Yellow (8 page)

I race home and change into my faded Kmart cossies, wiggle into Mum's old board shorts, and I grab the Coolite under my arm. I'm still not talking to Mum and she's usually in bed when I get home, her eyes vacant as though she's somewhere else and it's someone else lying there, wearing her skin. The wind has picked up and it makes me zigzag as I near South Beach, as though the ocean itself doesn't want me near, and it's pushing me away. The waves are big out near the reef, which is about a hundred metres from the shore. My stomach jumps to the upper cavities of my chest, and I want to walk back home again, but I made a promise. If I back out now, I'll never get the guts.

The waves come in sets. A series of ten, maybe fifteen eight-footers break at the outer edge of the distant reef, gaining power as they barrel across the coral shallows, and then crashing hard like a tackled footballer, all force and spittle and fury, followed by a lull. The lull lasts a while, enough to almost make you forget the bombs were ever there, and I figure that there might be enough time between sets to cross the reef into the safe zone, where the waves haven't yet broken.

Where Boogie's supposed to be.

There's only one other surfer out there; he's a small silhouette, so small that if I close one eye and point I could make him disappear behind my fingertip. I spear the water with the tip of my board and duck dive under the smaller waves near the shore. Soon, once I pass the breakers, there's no noise but my own hands slicing through the water and the sound of water splashing onto the board. After fifteen minutes of paddling the shore seems so far away, and I'm only halfway there. My breath is jagged, and the ocean swells and falls with its own deep lungs. I try not to think of the board's shadow below me, which looks like a shark. There are enough real sharks to be scared of, and real sharks go unseen for the most part, right up until it matters, that is.

Slice.

Slice.

Slice.

My arms are two dull aches by my side. The shore seems small and unreal now, like a world that sits inside a snow globe, and all that truly exists is the water, swallowing the horizon in one fat gulp, and then the other surfer who emerges triumphantly every now and then from the liquid tunnel of a distant wave. I sit on the board near the edge of the reef and dive under the waves when they come, until it feels like my nose and eyes and throat are clogged thick with salt. All of my instincts are telling me to go back. I can understand why the men call the waves out here monsters – there's something of the childhood beast in the way the wall of water forces forward, all liquid muscle and a fury that can't be reasoned with or tamed. Maybe that's why the boys are drawn here; maybe that's what surfing is all about, facing up to the beast and becoming a man, like the rituals of olden times. Maybe that's why boys aren't as cruel to each other as girls are – they prove themselves to the ocean every day, this thing much bigger and stronger than themselves, and that's enough. They've proved enough.

The set finishes and it's my chance.

Slice.

Slice.

Slice.

I paddle as fast as I can with cupped hands, chin perched firm against the waxy board as the water slaps my face, salt-stung eyes steadfast, towards that spot behind the reef. I'm in survival mode. The adrenaline slows time and stretches things out, and everything is forgotten in this moment. Nothing else seems to matter, not school, not my parents, not even really Boogie. Nothing exists, except the sense of gliding across glass, and the need to be quicker than the next set. All I am right now is two arms, two hands, and the feel of water. And then the surge starts to suck the water from under me, so that my hands scrape sharp against the bottom of the reef, and I'm being pulled forward towards the crest of a wave that's beginning to stretch its legs into the first of the next set.

I haven't made it.

Shit.

I'm right, smack bang in the thick of it.

It's too shallow to duck under, maybe two feet deep.

Panic tightens its fingers to pinch all my nerve endings, and on instinct I turn my board around and paddle with a furious intensity. The wave shoulder barges me, and my body remembers what Lark's taught me over the years – there's no room for hesitation or mistakes, and the next thing I know, I'm up on my feet, and the wave is feathering in front of me.

I'm doing it.

I'm really doing it.

My toes are clenched tight into the wax job.

It feels like a cross between falling and flying.

It feels like a goddamn exclamation mark.

We're just past the reef now, and a barrel curls behind me, and chases until it's at my heels.

I'm really doing it.

Until I'm not.

The maw of the barrel closes in on me, and the lip thwacks me on the back of the head, and the next thing I know the wave is stomping down, as I'm churned under the water.

This is what it feels like to drown, I think.

This is what it feels like.

It feels like being throttled by blue.

It tastes of blood, or is it salt? They taste the same in this moment, blood and salt, and I wonder if they always have.

