Dad said Paradise was named after some old tourist who wandered in on one of the only sunny days of the year and couldn’t believe the sight. Blue skies changed something, saturated the landscape like you’d see on a postcard. Any other time it was shadows: muted hills under grey skies, one lone mountain watching over empty paddocks, rowed plantations. I liked the shadows, how mood shifted with the light. The names on a map mostly weren’t real towns, just outlines traced through farmland, bush. Sheffield was the only place big enough to have shops, a proper school.

The name Paradise stuck well enough but my dad always said it was no kind of paradise. He said a lot of things but I reckon he was right about that. It never felt much like paradise growing up. Two years after he died, my mum married one of the Jehovah’s Witness elders: a wrinkled, skinny man with shoes that always looked too big. He kept porn magazines in the back shed. I stole them, read through each one while I hid under a quilt my grandma sewed.

I leafed through them but when I touched myself I thought of just bare skin, known hands and the minds that moved them. Desire seemed like a kind of reaching: not for flesh, or not just for flesh, but for a closeness that couldn’t exist outside of that one moment. I thought about boys and girls. I thought about my boyfriend, Jack, and I thought about a girl at school.

Netta was in the year above but we shared some classes. Dark brown hair fell to her chin and her knees were freckled. Her dad was Vietnamese. In primary school he came in for a day, taught us all to say the kind of phrases adults use for small talk. I wasn’t too interested until the teacher asked what he thought the most beautiful words were, the things that didn’t really have an equivalent. Chia buôn, he said: to share sadness. Netta looked sad a lot. At school she’d never had a boyfriend but once I heard a man outside the Sheffield Hotel say he got her drunk on Passion Pop and fucked her in the back of his ute. I stuck a pocketknife in his tyre.

Jack believed half of what the elders said about sex, so we didn’t do it right away. I’d sit with my mum in meetings but it didn’t feel right when they talked about bodies like what they were built for was unclean. Mum said Gerald was the only one who did have things right and we should all listen. When I heard them fucking at night, I thought of the magazines he kept in my father’s shed — women bent over, fake tits dangling — and I thought of the sagging grey skin on his ankles when he stood in front of the congregation and talked about desire like that was the worst of us.

*

My grandma died the same year as my dad. I never thought it was that great a loss but afterwards our family came together in a way they didn’t for Dad. My mum’s brothers crawled around under her house for a month, fixing the foundations. That’s what they said, anyway. Years later I was sleeping at my cousin’s house and we heard their parents talking outside. Smoke curled around stray light from the backdoor and standing in it they let slip about the buried money, said Grandma kept it under her house, didn’t wanna pay tax on it, didn’t trust banks.

My uncles didn’t find any money. No one did. Aunt Narelle left for the mainland a while later and no one talked about her after that. We were used to people leaving, to the silence that remained. My mum was the only one who heard from her, though I knew that was something to keep to myself. I got birthday cards with $50 notes.

*

We prayed every day. That part I didn’t mind. I liked the ritual, the idea you could make fragments of your own small life sacred, pick out what mattered. It was the meetings I didn’t like. Maybe if Gerald was a person you wanted to listen to, what he talked about would have gone down better. Honesty was some of it, charity. Afterwards Mum stood around with family and I watched her lie, saw his role in it. She held a leather handbag Narelle had sent her. Inside was a designer name I’d only ever seen in magazines.

Jack didn’t sit with me in the meetings. He sat with his mum. When we were kids his dad hit his little brother with a car, backed over him leaving the house. People in town said he was a bottle of whiskey deep, yelling into the night. Arty had followed him out. I guess their dad thought he only knocked a bin or something because he didn’t stop after. Jack found him, a small body with no more growth in it. He didn’t come to school for a month. Years later he told me he could still see what everything looked like: weathered timber lit up gold on the farmhouse, blood like liquid rust at his feet.

Netta went by a lot, walked there all on her own. At school she wouldn’t leave Jack’s side. It didn’t last, though. I don’t know why. Back then I watched him, wanted him to be okay, but I didn’t know him. We got to be friends the second year of high school. I saw a dog lying on the side of the road, asked the bus driver to let me off. When I turned around, Jack had followed me. The dog was big and it had a broken leg. We stood there a while trying to get it calm. I gave it half a sandwich out of my backpack and Jack carried it all the way back to town.

I watched Jack in the meetings sometimes. I tried to guess what he was thinking when Gerald talked about loss and suffering like there was some point to it, like we should count the things we were grieving not as tragedy but planned with purpose. I pictured my father in a grave and Gerald sitting in his chair. I pictured Arty tall as his brother.

