Max, don't have sex with your ex

Max, don't have sex with your ex.
It will make your life complex.
- E-Rotic, 1994

I awoke to a house submerged in darkness. The TV was off; the clock on the DVD player read 21:43. I found my boxers and shirt discarded near the couch, fingers still trembling gently as I put them on. I couldn’t account for my last two hours, other than the rather disappointing explanation that I’d simply crashed out afterwards. It hadn’t lasted long – maybe twenty minutes, thirty max – but neither of us would have survived much longer, given the intensity of our lovemaking. Lovemaking? Not really right, not even close. And fucking is too primal, too animalistic – though it wasn’t exactly short of that. What it was, I recognised in the still of the aftershocks, was breakup sex – angry, vindictive, deliberate. And explosive. As was Bethany’s climax. I’d never seen her come like that, arching her back and baring her sharp little teeth and screaming her orgasm into the blackness, cursing resentfully, her lithe, sweat-streaked body illuminated by the flickering light of the screen. Alarmed neighbours or passers-by might have feared an exorcism was taking place, and was either going very right, or very wrong. Just as well I was moving house soon.

Who was this astonishing, shameless, intense little girl who’d shown up in my living room, and what had she done with my former fiancee?

And more to the point, where was she now?

Ha. That I could have a guess at; I’d been loved and left. It figured. If anything it was the one bit of tonight that actually made sense: leave before questions get asked. I’d done it before, to other girls back in the dim and distant past, and I could remember and recognise it being done to me. I did it to avoid complicated, awkward situations in the future. It usually did bugger all to prevent them happening though, which is why I knew this situation would probably get no less complicated or awkward just because she’d fled into the night rather than staying to explain, for instance, why she’d decided to turn up unannounced after months without any meaningful contact. And why that meaningful contact, when it came, turned into borderline-insane, couch-shredding breakup sex (and yes, the lounge suite was on eBay as well – sincerest apologies to the nice couple who won that auction.) Presumably if she knew, that’d make one of us at least. She still hated me – it was hard to interpret the scratches and the fury in her eyes as affectionate - and I can’t say I really thought much of her, either. And things were still happening to me rather than me making them happen. So much for being proactive rather than reactive.

So what was I to do? About all I could do in the circumstances. I dug a beer out of the furthest depths of the vegetable crisper, considered turning on the lights and/or finding my pants, but figured the night was warm and clammy enough to go without light or heat, and I could do with some fresh air to soothe my fevered brow.

The sliding door creaked on the surface oxidation of its runners – even aluminium window frames suffered this close to the beach – and I stepped out into the cool of the balcony, armed with beer and boxers. The lights of Point Lookout descended into the darkness ahead, framed by the larger trees at the perimeter of the property. Another beautiful night in paradise.

What the fuck is going on, I thought aloud.

The sea breeze whispered a cryptic response.

“You tell me and we’ll both know,” said the girl on the balcony.

She was literally ‘on’ the balcony, perched on the flat part of the rail at the corner where it met the wall, her back resting against the brickwork, her knees drawn up to her chest. The railing was only about six inches wide across – plenty of room to balance a beer or a bowl of chips, less so to balance a girl, particularly with a ten foot drop through the darkness to the ground below. Then again, while Bethany wasn’t quite ballerina-tiny, she was still only a little thing. I couldn’t read her expression in the darkness, even after I’d lit a citronella candle and parked myself on the worn old couch, propping my feet on the barbeque table (more to get them near the candle than out of any sense of relaxation.) OK Angus, here we go, I tensed myself. Game on. All those long-rehearsed set piece arguments started welling up, ready to be deployed in the pursuit of Ultimate Victory. Whatever the fuck that actually meant.

“Sorry,” she said, “I was going, honest. I just… didn’t get far.”

“Door’s that way,” I indicated, with as much of a smile as I could come up with to suggest I didn’t want her to leave. Then, figuring I didn’t want to make it ambiguous, I added, “Take a seat if you like. A more comfortable one, I mean.”

“I’m fine.”

Lingering pause.

“Aren’t you cold? Can I get you a drink or something?”

“I’m fine.”

Back to pause mode. She was wearing a clean white shirt – probably one of mine, so clean couldn’t be absolutely guaranteed – and behind her crossed ankles, I glimpsed-without-trying-to-look-honest white panties, probably from the stash of clean underwear she’d left here, about a thousand years ago when we still did the occasional cohabitation thing. I’d long since packed her stuff up into a nice neat pile near the door, waiting for her to come and collect it since mid-October. Maybe that was what this was about. Ironic sense of timing, if so.

