All I Ever Wanted

by Vikki Wakefield

  Vikki Wakefield lives in Adelaide. She writes late at night and if she can’t read, she can’t breathe. All I Ever Wanted is her first novel.

  ALL I EVER

  WANTED

  VIKKI WAKEFIELD

  textpublishing.com.au

  The Text Publishing Company

  Swann House

  22 William Street

  Melbourne Victoria 3000

  Australia

  Copyright © Vikki Wakefield 2011

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  First published by The Text Publishing Company, 2011

  Cover design by WH Chong

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

  Author: Wakefield, Vikki, 1970-

  Title: All I ever wanted / Vikki Wakefield.

  ISBN: 9781921758300 (pbk.)

  Target Audience: For young adults.

  Dewey Number: A823.4

  Primary print ISBN: 9781921758300

  Ebook ISBN: 9781921834387

  For Margaret, who told me I could do anything.

  I hope there are books in Heaven.

  Contents

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ONE

  It’s easy.

  Happy pills. At best you’re a dancing queen with a direct line to God; at worst you can fry your brain. Thirty bucks each, retail. They come wrapped in a brown-paper package that fits in your bike basket. Plain view is good because a backpack on a Dodd is asking for an illegal search by a cop.

  I pick up the package from Feeney Tucker, a small man with a face like a jigsaw puzzle where the pieces have been pushed together to make them fit. He has a caveman’s brow and a cute, flared Barbie-doll nose. His lashes are long and pretty, his mouth thin and cruel. A thick neck, a pianist’s elegant hands and a strange floating grace like a cartoon maître d’. Dr Frankenstein could have put him together out of spare parts.

  Feeney stalls before handing over the package. He makes a call, asks about the boys, and gives it to me grudgingly. After all, I’m a sixteen-year-old girl on a clapped-out, yellow bike—hardly a convincing courier.

  ‘Make haste, little girl,’ he says in a voice like a Dickens chimneysweep.

  My reputation and my conscience are going to take a hit. So far, both are clean. My mum says her princess doesn’t need to be involved with ‘the business’. Not with two older brothers who share a couple of hundred brain cells, eleven arrests, two convictions and a sprinkling of bastard offspring. Mum’s words, not mine. But, needs must, Mum’s words again. The boys have got a short stint in remand and we don’t have a car. There are customers waiting and Fat Mother Dodd—on a bike, with a package—is as probable as life on Pluto.

  Feeney shoves me off on my bike and I pedal hard for a few of blocks. But the sky is blue and birds are singing and what could happen?

  I’m thinking, only this one time…it’s not like I’m a real criminal…just two more blocks and I’m home free. Feeling bursts of joy that it’s still summer, that there’s no school for two more weeks. Anticipation is a constant, wonderful state, when my life has gone nowhere for so long and a life-changing event must be imminent. Waiting for fate to step in is almost better than something actually happening.

  I hop off and walk the bike. Savour everything, even my paranoid imaginings. In my mind, the package is leaking a trail like Hansel’s breadcrumbs and there’s a queue of shiny, happy people skipping along behind me. I can feel my face burning brown, taste vinegar and chips, smell the odour of hot tar and old oil baked into the melting road. Hear the flip-flop of my thongs and the clack-clack of the wonky wheel. The bike rides too low, the handlebars too high like a chopper, but I don’t care. I’m smiling like an idiot. Days like these I feel innocent and happy, but I don’t know why.

  Heat seeps through my thin rubber soles and I hop back on. Pedal in a wavering line. The neighbourhood is so familiar I could make it home with my eyes closed. Nothing changes.

  I round the corner by the shops and everything changes.

  He’s there. Jordan Mullen, cool and relaxed leaning up against a wall, when my heart’s blown up like a puffer-fish.

  Not now, not now. But I know I might not get another chance any time soon, so I drag my toe along the gravel and slow up.

  He’s smiling at me like he wants me to stop.

  So I stop.

