything like that but I’m not joking when I tell you that there were people in Jindabyne who looked like they came straight out of The Man from Snowy River, and no jokes too, it’s even where he came from, the man in that poem, so this is all to give you a little background about how we came to be at The Man From Snowy River Rodeo, where all these men and women, boys and girls, were dressed up like cowgirls and cowboys and riding on horses and flying off bulls.

  I think we were a little gobsmacked. It kind of jerked us out of the reality we were living for a little while and put us into some kind of movie set. There we were, just coming into Jindabyne towards sunset when we noticed the rodeo. We’d been silent in that car for a while and so when I saw all that noise and movement it was something like relief.

  ‘There!’ I screamed so hard Asheeka smashed on the brake and accelerated again too quickly, forcing our heads forward.

  Outside the car at last, Asheeka and I stood by a caravan and watched kids, their faces bright red from the hot sun, try to throw balls into the mouths of clowns as their heads turned left and right. It seemed unreal in its wholesomeness: all those bright red clown lips and kids with neon-pink fairy floss stuck to their fingers.

  When I started to look around and refocus I realised that there were these two guys, not much older than us, watching what we were doing. I smiled at them and the taller one smiled back and I elbowed Asheeka and nodded for her to pay attention. She gave them her look that said I’m too good for you now fuck off and I smiled wider because that’s what Asheeka and I have always done. She did the mean thing and I felt bad and acted extra nice to balance her out. I don’t know why, it’s just always been that way.

  The guys started to walk towards us and Asheeka muttered under her breath, ‘You’re always picking up weirdos. Just stop looking at them all the time and they’ll go away.’

  By then they were right up in our faces and introducing themselves. The tall one with freckles and red hair and worn-out cowboy boots introduced himself as Ben. The dark-haired one with the electric-blue eyes was James.

  ‘Hey, ladies,’ Ben said like some kind of old-fashioned storybook gentleman. ‘You come up from somewhere to watch the rodeo?’

  ‘Not really,’ Asheeka said.

  It seemed to work, whatever this game was that Asheeka played with boys. In a few minutes James was asking if we wanted to come and watch him ride a bull. ‘I can stay on it for at least four minutes,’ he said, which meant nothing to me really but the way he said it made it clear that this was some kind of super achievement. He reminded me of Arnold, cocky and self-assured and happy to play Asheeka’s flirtatious games as long as he felt like he was really the one in charge.

  ‘Hmm. A bull,’ Asheeka said, like this was something she said every day. ‘Fine. We’ll watch you ride a bull.’

  James winked (at Asheeka specifically) and then he was off and I was walking towards the stands with Ben and Asheeka. Ben kept smiling at me. I was never sure how to respond to boys who smiled at you other than to smile back.

  When we were out there on the stands Ben put his hand over mine like he was my boyfriend already and I decided to go with it because I couldn’t think of what else to do.

  ‘There.’ He pointed to the gates and out came James, one hand on a giant cowboy hat that threatened to fall off at any moment and the other hand firmly on the reins. His butt jumped up and slammed down on the backside of a bull who clearly didn’t want him there until moments later he was down in the dirt and these two giant men ran out and grabbed the bull by the horns so that it didn’t step on him. Asheeka seemed impressed with James’s display. She smiled at him over the fence and I realised I was holding Ben’s hand, squeezing it really hard with all the excitement of everything.

  James climbed over the fence (because it was more impressive than opening the gate that was right there, I guess) and started to make his way up the stands towards us. His face was wet with sweat and his chequered shirt was all untucked. He sat down in between Asheeka and me, bringing this strong smell of dirt and cow shit with him. He turned to Asheeka and said, ‘So,’ as soon as he sat down. Boys – always waiting for a compliment.

  ‘You sat on a bull,’ she said flatly. ‘And then you fell on your arse.’

