The bell above the door to Snow’s corner store tinkled as I led Mattie and Sam inside and let them loose to ricochet like pinballs through the store.
“Behave,” I said, “or I won’t buy you a treat.”
They raced over to the cabinet so they could spend an inordinate amount of time discussing the various merits of the raspberry versus lime Popsicle, and were opening and closing its glass cover so all the cold air could escape when I felt a shimmer of heat beside me.
Sky-blue T-shirt; long, lean body tapering down to navy shorts; brown arms leaning on the glass.
He smiled, pushing a mess of dark curls from his forehead, flicking his eyes over the three of us before his gaze came to rest on mine.
“So,” he said, “see anything you like?”
The question filled the air between us and hovered there until Mattie announced informatively, “She’s not allowed to have any ice cream, she’s on a diet.”
Sam nodded. “A massive one,” he added helpfully.
The boy in the sky-blue T-shirt laughed and said, “Really? She looks just about perfect to me.”
And that was it, Joshua Keaton and I had met, and the heat between us just about melted every ice cream in the cabinet. “I’m Josh,” he said, his eyes, dark and flecked, still locked on mine. “What’s your name?”
“Tallulah . . . Lulu.”
“Well, Tallulah-Lulu”—he smiled—“I’ll see you around.”
Then he left, Snow’s bell signaling his departure.
“Ha-ha, you said your name was Tallulah-Lulu.” Mattie grinned.
“Shut up, Mattie,” I said, leading them both to the counter.
“Lulu’s got a boyfriend, Lulu’s got a boyfriend,” Sam chanted, dancing around me, and right at that moment, Josh walked back in.
“Are they right?” He grinned. “Have you got a boyfriend?”
“No,” I said.
“Do you want one?”
Later on, after Josh talked his way into walking us home, wheeling his bike beside us, and further talked his way inside our house, where he charmed Rose by inhaling a plate of her macaroons and impressed Harry by knowing what a snake pipe was, he asked me again.
“So, Tallulah-Lulu,” he drawled, a tiny dimple dancing on his right cheek, “do you want a boyfriend? Because I could be interested in applying.”
I giggled—at the inanity of his line, at him, at us, at me, standing in the kitchen of my house with the most beautiful boy I had ever seen.
“I’m serious,” he said.
Then he put one finger on my lips, leaned in, and kissed me.
Mattie and Sam were playing Star Wars outside on the lawn, Harry and Rose were somewhere upstairs, and I was leaning back against the table, eyes closed while Josh’s fingers trailed down my neck, brushed against my shoulders, touched my face.
His hand cupped my cheek as he pulled me toward him, his kiss growing deeper, and I don’t know how long it went, that first kiss, but I do know that his hands and mouth and tongue made every inch of my pure, untouched, Catholic girl’s skin want to be pollinated right there and then on Rose’s laminated benchtop.
Later that day, when all the mothers were out on their lawns calling their children inside, their singsong chorus of “Cait-lin,” “Aman-da,” “Chris-topher” signaling the end of play, he stood on my front step and said, “Well, did I get the job?”
I nodded my head.
“Excellent,” he said, turning to walk down the path and pick up his bike from its resting place behind Harry’s plumbing sign.
“So I’ll see you tomorrow,” he yelled, and disappeared down the street.
I watched him go and could not believe my luck.
Lying awake that night I thought about how strange it was that the evening before I had gone to bed a girl who had never had a boyfriend, or even been kissed. Now I apparently had a boyfriend, I was a girl who had been kissed, and I knew, despite my complete lack of previous experience, properly.
I smiled in the darkness, thinking of my family at dinner that night.
Harry teasing, “Tallulah Keaton, nice ring to it, love.”
Rose worrying: “Don’t be silly, Harry, they’ve only just met.”
And the boys rhythmically chanting, “Lulu and Josh, sitting in a tree, K–I–S–S–I–N–G!” and pounding their fists on the kitchen table until Rose told them she’d tie them to that tree if they didn’t desist.
Annabelle had rung earlier, but I’d asked Rose to tell her I was already in bed, not wanting to share Josh with her just yet. I could not, I knew, keep Josh a secret from Annabelle forever; it was in every way impossible.
I closed my eyes, wrapped my arms around my waist, and thought that if I really did have a boyfriend, if Joshua Keaton—I hugged his name to me—was my boyfriend, then I would just have to find a way to fill in all the spaces between him and Annabelle, to be enough for both of them.
“No way!” Annabelle shrieked, walking to school the next day. “So you’re standing in Snow’s and this guy just wanders in and asks you to be his girlfriend? You cannot be serious, Tallulah! What’s his name?”
