Cloudwish

by Fiona Wood

  ‘Wow. You got through a lot of material there.’

  ‘Got your back, babe.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘He said, Goodbye Jessica – using my name very deliberately. And looking at me, so he’ll remember next time.’

  ‘Sounds like he’s making an effort, then.’

  ‘Effort will be measured next week. For now he is still officially blacklisted. And – I’m not kidding – I don’t approve of you going to his party, with his idiot friends.’

  ‘I’m not even sure I approve. But I even more don’t approve of you cross-examining him.’

  ‘Too late for that,’ said Jess. ‘You should never have chosen a bossy best friend when you were five.’

  ‘What are you, my mother?’

  ‘You really are shitty. Are you?’

  ‘A bit. Yes.’

  ‘Yeah, well, if you weren’t dating a dick, I never would’ve had to cross-examine him.’

  Vân Ước’s annoyance was mirrored in Jess’s expression. This was the closest she and Jess had ever come to fighting, and it felt horrible.

  chapter 28

  She woke up with a burst of adrenalin on the morning of party day, tried not to think about last night’s disagreeable exchange with Jess, and was out the door by six am for a run.

  She came home and showered.

  She changed her sheets and did some laundry.

  She got through forty-five minutes of oboe practice, doing heaps of work on long notes and scales, and did as much homework as she could manage before lunch.

  She texted Billy and wished him luck for the race – which, it turned out, was a series of races, first heats and then a final.

  She supervised her mother’s tablet-taking.

  She got her parents together for a three-way eye-contact meeting in the kitchen at lunchtime to dissuade them from coming along to the art briefing at school next week.

  She worked her shift at Henry Ha Minh Rolls.

  She and Jess treated themselves to a two-straw three-flavour Slurpie from the 7-Eleven on the way home, which (sort of) broke the ice of their cross (for them) words from the night before.

  She spent an hour experimenting with filters on one disc image, and saved the file of comparative images to print later as a process note for her journal. Always, now, keeping in the back of her mind, What does it mean to me?

  She showered again, sent out a prayer of thanks to the pimple gods that she was breakout-free, washed her hair, brushed it out and sat down for a couple more hours of homework. Before she could settle to that, she spent (wasted) at least fifteen minutes rifling through her tragically understocked wardrobe, wondering what on earth she could wear to the party. She thought it should probably be a skimpy dress with spaghetti straps and high heels, like the outfits she’d seen in party photos her Reynolds housemates had pinned up last year, but she didn’t have anything like that in her wardrobe. Even if she had, her parents wouldn’t let her out wearing clothes like that.

  And she was back to square one. How to fit in? What to wear – if not to look good, then at least to look inconspicuous? Billy had said it was a barbeque. That sounded quite casual. Maybe she could get away with wearing jeans. She didn’t feel close enough to anyone at school to ring and ask, despite Lou and Sibylla’s kindness. It was a girlfriend conversation. Not a person-sticking-up-for-persecuted-underdog-classmate conversation. And she couldn’t call Jess, because Jess’s resolved position until Billy had proved himself worthy was firm disapproval. The best outfit solution was, sadly, still just the jeans and orange singlet she’d worn for casual clothes day the week before.

  Billy had texted back Rulers of the universe. See you later.

  He’d said people were coming any time from seven, so she figured if she left home at quarter to, she’d get there around quarter past and that would be okay.

  As she was dressing she heard her dad’s boss, Bảo, arrive. Odd timing. Bảo was part of the Friday dinner group, and he and her father played cards every second Wednesday. Like clockwork. Saturday night did not figure in their relationship.

  ‘Bảo and I will take you to your community service night,’ her dad said as she emerged from her room.

  ‘It’s fine – I can get the tram,’ she said.

  ‘No problem. All organised,’ Bảo said. ‘The van’s downstairs.’

  ‘Let’s go,’ said her dad. ‘You’ve got the address?’

  Vân Ước looked at the three smiling faces and knew there was no getting out of this one.

