Tattoos

‘If you had to get a tattoo, what would you get?’ Zed asked.

The three of us were at the baths lying on the boardwalk, on our backs, in the sun.

‘No way, I would never get one,’ I said.

‘But you have to,’ Elijah said, ‘it’s compulsory.’

I couldn’t think of anything I felt so connected to that I’d want it written on my body.

‘What would you get?’ I asked my brother.

‘I’d get a bass clef, here,’ Elijah said, pointing to the flank of his back, underneath his left shoulder blade.

‘What does it look like?’ Zed asked.

‘Like the top of a question mark, and then two dots beside; one on top of the other.’

‘I’m thinking of getting one,’ Zed said, ‘but it’ll have to be somewhere I can hide, so my aunt won’t tell my mum.’

‘How come you don’t live with her anymore, your mum?’ I asked. There was a noticeable pause before Zed answered, which made me feel like I’d asked the wrong thing.

‘Ahh, she needed a break apparently. From me.’

‘I’d get the ocean,’ I said, as I tried to change the conversation back, ‘for the tattoo.’

‘You can’t get a tattoo of the ocean – it’s too big. How would you draw it?’ Zed said.

‘I don’t know,’ I admitted.

‘It would have to take up your whole arm,’ Elijah offered, ‘and it would be all different shades of blue and green, and then you could get sea creatures morphing out of it.’

Zed sat up and looked at my rake arms that stuck out of my bathing suit.

‘What, like a sailor? The tide waits for no man,’ he said. ‘Nah, can’t see it on you.’

The light moved out from behind a cloud mass, and the brightness intensified. Zed reached for his bag. Inside were a number of cream rectangular boxes.

‘Hey, I’ve got something for you guys.’ Zed threw Elijah and me a box each, hooking them into the air.

After I caught the box I saw it had the letter a embossed on the outside, with something that looked like a wing.

The sunglasses I pulled out were made of pearly aqua plastic with silver lenses, and looked like candy. I’d never owned an expensive pair before. Elijah’s were emerald-green with gold lenses.

‘I got these ones,’ Zed said as he pulled a navy pair onto his face. ‘I found a whole box of them on the bus.’ There was a nimbleness in his voice when he spoke, a jump as it moved out of its own way.

Elijah put his new sunnies on straight away. I could tell he liked them. He put his hands up behind his head. ‘Thanks heaps, mate.’

‘Yeah,’ I said, struck by the unexpected kindness, ‘thanks.’

~

‘Look down,’ my mother said.

The night before the first day of school I sat in front of her on the loungeroom floor so she could cut my hair. I heard the scrape of sharp wet scissors close to my ears. Six weeks of salt and wind had turned the lengths of my auburn hair into something else altogether. The bottom part was yellowy blonde, the dry, split bottom of a straw broom.

I looked at my knees, the piles of freckles around them, and thought about how tomorrow Elijah and I would return to our respective schools. Elijah was about to begin his final year. From tomorrow we would be separated by our sex and half a kilometre. Even though it wasn’t his fault, it felt like a betrayal.

After the haircut, my mother told me to try on my tunic from last year. While I got changed she went into Elijah’s room and pulled out two pairs of his shorts and shirts and laid them on his bed.

I walked into my brother’s room in my tunic.

‘What are they for?’ I asked, looking at the clothes.

‘They’re for Zed.’

‘How come?’ I meant to ask why he didn’t have his own uniform, or why his aunt didn’t buy him one.

‘Because he needs them, darling, and we have spare.’

My mother inspected my uniform. She pulled at the front of it, where the material over the chest still sagged. The hem hung above my knees; I hadn’t grown much.

‘It’ll do,’ she said. She’d bought me a pair of new black leather shoes with laces. They were hard and unforgiving on my toes.

Inside, the part of me that was wild and free felt like a brumby being shoed.

At school, the bitumen where Cate and I sat with other girls in our year was hot and the seniors’ lawn was pale and yellow, summer-parched.

‘We need more trees,’ Cate said, as she looked up.

The school felt eerie and vacant without Elijah. I looked out the window towards his school when I was supposed to be doing algebra. I thought about him: making new friends, learning more things I didn’t know, sprouting hair on his chin, changing.

~

‘In case you’re wondering why I limp, I was in a bad car accident three years ago, and nearly died.’

My biology teacher Mrs Taigh was by far my favourite. That was what she told us on the first day of being in her class.

‘My leg was sliced through and I nearly lost it. If you want to come and look at the scars I can roll up my pant leg and show you; it’s far more interesting than the limp.’

After she told us that, I knew everything she said must be true. There were so few adults who were completely honest with teenagers. I admired the way Mrs Taigh looked us in the eye and told us what was real, even if the truth was a pale fibrotic deformity. I never noticed her limp again.

Mrs Taigh handed around a diagram of a human cell. I had underestimated their complexity; there was a whole universe inside each one. We learnt about the DNA in the nucleus and how parts of the chromosomes unwind to allow genetic code to be copied. The replicates left the nucleus and moved into the cytoplasm, like pages of a book, photocopied and posted. In the cytoplasm the transcripts turned into proteins that built organs, muscle and tissue. There were genes that made eyes brown and genes that made hair curly, genes that determined a person’s height. I started to wonder then what happened when there were errors in the genes. Could that be part of the reason Nonno forgot our names, slipped back in time, lived with the delusions of being persecuted? Even when we were sleeping, all this transcription and translation went on. I lay awake at night and imagined my body humming with the sound of cellular machinery.

~

‘Explain again how it works?’ Zed asked. Elijah had strung up a slackline in between our gate and a tall melaleuca in our front yard. Onto it he had pegged a large, unstretched cream canvas. We were helping my brother with his major work, for visual art.

‘First you pick a colour and paint yourself with it,’ Elijah said, motioning to some large bottles of acrylic paint and brushes strewn on the lawn. ‘Then just kind of run at the canvas. The theme is “figure in a landscape” but I haven’t worked out the background yet. This is just for a prototype.’ I was wearing shorts and an old T-shirt as instructed. The boys were just in boardies.

‘Okay, you’re up first, Grub,’ Elijah said.

I picked up the bottle labelled cyan and squirted some onto my arms and then used a brush to paint over my limbs.

‘Here, put more on over your clothes.’ Elijah grabbed the bottle and drizzled it over my shoulders and shorts. ‘Okay, now you run at it,’ my brother said.

With the whole front side of my body covered in light pigment, I started to move towards the material. At the last second I decided I didn’t want to aim for the centre, so I veered left, leapt, and hit the target before folding around the outside of the hanging. I went back to look with the others.

‘It looks like you, Grub!’ Elijah said.

‘Well, half of you,’ Zed added.

On the canvas was the side of my head, my aqua ponytail sprayed behind it. One thin arm, a side body and a bent leg. The rest of me disappeared out of frame. It did look like me, or an idea somebody might have of me. A thought held momentarily, before it was dismissed.

‘Okay, I’m up.’ Elijah grabbed a container of bright green-yellow paint. He drizzled it through his hair like shampoo and then over his arms, chest and legs like moisturiser while Zed and I laughed.

Elijah walked up to the canvas, standing in front of it like a mirror. Then he leapt up, arms out to the sides, and kind of chest-bumped the material, hitting it with the side of his face, torso and thighs.

When he moved out of the way to look, we saw he’d jumped quite high. He looked like a rising, mythical spirit compared to my humble markings.

‘The granny smith warrior,’ Zed dubbed him. ‘All right, I guess it’s me, then.’

‘Of course you’re going straight for red,’ Elijah said.

