Phase one: complete.
Phase two . . .
I straighten and do a quick perimeter check. I recognise a few of the kids wandering through the gates but no one looks at me. Not even Eddie Oro, who struts by wearing red body paint, devil’s horns, tail and a trident. ‘Red house rules!’ he shouts.
There are no German shepherds or teachers with AK-47s guarding the gates. Phase two is straightforward: it’s ‘walk away from the pool without being seen’. I’ll just log on and mark myself as sick, and all will be sweet. I can do this. Zan does it all the time.
I hitch my bag on my shoulder and turn. I walk away. Phase two: complete.
I turn and head back down Queens Parade. Because I have hours to kill and only one place I want to be.
Phase three: begins.
_________
The white bike is still in the front window of Be-Spoke Bikes. Maybe I’ll tell Mum I want it for Christmas. Pip can get me a basket for the front. I haven’t made the epic journey to gaze in the front window of Cheeky Chicken yet. It’s only three steps away but it feels too hard. I thought the second time would be easier.
If she’s in there, we can talk.
And all the things she’ll tell me about Luis will fill the emptiness inside me. I didn’t plan on seeking out Carmen again. It was supposed to be enough to see her smile.
Except it wasn’t.
And I’m tired of sitting back while everyone else decides what happens to me. I’m not that girl anymore. It’s time to take control.
I take the epic three-step journey with my heart doing one of those rapid Irish jigs. There’s a chime as I enter and the sudden assault of garish furniture, egg-shaped napkin canisters, a chicken on a motorcycle and the feeling of having swum a mile in grease is familiar and terrifying.
The chickens are still rotating on a spit. Still dead. Still disgusting.
Everything is the same as last time, except for one teeny tiny incredibly important detail.
Behind the counter is a guy: tall, skinny, foppish red hair, tortoise-shell glasses, scowl. His name tag says: Andy.
I immediately hate him. And not just because he’s looking at me like I’m weird for walking into a chicken shop five minutes after it opened (even though he works in the shop and is paid to feed people dead chicken from ten a.m. onwards). I hate him because he’s not Carmen.
He’s the anti-Carmen.
All my fantasies vaporise in a cloud of hard luck. I had it all planned out. I was going to walk in and Carmen would go from bored work face to epic smile and we’d share another bucket of chips and we’d talk about anything and everything.
Instead, I get Andy saying, ‘Welcome to Cheeky Chicken. The cheap, cheap, cheapest chicken in Melbourne.’
Andy looks mortified by every single word so I won’t hold it against him. I will, however, continue to hold him accountable for not being Carmen. For that, he must pay.
‘Is . . . um. Is Carmen . . . Is she working?’
He shakes his head. ‘Do you want to order or not?’
‘Is she coming in later?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe. Someone’s due to come in at twelve, but I don’t know who. I’d have to check the roster.’
We stare at each other. The chickens rotate slowly.
‘Are you going to check the roster?’
‘I don’t have it on me. Are you going to order?’
Sigh. ‘I’ll have regular chips.’
I’ll just have to wait. See if she shows up. I’ve got plenty of time. A whole day.
At first, Andy is grumpy with me taking up a table to myself, eating one chip every couple of minutes, trying to drag it out. But people start coming and going and I think he decides ignoring me is the way to go. I read my book for a while and then I draw and then I get bored.
Every time the bell chimes I look up but it’s never Carmen.
I get so bored I order another serve of chips – Mum is going to kill me if she smells the grease on me – and rest my head on the table.
Luis Castillejo, you worked at a terrible chicken takeaway with your sister, scowling at the customers and hating the way the grease aggravated your acne. You dragged your feet to every shift and made up crazy life stories for your customers. On the worst days you put too much salt on their chips just to piss them off and I don’t even want to know what you did to the special sauce. But once in a while you fed leftovers to the alley cats and took home a Cheeky Chatterbox for the homeless woman who sleeps in the gazebo at the Edinburgh Gardens and the more you stared at those chickens rotating the more you hated the sight of them and the more you wanted to break into a factory farm and set every last chicken free.
‘She’s not coming,’ says Andy.
