by Van Badham
9
After breakfast, Dad had a newspaper and a cable delivered to our room. He read while I got the internet working on his laptop. Lauren and I had that long talk on Gmail chat – I’d been trying not to think about Brody all breakfast but writing about it made it all come back. It was distracting. I signed out of Gmail and slapped the laptop shut.
Dad read his paper and I broiled. There Brody was on the street, kissing me. There he was in the ballroom, giving me a dismissive ‘see you round’. My brain kept asking Why? The insecure part of me answered back: You’re a lousy kisser, you don’t know what you’re doing. He doesn’t want anyone to know he kissed a fat girl. My heart beat in my chest, anxious and hard. As I flicked on the TV, images of war, death, famine and devastation merged into one another and I reminded myself that there were worse things in the world than some stupid boy not paying me the right attention … even if that stupid boy was Brody Meine and my body was still feeling the perfect warmth of his strong arms and hot skin.
I stood up and stomped into the bathroom, closing the door behind me. I stared in the mirror for a moment before taking off my T-shirt and staring at myself again. Even in the cold, unflattering fluorescent light of the bathroom, I couldn’t bring myself to hate my body the way parts of my brain were urging me to. I envied Michelle and Kylie their surfer bodies, sure, but I was not fat, I was not ugly, and I decided in that room full of shiny black tiles that if I wanted a surfer body that much, I’d always have the option to, you know, start surfing. Screw you, Brody Meine, I thought, forcing a determined smile onto my face. I am not going to let you mess with my head.
With a long inhalation of breath, I put my shirt back on and walked out of the bathroom. Tomorrow, at school, I would just ignore Brody Meine. From right now, I’d have as little to do with him as possible and everyone – my mother, the girls, Joel Morland – would be pleased.
I sat on the bed cross-legged, picked up my teacup and focused all of my attention on the TV news.
The text in the bottom left-hand corner of the screen read, LIVE INTERVIEW. A male news anchor with slick hair said, ‘Are they any closer to establishing the cause of the fire?’
The screen cut to Jenny Kent in her dark red suit. ‘Fire investigators suspect that it was caused by a dry lightning strike. South coast towns are still emerging from one of the driest winters on record and people’s gardens went up like kindling.’
My mind’s eye saw my mother’s green garden. I remembered that afternoon in the dining room when tiny damp leaves of the new thyme lawn clung to Mum’s feet. That was less than a week ago. The day of that soaking storm.
Kindling?
The screen cut back to the anchor. ‘And the teens are being nominated for a bravery medal?’ he asked.
‘Insurance claims are estimated to run into the millions, Mike, but we have no loss of life because quick, informed action prevented a bigger tragedy. The whole community here will be showing their gratitude to these fast-thinking young people—’
‘If you can find them,’ said the anchor.
‘Yes,’ said Jenny Kent with a toothy smile. Dark clouds were still streaking the sky above her head. ‘If we can find them.’
10
‘Your father tells me that you’ve been mentioned on the news,’ said Mum down the hotel phone.
I could tell from her tone she wasn’t going to apologise to me for our previous conversation, but she did sound calmer. Strategically, I decided to follow her lead.
‘Not by name,’ I said.
‘I’d prefer you kept it that way,’ she said, ‘because of the situation with your dad.’
My grip tightened around the receiver as I experienced a momentary shot of fear. Dad was still sitting on his bed. In the hours since breakfast we’d done nothing but loll around our room. He’d finished with his paper and was now reading a property investment magazine. He looked more relaxed and happy than he had in days.
‘What do you want me to do?’ I asked.
‘We’re all going to be fine,’ said Mum with affected lightness, ‘but while I’m stuck up here, I’d prefer you to be cautious. We don’t want to promote our vulnerabilities to anyone.’
‘On the news they’re talking about medals or something,’ I said. There was a news cycle on the television and I’d seen Jenny Kent three times since her LIVE interview.
‘If they approach you, tell them you would prefer to receive something anonymously. Me and your nanna, by the way, are very proud.’
