Dry
Dad would stand the three of us on the bench in a row and dry us carefully, including between our toes. You and Curtis are naked in all my memories of the men’s changing room. The brown birthmark on your inner thigh, the scar on Curtis’s buttock from when he fell off the garage roof, your two cheerful pointed penises—all parts of you I knew and loved uncomplicatedly. I don’t remember any adult men’s bodies, not even Dad’s. I never saw another girl in there, but I don’t remember feeling strange that my body was different. In my memories, it was a large empty space, just ours, air full of chlorine. I remember holding our hands out for Dad to puff full of talc. We’d pat it into our armpits and over our tummies and he’d say, ‘Turn, turn, turn,’ and we would, with a giggle, and he’d puff powder onto our bums. The first time I went swimming with a friend’s family, my clothes stuck to damp skin as I pulled them on, felt squeaky. With Dad, we were always dry.
I remember the day Curtis ran in the changing room, and then fell. I can see him fall in slow motion, knee bent as his foot flies out behind him and his face goes down. Remember how much blood came out of him? Streaks of red creeping across the wet white floor, diluting. It went towards a metal drain and I worried about losing it—we might need it back. I don’t remember what his forehead looked like right away or the trip to the A&E, but for weeks he had those black stitches above his eyebrow like a line of leggy bugs, squashed under a plastic square to keep them clean, keep him from tugging at them. You were the oldest and I was the girl, so both of us disapproved of him; always running, breaking things, at risk of pulling out his own stitches. In the pool, you and I would swim up and down, throw a ball back and forth, make friends with other children. Curtis would make Dad throw him in the air and catch him, make Dad hold his wrists and swing him through the water in splashy circles, need saving when he jumped into the deep end.
Then we divided, when I was seven or so. You three to the men’s, me to the women’s. I don’t remember the day, just a new phase of memory.
For years, the women’s bodies were a revelation. Women stand in front of the mirror blow-drying their hair, putting on makeup, adjusting the legs of their swimsuits up and down to see what looks better, what covers their pubes. Some women put their bra on backwards and swivel it around. Some pull their knickers up under their towel so they’re never naked. Some stroll back from the shower with their towel around their head, breasts bobbing free. They put their feet on the bench to dry between their toes, like ballerinas stretching. Every bum in the room is a different shape and shade. The shower walls have smears of conditioner and hairs of different colours pasted into them. The drains are foamy with shampoos and body washes. The room smells of so many ways women can smell, mixed together. In there, the difference of my body felt important; that there were people who had thick hair on their legs, that there were teens whose breasts had angry purple stretch marks like someone had scratched them, that I didn’t know how to twist the towel into a proud turban the way they did, and instead my wet hair dripped onto the shoulders of my t-shirt.
I watched other women put their hair into buns and learned. I found a forgotten velvet scrunchie on a clothes hook and took it. It felt like the nicest thing I owned for months, and when my hair was down I wore it around my wrist for its comforting softness, which I could rub against my lips when I felt lonely. I felt like I could still smell the last woman’s conditioner inside it.
Dad had always washed us with Imperial Leather and baby shampoo, now I started sniffing bottles in the supermarket and asking for my own. You walked sensibly beside Dad and asked for nothing and I wished I could be as good as you. Curtis dropped milk and it burst like his head, the workers putting up Wet Floor signs, piling paper towels on the puddle while the edges crept outwards, was it only once? Everywhere we went with him, it felt like the edge of calamity, but I never doubted that Dad would hold him safely back from falling right in.
Off in the other changing room, you two would have been changing, too. I remember teasing you for your six chest hairs when you walked the house shirtless. I remember Curtis starting to stink, his room like a rat’s nest you could sense from a distance. Dad taught me to wash blood from my underwear with cold water, because hot would set the stain. He said he learned this as a child from his mother, because he was always knocking his nose, grazing his arm, cutting his hand, and all his school shirts were white.
‘You were like Curtis,’ I said.
‘I was a bit like all of you,’ he said.
He must have taught you two things, too. Private but matter-of-fact. Coaxing Curtis into showers, showing you how to shave your beautiful sharp jaw close without cutting the skin.
