DAM

a dam is a barrier

Since we were young, Hetty had been the one people looked at. Men, women, other children. She captivated them, and I saw that once they were captivated they didn’t want to lose her. This fear of loss sometimes resulted in strange behaviour—girls at school following her around at lunchtime, day after day, as if in a trance; the man behind the counter at the milk bar lost for words whenever she came with me to buy a dollar’s worth of bananas and teeth; my father staring at her and then asking her question after question in our kitchen on the rare times she came to my house, his eyes following her as she moved around, waiting for her glass of orange juice.

I was never jealous, because I didn’t expect that kind of adoration. The way I looked didn’t capture anyone, and no one seemed to feel the need to let their eyes linger on me, or tell me how impressed they were by my height or my hair or my face. I could see, like everyone else, that Hetty had beauty. I wasn’t jealous, because I was captivated too.

There is a memory that sticks with me, that I come back to sometimes, of Hetty and me as girls. The memory is of a day about five years after we had met, at a time when our friendship was close and innocent. We were twelve and it was the summer holidays, with many long, languid afternoons stretched out in front of us like a horizon. There is a blurred edge to the memory, and I am unsure why. When I asked Hetty about it over the years, she told me she remembered very little of the day, and seemed to have nothing at all to say about it. I still don’t know whether she had repressed the details, or couldn’t tell me the truth.

We had pleaded with our parents—my mother, Hetty’s father; both difficult to convince for different reasons—to let us spend the day at Hetty’s uncle Tom’s property in Kangaroo Ground while he was away, and they had agreed, with the proviso that we wear our hats, clean up after ourselves and not swim in the dam. I had realised by this point that parents were terrified of water, of children drowning, of floods and disease, and though we both knew how to swim, Tom’s dam was wide, and deep in the middle. When I had asked my mother if I could go, I saw her anxiety bring her there, to the middle of that dam, where I would flail and start swallowing water, despite my years of swimming lessons and the fact that I never put my body in danger. Hetty’s father was also protective, but in a more extravagant, aggressive way. He had told her he would kill her if she went swimming, though we all knew she would do it, and the threat hung above us that morning after we were left there on our own.

We spent the morning in Tom’s shack. It was dark inside, with wooden floors and walls and a kindling ceiling, a ruffled bed shy in one corner of the only room. There was a strong smell of must, though it faded quickly, and reminded me of the smell of my sleeping bag after months rolled up and packed away for winter. The only photos on display were of Tom’s sister’s family—Hetty’s mother and Hetty’s siblings and Hetty. They all watched us from frames above the fireplace. I asked Hetty to tell me about her uncle, curious to find out about this man who didn’t seem to inhabit much of his own life.

‘He has depression,’ she said, carefully. ‘He gets really sick sometimes. But then sometimes he’s okay.’

I knew about depression—my mother had it. My father had used the word only once but it had stuck, and back then I ascribed all of her behaviour to that word, without nuance or understanding. With my mother, the depression was a blanket that covered her entirely, that I lifted when I could find the edge, and that she told me was too warm or too cold, depending on the day. With Tom, I imagined it to be even more impenetrable, like a splintered piece of wood stuck fast in his chest across his heart.

When Hetty showed me the only photo he was in, I could see he was tall and young, at least younger than the other adults in my life. I liked him and I liked his tiny house that didn’t seem to be the way most people thought a house should be. Hetty seemed to like him too.

We cooked a sort of lunch on Tom’s stove. I can’t remember what it was, that meal, but I remember there were only two aluminium plates in the cupboard and one sharp knife. I remember we ate with our hands, licking each finger clean, and that we enjoyed it. I ate more than Hetty, I’m sure; she never had much of an appetite and hated to feel too full, as if the stretch against her stomach was dangerous. We gulped down tepid water from Tom’s tap, Hetty reminding me to drink more than I wanted, to keep my body wet. It was a warm day, and hot inside Tom’s shack, with its steel roof. We changed into our bathers in separate corners, me sneaking a glimpse of Hetty as I bent to pick up my undies, knowing even then that her back was more beautiful to me than mine would ever be to her.

There was no question of not swimming. Down by the dam I threw my towel up above me so that it billowed and let it spread out against the red ground. It was both dusty and sticky there, near the edge, but I didn’t care if my things got dirty. I wanted to be cool and free, so I took off my T-shirt and sat down in my old bathers on the towel, feeling the fabric creep up in between my legs because they were too small and I needed new ones and it hadn’t seemed important until right then.

