by Debra Oswald
A couple of nights later, Ash had trouble sleeping. That happened to him sometimes, when his brain was churning stuff round and he couldn’t shut it up enough to sleep. He heard Ben coming in the front door. The clock radio showed it was 2.30.
Ash lay there for a moment, thinking. Should he get up, talk to Ben, have one more go at persuading him to come down to Mandawarra? Or should he forget about it?
Before he had a chance to decide, he was distracted by something else. He heard the murmur of voices from the far end of the house. It was Ben and their mother.
To begin with, Ash couldn’t hear the actual words they were saying, but he could hear the tone of each one’s voice, like when you’re listening to music and you can’t make out the lyrics. He could tell they were arguing. When they moved into the kitchen, Ash was able to hear more clearly.
‘You don’t understand how this stuff works, okay? You don’t get it,’ Ben snapped at their mother.
Marion was trying to sound calm. ‘No, I don’t understand. That’s why I’m asking you to explain it to me.’
‘It’s complicated. It’s – look, if you don’t care at all about –’
‘Of course I care about you, Ben. Please don’t say –’
Ben cut her off, saying in a sarcastic singsong voice, ‘I know. Ben’s useless. Ben’s not worth anything. Ben’s a piece of crap.’
It made Ash feel sick to hear his brother talk to their mother as if she was stupid.
Ben went on and on with volleys of bullying words at their mother. ‘For Christ’s sake, I’m talking about three hundred crappy dollars!’
When Ash heard Marion start to cry, he felt his face burning: burning with anger at Ben and with sympathy for his mum.
‘Are you crying now?’ Ben shouted at her. ‘Oh, that’d be right. Crying’s your piss-weak answer to everything.’
Ash considered jumping out of bed to yell at his brother and defend his mum. But he knew she would hate that; she’d be embarrassed, plus it would only make Ben more pissed off.
‘I don’t know what to do,’ she murmured.
‘It’s simple! Give me the money!’
His mother sounded very feeble now. ‘But Ben, we agreed – we said –’
‘Blah blah blah. Can you hear yourself? You drive me crazy, whining at me. “But Ben, oh Ben.”’
Ash flinched at the sharp edge in Ben’s voice, imagining those words slicing into his mother’s unprotected flesh. Ash couldn’t stand it anymore. He did the only thing he could do. He got out of bed and stumbled into the kitchen, eyes squinted up against the light, acting as if he hadn’t heard anything and just needed to go to the loo.
‘Oh hi,’ he mumbled, as if he was pretty much still asleep.
Ash appearing in the room was enough to make Ben back off.
‘Hi, sweetheart,’ said their mum, fussing with stuff in the sink so Ash wouldn’t see she’d been crying.
Ben stalked off to his bed in the lounge room and Marion retreated to her room.
Later, lying in bed, Ash realised there was no chance Ben would come to the Mandawarra festival. It was ridiculous to think Ash could rescue his brother by dragging him off to one blues festival down the coast. And maybe it was better that Ben didn’t come on the trip if he was acting like a jerk. Maybe it was better when he was off somewhere and not living at home at all. At least that way Ash could remember the good bits about his brother and not have to think about what a selfish fake and bully he’d turned into.
Chapter Fifteen
The Novaks planned to hit the road before dawn to get down to Mandawarra. So the night before the trip, Ash shoved a sleeping bag and a few clothes in a backpack, ready for the early start. On his bed, he’d found a pile of his favourite T-shirts washed and folded for him to pack. He smiled when he saw them, smiled when he realised that his mum had been thinking about him and made sure he had the clothes she knew he liked.
He’d almost finished packing when there was a knock on his bedroom door and his mum’s voice. ‘It’s just me, sweetheart.’
Ash opened the door and Marion came in to sit on the bed.
‘All packed?’ she asked. ‘Need anything?’
‘No, I’m right. Thanks for the clean stuff.’
‘Listen,’ she said, ‘I want you to give this to the Novaks. To thank them for taking you away for the weekend and everything.’
