Peripheral Vision (15 page)

‘We might get Chinese takeaway. Something with vegetables.'

‘So is he okay to ride now?' Holly asks. Even though she is still wearing the horse rug, she's shivering. She drags her feet as she walks backward around the ring, shoes making furrows in the sand.

A mist is beginning to form on the fields, blurring the edges of fences and trees in the distance.

‘He'll be ready soon,' Joe says. ‘He's a good pony. He knows what he has to do.'

The grandfather opens the gate of the round yard and urges the Arab out into the larger enclosure. She can sense freedom. Her tail is high as she trots around, tossing her head and kicking up her heels. She calls out to the other horses and a couple answer.

‘We'll collect the gear and take the ponies back to their paddock now, I think. It's been a good day.'

The darkness is coming fast. Joe collects the rugs and drapes them over the rail, ready to clip onto the horses for the cold night ahead. He loops Bobby's reins around the middle rail. The grandfather sorts the tack. They'll take off the bridle and halter after they've led the ponies through the three gates to their own paddock.

‘Holly, do you want to help me put the rug on Bobby?' Joe asks.

‘Oh,' Holly says, ‘I thought …'

Her tone of voice makes them both turn in time to see the Arab trot through the gate Holly has opened into the paddock beyond. When the filly sees the open space in front of her, she breaks into a gallop. Two other horses in the paddock catch her excitement. The two men and the girl watch in the thickening mist as the three horses race away in a wide arc. They disappear from view, with only the sound of their hooves on the earth giving any hint of their existence, and then they reappear on the opposite side of the long paddock, dancing and snorting hot steam.

‘Oh God, we'll never get her back.' Joe covers his eyes with his hand. Holly takes his other hand in hers.

‘I'm sorry. I'm really sorry.'

As if she has heard, the Arab trots across the paddock toward them.

‘Come on, girl, come to me, come on.' The grandfather's voice is calm, steady. He holds the lead rope ready to clip to her halter. It seems as though the Arab is listening. She moves hesitantly in their direction, dipping her head, until at the last moment she hears the whinny of another horse and she is gone, galloping the length of the paddock.

‘I'm sorry, Granddad.' Holly's voice wavers. Joe puts his arm around her and murmurs consolingly.

‘Don't worry, darling. It's okay. I guess we can leave her in this paddock tonight and explain to the people tomorrow when we come back and move her.'

The grandfather knows they can't leave her there overnight. A stallion and a gelding agist in the paddock. A new filly will upset the dynamic, create a dangerous situation. A fight could break out. Valuable horses could be injured. He pats Holly on the head.

‘It'll be all right. She'll come to me. She'll come back.'

Joe doesn't believe him. He goes back to fixing the rug on Bobby, encouraging Holly to duck under the pony's neck and buckle the front strap against his big chest. He thinks about buying beef and vegetables in black bean sauce for tea, or sweet and sour fish. Or maybe a chicken and a salad. He tries to keep his mind off the mother who still emails him, although he'd never tell Holly or the grandfather. She addresses him as
Dear Crip
, and accuses him of stealing her family. Her rambling emails taunt him for being soft and a loser and she demands he send her money, but he's stopped doing that.

Bobby waits at the rail, ready to be led to his paddock. Holly leans in close to feel his warmth.

The grandfather, exhausted, walks away into the misty green paddock filled with the shapes of horses, the lead rope trailing behind him like a slow-burning fuse.

Territory

Friday evenings we gathered before dark in the cafe. In March the twilight came at about seven thirty, with the heat from meats and pasta and sauces already steaming up the cafe windows. The dusky neon and streetlights made the glass light up like cinema screens. People passing by could have been actors, extras in a movie, seen through a mist, a window in Paris, the curtain of a noodle bar in a futuristic Los Angeles.

It had been two months already. Emma and Shannon and I were the only ones who never missed a Friday, and we were always the first to arrive. I ordered a martini, ‘Because I like a bit of spirit.' That was the line, the ritual to set the mood. I would sit on that martini till nine, when we set out. Emma and Shannon preferred wine. They were served by a new waiter who smiled shyly, glancing at Shannon as he poured her twice the normal amount.

