Yellow

I can’t go back to school and I don’t want to go home, so I cross the rickety old bridge over the river and follow the track through the hardy, salt-bitten trees to South Beach. South Beach is an isolated outcrop where nobody much goes except for the diehard surfers. Even then they have to weigh up whether the swell is worth cracking their heads open against the reef if they wipe-out, and the reef sharks that would follow at their heels, drawn by their blood as they paddled back to shore. Today, the southerlies mean I’ve got the place to myself. You can see down the beach forever and there are no footprints. All you see is sand and these poor excuses for trees, which huddle together as the wind whips the beach and hisses through its whitewashed teeth.

I like South Beach best. All the other kids go to Main Beach after school, the boys showing off on their boards, catching barrels, the girls working on their tans, setting their watches on twenty-minute timers and turning over when the alarm goes off. My town is the melanoma capital of the world. We go to get them cut out like other people get haircuts. Main Beach is all protected and curved inwards like a lap, with the sun warm and soothing and painting things golden. South Beach is different. It flings itself outwards towards the raging swell. It doesn’t pretend.

I just want to sit here and feel like I’m the only person left in the world, because strangely I’ve found the best cure for loneliness sometimes is to be alone. I wish my life was normal. I don’t even wish it was particularly good.

Just not this bad.

I borrow books from the library and in those books the girls are upset because their grades aren’t up to scratch, or the boy romancing them is from the wrong sides of the track, or their parents are too strict, and I just want to scream as loud as I can into the pages, ‘They’re not even problems! You don’t know how good you’ve got it!’

I hate the girls in those books, but I read them anyway, because for a little while I can pretend I’m them, and the worst thing in the world is that my kind but clueless parents don’t understand me.

And then Mitzy shows up.

Desiree’s powder puff of a dog must have followed me here because he streaks through the brush and onto the sand, all excited and sweet-looking and trespassing on my brooding. A fluffy white dog just doesn’t suit my mood right now – I want grey swell and seabirds with talons. Not Mitzy.

The dog digs into the sand and brushes himself up against my legs, tongue extended from his jaw and his head bobbing side to side, knocking against my school skirt.

I don’t want to pat him. I hate his adorableness.

‘Bugger off.’

Mitzy lolls his tongue and seems to smile.

‘Don’t look at me like that. It doesn’t help. You’re not as cute as you think you are.’ I shove the creature away, but he just hops about and noses himself into my lap. He looks up at me.

I have to bite my thumbnail to stop from patting him; it tastes of varnish and salt and grit. I trail my fingers along the sand and pick up a piece of driftwood. Until a couple of months ago, I would have taken the wood home for Lark to whittle into a dolphin for me. But that was before the summer had properly stretched out its legs and before the world went this mad.

I stand up and the wind makes my hair blow wild behind me like a comet’s tail. In a long, round arc I chuck the stick at the shoreline, where the seaweed clumps and the soldier crabs come to stare. The dumb dog chases it with an enthusiasm oblivious to my hate. He just doesn’t get it.

The stick’s too long for such a small dog, but he wrestles his mouth around it, the end of it dragging into the sand, slicing the beach like a sharp oyster cut, and he lays it at my feet, his face down on his front paws, bum in the air, tail wagging like a white surrender flag. The sea seethes in the background.

I pick up the end of the stick, which is all slick with slobber, and I throw it in that very same moment when the wind pauses, as though it needs to catch its breath from screaming.

I throw it too hard without the wind.

A good throw.

Far out past the breakers and into the calm beyond.

Mitzy sprints after it, headbutting the waves as he dives in. Stupid thing.

‘Go on, get all wet and sandy, there’s a good dog, then go away.’

I feel triumphant in a mean, satisfied way. I can see the appeal, why girls at school act the way they do. I imagine wet-dog smell all over the chaise longue, the sand in the carpet, Desiree tut-tutting and chasing the vacuum cleaner around the living room.

Coiling my hair with one hand to stop it whipping about like a wild thing, I bend down to brush the sand off my legs and go to leave, glancing briefly towards the shore.

Mitzy isn’t back.

He should be back.

At first I can’t see him amidst the whitewash that froths and curls like a whole mass of ridiculous small white dogs. I walk over to the shoreline, treading gingerly around the scuttling crabs, and it’s now that I can see him, a speck in the distance, being dragged out to sea in a rip.

A goddamned rip.

I stand, splaying and clenching my fingers. ‘Shit shit shit – come on, mate!’

I wade in to my knees, the rip pulling at my skin, forceful and urgent, snatching the sand beneath my toes.

‘Swim sidewards, you stupid thing!’

I’m running close to shore now, heavily, in slow motion, the current pulling at my knees and gripping my calves. I can see snatches of Mitzy in those moments after one wave has crashed and the next is yet to peak. In each snapshot I can see the dog is kicking less and less frantically, bobbing a little less high, but that damn stick is still in his mouth, pointing at me.

It’s like an accusing finger.

‘Come here, come on, I was lying, I don’t hate you.’

The next wave is a monster. The surge sucks so that the water level drops to my ankles and Mitzy disappears behind the swelling wall of water.

‘Shit shit shit!’

The wave crashes in front of me, spectacularly, thumping the shore like a bar fighter’s fist. The spray stings my eyes, sopping my clothes.

Mitzy doesn’t surface.

I call after him.

Other waves continue to form and fling themselves into nothingness.

Mitzy doesn’t surface.

After a while, I can see the stick bobbing up and down.

By itself.

I stand in the water, slumped, hands hanging from my wrists.

I killed the dog.

