Free Fall by Candice Fox Page B

though I’d been caught out on something. Guilt churned in the pit of my stomach. Once again, I felt the sting of being unable to understand the ways of women, their secret codes and inferences. We’d slipped into another language. I didn’t even have a basic grasp of what was being said here, what I’ddone wrong. I bit my lip and replayed the conversation with Hooky, tried to decide if anything untoward had been said by either party. But it hadn’t. It really hadn’t. There’d been work stuff only and a bit of the bantering that we always did. I couldn’t even begin to conceive of there ever being anything else to it.
    â€˜Baby,’ I said, reaching for Imogen, ‘don’t be silly.’
    â€˜Come on.’ She jerked her head towards the front door. ‘Let’s go. It smells in here.’

 
    Tara remembered. The memories came as tides, slowly rising, hitting their peak, and when they did she would sit on the bed and indulge them because she’d never had the strength to fight. She never knew which one would come. When she was at her most vulnerable the memories were of her youth – a Tara just starting to adapt to her pudginess, a Tara just beginning to assume her role as class reject. A short Tara, wide and soft, fleshy like a piglet, her little belly swelling and stretching the front of her sports polo as she panted. Cross-country day. That memory was always close at hand. The smell of freshly cut grass. The dread of the barbecue smoke in the school playground, the creamy fluorescent zinc being smeared on noses as the countdown to the afternoon session began. Tara the fat child rotating through as many excuses to Mrs Emmonds as she should muster, trying to find what would work, what would make the woman ignore her mother’s threats. My child will participate. Tara heard the warning every year from the cordless phone in the kitchen, Joanie stabbing the countertop with a finger as house staff swirled and ebbed around her, preparing lunch. Don’t take any of her shit.
    It wasn’t shit today. Tara really did feel sick. She tucked herself into the dark corner of mouldy bricks where the kindergarten block met the sports shed and breathed, listening to the big kids unloading the plastic markers and streamers with Mr Tolson. Tara held her belly and breathed. She was just learning to swallow the crying. She’d always been a crier, but she was beginning to relish in the hard, hot lump in her throat, the power she exerted in keeping it down, in keeping the tears at bay. Tara didn’t have power over many things. But she was beginning to understand, at eight, that she could control her own emotions. She could bring on or suppress rage like it was connected to a switch. She could make herself shake and sweat with fury, or make herself cold and fatigued with calm.
    As the day wound down towards the big race, Tara watched the other girls weaving ribbons into their hair and painting zinc dots on their cheeks. She went into the girls’ toilets and did the same, worked the colourful cream into her plump face.
    At the start line, no one noticed her. She kept to the back, the horizon ahead dominated by the shoulders of the enormous Year Six boys. Peter Anderson was wearing a Native American ceremonial chief’s headdress, his freckled cheeks lined with zinc. The colourful tails of the feathers fluttered madly in the wind. The boy started up a chant for Stuart House and it grew so loud that it almost drowned out the crack of the starting gun.
    Tara moved with the jostling bodies, and then she was on her own, little girls she’d remembered cowering in the playground on their first days in kindergarten rushing past her. She tried to befriend them once and for a few days had held a little posse of younger children as friends. But as they passed now they seemed not to recognise her. Their class clans had fused together and shut Tara out. By the time she