by Laura Elvery
I run. The sky lightens. The sun rises above Joiner Bay, which is shaped like an embrace, with two arms of rocky hills reaching into the water. The flowers on the trees are white and pink and yellow. There aren’t many houses out here. Set back from the road is the caravan park with a post box and a telephone booth out the front, and a fibreglass pool with a waterslide that gets jammed with kids during summer.
After Robbie killed himself in our shed, Dad said, ‘Isn’t it strange, Jake, that he brought that cord with him?’ Dad likes having a mate to talk to, and that’s usually me, and he always says exactly what’s on his mind.
I’d already thought about the cord. ‘Maybe he didn’t think we had one in there.’
‘We don’t,’ Dad said.
‘He must have known.’
At least one night a week Robbie came over to chat with Dad and me while we exercised. He wandered around, inspecting the equipment, cradling dumbbells. He knew we had a rowing machine and a bench press and a whole range of beams to choose from, painted dark green. Now, when people at school talk about caring for each other and about preventative measures, they’re not talking about having no beams, or no access to cords. Every single person in Lusk has a theory about why Robbie killed himself. Theories they’ve hunkered down with and won’t let go of. They’ve all used their imaginations very hard, sipping smoothies in the cafe in town and sharing their imaginations with someone else. They’ve locked the front door at night and sat at the kitchen table, bobbing a tea bag up and down in a thinking way.
I stop for water at the fountain and rinse it through my mouth, spitting it onto the road. I still haven’t seen anybody on foot in town this morning, only a few utes and delivery trucks. I pause the Strava so my time is still good, and I think about Robbie. He was short. He had bad breath. He liked watching Formula One racing and soccer on TV. He went to church. He had two younger sisters he spoilt with those glittery kid magazines from the supermarket. Robbie liked that I was nice to the twins and he made me promise I’d help them when they got to high school. The week before it all happened, he followed me around the library at the end of lunch, bored, slipping books out and putting them back spine-in. He found a hardcover about celebrities who died young and he kept on coming back to the shelf to read it. He showed it to me. I think I thought it was funny.
Lusk is hot. Even in May. Even at five in the morning. I press restart on my phone and spring from the balls of my feet towards the hill that will take me to the water. Years ago, Robbie and I sat on the sand at Joiner Bay for pretty much the whole month of January to watch a movie being filmed on the peninsula. They’d built a pirate ship with sails and cannons and a mermaid on the front. We ate fish and chips and mucked around in the water. Robbie reckoned we should swim out to spy on the actors, but we never did.
And where was I when Robbie fished out the spare key from the drainpipe and entered the shed? Where was Dad? We’d gone for a sunset run, on our other regular route, in the opposite direction, past the war memorial and out to Opal Bay. Dad promised me ten dollars for a PB. We came home through the front door, and I took off my sneakers and T-shirt and Dad passed me a water bottle. He did some high knee-jumps on the tiles. He stretched out his hip flexors and tossed me the TV remote from under the couch. I watched a bunch of things – about how to catch black bream with river prawns, about how much a three-hundred-year-old jade pendant is worth, about athletes who almost died when they took steroids in the eighties.
We ate dinner. I folded the ten-dollar note into the envelope in my desk drawer and went to bed. While I was asleep, Dad went out to the shed to use the rowing machine. He found Robbie and made the phone calls and stayed up all night. When I woke up, I saw Dad crouched beside my bed, wet from the shower. My muscles were tender after a dreamless sleep.
He said, ‘Mate.’
My first thought was that he’d injured himself. Still sleepy, I leant over to check his legs.
‘My little mate.’
Robbie was heavy, Dad said. Heavy and peaceful. That last bit Dad made up, as if I didn’t have the imagination to know what happens when your neck breaks and you suffocate in the dingy light outside your best friend’s house. Robbie’s trouble was with his church, someone said. His trouble was with a new girl from school. A clutch of older boys. His trouble was with his father, always distant and gloomy, who seemed to rally himself better after Robbie’s death than he ever had before.
On the footpath winding up the hill, I dodge dozens of jackfruit that have split open. They are fat, fluorescent, mammalian. I see and hear the ocean. I try to steady my breath in through my nose and out my mouth. The coal port out on the water is more solid than a simple idea. It’s an unshelved book, harbouring secrets. What’s to stop me right now from running into the ocean? Endorphins, according to Dad. The shed is empty now and we don’t go in there but endorphins will protect us both.
I reach the halfway point at one of the outcrops overlooking the bay. I press pause and reach for my toes. My theory about what stopped Robbie from doing it at his own house were his sisters: cross-legged on the floor of the bedroom they shared, peeling stickers from the magazines and placing them like medallions down their legs. That’s all I’ve come up with – he didn’t leave a note. Back at school after the funeral, I checked the library shelves for spine-in books, thinking maybe Robbie was into clues and secrets, even though he’d never talked about clues and secrets with me. I turned a corner and saw Mr Rigby standing in the 200s. He held a stack of books. They looked like props.
‘You need anything?’ he asked.
‘I’m right, thanks.’ I didn’t want to lose track of the shelves I’d checked.