I hesitated before I answered her, wanting to keep everything about him to myself for just a moment longer.
“Joshua Keaton,” I said, and waited.
I could not bear it if she made fun of it in some way, turned the letters of his name around or gave him a nickname that would make me wince every time I heard it.
I could not bear it if she spoiled him for me.
“Joshua Keaton,” she announced, “sounds completely intrigivating—now tell me every single detail of what happened, I want to know all about him.”
Relieved she had not mocked, I told her all I had learned about Joshua Keaton, which was not very much, snatches of information sandwiched in between Mattie’s and Sam’s romping, Rose’s baked-goods offerings, Harry’s car talk—“What do you think of the new Holden, Josh?”—and kissing.
I knew that he was seventeen, that he lived two suburbs away with his mother, Pearl—no mention of a father—and that he had gone to Ralston Road High School, but had left the year before to do a mechanic’s apprenticeship.
I knew he loved surfing, had a part-time job at DNA Motors, which he liked, working for a man called Mel, whom he did not.
That was about the sum total of what I knew about Joshua Keaton when I was walking to school with Annabelle that morning.
But later, as the days turned into weeks, and weeks turned into six months after the day we met, and he used a penknife and a blue pen to tattoo my initials on his wrist to mark the occasion—Harry calling him a “silly bugger” when he saw it—I could have told her so much more.
I could have told her he was five foot eleven and three-quarter inches tall, that the missing quarter inch drove him to distraction, that he had a shock of white hair beneath all those curls, but you had to lift his hair at the nape of his neck to find it; I could have told her he couldn’t whistle.
I could have told her he loved the Saint Kilda Football Club, Saint Bernard dogs, Vietnamese egg noodles with anything, being kissed on his back, the break at Duranbah, and Deborah Harry—“The second sexiest woman on earth, Tallulah-Lulu.”
I could have told her his father had left to join the merchant navy three weeks after Josh was born, and that the first time he got drunk he’d tried to call him on the HMAS Melbourne, shouting down the phone at the operator that it was a matter of national security he be put through to Davie Keaton, and that when she hung up on him, he had sat on a swing in Ralston Park and wept.
I could have told her that when he told me that story and cried, it looked like he was raining inside.
I could have told her he had double-jointed thumbs, that when he was thirteen he had written a letter to the motor racing champion Peter Brock asking to be his codriver, and that he had slept with the signed photo that arrived in answer under his pillow for weeks.
I could have told her that he tasted like almonds and smelled like lemons and that the softest place on his skin was everywhere.
I didn’t tell her those things, but in the end, it didn’t matter—she found it all out herself.
I arranged for them to meet for the first time at Wattle Beach, away from Harry’s and Rose’s or Frank’s and Annie’s curious eyes. It was hot, one of those days when the road shimmers at your feet and your shoulders are pink even before the sun hits them.
I was nervous, uneasiness pecking at my skin, and Annabelle took my arm and said, “For God’s sake, Lulu, will you relax? I’m not going to eat him.”
We were walking down the green-tinged concrete steps to the beach when I felt her shift beside me, her fingers pressing down slightly on my wrist.
“Is that him?”
Josh, running through the last of the curling waves, long limbs negotiating a path past little kids on surf mats and mothers with babies on their hips, board tucked under his arm, drops of water catching in his curls, then smiling beside us, as he dropped his board.
“Hey, Tallulah-Lulu,” he said, ducking his head to brush his saltwater lips on mine. “How’s my girl?”
He shook his whole body, large wet droplets diving off his skin, and lifted his chin toward Annabelle.
“Hey,” he said.
That was it, and there was nothing in that moment, in that first meeting—in all the times I replayed it later, when it mattered—that shouted a warning to me, nothing that said he is kissing you and drinking her in, nothing that whispered in my ear to be careful.
It was just the three of us, laughing and talking and finding room for one another on our towels under a perfect sun.
That summer, when I was sixteen, Josh claimed my family as his own, helping the boys build their infamous exploding volcano in the backyard—rocks, mud, sand, sticks, a hose, and a whole lot of trouble—holding the ladder steady for Harry as he cleaned the gutters in the roof; sitting, elbows down, at Rose’s kitchen table, chin poised on his clasped hands underneath, huge smile dimpling at his cheeks, waiting to be fed.
Rose had said we could see each other only one night a week during school term, and on weekends after I had done my studying.
She told Josh it was important that I do well, that I didn’t need any distractions—Josh, of course, being the distraction. He had smiled and nodded and continued to turn up at our house most nights just before dinnertime anyway.
