It wasn’t as bad as Calli anticipated. In fact, it was perfectly idyllic, losing something so special under the stars, out in the openness of the bush with a genuinely gorgeous guy. For two novices they certainly worked out the mechanics pretty quickly and it wasn’t the horribly frenzied fumble several of her friends described in lurid detail at the back of the class. It was actually incredibly satisfying and but for Declan’s extreme reaction afterwards, Calli might have been interested in having another go. Aside from Jase’s childlike dependence on her, it was the first time in her sixteen years she felt truly wanted by another human being and it was strangely addictive and utterly fulfilling.
By morning, the whole thing had turned into a nightmarish disaster of epic proportions. Declan could hardly look at her and for Calli, the gentle glow of desire began to curdle in her stomach, replaced by shame, disgust at herself and anger at her co-partner. His rejection of her felt sickeningly familiar and years of reading the signs in her mother, gave Calli the wisdom to know nothing would change now. The natural, comfortable companionship of yesterday was smashed in the dirt, scattered through the drought strewn leaves. Calli was cut off from the branch, cauterised by an organic thing which no longer required her presence. As she stomped off down to the stream to wash and to drench her misery in the cool, clear spring water, Calli crunched through the dry, crackly leaves, feeling exactly like them. She had given of herself for nothing and was now as discarded as the graveyard of splintered leaf and vein.
Hot, bitter tears flowed into the water as Calli washed and dressed herself in clean clothes. The cut from the razor blade had finally begun to heal, leaving a tender, shallow pink line where the open soreness once revealed the fatty layers nestling underneath. She fought the angry desire to open it up again, worse than before, to make her body pay for its final betrayal of her. There were so many ready weapons in nature’s armoury but as Calli’s eyes cast around searching, she remembered Declan’s questions about how she did it and his tenderness in taking care of her wound. He wouldn’t change his mind about her general unwholesomeness if she staggered up from the stream with another cut and besides, it wasn’t about that. It wasn’t sympathy or attention that was needed, but a blessed relief from the inner pain and disgust; an opportunity for some of the filth to flow out with the blood and run away. A little bit less muck inside her to contend with.
Shaking her head roughly and brushing the tears away, Calli forced herself to walk away from the hazards around the stream and march confidently across the paddock to where the tent still stood.
“Calli, about last night,” Declan started, standing up from the pan of water just reaching boiling point over a small fire. Calli put her hand up in front of her face and gave a wooden smile.
“It’s fine,” she said acidly. “I mistakenly thought we were in it together. I’m obviously to blame. Forget it.”
She crouched down in the tent and shoved her things roughly into the backpack she used as a pillow. Her dead brother’s scent wafted comfortingly out of it as Calli pushed her sweatshirt in, inducing a crippling wave of loss which felt like fingers around her heart.
Declan hovered for a moment and then tried to speak again, “That’s not what I meant. I dealt with it poorly. I’m sorry Cal. Please, I need to talk to you.”
She kept packing, ignoring his voice even when he squatted down and opened the flap so he could keep talking. “It’s just some friends and I, we made a pact that we wouldn’t do it...we would save ourselves until marriage and now I have to go home and admit I didn’t. I have a mentor and I’m going to have to front up and tell him...”
“Tell him!” Calli’s body whipped round so fast it made her vision temporarily blur. “Well, make sure you get the story straight, won’t you Saint Declan. I’m to blame, I led you on and made you do it. I’m the filthy, dirty slut, not you. You can still go to your heaven and I’ll head off down to where I belong. Although I couldn’t imagine an afterlife of pain and suffering that looks much different to here really, so maybe I’m already there!”
“Cal, no...” Declan made to reach into the tent for her but Calli’s face channelled something frighteningly self-destructive and terrifying. Declan drew his hand back as her eyes bore into him like a brand.
“Touch me again and I’ll kill you,” she said and her voice was so cold and lifeless he believed her.
