Out the window, the scrub turns to forest. A black dog hangs by its hind legs from a ragged rope against the trunk of a red gum, mouth lolling open, eye sockets empty.
Erik pulls the ute to a stop out the front of our house.
‘Cool car,’ he says. ‘Where do you put the wheelchair?’
My heart sinks. Not again.
‘It’s not ours.’
‘Well, whoever’s it is, they must be loaded.’
I reach for my bag, my fingers no longer shaking after the half hour drive. I feel better, stronger, with Alex’s arm around me.
‘The house looks just like I remember it.’ Erik studies the façade from the driver’s seat and squints. ‘Except maybe smaller. And I don’t remember any ivy growing up the side.’
‘It thrives on neglect,’ I say.
Erik spent pretty much the whole summer in Nan’s house when I was nine, yet I feel suddenly self-conscious, seeing it through his eyes. The rot in the wooden stairs that sag tiredly in the middle, the faded yellow weatherboard desperate for a new paint job, the rising damp on the side of the house facing us because the trees don’t let in enough light despite the heat.
‘I’d invite you in . . .’ I say, fumbling for an excuse not to, ‘but Mum’s got an old muso friend here. Again.’ I didn’t mean the again to slip out. It sounds resentful. It is.
‘An old friend with very nice taste in cars,’ Erik says. ‘Who is he?’
‘Your mum has a boyfriend?’ Alex raises her eyebrows.
‘No,’ I snap. ‘I didn’t even say it was a guy.’ But I suddenly wonder if that’s what he is. Though he’s never there in the morning. And Mum hasn’t been keen on the idea of boyfriends since we moved here.
‘You mean a woman drives that?’ Erik sounds impressed.
‘No,’ I admit. ‘But there’s no reason a woman couldn’t.’
‘Erik, stop drooling,’ Alex says. ‘Mum said your mum came over for tea a few days ago. She didn’t mention a boyfriend.’
The two of us stare at the house. Erik is still eyeing off the car.
‘Thanks for the lift, Erik,’ I say, getting out of the ute. ‘And for the, uh . . . the other thing. For being there. Both of you.’
‘You sure you’re okay?’ Alex peers at me from inside the ute. ‘I’ll call you tonight. We’ll talk about it?’
I nod and walk to the house, take the three steps to our front door, feel them groan beneath my weight. I stop a moment to compose myself before facing Mum and Robbie while I listen to the ute drive away.
As soon as I open the door, I hear his voice. He’s showing off on his guitar, singing some unfamiliar song. Maybe I can slip by unnoticed because the last person I want to speak to is him. And I’m still wearing Erik’s jacket. How do I explain that to Mum?
I close the screen door gently behind me and slink past them sitting on the back deck.
‘Rube!’ Mum calls through the open sliding door. ‘Come join us!’
The man stops playing. I reverse a couple of steps and arm myself with an excuse.
‘Roobster!’ he says.
He did not just call me that.
‘If you’re lucky, she’ll sing for you,’ Mum says, pointing at me. ‘She doesn’t sing for strangers, but she has the voice of an angel.’
She’s talking about me like I’m not even here.
‘Actually I have homework,’ I say.
Mum smiles at me. ‘Okay, sweet girl, but come join us later.’
‘Maybe.’
I won’t. Not this side of ever.
Why was I worried about having to explain the pilot’s jacket? She didn’t even notice.
I kick my bedroom door shut. Grab my notepad and a pen off my desk and scrawl out the lyrics that are rumbling in my head, just to quiet them.
I can already hear the basic melody. And as the words pour out of me, the pain goes with them. From my heart, down my arm, through my fingers and onto the page, it leaks. I need the lyrics to find me a way through the maze of my thoughts. It’s how I’ve always worked through things. Weaving them into song.
My hand aches by the time I’m done, blank pages now filled with scribbly lines. It’s committed to paper. And I can let go for a while, because something outside of me is holding all my worries. I shut my notebook.
For the first time since the party, I let go. Of Joey, of Lukas, of the ache I’ve been carrying like a heavy basket. Nan is gone, but Erik is back. Alex is by my side again. And they’ve stirred up the past in a way that’s seeping into my music.