Rose would hear the bike creaking up the grass and the gate click, and would roll her eyes at me and sigh, but both Josh and I knew there was no way in the world she would turn away a hungry boy from her table.
“Does your mother know you’re here?” she would ask, and Josh would nod because it was easier to do that than to explain that Pearl Keaton would barely have looked up from her ciggies and her crosswords for long enough to notice he was gone.
Pearl lived in a veil of smoke, sitting on her couch, her crossword puzzles spread out on the table with its ringed coffee cup stains and a bottle-green glass ashtray brimming with butts in front of her.
“Hello, darl,” she’d say when Josh led me by the hand past her up to his room. “You two behave yourselves up there!”
I would feel Josh wince beside me, wince at his mother’s crassness, her carelessness, the knot of her dressing gown loose, her feet encased in giant puppy-dog slippers.
“Why didn’t get you dressed, Mum?” Josh would ask. “You knew Tallulah was coming.”
“Well, excuse me, Peter Prissy,” she’d say. “You don’t mind, do you, love?” and I’d shake my head, embarrassed for all of us.
Pearl worked as a cashier at the TAB, had one friend called Caroline she went to the local football club with every Friday night, worked split shifts to put a roof over her son’s head, and told him that when his father, Davie Keaton, had gone to sea, it was no great loss.
Maybe it wasn’t, but when I saw the way Josh was with my parents, the way he sat at our table and drank in Harry’s words, I wondered.
I didn’t like going to Pearl Keaton’s, didn’t like the lies I had to tell Harry and Rose to get there.
I hated the shut-in rooms and the stained linoleum, the inevitable tussle on Josh’s bed once we climbed the stairs to his room while he grappled with my clothes and I grappled with my Catholic sensibilities.
It seems faintly ridiculous now, but it was 1982, I was a sixteen-year-old Catholic schoolgirl, and every time Josh touched me, somewhere in the back of my mind was Eve giving Adam that damn apple and cursing humankind for all eternity.
I was scared of sinning, worried Josh would no longer be interested in me if I let him go “all the way,” afraid I would fall pregnant and have to move away like Lisa Fitzgerald, banished to a grandmother in outback Longreach, her baby stowed away in the car like a fugitive.
“You don’t,” mothers up and down every street in our neighborhood told their daughters, “want to end up like Lisa Fitzgerald,” as if the direst thing in the world had happened to her, that she had caught leprosy or had been sold into white slavery.
I thought about Lisa, a vague imprint of a tall girl with glasses and a hooting laugh, and wondered how she did “end up.” I wondered if she knew she was the poster girl for celibacy at Saint Rita’s and that I thought of her every time Josh reached for me.
I would be wrapped around him, our limbs as close as crossed fingers, torn between wanting him and the knowledge that good girls didn’t do this kind of thing and bad girls got sent to Longreach.
“Oh for God’s sake,” Annabelle said to me one morning, “all this puffing and panting is nauseating, why don’t you just have sex with him and be done with it?”
“I just don’t want to yet.”
“Why? It’s really no big deal.”
“Annabelle, I really wish you’d stop going on about this—why is so important to you anyway?” I asked. “You haven’t even had sex yet.”
“Oh, yes, I have, and let me tell you, it’s really nothing to write homosapien about.”
“You’ve had sex?”
“Yes.”
“Who with?”
“Mark Morris.”
“You’ve had sex with Mark Morris?”
“Yep, in his car.”
“You had sex with Mark Morris in his car?” I didn’t even know she knew Mark Morris, the vice captain of the Saint Joseph’s rugby team, save for occasionally saying, “Get stuffed, Mark” when he called out something stupid when we walked past.
“Look, Tallulah,” she said, “as much as I’d like to stand around while you repeat everything I say, I’ve actually got some homework to do.”
We kept walking down the street together, but now Annabelle was doing this weird, exaggerated sashay, sort of swishing her hips and swinging her schoolbag in front of me, like a pendulum.
I kept my head down and stared at the footpath, confusion prickling at my body and, for some reason I could not understand, tears gathering deep in my lids, hot and salty and childish.
Annabelle could swing her bag all she liked and pretend that this was just another conversation on our way home, but she knew and I knew that it wasn’t.
We kept walking in silence until she stopped, put her bag down, and said, “Why are you carrying on about this?”
“I’m not carrying on, I haven’t said a thing.”
“Presactly, Tallulah. Look, I don’t have to tell you every little thing that happens in my life, do I? I’m sure you don’t tell me every detail of what goes on between you and Josh.”
