The Brink, page 21
‘Everything else is fucked up,’ Fezza says, encouraging me to take another rip. ‘We might as well be, too, hey?’
The second one gets me. Or maybe the first one took a few seconds to hit. But it’s the nicest feeling to have my shoulders relax and my sense of who I am drift happily out of me as I exhale. Everything I’m meant to do and meant to be is floating in the haze. What’s left is something easier.
Fezza puts a song on and cranks the speakers right up: ‘Magic Carpet Ride’ by Steppenwolf. Ryan and Mason join us. I don’t know where the others are. I don’t care. I’m laughing, and with each exhale, I feel more of myself leave my body. The part of me that was Val’s best friend. The part of me that was horrible to Naoko. The part of me that makes my parents proud. All of it just smoke I am glad to release.
When I decide to do it, my thoughts are slow and I can barely form sentences, but I’m not worried. I feel calm and ready. This is what I have to do to completely get rid of myself.
I leave the shack. I fall over on the sand. I pick myself up. I grab a half-empty cup of lemonade and drain it, because my mouth is dry. I let the wind whip the cup out of my hand. It rolls freely into the environment, polluting this pristine island.
I go into the red shack and peer into the second bedroom. Jared’s sitting on a deck chair, headbanging to whatever music is blaring in his earbuds. Brayden is tied to the rollout bed.
‘Kaiya—what’s up?’ Jared asks, ripping the earbuds out. His music is eardrum-burstingly loud: even from here I can hear metalcore guitars and a man screaming.
I cling to the wooden doorframe to avoid falling. I feel sick and happy. Every time I try to finish a thought, it floats away from me. No thoughts. Only action.
‘Bed,’ I say, jerking my thumb to the bedroom. ‘You want it, don’t you?’
‘For real?’ Jared’s eyes bulge at me. ‘What’s gotten into you?’
I smile at him. I feel like a real-life siren luring the sailor onto the rocks. ‘You want it or not?’
Jared smirks. ‘Hell yeah I do.’
‘So easy,’ I think, or I say, I’m not really sure if I verbalise it or not. My brain is like cottonwool, so soft and squishy and warm. But it really was easy: a few words and he’s mine.
Jared stands up immediately, but then glances back uncomfortably at Brayden on the rollout bed.
‘Hang on. Don’t want this pervert listening in.’ He stands over Brayden, holding up his pair of earbuds. ‘Hope you like Parkway Drive, dude.’
‘Are you serious?’ Brayden mutters, wriggling but strapped down in place so firmly that he can’t shake off the earbuds that Jared plugs firmly into his ears. ‘At least put on some Katy Perry or something…’
Jared pats him too hard on the chest. ‘Bit of metal is just what you need, bud.’ He looks up at me, his eyes shining as he swaggers across the room and takes my hand. ‘This way, Kaiya.’
He pulls the door shut on Brayden’s room and we stagger into the main bedroom together. I half-climb, half-tumble onto the mattress. The room spins until I feel something heavy land beside me. I reach out in the dark. My hand lands on top of his. His fingers open and I snake mine between them. His breath comes in shorter gasps.
Once his face is close to mine, bourbon breath on cottonmouth, I summon up the rock chick inside me: the chick who gets what she wants. Chrissy Amphlett, be my guide.
‘Jared,’ I whisper, ‘I want you to fuck me.’
Jared moans in triumph, his tongue deep in my mouth. I close my eyes as his fingers unknot the back of my bikini top. He thinks he’s got me, but actually I’ve got him. I’ve lured him and he’s so weak, almost mesmerised by the offer of my body, that he’s putty in my hands, willing to do whatever I want.
The more of myself I offer him, the more pliable he becomes, so grateful to be able to touch me that he does exactly what I ask. It stuns me how easy it is to get a man, to overpower him with your body: it’s as easy as training a dog, offering treats for obedience. I wonder if this is why they spend our whole lives warning us against it.
No thoughts. No feelings. Nothing to hold my body back. Just the thump of intoxicated blood in my ears, flushing out all the restraint, and the tingling pleasure of my synapses getting exactly what they want.
