‘So what?’ I say. ‘You’d rather go head first out the window?’ She doesn’t laugh.
We try not to bring work back to the room, both of us prefer to work in a bloke’s truck or their place, but sometimes if it’s cold out you get more done if you can take them somewhere yourself, so we figure out a rota so that she gets the odd hours, I get the even. She works harder than I do, she says she has a hunger to get out of the Hedland. One afternoon we’re sipping Cokes and ice outside the Four Square on the main street, and Karen points to an Aboriginal girl down an alleyway, leant up against the fence, her eyes closed with the sun in them.
‘See her,’ says Karen, ‘that’s what we got below us. That’s the level down. Those girls haven’t got the drive to get to a better place than this.’ I look at the girl she’s nodding at, a girl about my age, or maybe younger, wearing a soft blue T-shirt and a skirt that doesn’t look comfortable to wear. ‘That one there, I’ve seen her go for a can of beer.’ She turns to me and says in a softer voice, one that I’m not used to hearing come out of her, ‘Don’t ever think that we’re stuck here like her, we’re not, we got a way out if we want it.’
Karen gets picked up pretty soon after that, and I stay there looking at the girl who screws for beer money and I wonder what the difference is. She sees me looking and faces me with her two feet planted apart, and stares back in a way that lets me know there is something different there, but not something I know anything about. I move along, because she scares me.
For a couple of months the Hedland feels safe. I can walk around and I don’t feel eyes on me. I sleep, I don’t wake up and have that feeling someone’s crouched in the corner, that they’ve slunk in the window and they’ve been waiting for me to see them. But on my way to work one night I’m aware of the sound of footsteps close behind me. When I hurry, they speed up. The main thing is not to look, and I push into an all-night café. No one follows me in and I sit on a Coke for an hour and then the waitress starts staring at me and it could be because I’ve only bought a Coke and I’ve stayed too long. She starts walking towards me with a sour look on her face, and an older bloke with a thick middle comes up and sits with me.
‘She’s all right, Marg,’ he says, ‘she’s with me.’ He smiles at me in a way I haven’t seen in a long time, and the waitress rolls her eyes and goes back behind the counter. ‘Beer for your thoughts?’ he asks and gets the waitress to bring two. He’s lonely, and you can tell that he’s not just worried about getting his leg over, he’s worried about talking to someone.
‘Was reading here,’ he says, showing me his newspaper, ‘about how they found a six-foot carpet snake under this old lady’s bed — she’d been dropping food down for her cat when her nurse brought it in. Snake ate the cat and then ate the leftovers too probably!’ He laughs and I laugh too. The waitress looks over.
‘I always wanted a pet at home,’ I say but I shut up about that because the word makes me feel hot and sad. ‘You live far from here?’ I ask the man, wondering if he will try to pick me up later.
‘Yeah. Fair way,’ he says. ‘Come into town now and again for some decent food and stave off the boredom. Was in town tonight to see a film as it goes.’
‘What are you going to see?’
‘Missed it now. They were doing Lady and the Tramp — loved that film.’
I smile. He’s a soft old git. ‘Sorry if I made you miss it.’
‘Nah,’ he blushes a little, ‘don’t be sorry. It’s a treat to talk to someone.’
When we finish our drinks he doesn’t ask for anything, or try to make me stay with another drink. He just tells me to keep safe. ‘I’m in here every few weeks,’ he says, ‘if you ever want a talk and a beer — a night off.’ He shakes me by the hand. ‘It’s been a pleasure talking with you. Name’s Otto, hope we’ll meet again.’ He slips me $20 and leaves $10 on the counter for our drinks, then leaves the café without even a squeeze at my boobs. When he walks he goes from side to side as well as forward.
‘The way I see it,’ says Karen, lighting the second half of her last cigarette, ‘is that you just go straight down. You just dig to China.’
I frown. ‘China’s to the side.’
‘It’s a figure of speech.’ Karen frowns back and inhales the stale cigarette, passes it to me and I know we are friends. ‘England, then. If you want to be specific about it. The main point is, we’re not supposed to be here, us whiteys. The place is trying to spit us out all the time.’ I pass the cigarette back, careful not to take more than is polite. Karen puts it in her mouth and leans forward at me, pointing to her lip, almost burning me with the tip of the cigarette.
‘See this?’ There’s a small white scar there. ‘I’m twenty-three, I had a cancer burnt off there last year.’ She sits back, holds the smoke in her lungs and lets it out in waves. She folds her arms in front of her. ‘Who knows what else is going on with my face right now.’ She feels her cheeks like she’s looking for bits that will fall off. ‘Did you know our mum never gave us anything to cover over our faces? And that was the era of Slip Slop Slap — we did a whole fuckin’ school assembly on it.’ She stands up and does a little performance. ‘“Slip! Slop! Slap!”’ she sings. ‘“Slip on a shirt, slop on sunscreen and slap on a hat.”’ She does a turn and some jazz hands, then stands on one hip with her arms folded. ‘I was the bloody bird — even then, even then she couldn’t be bothered to zinc us up.’
‘You want a cup of tea?’ I ask, getting up off the floor.
‘This is our problem, right, I’ve worked it out,’ she says, not listening. I put the kettle on the stove anyway. ‘We shouldn’t be here, we shouldn’t have come to Australia to start with. Look at us — crusted with skin cancers. The sea wants to kill us, the bush wants to kill us. You know there’s a shell in the north — you pick it up on a beach, thinking you’ve found something pretty to hang round your neck, the fucker shoots out a poison arrow that’ll disintegrate your kidneys? It’s fucked, and we shouldn’t be here.’ Karen points the dying end of her cigarette at me again. ‘You — you are not supposed to go into the sea — it’s like a nest of snakes in there.’ She lets her head loll back and says quietly, ‘Fuck it, even the dry bits are a nest of snakes.’
‘You want mint tea or regular?’
Karen sighs, flings up her arms without looking at me. ‘I want flaming English Breakfast Tea! And a scone!’
‘Well, we’re out of milk.’
‘For god’s SAKE!’
I like it when she gets like this, it’s better than watching TV. She leans up to accept her black tea. ‘I wish I had some mull,’ she says dejectedly. I pour hot water over a regular tea bag. She blows into her mug and then takes a sip, grimaces, sighs again and sets the mug on the floor, where it spills over a little. She looks at the burnt-out end of her cigarette and puts it back in the empty packet. I try not to worry about the thing still being alight.
‘In England,’ she goes on, ‘they take teatime seriously. Know what a Devon cream tea is?’
I shake my head and let the steam from my drink work over my face. It’s hard to take my eyes off the cigarette packet, to not think about what is going on inside, what tiny spark might be left.
She leans forward and cups her hand like she’s holding something. ‘They take a scone, some jam and some cream, and they make little scone sandwiches out of them.’
‘Doesn’t sound all that exciting to me.’
‘But that’s the point!’ she says, showing me the palms of her hands. ‘They make eating a boring little cake a real event. With parasol umbrellas and silverware. You can do a Devon cream tea on a boat, going down the river, or you do it on a lawn.’