Girls Just Wanna Have Fun

“Jesus, you little shit!” she cried upon appearing at the doorway in her black stockings and bra. “What the hell?”
    Louis bunched the blouse to his chest, holding fistfuls of the soft material and trying to hide the great brown stain. The mark was so fresh that it was still creeping outward from its locus, still seeping in slow-moving eddies down the weave in the texture of the material; spiking out in areas like a braided river.
    His mother descended on him, a shrieking harpy with claws and teeth bared in frustration and unnatural rage. She tore the blouse from his grip and held it up, letting the air hiss through her clenched teeth in the suddenly otherwise silent room.
    The child couldn’t see her face because of the garment strung between them, but he could imagine the way her pretty features would have settled into a cold rictus of ire and disgust. She had made no secret to her son that he should have been born a girl. Louis tried to please her, he did, and he tried to placate her longing for a daughter. Even at his age, looking in the mirror before bath time made him angry at and guilty about the shrivelled appendage dangling in front of him that he just could not bring himself to loath like his mother had.
    “You little faggot…” she seethed, and then the tirade began. Her words hit his ears like tiny pebbles and stung like hail. Her disgust had fists that were far more effective than ones she would form with her own hands. He shrivelled up inside and bent down to pick up the coffee cup that had spilt its cold contents on his mother’s blouse.
    He was just trying to be good. Mothers liked their daughters to have tea parties with their dollies. He had none of those but spread about him was a soiled and well-loved soft rabbit, and a newer bear almost as large as he (whose fault this was anyway) because it tipped on its side.
    Eventually she ran out of steam, and Louis, trying to look as repentant as possible, slunk from the room. “Pick up your toys!” she hollered after him, kicking the bunny through the doorway with a stockinged toe. She turned, muttering, “Where’s the goddamned Sard?”

Flame-haired Eliza and curly-headed Louis sat underneath the kowhai tree in the middle of the roundabout at the end of their cul-de-sac. While they talked and giggled they systematically shed the skins of the pods. They were left with small seeds, bright, mustard yellow kernels like raw popcorn.
    The air was unusually thick and warm for a Dunedin morning. The tree, stunted from the children climbing over it during the long summer nights, gave little shelter. Its branches were low and spindly, grasping at some last hope of growth. It should have been reaching for the sun but instead it reached outward, as if to plead with generations of children to please stay off its back. It was a wizened old stick that, despite their ill treatment, the children loved like a puppy.
    “Do you think it’s going to work?” asked Eliza, inspecting the wide straw she had kept from her Frosty Boy. She put it to her lips; the taste of jaffa lingered.
    Louis laughed. “Yeah, Ellis is gonna get it,” he replied, grinning. “Build a base without us and pay!”
    “That’s right,” Eliza affirmed, nodding her head imperiously and glancing at the copse of pine trees that studded the bare hilltop. “You reckon he’ll tell your mum?” When she looked back at Louis, she was not boosted by his response.
    The young boy had shrugged and plucked at his Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles t-shirt. “Ellis won’t tell Mum,” he murmured, trying to appear nonchalant in the face of the true danger of their impending battle.
    The kowhai tree shuddered as a scream punctured the air. Louis was struck in the left cheek with something small and hard and green; Eliza immediately ducked her head and shielded it with her forearms while rising.
    “C’mon!” she shouted at Louis, who was dazed and patting the ground, looking for the missile. Eliza took a risk and grabbed at his arm, rewarded for her bravery by a shot to her ear. She yelped and it was then Louis seemed to regain his senses. He launched up with her help, scattering the little yellow bullets over the grass and tarmac and yelled, “Potato gun!”
    The two kids hunched over and shuffled to the meagre cover of Mr. Harkins’ feijoa vine, across the road from the roundabout. They collapsed behind the thick twist of curling roots. Rolling onto their tummies and mindless of the dirt and grass stains already singeing their clothes, they sought out their attacker.
      The scream came again, a battle cry! Both sets of green eyes fell upon Ellis and his buddy Ricky, hiding behind the brown picket fence of the boys’ home. With glee and a quick pop of the gun, the older boys shot again. The feijoa vine proved to be terrible cover. The young potato, dug up still green and compact, struck the bush above them.
    “We forgot the guns!” cried Eliza.
    “They would’ve been crap anyhow,” Louis shouted back. “It’s like a handgun against… against a bazooka!”
    “We’ll have to forfeit!”
    “Grandad didn’t surrender!” The children’s war-games, a regular feature of the cul-de-sac, were buoyed by the tales of Louis’ grandfather, who was a member of the Royal New Zealand Army and was a captain in World War II.
    “I’m outta here!” she muttered, scrabbling backwards. She made herself as small as possible before darting out from behind the bush, making a beeline straight for her house, next to Louis’.
      “Stop right there,” came a chilly voice, and Louis felt his throat tighten in defeat.
    The boys across the road stood up, potato guns still loaded, and Mother stalked out into the street, banging the gate behind her. Rising, Louis saw that Eliza stood a few metres from the hedge, caught like a possum in the headlights. She had stopped mid-sprint, one arm extended before her, fingers straight and compact together, her body twisted in surprise and momentum. At seeing her face, Louis couldn’t help but laugh – her mouth formed a little O rivalled only by her wide eyes.
    “Louis!” his mother hissed, and he immediately fell silent, choking on his laughter. She stalked towards them, her face speaking tomes of determination and anger. “Don’t you laugh at her!” she continued as she made her way over. “Eliza, what was he doing to you?”
    If she knew she looked ridiculous in her pink slippers and black pants suit, she didn’t reveal it. Her hair was wild and filled with hairspray and she reminded Louis of the Wicked Witch. The woman was still hurling insults and insinuations at her youngest child when she stepped up the roundabout. She was halfway to Louis, who had crept out to stand next to Eliza…
    There was a pop and a wet thump as a potato missile hit his mother where he, too, had been hit a few minutes before. As she turned to see the culprit, she lost her footing on the kowhai seeds scattered about the grass and fell, her leg twisting underneath her.
    Her howl dwindled down to a hiss and Eliza tore home. Ricky jumped the fence and fled home, too. “I’m sorry Mum,” Ellis was saying, “Ricky just…”
    But his mother was paying no attention to him. Her attention was on Louis. “Did you do this?” she seethed, picking up the kernels and scattering them at the boy. Louis nodded mutely.
    Her hand whipped out, finger extended towards the door. “Inside,” she growled.

