A Language of Limbs E-Book

Dylin Hardcastle

• Herausgeber: Verve Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 336

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

A love story about the almost crossovers of our lives...

1972. On a quiet summer night in Newcastle, Australia, two teenage girls must each make a choice: to act upon their desires or suppress them? To live an openly queer life or to try desperately not to?

Over the following three decades, these girls grow into women and live out their decisions, always almost crossing paths at pivotal moments. In an era that spans Australia's first Mardi Gras and the AIDS pandemic, there is joy and grief and loss and desire for each of them – but will their lives ever collide?

A Language of Limbs is about love and how it's policed, friendship and how it transcends, and hilarity in the face of heartbreak. A celebration of queer life in all its vibrancy and colour, this story finds the humanity in all of us and demands we claim our futures for ourselves.

Perfect for readers who loved Chloe Michelle Howarth's Sunburn, Carol Rifka Brunt's Tell the Wolves I’m Home and Joseph Cassara's The House of Impossible Beauties, as well as fans of Pose, Call Me By Your Name and Angels in America.

'Immersive and vividly descriptive... instances of queer joy in the novel, and moments of hardship are written with such grace. I will be thinking about this book for a long time' - Chloe Michelle Howarth, author of Sunburn

'A life-affirming, deeply-felt novel of the decisions we make and the lives that unspool from them. To read A Language of Limbs is to be reminded of the power of queer joy and community. I loved it' - Hannah Kent, author of Burial Rights

'Dylin Hardcastle's novel carried me away like a tidal current. Expansive across time, yet intimate in its focus, A Language of Limbs is that rare book that's equally poetic and propulsive - with twin protagonists who are impossible to shake. Nothing short of an instant queer classic' - Benjamin Law, author of The Family Law

'Poetic, fresh and mesmerising, Hardcastle's work is like nothing I have ever read. A Language of Limbs is full of feeling; a love story about the family we make ourselves. Upon finishing this book I was overwhelmed by a sense of, more. I am desperate for more stories like this' - Jessie Stephens, author of Something Bad is Going to Happen

This novel contains depictions of family violence, overt transphobia, homophobia, racism and physical violence. This novel portrays the AIDS pandemic. This novel also depicts a stillbirth.

Leseprobe

Praise for A Language of Limbs

‘A life-affirming, deeply felt novel of the decisions we make and the lives that unspool from them. To read A Language of Limbs is to be reminded of the power of queer joy and community. I loved it’ Hannah Kent, author of Burial Rites and Devotion

‘Poetic, fresh and mesmerising, Hardcastle’s work is like nothing I have ever read. A Language of Limbs is full of feeling; a love story about the family we make ourselves. Upon finishing this book I was overwhelmed by a sense of, more. I am desperate for more stories like this’ Jessie Stephens, author of Something Bad is Going to Happen

‘Dylin Hardcastle’s novel carried me away like a tidal current. Expansive across time, yet intimate in its focus, A Language of Limbs is that rare book that’s equally poetic and propulsive – with twin protagonists who are impossible to shake. Nothing short of an instant queer classic’ Benjamin Law, author of The Family Law

‘A Language of Limbs is a novel of (impeccable) vibes and mood, a gay hymnal written from inside the guts of the two protagonists… Hardcastle is helping carve out a new lexicon of queer experience, one that can hold the glory alongside the pain’ Australian Book Review

‘The latest novel from Australian writer Dylin Hardcastle begins in gasping poetic fragments of desire and discovery… This is an intricately woven work, whose emotions feel true’ ABC News

For those who I have loved quietly

Acknowledgement of Country

I was born in Cammeraygal Country, and have spent the majority of my life living between Gadigal Land, Wangal Land, and Bidjigal Land. I wrote this novel on the lands of the Bundjalung People and swam or surfed, each day after writing, in waters as clear as daylight. This novel is indebted to those rivers and lakes and sea, and to the Bundjalung People who have cared for those waterways since time immemorial, because it was in those waters that I dreamt and was playful, that I grieved, cried and laughed, as I mapped the contours of this novel.

At the time of writing this acknowledgement, I am living in Gadigal Country.

