Begin End Begin: A #LoveOzYa Anthology

by Amie Kaufman, Melissa Keil, Will Kostakis, Ellie Marney, Jaclyn Moriarty, Michael Pryor, Alice Pung, Gabrielle Tozer, Lili Wilkinson, Danielle Binks

  ‘It’s nothin’, really, I guess I just finally stepped up about … about stuff.’

  ‘Stuff?’

  ‘Yeah. About how he gave it to everyone … gave it to you,’ he adds. ‘He didn’t like that.’

  ‘Wait … you said something about me? To him?’

  He nods.

  ‘Cam, you shouldn’t —’ She cuts herself off. ‘Look what he did to you! With Mitch, there are no winners. Yeah, I wanted him to stop treating us all like pieces of meat, but I didn’t want anyone else to get hurt. I mean, a knife. A knife! He could’ve really hurt you.’

  ‘Nah. He was showing off.’

  ‘Don’t play this down.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  He is but he won’t admit it. Lucy hangs her head, letting his words settle between them.

  ‘Back then, all I wanted was to show that I wasn’t …’ Cameron pauses, nibbling on his nail as he searches for the right words. ‘Stuff it, all I wanted was for you to know I wasn’t one of them, but I’m no good with words. Then my plan to hash it out with Mitch didn’t exactly go to plan.’ He shakes his head. ‘Anyway, after what I did, standing up to him was nothing.’

  ‘No,’ Lucy says, voice sharp as it slices the air. ‘It was something.’ Cameron’s cheeks flush. ‘It was.’

  3.07 a.m.

  The driver flicks on the lights and radio.

  ‘Folks, some good news: we’re now pulling into Melbourne’s Southern Cross Station. Thanks for ya patience and sorry about the interruption earlier. A quick reminder to please check under the seats and in the front seat pocket for any belongings. Hope it’s been an enjoyable ride, and I look forward to seeing ya on our coaches again soon.’

  Lucy looks out past Cameron through the window into the terminal. A small crowd of shivering people wrapped in scarves and puffy jackets wait by the side of the bus.

  ‘So,’ Cameron says, staring through the glass as passengers seated in the rows behind them fuss with their luggage, ‘guess this is it, then.’

  Lucy nods.

  3.10 a.m.

  Their knees rest against each other.

  Neither of them budges.

  ‘We did good,’ Lucy says. ‘Three states, one night. Well, two states and one territory.’

  ‘It’s gotta be a record.’

  ‘Can’t say I’m excited about my trip back, though.’ She sighs. ‘My bum’s already killing me.’

  Cameron grins. ‘Flying next time, for sure.’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘So, ah … so there might be a next time for you? To Melbourne? I mean, I know your sisters live here so …’ His voice is quiet again despite the loud commotion around them.

  ‘Oh. Yeah. Well …’ Lucy’s mouth struggles to keep up with the thoughts thrashing around in her mind. ‘Maybe, but the next few months are pretty crammed: exams and training and band practice and eighteenths — and don’t even get me started on how much the school captain delegates when she can’t be arsed to do her share of the workload and …’ Her voice peters out and an embarrassed laugh erupts from her lips.

  Cameron spirals his earphones around his fingers. ‘But maybe one day, huh?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Lucy nods again. ‘Maybe.’

  The first word I ever learned was King, for my brother.

  Fingertips and thumb to the top of my head in a circle, like a crown.

  Most babies learn survival signs first — drink, food, up and hurt — words that get them what they want.

  Mum says I always wanted King — hook her finger and tap her nose — she liked to say, ‘Bowie, you’re never happier than when you’re being his little sister.’

  For the longest time I thought our parents had chosen our names for the signs they made, rather than sound or meaning. Because there’s something about the action of signing King’s name — like I’m pulling the very thought of him out of my head — that suited my big brother.

  And this is how he appears tonight — shadows one minute, then King in all his gangly glory under the buttery spill of a streetlight the next. Dressed in his weekend uniform of white Bonds T-shirt, black jeans and runners, with his skateboard idling under one foot, making the lowest of growls as he rolls it back and forth over bitumen.