I kept my head down, afraid to look at her, this new Annabelle who had not only had sex but had also started to keep secrets from me.
We came to the corner where we usually had our “Your house or mine?” conversation and I headed straight for home without her, and straight to my room.
“Lulu,” Rose called out, “aren’t you coming downstairs? There’s fruit and cookies on the table,” but I buried my head in my pillow and knew I couldn’t eat a thing.
That night, Josh took me to the movies in a borrowed car.
Coming home, we pulled over on the street next to mine and he started kissing me, tugging at my jeans and pulling my belt loose.
“Don’t, Josh,” I said.
“Why not, Tallulah-Lulu?” he mumbled, face in my hair.
“I’m just not ready.”
“Jesus, Lulu.” He let out a long sigh. “What’s wrong this time?”
“Nothing’s wrong, Josh, I just don’t want to.”
Drumming the steering wheel with his fingers, Josh said, “Well, when are you going to want to?”
“I don’t know,” I answered. “Stop asking me all the time.”
He ran his hands through his hair. “There’s lots of girls I could ask, you know.”
“Fine,” I snapped, opening the door. “Ask one of them, then.”
“Maybe I will,” he said, as I slammed the door behind me, and Josh drove off, and I stood there wondering if that was the end of us, if we would finish as quickly as we had started.
But Josh came over the next morning with a bunch of carnations he’d bought at the service station on the way and said he was sorry.
“I know I shouldn’t pressure you,” he said, scratching the back of his ear. “Do you want to, like, get married or something? Would that help?”
I laughed and took him in my arms, and told him that wouldn’t be necessary.
To get to Craybourne Island you drove across a dubious bridge in Wattle Beach that seemed to sag every time a car rumbled over it, and where during the day kids jumped like starfish from its railings, shouting to the sky as they leaped.
I had been to Craybourne many times, day trips with Harry and Rose, and later sandwiched between Mattie and Sam, the boot loaded with picnic baskets umbrellas and collapsible chairs.
I’d been there on school excursions year after year to study Craybourne’s famous soldier crabs; I’d been with Stella and Simone on a camping trip when we were twelve; I’d been with Annabelle, who pronounced it Cray-boring; but now, driving across the bridge with Josh, I felt like I had never seen it before in my entire life.
The bridge rumbled beneath the car as it always had, the boats bobbed for apples in the harbor, but nothing seemed familiar at all, sitting in Josh’s new car with my hands in my lap, rubbing my thumbs together.
He swung into the car park of the Half-Moon Motel, its neon sign flashing a sliver of a crescent every few seconds.
Josh turned off the engine, leaned over.
“How’s that for romance, Lulu?” he said. “I’ve brought you the moon.”
“It’s very nice, Josh,” I answered, trying to find something to say. “Very lunar.”
It was my seventeenth birthday and I had spent it lying to Harry and Rose, telling them I was staying at Annabelle’s for the night. “Annie’s making me a cake,” I’d said, half hoping, I think, to be caught out by the improbability of my words.
Josh kissed me, his mouth deep on my neck, his hands underneath my shirt, then, his voice saying, “Let’s go inside.”
I followed him with my head down, scared stiff that someone I knew—or worse, someone my mother knew—would see me there, loitering with Josh Keaton at the reception desk of the Half-Moon Motel.
“With intent,” Annabelle said the next day when I told her not quite everything.
“What?”
“You were loitering with intent.”
We giggled together on her bed, and I asked, “With intent to what?”
“With intent, young lady,” she said sternly, “to get pollinated.”
Then we collapsed in laughter.
But that night wasn’t really what Annabelle and I had reduced it to while giggling on her bed.
Not at all.
“Come here,” he’d said.
The half-moon outside blinked on and off, so every few seconds I could see his brown arms reaching out for me, his hands clasping the back of my neck, pulling me toward him.
Tracing the outline of my lips with his finger, he took my hand in his and slid it lazily down my body, hooking his fingers onto my skirt.
“Wait,” he said, smiling and swinging his legs off the bed.
From his sports bag he took out a candle, his cassette recorder, and a tape.
He set the candle out on the cupboard beside the bed and lit it, its tiny flame finding beauty in the shadows, and clicked the tape into the recorder.
“I made this for you,” he smiled.
I closed my eyes as he came back to the bed, feeling his breath on my body, and his hands running over my skin, the two of us laughing at the goose bumps they produced.
“You’re beautiful, Tallulah-Lulu,” he said.
“So are you,” I replied.
And as the sea and his sixteen-track mixtape played the soundtrack of us, so we were.