One Step

by Andrew Daddo

  When I have kids, I’m not going to shit-can the sports they play.

  Mum came when she could, but she also had to go to Hayley’s netball, but only if it didn’t mash up with Ronnie’s ballet, which was turning out to be more career than fun. Her teacher had her dancing most days and talked a lot about her ‘gift’. Mum was into it, and Ronnie, too. I tried not to resent her for being the youngest and flogging all the attention.

  It was a small dive meet anyway, just a few schools. I might sneak onto the podium. I might even win if I was lucky. Or not. I’d never won before. Maybe that also explained Mum and Dad’s reticence to come to the competitions. If I was a winner, they might be interested.

  Ronnie won stuff all the time. There were whole Sundays dedicated to dance competitions and she always came home with something. Her teacher was already going on about how she’d eventually lose her to the Australian Ballet, but she said the best thing she could do was prepare her and know that she played ‘the smallest part’ in a stellar career. Ronnie was barely eight years old.

  We did warm-up laps as a team, then warm-up dives. Coach Tran had looked at me as if I was a nutjob because I’d swum in my board shorts and she’d made it pretty clear I wouldn’t be diving in them. I had other ideas, but knew when push came to jump I’d be in Speedos like everyone else.

  By the last round the silverware was pretty much decided. Barontips High had a man-child. Built like an Olympic gymnast, thick stubble like a recently cut cornfield shaded the bottom half of his face. Tight, pubescent curls covered the crevice of his chest and a wide snail trail bloomed from his sluggos. If he was in Year Nine he’d probably repeated a few times, because he looked like no fifteen-year-old at our school. He was good, though.

  We weren’t last. The kid who got last was lame, about as useful as tits on a bull. He looked uncomfortable climbing up to the diving board, let alone jumping off it. Funnily enough, he always looked happy when his head broke the surface after a dive. The man-child was the complete opposite; he always looked cranky, like he’d stuffed something up, but once the 8’s and 9’s and 10’s went up, he managed to look shocked, as if it wasn’t for his dive.

  Coach Tran put her arm around me and said, ‘Well done, Dylan. Not your worst and not your best, nice and in the middle.’

  That was me, I suppose: Dylan in the middle.

  I rolled my wet stuff into my towel and jammed it into my backpack before checking my phone. There was a text from Mum.

  There were a bunch of emoticons following and some cash signs. I read it again and tried to piece it together. Shopping. Mum wanted to go shopping. CC must be credit card, and socket would be pocket. Cool.

  There were no other texts, which was annoying because it would have been good to hear from Ryan or Madison to work out a plan for tonight. I guessed Ryan wasn’t going, because he would have said something by now.

  I walked out of the change room with my face in my phone looking for Gracie’s number and almost walked into one of the other divers. He was with his dad who had his arm around him and was giving him a big, rough kind of cuddle.

  ‘You did good, son. It was good. Gutsy. I couldn’t do that. That’s nuts, that is – it’s like jumping off a cliff and doing flips and that. Judges are idiots, eh? You had more moves than anyone.’

  And the kid was letting himself be playfully tossed around by his dad and lapping up the crap he was talking. ‘That’s not always a good thing in diving, Dad,’ he said. He was pretty hopeless, but at least he knew it; I checked the board again and he was four spots lower than me. The dad got out of my way and shucked me on the shoulder before saying, ‘Nice work out there, fella. You shoulda won, or come second to my mate here.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘He definitely should’ve won.’ It made the two of them laugh, which made me smile, too. Winners are everywhere, you just have to change the way you look at the competition.

  ‘Seriously, that was good out there,’ the dad said to his son. ‘It was good to watch.’ He had him by the shoulders and was looking into his eyes, but not in a brutal, accusing way. He had his eyebrows up, and the corners of his mouth were stretched into a smile as he lowered his head to be at the same height as his son’s. ‘You are good to watch.’

  ‘Thanks, Dad,’ he said. And he hugged his dad in front of everyone. His dad hugged him back, then gave him a quick chop to the kidneys before saying something about a coffee, a croissant and a hot chocolate. It was like one of those sappy scenes out of an American movie.