‘Go big or go home,’ Zed said as he doused himself in scarlet. When his head and body were covered he ran at the canvas from the right. He body-rolled across the surface, turning himself over the marks Elijah and I made.

‘Yiew!’ Elijah whooped as Zed finished and ran at my brother, picking him up in a firefighter’s carry before they crashed, paint-covered, onto the grass.

‘What on earth are you doing?’ My mother appeared on the front path, wheeling her cello hardcase towards the gate.

Elijah had extracted himself from Zed and returned to the lawn holding the garden hose by its gun-like nozzle. ‘We’re making a prototype for my major work. What do you reckon?’ he asked as he angled the hose spray down his limbs, washing off the paint.

My mother peered over at the canvas quizzically. ‘I don’t believe I understand it,’ she said, ‘and I think you should clean this mess off the grass.’

‘We will,’ Elijah said, before he held his right hand out – the one holding the sprayer – towards her, as if making an offering.

‘Elijah, don’t,’ our mother said. Zed and I both laughed softly, for each other rather than her.

‘Watch out, I think it’s going to rain.’ Elijah squeezed the handle on the hose – just for a second. A spurt of water arced up and fell just over where our mother was standing.

‘Elijah!’ She pretended to look stern as she left but I could see she was smiling. ‘You paint like a musician!’ she called out defiantly as she left; the front of the black instrument case had droplets over it now.

Elijah finished hosing himself off before turning the jet onto Zed and me.

‘Get it out of my hair too,’ Zed said, using his fingers through his curls.

When we were somewhat erased of colour I looked over at the prototype.

‘What do you think?’ I asked Elijah.

‘Yeah, I need to figure out the background, but look at it. It’s awesome; it’s us.’

~

A few weeks into term was the District Swimming Carnival at North Sydney pool. I tumbled out of the rubber-smelling bus along with around thirty other girls from my school. The front entrance was orange brick and led into a dim stairwell. The sound of talking and shrieking billowed up, bounced off the walls and echoed as we walked down. At the bottom there was a long, carpeted corridor lined with oversized black and white portraits of swimming greats. John and Ilsa Konrads. Boy Charlton. Even though the photos were in black and white you could tell how light Boy’s hair was and how tanned his skin. His eyes shone with health. A woman did a swan dive from a ten-metre platform that no longer existed. She wore an old-fashioned black one-piece. A light cap. She was frozen upside-down, both her arms gracefully held to the sides and her toes pointed, so high in the air that the arc of the Harbour Bridge was in the background but the water below was out of view. It seemed possible she had dived from the top of the bridge into the pool.

Outside, the lanes glimmered aqua, and light reflected from the concrete, momentarily blinding us as we emerged from the stairwell. One side of the pool had grandstands and the other side had a wall made of redbrick with arches. The brick was decorated with painted cement seagulls, shells and eels. Each of the arches had a glass bay window that looked out onto the harbour. Right above us was the bridge. If you listened carefully you could hear its heartbeat as the trains passed over the tracks.

Our school filed up the grandstands, dressed in navy blue and bottle green. Usually Elijah’s school was next to ours but I couldn’t see them yet.

When the races started some of the schools sang war cries; they rose over the chatter of conversation and the sound of carriages rattling above. Intermittently there was a crescendo of high-pitched screaming from speedboats on the harbour. All the noises hovered above the pool, they bumped into each other and turned into new sounds. The mundane, perfunctory, excited and terrified all became the same amorphous mass.

Elijah won his age group in every stroke except breaststroke, which meant he’d go on to the Regionals. My last chance to advance was if I made the top two in the fifty-metre freestyle. When I lined up the air went still, my mouth was dry and the only noise I heard was the dull thudding pulse in my ears. Summer Smith, the best swimmer in my year, was next to me tucking her hair up under her cap. She was a good deal taller than me with toned brown limbs and square shoulders. The whistle sounded. The other racers and I stepped onto the back of the starters’ block and bent forwards. I could see the worn maroon surface of the block, rough like sandpaper under my feet.

Take your marks.

I stepped forwards and curled my toes over the block.

An ant crawled over my foot.

Pause.

Crack!

The shock of the starter’s gun hurtled me forwards into the pool. Underwater I held my arms in the shape of an arrowhead and kicked my legs. I was relieved to register that my goggles were still on. As I broke the surface I started moving my arms, right and left, over and over, without taking a breath. I didn’t like the feeling of chlorinated water on my skin. The burn of it. In the pool there was less buoyancy than in saltwater, so I felt heavier. I had to kick and paddle harder just to keep my head up. I looked to the bottom of the pool where there was a black line made of tiles. I missed the sandy seafloor: schools of baitfish, jellyfish; the moans and sighs of deep underwater winds. My lungs hurt and I took a breath. Ahead of me I saw at least two pairs of kicking feet. There were cobwebs of light that shook on the bottom of the pool, and the shadow of triangular bunting as I neared the end of the black line, a letter T ahead. I held my breath until the end of the pool was in sight. Three strokes, two. One. My right hand reached out and I felt the cold white tiles hit the backs of my fingers.

‘Fourth!’ an official yelled as she pointed down at me from under the brim of a panama hat.

Later at home I was surprised to find it wasn’t my hand that was bruised. Watching Elijah as he attached his ribbons to his pinboard, it was something else inside me, knuckle-white and clenched, that hurt.

After the carnival was over, Elijah found me in the grandstands, and we moved down to the bay windows to wait a while for Dad to pick us up.

‘Nice swims,’ a father of another student said to Elijah as they passed.

‘Thanks.’

‘Hey, nice swims, mate.’ A boy wearing the same sports uniform as Elijah came over to us.

‘Hey, Lucas,’ Elijah said. I recognised Lucas’s face from primary school, where he’d been in the year above me. He was much bigger now, probably six foot, with hairy legs and large arms that reminded me of peanuts.

‘Oh, hey!’ Lucas looked over to me and smiled, and I could tell that he remembered me.

‘How did you go?’ Elijah asked.

‘Nah, just made it through on the relay,’ Lucas said.

‘Ah well, footy’s more your thing anyway.’

The three of us sat there for a while and looked out over the pool: after a day of being beaten up it was finally still.

‘Did you see the whale that was in the harbour over summer?’ Lucas asked.

‘No? We were away up the coast, must’ve missed it,’ Elijah said.

‘We did see something though,’ I said.

Elijah caught my eye and knew what I was about to say.

‘Yeah, we were out surfing—’ he started, and I couldn’t help but interrupt him.

‘And I see this fin sticking out of the water.’ I put my hand out to show Lucas how big the fin was. ‘And a massive body.’

‘Was it a shark?’ Lucas asked.

‘Nah.’ Elijah shook his head, smiling. I liked that he let me tell the story.

‘It was a sunfish,’ I said.

Lucas looked confused.

‘Yeah, we hadn’t head of them either. Apparently they’re harmless.’

‘What did you do?’ Lucas was looking at me intently, waiting to hear what I had to say.

‘We got the hell out of there – paddled as fast as we could!’ I said.

Elijah laughed and nodded in agreement.

‘Geez …’ Lucas said. ‘Ah, there’s my dad.’ He raised a hand as he got up. ‘See you guys later.’

The school crowd had cleared and two older women started unpacking in the bay next to ours. They had large-bosomed bodies, thighs mildly textured with cellulite, parts that jiggled when they walked. They wore one-piece suits with halter tops and modest bottoms. The taller one started to put on her bathing cap, which was made of material and covered in flowers. Elijah and I watched them, mesmerised. When it was time to go we slung our sports bags onto our shoulders and headed towards the stairs.

