Numb

by Tanya Paterson

  “Thank you Hayley, that’s very kind of you.”

  So polite and such a nice accent. I liked how my name sounded on his lips.

  Oh my God, I had to get it together.

  “I’ll bet you’ve had tonnes of remarks about your pommy accent,” I said, for something different to say that didn’t involve food.

  “It’s terrible isn’t it? My mother has always insisted I cultivate a proper British voice and round my vowels-” Alex stopped suddenly and frowned, as if he’d divulged more than he’d intended.

  “It’s not terrible. I like it,” I admitted, feeling a flush spread across my cheeks. Christ, at this rate I’d start swooning in ten minutes. I had to get it together.

  We walked out into the midday heat, our eyes automatically looking for relief in the shadows as our pupils adjusted to the blinding sunlight. The air was thick and humid and I could feel tiny drops of perspiration forming on my skin. The humidity was typically oppressive this time of year at the end of the wet season. Only tonight after it rained would there be any respite from the heavy heat. Nothing to do till then but stay out of the sun and suffer through it.

  I silently (thank goodness) led Alex down the shaded pathways to the lockers while my skin tingled and my heart pounded in my chest. I concentrated on taking slow breaths before I hyperventilated. This was so not normal. If my body was going to act like this around this guy then I might have to change schools, not that that was likely because there were no other schools.

  Alex’s locker was in the same row as mine and we stashed our books. I grabbed my lunch – fruit smoothies for myself, Pete and Helen – and reset my lock. I didn’t have a bit appetite in the daytime. Usually it was too hot for anything more substantial and it just put me to sleep anyway.

  “Over here, Alex!” Dave called, waving from his usual spot under the jacaranda tree where he sat with the other popular kids. Dave nodded silently to me in greeting and I returned a small nod of my head, hoping he wasn’t going to come over.

  “The canteen is just over there,” I said to Alex, pointing to cluster of kids crowding around the shop window under the computer block. “I’ll be ready to dial an ambulance if you need one.”

  Alex laughed and the sound of it sent a shiver through me.

  “Thank you,” he said, his eyes twinkling.

  I stood there, not wanting to be the first to leave.

  I noticed Alex hadn’t moved either.

  “You joining us, Hayley?” Dave shouted as he strolled over.

  Yeah right, as if. Dave Matthews was the last person I’d ever sit with at lunch.

  “No, I can’t.”

  “Come on Hay, hang out with us, you might enjoy yourself,” insisted Dave, now standing next to Alex and too close to me.

  Time to leave. I smiled at Alex as I took a step backwards and away from them both. “Bye,” I said over my shoulder as I turned away.

  “See you later, Hayley,” Alex said, making it sound like a question.

  “See you later, Hay,” Dave said, making it sound like a threat.

  I walked away. And it was harder than I though it would be because it felt like I was on one end of an elastic band with Alex on the other; and the further I walked from him, the greater the tension and the stronger the pull to return.

  CHAPTER 8

  ALEX

  “Pardon?” I turned to look at Dave who’d been speaking.

  “So you’ve met our Hayley,” he repeated.

  “Yes. She’s…different.”

  Mesmerising, beautiful, distracting.

  “Yeah,” Dave snorted, raising his eyebrows as if I’d made the understatement of the century. He narrowed his gaze, his mouth twisting in thought as he sized me up, his thoughts clear as day on his features. He was wondering if I was interested in Hayley.

  “I wouldn’t have thought she was your type, Alex.”

  Dave feigned friendliness but he wasn’t very good at pretense, a poorly disguised warning lurking just below the surface as if he had a history or prior claim with her. She didn’t look interested in him but what did I know? Besides, I wasn’t looking for more complications and already I knew due to the very fact she made me nervous, that Hayley was exactly the girl to complicate things. I was not going there.

  “No, Hayley is definitely not my type.”

