‘She seemed almost glad it’s Lyndon,’ Sonia added. ‘She reckons we won’t have to get a security system like the Jacksons now that we know there isn’t some serial killer roaming the streets.’
I didn’t even bother trying to protest that nothing had been proved. I was wasting my breath. Instead, I changed the subject to Cassie and Grant Benson. Neither of us liked him and both hoped she would come to her senses soon. As I leant across to flick the channel on the television, I glanced at my watch. It was time to get home.
I knew I should probably call Dee and tell her I was on my way, or get her to pick me up. It was dark and she’d made me promise to do one or the other.
I sat up, shaking the pins and needles out of my feet, and I told Sonia I was going to head off.
‘On your own?’
I nodded. I’d roamed these streets for as long as I could remember and I was so sick of now being scared in my own neighbourhood.
It was only as I picked up my skateboard from where I’d left it outside the back door that she remembered the news she’d been ‘busting to tell’ all night.
‘I found out who Nicky Blackwell’s girlfriend is.’
At the mention of his name, I felt my stomach sink, heavy yet hollow. I wanted to know but I also didn’t. I had tried so hard not to think of him over the last few days, although I hadn’t succeeded. I’d really only seen him once, the day before, as I arrived at school. He had shot past me, rocketing down the hill on his board and turning into the school gate with the low swoop that had first made me notice him. I kept walking, hoping he hadn’t seen me, but he called out my name.
‘How are you going?’ His long hair was still damp from his morning shower, his eyes a brilliant green against the darkness of his tan. ‘Been missing you in detention – scaring away everyone else.’
Because I wasn’t looking at him, he’d tilted his head to one side, bending low so that he could catch my eye.
‘Ah, well,’ I said, for want of a better response and I felt like a fool.
‘How’s the skating?’
I shrugged and told him it was okay, turning away as I did so.
‘You know, you are allowed to talk to me.’
I looked back for an instant to see him standing there, board at his feet, arms crossed.
‘There’s nothing stopping us hanging out or having a conversation.’
But there was. My own pride. And the hurt I felt.
Sonia was jiggling up and down on one foot, eager to tell me. ‘I can’t believe I forgot,’ she said. ‘I meant to ring you as soon as I found out and then something distracted me and then there was all that stuff with Lyndon and I guess it just slipped my mind.’
Her name was Lesley. She was at Riverview Girls. Sal knew her because they did gymnastics for the same club.
‘So you told Sal about me and Nicky?’ I looked at Sonia in dismay.
She denied it of course, telling an unconvincing lie about how she’d just asked her sister what she knew about Nicky and his girlfriend, without letting her know why she wanted the information in the first place.
‘Apparently they’ve been together for about a year. They broke up two months ago and she was devastated. He ended it. I don’t know why, but she cried through three practise sessions and then a week later came in happy as anything again. They’d made up.’
Sonia waited for a response from me.
I didn’t know what to say.
‘There’s a photo of her in our room. You know, the gymnastics team shot.’
She took me by the arm, dragging me behind her. Standing in the doorway, I watched as she rummaged through Sal’s books, finally pulling out a photo album from the bottom shelf and impatiently flicking through the plastic-coated pages.
‘There.’ She held it up triumphantly, and I took it from her.
They all stood in four neat rows. The Linley Point Gymnastics Club. I had to hold the page next to the desk light to be able to see anyone’s face. Sonia ran her finger along the second row, finally stopping at a blonde girl, third from the end. She was pretty. Her hair was pulled back from her face. Her smile was wide, her teeth white and even, her nose small and upturned, her eyes looked like they were blue. I looked at her again, not sure why I was doing this. Knowing who she was didn’t change anything. I closed the album and gave it back to Sonia.
She was looking at me, wondering whether I was going to cry or react in some dramatic way, which I didn’t.
‘Thanks for finding out.’ It was all I said. I could see she expected something and that was the best I could do. And then, because I wanted to explain myself, I told her that it had been different with him. ‘We really got on. We liked each other. It wasn’t just like some stupid crush on a boy. I liked hanging out with him. He made me laugh.’
She put her arm around my shoulder.
‘I’m not going to cry,’ I said, and I glanced across at her.
She put the album down on the desk, and told me that they’d probably break up again. ‘That’s what happens,’ she said. ‘Once there’s a crack in the bottle, the whole thing is liable to fall apart.’
