Crushed Sugar

By Tracey-Anne Forbes

We disappear into the poinciana shadows, into the dream that alcohol and music and love create. I go in a dream, in a myth. This is how it should be, I think. This is the pagan story, the truth the fairytales promised us, the ending imagined from the earliest of murmured memories...
But myths are not founded on reality, and fairytales do not delive

• Language: English
• Publisher: Debbie Lee
• Release date: Jul 31, 2015
• ISBN: 9781760410063

Book preview

Part I: Seule

Schoolies’ Week

She has bought

red-glossed metal hoops

to thread through her ears.

---

At the table, drinking wine,

she laughs a heavy-lipped

shiny-tongued laugh,

twirling loops of hair

between finger and thumb,

eyes fringed, dark-centred half-moons.

---

Later, on the salt-crusted sand

she is coffee skinned,

honey-furred,

lilting her arms and skirts

in a bare-foot, flame-shadowed

scarf-dance.

She has become the wind,

the warm ocean and the guitar waves.

---

For the rest of her life

she will hold out her arms

for such moments.

Hair

The palm leaves smatter light like silver spears. They clash against the house, and the roof pops as if seeds, instead of heat, are falling on it.

Kate lies in her single bed in the cupboard-sized room at the back of the house and listens. Against the background of the noise of the falling heat above and the rising heat in the room beside hers, she stares through the palm fronds to the mango tree thrusting over the neighbours’ fence. Its branches are heavy with new fruit, like hair heavy with beads. The leaves of the tree lie flat and still, like a frightened bird’s feathers.

She can’t help imagining them. Lloyd on top, holding Lisa’s wrists, his knees and hips bony, thumping into her soft flesh. His fingers pressing into her arms, leaving bruises, the dark stains of his passion, or ownership.

Lloyd doesn’t live with them but he might as well. For the last three months he’s been sleeping in Lisa’s bed, taking Lisa from Kate. And Jack.

Jack can’t stand him. But then, Jack can’t stand most people. Except Lisa. Even Kate realises Jack is in love with Lisa. Kate doesn’t love Lisa or hate Lloyd, but she doesn’t like Lisa’s friendship being monopolised. Or the way Lloyd’s eyes slide away from hers like sly lizards.

It’s hot. Kate rolls out of bed and moves quietly away from the noises in the next room. In the hallway she bumps into Jack, who’s coming out of the bathroom wrapped in a sarong. Jack’s breasts swing like ripe pawpaws under the patterned cotton of the sarong and her belly is as round and firm-looking as a watermelon. Her acne-scarred face with its thick, fleshy nose and lips is red from showering. Her bleached crew cut is rinsed with green. Only her eyes are beautiful: a glittering, vivid green fringed with thick black lashes. But with those gorgeous eyes she stares abruptly at Kate, taking in her nightdress with contempt; then she pushes past her.

It’s only lately Jack’s hostility has become open. Since she cut her hair. When Kate and Lisa and Jack were at their Catholic girls’ school it had only glimmered like the russet lights in her burnished Irish mane; since they’ve come down from the country to uni, after not even nine months of living together, she’s cropped her hair and seems to thus to have the power to show open hatred. Samson’s mane in reverse. Now her hostility is powerful and contagious and savage; during the day she crams her head with knowledge and at night her body with oil and garlic and beer. When she’s drunk, she leers and spits at anything remotely soft.

Kate has found herself increasingly trying to appease Jack, if only because she is overwhelmed by her as an enemy.

There are puddles of water on the faded lino tiles and a pile of clothes behind the door. The room smells of mildew and steam. On the wall a blu-tacked poster of Elvis Costello is drooping, one corner dog-eared. Kate spreads a bathmat on the puddles and slips off her nightdress. She looks at herself in the spotted mirror. Her body is lean and strong; her skin is clear and her own hair, just touching her nipples, is straight and glossy brown. From healthy living and exercise. Doing as she’s told. She sighs.

Jack’s still in the kitchen when Kate comes in. She’s eating avocado on toast, reading a textbook. ‘Nice day for a – white wedding…’ is drooling sarcastically from the radio near the toaster.

‘Any tea left?’

‘Yeah.’ Jack doesn’t look up from the text.

Kate takes a mug and a bowl from the draining rack and sits at the laminate table. She pours tea and muesli and picks up a spoon.

‘Bloody capitalist pigs!’

The words, spat rather than said, make Kate jump. She doesn’t reply because she doesn’t really know what ‘capitalist’ means. Jack’s studying Political History; Kate’s doing a Bachelor of Science. But this word has been bandied around a lot lately and, despite her lack of interest in politics, Kate is beginning to feel curious about it. And its implications.

Jack claps the book shut and scrapes back her chair; she clatters her crockery together. She fills the sink noisily and, ignoring the other dirty dishes on the sideboard, washes the things she’s used. ‘Missed a good night last night,’ she throws over a shoulder suddenly.

‘Well… I had a lot of work to do for today.’ Kate can’t help the note of guilt in her voice. Because she knows Jack disapproves of her conscientiousness, but also because, she realises suddenly, she wanted to join in, but was too afraid that her ignorance of the political world, their main topic of conversation, would show. This afternoon, she resolves abruptly, I’ll go to the library and find a book which will explain it all.

‘Coming to the rally this afternoon?’ Again, the words are flung like pebbles.

‘I – ’

‘Yeah, yeah, you got lectures, right?’

‘Well…’

‘You know, your head’s so buried in the sand you wouldn’t know if there was a war around the corner.’ She picks up a tea towel and dries her dishes, glaring at Kate.

Kate hesitates, then doesn’t reply.