The First Nations People in my life have taught me so much about place, and what it means to be anchored in land, for our bodies to be rooted in water and sky. I am indebted to these friends for teaching me to slow down and to form deep and lasting relationships. As my dear friend, Larrakia and Jingili woman, Morgan Mags Marlow says, ‘You live in Country, not on it.’

I wish to acknowledge, then, the Traditional Custodians of the Country in which I’ve lived, and pay my deepest respects to the Traditional Custodians of Country right across this vast land and its surrounding islands. I acknowledge those who have been caring for these lands, waters and skies since time immemorial, and the Custodians of today who continue to care for Country and live in enduring connection to culture, despite ongoing processes of brutal and violent colonisation.

Through researching and talking about this novel, I learnt how deeply LGBTQIA+ liberation movements are indebted to the resistance and relentless activism of Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander People – a fight that has been fought since invasion, and that continues today. I acknowledge too that LGBTQIA+SB People have existed here, and loved here, since time immemorial.

I used to think of my work as an author as something I did, not something I lived. But through many yarns over the years, especially with Thunghutti and Bundjalung man, Warren Roberts and our friends at Yarn, I have come to understand storytelling as a way of being in the world and acknowledge Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People as the First and Original Storytellers and recognise their storytelling as survival, as resistance, as connection to culture, as joy, and as a way to care for Country.

I pay my respects to Elders past and present.

And extend those respects to any Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander People here reading this novel. Sovereignty has never been ceded. Always was, always will be, Aboriginal Land, Water and Sky.

‘We’re all the same fucking ocean.

We are the same ocean in different drops’

Peace Chattiya Sinsomboon

(One night on the kerb outside The Bearded Tit)

‘We stand on the shoulders of giants whose pain we will never fully understand’

Imbar Amira Nassi

a.k.a. imbi

(One night on the couch at Sabrina)

Content Warning

This novel contains depictions of family violence, overt transphobia, homophobia, racism and physical violence. This novel portrays the AIDS pandemic. This novel also depicts a stillbirth.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People are advised that this novel contains references to the Stolen Generations and police brutality.

I have done my best to accurately portray the lived experiences of the LGBTQIA+ community in a time I didn’t live through. However, I acknowledge that the LGBTQIA+ community is not a monolith, and that it is full of vastly diverse experiences. Thank you to those who have offered guidance and consultation. I hope I have done this story justice.

Most of all, I hope that as you read, you feel our joy.

limb one

All my life, undoes.

With my t-shirt – discarded on the floor. With my flesh – pricked pink and glistening in the hot glow of the lamp. With my breath – dense as a downpour. With my hips – pressed hard against the workbench. With my spine – arced and shivering. With my throat – open. With her hand – inside me. With our mouths – ravenous. With the door behind us – opening to the impervious wall of night. All my life, undoes.

Because my mother, standing in the doorway of the garden shed, screams. Or at least, that’s how I’ll remember it. A scream that pierces and pulls apart. Her words all blurring together, because I am already underwater.

I feel the blood draining from my hands and feet, running back into my core to protect my heart. I feel weightless, yet impossibly here, because there’s no escaping. There’s only undoing.

She has put her clothes back on.

Get dressed, she says, here, put this on! She thrusts my t-shirt in my lap. I clutch the shirt, for a breath, and feel this moment stretch out sideways, as I look through my own tears into her eyes, this girl I love, shaking my head, crying inside, no, no, no! As she manages a smile and squeezes my shoulders and my limbs quake like they already know what I’m about to lose. Because she leaves, pushing past my mother, out into the darkness. Running off down the street. I will never see her again. She is gone.

My father has heard the scream, and by the time he finds my mother, I am a shuddering, shaking. Trembled mess. My mother is in the doorway, pointing at me. What is it? he asks, hands open and reaching for me. Are you OK? And for a moment, I think I am saved. Forgiven. A moment – passes.

She was, my mother starts, struggling for words, with her. I scramble to my feet. Dad, wait, please. His eyes dart between my mother and me. I’m in my cotton shirt and pyjama pants. He looks down at my bare feet. The garden shed smells of wood shavings and compost and flesh. What the hell is going on? he asks, face fattening with frustration. Your daughter… says my mother, looking away from me, her face contorted by repulsion, like she can no longer fathom that I am of her. She was touching that girl! Touching? Oh, come on! My mother shrieks, erupts with tears. For God’s sake! She was kissing that slut!

