Not clearly enough, though, because I walk right up to Mrs Lee, a metre and a half of cross-armed steel.
‘Bugs,’ she says in that low voice you use to tell off puppies. ‘Don’t you have a class to get to?’
‘I’ve got an appointment, with the dentist.’
‘If I called your mother, she’d confirm it?’
She’s so bluffing, and so am I: ‘Yup.’
‘I remember your mother at school, Bugs. She was a bright girl, with a bright future. You remind me of her.’ Mrs Lee grips my forearm. ‘Don’t let yourself be derailed.’
‘I’ve got to go, I’ll be late.’
She lets go of my arm. ‘All right. You go to your appointment. With the dentist.’
If she rings Mum I’m dead, dead, dead. I don’t know what would be worse: Mum at home or Mrs Lee at school. But it doesn’t matter. I’ve got to find Jez.
I walk down through town like I have every right to be there, my lie about a dentist’s appointment like a forcefield – Excuse me, Miss, shouldn’t you be in school? PING! It would ricochet off me and straight through the truancy officer’s heart.
I can only think of one place that Jez might go. So I’m pretty stoked to see him when I climb into the plastic playground pod. The green of the pod has tinted the light so he looks a bit sick. He’s still drawing – but he’s started on the other arm, the coil of rope just a couple of centimetres long at his wrist. When he finishes it will look as if he is being pulled apart, or as if he has been strapped onto something with his arms open wide.
He’s on his knees, his arms out as the king hit comes down …
‘You look a bit green, B.’
‘It’s not easy being green, you know.’
‘Yeah, but you’ve never been an ordinary thing.’
I blush. I wonder what it looks like in this light? ‘Nice place you’ve got here, Jez.’
‘Yeah, thinking about expanding into the purple pod; y’know, after the two-year-olds move out.’
We sit top and tail. I can almost lie down, but Jez has to sit curled over. I guess it doesn’t matter for him anyway – he’d be hunched over his arm no matter where he was.
‘What are you doing here?’
‘Drawing.’
‘You know what I mean, Jez.’
‘I couldn’t just wander around. What if I got picked up? Mum doesn’t need that hassle.’
‘You could’ve stayed at school.’
He doesn’t answer me, just keeps drawing.
‘Jez,’ I say, trying to draw him out. ‘We should talk about it.’
‘We don’t need to, because here’s how it goes. I say that I want to leave school, you rabbit on about choices and opportunities, but you just don’t see that there are none. Not for me. Not now.’
‘Now that you can’t play rugby?’
‘I was in the Second XV, B. That was never my ticket out.’ He’s rolling his sleeve up higher. ‘It’s a waste of time; there’s nothing there for me.’
And then I say the most selfish thing I can. ‘I’m there. You can stay for me.’
He stops drawing and looks at me. ‘For you? You need me?’ I don’t say anything, so he just keeps pushing. ‘Do you, B?’
He’s just staring me out, and it makes me feel weird and uncomfortable. So I say ‘Of course,’ but in a ha-ha-ha light way, you know?
Jez starts drawing on his arm again. ‘So I stay at school for another year. Then what? I follow you to uni?’
I don’t know how to answer him, and the pod is filling with the smell of the marker he’s drawing with, and the strange green of the light is messing with my head. So I crawl out and sit on the grass underneath to clear my head. But it is still muddled, like my brain is a huge tangle made out of the rope he’s drawing on his arm.
And because I can’t think of anything else to do, I stand up and walk back to school.
10
Jez and me, me and Jez: that’s how it has always been. Me and Jez, through thick – Who you calling thick? – and thin: that’s us. He knows everything there is to know about me and I know everything about him. I love Jez. But not love love – like a brother.
Saturdays, we used to take off and skate around town all day. Freedom: just blatting wherever we wanted. Didn’t even bother with the skate park most of the time: up and down the streets going wherever we wanted to go. Just point your board and push off; goofy or regular, it doesn’t matter. I loved the sound of the bearings purring as our wheels kissed the asphalt, the sudden stop in their chatter as we ollied up a curb and the metallic clunk of the trucks when we landed it. We’d bring a packet of Raro and a couple of Tux for lunch – the dog biscuit would last ages because it was so hard, and if you tipped some Raro in your mouth afterwards you got rid of the taste.
