25

Just because they’re about the same size and both have long dark hair, people say that Goddie looks like Louisa. Some even call them twins. But they never notice that Goddie has brown eyes and a fringe and Louisa has blue eyes and no fringe. People, Louisa decides, are not very alert.

One dull summer morning at school Goddie slides in next to Lou. The surface of the desk has been carved with compasses then inked with so many names it feels like braille. The window allows in the muted breeze.

‘Hey,’ she says, not waiting for an answer, ‘Louie, guess what Lou? This week at Festival Hall, oi, are you listenin’? On Friday, this Friday yeah, there’s gonna be a grouse concert, all sorts, you know, Spectrum and Dingo and Daryl Braithwaite and tons of others. Come on, you gotta go out sometimes. You know you love your old Dazzling Dazza. Only three mingy bucks to get in...’

Louisa smiles, thinks Goddie’s hair looks nice today swinging in its great fat ponytail, falling like a dark river. She has already decided she should get out more, and thanks to the shoe shop she has the dough.

‘Yeah, I’d love to,’ she says to Goddie’s wide smile and they open their geography books. Today they’re studying the structures of clouds and await the enervating Mr Champion with his whopping hooked nose and his soothing talk of cumulous and nimbus and stratus and the secrets of clouds, of the possibilities of all things.

Though Louisa is slow to trust, she trusts Gail because in primary school they bonded over theft. They nicked roses for the teacher from the big house with the garden. If the roses hung over the fence, Louisa reasoned, they were fair game. So she positioned Gail as lookout while she plundered the blooms.

But breaking the stems was harder than she thought and mostly Gail stood there guarding but sometimes, under pressure, she fled yelling, ‘Look out, the lady’s coming...’ They stayed friends. Louisa would always forgive panic.

Friday night rolls by and it’s a rainy one. They take the green bus to Festival Hall, passing through the lowlands between Footscray and North Melbourne, both seriously con stricted by their jeans.

Gail reckons she knows one of the roadies who can get them up the front. Louisa doubts this but goes along with it anyway. They stand awkwardly round the back near the band entrance. Long needles of rain hit them and, damply, they edge closer to the wall. The roadies with their showy mullets and their astonishingly tight pants stream by like a chain of worker ants holding colossal speaker boxes above their heads.

Louisa isn’t looking out and the corner of one of the speakers jags into her head. She’s knocked backwards and Gail grabs her before she falls and says, ‘God, mate. You all right?’ Lou nods, but she’s dazed and Gail peers at her for a bit and says, ‘Carn, let’s give this away and go up the front, I can’t see the bloke I know anyway, bloody dill’s not here.’

Gingerly, Louisa touches her torn scalp and following Gail she thinks, not that much blood, not too much damage. They sit up the back next to a couple of blokes drinking VB from bottles in paper bags. The blokes offer them some and Gail goes ahead. Louisa wouldn’t touch the stinking beer if you paid her but restrains herself from saying so. The singers move onto the stage and the sound engulfs her. Dazza, past his satin phase, is all the better for it and Dingo is unbelievable.

The rain has slowed after the concert and the stars are out and the night feels as clean as tomorrow. With their ears full of music, they talk way too loud. They wait ages for the bus, in the flawless night raving away about the concert, and in the end they climb up into the empty bus and are transported back to the music by the static that still hums around them.

By Monday morning, Louisa’s head is as tight as a drum and there’s a throbbing red lump where the speaker corner got her. Time to show her mother. She’s in her school uniform, bending her head over her mother’s knee when Emmett walks in. ‘Show me,’ he demands and she says, ‘It’s all right Dad, it’s nothing at all really.’

‘Well,’ he declares primly, standing back from the wound with some distaste, ‘it’s obvious you’ve got yourself into some strife here. Someone’s probably raped you as well as bashed you.’

Louisa always suspected Emmett was nuts and now here again is solid proof. Anne says, ‘Hang on a minute Emmett, Louisa’s told you what happened.’ But he keeps going, winding himself tighter and tighter. ‘You’d better be honest with us now girl, or there’ll be consequences.’ By now he’s turning scarlet and the pulse in his neck is throbbing and she notices that his hands are so fat, his fingers look like sausages. She forces herself to concentrate on yet another bizarre scene in the kitchen. But her head hurts.

She examines him through her long-seasoned bitterness and her eyes narrow and this is the moment, the real moment, when she knows there’s nothing to fear here anymore. Her father is insane and that’s it. That’s all this is. ‘You’re cracked Dad, you know that? You are completely cracked. You should be in a bloody mental home. Do us all a favour and for God’s sake, find one.’ She has her hand on her head, holding the sore spot.

But Emmett isn’t all that riled. ‘Piss off then,’ he sneers nastily, stepping back from her. ‘If you’re not worried about getting your bloody silly self raped, then neither am I.’ She sees his big ugly face but knows that since the fight he’s damned wary of her. Knows without any doubt that she will go for him.

Anne is once again furiously silenced and Louisa knows the dance is just about done. She slams out the back door, head throbbing like an engine. Not much longer to go, she tells herself on the way to school, hauling little Jessie behind her like a boat.

All day she thinks there must be a way of getting out of this. In the library at lunchtime her English teacher, Miss Burton, a woman with cat’s-eye glasses and a halo of curls, takes the chair next to her. Miss B has a passion for the novels of Jean Rhys, and Louisa has been stuck on the same page of Wide Sargasso Sea for a while now, unable to think of anything but her head. Miss B asks if anything is wrong. ‘Louisa my dear, you know you can always ask me for anything.’

And it’s as if there’s a drummer inside her head thumping away. She can’t concentrate on the book, and though she can hardly bear to touch her head, that’s all her hand wants to do. She hesitates and says to herself, you gotta know when you need help and here is a good, kind woman who will help.

She bends her head down toward the teacher and parts her hair tenderly away from the swollen infected lump. And then she looks up into the teacher’s eyes and hoping it’s trust she sees there, says, ‘Dad thinks I was raped and that I won’t own up to it. It’s not true of course. A speaker box got me on the head,’ and this sounds so silly she laughs, but then she feels heavily sad and pushes away a loose tear and says, ‘I think my father’s mad,’ and it’s a relief to speak of such things.

Miss Burton doesn’t say anything but her face is a picture of sorrow. She pats Louisa’s arm and leans in close and whispers, ‘Come to my desk after school, my dear, I know a good doctor.’

The teacher takes Louisa out to her green sports car and they drive past the packs of kids surging through the gate like shoals of sardines. Miss Burton waits while Louisa picks up Jessie from the crèche and the child perches on her knee in the car in a startled state of suspended excitement, little white hands grabbing fistfulls of her uniform and mouth sucking in all that whooshing air.

The doctor says there’s a cyst underneath the swelling that was caused by the gouge but not to worry, everything will heal. She prescribes antibiotics and Miss Burton pays for them and even buys Jessie a little ragdoll in a patchwork pinafore at the chemist.

When she drops Louisa and Jess off at Wolf Street the teacher pats her shoulder. ‘You know, dear girl, it won’t last forever.’ Louisa and Jessie stand outside the gate for a time watching the sports car disappear down the winter-dark, rail-thin street.