‘So next time you eat a bacon sandwich, why don’t you think about that, huh?’
Silence.
Awkward silence.
Finally, Leo shakes his head and lets out a long, loud ‘whoa’. ‘You really are a freak,’ he says. Each word feels like I’m being tasered. ‘Dad reckons you lot are two hippies short of a commune and guess what? He’s right.’
He laughs, still shaking his head. He laughs and pushes away from the fence and turns his back on me.
A freak? He can’t call me that. He can’t.
I want to say, ‘What would you know?’
I want to shove his book down his throat and ask how he likes choking on other people’s words.
Mostly I want to cry.
But I do nothing.
I just close my eyes and listen to his footsteps and the door swinging shut behind him.
I stand there and listen to my heart beating in my chest and think about that line in that poem, the one about two people who’ve never met hearing the same sound but from two different places. I think about how my donor must have listened to this exact heartbeat a thousand times too and how strange that is, to know that we’ll never hear it together.
I listen and I do nothing.
The avalanche of self-hatred hits at three a.m.
I’ve been lying awake for hours, reliving the thing with Leo over and over. Each time the scene replays in my mind I make cuts and do rewrites and rework my character until I’m smart and quick-witted and a winner. I need a pause button on life. Mid-conversation I can press it and everything will stop while I craft the perfect comeback.
The avalanche gets really heavy when I realise how pathetic this is. Leo’s tucked up in bed right now, blissfully dreaming about all the girls’ hearts he’s going to rip out and squash under his Vans, but I’m the one who can’t sleep. I’m the one still tossing and turning. I’m the one who thinks she can undo the past by imagining a better version.
You really are a freak.
Five stupid words breaking my heart all over again.
I roll onto my side and flip the pillow to cool my blazing skin. But everything’s too hot. The pillow, the bed. I kick away the sheets.
There’s no way I’m getting to sleep now.
I sit up. Shadows hang from the walls like Dali’s melting clocks. I have my drawings pinned all over my room. I know them so well, stared at them so often that I don’t need much light to see them. I study the faces – Hannah and Professor Kirmani and Mum and Pip, and kids with shaved heads, and lonely looking orderlies and mums and dads who look tired, who look sad, who look like just one more piece of bad news would break them.
I swing my legs over the side of the bed and get up, heading to the window. I slip the curtain back and peer into the night. It’s dark and quiet and calm.
During the day I can see for two blocks. I can look into the back of our shop, the back of the butcher’s too. At night, all I can make out are blurs of charcoal grey and all those lurking shadows. I press my finger-tip against the glass over the little black hole I think might be Blissfully Aware’s backyard. That little blob of inky black where a butcher’s apprentice stomped all over my heart. It’s not that far, really. A few streets, a five-minute walk.
I wait, but the TARDIS doesn’t arrive to whisk me back eight hours so I can tell Leo the butcher boy that I might be two hippies short of a commune but he’s a sausage short of being a man.
I rest my forehead against the glass.
I can’t believe I’m still awake. And I can’t believe that after all the crap that happened yesterday, I’m awake because of a boy. Because of the thoughtless thing a boy said to me. I stare at that little blob of inky black until my eyes water and turn red. Burning anger takes over – it sucks up the self-hatred and anxiety until there’s nothing left but anger.
It rises in me, rises and rises, until I think I’ll burn up. The window is cool against my forehead but not cool enough to calm me. I pull back and let the curtain fall into place as an idea settles in my mind.
I can’t change what happened, not with Leo, not with Eddie Oro, not with my donor’s family. But I can change what happens next.
I look around for my dress and shoes.
My heart beats wildly but I don’t think I’ve ever felt this calm. Even as I slip out my bedroom door and tiptoe down the stairs, I am calm and I am certain and I am doing the right thing.
Fifteen minutes later the thing that surprises me least is how easily I get my hands on spray paint and a balaclava. I live in the kind of house where there’s a choice of spray paints in the ‘protest equipment cupboard’ and there’s a balaclava in the laundry basket from Pip’s guerrilla Barbie costume. What surprises me most is that I actually go through with it. That I actually tip-toe out of my house at three thirty-seven a.m. and walk to Bert’s Quality Butchers. That I actually pull a balaclava over my head and I actually hold a spray can to the butcher shop window with my index finger poised on the nozzle.
