‘You can sleep in Lacey’s room, if you want,’ Len offers quietly once we’re on the landing. His eyes are glow-in-the-dark bright.
I shake my head; it’s still buzzing. The dead-silent house eggs us on, a beacon.
‘We probably should. Sleep, I mean,’ Len continues. There’s no conviction in it.
How much build-up is too much? Bridging the electric gap between us feels actually impossible, for a minute, but so does not doing it. My hands sweat with the strain.
‘I’m not really tired,’ I whisper.
Len takes an unsteady breath. ‘Henry …’
I kiss him because I can’t not for another second. He kisses me back like I’m air.
He shudders under my hands. Gasps into my mouth. Push-pulls at me until I loop one arm around the back of his neck.
A memory flashes through my head: Rodin’s statue at a museum I went to with Dad. The figures’ arms wrapped around each other with such easy possessive grace that I was jealous, just for a second. Like they’d stood together that way a thousand times, one-person tight. Like they’d never stop.
When we do eventually sleep, he snores as soon as his head hits the pillow.
I’m rigid at first, stretched out on top of the covers in his room. It’s been years since we’ve slept next to each other.
It feels strange. Nice. Strangely nice. His skin is hot and vital, and the rise and fall of his chest is the only sound in the room.
After a while I grip my fingers around his softly, watching that his face is still smooth in sleep. They’re pianist elegant where mine are all nails bitten down to the quick. I want to thread them through at the knuckles to see if our hands fit, but my eyes shutter closed.
15
How to maybe-date your best friend: don’t.
Kidding. Kind of. But usually (from what I’ve seen, anyway) this part is the requisite getting-to-know-you phase. Coffees and questions about where you both grew up, your neuroses with your parents, bosom dreams etc.
We skip that altogether, given there’s no mystery there. There is a lot of coffee, but beyond that we head straight for the next level. All of the levels.
There’s hours at his house, pushed up against each other in front of the TV. Holding hands in my room. And the kissing – that’s probably the strangest thing.
I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop, for it to transition into something more like what I expected kissing would be (sedate, the way elderly couples in films do it), but it’s never not good.
The touching is taking some serious getting used to – I’m jittery, stiff. There’s normal touching with other people, and then there’s … feely stuff. But once it’s happening, it’s also a bit like a part of me’s been waiting to feel this way: ripped-apart good. To be made out with like that scene in The Notebook on performance enhancers.
We do ordinary stuff too – I mean, we’re not animals. I sit at the café and watch him work. Text him dumb things. Stay up too late at his house playing PlayStation. But it’s always there in the background: a living thing.
I’m definitely not thinking about feelings touching kissing when I drag him to family brunch, holiday edition, at Gran and Marigold’s in New Farm on Tuesday afternoon. Definitely not hyper-aware of his arm next to mine the whole drive there.
‘My beautiful boys!’ Gran coos when we walk in, hugging us both so hard our heads smack together. Without warning, she thrusts a worn paperback at me.
‘What’s this?’
‘Rilke!’ she says.
‘Who?’
Gran recites something in German, of which I only catch the word ‘blood’. ‘He’s prolific, Hen. Honestly. Sometimes I despair of you.’
I read the cover. It’s in German.
‘You realise I sucked at German, right? And French.’
‘You were all right in French, weren’t you?’
‘No. I told the examiner je suis douze les chats.’
Len snorts softly.
‘Well, there’s an English translation in the back!’ Gran snaps. ‘I want you to pick a quote for me. For your reading at the wedding.’ She grabs me by the book-hand and whispers in my ear, ‘Might help you sort your non-existent love life.’
‘Let him go,’ Mum says. ‘He’s been through enough this term.’
Gran does as she’s told, releasing me only to grasp Len by the hand. ‘And Lennon! I’ve been meaning to talk to you, actually.’
I stare at her. ‘Why?’
She ignores me, and beckons Marigold over. ‘Speaking of the wedding, we have something important to ask you, but I wanted to do it in person.’