There was maybe twelve feet between us, across the darkness of the deck, but it may as well have been a canyon, or the chasm between two skyscrapers. I looked at her and she looked at me. Well, she didn’t really look at me. She didn’t really seem to be looking at anything, just staring off into space. She was somewhere Zen, it seemed. I wondered if I should just fuck off and let her get back to meditating on my bloody balcony. There she was, asking to be shouted at, pleading to be told she was a vindictive, manipulative bitch with a family full of fucktards who owed me a new D4 Rocknroll Motherfucker T-shirt, but… I couldn’t. Because I honestly had no idea what to say.

So I said the first thing that came into my head. Usually works.

“That… wasn’t me. With the camera. In case you were wondering…”

“No, I know,” she said quickly. “I had a quick flick forward when you were out of it.”

“How long was I out to it?” And then realising that was a stupid question, as the answer was fairly obviously ‘Up to now’, replaced it with “Sorry if I just faded out straight after…”

A hint of a smile, if slightly sardonic. “Almost straight after. You put your arms around me and cradled me for a little while, which was kind of sweet. Unexpected. Weird… but sweet.” More than a hint of a smile now. “But then you fell asleep… so I went through your porn collection instead.”

“Look…” Was this even worth trying to explain? It was putting me on the back foot already. “I was clearing out some old stuff from our old sharehouse, and I thought I’d found a bunch of old demo CDs from the band days…”

“I’m sure someone would believe you,” Bethany replied sharply, but without malice. “You might have gotten away with it too, your friend’s quite camera-shy. Heard and never seen. Very strange relationship they must have had.”

There’s a fucking irony, I thought. Then thought hur hur, I made a funny. My silence was taken as affirmation of her position. Fine by me. I wasn’t here to argue about that.

“Tamarine Cernak,” she then said, apropros of not much I could make sense of.

“Huh?”

“The first girl,” she replied knowingly. Ah. That girl from that show. “The blank look did kinda give it away.”

I grinned. “Tamarine. I was thinking Tamarind, Tamarillo… I had a fruit fixation.”

She giggled at my admission. “As did her friend, apparently…”

A slightly less little pause, after the mild levity had subsided. Her eyes met mine, but it was quite some time before she decided on what she wanted to say. Fine by me, the quiet of the night was calm and soothing c.f. the random shitfight of competing thoughts that were rebounding inside my head. Would have traded anything for two bucks worth of clarity.

“Angus?” Bethany looked almost endearingly baffled. “They call you Angus, yeah? This big rock star you seem to be…”

“No bigger than before,” I replied. “Same dimensions as always…”

It was a crass line, but it scored a wry smirk. “Angus…” She still wasn’t sure it sounded right. “Angus, who are you?”

A weighted question. “Could ask the same of you,” I reasoned carefully, “Little Miss Demolition Expert.”

She flinched a little. “I’d say sorry,” she said, “but I’d be lying.”

“That’d be a one-off.” I couldn’t help it, it slipped out.

“Yes, and I’d be on my own there, wouldn’t I? I’m sure you meant it every time when you said I love you. Never just words to you, were they?”

OK, so we’ve ratcheted up to Defcon Lots already. Usually it took a good hour or three of arguing to get to this stage in the breakup fight. Which, I was pretty sure, was what this is. Several months behind schedule, but better late than never.

Her words hung in the chasm between us.

“It’s OK, you don’t have to answer,” she said, more conciliatory. “I never actually meant it either.”

That actually hurt, and I’m not quite sure why. Maybe my ego had liked the idea of not being the one most in love, the one who’d invested the most wasted effort into the relationship. Ah well, at least I knew where I stood. In concrete boots, on a flatbed truck, being backed out along deep-sea pier six.

“You were going, I think you said...”

Ah fuck. That sounds like loser talk. It’s only a flesh wound you fairy. (Fuck me, you liked her, didn’t you? You really, actually liked her. You stupid, hapless bastard. After all she did to you. You’re getting old and soft and vulnerable in your dotage. Back with it, genius, she’s talking again.)

“If that’s what you want, rock star.” It was almost a sneer. “You can pretend to be the jilted lover if you want. Pretend your heart was broken. Pretend you even cared. Pretend it was me you were thinking about when we used to sleep together.”

“We used to sleep together?”

“Nice.”

“No, I mean… did you ever actually sleep? You were always gone before I woke. Like I was too much of an embarrassment to wake up to.” If I keep banging away on this anvil I should be able to hammer this into position for a set-piece on goal…

“No,” she said.

“No, I wasn’t an embarrassment?” I retorted. “So all that angst from your family, I must have imagined?”

“No, I never slept,” she replied. “I don’t sleep much. I just don’t.”

“What are you, a fucking vampire?”

A sardonic smile. “Too hard to get vegetarian meal options.”