The world is out of control and so am I.
26
MASON
I don’t get crazy stoned. Just a happy high that wraps my brain in cottonwool, so nothing can hurt it. And in this haze, I know what I want.
I drift onto the beach. The breeze is cool on my skin. There’s a song in my head, a chorus on loop. Our footy-club song. I mumble it as I wander across the sand, a bounce in my step. That feeling of winning a game of footy, adrenaline and power in your blood as you wrap your arms around your teammates—that’s how I feel right now. The lion’s ready.
As I get to the red shack, the door opens and Kaiya stumbles out. Her eyes are glassy and bloodshot. Dunno how she can even see where she’s going, or keep her feet.
‘Oi, Kaiya.’ I catch her, steady her. ‘You okay?’
‘So good,’ she says thickly, looking past me, over my shoulder. ‘Even though you make up blow-job stories. I’m so good.’
She’s cooked.
I steer her to the blue shack to her bunk, where she curls up and closes her eyes.
And then I head back to the red shack. There’s a V8 engine purring in my chest. It’s ready to rev up, fast and furious.
I find Jared in bed, naked, only his feet under the sheet. His hair and forehead are slick with sweat, a shaft of moonlight falling across his shiny pecs.
I flop onto the mattress, facing him. ‘You look hot.’
Jared blinks up at the ceiling, wipes his forehead like he’s confused. ‘Uh. It’s a hot night.’
‘No. I mean you look hot. Sexy. Studmuffin. Hunk.’
The words tumble out. I nearly laugh. Doesn’t he realise how good looking he is? My mind is so cottony and soft I know he won’t be bothered by me saying it.
‘I know I am,’ he says, smirking, cocky as ever.
He doesn’t get it. I reach around his shoulders, smell the musk of his armpits, and sweep him into a sticky hug. ‘No, bro. You’re not getting it. I love you.’
‘Jesus. You are stoooooned, Mase.’
He’s not holding me tight enough in return, his hands only resting on the muscle of my back.
‘I’m not stoned,’ I say. ‘I mean it. I love you, man. Just cuddle me. It feels right, doesn’t it?’
I cling to him tighter, his head in the crook of my neck. His sweat drips onto my biceps; his lips are pressed against my collarbone. I close my eyes and feel my heart glow with our chests touching. My jocks stiffen.
‘You’re too horny for your own good,’ Jared says.
‘No. Stop talking, okay. This is nice. Just let it be nice.’
This is the moment Jared and I have needed. The moment he learns he can tell me anything, because I’m more than a best mate. I lean forward, my lips gently brushing his collarbone. And then, his collarbone being so nice to brush against, I do it a second time, in a gentle kiss.
Jared’s body stiffens. I hold him tighter and my body starts acting of its own accord. I kiss him a third time, more hungrily.
‘Mase.’ His limbs are frozen. ‘You’re throwing off weird gay vibes. Get off me.’
‘It’s okay, bro. I’m not being a creepo. It’s not just sex. I love you, man. I love you, love you. Not like a brother. I love you more than anyone.’
I pull my head off his shoulder, nudge his nose with mine. Even as he pulls his nose away, I lean forward and pull his head back to me, so my lips meet his. Jared tastes like beer and sweat.
And then I feel his knee drive hard into my stomach.
‘What the fuck!’ he shrieks.
Silver stars explode in my vision. I double over with pain from the kick.
Jared’s rolled out of the bed. He’s on his feet, looking down at me in disgust.
‘What the actual…how could you…you fucken perv…you tried to…what the…’
I try to get up, but I feel like I’m gonna yak.
‘I meant it.’ My voice is the smallest it’s ever been. ‘I love you, Jared. Don’t you love me?’
‘No, I don’t love you,’ Jared cries, his tongue poking out like he just tasted bitter medicine. ‘I thought you were my mate.’
I scramble onto my stomach and reach around in the dark, finding his calf, which he launches in my direction. His big toe strikes the corner of my mouth, catching like a fishhook. I taste blood.