As we passed them Elijah leant in and whispered to me, ‘That’ll be you one day, Grub.’

I tried to swallow a giggle.

As I walked up the stairwell, fourteen, with my brother, my muscles hard and tired, the thought that one day my body would stretch and dimple like dough, wrinkle, sag and wobble, that my hair would turn from copper-tone to grey, seemed at that moment to be the strangest of science fiction.

We waited out the front of the pool complex to see the boxy shape of Dad’s car emerge at the top of the hill. We sat with our backs against the wall and legs out in front of us. All of the fibres in my arms, legs and abdomen ached. They hurt on the inside, deep, next to the bone.

~

In the school gymnasium change room I saw that most of the bodies in my year had already started transforming. They had rounded breasts held in white bras and legs and underarms that required shaving. I was in the corner facing the wall with Cate next to me. She didn’t care about taking her tunic off; she stood in her shorts and bra while she looked for her top. I pulled my shorts on under my tunic first. Then I undid the zip at the back of my dress and wriggled quickly into my polo shirt.

Louisa was the most beautiful girl in our year, superficially. It wasn’t hearsay or opinion, but one of those things that was stated as fact. She always travelled flanked by two other girls in our grade who were not as good-looking as her, but just as nasty. Louisa. Even her name sounded like the twist of a knife.

‘Hey, Grub?’ Louisa asked as the three of them approached us. ‘When are you going to go through puberty?’ The two others laughed.

‘Maybe you need to eat a bit more grub, Grub,’ said another.

The blush started at the top of my chest and rose onto my neck and face, like a rash.

I turned to face them, squared my shoulders and took a slow breath in.

I looked Louisa straight in the eye.

‘Oh my God,’ she said, ‘her face is the same colour as her hair!’

‘I can’t believe you are related to Elijah Donohue,’ the girl on the right said. Her gaze started at my knees and then she examined me from the bottom up. Over my thighs, stomach, chest and face.

She shook her head. ‘I mean, he’s gorgeous.’

It wasn’t that I wanted to cry. It was just that the tears started in my throat and by the time they reached my eyes there was nowhere else for them to go but to overflow.

‘Just ignore them,’ Cate said, putting her arm around my shoulders. But I couldn’t. It would take years for me to unlearn the things those girls said to me, to pick them out like bindi-eyes from where they lodged under my skin.

‘Just ignore them,’ Louisa mimicked in a high pitch, before the three of them burst into fake laughter and walked away.

~

Our modern history class took an excursion two hours north to Old Sydney Town: an open-air reconstruction of colonial times. There were shops made of mudbrick with thatched roofs and women in calico aprons and mob-caps. A shopkeeper made candles by dipping long pieces of string into liquid wax, then he let it dry before he repeated this, over and over, until the wax built up on the hanging candles. The gaol was guarded by soldiers wearing white pants, red jackets with brass buttons and tall black hats.

Cate could trace her family back on both sides to those times. One of her ancestors came out to Australia in the First Fleet, on the Scarborough. No one from my family was in Sydney at that time, though their histories were filled with later journeys just as long. There were girls in my class whose families were from Greece, Sri Lanka and Iran. Families like Dad’s who immigrated much later than the ships’ landing, or like my mother’s, who arrived after the 1940s. My mother said lots of people moved to Australia after World War II, that it was time of vast uprooting, and with them people brought great sadness. When she talked of this I imagined the sorrow as pale blue and white and made of parachute material; large and billowing, it followed her family as it moved from Alexandria and hovered above them even as they tried to move away from it, enshrouding and enveloping them, always blocking out some of the light. When my mother spoke like this she looked me straight in the eye and it made me think she was referring to Nonno. I pretended I knew what she was talking about even if I didn’t. I pretended I knew, because to her it seemed very important.

While we ate our lunch, a man walked around our class in long white socks and a pointed hat.

‘Hear ye! Hear ye!’ The town crier. He announced that a convict had been caught stealing from another man and sentenced to a flogging.

There was movement in the public square: one of the men dressed as a soldier led out one of the men dressed as a convict. The crier kept ringing the bell. I looked around my class and wondered how many people were like Cate and had relatives who would have been in the real old Sydney, and how many were like me, whose ancestors came later. I knew there were other things that happened here that weren’t being acted out. How there were already people living in the basin. Scenes that no one ever re-enacted: the ones that showed the fates of the people who made the handprints. It’s interesting how that happened – how there were some conflicts about which lots was written down in books and plays, and about which movies were made, and other conflicts where the histories were less well preserved. I supposed there were differences then, between the world wars, and the wars that simply ended a world.

The convict’s shirt was taken off and his hands tied to a wooden structure. The soldier brought out a whip with a handle and cords with knots tied in them. He pretended to flog the convict by flopping the whip onto the man’s bare back, but I could tell it didn’t really hurt. The whip was coated in fake blood. By the end of the twenty lashes his back was covered in stripes of red that merged together in a thick crosshatch and smelt of tomato sauce.

~

Louisa and the other two waited for me outside my maths classroom. They surrounded me until my back touched the wall.

‘Do you know who Lucas is?’ Louisa asked. Of the three of them she usually spoke first; the others were echo machines.

‘Yeah, he was at the swimming carnival.’

‘Well, he’s going to ask you to his Year 10 formal.’ I was confused by this apparent knowledge about Lucas; I didn’t understand if it were true, or why that meant the four of us were here in a stand-off. I felt my face flushing again. It wasn’t the thought of going to the formal with Lucas that made me apprehensive so much as being in Louisa’s line of fire.

‘So, are you going to say yes?’ Louisa asked, staring at me intently. Our school had a no make-up policy, but her skin looked suspiciously even in tone, her eyelashes were just noticeably bulked by mascara and her closed mouth held a shine that gave away the lip gloss. The rules apparently did not apply to her.

‘You know he’s supposed to be going with Louisa,’ the one on the left said, before I had the chance to answer.

‘I don’t know,’ I said just before I managed to wedge my ringbinder between two of them and forge my way out. What I meant was I didn’t know who made the rules of what was supposed to happen and what was not.

~

In term three we studied genetics. Mrs Taigh taught us about Mendel growing peas, how he recorded generations of them. He measured their colour and shape until he figured out the basis of dominant and recessive genetics. I liked learning about how our lives began, and how it depended on our parents, and theirs before that. I thought DNA was like reams of fairy lights, tiny globes wound around wire that supercoiled onto itself. The genes that were turned on lit up and sparkled, and the genes that were recessive were turned off but still there, latent.

After school Elijah and I walked to the baths.

‘Who are you going to take to your formal?’ I asked.

‘Ah, I don’t know. Whoever asks me to theirs, I guess.’

‘Cate’s told me before that she has a crush on you.’

Elijah rolled his eyes. ‘Cate’s got a crush on everyone.’

When we got to the entrance we could see the water was so high there was hardly any gap between the surface of it and the wooden boardwalk.

‘Why is the tide so high?’ I asked.

‘What do you mean?’

‘How come sometimes it’s high, and other times there is hardly any water?’

Elijah laughed, the way he did when he was amused by things I didn’t understand. ‘It’s the moon.’

‘What do you mean?’ I couldn’t see how the moon could be determining what was happening here, at Northbridge, from so far away.

‘The moon,’ he said, ‘I mean, its gravity, pulls the water on earth towards it as it goes past.’

‘Really?’

‘It does!’ Elijah laughed again. ‘That’s high tide, and low tide is after it passes by.’

