‘You’re so stupid, Eddie! She could get killed!’ Biddy would hiss. ‘She could be abducted, Eddie.’ A pause. ‘She could drown!’
And there’d be a pause when Dad would see if she was going to apologise and Biddy wouldn’t and they’d keep going round in circles, like each one of them had to have the last word. But the next day, they would just have bags under their eyes and Dad never stopped me running.
It’s an unspoken rule in our house that we never talk about drowning.
***
That afternoon, I ran to Wade’s Point fast, imagining that I was being chased. Wade’s Point was right near Songbrooke, but I wasn’t really thinking about running into Ben. I’d only put lip balm on because of the cold.
Evie had stared at me on my way out. ‘Why’ve you got mascara on to go running?’
‘It keeps my eyes moist!’ I’d snapped, shutting the door and tearing off.
Wade’s Point was a cliff jutting out into the ocean, where two currents hit. No matter the season, there was always lots of spray as the currents and waves crashed together and into the cliffs. Sometimes there were all kinds of strange things thrown up on the rocks. Wreckages of small boats. Wardrobes and bright sandals and, once, a giant painted wooden cut-out of a cartoon character spinning a pizza.
As I ran, I thought about driving. I was going to sit for my licence the day after I turned eighteen. Mum had been that age when she’d sat for hers. You can go for your licence at seventeen in our town, but there was nowhere I needed to be that I couldn’t run to. Dad had looked really confused when I told him about it.
‘The day after your eighteenth, though?’ he’d said. ‘Why? Won’t you want to drink at your eighteenth?’
And I’d pulled a face because I never drank. Cheap beer and vodka reminded me of Mum. It galled me that Dad didn’t know that. Because Mum would’ve. Mum knew everything about me.
The tide was moving in as I ran along the shoreline. Always crashing, always unsettled, even when the sky was clear and the air was still. When she was five, Evie used to say our beach was always in the middle of a tantrum. When I asked her what the sea was throwing the tantrum about, she’d very solemnly said, ‘It needs more chocolate.’
I slowed to a jog and then sat for a while, narrowing my eyes until everything blurred. The mascara stung and I vowed to never wear it again, particularly when I was running.
I wiped at it until my fingers blackened. I tried to make out the shapes of mermaids in the surf. I didn’t believe in them, but I wanted to. It was comforting to think of them out there, watching us from the sea.
By the time I got back to the beach outside our house, Evie was hanging from her favourite tree at the top of the dunes. ‘Gwennie! Gwennie!’ she yelled, jumping down from her branch and barrelling into my stomach in a kind of exuberant wrestle-hug.
‘Get off!’ I shoved her away gently. ‘I’m all sweaty and gross.’
She just grinned.
We walked along the sandy track at the top of the dunes and then crossed the road to our house. We could hear Tyrone’s awful heavy-metal music from outside. Evie shook her head and kicked at the gravel.
‘What?’ I asked.
‘He’s just got no taste in music. It’s sad.’
‘Nope. None at all,’ I said. ‘You wanna know something freaky?’
‘Always.’
‘Well, he offered Loretta and me a lift the other day.’
Evie bit her lip. ‘He’s up to something.’
‘Yeah, I reckon. Keep an eye out, okay?’
‘Okay.’
Biddy and Dad were in the kitchen, chopping up a salad together. There was a big pile of broccoli on the table.
‘You got Glenned,’ I said, sitting down.
‘He was worried about us after the rain,’ Biddy said.
We all winced as Tyrone turned up his music another notch.
‘It sounds like a garbage can being murdered,’ Evie said, rubbing her head.
‘Several,’ said Dad. ‘It sounds like several garbage cans being murdered.’
Evie nodded.
‘You okay?’ Dad asked me. My dad never hovered. Even after everything had happened, he hadn’t hovered. But he was getting close to it since the guy at the café.
‘Fine.’ It wasn’t really lying. I was having trouble sleeping, but that was nothing new. I’d work through it. I always did.
‘You’re sure about quitting?’ he asked more quietly.