  He’s waiting for someone — or, someones — when a glob of torchlight suddenly appears on the street, just a few metres in front of him, and outside the pool of lamplight. He doesn’t notice it at first, until it’s joined by a second and then a third light that goes racing up his body to flash in his eyes — once, twice, three times — until he squints, turns his head, and makes a circle with his thumb and forefinger to say, Stop doing that, waving in the direction the lights are coming from — the darkened end of our street.

  I stay crouched by my window, where I’ve been since hearing King leave — the familiar sound of his feet hitting the floor, a creak on the staircase and the little bang of the back door. Mum and Dad are trained deep sleepers at the back of the house, but I can hear it all through the wall we share, and from my bedroom window I have a perfect view of the street down below.

  Then just as quickly as they appeared, he’s following, right foot on the board, left pushing off the road, sailing him through the night and after those three lights.

  Off on some adventure on his last night in Orianna.

  And before I’ve even fully decided, I’m already pulling on jeans and a T-shirt, reaching for a pair of thongs. Because all I’m thinking is no guts, no glory, and of squeezing fists over your heart, as that’s where the guts are.

  So I pad down the stairs, out the back screen door and run round to the junkyard side of our house to retrieve my waiting Malvern Star bike — ready to follow the roar of his skateboard.

  According to the puppy-of-the-month calendar hanging on our pantry door, we’re four days into the January Jack Russells, and King doesn’t plan to return until some undecided date in the dachshunds of December. He’s drawn a big red question mark over all the little squares, which freaked Mum out.

  She told him she’s putting her foot down — then she did, literally — and made him promise that he’ll at least be home by Christmas. She even bought this honest-to-goodness pink porcelain piggybank to start collecting all our five-dollar notes in, hoping that we’ll have enough saved by the end of the year to help him buy a plane ticket home.

  Not that King knows what his point of origin will be by then — Chile, Barcelona, Romania, Malaysia — they’re all on his list, along with a hundred other places that are anywhere but here.

  And Dad just keeps reminding him that it’s okay to come back, arching his hand for home, and doing this shoulder-squeeze thing: — squeeze — You can come home anytime you want — squeeze — nothing to be embarrassed about if it’s sooner than you thought — squeeze — your room will be just as you left it — squeeze.

  But King has been planning this escape since he was my age, fourteen.

  That was the year we moved to Orianna, and he bought a world map the size of our dining-room table and cork-boarded it to his bedroom wall. He collected brochures from the only travel agent in town, tore out the endpapers of airline route maps and started push-pinning places and plotting routes with string, like a detective on one of those American crime shows.

  I think we may even be into a whole new kitten calendar year before we see him again, and before I get a chance to tell him how I feel.

  They’re a way ahead of me, their torchlights dancing in the distance and winking around corners. Down Andromeda Lane, veering off Hubble Street, which intersects with Pollux Avenue, and Eridanus Esplanade, until I know for certain that they’re heading for the main street of town, which is called Orion.

  I ride far enough behind that I can just make out their four inky figures — two on skateboards, two on bikes — as I watch them ride over Pigott’s Bridge at the entrance to town. But by the time I get there I have to back-pedal and brake at the mouth of the main street, because they’re nowhere to be seen.
<
br />   Disappeared.

  And Orianna looks sickly tonight, bathed in sodium streetlights.

  Our town was founded for a gold rush, so everything is two-storey and imposing Victorian with balcony filigree. When we first moved here, I thought all the buildings had toothy grins, but right now they’re more like sharp-toothed smiles hiding hauntings.

  I hop off my Malvern and walk the bike down the wide, empty middle of the main street until I’m far enough into town that I can hear the low hum coming from The Parallax Pub on the corner.

  It’s a warm, still night — now that I’m off my bike I can feel the sweat collecting in my jeans, right behind my denim-clad knees. As if I couldn’t tell already that there’s no breeze anywhere, I need only look at the Tree of Life — this beautiful, kinetic sculpture planted in a patch of grass beside the old sandstone bank, now post office. It’s by this guy called Phil Price, and it has a tall, silver trunk and these impossible branches with flat discs at the end that spin like mad when the wind is up. But tonight they’re crooked and quiet, silently pointing me to where the music is humming.

