An Extract from Thora By Tilly Lawless
Tilly Lawless’ second book Thora is almost here!
Enjoy this sneak peak as we inch toward its launch date and learn more about Rhiannon, the book’s protagonist, and the moment she meets the alluring and mysterious Vanora.
Thora is available for pre-order now.
About Thora:
It’s 2009 and summer is encroaching on the town of Bellingen when Rhiannon is forced to move from her local high school to one in Coffs Harbour. Initially reluctant to leave behind her best friend Ellie, she quickly finds herself infatuated with the enigmatic Vanora. It’s only on befriending her, does she discover that like her, Vanora is a girl whose home life is shrouded in a web of secrets. Secrets that relate to her mother.
Set in the verdant Mid North Coast of New South Wales, Australia, Thora deals with family dysfunction, emancipation through friendship, and how girlhood is affected by the isolation of the country and the solace of nature.
About Tilly Lawless:
Tilly Lawless is a queer, Sydney-based sex worker and writer. Her debut title Nothing But My Body was published in 2021.
Join us at Donlon Books on the 23rd of July, from 6.30 - 8.30 pm for the official launch, and hear Tilly read more from the book!
Chapter 2
In her new uniform, a starched shirt with a tie and blazer, Rhiannon felt like she was in class drag. She was going to be with all the rich kids – did this make her a rich kid? It wasn’t like her lifestyle was going to change, though. She’d still have to get on two rickety country buses, with torn vinyl seats, windows that jammed and metal poles that burned you in both heat and cold. The final bus was an airconditioned one, that now sped along the freeway, exporting all these kids from the valley to the supposedly superior schooling of Coffs Harbour, depositing them out the front of a school you had to pay for, and that made you go to chapel.
Coffs Harbour was once a feared target of the Japanese in World War II because it had an airport, a train station and a sea port. Now, due to its strategic position on the Pacific Highway exactly halfway between Brisbane and Sydney, it was simply a hub for trucks and drug flow between states. Coffs Harbour, full of surfers, tacky motels and homophobia. The catchment for her new school spread as far inland as Ebor, one hundred kilometres away, stretched as far south as Macksville and as far north as Corindi. Rhiannon was disheartened by this distance; it was already hard enough to hang out with her old school friends when they lived in scattered valleys around the town, always having to scab a lift somehow because there were no trains and no buses on the weekend. Now whoever she befriended could live more than an hour away – what was the point in even making new friends?
She sighed and shrugged down into herself and the bus seat simultaneously, contemplating hiding on the bus till it did the round trip all the way back to Bello – where she would talk her friends into skipping class to spend the day by the river. They would surely be on to her missing the very first day though and she would get home from a peaceful day to have her mother on her back... it wasn’t worth it. She would have to push through. She tried to scope out the age of the people on her bus, as at least then they would come from a similar area to her. But the only ones who looked around her age were sitting near the front, and she was too intimidated to approach anyone older or further back than her. School buses always had an obvious hierarchy, ranked by age and social status, with the coolest sitting at the back.
The bus left the highway and began hurtling along windy dirt roads, the driver confidently taking the turns with a spray of gravel. Rhiannon tried to imagine the ferns weren’t grey with dust, but spangled with silver like the magic valley of The Little White Horse. She could still disappear into the imaginary when need be, and with each paddock that appeared in a cutaway slice between blurred sped-by forest she pictured herself galloping along on the little white horse, keeping up with the school bus but visible to no one.
At the last stop before the bus returned to the highway, the final person to get on was a girl who looked about the same age as her, given she was dressed in the ‘senior’ uniform. Rhiannon watched her with a degree of interest she hadn’t watched anyone else with, noting details that her eyes had simply passed over with the others. The girl’s skirt was hiked up higher than the uniform restrictions allowed, she had a frayed leather thong tied around her slender wrist, damp dark hair falling out of a loose bun, and one earphone in, while the other hung insouciantly on her shoulder. She leaked coolness just as her hair leaked water, a widening wet patch spreading on the back of her shirt. Rhiannon kept watching, entranced, as the girl sat in the first available seat, speaking to no one.
