I Had Such Friends

by Meg Gatland-Veness

  i

  had

  such

  friends

  i

  had

  such

  friends

  MEG GATLAND-VENESS

  First published in 2018 by Pantera Press Pty Limited

  www.PanteraPress.com

  Text Copyright © Meg Gatland-Veness, 2018

  Meg Gatland-Veness has asserted her moral rights to be identified as the author of this work.

  Design and Typography Copyright © Pantera Press Pty Limited, 2018

  PanteraPress, three-slashes colophon device, and good books doing good things are trademarks of Pantera Press Pty Limited.

  This book is copyright, and all rights are reserved.

  We welcome your support of the author’s rights, so please only buy authorised editions.

  This is a work of fiction, though it is based on some real events. Names, characters, organisations, dialogue and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, firms, events or locales is coincidental.

  Without the publisher’s prior written permission, and without limiting the rights reserved under copyright, none of this book may be scanned, reproduced, stored in, uploaded to or introduced into a retrieval or distribution system, including the internet, or transmitted, copied or made available in any form or by any means (including digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, sound or audio recording, and text-to-voice). This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent recipient.

  Please send all permission queries to:

  Pantera Press, P.O. Box 1989 Neutral Bay, NSW, Australia 2089 or info@PanteraPress.com

  A Cataloguing-in-Publication entry for this book is available from the National Library of Australia.

  ISBN 978-1-925700-01-5 (Paperback)

  ISBN 978-1-925700-95-4 (eBook)

  Cover Design: Steve Leard, Leard.co.uk

  Editor: James Read

  Proofreader: Lucy Bell

  Typesetting: Kirby Jones

  Cover Design: Elysia Clapin

  Author Photo: Dane Howell

  Printed and bound in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

  Pantera Press policy is to use papers that are natural, renewable and recyclable products made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The logging and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

  To Mum and Dad,

  Without you, I wouldn’t even be here,

  let alone this book, so thank you.

  Think where man’s glory most begins and ends,

  And say my glory was I had such friends.

  William Butler Yeats

  Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  Acknowledgements

  About Meg Gatland-Veness

  1.

  It all started when a kid died.

  He was driving his girlfriend home from a party on a Saturday night. And before you get any ideas, no, he wasn’t speeding and he hadn’t been drinking or taking drugs. It had simply been raining all day and the roads were shining in that horrible, glassy way. And there was a dog on the road – some old mutt who roamed the streets.

  The kid slammed on the brakes and spun the wheel to avoid the dog. That bloody dog. The car skidded into a tree. In the last moments, he swerved so that his side of the car took the impact. His girlfriend survived. He saved her life when he hit that tree.

  Before you sympathise with me, I must tell you that I wasn’t friends with the kid. Although when you only had one friend, like I did, the chance of them dying in a car crash was fairly slim. Especially when the only time your friend was in a car was when his mum was driving, and she drove slower than my tractor and stopped to let insects cross the road.

  I knew who the kid was, of course – the dead one, that is. He was the school captain and everyone at my school loved him. I don’t just mean the kids either. I mean the teachers, the principal, everyone. Even the frickin’ cleaners loved him. I think my dad wished the kid were his son instead of me.

  “That kid’s blood’s worth bottling,” Dad once said. He never suggested he thought any part of me was worth bottling unless he was then going to use it as fertiliser for his cabbages. My mum, on the other hand, I think had a bit of a crush on him. More than once I heard her say he was “as tall as a church steeple.”

  He was also extremely well built. Next to him, I looked like a candlewick. He was going places, you know? He had a chance of actually getting out of this town. He had curly blond hair and sun-browned skin. He was a swimmer, surfer and runner. He always won the hotdog-eating contest at the surf club and entered those Nutri-Grain Ironman competitions. You know the ones. He was smart too. “Smart as paint,” the principal said. He had the prettiest girlfriend in the school. And I’m not saying that to be cute, she really was the prettiest girl in the school. I mean, some people might have debated that point and tried to say that Abbey Ward was the prettiest girl in the school, but that was probably because she threatened to have them exiled to the old basketball courts if they didn’t.

  But you know what the best part about the kid was? He wasn’t even a bully. No lie. In fact, he was a pretty decent guy by all accounts. Not that he ever really spoke to me of course, but that’s why he was nice. He never called me a faggot or pulled my pants down or shoved me into the girls’ bathroom. He never stopped others when they did, but hey, he was only human.

  Anyway, the kid’s name was Charlie. Charlie Parker. And he was dead.

  It was the very start of Year Twelve. That meant there was only one year left of school. Ever. He never got to finish high school. But the rest of us still had to sit the HSC. His seat, in the hall, during the exams, would be empty.