  I texted Mum and Dad, saying I was done and it’d gone pretty well.

  Mum was straight back.

  Dad was a bit slower to respond.

  I lied. I’d got 411 points, but he’d never check, so what did it matter?

  While I waited for Mum I nutted out a text for Gracie but didn’t send it. It was too early, she’d think I was stalking her. Instead I sent one to Ryan.

  He didn’t respond. Maybe his phone was busted, or he was out of charge. Or credit. His mum was pretty funny about his credit, and if he used it up before the month was done he was usually off the grid. It was the 26th, so that must be what happened. Cool. Now I could bombard him with texts and he couldn’t answer.

  I laughed. That should sort him out. He wouldn’t have a clue what I was on about, and even if he did there was nothing he could do about it.

  Mum arrived with Ronnie in the front seat. ‘I got here first,’ she said. ‘Dibs.’ Her hair was pulled back in such a tight bun her face looked like a weapon.

  ‘Whatevs,’ I said.

  We went through hello and how was it before Mum said she was dropping Ronnie home to Hayley and then we’d go shopping.

  Ronnie had control of the stereo so it was the same song from Frozen the whole way.

  When we got home, Hayley wasn’t there and her phone was on the kitchen bench. Clever, I thought. I’d have to remember that.

  Mum talked about waiting, then she swore and said ‘bugger it’ a bunch of times and told us to get back in the car and we’d have a quick drive around to see if we could find her. ‘Dad should be home by then, anyway,’ said Mum. ‘We can get something to eat.’

  So we pissed away half an hour getting a coffee and some donuts, we dropped by the park, checked the corner shop, checked at her friend’s place, but she wasn’t anywhere we were. By the time we got home, Mum was steaming. She tried Dad, but his phone went to voicemail.

  ‘I could come shopping, too,’ said Ronnie. ‘I love shopping.’

  I checked my phone as if I hadn’t heard her and wasn’t interested.

  ‘What do you think?’ said Mum with a butter-wouldn’t-melt smile on her face.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Ronnie coming shopping? I know it was going to be just us, but she’s fun, isn’t she. And soooooo cute. What do you think?’

  ‘I don’t care,’ I said. ‘It’s all good.’

  ‘We can do something that’s just us another day.’

  ‘Can I come to that, too?’ said Ronnie.

  ‘Why not?’ I said. ‘Come to everything.’

  ‘Dylan,’ went Mum, in that long, don’t-be-like-that way. ‘We’ll do something else. And more fun than shopping.’

  ‘Dibs the front, then,’ I said.

  Ronnie pouted. ‘Already dibbed. All-day dibbed this morning. Suffer!’

  ‘Seriously? Mum?’

  Mum was, like, ‘Come on, Dylan. It’s not as if we’re driving to Newcastle. We’ll be in the car for ten minutes.’

  She went into the bathroom, shut the door, and then opened the door enough to put her hand out with a post-it note. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘It’s perfect.’

  Mum must have pulled it off her little affirmation shrine she had opposite the toilet. I read the words. ‘Treat your family as you do your pictures, keep them in their best light.’

  ‘Much clearer, thanks, Mum.’

  She flushed, came out of the toilet with her hand out and asked for her post-it back so she could re
-shrine it. ‘You ready?’

  We spent twenty minutes trying to find a park near the entrance and Ronnie kept control of the stereo. It was like being in the middle of a Taylor Swift festival, but at least she’d moved on from Frozen. And even though I pointed out to Mum there were heaps of parks a little bit further away, she said she knew she could get nice and close, we just had to imagine it. Then she got us to sing the ‘parking song’ and amazingly, after a couple of laps, a car pulled out of a spot in front of us.

  ‘Told yers,’ said Mum.

  ‘For you,’ Mum said, leveling a finger at the middle of my chest, ‘we need a shirt? T-shirt? Jeans? Slacks? Panties? Boat shoes?’ The longer the list went, the better I was feeling. I didn’t really need anything, but it would be good to get some new gear. A good T-shirt and dacks I could roll up my leg a bit. She was gagging about the panties. ‘And for you, young lady, we just have to get a couple of things from Bloch, which is right up here.’