It seems like ages ago. A couple years back we just stopped. I don’t know why. We just weren’t into it any more. The same stuff that used to be cool became boring. Maybe we became boring.
‘I’m bored.’ Stone Cold is bitching because she isn’t any good at fighting games: she just mashes the buttons on the controller and hopes for the best. You got to have skills and strategy for this game – well, at least the ability to remember a string of commands. She was knocked out of the game ages ago, so it’s just me and Jez going toe to toe in Stone Cold’s sleep-out.
We’ve both chosen the same character; you can tell who’s who by the colour of their dresses. Mine is in some sort of pinky red thing split up to the thigh and vacuum-packed around the chest. Jez’s chick is in the same get-up but in blue, with ribbons around the two buns of hair that sit on her head like teddy bear ears. I’m a chick because I am a chick, and it’s supposed to be empowering or something to see a chick kicking ass. Let me just say that a real chick with boobs that big would want to wear a decent sports bra. I’m afraid she’s gonna KO herself every time she bobs up and down. Which she does, a lot. Not just when she’s fighting either; even just hanging, she’s jiggling. Not that she’s had time to hang – Jez is pretty hard-core with his attacks. Jez reckons that because we’re fighting with the same character we’ll actually know who the better player is – because we don’t have to factor in difference in weight, strength, speed. One of us isn’t the big, slow meathead that just smashes, or the ninja guy who can do spells. We’re exactly the same on screen, so it’s our skills in the real world that matter. Whatever. I reckon he just picked the chick because he’s a guy and guys get a hard-on for chick-on-chick, real or not. It doesn’t help that each time one of the characters attacks or is hit she makes a porno groan, either.
Engh!
‘Guys.’
Oooh!
‘Seriously.’
Ahhh!
‘Can we do something else?’
I can’t look away from the screen – both our energy bars are so low that the next hit could be the KO – but I can’t resist low-hanging fruit, so I put on my prettiest smile and say to her, ‘We could go for a drive.’
Engh … ahhh … ahhh … ahhh! KO.
‘Yuss!’ Jez is not a gracious winner, fist pumping and kissing his biceps, even though I handed it to him. It was totally worth it to wind Stone Cold up.
‘Ha ha, no, Bugs.’ She’s a clockwork monkey chattering her teeth and banging her cymbals. ‘You know the conditions of my parole – no passengers.’
Jez takes the controller out of my hand and offers it to Stone Cold. ‘You could play, now that I’ve whooped B’s ass.’
‘I let you win.’
‘Whatever, B.’
‘I totally did. Rematch, or are you too chicken?’
He kisses his biceps again. It is so embarrassingly pathetic. ‘Let’s go.’
‘Guys.’ Our fingers are hovering above start. ‘Seriously. Bored.’
Jez chucks his controller down and shrugs. ‘We could watch a movie.’
She flicks through her downloads folder. ‘Seen it, seen it, seen it …’
God, we’ve only been on holiday for half
a day and she’s already like this. I don’t think I can take two weeks of it. If Stone Cold is like this now, imagine what she was like as a little kid. Now I know why Shelley always looks shell-shocked. It must be hell trying to amuse someone who refuses to be amused.
‘Ahh!’ The porno groans are contagious, it would seem, as Stone Cold throws herself on the bed. ‘This sucks. Let’s get wasted.’
And because it’s the holidays and because she offered, me and Jez agree.
But her vodka stash doesn’t – it has a shot in it at the most, no matter how many times she shakes it. ‘Fuck.’
‘Can’t we just take some from your olds?’
‘Mum marks the bottles. She thinks that it will stop me –’ Stone Cold’s voice is sort of light with laughter – ‘but I just top the bottles up. The gin and vodka are long gone; the whisky is beginning to look like pee.’
‘How often are you drinking?’ I ask.
‘What’s it to you?’ The lightness in her voice has gone. ‘We should just go buy some. You look eighteen, Jez.’