I look up and he’s leaning over the counter. Not really scowling at me anymore. It’s more pitying than that. He nods his head at the squat, blonde-haired girl tying an apron around her waist behind him. Not Carmen.
My chips have gone cold and I’m coming to the realisation that there’s only so long you can spend in a chicken takeaway when you don’t eat chicken.
My chair scrapes as I stand. I have been defeated by the Anti-Carmen.
‘Okay,’ I say.
He nods.
I pack up my things, taking the time to fit everything in just right. I stare at my full bag; the emptiness inside me aches.
I walk past the counter, almost to the door when I stop. I turn back.
My voice is tentative. ‘Can you tell Carmen that Ray dropped by?’
He stares at me.
‘Short for Rachel.’
He nods. ‘Sure.’
‘And . . .’ I take a step back towards the counter. ‘And maybe if you could give her this?’
My hand trembles as I slide a drawing across the counter. Just a small thing, on a sheet of paper ripped from my sketchbook. My heart pounds as Andy picks it up, inspects it, frowns.
‘What is it?’
I tell him it’s a shooting star.
‘Carmen will understand,’ I say, and I walk out.
________
I waste the rest of the day in the park, reading and drawing and daydreaming under a tree. I keep spinning from ‘I can’t wait for Carmen to get my drawing’ to ‘What the hell did I do that for? She’s going to think I’m a creepy stalker’. My brain is zooming back and forth like a car changing six lanes at once.
I amble back to the pool when it’s time, mostly feeling calm because a small part of me is happy that I took a chance. Happy that I took control.
I get fifty metres from the pool entrance when I work out something’s wrong. Terribly wrong. It’s not teachers with AK-47s or guard dogs or the police or the four horsemen of the apocalypse. It’s worse.
It's my mum.
My first thought is to run. Maybe run round the side of the pool, climb the fence and pretend I was inside the whole time.
But that’s not possible.
Because Mum has fire pouring out of her ears. She’s holding onto Pip, his arms wrapped around her waist, and she’s yelling at Mr Laidlaw. She’s got one hand on the back of Pip’s head and the other is flailing.
Pip isn’t wearing the octo-punk costume anymore. It’s piled at his feet, drenched.
Mum turns and our eyes meet and her look sucks the air right out of my lungs. I think I’d rather the AK-47s. Bring on the guard dogs.
Slowly, I walk up to her. Laidlaw is shooing the kids who have gathered, but none of them are budging because this is a car crash about to happen right in front of them.
I open my mouth.
‘Don’t. You. Even,’ Mum says.
I tug at the neck of my dress. ‘What happened?’
Mum angry-laughs at me. ‘You’d know if you were here. Where you were supposed to be.’
I look at Pip – his shoulder-length blond hair is clumped and dripping wet, his skin is blotchy and flushed, his eyes lowered. I think I get what the expression ‘like a drowned rat’ means now. It’s not just abou
t how drenched he is. It’s about how unexpectedly small and vulnerable he looks without the fluff and pomp of his costume. Was he always this bony, this breakable? Why did I think he was so much bigger?
‘It was just a joke,’ says Pip. But his knuckles turn white and he grips Mum tighter. ‘Cos I was an octopus so Eddie said I should swim and they threw me in but they were just playing. They didn’t know Octo-Punk can’t swim.’ He toes the mangled costume.
‘He could have drowned.’ Mum’s furious, but I see through the cracks in her anger to the pain underneath.
I can’t look at her, can’t look at Pip, can’t look at that stupid costume. Where the hell is Eddie? Why isn’t he getting yelled at? Why isn’t my mum setting the police and the four horsemen of the apocalypse on him?
‘You should have been there to protect him,’ says Mum. ‘You’re his sister.’
I bite the inside of my mouth. I want to yell: How is it my fault? You’re the one who lets him out of the house like this. You’re the one who should see what a target he makes himself. I didn’t tell Eddie Oro to be a jerk-faced asshat. I didn’t tell him to try and drown my brother.
But I don’t. I can’t. The words are backed up in my throat.
All around us, everybody stares. Once again we’re the centre of attention. Everybody whispers. Everybody judges.