We stood on the sand. I took off my shoes and flicked my towel at Elijah’s legs the way he always did to me.

‘Come on, I’ll race you in!’ He broke into a sprint, dropped his towel when he hit the wet sand and peeled his shirt off without stopping. Caught off-guard, I hurried to strip down to my swimmers. As I ran towards the shoreline I saw my brother knee-deep in the water, then up to the waist, falling headfirst into blue.

Dad’s brother Cormac was a cardiologist at Lane Cove Hospital. He worked long hours and came home after my aunt Lillian and cousins had already eaten dinner. He always looked tired. He took his glasses off and rubbed the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger a lot.

When Cormac, Lillian and my cousins came over for dinner we crammed around the kitchen table, with our elbows and knees touching. There was always a lot of laughing and banter, but whenever Cormac talked the table went quiet and people listened to him. I could see my mother holding her bread as she watched Cormac while he spoke. She looked at him in a way she didn’t look at Dad: with a kind of reverence.

If someone had a heart attack in the middle of the night Cormac got dressed in the blackness and returned to the hospital to unblock the cholesterol clot from the arteries that supplied the heart. Other times he would take us to the beach and when he did he seemed content. He was one of those people who never raised his voice, but when something disappointed him he would draw in a deep breath and then sigh. I started to think I might like to take care of people like he did, that I could be the person who was called in the middle of the night to make critical decisions.

Once all four of us cousins were squished into the back seat of their car. We drove towards the zoo and Lillian admired the jacaranda trees in bloom. The green of the harbour foreshore was interrupted by branches of exploding violet. Cormac looked up out of the window.

‘Rubella season,’ he said, and I wondered what that was like, to know so much about something that it changed the way you saw the entire world. To look out through the stained glass of all that knowledge. I imagined understanding the details about humans and their bodies. I wasn’t sure if my marks at school would be good enough. I wanted to talk to Dad or Cormac about it but somehow the right time, the right place and words, were never created. I recalled the way my mother paid attention to Cormac and thought maybe one day her eyes might skim past Elijah and come to rest on me, as she looked for answers from her daughter, a doctor.

I carried around this secret of wanting to be a physician like carrying something stolen in my pocket. I tried to hide it but at the same time I couldn’t resist reaching in and pulling it out to toy with. I took it out and looked at it, but I wasn’t sure exactly what to do with it.

I don’t remember ever being in a hospital, but I do remember the sickest I’d felt was when I was five years old and the fever hit. That winter was grey and icy with sideways rain that fell in sleet. The sickness turned me hot and cold, I froze underneath heavy blankets, then soon after I was slippery with perspiration. Rain hit the window in a soft irregular drumbeat. Our family GP Dr Wesseling was there; he looked down on me and placed his stethoscope on my chest and made low murmurings that almost sounded like English. A colony of bull ants walked up the wall; they moved around my dresser in a whorl. A green Derwent pencil drew on my ceiling, outlines of a fig tree, a star, a wave. A cockatoo sat above my doorway, inquisitive and jovial. It leant forwards and splayed its sulphur crown. As it looked down on me I could see the knobbled grey bulb of its tongue.

Time passed slowly and everything was tinted amber and contorted. When the rain eventually stopped I heard a regular clicking of metal on metal. I rolled towards the wall, unsure how many days had passed. The sound came from the chair opposite me, where my nonna sat knitting a scarf of mauve and cream.

When the fever broke the ants were gone, the pencil disappeared, there was no cockatoo anymore. Dad said they were hallucinations. My nonna was the only one who was real. It was mid-semester and Dad was lecturing while my mother was on tour, and he asked Nonna to stay in the house with me. Nonna was so worried she pulled a kitchen chair into my room. When I remember that time I still feel the searing pain in my limbs and back eased by her knitting needles, a sound that always reminded me of feeling cared for.

~

Elijah’s cello playing took on a new fervour as the HSC loomed. My mother told him he should aim for a scholarship to university.

‘I can hear the wolf!’ she sometimes cried out, no matter what she was doing around the house, one ear always on my brother. When I wasn’t old enough to know better, I’d imagined an actual wolf in miniature lived inside Elijah’s cello; that he’d feed it scraps of meat through the f-holes. I’d come to learn ‘the wolf’ was a particular noise summoned when long notes were held at the lower register. The soundwaves in the upper bout crashed into the reverberations made by the rest of the instrument. When that happened, the music was amplified and then cancelled out in turn. The result was a certain huskiness of the notes that became interrupted: an old dial radio trying to find the transmission.

For the exams Elijah was required to play one piece by a composer and another he had written himself. My brother practised for hours every morning and evening. In his learnt piece, there was a passage of fast notes he needed to play flawlessly. It took months to master. At night I lay awake listening. The melody began and then a mistake fell flat. He hit a patch of notes that stood and took flight and then stopped abruptly, not knowing what came next. He drew music with his cello, dark lines in the night, etches in charcoal. He stumbled through a passage and moaned, and then in an act of defiance he regathered for the section of triple-stopping – chords of three notes rebounding all at once.

When Elijah started Year 12 there were strict rules. He wasn’t allowed to go out during the week and on Friday and Saturday nights he had to be home by midnight. Our bedrooms were adjacent and overlooked the front yard, at the opposite end of the house from our parents. One Thursday night I woke suddenly, unsure why. Then I heard the light note of wood against wood. I went to the window and put my head behind the curtain.

There was a circle of yellow light that jumped around the wall of the house, held in the hand of a figure I could barely make out.

‘C’mon!’ I heard it say. Zed. The flashlight went still as he pressed it against the pane of Elijah’s window and the legs of my brother appeared climbing out of the frame.

Elijah fell out, dressed in jeans and a collared shirt. They were both chuckling and had backpacks with them. They sprinted over the grass, Zed shining the torch ahead so it bobbled and jerked as it lit up parts of the garden, path, sky. I heard their voices, laughing, already telling each other stories, already telling each other the story of that night as they wrote it.

I wondered if they were going into the city. They’d left the window ajar.

I let the curtain fall back across my face and climbed back into bed. I thought about waking my mother and telling her, but there didn’t seem to be any point. Elijah wasn’t in any danger; he was just going out with his mate. He’d be fine. His HSC results would be fine. He would always be fine. Even though I was too young to get into bars, I wished they’d invited me. I wanted to be a part of whatever it was that they had.

In October Elijah was selected to play his original work at the Opera House; he stayed up late and practised every night for weeks before. I rolled over in my bed and saw the fluorescent green on my clock-radio. 2.06am. His original piece was called ‘Storm’ and he rehearsed parts of it over and over, a record that skipped. The composition began with irregular plucking like spitting raindrops. Deep chords built in sections of thunder and the melody bellowed and howled like wind. In the middle was a frenzied gale and Elijah’s right arm moved so fast I always wondered why the bow didn’t just fly out of his grasp, an inside-out umbrella. I knocked on my parents’ door, confused as to why they weren’t awake.

‘I can’t sleep,’ I whispered in the direction of my mother. ‘You have to make him stop.’

My mother pulled back the covers and I saw her moving in satin, the grace of her limbs visible even in the night.

Elijah was in navy striped pajama pants and a white bonds singlet, facing the window. He was at the coda; the wind pushed the storm away, the thunder softened, the pelting rain subsided. The mole on his right cheek was still, his gaze was fixed and far away, the grip on his bow a fleshy vice.

My mother waited for Elijah to finish before she stood behind him and placed her hands on his shoulders. She kissed the top of his head. ‘It sounds wonderful.’

‘I just need to play it a couple more times.’

