FicWad

Pornography

After school Nancy rang me and told me to come over to her house. When I arrived I noticed she looked very worried. She stood at the front door with me, about to leave.

“I’m going to the police to report Ella missing. My boyfriend’s a policeman.” Nancy started biting her bottom lip. “Where could Ella be?”

“I’m sure they’ll find her. Don’t worry.”

“You’re such a good boy, Keith. What would I do without you?”

I smiled, proud of myself. “You said you wanted me to help Lily with her homework?”

“Lily’s having problems at school. I’ll pay you extra if you help her with her spelling.”

“Is she upstairs in her room?”

Nancy nodded. “I might be back before dinner but if I’m not, you can eat the fried rice I left in the freezer.”

I couldn’t find Lily when I went upstairs to her bedroom. On her bed was her schoolbag. Her window was opened, letting in orange afternoon sunlight. Lily’s room seemed much cleaner than usual. Her clothes were not all over the place like they were when I last came here.

I eventually found Lily in Ella’s bedroom. Still in her school uniform, she was kneeling down on the floor near a bucket of grey paint. Under the bucket of paint were newspapers laid down in case the paint spilled over. Lily’s right hand held a paintbrush. The metal frame of Ella’s bed used to be completely black. Now half of it was painted grey.

“What’s this for?” I asked.

“I’m painting,” she said. “It’s for Ella.”

“Does Ella want her bed frame grey? Did you ask her?”

“No, if I ask her, she might say no.”

“What if she doesn’t like it?”

Lily shrugged her shoulders. “My mum said I can do it. I make everything grey. Don’t tell anyone.”

“Why don’t you want me to tell anyone?”

“I don’t want them to stop me.”

“I don’t think Ella likes grey. Nothing else in her room’s grey.”

“This paint isn’t really grey,” said Lily.

“Then what colour is it?”

She shrugged her shoulders.

“It’s light grey,” I said.

“No it isn’t.”

“Stop painting now—you can do it later. Your mum told me to help you with your spelling.”

“Okay then,” she said, putting the paintbrush back into the bucket. She got up and ran out the door.

When I arrived back in Lily’s room I found her on the computer, browsing the Internet. She had to kneel down on the carpet to use the computer. On the bed was her bag, which I unzipped and browsed through. Her bag had a strange strawberry smell, probably the remnants of lunch. There were about four workbooks, a lunchbox, and a student diary in the bag. I grabbed all four workbooks and pulled them out.

“Lily, your mum told me you needed help with spelling. Which book do you have your spelling words in?”

“I don’t have any.” She stared forward. Her eyeballs twitched to the sides. “I left everything at school.”

If Lily left all her spelling words at school, I couldn’t think of any way I could test her. But Nancy was paying me extra for the lessons, so I needed to do something.

“Let me use the computer, Lily. I’ll find some words on the Internet for you to learn.”

Lily stopped typing. She paused for a few seconds, probably wondering whether she should let me use her computer. I had a feeling she didn’t want me using her computer.

“Okay,” she said very quietly. She stood up and sat on her bed while I sat down on the carpet near the computer

Using a search engine I found a website that contained Grade 3 spelling words. Since Nancy doesn’t actually get to see me teaching her daughter, she may start to wonder whether I actually did my job properly. So that I have some physical evidence of my work, I printed out the Grade 3 spelling words using Lily’s printer. I cleared Lily’s desk, took a spare chair from Ella’s room, and sat next to Lily on her desk. Her desk didn’t have any drawers; it just had four legs at the corners, so two people could easily fit on the same desk.

I put on the desk a handful of paper and a pencil, both from Lily’s schoolbag. Lily sat on the right side of the desk while I sat on the left side. I noticed that the bottom-right-hand corner of the desk was blunt, not pointy. Lily must have seen me staring at the blunt corner of the desk because she immediately gave an explanation.

“I used sandpaper and made it less sharp.” She got off her seat and picked up sandpaper she had earlier left on the floor. When she sat back down again she started sanding away at the corner. “If it’s too sharp, it might hurt someone.”

“I’m going to call out a word from this list,” I said, pointing to the computer printout, “and you tell me how the word is spelled.”

She nodded and stopped sanding the corner.

“Spell for me the word ‘raccoon.’”