My chest is screaming bloody murder.

The avalanche of water rumbles above me and I push, battle, thrash towards the surface.

Air.

A clump of blessed air.

And then the next wave thwacks down onto my head, and the light turns to black, and I'm back down, churning again in the ocean's bowels.

I'm losing my strength.

I don't know which way is up.

I heard once that drowning is the most peaceful way to die, that it's something like a sense of euphoria that washes over you.

I'm not buying it.

There's no peace, just undiluted panic. Panic and pain.

My lungs are clawing at me.

I grab my leg rope and struggle to climb up it.

Air.

I clasp onto my board and tumble along the angry clouds of foam, retching putrid water down my chin.

I'm alive.

I made it.

I roll the air around my tongue and drink it in, and I think I have never tasted anything so sweet in my whole entire life.

I'm alive.

I let the force and tumble of the waves batter me towards the shore, a bit of paddling here and there. I join the bedraggled clumps of seaweed on the shoreline, and close my eyes as I claw the sand either side of me, and feel the sun get softer as it starts to bleed into dusk.

Breathing.

Not drowning.

Alive.

‘You are the bravest kook I ever saw, you idiot.'

I open one eye to see the sky eclipsed by a freckled head.

Noah.

I sit up.

He was the other surfer out there with me.

Shit.

He's crouching next to me, all concerned looking, and all I can think about is how he blends into the beach, with his freckles like scattered sand, and eyes you could drown in.

‘You look like a sea monster.'

He reaches across and picks the seaweed out of my hair.

I look like a sea monster.

Shit.

I scramble for something to say.

Anything.

Nope.

Nothing.

Shit.

‘You're a better surfer than you are a talker, huh?'

‘Yeah, almost drowning is what all the great surfers are doing these days, didn't you get the memo?'

There's a terrible, stretched-out moment when he looks at me like I'm an alien, and then his face breaks and he laughs, a soft laugh.

‘I've got the memo lots of times. See this?'

He shows me the scar on his shin where the reef got the better of him.

‘Ouch.'

‘Most kooks start out at Main Beach, you know.'

‘Stop calling me a kook. Anyway, I hate it there.'

He looks mock outraged.

‘You hate Main Beach, where everyone goes to be looked at? What kind of a show-off are you?'

‘A terrible one, obviously.'

We both chuck seashells into the ocean, not looking at each other.

‘You weren't so terrible when you explained that book we're reading in English, that
Lord of the Flies
.'

I concentrate hard on a pink shell I've picked up. I don't know whether he's taking the piss.

‘Mrs Thomas made me, I wasn't showing off.'

‘You should've been. I would've, if I were you.'

I look over at him but his eyes are focused out near the bombies, near where I almost drowned. He goes on.

‘Those things you said, about that book, it's what I was feeling when I read it, except I can never find the right words, you know? The only way I can ever really show how I feel is out there, on the ocean. Surfing is the closest thing I have to . . . I dunno.'

I look at him again, and he's gone red in those small spaces of skin where there aren't any freckles.

‘It's the closest thing to poetry, I s'pose,' he says.

He's squinting back at the horizon like it's the most interesting thing in the world. After a beat I reply, ‘If that's true, then I'm a terrible poet. You saw me out there.'

He looks at me sideways, and a smile creeps onto his face. He laughs, and then so do I.

I'm laughing with Noah Willis.

Shit.

‘What did the conch shell mean, in the book? I couldn't figure it out.'

He really wants to know my opinion.

Noah Willis wants my opinion.

‘It's a symbol, kind of. It gives someone the power to speak, and the power to have the others listen to them.'

Noah mulls this over. I can see the thoughts swimming across his eyes.

‘A conch shell is a stupid reason to listen to someone, but you know, it's not like it's any worse than how everyone at school acts.'

I stare at him, and he squints like he's thinking hard about something that's far away as he keeps talking.

‘People at school listen to other people for the dumbest reasons – just 'cos you can surf, or 'cos you look a certain way, like Cassie does. It's all fake. It drives me mad, the way that everyone listens real hard to the people who aren't really saying anything at all, just 'cos they're popular. I mean, I've got nothing to say, and everyone hangs off my every word. It makes me want to cut my tongue out, you know? It's all a joke.'

