Take Three Girls

by Cath Crowley

  It feels mildly creepy here, not quite safe. I feel a small pang of longing for the party Lola, Tash, Rupe and the others are at – dancing to Queen Bey with the girls, parent-funded booze, nice food of some sort. Here, I don’t even want to sit down – that orange sofa looks like it would have a liquid level somewhere not far beneath the surface.

  The wrecking vibe is warming up. Front sitting room walls have already been graffed: dicks and balls (why?), lots of tags. Two girls, each wielding cans in both hands, are creating some pro-looking tentacular sprouting around a window frame, the solvent smell mingling sickly with the weed and beer. The lighting is crime-chiaroscuro from a couple of portable film lights pointing up in two corners of the room.

  I head upstairs to keep exploring. This house is a tatty Florence Broadhurst-esque dreamscape – a delicious clash of time-travel furnishing. I wish I could have seen it in daylight.

  I open and close one door – humping; a second door – shooting up, eep; a third door – ah, just right – empty room. O, wallpaper, lit by the streetlights – a hot pink, black and white wicker-weave pattern. Be still, my hammering heart. It’s the real thing: Florence, and the perfect backdrop for my dress made from decommissioned Gram curtains – Marimekko: big black and yellow geometric daisies. I shine my phone torch around. This must have been a library or home office; it’s lined with shelves now empty except for junk. There are piles of magazines, a broken The Sims 2 box, a small blow heater with its plug cut off, and a shelf of phone books with the 2001 White Pages L–Z on top. I think about taking it home – it’s super-thin paper, good for papier-mâché . . . What am I – crafty craft kinder girl? No! Resist!

  I find the clearest stretch of wallpaper, lean back against it, and paste on an enigmatic smile suitable to the pattern clash. Arm out, flash click, check, edit, filter, post. I have eight likes as soon as I refresh. Thirty when I refresh again. And a message from Max: Are you where I am? I message back: idk – I’m having a wallpaper love-in upstairs – come join ☺

  Max comes through the door with a blast of party sound and a smile. We sit at opposite ends of the window seat, knees up, toes not quite touching.

  ‘Tell me these are not your friends,’ she says.

  ‘These are not my friends. It’s an unfortunate friends of friends of friend situation. Hey, I’m looking for a new school. How do you like MCA?’

  ‘I like it lots. It’s perfect for driven arts tragics. There’s no Wellness program, but there is ample wellness.’

  ‘St Hilda’s thinks it’s an antidote to online meanies.’

  ‘Kate said they posted about you. That sucks.’

  ‘I chose not to take it seriously. At least not in public. There’s no good way to deal with that stuff.’

  ‘When did everyone decide it was even a thing to be anonymous and evil?’

  ‘It only takes a couple of people – and it’s like everyone is waiting, ready to follow the mean lead. It’s easy to set up a new site if one gets shut down. It’s like Whac-A-Mole. You don’t have stuff like that at your school?’

  Max shakes her head. ‘People would think it was too – nasty. Uncool. We get a lot of private school rejects. Not looking for any trouble. Recovering from trouble.’ She gives my foot a gentle nudge. ‘So, Kate’s been telling me about her perfect day assignment – it was writing music and performing it. What’s yours?’

  ‘I don’t know – playing with fabrics, dreaming up clothes that don’t look like other stuff. What about you?’

  Stu’s band is starting up again and we mirror grimace.

  ‘Oh, I’ve got a thousand perfect days. They all involve books and movies and music,’ Max says, trying to compete with the band’s volume.

  ‘I can hardly hear you.’

  ‘We don’t have to talk.’

  She swings her feet to the floor, tilts her face towards me, and checks with a look that she can keep going. My smile says yes, and, right here in the pull and glow of our kiss, I find the heart of the party.

  Later, just before some idiot threw empty spray-paint cans into the fire, just before they exploded and caused a fireball that ignited the old cypress hedge in a burning whoosh, just before we made our escape, laughing, and feeling lucky we hadn’t been standing on the other side of the fire, just before all that, I saw Stu standing under the lilly pilly tree, kissing a black-haired girl, his hand down the front of her jeans.