‘I don’t know how you got to be so selfish, Marlowe,’ says Mum. ‘I really don’t.’
________
The last thing I want to be doing in thirty-degree heat on a Saturday morning is washing offal off the concrete in the backyard of Blissfully Aware while Leo laughs at me.
But here I am, struggling not to throw up as I hose away the last of the blood, guts, brains and whatever other unmentionables make up offal, and Leo is explaining how in some cultures gifting the private parts of a sheep is the highest honour. I’m guessing he dumped the offal last night because it’s been here long enough to bake into the concrete and for the smell to infiltrate every molecule of air. I’m just lucky I was lumped with the opening shift at the shop and that I followed my nose into the backyard before Mum arrived.
Because my mum does not let go of anger. She death-grips it with both hands. She duct tapes it to her soul. She picks at it until it’s infected. And right now, my mum is angry with me.
And ‘The Offal Thing’ will just make her angrier. Even though I didn’t do it.
I swish the hose around. I’m sweaty, grumpy and smell like
I rolled around in the intestinal tract of a dead skunk.
‘I don’t get it, Ray,’ says Leo, leaning over the fence, tossing a cricket ball from hand to hand. ‘You haven’t liked any of my presents. You didn’t like the rat, you hated when I dumped that fish head through your letterbox and now you’re destroying my latest peace offering. Or is that offaling?’ I shoot him a sidelong glare. He grins madly. ‘Aw, don’t be like that, Ray.’
All my guilt at defacing his dad’s shop evaporated long ago.
Shroomp! Sucked up into a cloud of fury, which is currently hovering above my head, threatening to rain. I turn the hose on him. He laughs and jerks away but not quickly enough.
He shakes water out of his hair, still laughing. ‘I was just so impressed with your little graffiti project and I was so happy about being made to scrub it off while your mum laughed at me that I really want to get my thank you gift right. And maybe that means I need to take a few attempts at it.’
‘I think, Leo, that you’ve thanked me enough.’ I smile pleasantly at him but I hope it’s the kind of pleasant smile you might see on a cyborg right before its circuits short and it kills you.
‘I don’t think my humble act of vandalism is in any way deserving of . . .’ I wave my hand at the river of blood at my feet
‘. . . such gratitude.’
‘Oh, I think it is, Ray. I will be eternally grateful to you.’ He puts all the emphasis on ‘eternally’ and I picture myself in the centre of a Bosch painting, writhing in a pit overflowing with the unmentionable bits of dead animals while kittens and puppies and bunnies are being tortured all around me. I shudder.
‘Cold?’ he asks, tossing the ball high, then catching it against his chest. ‘You ever seen Empire Strikes Back? The bit where Luke’s been attacked by that yeti and Han Solo rescues him, but they’re stuck in a snow storm cos Han’s alien llama dies so he cuts it open and shoves Luke in the guts because it’s the warmest place to be?’
I stare at him open-mouthed.
He grins and gestures at the offal. ‘Just saying that if you were cold, you could . . .’
I throw up both hands, forgetting one hand is holding a hose. Water shoots the bins. ‘Are all boys this disgusting or just the apprentice butchers?’
‘I’m only thinking of you, Ray,’ says Leo. ‘Another act of kindness shoved back in my face. Why you got to be so mean?’
I turn the hose on him again and this time he fumbles the cricket ball as he tries to jerk out of the way. The ball lands on my side of the fence and we watch it roll until it hits the recycling bins. I look up.
Leo cocks an eyebrow. ‘Any chance I’m getting my cricket ball back?’
‘You have as much chance of getting it back as me crawling into an alien llama’s guts.’
‘Damn.’ He drums his fingers against the fence. ‘That was my favourite. Signed by Merv Hughes.’
‘I don’t know who that is and I don’t care.’
Leo clutches his chest. ‘Now that’s just sad. Everyone knows who Merv Hughes is. Everyone.’
I don’t. I bet my mum and Pip don’t. I reckon Carmen doesn’t. Luis? Maybe Luis played cricket and maybe whoever this Merv guy is he was Luis’ hero and if he saw a cricket ball signed by him he’d go crazy for it.
