The Boy/Friend

by R. M. Corbet

  Admittedly, that last one was one serious difference.

  Even though I missed Lou heaps, I didn’t mind the school. The one thing I did mind was being called ladies, and being told to behave in a ‘ladylike’ manner: ‘Close your legs, you’re sitting inappropriately’, ‘Your skirt is too short’, ‘I don’t want to see your knees’. If they worried so much about seeing our legs, why did they make us wear dresses? This was the twenty-first century, after all.

  The slide on the data projector was showing the difference between XX and XY chromosomes.

  ‘Only after nine to thirteen weeks of pregnancy does the embryo develop sex organs,’ said Ms Webb, and everyone laughed.

  So much for the twenty-first century.

  I imagined what it would be like having boys in our biology class, with boys and girls working together in groups. Would it be no big deal, or clearly distracting? Boys were like monsters or aliens to some girls. To other girls, they were like rock stars.

  I straightened my legs and looked down at my shoes. My laces were loose. My new dress already had a small tear. Was it crazy to dress in a uniform, day after day? Or did it save us from having a fashion parade?

  My old high school had been fun, but it did have its drawbacks: broken furniture and vandalised equipment; crowded classrooms with stressed-out teachers and hyperactive bores starved for attention. I wondered what Lou would be up to. Was he making new friends or going it alone?

  I shook my head. What Lou did at his school was his business, not mine. I had a new school now. I needed to move on. Make new friends. Branch out and stop looking back. I needed to start living in the here and now . . .

  ‘Maude McNaughton? Are you with us?’

  I jumped out of my daydream. ‘Yes, Ms Webb.’

  ‘Would you care to explain to the rest of us?’

  My eyes scanned the hieroglyphics she’d written on the board: XXY, XYY, XD, ZD, ZZ.

  The room was deathly quiet. I gave it my best shot.

  ‘It’s about the difference between males and females, miss.’

  ‘Clearly. Please, go on.’

  More? I shrank back in my chair.

  ‘There are males and there are females, miss. But sometimes it’s more complicated than that.’

  ‘In what way?’

  I could feel every eye in the classroom upon me. Waiting for the new girl to stuff up.

  ‘The truth is, miss, I’m finding the whole subject of sex quite confusing.’

  There were snorts of laughter from the three girls at the back of the room. I wished for a hole I could bury myself in.

  ‘Perhaps if you paid more attention, Maude.’

  ‘Yes, miss.’

  I tried not to die of embarrassment while Phoebe Wu, the walking encyclopedia, set about clearly explaining it all. How the dominant/recessive blah blah did something-or-other with the duplication/depletion blah blah blah. It sounded a lot like what I’d wanted to say, if I’d only known how to say it.

  There were males and females. There were heterosexuals and homosexuals, bisexuals and transsexuals. There were boyfriends and girlfriends, old friends and new friends. True friends and lost friends and mutants.

  At recess, outside in the courtyard, my face still felt torched with embarrassment. I looked up from my bench to see the three back-row girls standing there, smiling at me. Shauna, Bianca and Alison – the Magnets. I braced myself for the impact.

  ‘That was cute what you said about sex,’ said Bianca.

  ‘Cute and gutsy,’ said Shauna.

  ‘Mind if we sit here?’ said Alison. ‘Some scrags took our seat.’

  It wasn’t a purely random event. Bianca and I had been friends at primary school, though her entire personality had changed since that time. Her mouth was tighter, and she had started talking without using words: They were, like . . . (shrugs), so I was, like . . . (waves).

  Now she was one of the Magnets.

  I slid along the bench to let them sit down, then I slid a bit further to give them more room. Bianca (brown hair, hazel eyes) sat next to me, then Shauna (blonde hair, green eyes), then Alison (blonde hair, hazel eyes) at the end. Bianca wasn’t rude enough to look in my lunch box, but I was pretty sure the other two did. The Magnets weren’t nosy, exactly. But, like any gang, they had their own codes of conduct and style.

  There was some brief chitchat about Shauna’s cheese dip – calories, grams of fat, that sort of thing. This turned into a discussion of favourite cheese types, from the everyday to the exotic. The only thing everyone agreed on was that cheese slices tasted like soap.

