Wild, Fearless Chests

by Mandy Beaumont

Genres: General Fiction; Literary Fiction; Short Stories; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

She is the explosion, the clamour, the thunder. She is the beat, the rage. She is every piece of violence imagined on the skin. She is the near miss. She is the woman you once were, the woman you could be, the woman you are. She is a triumph of our shared history, is every one of you, is your wild and screaming voice on street corners, is the madwoman you fear you may become. She loves you.

As women's voices begin to rise together, Mandy Beaumont's brutal and uncompromising stories are a compelling reminder of the ways in which women have fallen, been dismissed, hurt, hated and loved from afar.
These are the stories we have always known, have always heard about and are perhaps just short moments away from. They are yours, ours, mine. They are booming anger. They are wild love. They are the distorted and the decided, the imagined and the wanted. They are the shaking ground beneath our feet. A powerful call to arms. They compel us to stand tall. To break free. To defy the gaze. To claim our space.

Wild, Fearless Chests is the sound of a certain revolution.

'"Drowning in Thick Air" is shocking ... It is not like anything I have read in recent years and takes me to a place I have never been in my life or imagination or in fiction.' Frank Moorhouse

Release date: January 28, 2020

Publisher: Hachette Australia

Print pages: 208

Sample

SHE STANDS IN the doorway, her body already pear-shaped and her breasts starting to fall with weight. She stands alone, watches as bodies move in front of a large screen playing pop songs. In the corner she sees a group of beautiful girls flick their hair to the ceiling.

Outside in the walkway, underneath the full moon of summer, he stands and rolls a cigarette, drinks cheap vodka from a plastic bottle that once held lemonade. She hears his laughter holding in a circle of admirers, hears the scratch of his lighter strike twice.

Last week she had found herself on his patio, lying on the hard wooden floor, naming faint clouds into shapes and images. She had told him that she kept seeing the nose of a dog. He told her that he always saw his mother’s face, that the faint tips of the clouds that hurried across the sky reminded him of the smoke she would exhale, her throat making small hissing sounds each time, worn and tired. In the late afternoon sun, as he touched her hand, he told her to stay.

She knew he didn’t find her beautiful, no one ever had, and she felt her cheeks burn with embarrassment as his housemates whispered about the shape of her face, about the small hairs that escaped the skin on her chin, about the weight on her rump. As they walked inside towards his bedroom, she felt his hand reach up and high five one of them. He closed the door in his room behind them and she heard the low echo of his voice tell her to lie down. His hands reached for her stained underwear. She couldn’t see her reflection in his bedside mirror.

Standing in the doorway tonight, she feels him watching her, hears his friend call her a whore, ugly and unwanted, his laughter loud and spilling onto the walls around them. She wonders to herself if she has become invisible, feels herself unable to breathe and grasps at her chest for fear of drowning in thick air.

Her chest bends slightly towards the ground and her hands fall to her sides. Beside her, a boy she has never seen before tells her he has wine hidden in the bushes in the park across the road, asks her if she wants to go with him, to drink, to watch the bats in the fruit trees, tells her she looks like she needs it. He reaches his hand towards the side of her face and touches the hibiscus flower she has placed behind her ear. She asks him if he knows what it feels like to be unseen by others. He takes her hand.

She sits with him in the park and passes the bottle of wine back to him. In the dark, on the edge of another’s groggy high, she is beautiful she thinks. When he gets up and pulls another bottle from a hole in a tree, she laughs at him. When he comes towards her and starts to grab at her breasts, roll the full bottle up against her groin, she pulls away. As he starts to tease her skin with the end of his lit cigarette, she tells him to stop. As he places his lips hard up against hers, as the sound of the disco starts to rise, as he hitches up her skirt, he tells her to lie still. He rips open her shirt, makes small grunting noises into her hair and makes her despair disappear into the night. She is quietened by his violence. She is, she thinks, in this moment, the furthest thing from noticed beauty. She feels his heat and the weight of his left knee on her pelvis as he pulls his pants up and tells her not to talk. She gets up, her back aching, and fumbles with her clothes, grabs at his hand as they walk across the street to the low lights of the disco. She rests her hip up against his as they walk, asks him if they should dance once they get inside.

