by Anne Davies
It was Gary’s birthday, and I was at his place for the night along with the boys in our class. We were lying around on sleeping bags in his old shed, and we had pizzas and cool drinks and a stack of DVDs. We’d already watched two, but they were pretty stupid.
“Have you got The Hunger Games?” I asked.
“Nah,” said Gary, squinting at me with his good eye. “Wish I did.”
“I’ve got it,” I said. “I’ll nick home and grab it.” I was already halfway out the door. Katy wasn’t home that night either—she’d gone over to stay at her friend’s place—but Mum would be able to let me in. I jogged slower as I got close to home. Bugger, she must be out. There were no lights on anywhere, but Reid’s car was in the drive. They must be there unless they’d gone out somewhere close—maybe to Mrs Brockman’s.
I walked up the side of the house in the darkness and tried the back door. Yahoo! It wasn’t locked, so I opened it, ducked into my room and grabbed the DVD.
As I was feeling my way out the back door again after I’d flicked off the light, I froze. Mum’s laugh came high and clear from her room. A man’s laugh, low and gruff, chimed in with hers. There was no light under the door. His laugh. Mum’s room. Within a heartbeat, it was all clear. I wasn’t stupid. I knew what was going on.
I moved as quietly as I could, and once I was safely outside, I leant against the back wall and slid down till I was sitting on the ground. My heart was hammering, my thoughts were whirling around and my stomach was churning.
As I calmed down, one part of my brain was telling me, Well, what did you expect? Dad’s gone, Ray Reid’s here all the time, they go out every weekend, and they like each other—so what? and while I knew this was all very sensible, that thought was soon pushed away by a rage of disgust that had no words at all.
I got to my feet and walked slowly to Gary’s. Surprised, the boys swivelled their heads and looked at me as I came through the shed door.
“Jeez, Luca, where’ve you been? We thought you must have decided to stop home or you got into trouble with your mum or something.”
“No, I just took ages to find the DVD. Let’s watch it now.”
They all chorused agreement, and I handed the disc to Gary. A few boys wriggled over, and I settled down amongst the chip wrappers, the empty cans and the smell of pizza to watch the movie. I don’t think I saw any of it. I was too busy with my own sickening movie running through my head.
Ray Reid was still there when I got home in the late morning the next day. He was stretched out on the veranda in Dad’s cane chair with his big, bare feet on a stool. Mum was near him, and they were drinking coffee as they read bits of the Sunday paper. Mum looked up as I came through the gate. “Good party, love?”
I nodded curtly and kept walking towards the door to go inside, but her voice stopped me.
“Luca, could you just come and sit here for a minute, please?”
I frowned, dropped my bag loudly on the step and sat down on the edge of the veranda. As I did, Katy came wandering around from the back yard, munching an apple. Mum turned.
“Katy. Good. Sit down for a sec.”
Katy finished the apple, even the core, leaving just the woody bit at the top like I always did, flicked it into a bush, plonked down beside me and leant back on the veranda post.
“What’s up, Mum?” she said, licking her fingers.
“Nothing’s up,” Mum said, glancing sideways across to Reid. “Well, nothing’s wrong anyway. In fact, everything’s great.”
Could have fooled me, Mother dear, I felt like saying, but I sat there silently.
Looking all pink and smiley, Mum said, “Ray’s asked me to marry him, and I’ve said yes.”
There was a silence. No, that word doesn’t explain what there was. I could hear a crow way off, doing his five-call cry. Why is it nearly always five? I thought, and I remember following this thought almost excitedly. Had I cracked some secret bird code of communication?
Katy pushed her foot slowly against mine. I flicked my eyes across at her, and she widened hers at me. She was as stunned as I was.
“What do you think?” Mum said, her voice urgent and breathy. We both turned to her, and Katy slid her foot away from me. Reid was looking at us both too (me mostly) with a crease of—anger? concern? smugness?—on his forehead.
“Aren’t you still married to Dad?” I croaked.
Mum shifted in the chair and licked her lips. “The divorce came through last week. That’s what we were both waiting for.”
