‘Where’s he from?’ Louise whispered in Alice’s ear.
‘I heard Sydney.’ Alice tried not to look over towards the new boy.
Dean McRae’s arrival at Lawson High School had caused quite a stir. To look at he was like any other teenage boy – limbs that seemed too long for his scrawny body, shirt untucked, hair in need of a good brush. The only real difference between him and the other boys in school was, simply, that he was new.
‘Well, I heard he got kicked out of his old school.’
‘Someone,’ Alice turned her head ever so slightly to sneak a peek, ‘said his mum bought the old Richards place.’
‘Well, my mum said he was only going to be here a month.’
And Louise’s mum would probably know. She knew everything about everyone in town. Not that that was hard.
Nothing ever changed at Lawson High, population 125. The principal had been a teacher there when Alice’s mum was a student. Alice sat in a chair for English that had her dad’s name carved into the back of it. When Louise’s mum got behind on the washing Louise would wear her mum’s old uniform and, aside from the missing piping on the shirt pocket, no one could tell the difference. The last time anything exciting happened was five years ago, when Alice and Louise had started high school and Brian, Louise’s twin brother, blew up the science lab and chemistry had to be done in the hall. The same hall that Louise’s grandfather had built. Not a lot happened at Lawson High. Not until Dean McRae showed up. Population 126.
‘He’s kinda cute,’ Louise said.
‘You reckon?’ He certainly didn’t compare to any of the guys from Silverchair, whose faces were plastered all over her maths exercise book.
Louise shrugged her tiny shoulders. Alice was always jealous of Louise’s small frame. Not that she was big herself, but compared to her best friend she always felt like a giant. Compared to her best friend, well, Alice wasn’t anything special at all. Her curly brown hair, which she tried to tame into plaits, was no match for Louise’s thick golden strands that cascaded down her back. Alice’s boring brown eyes never sparkled like Louise’s blue. And Alice always felt awkward manoeuvring her less than elegant frame anywhere near Louise’s graceful body. If only Louise was taller, she could have been a model. Still. It meant no one ever paid Alice much attention, and she liked it like that.
The bell rang loudly and the girls headed off to maths.
Taking their seats together up the back of the room, Alice grabbed out of her bag the answers to the homework she knew her friend wouldn’t have finished. Louise didn’t ask for them like she usually did, though, and Alice followed her gaze. Dean had entered the room and was looking for a spare chair. He held his hessian backpack in one hand and smiled at Wendy Dobson, who no one ever sat next to, or smiled at really. The girl with the boy haircut slid to the left to make room and Dean sat next to her.
Louise turned her head back to Alice, her eyes wide with disbelief.
Alice knew how much the new boy sitting next to Wendy Dobson would have irked her friend. She handed Louise the homework she’d done for her. Ever since Year Six, when Mr Nash threatened to repeat Louise and keep her from going to high school, Alice had helped her friend with her schoolwork. She turned and looked out the window, only half listening to Ms Robertson go over the previous day’s trigonometry that most of the class had struggled with. She’d finished the homework in one night and read two chapters ahead. Maths was her favourite subject, after all. Not because she found it easy, which she did, but because it gave her the chance to look across the school playground and into Faraway Forest. With equations she could solve in her sleep scrawled across the board in dusty chalk, Alice could stare outside and imagine herself walking past the trees through her very own Narnia-esque portal leading not to a land of magical creatures trapped in permanent winter, but to the skyscrapers and heaving crowds of Sydney 700 kilometres away.
Anytime anything happened on the news it happened in Sydney. Anytime Alice read about a successful entrepreneur, they’d found their fortune in Sydney. Anyone who was anyone came from Sydney. The view from the maths room was a chance for Alice to travel through Faraway Forest all the way to magical Sydney, so very, very far from Lawson’s Ridge, and imagine the day she’d get there herself.
‘So, Alice?’ Ms Robertson stood in front of Alice’s desk.
She quickly looked up to the board and scanned the problem Ms Robertson was seeking the answer to.
‘So x is greater than fifteen,’ Alice replied.
