Untidy Towns

by Kate O'Donnell

  ‘That was a really interesting night,’ I said, as we pulled up outside my house. I figured kindness and diplomacy were better than honesty. ‘See you tomorrow.’

  ‘Before I forget … well, before I forget again. Here’re some books for you.’ Grandad leaned back, reaching into the backseat footwell and handing over a plastic bag. ‘Gran sent them over.’

  They were ancient yellowy-paged tomes. My Brilliant Career. The Watch Tower. Seven Little Australians.

  ‘Tell her thanks from me. I’ll try to get to these around my study.’

  Fairly sure Grandad and I both knew I was far more likely to read than do much study, but both of us let the lie hang in the air.

  ‘Goodnight.’

  ‘Night.’

  And with the weight of classic Australian literature hanging from my wrist, I let myself in the front door and there was music playing and the smell of freshly baked bread in the air, Mum and Nick were on the couch, and though I didn’t mean to I started telling them everything about my evening.

  Jenny texted me. Camping at Sam’s place next weekend. You want to come?

  Nervous-making. But maybe fun-scary. Why not? Thanks!

  Over the last few years, I’d sequestered myself so successfully each holiday, like a lonely old celebrity under house arrest, going from bedroom to backyard, walking no further than the salon or my grandparents’ house. Busying myself with babysitting and books.

  I couldn’t believe that I had stayed away so easily.

  We hiked downriver on Sam’s family’s property, feeling like the gang from Tomorrow, When the War Began. Or maybe that was just me, the outsider an insider anew.

  These were people who had once been my friends. But I stuck close to Jen because I felt shy.

  Sam walked up front because he knew the best way. This boy, who I’d danced with when we had a bush dance for our year six graduation. All the girls thought he was super cute – he was such a nice boy with his funny yellow bowl-cut hair. Now he had farmer’s arms, scruffy dirty blond hair and a fantastic smile.

  ‘Good job growing up!’ I said under my breath to make Jenny laugh.

  Emma Garnett – who I’d always been a bit intimidated by because she was gorgeous and giggly – walked with us, the girls ganging together.

  Emma’s boyfriend, Daniel, I hadn’t really known before. His family only moved to town in the summer between primary school and high school. He seemed like the kind of guy who went along with anything anyone suggested, and only sometimes complained – mostly when there was work to be done. He was walking with Jarrod Foreman and I couldn’t quite understand this group – I supposed you made friends with whoever was around.

  Sam’s chosen campsite wasn’t far from the Emy River, hidden a little by the grassy hill that rose up not far behind us. We dropped our packs and the others all flopped on the ground.

  I wandered through the gums to look at the river. From the edge it looked freezing, but inviting. The river full, clear and shimmery; I just wanted to stand on the bank and look and look. Or leap right in, drawing my body into a cannonball.

  I could hear Emma singing and Daniel telling her to shut up. Someone kept calling out things like, ‘Who wants chips?’ and ‘I’ve got M&Ms’. I could hear the crinkle of foil chip packets.

  I wandered back over through the trees and they’d started to put the tents up. I hovered by a pile of poles and stuff, lingering rather uselessly. ‘You guys come camping a lot?’

  Emma chucked a bag of tent pegs at me. ‘Yeah, sometimes. For birthdays, or – you know – on the holidays.’

  ‘Thanks for letting me crash this one.’

  ‘You’re not crashing. It’s cool you wanted to come.’

  ‘I haven’t been out here in ages. It’s—’

  ‘Push them in on a bit of an angle,’ Sam interrupted. ‘Adelaide?’

  I hadn’t realised he’d been talking to me. I was pushing the pegs straight down, but he came over and demonstrated.

  He grinned. ‘They’ll stay in better.’

  ‘Yoo-hoo, city girl!’ Jarrod waved and started dancing around his lopsided-looking tent, feigning shrieks at imaginary dirt on his shirt.

  Emma rolled her eyes, but she was smiling. ‘So, what was your school like?’

  ‘It was okay …’ I began.

  ‘Why’d they kick you out?’ asked Jarrod, flinging tent pegs at Daniel, who was using a stick as a bat, or very skinny shield.

