I’m sitting beneath the hot scribbly gum that stands almost dead centre in the play area that backs on to the townhouses, prodding the swelling on my knuckle from when I punched the wall at home. Then she appears. She has on her usuals – ripped jeans and long sleeve top, baseball cap.
She stops beneath a low hanging branch of the gum. I watch her long arms reach up and the branch tug down as she yanks off a large green leaf. I see her freckles and reddened eyes as she studies it, or at least makes out she is.
I’d heard the yelling in her house, so thought she might want to come out. Christ, the whole neighbourhood had heard it. Like a dog being whelped. My dad had say, ‘Stroppy bloody kid. Lucky we don’t get that in our house.’ Yeah, just try and see what’d happen.
I sure as hell need the company myself.
I say, ‘You okay?’
She sniffles. A fly buzzes by, threatening to annoy me, but goes somewhere else. I think, At least the flies don’t think I’m shit.
She runs the back of her hand across her face and sniffles again.
‘What’d she say?’ I ask.
She shrugs.
She’s one or two years older than me. Lanky legged, spindly, and white. Like she’d been raised quick in a glass house. But I like that. It’s gaunt and sympatico. I’m not a tanned surfer dude myself. I’d hankered after her for ages. But no go, ever, she wanted older boys, with more meat on the bone and some cachet.
I wait.
‘The usual’ she says. ‘Homework, boys, what I wear. Tonight.’
Tonight is a party at a kid called Jeremy’s house. He had cachet in buckets. Slick back hair, the smile/sneer lips, and torso a perfect V like a Vulcan salute. He was good at sports, good at girls and dumb as dirt at anything else. But he lived in a two storey red brick number with an above ground pool and parents who were still married. Not that I knew if that meant anything. I hadn’t been invited, d’uh. Ellie had, but, hey, so had anything thin with tits.
But people crave the attention they do, and Ellie wanted to go, even though she knew he’d ignore her and she’d spend the entire night raising her skirt and acting crazy while failing to attract his attention, envious of the other liquored scrags he let drool over his biceps. They’d look down their noses at her too, just to rub in the salt.
I say, ‘Usual being she doesn’t want you ending up like her?’
She nods.
People are such shits. Ellie’s mum got herself knocked up at seventeen by the local bully boy. He pissed off to who knows where leaving the mum in Single Town with a towel full of misery and obligation she named Ellie. Like telling your mistake daughter not to make the same mistake is meant to be uplifting. At least she didn’t hit her, unlike one parent I know.
Ellie’s mum is scrawnier than her mistake; her ripped jeans were age not fashion. She has ragged self-cut hair and never wears makeup. I went to their house once. There was a slumpy couch and a couple of old chairs in the living room facing the TV. The kitchen was dark and had sweet FA in the fridge. Creature comforts as sparse as rare birds. I don’t think Ellie or her mum ever went out. For her mum at least, Saturday nights after the regular screaming match with Ellie were spent with a bottle of Jack on the front porch swatting the bugs that got caught in the balustrade. Life strings us all out.
Ellie sits down next to me, wiping an old cigarette butt out of the way before her bum hits the ground.
I try not to look down her top, can’t see much when I fail anyway. So I look at the paling fences that surround the pocket park. A black dog nose juts out momentarily, sniffs and disappears.
Ellie smells good. Flowery, maybe it’s the soap she pilfers from the chemist, or just the way she is. There’s lots to want, but little to say, so I just sit there and dream of her beside me, and fantasise that I’d know what to do. Like I’m some Casanova who knows how to make women laugh and collapse all over you, like Biceps Jeremy, but with brains. And minus the jawline.
She says, ‘I should go.’
My heart collapses, just a little, the little I’m used to.
I say, ‘What, to the party?’
She snorts.
I wanted her to stay. I mean, in a fantasy world she’d jump up and declare I was the most handsome and hunky piece of cacheted man-meat that ever gave time to a slice of sweet grief like her. Hell, I’d take the fantasy where I was the reliable one, sensitive and caring, and moderately handsome but not what girls look at first. Hell, I’d even take the real world, and not even the one that gives me the attention I crave, but the one where she is just there. Being someone who wasn’t beating up on me, or yelling me down or sniggering at me or calling me a piece of shit that flies wouldn’t touch or some stuff. Not leave me, just be a person in my nearness.
Truth was I had to get out of my house. My swelling hurt. Even this late I was still trembling a bit.
She shuffles her feet like she’s going to get up.
I say, ‘You know what?’
She pauses. ‘What?’
I smile that goofy kind of smile you do when you know you’re about to say something stupid, but say it anyway, because you can’t say what you really want. I say,
‘Your mum and my dad should get together.’
She looks at me like I’d just strangled a cat in front of a kindergarten class. Yeah, I know it was a stupid idea. My dad would go nuts with Scraggy Mum and Scraggy Mum’d caterwaul and scratch like the cat I was strangling. He’d probably start beating her too, and they’d both come out with lacerations, possibly convictions, who knows, you can only hope.
‘Think about it,’ I say. ‘He could come over to yours and we could go to mine while he and your mum did the thing.’
‘Oh gross,’ she says.
‘But it’s true. We’d get time away. An’ Dad’d be less inclined to swing his fists and your Mum’d …’ I stall.
‘Mum’d what?’ she says.
‘I dunno,’ I say, ‘be proud of you?’
Like having a man in your bed makes you proud of your mistakes. What a batshit dumb thing to have said.
She leans towards me with her arms out in front and I get myself ready for a bollocking but instead she places her hands on my ears and mushes her lips to mine. I hit the back of my head on the tree trunk as her tongue bores its way in. Mind blow right there, right here, beneath the scribbly gum and the heat and the smell of eucalypt and fruit soap.
I don’t know how long it lasts. Probably five seconds, if that. But in my mind it was an eon. Her smell, her tongue writhing in my mouth, her head weight pushing me needily against the tree – who thinks about how much a head weighs anyway? Especially at times like this. But, man, I’m feeling all het up and struggling to sit and not knowing what to do. Do I push back, do I hold her head too? Do I go for the breasts? Do girls even want that?
And here’s the weird thing, besides the head weight bit: I hear the sea in her cupped hands. In her hands for fucksake. That bullshit story they tell you, if you hold a shell up to your ear and you can hear the sea; you can do it with anything, a cup or a glass, it’s the same.
Turns out, you can hear it when a girl, (in my case, I suppose it works the other way round, but I wasn’t going to ask can we swap hands I’d like to see if you hear the sea like I do. While you’re kissing me.) when a girl cups your ears. While she’s kissing you.
Then she stops, smiles at me with those kind of dreamy I-wish eyes that I can never understand, then gets up and walks back towards her fence.
I watch her every step. In the blue heat, the stubbled grass of the park, the dog nose sniffing and disappearing again and the air like an ocean in my ears.
* * * * * * * *
Photo by Andrzej-Kryszpiniuk via Unsplash
