Freia Lockhart's Summer of Awful

by Aimee Said

  Dr Phil’s midlife-crisis mobile is gone when I get home, and Mum’s dozing on the couch. I tell Gran not to worry about making me any dinner, that I’m feeling a bit crook and am going straight to bed.

  “What kind of crook?” she asks, reaching a hand out to feel my forehead.

  I duck out of reach. “Just a bit off, that’s all. I think I’m overtired.” I yawn as evidence. “I don’t want to make a big deal about it; it’ll only worry Mum.”

  Gran looks unconvinced but she doesn’t argue.

  I close the study curtains, trying to pretend it’s not a warm, sunny summer evening. It should be freezing cold, to suit my mood. Freezing cold and raining that heavy, steady kind of rain that makes the air grey all day. Perhaps even a little thunder. If it was that kind of weather, I could put on my snuggliest pyjamas (the ones covered in ducks wearing galoshes that I officially “grew out of” at the end of Year Seven but keep at the top of my wardrobe for emergencies like this), get under the covers and wallow in self-pity. Boris is already there, sleeping off his dinner.

  “I don’t get it,” I whisper to him. “How could going away have been Dan’s idea?”

  Boris twitches his whiskers in response to my voice but doesn’t bother to open his eyes.

  “Some beagle you’d make.”

  There’s a knock on the study door. I don’t know what time it is, but a sliver of moonlight shines through the gap in the curtains, so I must’ve been lying here for a few hours, at least.

  “Are you awake, Bloss? Can I come in?” Gran opens the door before I can decide whether to answer. “I thought you might be hungry,” she says, holding out a plate and a glass of milk. “It’s avocado and cheese. I hope that’s still your favourite.”

  As I sit up to take the plate, my stomach lets out a loud rumble. “Thanks.”

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “About what?” I ask through a mouthful of sandwich. Now that I’ve started eating I’m ravenous, and Gran does make a good cheese and avo sandwich. (Her secret is to cut the cheese slices thick and add plenty of salt and pepper.)

  “About what’s going on with Dan to make you so miserable. Don’t give me that look. I was married to your grandfather for over fifty years; I can spot love trouble a mile off.”

  I take a long drink while I consider whether I want to tell Gran what’s going on with Dan.

  “A problem shared’s a problem halved,” says Gran.

  “No offence, but I think sixteen-year-old ‘love trouble’ is a bit different to old-married-couple ‘love trouble’.”

  “Try me,” says Gran.

  So I tell her what Dr Phil said to Mum about Dan choosing to go away, and how he doesn’t seem to be in any hurry to come back, and he still hasn’t called and I don’t know what that means. She lets me talk until I have nothing left to say, nodding occasionally, but not interrupting.

  When I finish she says, “There’s a reason why so many sad songs and poems and books are written about love. Sometimes it’s hard and sometimes it hurts, and when it does it’s the most miserable feeling on Earth.

  “‘Love is a trap for young players’, that’s what my mother told me when Bill and I had our first real tiff. We were newly engaged and we’d arranged to go for a drive in the country and have lunch somewhere. Of course, we were both still living with our families then, so getting away by ourselves was a pretty big deal, if you know what I mean.” She winks and I fight off a mental image of my grandparents getting amorous in a country laneway.

  “That’s what I thought we’d arranged, anyway, but your grandfather never came to pick me up. Three hours after he was supposed to be there he turned up in his cricket gear, covered in mud and asking if I wanted to come down the club to celebrate him being named man of the match. Well, you can imagine what I told him he could do with his souvenir wicket. I was furious that he’d chosen some silly game over me, and not even had the courtesy to tell me.”

  “So what did he say?” I ask, reaching for the other half of my sandwich.

  Gran sighs. “Nothing. Not a word. He turned round and left. I didn’t see him again for three days, by which time I was convinced our engagement was off. But then Mum invited him over for tea without telling me. I was so happy to see him again that I forgot about being angry. He told me that he hadn’t realised we’d made a definite arrangement. To his mind, we’d agreed that a drive in the country would be a nice thing to do ‘one’ weekend, not ‘this’ weekend. When his best mate called and said they were a man down for the weekly match he hadn’t thought twice about going to lend a hand.

