Ice-skating

Dom always calls it ice-skating, ice-skating but with cars. Sometimes, late in the evening, we go up near Lake Parramatta when there aren’t too many people about and take his car ice-skating after our parents have gone to sleep. Up here, the roads are wide open and the houses all sit like lonely leftovers in their squat concrete blocks.

Dom lets me drive sometimes but tonight I’m in the back-middle seat. Dom’s driving and his girlfriend’s sitting in the front next to him with her hand on his leg. ‘Faster,’ she calls out and I can see her grabbing his leg more tightly. Dom speeds up and drives another few blocks before hitting the brakes. We slide forward for what feels like forever. The concrete turns into a plain of smooth ice below the tires of the car.

‘You’re crazy,’ his girlfriend calls out. He turns up Dr Dre on the radio and I watch from the back as Dom rubs her knee and inches his hand up closer between her legs. Dom gets all the girls. I don’t get any but I like to watch Dom so that I can learn something I might be able to use later.

‘Time for a drink?’ his girlfriend calls out, passing their bottle of vodka to the back seat of the car. I take it, holding the neck of the bottle with one hand. I suck down the thrill of it. It has the taste of her lipstick still on the rim. I imagine this is what sex tastes like, kind of sticky and sweet and burning with the aftertaste of Listerine.

When I hand it back, she looks hot and excited like she’s ready for the future to keep coming and coming. ‘Figure eights,’ Dom calls out and suddenly we are swerving into the front of someone’s yard and back again and back. I watch the trees just standing there at the side of the road. They look at me, shocked.

I lean forward between them and watch as Dom’s girlfriend pours the vodka into her mouth: it streams out from the sides of her lips as the car swings around.

Dom drives faster, hits the brakes and turns the wheel hard. The world goes into slow motion. We pirouette again and again and suddenly I feel as though I am watching the whole thing from outside of my own body looking back at myself. Dom’s girlfriend is screaming. Dom is laughing. I am outside of myself and then – literally – I am on the outside. I feel my body fly through the windscreen, landing on someone’s lawn with a thud, the bone in the arm I land on snaps apart like a twig.