fiction | Jessica White

WIN FOR LIFE

MID-MORNING, I order my latte from Bambini and watch people pass in and out of the Downing Centre court. Once, while waiting for a coffee, I saw an argument erupt between a thin, greasy-haired man and his estranged partner, who held their daughter by her shoulders as a shield. The child stared at the ground, her arms limp, as though dislocated. I wondered who would win the court case – the one with a house full of furniture or the one who saved her loose change in a Nescafé jar.
    Once I’ve bought my coffee, I go to the news­agent’s to collect the Sydney Morning Herald and some Scratchies for the boy. Usually I buy him $2 Scratchies, but today I get a $4 ‘Win for Life’ – he might win $50,000 a year for the next twenty years.
    I sit on the edge of his desk; from his face I see that he’s tired again. I push the Scratchie towards him. I want to cup his cheek in my hand and wipe away the shadows beneath his eyes. He scrapes at the silver gum with a paper clip. He wins a free Scratchie, but the ‘Win for Life’ logo doesn’t appear.
    “Maybe next time,” I say.

I work at a credit card company, writing letters to clients whose accounts are overdue. It’s a dull and unforgiving job. I have a scholarship to study in London and I can leave when I like. Yet, each morning when I step out of the elevator at Level 12 and into the cramped office, I’m alert and electric, waiting for my first glimpse of him.
    It was his trim waist and tight ass that attracted me when I walked past him, a year ago. I stood at the photocopier and absently copied some documents, watching him lean over a desk, reading a newspaper. I’d seen him around, but never paid him much attention.
    Later, I went to his desk to ask him a trivial, work-related question.
    “Yes, ma’am?” he asked. I laughed at his greeting, then passed him a file. His parents were Korean and he’d grown up in Bowral. I watched his black eyes as he read the file and answered my question. Not many people would have called me ma’am. He’d surprised me and I liked it.

“Tell me about your family.” I nudged him, curled up by his side. Cicadas droned in the gum tree outside my window and the fan whirred slowly from side to side. I pulled the sheet around my neck. Our body temperatures were always at extremes – mine too cold, his too hot.
    “Why?” His tone was guarded.
    “I want to know.”
    He described how they’d cramped in a boat for weeks, feeling sick when the weak motor faltered. They were silent for most of the journey, stifled with thoughts of clouds tangled among the maples and poplars in the mountains, of the air of the village thick with moisture and tension, of the gunshots in the afternoons. When they stumbled into the humid heat of Darwin, they were sunburnt and shaky with hunger. The shore was blindingly white and angry wasps, whose nests had been disturbed, buzzed nearby. The locals appeared and his family struggled to pull fragments of English from their memories, forcing out the odd words through dry mouths.
    At lunchtime we sit in Hyde Park. I imagine taking off his clothes and stroking the hard arch of his back. His skin is smooth and taut, unlike mine which often breaks out in eruptions which I pick absently as I write.
    We lie back on the grass, first checking for seagull droppings. The boy tells me about a job he’s applying for in Adelaide with a ship-building company. An ibis wanders by hoping for the remains of my sandwich.
    “When do you find out about it?” I ask, reaching for my water bottle.
    “In about a month.”
    I kick the ibis away.

On the bus on the way home, squashed between bodies, I cannot concentrate on my book. I think of him pulling up my shirt, unhooking my bra and cupping my breasts.
After sex our conversations were relaxed and sprawling. I gave him the European myths which he’d grown up without: the story of Helen and the Trojan war, the Princess and the Pea, Hansel and Gretel. Sometimes he fell asleep as I spoke, but the night I told him about Pandora’s Box, he suddenly leaned over me. “Tell me that one again.”
    “What’re you going to give me for it?” I asked, slyly.
    “Nothing, unless you tell me. Then you’ll find out.”
    “Well, Pandora was given a box and told she wasn’t to look in it. But she was a curious girl and one day she decided to have a squiz. When she opened the box, all the evils of the world flew out – disease, jealousy, hatred, envy. She covered her ears and shut her eyes as they rushed over her head, but when they’d all gone she took her hands away. And there, in the box, she saw a tiny little thing – it was Hope.”
    He was silent, watching me intently, his pupils almost filling his eyes.
    “How do you know Hope’s wings weren’t broken?” he asked.
    “I don’t. The myth doesn’t say anything about that.”
    He leaned forward and kissed me gently, then pressed a path down my belly and between my legs.
    The bus pulls up at my stop. I buy milk from the corner store and smile tiredly at the Pakistani boy behind the counter. When I get home I make myself a cup of tea, water my Madonna lilies and watch the news.
    Unable to sleep that night, I get up and replace the newspaper linings of the cupboards. They’d been chewed by a rat that took me two months to kill.
    I pull out an advertisement I recognise from two years ago. “We decide who comes into this country and the circumstances in which they come,” Howard declares. I rip it into little pieces. My anger keeps me awake for another hour.