The balaclava is pink and covered in sequins but I’m still unbelievably bad-ass right now.
Bad-ass and angry.
Streetlights cast a honey glow but there’s no one to see except me and my bad-ass illegal activities.
‘You want to talk about nature?’ I mutter and start spraying. The paint hisses and my hand swoops and rises and dips and circles and the more I write, the angrier I get. My heartbeat is a steady rhythm, a joyous gallop that makes me certain this heart has rebelled before.
The smell of the paint gathers in a knot of wibbly wobbly nausea in my tummy, but the taste in my mouth is sweet as I stand back and survey my handiwork: Killing for a living? Now that’s unnatural.
Take that, Butcher Boy.
Take that, Eddie Oro.
Take that Cerberus and Ms Friendly Ear and my donor’s family.
I stare so long at what I’ve written that the words imprint on my mind. I just know that when I get home and climb into bed these words will be the last thing I see when I close my eyes and the first thing I see when I open them again in the morning.
I drag myself away. I’m high on rebellion. Maybe it’s also the paint fumes, but mostly it’s rebellion. My heart is drumming a beat that leads me home and it’s a beat that I can’t help dancing to. I dance through the front door, dance down the hallway, dance up the stairs and . . .
I’m halfway up the stairs when I notice a light in Pip’s bathroom, a slick of light under the closed door. I check my phone: quarter to five. Bowie is softly crooning, and somewhere in the background is the clinking and clattering of make-up tins and brushes and whatever else Pip uses to put together his looks. It takes him forever. Before the transplant whenever I couldn’t sleep I used to lie awake and listen to the sounds of Pip getting ready, kind of like lying in bed listening to rain on a tin roof. And when I was sad or scared, I used to stare at my door and imagine what he was dressing up as. Because if I thought really hard about that, I’d forget about the tightness in my chest, the aches in my joints, the queasiness in my stomach and the this-is-it-you’re-dying thoughts poisoning my mind.
A shadow shifts under the door; it would be easy for me to open it, maybe sit with him while he got ready. Or I could stand here and wait for him to come out. I could guess what today’s look will be: Crocobilly Rock, a crocodile who’s into ’60s rock ’n’ roll? The fifth ninja turtle, Giovanni, who prefers to read and drink tea than fight crime?
But I don’t do any of that.
Instead, I pad silently back to my room and close the door. I don’t bother changing out of my clothes, I just slide under the covers and shut my eyes. I’m almost too tired to notice that the only thing I see when I close my eyes is a swirling black ball of nothing.
________
I stifle a yawn while standing by the front door, school bag crashing against my shins as I sway in time with the ticking clock. I’m so tired I feel like someone dragged me up Mount Kosciuszko and threw me from the top.
Mum appears from the loun
ge, wrestling with bags and posters and Princess Sparkles. ‘You could offer to help,’ she says, crushing it all to her chest. ‘And don’t think I can’t hear you silently judging me. I know we’re late but – wait, are you sick?’
It’s crazy how quickly she can switch from stand-by mode to Robo-mum and all it takes is a little pale skin and bags under my eyes.
‘You look awful. Did you sleep okay?’ Princess Sparkles tumbles to the floor as she reaches for my forehead.
I duck out of her way as Pip bounds downstairs in an astronaut costume from two Halloweens ago. He has a fish-bowl helmet – papier-mâché fish and cellophane seaweed swimming inside – and shark face-paint. And thongs. Pink.
‘Ta-da!’ He jumps the last couple of steps and spins. ‘What do you think?’
Mum grins as she bends to retrieve Princess Sparkles. ‘Well, don’t you look a treat. Or should I say “trick”?’
They laugh. Or I think Pip laughs. It’s a bit muffled coming from inside the helmet. He’s definitely grinning, which, with the shark face-paint, is way creepy.
Mum’s frowning at me again, dangerously close to asking more questions. She’s a bloodhound for secrets.
‘We’re late for school,’ I tell her. ‘You remember, school? That government institution where I’m indoctrinated into apathy and capitalism?’