She handed Ash a fancy box of chocolates.
‘Oh great. Thanks, Mum.’
‘It’s very kind of them to do that for you. Also,’ she said, reaching into the pocket of her dressing-gown for a little wad of money, ‘I want to give you a bit of spending money, for food and whatever else you might need to get for yourself.’
‘Oh. But sixty dollars is too much,’ said Ash. ‘I’ve got some money I can –’
‘That’s your money you’re saving up. You shouldn’t have to use that. Take it,’ she insisted.
Ash shrugged and took the money. He felt guilty but also relieved. This way he wouldn’t have to eat into the guitar fund.
‘Are you right to wake up early?’ asked Marion.
‘No worries. I’ve set the alarm. I’ll wake up,’ Ash assured her.
‘Okay. Good. And since I might not be up when you go, I’d better say goodbye now. Have a great time.’
‘Yeah. I think I will.’
‘Have a really, really lovely time,’ she added and folded him in a hug.
Hugging her in her thin cotton dressing-gown, Ash could feel how skinny and feeble she had become. She smiled, kind of sadly, and left the room.
It wasn’t that his mum didn’t care about him. He knew that. She did the best she could.
At five the next morning, Ash hiked around to the Novaks’ with his backpack, chomping on an apple. The sun hadn’t risen yet but there was faint light oozing up above the trees and houses. It felt especially exciting to be heading off on a journey before dawn. Not that Ash needed any extra reason to be revved up. He was going to a blues festival and he was going to see Jimmy Nicholls play live. That was thrilling enough.
Outside the Novaks’ house, a number of vehicles were lined up. In front was Vic’s station wagon, with the back packed solid with groceries and bedding. Behind that was a minibus, the kind that fits twelve people plus a driver. The Novaks had rented it for the weekend so they could take any extra people who wanted to come along. Behind the minibus was an ancient battered white van with ‘Dynamic Landscapes’ written on the side. The van looked to Ash as if it was on its last legs and had no chance of making it all the way to Mandawarra and back again.
At the tail end of the convoy was a small car that had been hand-painted all over with bright geometric designs. The bizarre little vehicle belonged to Lizzie, a painter friend of the Novaks’ whom Ash had met at dinner a few times. Lizzie painted bright patterns onto every object in her life: dinner plates, the outside of her house, furniture, guitars, even her dog. She thought most things in the world needed a bit of colour added to them. Fair enough, Ash thought. But he was always careful not to sit still next to Lizzie for too long in case she started painting on him.
Between the house and the vehicles there was the usual Novak chaos. The twins were hauling bags of stuff that couldn’t possibly fit in the bus. Boy was having a hissy fit because he wanted to travel on the roof of the bus. In his rush to load up the vehicles, Vic had tipped over a box of fruit, so there were apples and oranges rolling down the path and the front lawn. Joanne was hugging people as they arrived, introducing them to each other and working out who would sit where.
‘Ash!’ yelled Charlie, running out the door with a fistful of CDs. ‘You and me are travelling in the minibus. I’ve got the soundtrack for the drive all worked out.’
Gradually the vehicles filled up with people and their belongings. Apart from the Novaks, there was a collection of friends joining the expedition. Some of the faces Ash recognised: they were people who’d been at the Novaks’ for dinner. There were other faces he
didn’t know, and he did his best to remember all the new names as he was introduced to people. The Novaks had only been living back in Australia for a few months, but they seemed to have more friends than anyone on earth.
Charlie had wanted every member of Blue Noise to go to the Mandawarra festival, but it hadn’t worked out that way. Charlie dreamed that Lily Opara would travel down there with him and, under the romantic influence of beach walks and fabulous live music, would realise how much she really loved him. In the end, as everyone could have predicted, Lily didn’t come.
Joel was all set to come until his mum reminded him of his cousin’s wedding that weekend. He couldn’t get out of it because he’d been roped in to play saxophone during the ceremony.