‘What about me?' Emma complained. The waiter blushed and topped up her glass before hurrying back to the kitchen.

The cafe was kitted out in rough-hewn wooden chairs and tables and the floor was polished concrete, which meant the wine was twelve dollars a glass instead of seven. Moisture condensing on the windows formed tiny rivulets that had seeped into the timber sill and caused the varnish to blister and crack. I found myself picking at the crisp flakes of varnish as we waited, the same way I used to pick at sunburn and scabs, feeling the creepy satisfaction of the dead parts of my body peeling away and leaving that pink baby skin, all soft and new and yet scarred at the same time.

Each time someone entered the cafe, their presence was announced by the squeak or rap of shoes on that concrete and the shift in the air: everything in the cafe was brittle and there was nothing to absorb sound or sensation except our human bodies. Perhaps that added to the jittery excitement that built as we sipped our drinks, waiting to see who would arrive, and what they would be wearing. At nine o'clock, six of us were sitting together, ready.

By the time we stepped outside, the night had sharpened into hard-edged shadows under a full moon and a clear sky. Emma hugged herself.

‘I should have brought a coat.'

She wore the dress we had seen in the Dangerfield window. It was a sack, shapeless and khaki-coloured with massive pockets sewn on the outside and a ragged hem. Urban guerilla girl chic, the shop assistant called it. ‘You should wear bright stripy tights or knee socks with it,' she said. ‘And platform shoes. Maybe even a bow in your hair,
Alice in Wonderland
style.' That's exactly what Emma had done. She looked crazy, dangerous, fun.

Shannon was in pink. She played demure better than the rest of us. Pressed jeans, a relaxed pink T-shirt, darker pink cardigan. Her auburn hair brushed straight, thick and soft over her shoulders. A clean face with a hint of blusher. Bree had gone moody and Goth with black clothes and dark wine lipstick, and Ozlem was the opposite, all frothy in light-coloured flounces and ribbons. Lu had chosen the shiny disco look. I wore my usual: black skirt above the knees, tight fluffy blue jumper cropped at the waist, black leggings, low heels, hair in a bun.

That was the only thing you might question about us. Other girls who went out in a group looked more alike. Arty types with arty types; girls who knew how to pick up wearing the uniform of short hip-hugging skirt, skyscraper heels, mascara and lipstick; anxious country girls in a giggly bunch trying too hard with their top buttons undone but their jeans too loose and complexions that sang of fresh air and cream. We were a mixed-up crowd, sometimes mistaken as a hens' night or a victorious hockey club, out on one of those occasions when different kinds of girls come together to celebrate.

‘Did you hear Suze got into medicine?' Shannon asked as we linked arms in the street. ‘They gave her a supplementary exam.'

‘I always knew she would.'

In our final year of high school Suze and I sat beside each other in biology. I'd lean over and copy whatever she was writing because she understood it in a way no one else in class did, as if she were a witchdoctor reading entrails. On a diagram where I'd see blue and pink splotches and dense topographic maps, she would see the anterior vena cava, an aberrant squamous cell, the deep mysterious structure of living things. The shimmying fishtails under the microscope spoke to her in ways I couldn't fathom, even with the study notes at my elbow. I knew she would end up studying the human body.

Emma had said she'd like to try the Kale Bar, so we tripped along the footpath talking about our studies and jobs, parting like a flock of birds to allow other pedestrians through and re-forming to take up other conversations, other chatter. When we reached the roped entrance to Kale, the bouncer smiled as if we'd arrived solely to cheer him up.

‘Ladies, you are very welcome tonight,' he said. ‘Too many men inside. You'll balance out the room nicely.' He unhooked the tatty velvet rope from its brass stand and waved us through, bowing as if he were a gentleman escort instead of a huge bull of a man who could move and punch at terrifying speed. ‘Here, on the house for you lovely ladies.' He handed me a wad of drink tickets. Once we were inside I shared them out among the girls and we fanned out through the room carrying our fancy coloured cocktails.

