by Nicki Reed
‘I hope so,’ BJ grins at me, her look tells me I’ve come a long way.
And we’re back to the maybe game.
‘Maybe she thinks she can break us down from inside. My mother is insidious.’
‘She just cares about you. Maybe she realises you can make your own choices.’
‘How quickly you forgive. I’m suspicious.’
‘I wish I had a mother to be suspicious of. Ruby and I are on our own. And since she doesn’t talk to me anymore, we’re even more on our own.’
I send another email to Ruby:
Dear Ruby, I can only apologise so many times (so far, seventeen). Who you have it off with is none of my business. I know that and I’m sorry. Make that eighteen times. Please, please, please talk to me. I miss you. BJ is off to the other side of the world next week. Ruby, you are in my city, but you might as well be on the other side of the world. I’m sorry (nineteen). Peta XXXXX
BJ’s birthday is the twenty-fifth of September but she’ll be away. To celebrate, we’re going for a bike ride and a picnic, if I survive. BJ’s lowered the seat on my bike and oiled the chain. The cane basket on my handlebar is filled with regulation picnic gear—water-resistant blanket, sandwiches, biscuits, fruit and two piccolos of sparkling wine.
‘You don’t have to do this,’ BJ says.
‘I want to.’ I buckle my helmet, get on the bike.
‘I’ll ride behind you to make sure you’re okay and to check out your arse. I haven’t ridden with someone wearing a skirt before.’
I wobble off. It’s not so bad once you get momentum. But by the time we’re three streets away from home, my bum is sore. I had plans of riding to the boatsheds in Kew but I also have a fallback.
We stop for a red light. BJ rolls up beside me. ‘You want to keep going?’
‘Sure. No. How about the park with the miniature train?’ It’s downhill.
‘On Belmore Road? It’ll be uphill on the way back.’
‘Yes, but I’ll be warmed up by then. And there’ll be three kilometres more experience in the legs.’ Proper cyclists talk about their legs like they’re separate from them, Yeah, nah, yeah. I didn’t have the legs today.
‘No worries,’ BJ says.
Green light.
The downhill bit is fun. BJ beats me by at least half a minute but I don’t mind. We turn into the park and it’s not until I’m almost ready to stop that I lose control of my bike. The front wheel flicks out. I’m off.
Gravel. Basket emptied. Onlookers. Grazed knee, red face. Not much pain.
‘Are you laughing? You’re laughing!’ I’m laughing, too.
‘Let’s see that.’ She crouches in front me.
Nothing’s broken, my skirt is where it should be, blood from my knee is trailing into my sock. BJ has antiseptic wipes and bandaids in one of her back pockets. She wipes the blood from my knee and sticks a bandaid on it.
Kids hoot as the loaded train does laps of its little circuit. Seagulls. The back and forth squeal of the swings. Pairs of cyclists on the bike path, dogs off the leash— freedom.
‘I can’t think of anything I’ve done this year that was better than this,’ BJ says.
Most of the picnics I’ve been on haven’t lived up to my expectations, but today, tucked in under a big old tree, lying on a blanket, stomach full, wine drunk, I’m with BJ, and it’s even better than I planned.
‘Presents,’ I say.
She thrusts out her hand. ‘Gimme.’
I love a girl who knows what she wants.
‘Could this be a book?’ She unwraps it. ‘Street French Slang Dictionary and Thesaurus. Brilliant.’
‘Couldn’t have you over there unable to communicate.’ I hand her another present, smaller and in tissue paper. ‘Happy birthday, Beej.’
She’s careful and she’s almost never careful. She unfolds the paper.
‘Wow, Peta, it’s beautiful.’ In the palm of her hand is an Ina Barry Spikey Bangle. It’s shiny, silver, reptilian, pointy, but it’s curved. I bought it and wrapped it but I’m as captivated as she is.
‘It’s engraved,’ I point, ‘in that curve.’
‘BJ for Peta forever.’
‘I know it’s cheesy, a little like what you’d find on the back of a toilet door, but it’s what I wanted to say. Anyway, we know about toilets.’
‘Babe, it’s not cheesy, it’s true. Forever.’