  Lying in bed, too hyped to sleep, I see it clearly, looping like a scene from a film. I’m worried about how to tell Clem and don’t come up with a single good way to do it. She looked so happy coming home on the tram. I don’t want to break that.

  Text from Tash: We’re all going to escalatorrrr, COME TOOOOOOO, YOU LAZY WENCH xxx

  I put my sound-of-rain app on and go to sleep thinking about kissing Max, and when I can kiss her again.

  Sunday 21 August

  Oliver’s dad cooks us breakfast in the morning. He hums at the stove, making scrambled eggs and toast. The kitchen reminds me of the one back at the farm. It’s used. Garlic and lemons on the bench. Herbs on the sill. The dog (called Inca) licks my hand and begs for bacon that I’m allowed to give him, but only after we’ve finished eating.

  Oliver walks me home. I’m thinking about waking next to him and the feel of sleepy kisses. I’m thinking about going to Iceland and all the new things that I’ll learn. ‘We’re close,’ I say. ‘We’ll practise every day next week until the long weekend?’ I ask, and he confirms that we will.

  ‘And then on the fourth we will blow them all away,’ I tell him.

  ‘The third,’ Oliver says. ‘The audition is on Saturday the third at ten am.’

  ‘You mean the fourth.’

  ‘Are you messing with me?’ he asks, smiling and putting a piece of hair behind my ear.

  ‘Yes.’ No. Shit.

  ‘Show me your calendar,’ he says.

  ‘Oliver.’

  ‘I know I’m being crazy, but I just want to make sure you have the right date and time.’

  ‘I have the right date and time. Nothing will stop me being there.’

  ‘Nothing,’ he says, with absolute faith in me. ‘And we’ll win.’

  This is problematic but not unsolvable. Surely I can take the scholarship exam at another time?

  When I get back to the boarding house the first thing I do is knock on Old Joy’s door.

  ‘Come in,’ she says, and waves for me to take a seat. ‘What’s up?’

  I fill her in on my problem. ‘It’s an audition for Iceland,’ I say. ‘So I have to be there. But I have to take the scholarship exam, too.’

  She actually looks sympathetic. ‘Kate, girls all over the state take the exam. They can’t move the date for one person.’

  ‘But I could take it early?’

  Even as I say it, I know it’s impossible.

  ‘Why do I have to choose?’ I ask. ‘Why can’t I be a musician and a doctor?’

  ‘You can,’ she says, not understanding, but understanding enough.

  ‘But now I have to choose and my life will go in either one direction or the other.’

  ‘Bit dramatic,’ she says.

  But that’s how it feels. ‘I want to be everything,’ I say. ‘Everything I want.’

  ‘And you can be,’ she says. ‘But at this particular moment in life, you have to choose. One way or the other. You can always go to Iceland next year.’

  She starts shuffling papers and looks towards the door, so I leave but I can’t find the energy to walk any further than the seats outside her office. I need to make a decision before I go back to my room, before I see Iris. Because as annoying as she is, she talks sense and she’s certain about things. Her certainty will infect me. I flick through my phone, look at the calendar again. How could I have been so stupid?

  But I was that stupid.

  So now I have to decide.

  And I have to decide soon, so Oliver can get someone else.

  But he can’t get someone els
e. It’s too late for him to get someone else.

  He got me.

  And I’m about to fuck him over.

  I’m possibly about to fuck him over.

  Or I’m about to fuck over my parents.

  And fuck me over, the old Kate says. Because if I don’t take the exam, I go back to the country next year.

  If I don’t audition for Iceland next year, I won’t ever go to the Harpa International Music Academy. And I won’t audition next year. I might tell myself that I will, so I feel better now, but I won’t. I’ll get the St Hilda’s scholarship, I’ll study maths and science, and I’ll take that path. If I go to the audition and succeed, then that’s a whole other life. Maybe one is just as good as the other. Maybe it isn’t.

  Old Joy walks out of her office and sees me still sitting here.

  ‘Why don’t you decide what you want, Kate?’ she says. ‘You’re a smart person.’

  I feel pretty dumb today.

  I walk into our room and find Iris sitting on my bed, staring at the door.

  ‘Where were you last night?’

  ‘With Oliver. I had a pass.’