That single word is an axe. Heart hacked into bloody chunks. Because this summer rolled through me like black thunder, hot and heaving. And she witnessed me in strikes of lightning. Flashes of truth and ecstasy. With her, my naked body shifted from an object of desire to the subject of the story. She saw me in all my horror, my blood sparkling red, staining her fingers the first time she reached inside me. And I liked how it felt, being turned inside out, learning that the self becomes whole in the moment it is opened.

I watch now, my hands on my mother’s chest, shoving her body, as if they are someone else’s hands. My mother’s head hits the shed wall so hard I think she might break through it. Her lips round into an O as a rush of air leaves her throat. Winded, she gasps. I watch her floundering in a pool of shock and disgust. My father’s hands are around my neck before I think to run. He drags me through the door, out onto the back lawn. And in the soft glow of the porch light, I see my father’s face, the colour of a salmon belly sliced open. Fleshy and wild. I try to speak, but his grip holds all the words. He raises his fist. Hesitates.

I think, I might die here.

The blow is swift. Cold on my face the way ice almost feels hot. I land flat on my back. The earth beneath me is spinning but spinning the other way. The wrong way.

I breathe in the sweetness of freshly cut grass. Inside muscle, the scent becomes the stench I will forever associate with the last time I see my father. Because as he kneels for another strike, I roll and scramble to my feet. He grabs my ankle, yanks me back. I kick him in the face, feel his nose crunch beneath my heel. He lets go and I am free. Up and running. Through the side gate. Down the driveway. Barefoot on concrete. I run and run and run until my feet are bleeding and I’m collapsing into the beginning of what will be my after. Because I know already that I’ll never again sleep in that bed, or swim in that pool, or piss in that toilet, or eat at that table. I’ll never again be between the borders of that house, because my being is transgression. A ghost there now, slipping through the plaster and weather-board. Bleeding on the grass. Seeped into earth. I’ll exist in that house only as an echo of everything before.

All my life… Here it is. Undone.

limb two

I wake in a heave of breath, reach for my bedside lamp and pull the string.

Between my legs, I feel the wet of my underwear.

Behind my eyes, I recall her – me, us – with startling realness, as if it were a memory. And perhaps it is. A memory of a memory of a yearning. Because in this dream –

she’s on her back – a white singlet – shadows of pink – I am grinding – her hands on my hips guiding me – back and forth and back and forth – mouth ajar – breath shuttling – she makes sounds I haven’t heard before – sounds that excite me – sounds that make my heart flutter like starling wings – like a great migration – south – a murmuration in the sky – swelling and contracting – the room is dark and blurry at the edges – everything is burning aching deep inside – and it feels good, this ache – a pulsation making me feel that I am alive – I am alive! – together – we bend and arc and grind in the unmoored glow – I look up – see the ceiling dissolve and fall away – light avalanches in – my eyes adjust and her face comes into focus – her – her since five years old – her since knobbly knees and missing teeth – her since the beginning of memory – time – desire – her – here – here she is –

I let out a deep sigh. Thinking of all the dreams. So many dreams, one after another, calcifying in the shape of her body. I remember her nipples hard beneath her singlet. I remember the sounds she made. I remember the unmoored glow. And all I want is to forget.

Because there she is – asleep on the pull-out mattress on the floor of my bedroom. I look down at my best friend, her still body, washed by tender light. Her face is dreaming soft. I watch her sleeping in this moment that feels swollen and wide as a lake.

Then slowly, I reach for the lamp, pull the string and turn off the light. Plunge back into darkness.

limb one

There’s a community park where I used to play with the boys in my suburb. Back when I was kicking the footy and getting tackled and jumping out of trees, just like them. Back when I had cropped hair and taut skin, just like them. Back before my body swelled and they became scared to tackle me, worried about hurting a girl. Back before I became the pulse of their desire. Suddenly watched. Suddenly craved.

