The Best Thing

by Margo Lanagan

  I managed to stop myself before I named Brenner. I managed to not say a few things when she turned on me and asked. I stopped and sat perfectly still, biting my lips closed.

  Then suddenly she remembered she had to go home ‘to help her mum’. And as she was going I said ‘This is just between us, right, Lisa?’ as fiercely as I could, but it was too late. ‘Sure,’ she said, and looked away. She was already freezing over. ‘See you later.’

  Yeah well, see you later, but we haven’t spoken to each other since. I thought it’d die down over Christmas, but this year is worse than ever. The looks I get! That awful feeling when anyone who finds themselves near you immediately starts inching away. It’s foul! I keep my head down and work, trying to focus my panicking brain, come home, collapse on the bed, and when I wake up do homework, watch TV, try not to think about the next day unless the next day’s Saturday or Sunday. Weekend memories keep me strong for the first couple of days before desperation for the next weekend takes over. Sometimes on a Friday I think I’m really going to crack up. There’s a really wild feeling at our school on Friday—everybody’s stirred up and practically partying already. Fridays I can’t tell whether people are going to leave me alone or come on extra strong to counteract their boredom. I mean, Mondays I know Brenner’ll be in a foul mood and Lisa’ll be hung over and Donna freezer-faced and powermongery, but Fridays I just can’t tell. All day I have to watch my back, and when I get home … the relief, the freedom—it’s dizzying.

  We went to the clinic, Mum and I. Outside, after the counselling, a clutch of people flaunted aborted-foetus placards. One caught my eye and mourned, ’Don’t kill your baby!’

  ‘Take no notice,’ Mum said when we got out of earshot. ‘A person’s entitled to a choice.’

  I thought about the person inside me, who next week wouldn’t even exist. No, not person. Not baby. Growth, to be excised, like a fibroid. Humungous anxiety, to be removed. Or so I thought, before I’d opened the bomb bay.

  I jig school at lunchtime to go to Pug’s. It’s too easy; I just wait until the teacher on yard duty’s up the other end and walk out. I’m trembling with my own daring, ducking home to change. I’m just so sure someone will see me and ask where I’m going, and dob me in to Mum and Dad. But I make it over there okay. Pug is out, but one of the other guys, Joe, lets me in. I go upstairs, lie on Pug’s bed and wait.

  When he gets back he looks at me all cold and alien from training. ‘What’s happened?’

  I don’t mean to whisper, but that’s how it comes out. ‘Nothing.’ Then I try again and say in a proper voice, ‘Nothing’s happened.’

  He sits down next to me. ‘You don’t look too good.’

  ‘It’s the light through the leaves. All green.’

  ‘No, sad, not sick. What’s eatin’ ya?’ He takes my hands.

  And I just go to pieces. Him saying ‘sad’ is what does it. Yes, I am sad; yes, something is eating me. God knows what—everything! I cry and lie and say it’s all the sneaking around.

  ‘But do you really have to be sneaky?’ says Pug, lying down next to me. ‘I mean, we’re goin’ together, aren’t we? Are we?’

  ‘I guess … I guess we are.’ It’s the first time I’ve actually said it.

  ‘I’m not seeing any other girl. Haven’t since a while before I met you; you know all about that. And you’re not sneakin’ round behind some other bloke’s back, or anything. It’s just your parents.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Well, you could tell your parents.’

  Sure I could. You’d be delighted, wouldn’t you, parents dear? What an oaf, you’d say to each other in your room that night. Where’d she get him?

  ‘What, they’d reckon I wasn’t good enough for you?’ His face is right up close to mine, our noses touching. His eyes are just a blurry sparkle.

  Aagh. Yeah, they would reckon that, but that’s not the problem. It’s something about me, and what I’d reckon. Eventually I just say, ‘Yes, something like that.’

  After sparkling for a long time, he says, ‘They’d be right, you know.’ His voice is really hushed, as if he’s telling me some terrible secret.

  He’s dead serious. He’s so serious and so close that my throat shuts off and I don’t breathe for a few seconds. I nearly say I love you—which I vowed I’d never say to anyone again! Instead I nod and stick out my tongue like a snake’s to touch his nose. ‘Wrong side of the tracks, boy,’ I laugh. A leftover tear sneaks across into my other eye.

