by Melissa Keil
I can’t remember when it was that we stopped sharing a bed. I don’t know why that thought flitters through my head. And I don’t know why, the moment it does, my knees do this jelly-dance, like they’re no longer concerned with keeping me standing.
I know I could sleep on my couch, or in the lounge, which is marginally cooler than my airless bedroom. But I kick off my shoes and crawl up behind him, resting my head on the edge of his pillow. My face is near the soft curls at the nape of his neck, a hand-span between us that seems suddenly impossible to cross.
I fall into a fitful, restless sleep, with the ghosts of all my stories swirling in my head.
I know it’s not yet properly morning, but the godforsaken never-ending heat is baking my bedroom, and yesterday’s dress is sticking to my sweaty back, and without opening my eyes, I can tell it’s gonna be a totally rubbish day. Cos I wake up to the foggy realisation that it’s only five more sleeps till the Rapture, and the Grease megamix is blasting from carspeakers near my fence, and Grady is gone.
I check the bathroom, half-expecting him to be sleeping in the tub like the morning after Gum Trees vodka shenanigans. But my bathroom is empty. He’s not rifling through the fridges in the kitchen, or scoffing our food in his blue booth. I grab my phone, but before I can dial Grady’s number, something freezes my hand. It’s like this montagey flashback of the last few days flies through my consciousness; his stubborn face and totally out-of-character temper and sad, sad eyes. And I feel woozy and nauseated, as if I’m nursing a mother of a hangover myself.
I kinda feel like eating popcorn for breakfast, and moping.
I sort of want to hide under my sheets with a torch and my longbox of Y: The Last Man to keep me company.
I’m half in the mood to run to Grady’s house and punch him in the head for making me stress.
But maybe it’s not Grady I’m stressed at. Not directly, anyway. And maybe punching him in the head isn’t exactly going to solve my problems.
I crawl back into bed and send him a text.
Are you dead? Have you woken in an alley with a body at your feet and no memory of the last twenty-four hours? If you are wearing a blood-splattered trench coat – run! Run now! Avoid all dames and broads, and anyone who looks like Orson Welles. Alternatively, you could just mosey back here and watch The Avengers with me. I know it’s not Christmassy, but we can festive it up with Santa hats and figgy pudding. Okay, I don’t know what figgy pudding is. I’ll google it. Or maybe you can make me pancakes as payment for dragging your beer-soaked butt halfway across the Valley. I always thought you’d turn out to be more of a port-and-lemonade guy, you know? Kinda like Mrs Garabaldi. Only, less testosteroney. Anyway. Avengers?
Okay, admittedly, that takes me while to type.
And it takes Grady a good forty-five minutes to respond. My phone lights up with that close-up of his eyeball, and a curt message that makes my toes curl:
Not dead. Feel dead. Talk later.
And then nothing. Nada. Complete silence from the only other person on the planet who can talk and text while simultaneously brushing his teeth and juggling small cats.
I fling my phone across the room, only half-aiming for the couch. ‘Okay, Domenic,’ I hiss. ‘Be a sulky arsebag! But don’t think I’m gonna be chasing you to the end of the earth!’
I stomp into the bathroom and shower under sub-zero water. I sweep my hair into a messy bun, and I layer on my brightest red lipstick. I dig out a black dress from the back of my wardrobe, the one with the pink skulls on the bodice and skirt, cos it totally feels like a skulls-and-blood-lips sort of day.
Mum takes one look at me as I hurtle into the kitchen, and she grimaces.
‘Uh-oh. Them’s fighting clothes. What’s going on?’
I yank my apron from the hook near the sinks. ‘Nothing’s going on. I’m tired. I’m sick of the noise, and this whole town smelling of pit-sweat and car fumes, and falling over drunk-arse morons every time I step out of my house! I want to be in bed with Best American Comics, not busting my bits in here serving coffee to people who are waiting to be abducted by aliens and whatnot! And you know what? The only thing I really want to do right now is punch Original Ned Zebidiah in his stupid Fu-Manchu face! Gah!’ I give up trying to tie the stupid strings of my stupid apron, and I scrunch it into a ball and toss it in the sink. ‘Has anyone even seen Original Ned? For all we know, this whole instalment could’ve been caused by the dude eating dodgy mushrooms or forgetting to take his lithium –’
‘O-kay,’ Mum says lightly. She grabs my elbow and steers me into the house, shutting the bakery door behind her. ‘As much as I enjoy a good dummy-spit, Sarah, the rest of the kitchen might prefer to come to work and not be assaulted by a scene from Glengarry Glen Ross.’ She plonks us both down at the dining table. ‘You want to tell me what’s got you so huffy?’
