Fury E-Book

Kathryn Heyman

• Herausgeber: Myriad Editions
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

'Fury took my breath away. Heyman writes with such brio, muscularity and physicality; her trademark humour, honesty and energy vibrate on every page. This memoir is a triumph.'—Jill Dawson'Gripping and brilliantly written...up there with the very best adventure memoirs such as The Salt Path by Raynor Winn or Cheryl Strayed's Wild. This is a literary work that will stand the test of time and has international bestseller written all over it.'—Louise DoughtyAt the age of 20, after a traumatic sexual assault trial, Kathryn Heyman ran away from her life and became a deckhand on a fishing trawler in the Timor Sea.Coming from a family of poverty and violence, she had no real role models, no example of how to create or live a decent life, how to have hope or expectations. But she was a reader. She understood story, and the power of words to name the world. This was to become her salvation.After one wild season on board the Ocean Thief, the only girl among tough working men, facing storms, treachery and harder physical labour than she had ever known, Heyman was transformed. Finally she could name the abuses she thought had broken her. After a period of enforced separation from the world, she was able to return to it newly formed, determined to remake the role she'd been born into.A reflection on the wider stories of class, and of growing up female with all its risks and rewards, Fury is a memoir of courage and determination, of fighting back and finding joy.

Leseprobe

Praise for Fury

‘A gripping and brilliantly written story of a young woman’s survival, up there with the very best of adventure memoirs such as The Salt Path by Raynor Winn or Cheryl Strayed’s Wild. Kathryn Heyman has pulled off an amazing feat, giving a true story of trauma and recovery all the narrative pull and beauty of the best of novels. Her account is a literary work that will stand the test of time and has international bestseller written all over it.’

— Louise Doughty

‘Fury took my breath away. Heyman writes with such brio, muscularity and physicality; her trademark humour, honesty and energy vibrate on every page. This memoir is a triumph, the journey it tells of a girl shaping herself in her own fashion a salutary reminder of the crushing oppression that girls face every day and the courage – and the fury – that it takes to get out from under that.’

— Jill Dawson

‘Heyman has every kind of courage there is. As a girl she dares the world to treat her as equal. It doesn’t, but she holds on to her ambition and her imagination in the face of the thousand shocks that female flesh is heir to; the litany of sexual terror women and girls dodge each day. And so, Fury is searing, thrilling and redemptive.’

— Anna Funder

‘This powerful, ultimately joyous memoir shows how—in the teeth of a gale – a damaged girl can find her own strength, and fight for her own path.’

— Jennifer Byrne

‘A vital addition to the national conversation. A searing, moving, deeply honest achievement.’

— Nikki Gemmell

‘Distressing, thrilling, immaculate – and vitally important.’

— Clare Wright

‘Fury is that old, old story in which a vulnerable girl becomes a victim, but it is made new by Kathryn Heyman’s bold, brave and poetic voice. She tears open what it means to exist in a predatory male world. It’s a confronting and compelling memoir, and also an uplifting one: the great triumph is in the art, the storytelling, the very words, that have saved her.’

— Debra Adelaide

‘I can’t remember when a book gripped me so tight and so hard. This stunning, harrowing memoir is a fierce testament to the power of words and books to save a life … an intoxicatingly triumphant story that defies the odds, as a fearless young woman’s spirit refuses to be crushed by the law or defeated by a roiling sea.’

— Caroline Baum

‘Each chapter is like a punch in the guts. It will move you, shock you and—yes—make you furious.’

— Jane Caro

‘Moving and ultimately triumphant, a story of survival and reinvention about a woman who refuses to let the system, her family and the men from her past, destroy her will to live and the truth of who she really is. Inspiring and brave.’

— Sarah Lambert

‘This sensitive, searching book broke my heart. Heyman transcends her harrowing Australian girlhood by taking herself to sea. That she regains her body and her self is a triumph. Utterly compelling.’