  ‘They didn’t kick me out.’ I pushed my shoulders back. ‘I decided to leave. I mean, they just wanted us to regurgitate their lesson back to them, read the textbook, answer the questions like so, use topic sentences, to not have any original thoughts. So boring. I thought, What’s the point?’

  ‘Fair enough,’ said Sam after a moment.

  Jarrod jumped to grab a branch and pulled himself up, doing chin-ups. Jenny swooped around, checking the ropes, and I watched Emma unzip her sleeping bag and lay it out flat in her tent, then shout, ‘Hey, Danny. Get in here.’

  I sank the last peg into place with my boot. It was so strange to be among these people. In my head they were all still in year six. But it felt strangely right. I crawled into my tent and lay down. We were so loud against the sounds of the bush. It was fantastic.

  At dinner we passed around chips and slabs of bread and peanut butter.

  Something caused me to ask that question, that awful question I hated. ‘What are you guys going to do next year?’ I don’t know why I asked, except that I was actually super interested in the answers.

  A collective groan, one I heard inside my own head as well. ‘Sorry.’

  Sam screwed the cap back on his bottle of drink. ‘I just want to get through the rest of this last year. It’s been all careers speeches, excursions to the university on the coast and meetings with our homeroom teachers to help us pick our subjects. Same for you, yeah?’

  I lay back on the raincoat I’d spread out over the grass. ‘Exactly the same. GAT tests and interviews with the careers counsellor: “You’ve really got to go to university if you want to get anywhere …” Sorry. I don’t know why I brought this up.’

  But it was so close, the future. Being free and being grown-ups. We talked a bit about our plans, like what we were going to do next year, and perhaps – at a stretch – what we wanted to do by the time we were thirty.

  ‘Of course I’ll be married and have a few kids by then,’ Emma said casually, as if she were saying, ‘Of course I’ll have another sandwich if there’s one going, thank you.’

  Daniel got a bit nervy and was quick to fling a handful of gumnuts towards the trees and scuff a hole in the ground with his heel, while the others made fun of him.

  Jen sat cross-legged, leaned her elbows on her knees. ‘I’m going to apply for science, I think.’

  ‘You want to do med – don’t lie,’ said Sam.

  ‘Doctor Dear,’ I said. ‘Has a nice ring to it.’

  She blushed. ‘Yeah. But I probably won’t get the marks for it.’

  ‘You will.’ Sam seemed sure.

  ‘What about you?’ I threw some grass towards Jarrod.

  ‘Ha!’ Sam burst out.

  I watched a red flush creep up Jarrod’s neck.

  ‘Sorry, mate,’ said Sam. ‘Think school was pretty happy to see you go. No offence.’

  ‘What do you do now?’ I asked.

  ‘Not much.’

  ‘Is it your dad who runs the mechanic on Petersham Road?’

  Out of the corner of my eye I watched Sam and Daniel swap a look.

  ‘Yeah, that’s not really for me.’ Jarrod shrugged.

  ‘That rain?’ asked Jenny abruptly.

  We all looked up.

  Jarrod got to his feet and ran off up to the top of the hill. He gazed across the horizon, then called down, ‘Come see this sky!�
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  We scurried up. From the top there was a view across the countryside, and a couple of Emyvale roofs. The sun was dipping out of view, but still illuminating some mean-looking storm clouds. It was beautiful. It was eerily still.

  Daniel put his arms around Emma, his chin resting on her head. Sam leaned an elbow on Jenny’s shoulder and though she threw him a dirty look she didn’t shrug it off.

  My arm bumped lightly against Jarrod’s. ‘So, what is it you’re going to do now that you’ve left school?’

  ‘I mow lawns, do odd jobs for people. I get a bit of work. S’okay, I guess.’

  ‘Yeah, just earn a bit of money and get a start while you figure it out, huh?’

  ‘Yep,’ he said. He looked at his feet. ‘So how come you left school, really?’ he asked.

  ‘I think,’ I said slowly, ‘it was that I’m not actually as smart as they thought I was. And there’s this insane pressure. Do law. Do medicine. Fulfil your potential.’

  ‘What do you want to do?’