Calli felt the sunshine replace Declan as his silhouette left the tent opening. She sat rigidly on her heels as he clattered around with the pan of water and the tin mugs. Did he really think a cup of tea would cure all this? She heard him swear after an unusually big clatter and the hiss which revealed he had spilled the water. The steady crunch of his boots on the leaves told her he was going back down to the stream for more. Calli watched his back through the fluttering flap of tent material as he trudged away. His shoulders were hunched slightly in his tee shirt, his muscular arms locked at his sides. Her fingers ached to feel his skin under her palms again and taste his butterfly kisses, but she formed her treacherous hands into fists of rebellion instead. As the physical distance between them grew further with each long stride, it was as though a string was cut in Calli’s psyche and she was galvanised into action, knowing with certainty she needed to get away.
With only minutes to spare, Calli was along the track and out of the clearing before Declan returned. She imagined his relief that the unwanted guest had upped and left and wondered if that was his intention anyway, making time for her to go. She was bad news. She wrecked everything that came within her grasp and it had to finish here. Her life was a cycle of blame, rejection and emotional neglect, but at least she knew why now. Her father was a sex predator, a control obsessed monster who drifted around the city before she was born, terrorising women. In Calli’s mind, there was little wonder she had given herself away at the very first opportunity because her genetics ruled it was so.
Calli’s inner ranting and berating of herself only served to make her feel even more worthless. For the next three hours as she picked her way out of the dense canopy, she tried to concentrate on following the orange triangular markers, once she found the track and not get lost. A couple of times she became disoriented and missed Declan’s instinctive intuition, having relied on him for direction for almost a week. Calli forcefully shut down the part of herself that wanted to run screaming back into his arms and beg forgiveness.
She brushed away another waterfall of misery, mentally noticing how her tears of desolation during her mother’s reign of hatred had all been cool and chilled the agony of her soul. Something was different. The fat drops were searing hot and angry, overflowing from a furnace of rage and bitterness deep in her core. The wetness burned and mingled with the sweat from Calli’s exertion, smearing her face with dust and muck which she hastily rubbed from one side to the other with careless, rough hands.
Her accidental forays off the rough track left a legacy of stinging scratches from bush lawyer and a nasty bruise on her cheek from a fight with a tree trunk during a slip. Declan’s words came back to her, as surely as if he was with her; The punga is not your friend. Feeling like an incredibly slow learner, she reminded herself why, as her feet went from under her on a steep, rocky surface and she grabbed out for the solid brown looking tree. It disintegrated in her grasp, leaving her to slip the four metres on her backside before managing to stop her fall with her left arm and face. The rimu trunk was solid, but administered some prickly scratches as Calli held on for dear life.
There was a time after the fall when Calli just lay there, cuddling the tree trunk and feeling the myriad hurts begin all over her body. It was a moment in which a mother should find her, scoop her up and hug her tightly, reinforcing the safety net around her life and lacing it with love. Calli waited for it, knowing inwardly that for her, it would not come. Marcia never did that for her eldest daughter, although Calli watched her do it for Sadie and Jase. Less so in the years since Danny died, but she watched with hungry eyes as Marcia leeched naked affection for her other official offspring. The tiny Calli with delicate limbs and scraped knees was rescued by Simon, another mother at the play park, or Danny while Marcia ignored her muted cries, staring woodenly ahead as though wishing the child would disappear altogether.
Calli gathered herself, hauling her beaten body and damaged emotions back up the ridge and forging on, feeling sure she must be getting close to meeting civilisation soon. It crossed her mind that the previous night may have yielded consequences and she trudged on, wondering how she would deal with it. Would she detest any future child and hold it responsible for its own unasked for conception, or would she shower it with love and make up for her own terminal disgrace? By the time the first of the wooden signposts informed her in pretty italics that she was a further hour’s walk from the car park, Calli reasoned there would be no baby. Whilst God cared little for her or her warped upbringing, she felt certain that Declan was convinced of his omniscient love and eternal grace, which inevitably meant his God would protect him from anything which threatened to reroute his charmed life path.
