Frankie

by Shivaun Plozza

  It’s hard to tell the wrong way up, but I’m pretty sure it’s a drawing of me. A nice me, though. A happy me.

  Kaboom.

  What’s that sound? Oh, nothing. Just my heart exploding into a million pieces.

  When I look up, he’s watching me. Waiting. With dimples.

  ‘Okay,’ I say.

  Bouncing to his feet, he reaches into his back pocket and pulls out a few crumpled notes, dumping them on the table next to mine. ‘Cool,’ he says and thrusts out a hand for me to shake.

  This time, I take it.

  Ten minutes later I’m back home at the unfashionable end of Smith Street. Terry’s Kebab Emporium: where kebabs go to die. I’m greeted by the familiar crack that spans the front window. It’s like the shopfront is giving me a sleazy, toothless grin.

  I walk in and Vinnie’s leaning against the front counter, flicking through a magazine. She’s calm, not a bleached hair out of place. You’d never guess she’d spent the last couple of hours having a conniption about me meeting up with Xavier.

  ‘Morning, sweetheart,’ she says.

  I collapse against the counter with a groan. ‘Afternoon, Vinnie.’

  Vinnie licks her finger and flicks over another page. Her nails are painted the same shade of red – Vixen Rampage – as her lipstick. ‘Is it afternoon already? Well, I never.’

  There are a couple of people in the shop, all of them too busy stuffing their faces with kebab to worry about the domestic unfolding in front of them. Or maybe they’re locals, used to looking the other way.

  Vinnie’s still got her head down and I’m not telepathic so I can’t get her to look up simply by thinking it. And I’d really like her to look at me so I can launch into a detailed account of everything and ask her what she thinks. Is Xavier for real? Is he after money? Is he likely to sell me to sex traffickers for a packet of smokes?

  ‘I’m starved,’ I say instead. ‘Do we have any food? I could score us some banh mi.’

  ‘Nice try, honey, but you’re going nowhere. You’re still grounded. It’s not my fault you wasted your one get-out-of-jail-free card meeting up with God Knows Who.’

  Finally, she closes her magazine and looks up, giving me The Nonna Sofia: eyes narrowed, lips pursed, a single hand on a cocked hip. We don’t live with Nonna anymore, not since she lost her marbles and had to go live at Peaceful Pines Retirement Home, but I can’t escape The Look.

  ‘Whatever,’ I say. From the bar fridge under the counter I grab a tub of Vinnie’s emergency supply of low-fat yoghurt, rip off the lid and lick it clean. I grab a spork from the canister on top of the bain-marie. ‘You could have had it so much worse.’ I spork runny globs of yoghurt into my mouth. ‘You could have –’

  ‘Don’t speak with your mouth full.’

  ‘– been lumped with a spider-fancying, cockroach-eating serial-killer-in-the-making. So you got a niece who gets expelled from school. Big deal. You’ve met Steve Sparrow. Tell me you don’t want to slap his face with the collected works of Shakespeare. I just did what everyone wished they could do. It’s called poetic justice.’

  She pushes the magazine away. ‘I love you more than life, honey, but I swear to god there are times when I could serve you on a spit.’ She jabs a pointed nail at me. ‘And you only got suspended.’

  ‘Suspended indefinitely. Don’t call us, we’ll call you.’

  It’s been two days since The Steve Sparrow Incident and I’m already bored, stuck at home with nothing to do except think about how ‘The Steve Sparrow Incident’ would make an excellent band name and how maybe I should learn an instrument so I can form that band. I don’t think being able to play ‘Three Blind Mice’ on the recorder counts.

  Vinnie shakes her head and starts tossing the bowl of lettuce with a pair of tongs. We both know she’s not really pissed off about what I did to Steve. Well, she is. Majorly. But right now she’s more upset about my meeting with ‘God Knows Who’.

  ‘She dumped him too,’ I say. ‘It’s not his fault she’s his mum.’ I stir the yoghurt. ‘He’s nice. Clean. Paid his half. Didn’t kill me.’

  ‘Who’s been looking after him then?’ She tries keeping her voice casual. She fails.

  ‘His dad, I think. In Queensland.’

  ‘You going to be seeing him again?’

  I do have a plan. I’m applying the rules of dating. If he contacts me in the next twelve hours I’ll know it’s a scam – too eager. If he waits twenty-four hours, then it’s okay to meet up with him again, but not if he takes longer than three days to text me. Then he’s a jerk who doesn’t deserve my time.