  “So you see, Bloss, these trials and tribulations aren’t particular to you and young Daniel. Every couple goes through them. And if they don’t, it just means that they don’t love each other enough to care, if you ask me.”

  Gran’s assessment sounds a bit harsh, but I can tell she’s trying to make me feel better, and it’s working, at least a little.

  “Gran … when did you know you were in love with Grandad?”

  “The moment he walked into the florist’s where I worked and asked if we had any flowers as blue as my eyes. He always was a bit of a smooth talker, your grandad.”

  I’ll say. He used the same line on me about forty-five years later when we were colouring in together, only then he wanted to know if there was a crayon as blue as my eyes. I didn’t know what a compliment was at the time, so I told him off for going outside the lines and handed him the murky grey-blue from my sixty-four colour crayon set.

  “All done?” Gran nods towards the empty plate and glass balanced on my lap.

  “Yes, thank you. That was just what I needed.”

  The look on her face when she takes them and stands to go tells me that she understands I mean more than the food. “Sleep tight, Bloss. And remember, there are two sides to every story. Don’t start waving wickets till you have all the facts.”

  “’Night, Gran.” I snuggle back under the covers, suddenly exhausted, and fall into a deep sleep.

  28

  In the morning there’s a piece of paper on the carpet in front of the study door. It’s a note in Gran’s old-fashioned writing saying that Dan had called at 9.30 and sounded “terribly disappointed” to have missed me.

  Even if it’s true and not a case of Gran trying to play Cupid, I still have to know what’s going on with him before there can be any chance of things being okay between us again. Gran may have had a point about there being two sides to every story, but this isn’t some misunderstanding: Dan lied to me. But how can I find out why without asking him outright? I decide to consider my options under a long, hot shower.

  It’s barely seven o’clock so I’d assumed I was the only one up, but when I get upstairs the bathroom light is on and the door’s open a few centimetres, the way Mum leaves it after her shower to let the steam out. Unlike the rest of us, who prefer to keep our bits to ourselves, Mum’s never been worried about being seen naked, and since right after her shower is often the best time to ask her for things like permission to go out on a school night (because she hasn’t had a cup of tea yet and her NO-reflex is off guard), I’ve seen her nude more often than I care to recall. But not since the operation.

  I’m about to head back downstairs when a reflection from the bathroom flickers in the hall mirror. I know I shouldn’t spy on my mother, but I’m stuck to the spot. She’s standing in front of the bathroom mirror, massaging the long scar that runs diagonally from her right armpit down to her ribs. After a minute or so, she puts the lid back on the bottle of vitamin E oil. Thinking she must be finished and on her way out of the bathroom, I back away a few steps, so that it will seem as if I’ve just come upstairs when we meet on the landing.

  When she doesn’t come out after a minute or so, I move to where I can see again. Mum’s still in front of the mirror but now she’s holding her left arm over her head. Her face is pinched with concentration while her right hand moves in small circles around her left breast, up to her arm
pit and then up to the top of her chest and neck. She goes over the entire area three times, as if she thinks things might have changed between checks.

  Is this part of Mum’s daily routine now, I wonder, to check and recheck that the cancer hasn’t appeared somewhere else in her body? When we were at the zoo Vicky said that once you’ve been diagnosed with cancer you can’t say you don’t have it any more until you’ve gone five years without a recurrence. Will Mum do this every day for five years? For the rest of her life? I step backwards again and begin to hum loudly. By the time I get to the bathroom door Mum’s pulled her robe on and is combing her hair.

  “Feeling better?” she asks cheerfully.

  I nod and study the floor tiles till she leaves, then I turn the water up as hot as it’ll go and stand under the pounding steamy stream, letting it wash over me. I don’t think about what to do with Dan. I think about Mum and her angry red scar and lonely left boob.

