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

  They’re going to get naked at Lake Claire?

  ‘Skinny-dipping?’ I ask.

  Ravi gives me a solemn nod and a shrug. ‘’Fraid so, kiddo.’

  But Em can barely contain her disgust, and she’s next to slap Ravi’s head, then sign zipping up her pants — telling him to keep it in there, as she points at his offending crotch.

  It’s Adelaide again who throws up her hands. Why do you want to come tonight? she asks me, and King rolls his eyes.

  I don’t know if I can put it into words just yet, this feeling like something’s ending and I have to be close to it.

  Instead, I squeeze my hand to my head and say, I want to be part of King’s last-night memories. He’s my brother; I don’t know when I’ll see him again! And I channel our puppy-of-the-month calendar — those liquid eyes gazing out of the September Staffordshires.

  King rolls his again. I don’t want to hang out with my kid sister on my last night in town!

  Ravi agrees, and starts sliding his circled thumb and forefinger down his body, until Em hits him again.

  King says, I don’t want you here!

  You are such a jerk! I sign in quick, sharp bursts.

  Adelaide tries to step in, but we’re not finished yet.

  And you’re a little shit! he says, hooking his fingers.

  Until Adelaide has to shake her hands and step between us. ‘Okay, okay, okay,’ and conscious of the gawkers who are still within earshot, she doesn’t speak as she signs to the group. We’re not letting Bowie ride home by herself, and if she does go home she’ll wake the whole house up and then we’ll get held up explaining that we didn’t knowingly lead your fourteen-year-old sister to the pub …

  King scowls at me.

  … Because we’ll run out of time, and the mood will be ruined anyway. So she comes with us!

  King raises his hands, about to disagree, but Adelaide firmly says, No.

  I knew Adelaide would be on my side — she was my friend first, after all. If you consider a friend someone you pay ten dollars two days a week to teach you maths for two hours after school. Which I do.

  Adelaide makes a steering wheel and points at herself, to say, I’m driving! I’m deciding!

  And with that we chain the bikes, walk round to the dead-end street at the back of The Parallax and pour into the old Holden Commodore.

  Adelaide drives with Em riding shotgun, and me sandwiched in the back between Ravi and King.

  We go over Pigott’s Bridge again, but this time we hang a left and follow the signs to Lake Claire. I’m worried for a second until Adelaide catches my eye in the rear-view mirror, shakes her head and gives me the smallest of smiles.

  The way is illuminated by a sliver of blue moonlight, and the car’s neon beams cutting through the night. But between Orianna and Lake Claire, there’s not a whole lot to see except rolling foothills in the distance, big patches of drought-dry land and pylons standing sentry.

  I read somewhere that Iceland makes giants of its pylons. Twisting and bending the electrical poles and wires of the steel-framed towers so they look like men and women walking over land, like they’re carrying the currents above their heads. I love that idea, Icelandic pylons inspired by The BFG, but I don’t know if they’ve started making them or if it’s just an idea someone had, to turn something functional into something fantastical.

  There’s no air-conditioning in Aidan’s wagon, so everyone rolls down the windows and Em sticks out her hand to stroke the wind rushing past. Adelaide does it, too, keeping one hand on the wheel, and from the middle back seat it looks like they’re flying us forward.

  ‘Where are we going?’ I sign and ask, but Ravi and King are looking stubbornly out their windows, while Em and Adelaide crack up laughing in the front.

  Em turns around to say, ‘It’ll be good, I promise.’

  And I believe her.

  The moment Ravi and King became friends, Em followed. She’s the eldest of three sisters, and even when Ravi wasn’t living with them he and Em stayed in constant contact through emails and texts. I don’t really remember who she hung out with before Ravi and King — she was just another face in the crowd, really.

  Adelaide Jones was different.

  Tonight she’s wearing a T-shirt that says, ‘To-do list: 1. Invent Universe 2. Make Apple Pie’. She has another one with the words, ‘Know Yourself, Before the Cosmos Can Know Itself’. And she once explained to me that her favourite with ‘Girl Code’ followed by a black-and-white photo of a woman standing beside a taller stack of papers, is something to do with going to the moon. She makes them all herself; designs them on her computer, buys cheap cotton T-shirts and gets them printed at Officeworks.