I don’t realise that I’m back in this park until the sky whitens and the spray-painted lines of the footy field take shape. I’m sitting against the trunk of a Moreton Bay fig overlooking the park. The tree’s skin is ribbed, veiny, cold. I wonder how old it is. It has been here for as long as I can remember, with its wide crown and huge, slumped arms. A kookaburra swoops down from the sky, landing on a branch above me. I crane my neck to look up at it, perched just above my head. I sit still and quiet, not wanting to scare it away, as day slowly breaks all around us. I imagine what my face must look like in the quickening light. One eye swollen shut. The throb of my flesh is an anchor hooked into the dirt of the present. I am held here by this pain, sharp-edged and metallic.

I remember how I felt the first time I sat with her by the still water of the creek, how everything became rippled and saline. How she had laughed at my nervousness. How I’d laughed at hers. How we witnessed each other. Suddenly, the kookaburra begins to laugh. The sound, fresh feathered and glittering, reverberates out through the park, into this new day. It feels cruel and absurd and beautiful.

limb two

My mum is awake when I walk through the kitchen. Morning, honey, she says and kisses me on the cheek. Did you sleep OK?

I shrug. Kind of… I had weird dreams.

Oh dear, again? What were they about?

I tell her I don’t remember.

We eat breakfast at the family table, and I try not to look my best friend in the eyes. Because after years of her harbouring my secrets, she has become the key that might unlock me. Her eyes, dark brown and bordered by thick lashes, see me. Really see me. And I’m terrified of what she sees. Of what she might know. Of what she might suspect. So, I shove pancakes into my mouth and try to forget how I feel with her lips wet against mine.

She wants to swim in the pool.

It’s a cracking day, my dad says.

We get changed in my room. I face the wall, partially hiding behind my cupboard door, and she laughs and tells me, oh come on, I’ve seen it all before. And she has. From the swelling of my breasts to the growth of hair between my legs. She’s seen it all before, as I have seen all of her. And yet, the flesh of this world feels sparkling and new. Like a sheet of ice glistening on the underside of the earth, changing every season, so that even when you’ve mapped it end to end, the contours of the coast take on a new shape and everything you think you knew becomes part of before.

There’s an orange flowering gum that overhangs my family’s pool. The sun falls through it, landing on the water, flecking it with sap-green light. I dive in first. It’s autumn and the water is already cold, engulfing my body. Dad is sitting in a deckchair, reading the paper. He tells us, somewhat proudly, that he has changed the chemical he ordinarily puts in, to a magnesium chlorine mixture.

The magnesium makes the water feel like silk.

She jumps in, knees tucked, cannonball. Surfaces laughing, splashing about. I am floating on my back. I can hear her talking about an assignment we have coming up. Then she says something about Greg, the guy she has a crush on. I exhale and sink, though I don’t know I’m sinking. Not until my back lands on the pool floor. I open my eyes. The surface is a metre above me. Beyond that, the flowering gum bends its limbs in a gentle breeze. My lungs begin to burn.

I think, I might die here.

My best friend is here for the entire weekend, until her parents return from their vineyard in the Hunter Valley. And though I come up from the bottom of the pool, I don’t really breathe again, not until she’s back next door. Waving over the fence. See you at school!

At school, she tells our friends about our weekend full of my mum’s delicious food and my dad’s shitty jokes and splashing about in the pool. All I can remember in any detail is the feeling of lying a metre underwater, choked by my desire.

Greg is standing down the street while we’re waiting for the bus. One of the girls tells her to go speak to him. Ask him to the dance!

Oh no, she says, blushing, I couldn’t. I’m too scared! And then she looks at me. Can you say something?

My insides lurch. What?

Please! You’re my best friend. Go tell him… I don’t know! She laughs. Just make me sound cool!

I am shaking, but I say, OK.

Slowly, I feel myself settle into a cold determination. Push my shoulders back. I can hear giggling behind me. She is excited. Thrilled, even, because she knows me, she knows I’ll tell him she’s the best thing ever. That she’s mind-blowingly smart. She knows every capital city of every country! Seriously! Just ask her. That I’ll tell him that she laughs with her whole body. How it makes everyone else laugh with her. That I’ll say that she eats fish because she likes to think the whole ocean then exists inside of her, like she’s got scales for skin.

Greg is smoking a cigarette. He exhales a thick cloud of smoke, then passes the cig to his friend, Keith. They both go to the boys’ school across the road.

Hey, Greg says. Half smiling.

