By Jane Downing.
She turned the knitting at the end of a row, feeling like a bird with a broken wing as she swapped the needles from hand to hand. A few stitches lurched precipitously to the tapering end of the left needle, lemmings, bunched together and ready to fall. The rest were so tight around the full girth of the needle Lorrie couldn’t push the precarious end-of-the-line stitches up out of harm’s way.
‘Relax, you’re getting the tension wrong.’
Lorrie’s mother sat on the top step of the caravan blowing smoke across the field of cape weed and Paterson’s Curse. Madeleine was turned away from her daughter, facing out towards the bright sunshine of the holidays. She had eyes in the back of her head all of a sudden. Belatedly. Her floral shorts were pushed high, exposing her pale thighs. To be sun-kissed, she’d sighed when she’d left Lorrie to it.
A tutorial on YouTube would have been as helpful in teaching the fundamentals of knitting. Plain – that was it for now. Purl – well, that sounded luminescent, way beyond the horizons of a twelve-year-old in a caravan stuck out on a headland.
They were not running away. They were not hiding.
Lorrie kept herself wedged on the seat behind the fixed table. As she bent forward to thrust the needle into the first stitch of the next line, the metal edge of the table pressed uncomfortably against her tender nipples. The night before she’d looked at them in the flickering light of the shower block. Alone, she’d taken off her denim jacket with the sequined flower on the left shoulder and lifted her shirt. Moths and insects had massed in the circle of light above her. Like the little bumps around the… teat? Was that the word? On a school excursion she’d seen a calf sucking on one as its mother stared onto space. Did the human body have its own word for the dark centre to this asteroid belt of dimples and lumps?
Stepping back from the mirror, she’d had to admit her chest didn’t really have breasts as such. Her flesh, once flat against her ribs, had just swollen into tiny puffy mounds. She’d wondered if there was something wrong with her as she’d stared into the mold-scabbed public mirror. In photos and porn, breasts were always round and firm, the nipples brown and nutty.
She couldn’t ask her mother about the changes in her body. Madeleine, previously uninterested in women’s crafts, was now only intent on setting some kind of knitting bee rolling. Someone must have suggested it. Because idle hands make… what was it… make something… out of nothing?
The pink scarf Lorrie had been set up to knit was as yet only as long as her thumb. She continued to agitate the thick learner’s needle into the stitches, one by one. The wool matted with her sweat. Outside the caravan birdsong, which sounded like calls of alarm, was briefly drowned by her brother’s whooping.
Their mother laughed as he whizzed by on his bike. ‘Go, Shane, go,’ she called, flicking the stub of her well-dragged cigarette after him. Then, twisting around to Lorrie, ‘go on, go out, get a bit of sun.’
Lorrie wanted to say she had to finish the row. Her voice didn’t come out. Rusted hinges scratched at the back of her throat. A box cracked open to let her words free, her voice box. Or if she had let it open wide, Pandora’s box.
‘Still not talking to me,’ her mother muttered, her back turned on her daughter again.
They weren’t the only ones at the caravan park; it only felt that way. It was still a few weeks until school ended for the year. By then summering families would have taken over and they wouldn’t recognise the place.
If they’d had to go away for a bit, this wasn’t where Lorrie would have chosen. A tin box in a field. All three of them in one tight room day after day. Theirs was the cheapest of the on-site fixtures. It didn’t even have an awning out front. Her mother had cooked, egg and bacon on a two-ring gas stove right inside the door.
She was still there on the metal step, waving Lorrie off. When Lorrie glanced back, her mother’s head was hidden as she leaned back inside the caravan. Lorrie didn’t have to imagine she was lighting her next cigarette on the gas ring. She knew it was the only explanation. Her mother was smoking a lot more now.
The grass crackled underfoot, brittle already from the summer just beginning. It scratched her soles, and up inside the hems of her jeans, and sent her hop-scotching to the sandy path that led out of the caravan park and into the dunes. It was hot already. Sweat prickled under her arms and between her thighs; each pore pricked as if by a needle of dry grass. She unsnapped the metal buttons of her jacket as she walked, wrapping her arms around herself to hold it closed anyway.
She had to lean into the trudge up to the ridge. Sedges towered head-high on either side of the path, a maze with only one route through. A dead thong hung like a Christmas bauble in one thicket of scrub. The swarming of insects added to the claustrophobia, so she began to run. Only ten more steps to be clear and standing on the highest point of this bit of coastline. It all fell away from there.