Waiting for. Like you wait for the Royal Show or your birthday or a holiday. Waiting to finally wipe off Dad. I got to my feet awkwardly. “Does that mean you’ll be here all the time? You’ll live here?”
“We’ll live in Geraldton,” said Reid. “That’s where I work, and that’s where high school is for you two. Plus,” he said, reaching his hand across to Mum’s knee, “that’s where your mum wants to live too. There’s nothing keeping us here.”
Katy piped up. “I love Geraldton. Luca, we’ll be able to go to the beach every day after school.”
I turned to her, shocked at the traitor she had become. “This is our home, Katy,” I said, hating the wobble in my voice. “All our friends are here. This is where we’ve always lived.”
Mum broke in with a note of irritation in her voice. “All your friends will be going to school there, Luca. There’s no high school here! You’ll see them every day.”
I looked down at my hands, surprised to see them trembling.
Katy got up. “Gee, are you going to have a big wedding?” She sounded excited. It made me sick.
Reid laughed and said, “That’s up to your mum, but I don’t think so. Just us and a few friends. My sister, of course, and a few people from work.”
“Would you like to be my bridesmaid?” I heard Mum say.
Katy gasped. “Oh, Mum, that would be great!” She jumped up and hugged Mum, and then, in front of me, she kind of skipped across and hugged Reid! I saw his freckly arms go around Katy, and I knew it was done. Once we moved from here, it would be as though Dad and our old life had never existed.
Anger surged through me at Dad. Why did you go so easily? Why didn’t you sell the house and move us all away from that toad? Mum would have been fine. She just got unhappy that you were away all the time and you were so cranky and tired when you were here. I started imagining what it could have been like—the four of us, maybe in Geraldton. Dad could have gotten a job there, and everything would have been like before. We would have been our old four-wheeled machine again.
But even as the pictures formed in my mind, I could hear Katy and Mum laughing and Ray’s voice chiming in, and I realised there was a new machine now. I just wasn’t part of it.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I came home from school a few days later, and a ‘For Sale’ sign had been hammered onto the fence. I wondered whether Dad would get any money when the house was sold. I supposed he wouldn’t, but then if he cared about the house, he wouldn’t have walked out of it so easily.
Katy was sitting on the edge of the veranda, swinging her legs and soaking up the sun. She had both arms stretched behind her like props, and her face was turned up to the sun. She was smiling a little and singing some tuneless little song. She looked so relaxed and happy that she made me feel good just looking at her.
“Howdy,” she grinned, her eyes still closed.
“How did you know it was me? It could have been a murderer or a dog.”
“I could say I smelt you,” she giggled, “but I just know the way you walk. We’re going to Geraldton tomorrow.”
“What for?”
She opened her eyes and shot a look at me. “Mum and Ray have seen a house they like, and they want to show it to us to see what we think.”
I laughed, a short, derisive blast of contempt. “Yeah, like they really give a crap what we care.”
She pushed herself up till she was looking straight at me. Funny how much she was starting to look lik
e Mum. “Give it a rest, Luca. It’s gonna happen, and it’ll be heaps better than here. We won’t have to catch a bus every day, there’s more to do in Geraldton, and we’ll have a nicer house than this old dump.”
“I like this house,” I said, staring back at her just as hard as she was glaring at me. “It’s our home.”
“Well, not for much longer,” she sniffed, sliding down off the veranda. “Besides, it was never Ray’s house. It’s natural that he wants to live in his own place with his own wife.”
“Not his own wife!” I yelled as she turned away from me. “He didn’t have ‘his own wife’; he came and took Dad’s.”
She turned and looked at me but kept walking away. “Sing another song, Luca. That one’s boring.”
Furious, I ran at her retreating back and shoved her as hard as I could. She sprawled face down into the gravel and lay there. The only sound in that horrible silence was my harsh breathing, and then she pushed herself up, brushed off the bits of gravel sticking into her hands and legs, and turned to look at me. Her nose was bleeding, and blood was trickling from both knees. I couldn’t move; I’d never done anything like that before to anyone, let alone to her. We stared at each other, and then I heard the wire door bang.