Hi.

Do you want a drag? Keith asks.

Sure, I say, and take the cigarette. I inhale, feel my lungs fill, then exhale. My breath quivers, but, surprisingly, I don’t cough.

Greg smiles now, like I’ve passed some sort of test.

I think, for a moment, of my dream, of my memory of a memory of a desire. Of her panting in my ear. I wince at the bright flashes of her face, lips wet, teeth gleaming. Of our bodies naked and knotted in a room with no edges. I shudder. All I want is to be excised of this haunting.

And so, I take a deep breath and I tell him, I… I think we should go to the dance together.

His eyes open wider. Really?

Yeah, I say, taking another drag. The cigarette is nearing its end. It burns hot against my fingers. I throw it on the ground and stamp it out with my shoe.

Keith is looking from me to Greg, trying to gauge his friend’s response.

OK, he says. Sure.

I brush his hand with my fingertips. I feel nothing.

Do you want to kiss me? I ask. Greg shrugs, then nods, and I take hold of his hand, drawing it to my hip. I arc my neck back. He leans down. Up close I see the wispy hairs sprouting from his upper lip and chin. I close my eyes and find his mouth. Greg’s lips are cracked from the sea. He tastes of tobacco and spiced chewing gum.

I sit next to him on the back seat of the bus the whole way home. I kiss him on the cheek when the bus reaches my stop. See you soon, I say, and he grins. When I pass her, there are tears in her eyes and she looks at me, searching. I like that to her, I am a stranger now. I like that she hates me. Because, I realise, hate and love sometimes come wrapped up and intertwined. It’s easier, this way.

limb one

There is something I soon learn about time… I learn that it stretches and slows and becomes difficult to fill when you have nowhere to go.

I think of ending things.

There is a new shopping precinct in town. I don’t believe my mother shops here. She doesn’t drive, and it’s several suburbs away from our… her house, so I think, hope, I might be safe here.

I walk into a clothing store, find a pair of shoes in my size. Some socks. A jumper. The shop assistant is helping an elderly woman try on a pair of boots. I walk out with everything. It’s just one bare foot in front of the other until I’m out of the shop, down the street and around the corner, clutching all that I have. It’s all that I have. I sit down in the gutter, dust the gravel off my feet and put on my new socks. My feet are all cut up. The cotton sticks to the pus. It stings a little, but when I put the trainers on, they cushion my feet like smoke, luxuriously soft after hours walking barefoot on hot bitumen.

Now what?

My stomach growls and I try not to think of my mother’s pancakes. How she’d make them on Sunday mornings when I had friends staying over. Stacks of them, fluffy and golden, with strawberries soaked in maple syrup. I try not to think of my father’s barbecues, the whole street packed into our backyard. Rissoles and sausages sizzling on the grill. Licked by tongues of fire. My mother, yelling at him, it’s too hot! Turn it down! as she and the other women lay out a spread of apricot chicken and devilled eggs. Prawn cocktail on a bed of iceberg lettuce. All those neighbours, packed into the backyard, with dogs barking and kids cannonballing into the pool. What will my parents say next time?

I imagine my father standing by the barbecue, tongs in his hand, and my mother, hanging off his arm. She’ll flick her hair back off her shoulder and say, with pride, we’ve sent her to a boarding school. In Melbourne, my father will add. And my mother will smile as she boasts, she’s just too bright for the schools here.

In another version, my parents will chop me out of all the family photographs. My father will repaint my room and take my clothes to the tip, tossing them in a heap between the rats and rotten mattresses. But not my journals or my art. My collages. My paintings. My polaroids of a summer spent between yellow banksias. Her. Her body all saturated and dripping. My love letters. The beginning of everything I dreamt of making. Those, my mother will burn. Our daughter, she will say, is dead.

I walk to Merewether Beach, the sandy edge where the steel city of Newcastle meets the Tasman Sea. Along the horizon, huge ships with shining red hulls await their turn in the harbour.

