Page 12 of The Sirens

11

JESS’S DIARY

1998

7 February

February is the worst month. Christmas long gone, my birthday, too. Everyone’s angry, tired from the heat. The kind of heat that makes you wish you were a lizard, cold-blooded and small, able to take shelter in the shadow of a rock.

There’s no air-conditioning in my room, just the fan that stirs the air like soup. At least it drowns out the sound of Mum and Dad bickering. Sort of. I can hear enough to know that it’s about me. Again.

After all, I’m the only thing they ever seem to fight about.

Mum walked in on me in the bathroom the other day. I forgot to lock the door, I was so anxious to wipe the sweat from under my arms and between my breasts. I could feel the moisture doing its work already: worming its way into my skin, cracking into a hundred silver rivers. I had the light off – I don’t like seeing myself in the mirror – and I guess that’s why she thought there was no one in there. She opened the door and screamed. Not exactly the reaction you want to the sight of your nude torso, even from your mum.

Later, she knocked on my bedroom door.

‘I don’t know how you can read in this light, Jess,’ she said, pointing at the drawn blinds blocking out the harsh summer glare, leaving only the lava lamp’s glow. I love my lava lamp, its shimmering waves of green. It’s peaceful, like how I imagine underwater to be.

I rolled my eyes and she sat on my bed, moving aside the pile of clean laundry she’d told me to put away earlier.

‘We need to talk about your skin,’ she said. She took my hand in hers, played with the hem of my sleeve.

‘Sweetie – I know you like to cover up,’ she said, her voice gentle and horribly calm-sounding. Her therapist voice, I call it. ‘But it’s so hot outside. If you wear too many clothes, you’ll sweat, and then, well …’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘Frankenstein.’

‘Oh, sweetie,’ she said again, squeezing my fingers. I wished she wouldn’t. I was worried I’d cry, and then where would we be?

‘I’m sorry about before,’ she went on. ‘I didn’t know you were in there and it gave me a fright—’

I snorted.

‘Come on, Jess,’ Mum said. ‘You know I didn’t mean it like that. Your father and I, we think you’re so beautiful.’

Like that was supposed to make me feel better. Every child is supposed to be beautiful in the eyes of their parents. But Mum literally screamed when she saw my naked flesh.

I pulled my hand away.

‘I’m not ashamed,’ I lied. ‘I just like dressing this way. It’s cool.’

‘OK, sweetheart,’ she said. But I could tell she didn’t believe me.

Anyway, now they’re yelling. I’ve turned Rosetta Stone up on my stereo but I can still hear it.

Mum’s cooking dinner (paella, so we know she’s upset) and the sound of her chopping vegetables filters down the hall with their voices.

‘I know that’s what we said,’ she’s saying, her words punctuated with the thud of the knife on the cutting board. ‘But that was years ago. And we can’t go on like this. She can’t go on like this. We need answers.’

‘I’m not taking her back there,’ Dad says, and then the argument descends into furious whispers.

I know who they’re talking about, of course. The skin specialist I saw as a kid, Dr Becker. He had a weirdly shiny face, like sweaty cheese. Mum and Dad would take turns driving me to Bourke so that I could sit on his examination table while he looked generally confused.

They stopped taking me after Dr Becker asked if he could write a paper on me for some medical journal. Since then it’s just been me and a big tub of Vaseline.

It’s easier if I deal with it on my own. I guess I’m good at doing that.

20 February

We did self-portraits in Art today. Mr Hennessey said mine was ‘unique’. He leaned over my shoulder, said he liked the way I’d painted myself in blues and greens. That I had a different way of looking at things.

I’ve always wondered what Mr Hennessey would smell like up close. He’s so different to the other men around here, the farmers with their crinkled eyes and big meaty hands. His nails are lined with paint instead of dust. It turns out that he smells of soap and coffee. And something else – a strange, sweet smell. Musky and male.

‘What made you decide to use those colours, those loose brushstrokes?’ he asked. ‘It’s … unexpected.’

I looked down at the jet stubs of my nails, the black top I wore under my school blouse, the sleeves stretching all the way to my knuckles. I knew what he meant. Most Goths don’t see themselves in colour.

I wanted to tell him that I long to take the paintbrush in my hand, dripping with blue, and swirl it over my ruined skin. To hide the silver cracks and flakes with patterns of cerulean and cobalt. To make myself beautiful.

