Chapter 13
The breeze began as a welcome sign that the day would cool. The Tasman Nimbus had drifted to shore after hours of threatening gestures on the horizon. People on the beach packed up and left, some for home, others for the enclosed beer garden across the road from the sand hills. Gradually the beach was emptied of its jetsam.
There is excitability present during those few moments prior to a storm. Indecision hovers; there is the dare to wait it out for as long as possible, or to scurry away to shelter. Car drivers panic when no one gives them way. People come alive with the breathless sensuality of electricity in the air and sometimes do things that in other times would appear irrational to them.
‘Look at them go!’ laughed Juno derisively.
‘They never enjoy themselves with their bundles and crap.’ Lamont agreed tersely. ‘Screaming kids and sand up their arses. Why they come to the beach I’ll never fucking know.’
As the storm wrestled with its resolve to drop its watery load, the five o’clock fitness mob moved at a trot along the water’s edge, like a hastily convened lynching crew, their eyes pained and mad and never wavering from their distant targets.
‘You know,’ Lamont swivelled his head as he watched the tits of the frantic females in the herd of bobbing lunatics. ‘I once saw a little kid nearly trampled to death by those fuckwits!’
Juno smiled knowingly. Since the morning’s treat of cokes and ice creams, her brother’s demeanour had soured. ‘What’s the matter with you? Someone bite your balls off?’ she teased deliberately.
‘Juno!’ Lamont shut his face as his eyes retreated to a sore point in his mind. ‘Go string your tits somewhere else.’
‘Oh, your great savage!’ Juno retorted with a mixture of understanding and contempt. Her smile stayed on her mouth like a pastry salute. Then, as if the ceremony had passed, it cracked and crumbled in the first drops of rain. ‘You couldn’t have treated her more ignominiously if you tried, Monty. One moment you’re all over her. Then pfffft! You ignore her as if a disease had lodged between her thighs. No wonder she pissed off. I don’t blame her!’
Lamont carried apology in the satchels of his eyes, but his mouth clenched and a vile taste met his tongue. He would not have another chance to express how he felt.
*
There had been no one at home to excoriate the blemish of rejection. The sun had peaked in the sky and it seemed as if the world had migrated to the peninsular. Dali sat listless as a discarded banana peel. The house was not the same without her family. There was no note to say where her father and brother had gone. So she sat on the verandah listening to the noises of the world at play.
When the wind was right the sounds of the weekend carried to the house beneath the cliffs. Today, with the sea breeze, she hoped that the voice of Lamont would climb from the beach. But the sounds were amorphous strangers and left her alone. She was displaced, unhappy and yearning for the boy with the scar to climb the stairs and remove the ache from the house.
‘Jesus!’ she muttered sadly. ‘Where does it end?’
A spur of the moment and Dali was down the verandah stairs in a flash. She kicked her toes into the dust of the track as she descended to the lakeside. A curved flap of skin unrolled from her big toe and beneath the dust the raw skin bled grey and red. She bent down in the middle of the track to stick the skin back onto her toe. It was too dirty and she allowed it to flap.
The lake waters washed the toe to a glowing pink stump with a flap of skin like the hood of a convertible automobile. She sat on the grass and examined the fine corrugations of newly exposed flesh. ‘Under the skin we’re all the same’ she muttered scornfully.
She removed herself from the stares of a line of fishermen and made her way around the lake. There was a busy activity on the water. The reserve was filled with families at lunch and an ice cream van rang its bell. Children poked about in the trees and shouted to each other. Dali wandered aimlessly and enjoyed the visitors to her backyard. Some of them gazed at her as if she did not belong. Others ignored their football to poke their lewd fingers at her. The afternoon passed slowly for her.
Dali wanted to rejoin Lamont and Juno on the beach, but the morning’s hurt still hurt. When the storm shuddered and bullied, Dali pressed herself against the trunk of a cedar. She cried in anguish for the storm to banish the foreigners from her domain. Shadows disappeared as the sun was swathed in blackness. A pall of malevolence settled over the reserve. Soon she was alone with the thunder.