‘You’re fucked in the head,’ he says.
The pain in my mouth penetrates the cottonwool haze. I recoil, scrambling to get away.
‘Get out, Mason. Don’t ever come near me again with this gay shit.’
He pushes me in the back, and I stumble into the glass cabinet on the wall.
I get my hands up just in time to shield my face from smacking into the corner of the bracket, but my foot catches the bottles on the bottom tier of the shrine.
I can’t do anything to stop it.
Three glass stubbies clatter onto the tiles…and suddenly it’s a cascade…a roaring torrent of bottles tumbling from the higher tiers and smashing on the tiles, the castle of glass collapsing in a deafening roar.
It only takes seconds, and the shrine that took so long to build is nothing but broken shards.
‘Fucken dog!’ Jared roars. ‘You did that on purpose!’
His shouts chase me outside, but it’s the sound of glass shattering that stays in my ears as I run, like the sound of the ocean trapped in a shell, haunting it. I lurch down the beach with an open wound much bigger than the glass cuts on my feet.
Eventually, I trip over a deck chair and stack it, landing on my back on the sand.
I spit blood out of my mouth and stare up at the emptiness of the night sky. I don’t know the names of any of them stars. I don’t even know which ones are the planets.
But somewhere up there in the sub-zero cold is Pluto, spinning away from the normal planets in his bent orbit.
Alone.
FRIDAY, 23 NOVEMBER
27
LEONARDO
I wake in pre-dawn gloom, face-down on the stale-mothball mattress. My nose hurts. My jaw throbs. I can’t feel my teeth. I remember shouting but I don’t remember why.
Something stinks, something the salty ocean aroma can’t fully cover up. It’s sickening, like when you walk into a hospital and the lemon-scented disinfectant hasn’t quite masked the stench of human fluids.
I roll onto my back. The smell is unbearably strong. Bile shoots into my throat. I force myself to sit up despite the splitting pain in my head.
There are shards of glass across the floor in the doorway, jagged diamonds glistening in a pool of blood.
‘Oh, fuck. Jesus Christ.’
I stumble in my haste to get to the door, crunching across the broken glass in my thongs.
The door to what was my room is closed, but the main bedroom door is wide open. The shrine has vanished: someone is sprawled on the tiles amid a mountain of red-stained shattered glass. His white footy shorts are splattered in blood.
I lunge forward in horror, grabbing his body, shaking it, shouting at him to wake up.
He doesn’t respond. There’s jagged, broken beer bottles all around his head and a thick shard of glass wedged in his neck.
The pool of blood is cold. His skin is ashen.
I start saying ‘no’ under my breath until it gets faster and louder and no longer under my breath but above my breath, above the wind, above the ocean’s roar.
Jared O’Shea is dead.
28
KAIYA
The shouts wake me.
It takes me a moment to get my head together. I got high last night. Stoned. The thing I thought made Naoko a train wreck. The thing I wanted and feared. My hands are gritty with sand. My throat is sore. There’s a dull throb between my legs.
The shouts don’t stop.
And then someone else screams.
I haul myself out of the bunk. Everyone’s running to the red shack. We all push through the open door of the main bedroom.
I’m not ready for what I see.
Jared, covered in blood, broken glass everywhere.
Jared, no longer breathing.
Jared, throat cut by a shard of glass.
Jared, dead.
At first, I don’t sob. I scream.
Nobody consoles me because they’re all losing it, too.
The world is shaking, blurred, out-of-body.
Val’s a puffy-eyed mess, clutching Jared’s shoulders until she’s pulled away by Aisha.
Mason reaches over Jared’s chest and starts to perform CPR until Fezza tells him it’s hours too late for that. Mason shrieks at him and punches a hole clean through the wall.
Leonardo’s doubled over on the floor. He looks pale, like he just threw up. Ryan’s standing close beside him, helmet visor open, ice-blue eyes staring.
For minutes, the room is an aching, airless vortex of muted swears, leaking salt water, shaking disbelief. Every breath is drawn sharp enough to split a lung.