Len sucks his teeth, looking between them. ‘Okay.’
Gran clasps her hands together under her chin. ‘I’ve been looking through all these wedding picture people, and they’re just crap, darling. We want it to be someone we know, someone good. We want you to do it. Will you? Please?’
Len looks thoroughly taken aback for a minute.
‘If you’d like to, of course,’ Goldie qualifies.
‘I … Yeah. I could do that.’
‘Wonderful! Then it’s settled.’ Gran beams and kisses him on the cheek before disappearing into the kitchen where Mum’s sorting out lunch.
‘You don’t have to—’ I start when she’s gone.
He smiles and holds up an ‘it’s fine’ hand. I want to say more, but then Ham drags him into the backyard.
‘How are you, Henry?’ Marigold asks me suddenly, handing me a glass of red wine.
Gran doesn’t have anything remotely resembling a romantic pattern. My sketchy memories of Pa are that he was stoic and sturdy. Goldie is an ethereal, fairytale type, with her big honey-dyed hair and magnified glasses. Her conversation starters are always sudden, like she was in another realm before focusing on you.
‘Uh, good.’ I say, shrinking back from her penetrating gaze.
‘This is your last year?’
‘It is, yeah. We just finished the big exams.’
She peers at me over the top of her drink, in full retired-psychologist mode. I’m wearing my heaviest gold-rimmed glasses; hopefully they conceal the Len-thoughts behind them.
‘You’re handling everything else okay? Growing pains can be tough.’
‘Um. Handling it pretty well, I think,’ I blatantly lie.
She squeezes my shoulder; the brass rings on her fingers press into my skin. ‘It’s all relative, you know,’ she says in her soft voice. ‘I dropped out of school when I was fourteen; my brother went straight to university, and then he dropped out of that. Now he breeds horses. Don’t feel too pressured to have it all sorted right now.’
‘Er. Thanks, G,’ I say, awkwardly gripping the neck of my still-full red wine. ‘Will do.’
Dad brought a sketchpad with him and is idly tracing the outline of Len, Gran and Ham playing tiggy in the garden.
‘Reuben!’ Mum calls from the kitchen. ‘Come and try this. It’s nearly ready.’
‘What?’ Dad clatters through the sliding door, stamping his boots on the welcome mat.
‘Honestly.’ Mum holds out a slice of Gran’s vegetarian nut loaf. ‘Sometimes it’s like being the wife of a ghost.’
Dad wraps his arms around her waist. ‘A hot, cool, flexible ghost.’
Ham’s standing at the door covered in mud. ‘Ghosts? There are ghosts here?’
‘Now you’ve done it,’ Dad murmurs into Mum’s shoulder.
‘No, Hambam,’ Mum soothes. ‘It’s a saying.’
‘A séance?’ Ham screams, running off.
Mum looks exhausted.
‘I’ll get him,’ says Dad.
Gran watches all this with a faint line in the middle of her forehead. ‘Right. Billie, sit down. Goldie, pour her some wine. Boys, come and help finish lunch. This gravy is cement.’
/>
Len and I exchange a glance. It sparks, despite the five intrusive Hamlets.
‘Yes, chef.’
It sparks again on the drive home. All my skin goes sunburnt.
(His face doesn’t look like the one I’ve known basically my whole life. He looks how I feel: hungry.)
Mum and Dad make small talk I don’t hear, and carry a sleeping Ham inside.
‘Let’s go somewhere,’ Len says, clicking his keys.
The suburb’s sleepy around us, toffee-apple twilight almost completely silent. There’s atmosphere, so much that I think it might swallow me. I crack a window, just in case.
I don’t say anything when he drives us out further bush than the Reserve, pulling to a stop at the edge of what looks like a cricket pitch. I’m grateful for dusk’s cloaking purple, obscuring the fact that my face is the exact same colour.
He’s so … confident. The way he opens my door, leaning against the car, so I’m face to face with him when I step out. It makes me nervous. More nervous.
