An excerpt from Australian writer and sex worker Tilly Lawless’ new novel, ‘Thora’

“She knew she had a crush on her, she had accepted that. She knew she wanted nothing but to be alone with her. But she had no idea if Vee was interested.”

“Vee, Vee, Vee. It’s all she ever talks about,” Ellie complained to her mum, as the latter readied herself for a Monday day shift. “Don’t be jealous, it’s only going to push her away,” Sasha said as she rubbed sorbolene cream onto her whole body. Her skin was constantly dry, a side effect of her work and the endless showers it required.

“It’s only natural for her to have a good friend at this new school. She needs to hang with someone. She still spends all her weekends with you.”

“Yeah, but I bet it would be with Vanora if she lived closer. All she can talk about is how cool and amazing she is.”

“She would think the same things about you.”

“Well, she doesn’t say them does she?!”

“It sounds like she has a crush, and good for her.”

“A crush?”

“Has it never occurred to you that Rhi is gay?”

“What – gay?!”

“Is it really that much of a shock to you?”

Simultaneously, Rhiannon was on the phone to Vee, asking her if she wanted to come and stay over on Friday night. Her mum was going to be gone for most of the evening at a book club, so they would have the place to themselves.

She lowered her voice as she said this, knowing Angela would be listening. She wished more than ever that she could text Vee but her mobile got no reception at their house, and she never had credit anyway (and Vee, astoundingly, didn’t have Myspace). Vee said yes without hesitation.

Every day since her false pregnancy scare, they had sat together on the bus. They still didn’t really hang out at school – they weren’t in each other’s classes besides maths and, Rhiannon soon discovered, Vee often skipped the class before lunch and caught a bus to the beach in the middle of the day, coming back only for the final period when attendance was marked – But oh, those forty minutes of bus ride each day! It was a hallowed time.

That week it rained and rained and rained. The Bellinger swelled and browned as it always did, and on Friday at midday the Bellingen bus was sent to pick up the kids early from school, before all the bridges went under.

Vee left with Rhiannon, and the mood on the bus was one of elation. A year eleven boy hit on them both on the way home, came up to the front of the bus so he could lean over the back of their seat; “come back to mine for a flood party,” he kept insisting.

“He just wants us to get flooded in at his house for a few days,” Rhiannon whispered.

“Hey, I heard that! What’s so bad about being stuck at mine? It’ll be sick. I’m on the side with no police and the bottle-o.”

“Dude, so am I. I’m out in Thora. It’s also just so you have a chance to get with her.”

He opened his mouth to respond but no response came, and after a long minute he gave Rhiannon the finger, annoyed at her cock blocking, and skulked back to his seat alone. If Rhiannon felt any sense of rudeness that dissipated with the grateful and knowing grin that Vee turned on her.

They met up with Ellie in town, all of them grabbing a chai milkshake at the gelato bar together before catching the final bus home. Ellie watched the two of them flirt as she tactfully pretended to be interested in how big she could blow her bubbles. Now that she knew what it was she wasn’t threatened – after all, she didn’t want to get with Rhi! She was surprised by how much she liked Vanora, who was friendly and easygoing in spite of her mysterious reputation.

“Come stay at mine, it’ll be so much fun. It looks like it’s going to be a big one, we might even be stuck in till Monday.”

Rhiannon looked at Vee, fiddled with the straw in her mouth and considered. She knew she had a crush on her, she had accepted that. She knew she wanted nothing but to be alone with her. But she had no idea if Vee was interested. She slept with boys after all… and besides, her mum would be home now because the book club would most definitely be cancelled.

Ellie saw her hesitation and added generously, “You guys can have the spare room.”

“Are you cool with us changing plans slightly, Vee? Ellie’s mum is great. She’s so chill, not like other parents.”

“Yeah, I’m down for whatever. I’m just excited to see my first flood up close.”

“Okay, done. Ellie, just make sure I remember to call my mum from yours.”

That afternoon the three of them put on gumboots and waded across the flooded paddock opposite Ellie’s house. The cows had already been moved up the hill and the water swirled around their shins. As they drew closer to the Bellinger, they could see that all the castor oils and juvenile casuarinas along the riverbank were being pummelled by the flood waters, flexible trunks bent almost horizontal.

Rhiannon thought of Gone with the Wind, and the bend of buckwheat, bowing to the inevitable. That’s what all these plants knew to do, and humankind had learnt to mimic it, in the building of Lavenders Bridge with its collapsible railings. Ellie’s horses stared and snorted at the rising river, not truly scared because they had seen it many times before, just having fun as the girls were, splashing each other in the shallows, out of reach of the mighty current.