  Her mother gave her a kiss-push-out-the-door.

  She was going to be arriving at Billy’s party underdressed, too early, in a van that said Bảo Mac’s Happy Chickens with graphics of, yes, very happy-looking cartoon chickens painted on its sides, and a large 3-D model happy chicken on the roof of the van.

  Before this moment of new hell, the van had only ever been a vague philosophical conundrum: how could the chickens be happy, given that they were dead and destined for the dinner table? Now, it had been transformed into a weapon of torture designed for her personal mortification. She was spending a night in reverse-Cinderella land.

  She sat in the front, perched up high in the traffic, nice and visible, beside her dad and Bảo. She leaned her back in hard to the seat, as though it might decide to be kind and swallow her whole. Fortunately, the van was refrigerated, so there was only a minimal pong of chicken, tinged by the bleach used to scrub it out.

  She directed Bảo to pull in at the corner of Billy’s street with only the smallest glimmer of hope, because, as she feared, they insisted on delivering her to the house, so they would know where to pick her up.

  She had a wave of nauseated fear when she imagined her father might want to come in and check out the community life rowing ceremony. Her cover would be blown and her parents would never let her out of the door again.

  ‘Bye,’ she said firmly, jumping down.

  ‘We will be back at ten. Be ready.’

  ‘Thanks,’ she said, only daring to look around as they pulled out from the kerb, with a blast of diesel this street would never before have experienced, once she was safely inside the (thankfully, unlocked) gate. It must be her lucky day. The coast was clear of mean girls.

  One bullet dodged. But straight into the path of another.

  chapter 29

  Arriving at the front door, also open, she tried and failed to locate a bell or buzzer, and was about to lift the hand-shaped knocker when an elegant woman walked across the hallway and paused as she saw Vân Ước. She looked puzzled, clearly wondering who this girl was, standing in her doorway. She was not a Tiff, or a Pippa – a girl whose parents one knew. Vân Ước didn’t have mind-reading skills, but it was fairly obvious what Billy’s mother was thinking in the moment before an appropriately warm smile of greeting appeared on her subtly frozen face.

  Billy came leaping down the stairs, barefoot, in jeans, hair hanging down in its characteristic wet tangle. She’d have to give him the low-down on the towel-dry one day. She was pretty sure he must just shake his head, like a dog, when he got out of the shower. She frowned – must not think about Billy in the shower. Too distracting for a walk through the minefield of his parent-inhabited house.

  ‘Vân Ước! Great – you’re so early. You’ve met my mum? Abi.’

  Vân Ước smiled, made eye contact and held out her hand to shake hands with Abi, as Debi had taught her to do. ‘How do you do?’ she said. People like Abi expected some formality, a straight-line version of Anglo good manners, which, to them, were simply ‘good manners’. In Vân Ước’s family, arms folded across the stomach and a gentle bow was the well-mannered greeting to an older person.

  ‘Lovely to meet you, Vân Ước. Do join us in the garden. You’re our very first guest.’

  Billy gave Vân Ước a friendly eye roll, as though
to say, Yeah, I know, full on, and they followed his mother outside.

  Mel appeared with a massive platter of gourmet-looking sausages. She smiled and said hello to Vân Ước, and started tonging sausages onto an equally massive barbeque hot plate.

  ‘I don’t know about your mother, Vân Ước,’ Abi said, ‘but I’ve found that if there’s a large group of young men about to arrive, who might also be having a beer, it’s a very good idea to have loads of sausages and bread ready to go.’

  Vân Ước just smiled. Her mother had nearly flipped her lid when one young man was reported to be in the general vicinity of the flats; a large number of them turning up might cause spontaneous combustion.

  ‘I don’t think I’ve met your parents yet, have I? Are you new to Melbourne? A corporate transfer? From Singapore, perhaps?’

  ‘Mum, don’t be such a stickybeak. Vân Ước’s family lives in Melbourne. She was born here. You don’t know everyone in Melbourne.’

