Shutting the door behind me, I scurried to the lift, head down, praying that no-one from the wedding would see me, almost breaking into a sprint past the dining room where a celebratory after-wedding breakfast had been planned.
There was no-one there of course, there was nothing to celebrate and nobody would have been able to stomach anything, much less eggs.
The lift door opened and my hands shook as I pressed the button for the car park. I closed my eyes until it opened again, then I half-walked, half-jogged to the car, my suitcase bumping behind me. By the time I got in I was crying hot, plump tears and wondering where I should go.
Not home, not yet.
I thought of Simone and Stella – the only two people I knew who had not been at the wedding and who might understand what I had done.
Somehow, I had managed to stay friends with them all through high school and long afterwards, when Simone had changed her surname to Severet and become the poster girl for lesbians, and Stella had changed her name by marriage to McNamara and become the poster girl for Catholics.
We had remained close despite my defection to Annabelle, who neither of them had been particularly fond of, particularly after my sixteenth birthday party, the night Annabelle behaved as territorially as any of the animals featured in one of Fergus’s documentaries.
Remembering that night as I swung out of the driveway, I thought that when I told Simone what I had just done with Annabelle’s husband, she would probably crack open the champagne.
About a month before I’d turned sixteen, Rose had decided it was time for the two families – mine and Annabelle’s – to meet ‘properly’.
‘Lulu,’ she said one morning, coming out of the kitchen and wiping her hands on a tea towel, ‘I think it would be good to ask Mr and Mrs Andrews to your birthday party.’
‘Frank and Annie,’ I said.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Frank and Annie, that’s what I call them,’ I said with a satisfied smile, a smile that told my mother that while she might live in our street, plumbing the depths of perturbia, I – Lulu – was moving in far more sophisticated circles.
‘Is that right?’ she said. ‘Well, I think we should ask Mr and Mrs Andrews to your sixteenth birthday dinner at home, and I also think you should ask Simone and Stella and a few of the other girls from school.’
‘But Rose . . .’
‘No buts, Tallulah.’
Defeated, I rolled my eyes at her, flounced off to my room, slammed the door, and began writing down which of St Rita’s least annoying young lesbians I would be asking to my party.
Simone and Stella, of course, who, despite Annabelle’s objections, I still spent some time with.
‘But why do you have to go to Simone’s?’ Annabelle would wail. ‘If you come over to my house, Frank’s going to let us paint stars on my bedroom ceiling.’ ‘Don’t go shopping with Stella, come to the movies with me instead, you know she’ll only make you buy something completely unbecomative.’
I always hoped the four of us would become friends, but Annabelle and Simone resisted, circling each other like wary cats whenever they were in the same room.
Stella, of course, would have been happy to include Annabelle; Stella was always happy to include anyone, and on the day of the party she bounded in to my room like an overexcited Labrador.
‘Happy birthday, Lulu! Hi Annabelle,’ she said. ‘Gosh, you look nice, Annabelle, I love that top you’re wearing!’
‘Hi Lulu, happy birthday,’ Simone said, coming in behind her. ‘Hello Annabelle, you’re already here, what a surprise.’
Annabelle, sulking on the bed, didn’t bother replying. She just looked at me and said, ‘Well, aren’t you going to open your present?’
‘I can’t,’ I said. ‘Rose says I’ve got to open them all together.’
‘But I want you to open mine now.’
‘Well, I can’t,’ I said,
‘What can’t you do?’ Rose asked, entering the room and displaying the uncanny gift she’d possessed since my early childhood of materialising out of thin air.
‘Oh, Tallulah’s just complaining about you making her open all her presents together, when she really wants to open mine now,’ said Annabelle, displaying her own particular gift, which was to put words in my mouth.
‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, Lulu,’ Rose said, ‘if it’s that important to you, open it now – and then you girls come downstairs, the others will be here soon.’
Annabelle sat on the bed with a satisfied smile on her face while I opened her present.