This was as close to an apology as I knew I would get.
‘Tell Nanna I love her,’ I said, blushing.
‘I will,’ said Mum. ‘She’s already looking much better.’
‘Mum,’ I said after a pause, ‘why did you tell Dad to buy a rooster?’
Dad flipped a page of his magazine.
‘They’re very high in protein,’ she said brightly. ‘I thought you might need it, after all the shock.’
That didn’t explain the need for hazel twigs.
11
All day, A4 notes arrived under our door informing us of the emergency effort and its progress. Clean clothing was available in the ballroom. Trauma counsellors were now on call. Representatives of the insurance companies would be willing to meet with claimants. Laundry could be deposited and collected at these times. Sandwiches and a range of cold snacks were available in the Seaview restaurant, but room service and use of the minibar would incur charges to the room.
Dad, feeling indulgent, called room service and ordered pizza. When it arrived, we found another crisp note under the bellboy’s feet.
‘They’re so organised,’ I said to Dad.
‘Country town,’ he said. ‘You’ve got to handle emergencies efficiently or you don’t last long.’
‘There is a reported improvement in air quality and residents of Boronia Road (East) can return home tomorrow,’ Dad read, ‘although they are warned to stay indoors.’
‘Great,’ I said, serving out some slices of steaming Hawaiian pizza onto two plates.
‘There’s a bus service to local schools in the morning,’ he said. He lowered the piece of paper. ‘You want to go?’
‘I have a choice?’ I had eighty minutes of Modern History in the morning that I was now really keen to get out of.
‘You can get the jeans and T-shirt you’re wearing washed and dried for tomorrow if you take them to the laundry now,’ he said. ‘I don’t think the bus will make a detour for your uniform.’
‘What do I wear in the meantime?’ I asked him.
‘Your dress came back from the laundry. It’s hanging in the wardrobe.’ He smiled. ‘Or I’m sure you can get a lovely T-shirt from the Yarrindi Show.’
Then the phone rang.
‘Hi there,’ said Joel Morland.
12
I met Joel outside the elevator on the ground floor. I giggled when I saw him waiting for me. He’d succumbed to a Yarrindi Show T-shirt.
‘You look nice,’ he said, acknowledging my little pink dress.
Despite its adventures, my beloved dress had come back clean and smelling faintly of roses. ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘This is what I was wearing last night. Want to help me find the laundry?’ I had my jeans and T-shirt in a bag.
‘I thought you said you didn’t go out last night,’ said Joel as we walked down the corridor.
‘No, I didn’t,’ I said slyly. ‘I just said I didn’t go to Belinda’s.’
We walked on in silence until Joel said, ‘You went on a date?’
I didn’t immediately know how to answer that question. ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘with a whole team of firemen. It was totally hot.’
Fortunately, Joel laughed and didn’t ask any more questions.
We dropped in my laundry and then wandered to the Seaview, where they had platters of triangular sandwiches on the serving tables. The uncomfortable division of true guests from evacuees was obvious between the well-dressed people ordering food at tables and the pallid posses o
f evacuees wearing the Yarrindi Show T-shirts.
‘You know that they’ve got clothes from the charity shops in town here now? They arrived late this afternoon,’ Joel told me as I poured myself a hot chocolate from a machine. ‘You can just help yourself and keep it.’
‘Then why are people wearing the show T-shirts?’ I asked.
‘Like a badge of solidarity, or something,’ Joel said with a shrug.
‘Is that why you’re wearing one?’
‘Nah, I haven’t been back downstairs since after breakfast,’ he said, fixing his own hot chocolate. ‘My mum’s pretty messy. I stayed with her but they had to sedate her and now she’s just unconscious.’
‘They had to sedate her? She was that freaked by the fire?’