  Asheeka turned just at the right moment like she always did just before people really get angry at her and smiled a big toothy grin that made James put his arm around her. She put her hand over his and pulled it gently off. ‘Leaving now,’ she said in her playful flirty voice. ‘See you both later.’

  I followed her down the stands and out of the place. Ben stood up and watched us go, his hand over his eyes squinting towards us.

  VISITING HOURS WITH DAD

  I am sitting in my cell thinking about those boys when I get called into the visiting room to see my dad. I’m taken into the waiting room before the official waiting room and searched before I’m allowed to sit and wait for Dad at a table that is bolted to the floor. This place is all rooms within rooms. Doors behind doors. Girls waiting impatiently behind walls to be seen.

  I watch as a girl in the corner of the room tries to kiss the boyfriend who’s visiting and is pulled back by a guard just at that moment before their lips meet. Then Dad walks in, smiling through that giant gap between his two front teeth. He has armfuls of Coke cans and packets of lollies from the vending machines they keep in the hallway between the outside door and the entrance to the waiting room. Everyone waits for these. You can tell, sometimes the girls are more excited by all the sugar their visitors bring them than the visitors themselves since the biggest treat we get in here is the watery orange cordial they call orange juice.

  Dad lays out all the stuff he’s brought on the table between us. He opens up several packets of lollies all at the same time and we sit there for a while eating, letting the M&Ms that don’t make it to our mouths roll all over the table and onto the floor.

  ‘They all right?’ Dad says, scanning around the room at everyone else.

  He’s gesturing to me with his eyes to look at Carlie and her mum. They both have tattoos inked across their arms and up the back of their necks and I know what he’s trying to say, that I’m not like one of them, like we’ve both arrived on an alien planet.

  ‘That’s Carlie. She’s nice,’ I say. I don’t say that Carlie scares the crap out of me because I saw her slam a chair against a wall after she was told her television privileges were being taken away. ‘Mixed bag. Everyone’s got problems. Some of them big big problems but, you know, it’s okay.’

  He spontaneously stands up and hugs me again and the guard tells him to sit down. ‘I miss you,’ he says.

  ‘I know. I miss you too.’ The olive colour of his skin has become darker. There are freckles on his nose. Patches of red on his arms that highlight the muscles which have started to pop out again there.

  ‘You’re looking like you’ve been sunbaking on the deck,’ I say, but I know it isn’t because of that.

  ‘Can’t get in.’

  That’s what we used to do, afternoons after school, well before my mum came home from work. Dad would come over with McDonald’s milkshakes and we’d hit the outdoor pool on the seventh floor of Mum’s apartment building. I’d read in the hot tub and Dad would lie on one of the li-los or stand near the fence watching people walk along the river, the pot belly he’s now lost hanging over his board shorts. He’d tell me what everyone was doing below on the footpath that ran along the river. He’d be like, Here they come, all the MILFs with their giant fake eyelashes and Lorna Janes and the matching running prams, and there’s all those boys you’re never allowed to date, the ones with the saggy jeans and the neon-coloured sneakers, and I’d look up from my book and get distracted by how much he just loved being in this place.

  Dad leans over and empties half a packet of Skittles into the palm of his hand. He throws them into his mouth and chews them slowly, his
watery brown eyes making their way around the room until he’s sucked the whole scene in.

  ‘I saw her again. Asheeka’s mum. She reckons you corrupted her daughter.’

  ‘I don’t think Asheeka would let anyone corrupt her.’

  ‘That’s what I said! I miss telling her to put out her ciggies and pull down her dress when you guys came to visit me.’

  ‘She’s somewhere out there. I know she’s okay.’

  ‘How do you know she’s okay?’

  ‘I just know.’

  He looks at me again – that I’m-staring-deep-into-your-soul kind of look, and says again, ‘I miss you.’

  He doesn’t know how to say much more when he visits me. We need to talk about things, how he left me twice, once on the night that we left and then once again out there on the road but I don’t know how to have those conversations here yet. I try to bring them up and the clock starts ticking and visiting hours draw to an end and the conversation we need to have falls into the silent spaces of him exiting the room.

