A Small Madness Read online

  First published in Australia in 2015 by Allen & Unwin

  First published in the UK in 2015 by Allen & Unwin

  Copyright © Dianne Touchell 2015

  The moral right of Dianne Touchell to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the United Kingdom’s Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or ten per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin – Australia

  83 Alexander Street, Crows Nest NSW 2065, Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

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  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  Allen & Unwin – UK

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  London SW15 2TG, UK

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  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  Murdoch Books is a wholly owned division of Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd

  A Cataloguing-in-Publication entry is available from the National Library of Australia

  www.trove.nla.gov.au

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN (AUS) 978 1 76011 078 9

  ISBN (UK) 978 1 74336 598 4

  eISBN 978 1 74343 980 7

  Extracts from Ray Lawler’s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll have been included with permission of the publisher, Currency Press.

  Cover and text design by Ruth Grüner

  Internal images by Ruth Grüner

  Cover image iStock by Getty Images

  Typeset by Ruth Grüner

  For Ainslie Harris Touchell

  contents

  chapter 1

  chapter 2

  chapter 3

  chapter 4

  chapter 5

  chapter 6

  chapter 7

  chapter 8

  chapter 9

  chapter 10

  chapter 11

  chapter 12

  chapter 13

  chapter 14

  chapter 15

  chapter 16

  chapter 17

  chapter 18

  chapter 19

  chapter 20

  chapter 21

  chapter 22

  chapter 23

  chapter 24

  chapter 25

  chapter 26

  chapter 27

  chapter 28

  chapter 29

  chapter 30

  chapter 31

  chapter 32

  acknowledgements

  about the author

  He’d eaten an orange. His fingers were sticky with it and smelled strongly of that pith-muck that collects under your fingernails after peeling the rind off. She didn’t care – they were in love. She let him put his sticky hands in places her own had never been. All those places she’d been warned about. The places that attract strangers with lost puppies and the wrong touch and sin. Private places that embarrassed her and shocked her eyes wide when he touched them.

  She’d been told it was supposed to hurt and it did a little bit. Like when she had her ears pierced. He didn’t move much when he was inside her and it was very quick.

  A dog was barking somewhere. Lost puppy.

  When it was over and she pulled her knickers up, she realised her bottom was crusted with cool sand. The heat was over, along with summer. They walked the dunes in a flush of new shyness, talking of the beginning of their last year of high school.

  Rose didn’t tell anyone about it. She wondered if it showed. She looked at herself in the mirror and turned this way and then that way. She stood as close to the mirror as she could, leaning over the bathroom basin, looking into her own eyes until they disappeared behind the fog of her breath. Looking for something. Some evidence that she was different. Her mum had told her that she was a woman when her period had started, but when her period had started she was still playing with Barbies. Surely now, though. Something had shifted inside her, a gear being ratcheted over a clunky cog, gaining torque, starting her up. But it didn’t show. How could all of these feelings not show? At the dinner table Rose found herself staring at her distorted reflection on the back of a soup spoon, strangely pleased with the bulbous caricature smiling back at her. She was a woman now, but it didn’t show and she couldn’t tell anyone.

  It always showed with Liv and Liv always told everyone. Liv was Rose’s best friend and Rose was Liv’s only friend. They were about as different as two people could be. Everyone thought it was odd that they hung around together – the good girl and the school bike. Rose had asked Liv what being the school bike meant after hearing her called that by a girl who passed them in the corridor. Liv had laughed out loud before replying, ‘It means everyone’s had a ride.’

  Their mothers had sat them next to each other on the first day of first grade. Liv used to say that their friendship had its seeds in nothing but geographical proximity, but Rose never forgot that first day of first grade when she’d peed her pants and Liv had stood next to her holding her hand while all the other kids giggled and ran away. You stick with the people who know your humiliation history. At least that’s what Rose believed.

  Liv started meddling with boys when she was twelve. That’s what Rose’s mum called it: meddling with boys. ‘Don’t meddle with boys, Rose,’ she would say, as if boys were an ant hill and girls a sharp stick. Rose’s mum wasn’t a prude, but Rose distinctly remembered being told that girls have a ‘money box’ and boys have a ‘whistle’. Rose learnt most of the biological names for body parts from Liv. Liv was like a reconnaissance agent on the front lines. She went in, assessed the opposition, got felt up, and reported back.

  ‘It’s called a fingeroo.’

  ‘I thought you said it was called a penis?’

  Rose and Michael started dating almost by accident. They would go out with a group from school or church and find themselves standing together in queues, or sitting together in movies. It was when Rose started feeling self-conscious around Michael that she realised she liked him. That first awful time she had to turn and walk in the opposite direction to him in the school corridor and found herself pausing, ever so slightly, with the knowledge that her bottom looked like a stocking full of cottage cheese in those particular leggings. Why, oh why, had she not worn a longer shirt? She had a class to get to, so she had turned and walked away with her face inexplicably burning and one eyelid twitching. When she thought she’d given it enough time, she’d looked back and was mortified to find him still watching her. But that’s when she knew he liked her too.