  ‘Maybe – maybe I’ll see him again.’

  ‘Well, it won’t be tomorrow,’ says Vinnie. ‘We’re busy.’

  Tomorrow is The Meeting – my meeting with Principal Vukovic.

  ‘Let’s not go, Vin. We could skip the firing squad and go get donuts instead.’

  I get a laugh. Which is a bonus.

  ‘Not on your life,’ she tells me. ‘This meeting is important. I’ll-kick-your-arse-if-you-mess-it-up important. We’ll sort this out, and you’ll be back at school before you’ve missed too much of your final year.’

  So, no pressure, right? I’ll just walk into the principal’s office, ‘explain my actions’ and all will be forgiven. Then we’ll all go unicorn riding.

  I put down the yoghurt and grab Vinnie’s magazine. ‘Is making up crosswords a job? I could do that.’

  ‘You need to finish school before you can get a job,’ she says. She tries running her fingers through my hair but her nails get tangled in the knots. ‘And uni. Didn’t you always want to go to uni?’

  I shrug. ‘Uni’s overrated. Ian Curtis didn’t go and he’s, like, the most important human being. Ever.’

  ‘You’ve got to focus, Frankie. This is your future we’re talking about . . .’

  I concentrate on the crossword. The first couple of clues are easy. ‘Progress in Greece initially inhibits four-legged animal’. I scrawl ‘pig’ in the little boxes.

  ‘. . . believe you me, you do not want to be working in this dump forty years from now.’

  ‘I am the crossword goddess, Vinnie. Goddesses do not need to finish school.’

  She snorts. ‘You’re the goddess of being a pain in my bum, is what you are.’

  We both look up as the bell jangles. Speaking of pigs . . . Detective Inspector Eric Marzoli spills in, shaking off the rain. Now I can play my favourite game: How Long Before Vinnie Threatens to Shove Something up a Cop’s Arse. I check the clock above the drinks fridge. And your time . . . starts . . . now!

  ‘It’s crazy out there,’ he says. ‘Just saw a Merc almost collide with a tram.’

  Vinnie glares at the puddle forming around Marzoli’s feet. ‘Everybody drives like a moron soon as the weather gets nasty. Course, you being a cop and all, I guess you could do something about that.’

  Ten seconds and counting.

  Marzoli runs his hand over the top of his head – thin wisps of hair clumping together in the wet. ‘That’s for uniform to sort out.’ He looks up at the menu and chooses the Smith Street Gonzales. ‘What the wife doesn’t know,’ he says to Vinnie with a wink. Half his face has to collapse to make the wink happen.

  There’s no way this guy has a wife.

  ‘Nice choice, Detective,’ says Vinnie. She smiles. It’s thin but passable.

  Twenty-three seconds.

  Vinnie does a shimmy as she hitches down her skirt and starts on Marzoli’s order – lamb, no onion, extra jalapeños.

  Marzoli turns my way; his eyes lock onto me like a pit bull’s jaws around the neck of a Shih tzu.

  ‘Shouldn’t you be in school?’ he says.

  ‘Isn’t that for uniform to sort out?’ I drop my gaze to the crossword. ‘Five across. Four letters.’ I tap my pen against my lip. ‘Eject backwards first before cutting work in half to make preserved meat.’

  The electric knife roars to life as Vinnie starts shaving lamb off the spit. ‘Be
ats me,’ she says. ‘Spam?’

  ‘Second letter’s an “e”.’

  Vinnie doesn’t bother with gloves, just starts piling on lettuce, tomato and way way too many jalapeños.

  Thirty-five seconds. She’s doing well.

  ‘’Fraid I’m not just here for the excellent food,’ Marzoli says. He pulls out a little black notebook from his coat pocket. ‘We’re canvassing the neighbourhood. There’s been a spate of burglaries in the area and we’re checking if anyone has seen or heard anything suspicious.’

  ‘Burglaries?’ Vinnie keeps her back to Marzoli.

  ‘Yup.’

  Forty-two seconds.

  ‘And seeing as though we’re open all hours you thought we might have seen something?’

  ‘Sure,’ says Marzoli. ‘That sounds about right.’

  ‘Pure chance you walked into this shop to ask us questions?’ says Vinnie.

  Fifty-one seconds.