Then, so many splits; slow like velcro coming apart one hook at a time so you barely notice. Realising it felt strange to cuddle up against Dad while we watched TV, that I no longer wanted to call him Daddy when I was tired or sad, in case someone heard, that I couldn’t ask him to sunblock my back at the beach without a slight sense of strangeness. You didn’t want me to go to the dairy with you because people might think we were dating. I’d rather leave home with the back neck-button of my dress undone than scoop up my hair and ask any of you to help. All piling on top of the change of changing rooms until I was a body none of you knew or touched any more.
Your last year of school, you shone, and I was so proud from three years below. You walked like a man. Other guys tried to do their hair like you. Girls from the years between us tried to be my friend so they could visit our house and be near you. I didn’t tell them that at home you farted, wore ripped pyjama bottoms with leg hair emerging from the holes like the microgreens Dad grew on the kitchen windowsill, that you and Curtis had a game of flicking each other’s balls whenever the other one seemed too relaxed, and that I’d seen you sit in the back garden crying late into the night and refusing to tell any of us why.
I remember reading a men’s magazine in the doctor’s waiting room around that time. I don’t know why I picked it up, why I turned to the advice. But someone’s girlfriend wanted to move in together and he wasn’t ready. His friend had told him it would end their sex life—once he saw her vacuuming in her underwear, once she got out of the shower, warm and shiny with water but too tired to be touched, she would stop being a magical sexual being. He would have to work to find her hot, work to care more about her body than the mysterious bodies of other women, so he should hold off that moment for as long as he could, until he wanted to have children with her and let everything change anyway. I don’t remember what the columnist said—maybe I was called into my appointment—but then, every time I did housework and tucked my sweaty t-shirt up into my bra, I wondered what that magazine man would think of me. I walked into your bedroom while you were masturbating once and left so quickly that later I thought I might have imagined it, that you were probably doing something else in your lap in front of your computer, but you were uncomfortable around me for weeks, glared at me.
And then you were gone, mostly, just home for your university holidays, using expressions you’d never used before. Curtis hid away in his room, depressed by high school, and we didn’t do anything as a family any more. We didn’t stop swimming when you left—we’d stopped long before then—but it was when you were gone that I noticed the gap. The house was still without you. There was a dinnertime chair that always had nobody in it. Dad and I started watching Formula One together, up in the night to catch key races live. I liked the roar, but I was doing it for you; I was trying to fill the gap of your body on the couch beside him. I tried to lean in when you would have, shout when you would have. I began to forget what you would have done, and I watched you closely when you came back, but you seemed like someone new. You wore cologne and the musk drowned out the usual soft smells of our house. You left at night to drink with friends and in the morning you had sharp vomit breath, heavy eyes.
That’s what I imagine you like, that night. Maybe because it’s the most distant you I can make in my mind.
Curtis asked me, a week or so afterwards, ‘are you scared of him now?’ It hadn’t occurred to me to be scared of you, yet. I was still in Formula One mode, trying to work out how you would move when you were somewhere I couldn’t see you. I thought there must be a way to make it make sense. I dreamed, one night, that it turned out it wasn’t you at all; someone else looked like you, walked like you, did their hair like you, and they were terrible. They’d been caught on CCTV and people had looked at the footage and thought it was you. An easy mistake when everyone knows and loves you and wants to see your face in photos. I woke up floating, I thought I might have never been so happy, then I untangled it all and only the worst parts stayed true.
It was Dad who told me. I realise now that I don’t know who told him, or how. I assumed that I was the first person he called and that it was almost instant, but now that’s slippery. I realise he could have let it settle for a day or two, he could have talked to a friend, he could have fallen into crisis and paid for emergency counselling and had a professional coach him through how to tell his children. But he called and told me and it felt brand new. He was matter-of-fact, like he always had been, the same gentle voice passing on the bits that mattered. You’d been arrested. Reckless disregard, Dad said, criminal nuisance. I thought of Curtis, thought he was mixing you up somehow, even though he never did that. She had survived. They weren’t able to establish that there had been intent to kill. They hadn’t been able to gather enough evidence to charge you with possible sexual offending, or with stupefying. Dad said those things and I felt the but and the yet hovering behind them and realised he could sound calm when he was completely broken inside and I wondered how many times in my life he’d been doing that and I hadn’t known.