They reach the back door of the disco and she sees his friend standing with one foot folded against the brick wall, smiling at them both. The boy who has just made small bruises start to rise on her chest tells his friend that she is all his, that he’s glad he went first, tells him to have fun. He walks back into the disco and she speaks, her voice low and quietly shameful in her sudden longing. She tells the boy with his hand now around her waist that she just wants to go home.

Ignoring her, he walks her to the baseball field, bright lights shining down on each corner net as he softly pushes her to the ground. She brings her knees up against her chest as protection. He sits beside her and starts to talk about his day, about his favourite band playing earlier on the big screen inside. He tells her that he doesn’t even know her name but has seen her around. She starts to tell him her name, but he speaks over her, tells her that he knows what kind of girl she is, that plain girls always do the dirtiest things, that girls like her never complain.

Under the bright light he pulls at her, rips open her thighs, undoes his jeans. As she starts to scream at the night sky, he clenches his left hand over her mouth, silences her, laughs down at her. The sound of her body tearing brings warm tears to her eyes. Under the bright light he slams into her, pushes her elbows into the gravel, the smell of blood reaching her nose. Out on the street, a group of men she has seen before walk past, cheer him on like he’s a sporting hero. Under the bright light as he holds down her open mouth to the dirt, she is but veiled in his wanting. She begins to choke, to fit, to gasp. The watching crowd quietens. The watching crowd moves on.

Under the bright light she is left alone and half naked. She lies still in the quiet and thinks about all the women like her. She thinks about the voids that they sit in, the places they are pushed into. She thinks of the unwashed, the unkempt, the large and the sullen, of the women ignored and raped in the dark. She thinks of all those before her, their collective anger and sadness pounding with their feet on the ground where she now lies. She thinks of being held in place for the comfort of others.

She hears a group singing near the corner of the field and she rises and pulls up her pants, walks slowly towards the street and hails a taxi. She gets in and sits on the cold back seat, quietly buckles herself in. The taxi driver ignores the blood on her arms, turns the radio up.

She stands in her underwear before her mother two days later, the bruises on her chest, the large handprints on her inner thighs howling against her skin. She presses on each bruise and puts her hands to her head to break open the thin scar forming over each elbow. She wants her mother to know that she has been loved. But her mother changes the channels on the TV with the remote, asks her to make a cup of tea, doesn’t look up when she sighs. The volume of the TV rises, its noise drowning out with the soft closing of the door behind her.

Weeks later, when the bruises have become light brown stains on her skin and the memory of being wanted has begun to wane, she starts to feel sick in the mornings, to cramp in class, starts to wonder if the whisperings from the older girls at school about how to tell if you’re pregnant means that she might be. She begins to feel the heaviness of her breasts, the summer heat catching under them as sour sweat. She begins to feel on the very edge of being noticed.

She walks the aisles of the chemist just before it closes with her head down low and grabs at the test with the brightest label. She stands at the counter and hands money to the man who is serving her, watches him look through her, beyond her, sees him smile at the blonde woman behind her whose breasts are heaving with the rhythm of her breath. He doesn’t notice as her coins fall to the floor, doesn’t place the test in a paper bag for her private comfort.

At home that night, while her mother eats a microwave meal and watches game shows hosted by small neat men, she takes a small mixing bowl from the top cupboard in the kitchen, walks with it to her room and places it on her bed. As her mother yells out answers to a quiz, she squats above the bowl with her underwear pulled to one side and pisses on the small plastic stick. As her mother coughs with food in her mouth, she sits back on her bed and places the wet stick in her hand. As her mother changes the channel to the nightly news, she stares at the two lines now visible, feels her chest lurching, her throat tighten, gasps out at the soft evening breeze through her window.