He didn’t struggle as she tugged the neckline of the dress over his head. He was mute as she forced him into the ballet slippers, made him stand in his pink room with Barbie on one side and a life-sized doll on the other. She pressed a video into the player and Cyndi Lauper filled the blue screen of the television.
    “Sing,” she commanded.
    He didn’t bother protesting. This was a punishment he had had so many times that he no longer wondered why. Shuffling his feet in a weak imitation of the dance on the video, he began,
“I come home, in the morning light
My mother says when you gonna live your life right?
Oh mother dear we’re not the fortunate ones
Girls, they wanna have fun, ooh girls just wanna have fun…”

They were holding hands on the trampoline. The scent of burning wax and candles still filled Louis’ senses, and when he licked the corner of his lips he could still taste the sweetness of Eliza’s birthday banana cake. He had made it especially for her, for her seventeenth birthday, and they had celebrated it in secret in the empty lot behind their homes. The trees had been felled for the lot to be subdivided.
    “So yeah.” Eliza had been nattering away about something, but he was too absorbed in his own world to have really noticed. Abruptly, he said, “When I was little, Mum used to dress me up in girls dresses and make me dance to Cyndi Lauper.”
    He heard a soft, incredulous snort of laughter beside him. “She what? C’mon, Lou.”
    “She did,” he persisted; suddenly intent on revealing this part of his life he had kept hidden from his best friend. “She had five frocks, her favourite was this little blue number with green sequins around the neckline –”
    “Louis!” The trampoline eased down as she rolled over to lie on her side facing him, her head propped up by her hand, the elbow denting the black material of the tramp. “You’re kidding, right?”
    He could glimpse the pale reflection of the moon in the pupils of her eyes if he turned his head just a fraction. “No.” He drew his lower lip in between his teeth.
    She collapsed back down onto the trampoline, rolling onto her back once more to confront the harsh glare of Venus, bright in the sky at this time of year. “Well,” she said after a moment, “are you embarrassed?”
    “No,” he repeated, closing his eyes and watching the phantom of the moon play green and red behind his eyelids. “No. I never really got it.”
    “Got what?”
    “Why it was supposed to be a punishment, I guess.”
    “Durr, it was because you would have looked ridiculous. Why are you even telling me this?” He could hear a thread of ridicule laced in her voice and his hackles went up. He could feel an anxious geyser bubbling in his belly at her sudden turn of voice.
    “Don’t worry, forget I ever said anything.”
    “Louis…”
    “Just don’t worry!” he cried out, sitting up abruptly on the trampoline and trying to prevent the geyser from spilling. The two bodies rocked with the momentum and Eliza was suddenly aware of her friend’s anxiety.
    “I’m sorry,” she pacified.
    “Forget it.”
    “Are you… are you gay?”
    He fixed her with such a stare of indignation and betrayal that she recoiled physically. He could barely form the words. “What does it matter anyhow?”
    “It doesn’t, I mean I was just –”
    Their argument was broken by a thud against the fence behind them. Eliza screamed as the thud came again, the sound of something large hitting against the wooden panels. Louis jumped in front of her, his arms spread to shield her from whatever was behind the fence when a hand appeared on top of the fence and they heard a growl and a curse.
    The thump came again and a figure launched himself over the barrier. Eliza cried out again and Louis was gripped by indecision as fight or flight seared through his veins before he realised who it was.
    “Ellis?”
    He had grown big and strong but as the moon struck his face, his features were young and fearful. There was dark spattered across his face, up from his jaw line to his brow line. “Fucking goddamned shitdick!” he whispered with such intensity Louis knew it wanted to be a scream. His brother wiped his face, eyes wide as the moon above them before moaning to his brother, “Oh god, what if he gave me the AIDS? Oh, god, oh, god… that fucking shit…”
    “Ellis! What’s the matter?” Louis questioned, sliding down from the trampoline, leaving Eliza watching the strange scene unfold before her.
    The older boy’s eyes were glazed, unable to focus on his brother’s thin face. All he could say before he ran to vault the fence between his home and Eliza’s was, “That faggot fucking deserved it, Louis!”

