Beautiful Mess

by Claire Christian

  ‘I forget they’re there,’ he says. He doesn’t move. ‘They’re really ugly aren’t they?’ I look up at him and shake my head and touch the tiny scars one by one.

  ‘I don’t think you’re ugly anywhere,’ I tell him and he puts his hand on top of mine.

  As he does the giant door to the cold room opens and there’s Ricky, stunned in the doorway. Me on my knees and Gideon in his jocks, holding his pants in his hands.

  Gideon is mortified. ‘We can explain,’ he stutters quickly, pulling on his jeans, but I just sit, smiling, because he’s wrong, I can’t explain what I’m feeling right now.

  ‘Ava, I’m Nola.’ She smiles. ‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to make you say or do anything that you don’t want to do. You’re paying me to help you out, and I want you to remember that. Because I think people get really freaked out about therapy and it’s unnecessary. I like to remind all of my clients of this. I don’t know you. I don’t know any of the people you know. Everything I learn about you will come from you. You can tell me as much or as little as you like. But the idea is for me to help you work out a way to feel better. To come up with some strategies to be able to deal with whatever feelings you’re having that you don’t like. Does that make sense?’

  Nola is calm. And beautiful. She has bright red lipstick that matches her bright red square glasses. I think she’s probably in her thirties. She has a big diamond wedding ring. Her skin is a dark caramel brown and she has this thick Australian twang. She’s quiet. She doesn’t stare at me. Everyone at TAPs sees Nola if they want to. Minda said she was awesome and told me that I was an idiot if I didn’t make an appointment.

  ‘Do you want to tell me about you?’ she asks.

  ‘I don’t really like talking,’ I say, looking around her tiny office. There’s a heap of kids’ drawings in frames on the wall and a bookshelf that’s jam-packed with books. She has a giant spray-painted mural hanging on a canvas on the wall, all swirls of oranges, blues and purples.

  ‘About yourself or in general?’

  ‘Both.’

  ‘Okay. We don’t have to talk. How do you feel about drawing?’

  ‘I’m not very good.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. How about I put some music on and we just draw and then we’ll have something to talk about other than you?’

  ‘Sure.’ I figure I don’t have anything to lose and anything that will avoid me having to talk sounds great to me.

  I’ve been to one other therapist and two counsellors—they were all fine, asked the same questions, but they kind of talked to me like I was a child and it just pissed me off. I didn’t go back to any of them, even though Dad wanted me to.

  Nola stands up and walks over to a chest of drawers in the corner of the room. She opens the bottom drawer and pulls out two shoeboxes filled with craft supplies.

  ‘Do you want to choose a song?’ She says motioning towards the bookshelf where there’s a stereo and an iPod. I walk over and start flicking through the artists and click play on Jeff Buckley.

  Nola closes her eyes and nods. ‘Good choice. I got this album when I was your age. It was very important to me.’

  ‘I’ve only just started listening to it.’ I pause. Gideon made me listen to it last week. ‘My friend gave it to me.’

  ‘Well, your friend has very good taste.’ Nola kicks her shoes off and sits on the floor at the coffee table. I sit on the opposite side of her; spread out are coloured papers and jars of pens, boxes of pastels and crayons, glue sticks and other craft supplies and there’s an empty art book placed in front of me.

  ‘Now the idea of this is to just do whatever. Don’t think about it too much. It can be scribbles or words or anything, really. Just go with whatever feels good.’

  I smile at the obvious dirty innuendo and Nola’s eyes glint a bit as she smiles. ‘We don’t do it enough.’

  She opens her own art journal and grabs a yellow crayon and she starts drawing. I watch her for a moment as she swaps to a red crayon and makes large swirls, the crayon in her hand swishing around the page messily. Then I grab a black felt pen and start drawing squares.

  A small square and then another square, and then another. I pick up a purple texta and draw a heart in the smallest box. I colour it in. Jeff Buckley’s singing about goodbyes. A lyric catches my ear so I write it down in little letters at the bottom of the page, only I replace the word ‘him’ with the word ‘her’. Grabbing three pastels in my hand at the same time I write it over and over again, bigger and bigger and bigger until that’s all you can see, just big messy letters covering the whole page.