One wall of the bar had railway booths with sliding doors and benches either side of a fixed table. Heavy iron lamps, slung just above head height, gave out a dim yellow light. I slid onto a bench in one of the booths. Shannon moved toward the opposite bench but I asked her to sit beside me. Bree and Ozlem perched on stools at the bar, and Emma and Lu had chosen a round table on the far side of the room. In the gloom, the only way I could recognise our girls at the distant table was Lu's silver sequinned top catching the faint light and rippling like a fish flank in dark water.

You never know who will come up and talk to you at these places, or why. Sometimes they pick demure Shannon, sometimes they're drawn to the party girls like Lu, sometimes a guy will even turn to me, maybe because I look somewhere in between, the underconfident one, the one who might be grateful.

I couldn't sense the necessary hard urgency in the first boys who came to chat us up. They were anxious, skittish, too conscious of their looks and unsure of what to talk about. I could read where things would go because I knew the opening lines so well, the angles they used, the uncomfortable way they leaned on the doorway and kicked restlessly at the baseboard of the booth. Shannon looked pointedly at her phone a couple of times until they took the hint and drifted away.

The next two boys who sidled up to our booth loitered at the carriage door for a few seconds before offering to buy us drinks. We invited them to sit down. They edged in and shifted around until their bodies settled into an awkward stasis. The boy opposite me, tall and skinny, had twisted so far over his drink that he had to look at me with one eye, like a bird, and even then it was through a flop of clean private-school hair. His friend was jiggling his left leg so hard the whole booth shuddered along with it.

At eleven, after we'd got rid of those two and had a drink with a lone boy who quickly lost interest in our conversation and wandered back to his friends at the bar, we decided to leave.

‘I parked in the station carpark,' Shannon said. We hurried along the street, heels clattering on the empty footpath, shivering in the cold that had descended in a chill mist while we were inside. My new shoes were rubbing my small toe. I could feel moisture there, perhaps a broken blister or a smear of blood from the chafing, and I thought again of Suze passing the entrance exam for medicine.

‘It makes it seem like everything will be all right, doesn't it?' I said to Shannon. ‘Now that Suze will be a doctor, I mean.'

‘Yeah, it does feel like that.'

The streetlights were blurry in the mist, and the shops we passed were as dark as if they were hung with blackout curtains. The street with its wide verandahs stretched ahead in an overhung corridor of shadow, but no one had followed us from the bar, so we had no reason to be afraid. The only thing to make us hurry was the cold. At the carpark Shannon beeped open the lock of the Honda. We flung our bags inside and jumped in, and Shannon started the engine so the heater would come on.

‘Guess what? I thought ahead.' Shannon leaned over to the back seat and pulled a big canvas bag onto her lap. She extracted a thermos and two white melamine cups from the bag. ‘Hot chocolate and there's real chocolate as well. A block of organic dark. I don't know why I never thought of this before.'

‘You are brilliant, Shann.'

A couple of times we'd bought hot chips and gravy from the stand in the petrol station on the highway and taken them back to the car, but they had made us feel sick. They'd stunk out the car for days.

I looked at my watch. ‘Probably not long now anyway. It wasn't much of a crowd.'

Once we'd snuggled into our seats, with the hot chocolate warming our hands and the car windows fogging up, Shannon turned on the radio. The upbeat voice of the DJ brought a skip of happiness into the car. I loved the first song that he played.

‘This is “our song”, Steve and me.' I laughed, embarrassed. ‘How corny is that, having a song.'

‘No!' Shannon rested her cup on the dashboard while she broke three squares of chocolate off the block and handed them to me. ‘Eat this before it melts. You're a romantic. It's a byoodiful thang.'

‘Ha ha.'

‘Is Steve okay with you doing this?'

‘I told him I'm at a support group for Suze.'

‘Well, we are.'