‘Thank you, Miss Pond.’ Ms Robertson casually opened Alice’s notebook and tapped the blank page. ‘So . . .’ she continued as she walked back to the front of the class.
Alice scribbled down the equation and the solution and let her pencil drift to the side of the page where she drew flowers and butterflies floating over the top of a somewhat crooked Opera House.
‘You coming?’ Louise asked, nudging her. Alice hadn’t even heard the bell.
‘Hold your horses.’ Alice packed up her books.
‘Did you see the way Wendy was batting her eyelids at that McRae boy all lesson?’ Louise leaned across the table.
‘Hadn’t noticed.’
But clearly Louise had. She always noticed the boys. Ever since they were little. And they always noticed her back. Alice remembered Louise’s first crush, aged five, when she followed Andy Johnson all round kindergarten, sitting next to him every recess, every lunch, sharing her food with him. When Andy Johnson’s family left town, Louise cried for a whole twenty seconds before deciding Billy Trainor was more to her liking. Aged eight, it was Mark Kelly. Aged nine Greg Fletcher. And then she discovered that letting the boys chase her was a lot more fun and, by the time they were sixteen, Alice spent a lot of time watching Louise be pursued by various boys till they won the chase and she’d get bored and move on. Dean McRae was the first new prospect to pass through Lawson’s Ridge in a long time and Louise was certainly going to notice.
Taking her usual route home from school, Alice approached Faraway Forest. No one else called it that, of course. No one else called it anything, really. ‘The scrub by the school’ was probably the most common way to refer to the few clumps of trees, the scattering of messy bushes, the overgrown grasses covering the forlorn stretch of land on the other side of the schoolyard. If anyone bothered to refer to it all. Alice had taken to calling it Faraway Forest when she was ten and had discovered the red ironbark in the very centre of the green and brown tangle. That was when her mum got sick. With slender, pointed green leaves dripping from pale branches that reached out from a sturdy black trunk, her ironbark produced flowers that, to a young girl, looked like red fairy tutus. Alice would climb up a few branches and make a perch. From there she’d drop her fairies, twirling and dancing through the scrub beneath, down into tiny pixie villages. The trails in the grasses turned into highways along which magical elves could travel, the rocks into secret caves tiny trolls patrolled. Even before she’d learned the tree was impervious to the hottest of fires, she’d always felt safe there. And as time wore on Alice needed to feel safe. For eight years she’d sought shelter sitting in her old friend, the tree.
‘Hello, mate.’ She put her scuffed black school shoes on the rock that allowed her to reach the fallen branch caught between the unusual twin trunks of her tree and from there she hoisted herself further up. She settled on the ironbark’s lowest limb, strong and thick, and leaned against the ridged trunk. It wasn’t time to go home just yet.
‘Hey up there.’
Alice looked down to see the new boy standing in front of her tree, legs astride, fists on hips.
‘Hey.’
‘Is that a private branch, or can anyone join?’
Before Alice had a chance to tell him it was, in fact, a very private branch, he’d scaled the trunk and was sitting beside her.
‘Hi.’ He smiled at her as she inched away a little, her eyes cast down. ‘You go to my school, right? Or, I go to yours is more like it.’
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Alice pointed to the school crest on her white blouse and rolled her eyes.
‘I’m Dean. Dean McRae.’ He held out his hand.
Alice looked up to answer and her breath caught in her throat. Gazing back at her were eyes so blue, so bright, she almost slid off the branch.
‘Whoa, steady there,’ Dean said, catching her. ‘Don’t climb trees much, hey?’
‘Actually,’ Alice coughed, ‘all the time. Just not used to sharing my branch with anyone.’
‘Your branch?’
Alice shrugged.
‘So, have you got a name? You know, so if anyone asks if they can come up here I can say, no, this branch belongs to . . .’
‘Alice.’
‘This branch belongs to Alice. Nice to meet you, Alice.’
Alice tried to think of a way to get rid of the trespasser. ‘I heard you were booted out of your old school.’
Dean laughed. ‘Really? What else are they saying about me?’
‘Lots of things.’
‘Well, I guarantee you the reality isn’t anywhere near as interesting as the gossip.’
