Wicked Game

  January to February 2003    I get back on the Oz Experience bus and travel further up the east coast.     It stops for two days in a remote farm. We have to be careful with water because there's a drought. It rains solidly the whole time we are there.    As we near Mission Beach the driver tells us this is the only place you can do a sky dive with a beach landing.    Should I? Should I? Should I?    I should.    I put my name on the sign up list.    Later that day I am in a helicopter harnessed to a man. The straps slip down my narrow shoulders. I fall through the door, fall, fall, fall through the air. Wind rushes past my ears.      I am alive now like I haven't been since that last night out in Sydney.    The man pulls the cord. Silence. I seem to shoot up in the sky. I can see the rainforest, the reef in the sea spread out below me.    I'm on the beach, dizzy. I t...

  January 2003 I get a bus to Nimbin. I spend the days writing everything I remember from Saturday night and Sunday morning in a notebook. I had Shelley's lip balm in my bag. I don't think Adam or I were wearing seatbelts in the car. The third man in the house in the morning- Did he- No. He couldn't have done. I would know. Surely I would know.    In the night I sit in the tent with the other residents of the hostel, smoking, getting stoned, forgetting.    I'm walking to the town when the owner of the hostel passes in his truck. He stops and asks me if I want to go with him. He's going to his ex-wife's house to do some gardening.    'Okay,' I say. I get in the truck.    His ex-wife, he tells me, lives in a commune, but everyone in it has their own house and garden. She's on holiday with her partner so he's looking after the garden and keeping an eye on the house.    When we get there he gives me a glass of water and tells me to sit ...

  January 2003 I'm on the Oz Experience bus waiting to leave Sydney. The Doors' People Are Strange is playing through the speakers. All these strangers on the bus, I seem to see them through a gauzy veil that I am trapped behind.     I still smell of Nick.     What I thought happened can't have happened. He was nice afterwards. He talked to me. He brought me water. He drove me home. I kissed him. It can't have happened.      But I was unconcs-     I push the thought out of my mind. It. Didn't. Happen. I was just the kind of slut who had sex with two men in one night.      The bus takes us through rural areas. We watch a sheep being sheared. We learn to crack whips and throw boomerangs. I can't get the boomerang to come back. On Wednesday evening we arrive in Byron Bay. The bus driver announces the name of a pub for everyone to meet up in later.     As I wait for my backpack to be unloaded an older couple from the...

  January 2003 It's our last Saturday night in Sydney. On Monday we will all go our separate ways; north, south, west. We are on the subway, drunk and going to get drunker.       James teases me about my appearance in photos, the way my narrow face and dark grey eyes look demonic under the camera's gaze.      'I'm not evil.' I point my finger at him. He bites it.      'You are evil.' He leans back in his seat. 'And your fingers taste nice.'      'What do they taste like?'      'Salty.'      Later, by the ATM Rosie says, 'Why don't you just snog him?'      'He's nineteen,' I say. A three and a half year age gap seems as wide as the ocean.     We are dancing in a nightclub. Then- I am kissing someone. A man with dark curly hair and glasses. I don't know who he is so I just keep kissing him. He grabs my wrist and pulls me through a door. I see the picture on it. The ...

  December 2002 The train pulls out of Central Station. I'm going to the Blue Mountains. My phone beeps as a text message arrives. Shelley wants to know if I'll be back for dinner tonight. I start to reply but the screen pixelates and turns upside down. I can't type anything. I turn it off and on again but the screen is still wrong. I spend the day walking, taking in the hazy blue atmosphere. There is nobody else here. I gaze at the Three Sisters, a rock formation that juts into the skyline. I pass waterfalls, the torrents seem distant and subdued. Brown butterflies flicker around me. I feel like I've walked into another world. As I walk out of the station in Sydney that evening a man approaches me. He says something I can't quite understand. I'm not sure if he's asking me for money or trying to sell me drugs. I shake my head and quickly walk away, striding onwards.  The song  Jane Says  by Jane's Addiction creeps tinnily through an open shop door. My so...