Boundaries (Chapters 3 and 4)

 

“Three  (Olive)”

2022

Olive sits on the toilet, certain she has a UTI. Her phone rings and there’s no caller ID, and Olive feels a burning pain so significant that for a moment she considers it possible she’s passing another kidney stone.

“Hello?”

“Is this Olive Newbury?”

Olive groans, then reaches for the toiler paper.

“Is everything okay?”

“Yeah. Yes. This is Olive speaking.”                           ,

“This is Patricia, I’m the RN at Everside Supported Living.”

Olive wipes, checking the paper for blood.

“Everside is where your mother, Ethel, lives semi-independently,” says Patricia.

“Yeah.” Olive wipes and checks again.

“Well, I -- are you sure everything’s okay?”

“What exactly do you want to tell me?”                

Olive flushes and stands, shuffling to the sink while pulling her pants up.

“Your mother, Ethel – she absolutely cannot live with us any longer.”

Olive calmly turns to the mirror. She washes her hands, putting the phone on speaker. In the reflection, her regrowth reaches her ears.

“Oh. Again? What? Is it the betting?  The card games?”

“This time we mean it. She broke another resident’s clavicle. And I know clavicle’s break around here very easily, but other residents saw her do it.”

Olive pores over herself in the mirror, checking the bags under her eyes. She opens one of the cabinets, looking for the home dye that worked best last time.  

“So, what, the police are charging her? She assaulted someone?”

“No – no, not exactly. We couldn’t get a statement from anyone.”

“So, there’s no evidence.”

“They’re all afraid of her! This is a private facility. We’re asking her to leave.”

“Have you called any of my brothers?”

“Ethel has only given us permission to phone you.”

There’s a knock at the front door. Olive looks out the bathroom door.

“Oh, who is…I have to go, Patricia. This is what my mother’s house and assets – my inheritance -- pays you to deal with.”

“Please come and collect her.”

Olive hangs up. There’s another knock at the front door, this time several in rapid succession.

“Hold your horses. I was on the phone.”

Olive opens the front door. David is holding a frayed sports bag and Olive’s collected mail. He smiles, returning a quick embrace from his mother. It’s been a year.

“Oh. David. You smell ripe.”

“Sorry. I walked from the train. And I’m not feeling so good.”

Olive suddenly realised she was mothering him, hand on forehead, checking David for swollen glands.

“Come lay down. I’ll unpack for you. Your room’s where I keep my cleaning supplies for work but you can stay in the office.”

#

Olive watches as David vomits three times in the space of an hour, each time with ever-more bile. She takes the bucket and cleans it out in the shower and replaces it dutifully. It’s a conflicted feeling to have a sick child - on one hand, of course it’s distressing, full of anxiety, but on another, it’s one of the few parenthood dynamics that requires little thought and planning. It’s almost as if it happens to someone else.

Olive ignores another call from the nursing home.

“Maybe you go to it in that flat-share. Too many folks in a cooped-up space,”
 Olive says, wiping David’s brow. “Is it just vomiting, or…?”

David shifts. “A little diarrhea.” Nothing quite like discussing loose stools with your mother to regress you back to childhood.

“Maybe I need to call Dr. Alderman to check you out? He started doing house calls again this year, y’know?” Olive says. “And you have to eat. I’ll butter some toast.”

David, lying face down, restless legs kicking in discomfort, finally looks at Olive.

“Isn’t Dr. Alderman really old? Like Methuselah old?”

“Family doctor. Known him for years. Since I was a kid.”

Ethel reckons since she was at least fourteen.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Four (Olive)”

1975

When I was in Grade Nine, I yearned to smoke menthols the way Norma did, all confident and showy: billows of smoke surrounded her like apparitions. Joey Murolo, one of the Redlands surfer boys, had once told me Norma was a good root. Norma’d meet the boys in Capalaba, and then ride with them in their panel vans to a secluded spot at Wellington Point and do the deed. Norma never told me what “the deed” involved, and so my imagination roamed, recalling the animated sperms from the overhead slides Ms. Cassimatis would show us in physical education class, jumping between my thighs like breaching whales.  

Conversely, Isabella, an effortlessly beautiful exchange student from some town outside Pescara, who communicated mostly through grunts and pointing, and spent time poring over the English/Italian dictionary her host family gave her, seemed to have no interest in the deed, and Joey Murolo also reckoned she’d be a good root, too. It boggled the mind that my two best friends could take more antagonistically different views on the deed and still seem equally sexual to boys like Joey Murolo.

Isabella and Norma and me were eating lunch by the water fountains at our table. The Principal, Mr. Freidkin, had just walked by and complimented me on a paper I’d submitted for some state school essay competition and Norma was giving me shit for it (and Isabella was calling me a tipo strano). We sat where we sat because it was far enough away from Joey Murolo and the Redlands boys that they had to walk past after every lunch break, but close enough that Norma could make sure they saw her legs when the teachers didn’t notice she’d hemmed her uniform.

“Why don’t you just fuck Johnson Munroe?” Norma asked, eating just the cheese from her sandwich, like a queen picking apart a gift of devotion.

“He is your – how you say – equal.” Isabella stopped herself from conferring with the dictionary.  We knew exactly what she meant.

“Yeah. He’s still a spunk. Just more…achievable. For you, I mean,” said Norma. She never seemed cognizant of her own cruelty. She just said things. “He doesn’t sit with the Redlands Boys, so he may actually go for it.”

Johnson Munroe sat at the tables by the demountable building with the Anderson twins, Mark and Denny. Mark and Denny were skinny and had bad acne but over the last year Johnson had a growth spurt and started to get a tan from surfing. We estimated he was about a semester away from ditching the twins entirely and joining the Redlands Boys.