  It’s playing from the pub’s ancient jukebox, and above the constant rumble of conversation I can only tell that it’s a song about flame trees.

  As I approach The Parallax, I see men and women sitting on the pretty garden benches lined up outside, or leaning against the white wooden pillars of the archways, drinks in hand. And on one of the benches sit three people I recognise — two bikes propped against the sandstone wall beside them, and probably two skateboards tucked under the bench — it’s Ravi, Em and Adelaide.

  They’re collapsed the way they were at school all those years, didn’t matter if it was the grassy lower oval, common-room floor, or if a teacher was crazy enough to let them sit together at a desk, they always spread like margarine.

  Tonight is no different; Em’s legs are in Adelaide’s lap and she’s sitting up to talk to her, their faces so close together that Ravi has to lean round the back to hear, one hand on Em’s shoulder for balance. All they need to be complete is King, who just then comes out of the pub holding four green glass bottles by the neck, one for each of them. They all thank him — fingertips touching chins — and then Ravi gets up and gives the bench to the girls, so he can stand with King in an archway, clink bottles and gaze out at the main street.

  Which is when they see me, standing beside my Malvern, and blinking up at them in the glare of pub lights.

  Ravi arrived in town in Year 10. His mum had just left and his dad couldn’t cope, so he sent Ravi to live with his aunt and uncle, who run the Orianna licensed post office. Em’s their kid, and the only one of Ravi’s cousins who’s the same age as him — they both work in the mail room out back, though Em works counter now that Year 12 is over and she’s going to be more involved in the family business.

  Ravi was always mad back then. There was a spree of smashed car windows in the weeks after he first arrived, and we drove past him once on the back road of town, Dorado, wearing an orange fluoro vest and picking up litter with a bunch of kids from about four other municipalities. As we drove past, he gave us a jaunty salute with his trash spike.

  We’d been living in Orianna for three years by then. Dad had taken over running the shop since Pop died, Mum liked her job with the council, and I had Laura and Kylie to hang out with at school. But the move was hardest on King, ’cause he had the most to leave behind. His specialist school and the friends he’d known since kindergarten, and Mum’s side of the family where he was third-generation. To come to Orianna where the teachers just kept saying how hard it was for them, and classmates who had grown up in each other’s pockets, who even after three years had no interest in learning a whole new language just for him, turned his world upside down and inside out.

  So I guess he and Ravi had a lot in common.

  Ravi smashed windows and King mapped his escape.

  Looking back, I think friendship was inevitable.

  I wasn’t there when King broke Ravi’s nose. Em was however, and Adelaide, though none of them were friends with her at the time. But by recess I’d heard the whole story, probably with a few embellishments thrown in — like, I’m pretty sure Ravi didn’t respond with a Guile high kick.

  They were in PE, playing footy, and Ravi apparently said, ‘Kick it to me!’ because nobody had told him to forget King on the field.

  ‘Kick it to me! Kick it to me!’ just like that Uncle Tobys ad. And because he didn’t, Ravi pushed King at half-time and King punched back. Just let fly so fast that Ravi was on his arse, with his hands still in mid-air, grabbing at King’s shoulder that wasn’t there.

  Then it was on. Apparently.

  I know that Ravi and King needed more than sickbay medical attention, and his uncle, Mr Singh, drove the boys to a bulk-billing place where Mum met up with them and he and Mum got along like a house on fire — commiserating over raising testosterone — and Mum invited the family over for dinner with a side of forced apology.

  That night, King and Ravi folded their tall frames onto our sofa lounge and sat facing each other.

  ‘Sorry, I didn’t know you were,’ Ravi paused and quirked his eyebrows at King, ‘you know, Deaf or whatever,’ he said.

  King had been watching his face intently, and I could tell Ravi felt embarrassed by the scrutiny.

  Sorry is a clawed hand, palm facing you, shaken across your mouth. And as King apologised I watched Ravi’s own hand curl into a claw, mimicking the sign.