— Carrie Tiffany

‘Heyman is a woman looking at the past with clarity and speaking to the present clearly: enough … ’

— Bri Lee

For Stephi Leach, who saw the woman that the girl might become, and helped me to see her too

Contents

Title PageDedicationFuryAcknowledgementsAuthor’s noteAbout the authorCopyright

Fury

Bloody Bonaparte. He shouted into the air, the words flapping away from him like seabirds. You fucker. This fucking gulf. His shouting turned to howling, the pitch running higher and higher. His face lifted to the storm-whipped sky, a fist raised to the wheeling seabirds, their clacking squeals drowning him out. I caught only occasional words: fucker, Bonaparte, useless. Some words flew out to me, teetering on the metal trawling boom, the rust sliding into my palms, the storm spray spitting up. The deck seemed an ocean away, never still. Even with the rolling of the boom, I could feel the constant tremor in my legs. I was fifty metres from the safety of the deck, standing on a piece of metal less than a foot wide. Twenty metres below me the dark ocean rose and fell, surging with its foamy mouth.

Rust, the taste of it, mixed with salt, with fear. Forever after this, I will associate the smell of rust with fear, with the arse-clenching terror of almost-certain death. Despite all the moments that led me to that trawling boom, and that storm in the middle of the Timor Sea – all the moments of near-death, near annihilation – this is the one that turns my stomach to liquid years, decades, later. Even now, writing this on solid ground, my legs have begun to tremble. My body, asking me not to remember. We have got this far, my body and me, without trawling up the mud and mess of it all, the memories that made me.

On the deck, next to the gob-spitting, fuck-shouting skipper, the deckhand – Davey – held a light above his head. Each time another wave roared up, the light was swallowed by the water and the dark. Behind each loss of light, he called, Sorry, I’m sorry. Sorry not just for the loss of light but for his wounded arm, bandaged to the shoulder, which meant that it was me out there on the slippery boom, trying to pass tools down to Karl, the first mate suspended from the broken boards with a spanner clenched between his teeth while the waves roared.

We should have hauled the nets up when the storm started. We should have learned some skills, had a less desperate, more capable crew. We should have – he should have – listened to Karl. We should have battened down, settled down, gone to ground. All the should haves, useless when the thick salt spray is in your face, when the black night is whipped by wind and wild rain. Desperation made us keep going, lowering the nets when we could hear the rumble across the sea, could feel the lift of the wind, the waves whitening as the sky turned dark. Karl had looked up at the sky, sniffed the air, and called up to Mick in the wheelhouse, ‘We shouldn’t shoot away. It’s going to turn bad.’ Mick had clambered out, standing with legs wide on the tray, hands on his hips, eyes narrowed while he followed Karl’s gaze. His first skipper’s job, a favour from the uncle who owned the fleet. It made him anxious, unsure of his own footing. The nets dangled above us; Karl’s hand hovered on the winch. Karl waited, and then added, ‘It looks like it’ll be rough, skipper. What do you reckon?’ He might as well have been an alpha dog, a wolf, rolling over to show his belly. But it didn’t work. When Mick shook his head and said, ‘We can’t afford to miss a catch,’ Karl nodded and said okay. It was only after the skipper scrambled back to the wheelhouse that Karl said, ‘He doesn’t know anything about what it’s like out here. He couldn’t read the gulf if it was printed on a poster in front of his stupid face.’

The booms on the Ocean Thief stretched out on either side of the boat, wide arms forming a crucifix across the moving palette of the sea. On a good day, these trawling booms glinted with tropical heat. Inhabited by temporary colonies of seabirds – terns with punk hairstyles, gulls spreading their white wings, sometimes a sea hawk – on those days they had something soothing, domestic, about them. A marine Hills hoist, an aquatic, static windmill. But not that day. Not that night.

My bare feet curved, my toes gripping the narrow width of the bar holding me unsteadily as the boat lurched. Following Karl’s instructions, I’d hooked my arms over the narrow band that formed a sort of rail above the boom. Mouth dry, terror at the back of my throat, I leaned forward, clutching a Dolphin torch in one hand, the beam rising and falling as the wooden boards below me slapped up and down with the slide of the ocean. Waves smacked against the boards with the force of a punch. The metal cut into the softness of my armpits. Framed by the black of the water snapping at his feet, Karl’s face flashed in and out of the light, his hand reaching up to mine.

The belt of tools at my waist dug into me, the handle of something – a spanner? a wrench? – stabbing into the flesh at my hip, a relief from the pressure of the thin rail across my belly. Karl shouted up at me, but the storm whipped his words away. Ack. Asser. Ick. Uck. It was all noise, a wash and a roar of noise: Karl’s snippets, half-words that disappeared into the storm; the punch-roar of the waves; Davey on deck calling sorrysorrysorry; the skipper behind him fist-shaking, shouting; the shriek of dolphins trailing the fishing boat; my own bloody heart, the thudding of it.