Her heart beat fast, trying to leap up her throat and out of her mouth. She stood unmoving as it settled, her hands on the hips of her jeans, two sizes bigger than the last new pair. If she stepped out beyond the grasses, she’d be exposed. Exposed to who? The beach was deserted. She’d be exposed, nonetheless.
The continuation of the path down to the beach was steep, a mini cliff face. And the ocean beyond was as deserted as the beach. A white line cut steadily through the scattered peaks of small waves. The wake of an animal.
She looked across the water to the horizon, stretched forever in both directions. It was too difficult to imagine anything beyond it.
If she went down to the beach, she’d have to climb up again. So, she turned back.
‘Bitch,’ Shane screamed, because no-one but Lorrie was there to hear. Her brother appeared and disappeared between the caravans in a shot.
There were a number of on-site vans like theirs set in a grid of paths. Shane reappeared from the right, charging towards her. He raised his bike on the back wheel. A lion rampant on a knight’s shield, or the Lone Ranger’s horse rearing up.
If she hadn’t stepped out of the way, would he have swerved?
She could see him reflected in the main window of a caravan to her left, then he was gone again.
‘Truck, you fuck,’ he hissed to announce himself behind her. The Lorrie to Truck shift of her name had never been affectionate. He was ten. She hadn’t even known the meaning of fuck at ten.
‘He was going to teach me to fish this holiday. He has rods. He was going to teach me to gut them. Now he’s gone because of you.’
She could see the muscles on Shane’s legs popping in the restraint needed to pedal at a walking pace beside her as his accusation lengthened from name calling to denunciation. He was only wearing Speedos, she could see too how tight his stomach muscles were clenched. His eyes were squinting against the sun. The half-lowered lids were probably the only thing keeping his bulging eyeballs in their sockets.
He passed her. Did a sweeping uey, his wheels scattering gravelly pellets up her legs.
‘It’s all your fault,’ her brother said, dangerously close behind her again. ‘He’d be here except for you.’
But she knew he hadn’t left because she’d asked him to. She’d been asking him to go for a long time.
She set herself a goal: do ten more rows before I have another biscuit. The Family Assortment packet lay open an arm’s stretch away, going stale in the thick cloister of the caravan. She counted stitches to drown out the voices.
Her mother was outside on a banana chair now. Her best friend, who’d arrived from town with a brace of wine bottles, was reclined alongside her. They were like twins in identical shorts and crop tops, hair piled on top of their heads, secured with scrunchies that held their scraped-up wrinkles too tight. Peas in a pod laid out on the sun lounges unfolded in the shade of the cars. They were set just below the caravan window, propped open earlier in an attempt to alleviate the heat inside, along with the smells of dirty laundry and bacon fat. Lorrie sweated as she knitted, sitting in her reclasped jacket, pretending not to listen.
Yvonne described the journey down. Missing the last turn off the highway. The number of dead wombats by the side of the road. ‘I like your toenails,’ she said in the same breath.
Hadn’t she noticed they matched her mother’s fingernails, Lorrie wondered, losing her count, going back, labouring on.
‘They don’t scream desperate, back on the market?’ her mother giggled. One of the Rieslings had been opened while they were struggling with the tubular mechanisms of the banana chairs. That was before they’d given up and reeled Shane in to help. Before they’d seen him on his way again, with a breezy, ‘back by sunset, hey.’
‘See, same,’ her mother breathed.
Lorrie didn’t have to look out of the caravan to know her mother was waggling her fingers and toes; candy pink, like the wool her mother had chosen for the project. All girls in this together now, branded pink.
Her mother’s voice dropped. Then, ‘Is he gone?’
‘Yes. I got Jason to lock up after the shit’s last load. And Jason got the keys back off him, don’t worry.’
The silence was not empty. The heavy clunk of bottle against glass. The splashing of liquid.
‘And how are you going?’ Yvonne asked in her careful voice, the same one she used working with preschoolers at the childcare centre.
‘I loved him.’
A glug of wine into a wine glass, or a sob caught in the throat.
‘I liked him too Mads. He had us all fooled. Who could have known?’
Lorrie crammed a Monte Carlo into her mouth. The corners of her dry lips ripped as she kept pushing the whole biscuit in. She had to wait for her saliva to moisten then dissolve the biscuit before she could breathe again.
