‘But you are a scientist. A marine scientist. I thought you meant that we should come up with something that isn’t as simple as a job signifier.’
‘Well, I didn’t mean it like that exactly. I meant it more as the way my mind works. Perhaps I meant something more like scientific, as in scientific thinker.’
‘And do you think that describes everything about you? Your entire approach to life?’ There was frustration and accusation in the way Lauren directed this question at poor Ivan.
‘Well, of everybody here you know me best. What would you suggest?’ Ivan responded, squinting as if he was expecting to be harmed in some way.
‘Hmm,’ Lauren said. It was almost possible to see her mind fill up with a whole lot of negative terms she was having to bat away. Not that successfully. ‘How about obsessive?’ she suggested.
‘Obsessive?’ Ivan frowned, as if not entirely dismissing the idea.
‘Deep?’ Jed quickly suggested.
‘What about me?’ Jaspar butted in, clearly impatient to join the game after sitting through all the adult talk. ‘What’s my one word?’
‘That’s easy,’ Lauren said. ‘I vote for inquisitive.’
‘What does that mean exactly?’
‘Wanting to know how things work, what they mean.’
‘Yes,’ Jaspar smiled, easily satisfied. ‘That’s me.’
Meanwhile I was turning over what I might come up with for myself. The types of words blaring in at me were uncourageous and perhaps even sneaky. A while ago, I might have come up with something else like genial, say, or easy-going, but actually an incisive person might still be able to discern something whiffy about such words, a hint of repression perhaps, when that’s all you can say about yourself. If I was feeling kinder to myself, then reticent or careful might be milder choices to describe a person whose sins were more of the omitting kind.
That unused swab was still sitting inside an envelope on my dressing table. All I had to do was waggle the thing about inside one of the right mouths, in some sort of unsuspicious way (the hard part), maybe forge a signature, and send it back off to where it came from. Since its arrival I’d lain awake weighing the alternatives, imagining myself opening the return envelope and formulating the words I could use to tell Dylan the truth about his paternity. Good or bad. Or rather, in this case, conditionally good or spectacularly bad. At night, alone in my bed, I was able to convince myself that I had the ability to deliver the news, whatever the result, in some way that would have a positive outcome for everyone. By the morning’s light any resolve had completely slipped from my grasp, and I’d let another day pass while I gathered strength. The potentiality of the answer was sitting so uncomfortably on me that it was making my back ache, deepening the black marks under my eyes.
A chill was beginning to settle into the air now the sun had finally slunk below the horizon. Several citronella candles were burning along the top rail of the balcony, giving off their protective field, but there was that feeling that summer mosquitoes were amassing somewhere in dark corners, sensing the available blood, and waiting for the candles to burn out and the true banquet to begin.
Lauren was next, and while she considered her word I could feel my heart begin to beat faster with the effort to come up with some sort of fancy facade for myself when the game came around to my side of the table.
‘Manager,’ was the first thought Lauren offered.
‘But it was you who said we couldn’t use job specifiers,’ her brother said.
‘I wasn’t thinking of my job, actually,’ Lauren said, slurring softly, and I found myself liking her a little more for allowing herself to get a bit drunk. ‘More my whole life. I manage the house, I manage all the relationships, I manage our finances, and I managed the dinner tonight.’
Nobody said anything. Nobody agreed or disagreed. Lauren’s idea of herself was left to linger around her like an awkward smell as we all moved on to Jed.
‘I think for me – übercool,’ Jed said, not seriously.
‘Definitely something artistic,’ Ivan offered in an admiring way, as if something artistic was a thing that he might have liked for himself but could only acknowledge was out of his reach. ‘Maybe creative?’
‘What about wonderful?’ Jaspar said. ‘My wonderful dad!’ He suddenly looked over at me with a gaze that was so freakishly, protectively adult that I began to wonder if he’d noticed something that day back when I’d driven them all to the A & E. He might have noted the way the admitting nurse had assumed the panicking, dishevelled bunch of us were a family unit – me and Jed and Jaspar and Jaspar’s drama-queen friend who had come bursting into the shed yelling emergency, disaster, broken glass, bad cut, tourniquet, help. Maybe, even as blood was still seeping out of the deep gash in his foot there in the waiting room, Jaspar had somehow clocked me enjoying that little assumption.