  ‘Like this?’ he asked, head down to look at his hand.

  I was sitting next to Ravi on the couch, so I reached all the way up to tap the underside of his jaw. ‘Look up, he needs to see your face,’ and Ravi obeyed, looked King in the eyes — well, eye, since one was swollen shut — and apologised again.

  That time, he meant it.

  Bowie? What are you doing here?

  King hands his bottle to Ravi and marches towards me, grabs my elbow so I’m forced to release the handlebars and let my bike clatter to the road.

  Do Mum and Dad know you’re here? Were you following us?

  Em and Adelaide are standing with Ravi in the archway now, watching King and me have this awkward, one-handed conversation, when Kel steps out and I nod in her direction for King’s benefit.

  Kel owns The Parallax with her husband, Aidan. King’s only worked here since last year, when he turned eighteen, as a busboy, cleaner and then helping Aidan out on the grill.

  ‘Everything all right out here?’ she asks, and Ravi shrugs his shoulders and sticks his thumb out sideways, cranks it in a circle to interpret for King.

  ‘Fine, thank you, Kel!’ I say, giving the universal thumbs-up sign and smile, and then I shrug my shoulder until King finally lets go.

  ‘Okay, and who’s driving tonight?’ she asks, turning to the others.

  Adelaide puts up her hand, and Kel gives her a set of car keys. ‘You break it you buy it,’ she says, followed by, ‘So please, break it!’ and I know it must be the old silver Holden Commodore wagon, the one that Aidan’s been trying to sell since forever. It’s practically another sculpture along with the Tree of Life, a fixture on the main street every weekday that it’s parked at the back of the pub with a FOR SALE sign in the front windshield. Aidan let King borrow it a few times while he worked here, and apparently one last time for tonight.

  ‘You tell your brother to look after himself, you hear?’ Kel says, and I roll my eyes once she’s turned away, sign Take care to King and then crouch down to right my bike.

  Aidan actually learned a few signs, but Kel was like most everyone else who first tried shouting at various volumes, and then only really interacted with King when family or friends were around to interpret. It bugs the crap out of me, and Ravi, too, judging by the gesture he’s giving Kel’s back, but King just seems used to it now.

  Em, Ravi and Adelaide grab their bikes and the skateboards, wheeling them down to stand beside me and King.

  Go home, he says to me.r />
  I shake my head. No.

  King’s gestures get bigger. GO HOME!

  No.

  BOWIE!

  My name is one hand zigzagging downwards, and I’ve never been brave enough to ask if that suits me, in case it does. Right now King cuts out my name like his hand is a knife, and for just a second I think how much I’m going to miss this — the very picture of sibling rivalry — and a second is all I need to crack a smile and then start laughing so hard that it hurts.

  King throws up his hands, takes his bottle from Ravi, and by the time he’s knocked it back my laughter has started to trickle out. I kick out my bike stand so I can have my hands free to touch my chin and curl my fingers. Please. Again and again, and again — Please, please, please. And I can see Em at least, is about to cave.

  We’re not doing anything. King shrugs.

  I want to hang out with you tonight!

  He looks up and down the empty street, as if to say, This is it — this is all there is! Then he takes a long pull from an imaginary glass, gesturing at the pub behind us and reminding me that I’m not old enough to drink.

  We’re attracting a few onlookers now — all those people sitting on the pretty park benches are leaning forward in their seats, or turning their bodies to watch me as I take an imaginary wheel and ask him what the car is for, then?

  Now he’s frustrated, swiping at his blond fringe, which keeps falling over his eyes. He huffs and comes back round to BOWIE! GO HOME! all over again.

  Adelaide eventually breaks us up by stepping in between King and me and nodding her head at the small crowd gawking behind us. Ravi turns around, too, and pretends to be trapped in a glass box — mime, he’s saying — and the people think he’s enough of an idiot that they look away. King slaps him upside the head.

  Ravi comes back to me, crosses his heart for honesty and fingerspells L-A-K-E C-L-A-I-R-E, then makes a circle with his thumb and forefinger that he slides slowly, teasingly, down his body while jiggling his eyebrows at me.