“I thought they were all vegetarians now, Twilight style…”

Bethany rolled her eyes. Which surprised me, last I’d seen of her bedroom bookcase (fleetingly, in daylight) it’d had a good few examples of Meyer’s slop and detritus littered thereabout. “If you’re going to make me a fucking vampire,” she insisted sharply, “at least make it a proper one and not a sparkly fucking vampire.”

“Funny,” I said. “I had you pinned as a total Twilight fangirl.”

“Yeah, that’s me,” she said flatly. “I’m totes sparkly.” She was looking out into the distance, for what I wasn’t sure. “I can’t be mad at you for not caring enough to bother. Even after two years together, everything I know about you I only know from reading in the newspaper. You have any idea why that might be?”

Ah, yeah. I was kinda waiting for that. Didn’t mean I had much of an answer.

“…Because journalistic integrity is dead?” I offered after a while.

“Look… I’m not angry, or sad, or hurt. Well, I am, but there’s drugs for that,” she said flippantly. “It’s probably what I deserve for picking someone based on their lack of interest in asking questions. I just didn’t expect it to blow up in my face so spectacularly.”

OK, now I was starting to get lost. “I’m sure I told you I used to be in a band…”

“Yeah, yeah. A band. Playing someone’s 21st, or uni band competitions or whatever. You didn’t tell me you were a fucking rock star. With, like, fans and albums and stuff. There I was, thinking I had this nice, dependable, slightly vacant, reasonably dull older guy, with a nice car, a decent job and a cool house…”

“Going, going and gone,” I remarked. “In reverse order.”

“You’re selling?” she contemplated. “Crittenden will be interested.”

“Crittenden can fuck off,” I replied stoutly. “I’m using the same outfit who found it for me in the first place.”

“I meant,” she said, “as a purchaser. He could run right over the back of the ridge and link up with that pink monstrosity on the southern side. Of course,” she added archly, “he’d need council approval…”

“Like that’s going to be a problem,” I responded, then realised that was exactly what Bethany was suggesting. She went for subtlety, I went for Stating The Bleeding Obvious. I hadn’t adjusted for Bethany suddenly inventing a sense of humour. “Well, we’ll have to put a stop to that too.”

“I don’t think your brand of cricket bat diplomacy is going to get the point across the way you’d like it to.”

Ouch. I couldn’t tell whether she was trying to be affectionate, sarcastic or just breathtakingly insensitive. I decided to take offence, just in case.

“I have other tricks in my bag for Crittenden, he’s got problems ahead if he causes me any further grief. I have, as a wise man once said, a cunning plan.”

“Would that cunning plan involve, I don’t know… sleeping with his daughter?”

She knew. The smile was light-hearted, or tried to be, but she knew. I was losing this, badly.

“Not so much,” I replied carefully. “I’m pretty sure his cunning plan involves claiming I have, though, in order to put me under financial pressure to sell on account of having no job…”

“But you slept with her, yeah? You finally gave into temptation… and yes, it was that obvious you were tempted,” she added archly. “And don’t flatter yourself, it doesn’t really bother me if you did or didn’t.”

I doubted that, otherwise why bring it up?

“It bothers me that your father and hers are besties though, and that’s why I’m making no fucking comment on the matter to you in particular.”

She glowered at me. It was definitely a glower, even in the limited light it metered as such. Significant disapproval. I’d seen this sort of thing before, particularly from her.

“It’s pretty insulting to suggest I’d have anything to do with getting you suspended. What Gerald and Roger Crittenden get up to is their business. Don’t know, don’t care, not involved.”

“You know, I’d love to believe that,” I remarked. “I’d love to believe you have nothing to do with the fact I’ve still not been paid for my last two weeks’ work at SCC. I’d love to believe you have nothing to do with the fact every time I pull out of my driveway, there’s your brother’s fucking police truck in my rear vision mirror. I’d love to think…”

“Why start now?” Damn, she was quick. “It’s not my doing,” she reiterated sharply. “Any of it. I’ve been trying very hard to forget you exist for the past two months. Trust me.”

Her words hung in the air for a moment. Mainly because I was weighing up whether I was going to get away with my intended response. I was well behind on the scoreboard, time for a Hail Mary.

“Trust you,” I repeated. “I’ve heard that before tonight…”

And with that, a mental rewind to two hours before, an intense, wild-eyed little thing riding me bareback for all she was worth and murmuring, pleading, that I could come inside her, it was okay… trust me, she said. Right now, that instant seemed a thousand years ago. By then it had been way too late for second thoughts, plan Bs, or wondering whether we should have stopped and checked the cupboards for contraceptives before we threw ourselves into this. Whether I trusted her or not, that was what was going to happen. And did.

She chewed her bottom lip, her blushing cheeks betraying her. She raised her eyes to meet mine. Still no closer to understanding her. Or understanding why we were so profoundly incapable of sharing a wavelength only hours after becoming as intimate as two people could ever be with each other. Two years, an engagement ring, and still the question, as valid of her as it was of me: who are you?

