by Steph Bowe
But, no. It sounds like it’s outside the house, against the wall. I imagine a Spiderman-like figure, crawling along, peering in windows. Doesn’t seem like something a robber would do. Must be an animal. What kind of animal? Maybe something bred with the goats? Maybe some sort of possum-goat hybrid monster?
I appraise the contents of my room for a possible weapon with which to defend myself. Most of my books are paperbacks, so they’ll be useless. Perhaps the best option is to grab my doona, throw it on the creature and trap it.
When I look up, Iris is at the window, grinning and waving, like it is perfectly ordinary to be peering in a second-storey window at one in the morning.
I scramble over and wrench the window up. ‘I just had a small heart attack,’ I tell her, but I’m smiling. I glance past her to the ladder extending down the side of the house. She is on the top rung. I won’t tell her I thought she was a robber or a possum-goat monster. Goat-possum? Gossum? Poat?
Still standing on the ladder, she starts to ramble. ‘That time I came over for afternoon tea, you made a joke about being Rapunzel in her turret, which you’ve probably forgotten about by now but I kept thinking about. So, here I am as whoever rescues Rapunzel, though I don’t think he had the benefit of a ladder. But your hair isn’t long enough. Not that you need saving. I just thought you might fancy a walk. Have I taken the joke too far?’
I shake my head. ‘Did you carry a ladder all the way over here?’
‘I did. May have been a bad idea. I’m very sore. And I’m concerned I’m going to fall to my death. But it’s worth the risk. Because I wanted to apologise for almost getting you shot, and to assure you that tonight’s walk will be completely safe and involve no trespassing on private property or alien-related hoaxes. That is, if you still want to go for a walk with me after the danger I put you in.’
‘Of course. It wasn’t your fault. Well, it sort of was. But you couldn’t be expected to know that she’d bring out a shotgun. You’re from the city—I assume not the part where people carry guns.’
‘No, not a lot of guns where I’m from. I’m glad you’re okay. I’ll be careful in future.’
‘Can I get changed? If we’re going for a walk?’
‘You don’t need to.’
‘I’ll get a hoodie. You want to come in for a sec?’
I help her clamber through the window, wincing at every slight sound, my heart pounding while we’re holding hands, her calluses against mine. She is laughing silently, and immediately makes herself at home, plopping herself on the bed. Marianne weaves around her on the peaks and hollows of the doona, and Iris scratches under her chin. My hair is probably sticking up at all angles and I can’t guarantee that the T-shirt and trackies I wear to bed are not covered in stains from tea or late-night snacks. And here Iris is, wearing a dress patterned with tiny teapots, everything about her perfect.
‘Are you going to get that hoodie?’
I’ve been standing in the middle of my room, staring at her. I turn to dig through the pile of clean clothes on the chair that Marianne has been known to use as a nest. I find a black hoodie reasonably clean of cat hair and smooth down my own hair as discreetly as I can.
She goes first, down the ladder, whispering careful, careful, careful. Her enormous bag is waiting at the bottom. I would not be surprised if that bag housed a portal to another world. She smiles at me in the near-dark, closer than she needs to be as she helps me off the bottom rung, her fingers gently grasping mine. The grass is soft and silent underfoot. She brings the ladder down and lies it horizontally in front of the fence, so no one sees it while we’re away.
Once we’re on the road, Iris drops her bag and does a neat cartwheel. When she’s upright again, I clap and she bows. ‘I practised that for years. Are you impressed?’
‘Immensely!’ By everything you do and say, and by your entire existence, I want to add. She dusts the gravel off her hands and seems pleased.
We dance like idiots down the street, like I do when I’m on my own, or on my own with Stanley. In the magic of the dark, with only Iris, it seems okay. We laugh, and then forget why we were laughing. The houses are far enough back from the road that I’m confident we won’t wake anyone, and, frankly, I don’t care. With the stars out and the moonlight illuminating her face, Iris seems unreal, like a sprite, like a magic spell that has brought my perfect girl to life. I want to hold her and make sure she doesn’t vanish on me.
