TIGER A fable by Rachel Briant
He stood there, in the centre of the pulsating crowd. His eyes were on me, the flames reflected in his iris. ‘Kiss me,’ I said, breathless as I walked nearer. ‘I’m not so good with public affection,’ he said, voice low. Something shy or malicious crossed his face. ‘Just one, little kiss ...’ I grinned like a fool, my heart was buzzing as the trip took over. That’s when he pulled into me. I don’t remember that first kiss so great, it was more like a feeling of melting plastic, dripping and warping and mutating next to the licking flames as the party went on around us, becoming a faraway mush of activity. His name was Dan and he smelt like pear cider. I never knew his surname, never asked - nothing like that had seemed relevant/necessary that weekend. I wish I had, because after that things got to be a bit of a blur and my memory something I could no longer rely on. It would have undoubtedly been useful for the police. ‘Becka?’ her voice interrupts, and I re-emerge from thoughts. I look up and notice the face beneath the frown. Ruby hasn’t smiled much lately, neither in fact has anyone much. Sobriety isn’t something I remembered being so dull, but they did tell me things might not be so easy at the start. ‘Yeah, yeah…’ ‘You’re doing it again.’ ‘What?’ ‘Biting your nails. Are you sure you’re OK? Do you want another pill?’
I look down at my hand. Indeed, the girl is right. I hadnt even noticed, but I’d managed to bite the nail on my forefinger to a little half-moon. Man, and now that I have, I’m feeling it sting. Dan had been hot. Not just your standard boy in the street hot, but the ‘wow I’m sure that dude would never talk to me’ kind of hot. Not that I’m not a pretty face, but hey, let’s just say no one has ever approached me with a modeling contract. The kind of guy that affects girls like a heat wave does an ice cube. You can’t think straight, and for someone who’s identity surrounded her ability to ‘A’ her way through high school, that’s gotta be one hell of a heat wave. Some people tell me maybe he wasn’t so hot, maybe it was just me that found him hot. But these people didn’t see him, only a pixilated pic in the paper. They never saw Dan and they never had his eyes on them they way they were on me. Even before the white powder in the little plastic rectangular bag, something had felt wrong. But I went with it- I know now it was vanity and an inclination similar to greed. Maybe I could turn the tables and get him hooked on me instead? He probably read me like those big-text books my grandmother has had to get out from the library since her eyes went bad. At least that’s what my dad says. ‘Folk like that feed off peoples lust for themselves,’ he told me. Dan went to jail on the 17th April 2008. He was arrested in his
apartment where they also found over 50 kilograms of toxically laced Estacy and an underage girl without a visa or much idea of who she was. That girl was me. I’m Becka and I am 17 years old. I have 1 older brother, Ben, who is studying as a civil engineer in Wellington, New Zealand and my parents are Jack and Mary who divorced when I was 5 and I was born in Australia, Sydney on the 7th June 1993. I’ve repeated this line of facts daily for 3 months. I keep it written on a crumbled piece of paper in my back pocket for those hollow moments. Its funny how it works. I forget yesterdays but I can remember that weekend as clear and as sharp as if it were happening over. Some psycho-analysts believe trauma victims unconsciously repeat certain painful memories so that they can come to grips with them. Perhaps I’m convinced there is something I’m missing, some piece of the puzzle that if I could just remember it would mean things didn’t have to turn out like they did. Or maybe I just miss him. ‘I like your necklace,’ I’d told him that Sunday. I’d been playing with it all weekend, every time we’d caress it would be dangling somewhere near to me. I’d toy a finger or two around the string, fiddling with the little skull bead straight out of some Festival of the Dead. It was both hostile and intriguing. Bit like him really, I thought, sweet but with something ominous stirring behind his pupils. ‘You can have it.’ He said, pulling it over blonde sweeping bangs
before I could protest. I remember how his chest had looked bare without the little skull leering from it. They say ecstasy attacks the nervous system. Panic attacks HAVE become a normality for me. I guess I owe it all to Ruby now. If it wasn’t for her, who knows, maybe no one would ever have gotten to hear my twisted little love story. Maybe that wouldn’t have been so bad, but what’s left of my rational mind tells me that thought is destructive and should be beaten into a little corner so it can diminish to nothing in silence. Week on week, I gain a bit more of the old me back. I think in pictures a lot. It seems to help, if only to take the edge of things a little. Like how Ruby resembled a rag doll that day she met me at the little Parisian style café in New York. Talking through her tongue like it was made of felt. She’ll never see how I saw her frown that day; it calmed me to imagine a snake resided there in the creases. Something she said woke me up though - I’d been laughing so hard she’d passed straight through shock into anger. ‘Get a grip Becka,’ she’d said, and her voice had floated at me like a dart through the reptilian puppet show. Even now that I make more sense I can’t laugh without strangers passing glances. I guess I can’t blame them; a story like this shakes people up, makes them think deep and stone-cold-seriously.
I guess I’ve become somewhat of an urban legend, one of those stories parents tell their daughters as a warning against the world, proof of an existing potential of evil, a thirsty threat ready to snatch away their innocent princess. Don’t tell mum, but I wouldn’t take a day back. I didn’t know living until I tasted the cave of his mouth. Maybe it was just the adrenaline, the drugs, my hormones sparking delusion. But I do know they say you’re never more alive than when you feel close to death. When you let everything and everyone you’ve ever known disappear to a tiny single wasp lonely in the dark. No past, no future, no identity. Every second an eternity. Free. Dan, I know I should hate you. But instead I’m grateful. Thanks to you, I’ve made my own legacy. Even if the glamour of it is all in my head and something I’ll regret as long as I live.