“What happens on the field stays on the field,” was her defiant reply.

“That’s what you teach your girls’ netball team?” I asked.

“That’s what you taught my wing attack?” she responded tartly.

I decided that I had a better chance of winning this argument if I just shut the fuck up. Proving me right, the lengthening, confessional silence began to do its work. She hugged her knees closer to herself, and admitted, “It’s… kind of embarrassing. And way too much information, I know. Even for you. But…”

Entire stars and planets were born and dying in the time it took her to get to the point. Which was that her body hated her and wanted her to suffer.

“I get really… really awful period pain. Always have. I mean, curled up on the floor, scratching at the carpet sort of period pain. You don’t even remember, do you? You seemed to know to keep the hell out of the way…”

She spoke softly, but in rapid-fire bursts, as though she thoughts were racing ahead of her words and she occasionally needed to wait for them to catch up.

“It’s OK, I think. I mean I’ve been to every specialist going, it’s not endometriosis or anything that would affect my fertility, should I ever meet anyone who I might want to settle down with.”

She offered an ironic, slightly embarrassed smile, like she knew she was venturing into uncharted admissions here, but decided to go for it.

“So apparently there’s nothing wrong with me, I just get unbearable period pain, and always have. About the only thing that takes the edge off is the pill. So, I’ve been on it pretty much forever. So…”

So... that disclosure might have been handy a while ago. Two years ago for starters. I happened to be an enthusiastic aficionado of the bareback sex. For previous reference see previously published research conducted with Dr Artemisia Bailey on sabbatical at the University of Airlie Beach, 1998.

“If you’re worried about... look, we used protection. And there hasn’t been anyone else since you.”

I regretted admitting sleeping with Anna the moment I’d done so, but there was enough plausible deniability (particularly consider I hadn’t dropped a name in there) that even if she did run back to Daddy to tell on me, it was still he-said she-said. Probably.

“Noone else? Not much of a rock star then, are we?” she mused wickedly. “Well below average I’d have thought.”

“Nah,” I replied, “all I gotta do is leave the door unlocked, put on some amateur girl-on-girl stuff and they just wander in of their own accord…”

“Touche,” she said. Then, after a while... “I’m sorry. I am, really. Tonight’s been weird, really fucking weird. I’m in a really messed-up space. I’m sorry if you’re as confused as I am. I can’t imagine it. Maybe as drunk. Probably not as confused. But I didn’t come here… look, all of this, the sex wasn’t what I had in mind when I came here…”

“What did you have in mind?”

“If I knew that,” she replied, “we’d both be a lot further ahead, wouldn’t we?”

A little silence interposed itself between us, while Bethany reviewed her position - still seated precariously on the ledge like a perching sparrow. She still seemed unconcerned by the precipice to her right. I wasn’t. I kept expecting her to disappear from sight with a sudden squeal and a sickening splat.

“It’s that… there’s two Andrews, or Anguses, or whoever you are. There’s two of you, and I don’t know either of you. Even though I told at least one of you I loved you… and it’s rich of me to accuse anyone else of personality disorder I realise, but… there’s two of you. I know Andrew Young, teacher, friendly, sociable, sense of humour, nice house, a bit dull…”

“Enough with this ‘bit dull’ stuff, yeah?”

“But he’s dead, isn’t he? Or missing, or lost, or never really existed,” she said, a little accusingly. “And then there’s this ‘Angus’, this beer-swilling, groupie-screwing, bogan chauvinist thug who plays the guitar and writes songs about drinking beer and screwing groupies, because all he does is drink beer and screw groupies... And everyone’s heard of him except me because I only listen to crappy pop stations. And he’s best mates with the guy who wrote Mesmerising and Love is Cruel. Which is pathetic, because I was planning to use Mesmerising as my wedding song…”

“Should have said before, Marty could have flown in with his helicopter and played it. He’s done it before. Weddings, christenings, bar mitzvahs…”

“What I’m saying,” she said finally, “is that I felt we kind-of had a arrangement. Of some sort-of kind-of sort, anyway. Maybe it was just in my head. Probably… almost definitely, actually, it was just in my own head.”

She smiled self-deprecatingly, but wouldn’t raise her eyes to meet mine. She was staring at her toenails. They were painted a deep ruby red with sparkly flecks, like the paint on the old Atomic Mandarin II. I wondered if she’d ever considered doing them in orange. Maybe a ‘Holley Equipped’ ankle tattoo to go with. The height of fahhsshun.

“You know... you and I, we’d get married and be content, and settled, and normal, and all our skeletons would stay in their closets, and we’d love each other, or pretend to, and live happily ever after, or as near to it as we were ever likely to get.”