We had heard the first crack of thunder earlier, but we put the nets out anyway. We’d held to the deck as the six-berth fishing trawler slid up and down relentless waves, and, when the rain started pummelling us, huddled in the galley. It was the shrieking of the dolphins that called us back out on deck, pods of them trailing the boat, the strange squeal louder than the storm. Karl and I leaned out on the gunwale then, squinting into the rain until we could see. The boards that held the nets steady had broken. We couldn’t get the nets up without mending the boards. And if we couldn’t pull up, with unstable nets heaving in a thrashing sea, we were unbalanced, likely to be forced over, or under, to become one more weekend news story of boats lost in the Gulf.

Karl raised his face again as another wave hit. The screw. Iver. Need. Mash.

Folding myself in two, I leaned further down, a screwdriver dangling from my hand. Karl reached up, but not close enough. My foot lifted off the boom, while my arms gripped tighter. On the deck behind me, Davey shouted a warning. The boom lifted then fell and the boards smashed towards me. The torch dropped from my hand just as another wall of water surged, pounding into my face, my eyes, until I was blinded, only feeling the turn of metal beneath me. I grabbed at something near, while the wall of the world – dark, impenetrable – came closer. Terns screeched, counterpointing the shrieking of the dolphins and the rattling inside my skull, a bass reverberation. Karl’s voice sounded below me, a call, a warning, and then there was the clang of the chains and a sudden smack to my face. The thickness of blood then, and soundless dense black.

The party was in Sydney, in an apartment full of people I didn’t know. Drama students, mainly. Beautiful people, funny people, smart people. A friend, Penny, had dragged me along for reasons that I still can’t fathom. I do remember what I was wearing. I’ll always remember that, I suppose. Earlier that year I’d found, in a charity shop, a green-and-black-checked vinyl trench coat with a pointed collar and a neat belt. Inside the vinyl I sweated like the inside of a car, but it was worth it. I had a little skirt on underneath, and green pointed boots. Boiling, sweating, and the fattest girl in the room, I kept drinking. And I kept drinking, waiting for someone to notice me, to speak to me, to find me funny, or interesting, or to like my careful green trench, to notice how witty it was, how ironic. But none of these things happened.

Penny stayed in the kitchen, running her hand down the arm of someone called Jeff, who’d just landed a role in a new film about the heroes of the Kokoda Track. He had one line, and he kept repeating it in the kitchen, while Penny tilted her head back and laughed, revealing the long line of her throat. His Adam’s apple bobbed when he watched her laughing, the dusting of pale brown hair moving like wheat stalks.

That head tilt, that laugh, that hand slipping easily down a muscled arm: I couldn’t do it, couldn’t quite understand it. When I tried, the laugh came out broken, the hand too firm on the arm, the head thrown back so fiercely that I could hear my own neck crick. It was a girl thing. I’d watched it right through high school but even now, at twenty, I still couldn’t understand it. It looked like a performance, all of it – the hair flicking, the gathering in giggling groups, the coded language. But I’d somehow missed the rehearsal notes.

In high school, I once watched Sylvie Fagan standing in a group of boys, listening, laughing, smoothing her legs together. As she listened, she rubbed one newly shaven calf against the other. She looked like an elegant flamingo. When I tried it the next day, I lost my balance and tottered sideways, cheeks flaming red, my audience of boys doubling over with laughter. Also, I talked too much, tried to match the boys with their jokes and stupidity, tried to outdo them.

In that apartment, with Penny in the kitchen and me in the living room, I balanced on the arm of a sofa, kicking my green boots out in front of me. Three girls danced in front of a faux fireplace while an American man shouted encouragement. They followed each other seamlessly: hand up, hip jut, click and turn. Hips swaying, shoulders shimmying. Those girls. Their hips were narrow in a way mine never could be, their hair long and shining. They seemed like girls from hair product advertisements. I kicked the pointed toes of my boots and pretended not to notice, not to care. The dancing was smooth, the shimmying mesmerising. But if I watched, if I gazed at the dancing trio, I would be – what? Not a girl? A man? I couldn’t understand what I was. If I didn’t want to dance like the dancing girls, shimmying for the shouting, cheering American, what sort of girl was I?

