the sinking of a river valley
A party at Marjorie was planned for the birthdays of Dill, Clark and Ingrid, all within the first week of summer. It was getting so hot in the middle of the day that it felt damp inside the kitchen at Cafe Art Song and I could smell wilting daylilies as I walked home each evening. I decided to invite Faith along, to see her among others, to put some pressure on this thing I hoped I was feeling. I wondered whether she found parties as difficult as I did. Maybe it would be different here, anyway. Back in Melbourne the parties had been full of people from school I had never known how to talk to, and too many old memories for the possibility of new ones.
I got home from work in the late afternoon and was met at the door by Steph, who told me she was off to get the alcohol. I asked her to buy me three long bottles of beer and pressed money into her hot hand twice before she would accept it. She asked me if I had invited anyone but I didn’t feel like telling her—not because I wanted to keep anything secret, and not because I was ashamed that I felt things for Faith, but because I just didn’t feel like spreading myself out and waiting for reactions. She would meet Faith if Faith came, and she would draw her own conclusions, wonder her own wonders, or think nothing of it at all.
Steph was so kind and tried to be unassuming, I could tell, but she could see things and maybe even read my mind if I let myself think about it for too long, because she had green eyes that grew up your neck and became a flower on your face before you could stop them near your chin. She smiled, and rubbed my shoulder before she jumped down the steps, and I knew she would likely know what Faith might be to me as soon as she met her.
It was hot in our bedroom and Hetty wasn’t there so I took off my jeans and my shirt and lay on top of the doona in my bra and undies, watching my tummy lift up and down slightly as I breathed in the thick air and let it slowly back out. The undies were old and tight, and cut across my belly. I hadn’t noticed all day at work, wearing them under my jeans as I crossed from kitchen to floor, or on the walk home, but now the feeling was unbearable. I reached down and pulled them off—down my legs and over my toes—and threw them at my corner of the room. I could smell myself, and I liked the smell. It was rich and hungry, and made me remember I was full of lots of things. I thought about the party and felt tiny flutters in my stomach. I was always nervous in my stomach before a party.
I wondered where Hetty was. There wasn’t much of her in the room, really, if I looked around from where I lay. She didn’t own much, hadn’t brought much with her from Melbourne and had accrued nothing since being here that I could see. Most of what she had here was still in her pack in the corner, a favourite spot of Whitney’s to curl up on top of and sleep. I guessed she had some things at work with her, or she kept them in the multicoloured bag she always had slung against her hip. The room was mostly Whitney’s and a little bit mine. Hetty was hardly anywhere, and I missed her.
It was still warm when people started knocking on the front door of Marjorie, their arms full of drink, an energy in their eyes and bodies and voices. I had changed into a long skirt and blouse, the only special things I owned, and could feel my thighs rubbing against each other underneath. It wasn’t uncomfortable, but it did remind me of my body as I walked from lounge to kitchen to yard. I wondered when Faith would arrive. I took gulps of the fat bottle of Molson that Steph had bought me and felt the slow bubbles pop in my head.
I watched Dill and Clark and Ingrid talk and laugh with their smudged pink lips and tongues, from the big bowl of raspberry punch Steph had mixed, complete with floating cherries and edible flowers that looked like yellow butterflies resting on its surface. I stood in the kitchen and spoke to Clark and Isabel and their friend Lou about the Australian summer—how even in Melbourne there would be stretches where it would be over forty degrees for days on end—and they told me they wanted to go there, like everyone did, and that they loved Australia already. I listened to Dill talk to a tiny girl with gold shoulders and tried to work out if he was waiting for Hetty. My Molson bottle emptied and I opened another one.
After I had been offered some of the punch and a glass of Ingrid’s wine and my eyes were warm in their sockets, Hetty arrived with Elaine. They piled into the living room in the middle of a private joke, and Hetty looked at me with eyes that told me she was drunk already, that she wasn’t really there. My body tightened with Elaine near me—I could feel it in my shoulders and my lifted clavicle. I watched as Hetty fell against her and giggled, and Elaine lifted Hetty’s chin head and said, ‘You’re such a bitch!’ It wasn’t funny to me, this crude show, and I was disappointed.