But the classroom was silent, the only sound the scratching of bristles on canvas, the slosh of turps in a jar. The fans whirred overhead, rustling paper. The other kids were half splayed out on their desks, cheeks flushed, lethargic in the heat. But I knew they were listening.

‘Dunno,’ I said, and he nodded and moved on to the next person, Shelley Peters, who’d painted herself with yellow plaits and jammy circles for cheeks, like a child’s cartoon. ‘Talk me through the choices you made here,’ I heard Mr Hennessey ask her, making thoughtful noises while she prattled on. I felt the blood in my cheeks, and I gripped the paintbrush hard, working furiously. Idiot. I’d thought he was giving me extra attention, like he was telling me – in his understated way – that I was different to the others. Special.

But then, when the bell rang and everyone rushed to scrub the paint from their hands and pack up their work, he asked me to stay behind.

‘You’re talented,’ he said, shuffling the sheaf of papers on his desk. Charcoal and ink drawings, other students’ names scrawled at the bottom. I wondered what his own art looked like. ‘Anywhere else, and I’d be recommending your parents enrol you in weekend classes at the local art school, but this being Dawes Plain ’

‘There isn’t one,’ I finished for him, and we grinned, our eyes meeting. I looked away quickly, my gaze landing on his arms. His shirtsleeves were rolled up, revealing the fine blond hairs on his forearms. I wanted to paint them.

Not for the first time, I wondered what he was doing here: this wasn’t the kind of place people like him moved to. It was the kind of place they escaped.

‘How would you feel about some extra lessons?’ he asked. Something leapt inside my stomach. ‘One to one, after school. Do you think your parents would mind?’

‘Anything that keeps me from devil worship,’ I said, gesturing at the black leather choker around my neck – which was unfair of me, as Mum and Dad aren’t exactly religious. But it made Mr Hennessey laugh, so it was worth it.

‘It’s settled, then. Here, after school, next Monday.’

I can hardly wait. To learn from him, to get better and better. But I do feel sort of bad about it. There was a time when art was mine and Dad’s thing. He was the one who taught me to draw. Some of my earliest memories are of sitting on his knee, his hand guiding mine on the page. ‘Now, draw what you see,’ he’d say, pointing at a stumpy tree or a vase of dried flowers or whatever it was we were looking at, ‘not what you think you see.’

Dad’s pretty good, still, though he doesn’t draw as much as he used to. But every Christmas he gives Mum a framed picture of a different bird to line the hallway with. There are dozens now, and they’re becoming increasingly obscure – the earlier ones are things like cockatoos and kookaburras, but last year he gave her something called a lemon-bellied flycatcher, whatever that is.

It’s sweet, how he spends ages beforehand shut up in his study, leafing through her Birds of Australia book for one he hasn’t done yet. ‘You’ll have to move on to Birds of England next,’ I said once, which made him shudder.

But as good as Dad’s bird pictures are, I don’t think there’s much more he can really teach me. He only ever draws wildlife: birds and plants and butterflies. (‘Can’t draw a face to save myself,’ he says.)

I want to do more. I want to draw people, to capture them completely with my paint and canvas. To tell their stories.

What story does a bird tell?

Later

Holy fuck.

My heart is pounding so hard, my hands are sweating so much I can barely hold the pen.

When I got back from school, I kept thinking about Mr Hennessey. About next Monday. About his words. You’re talented.

But there was something else, something itching at my brain.

It was something Ms Entwistle had said about genes in biology. I was wondering if my gross skin was hereditary, and if so, why I had it and no one else. Maybe a grandparent had it? I wouldn’t know, Mum and Dad never talk about any grandparents, or any other family. (I never thought that was weird until kindergarten, when everyone started going on about ‘my nan this’ or ‘my pop that’. It had been normal to me that we spent Christmases just the three of us, that no envelopes containing five-dollar notes arrived for my birthday. That there was literally no one else.)

That got me thinking about all the stuff I didn’t know, stuff they hadn’t told me. I thought that if I told them about what I’d learned – about genes and genetics – then it might open some kind of door, that then they might tell me about their parents and grandparents and siblings.

Our family.