My mother hushed as she prised the bow from my brother’s right hand and took the cello by its neck. ‘It’s enough, you’ve done enough,’ she said.

From the doorway I saw her lift the cello, his wooden partner, and lay it back in the case. He’d forgotten to rest the endpin on the mat: it left a small tear in the old carpet.

Elijah sensed me at the doorway, his green eyes livid. ‘Just one more time?’ he pleaded.

My mother sent me away with a single look. As I left, I heard her usher my brother back to bed.

‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘you can practise too much.’

We dropped Elijah at the Opera House several hours before the concert. He stood at the bottom of the curved sand-coloured stairs that led up to those white sails. He was wearing blue Converse sneakers, jeans and a long-sleeved grey T-shirt. He had the rented tuxedo in a suit bag folded over one arm and his cello hardcase in the other. His canvas schoolbag was slung over his shoulder. I looked at him there through the cloudy back window as we drove away, against the background of choppy harbour, bridge and arched sails. Even though he was still somewhere between a schoolboy and a man, he seemed all of a sudden to me a real musician.

Later in the concert hall we took our seats with the other families. Elijah was on second last. The spotlight came on as he sat on a stool with his cello, and formed the droplets that I knew almost by name. The audience responded to him: there was a hushed silence as they leant in and clung to each minim. When the stormfront hit, they were pushed back into their seats by the fury. I watched the people around me, their eyes resting on Elijah’s dark hair, his broad shoulders, the straightness of his spine. At the end the concert hall erupted with applause. My mother had tears streaming down her face. I leant back in my chair and looked above the stage where transparent plastic doughnuts hung.

Somewhere deep inside of me I felt a rushing noise of an endless sigh: the sound of wondering if this constant applause for my brother would ever end.

~

‘Explain it to me again: what exactly are you going to do?’ Dad asked. We were sitting around the kitchen table eating dinner like we usually did: my parents, Elijah, Zed and me.

‘Live,’ said Elijah.

Elijah and Zed had saved enough money to buy a second-hand car and they wanted to drive it to the Gold Coast in the new year.

Zed let Elijah do all the talking. He was busy eating my mother’s beef stroganoff. He ate with complete commitment to the process, mopping up the sauce at the bottom with crusts of bread.

‘Zed, honey, would you like some more?’ my mother asked, already filling the ladle.

‘Yup. Please.’

Once I asked Zed if he even got fed at his aunt’s house. I’d started teasing him in the same way I did my brother. ‘Yeah,’ he’d said, ‘but there’s not as much and the food doesn’t taste as good.’

Elijah explained how he wanted to take a year off and go on a road trip with Zed. Dad said he’d prefer Elijah to wait until the HSC results came out, to see what offers he received. It was unclear if Zed was planning on going to university. Dad ran the fingers of his right hand through the front of his hair and then pressed in on his temples.

Unsurprisingly, my mother took Elijah’s side. There was something inside of her, a primal mechanism that eternally acted in defence of him.

‘If you get a music scholarship, we can just defer it,’ she said. ‘Many musicians do this, take time out, travel, see other musicians – but you must take your cello.’

‘I’m not taking it, it’s too big! Anyway, it’s only for a year.’

My parents looked to each other simultaneously for answers that neither of them possessed. Finally, my mother flicked her hand.

‘Let him go, have an adventure. This is a safe country, and he’s only young. When he gets back he’ll be more settled for his studies.’

That night I heard the dark muffled rise and fall as my parents argued long after I had gone to bed. I followed the rhythm of their voices, trying to catch the edges of the words as they tumbled.

I thought of Elijah heading north with Zed, the red and white Ps stuck under the number plate flapping in the headwind. The metallic slap of the surfboard straps as they hit the roof of the car.

The idea of Elijah leaving made me think more about the end of high school and what I might want to do. From the time I was small it felt like school went on forever, then the fnish came into view.

It was like falling off the back of a wave; we would drop down the other side into a void, into the real world, into freedom.

My mother took me shopping for a formal dress. I found a crimson and gold gown that was a version of a Chinese cheongsam, but when I tried it on my mother shook her head. In the mirror I saw the tone of the dress against my hair: it made my freckles stand up out of my skin.

‘No,’ said my mother.

She chose a sapphire dress that reached the floor. I could see the bones of my ribs and hips underneath the fabric.

‘You’re so thin!’ the shop assistant exclaimed approvingly from underneath dark hair and heavy false eyelashes. She kept pulling back the change-room curtain to look in, even though I didn’t want her to.

‘We’ll have to take it in here,’ my mother said, as she tugged at the bust. The dress matched my eyes, a polar blue made of deep ocean. It had a halter neck, a slit up the back and an elegance that belonged to a much older woman.

~

At the formal, after the meal, Lucas and I sat at the table watching other couples dance.

‘You look just sensational tonight,’ he said, his peanut arm on the back of my chair. My mother had paid for me to go to a salon, and my hair had been washed and set in a low chignon. I felt nice, but not like myself.

‘Thanks,’ I said, and smiled. Before I knew what was happening Lucas leant in, his face touched my face, his lips were on mine and he was kissing me in front of everyone. Unsure what to do, I copied him. I put my hands on his shoulders and felt the density of them through his suit. When his lips parted, his breath was in my mouth, the taste of it, his tongue as it moved against mine. The way Lucas touched me was gentle; I felt his hand on my lower back drawing me closer. As Lucas and I kissed I couldn’t help thinking of Louisa, and how she probably already knew this had happened and how she would be calculating reparations.

When Elijah and Zed returned from schoolies week, Zed had a tattoo on the outside of his right upper arm. It was early December and, while they had finished school, I still had upcoming exams. On Saturday night, the three of us waited for my parents to go out. After they left Zed took the bandage from his arm, pulling it off gently to reveal small rust-coloured stains on it. There was a woman’s face drawn on him in black ink. She had thick, arched brows, large striking eyes and small nostrils that hung above a pouty smile. There was no outline of her head, no hair, ears or chin. The features just floated on Zed’s skin, as if in space. From some angles, she looked up at Zed’s face, and from others she stared past him. She reminded me of the cartoon on Redhead matches, the kind of woman who would invite you over for dinner and then set you alight.

The boys were keen to watch a horror flick. Zed shut all the doors and pulled the curtains to make the loungeroom dim, like a cinema.

‘Are you going to watch with us?’ Zed asked. He had his T-shirt rolled up over his right arm so it sat off the tender site of his tattoo. It looked like the woman was wearing a white habit. From here, she looked vaguely uninterested, as if she were looking past Zed, towards the door.

I was supposed to be studying for my maths exam on Monday.

‘Nah, Grub’ll get scared,’ Elijah chided.

‘Sure,’ I said, and sat on the couch, ‘I’ll stay.’

Elijah took the two-seater closest to the television and lay back. The movie was gory. In the first ten minutes a high-school girl had her head torn off: blood spurted out, pulsating from the stump of her neck.

Elijah cradled his head in his right arm. He seemed to find the most awful parts amusing. Zed and I were on the larger couch. Zed leant back against the centre pillow with his thighs splayed apart. His left shoulder touched mine, and every time I flinched he felt it. When I startled, his squinted eyes looked at me in the half-light and he laughed under his breath. Zed’s left forearm lay just next to my right – it barely touched it but was close enough that I could feel its heat. I wasn’t sure if I had put my arm there first, or if he had, but now I didn’t want to move in case I drew attention to it. Besides, I liked the way it felt.

‘We need snacks,’ Elijah said, standing.

‘Do you want me to pause it?’ Zed asked.