The drinks made my thoughts fluorescent. Despite disliking Elaine and feeling she was not the right kind of friend for Hetty, I knew why they were spending time together. Hetty craved defiance, and I couldn’t give it to her. I sometimes wished I was the kind of person who would tell a friend what was useful, that I wasn’t so often afraid of the potential for hurt feelings and a fight that I would be the cause of; but I wasn’t and I couldn’t be, and I had to come to some sort of peace with that. I would always have to share Hetty with these friends she would make throughout life who rubbed up against her and pulled her up and down. I couldn’t change it.
I decided I would go and stand in the courtyard with Ingrid’s friends, who were dancing and sharing cigarettes and tying the fairy lights around their foreheads, but Hetty was saying something to me, loud and near now.
‘Can I talk to you?’ she asked, her face close with hot breath.
I nodded.
‘We can go up to our bedroom,’ she said, as if that was something special. It was tiring: the pull of her booze eyes and the pull at my arm with her skinny fingers that didn’t know what they were doing. I wished she hadn’t come home.
We saw Whitney on the stairs on the way up, cowering against the wall with her plush hair standing, her eyes angry at the noise and the house full of people she didn’t know. Hetty bent down to pat her and slipped, letting me grab at her sides before she fell. Once we were in our room, she closed the door and flopped on the bed, letting the air out of her mouth loudly.
I wanted her to know I wasn’t just full of time for her. She had been with Elaine and now she was a wreck. I couldn’t clean that up.
‘What is it, Hetty?’
She lifted herself up off the doona slowly, looked at me and sighed. ‘I think Elaine likes me.’
I sighed. Of course she did. Everyone did. I did. Dill likely did. The whole party downstairs probably dreamed of having Hetty next to them; of kissing her neck, of hearing her and knowing her sounds were theirs.
‘Yeah. She probably does. Do you like her?’
At this, Hetty groaned, and scratched her arms. I noticed that some of her nails were bloody around the edges.
‘No. Not like that. She’s tough. And she’s funny. But I don’t like girls in that way—not really. And she looks at me so intensely sometimes. I don’t understand it.’
She didn’t even look up at me as she said this, and I reminded myself once again that she hadn’t guessed how I felt, how I sometimes let myself feel, about her. It almost made me angry, how she was just out there in the world, being gentle and gorgeous and callow, never stopping to wonder what that might do to people.
Hetty sat up again then, and patted the bed next to her. I walked over and sat down.
‘The thing is,’ she said in a low voice, looking at me sideways, ‘sometimes she says things I can’t quite hear, under her breath, and it scares me.’
The air around us stopped.
‘What do you mean?’ I asked.
‘I know it sounds weird, but that’s what I mean. She says things under her breath. I ask her to repeat them but she denies even saying anything at all.’
‘Okay…But what do you think she’s saying?’
‘I don’t know! It’s weird. She says I’m imagining it. But I’m not. It’s like tiny whispers.’
Hetty was picking at her nails. I could see dabs of red on the pads of her fingers where the blood had moved. She sighed heavily, as if she needed to hold each breath in as long as she possibly could before she let it out.
‘And she used to cut herself. All up her arms and down her legs. With a Stanley knife. Not anymore, but it’s so sad, Ness. I don’t know how to make sure she’s okay.’
I remembered those white lines trailing the inside of Elaine’s arms: the only vulnerable thing about her on that day out the front of Cafe Art Song. Knowing she had cut those lines herself was knowing she understood pain.
‘But, Hetty, I don’t know what you’re trying to say. Is she being a bitch? Then stop being friends with her. If she makes you feel uncomfortable and then denies it, you need to do something.’
It seemed to me that Elaine wasn’t the type of person who would say anything under her breath. I couldn’t quite picture it—yet Hetty was so upset.
‘I don’t know! I don’t know. I don’t think she’s being a bitch but it’s just weird. I feel weird.’
I took her hands in mine and turned the fingers over. ‘Stop hurting yourself. Please.’
She laughed, lightly, and pulled one of her hands away to pat me.
Faith didn’t come to the party. I didn’t text to ask her why, but I waited in my skirt and my lace-collared shirt until one in the morning and didn’t see her come towards me, smiling, as I had imagined. My body felt tired, and the hope I’d been holding quietly in my tummy left, leaving nothing but fizz.
That night I went to bed hours before Hetty but was awake when she crept in, the shadow of her body in the street light hunched over, as if that might help her keep quiet. She lay down next to me, smelling of meat and cigarettes. When I finally fell asleep the dreams were chaos.