“Katy! What on earth…” It was Mum, standing there, drying her hands on a tea towel.
“It’s nothing, Mum,” Katy said. “I just stacked it.”
Mum jumped down from the veranda and put her arms around Katy. “Come in, and I’ll put something on your knees and face. Oh, Katy, look at those hands! ”
They stood there, Mum’s back to me, her T-shirt loose over her tight jeans, and Katy’s eyes burning into mine over Mum’s shoulder. I wanted to run and put my arms around her too, even around Mum, so that everything would be good again and we’d laugh and go inside and have something luscious to eat and that warm, happy feeling of belonging would come back. But of course, I didn’t move, and Katy’s eyes closed as Mum turned her towards the house and they both climbed up the steps slowly and disappeared through the door.
That night in bed, I could see that Katy’s bed lamp was on. I thought that she must have been reading or on her laptop in bed. I lay there, willing myself to say the words, and then out they came.
“Sorry, Katy.”
There was no answer. I thought she must have gone to sleep and left the light on, but a couple of minutes later, the room clicked into darkness. I lay there feeling cold. I was alone, and it was all my fault. I looked at the clouds scudding across the inky darkness. The moon shone clearly through my window, and I looked down at the white sheet covering me. I only seemed to make a small bump in the moonlight. I wished we were younger and Katy would come snuggling under the covers with me again as my other half. We made a fairly big bump together, but alone, I saw I was nothing.
If Katy had been caught in the middle, somewhere between understanding how I felt and at the same time understanding Mum, it was over. The lines were drawn. We talked again almost normally after a few days, but something was gone. The impossible had happened. Katy and I, once two sides of the same coin, were separate people.
*
We got into the back of Ray Reid’s car the next day with him and Mum up the front like they were married already and drove to Geraldton. We went down the gravel road and then left past the Greenough flats, where the trees, bent almost to the ground by the strong sea winds, looked like women on a battlefield stretching towards the ground, looking at their dead, their shapes fluid and gaunt. We drove past them and past the farms scattered along the way till the houses started appearing near the road instead of set well back like the farms. The houses clustered thicker until we were in the town itself.
We drove through the main street, out past the memorial, and there, half-way up a hill, was a two-storey house with a ‘For Sale’ sign and a short, fat man in a suit standing out the front. Reid pulled into the drive, and we got out. I turned away from the house and saw that there was a clear view of the ocean curving away from both sides of the marina.
I trailed along behind as we went through the house, with Katy and Mum ooh-ing and ah-ing at every turn. I had to grudgingly admit it was a nice place: there were four bedrooms and big windows at the front where you could see above the roof across to the ocean, which stretched away to the horizon, the sun glittering off the crest of each ripple. I sat down on the front step and gazed at that view and then got up and sat in the car. No matter how nice it was, I didn’t want anything from him, although I imagined the money from the sale of our house—the house Dad had bought—would come at least part of the way to covering the cost of this one. Katy came bursting out of the front door, and Mum and Reid stood talking to the fat agent.
“Isn’t it amazing, Luca?” Katy called out to me. “We’ve got our own bedrooms with a bathroom just for us in-between. I love it!” She ran in circles on the lawn like a little kid. I turned away in disgust. Well, he’s bought her, that’s for sure—and from the smile on Mum’s face, the deal’s done.
We packed up to move six weeks later. It was frightening how small the pile of packing boxes was from our home when we left. With the shed empty of Dad’s stuff, there was really only our clothes and a bit of kitchen stuff.
“We’re going to have all new stuff,” Reid said one night after tea. “New lounges, new tables, chairs, beds, everything—for a new life.” Katy and Mum sat snuggled up on the lounge, going through a pile of those house and garden-type magazines, their voices murmuring with the turn of each page.