Iris collapses dramatically on the footpath when we reach the main road. Still lying stretched out, she rummages through her bag and, with an Ah-ha!, brings out a ziploc bag full of chalk. She outlines her waist, sketching up towards her arm, out to the side.
‘Why the chalk?’ I ask. I am genuinely curious.
‘For emergency games of hopscotch,’ she says, serious. ‘For impromptu street art. So I can retrace my steps in case I get lost, like Hansel and Gretel. Here, help me finish.’
She hands me the chalk. I kneel down beside her and carry on the line she started, drawing around her right arm. I feel the warmth radiating from her. She watches me as I draw. When I reach to outline the fingers of her left hand, I am leaning right over her and have to stop my hair from falling across her face. I could lean down and kiss her, if only I were gutsier.
When I finish, she stands up and fills it in. She gives her crime-scene figure pink hair and a yellow dress. ‘Your turn,’ she says.
I lie next to her outline. The footpath is hard and cold and the street is quiet. The only thing I’m conscious of is how close we are. I stare at the sky, while she draws around me.
‘I got a reply from my dad,’ I tell her.
‘What’d it say?’ she asks.
‘Don’t know yet. Too nervous to open it. There’s hope in not knowing. As long as I don’t open it, it could be a good letter or a bad letter. Once I’ve opened it, there’s no more possibility.’
Her next words are considered. ‘The fact that you’ve got a reply is a good sign, though, isn’t it? No response would be worse. Having a letter at all makes it more likely to be a good letter, I think.’
I nod, as much as I can while lying on the footpath. I sit up and consider our outlines, close but not touching. I’m a little bit wonky. Iris hands me some chalk. I draw daisies around us. We sit side by side, admiring the chalk versions of ourselves.
‘Tell me about your family,’ I say.
‘My parents both think they’re funny and they’re really not.’ She grins. ‘I’m the same, so I can’t really judge. Mum is obsessed with interior design. She watches every renovation show on TV. They’re both great with numbers. Dad is a bit disappointed I’m not a maths genius, but he tries to hide it. Geometry is my only strength in that area.’
‘How’d they meet?’
‘They worked at the same firm in Sydney. No great romantic story, unfortunately. Mum moved here from New Zealand when she was only a bit older than me. Came for economic opportunity, stayed for love. That story. Same for my dad. He’s from Mumbai, but it was called Bombay when he was born. It’s sort of weird, being half-and-half. Like you don’t properly belong to one culture or another. I don’t think it’s even possible to be half- and-half. I got named after my mum’s mum, hence the elderly English lady’s name.’
‘Like a character out of an Agatha Christie novel,’ I say. ‘Somebody Poirot or Miss Marple is investigating because she’s been poisoning people.’
‘I would make a good murderer in a cosy crime mystery. Because no one would ever suspect me.’
When I step back and look at it, our footpath art is predictably childlike. We’re not exactly graffiti artists. We keep walking. I look in the shop windows, half-expecting to see movement, things that come alive in the dead of night. The old mannequin in the op shop is disappointingly inanimate.
‘Have people ever been racist to you?’ I ask.
‘To my dad but not really to me. Sometimes someone will say, Where are you from? and I’ll say, Here. And they’ll follow up w
ith Where were you born? and I’ll say Here. And they’ll say No, what’s your culture? We just go in circles because they want me to say I’m foreign. I’m as Australian as anybody. Not as Australian as Indigenous people. But as Australian as everybody else.’
I nod. ‘I think growing up here has been tricky for Clancy. People don’t hassle him, but almost everyone is Anglo and sometimes people can be racist without knowing it. His family celebrate traditions that no one else in town does, he speaks another language, and looks different…I don’t know what that’s like, being part of two cultures, so I’m not sure if I’m a good friend, in that respect. Maybe that’s part of why he’s so keen to move to Sydney. It’s easy to feel like an outsider when you live somewhere as homogenous as our town.’
‘I think it’s easy to feel like an outsider in cities, too,’ Iris says. ‘Good friends help with that, even if they don’t share the same background. And you are a good friend.’