‘My dad died in an accident when I was eleven,’ said Joel. ‘She keeps it together most of the time, but when something bad happens she can really fall apart. Now she’s asleep my stepdad said I could get out of there for a while. There are two double beds in the room but it’s just not enough. My little brother’s loving it, though. There’s Mum having a nervous breakdown and he’s jumping on the bed and watching cartoons and eating chocolate bars. Have you seen the pool?’
I shook my head and Joel walked us down the hallway in the opposite direction from the Seaview. When we reached a pair of saloon-style swinging doors that had a sign reading Cool Breezes Bar above them, Joel said, ‘If they ask you for ID, just cry and act like a fire victim. Everyone at Yarrindi High dreams of hanging at this bar.’
He pushed open the doors and we walked in. Soft jazz was playing and the room was bathed in damp brown light. A white-shirted barman in a black waistcoat and matching bow tie was serving a counter.
Beyond the seating area, huge glass doors led out to a kidney-shaped swimming pool. The fronds of potted ferns flittered in a strong breeze, and the water in the pool was choppy. Pale blue light shimmered on the water.
‘Wow,’ I said.
‘The wind’s a good sign,’ said Joel. ‘Maybe the smoke will be gone tomorrow.’
‘Would you like to order any drinks, sir?’ asked the barman as Joel and I walked past him.
‘We’re here to look at the pool, if that’s okay,’ said Joel.
‘Sure,’ said the barman with a professional smile. ‘Let me know if you need anything.’ We walked past the tables and I noticed some Yarrindi Show T-shirts in the lamp-glow. Something in my heart warmed to see people relaxing.
‘Looks gorgeous,’ I said, when my face was centimetres from the glass.
‘Over there,’ said Joel, pointing to a little hut in the far corner whose wooden doors were locked with chains, ‘is the Cabana Bar. They do poolside drinks. You know the whole pool hangs over the ocean? The back wall is all glass, so you can see the ocean even while you’re swimming. I wouldn’t want to clean that tomorrow, though. If you look you can see ash on the water.’
‘How do you know about this place?’
‘Every time Yarrindi High has a dance or a formal or anything we have it here. During the Year 10 formal me and some other people managed to sneak in here and have drinks at the Cabana Bar. It was perfect – until Garth Dalton, the stupid nob, decided to throw my friend Scott in the pool and we all got thrown out.’
‘Sounds like the kind of thing Garth would do,’ I said.
‘I hate that guy,’ said Joel. His voice was hard and I knew he meant it.
‘Then why’d you go to his girlfriend’s party?’ It was a rhetorical question and I asked it without thinking, but Joel looked at me, and he seemed really sad. ‘You don’t have to tell me something you don’t want to,’ I said.
What he said in return was something I didn’t expect.
‘Tell me one thing,’ he said, gazing out at the pool. ‘What’s going on with Fran?’
13
We’d found a table by the window and while Joel sank into one of the wooden chairs, I went to the bar and charged a Coke and an orange juice to my room. I guessed that Dad wouldn’t mind and I was happy to pay him back if he did. When I put the drinks on our table and sat down, Joel said, ‘Thank you,’ in a defeated voice.
‘I mean it,’ I said, ‘you don’t need to tell me—’
Joel was abrupt. ‘I really don’t like the people you hang out with.’
‘Most people don’t,’ I said, ‘but they were nice to me on my first day.’
‘Yeah, there’d be a reason for that.’ I thought of Belinda telling Fran in the toilets about the plan to match me up with Matt and I wondered if that was all there was to it. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘Kylie is a really nice girl and Steve’s a pretty decent person too. Garth, though, he’s such a jerk. You ever sit there wishing a wall would just collapse on someone?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Okay, so me and Fran met on the first day of Year 7 and liked one another, like, instantly. She went to primary school down the coast – you know her parents have a property? So she was used to being in a school with fifteen people in total and she was really shy. And because I was into road-biking, I could get down to her place easily enough and we started hanging out and then one night in Year 8 I was down there and there was a big rainstorm and her parents told me to stay over.’
I thought of Brody Meine rejecting a similar invitation.