  Dave smiled, satisfied, and pat me on the back asking “so, who is then?” as he led me towards his friends sitting in the shade of a huge jacaranda tree. I spotted Ally from my Business Studies class. Ally was exactly my type if past history was any indication. She was attractive, popular, a little shallow and a lot more interested in a good time than an emotional connection. I wasn’t the kind of guy who enjoyed romantic strolls and unburdening my soul. One look at Ally and I knew we could have a good time together and I could leave at the end of the year with no complications, no strings.

  “Is Ally seeing anyone?” I asked Dave as neared the table.

  Dave’s grin widened. “I think it’s your lucky day mate.”

  There was a chorus of ‘hey’s and ‘hi’s and even a ‘g’day’ as I was introduced. I recognised almost everyone. Dave’s buddies – a trio of jokers called Macca, Tony and Benny – were cut from the same side-of-a-barn pattern as Dave. They were in the middle of recapping the weekend and laughing about a friend of theirs who’d passed out drunk in the doorway of the local police station with an unlit spliff in his hand. Ally threw me another flirtatious smile as she patted the seat to her right, inviting me to sit next to her. I sat down, half-listening to the guy’s story – ‘honestly Officer Jones, its not my joint, I always roll mine with a filter’ – while I checked out the others around the table. Rachael and Kylie were poring over a fashion magazine but both threw meaningful looks at Ally as I sat down. The other girl at the table, Dave’s girlfriend Krista, was obviously the queen of the pack and easily the best looking of the four girls. I imagined every guy at school spent a decent percentage of his evening fantasising about any one of them with their perfect blond hair, deep tans, tiny skirts and lashings of lip gloss. There was definitely something in the water in Australia.

  I could tell that this group would suit me just fine. I needed a distraction, and I’d bet they could provide one.

  “Alex is from London in England,” Ally said by way of introduction.

  “As opposed to London in America?” said Rachel sarcastically. Ally glared at her.

  “Actually there are more than a dozen places called London in America,” added Kylie who immediately looked like she wished she’d kept her mouth shut. Ally shot a self-satisfied look at Rachel who in turn turned on Kylie.

  “How can you remember stuff like that and not remember you still owe me ten bucks?”

  Kylie shrugged in reply.

  “So what do you think of the Whitsundays, Alex?” asked Ally.

  There was no way I was answering that question truthfully so I just said, “it’s great.”

  Macca and Benny snorted in laughter. I guess I wasn’t very convincing.

  “Yeah, right.”

  “I can’t believe you ditched London to come here,” Dave added.

  Tell me about it, I thought. Instead I feigned innocence and said, “What do you mean? The Whitsundays is paradise, right? Sunshine, sandy beaches, coral reefs….”

  “Paradise?” Benny choked with laughter. “Yeah, right. Stingers, mozzies, crocs…”

  “Red back spiders…”

  “Snakes…”

  “Crotch rot…”

  All the guys winced as the girls laughed.

  “You got the short straw mate,” Tony added.

  I smiled back at them, pretending to enjoy their joke.

  Don’t I know it.

  A flash of orange caught my attention and I turned to catch Hayley walking along the edge of the quadrangle with the obscenely fat boy she was with this morning. They were laughing at some private joke.

  “There goes the fag and his lesbo hag,” smirked Tony,
noticing my distraction.

  “She’s gay?” I blurted out in surprise and confusion, a weird sensation of loss deflating me.

  “Pretty boy Pete is.”

  “Yeah, they don’t come any queerer than that whale.”

  “Hayley’s not,” said Kylie.

  Benny shook his head in affirmation. “She just doesn’t go out with anyone.”

  “How the hell would you know?” teased Macca, and Benny shoving him not-so-lightly in the arm.

  “A few guys have asked her out,” Kylie quietly explained to me, “but she’s not interested.”

  Krista narrowed her eyes at Kylie. “She’s a freak,” she said, daring to be contradicted.

  “Yeah, a frigid freak,” added Rachel. Kylie cringed under the weight of the girls’ combined gaze but held her tongue. She knew her place in the food chain too.

  “Is that true Dave?” smirked Tony.