I'm just staring at him now, like he's the alien. It makes me think how you never really can tell what's crawling around inside anyone's brain, not really. He's on a rant now.

‘I mean, if people in the book were smart, they'd have listened to Piggy. He's the one they should've listened to, the one with the brains, but they're all too busy with the stupid conch shell.'

Noah turns to me, and I smell that smell again. Male and sharp. He's so close our shoulders are almost touching. I want them to touch. Please let them touch.

‘Sort of like you. People should listen to you, too,' he says.

I don't know what to say.

I'm like Piggy?

‘I don't like to talk,' I finally reply.

‘Maybe, but you say a hell of a lot with your eyes.'

I look down. I hate my eyes. I bite my lip and find my words.

‘People say that eyes are the windows to your soul, and if that's true, I'm screwed. I'm like those rich people's houses near Main Beach, the ones that are nothing but windows and you can see right in.'

He laughs that quiet laugh.

‘I hate people with those houses,' he replies. ‘It's kind of like they're showing off their fancy lives to all the people walking down their street who can't afford it. It's like a fishbowl.'

‘Tell me about it. Imagine living with a fishbowl on your face.'

He shoots me a sideways glance again and then a smile scrunches up his face so that a bunch of his freckles touch, and I wish he'd just move over a little, so our shoulders touched too.

‘Your eyes are different, that's for sure.'

‘Some guys at school once told me I could be pretty, maybe, if it wasn't for my eyes.'

Noah's grin disappears and all of a sudden it's like a blind's been pulled across his features.

‘Those guys don't know what they're talking about. Anyway, it's getting dark.'

He stands abruptly, and picks up his board, almost a silhouette now that the sun's just disappeared behind the dunes. I don't know if he means that the boys are stupid for thinking I could maybe be pretty, or if they were stupid for saying my eyes make me ugly. I'm guessing it's the first option because he's halfway down the beach now, and I pick up my board and follow his shadow through the track home.

Mum's in front of the telly when I get home. She's propping herself up from the floor, trying to sip from a too-full glass of something strong, while the TV entertains itself. I slam the door behind me, and she turns and clocks my face.

‘Oh Jesus, don't you start on me again . . .' she slurs.

I look at what she's wearing – she hasn't gotten out of those pyjamas in three days, and even the cotton material looks greasy.

‘I won't mention it's your turn to do the washing then. It's been your turn for the last three months.'

She looks up from her glass.

‘Oh baby giiiiiirl . . .'

She's looking hard at me and she reaches out, but there's no way in hell I'm moving forward. At that moment the studio audience on the game show she's watching starts to do a countdown, and it's not until the jackpot goes off after a five-second count that she bothers to lower her arm. It's like we have our own bloody soundtrack.

‘When did you grow up soooooo big?' she asks me.

I bite my bottom lip, and I want to say that I grew up during last summer, while she wasn't looking, but I don't. She won't remember in the morning anyway. Instead I step over her and head towards my bedroom, only looking back when she calls after me. Unsteadily, she gets up onto her hands and knees.

‘I'll do the washing now then, Kirraaaaa. I'll do the washing for us,' but then her hands buckle under her, and her face is planted against the carpet. I don't move forward to help her. In a feat of determination she pulls herself back up and onto her feet, and she wobbles a few steps until she bumps into the coffee table and tumbles back over again.

A memory comes to me, the kind of flashback that kicks you in the teeth. At the beginning of summer I'd found a Christmas beetle that'd fallen into a bucket of water I'd once grown tadpoles in. The creature's back was shiny and its small legs flailed hopelessly as it tried to scale the bucket wall. I knew I could just trail my hands through the water, scoop it out, and it would be all right. But I didn't feel like it anymore. I squatted down on my haunches and watched it, blankly, until it stopped twitching, and bobbed up and down all boat-like. I didn't feel sorry for it as I was watching. It was like my feelings had all been wrung dry, and I remember the only thing that made me hurt in the gut was the knowledge that I wasn't feeling anything at all. I'm thinking of this drowning beetle now, as I watch my mother stumble.

‘Don't worry about it. You'll probably break the bloody thing,' I say to her, and start to stomp towards the laundry.

‘How was your father? I know you were over there!' she calls out after me and her words smack me on my back. She's begun calling him that – ‘your father' instead of Lark – as though I owned him and she wasn't connected to him at all, like they're just two strangers placed side by side on the electoral roll because they happened to share their last names. She spits the words out, like I'm tainted too, by the association.