  ‘I am. I am,’ he insists. ‘Is that okay with you?’

  ‘What d’you mean? I was just joking, you idiot.’

  He shakes his head. ‘Yeah, well, I reckon one day you’re not gunna joke about it.’

  I move my head back to see him better. ‘What are you on about?’ I say uncomfortably.

  He watches my mouth, speaks carefully. ‘I just reckon, you know, someone like you … you’ll, you know, move on and that.’

  ‘“Like me”? What’s that?’

  ‘Well … smart enough to stay in school. There’s that. And, well, your mum and dad, both working. With office jobs and that, I mean.’

  ‘My dad’s a salesman. An insurance salesman. That’s not exactly high class, is it?’

  ‘Higher than a car mechanic, like my dad. Higher than unemployed, like me. He’d wear a suit to work, wouldn’t he?’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ I say. ‘You’re judging me by who my parents are. When it’s about you and me, here in this room.’

  ‘No.’ He lies on his back. ‘This is nice, but it’s not everything.’

  ‘It’s everything we need to think about now.’

  He stares at the festoons of dust on the ceiling rose. ‘I’m not talkin’ about now. I’m talkin’ about later on.’

  ‘Why? What’s wrong with now, that you have to go glooming on about the future?’ Says I, the one who was just crying my eyes out about everything.

  ‘Nothing,’ he says quickly, and faces me again. ‘Nothing, except … I don’t want it to finish.’

  ‘It’s not finishing!’

  ‘But it will.’ Finally his eyes meet mine and stay.

  I can’t bluster any more. ‘Maybe,’ I say in a low voice.

  He looks sad, and satisfied in a way. I feel as if he’s tortured a confession out of me, but I’m not sure how much I’ve given away.

  ‘But now,’ I insist, my hands pressing his back.

  ‘Yeah? Now?’

  ‘Now I love you,’ I say to his chest.

  ‘Okay.’ He begins to smile, to pull me closer. ‘Let’s forget about later on, then.’

  ‘Let’s.’ I laugh with relief.

  At three weeks the embryonic cells are beginning to differentiate themselves. The first stages of a rudimentary brain are a swelling at one end; the embryo’s outermost cells are early nerves. Inside, bones, muscles, blood vessels, organs and a simple intestinal tube are beginning to form.

  ‘Coming to the shops with us tomorrow night?’ says Mum over Wednesday dinner. ‘I thought we could go on to Pasha’s afterwards.’

  ‘Working late tomorrow. Sorry.’

  Mum puts on a groan. ‘We hardly ever see you.’

  Dad: ‘Gotta be done.’

  ‘I didn’t drag you up by your bootstraps just so you’d disappear from our lives.’ She’s looking at me, winking, when Dad’s knife crashes onto his plate.

  ‘Bloody hell!’ he roars. ‘What a thing to say! And in front of Mel, too. Whatever I’ve done—’

  ‘It was just a joke, Dave—’ she mutters, startled.

  ‘Whatever I’ve achieved I’ve achieved by the sweat of my own bloody brow, not because you—’

  ‘It was a joke, for crying out loud! Mel knows it’s not true, I know it’s not true, you know—’

  ‘—not because of anything you did!’ He finishes and they stare at each other.

  ‘Hey, calm down, you guys.’ My voice sounds insultingly mild and weak.

  But Mum’s picked
up on something. ‘Well, moral support doesn’t count for anything, I guess?’ she says rather coldly.

  Dad goes back to his dinner.

  ‘Or practical support, I suppose? Like, four years of being on the night shift with Mel? That wasn’t of any assistance to you?’

  After a nasty pause, Dad rolls his eyes. ‘Yeah, right, Jan, you’ve been a saint. Now drop it.’ I’ve never heard him be rude to Mum like this.

  ‘You brought it up, remember.’ She stands up. Her eyes are filling with tears. She stacks my empty plate on hers, then snatches Dad’s from under his nose.

  ‘Hey, I’m not finished!’

  ‘If you want to eat, you can make your own bloody tea!’ She takes the plates out, leaving Dad looking stupid with his knife and fork in his hands. He glances at me, as if to check whether I noticed.

  ‘You’ve really hurt her.’ There’s surprise in my voice, as if I hadn’t thought it was possible.

