The Incredible Adventures of Cinnamon Girl

by Melissa Keil

  ‘Well, yeah, that, but also … I thought maybe we could check out some schools again as well? Melbourne Uni law faculty is having a summer session I’d like to go to, and I thought maybe you’d want to see the College of the Arts again? You zoomed out so quickly when you did your interview that I don’t think we saw more than the reception and, you know, you should look around before …’

  I drop the envelope, my hands doing that clammy thingo again. ‘Why would I want to do that?’ I say quietly. I flip to a random page in my Spider-man book and stare blankly at a panel. In my peripheral vision, I see Grady cross his arms.

  ‘Because, up until a few months ago, it was all you could talk about,’ he says, just as quietly. ‘Because whatever it is you’re thinking about, it doesn’t hurt to look, Alba.’

  When I glance up at him, he is staring at me with his stubborn-face, and though I don’t get my back up often, I feel my spine straighten.

  ‘Grady – stop pushing. It’s really starting to get old. You know – gah, I can’t even remember anything I said in that stupid interview, I was so freaking nervous! And you saw how many other people were there, all clutching their folios like hopeful morons … I don’t know why you just assume they’re gonna want me. And why can’t you understand … I don’t get what’s so wrong with being happy where you are. Why does everyone need to be in a super-mad rush to be somewhere else? I love it here, and I’m happy –’

  Grady squares his shoulders. ‘You’re scared,’ he says, in this decisive tone that pisses me right off. ‘You’re afraid, and so you’re hanging on to what you know because you are terrified of what comes next. Okay, right now things are awesome as they are, but Alba, why can’t you see that things could be even better –’ He runs his hand over the back of his neck. And then he picks up his Sherlock hat and twirls it frantically. ‘I know it’s not my place to tell you what to do –’

  ‘It’s really, really not, Domenic,’ I snap.

  His eyes fly up to mine. ‘Don’t first-name me, Sarah,’ he snaps back. ‘I’m trying to help you.’

  ‘And who says I need your help, or your advice? You are not my Alfred!’

  Grady tosses the deerstalker onto the bed. ‘Don’t know if you’ve noticed, Batman, but I am not your butler!’

  ‘Then why are you acting like a know-it-all grandpa!’ I bark back. ‘You don’t know everything! You don’t know what I’m supposed to be, or where I’m supposed to go! You can’t make me do something I don’t want to do –’

  Grady leaps off my bed. ‘So stay here!’ he yells. ‘You’ll end up marrying Eddie, since he’ll be the only guy left. Your kids’ll be born with five o’clock shadows and have, like, no necks, and you’ll move into the flat behind his dad’s milking shed and join the country women’s knitting club or whatever, and you’ll stop drawing and reading and smiling, and you won’t be you anymore. And you’ll forget all about me.’

  I hunker against my wall, my blood not so much fizzing as boiling. ‘Cos they’re my only options, right? And who says I need to marry anyone! Maybe I’ll run the bakery with Mum! Maybe I’ll open a shop with Tia and start making my own dresses! Maybe I’ll build a studio and publish my comics right here in the Valley! Maybe I’ll be the first person to rollerblade over the Tanami Desert! You don’t know!’

  Grady stops pacing and swings around again. ‘It really doesn’t bother you at all, does it?’ he says, glaring down at me. ‘I’m leaving, and you’re staying, and you couldn’t care less that that is going to be it. Because think about it, Sarah. Paulette isn’t going anywhere. Eddie’s brothers, and my brother, they aren’t going anywhere. Half our class has already hightailed it, and we’re probably never going to see them again. If you stay here, you’re stuck, and if I leave –’

  ‘You’re not coming back.’ Those stupid tears that have been threatening all week finally well and spill over. Grady freezes. His face becomes stricken. I hardly ever cry, and he’s never been able to stand it when I do.

  ‘Alba, I’m sorry … it’s all right. God, I’m an idiot. Don’t listen to me.’

  ‘You can be a real arsebag sometimes, Grady.’ I throw myself on my bed and attempt to wipe my tears with a ream of Christmas paper.

  The bed dips as Grady sits beside me. I can feel my whole body trembling with angry tears, but I take a couple of deep breaths. Grady and I don’t fight. I refuse to accept that we are fighting.

