‘I can piss standing up,’ she tells me.
‘Bullshit.’
‘Wanna bet?’
‘Okay. How much?’
‘Five dollars.’
She’s got her feet wide apart, knees slightly bent, leaning over. She’s doing it. I rub the bottom of my chin with my thumb. I’ve lost the bet and the piss is sinking into the dirt.
She hitches up her undies.
I hand over the money.
•
We’ve known each other from day one. Which is not quite true, but true enough. We met in school when we were fifteen. She had been a student in some hippie institution, and wore colours and beads. She and I liked each other immediately. We fell upon each other. We were misfits but we desperately wanted to be liked.
I was very young when I worked out that I preferred spending time with girls. Kid-in-the-sandpit young. At fifteen, it was a little bit different. I was kissing girls as well as hanging out with them and that was changing everything. She didn’t care; sex didn’t muddle us up. We knew it straight away, just by looking at each other. She made me laugh, and she seemed like a sister to me. I don’t have a sister but I imagine her and me is what it would feel like.
She gave me good advice about sex, about love, about the differences between men and women. Much better than anything I received from other girls, from guys, from Mum, Dad, from my teachers; even better than the television. I had another friend, Jessie, and we used to talk, but one night we rolled around together drunk at a party and pashed on. They were only alcohol kisses. The next day at school, we avoided each other. My crush was on Bella, big, beautiful, black-haired, long-legged Bella. But Bella never looked at me.
I was also close to Derek. We were cool. He was okay, but he wanted to fuck me. That sounds up myself but it was true. He told me and I said it was alright, that I didn’t mind, that I was kind of flattered. But that changed things too. Again, I just wasn’t interested. I did have sex once with a guy, Dominic Borstino. I guess it was sex. We wanked together watching porn. His dad was out and we found the pornos under Mr Borstino’s bed. We watched them and touched each other’s dicks a few times. We didn’t look at each other. As soon as I blew, he jumped up and left the room. He spent ages in the bathroom. I heard a flush through the porno-disco music and he came out with a towel, all zipped up. I was pissed off. I had wanted to see him come. I never told Derek about Dominic. But I told Zazie.
That’s her name. I should tell you that. Her name is Zazie.
‘Did you like it?’
‘Dunno. Don’t think so. It was strange with no talking, no kissing.’
‘Did you want to kiss him?’
‘Nah, not really, but I still wish we had. I didn’t really want to kiss him but I wanted there to be kissing.’
The bell whistles the beginning of class and she jumps off the fence, tramples the cigarette. ‘Would you do it again?’
I shake my head no. ‘I like girls,’ I tell her.
We head for the lockers.
•
The name Zazie has no history, she tells me, none at all. Her mum made it up, plucked it out of the multicultural air. Zazie’s mother has a mix in her. Scottish, English, some French and maybe something Spanish, but she shed her European skin long ago. She had got pregnant at twenty-four, two years out of uni, one year into a research job on radio. She decided to keep the baby. The father was doing a PhD in agricultural science, measuring and counting the land. Neither wanted marriage. But Zazie’s mum wanted the baby. Every summer after New Year, Zazie would go up north to stay with her father, his wife, and their two children. I’d miss her like crazy. My suburb’s asphalt streets stank from the heat. There was nothing to do.
She would come back bush-brown. ‘Fuck, it was boring up there,’ she’d always say, and straight away she was back to watching videos, smoking cones. I always envied her those summer escapes. It was nowhere, a farmhouse amid a numbing puzzle of paddocks, but it wasn’t home, it wasn’t the suburbs. It wasn’t fucking Blackburn.
Blackburn used to be orchards. Shady fruit trees, apples and oranges. But I never knew the orchards — they got taken over by supermarkets. There was one magic spot left, a hillside that ran into a creek. I walked up and down along that creek, winter and summer, fleeing the wearisome suburban grind. I saw a snake once. It was thin and shone a brilliant black. I had jumped on a log and it slid away from underneath, flashing into the undergrowth. It was a tiny thing really; my fear was only momentary.
I told Zazie about it. She laughed. ‘You should see the whoppers I’ve seen in Queensland.’ Another reason to be envious.
In the library, flicking through film books, I came across an entry for a film called Zazie in the Metro. A French film by Louis Malle, the guy married to Candice Bergen. I showed it to Zazie. She got all excited. ‘Did you name me after that film?’ she asked her mother when she got home. Her mum had never heard of it. But Zazie was not convinced. She must have come across it at some stage. Zazie must have come from somewhere.
‘So you do have a history,’ I told her.
‘Yeah,’ she laughed. ‘I’m related to Murphy Brown.’
•
Our last summer at school I had sex with Kayla Robinson. I forgot the condoms and splashed all over her stomach. We lay close together afterwards, listening to each other breathing. The radio, whose sound had disappeared while we were fucking, came back slowly. I gently pushed her away from me, wanting to get up, and our skin had stuck together. Patterns were forming across her stomach, her breasts were wet. I kissed her and she tickled my dick.
‘It’s droopy — it looks tired,’ she giggled.
I didn’t say anything, I grabbed my T-shirt. The drying semen looked odd on her body, on her soft skin. I cleaned her up.
•
Kayla, Zazie and I were watching The Color Purple on video. I was a little stoned, a little bored and flicking through magazines.
‘They’ve changed it,’ Zazie complained. ‘The women were lovers for ages in the book.’
‘Hey, Zaz, you’re a lesbian, aren’t ya?’ asked Kayla. The question was straightforward, interested. There was nothing sly or malicious about it. But the room became dangerous.
‘Yes,’ said Zazie.
We didn’t look at each other. When the movie finished we went out to get smokes. Zazie was strolling the aisles of the 7-Eleven, shoplifting chocolates. The three of us were walking around the shop, hand in hand.
•
A girl at school got murdered. Her body was dumped on the train line. She was younger than me, two years below, but Kayla was good friends with her sister. Zazie was angry, not scared like Kayla, but furious. Cops came to talk to students, to teachers, news crews would follow us home.
‘I want to get out of here,’ Zazie started saying. ‘I’ve had it with this place.’
The murdered girl was Orthodox. Kayla and I went to the funeral. The church was weird, smelly but wonderful. I got high on the incense, on the colours and gold of the icons. The saints looked poor and tired, some of the holy pictures seemed weathered and damaged. The dead girl’s mother was hysterical. That was the part of the ceremony I hated the most; she was falling and twisting into cracked shapes, supported by her sons. She was howling. Beside me, Kayla was crying softly. I tried to cry, I squeezed my eyes tight, but nothing happened. I wasn’t sad.
•
Zazie moved. Her mother sold their place, got a flat in Brunswick. That changed everything. I was a regular house guest, crashing out on the sofa in the lounge room. I loved Brunswick, the small houses, the trams and the streets. It was noisy and the air there smelt like a city. I was looking for work, Zazie was studying. It was just one year really, one small year, but we had tremendous fun. There was always speed and there were always parties. Strange beds all the time. Kayla and I broke up, Derek moved to Sydney. It was just me and Zazie.