  Without making a conscious decision to do it, I find myself making the same small circling movements across my chest as I wash. Even though I’m certain the bathroom door’s locked (as I’ve kept it ever since Ziggy walked in on me practising my sexy-kissing face in the mirror a couple of years ago), I’m self-conscious about touching myself. It feels almost as awkward as when I got fitted for my first bra and Mum and the fitting lady made me lean over and hoick my boobs into place while they watched and advised on correct hoicking technique.

  I’ve never paid any attention to how my breasts feel until now and having never felt anyone else’s, either, I have no idea what “normal” should feel like. I keep circling until Ziggy bangs on the door, threatening to kick it in if I don’t get out of the bathroom pronto.

  Mum and Gran are at the dining table when I get to the kitchen. Judging by the way Mum’s holding the newspaper up to cover her face, they’ve already come to blows this morning.

  Gran puts down the brochure she’s reading. “There’s a fresh brew in the pot.”

  I get a mug from the cupboard and pour myself a cup of tea to drink while I decide what I feel like for breakfast.

  “Isn’t it a gorgeous day?” says Gran. “The Bureau of Meteorology says it’s going to get up to thirty-two degrees. I was saying to Gene, it’s the perfect weather for a daytrip to the seaside – the proper sea, I mean, not those tiny bays that pass for beaches around here.”

  Mum lowers the paper just enough to look crossly over the top of it. “I already told you, I have an appointment at two. There’s no way we can drive to the coast and back in time.”

  “I wasn’t talking to you,” snaps Gran. “Freia and I could go on the train, couldn’t we, Bloss? The coastal line leaves from the city.” She picks up the brochure again, which I now realise is a train timetable. “If we hurry, we can make the ten-seventeen and be there in time for lunch.”

  The idea of spending a whole day with Gran makes me grimace. Just because we shared a moment last night doesn’t mean she’s any less of an embarrassing pain in the neck the vast majority of the time. I take a sip of tea to buy myself a few seconds to come up with an excuse not to go. My mind races from the ridiculous (Boris is looking peaky and I have to stay home and take his temperature every hour) to the lame (I’ve forgotten how to swim) without producing anything plausible.

  “That’s a brilliant idea,” says Mum before I can say anything. “I’ll give you a lift to the station, if you like.” She gives me a hopeful, please-do-it-for-my-sake smile and I remember my resolution to be a better daughter.

  Ten minutes later we’re in the Volvo and Mum’s reversing out of the driveway. At her insistence, I’m slathered head to toe in SPF 50 sunblock, which makes the backs of my legs stick to the vinyl seat. She’s put another tube of sunblock in my backpack, along with two of her extra-big-and-floppy foldable hats, a couple of towels and a huge bag of organic trail mix. Gran has her tote bag with her, as always. I hope she’s not planning to sit on the beach and knit. More than that, I hope that the crocheted lime green singlet she’s wearing doesn’t have a matching crocheted swimsuit – or worse, a bikini. She twists round in the front passenger seat and winks at me, like this is some joke we’re in on together. Yeah right, the joke’s on me.

  I hardly ever catch trains, and I’ve never caught one outside the city except for when we had an excursion to Ye Olde Towne in Year Five, to learn about gold panning and convict flogging. My main memory of that train journey is of puking all the way home after eating too many ye olde lollies. Gran, on the other hand, is a seasoned rail traveller, as she tells us at length in the car. She and Grandad once took the Ghan all the way from Adelaide to Darwin.

  After Mum drops us off, we get our tickets and find the platform for the coastal line where the train is already waiting. I go to get on the first carriage we come to, eager to put down the heavy backpack, but Gran yanks me back and leads me all the way to the other end of the train. She walks the length of the empty carriage before selecting seats in the front bank of four.

  “Golden rule of train travel, Bloss,” she says as she takes the window seat and puts her bags on the one facing it, “always sit as close to the front as you can. All the lazy people get on at the other end, so the carriages are more crowded and the loos are used by more people, too.”

  Her words are still hanging in the air when the carriage fills with other voices. I look round to see a crowd of silver, grey and lilac heads. It seems every pensioner in town knows the golden rule.