I wanted to watch Hetty’s body as she waded, so I urged her to go first and she did, so freely, making little bird noises as the water swallowed her. I found her beautiful and too perfect, but that day it didn’t feel painful. Soon after, I joined her, and we both grew brave enough to sink right into the water and swim around in the caramel colour of it. I don’t remember if it was cold but I imagine it must have been. I know the afternoon sky grew dull before we came out again, Hetty long after me because she was a water baby.

At some point I needed to go to the toilet. Tom only had an outhouse that sat far away from both the dam and the shack, over where the smell of it would only disturb the kangaroos and the skinks, under a dying yellow box. I told Hetty I was going and she answered with her eyes closed, lying back on her towel to soak in the sun. Her hair was even longer back then, and in its half-dry state it looked like seaweed soon after it has beached itself: dark and thick with previous life. I saw how the curve of her hip was round in a way that no boy’s body or man’s body was. I knew briefly that that was what I wanted, then let the knowing go.

My walk to the toilet and back took longer than it should have. I was barefoot, and careful to avoid the burrs and the ants, of which there were many. I sat long on the toilet and sang a song to myself: I remember that because a bird outside the outhouse seemed to be singing along, until I stopped and it kept warbling. After I had scooped in the right amount of sawdust from a bucket near the door, I opened and closed the door of the outhouse carefully and looked for the bird that had been singing in the big tree above. There was no movement and no feathers that I could see, but as I turned to walk back towards Hetty and the dam, there was movement and a rustle in the grass near me, and I stopped still to see what it was.

More rustles revealed the small spiked body and thin snout of an echidna, making its way along, trying to find a snack. I watched the way it moved, precisely and with great purpose, snuffling at the earth for ants, safe in the knowledge that it was covered in spiky armour. It didn’t appear to notice me, but I wondered if that was an echidna’s way—to appear unruffled in order to stay that way. I watched it a while, backing carefully away as it neared me so I wouldn’t frighten it; then it turned and started to move in another direction. I realised that I was hot and should get back to Hetty.

I turned and began walking back towards the dam, seeing then that there were two bodies there now, and that they were close together. My feet sped up before I could register the sight. I had left her, where we weren’t even supposed to be, down near the water. I had been singing and sitting while she had been bothered, or caught. I didn’t stop for the burrs as I ran towards her.

Getting closer, I could see that the second figure was a man. Where had he come from so quickly, and what was he doing so close to Hetty, who was sitting up now, facing him? I felt like crying as I ran, and my chest hurt despite the short distance.

They turned towards me as I neared them. Hetty’s face was pink, and she was almost smiling in a small way, as though she didn’t know what else to do with her face. The man had picked himself up from where he had been kneeling, close to her—and now that I could see the whole of him, I understood that he wasn’t really a man. He was an older boy, or perhaps a younger man in his early twenties, and had long hair that was unwashed, and brown arms coming strong out of the sleeves of a red flannie. He didn’t look like he was planning to go swimming. There wasn’t a smile on his face, this man who had interrupted everything, but he wasn’t frowning either, as if I didn’t matter enough to him either way.

Hetty wrapped the towel beneath her as far as it would go around her torso, and I watched him reach his hand down towards her thigh and squeeze it until the air was still. Then he turned and began to walk away, and we watched him, and when he was near gone he turned back and said to Hetty in a loud voice, ‘Too bad your friend came back, hey?’ letting the dust he had kicked walking in his big boots gather around him like a tiny tornado.

After he’d gone, Hetty wouldn’t tell me what had happened between them, though I asked her the same question in every way I could think of. She’d never been secretive before, and I couldn’t understand the tight face she kept making. I watched her rub at her thigh where his hand had been and hoped she would stop staring out into the distance, until she did, saying sorry, and should we call her mother to come and get us. I remember feeling so separate there next to her, knowing I didn’t want or understand whatever it was that she had just had, and that I would one day lose her to this thing I could never give her that she wanted, despite the violence I had smelled in the air when I had seen them together.

After we had gathered our towels and pulled our dry clothes on over our damp bathers, we walked to the house in silence and used Tom’s phone to call Hetty’s mother, Patricia, who told us to wait on the side of the road for her. We walked to the road and sat on the gravel together, and I wanted to touch Hetty to snap her out of it, but I also didn’t want her to sense that I didn’t understand.

It was so long before Patricia arrived, the two of us waiting there in silence, but only as the car appeared on the road did Hetty turn to me. Her face was pale.

‘We touched each other a bit. Him first.’

I tried to nod my head, so she would go on. My neck felt like it was broken.

‘It wasn’t that scary,’ she said, and stood up to dust the brown off her dress, the dam coming back through the fabric from her bathers beneath.