The field is iridescent green under the muted glow of old floodlights. He pulls me to the centre, then flops down onto his back. The stars are waking up, a sequined blanket thrown over our heads.
He holds out his hand to me.
‘Is it wet?’
‘Relax. I come here all the time.’
I hesitate, still squinting at the grass.
‘Hamlet,’ he says. ‘It won’t kill you to live a little.’ He closes his fingers around mine and pulls me down. I shift awkwardly for a bit until my head rests near his shoulder.
A car speeds by, lights washing the grass. It makes me jump, and I jerk my head away from his reflexively.
Len laughs, moving the earth underneath us. He finds my reactions to physical intimacy infinitely funny.
‘You said you come here?’ I ask to distract myself, settling back down.
He tips his head towards me. ‘Couple of times a week, since Mum.’
I feel my face go slack. He’s only ever talked like this a handful of times. The weight of it nearly makes me say, ‘it’s okay to miss her’, but then I stop, because who am I to tell him that, or anything.
He looks away from me and nods like I did say something.
A shape dances across the sky, a lightning-coloured thing that’s either astral or a metal tube carrying people to Europe.
Len pauses. ‘Looking up helps me think. Reminds me we’re all just tiny specks of nothing, and soon our petty problems will be puffs of dust.’
The words hang in the air for a moment, then sink down. We look at each other, and burst out laughing.
‘Deep,’ I compliment. ‘How long did it take you to come up with that one?’
He smiles easily, and leans in closer, so that my head’s pressed into the base of his neck.
I shiver. (From the cold. I’m not jumpy.)
‘Really, though. It’s like a pocket of calm in the sea of chaos.’ He moves his fingers until they’re wrapped around my wrist.
The sensation is so stark that I shut my eyes for a few seconds.
‘Is it always like this?’ I blurt out eventually.
Because it’s Len, he doesn’t need more context to know what I’m asking. He looks at me for a long time (it’s such a look), and says, ‘No. It’s not.’
I take a breath so big it hurts.
‘Do you bring all your conquests here, then?’ I ask, trying to lighten the mood.
‘Please. It’s my thinking place. Not my—’
‘Sticking place?’
He laughs again and it vibrates through both of us. I join in, even though nothing’s particularly funny. Everything feels hilarious all of a sudden, the whole blurry world a carnival. It must go to my head, because the next words to fall out of my mouth are, ‘I’m curious, though. Have you ever …?’
Heat immediately washes through me.
‘What – brought someone here?’ He wrinkles his nose. ‘Nah.’
I sit up more, steadying myself with a hand on his chest. Before I can wuss out, I push on. ‘No. I mean like, have you ever. As in, with …’
I know the answer, of course – he’s Len. NGS’s resident Don Juan, with a jar of hearts from every school in the area. Still, a tiny screaming part of me hopes he’ll deny it. Then maybe I could pretend we’re at least marginally in the same league.
‘Yeah,’ he says, unabashed. ‘I have.’
(Right.)
He looks at me, leaning back on his elbows. ‘It’s okay that you haven’t.’
I want to say something – a nonchalant remark, anything – but my tongue is stuck somewhere between my throat and the stars. I flop back down, more heat rushing to my face.
‘Okay,’ I repeat.
He squeezes my wrist once. ‘Yeah. It’s cool.’
I glower up into the backlit black. ‘It is far from cool.’
Len rolls onto his side, our faces almost touching. ‘You know, right?’
‘What?’
‘I don’t, like, expect anything.’
‘I … you … I wasn’t—’ I huff. (Why am I like this? This isn’t at all the suave exchange I hoped for.) ‘I mean, yes. I know.’
‘Good.’
I clear my throat. ‘Um. You can, though.’
‘What?’
‘I mean,’ I mumble. Swallow. ‘Like, obviously I have zero experience. Sub-zero. Sub-Saharan Africa, that’s how much of a dry spell my life has been. But—’
‘I know,’ he puts me out of my misery. ‘I was there.’