I drop my head into my hands. ‘Mum, everything is just getting so … muddled. Messy. I’m tired of thinking, and stressing, and not knowing what’s happening with … people. With me. I really don’t think I can cope with much more of this. I just need everything to go back to the way it was. I need everything to just … stop now.’
Mum crosses her arms. ‘Well. Too bad,’ she says with a shrug.
I drag my head up. ‘Jeez. Way to be sympathetic, Angela.’
Mum laughs. ‘What do you want me to say? That you can hole up in your room forever? I’m not booting you out. Stay if you want. We can invest in matching cardigans and spend our nights at the Junction having vaguely racist conversations with the Alberts’ aunts. Stay, Sarah, till you’re old and incontinent. Or until the mole people return to rule over humanity. If that’s what you really want.’
I hug my knees into my chest and cover my face with my hands. Honestly? Right now, the only thing I am certain I want is the blissful unconsciousness of sleep. Because if I let myself think about it – really allow myself to imagine living this little life forever – all I feel is that nameless, belly-churning panic again.
I’m merrily sinking into a haze of my own confusion, so it takes a good few minute of staring through my fingers to realise that the light in the lounge is a little … odd. I glance through the window. And, unthinkingly, I float to my feet.
‘Mum … look at that.’
Mum swivels around and peers out the window as well. ‘Oh,’ she says softly.
The vivid cerulean sky of the past few weeks has disappeared. Over the farmland the sky is white, as blank and featureless as winter. It looks like it should be cool, but I head out to the verandah with Mum in my wake and the heat hits me the moment I crack open the door. There are a few people sitting on the hay bales near my back fence, but the atmosphere is weirdly subdued. There’s something about the low sky that feels insanely claustrophobic. Almost like this hushed dome has descended over the Valley.
‘Maybe a storm’s on its way?’ Mum says uncertainly.
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘Maybe.’
But there is none of that ozoney smell of brewing dry lightning in the air, the scary harbinger of bushfires. If anything, it’s … even more unsettling.
I pull Mum inside and close the door quickly. ‘Mum, do you need me today?’
Mum drags her eyes away from the sky. She sighs. ‘We’ll cope. I’m cutting the menu to staples since now Merindale’s basically run out of everything as well. We should be able to churn out enough rolls and vegan brownies to keep the masses from rioting. Go. Do what you need to do, bub.’
I skulk back to my room and grab a sketchpad from beneath the piles of dirty clothes. I pull my curtains shut and crawl into bed with a handful of 2Bs. This sketchpad is an old one that I haven’t touched in months. Half of it is covered in a rough storyboard, some panels of which eventually found their way into my Cinnamon Girl folio. She’s scattered in spirited poses, her face beaming out of the page, back when she still looked cheerful, and hopeful, and not so – well, deranged.
I glance at the sketches that are now littering my
bookshelf and walls. Her face is scrunched in expressions that, if she had superpowers, would suggest she might be exploding a planetoid shortly, or vaporising a baddie into his component atoms. Maybe I should give her superpowers. Hey, she’s mine, and I can do whatever the hell I want with her. Despite the fact that, across my room, she’s insisting on remaining pissy, and antsy, and bored, and annoyed, and something else, too.
I lean against the wall behind my bed with the sketchpad on my knees. My hands fly over the page, a scratchy storyboard in uneven panels. I draw her in giant boots and a kick-arse dress, a snarly frown on her square-jawed face. I draw her as a roaring Goliath, dangling from the side of the Empire State Building, and I draw her as a pocket-sized warrior in a costume just like the Wasp’s. I draw her hunched over a bar in a smoky cocktail lounge like one of Grady’s noir heroines. I draw her as a clichéd chick superhero, all anatomically stupid pose and giant bazongas, which almost makes my fingers fall off in loathing. I draw her in her warehouse apartment, staring through her windows as the sky explodes in the distance. I draw her soaring, arms stretched, through a wide pale sky, and stomping her way purposelessly across the moon.
