Over This Backbone, page 28
The brave decision, she adds in a voice almost too soft to hear, and I nod.
In the bungalow I see that there are two missed calls from him but no message. I feel a little sick. I don’t know what he wants and I don’t want to know. I turn off the phone and then the light.
They leave in the very early hours of Boxing Day when the sky is peach and the magpies warble.
There are embraces and jovial backslaps and declarations of love, until there are none and then Dad climbs into the car. We stand facing one another—Mum and me.
I’m so sorry I can’t be there to see you at the end, she says fast and sudden. I tried to get Dad to change the boat, but apparently it is very expensive. I feel so guilty. And I’m sorry we couldn’t bring you out earlier. He was very adamant. I hope you’re not angry. I’m so proud of you.
I laugh. Oh my god, Ma. Not one piece of me is angry. It doesn’t matter. I’m grateful. Thank you for everything you’ve done for me.
I look at her lined face, blue-grey eyes and her teeth that have been ground down over the years, at her surf-bleached hair, at the simplicity of her—the lack of pretence. She’s brimful of care.
I’ll be okay, I tell her one final time. I love you.
I lift Mordy’s resistant, labrador body into my arms and wave his paw at the car until they’ve gone.
I take the bus to Phillip Island to stay in the caravan for a night. Dani meets me at the bus stop and we drive straight to the ocean. Her hair is white-blonde now from the sun and sea.
In the same breath, she tells me that the weather has been hideously soggy, and that her and Dom will be having a baby by midyear.
I nearly crush her in my exuberance and frustration.
Why didn’t you tell me?! Where is he? That bastard—I can’t believe he didn’t say.
He’s back up in Queensland with family for Christmas, she says. So, do you really think it’s good?
It’s what you’ve always wanted, Danio. I plant kisses all over her face and feel genuine joy.
The beach is busy but we dance across the scalding sand, away from the people to a secluded cove. We spread ourselves out half in the sun and half in shade of the cliffs.
I’m glad you went back to the track after the festival, she says. I was scared that you wouldn’t and then he’d win.
Who? Ben?
Of course. That night was so scary. It was the worst reaction I’ve seen you have.
Did you see much of it?
She tugs her bikini further up into her arse crack for the exposure. Oh not really. But we were there at night, checking on you every few hours.
While I was asleep?
Yeah.
Who was?
Me, Tommy, Anna. We took turns.
I swell with gratitude.
Thank you, Dan.
I watch the side of her beautiful face, the upward arc of her nose.
Do you ever regret bringing him to me? I ask softly.
Oh. Do you think I should?
You’ll have to answer this one yourself.
She thinks on it while her fist trickles sand onto the towel.
Nah. Because it’s all learning, isn’t it? And it’s not good. He’s not good. But it’s all learning. Maybe you wouldn’t have finished the track if it weren’t for him being so not good?
I haven’t finished yet.
But you will, she smiles and rolls from her towel onto mine. Our hands touch and we stay like that until the sun sends us sweating into the sea.
I am not angry or disappointed. I have made peace with this compromise, this lopping of another track limb. I know that it doesn’t matter; I will make up for it in the final four days. That I will walk fast and well to Walhalla, that I will be brave and gritted against failure.
Maya calls when I am on the bus back to Oma’s on the twenty-seventh. She tells me that she is fine, and that she’ll pick me up at five-thirty the following morning.
That last afternoon I gather the contents of my bag—restock a minimal amount of food from the box and stuff my clean thermals into the pack and refill the fuel bottle. I look at the maps, plan my amended campsites, set up Maya’s phone number to receive the GPS tracker messages and finally, remove Ben’s. Then I am ready.
Oma and I eat dinner on the back deck. It is thick with summer out there and Mordy sits pleasantly at our feet. We talk about things that aren’t important, things that are light. We drink apple fizz and laugh. Beneath the table I let Mordy lick the mayonnaise from my fingers while I think about how it will feel to walk into Walhalla.
There’s a tapping. Three taps, a pause, four taps, a pause. I open my eyes and panic because it must be Maya, which means I must be late.
I sit up in bed and look around and groggily jigsaw the pieces together. It’s still dark out. My phone says that it is eleven-thirty. It couldn’t be Maya—she doesn’t know the house.
I stumble to the door, yank it open and reel back. Ben stands on the step with a black gift bag. There are sunken purple circles beneath his eyes. He smiles widely because he knows that he is more beautiful when his dimples show, but it is at odds with his pale, gaunt face.
Jesus Christ, I hiss. What are you doing here?
Merry Christmas, he says loudly and holds out the bag.
Keep your voice down.
I don’t take the bag. Watch it like it’s electrified. It could be.
Hey, don’t be mad. I needed to see you and you weren’t answering your phone—I didn’t know what else to do, he whispers with a small smile, reaching a hand towards my face. But I flinch. I look past him to Oma’s bedroom window. The light is on, the curtains drawn.
Can you let me in, he says. We need to talk.
He pushes the black bag into my hand and I quickly toss it onto the bench.
Fine, I say with gritted teeth. Just so we can talk.