  Michael was the first boy Rose kissed properly. Really properly. She told Liv about that because she thought it was the most exciting thing she would ever do. Once they had got it right. She was about to pike out on the whole thing when they finally sorted themselves and it started working the way it should. He tasted good and it wasn’t too wet and he pulled her hair a little bit and she felt it in places far from her mouth. She’d only been kissed by one other boy and it wasn’t like this. Jeremy Rislow had kissed her at a party and it had felt as if he’d needed to shave his tongue. Liv told her afterwards she’d seen Jeremy vomiting in the garden ten minutes prior. Then Liv
had had to hold Rose’s hair back while she vomited.

  Liv called Rose a late starter and told her she should have had sex by now. According to Liv, everyone else had had sex. And Liv had had sex with more than one boy.

  ‘You’re a bit of a late starter, Rosie. But don’t worry about it.’

  ‘I don’t. I don’t want to have sex. Not yet.’

  ‘Okay. But take these anyway.’

  Condoms. A strip of condoms in shiny foil pouches that rustled guiltily in Rose’s bag all the way home on the bus. They were still hidden behind a fat volume of nineteenth-century poetry, bottom shelf of Rose’s bookcase, when Michael slipped a finger inside her knickers on the beach. She didn’t even think of them. Until afterwards.

  Rose wondered if she should tell Liv about it just to get her advice about the whole lack-of-a-condom thing. Liv was hard-headed, practical and strangely non-judgemental for someone who was judged regularly and harshly herself. But something gave Rose pause. She wanted to have this for herself and Michael alone, for a little while at least. She didn’t want to take all those feelings that didn’t show and dilute them by dissecting every moment of it until it was just a narrative of the mechanics for someone else’s enjoyment. Not even for Liv. Not yet.

  Rose had been pretending to be someone else the day that Michael decided he loved her. She was in the middle of dress rehearsal for the school play, standing on the stage in the school gym, her voice ricocheting off the polished boards with an intensity that set his bones ringing like a tuning fork. He couldn’t stop watching her. It wasn’t that she was particularly beautiful, but there was an awkward loveliness about her gestures and intonation that set her apart from all the really pretty girls. She could hold Michael’s attention simply because she wasn’t seeking it. In the middle of one of her lines, when she forgot the words, she filled her cheeks with air, squatted down on her haunches like a peasant in a paddy field, and twisted her hands together under her chin. Michael started laughing. Everyone had started laughing. Her costume was one of those old-fashioned, full-skirted dresses like his grandmother used to wear, with a full bib apron over the top. He remembered her stockings and clunky brown lace-up shoes. And he remembered the line she got stuck on. He had no idea why it was so fresh in his mind. It might have been the way she said it, rising slowly up again with all that paddy-field vulnerability still in her face. She had seemed to look right at him and bawl, ‘I want what I had before. You give it back to me – give me back what you’ve taken.’

  He didn’t know why he should think of it now. It was the first thought he’d had all day other than when they might be able to have sex again.

  He’d kept asking her, ‘Are you sure? Are you sure?’ His brother, Tim, had warned him about things like that. Having to make sure you have consent. How girls can sometimes say ‘yes’ but mean ‘no’. Or say yes, and then say no when it was over. Tim had also said to make his first time with a slut. ‘It’s like learning to drive in a rust bucket. Doesn’t matter how many dents you put in it and then you’ll know what to do when you’re riding in something that’s had a bit of spit and polish.’ But Michael hadn’t done it the first time with a slut. He’d done it the first time with Rose and he loved her.

  He told his brother straightaway. He walked into Tim’s bedroom, shut the door and said, ‘I had – I did – you know.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, open the door!’ was Tim’s response. They were not permitted closed doors. This rule applied to all doors in their house apart from their parents’ bedroom door and the bathroom door, although there was a small battery-operated egg-timer in the bathroom which their father said was to teach them to conserve water but which Tim insisted was to prevent wanking: ‘Have you tried to jerk off to that goddamn tick, tick, tick, tick; it’s like fucking a suicide bomber!’ Michael opened the door and sat on the end of Tim’s bed. Even though he was fairly certain there was no one else in the house he whispered, ‘Did you hear what I said?’

  ‘Yup. With that Liv girl, right? The school bike?’

  ‘Rose.’

  ‘Oh. That’s too bad.’

  ‘I, we . . . I didn’t use a condom.’

  Tim put down his pen and turned to face Michael.

  Tim was at university now, studying engineering. He was on the Right Path. Michael had been hearing about the Right Path for as long as he could remember and he believed in it. He wanted to walk that path too. He didn’t have to find it first, or choose it from a delta of possibilities at a hazard-laden impasse: the directions had been clearly marked. Tim’s advice was to make sure that, on any foray into the pleasures of the gutter at the side of the Right Path, Michael never take any substances which might interfere with stepping back up onto the path and always, always use a condom. Now Tim rested his pen lightly between his index and middle fingers and tapped the end against his desk, metronome-like, in a gesture Michael found disturbingly reminiscent of their father.

  ‘But I gave you some.’