Standing atop the grassy knoll above the beach, I watch two surfers walk up through the bushy dunes and rinse the salt off under a public shower. They are only a few years older than me, I guess, with their sun-bleached hair and chapped lips. Still lanky and lean. I watch them chatting, laughing. What are they saying, I wonder. One cocks his head to the side, fingering his ear to get the water out. When he straightens his neck, he sees me staring and looks, for a moment, puzzled. Then he grimaces. I avert my gaze and start walking down the path towards the beach. I feel his eyes hooked into my shoulder blades, hear him snickering with his friend. Quicken my pace.

Bronzed bodies are splayed out on the sand on brightly coloured towels. The beach smells of coconut tanning oil and dried seaweed. I take off my shoes and jumper. It’s autumn, but the air is still hot. I sink my feet into the sand – coarse and crunching under my weight. Sitting down, I scoop up a handful, letting it sift slowly through my fingers, time landing in a small mound of broken bodies.

I don’t have swimmers, so I strip down to my t-shirt and undies. People are looking at me, I think. Then I realise, no, they’re not. None of them. Because they have gossip and chitchat and catchups, and books to read and children to watch in the water. They have lives that exist here and now. And none of them know that I can’t go home. That I have no home. That I loved my best friend and now I might die.

The ocean takes me. Like the sea is real and all that was a bad dream. Like the shore will take a different shape when I touch the sand again. Like I’ll be able to go back to my bed and dream a new dream. I dive under and open my eyes. From here, the world is sun-lanced and shimmering green. I swim through beams of soft light, my body turned over by clouds of sea foam. I feel weightless. Effortless.

I think of ending things. Because when I return to shore, the fabric of my t-shirt has stretched. Sopping wet, it sticks and clings to all the awkward parts of my flesh. I feel overdressed and foolish. But this is the normal bit, to be fifteen years old and self-conscious of my half-formed breasts and meaty thighs. I can stomach this bit. It’s that other bit I can’t. It’s the walking slowly, the not wanting to reach my clothes on the sand because when I put them on, what else is there?

I don’t even have a towel.

limb two

I am exiled from my friendship group, but I survive, because I have a boyfriend now and the dreams have stopped.

I spend recess and lunchtime in the school library. The air is stuffy, but the librarians know me by name, and on Wednesday, they share their morning tea cake with me. Here, I get to exist between books. Tiny worlds open up to me and become big. I go somewhere else, into the blackened woods of old fairytales, into the blinding white of future stars. I read and read and read. What do you think you’ll do after school? Annie asks me one recess, sitting down in the chair beside me. She’s silver-haired with hexagonal glasses and pastel-coloured cardigans she tells me she knits herself. I shrug. I’m not sure yet.

Well, what do you like?

I like reading, I tell her.

Annie smiles and says, me too.

I look down at the book I’m reading. A story about slippages, where time falls away and unravels so quickly you feel the wind of it passing through you. I put my bookmark in between the pages and close the book. Orlando.

You know, Annie says, Virginia Woolf wrote that book for her lover…

Leonard, I say. I’m familiar with their story.

No, Annie says, shaking her head, whispering now. Her name was Vita.

I don’t finish Orlando. I put it back on the shelf, forgetting to remove my bookmark. And there it will sit, punctuated by a piece of fabric embroidered with my name. Half-known truths. Half-known stories with endless endings.

Three decades will pass before I read another book by Virginia Woolf.

The school dance is on Friday night. Greg comes to my house early to have dinner with my parents. He arrives as Mum lays her apricot chicken on the table. The meat is steaming, glistening and gluggy. When I meet him at the door, he’s wearing high-waisted corduroy pants, a white belt and a freshly ironed shirt. His hair is combed over and slicked with gel. I kiss him on the doorstep, then lead him inside.

Mum gives him a hug and tells him how nice it is to finally meet him.

Dad shakes his hand and comments on Greg’s firm grip. He’s impressed, and says something about Greg being a real man.

Greg is beaming.

Me, I feel like the lino floor is too slippery, like I should step carefully or my feet might slide out from underneath me.

Dad offers Greg a beer, which he readily accepts.

Mum says I can have a glass of wine and pours me one before I agree.

Dad tells Greg that I’ve never had a boyfriend. I was worried, he says, that she wasn’t interested in boys! My face flushes. Hot pink. I feel so big with all their eyes on me.

Oh, stop that nonsense! my mother says, laughing.