‘This isn’t real,’ Taylor mutters.
It definitely doesn’t feel real. That can’t be Jared, extinguished on the floor.
I look at Val’s face and see how destroyed she is. She has no make-up on, exposing a small flare up of acne across her cheek. Her eyes are wide, with dark bags around them from crying. She reminds me of that Edvard Munch painting, a horrified screaming face contorting and melting into the overcooked orange haze of an apocalyptic sky.
I think about what I did with Jared last night. We had sex. After, he wanted to hold me close to him. He was gentler than I’d imagined he could be. In that moment, I didn’t hate him.
But I’d bailed on him, fast. I made an excuse and left. I was ashamed, confused, high.
What if I had stayed, like he’d asked me to? If I’d stayed, would he still be alive?
What even happened here? An accident? A suicide? A murder? Nobody’s asking it out loud, the way we did with Baz. It’s different. So much bigger. Jared was one of us.
And right this second, what happened doesn’t even fucking matter to me. The fact is, the world where Jared existed has ended, and there’s a new world where he doesn’t.
Everything has changed. Nothing will ever be the same.
29
MASON
My hand is throbbing from punching the wall. It was thin plasterboard, but it still stings like a motherfucker.
It hurts, it hurts, it bloody hurts.
Somewhere in the dull shock in the room, someone says something about moving Jared—giving him some dignity. I wanna do that.
Kaiya takes the shack’s tiny broom and sweeps the glass to the edges of the room. I move straight in to be the first to lift him, taking his shoulders. Ryan, Fezza and Leonardo help. We carry Jared onto the bed.
I cover him with a sheet, tucking it around his sides like I’m putting him to sleep. I want to climb under the sheet with him, cuddle him until his eyes open and he’s okay.
I can’t. I don’t. I feel a jagged mountain erupting in my throat.
I run out of the room, out of the shack. I run down the beach with acid-rain tears burning my cheeks. The hot sand stings the glass cuts on my feet. I pulled a dozen tiny shards out last night and washed the blood off in the salt water, but they haven’t stopped stinging. And that pain is nothing compared to the gaping ache in my heart every time I think about Jared.
I slow to a stop at the fire pit. There is nowhere to run to, no amount of motion that can take me where I want to go.
There is a parallel universe, somewhere way past Pluto, where last night took a different path. A universe where I lay down beside Jared in bed and told him who I was, and when I looked into his eyes, instead of bitter disgust, I saw a flame flare; he drew me closer, inviting me into his body. And I got so close to him that I was inside him, closer and deeper than any man can be to another. And when I was inside him, the parts of him that hurt disappeared, the wooden walls he’d built around himself were reduced to cinders, and I felt his flesh smooth and soft against mine, our sweat glided us into one another, and he was happy the way he deserved to be, his eyes danced, loving me and everything I meant to him. He would have been fixed.
And I would have been fixed, too. I would have had the man I love—my best mate—look at me and see something different. Not Mason the big unit. Not Firetruck. A man who is beautiful, loveable, soft. Someone to swear at, and headbutt, and wrestle, and slap the arse of, but also someone who needs—craves—to be touched gently, to be held, to look deep into another’s eyes and see himself reflected, see himself known. And I could have given all of that love back to Jared, twice as strong, so he knew what love felt like, too, because I don’t think he had ever known it.
That universe is not this one. I will never know it or smell it or touch it.
It was a fantasy. A dream I wish I’d never woken up from.
And now that I have, all I want is to go back to sleep so I can be with my mate Jared again.
30
LEONARDO
The worst part isn’t that Jared’s eyes are shut, never to open, or that his mouth has never been open so long without an insult coming out of it.
The worst part isn’t how ice-cold his calf is when we lift his body onto the bed.
The worst part isn’t the flash of memories from our happier, much happier, primary-school days: wrestling the footy off each other in his backyard; mashing buttons on the PlayStation controller, swearing and laughing as Crash Bandicoot smashed a box of wumpa fruits only to fall down a hole; the Easter when we nearly threw up from gorging on crème eggs.
