Peripheral Vision (9 page)

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‘If you were my sister,' I asked Klara Fuchs, ‘do you think we'd still be best friends?'

‘Oh, Natalie, of course we would,' she said, and I believed her.

We were in love, the way that primary-school girls fall in love with each other. When I look back now I realise that Klara was thin and brittle like a bunch of sticks held together with cloth. But at the time I thought she was perfect. She wore bright striped dresses that her mother had made, and matching single-colour cardigans. She wore long white socks every day. She smelled different from everyone else, tart and spicy like an exotic fruit. The first night I stayed for tea at her house and they served me sauerkraut I recognised the smell. Sometimes, in school, we held hands under the desk. I remember the sensation of her hot sticky fingers entwined in mine.

I was an only child. Klara had a sister and a brother. Her sister was nine years older than us, almost an adult. She only ever spoke to us to point out how annoying we were. Klara's brother, Dieter, was thirteen. As much as I wished Klara was my sister and could live with me at my house, I wished Dieter was not her brother and that I had never met him.

If Dieter found a drawing we had done, he ripped up the paper. If he caught us playing in the mud, he smeared the mud over our faces. If he caught us at the swimming pool, he tried to hold us under. He might always be around a corner, so we had to speak softly. He might find the spell we had written to ward him off, so we ate the paper.

When I sat opposite him at the dinner table, smiling politely as I tried to chew my serve of sour cabbage and meaty sausage, Dieter watched me. He stared until my throat tightened and I couldn't swallow. He seemed to hate me for no other reason than sitting opposite him at the dining table and catching his eye. Klara sat next to me at the table, hardly letting anything pass her lips, as if Dieter was controlling her food intake. She carried herself in a hunch, and she shivered easily. The temperature only had to be slightly cool and Klara would start shivering. Or if her brother was nearby. Then she shivered too.

The times Dieter was around were the only times I wondered if I could keep on being Klara's best friend.

One Sunday Klara's mother and father took us on a trip to the Caribbean Gardens in a suburb a long drive away. Klara, me, Dieter and his friend from school. Fibreglass statues of animals rose out of dry garden beds like we were in a museum, and the sun beat down over acres of brown
dirt and colourless rides and stalls selling hot jam doughnuts
and sausages in batter. The parents set up at a picnic table with a tablecloth. They brought baskets out of the car boot filled with bottles of beer for them and cordial for us, stuffed cabbage rolls and thick, heavy cake smelling of honey. At the table Klara's father shook out a newspaper and held it in front of his face. Her mother stripped down to a pair of bathers, lay her towel on the dirt and settled down with a book and a sunhat.

‘Why don't you go for a swim,' she said to us, nodding in the direction of the muddy lake a few hundred yards away. A paddle steamer ploughed through the water on the far side. Klara and I wandered around the statues of elephants and giraffes and crocodiles. Further along the shore a replica submarine rose out of the dust like a grey dinosaur. Dieter was on the deck, trying to climb the periscope. Klara saw what I was looking at and she tugged me in the opposite direction.

‘Let's play over there,' she said, pointing at a bare patch of earth further along the shore. I followed her and she picked up a big stick and started sketching something out on the ground.

‘What are we playing?' I said.

Klara looked over my shoulder and whispered, ‘Nothing.' She dropped the stick. She whispered again, ‘Let's go and play over there
,
'
and she pointed even further away,
out into the field where even her parents couldn't see us.

‘Are we allowed?' I asked. My parents would never let me wander that far. I glanced behind and saw Dieter coming toward us with his friend, red-faced and crying, staggering behind him.

‘Okay,' I said to Klara and we started to walk quickly away.

‘Hey,' Dieter shouted.

We bolted like startled deer, running till our breath was ragged and our chests sore. We ran past cages of monkeys and stands of poplar trees and enclosures of emus in the sun until finally Dieter gave up following us and we found ourselves in a small copse of eucalypts somewhere in the back of the Caribbean Gardens. We sat on the ground, cool earth covered in a dry carpet of leaves. I felt as if I had travelled through some barrier to reach a place in another time or another dimension. The trees had seemed small in the distance but now they were huge above us. I lay back on the fragrant leaves and looked up through the branches at the distant pale sky.