‘Perhaps imaginative?’ I managed to say, secretly thinking that wonderful was something I could almost vote for.
‘Or artful, even,’ Lauren said, without raising her eyes from her plate.
‘A lady on Dad’s Facebook has a word for him,’ Jaspar said. His cheeks were now quite flush and I wondered about the wisdom of letting him eat that terrible seafood course with all that tequila in it.
‘What’s that, darling?’ Lauren asked, as all eyes turned to him.
‘Pervert,’ he announced gaily, grinning broadly. That smile quickly evaporated as he registered the shock value of what he’d just said.
Lauren pushed her chair back and headed inside the house. Jed and Jaspar followed, and then Ivan got up from his chair. Not wanting to sit at the table alone, I trailed behind too. At the computer Lauren pulled up Jed’s fan page. Somebody had put up a photo, taken from behind, of Jed with his face half-turned towards a blond girl in skimpy clothes, walking into the bush together. He was smiling and had his hand on the middle of her back, as if he was pushing her. You couldn’t see her face, only the back of her head. It was captioned – ‘She’s just a school girl, and Jed Jordan is a dirty PERVERT.’ The first comment below had two words: Creep alert.
I glimpsed the information line: 3564 people like this.
Jaspar, now in defence mode, said to Lauren accusingly, ‘I tried to tell you before but you weren’t listening.’
‘What is this?’ Lauren said as she typed Jed’s name into Google, only to find that it had been picked up elsewhere as a topic. There was speculation about what it meant. People were saying they could believe he was a paedo, pervy has-been.
Lauren spun her chair around and glared at Jed, who had turned quite pale, and said, ‘What the hell?’
Ivan tactfully touched my elbow and said, ‘I think perhaps it’s time for you and me to call it a night.’
Sweet sixteen
I didn’t know. How could I not have known? I’ve been looking forward to my sixteenth birthday forever. It should’ve been great. But it’s turned into the worst day ever.
It starts out well with a big pile of parcels around my breakfast plate. The first one’s a surprisingly styley matching bra and underpants. Dark blue and sophisticated-looking. This is the way my mother chooses, on this big day, to acknowledge me.
‘Try them on!’ she says.
‘What, now?’
‘Why not? Don’t you like them?’
Probably the most excellent present she has ever given me, but am reluctant to parade around in them in front of her. ‘I’ll put them on after my shower,’ I say, placing them to one side, eyes now on the box, all wrapped up with a big pink bow, that looks like it might possibly be the new phone I want.
Usually Mum respects my privacy and would never normally do anything like swing open the bathroom door while I’m getting dressed, but this morning she obviously feels entitled to celebrate her own generosity. Am retching into the toilet in the new bra and pants when the door flies open, and am unprepared to shield my mother from the fact that I’m bursting out of the bra. There is a long moment as she stands in the doorway,
knuckles whitening on the handle, and stares with an open mouth at my body.
She offers a comment: ‘You’ve been sick.’
I straighten up, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand.
‘Is it … too many pancakes?’
I shrug. ‘Maybe.’
Her eyes flick over the new bra, the way I’m squeezed in. ‘And you’ve got a lot bigger up top?’
Look down and have to admit this is true.
She looks away and back again: ‘So how many pancakes did you have?’
The right answer is just two.
‘You haven’t been sick before, have you? On other mornings?’
I don’t immediately think to lie. I just don’t answer.
‘And you’ve just grown, right? It’s not because … I mean … you haven’t been … having sex … it’s not that you could be … ?’
Standing there feeling exposed and childlike, open my mouth to answer but nothing comes out.
‘So you have? You could be?’ She looks frightened suddenly, has gone noticeably paler. Her eyes go up to the ceiling, as if there might be an answer to all the dilemmas in the universe somewhere up there. ‘Get dressed,’ she says. ‘I’ll be waiting.’