‘Nah, I’ll be quick.’ Elijah hurdled over our row of legs and left the two of us alone.

I tried to focus on the movie and act as though I didn’t notice that Zed’s arm was touching mine.

‘Awwwww.’ He reeled at the sight of another casualty and his arm slid against mine, a kind of caress.

I wondered if Zed was about to look at me. On-screen the head cheerleader was getting demolished.

Just then Elijah re-entered the room with a bowl of buttery popcorn that he held out to Zed.

‘Thanks, darling,’ Zed said to Elijah as he took a handful and kept watching the movie as if nothing had happened.

It was nearly forty degrees on the last day of school. My backpack was crammed full of textbooks, tupperware and Christmas cards. The book corners stuck into my back as I waited in line for the bus. During term Lucas would often wait for me at the gate after school, and we’d walk to the library to study for exams. When he did that, sometimes he’d carry my ringbinder and we went slowly, the walk being more fun than the destination. We’d been going out since his formal. His family had taken him out of school early to go to Adelaide for the holidays, so he wasn’t going to be around all summer.

When the bus arrived, the younger girls clambered on first and got the double seats down the front near the larger windows. The only empty spot was the one above the engine that was extra toasty. I sat on the vinyl and held my bag in my lap. I opened the window as far as it would go, which wasn’t very.

The bus lumbered around the school block and turned on to Miller Street to the stop that was a meeting point for lots of different local high schools. Louisa was there with her sycophants standing in a circle. As we pulled in, I saw her crowd were mostly guys today, but wearing different blazers – they weren’t from Elijah and Lucas’s school. I didn’t understand the phenomenon that was Louisa, what it was about her that made her the nucleus around which everything orbited. There were tons of other pretty girls in our year. It must have been the way she acted, or how she never said anything remotely interesting. Possibly it was the way she singled people out and laughed at them. Maybe it was her beauty that drew people to her, but it was fear of her cruelty that kept them close by.

I sat up a bit straighter when they all got on my bus. Louisa spotted me as soon as she got on. Her eyes narrowed: she easily located the outline of my fear.

‘Hey, Grub,’ she said with a smirk as she and the boys moved past me to sit along the back seat.

‘Hey.’

The bus rolled towards Northbridge. Louisa and the others were playing corners and cavorting on the back seat. I was careful not to draw attention to myself. I didn’t want to talk to them. I just wanted to make it to my stop and get off.

My fears were unwarranted. I heard Louisa sitting on one of the boys. I didn’t dare turn to see which one, but he had a deep, near-baritone voice. It seemed like they were sharing earphones on his iPod until the others kept yanking Louisa’s out, making her squeal in a way that satisfied them.

I slid a centimetre to my left just so I could rest my head against the window. When the bus stopped at a set of lights the window shook and my head vibrated in a way that was calming.

I must have closed my eyes for a moment. When I woke Louisa was outside the bus, waiting on the footpath for the rest of the group to disembark. The baritone leant down so she could whisper into his ear.

The bus doors swung shut and the driver changed gears.

It took me a moment to register what happened next, to feel the warm soft gelatinous matter that landed in my eyes and across my cheek. To realise it was material from the back of the throat of the guy whose hand Louisa was holding; to connect that she must’ve instructed him to spit it into my face.

‘Can you smell that?’ Cate and I were on my bed reading magazines. It was the same damp smell that had been coming out of Elijah’s room for weeks.

‘Yeah,’ I said.

‘It’s weed.’

That explained the closed door, Elijah being dazed, the way he shuffled around the house eating toasted sandwiches.

‘I didn’t know your brother smoked pot,’ Cate said accusingly.

I didn’t either. I had no idea what he was into anymore. Not music. He only played intermittently and when he did the sound was excessively slow.

My mother had been trying to make him play but the last time she pushed, Elijah got so frustrated at her that he threw his bow against the wall and it fractured like bone. Since that happened she hadn’t asked as often.

~

I was seven when my nonna died and my mother made me dress in all black. One Friday we were all having dinner at her and Nonno’s house, and the next day she was gone. There was no ailing or transition; she was never sick, never went to hospital. She was there and then she wasn’t. At the synagogue the ceremony was in Hebrew, a language I couldn’t read or understand but one that was still familiar. It’s a sound that has a rich, deep colour like wine and had always been underneath and at the edges of my life in a way that felt comforting.

I’d seen a magician on TV. He had a white rabbit in a black top hat and when he tapped it three times the animal disappeared. She was gone. Just like the rabbit. My mother held the crochet blanket I had helped Nonna make.

‘This is for you,’ my mother said, but I didn’t want it. I wanted someone to open the coffin and wrap my nonna in it. I wanted her to be in the beauty of all those colours and kept warm for eternity.

~

‘Keep to the left up here,’ Dad called out from behind me. We were on a trail from The Spit to Manly. Dad knew so many of the branches and corners of the walking tracks around here on Guringai land. I loved being outside with my father, the smell of dirt, the sound of leaves underfoot. The way it stilled my mind but heightened my senses.

We stopped at a rock ledge that looked over the harbour and sat and drank water from our thermoses.

‘I think I know what I want to do when I leave school,’ I said.

‘And what’s that?’

‘I think …’ I paused for a moment, feeling that if I said the words aloud that would be a point of no return. ‘I want to try and study medicine. To be a doctor.’

There was a flash across Dad’s eyes, a sparkle in them as he looked at me intensely, momentarily trying to figure something out about me.

He smiled. Not widely, but in a small way that seemed more real. ‘That’s terrific, Grub. You’ll be a wonderful doctor.’

My heart beat with a greater volume then.

‘I’ll speak to Cormac – maybe you could go with him, for work experience at the hospital, or at his clinic.’

‘That would be great, thanks,’ I said.

I hadn’t said anything to my mother yet. I wasn’t sure what designs she had on me, but I knew she would be surprised by this. Somehow, she always made me feel bad about myself for not being more creative, or more like her or my brother.

~

‘Why not? We’ll take care of her.’ Elijah was trying to convince our parents to let me go with him and Zed up to Hawks Nest by ourselves.

‘She’s too young,’ Dad said.

‘Too young for what? All we’re going to do is go to the beach, watch movies, sleep and eat. She won’t be driving the car or speaking to strangers.’ Elijah made a show of the last bit, making it out like my parents were being unreasonable.

‘I suppose …’ my mother began.

‘Rebekah!’ Dad interjected.

‘What? It’s not like where you and I were born Seamus, this is Australia. How much trouble can they get into in Hawks Nest?’

‘I’ll make sure she wears suncream.’ Elijah looked to where I was listening to hear my fate. ‘Twenty-four hours a day,’ he added.

When my mother laughed, I knew Elijah had her.

We drove up in the Toyota Zed and Elijah had bought, the two boys in the front and me in the back. The vinyl back seat heated up so much that a layer of sweat built up between it and my skin; it caused my back to slide when we turned a corner.

When we got to the house Elijah dumped his stuff in my parents’ room and Zed took the spare room with the queen bed. I was left with the room that had tiled floors and bunkbeds. It was the one Elijah and I used to sleep in, and it felt odd being in there by myself.

In the loungeroom Zed lifted the perspex lid from my father’s turntable and opened the record drawer.

‘Led Zeppelin, The Beatles, Bob Dylan … who bought all of these?’ Zed asked.

‘They’re my dad’s,’ I said. I was lying on the couch pretending to read, but really I was watching him.

‘Your dad has sick taste in music.’

‘My mother makes him keep all his albums up here,’ Elijah said as he walked in eating a packet of Twisties.