The next morning, her mother sits at the kitchen table eating toast and she places the stick in front of her. Her mother stares at it, slowly takes another bite of her toast, doesn’t notice as the kettle starts to hiss near the kitchen sink, doesn’t notice when the butter on her toast starts to run down her palms. She starts to tell her about the night it happened, but her mother doesn’t hear. She talks about the redness on her elbows and watches her mother stare at her own reflection, touch the thick grey hair that falls to her shoulders. She is lost in memory and regret, she thinks, lost in the remembering of her youth cut short by her own wanting.

Her mother tells her that she is too young to have a child, that others will notice her on the street. Tears start to roll down her chin, a pleading to her mother to be seen, to show the world that she was once wanted. Her mother gets up and leaves the table, her shallow breaths bounce off the walls as she walks out the front door.

On the Monday before her sixteenth birthday, the woman behind the counter grunts at her as she introduces herself and her appointment time. Her mother stands waiting beside her, her fingernails tapping on her purse, and motions for her to go and wait by the window. When the woman looks up from her desk, her mother starts talking in low tones, nodding and blowing her nose on a pale pink tissue. She sits and watches them together, hears the large pause between each turn of the clock hands above her. Moments later, a young nurse stands at the door and calls her name, ignores her when she says hello.

In a small pale room the nurse hands her a gown with an open back and tells her to take her clothes off, to lie down until the doctor is ready to see her. She nods and takes her shoes off, folds her socks neatly into squares beside them. In the distance, the faint sounds of suctioned air and gutted moans move slowly over the partition walls. She looks down at the speckled sun sitting on the tips of her toes, looks up as the doctor walks in and sits at her feet. Without greeting or warning, the doctor spreads her legs open and inserts his cold fingers into her, taps his feet as if impatient. He starts to talk to the nurse, and she feels a sudden warmth in her upper chest, feels the harsh opening of her with thick metal, the hardness of a tube pressing in on her, feels the pressure of suction between her legs.

Over the noise of removal and forgetting, the doctor starts to talk to the nurse about his holiday house for the summer. She hears her giggle like a school girl, hears the phone ring, hears cars out the windows, hears a young child in the waiting room crying, hears her mother sniffing loudly and dragging in all the sad air around her. She is the only thing that doesn’t make noise.

As the machine stops, the doctor rises from her and pats her knee with a heavy hand, walks towards the door and asks the nurse when his next appointment is due. Her legs still wide open and now numb, they both ignore her and start to busy themselves with paperwork, then walk out the door together.

Ten minutes later, as she begins to fight off tears because others will never know that for one brief moment she felt like she was placed and discoverable, the nurse walks back in and tells her to close her legs, to dress and meet her mother in the waiting room. She tells her that the bleeding will stop in a few days. Her breath stills.

Her mother takes her home in silence, and the large sanitary pad sitting between her legs captures small blood clots that feel like her body knows its loss already. They do not speak to one another. Her mother goes to the kitchen and turns the radio on to drown out the day. With her hands on her stomach she slowly walks up the stairs to her bedroom.

She lies down on her bed, her head pounding, her fingertips tingling like they contain fireworks ready to explode, and she feels lighter than she ever has. She looks down at her body, sees a thin pool of blood staining the sheets below her, slowly expanding around the sides of her hips. As she tries to get up she hears her mother’s car start, hears it reverse out the driveway and drive up the street. She is alone. She bends to the floor and slowly crawls to the bathroom. The heat of the shower has always brought her relief.

In the bathroom she pulls herself up against the toilet and stands with uneven feet, steps into the shower and turns it on. Steam fills the room. In the mirror above the basin, she cannot see her own reflection and wonders if she even exists, wonders if her missed beauty will become her tragedy.

Below her, her blood starts to flood and move in circles beneath her feet, starts to clog the. . .