  I smile back, but it’s a corpse grin. My lips are stuck to my teeth and I can feel my hair doing its own thing. There’s grit in my eyes but I can’t rub them because I might miss something.

  ‘I’ve been waiting for you,’ he says, and I have this moment like in that old movie where the waves roll in and the gulls shriek and there’s nothing but me and him. Except that there are no waves and the gulls are shrieking because the car park is a Macca’s mecca.

  ‘What for?’ I ask him but forget to bat my eyelashes or some other flirty thing that would make me sound less rude.

  He’s not bothered though and I remember why I’ve been in love with him for a hundred years—or at least the last five—because he looks like Leonardo DiCaprio before he got old, and his eyes are like shards of blue glass. It’s a bad-boy face—like when your letterbox gets bombed, and you know if you stake it out for ten minutes, one of them has to come back to check out his handiwork. That’s him, the one who comes back.

  So I say, ‘What for?’ again, but kinder this time. He winks at me and I can see myself in something satin and strappy with a freakin’ corsage pinned over my heart which is ready to burst.

  Jordan takes my bike by the handlebars, wheels it into the alley behind the shops. The act seems almost chivalrous. I follow, my eyes fixed on the smooth, brown part of his back where his jeans hang low, just so. I’m sleepwalking, reacting, not thinking. This perfect, blue day.

  Jordan kicks the bike-stand down and turns to face me. His eyes search mine like he’s found something in there—back and forth, back and forth. I’m mesmerised, as if he was swinging a pocket-watch. My lips pucker even as I tell myself: be cool, don’t sweat, suck in your belly.

  Then he says, ‘Give me the package.’

  ‘What?’ I ask, blinking.

  Jordan Mullen is looking at me like I’m something he wants to scrape off his shoe and right then my heart breaks, but somehow beats on.

  He says again, ‘Give me the package.’

  ‘Don’t,’ is all I can say, as if it will make a difference.

  He takes the package anyway. He rolls my bike into the dry creek at the end of the alley. It lands upside-down and he walks away. Leaves me standing there.

  Jesus, I can’t do anything right.

  The next breath I take fills my lungs with despair. I stare at my bike, one wheel skewed like a lazy eye. I leave it there. I leave it because that bike reminds me every day that I could hold my breath between the times I’ve had something I wanted, and
lost it—and still live.

  The summer holiday is nearly over.

  This is not how it’s supposed to be.

  TWO

  I feel like running, but I don’t. I walk, because in our street everybody knows everybody’s business. Someone will notice I rode up and walked down. Over fences and through keyholes, your business can pass like a Chinese whisper and beat you home, even if you’re running.

  Tudor Crescent, one through forty-six, an arid alley of half-houses and not a Tudor or crescent in sight. A lost street in a forgotten suburb, an hour from the city. Low, chicken-wire fences that don’t keep anything in, or out. Corrugated-iron roofs that peel and flap in the wind. This hot spell has bleached the street. Everything’s toast, apart from the witch’s oasis at number thirty-two.

  The trains run behind our side. If you stand at the top of the street and draw an imaginary line of perspective, our side hangs loose, like it’s been shaken off its hinges. For as long as I can remember, we’ve lived here. Mum says that the other house, the one I was born in, was worse. As if that’s possible.

  I should have done something. Kicked or screamed or made a scene, anything but stand there and let it happen. I should have told him something trite but true, like he didn’t know who he was messing with. I could have told him that I needed to rewind that scene because something was missing. I shouldn’t have stopped. But I did.

  Two wars will come of this.

  Out of habit, I cross the road to avoid the Tarrant place. The front yard is full of wounded toys and old junk. A bare-bummed toddler gives me the finger, so solemnly I could almost take it for a greeting. Another raggedy kid that could be a boy or a girl tears through a side gate and skids to a stop. Stares at me like I’m the antichrist. Gargoyle’s choker chain hangs off the porch, empty, but you can’t ever chance it.