  ‘I’m really sorry, Alba,’ he whispers. ‘I’d rehearsed this speech in my head, and I’m pretty sure it sounded less … toolbag-ish in there. I know it’s your call what you do. But you are so talented, and the thought of you wasting that …’ He touches my back tentatively. ‘Alba? I don’t get what’s going on in your head. I don’t know what’s changed. And it’s freaking me out because I’ve never not known before …’

  I take another breath and haul myself up. I push my palms into my eyes, focusing on the sparks behind my lids. ‘Grady, listen to me. I don’t know what I want. I know what I’ve always said I wanted, but I haven’t had to properly think about any of it, and now that I do have to think about it, it’s just all too … big. Too much. Sometimes my head is so foggy with all the stuff I’m supposed to want, I can’t pick the bits that are me talking and the bits that are everyone else. Sometimes I can’t shut your voice out of my head, and it’s like, I can’t hear me over it. Does that make sense?’

  I drop my hands. His cheeks are flushed, but I can tell that behind those stubborn eyes, he’s trying his best to rein it in. ‘I didn’t realise I was crowding you –’

  ‘No, shut up for a sec. I’m trying to make a point. Grady, sometimes it feels like you have fired this starter pistol, and, what, I’m just supposed to start running behind you? Even though I’m basically comfortable hanging around the snack bar in my pyjamas, and I don’t even know if I want to be on the track, and my shoes are somewhere underneath my bed, and hey, maybe swimming is more my thing –’

  Grady shakes his head. ‘That … is a terrible metaphor.’

  ‘Yeah, okay, my metaphors are rubbish, but the point is – I need to figure it out on my own. My decision.’ I swipe my hands on my dress, but the icky tinglyness remains. ‘I’m … not your sidekick, Grady.’

  He nods, but his eyes stay locked on his hands. I lean into his shoulder, aiming for a confidence that seems to have left me somewhere around boob pancakes. ‘Domenic Miles Grady – do not panic. Look, I know you’re scared.’ He snaps his head around. ‘But Grady, you are going to be brilliant. You’ll be a big fancy lawyer, and you’ll get to see all those places you’ve always wanted to. And whether I go or stay shouldn’t make any difference.’

  He laughs, but there’s zero humour in it. ‘Yeah. It shouldn’t.’

  He stares at the floor, and I stare at the sweep of curls near his neck. And, for just a moment, I allow a tiny crack in the compartment in my head where I store all the stuff I haven’t allowed myself to contemplate. For just a second, I imagine waking up in my bedroom, and looking out over the Valley, and realising that Grady is not in his yellow house. He’s not stretched out on my couch in his pyjamas, or waiting for me in his booth in the diner. He’s not hanging with his brother at the garage, or hauling boxes at the Eversons’. He’s not doodling stick men on my notebooks in our teeny classroom, long legs in his scratchy school uniform taking up too much space beneath our table. He’s not about to burst through my verandah door with a story about something he’s read on the internet. And then I slam a lid on the compartment, cos it feels pretty much exactly like someone is sitting on my chest.

  ‘We can’t do everything together forever. Maybe … we aren’t supposed to?’ I say, the words feeling wrong even as I’m saying them.

  Grady’s eyes linger on the collage of photos I’ve hung lopsidedly above my bookshelves. ‘I know,’ he says softly.

  He collapses backwards on my bed with a sigh. And then he reaches up and tugs at my wrist, pulling me down beside him. We used to play this game when we we
re little, lying like this and mashing our knees together until someone caved and owwed and called stop. We haven’t done that in a long time, though; Grady stopped wanting to play when his legs got big enough to leave a bruise.

  I reach for his hand. His fingers twitch, before he links them tentatively through mine. For a long time, neither of us says a word. For the first time in my whole life, I have no idea of the right words to say to him. But it’s Grady. We don’t run out of things to talk about.

  ‘Do you really want to rollerblade over the Tanami Desert?’ he says eventually.

  ‘Should probably learn to rollerblade first, right?’

  ‘I’m guessing it would help, yes.’

  ‘And do you really think I’d marry Eddie? Our kids would have very giant heads.’

  He chuckles. ‘Naw. Can’t see you ever being quite that desperate. Even if we are looking at a last-man-on-earth-type scenario.’