“He works at the record store all by himself after school., And he’s eighteen,” Norma said, grinning “You should pay him a visit,”

Isabella consulted her Italian/English dictionary and agreed, and soon both her and Norma were egging me on, making me feel excited about an idea that had never really been borne from me.

#

I ran a finger across a dusty album jacket a safe distance from the counter. The key was to appear as if I genuinely had a purchase in mind, should any real customers show (and I had seen none), they would know I wasn’t just there to accost Johnson. Johnson, for that matter, stood at the register absorbing a magazine and staring blankly at a wall. It was the first moment I’d had alone to really consider him as someone to lose my virginity to. He had curly blonde hair and wore footy shorts always, and I’d caught myself thinking about his muscular legs in quiet moments. I’d never connected those quiet thoughts with an active desire for sex, but nothing Norma said to me seemed to imply that sex was something you wanted and took, like food or water, but simply something that happened to you.

 Her and Isabella were sitting by their bikes outside the shop, sharing a cigarette, and whenever I’d shoot them an anxious look, I’d get nothing back but giggles and more pressure to approach Johnson.

 “Go, just go,” mouthed Norma, as she exhaled a puff of smoke. I walked up to the counter and finally made eye contact with Johnson. I saw, for the first time, his eyes were green and thin, and reminded me vaguely of a fish’s.

“Yeah?” he asked.

“I think it’s time to change those posters.”

I gestured to the yellowing posters hung on the wall behind him, the covers of LPs released in years past. They weren’t ancient, and the store wasn’t busy enough to justify a rotation of printed media, but I had nothing else to say. Johnson looked back at the posters.

“You know that’s Prince, right?” His inflection didn’t change. He flipped through the magazine again,

“I know. I was just being a moll.” I shifted the weight on my feet. Isabella and Norma were in hysterics outside. Johnson cut a glance at them.

“Do you think you could help me ditch them? They’re annoying me,” I asked.

“Aren’t they, like, your mates?”

I nodded. “What are you doing after your shift?”.

#

Johnson had parked in a paved area off the main drag, deserted by shops’ close and shaded by a gum tree. I knew Norma and Isabella were following somewhere nearby, but they’d upped their stealth game. He opened the backseat of his car - something beat-up, handed-down – and gestured for me to hop in. I pushed empty bottles and takeaway containers to the car’s floor and did as he said. Johnson followed behind me, shutting the door.

“Shirt,” Johnson said, which I assumed was a command. I did as I was told and lifted my tank top over my head. I was wearing the same bra my mother chose a few weeks after I first got my period. I laid down on the backseat, a window roller protruding into my neck.

Johnson undid my top buttons and pulled my jeans down, the same fish-like look in his eyes I’d seen earlier. I watched him unzip his fly and I turned my head to the sky. I felt a sharp prick and then a spreading, crisp, pain, like being knifed. I felt pooling blood, but he said nothing, a view of the top his head rising into my eyeline every few seconds as I watched the branches of a tree out the window. Moments later, he grunted, and I saw him rebutton his pants. I lay bare-arsed on the backseat as he dressed.

   “Guess I’ll see you at school?” he said. I was still watching the tree outside sway in the breeze, too afraid to look at him. A magpie had flown into view.

“Yep.”

He stayed in that position for a moment, looking at me, and I took the hint. I pulled my jeans and tank top back on and got out of the car.

I stood in the street, limp and useless, while Johnson climbed in the front seat and drove away. The breeze – once warm and welcome – now felt plaguing.

“Norma? Isabella?”

I half-expected them to emerge from behind a powerline, having been meters away the entire time, making the whole exercise some sort of ridiculous game. Making it not real. But they never did.  Instead, I watched, in the distance, as they biked away down the street, not giggling anymore. Like they were fleeing a tragedy.

I started walking away from the main drag, hoping I could get home and into mine and my sisters’ room without talking to Mum or any of my brothers. I touched the space between my legs. It was wet. I looked down at my hand. Blood was flowing now; thin, red blood. The kind you get from a fresh injury. A clean wave of panic overtook me, replacing the anxiety and shame. I felt myself go pale and my limbs weak.

My jeans, though a dark denim, couldn’t hide a growing patch of blood for the whole time I walked home. I fished for fifty cents in my pocket and bought a newspaper from the vending machine, wrapping it around my waist.

#

“What, did someone stab ya?”

Kurt, the loser Mum was sleeping with at the time, lightly smacked her on the arm as I walked in and dropped the newspaper in the bin.

“Ethel. Shut up.”

Mum sighed and shooed him from the room. I could hear one of my brothers on the phone in the kitchen and Mum sensed my panic about it.

“Don’t worry about your brother. Come sit with ya’ Mum out on the patio. Put a magazine down first,” she said.

I followed Mum out onto the back patio, joining her on the rotted wood bench that overlooked our overgrown Housing Commission yard.

“Some boy do this to ya?” she asked.  I didn’t answer. She lit a smoke.

“Well, you already got your rags, so I know it’s not that.”

I finally nodded. Mum, with what I imagine took every ounce of her strength, placed a compassionate hand on my shoulder.

“Happens sometimes the first time. What’re ya, fourteen?”

I nodded.

“It means ya’ won.”

“I won?” I was still bleeding.

“Wasps – they’ll sting ya, leave their stinger in ya, ouch, but then fly away and die. Ya’ win.”

“I think that’s bees, Mum.”

“Point is – you’re the winner. This is power. This blood – it’s how ya get your power.”

Mum looked down at my pants, still freshly bleeding through.

“Maybe Dr. Alderman should pay a visit just in case. You kids, I swear.”

Mum took a long drag of her smoke before getting up.

“Bruce! Get off the phone! We gotta call the doctor! Ya’ sister went and got herself fucked!”

I heard Bruce snicker as he slammed down the phone