  After a while Nola turns the music down and looks at my drawing.

  ‘I don’t even know what it is,’ I say. I feel incredibly self-conscious.

  ‘It doesn’t have to be anything.’ She looks at the picture and I watch her face to see if she’s doing some kind of mad psychologist voodoo and is going to turn around tell me I’m a head case.

  ‘If you were looking at this for the first time, if this was my picture, what would you want to know about first? Where do you reckon your eye would be drawn?’

  ‘The heart,’ I tell her.

  ‘Yeah, okay. Why is that?’

  ‘You can only just make it out. Only just notice it.’

  ‘It’s pretty small. Pretty well hidden,’ she says.

  ‘Yeah, it’s covered by all of the other lines.’ I don’t know if this is right, if this is what she wants me to say, but it must be, because then we talk about the colours, the lines, the other things we both notice. The picture stops becoming something that I even drew and just becomes a thing we’re talking about, until eventually I’m telling her about myself. About some of the things that have happened.

  ‘I’m going to tell you exactly what I know about grief and it might make some things clear.’ She picks up a pen and draws two lines on a piece of paper. ‘It’s on a graph, yes?’

  I nod.

  She continues, ‘This line is the time that passes and this line is the experience of grief. Okay?’

  I nod again, already feeling dismissive of what Nola is about to say because nothing that anyone else has ever said before has made any sense. Nola draws an x on the graph.

  ‘This is the death—it indicates the beginning of our graph. And now this,’ and she proceeds to draw haphazard, squiggly lines all over the graph, ‘this is grief.’

  It’s a ridiculous unplanned mess of purple ink, and she says: ‘There is no typical path, Ava. It is what it is and you feel what you feel. And it’s crap. And it’s going to keep being crap. Until one day it’ll be a little less crap and I can’t tell you when that will be, but I can tell you it will come. You’ve just got to wait it out.’

  I feel the most overwhelming sense of relief. ‘Thank you,’ I say.

  ‘Thank you?’ She seems surprised. ‘Most people feel extremely disappointed when I tell them this.’

  ‘Nope, I just feel like that makes the most sense ever. The fact that you even acknowledged that it’s shit. That helps.’

  ‘I’ve never had anyone I love lose their battle with depression,’ she says, ‘but my dad died four years ago and I miss him every single day. I still catch myself instinctively picking up my phone to call him and then I realise I can’t and it’s—’

  ‘So fucked,’ I cut her off. ‘I do that all the time and it’s the stupid shit I want to tell her the most or text her when a song we like comes on or when I see something that I know she’d laugh at.’ I pause. ‘I feel like I will never be the same again.’

  ‘You won’t. You can’t be. We’re not fixed things, Ava. We change every single day. I mean there’s things in our bodies that grow and die every single second. We’re physically changing right now.’ She stops and looks at me and I’m listening. Intently. ‘You’re not the same as you were before Kelly died. You are different. And part of your grief is grieving for who you were then, because some parts of that girl are gone.’

  I don’t know how t
o take this in, or what to say. It feels massive.

  ‘But you’re not dead, Ava. You’re still here. So, we’ve got to start processing what this new Ava wants and how she wants to feel.’

  ‘Yeah.’ I take a big deep breath in. ‘But it’s hard.’

  She smiles a big cheeky smile. ‘Nah, not hard. It’s so transient anyway, because we’re always changing. Just take it, like, a week at a time and let future Ava worry about the other changes. Unless there’s changes you know you want to make right now, then we can talk about them if you want.’

  I do want. I so desperately want. I want to talk to her about the biggest change in my life right now: Gideon, or more specifically me and Gideon. I tell her all about my friend, about kissing him, about not being able to not kiss him when we’re around each other anymore and I tell her about the fight, about what we said to each other.

  ‘If you want to be my friend, Gideon, then stop trying to be my boyfriend,’ I snapped at him when he tried to hold my hand as we walked down the street.

  ‘I didn’t mean—’ He quickly pulled his hand away.