*

Jack’s mother was sick for one of the meetings and he sat alone, drove me home after. He stopped on the main road, I told him to, but I wouldn’t get out. My house was vague light in the distance, swaying branches changing what came through. I asked if he wanted to see my breasts.

“You know I do, Bobbie, know that’s not it.”

“Is she really sick?”

Jack didn’t answer right away. He said, “Not well. Not a cold though, nothing you could catch.”

“Seems like it’s catching sometimes.” I cracked the window, wound it up again. “Seems like being around someone can start the same inside yourself.”

“Wish it worked the other way. That anyone could help her.”

“Maybe you do. Maybe she’d be worse otherwise.”

“That’s bloody frightening.” Jack dropped his hands from the steering wheel. On the side of the road overgrown pasture changed shape, it folded in the wind.

“You do a good job. You shouldn’t have to but you do. Dad said it even. Used to watch you looking after your sister.” Steam rose off the bitumen. I watched it a minute and then I turned to Jack, said, “What if we just took our clothes off?”

He laughed, just. One side of his mouth curled up. “What if we did?”

Before I got scared, I pulled my shirt over my head, jumper too. Jack got stuck on his jeans. The buckle caught. There was something funny about the way our bodies bent inside the car, the way they had to. I sat naked, looking straight out the window, smiling. Jack reached one hand closer and I felt my nipples go hard. Inside my head every beautiful thing flashed and pulsed. The moon came closer. I could feel it in the leather underneath my skin, on the cracked old dashboard.

*

I don’t know who saw us. We weren’t careful, it could have been anyone. All we did was sit there. It got cold enough that we put our clothes back on but I could feel it in my body for hours after: that something exciting was coming. Gerald pulled Jack and me out of the next meeting. I don’t remember what he said, Mum either. I just remember how much I hated them for what they were trying to take away.

Later Mum said I was a disgrace and wouldn’t look at me for a week. Gerald looked too closely. I wasn’t allowed phone calls, time out after school, but one night the phone rang and Gerald knocked on my door, said Ida was calling. Ida was someone my mother always told me to invite over. She was the only one our age who had been baptised. All the elders said her obedience gave them hope. I guess that’s why Gerald said I could talk to her, but she wasn’t anyone I wanted to talk to. When we were ten I saw her crush an injured bird with a brick in the school playground, replayed it over in my head every night for a year. I could never tell if it was cruelty or kindness.

I picked up the phone, stood watching my reflection in the windows at the back of the house. Carpet the colour of pea soup flattened under my feet. It was Ruby who said hello, Jack’s sister. She told me to sneak out if I could, that he’d wait for me around the first bend. I went back to my room and opened a book but I didn’t read it. After I heard the bed creak down the hall, I put my shoes on. When I got to the road I ran, hands in my jacket pockets. Jack’s car was pulled off far as he could get it, dead leaves and mud under the wheels. No lights. I stood there a second and then I pressed my lips against the glass and blew. We leaned our backs against the car.

“Didn’t think I’d get in trouble,” he said. “Mum’s never said much about anything. Got it wrong though. Said I made her sad, that I was taking steps behind my old man.”

“That’s not true.”

“Thought she’d know that much.”

Across the road, gum leaves whispered through cold blue light. “Maybe it’s easier for her to think that,” I said. “Think there was something bad enough in him it’d get passed on. Means she couldn’t have changed anything.”

“You think it’d be easier if you could see that kinda thing when you’re stuck in it?”

I shook my head. “Think there’s a reason you can’t. I don’t care what Mum thinks, Gerald either —  just hate that there isn’t any place to go.”

It was quiet a minute. “We could leave. Go now,” Jack said.

Around us nature shifted. Stars peered out from behind moving clouds. I turned sideways, tucked one hand under his coat and looped one behind his back. I could feel his chin against my hair. Our breath came out in white clouds like morning mist.

*

Jack wasn’t at school Monday. I walked through Sheffield after the last bell so I could say I missed the bus. Murals decorated the sides of buildings: landscapes, most of them, people painted without any reasons for failure. The town was going bust after dam workers moved out and someone thought up murals as a way not to be forgotten. I stood under one a while, looked at brushstrokes so close there was no shape to anything.

Down the road Netta was sitting on a brick wall with two boys in front of her. I couldn’t hear what they were saying but she had her head bowed and when she looked up, she was crying. I swung my backpack out, not hard, not hard enough to hurt. I said, “Haven’t you learnt yet when a girl doesn’t wanna know you?”

“Reckon it’s the other way around.”

“You’re the one standing there.”

“Bite ya tongue, Bobbie. We’ve all heard what you’ve been up to. Thought being a Witness meant ya wouldn’t be such a fucken slut.”