Luis Castillejo, you were a junior cricket star. Everybody said you would one day play for Australia and it made your chest puff out to hear it. You would have liked Leo the butcher. You would have jumped the fence to play backyard cricket and argue about the rules, and every time you lost a ball over the fence I would have brought it back for you.
‘Hey, Ray?’ Leo is leaning over the fence, hands dangling, those long fingers tap tap tapping against the palings. ‘Ray?’
‘What?’
‘Missed a bit,’ he says, pointing to the back fence. ‘Or should I say “missed a ball” because that looks a lot like a bull’s –’
‘Gross. Shut up. Please.’
He shrugs. ‘It’s just nature, Ray. You love nature.’
My skin tingles, little pricks of heat that pop all over my body. Is this anger? Panic? No. It’s . . . what is it?
‘At least I don’t repeat myself, Leo.’
‘What?’
I switch off the hose and turn to face him. My heart is racing but I feel calm, in control. I’m enjoying this. That’s what those little pricks of heat are: excitement, anticipation. ‘A fish’s head through the letterbox? Funny.’
‘Did you get my note?’
‘Yes, you didn’t know where I lived and you didn’t have a horse’s head so this was the next best thing. Hilarious.’
He bows. ‘Why, thank you.’
‘And now you dump more dead animal in our backyard?’
‘So?’
I wind up the hose and chuck it by the back door. ‘You’ve got no imagination. You’re just doing the same joke over and over. You’re a two-dimensional character in a two-dimensional American sitcom and the only thing you’re capable of is saying the same unfunny catch-phrase over and over.’
He laughs then he frowns and then he laughs again. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’
But before he can say anything else, the screen door at the back of the butcher shop swings open and Bert the Butcher pokes his head out.
‘Quick slacking off,’ he snaps at Leo. He doesn’t even bother looking at me.
‘I’m on a break,’ Leo snaps back.
Bert laughs and it’s not a kind sound. ‘If you spent half the time worki
ng as you do slacking off you’d be a half decent butcher by now. Instead of the waste of space you are.’
Red creeps across Leo’s cheeks. He won’t meet my eye, like if he can’t see me, then I can’t hear what going on.
‘Gee, thanks, Dad. Way to parent.’
‘Smart-arse.’ The wire door slams shut, Bert behind it.
Leo pushes off the fence, his jaw taught with anger. ‘Arsehole,’ he mutters. He kicks the ground.
I feel like I’ve just barged in on someone else’s dream and got an eyeful of all the secrets they keep hidden deep inside. I feel bad for him. His dad is toxic and clearly Leo has about as much control over his own life as I do. He’s trapped and I know how that feels. I mean, this boy is the definition of infuriating and I have every intention of paying him back for his ‘offaling’ but I walk over to the bins, pick up his cricket ball and walk back to the fence. I hold out my hand.
‘Take it,’ I say. ‘Before I change my mind.’
Leo finally looks up at me. ‘Is this you pitying me, Ray?’ He takes the ball out of my hand, careful not to brush my skin with his fingers. I catch myself wondering what it would feel like if he did touch my hand. ‘Cos I don’t need your pity.’
The words ‘But I’m trapped too’ hover on the tip of my tongue. But his jaw is set and his brow is furrowed. He’d look angry if it weren’t for the panic in his eyes. The ‘please don’t see through me’ panic. I know how that feels too.
‘This is to catch you off guard.’ I turn away and march back to the shop. ‘To make you think I’m nice when I’m really going to destroy you.’
‘Don’t worry,’ calls Leo, and even though I want to turn back, I don’t. It’s the smile in his voice that makes me want to turn around and it’s the smile in his voice that makes me terrified to turn around. I hear him toss the ball and catch it one more time. ‘I’m starting to see just exactly who you are.’
The chant goes up: ‘Tear down the fences; free the refugees!’ The noise vibrates through my body, the way loud music rattles your bones. Mum’s always on about nonconformity and doing things your own way, but I like being huddled in the centre of a crowd – nothing feels as powerful as not being alone.
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