Then I toss the sketchpad onto the floor, and I pull on my sleep mask and go back to bed.
•
It feels like only minutes before I sit up with a start. I tug off my mask and hurry to my window.
The white sky is still bearing down over the farm. A breeze has kicked up, rustling the tents and what remains of the scrappy Thunderdome. I’m sweaty, and my room is boiling, but as I stare out over the field the flesh on my arms becomes all goosepimply.
I rescue my phone from beneath a couch cushion. It’s just past lunchtime, and I have only one text. It’s not Grady’s doe-eye that flashes on my screen, but the puckered selfie of Petey’s lips.
Hey Alba. Is Grady with u? We’re supposed to be helping Mr Grey move the karaoke machine into the courtyard – he’s on a mission to do an Apocalypse Now-themed NYE – but I can’t find DG anywhere.
I don’t bother responding. I call Grady’s number. I’m only a little bit surprised when he doesn’t answer.
I wipe away my smudged make-up and scrub my face till my skin feels raw. I change into cut-offs and Dad’s soft blue Archie T-shirt that says I’m with Jughead on the front. And I scoot through my back door and walk away from Albany’s.
•
I head away from the farm, and the penny-farthing that has gathered a following over the last week; at this moment, a group of shirtless guys are posing in front of the oversized wheel, Christmas hats on their heads and cans of beer in their hands. After the Frida incident, I’d collected the rest of my gnomes and stored them in the space beneath the back verandah. The spots of empty dirt seem wrong somehow, a little gnome graveyard where my ceramic family should be.
I pause at the Eversons’ fruit-and-veg. In front of the window is a sun-bleached bench that has lived there for as long as I can remember. I don’t know how many hours I’ve spent on it, drawing and distracting Grady while he’s supposed to be working. On a normal Boxing Day, Mr Everson and Mr Garabaldi and Mr Grey would be perched there, side by side, sharing beers and old-man stories. But the bench is occupied by a bunch of strangers, and my three old men are nowhere to be seen.
Without thinking about it, I turn back down Main Street, and head east out of town.
•
I clear the few caravans and cars on the outskirts of the Valley, and the noise quickly disappears. It’s a good half-hour walk down the empty road, but I have this hunch I’m heading in the right direction.
Set back from the road is the primary school that closed a few years before I was born. Now, it’s little more than a graffiti-filled building in the middle of an overgrown field, with a weed-infested playground behind it. But it’s the closest place that has a proper court, and I know it’s where my boy would go when he needs to clear his head.
I hear the thud of a ball against bitumen. I duck beneath the gap in the fencing and pick my way carefully through the grass.
‘There you are,’ I say brightly as I round the building. ‘I’ve been looking for you everywhere.’
Grady pauses, his back to me. Clouseau lopes across the grass and licks at my ankles. ‘Everywhere?’ Grady says as he tosses the ball neatly through the rusted hoop. ‘There’s, like, four places I could be. Where exactly did you look?’
I sit down on a bench at the edge of the court and haul Clouseau into my arms. ‘I dunno. The bakery. The street. I am not the detective, Grady.’
Grady bounces the ball a couple of times. It hits a nasty-looking thistle growing through the three-point line, and it careens sideways into the grass. He sighs. And he finally turns around. He rubs his palms over his hungover face before he meets my eye.
‘So. Either I’ve developed a particularly offensive skunkification ailment, or you, my friend, have been avoiding me for the past two days. Two days, Domenic. That’s, like, five months in dog years.’ I straighten my spine as my confidence falters. ‘Not to mention the hard-boiled drinking problem you seemed to have adopted …’
He grimaces. ‘Yeah. The beer might have been a mistake. If it makes you feel better, it tasted almost as crap on the way back up.’ He kneads the back of his neck. ‘And I haven’t been avoiding you. I’ve just been trying to give you “space”. Isn’t that what you said you wanted?’