“R-A-C-O-O-N.”

I was surprised because I actually expected her to get this word correct. “Uh…you should have used double cs instead of just one.”

“Oh…okay.” The little girl bit her lips, opened her eyes up wider, and tilted her head down slightly. It was a good attempt but a bad start. I started to wonder. If I kept giving her hard words, she may not like me anymore because being around me will make her think that she was dumb. On the other hand, I didn’t want to give her really easy words because then she might go tell her mum that the lessons are easy and then her mother may think I’m useless because I am not challenging her. If she thinks I’m useless then she may cancel the lessons and I’d lose money.

“What do you think happened to Ella?” asked Lily.

I had a feeling Lily was trying to divert my attention away from spelling.

“Ella was with Mark,” I said. “Mark must have taken her somewhere.”

“Will I see her again?”

“Your mum’s at the police now. They’re working hard to find her.” I paused. “Do you want to get back to the next word on the spelling list?”

She nodded. “Okay.”

“Tell me how to spell ‘rattlesnake.’”

“Aren’t these American words?”

“The spelling of these words is the same here.”

“No, but I don’t think there are many raccoons or rattlesnakes in Australia.”

“Okay, don’t worry about that word then.” I skipped a few words on the spelling list in order to find easy words. “Spell for me the word ‘cat.’”

She got that word right, as well as the next six words I gave her. After a while, though, it was irritating because Lily wasn’t listening to me again. She stared forward and, with her hands, she stroked on her shoulder-length hair.

“My mum won’t let me get a hair cut,” she said. “It’s too long but she said no.” With her hands behind her head she held up her hair to see whether she could make a ponytail.

“You don’t need a haircut.”

“I can get a haircut myself at the mall if I had more money. But my mum doesn’t give me any money.” Lily turned her head and faced me. “Daddy used to always give me money.”

“Would you, uh, like to borrow some money from me?” I took out my wallet and hesitantly took out a twenty dollar note.

“Really? For me?” She grabbed the money and scrunched it up into her pockets.

“You want to learn more spelling words?” I asked.

“No, I think I’m hungry now.”

On the kitchen table that night I ate leftover fried rice while Lily ate sushi. I had already chopped up the chicken sushi into small bits so Lily could eat with her hands. She told me that when her dad was alive he always took her to Japanese restaurants but now that her father was dead her mum only ever took her to McDonald’s.

“Mummy said it’s my fault she’s fat,” said Lily. “She said…when you have lots of babies, you get really fat. It’s called ‘baby fat.’”

What she said was probably true. I’ve seen girls in my high school who had a habit of spreading their legs around boys and they ended up having babies when they were still teenagers. They were all fat. That might be one reason most women nowadays don’t have kids: they want to preserve their body figure. Women in Hollywood are renowned for how often they adopt children compared to ordinary women.

The front door opened and Nancy walked into the house. She was back from the police station. She entered the kitchen and asked Lily how she was. She paid me a hundred dollars for my babysitting and tutoring.

“Did they find Ella yet?” I asked.

“The police have already questioned lots of people, even your principal.”

“So what have they found out?”

“As it turns out,” said Nancy, “your principal already reported Ella missing. The principal said that when he last spoke to you, you said you were trying to look for both Ella and Eddie at the park.”

“I found Eddie but I couldn’t find Ella.” I thought back to when I was at Dendy Park earlier this day. “I saw Mark with a bunch of his friends. He was at the pond…that brown pond. He went into the girls’ toilets and then disappeared.”

Nancy’s right eye widened while her left eye shrunk. The idea of people disappearing in toilets was bizarre. “The police have already talked to Mark while he was at school,” she said. “Mark said he was at school all day today. He said Ella left the school at lunch to get something from the milk bar.”

“He’s a liar,” I said. “Ella told me she was meeting Mark at Dendy Park. I saw Mark there at the park. He was with a bunch of his friends…and they had a black bag. Eddie was with me. You can ask him.”

“What time did you see Mark at the park?”

“About two o’clock, I think.”

“That’s impossible,” said Nancy. “Your principal said he had video surveillance cameras around the school and the video cameras only picked up Eddie and Ella leaving during lunch. The cameras got Mark entering the school in the morning. Mark was never seen leaving the school until four o’clock that evening when classes finished. This is what the policeman told me. Mark must have been inside the school for the whole day. Whoever you saw at the park couldn’t have been Mark. It’s impossible.”