  ‘You’d be surprised, darling.’

  ‘I’ll tell you three things about Vân Ước. She duxed extension maths last year, equal with Michael Cassidy (whose parents you do know), she duxed French, and she is the best art student in the year level.’

  Vân Ước could see Billy’s mother assessing her in a blink; she was a scholarship social nonentity, and Abi was far from impressed to hear the three things. Whereas she was astounded that Billy had registered anything at all about her that predated the fateful creative writing class.

  The doorbell rang. ‘And that’s all you’re getting,’ said Billy, bending down and giving his mother a quick kiss. ‘And don’t forget you said you and Dad were going to be out tonight.’

  ‘And we are, but we’ll be back before midnight, by which time we expect you to be saying goodbye to your guests and settling down for some sleep after such a big day.’

  ‘Sure.’

  Billy took Vân Ước’s hand, a gesture that delivered some much-needed reassurance, and which she saw Abi register immediately, as new arrivals flowed into the garden, greeting Abi and Mel, helping themselves to drinks and setting up a volume of chat that would continue to grow.

  ‘Vince, can you chuck on some music, buddy?’ Billy asked. Vân Ước could see that Vincent was thrilled to be the one selected; he headed back inside, fiddling with his iPod, and very soon Chet Faker was filtering through the French doors.

  She sat in a garden chair in the shadows for ages. She felt like a shadow. Billy was so much the centre of things; his crew members were elated at the day’s triumph – this regatta vindicated the gruelling training regime they’d been subjected to all summer. The guys, she saw, had mostly come pre-loaded, as they called it in media reports on underage drinking, so they were more than half-pissed and could afford to drink at what looked like a moderate rate at their friend’s house. Naturally, she couldn’t drink; her parents would have a complete meltdown if she came home with alcohol on her breath.

  Lots of them would go out clubbing after the party, armed with fake IDs, and keep up the drinking. She wondered how their bodies could stand it. She knew from ambient school chat that this sort of parent would let other parents know that they’d be serving some alcohol, and it would be up to individual families as to whether that was okayed or not. But once a critical mass had arrived, it was a free-for-all, and surely the parents knew that and blind-eyed it. When she looked at the ice-filled metal tubs decoratively placed on tables and laden with beers and bottled mixed vodkas, the girls’ preferred drink, she was amazed that anyone ever made it to school on Mondays.

  Billy finally managed to penetrate the wall of people and reached her just as his father appeared at the doorway into the house.

  His presence was electric. Like Billy’s mother, this guy was a perfectly polished magazine version of ‘parent’. He oozed authority. Billy broke away from her, with obvious regret, and went over to stand next to his father, who looked at him with pride and ownership, but no apparent warmth. Vân Ước got the feeling, looking at them together, that it could be this relationship that fuelled Billy’s restlessness.

  They looked like superior beings framed in the backlit glow of the French doors.

  It clicked for her, the thing about Billy – he was no longer comfortable in the role he’d been assigned. He looked the part. He knew it perfectly. It just didn’t play so well anymore.

  ‘Guys, a quick word,’ Billy’s father said to the crowd. The noise died down. ‘Congratulations for today. You rowed like the winners you are. We’re going to kill it this year! Here, and then in England. Row, Crowthorne!’

  Vân Ước nearly jumped out of her skin to hear the whole group yell back, Row, Crowthorne! This must be what they all did standing on riverbanks at regattas. A whole new world. A strange world.

  ‘I DIDN’T HEAR YOU,’ shouted Billy’s father.

  ‘ROW, CROWTHORNE! ROW, ROW, ROW! ROW, CROWTHORNE!’

  ‘That’s more like it. Party here after Head of the River – it’ll be a third-generation win in this house, so the least we can do is buy the drinks.’

  He raised a hand in farewell and disappeared to hoots and whoops of approval. Someone turned the music up.

  She heard the inevitable bitchy comment about her clothes: ‘Check out Vân Ước, she’s come as a dude.’