  I pulled my raincoat hood up and stood watching the sun disappear as the storm rumbled in.

  I looked at the people around me, tried to lay out their futures.

  Jenny’s was easy: she’d study her arse off through year twelve, get into medicine and be a doctor before any of us could blink. Sam would flex his muscles and break girls’ hearts until he took over the family farm. Emma would have babies and sew all their clothes herself. Daniel would do whatever he was told.

  And then I came to Jarrod, and his future was kind of blurry.

  Was my future blurry too? I wanted so many things. There was the do-law-and-become-rich-and-successful plan. There was a go-backpacking-around-the-world-and-get-a-few-diseases-and-life-experiences idea. But the hang-out-in-Emyvale’s-historical-society plot? What a twist. Maybe I was like Sam, with a get-through-the-next-few-months plan.

  I turned to Jarrod. ‘I have absolutely no idea.’

  When the first lightning cracked and split the sky we all shrieked and hurtled around as if possessed and took to our tents for refuge.

  For a little while it was nice. Jenny and I lay in our sleeping bags. ‘Isn’t it great to be all snug when it’s raining outside?’ I said.

  We talked. She talked about her work at the pharmacy, about her little sister going to pony club. About school assessments and how she felt pretty organised, but still nervous.

  I talked a very little bit about friends from school. ‘They’re absolutely bonkers, honestly. Rich city kids.’ I shook my head like I knew it all.

  ‘Sounds fun though.’

  ‘They are a lot of fun.’ I didn’t elaborate. I hadn’t talked to anyone but Mia since I’d left. Apparently that’s just what I did: lots of leaving and not speaking. ‘But they didn’t really get me, you know?’

  People must not have realised how much they meant to me. Like Jen, I felt close to her in spite of the distance I’d created, and I wanted to tell her.

  But then the wind picked up and the rain got heavier, lashier. The poles started bending and bowing. The side of the tent slapped me wetly across the face and I wriggled closer to Jen.

  ‘Do you think it’s going to stop soon?’

  Her breath caught on the inhale. ‘I don’t think so.’

  There was a scuffling and some heavy thumping outside. I curled up in my sleeping bag (the bottom was wet) and then the tent pulled back a little, the zipper started unzipping (my heart started up staccato) and then Jarrod lunged through the flap, crashing onto our legs. He was saturated. ‘Man, this rain is full on. I reckon we might have to abandon ship.’

  ‘It’ll take us ages to get back,’ said Jen calmly, but crossly.

  ‘Seriously, though, our tent’s completely fallen down.’

  ‘What about Em and Dan?’ I asked.

  ‘Sam’s gone to ask them what they wanna do.’

  ‘For his sake I hope they have clothes on!’ The thought of him bursting in on them in the middle of something, probably in the nuddy, was absolutely hilarious.

  Jarrod laughed an easy, delighted laugh. It made me want to make him laugh some more. Then there was a crash as a branch cracked from its tree and thudded to the ground. I almost screamed.

  We agreed to pack up and head back. Everything seemed seventeen times more frightening as the rain came down. The water levels in the tents kept rising and tensions did, too.

  ‘Can’t we just come back for them in the morning?’ I asked, shivering, after a tent pole boinged out of my grasp and water dribbled further down the back of my neck.

  ‘Don’t be stupid, they’ll get completely wrecked.’ Jen held handfuls of tent, her face bright red and streaked with rain. ‘It’ll take ten minutes, just help me.’

  Lightning, thunder, the whole mess of nature seemed to be against us and the rain just fell harder. We were soggy and cranky.

  ‘Everything is saturated!’ Emma hoisted all our backpacks and bags into a pile under a big sheltery tree. Her face was streaked with water, maybe more tears than rain. Another crack of lightning lit up the sky spectacularly and she whimpered and threw herself onto the bags and one rolled-up, sodden tent carcass. We all teased her for being so pathetic and dramatic.

  Me, I wanted to be whimpering there with her. But Jen made so much sense and when I looked around there just weren’t any other options. Is this what it meant to be an adult? I set my face into its best ‘coping with it’ expression and went on coping with the situation at hand, like a mother-fudging grown-up.