‘I, um, thanks.’ I don’t know whether to smile or not. ‘Sometimes it was terrible, when we were at school—kids used to have a go at Clancy because he loved musical theatre. Gay Clancy, that sort of thing.’
‘That’s rough. Is he gay?’
‘He’s always liked girls, that I know of. He’s keen on you.’
Iris laughs. ‘That’s so funny. I don’t think anyone has ever been keen on me.’
‘That’s ridiculous. You’re beautiful.’
She bumps my shoulder with hers. ‘Thank you. You’re beautiful yourself.’
‘What about you?’ I ask. ‘You keen on him?’ My throat goes dry. I should have brought water. Iris might have some. It’s a very big bag.
‘No,’ she says, and she’s got this expression like she’s just about to say something else. I am focused on what I want Iris to say and how unlikely it is that she’ll say it. Finally, she speaks, but all she says is ‘He’s nice, though.’ I can tell that’s not what she wanted to say.
‘I should probably head back soon. Where’s your house?’ I ask.
‘Acacia Drive. That way.’ She points in the opposite direction. I know where Acacia Drive is; I’ve walked every street in this town.
‘The house where the Hendersons used to live?’
‘Maybe? What house did they live in?’
‘It has a veranda that goes right around and a yellow door and a rose garden. Number eight.’
‘That’s me. What are the Hendersons like?’
‘Nice. Elderly couple. They went sailing last year. Big round-the-world trip. Should you head home?’
‘I’ll walk you back first.’
‘You don’t have to walk me home.’
‘I want to. You shouldn’t be wandering about at night in your pyjamas on your own. Anything could happen! Alien abduction, for one.’
‘They’d be more likely to abduct you, since you’ve been tarnishing their good name. Avoid bright lights and unidentified flying objects, okay? But, seriously, be careful. Keep an eye out for foxes.’
‘I will. Don’t worry about me. I’ll fend off wild animals and would-be attackers with my trusty ladder. Did I leave it at your house?’
‘You did. You sure you won’t get lost on your way home?’
‘I marked the way over with chalk. I’m only in trouble if it rains, or if someone else starts chalking other routes on the footpath.’
I laugh. When the back of her hand grazes mine, I grasp her hand, emboldened. It’s warmer than mine. My heart thrums in my chest. I feel as if I may faint. I don’t know how I’m remaining upright. She doesn’t let go until we’re back at my house.
I lift myself over the fence, but when I turn back I see she’s stayed on the other side.
‘Will you wake them if you go in the front door?’
‘Probably not. I’d rather wake them than take my life into my own hands on the ladder again.’
We grin at each other. She fairly sparkles in the moonlight. She steps onto the lowest plank of the waist-high fence and leans forward, precariously balanced. We are almost close enough to kiss. I have no idea whether she is thinking that, too.
She places her hands on my shoulders, arms outstretched. ‘I’m sorry, I’m about to fall forward. I have an unusually high centre of gravity. Could you step closer?’ Her hands are hot on my shoulders.
I smother a laugh and take a step forward so she can rebalance. She is still close. I find I am on tiptoes, so we’re the same height.
‘Thanks,’ she says. She takes her hands from my shoulders, tucking a loose piece of hair behind my ear with one hand and touching my neck with the other. I try to steady my breathing; my efforts are futile. I can feel her breath against my face; it’s more even than mine. I know that it is going to happen before it happens and the knowing alone is enough to set off a feeling of panic. Which is counter-intuitive. How can something I want so much make me so anxious?
Then I’m out of my head and back in my body again, because she’s leaning in.
She kisses me.
It’s like the first time I got electrocuted by the fence at the Logans—when I sneaked in on a dare from Clancy to jump in their new above-ground pool. I never did jump in the pool. The dog chased me off, and I got electrocuted again on the way out—not the getting-chased-by-a-dog bit, I mean, the electric current. Every part of me feeling it. Every part of me lit up.
I’m aware how irrational it is to feel that everything else ceases to exist because she is kissing me, but that’s how I feel. There is nothing logical about any of it. I also feel like my legs are going to go on me.