It was a photo of the two of us, arms linked, looking up at the camera with huge grins on our faces, and engraved on the wooden frame were three words: ‘Best Friends Forternity.’
‘Forternity,’ Annabelle told Simone and Stella sweetly, ‘is Tallulah’s and my word we made up together. It’s a cross between forever and eternity, and it’s actually stronger than both of them.
‘So,’ she added brightly, ‘what did you two get her – some lipstick, I suppose?’
I looked over at Stella’s quivering lower lip and Simone’s furious gaze at Annabelle and knew instantly that inside the small package Stella was holding was Revlon’s ‘Pink in the Afternoon’.
Downstairs things didn’t get much better.
An assorted group of St Rita’s young lesbians were arriving, but I barely noticed them, instead watching anxiously as my mother and Annie talked in the kitchen.
The thing is I knew my mother wouldn’t like Annie, and not just because Annie herself had told me that most women didn’t.
‘Women loathe me, Tallulah,’ she’d said to me one day at the River House. ‘They always think I’m going to run off with their damned husbands – really, as if the one I’ve got isn’t enough.’
The tinkling laugh followed, and I joined in with her, saying, ‘Well, I like you, Annie.’
She smiled at me. ‘Give it time, Lulu.’
But Rose, I thought, would not like Annie because in Rose’s world love meant knitting your children ponchos with fringes in winter, hand-stitching perfect hems on school uniforms late at night, and sending your husband off to work after a hot cooked breakfast every morning. In Rose’s world, love was all about home economics, and Annie, she knew, sent Annabelle off every morning with nothing more than tuckshop money in her pocket, and sometimes she even forgot that.
As for Annie, I didn’t know if she would like my mother or not – Annie didn’t really seem to notice anyone long enough to form any sort of opinion on them.
Pretending I needed a drink, I entered the kitchen quietly and was relieved to hear Annie’s familiar laugh.
‘No really, Rose,’ she was saying. ‘I’m so grateful for the girls’ friendship, and the way you look after Annabelle, giving her all those afternoon teas, she loves them. Sometimes she asks me to make your rainbow cake, but I’m just not that sort of mother, I’m afraid.’
Tinkling laugh again, followed by Rose’s voice cutting across the laminex like a whipbird in the rainforest: ‘So, what sort of a mother are you?’
I held my breath.
‘A reluctant one,’ Annie smiled.
*
‘Happy birthday, darling!’ Rose announced later, bringing a cake into the lounge room. ‘Sweet sixteen and never been kissed.’
‘Better not have,’ Harry said.
‘They’d have to get past her moustache first,’ Annabelle said, and everybody laughed.
I leant down and blew out my candles and my wish, when it came uninvited and unexpected, just about knocked the rest of my breath out of me.
Sometimes I wish Annabelle would leave me alone.
The moment I wished it, I felt guilty.
You don’t mean it, I told myself. You don’t mean it.
But a small part of me, the part that sometime
s couldn’t breathe when she was around . . . well, that part did.
She didn’t like me to stray too far from her side – if I went anywhere with Simone and Stella, she would sulk for days; if I wanted to go home alone, spend time with my family without her, she would turn up on our doorstep half an hour later anyway; if I went shopping without her, she would hate what I bought, and demand I return it so she could help me choose something else; if I laughed with another girl during class, she immediately wanted to know what the joke was.
She engulfed me.
But even Annabelle’s sometimes overwhelming attentions did not prepare me for the onslaught that was Joshua Keaton.
The bell above the door to Snow’s corner store tinkled as I led Mattie and Sam inside and let them loose to ricochet like pinballs through the store.
‘Behave,’ I said, ‘or I won’t buy you an ice-cream.’
They raced over to the cabinet so they could spend an inordinate amount of time discussing the various merits of the banana Paddle Pop versus the Have a Heart, and were opening and closing its glass cover so all the cold air could escape when I felt a shimmer of heat beside me.
Sky-blue T-shirt, long, lean body tapering down to navy boardies, brown arms leaning on the glass.
