Paperbark

Novel Excerpt - Written by Ayla Melville

There is little in this world that makes us feel more helpless than watching a bird fly against the inside of a window. The little winces and whines we make. The whispered ‘oh no’s and ‘stop that’s. We know the closer we approach that window, the more frantic the bird will become. But if we don’t attempt to open it, the bird will just sit there - unable to move, unable to fly away. It will sit and sit and sit on that window frame, until we are ready to confront the discomfort of watching it struggle - for a chance at setting it free. Sometimes we are the freer and sometimes we are the bird; sometimes we are even the window. Sometimes, we are all three.

Chapter 1

Spring 2013

The house didn’t have much of a roof anymore. It was as though an impossibly large claw had gouged the pointed top apart. The torn beams hung there, suspended in space. Jagged pieces of glass protruded from the warped window frames, resembling exposed teeth.

None of us spoke. Harry was flicking his bicycle bell. Jackson kept pushing his fringe out of his face. We were still straddling our bikes. I felt like maybe we should put our stands down and get off, it seemed more respectful, but I was glued to my seat.

‘My nose is tickling,’ Harry sniffed, ‘you reckon that’s the smoke?’

‘Nah, reckon that’s the finger you’ve got jammed up it all the time,’ Jackson retorted.

‘Stop ringing the fuckin' bell.’ My voice was a lot quieter than theirs, but they both stopped bickering, and Harry took his hand off the bell.

‘Johnnie…. You good?’ Harry sounded taken aback.  

‘I’m cool. Just wondering what happened, that’s all.’

I didn’t know how I felt. But I wasn’t cool. There was a sickly, heavy sensation in my stomach. Like a dead weight had landed in my belly and was dragging me down with it.

‘Johnnie, this is Satterley we’re talking about. The guy was fucking nuts.’ Harry said.

‘It wasn’t just him though was it,’ I snapped back. ‘His parents. His little brother.’

‘They were weirdos too.’ Jackson shrugged his shoulders.

‘Yeah, well. Now they’re dead.’

I looked up, into the second story, through the broken window. There were still pictures and posters on the wall, all blackened and peeling. Was that Brodie’s room? Or if it had been his little brother’s?

‘Dad reckons it was probably a cigarette that lit ‘em up.’ Jackson said matter-of-factly.

‘Nah, gas leak. Doubt any of them smelt it with all that stink.’ Harry made a hacking noise with his throat before spitting on the gravel drive. I couldn’t look at the house anymore. The dragging feeling was making me nauseated. I spun my bike round and hit the tarmac peddling.

‘Jon – the fuck?’ Harry called.

‘You’re both fucking idiots!’ I shouted without turning around; the wind caught my words and I hoped it would carry my bite to their ears. I mimicked into the air, knowing exactly what Harry would be saying to Jackson.

‘Christ. Must be on her period.’

 ***

My legs were screaming but I kept pushing on. This was the final hurdle before I could fly down the spiralling slope, screaming, sending rocks flying off the dirt path. This was one of the routes my dad had shown me when I was small. Mum had screamed at him when I came home with a bump above my eyebrow and deep scratches on my elbow, but I had never forgotten the feeling of that first ride. The rush. The complete focus on every turn, every bump in the trail coming into sharp focus before I adjusted the angle of the handlebars, the branches catching and snatching at me as I tore past them; deeper into the bush, further from everything else.

I lifted myself up, off the seat, wanting to reach the crest faster. My chest felt tight. I kept seeing his face, scowling at me from the bus stop, the stillness of his stare. My teeth ground together as I conquered the last few metres of craggy rock. I reached the entrance to the track and pulled myself to a halt in front of it, breathing heavily. I’d never noticed that the bowed tree with low hanging branches, which had caught a few unsuspecting cheeks in its time, was a paperbark. It stood to the left side of the trail, like a guardian; waiting to usher me in. I swallowed.

Summer 2010

He was a rough kid, even back then, in primary. His hair buzzed off by his mum in an effort to keep headlice away. One of his front teeth was chipped, yellowing at the unclean break. He was quiet mostly, just kept to his own, sitting at the back of the class, his hands crossed in front of his chest. Legs slack and gangly, leaning back like he couldn’t give a damn. But of course, he did, when the other kids whispered that he smelt of piss. He spent lunch times alone, down on the bottom oval, in the corner of the field where a small group of trees created an alcove. Strictly speaking kids weren’t allowed to muck around so close to the boundary line. But he was more of a disruption if he was forced to interact with the others. He would throw too hard in dodgeball - giving one of the other students a bloody nose - and had once pulled one of the girls down from the monkey bars, because she said he looked even funnier when she was hanging upside down.  

In his grove he etched hundreds of bright green ‘B’s into the bark of the eucalyptus trees. He cleared branches and debris from the ground and made a type of cubby hole by standing the branches upright and beside each other, creating a leafy shoji blind. One of the teachers, who took pity on Satterley, even brought him brown string one afternoon, to help him secure the structure. Surprisingly, the other kids did not bother him there. They would giggle and tease at his dirty uniform when he came back to class after the break, but they left him be - the boys too busy playing men, roughhousing by the basketball courts, the girls sitting in groups on benches, giggling and falling out with each other.

I sat in the dirt, stripping sections of bark from one of the trees. The dust from the deeper layers spun around me, glowing like fireflies in the flickering sunlight. I wasn’t really thinking about what I was doing. It felt good to rip and pull and work away at something, it helped blur out the taunting voices. I heard his shoes scuffing the dirt behind me before he spoke.

‘This is my spot,’ he said, stupidly.