‘It was the best night of my life. The best. Then we were together and, man, I got offered a place in an Australian Institute of Sport cycling programme in Year 9 and I turned it down because I didn’t want to be away from that girl.’
Joel drooped into his Coke.
‘What happened then?’ I asked.
‘We were together for two years,’ he said. ‘I reckon it’s probably because of issues with my dad dying or something, but I just gave it everything. This is when she was still friends with Louise.’
‘Louise Parker?’ I was surprised. I heard Belinda’s voice say, Stuck-Up Bitch Louise Parker in my head. My hand went to my pendant, on instinct.
‘Yeah, but then Michelle Ozolins was in the market for a new best friend, and she picked Fran because they were in the same class for Geography and I think Fran was pretty enough to meet the Ozolins Standard. Michelle’d been best friends with Kylie but Kylie was spending all her time with Steve, and I guess Michelle felt left out because she was supposed to be seeing that turkey Dan Rattan and he was chasing every other chick in the school.’
Now I felt really uncomfortable.
‘And for Fran, right – shy Fran, little dairy school Fran – this was the big time because the popular girls wanted to hang out with her. She was already studying for her licence because her dad promised to buy her a car when she passed her test and I think she got it in her head that because she’d be able to come into town more she should be hanging with the people who always made a big deal of doing something. Or whatever. I don’t pretend to know how girls think, man. All I know is that she was spending all this “girl time” with Michelle, and Louise got completely frozen out. Louise even called me about it but, you know, it was Fran’s decision who she wanted to spend time with.’
Me and Michelle going to Babes so she could pick my clothes. Me and Michelle sharing secrets, buying ice-cream. Michelle inviting me to come surfing. Me and Michelle and our exclusive double act in English. Girl time.
‘Right,’ I said, half to myself.
‘And so Louise got kicked, and then Michelle started on me. I mean, she was always really nice to my face but she got in Fran’s head about me not being cool enough to sit with their group and how it would be awkward for me at barbecues and whatever it is those people do. So Fran told me that we could keep seeing each other but it wasn’t a good idea for me to be around if she was spending time with them. And I went along with it, because …’
‘Because you were in love with her,’ I said.
‘Fran wouldn’t even talk to me at school,’ said Joel, ‘but she’d still phone me whenever she got home and I was still riding down there on my bike, and having dinner with
her family and staying the night.’ He stressed these last words so I would have no doubt as to what he meant.
I hated the wounded look on Joel’s face and I hated this story but I had to – had to – keep hearing it until it was all told out.
‘And then the Year 10 formal was coming up,’ said Joel. ‘I just presumed we would be going together, but the night I asked Fran if she wanted me to hire a limo for it or something, she told me that it had all been set up that she was taking Rob Rogers instead. Those guys think they are such a big deal because they are on the school soccer team and none of them – not one of them – are within a thousand miles of being a professional sportsman.’
‘What did you do?’
‘She was crying and apologising and I just lost it. We were at her parents’ house and they have this big balcony and I was so angry I just kicked out this paling – splintered it. I felt really bad and I fixed it later, but I just couldn’t believe she would do something like that to me. And she went on that because she’d shafted all her old friends, if she got kicked out of the new group she’d be completely alone. So I said to her, okay, fine, be Rob’s date to the formal but I will be getting a hotel room here at Noah’s and if you do not come up there when the formal’s finished, we are over.
‘She looked so beautiful at the formal. She had this long red dress on and most of the girls had their hair up but she had hers out. Seeing her with Rob just made me sick, so me and Scott and the guys went exploring and got into this bar. Fran had seen me leave and chased after me and for a while it was just her, me and the guys out here. The way it should have been in the first place. Then Rob came looking for her, Garth threw Scott in the pool, we all got kicked out and Fran went off with Rob.’
‘And that was it?’ I said.
‘No, I took Scott up to the room I had to give him some towels and get his suit dry. That was my Year 10 formal.’
‘I can’t believe she didn’t come to the room,’ I said, although, based on my knowledge of Fran, I believed it completely.