‘Yeah.’ I only just managed not to roll my eyes at him. ‘I wouldn’t have quit if I wasn’t sure! When do I ever do anything I’m not sure about? Besides, I’ve got lots of school work to do.’ Which was true; everyone said year twelve was hard, and I’d be starting it next year. I was also just beginning to realise that there were big gaps in what I needed to know in class. I supposed it was to do with Mum and everything, how I’d been distracted for years. Loretta had helped me as much as she could, but it all seemed kind of fuzzy. Particularly maths.
Dad nodded. ‘Thirty by the time you were thirteen,’ he said. He said it sort of jokingly, but it annoyed me. I’d grown up quickly because I had to.
‘Well, I don’t blame you,’ Biddy said. ‘I know they said it was a freak occurrence and he was just passing through, but people are on all sorts of things these days. And that café is all by itself, right on the beach.’
‘It’s not by itself – it’s on the main street!’ I said. ‘I just don’t want to go back. I was bored there, anyway.’
‘Loretta’s going back,’ Dad said.
‘So?’ I replied. ‘Just because Loretta does something doesn’t mean I have to, too.’
Evie snorted. ‘You do everything together.’
‘Well, not this.’ I crossed my arms.
***
Loretta came over as we were finishing dinner. She dumped her turnips on the table. ‘Mum said to get rid of them,’ she told Biddy.
‘So you brought them here?’
‘Please! Please take them. It’s bad juju to throw them out.’ Loretta pulled a very sad face. ‘I’ll do all the dishes from dinner if you take them!’
Biddy chuckled. ‘Deal.’
‘Thank you.’ Loretta bounced over and grabbed the closest tea towel. We were quiet, listening to the sound of Biddy and Dad pulling on their jackets and heading out for a walk around the block. Loretta thought it was cute, but to me it always seemed so stupid that they walked along the streets and not the beach.
‘You still not sleeping?’ Loretta asked as I filled the sink and started loading it up with plates.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Not sleeping. Not well, anyway.’
‘Remember when you were really little and couldn’t sleep? You kept a diary.’
I shrugged. Tyrone came in and Loretta started handing him plates and he began putting them away, without a word.
‘You should keep one again,’ Loretta said. ‘It’ll help you sleep.’
‘Keep what?’ asked Tyrone.
‘I’m too tired, Rets.’ I didn’t want to tell her that I’d started keeping the diary again. That, weirdly enough, I’d written the first entry just before I went to work the day the man had smashed all the windows at the café. That Mum had popped into my head and wouldn’t budge and now I couldn’t stop thinking about her. I didn’t want to explain to Loretta that I was writing whatever came to me about Mum and everything. That none of it made sense the way a diary was supposed to make it.
‘Give it a go, okay?’
‘Give what a go?’ Tyrone asked.
‘Don’t be a stickybeak,’ Loretta said.
‘You’re such a pain,’ I told her. ‘Alright. I’ll keep the stupid diary.’
Tyrone reached down next to me to put the big bowl under the sink. ‘Bottle of vodka should do it. Put you to sleep, I mean.’
‘Ha-ha. We’re not all eighteen, you know.’
Loretta handed Tyrone a glass. ‘Shouldn’t you be out with your idiot mates?’ she asked archly.
/> ‘Nah. Getting up early for a surf.’
‘You don’t surf though.’ Loretta rubbed at one of the glasses until it sparkled. ‘You just bob around out there like a cork.’
‘So what? If you’re on a surfboard it’s surfing.’
‘The surf kids at school would kill you for saying that! Anyway, you have to catch waves for it to be surfing.’
‘Do not,’ Tyrone said.
‘Do too!’
‘Do not! What would you know anyway? The closest you come to surfing is living on the same block as the surf shop!’
I let the water out of the sink and flopped down at the island bench, listening to the two of them bickering and wondering about the man at the café and smashing glass and mostly about Ben, who was just down the road at Songbrooke.
***
FROM THE DIARY OF GWENDOLYN P. PEARSON
Years ago, after everything happened, I had dreams. Unhappy dreams of water and big swell, tossing me around until I couldn’t breathe. Even though what had happened wasn’t anything to do with the waves. And I listened to the wind, coming wildly in from the sea, and wished more than anything that those dreams would go away.