He said it and he left. They both did. I’d take someone’s meanness better if they had the guts to stick around. No one does, though.

Netta rubbed a thumb under her eyes, one and then the other. She was smiling. “I heard it too. Wouldn’t have thought Jack had it in him.”

“You used to be friends.”

“Grew up together. Everyone stopped talking to us after Mum rooted the butcher. Dad forgave her but no one else did.”

“Doesn’t seem like Jack.”

“It isn’t. But that young everyone’s connected, can’t do anything without someone knowing. He had no choice.”

“Is that what made you so sad?”

Netta laughed, shook her head. “Used to have a crush on him, though. Thought we’d get married one day. Sounds stupid saying it now, especially to you.”

A bee landed on Netta’s shoulder. She saw it but she didn’t brush it off. I looked from it to her face. The inside rim of her eyes was red as her lips.

“It doesn’t,” I said.

*

It was an hour’s walk home, longer, but I didn’t mind. Mud pooled on the side of the road. Mount Roland sent lengthening shadows over old tree stumps, low paddocks. Snow dotted the top, small patches of it. Black cows pressed their noses over a paddock fence. I clicked my tongue, held out a hand. I’d just started walking again when a car sped past and someone leaned out the window, yelling. I stopped and watched, waited to make sure they kept going.

Men have a special way of making you feel like only certain parts of you matter, that the rest are either hidden or something to hide. I’d figured that out young enough. Religion had started to feel the same, the meetings that told us parts of ourselves were only there to be conquered. Looking down at my school uniform, I thought of my own body pale in the moonlight and then I thought of all the ways sex was turned into something awful, how it was only body parts isolated from human warmth that could hold any kind of ill-intent, anything to be wary of.

Somewhere between Sheffield and Paradise I had an idea. The first rush of it stuck but I didn’t think I’d ever go through with it. Late the same night I lay in bed looking at shadows on the ceiling and I wondered if maybe the only thing stopping me was what I’d be willing to try. Maybe that’s all that stopped a lot of people. I thought about Grandma and the money under her house and I wondered what she had wanted it for, whether she’d have been a kinder person if she’d had the guts to do something with it, not just bury old notes for other people to fight over.

*

Mum said she was worried, that I wasn’t allowed alone with Jack or any other boy until we were both past the bloom of youth. That sounded like an ugly thing when she said it. Spit came out of her mouth. I thought of myself as a flower, petals plucked. Rotting. She said she was worried. She wasn’t worried enough to stay home, though. There was a convention in Hobart and Gerald had used money Aunt Narelle sent to book a hotel no one else in our town could afford. They asked our closest neighbour to stay.

Mrs Gilly was in her seventies. Each morning, she highlighted sections of the TV guide to plan her day. I overheard her say she was too old to babysit, that she’d eat dinner at her own table but sleep over because that’s when I needed watching. Mum left while I was at school. I saw a note on the counter when I got home but it wasn’t for me. Mrs Gilly read it over, took the money. The first night I listened to her get up and shuffle down the creaking hallway to piss. Flowing liquid hit the toilet bowl and she whispered to Jehovah. I hummed entire songs to cover it.

After school the next day, I sat in the sunroom at the back of the house. Slatted glass looked out over the yard, further into paddocks. In the corner sat a record player no one but my dad had ever used. Most of the records were gone but I’d kept a few, shoved them under my bed when Gerald boxed the rest up. I lay on the carpet listening to The Doors, the slow hiss of a blunted needle. Dust caught in changing light through the window. Gold marks crossed my thighs and then disappeared as night fell. Realms of bliss. Realms of light. By the time Mrs Gilly turned a key in the lock, I was in bed reading.

Thursday, I woke early and changed all the sheets in the house. My mother’s bed smelled like Gerald and I poured in double the laundry liquid. Outside, frost blurred the surface of things as far as I could see, took the colour and drained all intensity. I was nervous walking to the bus stop. Kids threw things across the aisle, apples or backpacks, everyday missiles. The sky over town was grey and still.

*

I didn’t lie about it, wouldn’t. I asked Netta in the bathrooms at the back of school, Jack that afternoon at my house. He had walked the whole way, left his car at home so neighbours wouldn’t know he was there. I told him he shouldn’t have bothered.

“We’ll get kicked out, Bobbie. Shunned.”

“I know.” Wallpaper lined the hallway. I reached out, tugged at a section coming unstuck. “But there isn’t anything there we should want. Can’t see real faith’d count on those meetings for anything.”

In the kitchen, Netta was sitting at the table with a bottle of Jameson in front of her. She’d stolen it from her father. Jack stopped when he saw her, looked back at me.

