To tell you the truth, the audition was nothing to talk about. No lights, no beautiful breathtaking moments, just me doing what Sarah said. A dive roll, a dive roll to a handstand, a back roll, cartwheel, a round-off, a round-off to a back flip. I said I couldn’t do this, but I could do a back walk-over. There were flexibility and strength tests and then a few questions and it was over. Sarah said she’d let me know, but she didn’t give me a clue, not even with her expression, which remained sharp and friendly the whole way.
That night, Kite and Ruben and I go down to the Termo to see Barnaby and Ada playing. This is almost as good as the night I imagined with the Argentinean tango teacher, and luckily I don’t need a lava lamp or a frock.
The Termo is a big old pub opposite the train station. Inside, where Barnaby is playing, it’s dark and smoky and crowded. I’m not sure why, but I feel excited. Maybe it’s the darkness; maybe it’s being out with Kite in a grown-up place; maybe it’s because I’ve done the audition and now I can relax; or maybe it’s because I feel special since all the people are here to see my brother and I can shine with the borrowed light of his specialness.
But mostly I think it’s because Kite holds my hand. No one can see we’re holding hands because everyone is standing up and it’s so crowded. I lean into Kite a little. I can do this because it’s what people do when bodies are all messy and together and covered in darkness and anticipation. Ruben is standing at the back, but we’ve pushed through into the middle of the crowd. Barnaby and Ada aren’t the main act: they’re supporting The Vines, but still, standing up there together, with electric guitars, they look like a real thing, a real act, not just Barnaby and Ada but something else. It’s like the music transforms them. Just like the trapeze transforms Frankie.
Ada looks out from her long black hair and holds the microphone in one hand. She says in a low, slow voice, ‘This one’s for our friend, the stowaway.’
Barnaby is grinning and looking out in the crowd and I know he is looking to see me. At this moment I feel as if I could just be dancing tango in a gorgeous frock, but I hold the feeling inside me and all I do is lean a little more into Kite and grin, and right then I know I’m having a moment of perfect happiness. If only Lola could see me now, she’d know I wasn’t afraid of heights, not one bit.
We have to leave before the end because it’s late, but I don’t mind since I’m just not in the mood for minding anything. When we get home, Ruben shuffles off inside and Kite plonks himself down on the verandah steps and pulls me down beside him, saying, ‘Sit down and look at the sky, it’s different here. The stars are brighter and the night is blacker.’
I’m smiling at the stars and at the night and at the feeling inside me, which is brighter than the stars and bigger than the night. Before it happens, it’s as if I know it will. But I turn to Kite and I’m nervous and he looks at me and very slowly our faces begin to touch and we kiss. Not just one kiss, but two,
then three,
then four.
All soft, long kisses, all getting longer and closer, and closer. And then our mouths are opening, and slowly we’re kissing a real grown-up kiss.
On the steps, under the night.
Kite and me.
Chapter 36
Next day, I’m catching the train back to Melbourne. It’s been arranged. Ruben drops Kite at school then takes me to the train station, but I’m not too sad to say goodbye this time because not only have I been well and truly kissed, I’ve a good feeling I’ll be back to join the circus. Ruben says he’ll be ringing me in the next couple of days to let me know.
It’s only as I’m saying goodbye to Ruben that I suddenly remember Harold Barton’s letter. I’d been so distracted by my own excitement that I’d forgotten all about it.
Ruben reads it right there on the platform. He raises his eyebrows as he reads and then looks at me, surprised.
‘Did you know what this was about?’
‘No.’ I begin to feel worried.
‘He wants to join the circus.’
‘Harold Barton!’ I couldn’t believe it. ‘Harold Barton wants to join the circus? How? I mean, what does he do?’
‘Apparently he juggles. He says here he can do tennis and other tricks.’
‘He never told me that.’
‘No. Well, I think the lad holds his cards quite close.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean there’s quite a lot you wouldn’t know about Harold Barton because he hides it, but he’s had a tough time.’
‘A hard time? I thought he had it easy. He looks like he does.’