  ‘Not to stay at Oliver’s.’

  ‘To stay at Ady’s. Clem had a party. We went straight there from detention.’

  ‘So you’re her friend now,’ she says.

  I know Clem’s awful to Iris sometimes, but she’s not awful to me. ‘I think it’s a sister thing,’ I say to her. ‘But I can be friends with both of you.’

  ‘You’ll find out the hard way what she’s like,’ Iris says. ‘Don’t say I didn’t warn you.’

  I sit next to her. I’m tired, and now I have to figure out what to do about Oliver. Iris will find out anyway, so I don’t bother hiding from her what’s happened.

  ‘You can’t audition,’ she says without hesitation like I knew she would. ‘You can’t throw away your future for a guy.’

  ‘It’s not about Oliver. It’s about Iceland, and all the places that leads.’ It’s about who I want to be.

  ‘No scholarship, no St Hilda’s.’

  I hate that the choices about my future can be reduced to that clipped sentence. Futures need long sentences, with lots of parentheses (maybe you might change your mind), go this way (but don’t worry, you can come back), try this for a while (see where it takes you).

  ‘Why are you so judgemental?’

  ‘You asked for my opinion,’ she says angrily, which is a fair point.

  ‘Can I still come to the farm?’ she asks, after we’ve been sitting in silence for a while.

  I try not to think about how Ady and Iris will clash. ‘Of course,’ I tell her.

  I walk to the Organic Grocers later in the afternoon. Ady’s agreed to meet me. She’s sympathetic when I tell her about my problem, but she doesn’t have an answer. I don’t need her to have one. I just need to tell someone who’ll understand how much life sucks sometimes.

  ‘This I can do,’ she says, and then leans back. ‘If I knew something about someone you’d kissed – scrap that, someone you’d had sex with – something like he’d kissed someone else, would you want to know?’

  ‘Oliver kissed someone else?’

  ‘You and Oliver had sex?’

  ‘Who are you talking about?’

  ‘Stu,’ she says. ‘I saw him and a girl. I don’t know whether to tell Clem.’

  ‘You should tell,’ I say immediately. ‘Especially if they’ve had sex.’ I pick some seeds off the crust of my toast. ‘How do you know they’ve had sex?’

  ‘Some things you know.’

  ‘Oliver and I didn’t have sex. We kissed. A lot.’

  ‘I know,’ she says.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘There’s a hue about you,’ she says, waving in the general direction of my face.

  She puts on her coat. ‘I have to tell Clem.’

  I ask if she wants me to come with.

  ‘I think one on one is better for this,’ she says. ‘But thanks.’

  Sunday 21 August

  When Tash arrives at ten to eleven, my mother is in the front garden pruning the quince tree. Charlie is helping, stacking offcuts.

  ‘That looks like a job for Robert, Jen.’

  My mother looks at Tash, then looks at me, and I could swear she’s deliberately trying to scare Tash off. ‘No more Robert. No more Marion. This is the era of austerity at 22 River Place, Hawthorn, Tash. At least until I get a job.’

  The bemused look Charlie gives me reminds me so much of our father that I get a lump in my throat.

  Tash’s eyes are gossip saucers. She looks at me with pity and loathing, the only response she knows to a ‘coming down in the world’ story. The pity component is a down payment on friendship retention in the event that we pick ourselves up again.

  My mother lops off a branch that I’m pretty sure Robert would have left on. Farewell sweet-smelling, fuzzed quinces who will never germinate, grow to maturity and sit in the large blue-and-white bowl making the sitting room smell mysteriously pretty.

  No more Marion? Are the bathrooms going to clean themselves? My heart sinks. Noooo. I’m too young to clean bathrooms. Or too old to start. Or neither. I just don’t want to do it.

  Red Hot Chili Peppers is filtering into the garden. My mother is singing along, grimly, to ‘Scar Tissue’. This is her ‘I had a life before I had children, you know’ music. It’s also her ‘forty-something lawyers are cool, too’ music. Maybe it’s ‘I managed to use cocaine and let it go, but it got its claws into my husband good and proper’ music, as well. Who knows what’s going on in there?