‘You still go running?’ Mr Rigby asked. A couple of students wriggled past us down the aisle, heading for the beanbags.
‘Yeah.’ I thought he was going to tell me to be careful.
He said, ‘I went to church with Robbie and his family.’
I held my breath.
Mr Rigby nodded. He tapped a finger against one of the books in his hand. ‘Here.’
The book was called Striding with a Singular Heart. On its cover, a silhouetted woman in running shorts sped towards a marbled mountain.
‘Be careful with that dust jacket. It’s old.’
I’m jogging down the hill, breathing deeply, holding myself upright, and Robbie makes his way into my mind, where he hangs like a teardrop. A watery breeze picks up the smell of the ocean. The endorphins are setting in and I start the timer again. I shake the blunt, numb ends of my fingers. The book Mr Rigby lent me said that some people think running is like praying. It isn’t difficult to turn running into praying, or to turn disbelief into faith. It isn’t difficult to turn sadness or confusion into the slim white nerve of a cord looped and fixed around a beam.
Orbit
Dad used to tell me that if our dog, Kato, ever got into a fight with the Doberman down the street, I should never under any circumstances step in and try to break it up. He made me promise that I would run away, because Dad said even though Kato loved me, if I got between them, they would rip me up. Dogs were dogs and, in the middle of a fight, Kato would forget who I was.
Nowadays my best friend is Krystal, but this morning we were running late and Miss Chester wouldn’t let us be excursion buddies. She said, ‘Oh, honestly, girls. It won’t kill you to go with someone else. You’re not getting married.’
As we cross the road, Miss Chester tells us to find our buddies and hold their hand. Matthew looks across at me and hovers his hand near mine, and I don’t want to touch him either. Behind me, Krystal is stuck with Samir, who always does his school work, but never says boo to anyone because he doesn’t speak the language.
Miss Chester doesn’t want children. Not ever. Krystal asked her two weeks ago when we found out that Mrs Romano the Music teacher was pregnant and hadn’t just been wearing all those flowy dresses for fun.
‘Aren’t you supposed to compromise when you love someone?’ Nate said.
She turned her back on stupid Nate to write on the board and said, ‘Yes. But not like that.’
In the middle of our excursion to the Orbit, Mr Chester shows up. I don’t know it’s him at first – I think it’s just a man in an Arsenal jersey who lives in Stratford. But then Miss Chester says, ‘Russell?’ and her face looks like the time our headteacher, Mr Walcott, burst into the classroom when we were making lots of noise because the DVD player wouldn’t work. And I remember that her boyfriend’s name is Russell.
‘Russell. What are you doing here?’
He lifts himself off the park bench beneath the Orbit. He walks through the lines we’ve made with our excursion buddies – just ploughs on through, as though he doesn’t even see us in our fluoro vests – and stamps right over to Miss Chester. I wait for him to give her a big kiss but instead he yanks her arm behind her back and she says his name again and she topples to the ground.
*
Mum says they shouldn’t waste millions of pounds on things like the Orbit, and that politicians shouldn’t be allowed to do whatever they want with everyone’s money when loads of people are starving in Africa and even in the north of England. Now that the Olympics are over, she’s sure nobody will want to go to Stratford for fun, and what are they going to do with that big empty stadium? When I’m older, I’m not going to pay any tax except to buy computers for schools and hospital equipment for babies and food for animal rescue centres.
But I wanted to go on the excursion, so last week I asked Dad to sign the letter during an advert break for Fifth Gear.
‘What’s this, then?’ he said, reaching for his glasses.
‘Miss Chester’s taking us to the Orbit.’
He shifted around in his recliner and the cat fell from his thighs. He skimmed the paper. ‘That thing …’ he said and I thought it was going to be exactly the same as what Mum said and I wondered if adults only marry people who agree with them. ‘It’s quite interesting, isn’t it? Like someone’s had a bit of fun with Meccano.’
‘Mum doesn’t like it.’
‘Hmm,’ he said.
‘Can I go?’
He put his left hand under the paper to make a table, and wrote his signature on the bottom of Miss Chester’s letter, the ‘P’ from Paul looking like a pregnant lady who’s about to pop. By then Fifth Gear was back on, and he’d already taken the glasses from his face, and Milly was stalking her claws back onto his thighs.
At the Tube station this morning, Catie forgot her Oyster card and Miss Chester was furious because she told us that she wouldn’t be responsible if anyone came unprepared. But Miss Chester had no choice, and paid for Catie’s ticket, but she’s going to stay with her till her mother picks her up this afternoon so she can be reimbursed.
The Orbit has a long name that is the name of the man who built it. But everyone just calls it the Orbit, even Mayor Boris Johnson, who’s very keen on it and seems to want everyone else to like it too. On the video we watch on the bus, Boris is wearing bright yellow: just like the letter home said, we have to wear fluoro vests and hard hats in case bits of steel fall on our heads. Krystal’s vest is too big for her, and mine smells.
Our tour guide is a man called Eric who looks like he’s just come from an action film. His hair is cut spiky, even though it’s grey and he must be as old as my dad. He says he’s delighted to see us. Excursions always start like this, but by the end Eric will be rubbing his forehead and telling Miss Chester that he doesn’t know how she does it, day in day out, haha.