Ellis wasn’t present at school the next day. Louis sat among the other boys, his shoulders slightly buckled under guilt and stress. There was an air of confusion in the assembly hall as the white-haired principal stood before the collective in silence, hands clasped behind his back, lined face pulled young in grief.
    When assembly was over, with no songs sung, not even a memorial hymn, the crowds dissipated out of the hall like the scent of the sun on wet tarmac and Louis was called over by the Dean.
    “Louis, you can go home if you need to.” The middle-aged man, with his round spectacles and red-tipped nose, made every effort to sound sympathetic.
      He tugged at the red-edged lapels of his blazer, barely able to keep the thought of his mother’s wrath, projected and transferred to her younger, innocent son from blazing into his mind. He had already endured her banshee wailing when the police had taken Ellis away just as the sun was touching the horizon of the harbour, suspected in the murder of a young man within the district.

Louis left school; he took up a class in the local polytechnic in cooking. He left home and in doing so, lost touch with Eliza. His mother would lie in her bedroom in a dazed torpor while he trained in Wellington, Melbourne, Provence. They would not talk again.
    Somehow, Eliza tracked down the elusive Louis, having just walked in the door after a long night working in a restaurant in Cuba Street, Wellington. When he answered the phone her tone was pensive. “It’s Eliza,” she told him simply.
    “Oh,” was all he could think to reply.
    “Your mother just passed away, Louis. Breast cancer. I’m so sorry.”
    He struggled within himself to care, to feel, to sense some change in his bodily response that would let him know he was still a human with the ability to care and forgive.
    At his silence, Eliza pressed, “Louis? Your brother is getting out of jail to attend the funeral. We need someone to cater the wake. Louis?”
    He considered his options – maybe performing that duty would alleviate some of the indifference to the turn of events. Not a turn of events, he reflected, just this… thing, that had occurred. A grandfather clock chimed eight o’clock in the empty apartment, startling him into saying, “I’ll come down on the next flight.”

They started arriving around 7:45, when dusk was just about to fall; the sky was a candy-shop of colours. There had been no complaints as the wake slowly transformed itself into a soiree of middle class, stern men and women for whom the pointed blink of dry eyes took the place of tears. Louis had served a feast to the wake-come-dinner party, burying the memory of his mother beneath canapés and nibbles and asparagus rolls. Now it was close to 9:30, the moon high and orange in the sky. The fading scents of cut grass and a far-off barbeque mingled with the fresh sweet perfumes of the raspberries in the ambrosia, strawberries dipped in chilli chocolate sauce, peaches and caramelised pears.
    “It’s such a wonderful spread, Louis,” murmured Eliza. “God, she would have been so proud.”
    Louis ran a hand through his hair, his face crumpled like the napkin in his fist. “I’d like to think so, Eliza, I really would.” The unspoken assumption was that he knew she wouldn’t have been; he had never pleased her, and how would the stark grip of death melt the frost of her spirit?
    Ellis burst through the French doors, the loose hinges on one sending it crashing noisily into the curtained wall beside. “Is it true?” he questioned, his tone aggressive and probing, his gaze like angry embers.
    “Ellis!” exclaimed Eliza.
    “Is it true?” growled Ellis again.
    Louis knew what he was referring to. He knew his mother’s death would bring about some revelations. “Ellis,” was all he could reply, suddenly, overwhelmingly exhausted.
    Ellis stalked up to his brother, stood on his toes to push his face eye-to-eye with his taller sibling. His face burned hot with hatred and shame for Louis, tiny glistening diamonds of spittle dotting his chin. There was a long pause, the air strung high and tight like a violin string with the tension of the trio in the room. Finally, the word oozed from Ellis’ damp lips: “Faggot.”
    Eliza stepped forward and Louis closed his eyes, too exhausted to deny, to explain, or simply agree to get him out of his face. An icy finger drew itself up his spine.
    “Take your faggot desserts and fuck off,” he hissed, turning abruptly to grab his jacket and slam the door behind him.
    “Louis…” Eliza whispered, moving as if to embrace him.
    Louis regarded her coldly. He brushed past her and went out the French doors, gaping open like a fresh wound. “Ladies and gentlemen,” she heard him call gaily, “your pudding awaits!”