  Two doors further down I wave at old Benny in his cockpit, a bashed-up dentist’s chair. Next to him, a dozen empties and a kidney-dish full of smouldering butts. He waves back, his gappy teeth like piano keys.

  The downside to avoiding the Tarrant house is that I have to pass Mrs Tkautz.

  Mrs Tkautz tends her garden with all the love of a childless woman. Because I’m a godless child, so she says, I sometimes snap the heads off her tulips and chuck in a few handfuls of birdseed where it thrives and re-seeds in her cow poo. Just a bit of fun, because small things amuse small minds and I’ll never amount to anything.

  Thank you, Lord. The witch is out. A waft of flowery sweet-sickness reminds me not to underestimate her power.

  I cross back.

  The other half of our house, where Lola lives, is closed up and silent. Each half is a mirror-image of the other, connected by the lounge-room wall and the outside laundry. Lola lives like a ghost; we never see her, but we hear her through the dividing wall as clearly as if she was in the same room. There’s a banged-up coupe in her driveway, but it hasn’t moved in months and the weeds have grown up around the tyres. Its coat-hanger aerial is twisted into the shape of a heart.

  Our place doesn’t look different from the other houses—it doesn’t pay to make it pretty. Things that tinkle or shine look out of place; anything too grand provokes spite and vandalism, or worse, theft. The night of my twelfth birthday my new bike was on the porch, glowing neon in the dark; a few days later it rolled past with another kid on it. Sometimes I wish I’d got the delinquent gene so I could have stolen it back, but Mum said, Let it go, get the old yellow bike out and ride that until you learn to drive. No one will steal that old thing. It wasn’t the first time I had to let something go.

  Heat and dust swirl about, sticking my hair to my lips. A baby cries, but it’s not one I know. Someone has sprayed driveway gravel all over the front porch with their tyres and the wind has blown the letterbox lid open. The street looks like the set of a ghost town in an old western movie, but there are eyes everywhere.

  I stand at the end of our drive and try to hear over my hammering heart. I listen to the telly babbling and the baby crying and Mum having a one-sided conversation.

  ‘Yeah, she should be back by now…No, I haven’t told her…I will, she’s just going through that “It’s all about me” stage…I couldn’t get it myself, I’ve got Matt’s youngest…They could be out in a week, but it could be a lot longer, it depends on the evidence…I know, I’m worried sick about it…Look, I’ll tell you more when I know more…We’re doing okay…Gotta go, I’m missing the shopping channel.’

  I Russian-squat past the lounge window, but she hears me.

  ‘That you, Jemima?’

  If a scarecrow had a voice, it would sound like Mum’s. Dry as wheat and chaff.

  In that second, I opt for delusion over confession. I grab an old telephone book off the recycling bin and shove it up my T-shirt as she opens the screen door. She fills the doorway. The short trip from the couch has made her breathless.

  ‘Orright,’ Mum wheezes.

  ‘All good,’ I say, my arms crossed over my chest.

  She holds out her hand. ‘There’s no need to hide it, Mim.’

  ‘I know. It’s okay. I’ll stash it in the pit.’

  She gives me an odd look, then nods. ‘Don’t open it.’

  ‘As if.’

  It still surprises me that we’re eye to eye. There’s no ducking her glare any more. I guess I’m all grown up.

  I hold the phone book tightly, squeeze through the side gate and follow the driveway out to the back shed. The key is Blu-Tacked to the inside of the mooning gnome, where it’s been for years. I unlock the shed and step inside. Gusts of cool air, petrol, old grease and… something else. Like bad meat.

  Even though my half-brothers don’t live here any more, the shed is full of their stuff. I have to tiptoe around bike parts, paint tins and rusty tools. When I lift things out of my way they leave perfect outlines in the dust.

  I’ll give it five minutes, long enough for me to go through the motions. Wheel Dillon’s Harley off the boards, open up the pit, stash the ‘package’.