  With the cheese details finally dispensed with, we sat rubbing knees while Alison entertained us with the bittersweet tale of her latest romance. Waving a celery stick around like a conductor’s baton, she spared us no detail, emotional or physical. Shauna was the undisputed boy-magnet of the three, but Alison got points for trying. What she lacked in natural beauty and grace, she more than made up for in enthusiasm.

  When she’d eaten her celery stick, Alison stopped monologuing to pick at the stringy bits stuck in her teeth.

  Bianca turned to me. ‘So, Maude, who is this boy of yours?’

  Had I been thinking out loud back in class?

  ‘The one who makes sex so confusing,’ said Shauna.

  ‘It sounded like someone has stolen your heart,’ said Bianca.

  I tried not to look shocked. ‘Actually, there isn’t anyone.’

  ‘Actually,’ said Alison, ‘I hadn’t finished my story yet.’

  Bianca raised an eyebrow. Shauna looked bored.

  ‘Go right ahead,’ I said.

  Alison went on to explain how her new boy had rung while she was in the bath. ‘I was, like, covered in shampoo and soap.’

  ‘Wouldn’t that rust out your phone?’ I asked.

  ‘You kill me, Maude,’ Shauna laughed.

  Alison rolled her eyes. ‘He’d been saying all week how he needed to talk. But when I told him where I was, he went kind of quiet.’

  ‘I’ll bet,’ said Bianca.

  ‘Then he started going on about his last girlfriend, and how she just wouldn’t move on. How he felt responsible. How he wasn’t ready for another relationship right now. He was a mess, in the end.’

  ‘How embarrassing,’ said Shauna.

  ‘That’s when I told him he was dropped!’ said Alison. ‘I mean, hello? I was, like, naked, and he was, like, babbling.’

  Bianca and Shauna both laughed out loud.

  Alison turned to me. ‘How come you’re not laughing, Maude? Do you think I was mean?’

  ‘He sounds like a nice guy, that’s all.’

  ‘A nice guy? How?’

  ‘It sounds like he was calling to break up with you,’ I said. ‘He was just trying to let you down gently.’

  Shauna snorted. Bianca was speechless.

  Alison glared, fit to kill.

  ‘What would you know about boys, Maude?’ she scoffed.

  different directions

  THE FRONT YARD OF LOU’S place was messy enough, but the backyard was like another planet – an overgrown wilderness, cluttered with junk. There were sagging grapevines, broken banana lounges, a bike cemetery piled high with rusted wheels and frames, a woodpile, a falling-down toilet, and an old couch with weeds growing out of it. Past the fruit trees and gone-to-seed vegie garden there was a chicken coop, a fish pond and a big run-down barn called ‘the studio’. When I’d suffered enough in my nice, tidy house, at the hands of my nice, polite family, with their long list of nice, tidy things to do, I’d slip out the side gate and skip down the street to Lou’s place.

  Maude McNaughton: getaway girl.

  Lou was out in the studio with his brother, Miles. I could see them through the window, drilling holes in hub caps, bashing them into shape with mallets, and trying to thread them with bits of old wire. Miles was younger but wilder to look at. His hair was shaved at the sides and dyed yellow on top, and he wore a military jacket with a big A for Anar
chy painted on the back. Lou, in his overalls, looked more like a motor mechanic. All around them were lengths of chain, iron plates, drainpipes, paint tins and steel bolts. They’d been collecting scrap metal from the factory blocks, hammering and tuning it into weird new instruments for Lou’s latest musical ‘project’.

  The Martins were a musical family. Lou’s mum was a singer. His dad played piano. They performed in small jazz clubs and bars around town and were nocturnal, rarely waking before noon. They’d named their three kids after famous musicians: Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong and Miles Davis. Go figure.

  The studio was where the family’s various bands came to rehearse. It was set up with a drum kit, a PA system, two amps, three mike stands, a mixer and a tangle of leads, an electric piano and several guitars. There were egg cartons stuck to the ceiling and thick velvet curtains at the windows, to deaden the sound. Posters of crooners and rock gods and punks adorned the walls: Elvis, Iggy Pop, Tool, the Clash, Blink 182, Joy Division . . .

  Anyone apart from the Wiggles.