The rain held off, as if the weather had merely played with the fears of the multitudes. Lightning burnt strips through cloud. Thunder echoed in pursuit. Dali moved tentatively into the trees and followed her will toward the cliffs. Below the foliage the air was calm and warm and the ground was smudged with rubbish left behind. Gusts of irritable wind belted the cliffs and sprayed granite with leaves and a furious dust.
Inside the protection of the bamboo grove she rested. Her sanctuary was clear of litter and was not trespassed by strangers. Her thoughts were bittersweet with memories of a few fleeting seconds with Lamont in her mouth. Since the accident her new life had enmeshed her. She had seen hope with Lamont. His family had become an extra arm around her shoulders.
She had buried herself in her studies and ignored the jealousies of her schoolmates. The distinctions of her final exams framed the wall behind her bed. She had tolerated her awful past and now she was free from the dog collar of destiny and its throttling hold. She closed her eyes to halt the flow of water from her heart.
*
They watched astonished as tears ran down his cheeks. It had been sudden and he had said nothing. The band played its final bracket and the pub crowd was boisterous with booze. Everyone had braved the storm as it made its ominous approach from the east. Without warning, Rane vomited on the floor. He was coughing and crying and heaving his body as the mess of food poured out of his mouth. There was a taste of death at the back of his throat.
He had seen his sister in the trees and he had been struck by a powerful sense of malevolence. There was a blur of ugliness and he realised the sickening churn of his bowels. As his father stretched a helping hand across his shoulders, Rane farted a long stream of noisy sulphurous wind and the stench drove through the room like an ancient plague.
‘Christ.’ whispered Hans Dorfman.
*
The storm allowed him to creep close behind her. Dali was sitting cross-legged, facing the cliff, when his large hands reached over her shoulder and clamped her mouth shut. Dali stiffened with horror. Her screams were stifled in her throat. She tried to bite the flesh that held her. Her jaw was locked. A pungent stink of rotting flesh clogged her nostrils. Her legs kicked in vain as her head was forced between her thighs.
‘Little wog whore!’
The hoarse sound of the man’s voice chilled her soul.
‘Chink slut! You’re all the same. You fuck like rabbits! You swamp our land with your vermin.’
Dali thought her neck would crack as the large hands forced her head to the ground. The hand that held her mouth came away and she gulped a mouthful of compost as the other hand forced her further into the ground.
‘Let’s see how you fuck-crazy slit-eyes handle a jolt of white love muscle!’
He ranted into her ear as his other hand cranked her body out of its painful pike. Dali’s legs were flung back brutally as her face was buried beneath the choking carpet of muck. She felt his knees upon her back. She tried flicking her heels back against his body but the effort was useless, like running in air.
Kneeling on her the man reached down with his free hand and forced her jeans from her waist. Her buttocks pinched and shivered under her pants as his hand ripped the flimsy garment away. ‘What’s the struggle for, bitch?’ he gloated as his fingers fought through her stiffened thighs.
Dali squeezed her knees together as the hand prised its way toward her vulnerable softness. She tried with every muscle in her body to free herself. As the pressure from his hand on the back of her neck lessened she spat out the filth from her mouth and screamed. The pain to the side of her head was sharp from his punch. There was a blur of ugliness in her head before she realised the intense pain in her lower abdomen.
As she suffered her pain excited her nerves. A dreadful ache beat upon her brain as she hovered on the verge of collapse. She knew when the blade tore open the flesh of her stomach and drove its rude passage through her bowels.
He had lifted her slightly to permit the blade to pierce her just above the groin. He was fascinated as he watched her blood spray violently at first and he was disappointed her fight had not lasted longer. As Dali’s body emptied itself of blood, he withdrew the blade and tossed it into the surrounding bamboo.
‘I want my bitches to bleed!’ He glared at the back of her head. ‘You hear me, you wog slut. I hope you can enjoy me. If you can hold on long enough.’
He then opened his trousers and with one hand straining to hold up her dying body, he managed the ultimate orgasm. ‘Jesus! Fuck me!’ he cried as his obscene act delivered Dali from her hymen and her life.
He left her carcass in the bamboo grove and walked away to the water’s edge where he washed the stain from his body.
