Pikelet, you don't have to.
Oh, I said with false brightness. Maybe I do. Maybe I will. Okay, she said. Now where did I leave those instructions? I shoved off my damp jeans and clambered onto the bed and kissed her inexpertly. Eva's hair was unwashed and her mouth tasted of hash and coffee. Her fingers were stained with turmeric.
She smelled of sweat and fried coconut. She was heavier than me, stronger. Her back was broad and her arms solid. There was nothing thin and girly about her. She did not close her eyes. She did not wait for me to figure things out for myself.
In the afternoon, when we'd eaten her curry and smoked the rest of her hash, she saw me standing in the livingroom, looking at all their stuff. I was stoned and emboldened. I felt older, pleased with myself, and for some reason I was noticing for the first time just how new and choice everything was. One day, I told myself, I want gear like this.
What? she said, cutting up a grapefruit.
Nothin.
Bullshit. You're thinking where does all the money come from.
No. Not really.
Jesus, Pikelet. You're like a book.
I shrugged. She was wrong but I didn't want to look any more stupid than I was.
It's a trust account thing. My father's money.
For Sando too?
She smiled. Yeah, him too. But they don't get along, my dad and him.
But that's how he can —
Surf and travel, yeah. How I could be a skier. Sure.
I was bombed. I didn't really know what a trust fund was but I felt the distance it put between us; it was bigger than the gap in our nationalities, even our ages. Money just showing up in a bank
account. Without work. I said nothing but Eva must have seen it in my face.
The big, bad world, Pikelet. It is what it is.
Wow.
Guess it's not fair, but so what.
I spose.
Nothing's fair, Pikelet. Some guys get balled at your age, and others — poor ugly bastards — wait till they're thirty. I guess we could give it all back. You wanna give up getting laid, in the interests of fairness?
I shook my head, sheepish.
Just be nice to me, Pikelet.
Orright. I am. I mean I will.
Don't brag about me, okay? Not to Loonie, not to anyone.
I wouldn't, I said with my voice breaking. I promise.
But even while I stood there I saw the pleasure and complacency leaching from her face. She looked down at the grapefruit as though she couldn't remember what it was.
Jesus, she said. Maybe you shouldn't come out again.
What?
It's not right. It's not fair on you.
What if I want to? I asked petulantly.
Listen, Sando will be back soon.
I stared at her. How soon?
The rain's stopped, she said. Go home.
I was wired night and day for a week. Before this, beyond the desultory appraisal I gave every female I met, I'd had no particular sexual interest in Eva Sanderson. She wasn't quite the stuff of my erotic imaginings. True, she was blonde and confident in that special American way but there was nothing Playboy or Hollywood about her. My fantasies lurched from Suzi Quatro to Ali McGraw and back in a moment. The rockin chick, the dark waif. But Eva was stocky and blunt. As a blonde she tended toward the agricultural. She lacked rock-and-roll insouciance on one hand, and on the other she failed to give off the faintest aura of fey sensitivity. If anything she was abrupt and suspicious, handsome rather than pretty. Her limbs were shapely enough though tough and scarred. Yet the idea of her had taken hold. The fact of her body overtook me. Eva was suddenly all I could think about.
I didn't ride out there. Nor did I call her from the box outside the pub. I tried to remember every moment: her belly against mine, the briny taste of her skin, the low, incendiary growl she made. For days the sharp smell of her lingered on my hands and every time I yanked myself under the blankets it seemed to return with the heat of my body. I thought about Sando and what a turd I was to have done this. He might be home any day. I felt the impossibility of the situation coming down on me. I'd buggered everything now, lost it all. And yet I thought again of the bitter, smarting sense of rejection I'd been left with. Sando didn't rate me, didn't give a shit at all. He'd cut me loose. The yellow Brewer was just a consolation prize. He was never my friend. Eva let it slip more than once — we were there to flatter him, to make him feel important. The guru. So the hell with him.
At school lunchbreaks I stood in the phone booth beside the basketball courts and stared at Eva's number etched in blue biro inside my wrist. But I didn't dial it; I didn't dare. Maybe she was serious about my never going back. She might be stricken with remorse. Maybe she'd just felt sorry for me, the boy left behind, and taking me to bed had been some stoned moment of kindness she regretted already. God knows, I hadn't been any good at it. And she could get nasty so quick. If she was off me I should be careful because you never knew what she'd say or do. You couldn't trust her. But it was torment like this, thinking she'd cut me off cold. I wanted her.
When I looked at girls now I compared them to Eva — the shape of their legs, the skinniness of their arms, the way they sheltered their breasts with their shoulders. Their perfumes smelt sugary as cordial. I hated all their rattly plastic bangles, and the way they plastered their zits with prosthetic-pink goo and chewed their lips when they thought no one was looking. Unless every single one of them was lying, they were all going out with older blokes, guys with cars and jobs, men who liked their peroxided fringes and bought them stuff. They suddenly looked so… ordinary.
One evening when I thought I heard the chatter of the Volkswagen at the end of the drive, I put down my book and lay very still on the bed. I thought first of Sando, though he'd hardly been gone a fortnight. If it was him, what would he want of me at ten o'clock at night? Unless he knew something. I tried not to think of that, of him here and angry and twice as big as me. Eva wouldn't drive in to try to see me, would she? With my parents asleep in the house? Waiting for me to come out and down the long drive to meet her by the road? The idea was too crazy, too beautiful, too frightening. I snapped off the bed lamp and after a while the engine noise pulled away. I knew well enough what a VW sounded like. Five minutes, it'd been there. It could have been nothing more than a couple of lost Margaret River hippies consulting their map in the mouth of our driveway. Still, I waited to hear it return, barely moved a limb. At the thought of her waiting out in the Kombi my cock began to ache. And then, through the thin wall, the fridge motor kicked in again and I couldn't be sure that I hadn't imagined the entire thing.
I held off for a whole week. But the next Saturday I rode out in the pelting rain. I felt mad, reckless, doomed.
The dog announced my arrival. Eva came out onto the verandah and didn't say hello. She unzipped my sodden jeans with a determination that bordered on violence, and she took me in her mouth while the dog and the swollen estuary and the whole teeming sky seemed to look on. I held her hair and shivered and cried from relief.