by Robin Klein
My pencil case wasn’t a proper one. It was just a cardboard box decorated with ballerina pictures, drawn by me. I noticed with mortification that I’d drawn all the ballet shoes with dozens of straps crossing over and over.
‘Hey, sweetheart, you’re a good looker,’ Lennie said to Alison. ‘Reckon I’ll go back to school. Fillies didn’t look like you when I was at school.’
(I personally didn’t believe that Lennie ever went to school at all. I think he just groped his way out of a forest covered in bark and lichen like something out of a science-fiction story.)
‘Say thank you about the pencil case, Erk,’ Mum said. ‘Where’s your manners?’
‘Thanks,’ I muttered into my lemon-flavoured junk food.
‘Tell you what, love,’ Mum said to Alison. ‘We’re having a barbecue. So why don’t you stay and have tea with us?’
I prayed for Lennie to swallow the flip top off his beer can and have to be rushed to hospital. I concentrated on sending Mum ESP messages all screaming out NO! But my mum was abnormally sociable, and you could tell she was thrilled to bits that finally some kid from school was dropping in at our house.
I hurled ESP messages at Alison Ashley screaming, ‘Don’t you dare stay here! I don’t want you! Get back to Hedge End Road where you belong!’
But all Alison said was, ‘Thank you very much for the invitation, Mrs Yurken. There’s no need to ring my mother. She’ll be working late tonight, so I was home by myself anyhow. I’m sure she wouldn’t mind if I stayed, as long as I get home before dark.’
I could have died.
‘You and Erk might want to play records in her room till tea’s ready,’ said Mum. ‘Erk’s just mad about that group Splunge, or Splurge or whatever they’re called. She’s got their album. Plays it non-stop.’
I really could have died.
Splurge was a group all the little kids in Grade Five and younger raved about, and I certainly didn’t wish to advertise to Alison Ashley of all people that I owned their album. I dragged myself numbly up the hall, with her following, and hesitated at the door of my bedroom. I thought of the horrific mess Jedda’s side was in. She’d set up some carton steeplechase hurdles down the middle of the room, and her mattress and bedding were rolled up on the floor. I kept telling her that she’d grow up all twisted like an espalier fruit tree if she slept there, but she never took any notice of me, maybe because I didn’t look like a racehorse trainer.
I couldn’t invite Alison Ashley into that weird-looking room. So I opened the door of Valjoy’s and said, ‘This is my room.’
Valjoy had a weekend job at the milkbar, and she spent all the money left over from buying clothes on interior decorating. She’d painted the walls black and the ceiling gold, and a huge stereo, which Blonk gave her for her fifteenth birthday, took up almost one wall. Mum wasn’t too happy about having it in the house, because she said Blonk certainly couldn’t have afforded such an expensive set by legal means. Sometimes when the police sirens were wailing up and down Wilga Street late at night after the Eastside Boys, Mum became nervous enough to unscrew the handle off Valjoy’s bedroom door, so if the police accused her of harbouring stolen property, they couldn’t get at the evidence in a hurry.
Valjoy had a fake leopard-skin bedspread, a pink plush elephant the size of Lennie, and a yellow beanbag. I sprawled casually on the leopard-skin bedspread. ‘You can look through my record collection if you like,’ I said. ‘That’s not really true, what Mum said about me liking Splurge. You know how parents get things wrong. My little sister is the one who’s rapt in Splurge.’
Alison inspected Valjoy’s vast collection of albums. Valjoy used to go with this boy who worked in a record shop, and he was always giving her records, which he got at a discount. Or more likely pinched.
‘It’s a pity, but I can’t play any for you right now,’ I said, ‘The stereo needs a new needle. I’m terribly fussy about scratching my records.’ The truth was that I didn’t know how to work Valjoy’s record player, which had as many dials and knobs as an intensive-care unit. Also, she’d said she’d paralyse me if she caught me anywhere near it. ‘You can look at my clothes if you want to,’ I said. ‘Just slide open the wardrobe doors.’
Alison didn’t say anything, but she riffled along the long line of coathangers. Valjoy had thirteen pairs of jeans and twice that many tops, and a pair of shiny fake-leather pants, and a lot of dresses Mum wouldn’t let her wear in public unless she put a cardigan on over the top.