I killed it.

The dog is dead.

The ocean ate it.

Shit.

I sink to my knees and the tide in turn makes my school skirt bubble up about my waist, mimicking the bluebottles, and then deflate to cling stickily to my thighs. I watch the space where the dog drowned and dig my hands into the seabed to keep steady but the sea keeps stealing the sand from between my fingers.

I don’t even realise I’m holding my breath until I reach the bush, and then I gulp for air, as though it had been me out there being pummelled by the waves. I lean against the eucalyptus tree and rip the bark off the trunk as I try to catch my breath and still my heart.

I’m a horrible, horrible person.

I’m the worst person I know.

Cassie and the girls might be cruel and my parents might be hopeless, but nobody I know would kill an innocent animal. His only crime had been that he was owned by a woman I didn’t like and I’m pretty certain Mitzy didn’t even like Desiree either – the dog had only today been chewing the legs of the wooden furniture in an obvious cry for help.

Sobs claw out from my belly and I’m dripping salt water, from my clothes, from my eyes, and I keep thinking of the stick in Mitzy’s mouth. Pointing at me. Blaming me.

And then I hear it.

Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrriiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinnnnnnnnnnnnnggggggggggg.

It’s a shouty sort of sound, so synthetic against the bird calls and the cicadas’ shrills that it turns a sob into a hiccup somewhere inside my throat and it pulls me out of my panic enough to turn towards it.

The culprit is unremarkable. It’s an old Telstra telephone booth that sits beside a disused track. The glass has been long smashed, used chewing gum is shoved into the coin slot and For a Good Time someone could Call Carly The Dirty Mole, or so says the graffiti scrawled on the back wall in faded texta. The whole thing smells like pissed-out VB. It seems so forgotten and desolate, and yet here it is, ringing to itself. Just when I think it’s stopped it starts up all over again.

I answer. I don’t know what else to do.

‘You can hear me?’

The person on the other end is a boy, and he’s about my age judging by the way his voice breaks at the end of the sentence. He doesn’t sound like anyone I know.

‘You’re the one who called me . . .’ I hiccup, but he doesn’t seem to hear me and he repeats himself.

‘You can hear me?’ This time it’s less of a question.

I start crying again and I can’t reply.

‘Hey, are you okay? You sound upset?’

The sobs start shaking my shoulders. No, I’m not okay.

‘Hey, is this about the dog? You don’t have to cry, it wasn’t really your fault.’

‘How do you know about Mitzy?’

My eyes slide across the bushland to see who’s spying on me, to see who’s borrowed their parent’s mobile phone and is playing a sick practical joke.

Nothing.

The trees are too salt-bitten and stunted to provide any real hiding place, and nobody around here has parents who could afford a mobile. There’s an official-looking number on a sticker near the coin slot – I jot it down: 02 740977. If this is the number of the telephone booth then maybe I can ring Telstra and find out who’s been calling.

The boy replies, ‘The dog just arrived here with me.’

‘He couldn’t be, I watched him drown.’

‘Drowning doesn’t take long. But he’s gonna be sucked away soon, into the somewhere else. They’re always sucked away, the birds and the possums and all the things that die near here. Except me. I died but I never got to leave.’

Fear has a taste, I’ve discovered, when it grips you this badly – it tastes metallic and sharp, like biting down on aluminium foil when you have fillings.

‘I don’t believe in you,’ I whisper. ‘Ghosts aren’t real.’

‘You’re wrong.’ He sounds upset. ‘There’s nothing more real than the things that can haunt you . . . But, you know, there’s nothing more powerful than deciding not to be afraid.’

Maybe he’s right, but the thing is, fear doesn’t let you decide if you’re going to feel it or not. It barges in on you without knocking.

‘You don’t exist!’

‘Don’t tell me that I don’t exist!’ He’s really upset now.

And there’s a jolt.

It feels like swallowing cold jelly, but if my whole body was a throat. I feel it, chilled and slippery, sinking down next to my shivering bones. Then the weight of my skin is unzipped from the inside, shaken from my shoulders. And then I trip.

I trip.

And I fall out of myself.

It’s so dark.

I feel like I’m drowning in darkness.

Creatures slip in and out of ripples in the blackness. A bream jumps over my foot. A possum’s eyes stare, unblinking. Skinks scuttle.

‘Where am I?’ I call out into the thickening inkiness.

‘In the otherplace,’ the boy tells me, and I spin around, but I can’t see him.

But I do see Mitzy. He bounces and his tongue flops and he hurtles towards me, a sodden powder puff of a dog, shedding droplets with each bound as he cannonballs closer. I smile and crouch and call his name, and he’s about to leap into my lap when I remember.

Mitzy is dead.

He passes straight through me, along with that cold jelly feeling.

‘You’re the first person who can hear me in almost twenty years.’ The boy’s voice slips through cracks in the darkness, so close. ‘That has to mean something. We must be able to help each other.’

I stand suddenly and my eyes dart about, scanning for even a shadow of him.

‘I don’t need help . . .’

‘You’re a bad liar.’

‘I said I don’t need help!’

‘You’re a really bad liar!’

‘Why can’t I see you?’ I ask, my voice climbing to the edge of hysteria.

‘Because you’re looking through my eyes, and I can see inside you.’

It’s now that I scream.

‘I didn’t mean to scare you . . .’

I keep screaming.

I’m jolted back to the phone box. It’s light again and my soul clings tightly back onto my bones. I fling the receiver away like it was a spider on my face, and I don’t stop running until I’m back on my front lawn, lipstick squelching between my toes.