He smiled, pushing a mess of dark curls from his forehead, flicking his eyes over the three of us before coming to rest on mine.
‘So,’ he said, ‘see anything you like?’
The question filled the air between us and hovered there until Mattie announced informatively, ‘She’s not allowed to have any ice-cream, she’s on a diet.’
Sam nodded. ‘A massive one,’ he added helpfully.
The boy in the sky-blue T-shirt laughed and said, ‘Really? She looks just about perfect to me.’
And that was it, Joshua Keaton and I had met, and the heat between us just about melted every ice-cream in the cabinet. ‘I’m Josh,’ he said, his eyes, dark and flecked, still locked on mine. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Tallulah . . . Lulu.’
‘Well, Tallulah-Lulu,’ he smiled, ‘I’ll see you around.’
Then he left, Snow’s bell signalling his departure.
‘Ha, ha, you said your name was Tallulah-Lulu,’ Mattie grinned.
‘Shut up Mattie,’ I said, leading them both to the counter.
‘Lulu’s got a boyfriend, Lulu’s got a boyfriend,’ Sam chanted, dancing around me, and right at that moment, Josh walked back in.
‘Are they right?’ he grinned. ‘Have you got a boyfriend?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘Do you want one?’
Later on, after Josh talked his way into walking us home, wheeling his pushbike beside us, and further talked his way inside our house where he charmed Rose by inhaling a plate of her macaroons and impressed Harry by knowing what a snake pipe was, he asked me again.
‘So, Tallulah-Lulu,’ he drawled, a tiny dimple dancing on his right cheek, ‘do you want a boyfriend? Because I could be interested in applying.’
I giggled – at the inanity of his line, at him, at us, at me, standing in the kitchen of my house with the most beautiful boy I had ever seen.
‘I’m serious,’ he said.
Then he put one finger on my lips, leant in and kissed me.
Mattie and Sam were playing Star Wars outside on the lawn, Harry and Rose were somewhere upstairs and I was leaning back against the table, eyes closed while Josh’s fingers trailed my neck, brushed against my shoulders, touched my face.
His hand cupped my cheek as he pulled me towards him, his kiss growing deeper, and I don’t know how long it went, that first kiss, but I do know that his hands and mouth and tongue made every inch of my pure, untouched, Catholic girl’s skin want to be pollinated right there and then on Rose’s laminex bench.
Later that day, when all the mothers were out on their lawns calling their children inside, their sing-song chorus of ‘Cait-lin’, ‘Aman-da’, ‘Chris-topher’ signalling the end of play, he stood on my front step and said, ‘Well, did I get the job?’
I nodded my head.
‘Excellent,’ he said, turning to walk down the path and pick up his pushie from its resting place behind Harry’s plumbing sign.
‘So I’ll see you tomorrow,’ he yelled, and disappeared down the street.
I watched him go and could not believe my luck.
*
Lying awake that night I thought about how strange it was that the evening before I had gone to bed without a boyfriend, a girl who, just like Rose had said at my birthday party, had never been kissed.
Now I apparently had a boyfriend. I was a girl who had been kissed, and I knew, despite my complete lack of previous experience, properly.
I smiled in the darkness, thinking of my family at dinner that night.
Harry teasing, ‘Tallulah Keaton, nice ring to it, love.’ Rose worried: ‘Don’t be silly, Harry, they’ve only just met.’ And the boys rhythmically chanting, ‘Lulu and Josh, up a tree, K–I–S–S–I–N–G!’, and pounding their fists on the kitchen table until Rose told them she’d tie them to that tree if they didn’t desist.
Annabelle had rung earlier, but I’d asked Rose to tell her I was already in bed, not wanting to share Josh with her just yet. I could not, I knew, keep Josh a secret from Annabelle forever; it was in every way impossible.
I closed my eyes, wrapped my arms around my waist, and thought that if I really did have a boyfriend, if Joshua Keaton – I hugged his name to me – was my boyfriend, then I would just have to find a way to fill in all the spaces between him and Annabelle, to be enough for both of them.