I gape at him while my brain reels back over our stupid fight. ‘I said I needed head space, but I didn’t mean … Grady, do you even remember the last time you and I went a whole two days without talking?’
He sighs again. He fishes his ball out of the grass, and he comes and sits beside me on the undersized bench. ‘And do you think that’s normal?’ he says eventually.
‘What do you mean?’
He looks out over the farmland. ‘I’ve been thinking about stuff. Stuff that you said, and … I think you were right. I don’t think I’ve been very fair to you, Alba. It’s not my place to talk you into anything.’ He bumps my shoulder, but his eyes stay focused somewhere in the distance. ‘I couldn’t even talk you into doing Scouts with me when we were kids. And there were toasted marshmallow nights involved. Remember?’
‘I would have sucked at all that outdoorsy stuff,’ I mumble. ‘But Grady, I didn’t mean that I wanted you and me to not hang out. That’s just the stupidest idea in the universe. Especially now, when time – I didn’t mean –’
‘The thing is,’ he says quietly. ‘Everything you said … it’s stuff I’ve been thinking about as well.’ He drops the basketball and rolls it between his feet, slowly, backwards and forwards. ‘Sometimes your voice is all I can hear in my head, too. Sometimes it’s hard to see anything clearly when everything’s been so … great. You know?’
I look down at the bench beside us. It’s covered with sketchy graffiti; faded, misspelt reflections from little hands long gone. ‘Grady … when did you decide you wanted to be a lawyer? Do you even know why you picked that?’
He scoots off the bench and sits on the ground with his back to me. ‘Well, when I was a kid I wanted to be Inspector Gadget. You remember that, right?’ He runs his fingers over Clouseau’s ears. ‘Not my proudest phase, but – I dunno. I always liked puzzles. I think the world is really unfair, and I like the idea of making it a bit fairer. I would’ve been a detective, only pretty sure I’d shoot myself in the arse with my own gun.’ He swallows uncertainly as he glances up at the white sky. ‘You know why I chose law, Alba. It was because of your dad.’
‘Dad?’
‘Well, yeah. Will always had the best stories. He was always telling me about the cases he studied at law school and the weird people he met at uni. He said it never bothered him that he didn’t practise, cos he just loved learning all that stuff. Will was, like, the coolest grown-up I knew.’
‘I’d forgotten all about that.’ I stare at the top of his curls in a sudden swoop of shame. ‘You and Dad. I’d forgotten how close you guys were. I don’t
know why I never thought about it before, but it’s like … you lost two dads. Right?’
‘Careless, huh?’ he says with a humourless laugh.
I hug my arms tightly around me, even though the heat from the bitumen makes my skin feel like it’s liquefying.
‘Grady. I miss my dad,’ I whisper.
He leans his head against my knee. ‘Yeah, Alba. I miss him too.’
Grady sighs. He swivels away from me and lies down on the hot, cracked ground. And I don’t know why, but I have this sudden, insane flashback of us when we were kids. We used to hang out here all the time, watching Anthony and his friends playing basketball, or Daniel ripping up the grass on his bike. And there it is again – for some reason, I can’t remember the in-between. In my memory, Grady was a scrawny, boofy-haired kid, and then he was –
He closes his eyes. I remember, once upon a time, Cleo carrying a giggly Grady upside-down by the ankles from here. Now, he towers over his mum, his shoulders way broader than hers –
‘Alba, you need to figure out what you want,’ he says with his eyes still closed. Maybe I’ve never noticed, but though his voice isn’t a gravelly man-voice like Ed’s, it’s still solid, and sort of deep. ‘And if staying here is what you really want, then that’s just the way it has to be.’
Have I really never noticed that a light layer of hair trails down his arms to his wrists, and that his hands are big, and rough from years of basketball and hauling boxes and odd jobs around town? That when he reaches up to run a hand tiredly behind his neck, the muscles in his arms pop – not as chunky as Daniel’s, but still, substantial, and so guy-like –
‘You were the one who said it,’ he says softly. ‘You said we can’t do everything together forever. Guess it’s taken me a while to get it through my head, but …’ he drags himself upright and sits beside me on the bench again. ‘I think you were right. One way or another … I suppose everything ends.’