Larissa
by Misha Cahill
Larissa — you wanna kiss her. I always thought of her as a black
bitch, like the card game. Not that she was truly black. She just
had long black hair.
Every evening, at about ten, she used to come around, after the she’d
shut the front doors of the hotel. She still had the smell of hotel
soap on her hands, as if the soap had washed right down to the bones
in her white fingers. She came round to my house, with the dirty
mattress and the dirty linty carpet, and the dirty boys lounging on
the porch in the smell of beer, with moths overhead. We went into
the orange light of my bedroom. Larissa never looked me in the eye.
Larissa, you wanna kiss her.
It wasn’t normal love — it was as if I knew her since I was born,
like she was my sister. I didn’t think I had to explain anything to
her, and I ignored her voice, like a little moth fluttering in the
porch light. I thought she was mine; I thought you could buy her and
have her. I thought she was mine because she said she was.
We were a team and I was the boss.
I’m thinking all this sitting on the hot bus with Amanda. We’re
pressed up thigh to thigh, against the seat rails. I’m pretending to
revise for the class I have with Amanda, but dreading university, and
thinking about whether Amanda could be a girlfriend. And you know,
looking out the window, trying to get a gulp of fresh air from the
pop-out pane at the top of the window.
And there she is, Larissa, waiting at the next stop, looking
ridiculous. She’s in black chunky heels with a bad perm, her hair
slick with product, her stomach sticking out, her little breasts
pointed. The way she looks, everyone will hate her. But I don’t hate
her; I don’t hate her at all. Larissa. And the worst thing is, she
thinks she’s beautiful. When she gets on the bus she checks out the
guys’ faces, making sure they’re looking. Until she sees my face,
then she’s most pleased of all. Cause she knows I’m a fool, and the
worst fool. I despise her and that’s a fact.
As soon as she sits down she’s whispering loudly to Amanda about the
guys that supposedly want her. This is while we pass the Caltex with
the hot pies in the heated drawer, the dirty big petrol stains on the
concrete and the upstairs flat where Larissa used to live. I saw her
sitting on Roland’s knee there, but she said it was nothing. ‘He’s
nothing to me’. They had a seventies television and a lava lamp.
While she talks to Amanda, I think of when she clung to my knee,
wrapping her thighs around my foot, her tears and snot running into
her mouth. She begged me to stay in. But I went, and came back to
her sitting on the grass in the garden, in the rain in her white
nightie. I guess she planned it that way, very Mills and Boon. It
was nice that she was there. It was nice to come home to something
warm. Her hysterics made me feel so powerful, as if I could walk to
Whangarei.
After that, three days without a phone call turned into four. I went
to her flatmate. I felt like I hadn’t eaten for a week. He said she
wasn’t there, standing at the door in his stupid Hawaiian shirt. But
I could see her car, with the fur coat in the back. It was so warm in
there. The little black gearstick always hot.
And now she’s sitting in front of me on the bus, like she never knew
me at all. I’ve got that feeling again, like there’s nothing there,
no food in me. I could kiss her right now, I could press against her
small lips, but she’d say ‘Get away’ in her stupid, lower class, small
voice. She should have treated me better. She pretended to be in
love. It was something she copied off TV. But what’s the difference,
if it’s love. What’s the difference, if there’s someone to show up
with you, to walk in the door with you, to take your wrist when you
get home. It’s not possible that once, she should have been on her
knees, and now she won’t kneel any more.
And then
She stands up and stretches, ready to get off, looking around for the
boys’ reaction. But I’m gonna be the one, I’m gonna be the one who
notices the gap under her shirt, her stomach. I grab her wrist, hold
it round the whole way, so my thumb and finger touches.
She looks like she’s about to scream, and her stupid perm shakes. But
I tell her seriously,
‘Rissie, don’t go. Don’t go, Rissie.’