No-one heard her choking.
I don’t want him to pick me up at school. I don’t want him picking me up at Scouts. I don’t like him getting me ready for my shower. I don’t like him coming into my room. Don’t let him move in with us. I don’t like him. I don’t want him. Her mother had never heard any of it. She almost hadn’t believed her own eyes.
No wonder no more words came out of Lorrie now.
Best friends were invented to make you feel better.
‘You’ll find someone else,’ Yvonne assured Madeleine outside the propped windowpane. ‘Someone better.’
Lorrie imagined tears welling in Yvonne’s sympathetic eyes. Synthetic tears. Loving the drama.
‘But how will I ever know if a man is after me and not…? And now she’s almost a teenager.’
A hand slapped against hard flesh. Ankle probably. Mosquito time.
‘Fish and chips from down the road?’ Yvonne suggested.
‘You read my mind, Bonnie my lass.’
They made Lorrie walk with them, pressuring her to leave again the enclosed womb of the van. ‘To work up an appetite Lorraine.’
‘Leave your jacket here. How can you stand it in this heat?’ Her mother had her hand on the collar. They struggled, Madeleine and her daughter. Sequins from the decorative flower popped and rained down, discs of purple and gold slipping between the gaps in the metal steps of the van. Lorrie won that one.
Lorrie didn’t notice the dropped stitch until she was twelve rows on. The left behind loop sat out against the plain knitting, circling a patch of air, sticking its tongue out. A ladder climbed all the way up to her needles where there were now thirty-nine stitches not forty.
She unwedged herself from behind the table––the exact spot where no-one else could possibly get in––and carried her abomination of a scarf over to the open door. Seven steps. She squeezed onto the top step beside her mother. The tight fit made her aware of how much bigger she’d got. She held up the knitting. She was close enough to hear her mother swallow her impatience.
Madeleine put down her tall glass and long cigarette and took both needles. The scarf was a hot blanket across her naked knees, a rectangle finally longer than it was wide. She peered at it for some time then started an elaborate fishing for hooks of wool to knit the dropped stitch back into the fabric of the scarf. Lorrie stared at the weeds. Her mother’s left arm knocked against her with each restitch. Her cigarette balanced near their bare feet. The wool nestled against the stem of the glass like a lost kitten.
It took a long time for the loose rungs on the ladder to slowly disappear. Lorrie could smell herself. Or herself on her jacket, despite the menthol fumigation. She realised the absurdity of sitting in a vehicle with wheels that could never travel.
‘You need help Mads?’ Yvonne asked from her banana chair under a hat and the lengthening shade. Mads. Her friends called her that. Shane called her Mad when she wasn’t around. He meant angry not crazy. Although, which was a better mad?
Their mother thrust the knitting back at her. ‘Finished.’ The repair looked like a scar. Thick, and puckered down each side. Still ruined, even though she’d tried to make it right.
Lorrie ran her finger over the lumpy knots. Exhaled. It wasn’t enough. The only other option was to rip it right back. To unknit. Back to the intact row. And start again from there.
She pulled the needle out from the knitting. Her mother snatched the scarf back.
‘What the fuck, Lorraine?’
Lorrie pulled at the strand of wool that ran like an umbilicus to the thirty-nine exposed loops. Lightly at first. One by one, the stitches dissolved. Lorrie felt sick. Every hard-won stitch was unsecured and vulnerable. And then, gone. She pulled harder and felt an answering tug of resistance. Her mother clutched the scarf to her chest. It was too much. Lorrie threw herself out of the caravan. She launched with the bounce of the steps, and ran, wool still in her grasp, knitting unravelling line by line in her mother’s hands. Way past the line with the dropped stitch.
The kinked wool caught on the grass, flew over Shane on his bike, stretched and wreathed the scrub, as she ran to the shore and tumbled down the last of the cliff path onto the beach. The unravelling scarf finally running out, as her calves screamed in the sprint across the sand. Screaming silently within every cell: he is gone, he’s been thrown out, he’ll never come back. His hand no longer around her wrist, her waist, her neck.
She kept going. Into the water, a slap. Cold, a body too big to be warmed by the early summer sun. But as it hit her knees, her thighs, her belly, it felt warmer. Almost amniotic. Now, an embrace.