‘Yeah. I know he gets lots of things. His parents spend money on him because they feel guilty they don’t get on; in fact I think they’re estranged. His dad is a difficult man. Very troubled. I don’t think he’s really able to father Harold at all. In fact the circus would probably be very good for Harold. Why don’t you tell him to give me a call?’
‘Is his father mean to him?’
‘I don’t know exactly what goes on. I just know it’s a difficult home life for Harold. He’s not as tough as he seems.’
All of a sudden there’s a lot of things I want to ask Ruben because I have a feeling he knows stuff, I mean the underneath stuff, the great lurking realness. But my train has arrived and he’s ushering me towards it. For one thing, I’m wondering how he knows all that about Harold. Has he spoken to Harold? I even remember once Harold asking me about my dad and I wasn’t being very friendly because I always assume with Harold that I have to be ready for an attack. Maybe Harold really wanted to talk. Poor Harold, I think to myself, and it almost shocks me to have a sympathetic thought for Harold Barton.
But I’m happy to wriggle into my seat on the train because I can sense a bit of thinking coming on and there’s nothing better than a train ride for getting the mind in a loose and rambling mood. Before I even start on Harold Barton, I want to go over the night before’s spectacular kissing event.
I stare out the train window and immediately plunge down like a deep-sea diver into my memory of it and swim in a floating, winding way through the words and feelings and moments as if they are a strange shimmering wonderland. But somewhere in the wonderland there’s an awkward and unexpected bend, something I can’t just glide through or know how to negotiate. It comes after the kiss which, of course, eventually stopped, since everything does have to stop some time, or at least change and become something else, even though there are some moments you want to just keep going on and on. I don’t know how it stopped, I just remember Kite looking at me and I think our eyes were still kissing, or if eyes had hands then our eyes were holding each other, and Kite said, ‘Hey, I really like you, Cedar.’
I didn’t say anything, except I smiled and kissed him right on the soft spot near his eye. I don’t know why I didn’t say anything; maybe I didn’t want to just copy or follow. Instead, I looked down at our hands, which were wound up together. And then Kite stood up, heaving me up with him. He led me inside, and that’s when we came to the hard corner. He took me to his bedroom.
At the door he turned towards me.
I said, ‘Where are we going?’
It was obvious of course, but I’d begun to feel like everything was getting deep way too fast and I needed a moment to work out where I was.
He grinned and whispered, ‘Come and lie on my bed,’ and I grinned too, because what could be better than to kiss and press your whole body close all at once?
But what if things went even further? What if he put his hand up my shirt and discovered I had only small boobs? What if he didn’t like me anymore after that? Maybe he’d only just decided he did like me and I didn’t want him to change his mind now. But if I didn’t go and lie on his bed, would he think I was a boring old prude? In fact, was I being a boring old prude? Was I being backward? I breathed in. Come on, Cedar, I said to myself. If someone’s going to love you, they have to know you, small boobs and all.
‘Okay,’ I said, just like that, just b
ecause I didn’t want to be a scaredy cat. And just as we began to plunge into the bedroom, Ruben emerged from the bathroom in his blue spot pyjamas and we all stopped moving and stood there in the hall, trapped in this feeling that Ruben had just caught us out, and even Ruben didn’t know quite how to act or what to say. The first thing that happened was Kite let my hand drop and Ruben smiled softly and coughed and said he thought we should both be in our own beds by now, and he looked at Kite and said he’d assured my mother that he’d take good care of me while I was staying with him. Kite just grinned and turned me by the shoulders towards my room.
‘She was just on her way,’ he said.
‘Good night,’ I said, and off I scurried, leaving them to sort out their father and son stuff in the hall.
Once I got into my own bed I wasn’t sure if I was relieved or disappointed, and even now, as the train chugs along, I can’t work it out.
When you really, really want someone to like you, you do everything you can to make yourself likeable. Some people, like Marnie, put on make-up to look more appealing. Others, like Harold Barton, flash their new enviable things around, as if those things are extra limbs of themselves. Whereas someone like Caramella has the opposite strategy. She tries always to deflect attention away from herself by wearing big T-shirts and by being always more interested in you.