Later, when Kate’s back in her room sorting through the notes she’s going to need for the day, she hears Lloyd’s Mini-Moke start up. Then Jack’s guttural voice competing with the unhealthy engine. Lloyd must be giving Jack a lift to uni. Despite hating him, or perhaps because of it, Jack doesn’t mind using him when she can. Especially since she cut her hair.

Then Kate hears a different sound – a sort of groan – and turns from her books to Lisa, standing in the doorway.

And sees that Lisa’s hair is gone. Hacked away. All that’s left is a patchy, furry-looking cap. Like the cropped head of a doll Kate’s brother once mutilated.

‘Oh no, not you, not you too…’

‘What?’ Lisa stands in Kate’s doorway swaying slightly. Her ears protrude pinkly, small and pointed and elfin. ‘What? Oh, the hair. Lloyd and Jack did it last night. Had a few drinks when Bill came round.’ She leans against the door jamb wearily. ‘Got any Panadol?’

Kate stares at her, at her downcast, toothbrush lashes and flat, rather Asian face. She looks younger, boyish, still pretty in an alien, sad sort of way. Like a prisoner, or a cancer victim.

‘Why?’

‘Why? Why what? Oh, the hair. You don’t get it at all, do you?’ Her voice is heavy and weary.

‘No. No, I don’t.’ Kate feels suddenly angry, angry and betrayed. ‘All I see is you and Jack getting in with those punks Lloyd hangs around with, getting further and further in. Getting swept up in it, caught – why do you want to go out of your way to be so ugly?’

‘Because beauty is a capitalist, sexist ploy to keep women subservient to men. To serve their sexual desires.’ Her voice is dull and monotonous. Her face is clay-pale. ‘And babies keep women tied to the home and to the man, the father. Which is why, among other things, I’m having an abortion this afternoon. Now have you got any Panadol or not?’

‘Abortion?’ Kate, still sitting at her desk with her notes in her hands stares stupidly at her.

Lisa comes into the room and sinks onto Kate’s bed. Her lips, full and flat, little-girlish, are drawn together. ‘Yeah. Why do you think I haven’t been going to uni? God, I feel so sick. And now this headache – ’

Kate looks at her wordlessly. Kate knows nothing about how a pregnant woman feels, nothing about abortion or abortion clinics, nothing really even about sex. And hardly anything about Capitalism or Marxism or Sexism. Lisa and Jack seem suddenly like boats torn from their moorings, heading courageously out to the ocean swells, while she, Kate, rocks uncomfortably, bumping the dock in their wake.

‘The Panadol?’

‘Oh – sure – here.’ Kate rummages in a desk drawer then hands Lisa a card of tablets. ‘I thought you were on the pill?’

‘Yeah. But I missed it a couple of times. Didn’t think it would really matter. It does. Thanks.’

Their hands touch briefly, and Lisa grimaces.

‘Will you be all right? Is Lloyd taking you? Do you want me – ’

‘Yeah, he’ll take me. It is his fault too, after all. Didn’t want to miss the rally, but he’ll bloody well have to. You going?’

‘To the rally? Not – this time.’ Kate turns back to her notes and bundles them neatly. ‘Do you have to stay in overnight?’

‘Nuh. Be home after the anaesthetic wears off.’

‘Oh.’ Kate wants to say more, wants to say she’ll be here if Lisa needs her; but she thinks that somehow it would sound clichéd, and that anyway this is something between Lisa and Lloyd.

Lisa stands up wearily. ‘I’m going to get some tea. See if I can keep it down with these.’

‘Okay. Lisa – I – hope it goes well.’ Is that what you say about such things?

Lisa smiles faintly from the doorway. ‘Ta.’

Left to herself, Kate sits quite still. On the desk in front of her is a physics textbook, with swirling coloured lines on it, all the colours intricately and precisely twisted into spirographs. In a totally manufactured, perfect pattern. Her hand, human, slim and brown, lies beside it.

Next year, she thinks, I’ll be in second year. And I’ll still be living with them because I don’t know anyone else in this city. Next year will be 1980, the beginning of a new decade.

The palm fronds crash against the roof suddenly, and she looks up, startled, to her window. But all that is there is her own reflection in the dirty glass. Her face is small and pale in its glossy frame of hair. She stares and stares at it, until she realises with horror that she is imagining how she would look with the hair gone.

Cat Catch

Rain in fat drops, cold as coins, hit the South Brisbane platform and fizzled into the concrete. Midnight in January, and the earth still stirred with heat.

Kate flicked the elastic backs of her web-and-stud shoes from her heels, and eased her feet onto the warm pavement under the train shelter. A blister bled on the middle toe of each foot and her soles burned. She lifted one foot and massaged it gently, flicking a glare at the only other person waiting for the train: a red-haired man slouched against the wall of the closed ticket office, who was looking at her exposed thigh. He turned away.

She dropped the foot and slumped, shoving her elbows onto her knees, and pushing her chin up wearily with her cupped hands.

A long night – too long. Her head buzzed with weariness and her black Giorgio Chiari mini clung in cloying polyester dampness to her torso. A walk in the rain would be welcome, she thought, if only it kept raining for another half-hour, till her train stop. Then a cold shower and the fan on full, her cool cotton sheets, and sleep.

Not too many more nights, she consoled herself. Not too many more nights now, and she’d quit. Quit working nights, period. Go out and enjoy what those she served enjoyed.

Ever since she’d moved to Brisbane from the central Queensland cotton town of Emerald, she’d survived on night work. First as a ‘flower girl’, driving from Ferny Grove to Jindalee to the posh pubs at Riverside, to entice young and not-so-young men flushed with drunken sentiment to pay outrageous prices for carnations or roses for the girls they hoped to lay. Then she’d moved to waitressing, something she’d trained in at TAFE in Emerald, balancing trays of drinks and fanning platters expertly at impatient – whether from desperate bonhomie or genuine glee – punters at the