‘Have we lost him?' Klara gasped, almost sobbing trying to get oxygen into her skinny body. ‘Is he behind us?'

I sat up. She was still doubled over, still sucking in air.

‘I can't see him,' I said. But that didn't mean he wasn't there.

He was there one day at their house when I rounded the corner, looking for Klara. He and another friend of his. His friends were always small boys, while he was big, solid, fleshy. His small friend was holding a dartboard and Dieter had a dart in his hand aimed at the dartboard covering the friend's stomach. They were in shorts, both of them, bare-chested. I wore a pink spotted dress and my best sandals because Klara and I were going to practise walking with books on our heads.

I never saw the dart leave Dieter's hand, never saw it fly through the air. I was watching the board to see where the dart would land before I made a break for it and ran across their line of vision on my way to the back door. When the tip of the dart flew straight into the boy's chest, above the right nipple, and hung there, I was as silent and astonished as both of them. We all watched the dart standing straight out from the boy's chest as if it had hit a tree trunk or a pole. Four feathers, vanes quivering. A brass collar holding the dart tip to the shaft.

A trickle of blood emerged from where the tip had penetrated the boy's chest, and dribbled down toward the dartboard he was still holding against his belly. All of us silent, waiting for the dart to fall out. Dieter let out a sharp bar
k
, a laugh of sort
s
, and his friend's eyes widened as though he had only just realised that this dart was embedded in his own chest. The boy shrieked. Long and high like a rabbit.

Dieter won't like that, I thought, my stomach starting to spin. The shriek went on and on. Dieter's mother came pelting out of the house. Klara's narrow, frightened face appeared at her bedroom window.

‘He moved,' Dieter called to his mother as she flew past. ‘He shouldn't have moved.'

When she reached the boy, Dieter's mother took hold of the dartboard he was still pressing against himself like a target and flung it to the ground. The boy kept staring at the missile standing out from his breastbone. He pushed Klara's mother away when she reached for the dart. His mouth was wide open but no more sound came out. She stepped forward, grasped the dart, pulled, then covered the place it had come from with her hand.

A few weeks later I came to Klara's house and the boy was there with Dieter again. They were tying red crackers together and lighting the fuse before they threw the bundle into an empty oil drum in the vacant lot beside the house. The crackers hammered around the drum like a machine gun. Dieter laughed and laughed, and the boy with a hole in his breastbone stood behind him and giggled and glanced around nervously, as though the danger might come from somewhere else, not right in front of him.

‘Go and get the Catherine wheels,' Dieter said.

‘Okay,' the boy answered breathlessly, and as he raced past me to the house I wondered how Dieter could keep these people coming back.

When Klara and I were eleven, her family moved to a small farm in the country. The next summer holiday, I went to spend a week at their new place. They lived in a fibro house, and the property ended on the boundary of a flat scrubby national park. In the heat of the day Klara and I walked together through the straggly bush and sat with our legs dangling in the creek. Or we lounged on her bed in her bedroom, batting away mosquitoes in the dense air and slurping fast-melting blocks of flavoured ice.

Klara sat with her arms wrapped around her legs, her chin resting on her knees. Sometimes she held her pillow like a shield, pulled tight against her shins. She was so thin and could make herself so small that the pillow almost hid her from my view when I lay on the other end of the bed. When she was hidden away like that, she told me some of the dark thoughts that occupied her mind.

‘I picture myself dead. Like I'm dreaming, it's so clear. My body lying bleeding on the floor, my head smashed in. My stomach split open like a supermarket bag. Do you ever have those dreams?'

‘No,' I said.

‘Dieter will kill me one day. I know it.'

She turned the jam biscuit she had been holding for fifteen minutes around and around in the palm of her hand and finally nibbled the jam that had oozed out the side of the biscuit. A red spot stuck to the corner of her mouth.

‘I think he's insane,' she said.