I had to smile. ‘You reckon?’
‘I know.’
nineteen
Fact: I want to go back to the way it was.
I wrote those words in my diary after I returned from Sonia’s because, despite my determination not to be scared, I felt wary as I rode through the back streets from her place to mine. I rushed from streetlight to streetlight, grateful for the spill of white before I plunged back into the darkness, relieved when I finally reached our gate and saw that Dee and Tom were home.
But that wasn’t all that had seeped through me. Getting to know Nicky during this time had been like a beacon for me, an excitement that had kept me buoyed. That was gone now. Putting a face to his girlfriend might have made me feel all the more foolish for ever hoping he would want to be with me, but still I missed the way that hope had made me feel, no matter how pointless it might have been.
I closed my journal and got into bed, the night held at bay by my small reading lamp. When I switched it off, I wanted only to sleep. But I stayed awake for hours, thoughts of Lyndon, Nicky and Daniel all colliding with each other in a confused tangle that kept me turning until long past midnight.
The next morning I woke tired, my head still heavy with anxiety.
Downstairs, Tom was making breakfast in bed for Dee. He was humming to himself, the radio on the kitchen windowsill tuned to the news station.
‘Are you gonna make me a tray too?’ I asked, looking at the neatly laid out toast, jam, butter and a cup of tea. ‘I’ll have a juice though, and some cereal.’ I picked up a slice and took a bite.
He hit me on the head with the newspaper, before making his way carefully out of the kitchen, laden tray balanced precariously on one arm, the newspaper under the other. Sammy, who was underfoot, was kicked out of the way, and then I heard him, heading up the stairs, singing at the top of his voice.
I sat at the kitchen bench, uncertain as to how I was going to pass the weekend. I considered practising my skateboarding out the front. I was improving, there was no doubt about it, but I was still hopeless when it came to steep hills. Secretly I harboured a vision of me swooping down to the school, the rush of air cool on my face as I cut in on Nicky, not looking back at him as I leapt off and kicked my skateboard up into my hands in one smooth movement. Not that such a demonstration would be likely to impress him. What he seemed to like was a small and pretty gymnast who knew how to cry.
As the phone rang, I leant across to pick it up, assuming it would be either Sonia or Cassie wanting to make plans for the day.
It wasn’t.
The woman’s voice sounded strained as she asked for Dee.
‘I’ll just get her,’ I replied. ‘Who’s calling?’ This was what Dee insisted we ask, because more often than not she didn’t want to speak (she hated the phone) and when we came to her she would wave us away, mouthing the word
s ‘I’m not in’, leaving us to tell some half-baked and appallingly transparent lie.
‘It’s Mrs Jenkins,’ she told me. Her voice choked. ‘Ray’s wife.’
I’d never heard of either. I left the phone off the hook and went to the bottom of the stairs.
‘PHONE!’ I shouted.
There was no response.
‘ PHONE!’
‘Who for?’ Tom called back.
‘Dee.’
I walked away. If she didn’t want to talk, she could get Tom to tell her lies for her.
About fifteen minutes later, as I was adding my bowl to the new pile of dishes by the sink, Dee came down, her hair still wet from the shower, her face pale. She hadn’t put on any make-up, which wasn’t unusual for her, but she looked more washed out than I’d ever seen her. She searched for her keys on the bench, asking me if I could help, and because she seemed so distressed, I did so without complaining.
‘Where are you going?’
‘To visit Ray.’
I had no idea who Ray was.
‘He’s one of the builders who helped out with the ban on the development.’
‘And what’s wrong with him?’
She paused for an instant, putting her bag on the bench, her keys now in her hand. I could see she was uncertain as to how much I should know. I’d never even met the guy, so I didn’t understand the hesitation.
‘He’s in hospital,’ she eventually said. ‘His wife called to tell me he was bashed up last night.’
The crack in Dee’s voice was barely discernible, no more than a slight break in her words, a hairline fracture running through the syllables, but it was enough to make me realise how anxious she was.
‘He’s in a coma.’
At that moment, Tom came down, also with car keys in his hand. He wanted to drive Dee, insisting she was too upset to go on her own.
‘They may not even let me see him,’ she said. ‘But I’d like to leave him some flowers and I’d like to let Sylvia know we care, that we’re there for him.’ She told me they wouldn’t be long.