  She’s made one for King as a going-away present; written in the tiniest of fonts is this Gwen Harwood poem he liked when they studied her in Year 12. And underneath the poem are these sketches Adelaide drew of hands held up, spread out, and little curved lines springing off the fingers to make them look like movement, clapping in excitement.

  They are King’s hands; I know because Adelaide mapped them for a whole summer last year, sitting at our kitchen table or lying on a blanket down by Lake Claire — the last one I didn’t see myself, but know from the photos Blu-tacked to King’s wardrobe. Adelaide complained that they’re the hardest part of anyone to get right, so she needed practice — she said hands are like mountains up close, with all these infinitesimal ridges, and you have to be a cartographer to get them right.

  I can’t say exactly when the four of them became friends, I can only guess it was around the time the rumours started, when they were at the end of Year 10. That was when Adelaide stopped hanging with her old crowd — the footballers and weekend riders — and after a party where people said she got too drunk to say stop.

  King knew Adelaide — everyone did, because of who she hung out with — but also because she was tutoring me. And when she stopped hanging with the people meant to be her friends, King started walking her home after our sessions. Then I began teaching her signs in between sines, cosines and tangents. Until one day they were Ravi, Em, Adelaide and King — fundamentally and completely quadrilateral — and the rest, as they say, is geometry.

  Claire is a corrie lake, and once the wagon is curving round the road at the edge of her without stopping I get an idea of where we could be going.

  After the gold ran out, people turned to the skies above Orianna, and the galaxies, too. She became an astronomy town, and home to the Goodricke telescope that mapped the Delta Cephei star. Orianna was remapped, too, and the streets named in honour of their astronomical responsibility.

  The telescope itself was named for this guy John Goodricke, who hypothesised regular variability and is still the youngest ever recipient of the Copley Medal — given when he was just nineteen. He was also Deaf, a fact that Mum and Dad tried to spin into a good omen when we moved to Orianna.

  They tore the stupid thing down, King said, so what does that tell you?

  It’s true. Goodricke was the fifth largest telescope in the world in the nineteenth century, and the largest in the southern hemisphere. But that all changed with the Second World War — when they tore down the telescope and used its lens for rifle scopes.

  These days the old observation dome just sits like a fallen moon atop Mount Solemn — and it’s where Adelaide is steering us to, up the wide road leading to the abandoned observatory. Up, up, up to where I’ve never been.

  And already Orianna is just a smudge of light on the horizon, getting smaller and smudgier the higher we go, at a steady thirty-degree angle that Aidan’s wagon seems determined to climb. Until we’re there, parking in the old designated spot for scientists and tourists.

  Adelaide turns off the ignition and we all just sit for a moment, staring at the fat, dome moon the size of a house, still so brilliantly white that it casts its own light.

  Then Ravi opens his door and the spell is broken, so we all tumble out.

  Of course they’ve al
l been here before. It’s one of the first things kids in Orianna do when they get their licence, or access to a car. The observatory is too far out from town to get here any other way — I know because me, Laura and Kylie tried to ride it once on our pushbikes. We didn’t even get as far as Lake Claire before the uneven road killed our backsides, and we knew we’d never make it home in time before nightfall. As we rode home, Laura said she thought her dad would drive us up the mountain if we asked — but there was something about parental supervision to an abandoned place that sucked all the point out of it; we knew that much, even in Year 5.

  Now I’m here, looking at this steel balustrade that wraps around the lip of the mountain, and some rusted old signs showing shadow men leaning too far over and falling to their death. I do it anyway, hooking my feet onto the rung of the balustrade and heaving myself up, when I feel someone grab my T-shirt tightly and keep me steady. I turn round, and it’s King.

  Then a light flares from the corners of our eyes, and we both turn to Em who’s flashing her torch, motioning us to come. We walk over to where Ravi and Adelaide are standing at a little steel door with a KEEP OUT sign hanging at a jaunty angle by one last rusted screw.