‘Except everyone knows I’m not.’
‘Jeez.’ She’s kicking at the floor with her toe. ‘Play a bit of rugby and you think the whole world cares.’
She’s touched a nerve, but she’s so dumb to everyone else that she doesn’t realise. ‘It has nothing to do with rugby,’ he says slowly, making sure she catches each word. ‘My mum took me to each bottle store and told them how old I was.’
‘Why?’
‘Because she’s OK if I drink with her, where she can keep an eye on me.’ I stifle a laugh, but Jez carries on: ‘But she doesn’t want me to be one of those people that drinks because they have to, not for fun. She doesn’t want me to drink alone.’
Stone Cold looks down and is very still and very quiet, and all of a sudden it’s got kind of heavy in here.
‘We could make some,’ I say in a bright kindergarten teacher’s voice. ‘We learnt how in chem. All we need is some fruit, or even banana peel …’
‘We learnt how to boil fruit, Bugs. We didn’t even get to add the yeast, remember?’
‘Let’s just admit that it’s easier to score a fifty bag in this town than it is to get drunk, eh?’ I mean it as a joke, but I can tell by the looks on their faces that they’re considering it.
‘I could,’ Jez says. ‘I could score us some.’
‘I thought you needed to be eighteen for that too,’ Stone Cold says.
‘Not the fake shit. I can score us some real shit. I just need some money.’
Just like that, Stone Cold moves faster than I’ve seen her move all day, and she has the money and presses it into Jez’s hand.
‘Let’s just go to the Starlight,’ I say. ‘Let’s go to a movie.’
They both look at me like I’m dumb.
‘What are we, five or something? They’ve only got kids’ movies on,’ Stone Cold says.
I want to say that we are kids, but even according to the Starlight we haven’t been since we were thirteen. I didn’t feel adult then, and I don’t feel adult now; am I the only one who’s freaked out by this idea?
Jez says, ‘I’ll be back in an hour or so,’ and he’s out the door.
‘Do you think he’ll be all right?’ Stone Cold is probably creaming herself over what a big, brave man Jez is.
‘He’ll be fine.’
‘One of us should go with him,’ she says, making it clear that that one is not her, ‘in case there’s trouble.’
So I get up and follow Jez. He’s not that far ahead of me, so I catch up, and we’re walking side by side down the hill into town. And it’s pretty good to be out walking with your best mate. Chasing geese that are wild is a fine way to pass a Saturday afternoon. This is what this is: a time-filler, a mission without success. We’ll go back with Stone Cold’s money and apologise, and then we’ll watch a movie and have pizza or something. Because, like Jez knows any dealers …
‘Oh fuck no, Jez!’
‘What?’ He says it like I have no idea what he’s thinking, but I do, man, I do.
‘We can’t go to the Cock.’
‘It’s cool, B. It’s just business.’
‘Just roll up some oregano or something. Like she’d know the difference.’
‘I would.’ He touches his head. ‘It helps, with the headaches.’
Yeah, like all brain damage needs to heal is a little more brain damage.
‘I have Panadol …’
‘B. He owes me, OK?’
‘He might not even sell to you.’
‘He will.’
‘Have you bought from him before?’
‘Don’t be so prissy, B. It’s not like you haven’t been wasted before.’
I shut up, because it’s true. But it’s one thing to have a toke at a party; it’s different if we’re going out to score from the Cock. What if he flips out or something? We’re walking into town, near my place, and for a second I panic that Mum will see us and ask us what we’re doing, but she’s at work. Holidays mean that the weekends are filled with double shifts of the rich bastards that stay at her hotel. Maybe I should take Jez back to my place, make a cup of tea and just get him to think about it.
‘Where are you going, B?’ Jez jerks his head in the opposite direction. ‘This way.’
Since he moved out of Jez’s place, the Cock has been living in this little flat near Cherry Island. It’s kind of a shed, like what they call a ‘chalet’ at motor camps. In actual life, it’s what they call a ‘dump’. We just stand there, and I know this is my last chance, so I grab Jez’s arm. ‘C’mon, let’s just go.’