  By the way, I’m Hamish. Hamish Day. And I think that before we go any further you should know that I was a bit of a loser. You probably already realised that since I told you I only had one friend. And I constantly smelt like a farm. You know that farmy smell? Shit and hay and cows. That was my allure. I smelt like a farm because I lived on a farm. Yep, my dad was a full-on farmer, flanno and everything. I was also into photography. And I don’t mean dodgy photography, like naked chicks and stuff. I mostly took photos of the animals on the farm, but that’s because there was absolutely nothing else to see where I lived. If you want to know what I look like, and I can’t think why you would, I am pretty short, I am very pale, I have dark brown hair and eyes that only accentuate my paleness and I have zero muscles. And I mean zero. You might think that having lived on a farm would mean that I am built. Well you are wrong.

  My only friend was Martin. Martin Archer. He was a loser. And by loser I mean geek. And by geek I mean super geek. I mean not your average geek. He was into things like video games, collectable action figures and comic books. Yep. That guy. That guy was my best friend.

  Anyway, so Charlie Parker was dead, his girlfriend was in hospital covered in cuts and bruises and our year advisor gathered us together at the start of school that day to te
ll us what had happened. He was crying when he told us. That was sad because he was a nice guy, my year advisor. I don’t think he knew my name though.

  Then my whole year took the day off classes to sit together in the staff common room and share stories and boxes of tissues and look at photographs of Charlie. Charlie smiling. Charlie with a surfboard. Charlie with his girlfriend. Charlie running on the beach ahead of all the other boys.

  I am going to be honest with you here, and tell you that it made me sick. All the girls were crying and most of the boys were too. It was one of those moments in movies and books when people who were normally enemies or outcasts came together in a time of need to form some sort of beautiful bond that went beyond the realms of cliques and popularity.

  But that never happened. I was still a loser in that room, I was still an outcast. Martin was sitting there right next to me. Neither of us were crying. Girls who normally wouldn’t give us a second glance kept passing along these photographs and tissue boxes and I still felt alone. I was alone and bored and Charlie Parker, the one person I thought might make it somewhere, was dead.

  Charlie Parker was buried in the ground and I was still self-conscious about the fact that my mother had picked out my shoes for me and they were a size too big because she had a pipe dream that my feet, along with the rest of me, might keep growing. There was cottonwool stuffed in the toes. I was also extremely conscious that almost every other guy in the room, except Martin of course, had a weeping girl bundled in his arms, and there I was with no one to comfort. I was stuck sitting next to Martin who was probably thinking about whether or not his shipment of comic books had arrived from Japan yet. I looked at the other boys with such envy. It was so easy for them. So easy to just be with those girls, to touch them without worrying. I hated them. I hated everyone in that frickin’ room. And, most of all, I hated Charlie Parker for making me sit through that hellhole of a day.

  It didn’t happen until that afternoon though, after everyone had petered out of the room and casually draped themselves over the school grounds like washing on the line. Martin and I had escaped from the common room at lunchtime and spent the rest of the day in the library. I was taking photos of the books while Martin had managed to unblock the internet so he could play World of Warcraft on a school computer, and since it had been such a trying day for us poor Year Twelve students, the librarian didn’t even tell him off.

  But anyway, it happened when I was standing at the bus stop. Everyone in the line was awkwardly silent, their conversations were whispers about whether you could still see the blood splatters on the road and how there was broken glass stuck into the tree trunk that just wouldn’t come out.

  My bus was always later than the others because it only took about fifteen people home. Not many lived out my way, just us loser farm kids. Our bus driver also liked to park around the corner to have a cigarette before picking us up. The bus always stank like an ashtray. Also, just for the record, Martin’s mother drove him to and from school every single day. Poor kid didn’t stand a chance in high school.

  So, then it happened. Peter Bridges pulled into the bus bay. You’re not allowed to do that. Peter was in my year but I hardly ever saw him at school. He was on the football team, though he had almost been kicked off more times than I could count for fighting and not showing up to training. His car was the cheapest-looking piece-of-shit Toyota Corolla I had ever seen in my life.

  Peter leant over his passenger seat and looked straight at me. I was standing on the hill by myself, as usual.

  “Hey Hamish,” he said, and I couldn’t for the life of me work out how it was that he could possibly know my name. “Want a ride home?”

  I wish I didn’t say it, I really do, but I couldn’t help myself and my little white hand came up and pointed to my weedy little chest. “Me?”

  “Get in,” he said and turned the radio up.

  I stood frozen to the spot for what felt like ten minutes. Part of me wanted this to be real – that Peter Bridges would actually willingly spend time with me. But the rest of me was picturing a group of footballers hiding in the back seat waiting to pummel me into the dust, or a short drive to a deserted street where Peter would take my stuff and splatter my face into the pavement. I wondered how long he would wait for. The odds of this being a joke far outweighed the chance that it was serious, but for reasons unknown I walked down the hill, opened the door, dropped my bag on the floor and sat down. I won’t lie, I did check the back seat for an ambush. I found nothing but sand, empty cigarette packets, McDonald’s refuse and dirty clothes. Sitting on the back seat was a scungy old beach towel and at least three odd thongs. And when I say thongs I mean sandals, not underwear.