  “That’s right!” Benny exclaimed gleefully. “Dave kissed her.”

  “Really?” I asked Dave. So there had been something between them.

  “That was the seventh grade,” Dave said, glaring at no one in particular.

  “Didn’t she punch you?”

  “Oh yeah, I remember! Gave you a real shiner.”

  “From a girl. Oh, the shame!”

  “That was a long time ago,” Dave said, warning them off their teasing by notching up the intensity of his glare to incandescent. The guys got the message but silently smirked at each other anyway.

  “Yeah, it was a long time ago so drop it,” said Krista, her tone putting an end to the conversation. “He’s moved on to better things.” Krista wrapped her arms around Dave and drew him closer to her, kissing him slowly and deeply so that his (and everyone else’s) attention diverted from Hayley to her. When Krista released Dave she caught my eyes and held them a little too long. Oh shit. I looked away. I knew the look in her eyes, the hidden message, and I wasn’t ready to rock that boat, at least not on my first day. I was the newcomer, I knew my place as well.

  Even after only a few hours with these people, I realised that kids there didn’t hold back or disguise their feelings like they did in England. If there was a code of conduct it would be ‘what you see is what you get’. Everyone I’d met so far had been more upfront about their intentions (or perhaps I just found them easier to read) and said exactly what they thought. In my world, no-one ever did that. I never really knew what the other person was thinking or who they genuinely were on the inside. Bloody hell, I didn’t even know who I was. Sometimes I would catch my reflection and wonder – who is that person staring back at me? He looked like me, but he couldn’t be the same person because the guy in the reflection was smiling when on the inside my real voice was screaming. I didn’t know this guy in the mirror and I got the feeling that I wouldn’t like him if I did.

  That’s because he’s an arsehole.

  If it wasn’t enough to see another person in my reflection, the voice inside refused to be silenced. He was always there hearing my lies and shouting, sometimes whispering, always intruding, complaining, angry. He tormented me. Berated me. Hated me. He was me. I listened to him once and look where that had got me – exiled to the other side of the bloody planet.

  “How was your first day?” Maria asked, giving me a one-armed hug as she put down a bowl of salad in the centre of the table.

  “Fine,” I lied.

  “Told you it would be,” Charles said as he expertly flipped steaks and sausages on the barbecue.

  Every evening, the three of us sat down together for dinner. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d shared a meal with an adult that wasn’t at some formal dinner or event my mother and Jeremy had forced me to attend. That night we were eating outside in the gazebo. It was just dusk and still very warm. A fan whirled from the ceiling and an electric mozzie zapper buzzed each time it fried another victim. Charles brought a plate of grilled meat over to the table and placed it in the middle next to the salad and rolls as we sat down.

  My aunt and uncle were model hosts and had made me feel welcome since the moment I arrived. All last week, they’d given me space and let me chill out in the house while I recovered from jet lag and my leg adjusted to freedom from the brace. I’d expected a series of stern lectures followed by a packed sight-seeing and meet-and-greet itinerary. Instead I had a mini-holiday – nine days lazing by the pool and watching DVDs while being waited on by my attentive aunt and uncle. It was as if they could tell I needed those days to adjust to the colossal changes in my situation and grieve for the life I’d lost.

  It made me wonder how Charles and my mother were born of the same parents. Their personalities were so remarkably different. My uncle laughed heartily and often and he and my aunt were genuinely affectionate to each other. He was warm, welcoming and kind: qualities not usually observed in my mother. I wouldn’t be surprised if either of them had been adopted.

  “When we first moved to the Whitsundays it was a complete culture shock…” Charles said, helping himself to a steak.

  “…but very quickly we grew to love it here.” Maria finished, as was typical for them.

  “We knew you’d settle in.”

  “Who knows? You might never want to leave.”

  Yeah right.

  I changed the topic as best I could and asked polite questions about their respective days – Charles had visited his office for a few hours, Maria potted around the garden and saw a family of kangaroos sleeping in the shade of the tall silver bark at the bottom of the hill. We could have been a typical family, sitting around the table at the end of the day. But when Charles asked about the people I’d met at school, I mentioned a few names and that I’d been invited to a party the following weekend. I realised my mistake the instant the words were spoken.

