Evie Wyld - All the Birds, Singing

He mounted the stairs. It was nobody else but Lloyd come to give me some news on the sheep. And then Lloyd was pelting up the stairs, faster than his feet could fly, and light, like he had more than one set of legs, and in a second he had beaten a path along the hallway and right into my bedroom, without even knocking, and he was standing right on the other side of the bathroom door, breathing, and I knew that it was not Lloyd. It was something else. Light blocked out in patches underneath the door, it stood perfectly still and panted deep in the back of its throat. I couldn’t remember if I had turned the key in the bathroom door or not. I held my breath and the panting stopped. There was a thump on the door, and I splashed more water out of the bath, and a splitting pain slammed through my head.

‘Lloyd?’ I called. The key in the door trembled but it did not open and whatever was on the other side started running again, pounded once more on the door as it passed it, then ran fast around the bedroom. I heard the springs creak as it flew over the bed, and then it was out of the room, slamming the door behind it, and it carried on up the stairs, up and up the stairs that were not there because there was no room above mine, and then the house was silent, apart from a soft wheezing sound that came from me. The water was cold and I was no longer sure how long I had been in the bath, it was not even seven when I first ran it, but the light outside was bright and all the birds were singing. Far away I heard my dog barking, angrily.

There was a loud crash and a man said, ‘Good god, woman, what have you done?’

Outside Darwin, I pick rock melons and cucumbers with the spines that stick in my palms and fill with pus at night. Out in the sun, my scars are still tacky and they stick to my T-shirt and remind me they’re there. I make about $20 a day, which is enough to eat or sleep but not both, and sleeping in the YHA dormitory is miserable. There are bedbugs and worst of all there are the other sleepers who are all backpackers. They are English or Canadian or Scottish, which I thought was the same as English, but it turns out is very different. They frighten me, these people with their white dreadlocks and their ease at sleeping next to strangers. They think I’m their age because of my height, and one guy invites me out to watch them play drinking games. When I say I haven’t got the money, he says he’ll shout me one, and then I spend the night watching men have box-wine bladders poured down their throats, and then I watch them wheel off and puke up under the trees I sometimes sleep under.

In the bunks at the YHA I wake up one night, the taste of smoke in my mouth, and my heart is pumping and flapping about inside me. I stay still and wait until my eyes get used to the dark, listening to the different styles of breathing and snoring the other people in the room have. When my eyes become used to the dark, I can see that the guy on the bunk on top of me has his head hung over the side, and he’s watching me, not moving, not making a sound, just watching me with eyes that look black and wet in the dark. I shut my eyes and don’t move until morning, until I hear the man get down off his bunk and leave.

I put a bit aside every day and have enough to buy a second-hand sleeping bag, and I decide outside alone on the beach with a full belly is better than the YHA with all those creepy people. During the day I stash my bag behind a closed snack bar in an old bread tray. It’s hard work fruit-picking, and by the end of a day I’m starving, so it’s a good feeling to be able to get a calamari burger and chips and then sit in my bag and watch the fruit bats swoop about. I sleep well on those nights, while it’s warm and dry. In the mornings I swim in the sea.

When the season starts to change, there are no more things to pick, and the very little I’ve saved up gets me each day a dim sum from the fish shop and an apple or an orange. Sometimes the fish-shop guy chucks in some chips, because he says at least I keep myself clean and I don’t put his customers off. Which is sort of a nice thing, but it means he thinks I’m a homeless. Which all in all is pretty accurate.

My clothes start to go a bit rancid — I’ve got three changes which stay in the bottom of my bag, and washing them in sea water doesn’t do much of a job. I have to leave my bag sometimes when I go and try and find work. I get a cleaning job, disinfecting the public toilets around town. It makes less than fruit-picking and is longer hours and when I get back to my bag and my clothes, someone’s binned the lot and it’s all gone.

I lie to the woman who gives me the job, and say I have my own transport, which means I spend most of the day walking around town with a stinking bucket of bleach, and the air sanitiser which is supposed to be peach smelling but which smells of crap as well as of peach. I have to return the mop and bucket by 7pm each day, so sometimes I have to miss cleaning a toilet or two. I know they make spot checks, so every morning I’m terrified of being caught out. I smell awful, it’s in my hair and my skin and I’m pretty sure that peach ’n’ crap smell comes out on my breath. The fish man stops giving me free chips, and I stop going there because it’s embarrassing. I get out in the breakers, which feels dangerous after dark and it’s cold now too, and I snort up sea water to try and get the peach out. Up here is the water the whale sharks move through at this time of year, the only sharks people get sad about if one of them gets stuck in a trawler’s net or washes up. I think of those big fish and their wide toothless mouths out there and then I think of their smaller cousins with the teeth and I imagine them brushing against my legs.

While I’m making myself comfortable in the wide roots of a mango tree, a man offers me $30 to put his dick in my mouth. It seems like so little to ask for, such a short amount of time to have taken up. He gives me $15 and says, ‘There, half before and half after,’ and I feel like I’ve tricked him. That I have a tongue and a hole in my face means that in four or six minutes I can make more than a whole day of stooped, stinking work in the toilets. He holds the hair at the back of my head and drives his dick in hard so that it chokes me, like he is taking a swab, and his fingers in my hair tighten when he comes. It’s all over pretty quickly, the only really bad bit is when I have his stuff in my mouth and I think he might not give me the other half of the money if I look ill, and so I swallow it and give him what I hope is a winning smile. The man smiles back and wipes something from my cheek. He tucks his dick away in his trousers and reaches into his pocket. He gives me another $20 and says, ‘You get extra for that nice smile.’ And then he leaves. I buy myself a single room in a YHA, and lie awake most of the night because I feel excited about what the money means, but also because my stomach is churning.

It’s a few nights before I get another one, and this one is not so friendly as the first, and I have to put my hand around the base of him to stop my eyes from running, to stop him smashing into my nose. When he comes he seems to take special care to put some of his stuff over my face and hair as well as some of it in the mouth. I wouldn’t mind, but this one only offers $10 and I have to wait till morning to rinse it off in the sea, because when I get down to the shore seagulls are screeching and diving and something is feeding under the surface. He lets the money drop on the floor and gives me a look like he is sorely disappointed in me. He takes no notice of my blowie smile, just zippers up and leaves.

‘Thank you!’ I call out after him, worried I haven’t been polite enough.