by Fiona Wood
Fiona Wood has been writing television scripts for the last ten years on shows ranging from MDA and The Secret Life of Us, to Home and Away and Neighbours. Six Impossible Things is her first YA novel. She lives in Melbourne with her husband, two YAs and a very bad dog.
First published 2010 in Pan by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited
1 Market Street, Sydney
Copyright © Fiona Wood 2010
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.
‘She Walks in Beauty’, George Gordon, Lord Byron, 1815
‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1798
The title Six Impossible Things is from an exchange between Alice and the
White Queen in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass
‘Rock and Roll Friend’
Words and music by Robert Forster and Grant McLennan
© Complete Music Ltd. administered in Australia/NZ by Universal
Music Publishing MGB Australia Pty Ltd
All rights reserved. International copyright secured
Reprinted with permission
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication data:
Wood, Fiona Anna.
Six impossible things / Fiona Wood.
ISBN 9780330426060 (pbk.)
For secondary school age.
Boys – Fiction.
Adolescence – Fiction.
A823.4
Typeset in 11.5/16 pt Minion by Post Pre-press Group Australia
Text design by Liz Seymour
Printed by McPherson’s Printing Group Australia
Papers used by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.
These electronic editions published in 2010 by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd
1 Market Street, Sydney 2000
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. This publication (or any part of it) may not be reproduced or transmitted, copied, stored, distributed or otherwise made available by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical) or by any means (photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise) without prior written permission from the publisher.
Six Impossible Things
Fiona Wood
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For Zoe and George
Prologue
THERE’S THIS GIRL I KNOW.
I know her by heart. I know her in every way but one: actuality.
Her name is Estelle. I yearn for her.
She walks in beauty – yes, like the night of cloudless climes and starry skies – with one iPod earbud in at all times – the soundtrack of her life.
She’s stopped biting her nails, except for the left hand little finger.
She sometimes nibbles the inside seam of her school jumper cuffs.
She’s an only child. Like me.
She plays the cello.
She likes mochaccinos. And banana milkshakes – made with syrup, not real bananas. And Cherry Ripes. She has a friend in New York she sends Cherry Ripes to. You can’t buy them there.
She has more than one friend. Unlike me.
She lives next door. To where we live now.
She laughs a lot.
She and I have a three- band overlap in our top five bands.
Her favourite writers are Georgette Heyer and J.D. Salinger.
I can’t tell you how I know all this stuff about someone I haven’t met.
1
IF YOU CAN FORGET that it means someone just died, inheriting something is a good thing, isn’t it? A stroke of luck. Improved circumstances. But when it happened to us it had the opposite effect. Everything got a whole lot worse. Quickly.
Things had been going wrong at my father’s work. Even in a place the size of ours I could hear the fights. Our apparently comfortable life was an illusion propped up by some massive overdraft. It was all about to come tumbling down. And we to come tumbling after.
Money problems were just the beginning. Listening in from the upstairs landing one night, I understood in a single sick thud of my heart that my parents didn’t even seem to like each other any more. But since when? Smiiiiiile! That’s us. We look happy. Suspended on the Brooklyn Bridge, eating felafels in the Marais, underwater with blue-lipped clams off Green Island . . .
What went wrong? When? And how did I not notice?
Was I like that frog not realising the water’s getting hotter till it’s too late and he’s soup?
When my mother’s great-aunt Adelaide died and left her a house I thought it might take some pressure off the situation. And it did, but not in the way I hoped. It was about a nanosecond later that my father dropped the bombshell – the family business was in the hands of receivers, he had been declared bankrupt, he was gay, and he was moving out.
Guys, please, one life-changing shock at a time, I felt like saying.
There was a mortgagee’s auction of our house. That’s when the bank sells you up because it basically owns the house. The creditors – people to whom my father owed money – sent in liquidators who came and took all our stuff away. It’s pretty much like moving only you never see the removal truck again.
Josh Whitters from school pulled up on his bike when the truck was being loaded.
‘See you’re moving, Cereill,’ he said.
‘Your powers of observation are impeccable, Whitters.’ I wondered if he knew the whole sorry story.
‘Hear your dad’s gone broke.’
He knew.
‘Yep.’
‘Loser.’
He took off.
I’m almost sure he didn’t see them load my Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle beanbag. I know, I should have given it away years ago.
Usually in a business meltdown like this one people get to keep their personal stuff, but in our case every single thing we had was owned by the company.
My mother and I had stashed some stuff at her friend Alice’s house – kitchen things, books, clothes, my comics, and a TV. And we’ve kept the photos, but not the silver frames. Our entire life in a couple of boxes.