‘Lark's fine,' I shout back over my shoulder. ‘Lark's always fine.'

Somewhere in the living room a glass smashes.

‘Well then, that's proof that karma doesn't exist, isn't it?' I hear her mutter.

It makes me wonder what I did in a past life, because if karma did exist I think I must have been Hitler, the way this life's turned out.

I strip the beds and throw our things into the washing machine, that leaky shuddery thing that makes it sound as though there's a swamp monster in our laundry, then I stomp back into the kitchen and take the yellow pages from its spot on top of the fridge. Flicking through, I find the ads for our local Alcoholics Anonymous. I rip the page out, and in bright-red marker pen I circle the ad and stick it on our fridge.

Fat lot of good it'll do, though. I don't think she even eats these days.

I don't know much about happiness, but I know that in a small way, if nowhere else, okayness can be found slipping into crisp sheets at the end of a really long day. It calms me down as I open the linen cupboard, seeing those sheets pressed and fresh and stacked properly where I put them there last week. I like neatness and order. They remind me of respectable people's hands. The way those sheets are all folded and just sitting there politely, it's like the way that rich people hold their hands when they're sitting in the doctor's waiting room – you know, the type of people who wear pearls and have clean fingernails. Before I grab a couple of sets to put on the beds I stand there for a moment. I close my eyes and lean against the frame, and with my eyes still closed, I slot my hand inside the folds of one of the bed sheets at the bottom of the stack. I imagine, with the pressure of it, it's someone holding my hand. Not just someone. I imagine it's my mother holding my hand, and she's soft and nice and smells sweet like washing powder. She's holding my hand because she wants me to be safe.

Isn't that ridiculous?

When I'm done with the sheets, I step into the shower and wash the sea off of me. I wash the day off me. As the shampoo suds crackle in my ear I think of Willow and her bare feet; I think of Boogie, and what he said that made both our words crack with sadness. I think of Lark, playing with the dog who wasn't Mitzy, and then the surf and being throttled by blue. I think of my mother, the drowning beetle. And I think of Noah. I turn my face up towards the showerhead and I think of Noah. I think of how he looks like he got caught in a shower of freckles. Our shoulders when they were almost touching. The way he smelt. How he wanted my opinion. How he thought I was like Piggy.

Jesus, Kirra. He thinks you're like Piggy.

I turn the shower off and wrap the towel around me, then wipe the fog from the mirror so I can see my face. My hair, clumping down my back in a shade of dirty yellow. My small face with its pointed chin. My small nose. My regular-sized lips. And then my eyes. I squint to try to see if I'd be pretty if they were smaller. In this fuzzy, squinty reflection I do look pretty, in a way. But then I open my eyes properly again, and the size of them, the yellowness of them, scares all the beauty away. It chases it right from my face.

I think of what Boogie told me. I wonder how I can draw blood with my words. What does that even mean? I think of Cassie, and Lou and the rest of them, and I think of the words they use on me, and I think of The Circle, and how it felt like their words were scratching me right up, except the scratches were all on the inside, and how it felt as raw and painful as it would have felt if they'd been using their fingernails to claw at my skin. Maybe more. Real scratches heal. Those words they used, they drew blood all right. I need to use those types of words, Boogie said, and I wonder where I can find them.

My reflection stares back at me, and it almost scares me, how intense that girl in the mirror looks.

‘Oh yeah, Cassie? Well at least the bleach hasn't leached into my brain,' I whisper to the girl in the mirror. The girl in the mirror nods back at me. I whisper a little louder.

‘Is that foundation you're wearing, Tara, or did a concrete mixer unload itself on your face?'

The girl in the mirror can taste the blood. And she likes it.

‘Hey Sasha, is your favourite colour beige? It should be, because you're so generic.'

The eyes staring back at me flash.

‘Hey Lou, Cassie doesn't like you, she just thinks of you as an attack dog who'll lunge when she says sic 'em!'

The eyes in the mirror aren't flashing anymore, they're on fire. They look like two yellow fires ablaze on my face. I look tough. I look fierce. And I scare myself.

I look away, then I peek back at my reflection through my eyelashes. Do I really want to be a person who has claws?