Rhiannon wanted to talk to her, be friends with her. So much so that when the bus pulled into her new school gates, she looked less at the school and more at the girl, trying to make fleeting eye contact and hoping the girl would say ‘hey, you’re new!’ She didn’t seem the type to do that, but still. As Rhiannon walked into the school grounds technicolour scenarios played out in her mind, of the girl in the classroom, having to take the only spare seat next to her. Of her getting her bag caught in Rhiannon’s as they walked along a narrow corridor, of having to disentangle from each other and maybe briefly touch hands.
Rhiannon had her bag on a bench between two big swarming groups. One group of chattering girls, whose straightened hair and glinting lip glosses and proximity to some lounging surfer boys proclaimed them as the ‘cool group,’ and another group, slightly smaller and less loud and more gender mixed. As she scrounged around for her books for first period, a fat girl with dyed black hair and multiple facial piercings from the latter group gestured to her to move her bag closer.
‘Hey, you can put your bag with us. I’m Zoe by the way. And this is Keira.’ A strikingly tall and beautiful girl with brown skin gave a casual ‘hey’ from beside her before turning back to her own bag. She was Aboriginal, and Rhiannon quickly gathered that maybe she was with the girls who were ostracised from the coolest echelons of the schoolyard, for varying reasons.
‘Thanks, I don’t know anyone here. I’m Rhiannon.’
‘Yeah I can tell. Who have you got for first period English? You might be with us if you’re lucky.’
She was, and as they headed through the corridors together Zoe quizzed her on where she came from.
‘Bellingen, hey? Yeah you won’t fit in with them. They’re all from that chain of beaches. Korora, Sapphire, maybe even Korora Basin if their house is big enough. I mean, don’t get me wrong, you’re pretty enough. The guys’ll love you just like they love Keira.’
But Rhiannon didn’t care about the guys loving her. She just wanted the girls to. And to know about the girl from her bus that morning. She described her to them both, haltingly and nervous without understanding why. Though she felt drawn to girls in a way she never did to guys, and she had admitted to Ellie after a read of the sealed section in Dolly mag that she was ‘bicurious but like definitely don’t ever want to go there I’m just, like, curious about people who are gay and stuff you know,’ she had not recognised her fascination as attraction.
Zoe wondered aloud as to who it could be before Keira said, ‘She’s talking about Vanora.’ She turned to Rhiannon and added, ‘she’s in our maths class.’
‘Ohhh, Vanora! Oh yeah, she’s cool. But she’s a massive ice queen. You won’t ever get to know her. She keeps to herself. Except supposedly she’s a bit of a slut, though I’ve never even seen her talk to a guy but outside school apparently it’s a different story.’
‘She’s a strange one. She doesn’t fit.’ Keira looked at Rhiannon directly when she said this, almost as if warning her. But it meant nothing to Rhiannon. Her mind was echoing with Vanora’s name, as the V crashed against her cranium and the softness of the rest rolled and washed and darted within. Vanora. A name to write a poem about, to sing an ode to, to hang a badge on. A name to fold up into a little note and carry in your pocket, to mull over and trace the letters of.
Her mind snagged on the second statement, a harsh condemnation in high school, where all everyone wanted was to not stand out, to shave off their square peg sides and be one among many. What did Keira mean, she didn’t fit? How could a pretty, skinny white girl not fit in a coastal high school? And for Keira to say this, the only one whose ancestors hadn’t come in boat loads of immigrants, or planes fleeing from far off war, whose ancestors had been there for millennia and now was vilified as if it were her that didn’t belong.
‘What do you mean she doesn’t fit?’
But now they were entering the classroom and her question went unanswered.
Rhiannon’s first day passed in a blur, the only memorable part was the hour she spent in the same room as Vanora for a year ten assembly, unable to muster up the courage to smile at her let alone speak to her, but hyperconscious of the fact that they breathed the same air, that the same oxygen tickled both their lungs and the same school bell assaulted both their ears. She watched her fiddle with the leather thong around her wrist and wondered if her hands were calloused, wondered if the lines she drew across her knuckles in biro had any meaning or were simply the scratches of an overactive mind, till the teacher noticed her distraction and told her off in front of the year for daydreaming.