‘Is Lester here yet?’ Ash asked Charlie, as they piled their backpacks into the rear of the landscaping van. Lester had been yabbering nonstop about the festival and which acts he wanted to see most.
‘Negative,’ said Charlie. ‘Bad news there, my friend. Lester rang last night. His grandfather’s really sick. He has to stay here and do family stuff.’
In one way, Ash was disappointed Joel and Lester wouldn’t be coming. But in another way – which he would never admit to anyone – he was pleased. This way, it felt as if he was travelling as part of the Novak family, rather than part of the band. Ash sometimes let himself have silly fantasies in which the Novaks adopted him and he could live with them permanently. He felt guilty about having those thoughts, because it was mean and disloyal to his own mum. But the thoughts were still lodged there in his brain.
‘All aboard,’ sang out Vic. ‘We better hit the road.’
Ash climbed into the minibus and was looking for a place to sit when he saw Erin Landers in one of the front window seats. Ash hadn’t seen her arrive. She must have slipped into the bus while he was behind the van.
There was a spare seat next to Erin. But she’d been so stand-offish with him on MSN and at rehearsal, Ash figured he wasn’t exactly welcome to sit there, squashed up close to her on the narrow bus seat.
He flicked a quick smile hello to Erin and ducked into a seat two rows behind her. From back there, he could see her shiny dark hair flicking back and forth as she talked to Nina, the Novak twin who plonked herself down in that spare seat.
Chapter Sixteen
Now Erin was completely sure Ash wasn’t interested in her. He’d walked straight past the empty seat next to her on the minibus. That was pretty strong evidence. It was time to get over her unrequited crush on Ash Corrigan once and for all.
Erin didn’t have much chance to stew about Ash though, after Nina rocketed up the bus steps, jumped into the seat next to her and immediately began chattering like a hyperactive monkey. Nina had decided that Erin was her new favourite person.
The convoy set off from the Novak house, with Vic driving the station wagon out the front, Joanne at the wheel of the minibus and the landscaping van and funny painted car following.
Erin had no idea who most of the people in the various vehicles were. Were they all Novak relatives? It didn’t look like it. But they did seem to be part of the vast clan of Novak friends.
Erin’s parents didn’t have many friends. Really, there were just two other married couples the Landers went out to dinner with occasionally and that was pretty much it. Both those couples were so similar to Erin’s parents that they were like clones. All they ever seemed to do was talk about wine, home renovation and their boring jobs or boast about their children’s achievements (the achievements they could measure with exam marks, sports scores and official prizes, that is). Erin’s mother thought it was rude for people to drop in at their place uninvited and she was always a bit tetchy when there were visitors in the house.
The Novak family was so different, Erin could hardly get her head round it. She’d been to Charlie’s house several times and stayed for dinner twice. There seemed to be a constant stream of people through the place, staying to eat, playing music, taking photos, camping out on the lounge-room floor for a few days, whatever. And it wasn’t just the large number of visitors; it was that they were such an amazing mixture of people. Musicians and artists, doctors, forest-dwelling hippies visiting the city, the schoolfriends of the Novak kids plus many of their parents too, half the neighbours who lived in the street, the guy from the fruit shop up the road, a part-time drag queen who visited either as Roger or as Regina, a pack of surfers Vic had met at the beach, several women Joanne had gone to school with thirty years ago, two Tibetan Buddhist monks, the landscape gardener who was working on the house next door and others. Like human magnets, the Novaks seemed to attract people and then gather them into this huge, noisy, writhing collection of friends.
The Novaks were always super friendly to Erin but she wasn’t sure how to take them because they weren’t like any family she’d ever met. With normal, boring families, you knew what the situation was. When Erin went round to the houses of her other schoolfriends, she could suss out pretty quickly how things worked: if it was the kind of family where you could take snacks from the pantry without asking, if you could crack silly jokes with the mother or not, if you had to take your shoes off at the door, that kind of stuff.
