Anonymity Jones

by James Roy

  Anonymity Jones

  JAMES ROY was born in western New South Wales in 1968 and spent much of his childhood living with his missionary family in Papua New Guinea and Fiji, where he adventured by day and read books by night.

  His critically acclaimed works of fiction and non-fiction include the CBCA Honour Books Captain Mack and Billy Mack’s War, and the CBCA Notable Books Full Moon Racing, A Boat for Bridget, The Legend of Big Red and Town. In 2008, Town also won the Ethel Turner Prize for Young People’s Literature in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards as well as the Golden Inky in Australia’s only teenage choice awards.

  James lives with his family in the Blue Mountains. He enjoys trying to make music and art, doesn’t like olives very much, and hasn’t entirely abandoned his dream of sailing around the world.

  Also by James Roy

  Almost Wednesday

  Full Moon Racing

  Captain Mack

  Billy Mack’s War

  Problem Child

  Edsel Grizzler: Voyage to Verdada

  Town

  Hunting Elephants

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including printing, photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Anonymity Jones

  ePub ISBN 9781742740249

  Kindle ISBN 9781742740256

  A Woolshed Press book

  Published by Random House Australia Pty Ltd

  Level 3, 100 Pacific Highway, North Sydney NSW 2060

  www.randomhouse.com.au

  First published by Woolshed Press in 2010

  Copyright © James Roy 2010

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Woolshed Press is a trademark of Random House Australia Pty Ltd. All rights reserved. www.woolshedpress.com.au

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia.

  Addresses for companies within the Random House Group can be found at

  www.randomhouse.com.au/offices

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication Entry

  Author: Roy, James, 1968–

  Title: Anonymity Jones/James Roy

  ISBN: 978 1 74166 453 9 (pbk.)

  Target Audience: For secondary school age

  Subjects: Teenage girls – Juvenile fiction

  Dewey Number: A823.3

  Cover illustration by Stella Danalis

  Cover design by Stella Danalis

  Typeset in 11/18pt Adobe Garamond Pro by Midland Typesetters, Australia

  Printed and bound in Australia by Griffi n Press, an Accredited ISO AS/NZS 14001:2004 Environmental Management System printer.

  For Phil

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  By Same Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Preview of Hunting Elephants

  Once, in a street not very far from yours, there lived a girl called Anonymity Jones. She lived with her mother – who had over the years changed her name from Corinne Randall to Corinne Jones, then back to Corinne Randall – and with a man called John, who behaved as if he was Anonymity’s stepfather but wasn’t in fact her stepfather at all, since he wasn’t really married to her mother.

  Anonymity’s older sister went by the name Raven even though she’d been called Megan when she was first born, and some of the way into high school. Raven loved dark, brooding, frightening things, and didn’t live with her family any more. She’d finished school and was hoping to become a writer but hadn’t yet worked out what she was going to write about. So instead she’d gone travelling to see the world, even though Europe is only a small part of the world, and she was seeing only small parts of Europe.

  Anonymity’s father, Richard, had once been very much in love with Corinne. They’d met at the accounting firm where she was a receptionist and he was her boss.

  At that time he’d had a different wife, Virginia, with whom he was no longer in love. Virginia knew about the receptionist from Richard’s work, and would pretend not to notice when, in conversations about things that happened at the office, he would mention Corinne’s name, before hesitating.

  Virginia had also pretended to be surprised when she learnt by accident that the five-day conference Richard and Corinne had flown to lasted only two days and that the rest of the time they weren’t listening to long presentations about tax law, and how to run a private accounting firm, but were in fact ordering meals up to their eighteenth-storey hotel room, which had a balcony overlooking other hotels built beside a beach.

  Anonymity didn’t know that this was how her parents had met until Corinne used it against her father. This wasn’t because her mother was an especially unkind person, but because she was doing what cats do when they are cornered, which is to spit and hiss and scratch until whatever has cornered them either runs away or has been stripped to ribbons. And since Corinne was a Leo, this might have made sense to anyone who believes in such things.

  Anonymity heard Corinne use this information against her father when he accidentally let slip that the conference in Hong Kong wasn’t in fact a conference at all but a two-week holiday with a sales rep who had visited him in his office and left behind several notepads, two pens, a lava-lamp paperweight with the name of a software company on it, and a piece of her underwear.

  It was this very lava-lamp paperweight that Corinne Randall, who was still Corinne Jones at the time, had thrown at Anonymity’s father. The sound of the paperweight crashing into something on the other side of her bedroom wall had made Anonymity jump in her bed. She’d been almost asleep, but after the terrible thump and the sound of raised voices in the next room she grew concerned. Her parents had been known to fight from time to time, just as all parents do. But, until now, nothing had been thrown, ever.