  The oldies take forever to sit down. There’s a lot of chatter about who’s sitting with whom and who needs to be on the aisle because they have a weak bladder and who gets travel sick if they face backwards. It’s pretty much a replay of the Ye Olde Towne excursion, except this lot doesn’t have a teacher with them to tell them to sit down and shut up. They’re still negotiating the seating arrangements when the train pulls out from the platform.

  “Excuse me, ladies, but is that seat free?” asks a man, pointing to Gran’s bags.

  “Certainly.” Gran puts her handbag on her lap and wedges her tote between us. “I’m Thelma Beauford and this is my granddaughter, Freia.”

  “Stan Majors,” says the man, shaking hands with each of us before sitting down. He tells us that he’s with the other seniors, on a University of the Third Age trip to investigate tidal pool erosion. (So I wasn’t that far off with the school excursion after all.) As he talks, I can’t help staring at the silver tufts of hair sprouting from his ears. They wave mesmerisingly in the breeze from the train’s air conditioning.

  Stan and Gran trade stories for a while. She tells him about moving to Queensland and that she’s come down to support her daughter through her “women’s troubles”, and Stan tells us about his dear-Marjorie-may-she-rest-in-peace, and the obligatory photos of grandchildren are pulled from wallets. Gran obviously feels that Ziggy and I can’t compete with Stan’s six grandkids, so she plays her trump card and tells him that she and I are on a daytrip. She even makes it sound like it was my idea.

  “It’s our special day together, isn’t it, Bloss?” she says, reaching over the tote to squeeze my shoulder. “We’re going all the way to Little Ridge.”

  At the mention of our destination, I turn my head so fast that I snap a muscle in my neck. Gran takes advantage of my wincing to avoid eye contact, quickly asking Stan about dear-Marjorie-may-she-rest-in-peace to keep up their conversation.

  I rub my neck with my left hand and use my right to root around in Gran’s tote until I find the train timetable. The station map on the back confirms that Little Ridge is where the coastal line terminates. My stomach gurgles loudly. It’s either sick at the thought of how Dan’s going to react to me showing up unannounced or a reminder that I didn’t have a chance to eat breakfast this morning. I open the trail mix in the hope that it’s the latter.

  By the time the built-up outer suburbs have given way to fields and paddocks full of sheep, I’ve eaten about half a kilo of nuts and seeds. When the train lurches around a sharp bend, the t
rail mix threatens to reappear. I know I have to stop eating and calm myself down so I close my eyes and try to remember the positive-thinking visualisation we learned in Health and Development last year. The idea is that you imagine yourself succeeding at whatever the big scary task ahead of you is, and that makes you feel like you can do it. I count to five as I inhale, hold the breath for a beat and then exhale for five. After a few deep breaths like this, I conjure up an image of Dan. He’s coming out of the surf, his wet hair slicked back from his face and droplets of water running from his broad shoulders and down his chest … hang on, I’m veering out of positive visualisation and into steamy fantasy here. Time to focus. I take a few more deep breaths until I see Dan on the beach again. This time he’s fully clothed, which is much less distracting. He’s walking towards me, smiling. This is going well, so far. He gets closer and closer to me, grinning happily. Then, when he’s close enough to touch me, he keeps walking. Straight past me. I turn towards where he’s going and see a blond girl standing on the beach behind me. Kristy. When Dan reaches her he stops.

  “Are you all right, Bloss?” I open my eyes to find Gran and Stan staring at me. Gran must be worried because she’s paused her knitting mid-stitch.

  “You sounded a bit funny,” says Stan. “Like you couldn’t catch your breath. Is it asthma?”

  I shake my head and straighten up in my seat. “I’m fine. I must’ve dozed off.”

  Obviously, thinking about Dan is not going to help me at this stage. What I need is distraction. I glance around the carriage, hoping to spot a discarded magazine or newspaper, but there’s nothing. In desperation, I reach into Gran’s tote and pull out the wad of bright blue. I put the right needle into the back of the first stitch and begin reciting the rhyme about the bunny.