Our first fuck was hurried and nervous, snatched in our lunch break in his father’s apartment in the city.
    “We’re both leaving,” he said afterwards, his head against my chest.
    “I don’t care.” I preferred to be with him, then sort out the mess later, when we went our ways.
    I asked him to come over to my flat. I wanted to stroke his smooth chest again and trace the Korean characters tattooed onto his left arm.
    I’d never been in love before. None of the thousands of love stories that I’d read in books, seen in movies and heard from my friends prepared me for the sense of imprisonment it brought. But, having fallen, I suddenly understood what it was that made a prince hack through briar to reach his girl, and what made a princess hope, through years of boredom and loneliness and longing, for her man to reappear.

I walk to work in the mornings, listening to Crowded House on my cheap CD player which skips when the batteries wear out. Today the air is clear and biting. I imagine the boy fucking me against a wall, my breasts squashed against his chest, hurting. I taste his saliva and hear his breath in my ear. I feel myself getting wet.
    I pass the homeless men sitting on blue milk crates by the door of the bakery, hoping for bread. They live at the Salvation Army shelter across the road. One of them says something to me but I can’t hear what it is because ‘Don’t Dream it’s Over’ is playing. I quicken my step to keep up with the beat.
    When I give the boy a $5 and a $2 Scratchie, I can tell he only managed a few hours’ sleep the night before. He’s doing seventy-hour weeks to support his sick mother and repay his bank loan for his naval architecture degree. When he leaves our office he works in a restaurant and on the weekends in a supermarket. I don’t often sleep with him, these days.

He told me how his parents had moved to Bowral and how, when he was born, they kept on working. They needed the money. During the day he was looked after by friends; it was a different friend each week. He doesn’t really have a sense of home. When he told me this I wanted to weep, but he didn’t seem bothered by it.
    His parents pieced together English and moved to Sydney to complete their university degrees. He played rugby in the long twilight with his mates, breathing in the scents of sweat, frangipani and steaming asphalt.
    I never thought I’d fall for someone who was passionate about rugby. My family never watched sport. My father was a watercolourist and my mother read fiction voraciously. The telly was always tuned to the ABC.
    When Australia played its first game at the Rugby World Cup, I found the boy wearing a Wallabies’ jumper. “What’s this?” I asked disparagingly.
    “It’s a rugby jumper,” he said, equally condescending. He went to the pub after work to watch the game.
    That evening, while the rest of Sydney watched the football at the stadium or in a pub, I soaked in the bath. I thought about his thumb pushing over my nipples, then heard the doorbell. I hurried from the bath, wrapping myself in my pink towel. Dripping wet, I opened the door. It was him.
    “What happened to your game?” I asked, concerned.
    “I’m still trying to figure that out myself.”
    I smiled and pulled him to me. He smelled of beer and cigarette smoke. The towel slipped to the floor and his fingers reached into my cunt.
    Afterwards, I lay by his side, listening to his heartbeat. He began to tickle me and didn’t stop until I bashed him with a pillow. I was jealous at how quickly he could fall asleep.