I’d brought cheap wine, shared with Penny. She’d brought me. As an audience? As the plainer friend? She was a girl who’d got the rehearsal notes. On her bedroom wall was a framed collage of high school photographs: her long hair sliding down her back while she leaned against a boyfriend with his wetsuit peeled to his waist; another of her with a team of girls, their pretty heads close together, eager faces, long legs.

The wine went quickly. I perched on the sofa, smiling mysteriously with my lips closed over my crooked teeth. I’d read, in Rolling Stone, a description of a famous woman, the muse to a musician and then to a designer, who could stand alone in a crowd looking completely calm, completely contained. Sometimes I stood in front of my mirror, experimenting with looking contained, mysterious. Smiling into the distance, deep in thought. But not so deep that I couldn’t be approached. If I was lucky – mysterious enough but approachable enough – I might get to be a muse. The midwife to someone else’s creativity.

Some time after midnight, I emptied the second bottle and trip-trapped to the kitchen on my new green boots. They clacked on the tiles like teeth. Penny was tangled in the Kokoda Track man, her mouth swallowed, her hands on his neck. I stood in the doorway and waited.

In primary school, girls had best friends and named them, declared them like crushes, signing up to a public kind of coupledom. She’s my best friend. Why are you talking to my best friend? And Lisa O’Daniel was my best friend. She was, consensus had it, the prettiest girl in school. And I was the girl whom pretty girls would choose to be their second-in-command. The not-too-pretty girl, the more-or-less-plain girl who could scrub up all right. In our last year of primary school her family took me with them on a camping trip. I was the poor friend, always the poor friend, dragged along to entertain Lisa, and I knew that this was my job. But this time, there was a boy. Jack? Jake? I can remember his long arms, the way his hair bushed on top of his head, his large teeth. I can remember the way he took my hand on a walk down the bush track to the beach and I looked back, worried that Lisa would see. When he left the campsite, packing up his car with his parents for the rest of their once-in-a-lifetime road trip, he kissed me chastely on the cheek while Lisa watched, and for the rest of the camping trip I was alone. But before he left, with his parents waiting in their hire car, he ran back and whispered to me, ‘She thinks she’s better than you, but it’s the other way around. You’re better, way better,’ and then he kissed me on the mouth, his lips leaving a warm imprint. I’m still not sure who decided that there was a competition: the boy, or Lisa, or me.

In high school, Lisa called me over to her house one night. A crowd had gathered in her front garden, forming a circle with Lisa O’Daniel at the centre: they whooped and cheered while Lisa called me a liar, a backstabber, a slut.

And I told Lisa O’Daniel that I had never been a backstabber.

In the Sydney kitchen with the Kokoda Track man, there was no chanting circle. There was just Penny and the bobbing Adam’s apple of the newly minted film actor. After a while, Penny turned her head to me, eyebrows raised, and said, ‘What?’

I said, ‘I think I’m ready to go.’

‘Then go.’ Perhaps her eyes rolled when she turned back to the actor. Or a shoulder shrug, shaking me off.

I opened my mouth to say, I don’t know where I am, or how to get home, and then I closed it again. I felt for the folded notes in my pocket.

The party was on the outskirts of town. The party was full of strangers.

But the stranger who was dangerous was not in that room.

Outside, the air vibrates with the wetness of spring. Lights blur in and out of focus: cars, streetlights? I can’t tell; can barely tell which is sky and which is road. Both are black, shining with the reflection of a plump moon. Leaving the party, I raised my hand, muttered a drunken goodbye to the room. No one noticed me go, no one raised a hand or an eyebrow as I stumbled out onto the street, my hand luffing in the air, a flag without country, without purpose.

Pieces of gravel flick up beneath my scrabbling feet, somehow falling into my boots, inching down beneath my soles. Bending over, I try to slip my hand into the top of the boot, wriggling my fingers about to find the bits of pebble worrying at my toes. When I stumble, tumbling face first towards the road, there is no one to laugh with, but I laugh anyway, as though I am surrounded by friends hooting joyously at my drunkenness. Nonetheless, I’m sober enough to think this: I need a taxi. It will no doubt use the last of my week’s wages, the small amounts I eke out daily. But still.

