Thrill Seekers (8 page)

So there I was, still slightly damp, standing in front of a class who had all seen my willy and watched my mother kiss me. And to top it all off, I had my arms around Beck Roche, the biggest goody-goody dag in the whole Universe, dancing.

‘No Douggie, like this,’ hissed Beck, grabbing my hand and pulling me to where she wanted me.

‘This way?’

‘No. Put one arm here and hold my hand. Okay, now spin us around a bit.’

So I did. Steve was pissing himself. But I wasn’t looking at him anymore. I looked at my feet, making sure I didn’t mess up. I could do without falling over in front of everyone.

‘You’re doing very well, Douglas,’ said Miss Bateman. ‘Now just look up. No, not that far. Just at Beck. That’s right.’

I looked at Beck and, so I didn’t have to stare at her eyes, I started counting her freckles. She had lots of them, not big ones like some kids, millions of tiny freckles like a fairy bread sandwich.

‘Your freckles are like hundreds and thousands,’ I said without thinking.
‘Thanks,’ she said, and smiled, like it was something good to say.

She shouldn’t have smiled; I wouldn’t have liked it if someone called me a
freckle-head
. But she didn’t seem to mind.

It was time for the rest of the class to dance as well, so we stopped spinning and got ready to start again with the one two three stuff.

When the music began, me and Beck were the first to go forward, bumping into the back of Steve and Susan Lock, who was two times as tall as him and three times as narrow. They were still figuring out how to hold hands.

Beck and I looked at each other and raised our eyebrows.

‘Losers,’ whispered Beck, and I laughed.

By the time we got up to the waltzing bit again I knew that Beck’s eyes were green,
with a little bit of grey, and that she liked fishing as much as I did.

We were talking so much as we twirled around that we didn’t even notice that the music had stopped and Miss was clapping her hands to make everyone shut up.

‘Douglas and Rebecca,’ she said, but she didn’t sound angry.

Everyone was looking at us, so we dropped hands and quickly moved away from each other, got into our lines and paraded back up the stairs.

As we settled back into our chairs, Beck said, ‘I didn’t mean it, you know.’

‘What?’

‘About you being stupid.’

‘That’s okay. You’re not too stupid either.’

‘And I’m sorry I teased you about your mum,’ she said in a rush like she had to get it out fast.

‘I suppose she is a bit weird.’

‘All mums are weird. You should see mine,’ she said, pointing her finger and making the coo-coo sign around her ear.

I smiled at her and I didn’t even care if Steve saw.

It wasn’t such a bad day. I’d do anything to have it back again. To start right there and do everything different. But it’s too late. Everything’s gone wrong. I’m in the fucking lock up and Beck’s with Jacko getting wasted every day, rooting a bastard like that when she should be with me. Wish I had a magic raft to ride back in time with the current. It should’ve been me and her. We’d have been good together. There’s still a chance I reckon. Once Jacko’s out of the picture. He never stays with a girl for long.

But I’ve got to sort this shit of a mess out first. Got to get out of here.

It can’t be true what they’re saying about me. Must be one of their plots. All of them against me, trying to keep the women for themselves. Get rid of me. Get rid of me for good, if what the pigs are saying I’ve done is true. I can’t think about it now. Can’t let that night come back into my head. I’m just going to lie here and think about Beck, about me and her together. Maybe I’ll write her a song. Yeah, that’s it. That’ll have her begging for it, just like all the other chicks.

Tell you what though. I’m never taking bloody acid again.

Pop. More a feeling than a sound. Something breaking. At last. Jacko’s inside me.

He didn’t want to do it, happy with another head job, but I talked him into it.

‘I’m ready,’ I said, fed up with being the only sixteen-year-old virgin left in Brisbane. We could’ve done it before, there’ve been lots of other nights, but I wanted it to be special. Wait for the right time. The right night. The right boy. Jacko. An act of love to tie us together, keep him close to me when everything else is falling apart.