Greg, who is a year older than me, has his licence. He is driving his dad’s Holden. The car smells of leather and tobacco. He lights a cigarette, then passes it to me. I take a drag while he inserts his new cassette into the car’s stereo. ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’, by The Beatles comes through the speakers. The sound crackles and pops, but we don’t notice, because we’re singing too loudly. When the song ends, I say, you’re a terrible singer.

He laughs from the back of his throat. So are you!

And now I am laughing too. Because this is easy, belting out a chorus about things I understand.

We meet Keith and two more of Greg’s friends, Darren and Paul, in an alleyway beside the community hall. Darren is with his girlfriend, Helen, who is in my year, but at another school in Newcastle.

Greg introduces us.

It’s nice to meet you, she says, then compliments my skirt.

Thanks, I say, blushing. My mum made it.

Greg has his arm around my shoulder. Should we go in? he asks.

We head to the door, where a parent is taking coin donations.

Greg pulls out two coins, saying he’s paying for me, even though I have a coin that my mum gave me. Thanks, I say, smiling.

He tells me, no worries, then plants a kiss on my cheek.

Greg can’t sing, but surprisingly, he can dance. And for a moment, I am swept up in the way his long limbs bend and sway with perfect rhythm. He grabs me by the hips and pulls me into the song, into its beat. I dance with him guiding me, and all the awkwardness falls away. And I think, this is exciting. This is how I’m supposed to feel.

Then I see her, moving across the dance floor like a swell undulating through open ocean, and the ceiling opens up for me to shiny wet sky. I want to touch her, to rise and fall with her. And so I say to Greg, should we get out of here?

He nods, grinning widely.

Keith, Paul, Darren and Helen squish into the back of Greg’s dad’s Holden. I’m in the front with Greg. We drive with the windows down, air rushing in between plumes of cigarette smoke, all the way to Merewether Beach. Greg parks by the surf club. We get out and walk down to the edge of our town, where the lights of houses and streetlamps spill out into black water.

We take off our shoes and clothes on the sand and sprint into the darkness, screaming and splashing about. Greg finds me in the sea and kisses me hard, his naked body pressed up against mine. His tongue is warm salt.

There’s a faint pulsation between my legs, and the longer he kisses me, the thicker it becomes. So much so that I almost forget the shore of my desire.

We lie between tufts of grass and crab holes. I’m on my back. We don’t have a towel. His body is on top of mine, and as he finds his way inside me, I exhale all the parts of me that imagined something else.

limb one

My sixteenth birthday passes through me unknowingly. I have my head in a dumpster when I find a newspaper with the date on it: 28 April 1972. Four days have passed since the garden shed. Or is it five? Six?

Happy birthday to me, I say.

I wonder how the day passed through my parents. Strangely, imagining that they had cared is so much more painful. I realise that hate and love sometimes come wrapped up and intertwined.

I fish from the dumpster two brown bananas and a cookie tin. Prying the tin open, I find, to my sheer joy, Arnott’s assorted biscuits. They’re stale, but I don’t care. As I shove the first into my mouth, I can’t help but laugh at the irony. My mother, too, would have thrown these away, never allowing anything to go stale in her kitchen. It’s mothers like her prematurely throwing things out that allows for daughters like me to survive.

I crouch down behind the bin and ram biscuit after biscuit into my mouth, barely chewing, so they form thick wads in my throat. Down the alleyway, a girl walks past in her school uniform. She turns her head and I lean into the shadow of the bin.

I think of school. Chalk words and diagrams on the blackboard are already beginning to warp and fade, becoming memories of a memory. Yet the feeling of being in the library, surrounded by shelves of books, feels achingly fresh. When I remember that the book I was reading, Orlando, will now sit on the shelf indefinitely, half-finished, I am overcome by grief. In these half-known truths, there are endless endings, and I mourn the open-ended ending of everything I ever knew. Perhaps that’s how endings happen. We like to think of full stops and final pages, but so often the book is forgotten or lost, leaving us on a half-formed thought with nothing to close the

A rat scurries past me. I shriek and jump to my feet, looking back down the alleyway. The girl is gone. Just like that. Off on her way to school.