Since she'd moved away Klara had sent me notes and cards. We'd talked on the phone but she had never mentioned Dieter.

‘I haven't thought about him all year,' I replied. ‘Where is he?'

‘He's been staying at a friend's place. He's back tonight. I don't want to see him. I don't want him to live here,' she whispered.

‘Neither would I,' I said.

We were silent for a moment. I picked at a mosquito bite on my shin and from the crater a drop of blood welled up. I blotted it with my hanky.

That night Dieter arrived. The car dropping him off pulled up so fast at the front of the house that pebbles from the driveway flew up and pinged against the lounge room window. The car door slammed and the car backed away, tyres spinning and crunching on the gravel.

‘Let's go to my room,' Klara said hurriedly. She took my hand and pulled me out of the lounge room and along the hall to her room. Behind us, the front door opened and a gust of wind burned along the hallway.

On my last day at their house I woke late. I was sleeping on a mattress on the floor of Klara's room. The night before, we had set the alarm to twelve for a secret midnight feast of chips and chocolate we'd been hoarding all week. Everything tasted extra salty and extra sweet by torchlight. We stifled our laughter by stuffing the sheets against our mouths and fell asleep again at two.

‘I think she's in the shed, darling,' her mother said when I came into the kitchen after my shower, so I skipped to the shed and pushed open the big door. Dieter and Klara were both inside in the gloom.

‘Hi
,
'
I sai
d
,
unable to see them properly,
‘what's happening?'

Dieter giggled his squeaky unnatural giggle.
My stomach
leaped inside my ribcage and my skin prickled. As my eyes became accustomed to the dim light, I saw Klara standing against the wall, her arms held out horizontally, her face turned away from Dieter, who was standing a few metres back from the wall. Below her hemline Klara's legs were glistening, and there was a puddle in the dust at her feet.

‘Ready?' Dieter cried, and he giggled again.

Klara pressed her face back further against the wall as Dieter drew back his arm and flung a knife in her direction. The knife thudded into the wall above her left arm before clattering to the floor. Another was embedded in the wall near her face.

I tried to scream but no sound came out. Dieter was
staring at me and giggling with such hysteria that he sounded
like a neighing horse. I ran toward him and shoved as hard as I could, and he lurched back, dropping his handful of mismatched kitchen knives on the dirt floor. His laughter stopped. Instead, I could hear the furious rasping of his breath. He grabbed my arms and forced me backward until I slammed into the shed door and it swung shut. The only light came in through the green translucent sheeting on the roof. Dieter's face above mine shone green like his eyes. Even his teeth, bared in a crazy grin, looked pale green. He forced me to the floor and started to pull at my jeans.

‘Klara.' My voice came out like a long, high sigh.

Dieter pressed his forearm on my throat and leaned down hard while he wrestled with my jeans with his other hand. I was choking. I punched him with my fists until he slapped my face so hard I thought my head would fly off my body. As I lay stunned with my head in the dirt, he rocked back onto his heels. He took hold of my jeans and wrenched them off, dragging my sandals along with them. Then he pulled open his own jeans. Now I screamed. His hand came down so fast to cover my mouth that only a peep escaped.

He was too strong for me. I tried to throw myself to the side, but with one hand still over my mouth he caught my wrists and pinned them to the ground above my head. He used his knees to prise apart my thighs and he pushed and pushed and pushed until something broke and he was inside me. The pain split me in two. His green face was inches away from mine, sweaty and grimacing. His teeth, still bared, were tipped with foamy saliva like a dog's fangs.

As everything slowed down in my mind I rolled my eyes from side to side, trying to escape the face leering above me. When my eyes reached their lowest point of vision I saw Klara's corduroy sneakers. I looked up. She stood, with her arms hanging at her side, watching. She was watching me, my face, and she stared and stared and I stared back, our eyes locked, expressionless, as Dieter pounded into me, grunting and panting. Finally he shrieked and let go of my mouth and my hands. He pushed himself off me, stood up and walked out of the shed, doing up his jeans. The shed door stayed open a crack and suddenly nothing was green anymore, just dull grey, back to dull grey.