  ‘Huh! She put the boot in first!’

  ‘She asked you out. That’s what happened first.’

  He stares at me as if I were a piece of furniture that decided to sit up and talk. ‘Bloody women!’ he mutters, putting down his cutlery. He gets up and goes over to the television.

  ‘Bloody men!’ I retort in a boofhead voice just before he switches on.

  Scene: Franklins. MUM and ME are cruising through the meat section.

  ME: So did you drag Dad up by his bootstraps?

  MUM: I cut the ad out of the paper, that’s all. I helped him buy the suit for the interview, made him get his hair cut. It was a joke we had, that I made him do it. Until the other night, that is.

  ME: What’s up with him?

  MUM: I don’t know. Midlife crisis. (Look at each other, ME questioning, MUM not having any answers. MUM draws a breath, looks bright.) How about Chinese, after?

  ME (not hungry at all): Yeah, good idea.

  Lunch at Pug’s parents’ place. Two short bundles, one of loud anger, one of smiling serenity, plus three tall children—snappy Lu, understated Dino and exotic Oriana, a big exclamation mark pining for an exciting sentence to justify its existence. That’s the Magninis, and as a combo they’re pretty hair-raising for someone from a single-child Anglo family. Where’s the volume control? Where’s the OFF switch? Even when they’re just having normal conversations they sound as if they’re fighting; when they’re fighting, they make enough noise for ten people. All of a sudden I get an inkling of why Pug took up boxing—the blissful quiet of fighting without words.

  It’s a three-way conflict between Oriana, Mr Magnini and Pug’s older brother Luciano. Mrs Magnini throws in the odd placating remark, trying to draw attention back to the enormous, rich lunch she’s cooked, and Pug rolls his eyes at all the noise and provides brief translations for me. Towards dessert he starts getting fed up with them.

  ‘Basta, basta!’ he yells over the three of them, so suddenly I jump. The noise stops, the room rings. He scowls from father to brother to sister, then goes on to say something very emphatic, with a lot of arm-waving, indicating me with his hands, indicating them, himself. When he stops, his father looks at me, waves his fork at Luciano. ‘Sorry. My son can’t help, he is an idiot.’ Oriana hoots and Luciano laughs and retorts something.

  ‘Shut up, Lu,’ says Pug.

  ‘Sorry.’ Luciano pretends to be ashamed of himself, then winks across at me.

  We get through to coffee before the next eruption. For a while Mr Magnini puts up with Luciano’s goading, greeting it with a haughty look, a puff of air, a wave of a large hand. Then Luciano hits some sore spot and he can’t stay silent any more. Back and forth they go; it’s like watching a tennis match.

  Pug reaches across and picks up my coffee in its little gilt cup and saucer. ‘Come on, Mel, let’s leave ’em to it.’

  I follow him onto the patio, which is pebblecreted with a white balustrade and two ornate concrete pots spilling red geraniums. A vegetable garden marches away down the yard, and a tiny white concrete fountain in the shape of a semi-nude goddess spills into its bowl on the strip of left-over lawn.

  It’s a relief to see sky instead of black flock curlicues on a gold paper background, instead of fancy-cut crystal glass and gold cutlery and lace tablecloth. It’s great to breathe air instead of pasta-steam and chicken-steam and garlic-onion-and-rosemary steam, to feel the nausea-block in my throat easing back in the eerie quietness.

  I steady my saucer on the iron-lace table. ‘Is it always this bad?’

  ‘Oh, yeah, about. Usually I haven’t got any excuse to dip out, but.’ Pug smiles at me, shamefaced. ‘Yeah. Sometimes it can get heavy, you know, Dad laying down the law and Lu and Oriana just blowing up. Once he decides on something, he won’t bloody shift.’

  ‘And what about you? Don’t you ever blow up at him?’

  ‘Well, just then was about … yeah, that’d be about the most noise I ever make.’

  ‘What were you saying to them? I was impressed.’

  Pug looks at his runners tapping on the terracotta tiles. ‘I told them they should be ashamed of’mselves. I said, “I’ve brung this girl along specially to meet you. What’s she going to think? What’s she going to tell her parents? That we’re a bunch of crazy wogs who can’t control their tempers? She’ll leave me, listening to you lot. She won’t want to have anything to do with me.”’