Now at last the moment has come.

Into the darkness and the smell of rum where his face should be, I whisper the words I’ve been practising for half a year.

‘I love you.’

He raises himself up, straightening his arms. ‘Fuck. What did you have to go and say that for?’ he says. ‘I don’t love you. What the fuck’s that supposed to mean?’

His words pin me to the bed.

‘Why’d you have to go and ruin everything? I’ve had enough of your bullshit. All the pathetic moaning and crying over Russ. Get over it for fuck’s sake. That was months ago. Why don’t you go out with one of the other fellas? Brian really needs a root. Or what about Steve? Shit even Douggie reckons you’re okay.’ He prises himself out of me and flops onto his back in the narrow bed. ‘I knew it was a mistake not to piss you off sooner. And this is what feeling sorry for someone gets
me? Virgins. I should’ve known better.’ He rolls over and faces the wall.

I lie stiff, holding myself away from him, trying to swallow the hurt that’s stuck in the back of my throat.

‘But,’ I say, ‘but…’

‘But I’ve been sharing your bed every weekend,’ I want to say. ‘You’ve been kissing me, holding me. How can you not love me? What’s all this been if it hasn’t been love?’

He falls asleep snoring, open-mouthed. The stink of rum seeps from his pores, and mine. The smell of his sweat is on my skin. How can I have been so wrong? I’ve been saving myself for my ‘true love’, the ‘one’. The way you’re supposed to. I thought he was it.

Of course he’s never said he loves me, though I’ve thought I’ve seen it in his eyes. Haven’t I? We’ve been hanging out for ages. I thought he was my boyfriend. Sure we don’t spend much daylight time together.
But the nights, especially since Russ drowned and I practically moved into his place to get away from the misery of home, the nights we spend wrapped in each other’s arms, breathing the same breath. Isn’t that love? Or am I just a pity-fuck? Not a choice he’s made. Are all the grand love stories and romantic dreams only in my head? An alcohol-soaked delusion? Idiot.

When I wake up, foul-mouthed and bleary in the morning, he’s gone. I’m glad. What could I say? How could I look at that face I once thought so beautiful, knowing that he could flick me away without feeling a thing except perhaps relief?

I grab my t-shirt from the floor and pull it over my head. It reeks of the rum I spilt down the front and all the cigarettes and bongs I smoked. As I stand up something gushes between my thighs. Blood.

Leaving a trail of splatters on the carpet I hobble cross-legged to the bathroom. Thank God it’s a weekday and the house is empty. It’s been pretty dismal around here
since Russ died. Jacko acts like nothing’s changed, but it has. And then Douggie did what he did. Kids are spooked. There’s a brittle edge to the laughter at parties, as if everyone’s scared that as soon as they stop laughing they’ll cry. Like me.

Though this morning under the shower I can’t help smiling a little to myself as the rose-coloured water swirls down the drain. Maybe it doesn’t matter so much that he doesn’t love me. I’ve done it. I’m not a virgin anymore. Now I’m a real woman, just like a Jewish bride on bloodied sheets. I am ‘deflowered’. A maiden no longer, or whatever shit they say in those old books.

I clean myself up, put on a pad and scrub at the stains on the carpet, the detergent foam turning pink. But when I go to the toilet a short time later the pad is already overflowing scarlet. I put on another one but soon it too is thick and heavy with blood. I change it again and again as I sit staring at daytime T.V. hoping it will just go away.

I know something is wrong. I’m sure it’s not supposed to be like this. I read a story once about a girl who’d almost bled to death after her first time. I thought it was ridiculous, a horror story to put girls off sex. Now I realise it just might have been true.

I ring Pete, he knows more about sex than any woman, and tell him what’s happened. I don’t tell him what I said to Jacko in the dark and his awful reply. That hurts more than the weeping wound between my legs.