But with the Novaks there was no predicting. It was hard to know what the rules were in their house. Actually, there didn’t seem to be any rules – other than the rule that everyone had to stop what they were doing and get together at the table for dinner. It was exciting to hang round at the Novaks’ place but Erin always felt slightly nervous and unprepared for what might happen next.
When Charlie had first mentioned the Mandawarra festival, Erin knew it would be tricky with her parents. She introduced the idea gradually, saying the Novaks had offered her a lift, along with some other kids from school. Her parents assumed it was a school-related trip and Erin let them go on thinking that. She never flat-out lied. She just never put them straight about the fact that the festival excursion had sprung from the feverish brain of Charlie Novak and had nothing to do with the Year 10 music course.
Even so, her parents were wary. Erin didn’t go to many of the parties her Year 10 friends went to and her parents hadn’t allowed her to go away for a beach weekend with a bunch of kids last January. Now her mother was concerned because she’d never met Charlie’s parents. Mrs Landers insisted on ringing the Novaks to discuss the trip.
Erin hovered in the kitchen, listening to her mother on the phone in the hallway, talking to Charlie’s mum, Joanne. She asked about the festival, where they’d be staying and other fussy-mother questions.
Erin could tell from the smarmy tone in her mother’s voice that she was impressed Joanne was a doctor. Mind you, if she saw the messy Novak house and some of the strange people hanging out there, she’d have been mortified.
Erin’s guts twisted up with embarrassment when she heard her mother boasting about Erin’s piano achievements, even quoting piano competition results. Charlie’s mum must have made the correct impressed noises in response to the boasting, because Erin’s mum sounded smug and happy. It was excruciating to stand there listening to her mother rabbit on, but worth it if it meant she could go to the festival.
Now that Erin was sitting in that minibus, part of the Novak convoy, the anxiety hit her. She wasn’t so sure the trip was such a good idea after all. Maybe she wasn’t ready for all of this, for going to a festival with people she didn’t know very well and their strange friends. Erin worried she wasn’t really a going-to-music-festivals, blues-muso, bold kind of person. She was a sensible-girl, good-marks, classical-piano, does-what-her-parents-say kind of person. Erin didn’t handle change very well. When things around her were changing, there were too many things she could worry about.
Plus, she was facing the dilemma of how to survive three days and two nights in close proximity to Ash Corrigan. How could she stand spending all that time with a guy she had a powerful yet hopeless crush on? A guy who thought she was a sad case, an embarrassment, too boring to sit next to on the bus?
Why had she come on this trip? Was she crazy?
Erin wondered if she should jump out of the minibus at the next set of traffic lights and run squealing back to her dull, predictable suburban house.
But Nina Novak never stopped talking long enough for Erin to find her escape moment. Pretty soon they were out of the city, heading down the south coast, already on to the second disc of Charlie’s carefully chosen music selection.
‘I’ve put together the soundtrack of our journey,’ he explained.
As each new track started, Charlie would announce the song and the artist, like a smooth radio DJ.
Two hours into the drive, Vic Novak turned the station wagon off the main road and pulled over. The minibus, van and car snaked in behind. It was time for breakfast on the road, Novak style.
On a brilliantly green headland overlooking the sea, there was a beautiful park with tables and gas barbecues. Vic knew the best spots on the south coast from surfing trips.
Eskies and boxes were carried out of the Dynamic Landscapes van and Vic prepared breakfast for the twenty people in the convoy. He cooked mega quantities of bacon, eggs and tomatoes plus veggie rissoles for the vegetarians. The twins buttered bread. Ash helped Boy pour juice into plastic mugs for the kids. Joanne and Lizzie, the crazy painter, handed out tea and coffee from thermoses. Charlie set up a sound system so there’d be ‘breakfast music’. Quite a few people started dancing around the park. The Novaks seemed to make every ordinary thing into a party, a special occasion.
The breakfast food was demolished, leaving everyone’s lips greasy and their bellies full. Erin couldn’t believe how ravenous she was and how much she ate.
Vic finished his coffee and then peered thoughtfully at Charlie.