‘Are you allowed to wear high heels?’ Alison asked.
Valjoy had all these pairs of strappy shoes with heels as high as lighthouses. ‘Of course I’m allowed to,’ I said.
‘How come you never wear any of these clothes to school?’ Alison asked.
‘I save them for the Cascade Disco on Saturday nights.’
‘Are you really allowed to go to that place?’
‘That’s what I use all that make-up for,’ I said, waving airily at Valjoy’s dressing table. Valjoy knew a boy whose mother was an Avon lady, and she was always receiving gifts of cosmetics, though Mum said that boy’s mother must wonder why her stocks were always running low.
‘You can try on any of that make-up,’ I said. ‘I’ve got plenty. Help yourself to some of that blue eyeshadow with the glittery stuff in it.’
‘I don’t think I’d better,’ said Alison Ashley. ‘I’m not allowed to wear make-up. My mother would be cross.’
My mother would be cross! Honestly! Everyone else I knew would say ‘Mum would chuck a mental’ or ‘I’d get a clip over the ear’.
Alison sat down in the beanbag. I’d always thought that there was no possible way anyone, even the Queen, could plonk down into a beanbag and still look dignified. But Alison Ashley managed to. One minute she was standing up looking at Valjoy’s warpaint, and the next she was sitting gracefully in that beanbag with her ankles crossed and her hands folded neatly in her lap.
I picked up one of Valjoy’s glossy magazines and flipped through the pages. When I came to the centrefold I was embarrassed and quickly put the magazine back.
‘I guess you’ve done all that homework already?’ I said crossly.
‘I haven’t even thought about the homework yet,’ Alison said. ‘I’m not all that interested in homework. I did marsupials in Grade Four, anyhow.’
‘Miss Belmont is a fantastic teacher.’
‘I never said she wasn’t.’
‘Everyone does their homework in her class. Even Barry Hollis always turns in something, even if it’s just a couple of sentences. We’re lucky to have her for our grade teacher.’
Alison Ashley didn’t say anything for a long time. Vanquished.
‘Was that your dad out there in the kitchen?’ she asked, changing the subject.
‘Certainly not!’ I said indignantly. I considered various ways I could explain Lennie. I could say Mum was a psychiatrist and Lennie one of her patients. Or that he was our gardener, only that would have sounded peculiar because our front yard was so primitive.
‘I thought he must be your dad because your mother was sitting on his knee,’ Alison said.
Could I say Lennie was my grandfather? She’d never believe that, because he didn’t look quite that old enough, and ladies my mum’s age probably didn’t go round sitting on their father’s knee, anyhow.
‘He’s a friend of hers,’ I said sulkily. ‘But she doesn’t really like him. He’s not her boyfriend or anything like that. Her real boyfriend’s fantastic. He’s very handsome and he owns a racehorse stud-farm and a Mercedes. He’s going to buy Mum a fur coat the day she agrees to marry him. I help train the racehorses at that place he has.’
‘Really?’
‘I just said so, didn’t I? My real father is dead.’
‘Oh,’ said Alison. ‘Sorry.’
My real dad wasn’t dead at all. Last thing we heard was that he was wanted in Queensland for selling shares in a non-existent tin mine.
‘My father was kil
led in a plane crash,’ I said. ‘He was a test pilot. When he knew the plane was going to crash, he flew out over the ocean and crashed there so he wouldn’t come down on any houses. Every year on the anniversary of his death, I take a big wreath of roses down to the beach and cast it out to the tide. But you’d better not mention to my mum that I told you about my father getting killed. She never got over it.’
‘But I thought you said she had a boyfriend with a racehorse stud-farm now?’
‘What’s that got to do with it?’ I demanded. ‘My mum’s very popular. She’s a hotel manageress. They have big wedding receptions there. When they get really busy, I help out. I wear a black dress and black high heels and a little white frilly apron and serve pre-dinner drinks to the customers.’
‘Oh,’ said Alison Ashley.