The liquidators went through the place like a plague of locusts. It was horrible walking through the empty house. I hadn’t heard that echo-y sound since we moved in. Back then it sounded like excitement and things to find out. Now it just sounded like The End and stuff I wished I didn’t know.
We’d been uprooted. Liquidated. Terminated. Not to mention deserted. Whitters was right. I sure felt like a loser.
2
THE LIST:
1 Kiss Estelle. I know. I haven’t met her. Technically. But it gets top spot regardless.
2 Get a job. We’re in a complete mess financially. It’s
down to me to tide us over money-wise if my mother’s new business crashes.
3 Cheer my mother up. Better chance of business not crashing if she’s half okay.
4 It’s not like I expect to be cool or popular at the new school, but I’m going to try not to be a complete nerd/loser.
5 Should talk to my father when he calls. But how, when the only thing I want to ask is something I can’t bear to hear the answer to: How could you leave us like this?
6 The existential one. Figure out how to be good. I don’t want to end up the sort of person who up and leaves his family out of the blue.
Impossible.
Impossible.
Impossible.
Impossible.
Impossible.
Impossible.
3
WAKING UP, IT’S NEVER more than a couple of seconds before it washes back over me, what’s real. Wham. A sucker punch to the guts – anger sits there with an evil grin. Misery is beside it, weighing me down like a brick. A month since my dad left and my mother and I moved into her great-aunt Adelaide’s house. Former great-aunt. It’s freezing here. My fingers are so cold I can’t make a fist.
The windows have to stay open because of the smell. Heaters are emergency-use-only because of finances. The only time I thaw out is in bed and it takes ages because the world of electric blankets is past tense.
There are six bedrooms here including the one Adelaide actually died in. That door stays shut. Choosing my room is easy; I go for the one that stinks least. I’ve been spending a whole lot of time in bed since we moved in. It’s like my body is telling me to hibernate, and I’m listening. It should make for a riveting essay on what I did in the school holidays.
It turns out that we don’t even own this house, either. What my mother has inherited is a lifetime use of the house. When she dies, it goes to the Historic Homes Trust, not to me.
So if she dies any time soon, I’m on the streets. Or back with my father. I guess that’d force us onto speaking terms, at least. Pity she can’t sell the house. It’d be worth heaps. I’ve checked out the window of the local real estate agent. To make the inheritance even more oddball, there’s some guy who gets to live out the back, in the old stables building. That’s in the will, too, apparently. We haven’t met him yet. He’s away.
My mother’s not exactly thrilled with the arrangement. But it’s like she says, at least we’ve got a roof over our heads. Which is more than we would’ve had. We don’t have a cent left. We won’t even have a car when the lease runs out at the end of the month.
As if we could afford to fill it up with petrol, anyway.
There was a chance that Adelaide might have left my mother some cash too, but no such luck. She left her money to the National Gallery, which I doubt needs it as much as we do.
The only thing the lawyer handed over when we went to see him was a black – ebony – jewellery box. My mother’s eyes lit up but I could see the lawyer felt apologetic. So I knew she wouldn’t find what she was rummaging for.
‘Who got the diamonds?’ she asked finally.
‘A local shopkeeper.’
‘That’d be right,’ my mother said.
The box contained glass beads – clear with white streaks – a wooden spool of orange thread, some cardboard train tickets, nine small gold safety pins, a few copper one and two cent coins, and a handful of little carved insects and animals.
‘I believe these had sentimental value?’ he asked, sympathy leaking from his pinstripes.
My mother smiled. ‘I played with them when I was little. I used to line them up along the windowsill.’
Good times. Thank God I wasn’t a kid back then.
The lawyer cleared his throat, fiddled with a cuff and snuck a look at his watch. No doubt he had other clients out there awaiting disappointment.
‘Would you be interested in contesting the will?’ he asked.
‘Certainly not. Adelaide had a perfectly sound mind.’
The lawyer looked quietly pleased. You wouldn’t think so, because it would’ve meant more money for him, but I could tell he thought my mother’s response was honourable. So did I.
We get to keep the dog too. Howard. Though strictly speaking, on the inheritance ledger, that’s a minus because we have to feed him.
Being honourable obviously didn’t stop my mother from feeling pissed off. I had to remind her to slow down on the way home. We can’t exactly afford traffic fines these days. And, yes, we’re in the deep end without a floatie, but I’m pretty sure neither of us wants to die just yet. She was making a scary growling noise between clenched teeth.
‘Do you want to talk?’ I asked. Obviously hoping the answer would be no.