*
‘No way!’ Annabelle shrieked, walking to school the next day. ‘So you’re standing in Snow’s and this guy just wanders in and asks you to be his girlfriend? You cannot be serious, Tallulah – what’s his name?’
I hesitated before I answered her, wanting to keep everything about him to myself for just a moment longer.
‘Joshua Keaton,’ I said, and waited.
I could not bear it if she made fun of it in some way, turned the letters of his name around or gave him a nickname that would make me wince every time I heard it.
I could not bear it if she spoilt him for me.
‘Joshua Keaton,’ she announced, ‘sounds completely intrigivating – now tell me every single detail of what happened, I want to know all about him.’
Relieved she had not mocked, I told her all I had learnt about Joshua Keaton, which was not very much, snatches of information sandwiched in between Mattie and Sam’s romping, Rose’s biscuit offerings, Harry’s car talk – ‘What do you think of the new Holden, Josh?’ – and kissing.
I knew that he was seventeen, that he lived two suburbs away with his mother, Pearl – no mention of a father – and that he had gone to Ralston Road High School, but had left the year before to do a mechanic’s apprenticeship.
I knew he loved surfing, had a part-time job at DNA Motors, which he liked, working for a man called Mel, whom he did not.
That was about the sum total of what I knew about Joshua Keaton when I was walking to school with Annabelle that morning.
But later, as the days turned into weeks, and weeks turned into six months after the day we met, and he used a penknife and a blue pen to tattoo my initials on his wrist to mark the occasion – Harry calling him a ‘silly bugger’ when he saw it – I could have told her so much more.
I could have told her he was five foot, eleven and three-quarter inches tall, that the missing quarter inch drove him to distraction, that he had a shock of white hair beneath all those curls, but you had to lift his hair at the nape of his neck to find it; I could have told her he couldn’t whistle.
I could have told her he loved the St Kilda Football Club, Saint Bernard dogs, Vietnamese egg noodles with anything, being kissed on his back, the br
eak at Duranbah, and Chrissie Amphlett – ‘The second sexiest woman on earth, Tallulah-Lulu.’
I could have told her his father had left to join the merchant navy three weeks after he was born, and that the first time he got drunk he’d tried to call him on the HMAS Melbourne, shouting down the phone at the operator that it was a matter of national security he be put through to Davie Keaton, and that when she hung up on him, he had sat on a swing in Ralston Park and wept.
I could have told her that when he told me that story and cried, it looked like he was raining inside.
I could have told her he had double-jointed thumbs, that when he was thirteen he had written a letter to Peter Brock asking to be his co-driver, and that he had slept with the signed photo that arrived in answer under his pillow for weeks.
I could have told her that he tasted like almonds and smelt like lemons and that the softest place on his skin was everywhere.
No matter.
I guess she found that out for herself.
*
I arranged for them to meet for the first time at Wattle Beach, away from Harry and Rose’s or Frank and Annie’s curious eyes. It was hot, one of those days when the road shimmers at your feet, and your shoulders are pink even before the sun hits them.
I was nervous, uneasiness pecking at my skin, and Annabelle took my arm and said, ‘For God’s sake, Lulu, will you relax? I’m not going to eat him.’
We were walking down the green-tinged concrete steps to the beach when I felt her shift beside me, her fingers pressing down slightly on my wrist.
‘Is that him?’
It was Josh, running through the last of the curling waves, long limbs negotiating a path past little kids on surf mats and mothers with babies on their hips, board tucked under his arm, drops of water catching in his curls, rashie stretched across his chest and stomach. And then he was beside us, smiling as he dropped his board.
‘Hey, Tallulah-Lulu,’ he said, ducking his head to brush his saltwater lips on mine. ‘How’s my girl?’
He shook his whole body, large wet droplets diving off his skin, and lifted his chin towards Annabelle.
Walking on Trampolines Page 4