Nine Months

I got out of the car with a certain trepidation, unbuckled the child restraint and as I scooped up my daughter, I tried to rearrange my features into something more amiable. As soon as she touched the ground Isla whizzed off towards the play equipment.  I’ve never been one for family reunions. The problem was me, I thought, I was like an actor that didn’t know how to act, trying to be a better version of myself, one that was funnier, cooler, more confident and I knew it would fall flat. What if they asked about Lin?  I decided I would say we were sorting things out…and then someone would ask what I had been doing and was I still working at the sexual health centre?

“Richo, what’s happening? Still working at that sex place?” asked Ian. He pulled at his crotch as if the elastic of his underpants had worked itself into an uncomfortable crease and good-naturedly pumped my hand.

“Hey, Ian, not so much, you?”  I punched him in the shoulder in a gesture of friendship and then immediately regretted doing it, things had never been cordial between us.

“Just back from a job in the US putting stereo systems in cars, I’m making greenbacks as fast as they can print them.”

“Good for you, Ian, it’s great to see you,” I lied.

“We’re playing some cricket later, are you in?”

“Yeah, absolutely,” I said with the minimum of enthusiasm. 

I sat on the picnic blanket next to Mum, there was a stick or a stone underneath the rug, poking into my bum, I shifted to a more comfortable position, stretched out my legs and watched Isla turn herself upside down on the monkey bars. I immediately looked below her, tried to estimate how much damage she could do if she fell. 

“Lin’s not here?” asked Mum.

“Oh, yeah, no, she’s spending some time with her family, you know her parents are getting older…”

Mum tried to read my eyes, I looked away towards the cricket pitch.

Ian had started the game, he waved me over but I ignored him. My brother, Matthew, and some of my uncles mooched over, beer cans still attached to their hands, growling at each other like prehistoric men. 

“Narelle’s got a job at a primary school in Castlemaine,” said Mum.

“Narelle Barham?”

“Your second cousin.”

“I know who she is, Mum.”

“She’s had a hard life,” remarked Mum.  I hadn’t seen Narelle for many years, but I wouldn’t have thought that her life had been too hard, at least in comparison with mine.

I shaded my eyes and soon found her, a thin brunette smoking while reading under a gum tree which cast a dappled pattern, she seemed absorbed in the book, either that or she was ignoring me.  Even after all this time, her posture, her entire being was so familiar to me.

Mum followed my gaze, “Don’t stare too hard, you’ll go blind.”

As I watched, Narelle got up and threw a cricket ball back to a boy of maybe junior high school age, I’d never seen him before, he was batting opposite Ian.

“Ian’s really filled out,” I said.

“He’s lost his puppy fat,” agreed Mum.

Ian skied one in the air deliberately, a ‘rainmaker’ and when it eventually fell into someone’s hands he chugged over towards me and proffered the bat, I noticed he was using a real cricket ball, a Kookaburra.

“Don’t worry, I’ll go easy on you,” he said.

I glanced over at my daughter who was washing her hands in a puddle with circular motions, stirring up the mud. “Mum, can you keep an eye on Isla?”

“Hmm,” she said noncommittally.

I took guard, as Ian walked back to the mark there was an exchange between him and the boy, I couldn’t hear what they were saying. He came thundering in and grunted as he released the ball, I swear it was actually whistling as it came belting down towards me, I leaned forward in what I thought was a defensive position but the ball found the gap between my bat and thigh and made its mark, in a moment that somehow seemed preordained.

I was felled. There was an explosion that was beyond pain, completely visceral, I must have momentarily blacked out because I found myself in a foetal position on the ground holding my nuts, finally I managed to get to my knees, leaned over the bat for support, walked a few steps away, squatted again and vomited.  

Ian stood over me, “Right in the fuckin’ goolies,” he said with an air of satisfaction.

Then Narelle appeared beside her brother, her face was creased with concern.

“Richard, are you OK?” she asked.

“Been better,” I said with a grimace.

She took my arm, helped me to limp over to her table, I felt like I was trying to co-ordinate three legs.