It’s hard for me to inhabit my own skin, now, looking back at this staggering, arm-waving girl. Sometimes, now, I see them on the street, girls like me, barely able to stand, and I want to, it’s true, wrap a cardigan around their shoulders, take them home to sleep it off, to sober up. Mother them as I was not mothered, that’s what I want to do. I cannot look at these girls without a rush of fear. I can barely look back at myself, at my shiny coat, my green boots, my bare thighs pimpling in the cool air, my ridiculous faith that the world would take care of me.

Everything is soft: the air, the night, the ground, my legs, my tongue. My hand loose, the arm beneath it unsteady, the ground beneath my feet billowing gently. If the story had been different, if the ending to the evening were different, I would remember this night – if I remembered it at all – as one of many warm spring nights, blending in casual reminiscence. Jasmine scenting the darkness, balmy air on the arms, the pleasures of youth. That’s what I would recall, if I had any recollection at all. If I were not required to remember.

Later, when they ask me what I recall, I will try to tell them. I will try to make it seem that I do remember, because that is what they tell me to do. The Crown prosecutor, who is allegedly on my side, tells me this just before he tells me for the third time that I am not on trial. I meet him only once before the court case: his vowels are round, his chin long. I am distracted by the point at the end of his nose, like a mole drawn on a cartoon witch, and by the fat clamminess of his voice, as though his words are swallowed before they are spoken. He keeps his eyes on the windowsill behind me, or on the papers on his desk. He says, ‘What do you recollect? Try.’

Then, glancing down at my too-tight top, he adds, ‘Is there anything you need to tell me? Is this what you were wearing?’

I wore French knickers, the kind with loose legs. I loved them, the way they slid and slipped against my skin, the cut of them wide and free like 1930s tennis shorts. Penny, the friend who took me to the party, gave them to me as a birthday gift. She’d wrapped them in thin tissue paper and wrote a note on a piece of card: Something beautiful for a beautiful year. Silky, soft; they were a lustrous pearl colour, the shine of them reflecting the light. I suppose they reflected the streetlights outside as the taxi swerved across the white lines. Perhaps the light of his wedding ring was reflected too.

But anyway, when the clammy prosecutor asks me what I remember, the truth is that I recall only this: the slapping of the air, the whirring of the lights, the rushing of the ground. Everything is thick and slow, my movements dulled by the cheap wine. I remember that it felt pleasant being outside, away from the beautiful people, away from Penny and her need for an audience. Perhaps I shouted or whooped into the empty street, arms spread wide, inviting the world to come and get a piece of me if it thought itself hard enough. Did I have a ‘you’ll be sorry’ song stomping through my brain? It’s possible. Anything is possible. My clawing at the soft air, the taxi lights coming closer, the safe and familiar white of the taxi swerving towards the kerb. Like a painting, or a cinema poster, this part of that night carries a semi-lit haze over it. And his face, leaning across, peering through the window, smiling. A smooth face, warm, bearded. I do remember his face. I don’t make that up. Sweat sheening on his forehead.

I’m in the front seat of the taxi. This is Australia. We are egalitarian here. Years after this, when I live in Oxford and jump in and out of black cabs, I will feel myself unfurl with gratitude for the windows dividing passengers from drivers in taxis, the back seat so clearly separated.

My vinyl coat, so sixties, so retro-chic, sticks against my skin in the warmth of the taxi. My arms are wet in the sleeves. Perhaps I ask him to turn the air-conditioning down. My memories now, like the memories of very early childhood, are without words, are purely bodily memories, a series of sensations in the dim dark. Heat. Light. Swerve. Sick. The formation of a single word: no.

I must wriggle out of the coat, sliding against the stickiness of it, or at least drunkenly get half an arm out. When I am picked up later, I have one arm in and one arm out, holding my hands up in the middle of the road while the headlights of another car bear down.

It’s that second taxi driver who I remember, his arm beneath mine, his grey hair curled around his ears. Running, shouting. Somehow, I remember – or imagine – that he wears striped pants, too baggy for his skinny frame. Orange flashes across the road, his hazard lights blinking on, off, where he stopped short in the middle of the lane, running from the car to the girl – me – stumbling, tumbling, in the centre of the road. His hands under my arms as I buckle. A towel retrieved from the boot of the car and wrapped around my bleeding leg; his cardigan draped over my shoulders.