I nodded and slipped my shoe off. It was too dark in the well of the passenger seat to see if I was bleeding. The loud alert of a text coming through on our phones made us both jump.

Bree and Ozlem clear

‘I'll do ours.'

I tapped out our message.
Bec and Shannon clear

‘Hope we don't go too late tonight,' Shannon said through a gluey mouthful of chocolate. ‘You want any more to drink?'

I shook my head. The warm cocoa was making me sleepy. I pulled out a tissue and wiped away the steam from the windscreen and the passenger side window, and passed the tissue for Shannon to clean her window. She took it but made a mock face of dismay.

‘I quite like the foggy windows. When you can't see out it's like you're in a strange tiny world, car world. Cheap upholstery and farty-smell world.'

‘I haven't farted, and if you're going to then please let me know beforehand.'

‘Like when people fart in lifts and there's no escape.'

Another text came through, this time from Lu.
Emma and I have split. I am clear.

‘Oh shit, shit. This could be it.' Shannon's voice was wobbly. She grabbed the cup from my hand, opened her driver's door and emptied the contents onto the ground. When she had pulled the door shut she dropped the cups on the floor of the back seat and wiped the driver's side window with the tissue I had passed her.

Another text.
He followed her into Trevvie park. Heading for bridge.

We reached the park thirty seconds later and got out, trying to close the doors and the boot lid quietly. On our phones, the locate-a-friend app showed Emma in the pagoda beside the pond. Trying to walk fast but quietly made my left shoe chafe even worse and I was certain I was bleeding now. I could feel the moisture seeping into the lining of my shoe and pooling at the toe.

The path through the park was well lit, so we kept to the shadows on the grass, our shoes occasionally crunching stones that had drifted from the white pebbled walkway.

‘Shit shit shit,' Shannon hissed. ‘We have to turn off the sound on our phones.'

Only a moment after we'd both done that our phones flashed with an incoming text.

Hurry

I pulled off my shoes and started to run down the hill to the bridge that led to the pagoda. My feet ached each time the scattered stones made contact with my tender soles. Shannon, the school athletics champion, sprinted past in the rubber-soled flats she'd slipped on in the car. When I reached the bridge, everyone was there. They turned and looked at me and I understood what they saw in my expression: the rage and fear that had been summoned in me, birthed from the cold sludge pit in my gut of every insult and shaming my friends and I had endured in our short lives. For this moment I was the leader.

We ran silently to the pagoda, where we could see Emma pressed against a pillar, squirming against the grip of a boy who was using his right arm to pin her hands above her head.

‘We're here, Emma,' I said. In the darkness my quiet voice seemed to travel along the earth and up through the foundations of the pagoda, flinging the boy backward, away from Emma. As he swung around he stumbled on the uneven flooring and fell to his hands and knees.

‘What the hell?' the boy said, but when he raised his face we saw that he wasn't a boy. He was a man in his thirties, or even forties. His pants were undone and his half-erect cock glistened with a droplet of clear liquid at its tip. When he saw us looking he hurriedly stuffed it back into his pants and did up his fly. ‘Ladies,' he said, rising on his knees like a begging dog and lifting his hands in a gesture of surrender. ‘No harm done here, ladies. We were just having a good time.'

‘No,' Emma said. She hitched up her stripy pantyhose, which had been tugged halfway down her thighs, and struggled with her dress until it fell back down into shape. ‘No, we weren't, you fucker.'

‘Did he say it?' I asked.

Emma shook her head. ‘No. You should have waited, like we said. I was okay.'

‘Say what?' the man said. He was still kneeling. He had nowhere to go. We were all inside the pagoda now. Six women. One man. One baseball bat. ‘Look, I wasn't going to rape her or anything. She never said no.' He reached out to Emma. ‘You never said no, right?' When his hand touched Emma's thigh the sludge inside me churned up a dim memory of my childhood bedroom and the suffocating weight of the bedclothes. Then the sensation lifted and the clean air of the park flowed over me.