  Dude, fraud, misfit – sure, that was about right; the shape of not fitting in was almost comfortably familiar.

  She held a glass of mineral water and moved about the terrace as though she were looking for someone. A strong pang of wishing for Jess swept through her, and she wondered where little glass vials were when you needed them.

  The world was full of contradictions and things that couldn’t be explained. The interesting edge of science was located at that point: trying to explain the inexplicable. Making the intuitive leap. It was where all the creativity happened in that field.

  She castigated herself; a dumb wish wasn’t science, it wasn’t anything close. Puzzling over it for the umpteenth time, she still couldn’t come up with a theory to explain why this was happening, but what she was feeling was real, happening in the physical world, not just her imagination.

  Even at the opposite end of the terrace from Billy, she was conscious of his awareness of her. The party was keeping them apart, but he was moving towards her as though she had gravitational pull. It wasn’t natural. Unless you were a planet.

  It was obvious, unavoidable: she had to find the writer who took that class again and ask her about the vial. But how could she even broach such a ridiculous topic? You know that little vial in the creative prompts box? Have you ever heard of unexplained magical events following its use by a student? Please! Who was she kidding? It wouldn’t be possible to say such stupid words out loud. And how would she even find her?

  She paused beside a table, under a tree, looking at her watch, and looked around, as though she expected someone she knew to arrive at any second.

  ‘Hey.’

  Finally! Someone was going to talk to her. It was Vincent. She was pleased, and even though she didn’t like him, she smiled. He was going to make her look normal. A normal, party-going, socialised person.

  ‘Can you move? I can’t reach . . .’ He stretched an arm past her as she stepped sideways. She was blocking his access to the beer.

  ‘Sorry.’ She looked for Billy. He was still being waylaid. She smiled in response to his apologetic grimace. It was like one of those horrible dreams when you want something to happen but it’s all slowed down and ends up being unattainable. Time for a bathroom visit. Surely that could kill ten or fifteen minutes.

  By the time she emerged from the bathroom in response to someone banging on the door, the music had been turned up again, and the French doors framed a group of girls dancing with arms up in the air, shouting along with Taylor Swift. She stayed inside and stood on the edge of a group. She smiled, listened and
tried to look interested, but no one acknowledged she was there, or said anything to include her in the conversation, so she slipped away and found herself in the entrance hallway of the house.

  She headed outside to the front garden. Why not just walk home and tell her parents someone gave her a lift? What a relief to have that brainwave. There was no rule that said she had to stay. Billy could have tried harder to reach her sooner. Longing looks only got you so far.

  Groan, Holly and Pippa were standing like sentinels on either side of the gate.

  ‘Hi, Vân Ước,’ said Pippa. ‘How are you?’ She was drunk.

  ‘Hi.’

  ‘Tell me’ – she leaned in, then turned sideways to blow her smoke away from Vân Ước – ‘do you get back to China much? Because I love Shanghai. Love. It.’

  ‘My family actually came from Vietnam, originally.’

  ‘Oh, gosh, sorry. Well, Hoi An is beautiful too.’

  ‘So I hear. I haven’t been.’

  ‘Are you going away this year, Pippa?’ asked Holly, grinding out her cigarette on the flagstone path.

  ‘Sicily in September. My parents are so boring. What about you?’

  ‘We’re not even leaving the country. Port Douglas. My parents are so tight.’ Holly looked at Vân Ước. ‘What’s up – lover boy ignoring you? Has he hooked up with someone else? What did you expect? Is the guy who lives here really going to go out with someone who works in a paper hygiene hat?’

  That was it. He’d asked her to his stupid party. She’d been snubbed, ignored, bored and now insulted. She was going back in there, and if he wasn’t available immediately, she was going home. Surely by now he’d been stopped and hugged and congratulated and had chatted to and joked with every stupid person there.

  They almost collided – he entering the house, she returning to the terrace.

  He put his arms around her, moving to the music. ‘All I wanted tonight was some time with you, and here it is, finally.’