Alice frowned. He certainly didn’t speak like a streetwise thug, one of the many rumours already swirling. He also didn’t seem like the delinquent son of a rich politician sent far away so as not to hurt daddy’s campaign.
‘So, what is the truth, then?’
‘Just a boring old divorce.’ He looked down, avoiding eye contact for the first time since plonking himself on her branch. ‘Mum and Dad’s. Not mine.’ He looked up and grinned, a dimple in his left cheek appearing.
Alice giggled. Alice rarely giggled and she wasn’t sure she was okay with him being the reason she did.
‘What’s this town like?’ Dean looked at her and she had to turn away.
‘It’s as boring as it seems. Nothing compared to Sydney. Must be a real shock coming out here.’
‘It’s not that bad.’
‘Give it time.’
‘What’s not to love? Quiet streets, friendly locals.’ He winked at Alice.
‘There’s no theatre, no shopping, no nightclubs, no decent sporting events, no beaches.’
‘Okay, I’ll give you no beaches,’ Dean nodded, ‘but Sydney isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.’
‘I doubt that.’
‘Well, I’ve never been to a nightclub or the theatre. And shopping isn’t exactly my thing.’
Alice giggled again.
‘And there are some pretty dodgy parts of Sydney, you know.’ Dean lowered his voice.
She nodded. Of course she’d heard about places like Kings Cross. Who hadn’t? But surely even seedy underbelly action was more exciting than no action at all.
‘Speaking of which, Alice of the Branch.’ He bumped her shoulder with his. ‘Is it safe to be wandering around here on your own?’
‘Ah, yeah. Seriously, nothing ever happens in Lawson’s Ridge. Good or bad. Absolutely nothing.’ She shook her head. ‘But I probably should be heading home.’
When Dean didn’t move she cleared her throat.
‘Right, yes,’ he said, and climbed to the ground.
As Alice reached the bottom she lost her footing and stumbled. Dean grabbed her hands.
‘You okay?’ he asked.
Alice nodded, unsure of why she was suddenly unable to speak. She turned and ran towards home.
When Alice got to her front lawn, she picked up the newspaper that had been delivered, set Gus, the gnome, back to standing and brushed the dirt off his orange checked trousers. Harry Brown always liked to target poor Gus on his paper run and his accuracy had improved dramatically in the last six months. She raked the gum leaves that noisy cockatoos had broken off from the large eucalypt that stood guard outside her house. The house with the neatest front yard in the street. The house with seven gnomes neatly on display that showed no signs of the truth inside.
‘Today is going to be a good day,’ her dad had said that morning. ‘I can feel it, Tadpole.’ He’d rubbed her shoulders.
‘Me too,’ she’d said. Every morning he said it. Every morning she believed him.
Turning the key slowly, Alice opened her front door with a gentle push. She closed it softly behind her and went into the living room where her dad would be, just like he was every afternoon. Littered on the floor beside the brown sofa were empty beer cans. Alice didn’t bother to count them. She used to. She’d make a game of it – predict each afternoon how many there’d be and congratulate herself when she got it right. For a short time she even kept a chart inside her closet to track how close she got. But there hadn’t been any point lately. Thirteen. It had been thirteen every afternoon for the last few months. And the monotony had only reinforced how pathetic her situation was, so she’d stopped.
Alice grabbed a garbage bag out of the kitchen drawer and put the cans inside. She slipped her dad’s shoes from his feet and pulled the blanket over him. He was snoring softly and she kissed his lined forehead, brushing his greying fringe aside. One day he’d come back to her.
She made herself a cheese sandwich, one slice no butter, and cleared a space at the dining table to do her homework. When her English essay was finished, Alice changed into her pyjamas, checked on her dad, who was still safely snoring, and crawled into bed. She pulled the photo of her mum out of her bedside drawer and held it in front of her.