She stops. I don’t want her to. Our foreheads are together. I bite my lip.
‘Mum might see,’ I whisper. ‘Or Grandad.’
‘They’d be more concerned about you climbing about on unsafe ladders than a kiss, wouldn’t they?’ She smiles.
I want to whisper please stay but I don’t want to seem desperate or demanding. She holds my face and kisses me again, and then she steps back and off the fence, picks up her bag and her ladder and she’s about to go, that’s it. She pauses. I don’t know whether she is hesitating because she feels awkward or because she doesn’t want to go. I hope it’s the latter but the former seems more likely.
‘I like this,’ she says, suddenly shy. She’s looking up at the house behind me. ‘You and I. You and me. I don’t know which of those is grammatically correct. Us.’
I want to say so do I, but the lump in my throat won’t let me. I am overwhelmed with the splendour of her, and the night, and everything.
She half-smiles. ‘Goodnight, Kirby.’
‘Goodnight, Iris,’ I manage.
I watch her, awkwardly carrying the ladder, until she’s disappeared around the corner.
After this, I can’t sleep at all.
It’s the day of our one-night-only show. Clancy has constructed a little green hoodie for Stanley, and I have painted all his remaining visible bits green. He is not a convincing human-eating plant. We put him in an enormous terracotta pot, which he keeps trying to jump out of.
‘It’ll have to do,’ says Clancy. ‘He just needs to be confident.’
Stanley is always confident. Doesn’t mean people will believe he’s a plant from outer space.
‘This is a violation of food safety regulations,’ says Mrs Hunter, when Clancy and I arrive at the pub with the pot holding Stanley.
‘He’s a seeing-eye goat,’ claims Clancy. ‘He’s a legally registered performer. Actors’ Equity.’
‘Get your story straight.’ Mrs Hunter is amused underneath it all. Doesn’t mean she wouldn’t like to see the back of us.
We tie Stanley up in the beer garden until it’s time for him to go onstage. People keep walking through on the way to the toilets, while we run through our lines. We have a minimal set because Clancy wants the play to be fluid and naturalistic and also because we’re fairly useless when it comes to set production. He won’t admit that. Clancy is positively vibrating with excitement and I’m pretty sure he has been since h
e woke up this morning.
‘I forgot to tell you,’ he says. ‘The weirdest thing happened last night. Mrs Worthington came into the restaurant, which never happens, because Mr Worthington picks up the takeaway, and she told me she knew it was me and never to step foot on her property ever again.’
I debate whether to tell Clancy that I know who is behind the crop circles. But as soon as I tell him, other people will find out. It’s not like they’d run Iris out of town, but it might affect Saffron Gate. Plus, everyone knows Clancy, and knows he’s generally a fool. It’s not like it’s damaging his reputation. His reputation is already established: melodramatic idiot. Adding ‘crop-circle hoaxer’ doesn’t change much. I’ll tell him once the gossip dies down, which will be soon, since there will be no more alien visits to renew interest. Or I’ll let Iris tell him.
‘Judy said Mrs Worthington shot someone on the property,’ I say. ‘But no one’s shown up shot, have they? We should call hospitals.’
‘It’s so strange. Maybe it really is a time-travel thing, if she’s so convinced it was me.’ He adopts a contemplative expression.
‘It was dark, and Mrs Worthington has macular degeneration. It could’ve been anybody.’ I pat his arm. ‘Someone’ll get divorced or married and everyone will forget about it, don’t worry.’
Then Iris shows up, waving at us through the doorway to the beer garden.
It’s the first time I’ve seen her since we kissed the night before last. I was too nervous to text her, and I’m hoping she was too nervous to text me, too. The alternative is that she’s realised I’m awful and that kissing me was a terrible mistake, and she never wants to speak to me again. I don’t want to consider that. Especially given how hard it will be for her to ghost me in a town this small, and that Clancy is convinced the three of us are as tight as musketeers.
I’m thinking maybe it was all just a dream. But then she smiles at me and I know it was real.
‘I need your help with something outside,’ she says. ‘Both of you.’