‘I have a daughter your age,’ he says. ‘If anyone ever – if they tried to—’ He stops, looks away.

I wonder what it must be like to have a father who cannot speak for love of you.

By then, the cold air, the resistance of the tarmac underfoot, the crunch of gravel, the shock of my own scream – I think that these things have sharpened me, woken me from the dull daze.

But perhaps they have not.

Because I also remember this: the grainy brown counter of the police station, my hands spread out, while I say, ‘I’ve been—’

I stop then, try to gather myself. Pat at my hair, attempt to wipe at the make-up that I know will be smeared panda-like beneath my eyes. ‘I think I’ve been raped.’

The sergeant in charge is not young. Tall and frowning, he makes me think of my father, himself a policeman. Disappointed, held upright by a thread which could be anger, and with a long, horse-like face. Full of bluff and blunder.

His eyebrows are grey, scraggling across his forehead as he raises them. Holding his hands up, trying to slow me down. ‘Whoa. Let’s start at the beginning.’

I repeat my words, trying for more certainty, trying for the beginning. ‘I’ve been raped.’ The words feel wrong in my mouth, as though the active person in the sentence is me, being raped, rather than the man doing the raping.

The tall constable leans across the counter, looking me over as though I’m a second-hand car. He says, ‘I don’t know about that, girly, but you’ve certainly been drinking.’

This man, I think, is wasted on the front desk. With his investigative skills, he should have been a detective. I’ve lost count of what I drank at the party with the beautiful people who were mystified by my presence. I’ve long ago lost count of the number of times I’d been called girl, or girly. But, because on some level I understand that I am being assessed here, in this vomit-coloured police station, I am careful with my words.

‘Yes,’ I say, ‘I have.’ I try to make it sound apologetic, and then I add, ‘But I’ve also been raped.’ I correct myself again: ‘I think I’ve been raped.’

‘You think,’ he says, his lip stretching back across his teeth, like my father’s mare when he bridled her, her head tossing, her eyes turning white. ‘It’s the kind of thing you might be certain of.’

In the dark of the taxi, the alcohol swarms through my blood, my head tipped back against the vinyl of the car seat. Warmth floods over me and my tongue becomes heavy, my head begins to nod. I assume – but I can’t be certain – that I give the driver the address before I drunkenly flop. I think I do. I think I wave my hand and slur the suburb. I can still speak, although the syllables run together and the making of complete sentences is a little beyond me. Perhaps I giggle, although my drunkenness at this stage is rapidly descending from the raucous to the morose variety. Laughing for my imaginary audience as I toppled forward on the gravel while trying to dig out pebbles from my boot – this seems long ago, days ago. Pipe music plays on the radio, the kind of song that might call you to prayer, and, with the heat, I am lulled into a dozydrunken sprawl. My head lolls, my arms flop, my knees drop. I’m vaguely aware of him turning the music up, his hand on the radio dial. Vaguely aware, too, of the way his hand brushes against my leg as he moves it back to the wheel. But then the road is stretching ahead, and the lights outside are flickering, and the taxi takes a turn and another, and then my mouth drops open, and my head bounces lightly against the window; I am dimly, ever so dimly, aware of a little dribble limping down my chin. Pipes drift through the night, which seems to be getting longer. Vanilla, cloying, over-sweet, clotting the air.

I am drifting, dropping into the depths. Like a dream, when you’re aware of being in a dream, but also wanting to be awake. Those dreams when you can hear people talking, when you try to open your mouth and say, I’m here, I’m right here, I can hear you, I’m not asleep at all. The terror of those dreams, of trying to claw up to consciousness. This is where I am, down in the deep, with something troubling me, calling me up to consciousness. My legs sprawling, there is the sensation of another brush across my thighs. I close my eyes tighter, turn slightly in the seat. A hand now, squeezing my leg. Sloppily, I slap at the air.

Alcohol has numbed my tongue, made it heavy in my mouth, so that the words stop that come out as stoooiii. But it does not matter because he does not hear me or my words; he does not feel my hand batting at the air. Or, more precisely, he does not care to hear that or to feel this. Now, when I try to bring this to mind, it’s still the swirl of the street that comes back to me, the way the taxi veers off course, looping across the road, as the driver slips his finger into the shiny silkiness of my new knickers. Now I assume it is his own excitement that makes him swerve, his panting sheening face unable to concentrate equally well on the road.