It’s normal to hide your real self away under make-up, or shirts, or with things or diversions. My way of making myself likeable is to put on an act. With Kite, I act like I’m not jealous or like I’m not scared, and last night I was even prepared to act like I’m not shy about certain possible physical things that could happen between a boy and a girl, when really I am. I’m very shy, actually.
So, what happens if you make a boy like you, but it’s the other carefully constructed version of you that he likes; the one with lipstick on, or the one with the Wonder Bra, or the one with the bold, brave, easygoing, very cool act? What happens if he likes that you and not the real you, the shy, uncertain you? How long can you keep wearing your lipstick? How long can you hide the real you?
And if boys do it too, what version of Kite am I in love with anyway? What is he hiding from me? Is he really as great as I think he is? For instance, just because he kisses me doesn’t mean he isn’t kissing Lola as well. When I think about it, Kite sure doesn’t give much of himself over. We’ve never even spoken together about feelings, or us, and that’s because I can tell he wouldn’t like to speak, so I make it easy for him to keep himself to himself. But, come to think of it, what I really want is to sit down and talk without hiding or pretending or putting on an act.
It’s not as easy as you think to be yourself, and I mean your true, quaking, bumpy, hurtable, hungry self. Maybe what you really are is just a shape, like this:
which is always changing, always aiming to become a more defined and certain spectacular shape like this:
though really what you need to become is just more comfortable with the shape that you are:
because even that shape will keep changing:
and changing:
Chapter 37
Aunt Squeezy picks me up from the train station because Mum is at work. She’s waiting there on the platform at Spencer Street when I get off, leaning up against a wall with that faraway gaze in her eyes. She looks small and dusty and swallowed by the concrete platform, but she seems to me like a quiet, inspired dab of colour on a hard, grey ground. Aunt Squeezy always wears clothes that float and dangle and waft around her in layers of washed-out colours. I like the way she seems oblivious to fashion. When I land at her feet she jumps out of her dreaming, grins and gives me a big hug. I’m so glad to see her I begin instantly telling her all about my adventure, being sure not to leave out the bit about the wise moment with the trapeze. Then she starts telling me all about her adventure, only hers is a lot longer. She left home when she was only seventeen, and has been travelling ever since.
‘Why didn’t you go back?’ I say.
She sighs. ‘I never got on well with my parents.’
‘Oh, there’s a bit of that going around,’ I say, thinking of Harold Barton.
She laughs because she thinks I’m talking about my own mum.
‘Hey, your mum’s not mad at you. She was really understanding. You’re lucky to have a mum like that. I think when I arrived in your family I was hoping I’d kind of join up, and your mum’s been so welcoming. But I’ve decided to go home now.’
‘What?You can’t go home now. You have joined up. You’d be deserting us. Besides, I don’t want you to go.’ My head is suddenly reeling or rising up on its hind legs like a horse. Maybe it’s already a bit tightly wired with all my own new feelings and hopes, and this comes like a big, final blast to the circuitry.
Aunt Squeezy smiles in her softening way. ‘I’d love to stay. But you know how you were saying about being brave and true? Well, I think I need to be brave now and clear up things with my mum before I become a mum myself. I have to at least try, anyway.’
‘No you don’t,’ I say petulantly.
Aunt Squeezy puts her hands on her tummy, which is beginning to stick out. ‘It’s not just that. It’s also this feeling I’m getting about needing to grow up now. Now I’m going to be responsible for someone else, I can’t just keep travelling around and leading my own life. You’ll understand what I mean when you have a baby.’
‘I won’t have a baby, then. I always want to lead my own life.’
She laughs again and her owl eyes shine as if she’s just seeing a brand new thing in the field. ‘Oh, Cedar, you’re so like me. Or I was just like you at your age. That’s going to be good for us. I think we’ll always understand each other.’
She throws her arm around me. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll stay in touch. I may even be back – who knows.’
