Girlfriend

Girlfriend

She kissed me goodnight, enfolding the air with the smell of flowers and a tincture of alcohol. I later knew that dominant perfume to be gardenia: piquant, earthy and alluring, and the underlying smell the rasp of gin. I keep coming back to that moment, so intense, my mother at the house by the beach, this person with her blonde hair and smooth skin bending towards me with a goodnight kiss, a creature that my father had brought into our home. This is a moment that I capture in the heat of my quarantined life, clinging to that memory. Some days when they let me walk in the grounds, that moment reaches me, again and again.

My mother had become ill and my father had moved my mother and me to a small house by the ocean where the waves could be heard as a soft susurration urging me to run, just run away and get out from the press of the world. My father announced this move as a holiday, a vacation, but he had stayed in Sydney.

Since moving to this small coastal town, I’d lived with my mother, attended the local school where I was bullied at first but then became completely alone after I broke the nose of the boy who was constantly laughing at me, drawing attention to the small strawberry birthmark on my cheek, telling me to go and wash my face, the other children in the class tittering, nervous, yet fascinated by this taunting that occurred whenever a teacher wasn’t in the classroom and during break times. I hated to do it. I was trying to supress the heat that bubbled up and just became colour, a blinding red, like the end of a poker you push into a fire. Yet, I had yielded to that force. I needed to show them that I was inside this body and that I meant something. 

I’d picked up a hand sized rock from my beach walk, placed it in my bag and the next day at morning break as the boy and two of his friends approached me, it looked like I was fumbling in my brown lunch bag but I took out the grey stone and turned towards the boy, driving the rock into the boy’s face. He screamed and the duty teacher blanched as she took him off to the school sick bay, blood dripping from between his fingers as he held his hands to his face. There was red in my mind, on his hands, in the eye of the sun that was unforgiving in this place of plunging cliffs and wide open white beaches. White was the colour of everything I saw when red had left me that day, a thin line of burning white heat. When I look out the windows of this place white subsumes all of the colour and pushes into me, forces me to sleep.

I was suspended from school, my mother now required to home school me and the pattern of the days completely changed, with my mother becoming more stern, even more distant, with me home bound, companionless. The summer heat outside our cottage made us both short with one another, a slowly building tension that she said had to stop, that I must visit my father in Sydney so she could cool down, in every sense. Since the incident at school, she would shake me awake, telling me that I slept too much.

My father took my bag from me at the station, placed it in the back of his Mercedes, said he wanted to talk to me about what had happened at school and he then wanted us to have a boys’ dinner. The air conditioner in the car made me shiver, the lines of heat from the asphalt outside creating a mirage, the buildings a shimmer in the late afternoon. I was in this place but as part of that mirage, not substantial, not real.

In the car, he’d told me that what I’d done was wrong but understandable given I was being bullied. He said that he would look for a boarding school, one of his contacts could likely get me into a place in Canberra and that would be good for me, for my future, to have that discipline and the proximity to Sydney and the coast. I nodded and said nothing whilst he drove us to a pub close to Woolloomooloo, the traffic slowing us, the heat outside an episode between the icy car and the cool dark interior of the pub. 

My father and I were sitting at a table that showed the screens beyond the high bar.  Afternoon had become night and we’d had a counter meal, its remnants still in front of us, my father drinking red wine which he said went with his steak. The televisions were tuned to the State of Origin game. Men were shouting or groaning in response to the back and forth of the game. Against the passage of play, Queensland had scored a try and the air was tense with frustration, maroon beating blue, slowly suffocating any brightness. We watched in silence, my father drinking gin now, with a small amount of tonic.

“Aren’t you going to finish your chips?” I asked.

“I think I’ll just have another gin and tonic. Do you want another lemonade? Help yourself to the chips.”

“No thanks, I’m full but OK, yes, another lemonade please,” I said.

I knew he’d be drunk by the end of the game and that he’d still want to drive us back to the house before he put me on the train on Monday to return to my mother, to the small vacation cottage, the all-encompassing heat where I couldn’t escape the colour red. His girlfriend would be at the house. I hung my head over my plate, appetite gone.

“Are you crying?’” he said.

“No.”

“Then you seem very sad, what’s up?”

“Nothing, Dad, nothing, I was just feeling sad for our team.”

“Ah,” he said as he ruffled my hair, took a deep swig of his drink and turned to get another. 

The house was brightly lit, the sounds of soft jazz coming from the lounge room. The air was filled with the smell of lemon furniture polish and her distinctive perfume. My father told me to take my bag to my old room which hadn’t changed at all, the posters the same, the light brown doona cover, the wooden shutters; my clothes, a few books and a small tennis trophy the only things I’d taken to the beach house.  The window overlooked the tops of tress, their shadows moving in tune with the breeze outside that had a heavy edge, a pall of humidity that offered up the smell of eucalypts. The outside air had a hot bitter taste but I left my window open feeling the mix of the warmth of the night air and the house’s colder embrace.

She came into the room to say goodnight, her skin warm, the light behind her giving her an edge, an outline of body, and she brought the colour yellow, a touch of light green. She bent towards me, the warmth of her skin, the perfume of gardenias, enfolding the air. I saw the colour of low heat, an energy I couldn’t fathom, and all I could do was wish that this moment, her kiss on my cheek, would melt into my forever. I made it so.