‘Pink Floyd,’ said Zed, and he slid it onto the player.

Zed and Elijah went surfing the next morning. I didn’t even bother asking anymore if I could go. Zed’s answers were always the same: no room in the car, the surf was too big, they were going out again later. It would be easier if he just told the truth: that he didn’t want to share his time with Elijah. Of course, I understood. I felt the same way.

I laid my towel on the cement slab that formed the front porch. I was going to try to streak my hair blonde with the juice of a large lemon I had squeezed into a bowl. I used my hand to dribble it onto the strands and then brushed it through. Cate had said that’s all I needed, lemon juice and sunlight. I carefully lay down so my hair was in the sun but my face was in the shade. I didn’t want any more freckles. I lay on my back in my denim shorts and singlet and read one of the fashion magazines Cate had lent me. All the women in the magazines had perfect and slightly unusual faces, thin limbs and waists, large breasts. Where did women like that even exist? One of the women had just won a modelling contest: she had thin thighs, narrow hips and a dimpled chin. Actually, she was only fourteen, so technically she was still a child, I guess. After reading the magazine for a while, I started to feel a bit queasy. I put it down and laid my arm over my closed eyes. I could smell the sweetness of citric acid mixed in with the suncream that was on my skin. I fell into that phase that happens just before sleep.

‘What are ya doing?’

Zed was walking back to the house, Elijah not far behind him. They had zinc on their noses and their hair was wet from the ocean. Their chests emerged from the waists of their wetsuits that were half-removed; the neoprene arms hung, dripping and hollow, by their sides.

‘Nothing,’ I said, sitting up.

‘She’s trying to bleach her hair blonde,’ Elijah said.

‘No, I’m not!’

A smirk spread across Zed’s face as Elijah pushed past him into the house.

The woman on Zed’s arm was less inflamed now, no longer pale; she was an integrated part of him.

I collected up my things and tried to rearrange my hair by pulling it back into a ponytail, but it was stiff and hard where the juice had dried.

Zed stood back and nodded for me to go into the house before him.

‘I think it looks blonder, Grub,’ he said, but in a way that made it impossible to tell if he was being genuine.

It was weird being in Hawks Nest without my parents. I missed the sound of my dad’s voice talking about birds and the clatter of my mother making dinner. Without them we stayed up into the early hours of the morning watching films, listening to music and talking about things that didn’t really matter. The boys drank beer and smoked pot from a contraption Zed made out of a cola bottle and a piece of garden hose. We bought loaves of soft bread, cereal, tofu and sausages from the local shop and everyone fed themselves. We ate a lot of toast.

One night we met some of Elijah and Zed’s schoolmates on the sand dunes. Up there, away from the town, my eyes kept trying to adjust to the blackness, looking for a spark of light until Zed built up a bonfire. He tipped bourbon into the flames to make it swell and spit.

The guy with matted dreadlocks had a bodyboard and the boys took it in turns to try riding it down the dunes, standing up. The dreadlocked guy only made it a few metres before falling off in a barely visible scatter of knees and elbows. Others whooped him on.

I sat near the bonfire next to Elijah on cold sand.

‘You really going away next year?’ I asked.

‘Hope so,’ he said, while he looked at me.

‘You still going to play cello?’

‘Nah, I don’t think so. I mean, I do enjoy it, but there are so many new things to do.’

‘Won’t you miss it?’ What I really meant was, won’t you miss me?

‘I want to try other things. I’ve been thinking more about making art, you know, like getting back into painting, and photography. I want to experiment with fresh ideas, to make something of my own.’

‘Your turn, mate.’ The bodyboard was thrown in our direction and hit Elijah on the back of his head.

I stood with Elijah. I was wearing a cream ankle-length cheesecloth skirt I’d bought from an op shop with a teal singlet. The wind moved the soft material around my legs.

‘Hey, I got these for you.’ Zed pushed something into the side of my arm as Elijah jumped onto the board, using the leg-rope as a leash, and sandboarded down the slope. It was a six-pack of vodka mixed with lemonade.

‘Uh, thanks.’

The drink felt strong on the back of my throat.

A group of girls arrived after that. Some wore dresses so short I could see their underwear and the rest had denim shorts with see-through tops over bikinis. I didn’t recognise any of them. One of the girls wore a necklace made of small rainbow beads and she laughed loudly at everything Elijah said, brushing her chest against his arm.

We never came to the dunes when we were younger. It was a disorienting view of the town. There was an element inside the air, hidden and electric. I wondered what my parents were doing at that moment and wished I was with them.

‘Have you washed your hair yet?’ Zed was beside me again.

‘Yeah,’ I said, out into the night.

‘Does it still smell like lemons?’

I took a few strands and ran it under my nose. ‘Nah, just like shampoo.’

‘Can I smell?’

My head jerked up to face him.

Zed placed the palm of his hand on the back of my head and leant in. I could smell stale beer and the back of his mouth. I nodded my head forwards, unsure why I could spend all that time with Lucas, but it was Zed who made my heart race and palms sweat.

Before I knew what was happening I was kissing Zed. I tasted the alcohol as he moved his tongue inside my mouth. I breathed in his exhale. His hands moved from where they rested on my hips to my backside. I held onto Zed’s shoulders, cupping the back of his head in my hand, and he held me with a tenderness I didn’t know he was capable of.

Later we sat with the others around the bonfire. I listened and laughed as the louder boys told stories. Zed drank his beer with his left hand and had his right arm around me, tucking me tight against his ribcage. I couldn’t see Elijah properly. He was on the other side of the circle, and the girl with the beaded necklace was sitting in between his legs and leaning back into his chest. They started to kiss and then the wind dropped and all I could see was the white-hot centre of the flames.

Zed rubbed the side of my body; the woman on his arm was behind my back, pointing away into the stars. If she had been angled differently she would have seen that I was happy.

In the early hours of the morning those of us who were left threw sand on the bonfire to extinguish it. I walked back to the car with Elijah and Zed, who took my hand and laced his fingers through mine. I felt dazed by tiredness and alcohol.

‘Hey, man, you should let me drive, you’ve had more to drink,’ Elijah said.

‘No way, I’m fine.’ Zed pulled the keys out of his pocket and put them in the driver’s door before he dropped my hand. Elijah went shotgun and I slid into the back seat behind Zed.

There was no light on the gravel road bar from our headlights. The sound of the tyres rolling over the stones reverberated in the car.

‘How’d ya like to see some circle work?’ Zed asked. All of a sudden he’d put the car into first and locked the wheel to the left. Then he hit the accelerator. The car revved as the back wheels spun out, drifting over the road.

I hadn’t had the chance to put my seatbelt on. I was flung onto the right-side door and my head hit the window with a crack.

‘Shit, man! Slow down!’ Elijah was yelling; I saw him from where I was crumpled into the door of the car – he was holding onto the handle on the roof with one hand and his seat with the other, trying to centre himself.

‘Slow down!’ Elijah said again. There was another sound, a high-pitched screech I realised was coming from me and when I stopped I could hear Zed laughing. I caught his eyes in the rear-view mirror: they were strangely calm and purposeful.

The car went around two more times, the boot spiralling like the design of a shell. Elijah and I went quiet. Zed took his foot off the accelerator and I had vomit at the back of my throat that I swallowed down. I could smell smoke and clutch and dust. I felt a throb in my head where it had hit the window hard. Zed was the only one laughing.

The next day I woke with a headache. My fingers went to the tender rise of a swelling on my scalp. It felt purple. When I got out of bed it was already the afternoon.

‘Morning, sunshine,’ Zed said when he saw me.