  ‘Yay,’ went Ronnie.

  ‘We’ll be quick, I promise.’ She smiled at me. Ronnie wriggled into the middle and grabbed a hand from each of us.

  Bloch is the ballet shop – it’s pink and dancey and otherwise known as hell on earth. It’s like the school shoe shop, only worse. I didn’t go in. Eventually Mum stuck her head out and told me to have a look in a few shops to see if I could find what I liked. ‘That way, we won’t be here a second longer than we have to. Text you when we’re finished.’

  Our day together wasn’t really working out the way it’d been sold to me. I’d thought me and Mum would look at stuff together, not me go shopping by myself for what I didn’t know I needed.

  I tried a few shops, looked at the super-cheap surfboards in City Beach, checked out some boardshorts and T-shirts. There were cargos in Just Jeans, but not the right ones, Glue and JayJays had some okay stuff but it all looked the same. I was hungry and bored. There were no text messages on my phone, either. I went back to Bloch, sat out the front and checked the text I’d written for Madison.

  It looked okay, and after letting my thumb hover for a bit, I hit the go button. I was instantly flushed with regret.

  ‘Nearly done,’ said Mum from inside the shop.

  It’d been a lifetime already.

  My phone beeped. It was from Ryan.

  He was back and reckoned he had many offers for tonight. He was definitely lying because Ryan never had offers for Saturday night. I knew that, because usually I didn’t either. I was trying to work out what to say in reply when Mum bustled out of the shop and said, ‘For God’s sake, Dylan. Get your head out of your stupid phone and let’s go. Ronnie’s got to be at jazz in an hour. Did you find anything?’

  We stopped ‘really quickly’ so Mum could get a coffee. Ronnie wanted a smoothie, I wanted a milkshake, but in the end we got a large smoothie and two straws. Then, with Surfection in front of us, Mum took a hard right turn into David Jones.

  ‘We’ll get something in here, for sure,’ she said.

  ‘Surfection would be better, wouldn’t it?’ Had I known there was one at the mall, I wouldn’t have bothered with any of the other shops.

  Mum wavered. ‘Well, the thing is, I have a David Jones card. I get points. More points means closer to a new phone for me, means new hand-me-down for you.’ She was smiling sweetly, the way Ronnie does when she wants something.

  ‘There’s a whole youth culture section that’s sick,’ and as she said it she moved her head forward and back like she was an Egyptian dancer, or an emu. ‘Fully sick in here, bra. Come on.’

  To get to the ‘fully sick’ part we had to go through the kitchen part and the kids’ T-shirts and undies part and the nail polish part and the hair scrunchies part and the birthday present for Aunty Ellen part. We probably would have gone to the girls’ thongs and shoes part but I put on such a sad-sack show, Mum seemed to get the message and made a big fuss of finding the section with clothes for me. She was right, it was sick. Mum raced through the racks saying things like, ‘would you?’ and ‘who would?’ There were a couple of things that were all right, but not much.

  Everything she held up I grumbled about.

  ‘There must be something,’ she said, getting testy.

  ‘That’s okay, I s’pose,’ I said, pointing to a plain black hoody with a little target on it.

  ‘A hoody? Really?’ She looked at the tag. ‘What are you, a rapper? Ben Sherman makes hoodies? It’s over one hundred dollars. That’s ridiculous. Geez, the T-shirts are sixty dollars. What a rip off. What about these pants, then? Heaps of dudes are wearing these.’

  Mum had a pair of tan pants, with elastic at the top and bottom.

  ‘Not really cool, Mum,’ I said, fighting the force of the bad-smell look that I knew was all over my face.

  ‘Yes, they are. I’ve seen the homeys pull them up at the bottom, too. Very cool. Go on. And take this. Try this on, too. And this.’ She loaded me up with gear and pushed me towards the change room.

  The pants were kind of like MC Hammer cargo pants. They were fine, but nothing like what I wanted. I wouldn’t wear them, so I didn’t try them on. Mum was outside the change room saying ‘show me, show me’ and when I came out wearing the plain pale blue shirt she was, like, ‘put the pants on’. We had an argument in the fitting area that ended up with Mum calling me impossible.