She kisses me. This is the best picnic.
‘Put it on.’
‘No.’ She zips it into her back pocket. ‘I’d die if I lost it on the way home.’
The way home. Uphill. Okay. My basket will be lighter and the food will have given me energy and the wine might provide me with some nerve.
‘If you like, you don’t have to, I’m not saying you’re soft, but if you like, I can go home and get the car and come back and pick you up,’ BJ smiles.
‘You don’t mind? My knee…’
31.
Ruby has Mark. She doesn’t need me. But that doesn’t mean I don’t need her. I miss her antic style mode and the pronouncements she makes about life.
I sent her forty-five texts in a week. It’s nothing she wouldn’t do for me. And nine emails. She isn’t blocking them but perhaps she can see by their diminishing length that I’m tiring.
The day before BJ leaves for Paris we sit in her black Honda up the street from Ruby’s house and wait. We’ve got books and music, food and each other.
Two hours in, we’re bored, the books remain unread— they’re not stake-out books. BJ opens her door.
‘Where are you going?’
‘I’m going to have a wee in her garden. If I don’t, I’ll piss in the car,’ she says.
I wait and try not to pick at the scab on my knee.
She returns two minutes later. ‘She’s bloody home. In the kitchen. Emptying the teapot, I think.’
Three knocks on her front door and Ruby and I are face to face.
‘What are you doing here?’
‘I could ask you the same thing,’ BJ says, sticking her foot in the door.
‘I live here.’
‘Well, why don’t you answer your fucken phone then?’ BJ steps past Ruby and into the hallway.
Ruby scowls and stalks into the kitchen.
‘Listen,’ BJ is making herself at home, ‘tomorrow I go away for a month, and you two need to sort this out. I can’t leave Peta like this. Cups?’
Ruby points to the cupboard above the fridge. ‘Where are you going?’ she says over the rumble of the kettle filling.
She hasn’t read my emails or my texts. How much backstory do I have to give her? I don’t feel like reliving the last few weeks. I still have grey areas. Too afraid to ask, I haven’t determined where BJ spent her lost night.
‘She’s going to Bangkok and Paris.’
‘All in one day?’ Ruby prepares the teapot.
‘Yeah and back in time for dinner.’ BJ gives me one of those would-you-hurry-it-up-and-say-something glances. I shake my head, not ready.
‘Where’s Mark?’ BJ asking the question I want an answer to.
The teapot sweats on the kitchen table. I sweat in my chair.
‘Playing golf with Ravi.’
‘Oh, you’re a golf-widow. I’ve heard about them.’ BJ turns to me. ‘It’s a hetero thing.’ BJ picks up the snow dome Ruby has on the windowsill, shakes the Golden Gate Bridge into a blizzard. Ruby takes it from her and puts it back.
‘No, I’m a golf flatmate. Theresa’s the golf-widow and Ravi Junior is the golf-orphan.’
‘So, you’re not…’
‘No, Peta.’
‘Sorry. Clarification required.’ BJ holds her cup of tea in both hands, blowing a willowy bend into the rising steam. ‘You’re not an item?’
‘God, she’s worse than me.’ Two sugars stirred in and an incredulous look when I have none. ‘No, BJ, we are not an item. I think…And we haven’t fucked for a couple of days. He’s been away.’ She stares at her tea. ‘It�
��s starting to do my head in. I don’t know what he wants.’
‘I don’t know what to say.’
‘Don’t say anything, Pete.’ Ruby carries her tea to the lounge room. We follow her. ‘At least he’s improved. He used to sit here on the couch and cry, or stare at nothing, and say nothing. Now we go to bed and he comes into mine. I think we’re just taking our frustrations out on each other.’
‘Oh, Rube.’ I put my cup down and take her into my arms. We cry at each other. ‘Why didn’t you talk to me? I could have helped.’
‘What could you have said? You were pissed off we were having sex and I don’t know if it was at me or him.’
‘If you read my emails…’
‘I didn’t have to. I know you, remember? You wouldn’t have wanted your little sister on at you about how she was fucking your ex and getting her head fucked as well.’
‘You’re right. I wouldn’t have had the maturity.’