  I lean against Dill’s workbench, trying to slow my breathing. How to get out of this one? To have the object of your affection steal your package and roll your bike into a ditch somehow opens up all kinds of possibilities. I have a week, at best, to recover the package and exact a transcendental revenge. Something more imaginative than prawns in curtain hems.

  ‘Traitor,’ I say, my voice bouncing in the space.

  There’s movement. A sneaky shuffle, and a sigh that gets swallowed up by the wailing wind. On the floor, in the half-light, I see a wet spot. Then another. Then a patch of green slime. A twisted mat of yellowed grass like a tiny straw doll. Finally, a pile of half-digested meat.

  I’m breathing hard but there’s something breathing harder. Panting, and the scythe of a tail on the dusty floor. Funny how adrenalin can freeze you. Fight, flight or freeze. I can’t move. I know what’s on the other end of that tail and it’s nearly ripped my face off once before.

  Gargoyle is one sick dog. He lies like a newborn calf, helpless and slimy. Without moving my legs, I crane my neck to see. I grab a metal file off a shelf but he’s still, apart from his chest and his lunatic eyes. Slow steps, crab-sideways, keeping my back to the bench, holding the file like a lightsaber. Gargoyle glares and growls.

  His muscles are all bunched up under his loose skin. This is the creature of my nightmares, the vicious sentinel of Tudor Crescent. I’ve never seen him this close. He’s bigger than I thought, but somehow less scary. Maybe it’s his eyes, wise and droopy and red-rimmed, watching every move.

  ‘Puppy had a bad steak?’ I sing-song.

  Anyone could have poisoned him. The street would be a whole lot safer if its residents weren’t living in fear of Tarrant’s monster. Gargoyle’s slayer would probably have his image immortalised in bronze. What do I do? No way Mum will let Mick Tarrant in her shed to get his pony. If I tell her Gargoyle’s in the shed, if she has to scrape her backside off the couch, she might decide to open the package
. I need to keep her away from the pit until I figure out what to do.

  The beast stares me down and, just when I think my heart can’t take any more, he goes all soft. I put the file back on the shelf and hoist myself onto the workbench. How’d he get in here anyway? He could have crawled through the old doggy-door, but he must have been desperate.

  I jump down, fill up a bucket of water and push it over to him with a broom. I do the same with an old blanket that puffs dust and smells like childhood.

  He sniffs and blows, then turns away in disgust.

  ‘Jemima!’

  Dog and I both jump. He settles back and whines. Maybe I can ask Benny. He’s got healing hands and blackfella cures in little bottles the colour of rust. I’ll ask Benny.

  ‘Jemima!’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, Jabba,’ I mumble.

  Our eyes are locked as I back away. ‘Go home,’ I tell him. I prop the doggy-door open with a stick, so he can see his freedom.

  Mum’s back lying on her couch, like leftover dough. The baby I don’t know is picking at crumbs on the shagpile carpet, a little monkey with wise eyes and deliberate fingers. Everything in the room faces the television, except the baby.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Change the kid, will you? I’ve got to ring for something.’ She nudges a bulging nappy-bag towards me with her foot.

  I kneel down. ‘Hello. Hello, baby. Who are you?’

  He plucks at the face on my T-shirt with his monkey fingers. His ears are small and crumpled, same as Matt’s. I like this one.

  ‘Oh, Tahnee rang. Said you weren’t answering her texts. She’ll be here about eight,’ Mum says, hitting the speed dial.

  I take the baby to my room and let him play with my disco ball. He watches his face split into silvery slices and gives me a gummy grin. I blow a raspberry on his cheek and waggle my ears with my fingers. He does one of those contagious baby belly laughs and dribbles on the floor. I lie on my stomach with my chin in my hands and look at him for a while. Babies will let you do that. He has Matt’s eyes—my eyes, too—wide and grey-green with dark flecks and wet-looking eyelashes. Dodd eyes. Ocean eyes, except with the baby’s I can see clear to the bottom. I feel a tug of connection but I shake it off because there’s no point. He’ll be gone soon, like the others.