He and my brother were sprawled on the two couches in the loungeroom.

‘How are you feeling?’ Elijah asked.

‘Tired,’ I admitted.

Zed was under the window; intermittently a breeze blew the curtains and they partially covered him. The woman’s face was pressed against a maroon cushion. It looked like she was lying in bed, waiting.

Zed played with a Bic lighter; he ignited it with one hand and held the fingers of his other hand in the flame as long as he could. ‘I know what’ll wake us up. Who wants a smiley face?’ he asked.

‘Don’t, mate,’ Elijah said.

‘What’s that?’ I asked.

Zed lifted his legs off the couch and pointed one in my direction. ‘Here.’ He splayed his knees and pointed to the inside of his ankle, just above the bone.

There was a collection of scar tissue that looked vaguely like two eyes and an upturned mouth; its pale smoothness stood out against the rest of his skin.

Zed held the lighter head over the scars to demonstrate how it was made. ‘You have to heat it up first. Want one?’

I didn’t, but I didn’t want Zed to think I was scared. ‘My skin’s so pale, you probably wouldn’t even see it …’ I tried.

Before I could move, Zed had a hand on my left foot and held it there, sticking it to the carpet. He was warming up the lighter with the other hand.

My mouth went dry.

‘It’ll work,’ Zed said.

Elijah interjected, ‘Mate, I’m starving, let’s go get some food.’

‘Let’s do this first,’ Zed said. ‘Besides, you said she was going to be a doctor, so she needs to get used to, you know, the smell of burning flesh and all that.’

I tried to pull my leg away, but Zed had all his weight on it: he was too strong.

I didn’t want the brand. I was scared and confused. He’d been so affectionate the night before – why was his attention this morning menacing?

I looked to Elijah, and he had already stood up. He used all his force to shoulder-charge Zed, knocking him over onto the floor.

I ran to the bathroom as soon as my foot was freed; I could hear the tussle of skin on skin. It sounded like Elijah landed a few punches on Zed.

Zed was half moaning and half laughing. ‘Settle down,’ he pleaded. ‘I was kidding!’

I pressed the brass button lock when I was inside and sat on the toilet even though I didn’t need to go.

Zed’s edges, the parts of him that interfaced with the world, were tempting and exciting. His eyes were always fixed on what was ahead. Underneath, there was something distinctively not nice about Zed – but I couldn’t understand how that drew me to him.

He was the crystallised amber edges of a wound I couldn’t help running my fingers over.

On our last day away, we pedalled bikes barefoot to the milk bar to get burgers and chips. My hair blew out behind me as I rode. Elijah went in and ordered while Zed and I waited outside on the low brick wall next to the road.

Zed had his lighter and a half-empty packet of cigarettes. He knocked one out and lit it.

A man came around the corner holding the back of a small bicycle. On it sat a small girl in a white stack hat. She held the handlebars tight. As she pedalled and gained speed the father picked up into a slow run, still holding on to the back of her seat.

‘Do you ever see your dad?’ I asked. The words fell out of my mouth before I had a chance to catch them. Zed was wearing canvas shoes. There was a hole where his right toe was wearing through.

‘Nah.’ His mouth was full of grey smoke, then he exhaled. ‘He walked out on us when I was six.’

‘Do you know where he is?’

Zed shook his head. ‘Not really. You wouldn’t understand,’ he said, for a moment speaking to me as if I was a child. ‘Your family is so nice. One day you will.’

‘Will what?’ I asked.

Zed flicked the butt of his cigarette onto the footpath, where it rolled up against the wall of the milk bar, a trail of smoke still piping out of it.

‘Lose something you love.’

He got up and walked inside to meet Elijah.

There was certainty in the way he spoke that made me feel as though he knew something about my life that I didn’t.

When we got back to Northbridge, Elijah started taking bags inside the house.

‘I’m glad you came away with us,’ Zed said. He had the car keys in his right hand and then he put his hands on my hips in a way that made my heart beat faster. ‘Sorry about the lighter thing, I was only mucking around, I wouldn’t have done it.’

‘It’s okay,’ I said, reaching out my hands and putting them on his forearms.

He pushed me gently against the wall of the house until I could feel the stucco though my singlet.

He kissed me then, his mouth open and his eyes closed. He tasted sweet this time, and not of beer. I put my arms up over his shoulders, my hand in his hair, and he leant his body into mine. It was the light of the afternoon, a slight breeze and Zed – or the combination – that made the moment close to sublime.

That night when Lucas called me from Adelaide I told him I didn’t want to go out with him anymore, that I’d met someone else over the holidays. I didn’t tell him it was Zed. Lucas sounded surprised and hurt when I told him and it made the seconds feel dark and elongated down the landline. Despite being wounded, Lucas said how much he enjoyed spending time with me, studying together at the library, and that he hoped we could still stay friends, which established in me what a good person he was. My left ear felt hot against the receiver as I felt bad for Lucas and worse about myself. He tried to swing the conversation back towards neutral topics and asked how I’d been spending the summer. I did my best to extract myself from the conversation, so that it would end and I could hang up the phone.

I could still smell the bonfire, out there on the sand dunes.

My parents were away, and Zed went back to his aunt’s place for a while. Elijah pulled the curtains in his room, crawled under the sheets of his bed and shut the door. The next morning it was quiet in a way that was eerie. Elijah’s cello was propped in the corner of the music room, untouched. The absence of its sound, those deep reverberations, altered the house. It seemed less. As if the kitchen tiles, the dusty cracks between them, the peeling wallpaper, old carpet and windowpanes needed Elijah’s music to maintain their integrity.

I walked down to the baths and jumped in from the side, but it wasn’t as fun on my own. I lay on my back in the water and floated, looking up at the sky.

When I returned home for lunch Elijah hadn’t stirred. At three o’clock I stood outside his bedroom. I listened for any sign that he was conscious, on the computer, moving. The silence sat in my ears like gauze.

I tapped on the door.

‘You awake?’ I asked.

There was a grunt on the other side.

‘What are you doing?’ I asked.

‘Sleeping,’ he said, but I knew it wasn’t true. No one could sleep that much. An afternoon, a night and most of a day.

‘Do you want anything?’ I was standing so close to his door that the tip of my nose was touching it. There was a faintly metallic smell of paint.

‘We have ice cream,’ I offered, trying to bribe him out.

‘Nah.’

When my parents got home the next night, part of me wanted to tell them that Elijah spent all weekend in bed as if he was sick, but wasn’t; the way hanging out with Zed seemed to be something he needed recovery from. At the same time, I worried that maybe they wouldn’t let Zed come over anymore, or let the three of us be by ourselves. The lines of our family were changing. It used to be a ring comprised of my mother, Dad, Elijah and me. Zed was on the outside. Now it was triangulated: my parents in one corner, Elijah and Zed in another. I was somewhere else, in between.

When Elijah was in Year 7 he fell off his skateboard and broke his right arm above the wrist. He had to spend the whole school holidays in a plaster cast and wasn’t allowed to go swimming. By the end of the break the dank scent of Elijah’s splint followed him: of unscrubbed skin, wet cotton wool. We were both excited the day he went back to get the cast off. Dr Wesseling used a small circular blade that vibrated to cut. When the cast broke open Elijah’s arm lay there, but it wasn’t the same. It was white and wrinkled and covered with small threads of old skin. We looked at it, appearing like a dead lizard, the soft lightness of its belly face up. It was still attached to Elijah’s body but it was hard to recognise as a part of him.

That was what all of him was like now: a shrunken, more-frail version of himself.