  Vinnie swings around and dumps Marzoli’s kebab on the counter. ‘Your Smith Street Gonzales, Detective Inspector. And would you like a stiletto up your arse with that?’

  Stop the clock.

  Fifty-six seconds being civil to a cop. That’s a new record.

  Marzoli picks up his kebab. A jalapeño falls out and lands on the counter. ‘Still a charmer, Lavinia,’ he says.

  ‘Nobody calls me that, Eric. Now get out of my shop.’

  ‘How about you, Frankie?’ he says. ‘You seen anything?’ A thin strip of lettuce hangs from the side of his mouth. He sucks it up. ‘Anybody behaving oddly?’

  ‘This is Collingwood,’ I say. ‘Define odd.’

  He smiles. ‘Pity,’ he says. ‘Still, we’ll get the guy. We always do.’ He takes another bite and turns back to Vinnie. ‘Which reminds me: how’s your brother, Terry? You manage to get to Port Philip much these days?’

  I squeeze the spork in my grip. The reason Uncle Terry is behind bars is standing right in front of us, stuffing his face with our kebab. If I were Vinnie I’d have jumped the counter and spiked his eyeball with my Louboutin knock-offs.

  ‘He sure is lucky he had you to take care of the family business,’ says Marzoli. ‘Picking right up where he left off.’

  My spork snaps in half. ‘Jerk.’

  A jalapeño drops from Marzoli’s open mouth and plops on the counter. ‘What d’you call me?’

  ‘Five across. “Eject backwards first before cutting work in half to make preserved meat”.’ I pick up my pencil. ‘J. E. R. K.’ I fill in each letter. Slowly. Smoothly.

  A smile spreads across Marzoli’s face. He shoves the last of the kebab into his mouth, wiping his hands down the front of his jacket. ‘If you remember anything,’ he says, removing a business card from his pocket and dropping it on the bench. ‘Number’s on there.’

  Marzoli ducks through the front door with a jingle, jangle, jingle. ‘Always a pleasure,’ he calls over his shoulder.

  I turn to Vinnie. ‘A stiletto up the arse, Vin? I thought you told me not every situation needs to be resolved with violence.’

  She shrugs.

  ‘What was that about? Why’s Marzoli suggesting we’re involved in a bunch of burglaries?’

  ‘Just the usual cop bullshit. Something happens in this neighbourhood and we’re the first port of call. You ought to know that by now. But maybe we should be more careful about locking up. Collingwood types and all that.’

  I laugh. ‘Says Her Majesty, Queen of Collingwood.’

  Vinnie plants a Vixen Rampage kiss on my forehead. ‘Princess.’

  I sneak into the backyard; early morning dew clings to my boots as I trample through the patchy grass. I’ve got an hour before we’re due at school for The Meeting.

  Vinnie’s Persian cat sits at the back gate, face like somebody rammed him into a brick wall. Which, ironically, is what I fantasise about doing to him every time I discover he’s left a ‘surprise’ in my boots. I hiss at him and he hisses back before squeezing his fat arse under the gate.

  I grab a trowel and at the back fence I drop to my knees under the willow. I could easily dig with my hands because the earth is soft, but last time I did that there was dirt under my nails for days and Vinnie kept asking questions.

  I drive the trowel in hard and cut a worm in half.

  ‘Shit.’

  I part the dirt with the tip of the trowel and scoop up the two halves, placing them on my thigh. They don’t both wriggle off like I expect them to. I guess it’s a myth that cutting a worm in half makes two worms.

  I dig a small hole just to the left and bury the worm, trying to match up the two halves as I lay the little guy in his grave. I grab a willow leaf and a piece of bark shaped like a cocoon. I poke the leaf through the bark to make a cross, which I push into the ground for a headstone.

  Then I get back to digging.

  The whole point of a time capsule is you bury it and leave it. Well, that’s what Daniel, my shrink, said when he came up with the dumb idea to help ‘curb my aggressive tendencies’. You dig it up when you’re divorced, fat, stressed, lonely and thinking about a nip and tuck. So far I’ve dug this thing up three times and I only buried it a week and a half ago. I keep finding things I want to bury.

  The trowel hits wood so I scoop the mud away, slowly uncovering the pencil box I made in Year Seven woodwork.

  When I slide the cover back, globs of dirt fall on top of the freezer bag inside. I shake off the dirt and open the bag, revealing the photo on top: the only picture I have of my father.