‘Right. Yes.’ I nod rapidly. ‘But like – you can. Expect things. If you … want.’
He smiles slow with mischief and runs a hand over my sternum. I wonder if he can feel the shattering beat in my chest. How, when he dips his head, I swear it’s like the sky pours down on me.
‘Noted.’
I wake up jittery-early the next morning and lie in bed for a bit, before I find myself jumping up and straddling the ledge outside my window while the sky wakes up.
It’s a dewy-wet climb onto the roof, but I manage to swing myself onto the flat bit with only one and a half near-death slips. Once I’m at the top, Brisbane spreads out ahead of me.
For spring, the city blooms fuzzy purple hope.
It’s corny, but jacaranda trees kind of fascinate me. How quickly they paint the tired face of the city. That they’re beautiful, and we don’t even notice, most of the time.
It happens gradually every year. A few pop up, then some more, until everywhere is ruptured colour while winter shakes its fist in the background.
I’m a little too soon in the game this morning, but there’s enough to stare out at while the sun rises. To trace the bright violet thread through houses and roads right up to the horizon.
I watch the light change colours, until it’s on me.
16
My first major hurdle as friend-turned-more is his birthday. The September date looms ahead of me, a question within a question. ‘Fraught’ is the word I would use.
Also: ‘fragile’.
(I’ve held him while he slept, practically clung to him, but … do I do the birthday?)
I finally have a brainwave a few days before: Ged’s parents’ holiday house. We talked about maybe going away together before the end of the holidays. If we all go for the weekend, it’s not me overstepping the mark.
I dial Ged’s landline.
‘Jess!?’ he answers hopefully, followed by, ‘Oh. It’s you.’
Our proceeding conversation unfolds approximately thus:
G: WHAT D’YOU WANT?
H: Len’s birthday.
G: Jess is gone.
H: I know, man. It sucks. Listen, though, remember when we were going to go up to the weekender for end of term?
G: Everything is m
eaningless.
H: Maybe we should go now. Double celebration. It might cheer you up.
G: Life sucks.
H: Is that a yes?
G: Life sucks, and then you—
H: Aw, come on—
G: DIE. Like I want to.
H: And I want to talk to you about it. At length. But first do you want to maybe ask your mum?
G: MUM, CAN WE GO TO THE MOUNTAINS FOR LEN’S BIRTHDAY IT’S THIS WEEKEND DEFINITELY NO ALCOHOL AND NO (dry sob) GIRLS.
…
G: She said yep.
H: Brilliant! So, Jess?
G: Whatever. I don’t really wanna talk about it.
Hurdle number two is Lacey, who blows back into town like a hurricane on birthday eve-eve.
We meet her at Scott’s Corner, smudge-eyed and carrying several garbage bags of luggage.
‘God,’ Len says, hugging her hard and regarding her outfit: a pilled blue jumper held up over threadbare jeans with a thick belt. ‘Did you do any washing while you were away?’
She kisses him on the cheek. ‘I have you for that.’
Len clicks the kettle on to boil.
‘Tell me everything,’ Lacey commands, perching on one of the white leather stools at the counter. ‘How’s the great and terrible year twelve coming along?’
‘No school talk,’ I beg. ‘I have PTSD. Tell us about you, out in the big smoke.’
She wrinkles her nose. ‘Well, firstly, nobody calls it that unless they’re ninety.’
I poke my tongue out at her.
‘Of course, the workload is kicking my arse. Lots of arguing about ethical dilemmas that end in tears.’
‘So you love it,’ I surmise.
‘Yeah. I really do.’
Len puts a peppermint tea in front of her.
‘I need espresso pronto.’
‘Told you,’ Len says. ‘You’re full Melbourne. You’ll be wearing all black and buying a $900k terrace house in a drugs district, next.’
Lacey rolls her eyes. ‘I’m actually not loving that part of things, to be honest. Very cold, gloomy, et cetera. I’m thinking of moving back at the end of the year if my credits transfer. Home is where the heart is, and all that jazz.’
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