‘If you go anywhere, leave me a note,’ she insisted. ‘And make sure you keep the front door shut after we leave.’
She closed it behind her, leaving the hall beyond the kitchen in a darkness that still felt strange even though we had now been shutting it for some weeks.
Upstairs, Joe was still asleep. It wasn’t unusual for him to stay in bed until well past midday, emerging foul-breathed and heavy-eyed to sit at the kitchen bench and eat bowl after bowl of cereal. I hadn’t heard him come in from Kate’s the previous night, which meant he would have been late.
I flicked through the scraps of paper by the phone, messages scrawled and then forgotten. There was a note Dee had written to herself, a reminder to ring Roxie, with the phone number next to it. I picked it up, dialling the first number and then pausing. I didn’t know what I would say to Daniel if he answered, and the thought of trying to talk to him almost made me hang up. But I didn’t.
The phone rang six times before it was picked up.
‘Yes?’ It was Max, his voice loud in my ear.
I listened to him call out Daniel’s name, shouting up the stairs, and again, I almost lost my nerve.
‘Hello?’ This time it was Daniel.
I told him it was me, Winter. I just wanted to know if he was all right. ‘After yesterday.’
There was silence.
‘I’m fine,’ he eventually said.
‘Okay.’ I could hear the uncertainty in my voice. ‘If you need to, you know, come over, get out of the house any time, well, you can always come here. For dinner or whatever.’
He took a moment before he answered. ‘Dinner isn’t going to fix anything.’
He hung up on me, and I was left, phone in hand, the beeps loud in my ear.
I sat for a moment before I pressed down the receiver.
I looked up at the ceiling, biting back the salty sting of tears. I had only wanted to help, but I felt like an idiot for thinking there was any thing I could do or say to make a difference.
I picked up the phone again and called Cassie, wanting to talk to someone.
Karen answered. ‘She’s not up yet.’
I was about to tell her not to wake her, I’d ring back, but it was too late. I heard Karen thumping on the door to Cassie’s room, before opening it and calling out her daughter’s name.
‘Sorry about that,’ I apologised.
Cassie’s response was brief. She’d been awake, she said. She just wasn’t up for talking.
She didn’t sound okay, and when I asked her if she was all right, she began to cry.
I met her under the Gladesville Bridge half an hour later. It was close to her flat and it seemed to be the place she liked to hang out these days. The huge concrete pylons were bleached white and smooth, the grass underneath the bridge sparse, and often damp; it looked green from a distance but was, in fact, patched with dirt, a place where little would grow.
In front of me, the river widened. I sat down and leant against the swoop of the pylon and waited. It was different at this end of our suburb. This was where the peninsula joined the mainland. Up near the overpass, there were only flats, but if you took any of the small avenues or crescents down to the water, you found stone mansions, houses with gardens that sloped, green-grassed and bordered by neat beds, down to wide open bays. There were no waterfront caves and scrub, just an open expanse of turquoise, with small boats, white-sailed, bobbing on the smooth surface.
I could see Cassie walking towards me, and I got up, brushing the dirt from my jeans, raising my hand in greeting.
Her eyes were red-rimmed, the whites glassy, and she had tucked her hair behind her ears.
‘What happened?’ I asked.
We walked out of the shade of the bridge and up to the higher slope of grass, where we were visible from the road. The traffic was a louder roar now, but there was at least sunshine, warm and soft, on our limbs.
She sat next to me, knees drawn to her chest, and looked out towards the intersection where all cars were directed towards the bridge, fed in a great stream back into the mainland and then the city itself.
‘You can’t tell anyone.’
I promised.
‘Not even Sonia.’
I nodded.
And then, as she tried to talk, she only started crying again, barely able to utter any words.
‘Take a deep breath,’ I told her. ‘It’s just me.’
I had an idea it was going to have something to do with Grant Benson even before she told me the story. I had never liked him, and I had been surprised at Cassie’s sudden declaration of love.
She had walked home as she always did, up the road that led out of school and across the overpass. As she came to the other side, where the path dipped down to the shade under the bridge, she looked out for him, hoping (although she didn’t admit this) to see him waiting for her in the place where they had smoked a joint together the previous day.
She paused in her story, and I could see her breathing in, not wanting to cry again.
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