‘Now,’ Eric says. ‘Has anyone seen two thousand tonnes of steel before?’
Samir puts up his hand, which means Jordan does too.
‘Well, boys, you probably think you have, but not like this.’
Eric asks Miss Chester to go first: what does the Orbit remind her of?
‘I think it looks like a rollercoaster.’
Krystal whacks me with the back of her hand because that’s what she said when we got here.
Eric nods and says, ‘Yep. A lot of people say that. Anyone else? There are no wrong answers. It’s art.’
‘Maybe some chains?’ Madison says, putting her hand up at the end of her sentence so our teacher won’t yell.
‘A musical instrument,’ says Jordan. ‘But from the future.’
Matthew says, ‘Like an alien spreading DNA over its host.’
‘A rocket,’ says one of the Smith twins.
‘A rocket, hey?’ Eric smiles and frowns at the same time. He stands back and shades his eyes to look up at the steel. ‘Pretty weird rocket. But yeah, I suppose. Could be.’
After we’ve been to the observation deck at the top, and Krystal and I can’t find anywhere to carve our names, and the view of the stadium is okay but also a bit boring because you can look at it on Google, Miss Chester says it’s time to go and we take the lift to the bottom and we burst out into the sunshine.
‘Find your buddies for lunch,’ she says.
Krystal forgets the bit about Samir being her buddy and she crash-tackles me with a hug. Krystal’s cousin’s girlfriend was a dancer in the Olympic opening ceremony. She didn’t get paid anything, but she got to keep her costume and go to heaps of secret rehearsals. Mum and I watched the ceremony until I fell asleep, but they showed all the best bits on telly for weeks. At one point, enormous pipes came up from the ground and that was the Industrial Revolution. It was way better than the opening ceremony Miss Chester showed us after Mr Walcott had words with her and went back to his office and she finally got the DVD player to work. Three afternoons a week, Miss Chester puts on movies because it’s good for those of us who are visual learners, and also sometimes she needs a rest. We’ve been watching old Olympic Games because that’s our theme for the term. During the movies, Miss Chester sits up the back and stares out the window with her fingers on her lips.
*
I’m thinking maybe the man in the red jersey lives in Stratford because he’s sitting on a bench, while everyone else is wandering around and taking photos and drinking from water bottles. People can only come to the Orbit for a few months before they close it again. We’re lucky to be here.
‘Russell,’ Miss Chester says as he walks towards her. Russell wants to have children, but he won’t be bloody having them with her. Russell doesn’t look like someone’s dad. He’s younger than Miss Chester, and skinny and tall.
‘What are you doing here?’ she says.
At first I wonder if Russell is meeting us for lunch, which could be interesting. Nate and Lewis will hassle him about Arsenal and why he doesn’t go for West Ham. Maybe with her boyfriend around we’ll see Miss Chester smile. Maybe Russell will buy everyone a Coke.
He takes Miss Chester’s arm and yanks it so it bends around her back. ‘What’s this I fucking hear about you and Joel Price? Don’t fucking lie to me.’
Next to Krystal, Samir seems to understand every word and his mouth opens and shuts over and over.
‘Russell,’ Miss Chester says and he steps into her so that even though he’s skinny and she isn’t, she stumbles and lands on her back. Above her, Russell lets go of her arm, but he doesn’t help her up. Now he takes hold of her face and yells her name, once, twice, and he can’t stop.
‘Joanne, you’re a fucking liar and I always knew you were.’
‘What are you talking about? Get off me!’
Nate tiptoes towards our teacher on the ground, her skirt bunched up around her thighs and her top undone at the bottom.
‘Miss?’ Nate says.
Krystal’s fingers bite into the skin on my arm.
*
We catch the Tube. We meet the tour bus. We are given safety vests and hats. Lewis doesn’t want to wear his and Miss Chester tells him he doesn’t have a choice. Wearing them is non-negotiable and Lewis will have to catch the Tube all the way back to school on his own and explain to Mr Walcott why he’s back so early. So Lewis puts his vest on, but doesn’t do it up like you’re supposed to and he tosses the hard hat in his hands. Miss Chester shakes her head but she must decide that Lewis isn’t worth the trouble because she leaves him alone.
We climb some stairs. We take the lift. We dance around in front of the huge mirror that makes my face and body go lumpy and fat and then watery and skinny until it could be anyone’s face and body. Eric shows Catie how to look for Boris Johnson hidden in a map of the park. Eric answers my question about how much the Orbit cost. He tells Nate not to run. He reminds him that there are other people who are interested in the Orbit too, children younger than we are, and a woman with a pram and an old couple who hold on to each other and keep their hard hats on the whole time.
When Russell pushes Miss Chester to the ground, she isn’t wearing a hard hat because we had to leave them inside. She falls on her back first, then her head hits the ground and that’s what makes the sound: a thump like food falling from a table. A Christmas turkey maybe. After Russell yells in her face about being a fucking liar, he seems to be waiting for Nate to go away, and waiting for Miss Chester to say something. I want her to scream back at him. Maybe she doesn’t even know who Joel Price is.