The car park was empty, dust moving gently around the grey stone chips that made up its surface. Declan’s car sat where they left it, taunting her with its presence. Hatred dictated that Calli should damage it, but she no longer had the heart even for retribution. At the entrance to the main road, after navigating a narrow and treacherously blind lane, Calli halted for a moment, staring at the signpost ahead of her. Hamilton was emblazoned in white writing on a dark green background, calling her back to an impossible life. The opposite direction urged her on to pastures new and unspoken possibility in a location somewhere further south. She turned her body south and marched forward, emboldened by an unfamiliar sense of excitement and freedom. But the blossoming emotion was short lived and quickly extinguished, by bad luck and circumstance.
The cop car glided smoothly past at roughly one hundred kilometres per hour, a flash of white blurred by blue and yellow markings. It powered by, hailing Calli’s bare legs with grit which oozed free of the tarmac in the mid-twenties temperature. A guff of warm air pushed at her face and chest, less than the terrifying lorries which almost blew her off her feet, but still powerful. Calli ceased to look at the cars, not wanting to get eye contact with anyone, simply celebrating inwardly as their noisy engines carried them out of her life. She didn’t see the police car stop behind her and execute an expert turn in the road, but its brake lights glared red as it cruised slowly in front of her marching body, too close for her to kid herself it wasn’t stopping for her, too close for her to make a run for it. Calli stopped and cast around her, contemplating escape anyway.
“Don’t even think about it!” The police officer was tall and thin, his voice gentle but firm. He slid his brimmed hat over his glossy dark hair in one fluid motion as he stepped out of the driver’s door, smiling at her at the same time as radiating concern. “Calli,” he said. “How are things?”
It seemed like a ridiculously stupid thing to ask, of a girl whose limbs were filthy and blood speckled, a large red and black bruise spreading out over her left cheek and eye even as they stood there in the dusty heat. Calli chose not to answer, recognising two of Simon’s closest friends at the same time as the other man unwound himself from the passenger side and closed the door behind him. “You need to come with us, sweetheart,” Jim said quietly, backed up by the capable presence of a man whom for most of her life, Calli had known as Uncle Pete. Sweat was evident on the blue shirts of both men, circling in a darker patch underneath their armpits. Pete was swarthy, dark featured and fit, Jim more rotund and less so, but Calli knew any attempt at running from them would be futile. “Don’t run, Cal,” Jim said. “Don’t do it, sweetheart.”
Gritting her teeth and digging her boot heels into the dirt next to the road, Calli answered coldly, “I’m not going home.”
The cops eyed each other nervously, not seeming sure what to do next. She wasn’t just any teenage runaway, she was the daughter of a friend. It was more than awkward; it was horrible for them. A lorry slowed down guiltily at the sight of the cop car pulled over, but its back draught still buffeted the three as they tried to remain upright in the blast of engine-heated air.
“Where do you want to go, love?” Jim asked, fiddling with the button on his chest mounted radio, to cut out the crackling cacophony of sounds leaking out into the stillness. Crickets made their endless noise in the grass next to the road, signalling the official start of autumn. Calli turned her body and pointed south,
“That way,” she said decisively.
“That way it is then,” Jim said, sounding sincere and holding out his hand for Calli’s heavy pack. She waited a beat, not quite believing him, but Uncle Pete climbed into the back of the saloon and closed the door, apparently not concerned. Jim put her rucksack into the copious boot along with other black, unmarked boxes and led her round to the road side of the vehicle. Fear consumed her suddenly and she resisted entering it, finding herself butted up against the man’s rounded stab-vest. Her face was a knot of anxiety as Jim placed his hand reassuringly on her shoulder. “That way,” he said, pointing south again.
Calli believed him finally and climbed into the squad car. The engine roared as Jim executed a turn in the road, heading south towards Te Awamutu, but Calli lost her grip on consciousness shortly afterwards as the long walk, sleepless night and the awfulness of her life overtook her.