  So, I look at him and I think about all those things I miss inside this place: rain, like really feeling rain because you’ve been caught out somewhere in a downpour and it’s followed you home. Other things: food that doesn’t taste like its mostly made from bread and glue; looking up through the windows of apartments watching strangers eating dinner; Saturday nights on Church Street sharing giant bowls of ice-cream with Asheeka; counting the cranes hanging over all the buildings in Parramatta from the 48th-floor balcony; eating scrambled eggs and bacon on the couch with Mum on Sundays; Dad singing karaoke at the RSL. And other things – my soft cotton sheets, the lavender washing detergent Mum used on my clothes, all that sky at the park.

  A cliché: the things you miss the most are the things you never realised you had. It’s true, though. Surprisingly, the thing I miss the most is Mum.

  ‘Do you think Mum will come and visit soon?’ I ask Dad.

  ‘Soon,’ he says. ‘She just needs to work herself up to it.’

  One of the guards comes through and gives us the ten-minute warning and I know that soon I’ll lose him too.

  LAKE JINDABYNE

  It was summer and so the day went on forever. After the rodeo we parked our car down by Lake Jindabyne and the water was filled with bodies everywhere. I watched as an older woman stood up in the water like a giant lake creature, her swimmers wet and tangled and sticking to her at odd angles. Her breasts were laid flat against her chest like they’d had all the meat sucked out of them. I touched the skin of my arms. It was hard and firm and I was here and alive.

  Asheeka and I picked a little spot a bit further away from where most of the swimmers were and we stripped down to our undies and bras and ran out into the lake and through the coldness of that water until it didn’t sting anymore. There were small islands further towards the centre of the lake and I thought about swimming out there and establishing a new kind of home on one of them where Asheeka and I could live.

  We floated on our backs. Our bodies were lush and greedy and shameless. We opened our arms and legs in the water and took up all the space. The sky was blue and the sun was that same eerie red it had been for days. That same smoke we’d seen licking at the edges of Canberra had followed us here. It sat over the water like that fog you see in the pictures of San Francisco. When I think about it now I don’t know why we weren’t more shocked by it but I guess it was, to us, just part of this new everything in that alternative world we were discovering beyond the skyscrapers and multilane highways we were born into.

  I reached out and took Asheeka’s hand. ‘What are we doing?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I’m trying not to care for a little while. It’s quiet here, in this lake, in these mountains. I don’t have my mum jabbering at me all the time or Arnold telling me what to do. I can just think.’

  ‘What are you thinking about?’

  ‘Arnold. My mum. Arnold. Ronny.’

  ‘You should call your mum.’

  ‘You should call your mum. My mum wants me to get married.’

  ‘To who?’

  ‘Arnold.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because, you know, people have started to talk, in the community. Her community. We’ve been out too much together. Alone all the time. She wants us to get engaged after school, so, you know, I don’t get a bad reputation.’

  ‘Just tell her you don’t want to get married.’

  ‘You don’t understand. You’re lucky. You don’t have culture. You can do anything you want.’

  ‘That’s not true. I’ve got lots of different cultures.’

  ‘Yeah, but that means you don’t really have to stick to any one set of rules. You know, they don’t make you be one thing.’

  ‘Nan used to make me take her to Coptic Church and Catholic Church. She wants to cover all her bases just in case. I was bored out of my mind twice as much as I needed to be.’

  ‘Oh, wah, wah.’

  ‘Your mum can’t make you get married. You’re too young.’

  ‘No, but she can suggest it really strongly like there’s no other option. She was eighteen when she got married. It’s normal to her. She comes from the village.’

  ‘Just tell her you’re in Australia.’

  ‘As if that matters.’

  ‘But –’

  ‘You don’t get it.’ She let go of my hand and floated away a bit.