  ‘Grady, you don’t really think it’s true, do you? I know it’s impossible, but what if … the world has to end sometime, right? All those rogue nukes and tsunamis and ice caps melting, and we’re just sitting here, and, I dunno …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, maybe we should … do something. You know. What would you do if you only had one day to live and all that?’

  Grady pulls my hand onto his chest. ‘What would you do, Alba?’

  ‘I dunno. I think – and I know you don’t feel the same way – but I’d want to be right here. I’d want to be home, with you and Mum and Cleo and the guys …’ With my hand on his chest, I can feel the solid, familiar whump of his heartbeat through my palm. ‘If I only had one day to live, then this is exactly where I’d want to be.’

  Grady is silent for ages. ‘And if you had more than one day?’

  I untangle my fingers from his and roll onto my belly. ‘Well. Guess that’s the question, isn’t it?’

  ‘I guess so,’ he says, his eyes on my ceiling. ‘But Alba, you’re wrong about one thing. I want big things, you know that, and I can’t imagine any of them happening here. I can’t change that about me. But if I did only have one day to live, then this – right here – is exactly where I’d want to be.’

  I rest my chin in the crook of his elbow, and I smile at him until he drags his eyes to me. He smiles lopsidedly back, and just like that, I know this conversation is over.

  ‘You’re staying here tonight. Right?’

  He sits up and swings his legs off my bed, and he sticks the deerstalker on his head. ‘Nah. Better go. I promised Mum I’d wrap the presents we bought Aunt Molly and I’ve got … other stuff on tomorrow. And I should probably not leave the house empty. You know, I caught some drunk guy drinking out of Clouseau’s water bowl this morning? Seriously, this whole episode has put me off alcohol for life.’

  He grabs his Christmas box and heads outside. The gabble from the farm gusts into my room, and I try not to flinch as the jarring noise invades my space.

  ‘Merry Christmas, Alba,’ he says softly as he steps onto the verandah.

  ‘Hey, Grady?’

  He turns around again, the lanterns and Sherlock hat throwing his face into shadow.

  ‘Yeah, Alba?’

  ‘You know, you don’t ever have to worry about me forgetting you. Ever. You had very distinctive hair when we were little. I’ll always remember you as that kid I once knew who looked like Beaker from The Muppets.’

  He hesitates. Then he leans down and gives me a fleeting kiss on the cheek. ‘Woman, has anyone told you that you can be extremely mean?’

  I give him a dismissive wave, and he waves back as he disappears into the darkness.

  I sit on the edge of my bed again. Now, depressed-guy in the lounge is whining about only being home for Christmas in his dreams, and I have this overwhelming urge to run out there and chuck Mum’s iPod into the compost.

  I lie down and shove a pillow over my head.

  I’m not totally delusional. I know I can’t stay in this room forever. I know I’m supposed to want to leave. And maybe I do, one day. I want to see MoMA and the Musée d’Orsay, and I want to check out the headquarters of Marvel and DC and Dark Horse. I want to go to art school, one day, though the thought of being just one of a bazillion wannabes makes me feel small and blue. I want to make plans. But I just don’t know how to make myself jump on this arbitrary schedule the universe keeps trying to set for me.

  Because honestly? Part of me knows that Grady is right. I’m just not brave enough for the things I want. Any of the things that I want.

  My phone chimes. I drag the pillow away from my face and grab my mobile from the floor. On my screen, Daniel’s blue eyes are staring at me with a selfie I took of us that night at the Junction. His expression is straight from A Home Among the Gum Trees – part-bedroom eyes, part-someone-has-just-given-me-an-enema face.

  Merry Christmas, SJA. Hope Santa brought everything your little heart desired. Looking forward to catching up again – got a pres for you. xx Dan

  I text him back my most articulate response – question mark, exclamation mark, smiley face. And then I toss my phone on the floor and change into my jammies. I crawl under my sheets, despite the heavy, oppressive heat, and make a tent with my Spider-man book and lamp, just like I used to do with Dad’s comics when I was a kid.

  Sometime later I hear Mum and Cleo stumbling into the lounge. The god-awful Bing Crosby music is replaced with one of Angie’s early-nineties mixes that will, inevitably, end with one of them standing on the coffee table while belting out a Nirvana song. No doubt to be followed by the digging out of Mum and Dad’s wedding album, and a gush of cocktail-infused nostalgia-tears.

  I switch off my lamp and pull the pillow over my head again.