“That was the deal as far as I saw it,” I offered. Sounded kinda quaint and beautiful, the way she put it. Might have been my one last decent shot at that sort of happiness, even if it was a lie and a fraud.

She pointed accusingly at me. “So why did you break it by turning out to be some other freakin’ person altogether? That wasn’t in the deal, rock star.”

“I’m not good with fine print,” I admitted. “You should have seen some of the shit contracts we signed back in the Gasket days.” Which was crap, but I’m always happy to make stuff up in pursuit of a laugh. It’s better than having to be honest. Particularly in this sort of territory.

“It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” she said, defensively. “All I ever wanted was someone I could share my secrets with. Without him running like hell.”

“They’re that bad?”

“They’re not good,” she remarked.

“I’ll believe that when I read about them in the Weekend Australian,” I said.

“You see, that’s the thing. I know what your secrets are. And you don’t know any of mine, which doesn’t really seem fair.”

“Do I deserve to?”

“Yeah,” she exhaled, glancing up, “I think so. You deserve that much. Served your time. Two years. Two years you’re never getting back. You didn’t keep the receipt did you?”

I patted down my pockets with a frown. She laughed. She actually laughed. God, I’d missed that laugh. God, I was a fuckwit for still liking this girl. It was post-coital purple haze, nothing more. I’d get over it once the hormones dissipated.

“You at least deserve to know why I’m so messed up.”

“You’re messed up now?”

Bethany laughed again, shaking her head. “You’re good. You never knew, did you? Never even knew. It might have even worked after all…”

The girl on the ledge – and no, she wasn’t coming down any time soon, I’d asked - began her story somewhere near the beginning.

“Might surprise you to know I didn’t expect to marry a rock star,” Bethany said. “When I was a little girl, we used to talk about what sort of man we’d grow up and marry. A bit pre-feminist, but it was the ‘80s and it was the country after all. Some girls said they were going to marry doctors, some firemen, some went all out and decided they were marrying a prince. The ones who’d watched too many Disney movies, I guess. Most of them are probably still looking… I just wanted to marry a fisherman. Pretty dull, yeah?”

“Kinda biblical, I’d have said,” I offered. “Too much Sunday school.”

“You don’t fish, Andrew, do you. Too much excitement for you, I suppose. Does Angus fish?” she jibed. “I’d guess he’s not so good on throwing them back if they’re under the limit?”

“If it’s a size limit,” I quipped in return, “you’d be borderline, little girl.”

She was watching the stars. Don’t know why, they weren’t doing much. “It’s probably a bit Freudian, if not for the fact that Freud’s full of crap. Psych first year,” she threw in by way of explanation. “Didn’t pass, but that wasn’t the point… I did have a point. My Dad taught Brad and I to fish when we were little. Mum hated it, she always stayed at home, wouldn’t even cook the fish we brought home because it stank out her kitchen or something. And Brad hated what the salt did to his hair.” A wry smirk, which I shared. “But me… I just loved it. Everything from organising the bait and tackle – that was my job – to packing the car and helping Dad put the boat into the river. We used to run the boat up into the estuary, through all the winding sandy-banked rivers and up to one of our favourite fishing spots. We never seemed to catch much, but I just liked being with Dad and having him tell me stories about… anything, really. He loved fishing. He always wanted to open a fishing shop. Which was a bit tricky as he was supposed to be a clearance diver for the Navy.”

“He could have maybe run a dragline out the back of the wetsuit?”

Luckily I’m a fast thinker, hey. Hadn’t picked Gerald for ever having done anything non-sedentary in his fucking life, to be honest.

“We moved around a lot, with Dad’s various postings, and we didn’t see him for long periods. Brad and I were born in Sydney, while he was stationed at Garden Island, then we moved up to Cairns for a few years, where we didn’t see him much because he was away so much, so most of my memories – my best memories – are from living on the South Coast, first at Jervis Bay, then up at Nowra when he was transferred to the naval air arm at HMAS Albatross, which meant he didn’t have to go away on exercises any more.”

Her words, once they’d caught up with her thoughts, seemingly came at a hundred miles an hour, slightly breathless. With that, and her slightly wide-eyed, manic stare, I was trying to narrow down what it was she was on. She’d said she was drunk, but I’d have put money down that she wasn’t – certainly hadn’t tasted anything on her breath – and if Bethany-on-drugs didn’t make sense, what the fuck did tonight? Or maybe someone had switched her decaffeinated herbal infusions for a series of triple-shot ristrettos. Self-defence mechanisms were back on the job now. I hadn’t decided whether to hate her, to like her, or to laugh at her and walk away - probably not the latter as it was my house and I lived here - so I just sat and watched her, very carefully. Until I’d worked out what the fuck she was up to.