‘And you were looking after me,’ BJ says, passing round slices of the cinnamon bun we brought for the stake-out. She hands me a slice, buttered, extra icing.
I take it, smile. ‘Who’s been looking after whom?’
‘Okay. I’m leaving you to it. I’m going for a ride and I’ll be back in an hour or so. Peta’s bound to want to tell you how ace I am in bed and how you should give chicks a try. I’ll only stand about getting embarrassed.’
‘You’ve never been embarrassed in your life.’
‘Yes, I have,’ BJ says. ‘You were out cold on my bathroom floor and missed the whole thing.’
32.
Because BJ wants to be the master of her body clock we haven’t slept. She’s hoping to sleep on the plane and wake up in Bangkok like nothing happened.
I helped her pack. She was hopeless. Mopey, indecisive, she kept putting things in, taking them out. I pushed her out of the way. ‘Let me do it.’
All my favourite things of hers went in: black T-shirt, black jeans, black underwear, grey T-shirt, T-shirt with bow tie and lapels drawn on. Yes, it’s a cliché, but she works it. Two white shirts, even though she says I look better in them than she does. Oh, no, I don’t.
‘Also,’ she says, ‘I don’t want to be awake for Carole. I’ll feel less trapped on an aeroplane with my mother if I’m asleep.’
‘You could use the time to repair things. You never know.’
‘I do know, Pete. She wants her Belinda Jane back and she thinks a different time zone is going to do it.’
I’m looking into the front yard. The streetlights glow four-thirty in the morning and everything—the trees, the road, parked cars—has a touch of deep metal-blue. Light sweeps up the street.
‘The taxi’s here.’ I hate saying it.
BJ shoulders her bag, wheels her suitcase to the front door.
‘Don’t come out, Pete, it’s cold.’ It might be spring, but the nights are still wintry. ‘Go back to bed and think of me. With your hands.’ BJ’s eyes are shiny. Mine burn.
‘It feels like goodbye,’ I say.
‘It’s see you soon. Not goodbye.’
We kiss and I don’t want to let her go. There’s a beep.
‘Send me a postcard?’
BJ turns from the front door.
‘Every damn day, you’ll get sick of it. Anyway, I have to come back,’ she says, ‘Thunder’s here.’
33.
BJ’s first postcard arrives on Monday, postmarked Carlton. She must have sent it the Friday before she left. It’s Federation Square.
We discovered we’d been in the crowd there just metres from each other for the Apology. She was with Loz and Justine; I was with Taylor; Ruby was stuck at work but with us on the phone. BJ and I probably threw our tissues in the same bin.
The postcard says only 698 hours to go. Doesn’t seem too long. I’ve lived forty-eight of those hours already.
The library is busy enough to keep my mind in Melbourne. I’m taking public transport and reading, on the way in, on the way home, and I’ve got a good stack of books on my bedside table. The Stone Gods, Tipping the Velvet, About a Girl. We bought them at Hares & Hyenas but we could have got them at any bookshop.
I’m going to pick BJ up from the airport, early on a Wednesday in four weeks. I’m planning to construct a sign, something I can get away with in the all-go business of the airport. Marry me, BJ, it’ll say, in black letters on bright red. It’ll be like we’re starring in our own movie. We can’t get married, it’s against the law, but we can want to. Carole Smart can make her own way home.
After work I come home to a quiet house, a postcard between my teeth, and grapple with my keys, laptop and a surfeit of junk mail. No music blaring. No smell of cigarettes wafting in from the back verandah.
BJ’s empty ashtray and blue disposable lighter are on the kitchen windowsill. Mrs Dalloway twists an infinity symbol round my ankles. She is always hungry. I make her wait while I read the postcard.
Hey, remember that time we ate cornflakes out of the box in the boulevard and saw the sun coming up, up, up?
I stick it on the fridge under my ‘love handles are the new black’ magnet. Pour dry cat food into a bowl and step out of the way.
‘Oh yes, you love me now, don’t you, Mrs D?’
I text Taylor: how’s things or shouldn’t I ask. let’s catch a movie sometime. px
Less than a minute later she replies. no you shouldn’t and yes let’s. x
I ring Ruby: ‘Want to come over for dinner? I’m making risotto.’ Not so much asking as telling. I plan to have dinner with Ruby for the entire month.