  Ravi backs up, turns side on, takes deep breaths and starts shaking out his body, preparing to ram, when Em leans forward and pushes on the handle that swings the door open easily.

  We all give Ravi a pat on the shoulder as we file in.

  There’s a short corridor and to our left a little spiral staircase going up somewhere, but we walk ahead and through another door that swings open just as easily — leads us into what must be the circular observation room. Then Em’s torch beam swings around, joined by Ravi’s and Adelaide’s as they pull flashlights out of their back pockets to reveal how depressing the place is.

  It looks like what I imagine the inside of a big concrete water tank would look like, with cement floors, tall cement sides, and the smell of concrete after rain. There are some cigarette butts on the floor, a few glass bottles scattered about … and rainbow-coloured graffiti covering every spare inch of the smooth concrete curved wall.

  I tap Adelaide on the arm, asking for her flashlight, and walk up to a section that’s mostly covered in names — ‘Winsome ’94’, ‘Jack + Alice’, ‘Class of 2005’. There are the usual graffiti bubble letters and jagged font, a few drawings I can’t quite make out because people have written over them … there’s nothing crude or rude, at least not where I’m looking. It seems like mostly everyone just wanted to leave a little bit of themselves; proof that they were here.

  Adelaide comes up behind me, touches my elbow and moves me over a few spaces to a spot closer to the door we just walked through — she takes the torch and points the light on ‘Ravi + Em + Adelaide + King’ that’s scrawled in big bubble font I recognise from Ravi’s juvenile-delinquent days. She looks at me and smiles, then motions behind us, so I turn back around and notice a large cement block in the centre of the room where the Goodricke telescope must have once been mounted, plus a rusted cogwheel still there with a chain, and a hand-crank.

  Ravi and King move in perfect synchronicity to that crank, which they both start heaving and pushing at — and they’ve clearly done this a million times before, because they find a rhythm and pretty soon a slice of shutter is slowly lowering in the dome’s roof … a little window to the sky that perfectly frames the waxing crescent moon. And all we need is that weak moonlight, to fill the dome and see the truly spectacular sight.

  Ravi steps back, looks up, and throws out his arms like, TA-DA!

  Behind me I can feel Adelaide move to stand beside King, then watch as Em tucks herself under one of Ravi’s arms that’s still thrown out in triumph, so he curls it around her shoulders while they both look up.

  And I suddenly feel like Pinocchio after he’s been swallowed; dome roof with curved steel beams like a whale’s ribs, the moon and Milky Way right there at the yawning shutter of its mouth.

  I try to picture this place with the Goodricke telescope still inside, because for the life of me I can’t understand tearing something like that down when there’s still so much to see. And I don’t even realise that I’m saying this out loud, until King waves at Ravi to shine his light on me, and once I’m cast I say it again, and sign at the same time so they can all hear me.

  Adelaide waves, and Ravi throws his light onto her. ‘There are abandoned observatories all over, just like Mount Solemn,’ she says and signs. She fingerspells E for east and moves her hand to the right as she tells us that somewhere close to here, in a paddock in the middle of nowhere, there’s a large array of satellite dishes that were planted in the 1980s, only to have a newly elected government decide that funding should dry up a few years later.

  I remember reading about those satellites in science class, that they sent out a message when the radios were first erected; a message of numbers and DNA elements, song notes, the double helix, and a picture of humanity all strung together in binary and sent out, to 25,000 light years away.

  It’s crazy to think that those metal ears of radio telescopes are stuck in the ground now, and aimed skywards but rusted brown.

  And the funny thing is that their messages are still bouncing around up there — messages that were sent over 25,000 light years away will take 25,000 years to reach their destination (or 24,900-and-something years now). Our teacher, Ms Sims, said it was more of a symbolic gesture, a just-in-case we-come-in-peace that was never really intended to get anywhere. But I remember thinking how sad it’d be if someone up there waited long enough, got the message, and then replied. Sent back an answer to a question without knowing there was radio silence even before it had reached them. Put that way, the universe seems so lonely — with all these messages bouncing light years away to life forms unknown, when all the senders are long since gone. And maybe that’s all stars are — messages that have already burned up by the time they arrive.