‘You better move back. You’re going to need a babysitter,’ I say. And, for the first time ever, I think I almost know what it must be like to have an older sister. I feel close to Aunt Squeezy in a way that’s different from the way I feel about Caramella. It’s not better, it’s just as if Aunt Squeezy and I are two odd red flowers off the same bush, whereas Caramella and I come from very different bushes. Caramella and I have such different ways that it’s interesting, it’s slanted and far-ranging. What Aunt Squeezy and I have is just a knowing, a plain enduring home-baked knowing that comes out of the simple fact that we grew on the same bush. I feel really good and proud and bouncy as I walk down the street with Aunt Squeezy, just as if we were sisters. I feel almost like it doesn’t matter that she’s leaving; what matters is that she came and now my family is bigger.
So, when we get home and the phone rings I’m completely unprepared for it to be Ruben and even less prepared for him to say, ‘Cedar, I’m sorry to have to tell you that you didn’t get selected for the circus.’
Chapter 38
It’s all very well to live your own life, but what happens when your life doesn’t want to live you? How do you cope when your life swerves off the course you so determinedly set it on? I felt cheated. I felt that God had just come along and scribbled all over my master plan, and now I no longer had a trail to go along. Before the phone call I’d had a bursting, wriggling, burning line of hopes that were leading me onwards, and now someone or something had erased that line completely and I couldn’t go on without it. My life was rubbed out.
‘You’re being too dramatic,’ says Mum, while I am still sobbing on my bed. ‘Your life hasn’t been rubbed out at all. I work with people whose lives really have been rubbed out, and you’re not one of them. You’re alive and well, just very disappointed, but you’ll get over it, I promise you will. It’s a feeling, and it will go. We all have to feel disappointment along the way – it’s part of life.’
She has a point. She has a couple actually. Firstly the old ‘there’s-always-someone-worse-off-than-you point’ which, frankly, I think is a bit unfair because I don’t want to make myself look better by comparing my misfortunes to greater mi
sfortunes. It doesn’t seem right. Feels like you are treading on someone whose face is already in the mud, just so you can get a foot-up. But then there’s also the unbearable fact that disappointment is part of life.
‘That doesn’t mean you have to like it!’
I lift my head up from the bed. She smiles and gently pushes the hair off my face.
‘No, it’s rotten when it comes, but you have to be ready to let it go and move on as well.’
Move on? That was exactly the problem. Where? Now I’d never see Kite and he’d run off for ever and my whole career as world-touring acrobat would be over. I stop sobbing as I pause to wonder which is worse: the loss of Kite, or the loss of career.
As if hearing my thoughts, Mum says, ‘Anyway, you mustn’t think of it as the end. There are always other opportunities, and you’ll find them. If anyone can find an opportunity, you can.’
I shake my head dismally, mainly because I’m just feeling feeble and shaky and don’t even want to look past the place where my life has stopped.
Aunt Squeezy, of course, takes a similar approach: that same character-building line of reasoning. She even says, ‘Don’t worry, losers are much more interesting people than winners.’
I’m appalled. ‘Are you saying I’m a loser?’
‘No, no, I’m just saying now you’ve had the experience of losing something you wanted. That’s a great opportunity life has presented you with.’
‘I would have preferred the opportunity of touring the world in a circus.’
‘Sure, but this doesn’t mean you don’t get that opportunity, it just means you have to work harder for it. You have to trust, now, that there’s a good reason. You just can’t see it yet.’
It isn’t until the early evening that I eventually drag myself up off my bed. I take Stinky down the creek. The sun is sinking and the trees are sighing in relief. It’s been a slow, hot day, but now the shadows are long and the air has loosened and the sky has relinquished its relentless blue hold and let a dirty pink flush creep in. I sigh too. It seems that something is giving way. Not just the long, hot day of sobbing, but my holding on to it. I even notice a little glad thought, like the short pealing song of a bird sheltering in the shade. As I watch Stinky’s hairy bum happily trotting towards the creek, I think that at least I won’t have to live away from him now. Or Mum. And even Barnaby.
The Slightly Bruised Glory of Cedar B. Hartley Page 14