Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS WRITER.
We had been driving for six hours now and although it was nearly 4 pm the sky’s light had painted a dusky pink over the horizon. It was hot and sweaty, my jean shorts stuck to the skin folds in my legs as we got out of the car. Darel had already begun walking down the dirt track, “it’s down here love”. I knew where we were heading but the familiarity was lost on me. I hadn’t been to Fosterville in thirteen years and it had collapsed into a ghost town only a few years after I left on a hot night, not too dissimilar from this evening’s. Darel had lived in a neighbouring town working on a farm. Everyday he would walk down my main street carrying a stack of wood and wheat to swap for gas and whiskey, the boss wants what the boss wants, he would say. I was too scared to tell him where I lived out of fear he would rambunctiously turn up and knock on my front door to ask me out. It wasn’t that I didn’t fancy him to begin with in fact I think I have been infatuated ever since I can remember. There were almost no dark skinned boys in our town; it was white and rural, hot and always watching. I had always hated that. One day I was walking out of the very milk bar that I’m looking at now and walked straight into these gangly pair of limbs. Everything flew up into the air and before I could properly gage the situation, I felt his skinny arms catch me before I tumbled out onto the street. His dark eyes and black hair stared straight into my eyes, my dirty blonde hair. I was fourteen and three months and the only thing I had ever heard of the farm hands were anecdotes from my father.
“Trouble, that’s what those kids are, who even knows where their families are.”
This hypocritical advice was offered to my sister on a daily basis as she was always asking to go to disco’s with Darel’s cousins or other local boys that were “just no good, darling.”
Darel’s cousin was a tall boy who rode a dirt bike and cat called all the teenage girls after they left church. Because of that I felt embarrassed to be now in the arms of “trouble”. My dad was a strict man but a loving father and I knew with certainty that I did not want him walking down that street to see me gushing in the arms of the farm hand, smiling. And because of that I never told my father or my sister that Darel had said, “it’s you!” and for the first time since I can remember I felt like I really knew someone. The moment was fleeting and I quickly gathered my satchel that lay open on the floor and hurried off home. Coming home I felt like I had a secret. It was mine and mine only, this secret divulged into fantasy that was mine to control until one night my sister, who had been out drinking by the dam, caught me sneaking back in through our bedroom window.
“Where have you been?”
She was drunk and even though she was only a few years older than me I knew this wouldn’t stop her from yelling out to our father who would be sleeping on the couch, waiting, waiting for us to come home.
We were never close, my sister and I. She and my father seemed to be apart of this secret club, always invisible and silent to me, I was never invited. After I was born my mother suffered from what is now known as post natal depression and after my second birthday she withdrew herself from the celebrations to hang herself in our garage. I always knew my sister partially (mostly) blamed me for her death but I could never resent her as the only proof that I saw of her existence was one small photograph of her dressed in her brother’s Sunday suit, holding her father’s unlit cigar. That night I lay still on my bed listening to the sounds of mosquitos biting my toes.
The car was still running as I traced my steps down to dirt road, I remember walking down here as a young girl. There lay the grave, “loving wife and loving mother”, and as I felt Darel’s fingers grasp in between mine the clouds opened up and buckets of hot Melbourne rain fell onto my shoulders.
“Shall we make a run for it?”