  ‘You idiot.’

  ‘Well, at least they’ll get off my back now, about meeting you. Aah, they’re all right. Take ’em one by one and they’re fine. It’s just in a group they start actin’ like animals.’

  Among the photos on top of the television, an old one of Luciano, Dino and Oriana in a row. ‘Oh, this’s you!’ I say, grabbing it up.

  ‘Yeah, in the middle.’ Pug’s arms go around my waist, his chin onto my shoulder.

  ‘Oh well, I knew that!’ Putting him down is a way to cover up the sudden—oof! What is it? A throb of anguish, a knot tightening, a terrible reaction. His younger sister is just plain innocent, a happy little kid, nothing to worry about; Luciano is cocky and self-important in his little brown suit. Between them my crew-cut, big-eared Pug seems to beam out sweetness; it’s his wide eyes, and his being just a tiny bit self-conscious, not hugely, like his brother, or completely unaware like Oriana. That smile: sort of I-know-I-ought-to-smile, sort of I’m-just-enjoying-myself-anyway. Part of me wants to kidnap this photo, take it off public view, keep it all to myself; part of me wants never to have seen it. Because I can see how Pug was wide open for the world to blunder into, and it did, and I’m going to get flashes of this face (I’ve already had them!) as long as ever I know him, and with every flash this twist inside.

  Dad said, ‘God, remember how nice this street used to be?’ We were driving to Grandma’s, I remember. I looked out the window. It looked okay to me. Just houses, quite neat. Someone had a pair of small concrete lions either side of their gate, which I thought was a cool idea.

  ‘All the big trees are gone,’ said Mum.

  ‘Well, you wouldn’t want roots buggering up your pebblecrete, would you? Look at it, it’s been woggified to death.’

  ‘Da-ave!’

  ‘Well, it has—look, colonnades everywhere! Statues, aluminium windows.’ He shuddered. ‘Used to be nice old cottages all along here.’

  ‘People have different tastes, that’s all. Give ’em a break.’

  At four and a half weeks the embryo looks like a prehistoric animal. Rudimentary heart and eyes have formed, as has a tail, which will disappear within weeks, leaving shrunken tail-bones as a permanent reminder of humankind’s animal past.

  Nobody brought Pug and me together, like Lisa engineering a whole bunch of matches at that party (me and Brenner, Kerry and Cory Worth, Anna and Toby) just to see if she could do it. It just happened. When I think how easily Pug could’ve just walked on past it’s really a bit scary.

  It was a week or so after the miscarriage. I went up to Newtown to look for Christmas presents because I wanted
to enjoy myself, but I couldn’t find anything, and halfway through looking I had a weird attack of … I don’t know. The bottom dropped out of my emotions and I fell through. Everything looked bad—Newtown grungy and full of nightmare people, all weird one way or another, no-one smiling, the shops pathetic little temples of greed, the humidity pressing in, the traffic a herd of mad animals funnelling between the buildings. Worst of all was my life. I hadn’t heard from Brenner all week. It was the day after I’d told Lisa, and I knew that was a bad stuff-up. I was floundering, horrified at her having wormed most of my story out of me—I could hear her sweet, calculating voice in my head and my own confiding one, see her eyes swivelling away from me. I’d gone too far and I was petrified of what she was going to do. I stood outside Coles Fosseys looking in at the bundles of tinsel, sweating embarrassment and fear.

  I struggled on for a bit, but then I thought, Stuff it, I’ll go home, go to bed and sleep this off. So I turned down Mary Street.

  And almost straight away I regretted it, but not quite soon enough to retreat. Four guys straggled across the path and the road, all in top spirits, yelling and pushing at each other. I tried to look invisible and not-caring at the same time.

  But—clunk!—they saw me.

  One whistled and shouted ‘G’day, gorgeous!’ at me. I crossed to the other footpath and he crossed too. He was grinning and glancing at his mates.

  ‘Keep out of my way,’ I said, really severe.

  He dodged about in front of me, wouldn’t let me pass. ‘Can’t take a compliment, this one. Come on, gorgeous, loosen up. What’s your name, love?’

  ‘Get away!’ I sort of choked. I saw his hand come out. ’Don’t you touch me!’