Mum had just put dinner on the table – something she called a cassoulet, but which looked indistinguishable from a stew – and Dad was already shovelling it in his mouth. They both looked tired: there were blue shadows under Dad’s eyes, and Mum’s lips were pale and pursed, as if with the effort of holding in all the confidential things she’d heard at work. I hate it, the way she listens to other people’s problems all day and comes home to pretend we have none of our own.

‘Can you curl your tongue?’ I asked.

Mum frowned for a second, but then her features lightened.

‘Yep,’ she said, sticking her tongue out in a neat pink roll. ‘Dad?’

Dad shook his head. ‘We’re eating, Jess.’

‘Come on.’

‘Mike?’ Mum prodded.

He swallowed his mouthful of food and stuck out his tongue to show the bluish underside, then folded it, just as Mum had done.

‘Happy?’ Dad said, eyes already back on his plate. ‘Mm,’ I said, but my mouth had gone dry.

‘You all right, sweetie?’ Mum said, giving me a sharp look. ‘You’re a bit pale. Is it that time already?’

Normally, I’d have killed her for bringing up periods at the dinner table, in front of Dad, but instead I said, ‘Yeah, actually is it OK if I go lie down? Not feeling great.’

‘Of course,’ Mum said, her head tilted with concern. ‘I’ll bring you a hot-water bottle later.’

I just nodded, scraping the chair back abruptly.

‘Thank your mother for dinner,’ Dad said as I half sprinted from the kitchen.

‘Thanks, Mum,’ I managed.

I dragged myself down the hall into the safety of the bathroom, leaned my pounding head against the cool tile of the wall.

‘The ability to curl one’s tongue is genetic,’ Ms Entwistle had said, rapping her ruler on the blackboard to wake those who had dozed off in the stuffy classroom. ‘If you can’t do it, that usually means one of your parents can’t, either.’

Mum and Dad can both do it. But I can’t.

So that means one of them can’t be my parent.

21 February

The sleepwalking is back.

It hasn’t happened since I was a child – I’d almost convinced myself that it never would again. But last night it returned.

I was awake for ages, tossing and turning – the sheets seemed to cling to my legs, like the tendrils of some great vine, ensnaring me. The skin behind my knees and in the insides of my elbows itched and itched.

Thoughts jostled in my mind. The tiny blond hairs on Mr Hennessey’s arms, Mum and Dad looking at me across the dinner table. The ways I’m different from them, the ways I’m the same.

I only remember bits and pieces of the dream, like broken shards. The warmth of a hand in mine, a cold wind on my skin. Water, its lap and suck. A reflected face that wasn’t my own.

When I opened my eyes, I was standing on the bank of the dam. It was still early; dawn licking the horizon grey. Turning, I saw the glint of eyes in the paddock, the faint outline of the house behind me.

My hands shake even now, just writing about it. The dam is deep – ten feet, at its centre. And, thanks to my skin, I’m the only girl in Australia who doesn’t know how to swim.

What if I hadn’t woken up?

Thank God Max was at school today.

He sloped into English five minutes late, interrupting Mrs Clark’s monologue about The Tempest, his trousers slung around his hips as though he couldn’t be bothered to properly get dressed. When he sat next to me there was the familiar green stink of weed.

I couldn’t help but smile. Max up to his old tricks. Maybe the world hasn’t been turned on its head after all.

I’ve known Max since we were five years old. We met on the first day of kindergarten. The other kids pulled faces when I walked in: the rains had come the day before, and I’d flung myself into a particularly shiny puddle before anyone could stop me. Mum had done her best with the Vaseline, but tendrils of cracked skin snaked out from the hem of the blue gingham uniform. I’d scratched at it in my sleep, and dried blood had formed cratered scabs on my shins. Even the teacher averted her eyes.

At lunch, as I sat in a shady section of the quadrangle, my knees drawn up under my uniform, Max made his way over to me. This skinny blond kid with buck teeth and ears that mushroomed from his head. I guess, in a way, he owed me. If I hadn’t been there, it would’ve been him getting the weird looks.

He sat down and opened his schoolbag.

‘I got an Etch A Sketch for Christmas,’ he said, producing the toy with pride. ‘Want a go?’ We’ve been inseparable – joined at the hip, as Mum says – ever since.

Now, I leaned over to whisper in his ear.