“It was down on the South Coast was where he taught us to fish. Mum worked at the high school as a teachers’ aide and we had a nice wooden house surrounded by trees, just a few hundred metres from the beach. It was a bit creaky and old and Mum hated the colour and the spiders but it was like living right in the bush. The birds got us up in the mornings, the sound of the surf put us to sleep at night, the possums woke us in the middle of the night, we occasionally found little skinks crawling up the walls, wallabies in the back yard, carpet snakes in the garage... actually Mum hated them too. We used to tear around on our bikes with all the neighbourhood kids, acting up. Swimming, fishing, hide-and-seek, cubbyhouse wars, climbing trees, falling out of trees… The usual.” She knew I was a farm kid, she knew I knew what ‘the usual’ meant. “See that?” she asked, pointing to a barely perceptible nick at the end of one elbow. I saw. I’d probably noticed it before, but never thought much about it. “That’s where they had to run a wire through my elbow into my forearm to keep it straight after I smashed it up falling off the roof trying to get my kite back,” she explained proudly. “Mum was beside herself, but Dad just said, in his quiet, gentle way, if it doesn’t kill you, it makes you stronger. Plus it gives you cool stories to impress everyone with at school.”

“I think I like your Dad,” I said, now that I was suddenly pretty certain her Dad, her real Dad, wasn’t Gerald Toogood. Unless he’d had a lobotomy in the interim, which was always possible. “I like his approach to parenting, anyway.”

She smiled. “Mum was angry because she didn’t want me doing anything to myself which got in the way of my dancing, or my gymnastics. Or my music, or my drama, or any of the fifty million things she pushed me into. By the time I was twelve, two nights a week I had ballet practice, another two nights it was gymnastics, plus most Saturdays as well during school times, if I wasn’t playing tennis. I played the flute in the school orchestra, I had a summer job at the supermarket because ‘it was good for me to know the value of money’ – I had to walk past the bank on the way to ballet, they had the exchange rates in their front window if I needed to know that badly.”

ROFL! A joke! And a good one too. Bloody hell. She was on something. I’d chip in to feed her habit if she was always this much fun on the gear.

“And I still had to get stratospheric grades and perfect report cards or I’d get the silent treatment from Dad and the hairdryer treatment from Mum. Actually he was mostly silent because he didn’t want to get shouted at either.”

“I see why you liked fishing,” I offered. I wondered if she’d ever told this story to anyone before. I liked the idea that she hadn’t. It made me feel somewhat less insignificant given she’d never loved me and stuff. “Several hours of not actually having to do anything, or be answerable to anyone…”

“We didn’t do so much of it by the time I started high school,” she admitted. “No time, really. And Mum and Dad fought a lot, about a lot of stuff – not just me – so I didn’t want to be seen to be taking sides. With Mum you were either with her or against her. Stand in her way and you’d know about it. Dad sure knew about it later that year when he tried to stand in her way over me moving to Canberra to take up an AIS gymnastics scholarship. The family wasn’t moving, just me. They were only a couple of hours away down the highway to the coast, but it might as well have been in another country. I’d never been to boarding school, never been away from my family for longer than a couple of weeks at my grandparents’ place on the mid-north coast. So while I was excited, because Mum thought I was a serious chance of making the Olympics a few years down the track, I was scared out of my mind, which Dad could see. He tried to convince Mum that I should stay here another year and try again next year, when I was a little older. He ended up sleeping in the shop for a week. He’d bought the shop by then since he wasn't diving any more... a little fishing tackle shop near the beach, just as he’d always planned it.”

“Your mother sent you away to Canberra to live.”

“Correct.”

“Aged twelve.”

“Yes.”

“Deliberately.”

“Yes.”

“That’s child abuse, surely? Didn’t DOCS get involved?”

Bethany smiled a little. “It was the crazy Chinese instructors who were the ones who should have been looked at, if not by DOCS then by the immigration department. They were very hard-core. Apparently noone told them Mao wasn’t running things in this cultural re-education facility. They expected perfection, and they got it by screaming at you a lot when their supervisors were looking, and slapping you around when they weren’t. And they didn’t care if you were sick, or injured, or…” An ironic smirk. “Or doubled over in your dorm room with period pain… it was really not a nice place to have that happen for the first time. It’s really not a nice place full stop.”

