Solo (2 page)
She said her name was Bethany. I thought she was nervous, but later I realised she was always like that. Even when she smiled she was pinched and breathless, as though she had just received sad news and was waiting for things to get worse.
We walked down the path together. The group stood silent in a loose cluster, hands in pockets, with their bags between their feet like penguins with eggs.
Callum yawned, stretching out his arms, and his vest rode up above the hem of his pants. I could see the little line of hair below his navel disappearing into the elastic band of his underpants. I thought I was looking discreetly, but Bethany raised an eyebrow at me and we both giggled. Our bonding moment.
The next morning at breakfast I watched Callum talking with the other boys. He was fidgety. He had his forearm on a chair next to his, rocking it back and forth, jiggling his knee, rolling his shoulders.
He was wearing a blue checked cowboy shirt with the sleeves ripped off. When he scratched the back of his neck I could see the pale skin of his side, just below his underarm. There was the beginning of a wide scar, white and raised with stitch marks like a fishbone. It made me wonder if he’d taken the scarification thing too far, or if he’d been in a really bad car accident. It was a puzzle and I worried at it like a loose tooth.
I think about Callum. When I am having lustful thoughts about him, that’s what I imagine – I see those parts of him that are not private, but secret anyway.
Your opening line tells people what you care about and what sort of attitude you have. It makes a picture in the other person’s mind and it doesn’t really matter what else you say after that. They already have an image of you in their head.
I usually start with a story about when I lived at Nan and Pop’s place. They had a bed-and-breakfast on Lake Macquarie. The house was perched on the edge of the lake and had views to the south. People stayed there just for the night or maybe for months at a time. Nan made meals for them while Pop fished and took care of the garden. He taught me the names of all the trees and shrubs.
The house was old and creaky and had a timber verandah running all the way around the outside. There were pots of geraniums in the corners and a swinging chair with a vinyl covering that fluttered and slapped in the wind.
All the doors to the bedrooms were on the outside, leading onto the verandah. The only internal doors went from the kitchen to the dining room and then into the sitting room where there was an old TV on wooden legs, and a table with what Nan called ‘the tea-and-coffee-making facilities’, which was really just a sugar bowl and some individually wrapped biscuits.
I slept in a room on the east side of the house which had three sets of bunk beds all covered in fuchsia-coloured chenille bedspreads with a fringe around the hem. Nan said it was retro. She told me they were coming back in – she’d seen them at Spotlight. Pop said they were antique.
At the bottom of the garden, at the water’s edge, was an old timber boatshed. Inside there was a rowboat tied to a winch. You turned a lever and the boat would travel down the rail and into the water. Pop and I used to drop crab pots into the bay in the afternoon and collect them the next morning. The crabs inside snapped their claws. I’d squeal and laugh. Pop said that sound carried over water because there was nothing to stop it. He said people would hear my shrieks in New Zealand.
While Pop worked in the garden, Nan and I made cupcakes from a packet. We ate them straight out of the baking tin before they even cooled.
I liked that picture. I hoped the people I told could smell the baking and the salt spray, and hear the lap of the water over the crushed shells and coarse dark sand that was the shore. I wished they would see my grey-haired guardians as playful and sincere – active and at the same time still and constant. I wanted them to imagine me as a lanky tomboy with a ragged fringe that I cut myself, and grazes on my knees from climbing trees.
On that first night at camp, Bethany had the bunk above mine. She told me that for her seventh birthday her parents had given her a puppy, a book on how to raise a puppy, and a bowl, collar and lead all in the same shade of lilac, which had been her favourite colour at the time. She had called her puppy Minty, but he was very energetic and after a few weeks her parents decided that their family wasn’t ready for a dog so they gave Minty away. They also gave away her book on how to raise a puppy and the matching bowl, collar and lead.
Callum’s first story was about how one day he had been body-surfing with his dad and they swam way out to the breakers off a sandbar. After a while Callum noticed that his father wasn’t there any more. He looked back at the beach and his dad was sitting on the shore, arms wrapped around his knees, watching. When he saw Callum was looking, he held his hands over his head, palms together – a shark fin.