All my body wants to do is sleep, so I text Alex that I’m going to bed early. And without eating dinner, or having a shower or brushing my teeth, I wriggle under the bedsheets in Erik’s jacket that smells of a guy, and fall asleep. Too exhausted even to care that the strange music down the hall is my lullaby.
I cling to a thick limb of a tree, high up in the forest. My hands are slippery, the branch hard to keep hold of. I peer down through the branches. The height is dizzying, the earth impossibly far away. Dogs circle the tree. I grip the branch tighter, but one hand slips. Then the other. I lose traction, fall . . .
I wake drenched in a sheen of sweat, the air thick and still around me. I throw off my sheet. I’m still wearing Erik’s jacket. The dreams are worse when I overheat. I peel it off and lay it next to my pillow.
That’s when I hear a snarling noise outside. Ragged and nasty, and close.
Soft thuds as the dogs wrestle, growling and yowling, tumbling over and over. A thud against the house.
I stiffen. They can’t get in. But they’re right below my window, not more than the stretch of one arm away.
‘You’re awake?’
‘Shit!’ My hand is at my heart. ‘Don’t scare me like that.’
Mum’s in the doorway. ‘You cried out,’ she says. ‘I was worried.’
‘It’s the dogs,’ I say quickly. I can never tell her about the falling.
Mum follows my gaze to the window. ‘It’s not dogs,’ she says. ‘It’s the koalas. The males get so territorial in mating season. Sounds terrifying, doesn’t it? C’mon. You’re not too old for my bed yet.’
I follow Mum to her room. She wheels up alongside the bed, pressing one fist into the mattress and one into her wheelchair as she shifts herself across. I climb into the cold side of the sheets. I wonder if Mum ever wishes it were warm. If her bed feels empty or if she likes it that way. Maybe she does. For good reason.
‘Have you ever felt threatened?’ I say. It’s easier to ask her in the dark.
‘By what, Ruby?’
‘By . . . I dunno, a guy.’
She’s quiet for a moment. ‘Not seriously, not since I was little. But most women feel it at some point, I think.’
I feel her cold, bony body next to me, and I wriggle closer.
She puts her hands on my cheeks and kisses my forehead. ‘Is everything all right, my sweet girl?’
I want to tell her, so desperately I want to, but where do I begin? Sex with Joey Milano? The clip of me singing? Lukas not taking no for an answer? The sick feeling of him and Kyle fighting? His pure rage this afternoon? It would darken her heart with a cloud I couldn’t lighten.
‘What happened to you?’ I say instead.
There’s a very long pause. Her breathing becomes deep and eventually, she says, ‘I’ve never told you about my father.’
I never met my grandfather, but Nan always said he was a cranky old bastard. I knew that he drank too much and Nan hated it. He died when Mum was in primary school. I thought Mum told me everything. I thought I knew all her secrets, but maybe that’s not true.
‘What did he do?’
Mum exhales. ‘He was a complicated man. Hated the clatter of the piano, as he called it. His hobby was hard liquor and it lowered his tolerance for just about everything else. A lot of his unhappiness, he took out on poor Nan.’
‘Did he hit her?’
Mum draws a long breath.
‘Oh, yes.’ Her voic
e sounds old and resigned. ‘Your nan had a much more difficult life than most people knew.’
‘What did you do?’
Mum sighs. ‘I was a coward. Only a child, but I was still a coward. I used to hide under my bed. Come out when it was over. He was always sorry, of course. Afterwards.’
Nan’s sunlit face – carefree, laughing – comes to me. Rise and shine, she’d say each morning.
How did I never know she’d suffered this? How did she just rise and shine all those years?
‘Why didn’t she leave him?’
Mum laughs. ‘Oh, Ruby, back then it wasn’t simple. Women were tied in so many ways – they still are, but it was worse. Where would we have gone? How would we have lived? In the end we were lucky, I suppose, the drink killed him. Then we could mourn just the good parts. Keep pretending everything had been fine. Pick out the bits to hold on to and bury the rest.’