I knew a bit about that too. I remembered a tour I’d done there on a school trip to Canberra in the early ‘90s – sadly I actually, deliberately chose to go to Canberra on a school trip, largely because it was on the way to a couple of days’ skiing at the NSW Dept of Sport and Rec school camp near Thredbo – and thinking what a run-down, wind-blown, soulless shithole the place was, like something out of a Russian gulag, hideous square-box concrete buildings muralled with lurid government motivational propaganda, strength-through-joy and all that sort of crap. To a twelve year old, it would have been a concentration camp. As Bethany told her story, I’d wondered for a moment whether she might have been one of those forlorn looking kids I’d seen through the portholes of the viewing platform, being barked at by some sour-faced dragon, bounding repeatedly over vaulting horses, along balance beams, and somersaulting off horizontal bars into pits of foam rubber bricks. And then getting up and doing it again, and again, and again. Until the sour-faced dragon was happy, or until the bell rang for mealtime or shift change. But the age difference between us meant she wouldn’t have been there until the mid-90s at least, by which time I was at UQ not behaving myself.

“I’ve seen it,” I said. “Wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.”

Bethany seemed impressed. “See, now I actually know what you do wish on your enemies, and what you then actually do to them...” She held up a wrist, her left. More scars. “See how that bit sticks out at the top, just below the thumb?” She held up her right for comparison, silhouetted by the streetlight in the distance behind. “Scaphoid. Mistimed landing from the vault. Never really healed correctly.”

“They don’t, often enough. Not enough blood flow to the injured area,” I noted. Then, by way of explanation, added, “Bike riders get a lot of scaphoid breaks.”

“You?”

“Mate of mine.” There were few motorcycle injuries Mad Mick Martin couldn’t tell you about from experience. Scaphoids hurt like hell and took ages to heal, plus they made it hard to ride your motorcycle, which made it hard to go out and get bigger, better injuries which you could impress girls with, which was almost Mad Mick’s favourite thing in the entire world. Then again, Casey Stoner had won the previous year’s MotoGP title with a broken scaphoid, so while they hurt, they weren’t insurmountable. In short, teaspoon of concrete and harden up Mick you wet sack of shite.

“He’d have told you they absolutely suck,” she outlined pithily. “Particularly when you have to place your weight on your hand hundreds of times a day. I’m pretty much immune to painkillers now, having chewed through packets of Panadeine Forte like they were Tic-Tacs… amazing what a ‘doctor’ will be prepared to prescribe a thirteen-year-old girl when there’s the prospect of medals in two or three years. I was going to be too young for Atlanta, to Mum’s disgust – because it was my fault I wasn’t born two years earlier - but the Commonwealth Games in KL in 1998 was what I was targeting, or being targeted at, as a prelim to Sydney 2000. Sure, I’d be practically pension-age by Sydney, at seventeen, and I was already being told I was too tall and too overdeveloped – can you imagine it? – but if there was anything left of me by then, I’d be there.” She fixed me with a determined look. “I mean, you would, wouldn’t you? You’d chew painkillers like popcorn and hurt yourself daily and get screamed at by psychos and eat horrible food and have no friends and not actually have your first proper kiss until you were fifteen, and he turned out to be gay… big fucking surprise I know given he was a gymnast too… you’d do all that if the Olympics were in your home town and you had a chance to be there?”

“I was there,” I said. “We played the Aussie team afterparty, supporting someone or other who were very drunk and not very good.”

“Anyone I’ve heard of?”

“Noll… I wouldn’t think so.”

“Get off with anyone?” she inquired. “Any of the gymnasts, for instance?”

“Half my luck,” I replied. “No, one of the swimmers. She’d missed out on gold by some ridiculously tiny amount of time and was pretty bitter about it. I probably didn’t help much. She ended up coming second again, dammit…”

“…You’ve been working on that one for a while, haven’t you?”

“Sadly, yes.”

“Well, as you may have been able to tell by the fact that you didn’t pick me up at the Aussie team afterparty… I wasn’t there. I only lasted two years at the AIS. I was miserable and lonely and homesick, but that wasn’t why I ended up leaving. I left because I’d made a mess in the gym, and they weren’t very happy with me.”

“What sort of mess?”

“Blood, mostly. A few teeth, but mainly blood.”

My expression was the payoff she’d been seeking. She smiled to herself. She’d been working on that a while as well.

“That morning, in training, I’d messed up a dismount from the horse and banged my head pretty badly. I was probably concussed. I felt woosy, had blurred vision and wanted to throw up. Basically a hangover without the fun stuff, though I was still a few years away from learning anything about that. Any responsible, caring, professional coach would have sat me down and told me to have a Powerade and a lie down and forget about it until I could figure out which of the three balance beams in front of me I was meant to be performing on. No such luck with Mao. He just screamed at me louder and stamped his little feet harder, like that was going to magically fix everything. He was still screaming at me long after I’d missed my handplant at the end of the beam, smashed face-first into it, and splattered blood and bits of my face everywhere like a bad zombie film. Peter Jackson’s Brain Dead or something. Someone told me afterwards he was still screaming at the ambulance as it was driving away…”