  I think he’s my father. Vinnie said he is and he was living with Juliet when she had me so he could be. It’s not a great photo; he’s half cut out. But you can see a bit of his arm and half his face. He has a nice smile. He has my dark skin and my slightly hooked nose.

  I don’t remember anything about him.

  According to Vinnie, Juliet left me with him once when I was a baby. She went to the shops to get nappies, but she didn’t come back for a couple of days and when she did he’d overdosed. I was in my cot, my nappy falling off because it was so full. I almost died.

  I pull the serviette out of my back pocket and shove it on top of the photo. I figure something that reminds me of the first time I met my half-brother is something that should go in a time capsule. I don’t know if Xavier saw me slide it off the table and into my back pocket yesterday. I hope not.

  My phone buzzes. The screen’s smashed, cracks webbing in the top right-hand corner, but I can see Cara’s message: Good luck today, babe. No pressure but do NOT stuff this up. I NEED YOU BACK HERE.

  Thanks, Cara Lam, oh wise and beautiful BFF. Because I need to be reminded of The Meeting. I so want to blab on for hours to Principal Vukovic about why I’m such a psycho.

  Especially as I don’t plan on telling her the truth. All I want is to forget, forget about what happened in the corner of the library. I want to forget Steve’s Dorito-smelling breath and what he said to make me so crazy angry, angry enough to slap him with the fattest hardback I could lay my hands on. A fat book for a fat head.

  I get a sick taste in my mouth. Guess I can joke all I want but the closer it gets to The Meeting the harder it is to laugh. Because I know what I did to Steve was bad. Out-of-control, out-of-my-mind, out-of-this-world bad. Not that I remember much: anger does that to me. Red ink blots smear across my vision. One minute Steve’s shooting his mouth off and the next there’s blood and an ambulance and . . .

  No. Stop thinking about it.

  I slam the lid shut and dump the pencil box back into the hole. I shovel dirt from all around and pile it on top; I accidentally unearth the little worm’s grave.

  ‘Sorry, dude,’ I say.

  I give him a second funeral. This time I give a speech. I tell him how all his little worm friends will miss him. I tell him that the backyard just won’t be the same without him. I say how tragic it is that his life was cut short, but that’s a bad choice of words.

  Covering his poor little body with the last of the dirt, I tell
him I’m sorry for giving him such a shitty funeral. I can’t find the headstone again.

  I push myself up, wiping the muddy earth from my jeans. It just rubs deeper into the fabric.

  ‘Frankie?’ shouts Vinnie. ‘Where the hell are you?’

  Busted.

  I hurry inside, letting the wire door slam shut behind me. ‘I’m taking the garbage out.’

  ‘Garbage is still here.’

  Okay. So not such a good cover.

  ‘I know,’ I shout back. ‘I’m taking it out now.’

  That’s what you get for lying, Frankie. Bin duty.

  Vinnie slaps my hand. ‘Stop your fidgeting.’

  ‘I’m allergic to this skirt.’ I adjust the waistband of my winter uniform; the prickly fabric is made from sheep that rolled around in thistles.

  ‘Don’t start that now.’ Vinnie checks her watch again. ‘I closed the shop for this.’

  It doesn’t matter how often Vinnie checks the time, we’re not being let into the principal’s office until we’ve stewed. It’s how Vukovic rolls.

  With an armful of Romeo and Juliets, my former English teacher, Mr Tran, scuttles through the office foyer. When he spots me, he gives a curt nod and keeps heading to the door.

  I slink down in my chair. ‘Why don’t we just –’

  ‘This is important, Frankie,’ says Vinnie. ‘You’ll go in there, tell Ms Vukovic what happened and everything will be fine.’ She pats my knee. ‘You just have to tell the truth.’

  Over by the front entrance, Mr Tran lifts one leg, balancing the stack of books on his thigh to free a hand for the door. His corduroy pants sag around his arse. He teeters and the top few books fall to the ground. When he bends to pick them up, the whole stack topples.

  Ha. It almost cheers me up.

  ‘Won’t be long now, Francesca,’ says the school receptionist. Except she says: ‘Fran-chess-caaaaar’.

  I don’t know her name; I only know her as Sponge-Bum Square-Tits. She’s addicted to sniffing white-out and has the worst dress sense. The jacket she’s wearing today is the colour of cud. Seriously, it’s like a cow vomited on her.

  ‘Francesca,’ calls Mr Tran. ‘Help me with these. Please.’