“He plays district cricket you know.”

“Do you think he’ll ever forgive me for what happened between us?”

“Probably not in this lifetime.”

“I think I need a drink.”

She poured me a beer into a plastic up.

“Are you surprised to see me?” she asked coyly.

“You never come to these things.”

“Too many painful memories.”

“What do you mean?”

She just shook her head. “How long has it been, Richard?”

I knew exactly how long it had been since we’d last seen each other, it was burnt into my memory, only dementia or a lobectomy could have removed it.

“It’s been a little while.” I fished around for something to say, “Sometimes I still go back there, you know.”

“Whaaa?”

“To Anglesea. When I’m feeling down, sometimes I’ll go back and sit on the beach where we used to go, just to clear my head.”

She looked at me strangely.

“You want to remember and I want to forget.”

The boy was running after the ball, she followed him with her eyes, her expression softened. Narelle peered into my face.

“When you go back, do you think of me?”

“How could I not?”

******

We wouldn't see each other for the nine months of the school year but the summer holidays belonged to us. Sometimes we were down at Lorne or Anglesea, other times it might be Castlemaine or Porepunkah, wherever our families decided to plant the campervans. Dad had an old Holden station wagon, rust had eaten part of the tailgate and there were holes in the door on my passenger side which let in a steady stream of cool air onto my bare feet. The roads were so familiar that at certain points Dad would announce, “The car knows its own way from here”. These trips always seemed interminable, Dad was reluctant to stop for toilet breaks and when he did, we got out bent over like geriatric astronauts until we made it to the urinal, spraying our pee at the yellow bars in the trough which seemed to serve no other purpose than something to aim at, then chasing each other, working the stiffness out of our muscles, before long we were called back into the captivity of the back seat. But that year, the year everything changed, we were at Anglesea. 

Narelle’s parents already had their campervan up when we arrived and Ian was sitting cross-legged outside with a fishing rod, attaching a new sinker. Even before we were fully set up Narelle had come over for a visit and was talking to Mum in the kitchenette, from my bunk I surreptitiously looked at the sand that clung to her shorts, already damp, and wondered when we could get some time alone, just to see if there was still anything between us.  

Her appearance hadn't changed all that much over the previous twelve months, her body was still lithe but she was losing her boyishness and there were soft curves around her hips and thighs. When she walked my eyes would be drawn to her. But something more than physical had changed in her like a switch that had been flicked, something that was, as yet, still unfathomable.

In the end it was just so likely that if you found one of us the other would be there that everyone stopped commenting on it and left us alone. It was expected that either I would be with her family at any point in time or she would be with mine, that is if we weren’t on the beach.  

Everybody knew there was something going on between us, so I guess my parents must have too, but maybe they didn’t fully realise what we were doing.   

Whenever Narelle wanted to be close she'd pretend to wrestle me, it was a game we played because it was the only acceptable way for us to touch.

If we were on the beach she would come towards me, the sand gritty on her arms and thighs and grip my wrists tightly, pushing my arms up above my head so that her body flattened against mine with her swimsuit the only layer between us. Maybe I could have moved but I had no desire to get away.

"Do you give up?" she would say.

No, 'yield' was the word she used. “Do you yield?"

She would hold position as long as possible, past the uncomfortable point by which time she had placed her face against the soft part of my neck, resting her lips just below my ear as though she was about to whisper something and then roll off me in mock exhaustion, then pretend to smoke a cigarette.

That was how it started. From there to having sex was just the same thing but without the flimsy layer of her swimsuit. The day it happened she had been looking at me secretively, I suppose she was waiting for an opportunity.

“You’re acting really weird Narelle, just want to say that…” She had found me in the sand dunes behind the beach, I put down my copy of Pet Sematary and closed it with my finger keeping place like a bookmark. This time there was a look on her face of utter determination.

“Someone's serious this morning," I said already feeling something momentous was about to happen and that everything that we had done before had been necessary to arrive at that point. From her usual position over me she shifted her knees apart and pulled aside her swimsuit, everything she did was purposeful.