  Em waves and Adelaide lights her up. ‘Lucky you’re seeing this place tonight, Bowie, when everyone else has left for S-C-H-O-O-L-I-E-S,’ she mimics Ravi’s TA-DA with a smile on her face. ‘Sometimes on a weekend this place is too packed with kids.’

  Ravi clears his throat and Adelaide gives him light. ‘Or those toolie dudes who come up here trying to hook up with high school girls.’

  Em elbows him in the stomach. ‘Is that going to be you, Rav? Now that you’ve graduated?’

  Ravi steps away from Em’s elbow. ‘No, not anymore. And I can’t believe —’ he starts, then remembers and tucks his torch under an arm, motions Em to light him up. ‘I can’t believe we’re not going to get another chance to be here again.’

  Em swings her light to King, who says, You can still come here without me.

  ‘And me,’ Adelaide says, then for my benefit, ‘I’ve decided on the city campus, so I’m going to board.’

  Ravi says, ‘It wouldn’t be the same.’

  And it’s hard enough being an outsider, without having to watch something end that you’ve always wanted to be a part of.

  I click my fingers and Ravi swings back to me. ‘So, this is it? You’re all just leaving?’ I push out my hand.

  Em says, ‘I’m not,’ then nods to Ravi, ‘but his old man’s got a job waiting for him …’

  ‘I haven’t agreed yet!’ Ravi says.

  I’m shaking my head so King comes to me, puts a hand on my arm, but I shrug him off. Because I’m suddenly so tired, thinking about that big question mark over all the little squares of December, and being able to hear King snore through our bedroom wall, and how when I was little I used to think that I could pull the very thought of him out of my head, because he was just always supposed to be here.

  I turn around, watch their globs of torchlight dance around the cement walls as I walk out the door, but this time I turn right — go up the little spiral staircase, and hold tight onto the rusted rails that take me to a trap-door roof that opens with little effort.

  There’s a platform wrappe
d around the circumference of the dome, just wide enough for one person to walk single-file. There’s another balustrade like the one round the mountain, and I lower myself so I sit with my legs pushed through the rust-flaked rails.

  Orianna is in the distance, with the Milky Way fading to light overhead.

  A few minutes pass and I hear the main entry door open and slam shut, turn my head and watch King walk a little way out, looking for me. When he doesn’t turn around, I fling the thong from my right foot, so it lands just in front of him. When he turns and looks up, I make my fingers march for staircase.

  He crab-walks along the platform and lowers himself next to me, sticks his legs through the rails like I’ve done, then hands me my thong.

  The sky keeps lightening.

  You okay?

  I try to wave him away, but it’s too hard to wave and wipe tears from my eyes at the same time.

  Sorry, he claws.

  What for?

  He shrugs.

  I swipe a sorry across my mouth, and King raises an eyebrow at me.

  I shouldn’t have come tonight.

  He bumps my shoulder, and then again, until I crack a smile for him. I take a deep breath. I’m just really going to miss you.

  I’ll be back.

  Yes — but not soon, right?

  King stays still, and I take that as a no.

  I make a gun with my pointer finger. Mum will shoot you when you don’t come back for Christmas.

  King flattens and tips a hand to say, Maybe, then he raises both. Sometimes I forget why I wanted to leave in the first place. He leans so his back is against the dome. Because I worry about Mum and Dad worrying about me, and you missing me, and Adelaide falling in love with someone else or Ravi getting in trouble because I’m not around to stop him being an idiot, and I don’t like the idea of all of us leaving Em here by herself. He holds his hands steady for a moment, before saying, But mostly I’m scared that I’ll like the idea of going more than being gone.

  The sky has been breaking open while he’s been saying these things, and it’s just gone beautiful. But however I describe it will be wrong, a list of colours running and leaking into each other. So instead I’ll hold it to my lips, and feel it all the way to my fingertips.