‘Meet me at the greenhouse at lunch,’ I said, and he raised his pale eyebrows, then nodded. Wordlessly, he pulled up his shirtsleeve before draping his arm across my desk so that I could draw on his skin. He keeps telling me I should become a tattoo artist after school. ‘Fuck art college,’ he says. ‘Just move to Sydney and buy a tattoo gun. You’d make a fortune.’

I could still see the faded marks of last week’s design, a repeated pattern of thorns and roses. Today I had something different in mind. I pulled two pens – green and blue – from my pencil case and when Mrs Clark wasn’t looking, covered his milky skin with scales. Tiny, delicate ones, almost like teardrops.

There was no time to talk after class, and I spent the next lesson longing for Max, longing for him to take a thoughtful drag of a joint and then tell me everything was OK, dissolving my fears like one of his smoke rings. When at last the bell rang, I practically bolted out the door. I don’t think I’ve ever been so keen to get outside, into the heat. The sky was searing blue, and as I walked across the quadrangle I could feel little beads of sweat popping out on my skin under all my layers. (Now I’m covered in scabs, of course. My fingers itch to pick them off.)

I walked past the squat brick classrooms and the rusted metal drinking fountain, then the chalk-smeared tarmac gave way to scrub. Up ahead was the greenhouse. Water restrictions mean it’s now just a storage shed, but the name’s stuck.

The contents of the greenhouse – old bicycle wheels, cracked hockey sticks, ancient shin pads that smell of feet – spill out onto the dried grass, a cornucopia of rubbish. It sounds gross but there’s something weirdly beautiful about it: the harsh sun glinting on the rusting spokes, the view that stretches out beyond. Paddocks and hills, blonde as a girl’s hair, meeting the sky in a hazy line.

Max was already there, leaning against the back wall of the greenhouse, joint dangling from his lip, nodding along to his headphones. I’d never tell him this, but with his gold curls and wide green eyes, he looks almost angelic. I guess he lost the buck teeth and mushroom ears somewhere on the way to puberty.

In some lights, he’s even a little good-looking – or at least, he has a face I wouldn’t mind drawing. Another thing I’d never tell him.

‘So,’ he said, slipping his headphones round his neck so that I could hear the tinny whine of The Cure, ‘what’s up?’

I took the joint from his lips, pressed it to my own. ‘That bad? Fuck.’

When I told him, he stood for a while, brow furrowed. In the distance, a magpie burbled and there was the soft thwack of someone hitting a football, followed by a cheer. I brushed a fly from the tip of my nose.

‘Are you sure that’s right? What the teacher said.’ Max is good at science, though he pretends not to be. I shrugged.

‘I think I read that it was a myth,’ he offered, taking the joint back from me.

‘I dunno,’ I said. ‘But a part of me wouldn’t even be surprised. I mean, it makes sense, right? Neither of them has the bloody Flakes.’

That’s our nickname for it, my skin condition. Max says it sounds cool, like a band. I think it sounds like a type of washing powder.

‘I wouldn’t worry about it,’ he said, blowing a pungent ring of smoke towards me. ‘For what it’s worth, I’ve always thought you look loads like your dad.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah,’ he said, taking a step closer to me. As well as pot, he smelled of too much Lynx deodorant and Wrigley’s chewing gum. ‘It’s the ears. This little bit here,’ he pinched the top of my left ear between his thumb and forefinger, ‘it’s kind of pointy. Like an elf’s. Your dad’s is the same.’

‘Ow,’ I said, stepping away from him, though it didn’t actually hurt. But my ear felt hot where he’d touched me, and my cheeks burned.

He’d broken our new, unspoken rule. Even a year ago, I wouldn’t have thought twice about leaning my head on his shoulder, or punching him in the bicep. But now, the space between us felt different, charged somehow. I guess that’s why the drawing started – the tattooing, as we call it.

It’s become the only safe way to touch each other.

It makes me sad, sometimes. And scared, too. Scared that I’ll lose him, or that maybe, in a way, I already have.

‘You OK?’

I nodded, even though I wasn’t really. I almost told him about the sleepwalking then, but I didn’t know how to find the words.

Now, I don’t know what to think. Maybe Max is right. Maybe there is some kind of rational explanation, some way that it all makes sense. But another, louder part of me feels like something is wrong, like my parents are keeping something from me. And the more I try to ignore that feeling, to swallow it down, the more it grows and grows, swelling like a parasite in my gut.