‘He saw a shark and he swam all the way in. Fair dink. Didn’t bother to call out to me or anything!’ Callum grinned and shook his head. ‘Silly old bastard. Could have at least got them to turn on the siren or something.’
When I heard Bethany’s and Callum’s opening lines I wondered how they had been chosen to come on this camp. I wondered what sort of potential they had that I had too. I wondered if my opening line was as see-through as theirs.
Wendy, one of the counsellors, divided us into two groups. Group A would do the meal preparation and Group B would clean up. She explained slowly, and in a number of different ways, that the groups would be randomly selected at each meal, because they didn’t want to ‘develop an atmosphere of competition and exclusiveness’.
Callum is in Group A. Bethany is in Group A. Wendy calls my name and I’m in Group A too.
I don’t mind counsellors and schoolteachers. They don’t raise their voices. If they get mad at you they tell you why – usually over and over again. They distinguish between the behaviour and the individual. You can tell they’re exercising their training whenever they open their mouths.
When you do X, I feel Y.
We were making salad wraps. There would be no meat served at this camp. I shredded lettuce and eyed the others. Callum was at the other end of the bench spreading hummus on the flat bread with a spatula.
I tried to think of something to say. With normal kids it’s easier. You can ask where they live, or about their family or school, but here I couldn’t assume that they had a school, family or home.
‘I’m glad, because I’m vegetarian anyway,’ Bethany told me from across the bench. She was on cheese slices. ‘I hate it when people make a big deal about it, as if I’ve got some kind of medical condition.’
‘Don’t you think it’s weird how stuff that is bad for you is always cheaper than stuff that is good for you?’ I commented.
The others listened to us mutely.
‘At most restaurants there’s only one vegetarian option, even though there are more vegetarians all the time,’ Bethany added.
I said, ‘It looks like we’re only going to get one option here whether we’re vegetarian or not.’
‘I don’t know how you could not eat meat. It’s just too yummy,’ one of the girls said, shrugging.
Bethany pursed her lips but she didn’t defend herself. We lapsed into silence again.
I ate my wrap standing up and then waited in line for a plastic cup of juice.
While Group B cleaned up, Wendy handed us on to another counsellor, Stefan, who gave us a creative writing exercise to do. Stefan told us to think about someone who provokes a strong emotional response in us and write a positive statement about that person.
We were sitting in a circle outside, under a fig tree. There was a breeze and we could hear birds. It was obviously supposed to be a stress-free, stimulating learning environment.
I held my pen above the paper and thought about what I might write.
Callum has a cleft in his chin. I’d like to press it with my
pinkie finger.
My counsellor has a clear voice like a radio announcer on
the classical station.
Pop’s fingers are wrinkly, bent and swollen like tiny sweet
potatoes, but he can thread a hook on a fishing line, patch
a crab pot with fancy knots and write love letters to Nan in
handwriting that swirls and twists like a tango on the page.
I tapped my pen between my teeth. Bethany was scribbling away. I peeked at her paper.
My brother has a good imagination. He is also good at
team sports, for example, soccer. One time at Easter he stole
some of those chocolate eggs with the cream in the middle
off the counter at the newsagent (which was bad), but he gave
me one (which was nice).
Bethany looked over at mine. I grinned at her and wrote,
Callum has a nice bum.
Bethany smiled and then whispered, ‘It’s supposed to be someone you feel negative about.’
I hadn’t heard that part.
‘Yes,’ interrupted Stefan, ‘think of someone who might have made you feel sad or angry – someone who might have disappointed you in the past.’ As he walked towards where I was sitting I scrunched up the paper so he couldn’t see what I had written.
They might call it creative writing, but it seemed to me much more like the affirmation exercises that my counsellor makes me do.
My counsellor (the one who thought wilderness therapy would be just ace) says that you can be angry about something a person has done, but your anger is unlikely to change how that person behaves. She says the only person whose behaviour you can change is your own.
I poised my pen over the page again and tried to think of something positive to say about my parents, other than that after I turn sixteen I won’t have to see them any more.