  ‘You must really think I’m some kind of bloody idiot,’ shouted Corinne, who very rarely swore. ‘And maybe I am. Maybe I should have seen this coming.’

  ‘Why would you say such a thing?’ R
ichard shouted back.

  ‘Because you cheated on your first wife, with me! Do you remember?’

  ‘Look, Corinne–’

  ‘Why would you do this? Are you trying to punish me for something?’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

  ‘Are you looking for a way out? Because if it’s too hard, with what we’ve got to deal with around here, I’d understand. I would. But can’t we talk about that without introducing a third party? Christ! Again, Richard?’

  The argument didn’t last very much longer. For a while, all Anonymity could hear from her room was the sound of their voices, but indistinctly. Then, just when she was beginning to think that perhaps the argument had been nothing more than a rehearsal for another, larger argument to be staged at some point in the future, she heard her mother screaming, downstairs.

  ‘Get out! Get out! Get out!’ Over and over she screamed it. ‘Get out! Get out! Get! Out!’

  By the time Anonymity had come from her room, her father had gone. Surprisingly, he hadn’t slammed the front door, and Anonymity stood at the bottom of the stairs and frowned at the back of the door.

  Corinne was in the kitchen, leaning against the bench with her head pressed against the overhead crockery cupboard.

  ‘Mum?’ Anonymity said.

  Then she felt a hand on her shoulder. It was Raven, who was still living there at that time because she was two weeks from sitting her final school exams.

  ‘Hey, sis, leave it and come back up to bed,’ Raven said. ‘Just leave it.’

  ‘But Dad’s gone,’ Anonymity replied, and as she said it she heard the sound of his car roaring away.

  ‘I know. But there’s nothing you can do now. Come back to bed. Where’s Sam? Has he headed for the hills?’

  ‘Yeah, he ran out the back, I think. He couldn’t stand the shouting.’

  ‘Poor thing. He probably won’t come back in for ages now. I’ll go and get him in a minute. But go back up to bed, sis. There’s nothing we can do about Dad right now.’

  As she went past her parents’ room, Anonymity looked in there and saw the lava-lamp paperweight lying on the floor at the foot of the bed. It wasn’t broken, because the paperweights that sales reps leave in offices are not usually made of glass, but of a heavy, unbreakable plastic that can easily smash a hole in the door of a walk-in wardrobe.

  Anonymity didn’t see her father for a couple of weeks after that. She tried to call him, but he wasn’t answering his phone. Signs of him came mostly in the form of the text messages her mother received, which were greeted with a grunt, then deleted out of existence. She even heard the occasional one-sided conversation. At least, she heard the beginnings of those one-sided conversations, before her mother would stand up, leave the room and close the door quietly behind her, leaving Anonymity with Sam for company.

  Then, finally, she got to speak with him, by calling him on Corinne’s phone.

  ‘I miss you, Dad,’ she said.

  ‘I know. I miss you guys too.’

  ‘Are you coming home? The recycling is starting to pile up.’

  There was a pause. ‘I don’t know. I don’t think so.’

  ‘Are you still with...’

  ‘Kellie? I am.’

  ‘Does she love you, Dad?’

  He hesitated. ‘You know, I did the wrong thing, and your mum’s entitled to be angry with me. But I think that what happened was symptomatic of our relationship. Mine and Mum’s, I mean, not yours and mine. It’s not about you. Really.’

  While all these text messages and phone calls between Corinne and Richard were going on, Raven completed her final exams. She wasn’t sure how well she’d done, especially in some of the languages she’d been studying, but she claimed to be quite happy about her major work in art, since everyone had told her how good it was and how talented she was, and that even Blind Freddy could tell that she was going to get a fantastic mark for the series of five mixed-media self-portraits.

  The evening after Raven finished her last exam, they went out for dinner, to celebrate. Anonymity wore a flower in her hair. They went to Raven’s favourite restaurant, Il Trattoria, which was run by a woman named Rosa, who never left the kitchen, and her husband, Marco, who never went in there. They ordered pasta to start, parmigiana for their mains, and gelato and macchiatos for dessert. They even bought a bottle of Marco’s homemade red wine. Corinne drank most of it, and Raven had a little, even though she wasn’t quite eighteen. Anonymity took photos.

  Raven should have driven home that night. Had she not had that half-glass of Marco’s homemade red wine, she would have done. But drivers on their P-plates aren’t supposed to drink at all, so Corinne insisted that she would drive.