Since the guy at the café, they’re back. It’s why I can’t sleep properly.
I’ve had the dreams for a long time. For a while, after Dad and I moved in with Biddy and Tyrone and everything felt off balance and wrong, Biddy read every trauma and psychology textbook she could find.
She went through a phase of luring me into the kitchen with large blocks of chocolate that my mum, even when she was going through her worst patches, had never let me have. And Biddy would ask me questions about how I was feeling and if I was angry and how would I like to express my true self today?
It almost made me hate chocolate; the stickiness of it in my mouth, on my fingers, as she pried and pried and pried.
‘I don’t want to talk about it!’ I’d yell through a mouthful of claggy, half-melted chocolate.
‘But why don’t you want to talk about it?’
One day she shoved a notebook and pencils at me. ‘Why don’t you draw it all, instead?’
I wrote ‘I hate Miss Banks’ over and over again, even though I didn’t really mean it. Still, Biddy had got the message after that.
The problem with Biddy is that she doesn’t keep secrets very secret. I told her about Mum dancing in the garden one time and she brought it up, over and over, for months afterwards. Dad says it’s because I didn’t tell her enough, but why would I want to tell her anything when I know I’ll never hear the end of it?
I know that Dad will have told her all sorts of secrets that are really just his and mine, seeing as Jamie and Mum aren’t here, anymore. It’s part of what makes me uneasy around her, wondering what she knows.
What Dad has told her.
CHAPTER THREE
The next morning, I got up slowly, blinking quickly, like the sound of the waves and the dark were something that could be smudged away. I pulled on my grossest running shoes and my warmest jumper and walked towards the beach. I was quite a way down the shore before I felt okay enough to run. I kept glancing around, hoping to see the woman from Songbrooke on her horse, or maybe even a particular new boy, but the beach was empty. I was still feeling unsettled after my strange, dreamy night. I felt it in my feet, which wouldn’t move as swiftly as I wanted them to. I felt it in my shoulders, which pinched and caught as I swung my arms.
On the other side of the point, there was a beautiful little cove hemmed in by steep cliff faces. It was the nicest place to zone out for a bit. It felt so calm after the chaos of the point. After I’d struggled along the narrow path that only Loretta and I knew about, up and over the steepest section of cliff, I would always sit and stare out at the ocean. Loretta didn’t like the climb much, but she did a lot of things to make me happy.
I loved the cove. I loved the strange, hollow sounds of the wind and the way the waves didn’t know which way to break along the sand. I loved the cliffs, sheltering the cove from the worst of the weather. Sometimes I felt like it was a place I’d always known, like it meant something to me, but I could never work out what.
I had never seen another footprint in the cove. Even though it was close to Songbrooke, there was no way down from the boundary line to the cove. I was always on edge in the middle of summer, worried that the townies would poke around and find it. I was worried that it wouldn’t feel the same, afterwards.
I sat for a while, trying to blur the shape of the waves into mermaids, the way I always did. Then I headed home to get ready for school, walking and jogging. I felt too ragged to run.
Back at home, Dad was sitting at the kitchen bench, watching cricket replays on the television in the next room. Evie was next to him with a half-eaten bowl of cornflakes, scribbling into a diary, with her tongue poking out of her mouth. As I walked past, I saw only two words. TYRONE REVENJ. She was decorating the rest of the page with footballs and angry faces.
I made myself a coffee. That was another thing Biddy and I butted heads over. She thought coffee was like booze – you didn’t touch it until you were eighteen. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that sometimes my mum had ordered me my own cappuccino when we went out for coffee. One for Jamie too, if he wanted it.
Anyway, it wasn’t exactly poor parenting letting me drink coffee at seventeen. I made my coffee black and winced as it scalded my tongue. I didn’t actually like the taste of it. Not that I’d ever tell anyone.
I had a shower and got dressed, except for my shoes. I couldn’t find any of them and knew that I’d never hear the end of it if I wore my stinky old running shoes to school. They smelled like fish and seaweed and wet feet. Out on the beach was fine, but not even I wanted to be stuck in a classroom with them.