At recess and lunch, she was grateful to join Zoe and Keira, not condemned to eat alone as the new kid. Their friend Cam joined them too, a sardonic boy with a side fringe that he had to keep sweeping out of his eyes. He caught the bus into school with Keira, as they both came from out Orara way, though he seemed to hate the area, dismissing it as a ‘boil on the butt of Cowper.’
‘It’s actually beautiful,’ Keira said defensively. ‘His home is one of the nicest places in Karangi, he just hates it coz he hates cows.’
‘Hates cows?’
‘It’s a cattle farm. Angus.’ He flicked his wrist witheringly. How someone could hate cows Rhiannon had no idea, but she could see he had dreams beyond a Karangi beef cattle farm, no matter how beautiful.
‘Are you out that way too, Zoe?’
‘Na, I’m at –’
‘19 O!’ interjected Cam, before she could finish.
Keira snorted and Zoe rolled her eyes, Rhiannon looked confused. ‘That’s such a tired joke Cam, and she wouldn’t get it anyway. 19 Orlando Street is the Coffs brothel. He’s just saying that coz I live in Park Beach right near it.’
‘Oh wow, there’s a brothel in Coffs? Do you like, see the women walking out of it? What do they look like?’
‘The prostitutes you mean? They’re pretty underwhelming like, they’re always in tracksuits and carrying a big bag. Sometimes they’re even in slippers. One wears pink mini skirts and hectic heavy make-up though, and has huge fake tits. She’s Cam’s favourite. He always keeps an eye out for her when he stays at mine, don’t ya?’
‘I even got to speak to her once,’ Cam said to Rhiannon, sotto voce. ‘She was waiting at the same bus stop as me and she asked if her lip liner was smudged and I said –’
‘“No, you look incredible – I’m not saying you have drag queen makeup but a drag queen would love your makeup,”’ interrupted Zoe
‘Hey, that’s my line!’
‘He tells that story so many times,’ Zoe explained to Rhiannon. ‘And besides I doubt you even really said it.’
‘Poetic licence, babe. Just because you don’t have an imaginative bone in your body, at least not one anyone could find under all that – ’
‘Can you two stop bickering for once? It’s overwhelming,’ Keira said. Zoe and Cam stopped, but the truce appeared tenuous.
‘Hey guys,’ Rhiannon asked. All three turned to look at her. ‘I know you can be overwhelmed and underwhelmed, but can you ever just be whelmed?’ They all relaxed into immediate laughter at the 10 Things I Hate About You reference, and Keira smiled at her gratefully.
Rhiannon met her eyes with wry acknowledgement, and then looked beyond them, to where she could see a lone figure walking into the bushes surrounding the oval. With a rush of recognition she realised it was Vanora. What was she doing? They still had one period left. Was she sneaking off for a cone, to ease that final hour? Was she wagging it entirely? Or was she meeting a boy in those bushes? Was she about to get down on those fabled knees, take a teen cock into her notorious mouth, a cock that had the slight sour taste of urine because teen boys never wiped, always shook? Was he about to feel how warm and moist the inside of her cheeks were, was he going to send a sad squirt down the back of her throat so she gagged and spat it up in the wet leaves, was she going to come up with wet leaves on her knees too, that she would brush off with a quick hand so as not to give away her rendezvous? Was she going to catch the bus home afterwards, and bump those same knees against the seat in front, were they stubbled with regrowth or smooth or a soft down like Rhiannon’s? Did she stuff them under her school jumper when she was sad, tuck her head inside and smell the vinegar waft from her pre-menstrual pussy? Was she comforted by the familiar scent of her cunt, like Rhiannon was? Did she hold her hand against it when she fell asleep? Did she hope to hold someone inside it too? But, most of all, had she noticed Rhiannon like she’d noticed her?