  I should be happy. Almost everyone I love is in the one place, and Grady bought me a brilliant present, and, despite a weird hiccup, we’ve had an awesome Christmas, as always, and Daniel is here, and the world is spinning the way it’s supposed to, regardless of the ridiculousness happening outside.

  But I can’t shake this horrible feeling that – even discounting the end of the world – nothing at all in my universe is right.

  I wake up on a sweltering Christmas Day with an unfamiliar sense of foreboding.

  Normally, I’d be spending the morning schlepping in my jammies, reading Dad’s Marvel holiday specials and watching Double Indemnity with Grady, as is tradition. But normally, if the universe worked the way it’s supposed to, then Grady would’ve been snoozing on the other side of my room, waiting for me to pounce on him with Christmas Day cheer.

  But Grady’s couch is empty, and I can’t sleep. My mental alarm pings at 5.30 a.m., and my eyes are instantly wide, my heart double-timing in bewildering panic mode.

  I fall out of bed and click on my computer. The news is led by a bunch of jokey doomsday stories, each more nonsensical than the next. But there’s other stuff, too; stuff that should make me giggle, but serves only to send a clammy trickle of sweat tumbling down my spine. There’s a story about an outbreak of a bizarro tropical disease in Kenya. This weirdness at a Dutch zoo, where the entire troop of baboons freaked out and then fell silent, not eating or moving for days. Some dude in a village in France is convinced his goat gave birth to a rabbit. Though really, his proof seems to be an unfamiliar bunny hopping around his yard, and his goat appearing a little more chuffed than usual. Drunk goat-herders aside, the signs are, apparently, everywhere.

  But honestly? I have zero interest in decoding these portents of impending doom; wondering if the sky is falling cos someone saw the horsemen of the apocalypse riding through their cornflakes or whatnot.

  And besides. I know that the very worst things of all can sneak up behind you in the quiet and sunshine. And they don’t often come with warnings.

  I wander onto my verandah. The sun is creeping over the hills, and the horizon is a mishmash of smudgy pinks. A handful of people are moving in the fields, and many more are splayed on sleeping bags and car hoods. Stray paper Chr
istmas hats and the odd bit of toilet paper tumble past. Apart from the faint song of the Palmers’ cows, the farm is eerily silent.

  In the distance, where the fields are broken by the line of red gums, my eyes fall on a motorbike parked beside a tent. The bike is huge, a black body glinting in the early sun – a classic retro cruiser, or it looks like that from here. If Dad got a glimpse of that beast, he’d probably be halfway across the field barefoot in his jocks, drawn to it like a zombie towards chrome-accented brains. Even from a distance, I can tell it’s a beautiful bike. And it kinda makes me feel like yakking last night’s pumpkin pie all over my plastic backyard.

  I scamper back inside and draw my curtains tightly behind me.

  I stand aimlessly in the middle of the room, staring at my tacked-up sketches. Cinnamon Girl seems wholly unimpressed by Christmas Day. I briefly consider adding a Santa hat to her rockabilly outfit, but she’s becoming steadily more pissy-looking as her panels progress; messing with her could be a bad idea. I’m getting a little worried that one of these days she might jump out of the page and beat me to death in my sleep with one of her red stilettos.

  Though it’s barely passed six, I pick up my phone, and I call Grady. I have this flash of him face-planted in his pillow with his Sherlock hat on his head, and I can’t help but smile. I don’t know what I’m planning to say. I just feel this need to talk to him, like, right this second. I call twice. But Grady doesn’t answer. I send him a Merry Christmas text, chock full of festive emoticons, but – though I know he sleeps with his phone under his pillow – I don’t get anything back.

  So instead I wake up Angie with a pot of Lady Grey tea and a tonally challenged ‘Trolley Song’ from Meet Me in St Louis. It feels like ages since I’ve properly hung out with Mum. Angie and I whip up breakfast in our PJs while mercifully chatting about everything other than the apocalypse, and then we swap our presents. Mum gives me her traditional awesome artists’ bag with graphite pencils, pots of India ink and pads of Bristol board. Annoyingly, one of the art books I’d ordered for her still hasn’t arrived. For a fleeting moment, I see myself on a busy street with more than a handful of crusty old shops. And the rows upon rows of comics patiently waiting on the shelves of city stores …