Stefan wanted us to share with the rest of the group so I quickly wrote, ‘My mother has very long eyelashes.’
Most of the others had written something about their relatives, except for a boy so fair he was almost albino. He wrote about the staff at the video shop at his local shopping centre. I wondered if he so struggled for something nice to say about his family that he picked someone at random, or whether there really was an incident at the video shop that scarred him.
I had an incident at a bakery once. I watched him, wondering if he was a kindred spirit.
Callum wrote, ‘My mother is emotionally nomadic,’ which I thought was cheating, because it wasn’t positive, it was negative dressed up as ambivalent. I was disappointed. I wanted him to say something about himself. I wanted a handle that I could use to open the next conversation, so when it came time to say mine aloud I said, ‘My father is customer-focused.’
Night-time at the camp wasn’t as loud as I expected. Every now and then I could hear muffled laughter coming from one of the other cabins, or the scuffing feet of a camp counsellor on the beat. I could hear night birds calling, and insects, but traffic only rarely.
It’s amazing how quickly you can adapt to quiet. Every time Bethany moved, the whole bunk would squeak.
‘Lie still, will you?’ I hissed.
‘I can’t get comfortable! The mattress sags in the middle.’ She wiggled and the bed screeched.
‘Lie on the edge, then.’
‘What if I fall out?’
‘You won’t fall. What’s the matter with you, anyway?’
Bethany rolled over and sighed. ‘I’m worried about the Solo. Are you doing one?’
‘I go out after you come back, I think. Have you changed your mind?’
I could hear her breathing, and the crumpling sound as she moved under the doona.
‘I don’t know,’ she said eventually. ‘It’s all right now. You’re here and I feel like an idiot being scared, but by myself in the dark with all that bush around me, with all that space, and no one else . . . Do you think that’s dumb?’
‘No, it’s not dumb.’ I had been thinking the same thing. ‘They said there will be patrols checking for the flags,’ I reassured her.
‘But how often? Once an hour? Once a day?’ she asked. ‘And a flag seems a bit kind of, passive, you know? I want something that makes a noise.’
‘An air horn like the ones they have at the football.
La cucharacha la cucharacha.
That would draw attention. Even a whistle. You could wear it around your neck, or tie it to your shirt – a whistle and a light, like they have on lifejackets on aeroplanes.’
We lay in silence for a moment and then Bethany said, ‘I don’t know if a whistle is going to help you much if nobody has noticed four hundred tonnes of metal falling from the sky.’
We both giggled, and then tried to muffle it as we heard boots stamping along the concrete outside. ‘Go to sleep, girls!’
We lay still and waited. I closed my eyes.
The bed squeaked again. Bethany said, ‘My brother has this book on serial killers. It’s really sick but you can’t help reading it. You know, the weird thing is that those guys say they don’t know why they do it. Some of them say, “The devil made me,” or “I heard it in the dogs barking,” but most of them don’t. They don’t know why.’
I opened my eyes. In the gloom I could make out the floral pattern on the underside of Bethany’s mattress. Tree branches bowed and tilted outside the window, making shifting shadows on the walls.
‘I reckon most people are a little bit nutty,’ Bethany said. ‘Like my mum, when she does the washing she pegs out different colours in separate parts of the Hills Hoist. There’s a whites and a darks opposite, and then blues and reds. Sometimes if she’s got a brown colour you can see her standing there frozen while she’s deciding if it’s a red or a dark. And if she runs out of room in the quarter, she won’t put it in a different quarter – she goes and puts it in the clothes dryer. That’s nutty, isn’t it? But she’s not killing anyone. I just wonder how fine the line is between pegging in colours to roasting small children, you know?’
‘Yeah,’ I whispered.
‘You know what else? Psychos look like ordinary people. That’s what scares me the most. Except Ivan Milat. Have you seen pictures of him? He looks like a real freak. But the others – like David Berkowitz and even Martin Bryant . . . He just looks like a uni student. He looks like someone who’d play guitar. When I go through that book of serial killers and look at the pictures I always wonder if I saw one of them walking down the street, if I would know. The truth is, I don’t think I would.’