“That’s strange.”

“Maybe when I have time tomorrow I’ll talk to Eddie next door.” She started walking to the stairwell. “It’s getting dark now. I’m having a shower. When you leave, Keith, make sure you lock the door behind you.” She went up to the bathroom.

I started to wonder. Where was Ella? What was Mark doing dumping that plastic bag in the pond? If Mark was at Dendy Park, how come the surveillance cameras didn’t tape him leaving the school premises? Nothing made sense.

I finished the last few spoons of fried rice and put the plate in the sink. I walked towards the front door, walking by Lily while she was still eating her sushi. I was about to walk past the girl before I heard her saying goodbye behind me. I looked down and saw her still eating the sushi. Her fingers were sticky with rice and she looked up, probably expecting a goodbye from me.

“I’ll see you at school tomorrow,” I said, walking out.

It was night when I entered my house and saw Mum cleaning up in the kitchen. I enjoyed being in Lily’s house so much that whenever I walked into my own house, it felt as if the place were dead, as if nothing of interest ever happened here. All the action was happening somewhere else and I wasn’t in it.

I walked by my mum towards the stairs, hoping that she might notice how depressed I looked. I tried to walk slowly. Whenever I felt lonely there was nothing worse than people ignoring my displays of loneliness, and that was exactly what my mum was doing now. She was in the kitchen looking depressed herself, as if she wanted me to acknowledge her. I wondered whether I should go talk to my mum. Dad was nowhere to be seen so perhaps they had gotten into a fight. My conscience won and I eventually walked into the kitchen.

“Hello,” I said, deliberately sounding gloomy.

She smiled weakly at me. “Would you like to help me with the dishes?”

“Where’s Dad? Why isn’t he helping you?”

Mum shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know why he’s not helping me. Your dad’s upstairs in your room.”

I was slightly shocked. “What’s he doing in my room?”

Mum didn’t answer. I walked away from my mother and went upstairs. When I entered my bedroom I saw my dad on my computer. The lights were off in my bedroom. The only light came from the computer monitor. Dad heard me entering and looked up at me.

“What is this doing here, Keith?”

Whenever someone surfs the Internet the browser records which sites you’ve been to and stores it on the computer. On my computer monitor right now was a pornographic website. The website had on it many women all posing nude.

I was so shocked and embarrassed.

This was the first time Dad found pornography on my computer. In reality, I’ve only ever been to a handful of porn sites because of mild curiosity. But my dad had been snooping through the files today and had already seen one of my porn sites. He was now likely to believe that I looked at porn all the time.

“It was with an e-mail,” I said. “It was spam. I was going through my mail and one of the e-mails referred me to that site…and I had no idea it was gonna be one of those websites.”

“Alright,” said Dad. He became silent against and started browsing through the site, scrolling down, looking at all the different images of women. I started to wonder whether he enjoyed looking through the site. He turned his head around his shoulders and looked at me, but I diverted by attention to the floor, trying not to establish eye contact with my dad. I sat down on my bed.

“I don’t usually go to any of those sites,” I said, this time a little more forcefully. “It was in an e-mail. I’ve only ever been to a few…uh…porn sites.” It felt weird saying the p-word in front of my dad. It was the first time I had done so. It was such a dirty word, not the sort of language that was used in this house.

Dad got up. “Alright, I’m going to bed now, Son. Don’t go to those sites ever again, alright?”

“Yes, fine then.”

“Resist the temptation, Keith.”

“Okay, I understand.”

“Keith…” Dad took an ominous deep breath. “Keith, why did you volunteer to baby-sit?”

“I didn’t volunteer. I’m paid to baby-sit. I’m doing it only for the money.”

“How do you explain the girl’s underwear I found under your bed?”

“They’re my undies.”

“Your underwear has pink flowers on them?”

“Yes…they do.” They didn’t, of course, but in theory they could.

“This is not good.” Dad shook his head and breathed deeply. With his own fingers he massaged his temple and forehead. “I don’t want you babysitting that girl ever again.”

“Why not?”

Dad didn’t answer. He turned around and walked out of my room.