  ‘You can’t hold my hand in public, or buy me flowers, or write me poems or be so lovely all the time.’

  I don’t know why I said this, I liked it when he held my hand. But it felt so definite, it meant that he was sure about us, about what we were doing, and I wasn’t sure at all.

  He didn’t say anything.

  ‘Gideon?’ I wanted to make sure he’d heard.

  He did, because he just mumbled, ‘I don’t know what you want, Ava.’

  Good point. I don’t know what I want either. I knew I didn’t want to hurt Gideon’s feelings, but the look on his face showed me that that was exactly what I’d done.

  ‘I think I should go,’ I told him as he looked at me through his long eyelashes.

  ‘Is that what you want?’ he asked and again I said nothing.

  Finally he said, ‘If you want to be my friend, Ava, then you need to stop—’ I wasn’t sure if he’d finished the sentence or if there was more.

  ‘What?’ I asked.

  ‘Leading me on. If you want to be my friend, Ava, then you need to stop leading me on.’ His eyes quickly darted to mine and then to the floor, and the blood rushed from my head as I quickly tried to work out what to say.

  Nola looks at me. ‘Do you know what you want?’

  ‘I know I don’t want to hurt him.’

  ‘Yeah, but what do you want?’ Nola asks again.

  ‘Him,’ I say after a long pause and she nods.

  I want him. All of him. All of it with him. I do, and that’s petrifying.

  There was a short note from Ava when I got home. It asked one question and had two tick boxes for my reply.

  The last time Ava and I talked I accused her of leading me on, so I was kind of surprised by this turn of events. Ava Spirini wants to go on a date with me. I’ve never been on a date before and my brain is immediately flooded with an onslaught of romantic possibilities and also possible disasters.

  At work that night I hand her the card with the yes box ticked. She looks at it and smiles.

  ‘Good.’ She pauses, her eyebrows kind of dancing like she has a secret. ‘Tomorrow? I’ll pick you up at seven.’

  Before she arrives I’m in a good place. Well, for me. I’ve only contemplated about three actual scenarios where I could ruin it. So, I’ve pre-prepared a range of varied and interesting conversation topics and I’m wearing my lucky jocks. I don’t know what makes them lucky. They’re just my favourite. But I figure I can use all the help I can get.

  Ava knocks on the door at 7:04 p.m.—I know, because I’m waiting upstairs staring at the LCD screen of my clock. I walk down the stairs attempting to look cool but end up misjudging the bottom step and kind of tumble down in a thud to the floor. Ava and Susan both crack up laughing.

  ‘Smooth, kiddo,’ Susan whispers into my ear and I give her a sideways glance that she interprets correctly as ‘HOLY SHIT I’M GOING ON A DATE AND I DON’T WANT TO FUCK IT UP AND PLEASE TELL ME THAT I’M NOT GOING TO FUCK IT UP AND EVERYTHING WILL BE AWESOME.’

  She just smiles knowingly.

  Ava and I walk in silence for a while; it’s so weird that you can literally put your tongue inside someone else’s mouth and then have nothing to talk about.

  Then she says, ‘I forgot to give you this,’ and pulls out a small black plaited piece of leather with a tiny white flower stitched onto it. ‘I made it. For you. Instead of flowers.’ She’s awkward as she ties it around my wrist, kind of giggling.

  ‘Thank you.’ I smile, looking at the wristband and then at her.

  We walk a few more steps together and Ava holds my hand. Just slips her hand into mine and starts talking about something, except I’m not paying attention because I’m too focused on the way it feels for our palms to be touching.

  Ava Spirini is holding my hand. In full view of the public so that anyone who happened to look at us walking together right now would assume that we were a couple. I wonder if they’d be right in assuming that. I hope so. Ava’s hand in mine feels right.

  Ava’s grand date plan is for us to go trampolining. This is not something I would have expected, but it works out well, mostly. We bounce on trampolines and into foam pits, chase each other like idiots and run into trampoline walls. She laughs at how physically incompetent I am every time I fall over, trip or face-plant the tough bouncy mats, which is a lot. I get shown up by a group of eight-year-olds who challenge us to a slam-dunk competition. They all manage some kind of elaborate move to get the tiny foam ball into the hoop. I just end up doing the splits and pulling a muscle in my groin.