  Near the start of high school, Lou had discovered punk rock. He was all torn jeans and pimples and worn leather jacket. After all those years of hard work and devotion to jazz, he’d put his old sax away under the bed; exchanged it for a guitar and a cheap little amp and got to work practising three basic chords. He’d tried talking me into playing the drums. We could start our own band, like the White Stripes, he’d said. I’d told Lou I couldn’t play drums if I tried. (I preferred quiet reading to making a noise.) And that one White Stripes was more than enough for this world.

  Lou didn’t mind that I’d scuttled his plans. Now here he was, three years later, designing and assembling his so-called ‘post-punk industrial art-noise ensemble’: the Funky Junk Orkestra.

  Jazz plus Punk equals Junk.

  I took a deep breath, pushed open the studio doors and went in. I hadn’t heard a word from Lou in weeks. He’d avoided my calls and given one-word answers to my texts.

  Lou appeared not to notice me, but as soon as Miles saw me he waved hello. Cautiously, I waved back and crept closer to watch.

  ‘YOU GUYS LOOK BUSY,’ I shouted over the noise.

  ‘REHEARSAL TOMORROW. YOU COMING?’ yelled Miles.

  My heart dropped. Rehearsal?

  ‘IT’S BAND MEMBERS ONLY,’ Lou shouted.

  I wasn’t invited?

  Miles looked confused. ‘HOW COME MAUDE’S NOT A MEMBER?’

  ‘I ASKED HER BUT SHE DOESN’T WANT TO.’

  Liar!

  Miles glanced at me.

  ‘I’M NOT A MUSICIAN.’ I shrugged.

  ‘YOU COULD DO FRONT OF HOUSE.’

  Lou shook his head and kept hammering.

  ‘MAUDE DOESN’T WANT TO DO FRONT OF HOUSE.’

  ‘HOW DO YOU KNOW? HAVE YOU ASKED HER?’ yelled Miles.

  Lou stopped hammering and frowned at me.

  ‘Maude. Do you want to do Front of House?’

  Doing Front of House meant twiddling the knobs on the band’s PA system. It meant untangling leads and plugging them into the right sockets. It meant adjusting mike stands and saying ‘Check . . . One . . . Two . . . Three . . .’ into microphones. It meant testing levels. It meant stopping feedback and buzzes and hiss. It meant fixing circuits and soldering leads. For all I knew, it meant lugging enormous speaker boxes and getting electrocuted in the rain. I had no idea how to do Front of House, and I was pretty sure I didn’t want to know.

  ‘Sure. I’ll do Front of House,’ I said.

  Lou was unconvinced.

  ‘Even though you don’t know the first thing about it?’

  ‘If you want to teach me, I’m happy to learn.’

  ‘It’s a big commitment. Would you really want to?’

  ‘If you really think I can do it, I would.’

  ‘If you want to learn, I can teach you,’ said Lou.

  ‘If you want to teach me, I’m happy to try.’

  ‘It sounds like you’re not really serious,’ said Lou.

  ‘It sounds like you don’t really want to,’ I said.

  Miles scratched his head.

  ‘So you don’t want to learn unless he wants to teach you, and he doesn’t want to teach you unless you want to learn?’

  ‘It’s hopeless.’ I nodded.

  ‘I told you,’ said Lou.

  Miles shrugged then started up drilling again, while Lou and I continued to glare at each other.

  There was no point in trying to make sense of it.

  Through the glass doors, I noticed a girl standing watching us. She had shoulder-length blonde hair, a sweet baby face, low jeans and a tight top. I wondered how much she had seen of our spat.

  When Lou saw the girl, he immediately put down his hammer and went over to let her in.

  ‘What a cool place!’ she said, looking around.

  ‘Jill’s trying out for the band,’ Lou explained. ‘Jill, this is Maude. You already know Miles.’

  ‘Are you in the band?’ she asked, smiling at me.

  ‘No. I’m the neighbour.’

  I could have smiled more, but Jill was smiling enough for all of us. Not that I blamed her. If I had teeth like hers, I’d have smiled with them, too. Her blonde hair was perfect, the same way her teeth were. Too perfectly straight to be true.

  ‘Hope I’m not interrupting,’ she said.

  ‘We can do this another time,’ said Miles.

  ‘No, Maude was just leaving,’ said Lou.

  Trying out for a junk band? What skills did you need? Apart from a cute face, blonde hair and straight teeth?