“Let’s go look at Summervilles Bridge too,” Ellie suggested and they set off gladly, though Rhiannon’s ankles rubbed unpleasantly against the gumboots because her socks had been suctioned off her feet when water got in. The Rosewood River was more exciting, because it was a smaller river with a shallower bottom, and that showed in the utter chaos of the waters. There was a huge wave where the bridge usually was, and big logs jammed in what they could only assume were the pylons.

“What’s that crashing noise?” asked Vee.

“It’s the boulders on the river bed crashing into each other. Each time it floods they get thrown around and the river takes a whole new shape. This is going to be such a big one, maybe even as big as that one two years ago that left all the flotsam in those casuarinas, see way up high there?” Ellie pointed at what looked like birds’ nests of sticks halfway up the branches. “That’s how high it got.”

They pulled some loose, dead vines down from the nearby trees and threw them into the maelstrom to see how fast they would travel, or if they would be sucked underneath. “I’ve never seen a river look so much like the ocean,” Vee said, and she was right in her comparison.

Dark and turgid, the water was made of conflicting waves that crested and broke on top of each other, endlessly, little caps of white that frothed as if above shoals or beds of coral. It was violent like the sea could be, far more violent than the Bellinger, which moved as one huge force and seemed somehow tamer even though you knew beneath the surface corpses of wallabies and trees were carried pitilessly.

“You’ve got something on your leg, Rhi,” Vee said, gesturing lazily, and Rhiannon looked down to see a tiny black thing crawling up her thigh, that stretched with its long body like a slinky, gripped her with its hungry toothless mouth.

“Goddamn leeches!” She flicked it off with her index finger and then twisted round looking for more. ‘They’re all over our boots, guys! Look!” Sure enough, there were multitudes climbing up their gumboots, seeking out the warmth of a groin and the easy access to blood.

There were even more on the wet rocks and branches around them, reaching high and sniffing blind, ready to begin their impressive worming feat. They unanimously decided it was time to go back to the house. When they got back to Ellie’s the frogs were so loud in the pipes, croaking and glorying in all the rain, telegraphing their hallelujahs and mating calls to their kind, that they moved upstairs to her room, even though Sasha was happy for them to take up the living room and watch a movie on the big screen.

“They’re really going off tonight, hey,” Rhiannon said.

“Maybe they fancy your friend,” Ellie quipped, nodding at Vee who had plonked herself proprietorially across Ellie’s bed.

“Huh?”

“She’s talking about my fingers,” Vee laughed, unfazed, “you might be right, though I tend to think I have more of an affinity for salt water, not fresh water animals.”

“Yeah, Rhi said you love to swim in the ocean hey.”

“I do. Every day.”

“Does your family also?”

“My dad surfs. My mum loves the ocean. But she doesn’t swim much anymore.” Something in her tone changed and Ellie switched effortlessly to another topic. Rhiannon was disconcerted by how easily they got along, how Ellie had none of the uncertainty that she had with Vee, but simply ploughed onwards as if she were speaking to someone normal.

Rhiannon knew she was hopeless by comparison, she almost felt like a ‘tharn’ rabbit in Watership Down, it was so much to take in that she was going to be alone with Vanora, not at school and going to sleep beside her later that night.

“Do you have any pets, Vee?” Ellie stroked her cat, curled up on her bed as she said this.

“No, I love them but my mum doesn’t like kept animals. What’s your cat’s name?”

“Fanchette. Rhi suggested it. It’s from some book she loves.”

‘The Claudine novels, written by this French woman in the early 1900s. Her husband locked her up and forced her to write them and then published them under his own name. She was obsessed with cats.”

“Oh yeah, I know who she is, she was –” Vee started to say, but Rhiannon was on a roll, her tongue finally loosened.

“Amazing, right!”

“I was going to say bisexual,” Vee stated simply and silence settled on the room like a shroud, till even the cat stirred in its sleep, sensing the tension through the deep dreams of a feline.

Ellie got up to go downstairs, thinking it best to give the other two a moment alone. “Do you guys want a drink before dinner? My mum won’t mind as long as we only have one. I think I’ve still got that goon you left here, Rhi.”

They both nodded yes and as she left the room Rhiannon moved up on to the bed, so she could stroke Fanchette and be seemingly focused on her while she tried to work up the courage to say what she wanted to say.