  Ava holds out her hand to help me up. ‘Come on, Skinny, before you disgrace your family any more.’

  I hobble behind her, trying to convince her that I was robbed. She doesn’t go for it. I do, however, beat Ava four times in a row on some shooting arcade game and feel like my masculinity is restored. We laugh and cheat on the games where you can win tokens. We win enough for us both to get pencil sharpeners with smiley faces on them.

  ‘I have an idea,’ Ava says. She grabs my wrist and threads my smiley face sharpener onto my wrist band. She does the same to the one she’s wearing and then we have matching jewellery.

  ‘Now we’ll always have a reminder to be happy,’ I grin, and she blushes a little. ‘Or something else that isn’t completely lame.’

  She laughs.

  She won’t let me pay for anything the whole night and says it is her ‘constitutional right as the inviter to make the invitee feel special’. I don’t argue.

  I think about how amazing I feel. I like that she’s making an effort. I like that she wants to make me feel special. I like that she’s thought about me when she wasn’t with me.

  I feel full with ice-cream and laughter and good conversation. When Gideon and I finally come up for air we’ve covered everything from our greatest fears to places we want to visit in the world to our favourite ninja turtle. He’s told me all about his confusion about finishing school and his grand plans to write novels, and I tell him more stories about Kelly and how one day I’d like to go to Antarctica. I love how easy it is to talk to him. I told him things tonight that I haven’t told anyone. Not even Kelly.

  There’s a few disgruntled teenagers in neon green T-shirts packing up chairs loudly around us, trying to make us leave; we just keep talking and giggling.

  ‘Come on, I’ll walk you home,’ I tell him.

  When we get to the door, we make stupid small talk about the stars and I wait for a lull in the conversation so I can kiss him. Finally he stops rambling and I go for it, I kiss him like my whole life depends on it.

  He pulls away, smiling wide. ‘Do you want to come in?’

  ‘What about your parents?’

  ‘They’re out for the night, at a party, they’re crashing there,’ he says, and my stomach spasms with a mix of joy and nerves and I nod quickly and eagerly. I’ve never wanted anything, an
yone, more.

  I’m freaking out and all I can hear is my mums in my head, who are actually the last people you want to be thinking about when you have a girl in your room, sitting next to you on your bed, smiling at you.

  In Grade 5 I was on the bus and Amanda Pearson asked me if I’d like to go out with her best friend, Emily Drake. I said yes. Emily Drake was pretty. I had no idea what you were meant to do when you went out with a girl. I wasn’t allowed to go anywhere without my parents, so I told my mums about me going out with Emily and this is what they said: ‘Girls are nervous too. Probably even more nervous than you, and we’re going to guess that she’s really, really hoping that the next time you see her you’ll hold her hand. So even though you’re nervous you’re just going to have to be brave.’

  Even though you’re nervous you’re just going to have to be brave. Thanks, Mums.

  I look at Ava and I do the first brave thing that comes to mind. I stand up and walk across the room. I stand up and walk across the room away from the amazing girl in my room. I stand up and walk across the room away from the amazing girl sitting on my bed. I stand up and walk across the room away from the amazing girl sitting on my bed, smiling at me. I take three strides across the room and I turn off the light.

  ‘Gideon, what are you doing?’ she asks.

  I have no idea.

  I smile so big that my face squishes and closes my eyes. He’s so cute and nervous. And I’m nervous. I’ve never been this nervous. I’ve kissed loads of guys, including Gideon. But now, this feels different. It feels huge. We were doing fine, sitting close enough on the bed to be near each other but leaving just enough space to not actually touch.

  Once we came upstairs we talked and smiled at each other and I waited for him to kiss me this time, only he hasn’t yet. So then it got awkward and I started to think that maybe he thought that this whole thing was a really bad idea. And, because it’s Gideon, it means he doesn’t know how to actually tell me that he invited me up to his room to tell me that he doesn’t like me like that, that he was wrong and that he’s realised he just wants to be friends.