“It wasn’t too bad I guess. I had to have my face reconstructed and my jaw wired and ended up sipping porridgey stuff through a straw for a few weeks but at least it tasted better than the vile crap we were getting at the AIS. And I got lots of presents and everyone signed my cast and was really nice for once, almost like I actually had friends. But I’d had enough. Fuck the Olympics, I wanted to go fishing with my Dad and my brother, yeah? I called home – as soon as I had use of my jaw again – and told Mum I’d had enough and wanted to come home. She told me I hadn’t, and I wasn’t, and I needed to buck my ideas up very sharpish if I wanted to be in Sydney. I said I can be in Sydney anytime, it’s a five hour bus ride, I can be there in time for dinner and a movie…” She giggled. “No I didn’t. I wish I had. I wish I was funny. Or interesting, or confident, or anything… I can’t even argue properly. Can’t now, couldn’t then. I burst into tears and we had a screaming match, which I lost, because I was fourteen. Then I called my Dad, who by then was sleeping in the shop and not coming home any more, and told him I wanted to come home, and why. And he put down the phone, got in his beaten-up old Land Rover and drove up the highway, in the middle of the night, to come and pick me up early next morning. Then he dropped by the AIS and asked to meet with the trainer who’d been on duty when I’d been injured, and Dad punched him in the face so hard that he ended up sipping porridge through a straw for weeks. He never pressed charges, though. The story around the dorms had been that he was on very dodgy ground with immigration, like a lot of the imported coaches were.”

“Though not as dodgy ground as your Dad was with your Mum, presumably…”

Bethany’s eyebrows raised to the heavens. “She’d started before the truck had even pulled up, she was out in the driveway screaming at him. But he actually stood up to her. He’d spent so long just being hammered by her, day in and day out, that I thought he’d never do it. But he got out of the truck, pointed his finger at her, and told her it was her fault I looked like I’d been hit in the face with an express train, and the next time she had any brilliant ideas as to how to destroy her daughter’s life, she should fucking well keep them to herself.” She smiled. She was close to tears, but she was smiling. “Probably the happiest day of my life. If that’s not a sign of someone who’s deeply fucked up I’m not sure what is.”

I wanted to go to her, to put an arm around her, to tell her it was all right, she was all right. But I couldn’t. That wasn’t what this was about. This was therapy. Catharsis. She wasn’t telling me this because she wanted us to be closer. She was telling me this because she knew we were over – long, long since over, stick a fucking fork in it, it’s done – and she didn’t have to pretend she was normal or well-adjusted anymore. She knew I wasn’t – everyone who’d bought last Saturday’s Weekend Australian knew it, the whole fucking country knew I was a fucking basket-case – she just wanted me to know I hadn’t been the really fucked-up one. I’d always thought we’d had nothing in common, but we did share something after all.

Yay us.

“Says more about your mother than anything,” I replied.

“She got her revenge,” Bethany said. “She took him for everything in the divorce. Despite the fact she had already taken up with the principal of the school she was working at long before she and Dad split, she somehow came off as the victim. She got custody of us, with Dad only able to see us alternate weekends. It broke him. His shop went under, stopped eating, started drinking. One weekend he didn’t come by to collect us and get his fortnight’s work of passive-aggressive mind-games from my mother squeezed into ten minutes. We thought it was weird that he hadn’t come. It was Father’s Day weekend after all. Mum said great, that’s typical of the lousy useless bastard, we’ll go to Australia’s Wonderland tomorrow instead. But we snuck out and rode our bikes over to Dad’s little flat after dark. The front door wasn’t locked. I was the one who found the note. It said, ‘We apologise for the inconvenience’.”

“The meaning of life,” I murmured. “Douglas Adams. One of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy books.”

“Is that what it was?” she asked ruefully. “He used to read a lot – particularly later, when everything except his big pile of second-hand books had been taken in the divorce settlement or sold to pay for alimony – and he loved science fiction. TV too, particularly Red Dwarf and Doctor Who – we used to watch them together, Dad and Brad and I. We used to joke that Mum was the female version of Rimmer.” She blinked, and a pair of crystalline tears raced each other down her face, but she wasn’t going to let that slow her down, wasn’t even going to acknowledge them. Not while the finishing post was so close. “He was a kind, gentle man. We knew, even as kids, he had good times and bad times. He was very quiet in the bad times, but he never got angry, never got upset with us, he just retreated. Maybe for a week or two out of every couple of months, then our funny old Dad would be back. Except now he wasn’t going to be back, and…” She trailed off.

And I felt like a monumental cock for not going to her and wrapping her up and telling her it was going to be all right. But I wasn’t going to, because how the fuck would I know if it was.

“So you found the note,” I repeated. Adding the word ‘suicide’ seemed redundant and unnecessary. “That’d fuck anybody up.”

“Oh, don’t worry about me,” she said. “I only found the note... it was Brad who found the body.”