He takes two steps into the room and rests one hip against the bench. I shift back towards the cupboard and we stay in strained silence for a moment before he picks up the black gift bag.
Open it, he tells me.
Have you been drinking?
No. Only a few. Open it.
I don’t want to.
Fine. He tries to smile. I will.
Concealing the bag, he dives a hand in to retrieve the contents. What’s your favourite colour—red or purple?
Ben, I …
Just pick one! he whispers too loudly—an attempt at playfulness that hits like a slap. He faces me now with his hands behind his back.
Red.
He holds out his right hand and on his palm is a box. There is a picture on the front, though it still takes me a moment to realise that it is a small red butt plug. He watches my face with a sly smile and I must look horrified because he quickly brings out his other hand, which holds a purple couples-compatible vibrator—U-shaped, slick. Another disturbed silence falls over the room. I am speechless at the bizarreness of this gesture. He has never once cared for my own pleasure.
Why?
I’ve never used toys before, he says. Have you?
No, but we’re not going to use them. We’re not having sex. Not now or ever again. If you want to talk, let’s talk.
He watches me, calculating, then he turns to the bench slowly and places the boxes down.
He begins with one hip against the bench and his arms folded. I don’t understand why you’re so angry.
That’s the problem.
Well, can you at least try to explain it?
I turn on the lamp and sit in the wicker chair beneath it.
It’s hard for me to believe that you still don’t understand how you’ve hurt me, Ben. But I’ll do my best to explain.
He waits as I take a deep breath.
When we got together, I already had a hard time trusting that someone could be attracted to me. It was hard for me to believe that you might want me. But you made me believe it and so I did.
I do want you, he interjects quietly.
Don’t, I say. I believed you, but I shouldn’t have. Because all I’ve been for you is a punching bag. You’ve tortured me emotionally, lied to me, used me for sex, made me feel like nothing in order to make yourself feel powerful and in control. You’ve made me beg for humanity and care. You’ve made me feel small and ugly and dumb and disgusting. I haven’t asked you for much. Common decency. Kindness.
It’s because …
Don’t! Let me finish, I snap, pitched forward in the chair. He shuffles from one foot to the other.
You made me not believe my own emotions. Because of the way you treated me, I don’t have any trust in myself. And the worst part is, I really, truly wanted to trust you. Because I reckon I was damn close to being in love with you.
Don’t cry, don’t cry.
There’s a short pause while he squints at me.
You know you always blow things up in your head. You’ve done it as long as I’ve known you.
I scoff. Jesus, Ben. I don’t reckon I’ve blown things up enough.
I thought we had an understanding, he says. We weren’t in a relationship. We were kind of open—polyamorous.
No. Both polyamory and openness require a form of communication that you have never been capable of.
You can’t expect me to talk to you about sleeping with other girls.
I can, though. And I expected you to tell them the truth when they asked what was happening between us. But you didn’t do that either. You lied to them, and you lied to me. You don’t get it, do you? I rub my eyes furiously. On top of all of that, you made me feel like I’d gone mad. That I’d dreamed it all up. That you didn’t feel anything for me at all and it was a figment of my imagination. Do you know how much that hurts?
He says, That has nothing to do with talking about who we fuck.
It has everything to do with it.
He rises from the bed and takes a couple of steps towards me, worked up. I recoil back a little into the seat.
You’re a fucking hypocrite. You would never tell me if you fucked another boy while we were together.
I would if you asked.
Go on, then. Have you? Tell me.
Yes, I say. Tommy and I slept together. After that night at the Farm when you threw yourself at Anna, then told me you’d kill yourself when I tried to be your friend. Remember that?
What?
You heard me.
That blackness swamps his eyes and he takes two steps back into the kitchen. He places his hand on the bench and his pinkie finger lands on the blade of Ollie’s knife, lying where I’d left it by the dish rack. He looks down at it for a moment, confused. He registers what he has touched and I watch him, terror spreading up my spine, as he moves his fingers to the handle almost mindlessly and rests them there. He looks back at me.
How could you hurt me like that, he says. Why him?
Every nerve in my body is alive to the fear of his hand and that knife and the way he hovers on it, but I’m angry too—livid, in fact, incensed.
Hurt you? I spit. After what you’ve done to me? After all the threats, and the pain you’ve caused me, and the way that you’ve made me feel like I’m nothing. You have broken me. Everybody told me what you were really like, but I didn’t listen because I fucking loved you, and I thought I could fix it, but as if I could fix you. You won’t do a thing to help yourself—you won’t see a professional, you won’t even have a real conversation. You just use your fucked-upness to get pity and lure in young people who are strong but too young to know better. People who want to care for you. I should have listened to all of them because they were right—you’re a monster and I should never have thought that I could change you. You’re gone.
My words dangle like a noose. But this time I don’t feel sadness, only rage. My eyes are dry.
As Ben’s arm drops, the knife clatters from the bench to the floor. I recoil at the sound. He takes a couple of staggered steps towards the bed and drops down with his head between his knees. His back heaves as he sobs—wails at a pitch too high for his stature.
He seems to cry into his hands like that for a long time. I notice that the wicker chair has pressed cross-hatching into my thighs.
