Taken from the July 2012 issue of Dazed & Confused:

I’ve always been a sneaky bastard when it comes to my sister Iris. There was the time I watched her and Henry Cribb from two years above in the clearing out the back. I only knew it was her first time because I heard Henry say,

“You can’t get pregnant first go,” and Iris snarl, “Bullshit, put it on.” If she’d spotted me then, hiding in the lap of a rotten jarrah and peering round its trunk to watch Henry Cribbs’ white bits bounce away on top of her, she would have torn my hair out. But she’d skin me and hang me up a flagpole if she knew what I was watching now, because it’s so much worse. 

Through the knot of wood that you can push out in the upstairs loo wall, I’m watching her in our bedroom prance about with her walkman on while she mimes into the mirror. The mirror is hung high, so she can only get her top half in it if she stands way back by the door. She’s leant a chair up against the door handle to stop anyone bursting in – it is a room we share and I would be within my rights to crash in at any point, but I don’t want her to stop – I know this song, I watch her sing it often. 

Right now, she’s imagining sailors scooting around her, lifting her on their shoulders and punching the air, and becoming aroused by her navy-blue school-gym leotard being pulled up her crack

You could guess the song from how she’s dressed herself up, and the way she straddles a chair too wide, which I think makes her look more like The Fonz than Cher. Her dance moves vary day to day, but there is always the base which is a kind of marching chicken-walk, while she stares at herself in the mirror, mouthing the words with more animation than I have seen her use in all the time I’ve known her. 

She is more the sort to fix a stink eye on you and silently jab you with a compass in the back of the knee than to sing in public, but I can hear the words she doesn’t think she’s singing whispered down her nose, over the gallop of her dance routine. 

Right now, she’s imagining sailors scooting around her, lifting her on their shoulders and punching the air, and becoming aroused by her navy-blue school-gym leotard being pulled up her crack. She doesn’t have a leather jacket, but she’s tied off her denim one and I think she might have put socks in the shoulders to make her more of a triangle up top. 

In this moment and maybe a few lines into the next verse it’s like she sees herself as she looks, without Cher’s tiny cheese-elbow of a nose and those cheekbones, without the legs and butt that she wants everyone to see, and without the fat snakes of black hair

Nice one Fonzarelli, I think. She has been at the lipstick again, and even from where I sit in the dunny, I can see that she’s painted well over the lines of her thin lips like she’s eaten a bowl of spaghetti and tomato sauce without her hands. 

But there’s a moment, it must be during the instrumental, when she’s marching on the spot – lightly so she doesn’t shake the house – and it’s like she remembers something. She looks quickly around the room for spying eyes. She checks the window, the door, she does a spin, in time, probably, with the music, to make sure no one’s standing behind her. The human eye senses movement before all else, I think. I steady myself and keep watching. I don’t let my eyeball flicker, or I will lose it, and I will lose her. 

In this moment and maybe a few lines into the next verse it’s like she sees herself as she looks, without Cher’s tiny cheese-elbow of a nose and those cheekbones, without the legs and butt that she wants everyone to see, and without the fat snakes of black hair; she is skinny with chicken legs and no arse, the roundest part of her is her hip bone, and her hair is white blond and killed by sea salt, thin in a ponytail. It’s this moment I can see she’s just like me and that all she really wants to be able to do is to get out of the way of childhood and move away from all of us. She is not on a warship playing with big guns and sailors, she is a girl in a small town, with too many kids in it, and her greatest achievement in life so far is to be the eldest of five children. And then she squats down and does a spectacular pelvic thrust while she waves one hand in the air, and I see that she has cut the fingers off some gardening gloves, and she is Cher again with her rude bits on display and everybody screams and cheers. 

Throughout November we will be publishing an anthology of short stories from our favourite authors to celebrate #NaNoWriMo. Follow them all at http://www.dazeddigital.com/nanowrimo and share your stories with us by tweeting @DazedMagazine with the hashtag #NaNoWriMo.