“I thought maybe we could do it together,” I said. “What we did in your car. More, though.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Exactly what they thought we did. Got in trouble but didn’t get to touch each other, even. What if we did, made sure they knew it, too?”

Jack shook his head. He sat at the table across from Netta, put one palm against old wood. “You in on this?”

“Bobbie has a point. You feel safe with us, right? You’ve loved both of us.”

“Course I have, do still.”

“How can there be anything wrong with it then? You’ve seen hurt. We’re not hurting anyone.”

*

Once it was dark I pulled the records out again, stood in front of the player watching it spin. Enough light came from the kitchen that I left the lamp off and out the window a crescent moon gained height. Slow guitar folded into a rough voice. I wasn’t scared this time.

My mother still slept in the bed she had shared with my dad. He’d made it, sawed the wood by hand in the shed. I turned on an oil heater in the corner of the room, took my clothes off first. I left them on the floor, sat on the bed, hands either side of my thighs. Netta went next. Jack stood in the doorway, trying not to look. He turned around, pulled his shirt over his head. Mrs Gilly was watching The Footy Show. I knew it, knew when it ended.

We took small sips of whiskey, passed it on. On the wall was a framed picture, a painting. At first it looked like a cartoon, bright colours neatly placed, the words He Will Call written along the bottom. For all its colour, there was something cold about it. I caught us all staring. None of us knew what to do. Netta said we should each tell our worst joke. Jack repeated one I’d heard a dozen times, laughed before he’d finished. I said maybe we should close our eyes, pretend it was a game of Marco Polo, that we were reaching in the dark. Down the hall the music backed away and I could hear a lone voice crackle through the speakers.

It didn’t start as anything much. I traced a path over Netta’s freckles, watched her skin come up in goosebumps. My fingers were cold. Jack sat behind me like he might get in trouble. I held his hand, reached it close to Netta’s breasts. There was weight to them there wasn’t to mine. Jack looked up then, couldn’t help it. He turned and kissed me, held his other hand pressed against my collarbone. I closed my eyes.

Touch feels different depending on who it comes from, what you have about them in your head at the time. I knew who was touching me without looking. Netta kissed my belly, laced her fingers around one wrist. Strange for someone to be so gentle. The blankets lay at the end of the bed and we left them folded. I think there was good in being so bare. Netta sighed and I could feel Jack’s heartbeat, the sinking and rising bones that enclosed it. Outside, small leaves scratched against the glass. Hazy light passed over empty paddocks.

I thought maybe love was a physical thing, that it could fill a room.

*

Only the darkest part of night had backed away when I woke up. Netta was asleep on one side of me and Jack on the other. The bottle of Jameson on the floor was mostly full. I sat up, crawled towards the end of the bed so I didn’t wake anyone. Jack opened his mouth, let out noise that didn’t form into words. His breathing was slow still. I stood watching him a minute, held one finger to the window and wrote my name in condensation.

Down the hall I dressed in my own room, pulled boots on by the front door. I walked through the paddock until I came to barbed wire, pushed a hand far enough against it that I could step over. Mrs Gilly was asleep in front of her TV, that or she was dead. I looked through the window at her swollen face long enough to see she was breathing and then I turned and looked at the mountain.

The base of it started a few kilometres away. I cut the distance where I could, left the road for open farmland. There was a sign at the start of the Face Track warning about wild dogs. Climbing, my shoes slipped on boulders, wet detritus under a tightly closed canopy. I wiped blood off one knee.

On the top of Mount Roland I walked through a creek, cupped my hands in the water to drink. I was hungry but didn’t care much. I kept going until I thought I was at the right place. The last time I had been there, I’d made it on Dad’s shoulders. Just the two of us. Mum said she hated the mountain, that it was bad enough she had to look at it every bloody day. Dad said a lot but he loved it, I knew that much. Below me was Promised Land, Nowhere Else, Paradise. Mosaic paddocks spread out into climbing forests, land taken and renamed in a way that didn’t show what was built into the soil.

I pushed the dead out of my mind, what they put the living through. I pushed out my dad, and all we’d lost. I pushed out Grandma and her buried money, Arty all alone. I pushed out the living too: Narelle and my mum, Gerald. I stopped wondering what would happen if we all wound up on an everlasting Earth, what parting meant when you’d live forever. I didn’t think about Jack and Netta waking for school in an empty house.

I closed my eyes and listened to snow melt trickle through lichen-stained boulders. Scrub shivered in the fog beside me. I left my clothes in a pile and crouched low in the creek, lay back to get as much of my body under the water as I could.