‘Did you hate him?’
‘No,’ Mum says reasonably. ‘He was my father, and I didn’t know fathers could be any different. But I didn’t love him. As I got a bit older, I was determined to prove my playing wasn’t just clatter and that your Nan was right to love it. So I played and I played, to perfect the sounds. He hated it. I suppose he won in the end, because he died before I got the chance to prove myself. By the time I was twelve and the Newtown School of Performing Arts offered me a full board scholarship, he was in the ground. But you know what it all taught me?’
‘What?’
‘I promised myself when I was young – younger than you – that I would belong to no man, never be pinned by anyone. If a man ever came into my life, he had to prove himself. Love should be earned; not once, but a multitude of times. No one has a claim to be loved by virtue of their title – parent, friend, sibling, partner. Hearts kept are hearts earned. My father never earned my love, Ruby, and I have no room in my heart for people who don’t earn their place.’
Mum kept nobody from her childhood in Cooper’s Creek, nobody but Nan. I think of what the man said the other day – an enigma . . . not a trace of her. If someone hurt Mum, she axed them. Maybe that’s why the first time Alex hurt me I cut her off. But Alex embraced me, even though I’d spent a year shunning her. I hadn’t earned her forgiveness, and she let me back in anyway.
‘Is there room for error?’ I ask, more to myself than Mum.
But she doesn’t answer.
The next morning, I’m sitting at our dining table eating eggs and toast. The table rocks beneath me because one leg has always been slightly short. I can’t stop thinking about my conversation with Mum last night.
Have I earned my place in Mum’s life? I was a mistake, but she kept me. Raised me on her own. No father. Did she get judgement for that? Was she terrified?
Would I have the courage to do the same? She’s told me she considered abortion, but couldn’t live with the idea. That it felt like cutting off a note before it had been played. But I wonder if she still feels like that? If she could have her choice over, knowing what motherhood would be like and the future it led her to, would she still have had me? Kept me? Would she want me to have a baby I wasn’t ready for?
The wheels of Mum’s chair squeak along the lino as she emerges from her room. She pivots around to the fridge and yanks open the heavy door to get a carton of milk. Then she makes her way to the pantry and pulls out her muesli. I eye off the wine glasses from last night sitting on the sink. Could Robbie be her boyfriend?
‘Are you going to tell me why that man was here again?’
She waves her hand as if to dismiss the question. ‘Don’t call him that man. His name’s Robbie. I did have a life once . . . outside of here. Outside of you . . .’
A pain thrums in my chest. It’s the realisation, sharp and painful, that I’m right. The music they played that I know nothing about, the colour he brings to her cheeks, the shininess in her eyes. It was my existence that robbed her of her music. I’m the reason she gave it all up.
My eyes fill with heavy tears.
Mum stops mid spin towards the bench and looks at me. ‘Oh. You’re upset,’ she says, like she’s shocked by the power of her words.
‘He’s still in Celestial Vendetta, isn’t he?’
‘Yes.’
I feel her cringe. The band with her name in it, went on to the heights of success without her.
‘And you’re not. Is it because of me?’
‘Of course not,’ Mum says softly. ‘I had choices, Ruby. I chose not to follow him and the band.’
But her meaning is thinly veiled: she chose not to follow the band because she chose me instead.
‘So why isn’t he back in the UK with the rest of them? What does he want?’
I’m sure there’s a reason. If there’s something I’ve learnt in the last few weeks it’s that men only hang around if they want something.
‘He wants me to perform with them again,’ she says matter-of-factly. ‘A reunion show. At the Entertainment Centre.’
‘What?’ I practically drop my fork.
The Entertainment Centre. Mum playing a gig.
A thrill zips up my body. Mum’s just been handed the opportunity to play centre stage for a crowd. Maybe she can make up for a tiny piece of what she missed out on. My mind leaps ahead to the hotel room we might get to stay in, a backstage pass to hang out with the band . . .
‘When?’ I say.
‘I’m not going,’ she says flatly.
The certainty in her voice is uncompromising. I know this voice. When Mum makes a decision, she stays the course.
