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take off her clothes and then he pushed her to the floor. ‘Today,’ he said. ‘You’re mine.’ She realised that he really was moving to Brisbane.
    He spent the first hour biting her legs. He started on her left ankle, moved up to her shin, her calf, her knee, her thigh and then across to her right thigh then back down to the ankle. She cried and kicked him in the face until there was no way to tell which blood was coming from her legs and which from his nose and mouth.
    ‘I hate you,’ she said, when he was inside her, his legs chafing against the thousand bites on her own.
    ‘No, you don’t.’ He pulled out of her with a groan, coming all over her thighs. He rubbed it into her skin, mixing it with her blood. He licked her clean and then kissed her so tenderly she started to cry again. He nuzzled her breasts, sucking on her nipples gently. He called her angel, princess,
ohsarahoh
. She begged him not to leave her.
    ‘I have to, but it will be okay.’ He kissed her face all over. ‘
If they be two, they are two so As stiff twin encompasses are two, Thy soul the fixt foot, makes no show To move, but doth, if th’other doe
.’
    ‘What a load of shit,’ Sarah sobbed. ‘What total and utter bullshit.’
    ‘Sarah, you have to–’
    She slapped his face, hard, one, two, three times. ‘Just shut up,’ she said. ‘You didn’t bring me here to talk, and I don’t want to hear anything you have to say, anyway.’
    He took her at her word. There was nothing resembling speech for the rest of the day. There was nothing resembling anything she had ever experienced. The earlier leg biting was nothing. It was like holding hands. She thought she would die and did not care. The beast was fighting for its life and she wanted it to win.
    At the end of the day, Sarah could hardly sit up. Mr Carr carried her to the shower and washed her. He cried a lot, but he didn’t talk and neither did she. After all, what was there to talk about after the biting and tearing stopped and the screaming died down? He droveher to the bus stop in silence, and remained silent while she sobbed and dug her fingernails into his unyielding arm. Eventually, too exhausted to go on, Sarah got out of the car and he drove away.

Part Two

1
    Jamie made his way through the party, scanning the clumps of people, searching out Sarah. Jess had just returned from a six-month jaunt in Europe with a new boyfriend in tow, and Sarah had promised she would be here. But Jamie had searched the front hallway, the living room, the poolroom and the kitchen and it was too early, even for Sarah, to be locked in one of the bedrooms. He should have insisted on picking her up and bringing her himself; that was the only way he could ever be sure she’d be where she was supposed to be.
    Through the kitchen window, he noticed that there were twice as many people outside as there were in. Of course that’s where she’d be. Sarah had a theory that smokers were the most interesting bunch of people at any given function, and since these days smokers were always outside, that is where Sarah always wanted to be. She said that smokers were the coolest because of their blatant disregard for their own health and the middle finger raised to political correctness. Especially at this age. Older smokers at least had the excuse that
we didn’t know back then
or
stoppin’ at this age would kill me
. But people of Sarah and Jamie’s generation had no defence. They had endured years of health education and government-funded advertising showing black tar pouring from cut open lungs. From the moment they lit their first cigarette and raised it hesitantly to their lips, the Generation Y smoker knew they were sucking in a lungful of overpriced black death. Sarah had memorised a list of chemicals found in cigarettes so she could recite them to people who told her that smoking was harmful: acrolein, benzene, formaldehyde, nitrosamines, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, urethan,arsenic,