Pulling on my school uniform, am thinking it’s not my fault that I’ve got bigger. Am sixteen now, bodies change at my age. What does my stupid mother expect? But also am scared. Haven’t let myself think about it, but have to admit I could be. Try to remember how long it’s been since we did it. And because I hadn’t thought to just deny it, she knows now that I’ve done it. There’s going to be a hell scene when I open that door.
‘So you could be pregnant,’ Mum sighs. Her body seems to have become smaller, deflated, as if all the hopes and dreams that were keeping her jacked up have found a leak. Earlier, just minutes ago, she’d been a proud mother. She’d made a little flag that said ‘Sweet Sixteen’ and propped it up into the stack of pancakes she’d made for breakfast. She’d had a huge smile on her face as I opened the gifts she’d bought. The gifts that she’d obviously been planning, saving up for, for ages. Now she is saying, ‘You silly, silly girl.’
Feel a tear slip down my face and it’s as if I’m becoming nothing.
‘Who have you been doing it with?’ she asks quietly.
‘Nobody.’ Comes out in a midget’s voice.
‘Come on. Don’t be like that with me right now. Who?’
‘Nobody.’
‘Oh really?’
Can’t think of anything to say.
‘Is it a boy from school?’
‘No.’
‘That boy that hangs around with you? What’s his name? Wolf or Dingo or something?’
‘Dingo?’ A dangerous half-laugh escapes me. ‘No, it definitely was not Wolf, Mum.’
‘Is it that man you walk the dog for? I knew I shouldn’t have let you …’
‘Marty? Now you really are joking, Mum. You should see him. He’s got a leg in a cast and he’s ugly as.’
‘Well, who then?’
‘Nobody. What does it matter?’
‘Believe me, it matters. You’re only fifteen. Still a minor. Do you know that whoever it is has committed a crime? A crime, Haley.’
‘I’m sixteen now.’
‘But you weren’t when … I only hope we’ve caught it early enough. When was your last period?’
‘I don’t know.’ Shrug.
She puts her hand on my shoulders and gives me a shake ‘Take this seriously,’ she says. ‘Try to think.’
Wriggle out of her hold but can see that these questions will be endless. She is not going to stop until she has all the answers.
‘It’s important, you know. You don’t want to end up like me. A solo mother with no life of her own.’
It’s not often that I’m forced to contemplate exactly how she sees her own life. Am shocked by the implied resentment. Whisper: ‘Except you had me,’ and think that no matter what happens, there is no chance I will ever end up like her.
‘You have no idea what it’s like,’ she sighs. ‘You stupid girl.’
‘I’m sixteen now. I could leave if I want.’
She lets out a sad little laugh. ‘Well, that will solve everything, won’t it,’ she says.
Can’t take it anymore. This horrible feeling of dread, this brokenness from my mother. Might’ve expected something else. Twisted face and shouting. Not this loaded disappointment, this sad resignation. Need time to think. Get up out of my seat and run out the door.
My mother’s voice is calling out to my back. ‘Haley? Haley? Haley?’ she keeps saying. Confused at first, and then frustrated.
But where can I go? In my school uniform? Not anywhere near school. Run aimlessly, desperately, feeling how my arms are flapping about, how my legs are a bit spastic, knowing I look like a stupid dummy, running, running to nowheresville. End up down at the public football field. Flop down onto the drain bank, and cry and cry, for hours it feels like, feeling angry at Mum, angry at myself, mortified. My stomach feels queasy. There is a creepiness inside it. Maybe a roiling, ugly, nasty parasite living inside my body. A little writhing horrible worm, planted there, feeding off me, biding its time, waiting to explode out of me like an alien creature. Roll over onto my hands and knees and vomit up my breakfast into the grass. Pancakes. Move away and lie down again, looking up at the clouds hustling about, and they remind me of thoughts that disappear into nothing, and after I’ve lain there for a while I feel as if I am a nothing, with nothing left in my head, and no tears left in my body. Only hunger. Have been constantly ravenous for weeks now – maybe that’s why. Maybe I have just put on weight.