  Under the rain we toiled – and it felt like toiling – we were soaked through to our very skin. There was a little, little part of me that saw the fun, the part of this that would make a great story when it was over. It was as though we were organising something important, like Ellie and the gang when that war began.

  An eye-blindingly bright light beamed at us through the trees and we all screamed. In that split second if you’d have told me aliens had landed, I would have believed you. If you had told me it was an invading army and we were the last uncaptured people in the region, I would have believed you. I had always thought I would be great in a crisis. I mean, I had been so, so stoic up until then.

  But we were all totally useless when it came to it. We stood in the light’s beams, frozen like rabbits. My brain took a good couple of ticks over to realise it was a car’s headlights beaming at us, and the person climbing out was Sam’s dad in a Driza-Bone and gumboots. A knight in waterproof armour!

  It was late. By the time we got back to the house and poured ourselves through the door it was two in the morning. We were cold and exhausted, but were given towels and offered showers. Jenny boiled the kettle for cups of tea, heaped with sugar. We chorused sheepish but grateful thanks at Sam’s dad’s pyjamaed back as he went off to get two more hours of sleep before he had to get up for milking.

  Emma, Jen and I crawled into the spare bed and fell asleep instantly. It was so nice to sleep in with them like little mice. I woke up to rain on the tin roof and a close, comforting sound of breathing and snoring. The smell of the sheets was distinctive, some kind of hazy memory. Lavender and sunlight.

  This moment felt significant so I lay there and tried to breathe it in, to suck it down and store it. It felt important. I felt swelled with it.

  I was rebuilding the bridges I had burned. My space had not stayed unfilled, it’d been shifted and squeezed. But I could see now a way to wriggle back in. I could make a new space. In this new-old place.

  And when I came home again the next day, in half-dried clothes, Clover was standing on the window seat in the sunroom, looking out to the front yard, either waiting for me, or maybe watching puddles form.

  Holding onto my bike, the drizzle pitter-pattering on my head, I stood still and waited to see how long it would take for her to notice me. While I waited, I noticed so many new things about her. She was so
tall. In my mind she was a baby, a little bubba. But she had changed. Somewhere along the line, she had become a little girl. All of a sudden I felt incredibly sad.

  ‘I did a poo in the toilet!’ she shouted through the window, banging on the glass.

  What even was sadness? I gave her a double thumbs-up. ‘Gross! Good on you!’

  I was getting into the routine of historical society shifts. Thursday and Friday each week I sat at the welcome desk to welcome no one. Each day I was to ensure there was enough money in the float. We didn’t have a cash register, just a metal cash box with a little key.

  My responsibilities also included helping Grandad scan the archives on the days Bill didn’t come in. Helping analog become digital was a truly boring, repetitive job. But once the website was up and running we could share our archives with all and sundry, if sundry were interested – and of that I wasn’t convinced.

  Sometimes, I began to read some of the documents as I scanned and refiled them. Names of homes, streets, families that I knew appeared. With dates like 1856 and 1900. Crazy! Soon I was hooked. Reading made my job take longer, but at least it became a little more interesting.

  It was a new way of exploring Emyvale. For example, I’d already known that the McElliot homestead was built from bluestone quarried in the area by convict labour, but I hadn’t been aware that some of the floorboards were planks of wood scrounged from the shipwreck of HMS Regina – the very ship that Hamish McElliot arrived in Australia on, and that ran aground in Coopers Cove just twenty kilometres from here.

  I hadn’t known that the Regina had been bound for Sydney and should never have been sailing so close to this coast. I hadn’t known that forty people had died in the shipwreck, or that the survivors nearly all made their homes in the local area.

  I’d also discovered a newspaper article about the day they opened the clock tower. I had walked past the clock tower a million times (possibly a slight exaggeration), but I hadn’t known that the Lord Mayor of Melbourne had come down to celebrate it, or that there had been an afternoon tea by the river for selected visiting guests, including one Miss Lilian Adelaide Von Braun, who was known by all to be very beautiful if occasionally hot-tempered, a talented piano player, a baker of third-prize-winning Victoria sponges and the future wife of Mr Erwin Longley, my great-grandfather.