  Tash is texting most of the way as we walk the six minutes to Figgy’s, but I’m just happy not to be getting twenty questions about why I said what I said in class, or about the economy drive at home, so I don’t even ask who she’s talking to.

  At the back table in Figgy’s, sitting with my bestie – who looked like she despised me just ten minutes ago – I’m knitting a birdie cardigan sleeve as though it’s just any other day, when Lola and Bec arrive together.

  Tash jumps up and walks over to the door to meet them. Why? Advance party to let them know we can’t afford a gardener or a cleaner anymore?

  I’ve just worked out how to make little slits in the sleeves – mid-row casting off seven stitches and then continuing on – so I can sew in fabric petals to form wings running from the shoulders to the elbow. It’s not the sort of thing you’d wear very often. Oooh, plan: I’ll wear it a couple of times, label it, and put it out in the world to be shared. Share-wear-ware. It feels like it fits in with Malik-world, but I’m not sure exactly how.

  They all say at the same time what a great night I missed at Escalator. A round of giggles and smirks loops and repeats as they settle and sit.

  ‘Well, spill,’ I say. ‘Something juicy obviously happened.’

  Tash says, ‘Let’s order first; my hangover needs food.’

  We have the usual. Me: breakfast burrito; Tash: the hotcakes that she’ll half finish; Lola: avocado, haloumi and heirloom tomatoes on sourdough, with a side of spinach; Bec: fruit salad that she’ll devour, following which, still hungry, she’ll finish Tash’s hotcakes. The others each order freshly squeezed orange juice, eight bucks a pop. I’ll have to ask if we can pay for what we order rather than split the bill. Coffee plus burrito plus two-buck tip will clean me out.

  ‘What are you wearing, hon?’ asks Tash, as though she’s only just noticed my clothes. My mother has enough odd designer clothes that Tash has to check before she knows if she should praise or condemn, just in case I’ve borrowed something expensive. It’s not so bad. Almost the entire world relies on other people’s opinions to tell them what to think.

  I’m wearing a new ensemble made from the Gram upholstery fabric treasure-trove. It has completely different fabric front and back. An exaggerated onesie shape, like a paper doll, three-quarter sleeves and leg length.

  I put birdie down, stand up arms out to the side facing them, and then turn th
e other way before I sit back down, smiling. ‘It’s called, now you see me: escape-wear for parties.’

  Tash looks at Bec, eyebrows up.

  Bec responds. ‘Since when do you give your clothes titles?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ I don’t want to say: Since I started thinking they’re my art. I start knitting again, and shrug. Since why the fuck not? ‘Since birdie, I guess. But there are lots more in my head with titles.’ It gives me a spurt of happiness, even with the family shit happening, even with PSST horrors, to think of all the things yet to be made.

  ‘You know, you look –’ Lola starts. They look at each other, as if three-way glances zipping back and forth above ricotta hotcakes and blueberries will come up with the right party line – or as though they’ve had the conversation already, without me. ‘Okay, Ady, we’ve been noticing lately . . . you’ve gone from being a bit arty, and kind of cool, to looking –’

  ‘Peculiar,’ finishes Tash. ‘As though we’re not even the same species anymore.’ She laughs lightly, not unkindly. I know this laugh. This laugh lets you get away with saying the nasty stuff because you’re sort of kidding. I use this laugh myself, regularly.

  Looking down at my cardigan sleeve in progress as though it might be diseased, Tash raises an index finger to the passing waiter, and checks with us. ‘More coffee?’

  I think of the austerity drive. ‘Not for me, I’ve only got a twenty.’

  Tash looks impatient. ‘I’ll get it for you.’

  Bec makes sympathy eye contact with me. ‘No, I don’t want another coffee either.’

  ‘Just two more skinny lattes,’ Tash says, as though Bec and I are being difficult.

  ‘Thanks,’ I add to the girl taking our order. My family might be kaput, and my clothes might be too much for some people, and half the world might think I’m a fan of anal intercourse, but at least I say thank you to the person waiting my table.

  ‘So, too bad you couldn’t come last night,’ says Lola.

  ‘I got social outing number two crossed off the Malik list, so that was good,’ I say, smiling, remembering the party, remembering Max and wondering how Max and my friends would get on. Not quite seeing it.