We started high school two weeks before we moved, so we had those weeks of riding the bus to school with our friends. We’d clamber on each morning and rattle off down the road, past the waist-high wheat and past the dried pasture land dotted with clusters of dirty-white sheep and brown and white cows, skirting the main part of town till the bus pulled up outside the school gates. We’d jump down the steps, keen to be moving. Gary and I stuck together, feeling conspicuous in our crisp new uniforms and longing for them to look rumpled and worn-in like the older kids seemed to be.
The first day, we were gathered together onto a grass quadrangle, and then in a long, tedious calling out of names, we were allocated to various classes according to how smart the teachers thought we were. My name was called out early, and I went into the top class. I glanced across at Katy, but her head was down. She was clearly going into a lower class.
Luckily, a few kids I knew were in my class, so we grabbed desks near each other. Part of me longed for the familiarity of my old school, but the sense of strangeness here was overcome by the excitement of change. I had thought I’d feel grown up going to high school, but we were at the bottom of the food chain here. The other boys were big and loud, and a lot of the girls looked like women, gathered in squealing groups or walking quietly in pairs.
Within a week, though, I felt more comfortable. The moving from room to room and teacher to teacher took a bit of getting used to, but as I got to know my way around, I started enjoying it.
We moved soon after. The last thing I packed into the trailer was the tool chest Dad had left me. It was too heavy for me to lift alone, so I lay a cloth down on the shed floor and carefully put the heavier things on it. As I dragged the chest awkwardly towards the trailer, Reid came out into the backyard.
“Here, give that to me,” he said.
“I’m okay,” I mumbled. As I walked back to the shed to pick up the other tools, I realised he was behind me. I crouched down on the ground, wrapping the cloth around the tools to carry them out too.
“Just a minute, Luca. I want to talk to you.”
I stood, Dad’s long Philips screwdriver still in my hand, and turned to face Ray. He’d never been in here as far as I knew, and I hated that he was leaning so casually on Dad’s old bench.
“I’ve just about had enough of you. You’d better change your tune, or things are not going to be too good for you when we move. I don’t have to put up with a bad-mannered little shit in my own home.”
“I have to put up with you in mine,” I answered as calmly as I could.
Ray took a step towards me, his fists clenched by his side and his face twisted in a sneer. “That precious father of yours should have given you a few clips around the ear to knock that attitude out of you.”
“Don’t you mention my father,” I growled, starting to breathe hard. “I had no ‘attitude’, as you call it, with him.” I was panting now. “And you shouldn’t even mention him. You didn’t know him, never met him. All you did was sneak in here like a mangy dog when his back was turned.” I couldn’t believe what I had said, but it felt so good saying it.
Ray stepped closer, and his hand shot out. I was slammed into the tin wall of the shed with a clang, and I fell to my knees. My head was spinning, but I stood up and faced him, the screwdriver turned towards him and my arm raised.
“Keep away from me!” I rasped. Hot tears of rage mixed with pain blurred my vision for a minute, but I brushed them quickly away. We stood there, facing each other, his fist still up and my screwdriver pointing right at his stomach. I saw the fury in his face, the redness spreading down his neck, and the seconds ticked on, our breathing loud but slowing in the cool dimness.
His fist dropped. “You just go on thinking he was such a saint. Where is he now? How much of a father was he just to take off and never see you or your sister again? How much do you think he cares about you if he doesn’t even bother to pick up a phone and talk to you, let alone actually come and see you?”
There was no answer. What could I say? The pain of hearing those words actually said out loud was worse than the throbbing in my face and neck.
“He just slid out of here like a mangy dog,” Ray said slowly, a nasty little grin on his face. “Who’s really the dog, eh?”
I lunged blindly at him, my hand tight on the screwdriver. He leapt to one side and shoved me hard. I fell awkwardly, and then I felt his big body crushing me under him, one hand pushing the side of my face into the rough floor of the shed, the other one holding my wrist. The iron taste of blood was in my mouth, but the greatest pain was in my hand. He’d bent my fingers back till I could hold on no longer, and the screwdriver slid to the ground. He flicked the screwdriver away and twisted my arm up behind my back, his hot breath blasting me as he shoved his face down to my ear.