Jez just shrugs me off and knocks on the door. He says, ‘Be cool, B,’ even though he’s the one who’s nervous – he’s pulling his long sleeves down over his hands and rubbing his forearms like they itch. The door opens, and there is the Cock. He leans on the door frame dressed in a T-shirt and kie holoholo like he lives back in the tropical paradise of Tokelau, not near Cherry Island when it’s barely spring and the Waikato still fogs in the morning.
‘Well, well, well.’
‘Havoc.’ Jez says his name normally, like they just know each other; like they don’t have history.
‘Jez.’ The Cock nods at me. ‘Jez’s chick.’ I’m about to say something when he says, ‘I’m not his girlfriend,’ in a high voice like someone’s kicked his nuts in – which someone should so do. He pats Jez on the shoulder. ‘Must sting every time she says it, eh?’
Jez just goes tense at his touch. ‘Can we come in?’
The Cock folds his arms across his chest like a player in a photo of the First XV. ‘I don’t really have time for visitors.’
‘We’re not visitors.’ I’m pissed that he can torture Jez so easily. ‘This is business.’
‘And what business would I have with you, missy?’
‘You know what kind,’ Jez says in a controlled voice. ‘And you don’t want to discuss it outside.’
The Cock stands aside and we walk in. I follow Jez into the ‘lounge’. The whole flat is dingy. The daylight is filtered through old sheets nailed to the window frames. There is a haze of smoke, cigarette, weed and incense. It smells like resin – I guess someone is making oil – but it’s the patchouli that makes me gag.
‘Coffee, tea?’ The Cock is a parody of the welcoming housewife.
‘No thanks,’ Jez and I say in stereo.
‘Well, I’m having one. Can’t start the morning without a coffee. What time is it, anyway?’
‘About three,’ Jez says – in the afternoon, mate.
‘Still early, then.’ The Cock goes off into the kitchen.
Me and Jez sit down on the couch. The place may look grimy in this light, but it is surprisingly tidy. No masses of beer bottles on the table; the ashtray is not overflowing. There’s a couple of roaches and cigarette butts; the only ash on the table is left by the incense stick as it smoulders away to nothing.
I lean into Jez. ‘Do you think he’ll offer us brownies?’
‘Not unless we pay for them.’
The Cock comes in with a huge coffee press and an equally huge coffee cup, which makes him look like a little kid drinking a brew – mainly because he has to hold it with both hands. He takes a drink and then tops it up again with coffee from the press. ‘Nothing like that first sip, eh? Like your first drag on a smoke: just kind of hits ya.’ He makes a gun out of his hand and aims it between Jez’s eyes. ‘Pow! I like to put a shitload of drinking chocolate in, eh? So it’s like a mocha; so I get a buzz.’
‘I know,’ Jez says. He just looks at the Cock, steady as, like he’s in the room with a lion, or tiger, or bear …
More like a flying monkey.
The Cock kind of laughs. ‘Yeah, of course. How’s your mum?’
‘Good. Better now.’
‘Does she know you’re here?’
‘Do you think I’d say to Mum that I’m off to her ex’s to score?’
‘Yeah, nah.’ The Cock takes another drink and tops it up again; he looks down into his coffee cup. ‘I don’t sell to kids.’
Jez leans back on the couch and folds his arms across his chest. He puts his bung leg up on the coffee table, making the incense jump and the coffee quiver, and he says to the
Cock – in this really calm, light way, like he’s just talking about the weather or something – ‘Y’know, when I went to the hospital, the doctors and nurses had a real hard time believing that I had fallen over on the concrete when I was training. That I’d repeatedly hit my head on the ground after I fell, eh? That someone that unco would make it on to the Second XV and then bugger up the season by fucking up my knee.’
The Cock takes this big, long breath in, like he’s one of those wine judges, tasting Jez’s words. ‘Is it like that?’
‘It’s fucking like that.’ Jez doesn’t raise his voice; he uses it like the whip in a lion tamer’s hand. He takes the money from his pocket and slides it across the table to the Cock.
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