There is nowhere I can go to get away from all this. It’s just one of those things I’m going to have to face up to.
Walk back into the house, and she’s sitting at the kitchen table with her cactus face on, and with a glass and a bottle of wine in front of her. The atmosphere feels sodden with foreboding and disaster.
‘I rang your form teacher,’ she says in a hard voice. ‘She told me about some interview you’d done with Jed Jordan. She said she was worried about it because he took you to some hut in the bush. She said the nature of the conversation seemed inappropriate, that you’d talked about drugs and things. She told me that she asked to listen to the recording and there definitely seemed to be an undertone. She’d been meaning to bring it up, she said.’
‘She’s got the wrong—’
A hand is put up to stop me. ‘And so I go and look, and I find all the stuff.’
‘Stuff?’
She leads me into my bedroom, which has now been ransacked. She’s found the picture of Jed Jordan that was taped inside my bedside-table drawer, she’s found where I scratched Jed Jordan – the captain of all that on the underside of my headboard, she’s found the printed-out lyrics to Jed Jordan’s songs, and she’s even found the words my mind is stuck on the place you took me to / the weightless fall / the breath-held topple / into the perfect void/ © JJ written inside a heart in the inner lining of my make-up case. She’s found all those things but, luckily, she missed the diary containing a lot of scrawled out, made-up stories that occasionally have Jed Jordan starring as the guitar-strumming hero, and sometimes a darkly mysterious king, which is hidden inside the lining of my folded-up winter coat in the bottom drawer of the dresser.
‘It was him, wasn’t it? The dirty bastard.’
Can tell now that she’s probably drunk quite a lot already. She reeks, and she is much more witchy now. Trying to keep my voice as calm as possible, I say: ‘No, Mum, it wasn’t him.’
‘I knew you’d say that. It was though, wasn’t it? It’s just that you’re infatuated so you don’t want to get him into trouble.’
‘Mum, I promise you it wasn’t him. He just helped me, that’s all.’
‘Helped you? Took you up into the bush, you mean? Why would he do that just for a school project?’ She sways slightly, as she stands there waiting for an answer. Control has gone. The h
azard lights are about to come on any moment now.
‘It was just that it was quieter there. But nothing happened.’
‘I bet.’ There is an ugly expression on her face. ‘A man like that. A rock star. We all know what they’re like. Dirty bastards. All right then, if it wasn’t him, who was it?’ She moves towards the chair near the bed and sits down with a plonk.
‘It wasn’t him. He hasn’t touched me.’ Am standing in front of the dresser, safeguarding my secret notebook.
‘So?’
‘It wasn’t him.’
‘I still don’t believe you.’
Anything to get her off my back. ‘All right then. It was a boy at a party.’
‘What boy? What party?’
‘I don’t know his name. I was drunk.’
‘You mean you had unprotected sex with some boy you didn’t even know?’
‘Two boys actually.’
Her face falls. What a joke. She’s actually believing this.
‘Did they force themselves on you? Because if they did, that’s rape.’
‘No, I was drunk and I wanted it.’
She looks like she wants to hit me. ‘You stupid little slut.’
‘Yep.’ Agreeing seems the easiest thing.
‘Were they older than you, because if they were it’s still a crime.’
‘Nope, they seemed about my age, what I can remember of them.’
Her eyes flit around the room as she tries to take all this in. ‘Right. I want to know when and where this party took place.’
‘No.’
‘What do you mean no?’
‘No. Mum. I’m not talking to you anymore. You’re drunk. I hate you like this. Go away. Get out.’
She stands and steps towards me with her arms out, as if she’s intending to put her hands on my shoulders again and this time give me a lot more than a gentle shake, but I leap over the bed so it forms a barrier between us. Defeated for now, my sad, half-demented, unsteady mother sighs. ‘I just hope we’re in time,’ she says.
At the door she says, ‘I’m not sure I believe you.’
She doesn’t talk to me again after that. She drinks. She drinks all day and then she goes to the phone. ‘Are we still meeting tonight?’ I hear her slur. ‘Could you come and get me then?’
In the Neighbourhood of Fame Page 14