I never meant to hurt you, he finally whispers.
But you did. I lean forward in the chair.
I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, he says. I’m just a fucking idiot. Please. I’m a cunt. I’m sorry.
He rocks back and forth on the edge of the bed until I can’t stand it anymore and I go to sit beside him. I put a hand on his back and shush him in the yellow light of the lamp. He tips onto me. His head goes on my lap and I hold a hand against his shoulder and we both breathe.
Ben, you need to leave.
His head snaps to look at me from where he lies. I peer down.
He says, Don’t make me leave. Please. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.
You can’t stay here.
He sits up and his gaze is hard.
If I go home, he says softly, I will drink myself into a fucking coma and drive myself into a wall. I am this close …
He holds out his thumb and pointer finger with an inch of space between, then dissolves again into sobs.
I sigh. My eyes are heavy and I’m spent. I need to sleep, desperately and immediately. I am walking tomorrow. No—I am walking today. It is the early hours of the morning and I can’t keep fighting.
If you stay here, nothing is going to happen between us, I say. I’m not going to sleep with you. The only reason you’re staying is because you’re already drunk. You’re here as a friend.
He cries with his whole body. I sit and wait. Finally, he lifts his swollen face from his palms.
You can’t change things. It’s habit now. If I sleep here with you, I will want to have sex with you.
I almost laugh. What is wrong with you?
The only things that will calm me down are having sex or drinking myself into a coma, he says through heaving breaths.
I glare at him, disgusted. Done. I push him away from me and I crawl across the bed to the far edge. I yank back the covers, slip in, roll my back to him.
Please turn off the light, I say.
There’s a brief silence before the crying starts again and the bed shifts as he rocks. He heaves out sobs like there are demons inside him.
Sleep drags me down, but his feet across the floor bring me back, and then the door closes with a sharp crack. I sit up. The room is empty. He has gone and the light is off. I sink back down and wake again after some time when the bed shifts. I peel my sticky eyes open. He lies beside me, as far away as he can be. He’s wearing all his clothes and his boots, and he is on top of the doona staring at his phone. I see messages on the screen to and from Nikita. I don’t read them. I don’t care. I roll back over, tired of him, of all of it.
This time the sleep is deep and dark. My body is a heavy sack of blood and bone and my brain is off—there are no dreams. No scenes that play themselves out.
The room is a soft purplish black when I wake again and it’s loud. Takes me a pause to understand the noise which is rhythmic and hot and in my ear. Ben’s breath. His face is in my neck and he kisses me with wet lips and he pants against my cheek. He pushes himself up against my hip and his hand is in my shorts and then my underpants and then his fingers are inside me. He is touching me, fingering me. I am barely conscious but my body has reacted of its own accord—I’m wet and swollen, but I don’t want to be and that is the biggest betrayal.
I roll away from him. His curls are on my pillow, his chest bare, his face ready to crack into tears or excuses or frustration, into victimisation.
Get out, I say.
He yawns. Peta, I was asleep as well. It was like I said, it was habit, it was just instinct. I didn’t …
Get out.
He stops. He knows it. This is it, this time—I can see it in the brown of his eyes. No fight.
He crawls from the sheets and finds his pants on the floorboards. He pulls his boots on slowly, stalling, but there is no going back. There is a deathly quiet in this dull light. When he is dressed he turns to say something; I get in first.
Don’t.
He opens the front door, and when he’s reached the gate he doesn’t look back.
I stare into the sky over the passionfruit vine and the roof of the old garage, the sky that is violet and flayed with gashes of red cloud. Blood orange against the purple. I haven’t seen it so brutal before—in the mountains maybe where air is unstable, but never here.
As I go inside, my toe nudges at the knife which is still on the floor.
Please remember that people aren’t always good.
I pick it up and place it on the bench beside the two boxes—the sex toys, the same red and purple of the sky. I stare down at the three objects and despite myself, despite this terrible night, I laugh. Can’t help it. The strangeness of it gets me in the guts and bubbles up as a bitter guffaw.
These gifts of pain and of pleasure, side by side.
It’s time. I get dressed, then I press the last few items into my pack and step into the dawn.
544 km
We pass the hatchback by the public toilets in Tyers, where Mum and Dad have left it. There’s not much in the tiny town other than the thick stink and brown stain of the coal power station. The Latrobe Valley always smells like old eggs and Australia’s stagnation and I hope that the car won’t be stolen as we turn towards Baw Baw.
Maya doesn’t know about the night before. I want to tell, but don’t know how. We don’t talk about the track or her test results either, and I’m too nervous to ask.
Instead, we talk about the ocean, the plans for her block on the coast, her new puppy.
She takes me to the turn-off where trees reach up to the clouds. We get there later than I’d anticipated.
You’ve got the tracker set up to send to me?
Sure do, I buckle my pack over my stomach. You have my satellite phone number?
Yeah, mate.
Thank you, Maya. I don’t really have enough words to express it, but I hope you know how grateful I am for you, I manage to say.
I know it, young one. Her wise eyes crinkle. Hey—be sure to soak it in.