  Tim had given Michael a strip of condoms two years ago. Michael had seen their expiry date as a challenge: he would definitely have sex before they expired. But not with a slut. He wanted it to be with someone he loved. Somehow that seemed less wrong. In the sixteenth century you could have sex with someone you promised to marry sometime in the future and the church said it was okay. Michael saw that in a movie once. He loved Rose and wanted to marry her sometime in the future so that made it okay. His strip of condoms with their greasy innards and clearly stamped expiry dates were his pre-contract with Rose. Except he didn’t have one with him when they did it.

  ‘I didn’t have one with me when we did it,’ Michael said.

  ‘You don’t say.’

  ‘Will it be okay?’

  ‘Are you asking me if your dick is going to drop off? Because it might be a good thing if it did, at least until you decide to use it responsibly.’ Tim finally put down his pen. Michael realised he had been breathing shallowly in time with the tick, tick, tick of Tim’s pen pulse.

  ‘Look,’ Tim continued, ‘I assume it was her first time too, so you’re not going to catch anything from something showroom new. So, yes, it’ll be okay. Just don’t do it again without one. Idiot.’

  And Michael knew there was real affection in that advice.

  Rose felt mildly uncomfortable seeing Michael the following day. A subtle mixture of exhilaration and embarrassment made her pause when she saw him walking towards her.

  Michael watched her approaching and saw her hesitation: just a tiny tic at the corner of one eye betrayed her. She always got that when she was nervous. It was endearing. Michael dithered for just a moment, as long as it took to accurately interpret her uncertainty, then strode towards her. With one hand clasped on the back of her neck he kissed her lightly on the cheek. Without letting go, Michael whispered, ‘You okay?’

  Rose nodded briskly. Then she said, ‘You want to come over after school?’

  ‘Yes.’ He knew then that it really was all okay.

  Liv sidled up to Rose as soon as Michael had walked away.

  ‘That was tender,’ she said, giving Rose’s hair a tug. ‘Come on. Places to go, people to see, teachers to ignore.’

  The day crept on interminably. Each time she passed Michael in the corridor they grazed hands. They would see each other’s approach and position themselves such that one would drag their fingers across the back of the other’s. Somehow this small gesture had more significance than the usual body-slam hugging that had been their previous mid-hall greeting. Previous. Prior to. Before. There was an intimacy to it that set a shallow bonfire alight in Rose’s belly.

  Last class of the day for Michael was physics. He was distracted and fidgety, a detail that wasn’t lost on Ryan Littlemore, his partner in the current experiment. They were supposed to be discussing the theoretical aspects of building and testing their own mangonel, but the conversation had segued when Michael said, ‘Can a girl get pregnant if she’s a virgin?’

  ‘What,
like the Virgin Mary? What the fuck do you think?’ Ryan laughed.

  ‘No, I mean if it’s her first time?’

  ‘You been poking Rose without a pro-phy-lac-tic?’ Ryan broke the word down into deliberate, staccato syllables, just loud enough to catch the interest of other students nearby.

  ‘No,’ Michael said, returning to his diagram with vigour. ‘Stupid of me to ask someone who can’t even find his dick to take a piss.’

  ‘Fuck off!’

  ‘I’ve seen him take a piss.’ Sam Drake turned in his seat in front of them. ‘He can find it, Michael. It’s just a very small threat.’ Then he dropped his voice to a whisper. ‘And a girl can get pregnant her first time. But it’s super rare.’

  ‘No, they can’t,’ Ryan said. ‘It’s a myth designed to sell morning-after pills. It’s actually hard to knock someone up these days. Why d’you think so many women are paying megabucks to get some doctor to fuck them with a turkey baster? Something to do with hormones in chickens.’

  ‘You’re full of shit,’ Sam said.

  ‘Boys!’ Mr Brooks intervened. ‘Are we on topic? Have you chosen your independent variable?’

  ‘Hormones in chickens, Sir?’ Sam asked. The small group of boys sitting nearby caved in then to the laugh that had been simmering among them.

  ‘Get on with it,’ Mr Brooks said with a slight smile. Michael found himself drawing a chicken in his ballast bucket, determined never to bring the subject up again.

  Rose was waiting for him in the car park when class finished. They were going to go to her place. Rose’s parents were never home until close to six. Michael got off at the same bus stop as Rose and walked her home. He did this often. He called his mum from the bus and said he was going to Rose’s for a bit and to expect him later. His mum said to make sure he said hello to Rose from her and would Rose like to come over later for dinner?

  They stood next to each other beside Rose’s bed. Michael had been in Rose’s bedroom too many times to count but this time it felt fascinatingly unfamiliar. He was nervous. He hadn’t been nervous on the beach. The full flush of urgency he’d felt in consummating their relationship on the beach had more to do with getting himself inside her before he lost it on her thigh. He couldn’t quite place the origin of his anxiety now, but he had a feeling it had something to do with wanting to get it right for Rose. Tim had talked to him about going down on a girl but Michael had never even seen one up close and was terrified he’d put his tongue in the wrong place. To him, kissing a girl between the legs was more intimate than going all the way.