The afternoon is the longest stretch of the day. Whenever I get bored, I compose luridly erotic emails for the boy. Today I work in my wall scene and feel fluid dripping into my undies again. The email will give him an erection. The thought makes me smile. It always does.
    Soon enough, an email comes back. To tease him, I correct his spelling mistakes.
    “English is my second language,” he protests.
    “So what?” I reply. His spelling is irrelevant; it’s the nature of his words that excites me. His wit is as sharp as a blade; he lays traps for me and I trip, surprised at being caught out.
    We once joked about what it would take to get me into bed.
    “$50,000,” I wrote to him.
    The next day, he gave me fifty thousand Korean won.
    “This is only fifty Australian dollars!”
    “You didn’t specify a currency.”
    “I did too. I said Australian.”
    “Look, I’ve still got your email. I’ll send it back to you – the 50,000 didn’t have a dollar sign before it.”
    I paused, considering. “You’ll take the dollar sign out!”
    He began to laugh. He sent me pdfs of dollar bills in an email and, when I told him this wasn’t good enough, a bunch of proteas with 49,950 written on the card. The flowers shut me up.

His family had been crossing a bridge over the Nak­tong River with a crowd of villagers and their oxen when it shook and crumbled with explosives. Falling carts knocked people underwater and babies were pushed underfoot. The boy’s father and mother, who’d almost crossed the bridge, were close to the bank. They scrambled out and, miraculously, found the boy’s grandfather being helped to the shallows by two of his daughters.
    Above the screaming and bellowing of oxen, he heard the Yankee accents. He didn’t want to stay in a country where the allies were their enemies. He gathered up the remnants of his family and continued to the coast.
    At the estuary, the smells of dank water and rotting fish were overpowering. The air freshened once they were out at sea, but the children in the boat wouldn’t stop crying.

I open the door and find the boy standing there. He kisses me on the cheek instead of reaching for my ass and I know something is wrong.
    “You got the job?” I ask.
    He nods.
    I turn away, leading him down the hall, past the bedroom. I sit on the couch and he makes me a cup of tea. The Madonna lilies have flowered, dusting the floorboards with their white pollen.
    “Here.” He hands me the cup and sits beside me. His thigh is hot.
    I bite my lip to keep it from trembling, then take a breath. “I’m holding on.”
    “How can you think that? It’s illogical! This isn’t one of your stupid fairytales. I’ll be away for years!”
    The tea spills as I slam the cup onto the coffee table. “Don’t shout at me!”
    “I’m sorry.” He draws me to him, pulling my legs over his lap. “It’s just . . . you can create stories, but you can’t create your fate.”
    “I know that. But if there were no stories, there wouldn’t be any hope, would there?”
    He doesn’t reply. I feel his erection beneath my calves.
    “I love you,” I tell him. He doesn’t respond, but he doesn’t need to. I’ve caught glimpses of it in his face – a certain tenderness, like a mother’s as she watches her child teasing the cat, or singing to himself.
    Soon he’s fucking me in the hallway. Skin peels from my back but I hardly notice it.
    It was illogical, I thought as I closed my eyes with ecstasy, but not impossible.

In two weeks he’s gone. There’s no point in staying any longer. I hand in my notice and pack up my desk. I print out all the emails we’ve written; they take up two reams of paper. I give away my ferns and cacti, then go to the travel agent and book my ticket to London.
    “One way, please,” I tell the woman behind the desk. “I won’t be back for a few years.”
    As I wait for her to offer me a quote, I look at my reflection in the window and at the people walking beyond it. There’s an Aboriginal woman by the side of the street, her curly hair knotted and bedraggled. She’s holding out her hands for money.
    It occurs to me that it didn’t matter if Hope’s wings were broken. What mattered was that Hope was there. I reach under my skivvy and pick at the scab on my back.
    “The best is probably $1500, via Singapore,” says the travel agent.
    “That’ll do,” I reply, taking out my credit card.
    When I step outside, I tip some coins into the woman’s hand.
    I lie awake at night, remembering the prickliness of his cheeks when he hadn’t shaved. Or his tongue working between my legs until I arched my back in orgasm. I think of his acrid semen spurting into my mouth and of his slender fingers weaving through mine, gripping them when he came. I miss being able to turn to him when I’ve had a bad dream.
    A friend tells me there’s more chance of being struck by lightning than of winning a Scratchie, but I persist. I want to wake up next to him in the mornings, his body curled around mine like a seed pod.
    That’s why, every morning in London on my way to uni, I stop for my latte, the Guardian and another Scratchie. If someone had written the ending to our story, I could only hope that it was a good one.

Overland 180–spring 2005, pp.55–58