  “A party?” Maria looked to Charles, her face worried for the first time since I’d arrived.

  “Dinner,” I clarified. “At a restaurant at Airlie Beach and maybe a few drinks but nothing else,” I added, to ease her fears. I was lying of course.

  There was silence as Charles and Maria considered this, communicating silently in their own private language of infinitesimal eye movements and miniscule head shakes.

  “Well Alex,” Charles began slowly a few moments later, “we want you to make friends, and you’re 18 so it’s legal for you to drink but you’re still recovering from the…ah…accident. We wouldn’t want you to over do it.” He gave me a pointed look.

  What he meant was…you can go as long as you don’t screw up.

  “I won’t,” I promised. Even I didn’t think I sounded very convincing.

  That night I dreamt I was swimming in the ocean.

  Bright stars stretched across the sky and the light from a full moon reflected off the ripples of the waves. I was in deep water but not far from a small crescent-shaped beach. Salt water was streaming down my face and I realised I was swimming in an ocean of tears. An ocean I had created. I was about to swim back to shore when a strong rip-tide unexpectedly caught me in its wake and swept me away from the shore. The current was stronger than any force I had ever encountered before and it quickly pulled me far away from the shore. I knew I should try and swim for the shore where my parents were calling for me, but I didn’t want what was on the beach. Besides, I didn’t think I had the reserves of strength to fight the force of the current. Then don’t fight it, the familiar voice said, as the rip pulled me further out towards the unknown and unexpected.

  CHAPTER 9

  HAYLEY

  “Get your bum out of bed Hayley!”

  Nothing could have prevented that voice from piercing even the deepest coma. My eyes shot open and then scrunched together just as quickly. Argh, it was bright! I must have overslept.

  “A good morning to you too, Mum,” I grumbled back as I stumbled out of bed, blindly feeling my way along the hall to the bathroom, still unable to open my eyes.

  I really should get some exercise and go swimming, I thought to myse
lf as I turned on the shower and waited for the hot water to flow, but I was too tired. I’d been up till midnight trying to catch up on my missed Legal Studies work. I didn’t know what had come over me lately. All week, I’d tried to focus and concentrate on my school work during my free period and every time it was the same – distraction, hyper awareness, daydreams and before I knew it, the bell would ring in reality and I’d back at square one with absolutely zero work done. I’d turned into a space cadet.

  I stepped out of my pjs and under the tepid water as if on autopilot, hoping the water would clear my brain. Yeah right, as if it was as simple as that.

  When I arrived at school, Helen was already sitting at our usual spot under a leafy eucalyptus tree on the edge of the quadrangle. As per usual, her head was buried in a text book and her long hair fell messily over pages filled with formulae and diagrams. I sat silently next to her and pulled out my own revision without interrupting her. We has an understanding, if the books were out, conversation was out. Helen was even more obsessed with her grades then I was. Good marks weren’t the only thing we had in common. When Helen started at school she stuck out a mile because she was the only Chinese face in our dull homogenous student population. So much for multiculturalism. So naturally Pete and I adopted Helen immediately.

  Before she’d arrived, we’d always been the only odd ones out: Pete because of his sheer size and sexual preferences (he came out in primary school), and me with my unnatural paleness and orange hair (which I’d dyed around the same time as an external manifestation of an internal crisis – or so Pete said). We were thrilled to welcome another outcast into our gang. Amazingly, despite our differences, or perhaps because of them, the three of us became best mates probably because what we most had in common was that we had nothing in common with anyone else. Most of the girls at school were scantily clothed and permanently hungry beach babes who spent their time shopping, gossiping and plotting after beach blokes who were themselves scantily clothed, permanently hung-over and too busy fishing, playing football and plotting after the babes to bother with learning anything. The three of us didn’t fit in….physically or socially. And we didn’t care to.