Everything about her is thorough.
‘Nobody wants to see a cripple trying to play like a maestro.’ She opens the carton of milk and begins pouring it over her muesli as if she hasn’t said this terrible thing.
What a vile word. She doesn’t let anyone get away with calling her darling, let alone that.
She’s trying to shock me into silence. Distract me. Hijack my thoughts.
She’s going to sabotage what could be our shot at getting out of here. A life outside of Cooper’s Creek. A magical, musical life. A second chance at the life we were meant to have – our Plan A.
I need to change her mind. I need to figure out how.
I spend the weekend lying low. Texting Alex and perfecting a couple of new songs. Every time I bring up the Entertainment Centre gig with Mum, she shuts it down. So I stop mentioning it. She seems grateful for that and we manage to enjoy a duet session without either of us mentioning Robbie.
On Monday, I drive to school, which means using my last twenty dollars in fuel, but desperation incinerates good reason. Right now I’d pay a thousand dollars to avoid Lukas.
When I reach Maths and the bell rings, I realise Lukas is a no-show. I’ve wasted my money. Maths is Lukas’s favourite subject. It’s the class he never misses because he gets a kick out of running circles round the rest of us.
Millie, however, is there. Sitting quietly in the back row. Busy on her phone. She doesn’t look up as I walk towards her, but I hear Chante whisper her name.
Chante and Angel are sitting with Anna at the opposite end of the class to her, so I take the seat alongside Millie. She glances up at me briefly as I sit down, and we exchange a stiff smile. Her make-up is flawless – not a blemish on her skin, eyebrows perfectly shaped, lipstick immaculate. For a second, I think she’s done it for Joey, to show him what he’s missing, but then I hear a whisper from Chante’s side of the classroom. Angel is leaning towards Chante, who glances in our direction. Millie looks out the window.
The make-up isn’t for Joey. It never was. Girls don’t wear make-up to school for boys. They wear it as armour against each other. Whispers are the female version of a punch up. I’m pretty sure it hurts just as much.
Alex slides into the empty seat alongside me so that we’re sitting in a line – Alex, me and Millie. Safety in numbers.
Alex opens her Maths book and casts a sideways look at me. ‘Okay?’ she mouths.
I slide h
er book towards me and draw a love heart in the corner of her page. Thanks for being there, I write in fairy print. Sorry for all the times I wasn’t.
She takes her book back and writes beneath my words.
You’re welcome. Art room for lunch?
I add a smiley face, as Mr Kiriakou flashes a diagram up on the whiteboard. Roots of Integers.
I try to focus on the lesson, but there are other things on my mind. New things. Mum’s old world has crashed into our lives, and I can’t help feeling stirred up by the possibilities.
At lunch, I follow Alex to the senior art room.
On the way, she says, ‘Rube, do you think you should go to the police about what happened with Joey? I’ve done some research on it and I’m sure it’s rape.’
That word. I wish she hadn’t said it out loud. I wish I could snatch it back. ‘I didn’t say no.’
‘But you didn’t say yes. Your body language was screaming no. You were stressed about being in the yard. About someone seeing. It hurt and you didn’t even know it was going to happen. It’s not like he said, “Are you okay with this?” You were far from enthusiastic.’
‘He was pretty enthusiastic about getting the job done.’
‘Don’t make jokes. You didn’t consent. You need to think about it. The police.’
I think of the cop who pulled me over when I ran the red. What might he say? ‘Did you tell him no, sweetheart? Did you scream? Did you push him away? No. Did you tell him it was hurting you? No.’
I shake my head. ‘I couldn’t tell some stranger what happened. And I can’t prove it was against my will. I can’t even prove it happened. Arresting someone for rape is serious.’
‘Ruby what happened to you is serious. Of course it happened. I mean, you could be –’
‘Shhh.’ I don’t even want her uttering the words. Giving voice to it.
‘What are you going to do if you are?’
I take a deep breath. Deep breathing is meant to help with stress. So far it’s been pretty useless.
‘I don’t know. There’s a pill you can take . . . ’
‘The morning after pill?’
Ruby Tuesday Page 11