Her face never seemed to reflect moods at all like normal faces. You just couldn’t tell what she was thinking deep down in those Royal Show Blue Ribbon eyes. She made me feel nervous, and when I felt nervous I always talked a lot to cover up.
‘We’re only living in Barringa East because my brother is training to be a missionary,’ I said. ‘He works amongst socially disadvantaged people. He’s a monk, only while he’s away from his monastery, he doesn’t wear that brown dressing-gown thing that monks on TV usually do. He has special permission to wear jeans. Only you mustn’t tell anyone I told you about Harley, because they have to take a vow of secrecy, all those monks.’
‘Oh,’ said Alison Ashley.
‘So we’re only renting this house until Harley finishes his missionary training,’ I said. ‘Our real house is in that suburb where Kyle Grammar School is. That’s where we really live. But it’s all shut up now, with a cover over the heated in-ground swimming pool. Lennie, the man you saw out in the kitchen, he’s a private security guard. He just came over here to tell Mum he checked up on our other house to see no one’s broken into it while we’re living in Barringa East so Harley can dedicate his life to the poor.’
‘Erk!’ yelled Jedda. ‘Mum says the barbecue’s ready and you and that other girl got to come out now.’
She banged open the door of Valjoy’s room and glanced at Alison, only without much interest because Alison had Roman sandals on instead of hooves. ‘What are you doing in Valjoy’s . . .’ she began, but I shot up and pushed her out into the hall. ‘Come and see my new stable bed I made,’ she said, grabbing Alison’s hand. ‘You can crawl in and have a sleep if you like.’
I hastily snatched Alison’s other hand and tugged her towards the kitchen. It was like one of those scenes where they tie a victim to four wild horses to get the truth out of them, only I think Alison would have managed to look poised and graceful even if that was happening to her.
But Jedda shoved open the door of our room, and I could have died. There was the usual revolting sight of all her weekly snacks on the floor next to the hooped-up mattress. And since she wasn’t using her bed to sleep in, she’d dumped every single toy and article of clothing she owned on the wire base. She said it was quicker than hunting for things through the chest of drawers. Disorder, chaos, shame and utter mortification.
Alison Ashley looked at Jedda’s part of the room and blinked incredulously. Then she glanced at my bed. There was the red tracksuit top I wore to school most days slung over one bed post, and my school bag over the other. And my Barringa East Primary School gym skirt and top lying on the spread. Also my Splurge album with my name on it in big purple texta letters.
‘I sleep in this room sometimes because Jedda gets bad dreams,’ I said. ‘When she was a baby she was trapped in a burning pram for several hours before being rescued.’
‘Was I?’ asked Jedda with interest.
‘Tea, I mean dinner, is ready,’ I said quickly.
The barbecue was really terrible. I died every few minutes. It seemed to me that every person in our family was trying their hardest to act and sound and look like people who lived in caves, to show me up in front of Alison Ashley.
Jedda handed her a sausage. Just a sausage by itself, with no plate or fork or anything, and Alison looked at it and said politely, ‘Could I have a paper tissue, please?’
Lennie shook up a can of Coke and squirted Mum with it, and she squirted him back with the hose. Our cat jumped up on the barbecue (he wasn’t scared of anything, even fire), grabbed a steak and snarled and flexed his claws when Lennie tried to make him give it back. Mum yelled out to Harley that the food was getting cold, and he strolled out of his bungalow wearing underpants that had a pattern of red ants on a black background. I thought gloomily that even Alison Ashley wouldn’t believe that any monastery would let him wear clothes like that.
‘Harley,’ scolded Mum. ‘Get back in there and put some jeans or a towel on! You’ll embarrass Alison. Have you got any pain-in-the-neck brothers, love?’
‘No, there’s only me,’ said Alison. ‘I’m the only child.’
I just knew it. I would have adored being somebody’s only child. The centre of everything, with a pile of presents every Christmas and birthday, and a bedroom all to myself with a canopied four-poster bed and an en suite.
‘Have some sauce,’ I said sourly.
Our awful barbecue went on and on. Valjoy came home with Blonk, Spider, Ace and Titch. Alison Ashley looked at them expressionlessly, but tucked her clean little sandals in under the garden bench. She still held the sausage daintily in one hand but she’d hardly eaten any of it.