  The roadside breath-testing machine registered a blood alcohol reading of almost twice the legal limit. The test at the police station confirmed this. And later, watching her mother struggling to work out which note in her purse was the best one to give the taxi driver made Anonymity feel like leaning her head against the cold, rough bricks of the wall beside the front door.

  She imagined she was the cricket ball she once found under the azalea bush in the back garden. It must have been hit over the fence by one of the three rowdy boys next door, since neither she nor her sister had ever played cricket, and Sam had never played with those kinds of toys. The seam of the ball had rotted and lifted away and the cover was coming loose, falling easily away into four dark red segments, like wedges of an orange. A thread was wound around and around the core of the ball, and she’d found the end, picked at it, and began to unwind it. And now she was unwinding as well.

  The day her mother officially lost her licence was the same day that Anonymity lost her father. They’d just returned home from the courthouse, and Corinne was filling the kettle while Raven put the car away in the garage.

  ‘There’s mail,’ Raven said, coming in and slapping down a handful of envelopes.

  Corinne flicked on the kettle and began to sort through the mail, dropping the envelopes on the bench one by one. ‘Bill, bill, bill, junk ... uh...’

  ‘Uh what?’ Anonymity asked, noting the hesitation in her mother’s voice.

  ‘Nothing.’ But the way Corinne slipped her finger under the edge of the flap and ripped it savagely away suggested that it was rather more than nothing.

  She unfolded the handwritten letter, then Raven and Anonymity stood and watched her read it. They barely dared breathe. At last, she laid the letter on the bench beside the torn, deformed, useless envelope.

  ‘It’s from your father. This girl’s the real thing, apparently. He wants a divorce,’ she announced flatly, before turning and heading for the stairs.

  ‘Mum,’ Anonymity said, and she took a step to follow, but Raven had caught her by the arm.

  ‘Don’t.’ Raven picked up the letter and read it all the way through, before turning it over to check if there was anything on the back. Perhaps something like, Just kidding!

  But Anonymity had already seen that the back of the page was empty.

  It took several calls over a couple of days for her to reach her father.

  ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ she asked when they finally spoke.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I read your letter. This is the way it has to be?’

  ‘Oh, you saw it.’ She heard him take a deep breath. ‘It’s for the best. Really. It wasn’t easy, but it had to be done.’

  ‘So this Kellie – she’s the One?’

  Her father sighed. ‘How do we ever really know?’

  ‘Do you love her?’

  ‘We’re good together. That’s all I can say for now.’

  ‘And you and Mum weren’t ever good together?’

  ‘Once. But not any more. I felt tied down.’

  ‘Tied down? You’re married, Dad!’

  ‘Sometimes it feels like the same thing,’ he explained. ‘I don’t think that you can know what that feels like.’

  ‘Will we still get to see
you?’

  ‘Of course! What kind of question is that?’

  ‘Don’t forget that you’re our dad.’

  ‘How could I forget that? I’ll always be your dad.’

  A few weeks later, John arrived.

  Raven had just picked up Anonymity from babysitting, where she’d been looking after twin boys who did nothing but complain. Pulling into the driveway, the sisters remarked on the red American convertible parked out by the letterbox. Then, as they entered the living room and closed the door, Corinne stood up. The room was quite dark, because it was overcast outside and the curtains were partly drawn. Sam was on the armchair closest to the door, and as he looked up, Anonymity leaned over and kissed him on the top of his head. ‘Hey there, my gorgeous boy,’ she said.

  ‘Hi, girls,’ Corinne said. ‘This is John.’

  ‘Who’s John?’ Raven asked, but Anonymity had already noticed the tall, heavy-set man with the greying hair and the perfectly straight nose. He was sitting in the far corner of the living room, and he carefully balanced his cup of tea on the arm of his chair before standing up.

  ‘Afternoon, girls,’ he said, smiling.

  ‘Hi’, said Anonymity, also smiling, but only out of politeness. She wondered if she should offer to shake his hand, but there was something about him that suggested he wasn’t a shaking-hands-with-girls kind of man. Besides, she had an armload of shopping.

  ‘John’s a camera buff too, aren’t you, John?’ Corinne said to Anonymity, who blinked at the disconnectedness of the statement.

  John smiled. ‘I am.’

  Corinne slid her arm around Anonymity’s waist. ‘You should show John your camera. Remind me again, what sort do you have?’ Her cloying determination to forge this common starting point was irritatingly transparent at best, embarrassing at worst. ‘It’s a Canon, isn’t it?’