Of course, mostly, my dreams were about her. She’s in the water, every time I think of her, every time I dream about her. It’s dark and she is half-asleep and sinking, not fighting against it, but her lungs are filling and her eyes are burning with salt and she is overwhelmed with sadness, a deep certainty that everything is wrong and won’t ever be right again. She can just make out the thick wooden legs of the wharf, looming up above her. You—a stranger, rough and terrifying—are standing there, high above, but that already feels uncertain, half-remembered.
So you were coming home. You’d be back with Dad, only a few months after Curtis had finally left the house and I’d been worrying Dad was lonely there in the sudden quiet. You’d be the second taken chair at the dinner table, you’d be back in your teenaged bed, you’d have a curfew and a drinking ban while you waited to face charges. In my mind you were a ghost floating half-there from room to room saying nothing and what was Dad going to say to you?
‘It was a chaotic and unwitnessed incident,’ Dad told me on a later call, after a couple of weeks with you. The woman’s memory had shifted a few times; so had yours. He never said anything specific after you moved back in—I could sense your body in a room near his, holding the story and listening. Dad never handed the phone to you and I never asked. ‘The rest of us might not ever know what happened,’ Dad said, ‘and I don’t think they will either.’
‘I think I should come home now,’ I said. I needed to see you and look for the murky place behind your eyes, and then through it.
‘He’s just a fucking idiot,’ Curtis told me, not wanting me to make the trip. ‘He’s done something disgusting and then literally thrown her in the sea. She didn’t know his name, she might not have done anything about it, if he’d …’
I went home to see you and you’d let your beard grow, all patchy. I cringed away from the ugliness of your cheeks and neck, struggled to look at you when you talked.
Sleeping down the hallway from you, you grew a face in my dreams, were definitely you. I am her, dancing with you in a club and you’re persistent but friendly and my memories are little islands in a nighttime sea. A bright red drink. Waves breaking around me. Walking outside with you. Water over my head. Cold air under a streetlight, you not letting go of my arm, waves breaking around me, us laughing together, me spinning around and dancing and I don’t know if I’m on the sand or on the pavement or in the place out the back where the bins are. We don’t remember how we got here but we’re knocking things over and laughing together and time isn’t passing the way it usually does when I’m awake. Was there a friend I should tell that I was leaving? I couldn’t remember. There was so much water to deal with that it was hard to be polite, to remember all those rules about safety in numbers—anyway, now I had you. Your strong arm kept me up when I wobbled.
The fresh, cold shock of water. The sense as I broke the skin on it and sank that I could still feel your hot hands on my shoulders where you had held me too hard and swung me off balance and over the edge. The sting and soreness, a sense I’d been touched when I didn’t want to be and my body was wrong now, but I wasn’t sure I was right about that. Someone pulling me out, and he wasn’t you, and he hurt me more than you did, he said. He hit me on the wharf and he was scared he’d broken my ribs. He was trying so hard to get me up above his head but he could barely stay up himself, my dead weight in his arms, and there was nobody around. You were gone. You’d wandered away looking quite nonchalant. This man who’d gone for a walk and seen something unusual in the water—he’d decided to pay attention. He sounded amazed by himself when he told the story later, in court. He’d realised it was a woman under the surface and he’d jumped in and pulled, bruised her all over, wrestled her free from her heavy clothes. He’d thought that people might think he’d been responsible for all of what had happened—but he’d known he had to save her and he had. When I woke up, I was always crying and tasting the tears in the back of my throat, sheets twisted around my legs like seaweed.
‘Hope you’re locking your fucking door,’ Curtis texted me. He knew there weren’t locks. I remembered, with a jolt, walking in on you years ago, your hand in your lap. Dad washed your bedding and my bedding, hung it all out in the wind, put our rooms back together for us so my pillow smelled like afternoon sun. Neither of us did much to help around the house, because he got there first.
The last night before I left, I went out to the back garden, damp with dream-sweat, and when I looked up at the stars all I could do was wonder whether she’d seen the stars as that man pulled her up from the water, her head hanging back on her neck like it was broken. You must have heard the door. You came and sat beside me and neither of us said anything, but over time your body softened. You let your thigh in your pyjama pants—the one without a birthmark—be millimetres from my thigh in my pyjama pants. I worked not to flinch away. I worked not to press my leg against yours.
Caoimhe McKeogh is of Irish and Cornish descent and lives in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. She holds a PhD in Creative Writing from Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University and is publicist at Te Herenga Waka University Press. Her writing has appeared widely in literary journals including Landfall, Overland and The Masters Review.