‘Evie?’ I called, sitting back on my heels after checking under my bed.
‘Yeah?’ She popped out of the bathroom, hair in plaits, brushing her teeth.
‘Where are all my shoes? Did you move them?’
‘No.’ She darted back into the bathroom and I heard her spit and rinse.
‘Evie!’ I snapped. ‘Where are my shoes?’
She came back into my bedroom with toothpaste on her cheek. ‘Tyrone said you’d ask that.’
‘Did he just?’
‘He said to tell you to look up.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
Evie shrugged, clearly pleased that Tyrone had launched an attack at me and not her. I made a growling noise. There was nothing on my ceiling. I touched the top of my wardrobe, but there was nothing up there, either. Grumbling, I went into the kitchen.
‘I need my shoes!’ I yelled.
Dad looked startled. ‘What? You leave ’em somewhere?’
‘Tyrone’s done something with them!’ I said. ‘I’m going to be late!’
‘Maybe check outside? He was outside a lot before he left. Come to think of it, he looked very pleased with himself when he came in.’
I groaned. Tyrone looking pleased with himself was never a good thing. Outside, our garden was overgrown and salty and as cold as the beach had been.
‘Crap,’ I muttered. Tyrone had managed to get all my shoes up into the huge pine tree that took up most of our backyard. Every single one of them was out of reach. I heard the door open behind me.
‘Wow,’ said Evie, thoroughly impressed.
‘He’s ingenious when he wants to be,’ Dad said, supremely unruffled by the sight of his daughter’s entire shoe collection dangling in the backyard.
‘I’m going to be late!’ I wailed.
‘Okay, okay. Take it easy. I’ll get the ladder and get them down and you go finish getting ready, okay?’
‘Won’t that make you late?’ I asked.
‘Nah, I’ll be right.’
‘Thanks, Dad.’
My phone rang as I was scraping my hair up into a bun. I glanced down at the Loretta text that had just arrived. What r u bringing for family tree day? Mum’s making m
e take a giant ducking portrait of Grandma. I CAN’T EVEN LIFT IT, SHE IS DRIVING ME TO SCHOOL.
‘Oh, no.’ It was a history assignment. Our teacher was trying to bring history to life, so we had to bring in a photo of a relative who’d passed away and tell a story about them. We all thought it was the stupidest assignment ever, but most of us needed to get an okay mark to pass history. Ms Handson was a very hard marker.
We didn’t have many photos in the house. Mostly, the walls were crowded with artwork. The only photo I could find was the one taken of my mum back when she was a kid. It sat on the mantel. I stood, staring at it, until Evie came up and pinched me.
‘Rack off!’
‘You’re going to be late! Mum wants to know if you need a lift?’
I turned away from the photo. I couldn’t take it. Mum existed only in small pockets, now. And it felt wrong to take her out of them. ‘I’m right to walk. See you later.’
‘Shoes, as ordered,’ Dad said, dropping ten pairs of shoes into the middle of the living room. I yanked my school shoes out of the pile and quickly laced them up.
‘Thanks, Dad,’ I said. ‘Do you have any photos of Nanna? Or anyone? It’s an emergency.’
Dad blinked at me and disappeared into the bedroom. He came out with a handful of photos. Biddy’s family. Biddy’s grandmother. Biddy squinting into the sun in an unfamiliar town. ‘It’s all I can find,’ he said.
‘Thanks,’ I said, stuffing them in my pocket. I didn’t look at Mum’s photo as I ran out the front door. It felt like a betrayal.
***
Everyone was glazing over in history class. The presentations had sounded as though they’d be pretty interesting, but they really weren’t. People told meandering stories and even Ms Handson was yawning by the end of the second one. There were a few grainy photos of people’s grandparents and great uncles in army uniforms. Angela’s was the only appealing one – she showed pictures of her grandmother growing up in India, before the family had come to Australia, and talked about how she used to steal flowers from a mean neighbour. Amber and Ben were exempt, because it was their first week and they hadn’t had time to prepare, as though anyone in the class had prepared anything other than grabbing the closest photo on their way out the door this morning.
P is for Pearl Page 4