‘School was good today. Ms Robertson has given me even more homework to do, which is good. You wouldn’t believe Wendy’s new haircut. She looks so much like her dad now it’s a bit scary.’ Alice laughed. ‘We started a new unit in economics today. I’m not sure I’m ever going to need to know what the gross national product of Brazil is, but I guess it makes a nice change from the fiscal policy of the Australian government. In The Courier this morning there was an article about the new road out of town. Can you believe the idiots at council still can’t come to an agreement? How long’s that now? Four years? I guess that’s about all the news.’ She ran her thumb down the side of the photo. ‘Oh, except that the footy club needs new goal posts and Louise’s dad has a fancy new truck. Tells anyone who’ll listen all about it. Spends all his time in it apparently, and Mrs Jenkins calls it his mistress. Reckons when she’s on the late shift at the hospital, he goes out and spends time with it. Oh and there’s a new boy at school. Nothing special.’ Alice swallowed hard. ‘Well, that’s it. Goodnight, Mum.’
She kissed the photo and turned out the light, but sleep wouldn’t come. One image kept appearing every time she closed her eyes. She tried to block it, to think of something else, but those two piercing blue eyes and that left dimple just wouldn’t go away.
Kookaburra Creek, 2018
ell?’ The girl in grey stood up and took a step towards Alice. ‘What are you staring at?’
Alice blinked. ‘I . . . um . . . nothing. Sorry. What are you doing here?’
‘I was just trying to get some rest.’
‘Out here?’
‘Where else?’ The girl started to scratch her arm.
Alice recognised the mix of fear and anger in the girl. She recognised herself.
‘What’s your name?’
‘B . . . Becca.’ The girl smoothed her heavy black fringe over her downcast eyes, pushing it slightly to the left.
‘Well, Becca. Are you hungry?’ Alice asked.
Becca shrugged.
‘We can head back to the café and I can make you something to eat?’ Alice stepped forward and Becca inched back.
‘Okay,’ Alice said, frantically thinking of what to do next. ‘Or maybe I could bring you something.’
Becca shrugged again.
‘If you wait here, I’ll bring you some dinner.’
When Alice returned to Dandelion Dell, Becca was nowhere to be seen. Alice lowered herself onto the bench and placed the bowl of pasta beside her. She should have known the girl would run. She should have stayed and talked to her more.
The second she saw her lying on the bench, on this bench o
f all places, Alice knew deep down there was more to this than coincidence. There had to be. But she’d let Becca slip through her fingers.
‘What have I done?’ She sighed.
Above her a possum jumped from one tree to another. Alice stood and looked around, but the dark of night had set in. She left the bowl of pasta on the bench, in case Becca returned, plucked a dandelion and left it next to the bowl.
Walking back along the creek towards the café, Alice couldn’t help but feel regret.
In the morning Alice fixed the doorbell then stood in the kitchen and looked up to Sylvia.
Apple and custard.
‘Well, that’s new.’
Alice gathered the ingredients, moving around the kitchen with automated ease. As she measured out flour and sugar, all the previous day’s worry left her body and she started humming. From the height of her outstretched arm she dropped the diced apple into the bowl. She mixed the batter with easy rhythm and closed her eyes as she used the ice-cream scoop to spoon it into the patty cases.
‘Morning, petal,’ Hattie called as she entered the kitchen, breaking Alice’s trance.
‘Hattie.’ Alice greeted her with a hug. ‘Welcome back. How are you?’
‘As well as anyone my age can be expected to be.’ She flicked her black chiffon scarf over her shoulder, and the matching black hairpiece clipped in place created a bold stripe in her grey hair.
‘Tea?’ Alice asked.
‘Thank you. Why don’t you make yourself one too, and join me out on the deck?’
Hattie’s polite suggestions were never really suggestions, so Alice dutifully got two cups ready.
‘Sit, sit.’ Hattie waved a bejewelled hand Alice’s way as she carried out the camomile blend. ‘It’s always so lovely being home.’
‘How was Sydney?’
‘Fine, thank you.’ Hattie pulled her scarf tighter. ‘Just fine.’ The old woman took a long, slow sip of tea.
‘And how was the show?’
Every year Hattie went to Sydney to see whatever show was playing at the State Theatre, her old stomping ground.
The Kookaburra Creek Café Page 2