It is the swerving that brings me more to myself, with a dip of my stomach matching the lurch and then the sudden stop of the car, the wheels skidding slightly, a scraping on gravel, a bounce as the wheels hit dirt or grass. Deep down, in my deepdowndozydrunken self, the lurching echoes. I can still feel the twist of nausea now, all these years later, writing this; the bubble of saliva prickling at my mouth. There is a tear, a tug, the resistance of the buttons on the knickers. A small pop as one button gives way, rolling to the floor.

And then, a heavier lurch, the stab of pain inside me, my vaginal canal forced open, the breath of the taxi driver on my face, his beard on my nose, his voice, his breath, and the thrust of in-out-in-out. My body is limp, my limbs not entirely obedient, but I flail at him. Arms and legs, both, begin to obey the slow and slurred commands from my brain, and though there is little strength in me, my sudden buckling, my fists tearing at his hair, startles him. Enough, anyway, that I am able to shove against the door and tumble out, backwards, like a worm, landing buckled on gravel, tearing the skin from my shins and from my hands. Stones lodge in my knees as I scrabble, hauling myself up to all fours, stumbling to my feet. I run, then, pitching towards the road, towards the gleam of headlights growing closer, making holes in the darkness.

I jumped from a car at fifteen. Ran through a field, grass burrs catching on my clothes, pampas grass cutting me when I scrambled over the back fence to a stranger’s garden.

Sylvie Fagan introduced me to hitchhiking. We were fourteen. It was one of those sweltering Australian Sundays when steam rises off the tarmac. Heat blanketed us in the fibro rented house I lived in. She’d stayed overnight – a rare sleepover for me. Rare for me to have friends over, to overcome my mother’s embarrassment about our house, an embarrassment I had absorbed. I’d learned to apologise for the smallness of the house, for the tiny kitchen, the uncarpeted floors.

We’d lived in the police house in Boolaroo – place of many flies – while my father blustered and blistered and bellowed until my mother found a way to leave, and then we moved to the first of many tiny rentals. Most of the sisters had gone by then, licking their own wounds, and when the last sister left I was allowed to move into my own bedroom. Until then, I’d shared a double bed with my mother. At night, her loneliness swelled up, suffocating me, so that I would lie awake, trying to breathe, trying to resist being swallowed by the force of her need. I was nine years old when the last sister left; nine when I got my own room, my own bed. Nine when the curtain of loneliness and sadness stopped squeezing my chest each night. It was still there, though, years later, pulsing through the house like breath.

And then, fourteen, and hitchhiking with Sylvie Fagan to Redhead Beach. We’d set out with bus money in our purses, our string bikinis peeping out beneath little cotton dresses, but while we were waiting at the bus stop two boys in a white Valiant skidded to a stop in front of us. The boy in the passenger seat had long grainy blond hair, a tiny smattering of pink pimples running down the side of his cheeks. He said, ‘Are you girls hitching?’ And as I shook my head, my lips together, mute, Sylvie nodded, opened the back door, and said, ‘Redhead Beach. Thanks, boys.’ She seemed like a twenty-year-old, like someone in a movie. With her flamingo legs, her flicking hair, she’d learned the lessons of how a girl was to be in the world. Open, beaming, up for it.

Being a girl, Sylvie told me, that was everything. We had it all, she told me. We ran the world. She was Beyoncé before Destiny’s Child. And she loved it, being a girl. I watched her, curious, furious. There she is, painted in my memory: hip jutted, eyebrows raised, her long hair flying back.

Vinyl stuck to my thighs, there on the back seat of the car taking the side roads to Redhead Beach. Wind puffed at my face through the open window, and I stared out at the road, saying nothing while Sylvie sat forward on the seat and babbled to the boys cheerfully. When they dropped us at the beach – right outside the surf club – the boy in the passenger seat said, ‘See you later, quiet mouse,’ and grinned at me so that his mouth made a lopsided curve and my stomach flipped pleasingly. Three hours later, when we were ready to go home, we didn’t bother walking to the bus stop, we just stood on the main road with our thumbs pointing out and our dresses tucked up so that you could see the curve of our thighs.