When I wake in the afternoon, I pick up my biscuit tin and walk. Down the alleyway. Along the street. A school bus turns a corner. More school kids. I feel a pang of anxiety because, once upon a time, the school bus was the only place I found it difficult to survive. School was fine. I was good at school, excellent even. Surely good enough to get a university scholarship. I paid attention in class and handed in my homework ahead of time. A teacher’s pet. A nerd. A freak, because I spent recesses and lunches in the library, alone. Reading poetry and writing, thinking one day one day one day. The school bus was the twenty hot, sticky minutes that bookended each day. The time when I sat, sweaty, telling myself if I was quiet, maybe they wouldn’t know.

Did I even know?

I remember how nothing necessarily felt wrong, until it suddenly felt right. How I’d kissed a boy at a school dance and thought, well, that was something. How I was high off the nerves and mistook the feeling for excitement. How it wasn’t until I kissed her, down by the creek, all murky water and mangroves, that I understood.

I exist,

otherwise.

That I felt out of time because everyone else’s was circling forward, while mine was beating backwards. The library and the classes and the school bus and the dinner table all became a kind of dream that I sleep-walked through. At night, when I would meet her in the garden shed, I woke up.

Like seeing a painting upside down, trying to make sense of it. Appreciating it, even. Until the painting is inverted and the image becomes crystal clear. Now I can’t even remember what the world looked like before it made sense.

Another school bus is approaching. It’s this easy, I think, to obliterate oneself. I take a deep breath and step forward off the kerb.

The bus driver slams on his horn. I jump back as the bus whooshes past. The driver shakes his head at my stupidity, then continues down the street to a future I will never know. A half-known truth. A story with endless endings… I can’t go back for fear my father might kill me. Or for fear that he might not?

When I picture the alternative – going home, brushing over, pretending none of this ever happened – I think, I would rather die. Going back into the upside down feels utterly impossible.

So, I stick out my hand, out of time, thumb up, backwards, until a ute pulls to the kerb and a man with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth winds down the window. Where are you going? he asks. I think of the furthest place I know from here. Brisbane. He says, I’m heading west. I ask, can you take me to the highway? He shrugs. Sure, get in, and reaches across to unlock the passenger door. The cabin reeks of yellowed smoke. Thanks, I say, closing the door. He pulls away from the kerb and tells me his name is Steve, then jokes that his missus would kill him if she saw me in his ute. I ask bluntly, why? Not because I don’t know, but because I think it’s a stupid thing to say. He laughs, the sound bubbling in his throat. He says something about my black eye, but I’m not listening because his eyes are sliding all over me. I tug at my shorts, stretching the fabric so that it covers my knees. He reaches across and pulls my hand away. The fabric lifts. He grins.

I jump out of Steve’s ute as it’s rolling to a stop at a traffic light. I trip and land in the gutter. Hear him cackling as he revs the engine behind me. He yells out, prick tease! As I scramble off the road onto long grass that itches, I’m panting, not out of fear, but out of rage. Rage at his seedy smile. Flashed teeth. His hand on my leg. Rage at that ridiculous laugh, like he’s king of the highway. I want to kick him in the jaw. To stomp on that stupid grin. I kick a picket fence and scream.

Hey there… you alright?

I turn around. A man is walking towards me. Over the sounds of cars whooshing, he says, pretty impressive that was. Piss off! I yell, giving him the finger. At that, he steps closer. I look at his thick arms, bloated belly, broad shoulders, fat neck and think, yeah, I’ll give it a shot. I puff up my chest, becoming huge with air, and clench my fists. He raises both hands above his head. Hey hey hey, he says. I’m not going to fight you. Bloody hell. I scream, Stay back! And he does. He stops in his tracks, hands still above his head. I’m Dave, he says, I’m a truck driver. I bring fruit from Queensland down to Sydney. I eye him up and down. He’s wearing a suit, pressed shirt and tie. His thin hair is combed to one side. I say, you don’t look like a truck driver. Dave looks down at his outfit and chuckles. Yes, well, I’ve been at a funeral, he says. Then his voice cracks as he tells me, someone I loved… someone I loved very much. I notice his pink cheeks, his bloodshot eyes and puffy eyelids. My breathing is sharp, quick ins and outs, but I feel the knots of rage inside me loosening. My body is undoing, undone. I collapse back onto the grass. Let out a big sigh.