‘Yeah,’ I replied, not turning around, ‘I know.’

I kept stripping the bark, my nails digging into the tree’s flesh.

‘D’you mind?’ He asked.

‘You don’t own this spot Brodie. No matter how many ‘B’s you scratch into the trees.’ My voice felt scratchy. I knew there were angry red blotches on my cheeks.

‘Why you down here?’ He asked. ‘Where’s your group of giggling idiots?’

I snorted.

‘Off somewhere. Giggling. Being idiots.’ I paused, taking a deep breath. ‘They’re all so boring. All they want to do is stare at themselves and drawn on winged-liner and talk about the latest Marc Jacobs’ perfume, and then they look at me like I’m an alien because I don’t have a clue what they’re all on about, and I don’t care either, what’s the point in any of it?’

It all came out in a sort of rush. Like the words were relieved to finally escape my mouth, tormented by their endless circling in my brain.

‘Right.’ Brodie replied, sounding lost.

 Silence stretched between us. I tore the pieces of bark in my lap into thinner shreds.

‘You could use the bark you know,' I said. ‘You could weave it between the branches, to make your leaf wall thicker, or to make a mat to sit on. No wonder you’re always black when you come back from lunch.’

‘Yeah, thanks. But this is my spot. Mine. I made it. Go find your own.’

‘Like I said, you don’t own these trees. And I’m happy here. So, you either get over it, or you find yourself another spot.’ My tone was an attempt at defiance, but I heard it waver ever so slightly.

‘I don’t hang out with girls.'

‘You don’t hang out with anyone. And I’m not sure I’m a girl anyway. I don’t seem to care about the kind of stuff I’m meant to.’ The bite in my voice had faded.

‘Well, then. Guess I’m not a boy either.’ He laughed, but something hid behind it, not quite concealed. I turned and faced him.

‘I definitely don’t care about the stuff I’m meant to.’

 Spring 2013

My bike was propped up against a tree. I sat on one of the huge boulders we called ‘the hang-out rocks,’ inspecting the scratches on my hand from the ride down. There was a small splinter between two of my knuckles, but I couldn’t seem to get it out. My hands were still trembling from the adrenaline. I looked up, across the clearing. The water in the quarry was still, tinged an unnatural blue - crystals of calcium carbonate reflecting with the sunlight. Another thing my dad had taught me when he first showed me the basin, his hands cupping the water, showing me the way it became transparent in his palms.

I heard rustling in the brush behind me and snapped my head round, surveying the trees. Silence again. Then: a large frond came launching out at me from the bush. I leapt up, onto my rock, arms limp at my sides. Maniacal laughter ripped through the clearing. Jackson and Harry rolled out from behind one of the trees, howling and clutching their sides.

‘Should’ve seen your face mate,’ said Harry in a high-pitched peal.

‘Looked like a penguin with that stance,’ cried Jackson.

‘You guys are a right bloody laugh aren’t you. How’d you know I’d be here?’ I asked, my heart hammering.

‘We know where you go to stew.’ Harry inclined his head knowingly. They had both picked themselves up off the ground now.

‘And we reckoned it was a good day for a swim.’

They grabbed the backs of their shirts and pulled them over their heads, chucking the clothing unceremoniously on the rocky ground. Harry whooped before running down to the quarry’s edge and crashing into the water. The basin was deep, and he was fully submerged almost immediately. Jackson tore after him, reaching the water at speed and launching himself on top of Harry. They thrashed about playfully, crocs taking each other into death rolls. I had swum at the quarry for years. Every spring, when hot days slipped through the cracks and heated the air much more than was necessary, I returned to it, and it would again become my favourite hangout in the summer to come. I’d shown it to the boys last year. Only after they’d promised me, they wouldn’t tell anyone else about it.

‘You getting in today Jon, or tomorrow?’ Harry shouted.

My hands played with the loose threads on my sweatshirt and I felt a burning sensation down my neck. I didn’t feel much like swimming. My stomach still had the same sensation: that something was swimming in it. And there was something else. A panicked feeling. A deer-in-the-headlights feeling. I felt different this year. I was different. My chest, my hips, they had curved over winter. I was no longer the skinny, angular kid the girls had always made fun of. I thought I’d escaped all this. That I’d willed it away somehow.

‘Can’t.’ My voice was hoarse.

‘What do you mean, you can’t? Forgotten how to swim have you?’ Jackson called.

‘No. Pretty sure I still know how to swim arsehole,’ I retorted.

Harry laughed.

‘Feral today, John! Just get in the water, it’ll chill you out.’

‘I told you I can’t!’ The irritation in me rose again. The boys exchanged looks as they had earlier, frowning.

‘What’s with you today?’ Jackson called.

‘Nothing!’ I yelled back. ‘I just wanted to be on my own. This is my spot.’ I trailed off towards the end of my reply. I looked down at my shoes, willing them to be gone when I looked up. But of course, they weren’t.

Summer 2010

‘If we get caught doing this, we’re going to get shot.’

‘Shot by who? Know anyone with a gun?’

I grinned in spite of myself. He had a point.  

‘Where do your parents think you are?’ I asked.

‘Mum’s always busy with my little brother, dunno where Dad is. They don’t much think about where I am.’ Brodie’s voice held little emotion.

‘Oh.’ I wasn’t sure what else to say.

‘Where do yours think you are?’ He asked.

‘With the giggling idiots, obviously.'

‘Sounds like we’re covered then.’ He winked at me, then swung the school gate open.

The metal shimmered as it crossed the patch of light cast by a streetlamp.