  I stopped talking. Maybe she was right. And maybe there were a lot of things I needed to think about too: my mum, my dad, the boys. I watched her dip her head deep down into the water and emerge somewhere else. She looked so different in this light, in this everything. That thick black eyeliner she always wore had faded off now and her eyes looked half the size they usually were. Three young boys ran along the shoreline throwing a small football at each other.

  ‘What about that guy on the bull? I think you thought he was pretty sexy.’

  She splashed water in my face. ‘You thought he was sexy. You’re hopeless. As soon as I’m not watching you, you’re watching some guy.’

  That stung. It made me think about all those boys and all their looks after Jake told them what we’d done. I leaned my head back into the water again and tried to let my body become weightless, formless. The light from the sky broke over our bodies like puzzle pieces. I looked at Asheeka floating there, her body all patches of light and water and skin, and I closed my eyes, put my head under the water and disappeared.

  AT THE PUB

  That night we wandered into the local pub, our undies and bras still drying beneath our clothes, a little lip gloss, no handbags. We sat there in a booth, in front of glass windows overlooking the lake and all the secrets we had told it. I reached down into my bra and took out the credit cards I had collected, placed them on the seat between us.

  ‘Where did you get those?’ Asheeka said.

  ‘The rest stop. The lake. Rodeo.’

  She looked at me, very serious, and took the cards away. She stood there like a schoolteacher for a few minutes, staring at the cards as though she was trying to work out some way to punish me, and then pulled one out. ‘Louisa Smith,’ she said, rubbing her fingers across the embossed letters on the card as if she could take Louisa Smith in through her skin.

  I pulled Ms Louisa Smith’s card out of her hands and squeezed it between my fingers. I wanted to explain to Asheeka how it felt. Stealing those cards, I got the same kind of feeling I used to have when things made me nervous and I had to shove food into the hole that nervousness opened up in me. It was like that, a warm feeling that toned down everything. But I didn’t explain it. There were lots of things like this that I just couldn’t explain to Asheeka because she wouldn’t understand, but I guess there were lots of things about her that I didn’t understand either.

  I walked up to the bar and ordered us both fish and chips on Louisa Smith’s card. I thought about wine but I didn’t know what to order and I didn’t think I could get away with it with no I
D. By this time the bar was full up with people linedancing: men in giant cowboy hats and a band with an announcer who yelled out the moves from a podium at the front of the bar.

  I brought the food back to Asheeka, who was looking at everyone like they were aliens.

  ‘Linedancing night,’ I said.

  ‘What is that?’ she asked, drawing her finger across the table. ‘You dance in a line?!’

  ‘Guess so. I thought it was something people only did in old movies.’

  It was then that they showed up again, James and Ben, all cleaned up and in different but similar chequered tops. They took their hats off in front of our table, doing a slight bow and saying good evening to us.

  ‘Could we buy you ladies a drink?’ James offered, and we couldn’t say no. Asheeka gave the order for two gin and tonics as though James was our waiter and she was just getting through the formalities. James paused for a moment and smiled and they were off again through the crowd and back towards the bar.

  ‘Are you serious?’ Asheeka said, smiling at me.

  ‘I didn’t do anything. They came from nowhere.’

  I spent a really long time eating a giant chip. My problem in these situations was that I never really knew what I wanted. Most of the time I could take or leave boys. I’d never really had that flutter in my chest thing that other girls talk about. I sort of wished I did sometimes. It would be nice to lose yourself in something like love or lust or whatever.

  Boys were just there. They were in the car that picked you up. They were whistling at you in the Macca’s parking lot. They were just hanging around outside the school gates in their waxed-up cars.

  When they returned to the booth, James and Ben sat on either side of us so that we were squished in the middle. Ben sat so close to me that he was almost sitting on my thigh and James leaned in to ask Asheeka if she wanted to dance.

  ‘I’m not a cowgirl,’ was all she said before puckering up her lips and sipping at her straw.