Pete leaves work and comes over. When he sees me he insists on taking me down the road to the doctor. I don’t see the need. Do I look that bad? I stare at my pale face in the mirror. Surely the bleeding will stop by itself. It doesn’t hurt much, I just feel a bit tired that’s all. But I have to get some more pads from the shops anyway, so I let Pete talk me into it.

I lean heavy on his shoulder as we walk the five hundred metres to the doctor’s surgery. The road stretches and shimmers in the summer heat, the pad sticky in my
pants. We sit in the waiting room of the family G.P. waiting and whispering, flicking through old women’s magazines, staring at faded health posters. I’m anxious. The pad is full and needs changing. Soon it will leak, all over my skirt and the chair and I’ll have to deal with that shame as well.

Eventually the doctor’s receptionist beckons me into the office.

The doctor looks like he’s wearing a Groucho Marx mask, all nose, moustache and black horn-rimmed glasses. He even smells of cigars. He scrambles through the piles of paper and medical samples on his desk for my file, a page of yellowing foolscap filled with scribbled notes about asthma aggravated by smoking, antibiotics to fight chest infections, sedatives and a course of anti-depressants.

‘What seems to be the trouble this time?’ he asks.

‘I had sex for the first time last night and something’s wrong. I’m bleeding.’

‘Bleeding. Well that’s quite usual.’

‘It’s a lot. I’m bleeding a lot.’

‘Well that should stop soon enough.’

‘I don’t think so; it seems to be getting worse.’

He sighs and puts down his pen.

‘I suppose I’d better have a look at you then. Get up on the table.’ Stretching on some gloves, he nods in the direction of the narrow examination table against the wall decorated with peeling transfers of Winnie the Pooh.

‘Pull up your skirt. Get rid of your pants. Open your legs.’ He says with his back to me. He turns around and I hear him swallow.

‘For goodness sake, young lady. What on earth have you done to yourself? What a mess.’

‘It was just sex. Just me and my… my boyfriend. Sex, that’s all. Normal. My first time.’

He fumbles around with his plastic coated hands, hurting, poking, prodding.

‘There’s nothing I can do here,’ he says, ‘you’ll have to go to hospital and get stitched up. Pull up your pants and get down. I’ve finished with you.’

He tut tuts. ‘Just look at the mess you’ve made of my table.’

His neat white bed is smeared with scarlet and plum jam blood clots, his white gloves stained red as he peels them into the sink. He writes a referral and hurries me out of the room, calling for the receptionist to come and clean up the mess.

‘You get yourself to the hospital right now,’ he says, ‘or you could bleed to death.’

He glowers at Pete who stands up as I come out. ‘What have you got to say for yourself young man?’

Pete laughs and puts his arm around me.

‘It wasn’t him,’ I whisper.

We go to the hospital in a taxi and soon I’m on a trolley in a gown and cap, pale and frightened, being wheeled down corridors stinking of disinfectant. I have to let Pete’s hand go as they push me into surgery. My legs are strapped into stirrups and a nurse looks down at me with pity as the surgeon stitches my hymen back together again.

A virgin remade.

All that trouble for nothing.

Later the gynaecologist explains. My hymen was like a shield of steel, thick and hard, impenetrable. No wonder I always
found tampons unwearable, hobbling along spread-legged with half the tampon dangling between my thighs. Do the gods mean for me to be a nun? Is this some kind of a sign? Or a punishment.

That night in the crowded ward full of middle-aged women nursing fresh hysterectomy stitches, I lie awake trying to understand what’s happened. I decide to take the steel from my hymen and wrap it, tight, around my heart. I’m not going to cry over Jacko. I’m not going to cry over any boy, except my brother, ever. I won’t open my door to Jacko again. My shield of steel will protect me. I’ll forget him, lock him out of my life, and never look back.

When Mum drives me back home the next morning there’s a sorry looking bunch of supermarket flowers in cellophane lying on the front step.

I step over them and go inside, closing the door behind me.