Spider and Blonk revved up an argument about motorbike rally tickets and three dollars missing change. Mum raised her voice over theirs and told them to shut up and stop that punching and bad language and nick off to their own house if they had one, which she doubted. They wouldn’t do either, so Lennie grabbed Spider by the collar of his leather jacket, and Blonk by the seat of his jeans, and lugged them round to the front and dumped them over the fence.
‘It’s not fair!’ cried Valjoy. ‘I’m never allowed to bring my friends home!’
‘Don’t give me that!’ Mum yelled back. ‘This place is always neck deep in creepy-looking tech kids who’ve been suspended from school.’
Valjoy could never stand her friends being criticised, so another battle started and hamburger buns were thrown. Alison’s expression didn’t change one bit. After a while she got up and said she’d better get home before dark. She thanked Mum politely for asking her to stay for dinner and said she’d had a very nice time – the liar.
She said goodbye to Jedda, Harley, Lennie, Ace, Titch, and even Valjoy, who was sulking by herself under the clothes line because Mum had won the fight. Mum had a louder and bossier voice than Valjoy.
‘You’re a real nice well-behaved kid, Alison,’ Mum said. ‘You come round any time you like and play with Erk. I’m glad she’s found you for a girlfriend at school. She doesn’t get along very well with other kids as a rule. Erk, where are your manners? Get up off your numberplate and show your girlfriend to the gate and say tata nicely.’
Miss Anastasia Wallace was stalking along the footpath in her high-heeled shoes and ankle socks, with an empty supermarket bag over her arm. She was looking furtively over everyone’s fences. As well as reciting her weird poetry in public, she went around Barringa East pinching people’s cats.
‘You can get back to Hedge End Road if you cut across the oval,’ I said distantly to Alison Ashley. ‘Only watch out for Barry Hollis. He always bashes kids up if they go across the oval.’
‘Does he?’ Alison asked in surprise. ‘That’s funny. He was really nice when I met him on the way over. I asked him where your house was, and he even walked a bit of the way to show me.’
‘Barry Hollis always bashes kids up,’ I said. ‘He can’t help it. It’s like a nervous twitch.’
‘He asked me to come and watch him play football when the season starts,’ Alison said, as smug as a Porsche owner.
Miss Anastasia Wallace passed our gate. She turned around and to me she said, ‘Hello, Brian. Thank you for unblocking that gully
trap, you’re a kind, thoughtful boy.’ And to Alison Ashley she said, ‘Mrs Jagger, you can deny it all you like, but that brown tabby you claim you’ve had for six months is my Clarissa who went missing three weeks ago. I shan’t put up with it. If you don’t return her, I’ll be forced to notify the police. Good afternoon.’
Alison stared after her.
‘Don’t take any notice,’ I said bitterly. ‘She’s just a neighbour. All our neighbours are like that, one way or another.’
‘It’s certainly very different from Hedge End Road,’ said Alison Ashley.
Well then, Valjoy and Mum weren’t the only ones in my family who could yell. ‘Of all the nerve, Alison Ashley!’ I yelled. ‘How dare you criticise Barringa East and stare at poor dotty old Miss Anastasia as though she’s crazy or something! I never even invited you around here in the first place!’
‘What are you yelling at me for?’ Alison said. ‘What on earth did I do, Yuk?’
‘Don’t you call me Yuk! And my pencil case never did get caught up with your things. I remember putting it right down the bottom of my school bag. You just took it for an excuse to come round here and stickybeak. You are the most low-down person I ever met in my life, Alison Ashley, and get back to Hedge End Road, which is probably just as redundant and boring as you are. And I personally wouldn’t ever dream of stickybeaking at your house, because you and it hold no interest for me at all. Goodbye.’
I turned away and marched with dignity back to our barbecue. And her expression, I was pleased to see, finally had changed. She looked very upset.
Served her right.
’ve developed the film with the competition photographs on it,’ said Miss Lattimore. ‘You’ll have to get cracking, Grade Six, to print your entry pictures in time. This is your last art lesson before the school camp.’
Our grade certainly contained a lot of dense people.