"Narelle, do you realise where you're touching me? Oh fuck," I said involuntarily.

She kept looking at my face and when at last she saw recognition she gave a half-smile. My lasting impression of that moment was not really pleasure but pure and utter relief, a flooding, cleansing feeling. This time when she turned on her side there was a soft, drawing feeling.

"Ok, let's swim," she said readjusting the elastic of her swimsuit. I watched her scampering away, needing to get to the ocean. Still nothing changed between us, but afterwards everything would be different.

******

At the start of the vacation we’d told each other that summer would last forever but it hadn’t and as the holidays drew to a close I could feel something changing, as inevitable as the tide. 

It had started out like every other day, we’d been swimming and bought some cinnamon doughnuts and then we’d gone into the sand dunes on the back beach where we were hardly ever disturbed.

Narelle lay with her head in the crook of her elbow, I had applied sun cream to her back and thighs, I tugged at her bikini bottom and she rolled from one hip to the other so that I could pull them down, I looked at the striking line of demarcation, the paleness of her buttocks, then I lay on top, aligning my arms and legs with hers, my face on her shoulder, she didn’t move the whole time, except to tighten her buttocks when I came, a constricting feeling, like she didn’t want to let go. Then we lay facing each other, I pushed her fringe away from her face, she’d hardly uttered a word the whole morning.

“Narelle, how are we related?”

“Someone’s aunty’s aunty,” she said enigmatically.

“You’re not making much sense.”

She rolled onto her back and blew the fringe out of her eyes, looked at the pure blue sky. Her bikini bottoms were around her hips, she saw me looking at her vulva and with a quick movement she covered herself.

“Richard, I’m not sure…” She didn’t get to finish her sentence. We could hear the clack, clack, clack of thongs, as Ian came looking for us, he hadn’t found us yet, but he would soon, he was calling:

“Narelle, we’re going.”

I pulled out my book and Narelle took off behind the sand dunes with a towel. When Ian arrived I was pretending to read, he was the sort of boy who didn’t belong in a swimsuit, his togs were pulled up too far and his rashy rode up over his pudgy tummy. He stood over me, casting a shadow over my book, idly kicking up sand onto the open pages.

“You guys are so screwed. Come on Narelle,” he said before turning back towards the beach.

Narelle hurried after him, hesitated a moment.  

“I think Mum and Dad know about us.”

“Why?”

“Mum asked about my period.”

“And?”

“It’s all over the ship.”

I wondered briefly about women’s internal mechanisms, how I would never be able to understand them. Her genitals were complex enough, layers and openings, I couldn’t even fathom what happened further inside.

“Dad says after the holidays I have to stay on campus at Bendigo teacher’s college.”

“I know, but we’ll still get to see each other, right? Maybe I’ll get my licence, I could see you on weekends, things don’t have to change.”

She didn’t answer, Ian was waiting for her on the beach, she turned only to say, “I’m sorry”. I watched her walk away, she stopped after a moment and used the towel to wipe some sand from the inside of her thigh, then I watched her silhouette until she had disappeared completely. 

******

“’Sorry’ was the last thing you said to me, I can’t believe that was twelve years ago.”

Narelle turned to me. She didn’t look like the girl I remembered, she would have been eighteen then, but we all change, I thought. Her face had a lived-in look, there was wariness too, and something in her hazel eyes I hadn’t seen before, scorn, I thought.

“What happened to us, Narelle?”

“Life’s what happened,” she said a little too sharply and searched in her jeans for the smokes.

I saw Isla looking for me and waved, she started over in that hobbly, trotting action that is common to three-year-olds, the bottoms of her pants were muddy and her nappy was heavy, weighing her down. She clambered onto my leg and I lifted her up onto my lap, she rested with her chin on her hands, her pensive pose. 

“Are you my aunty?”

“Uh huh,” Narelle smiled but it didn’t reach her eyes, whatever connection we used to have was long gone, whatever had happened back then now seemed irreparable.

“So, got any kids?” I asked.

She lit up a cigarette, took a drag, closed her eyes and exhaled out the side of her mouth.

“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”