  Feeling unwanted, I left them and went to see Ella.

  In a house full of mess, Ella’s room was the worst. There were clothes piled in heaps on the floor and the couch. Books were either stacked high or scattered around like leaves. There were figurine fairies and mythical beasts. Rows of farm animals lined up on shelves. Half-knitted scarves and strange glazed ceramics. Shreds of scrap paper with lists and odd diagrams. Glue sticks and magic tape, felt-tipped pens and coloured pencils. Ella was constantly making things then abandoning them. She had no time to look back. No time to clean up.

  I was in awe of Lou’s older sister. Not because Ella was enrolled at art college. Not because she was wild and uninhibited. Not because of her dreads or her piercings, her ripped dresses, her strange make-up or her freakishly high-pitched singing voice. I was in awe because Ella was older. Almost eighteen. Almost an adult.

  Almost.

  She was seated at her sewing machine, making warm winter pyjamas for one of her teddies. Ella had made clothes for all of her soft toys. Casual wear. Sports outfits. Fashionable attire. Her bed was so crowded with smartly dressed creatures, there was hardly any room left for her anymore.

  ‘Maude! You skank! What brings?’

  ‘I was just leaving, actually.’

  ‘Why? Did Lou boot you out?’

  ‘He’s got band rehearsal. He’s fairly flat-out.’

  Ella put down her scissors and kicked her bedroom door closed with a thud. Then she picked up a big pile of clothes from her couch and threw them on the floor to make room for me.

  ‘He’s a jerk and a snot-ball!’

  ‘He’s just busy,’ I mumbled.

  But Ella had a radar for matters of the heart. ‘He’s a grump and a bossy boots. There’s no excuse. Musicians!’ she snorted. ‘They’re all fanatics, you know.’

  I cautiously took up my place on the couch while Ella paced her floor and informed me about her friends from art college. There was the classical cellist who practised twelve hours a day and wouldn’t answer the door or pick up the phone. There was the down-and-out composer of soundtracks for low-budget slasher movies, who had sold all his furniture to buy a one-way airfare to Hollywood. There was the death-metal frontman who took too many painkillers and performed strange incantations with spirits from the afterworld.

  All the fanatical musician types were there.

  ‘They get so caught up in their
music,’ sighed Ella. ‘It’s because they’re so passionate. They’re even worse when it comes to love.’

  ‘He told you, didn’t he!’

  Ella nodded.

  ‘Lou’s not my boyfriend.’

  ‘I know he’s not.’

  ‘I never think about him in that way.’

  ‘I’m sure you don’t.’

  ‘If anything, he’s the opposite of a boyfriend.’

  ‘The opposite?’

  ‘Why are you smiling?’

  Ella came over and sat down beside me. Together, we sank down deep into the spongy couch, looking up at the paint peeling from her ceiling.

  ‘Lou and you are old friends, Maude. You grew up together. You hung out together. Damn it, you even built your own tree house!’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So, what’s the difference between a boy-friend and a boyfriend, exactly?’

  ‘I would have thought that was obvious.’ I blushed.

  ‘It’s not all about getting your gear off!’ she laughed.

  ‘Please!’ I buried my face in my hands. ‘A boyfriend is a different person completely. It’s all about romance and finding true love.’

  ‘Handsome prince? White horse?’

  ‘Sure. Why not?’

  ‘So who says he can’t be an old friend as well?’

  ‘Lou’s not my boyfriend,’ I reminded her. ‘He’s got his junk music. I’m at my new school. We’re moving in different directions right now. And besides, he was being quite mean.’

  ‘Lou is a BOY, Maude. Boys are not like girls. They don’t think the same way. They don’t live in the same world we live in. When it comes to discussing their feelings, they’re utterly useless!’

  ‘You don’t think he meant to be mean?’

  Ella put one arm around my shoulder in a big-sisterly way.

  ‘He’s a dimwit. He can’t really help it.’

  shop till you’re dropped

  I MAY HAVE ONLY BEEN at my new school for a few months, but I’d already seen girls come and go with the Magnets. Their turnover rate was impressive. One day it was all smiles, bath-secrets and cheeses. The next it was cool stares and distant lunch benches. It was never going to work with the Magnets and me. There were stylistic differences. There was me and my big mouth.