  Peter had a lit cigarette in one hand that hung out the window in an almost purposefully casual gesture. He wasn’t wearing his school uniform, but that was no surprise. He wore a hoodie, even though it had been at least thirty degrees that day.

  He sped away from the curb before I even had a chance to put my seatbelt on.

  “Where to?” he asked, tossing his cigarette.

  “Oh, um, I’m out on the highway,” I said. “But if you don’t want to drive that far, I understand.”

  “No, it’s cool,” he said.

  Even though the car was held together with duct tape and sheer willpower, jealousy ate away at my stomach. I couldn’t afford to buy a car because I didn’t have a job and my parents would never have bought me one, not in a million years. I could drive the tractor though, but that hardly counted. You couldn’t pick up girls in a tractor with shit caked into the tyres. It just didn’t work.

  Peter had a job. He filled bags with rocks and sand down at the quarry. He had arms like a lumberjack. I sometimes saw him down there on the weekends when everyone else was at the beach.

  “Want to do something first?” he asked me.

  “Like what?” I said, leaning one of my arms on the window. Okay, I’ll admit it: I was trying to sound a lot cooler than I was. Truth be told I was shitting myself that I was going to say something he might think was too girly or too smart.

  “I dunno. You play footy?”

  Now would have been a great time for me to tell the truth.

  “Oh sure, I love footy.” Unfortunately I was an idiot.

  “I’ve got a ball in the boot I swiped from school. Fucking Anderson wouldn’t let me borrow it for the weekend so I just took it. Let’s take it down to the beach, yeah?”

  “Sure,” I said, sounding like the biggest girl in the world.

  Peter turned up the radio some more, so as to make conversation impossible. I tried not to look at him. Instead, I pretended to be fascinated by my fingernails. Yet another girly thing to do. Shit.

  Peter was a big guy, and by big I mean he was as tall as my father, and that’s tall. And he had big legs and those big arms. He had the perfect body for a rugby player. His skin was dark brown, and I’m not sure how many different races were in his blood but he looked slightly Aboriginal and slightly Maori and slightly something else. He was tough too; tough as nails. Nobody ever messed with him unless they wanted a couple of broken ribs and a smashed-in face. Unlike me. Anyone could’ve messed with me. A Year Seven girl could probably have messed with me and I’d have just squealed and hidden in the boys’ bathroom until she went away. In fact, I’m pretty sure that happened to me in primary school.

  Peter pulled into a car space at the beach and removed his key from the ignition. It wasn’t on a key ring. Then he popped open the boot and we got out of the car. I left my backpack and my school shoes and socks in the front. I wore white socks with my school shoes because that was the rule. Some people tried to get away with black socks, but not me.

  Peter’s boot was strangely tidy compared to the rest of the car. He pulled out the football and closed it before I really had a chance to see, but I could have sworn I saw a patchwork quilt in there.

  The beach was full of little, screaming kids making sandcastles, and parents soaking up the aft
ernoon sun with weary expressions on their faces. Poor parents. They never realised what they were getting into when they had kids. They didn’t know that their lives would end and they would only have their children’s lives to live through after that.

  There were a few surfies out the back but they weren’t having much luck catching waves. There were girls in bikinis lying on their towels in the sun covered in shiny suncream.

  The sand under my feet was still hot from the sun but I didn’t complain about how it was searing my skin off because I would have sounded like a pussy.

  It was the hottest summer on record and the temperatures were causing havoc on the farm.

  Peter was acting very aloof and I was still dubious as to why he was hanging out with me in the first place. I don’t think you fully understand what a legend he was at my school. He was the guy who set fire to things right before an exam so we had to evacuate everyone to the oval. He was the guy who covered the principal’s chair in Vaseline. He was also the guy who’d once orchestrated the tying together of the entire school’s bags in the quad while we were sitting in assembly. Not that he ever got caught, of course. He was also ace at every sport despite never showing up for training.

  We walked along the sand until we reached the shark tower. There were less people that way because it was so far from the flags. We stopped walking and suddenly I was anxious this was the moment I would have my face smashed in and lose half my teeth. Peter started to back away and my anxiety escalated. Was he waiting for his friends to tackle me?

  Then, all of a sudden, he kicked the ball into the air.

  Honest to god, I really thought I could catch it.

  I was saying to myself, You can do this, man; it’s just a football. People catch hundreds of them every day. You can do this.

  No chance.

  Peter laughed, but not in a you-retard-how-could-you-have-possibly-not-caught-that-ball way, just in a good-one-fool-we’re-all-friends-here way. Which was strange because we weren’t friends at all.

  I had to run to fetch the ball and when I tried to kick it back to him, I fumbled it clumsily along the sand.