Before she can start off on a tirade about the evils of modern schooling, I open the door and Pip starts making Darth Vader noises.
‘Wait,’ he cries. ‘I need to get acclimatised to the Earth’s atmosphere.’
I fight the urge to roll my eyes at him. ‘I thought you were going to be a beauty-queen robot from the future.’
‘Not ready yet. Today I’m an astronaut whose space shuttle crashed in the Pacific and he was saved by a school of sharks so he grew gills and became a shark too, like those children who are raised by wolves so they walk on all fours and howl and eat raw meat.’
The costume thing started when I got really sick for the first time.
We’d never been on a protest before, but Mum was on a karma kick – we needed to exorcise the privilege from our lives, she said. Dad had just left us so maybe it had something to do with that. I was losing it because Mum wanted me to wear a mermaid outfit for an anti-whaling protest. I was eleven.
Mum gripped the mermaid outfit in her fist; it shimmered each time she shook it. ‘But you like Ariel. You think she’s pretty.’
I loved the Little Mermaid but I wasn’t going to march down Bourke Street dressed as her, everybody pointing and laughing and not giving a damn about whales. Besides, my chest felt tight; my head was thick and syrupy. I’d been sick for a while. I’d been to tons of doctors but no one had worked out what was wrong.
Mum waved a hand at our posters. She’d helped us make our own: Don’t eat Ariel’s friends. ‘I thought you wanted to help.’
I did, just not dressed as a mermaid and not when the room wouldn’t stop spinning. So I complained and Mum coaxed, and the more we talked the more I felt like a stringless kite, nothing tethering me to the world.
Then it all went black.
I woke up where it was quiet and white and little bleeps and blips echoed softly around me. Mum was hovering beside the bed. The sheets were tucked too tight. It felt wrong. I felt wrong.
Mum crowded over me, grabbing my hand, squeezing too tight. ‘You’re okay, honey,’ she told me, smiling wider than seemed possible. ‘They found a little problem with your heart, but we’re going to fix it. Promise.’
I knew her smile was a lie. She kept telling me I was fine, we’d all be fine, everything was fine, all the while blinking back tears.
My mother had never lied to me. And now she couldn’t stop.
But Pip didn’t say anything. He was sitting at the end of my bed, wearing the mermaid outfit. And I laughed. I laughed so much I cried. Or maybe I cried because of the lies and my heart, but I still laughed and Pip grinned at me and I didn’t feel so bad anymore.
‘Come on, spaceman.’ Mum raps her knuckles against Pip’s space helmet and he grins, warping his shark-teeth cheeks. They start up with the Bowie karaoke as we head down the front path.
Ground control to majorly embarrassing.
We head out on to the street, Mum falling into step beside me as Pip bounds ahead, pretending to walk like he’s in space or underwater or both.
I pray to the pavement gods to swallow me whole. Oh the irony of being five-foot-one and wishing you were smaller.
‘So tell me about your first day,’ says Mum, bumping into my side. ‘We never got to talk about it yesterday.’
‘I learnt stuff.’
‘Like?’
‘Like how to vote Liberal and why war is good and that banking is my ideal career.’
She squeezes my arm.
I keep my eyes on my feet. We need to walk past Bert’s Quality Butchers to get to school. And there’s no way that telling myself to forget about last night will actually undo what happened. I don’t even know why I did it. All I know is the idea just kind of plopped into my head like a giant thought-poo and the logic of three a.m. told me it was the best idea ever.
Of course it wasn’t.
Of course it was wrong.
Impulsive.
Illegal.
And just thinking about it makes me feel hot and fuzzy and buzzed. In a bad way.
‘Mum?’
‘Yeah, honey?’
‘I think I might have . . . I mean, what do you do when you’ve done something . . . Like, how do you . . .’
But it’s too late. We round the corner onto Queens Parade and Pip is jumping up and down out the front of the shop.
‘Nizunmum! Nize unum!’ He points to the front window of Bert’s. ‘Nice one, Mum!’
The acid in my stomach rises; I can taste it in the back of my mouth, hot and sour.