‘I’ll be there in forty.’
Ruby lifts the lid of the saucepan, peers through the steam, frowns. She hooks a teaspoon out of the top drawer. Taste test. Screws up her face.
‘Sit down, Queen of Bland, while I try and fix this.’
‘But…’ I sit.
She washes her hands, makes herself at home in my pantry.
‘This is not risotto, Peta. What you have here is a rice dish.’ Ruby at the stove, no recipe needed. ‘And I’m not coming back tomorrow night. I’ve got a date. We’re going to the movies and then I’m going to go to his house and let him have his, what I hope will be dirty and strenuous, way with me.’
She doesn’t talk like that about Mark.
‘Who is he?’
‘A guy from work. Nathan something. He works on the floor above me in Reconciliations. We crack bad Catholic jokes in the lift. He was an altar boy and you know what they say about them.’
I wait. Not even Ruby would make a joke of child abuse.
‘You know, church angel, bedroom devil.’ She sprinkles a handful of parsley across the pearly tops of our full bowls.
‘You made that up.’ I go for the salt, she stops me.
‘Taste it first. Yes, I did. It’s wishful thinking. No, it’s projection. Think it and it will be. He looks fit…’ Ruby swirls parmesan into her risotto, her fork making a ceramic scrape.
‘Do the people at work know you trawl for men in the lifts?’ I have a taste. ‘This is good, Ruby, really good, what did you do?’
‘It’s called seasoning, Pete. I know you’ve heard of it.’
‘So Mark isn’t home then?’
‘Want to go to the movies on Wednesday night?’ she says. ‘See something French?’
‘That’d be great. Want to answer my question?’
‘He’s in Chicago, he left this morning. He’s back on the twenty-seventh. It wouldn’t matter anyway. I never bring anyone back to my place.’
‘And are you still…’
‘Fucking?’
I roll my eyes. ‘Yes, Rube?’
‘Sometimes we do, sometimes we don’t. I think there may be a system, but if there is, I don’t know how it runs.’
34.
Ruby slides a twenty across the counter to the popcorn vendor, her hand out for change that doesn’t materialise. ‘You think you got away with it, don’t you?’
‘What?’
‘Mark. You think you got out unscathed. No bandaids, nothing.’
‘I thought you were taking me out to take my mind off it. What are you talking about?’
‘I mean,’ she scarfs a handful of my popcorn, squashes it into her mouth, making me wait, ‘I mean you seem to have swapped lovers without looking back. Like you’ve changed your favourite colour. Chucked out all your blue stuff, gone on a shopping spree and filled your house with red.’
‘Are you being philosophical? Is there some meaning I’m unable to ascertain in this favourite colour analogy?’
‘Yes. You haven’t cried. You just swapped.’
‘What do you want from me, Ruby?’ I say it softly. If we have to have this discussion in the queue, I’ll try to keep it down.
‘I want you to see you haven’t got away with it.’
‘You make it sound like a robbery.’
The line is slow. We snail-pace it to the head of the queue, show the usher our tickets. I stand in the aisle, Ruby at my shoulder, nudging me: just sit somewhere. We sit. The light fades and the curtain opens.
‘It was a kind of robbery, Pete. And now you’re like Ronald Biggs laughing it up on a beach somewhere.’
‘Are you fucking mental?’
‘Sssh,’ she says with a grin.
‘What do you care? You love this type of thing. You think your life is a movie and you’re the star.’ I’m losing track. ‘I am not Ronald Biggs.’
‘She isn’t, you know,’ a voice from behind, ‘she hasn’t got the tan or the accent.’
Ruby turns towards the voice, her arm on the back of her chair: ‘Pipe down, mate. It’s got nothing to do with you.’
‘Look,’ he says, ‘you’ve got about seven minutes before the movie starts. I’m happy to listen to you fight with Ronald, but when the titles come on I want you two to wrap it up.’
I shrink into my seat.
‘Hear that, Pete? We’ve got seven minutes, or glasses here is going to clock you one. Tell me why you’re not Ronald.’