A Language of Limbs

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 okay? 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 weatherboard. 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
okay?

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, okay.

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.

Okay, 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.