Mum halts in front of the butcher shop, scanning the window – I swear it takes hours – before finally she throws back her head and roars with laughter: wild, straight from the gut, primal.
I think I’m going to throw up.
‘Brilliant!’ Everything tumbles to the pavement as she claps her hands together and bows, worshipping the red paint taking up most of the shopfront. Bright red spray paint that no longer looks defiant or smart or sassy. It’s just a crooked, barely legible B-grade comeback that is going to draw way too much attention. From my mum, from the scary butcher and probably from the police.
Leo bursts through the doorway clutching a sponge, water slushing over the lip of the bucket in his other hand. He clocks Mum and the scowl deepens. His hair is even messier this morning, one side sticking up like a tail feather. He looks away, face hard and cold.
‘Nice bit of art, that,’ says Mum, nodding her chin at the red paint.
He storms past her, all the horrible things he’d like to say written on the lines of his mouth. And then he spies me. His eyes widen and he falters, more water sloshing from the bucket. His cheeks burn red – they’re a matching set for mine. He holds my look for one of those ‘seems like forever but is really only two seconds’ moments before he throws a glance back at Mum.
‘Wouldn’t be caught out here when Dad comes back,’ he says.
Mum fake cackles. Pip joins in. It makes me squirm how much they’re enjoying this.
‘Shaking in my boots, kid,’ she says.
Leo dumps the bucket on the ground. ‘He only went back inside to fetch his meat cleaver. Then he said something about hunting hippies.’
He starts scrubbing at the paint – stiff, double-handed strokes that look like hard work. Good. Hope he cramps up. Hope he breaks a nail.
The shop door jingles and this time it’s Bert. He hasn’t got a knife but his look could do some serious slicing and dicing.
I crush Pip to me, arms around him, and I tell him to stay put. This is not a child-friendly situation.
‘I’ve called the police,’ says Bert. His face is red, like, about-to-explode red. ‘This is har
assment. You’re destroying my livelihood.’
Mum laughs: the witch’s cackle again. ‘You can’t prove a thing.’
‘I’m installing security cameras.’
‘Go ahead. There are other ways.’
‘Is that a threat?’
‘It’s whatever you want it to be, murderer.’
I’m almost too busy watching Mum and Bert to realise Leo has stopped scrubbing. His eyes are on me, narrowed but shining with malice. Specifically, he’s glaring at the hands I have pressed to Pip’s chest.
He smiles before turning away again. ‘I like your nail polish,’ he says.
I poke my tongue out at his back, but then it registers what he’s just said: nail polish.
I’m not wearing nail polish.
I never wear nail polish.
I look at my hands. There’s red on my nails. Not polish. Paint stains.
Pip kicks out a foot and wiggles it around. He’s wearing silver toenail polish.
‘Thanks,’ he says.
‘Do they call that colour Caught Red-handed?’ says Leo, with barely a glance over his shoulder.
‘Silver Nitrate,’ says Pip.
Pip tries to squirm out of my grip, but I hold tight. So tight he’s fogging up the helmet trying to breathe.
‘No,’ I say. ‘They call it Red Revenge. And I’ve still got the whole bottle to get through.’
Oh. My. God. Where did that come from? Was that really me? Am I possessed?
Leo gapes at me – he can’t believe I’ve said it either. ‘Is that right?’ he says. And then he smiles. A small part of his smile is admiration. Some of it is annoyance. But, mostly, the grin says, ‘Game on’.
What have I done?
This isn’t me. I don’t do things like this. I don’t spray paint shopfronts. I don’t talk back. I don’t make a spectacle of myself. I’m not the confrontational type. I’m the girl who can’t meet your eye, who smiles when you insult me. I take the mantra ‘If you can’t say something nice don’t say anything at all’ to the next level. But that was my old heart. That heart is rotting in a chemical waste bin.
This is my new heart.
I place a hand on my chest and feel a steady, confident, defiant ka-thump, ka-thump, ka-thump. Weirdly, I don’t feel anxious. Like, not at all. I should be hot and breathless and my heart should be pounding and my thoughts should be jumbled in a knotty mess. But I’m fine.
Tin Heart Page 4