  I wanted to tell her I wasn’t impossible, that I wasn’t even difficult, that I could actually be really good, it’s just that I thought we were going to do something together and she stuffed it up by spending the whole time shopping for Ronnie. But as I tried to say it, I could feel my throat tightening and I thought I’d probably cry so I said nothing. I just pulled my cap lower on my head, jammed my hands in my pockets and shut up. Then I got called impossible and ridiculous and a teenage sulk and we left with me feeling guilty. Ronnie dived for Mum’s hand and held on like it was a bag of lollies she’d never share.

  There was a sale rack outside Surfection, so as we walked past, in a final attempt at salvaging what was officially a crap afternoon, Mum pulled a pair of pants from the rack and held them up. I shrugged. ‘You sure?’ she said.

  ‘Dunno.’ They looked pretty good, I suppose. I could see the kind I wanted in the store, but they didn’t look like they were on sale and Mum’d already had a whinge about the cost of the hoody so I didn’t say anything.

  ‘T-shirt? Billabong? Yes or no?’ She was being short with me now, how she usually is with Hayley.

  ‘Yeah. Okay.’ I didn’t really like the shirt but I just wanted to get along with her again. It was shit when Mum was pissed off.

  ‘Don’t you want to try it on?’

  ‘No, it’s okay,’ I said. ‘It looks big enough.’

  She dragged a huge breath in through her nose and let it out slowly. ‘It’s something, I suppose. You’ll look nice. The blue shirt would look better, you sure you don’t want that?’

  She was saying something else but my phone buzzed with a new text.

  It was from Ryan.

  So he knew. How did Ryan know? Was he asked or did he find out about it? Did he mean crash it or come with him?

  ‘Well?’ said Mum.

  ‘Yeah, sure, okay.’ She shook her head, made a face at Ronnie and shoved the T-shirt back onto the rack. ‘Come on, then.’ And before I could say ‘where’, I was trudging up the escalator into David Jones where Mum grabbed the elastic MC Hammer pants and the blue shirt and paid for them.

  She looked happy. I tried not to be confused.

  The questions started again in the car.

  Who’s going? What time is it? Where is it? Are the parents home? Do you have to take anything? Some food, maybe? And some chips, eh? You’re sure the parents are home? You do have Gracie’s number, right? So I can speak to her mum, just to make sure she doesn’t need anything? Maybe I can help out?

  All the oxygen was being sucked out of the car and I was sinking deeper and deeper into my seat with Taylor Swift supplying the soundtrack.


  ‘A bit short on answers there, Tiger,’ said Mum, sounding as buoyant as I felt flat.

  ‘I dunno, Mum. I think it starts at eight. I’ll probably go with Ryan, I reckon. I’m pretty sure he’s going.’

  I hadn’t replied to his text yet, but knew if I went with him I wouldn’t be able to go with Madison. Or I suppose we could all go together, it’s just that Madison might want to go with me and not Ryan.

  And I might want to go with Madison. Just Madison.

  ‘So her parents, they’re home, aren’t they?’

  There was no limit to the ways Mum could ask the same question.

  ‘Pretty sure they are. They should be. But it’s no big deal anyway. It’s not like it’s a big party. It’s a gathering, you know? It’s just a few people.’

  Mum sucked her teeth making her sound like a TV kangaroo. ‘You think I didn’t go to gatherings? Is it on Facebook, Dylan? Honestly, now. If it is, you know I can find it by calling one of the other mums. They all know their kids’ passwords.’

  This was news. ‘I dunno, Mum. I don’t think so. Gracie asked me not to say anything about it because she didn’t want any dickheads going, so I’ll guess it’s not on Facebook. Why are you making it so hard? If it’s this massive out-of-control thing, I’ll just leave. Or I’ll ring you.’

  ‘I think I’ll drop you there,’ she said, concentrating on the car in front. ‘I can give Ryan a lift as well. He’d like that.’

  ‘How about I just don’t go?’

  ‘How about you stop being a drama queen? Tell Ryan we’ll pick him up.’

  Shiiiiiiiiiiiit, I thought. She’s going to ruin everything.