‘Talk, ha! I just don’t know what the point is, Dan,’ she said. I sensed she meant point of life, existence etc, rather than point of talking. Clearly a bit of life-coach action was required. Not really in my skill-set, unfortunately.
‘Well, I guess there’s always the old glass half full . . . isn’t there?’
‘That really only works if there’s actually something in the glass,’ she said. ‘We, sadly, are in a glass empty situation.’
‘There’s the house.’
‘Yes, the house. A mausoleum, certainly, but I suppose it’s better than the street.’
Stress level: extreme. It’s like she was a jar with the lid screwed on too tight, and inside the jar were pickles, angry pickles, and they were fermenting, and about to explode.
‘What are you thinking about?’ she asked.
‘Lunch.’
She groaned. Better than the growl.
Better than the street. Better than the growl. Things actually could be worse. But not much.
Where we live now is the exact middle in a row of five houses. It’s a massive double-storey Victorian Gothic terrace. The front facade forms a point over each house as though the top has been trimmed with giant pinking shears. There’s a brick-pillared balcony on each first floor and mean little gargoyles leaning on their elbows, jeering and grimacing in the dip of each zig. It’s in a book about Australian architecture – this actual building. They call it a ‘significant exemplar’. It’s grim – the sort of place you could set a horror film. Its red bricks are blackened with time, or pollution, or both.
Moving in took all of about five minutes.
I saw Estelle for the first time that day.
Invisible behind sheer curtains I stood in the bay window at the front of the house wishing to be anywhere but here, wishing it were two months ago and I had a mutant power that let me change the course of history, when she walked up the street, dreaming, completely unaware of the seismic shifts in my heart she was creating with each step.
She stopped outside our place and stared up into the bare branches of the footpath plane tree. First checking there was no one nearby she turned slowly around and around and around, framing her view of the twig-snaggled sky with a hand held to her eye.
Then she walked into the house next door, half-dizzy, smiling, and carrying my heart.
There’s this sky she likes.
4
THAT WAS THE LAST day of term, and we’ve been here for the whole holidays.
This is what I’ve been doing:
1 Sleeping – like I already said.
2 Trying to catch another glimpse of Estelle. Several sightings. No meetings.
3 Getting to know Howard. Enigmatic Howard. All-knowing Howard. Long looks. Doesn’t say much.
4 Listening to my mother’s part in phone conversations with my father about me.
5 Worrying about them, and about the new school, and – to take my mind off those things . . .
6 Following the Historic Homes Trust people around while they catalogue the house’s contents.
I could tell the furniture guy, Bryce, was annoyed but Posy, who did glass and porcelain, was nice. By the end her sympathy was worse than him being pissed off. She’d ask me what my plans were for the day as she checked underneath things
and made notes like ‘pair of first period Worcester plates’. It was awkward for both of us when the answer was always ‘not much’ – ie nothing.
Sometime deep into the second week when the comment about how it was too bad it wasn’t summer so I could go to the Fitzroy Baths had worn right through, she said, ‘Joining a club can be a good way to get to know people, Dan. What do you like doing?’
‘Reading. Mostly.’
I wanted to make her feel better . . .
‘There’s chess. Only I don’t like people who like chess. Not the ones I’ve met anyway.’
On her last day when every item in the house had been catalogued, tagged, coded and insured, she casually mentioned the Kids’ Help Line.
‘There’s no problem that can’t be helped by talking about it. At your age sometimes things can seem worse than they are . . .’
I sighed. ‘Things aren’t great, but it’s not like I’m suicidal. And I do have a friend – he’ll be back soon.’
Maybe you’re lucky if you’ve got one friend.
Mine – Fred – is staying with his mother these holidays. She’s living in London for six months, in Chelsea, studying Georgian underwear at the National Art Library. It’s a thesis, not a fetish.
For the rest of the six months Fred will be living with his stepmother and his dad – Plan B and the Gazelle.
One of only two good things about us moving here is that I live closer to Fred now, which will be great, when he gets back.
‘Anyway,’ I said, hoping to reassure Posy, ‘who’d look after Howard if I topped myself?’
I was Howard’s new meal ticket and he wasn’t letting me out of his sight. He looked up on cue when he heard his name – just one eye and one ear. Even in his preferred state of semiconsciousness he knew exactly what was going down.
What the house smells of is piss, by the way. Soaked in, marinated, wall-to-wall urine. We’ve been trying to get rid of it, but if you think spray-on deodoriser mixed with peed-on rugs is an improvement on the original smell then you’re lucky you’ve never had to choose between them.