Anyway, the plants are wild and cover everything.
‘My dad,’ says Zan’s voice behind me.
I spin around and she’s leaning against the back door, arms folded, foot kicked up against the wall. ‘He likes to grow things.’
‘What is that?’ I point to the scarecrow-shaped thing sticking out of the ground among the corn-shaped things. It appears to be wearing one of Zan’s black caps.
‘Come on,’ says Zan. She pushes off the wall and leads me through the garden and to the far side where I watch her step onto a chair and up onto a low concrete shed. ‘Hope you don’t mind heights.’
Heights are fine. So long as I’m nowhere near them. They can stay up there and I’ll stay down here and we’ll both get along fabulously from a distance.
‘Don’t be a chicken,’ she says from somewhere on the shed roof. Her voice is a little rough with the effort of climbing.
I grip the back of the chair and step up. It holds my weight. Good. I press both palms flat against the low roof and push myself up. My upper arms scream at me: We don’t do things like this, they say. We are for the lifting of food to mouth and for the pinning up of rude posters about obnoxious butchers and that is it.
I scramble up and lie flat on the roof. ‘This better be worth it,’ I say, but Zan’s not there. ‘Zan?’
‘Ladder,’ she says, her head peeking over the edge of the next level up, several metres higher than where I am flopped. She points to my left and then disappears from sight.
Ladder?
There’s a ye olde wooden ladder on the top of the shed, leading up to the roof of the house. I can’t see if it’s bolted to the bricks or just leaning against them. I pray for bolts.
I stand and immediately crouch back down again – heights! I crawl my way to the ladder and grip it with white knuckles, pressing my forehead to a rung. ‘We’re in this together, ladder,’ I whisper. ‘Don’t let me fall off you and I won’t use you for firewood. Deal?’
I climb up, wobbling and panicking the whole way up. When I reach the top, I discover that I’m now on the roof of the house, which is flat concrete. In a fit of mad genius, someone has installed a lounge chair, two couches and a coffee table up here.
Zan is laying on a couch, feet hanging over the armrest. ‘Welcome to my domain.’
I take slow, careful steps to the centre of the roof, sinking into the armchair opposite Zan. It’s suede, sags in the middle and smells of damp, but the view . . .
You can see the city.
You can see the lights.
You can, if you squint, see the stars.
‘This is beautiful.’ My voice is whispery and breathy in the way that words spoken in awe often are.
I hear the rustle of Zan sitting up. ‘Me and my brothers set it up,’ she says. ‘We used to sit up here all the time and then one day Chao was like, “Well, why don’t we get some chairs?” and then he was like, “So why don’t we get a couch?” And then a table. He was even going to try and rig up a TV, but Mum put her foot down about that.’
Zan hugs her knees into her chest, staring out at a sleeping city. ‘When I skip school, I mostly come up here.’
I should be staring at the view – that’s why she brought me here, I guess – but I can’t stop watching Zan. I can’t believe she keeps this all to herself. Hides everything behind that wall of cool, blank indifference. What I’d give to tear down that wall and use it to build one around me. Or maybe she could show me how she does it, so I don’t have to feel on display – open, raw and defective – all the time.
‘So that was some revenge,’ she says. ‘You going to pull his pigtails next? Or just skip straight to making out?’
‘It’s just a joke,’ I say, cheeks growing warm. ‘I mean, yeah, it did start out serious because he called me a freak and, god, all that offal but –’
‘Hang on, being a freak is bad why?’
It takes me a minute to gather my thoughts. ‘It’s like being reminded how other you are,’ I say. ‘I only ever get to be the girl with the heart transplant. Eddie Oro calls me a freak too and everyone at school just wants to hear about the surgery. They don’t really want to know me. If I went to a party – if I ever got invited to one – they would introduce me as Marlowe, the girl who had a heart transplant. And that is me – I am that girl – but I also want people to say, “This is Marlowe, she snorts when she laughs and never dances in public and can burp the alphabet and swear fluently in Danish.” You get that, right?’
‘I’m a gay Chinese-Australian,’ she deadpans. ‘I have no idea what you’re saying.’
‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘Of course you do.’
She nods, slowly.
I hesitate. I want to tell her the truth. About how I feel. But people go on about the truth like it’s something amazing and pure and beautiful and it’s not always. Sometimes it’s ugly.
‘Maybe it’s also because I used to know exactly who I was. And, yeah, trying not to die was a fair bit of that. But now I’m free to be more and I’m not so sure who I am now.’
Zan’s got a funny look on her face, like she’s got something to say, something serious, only she’s just sorting through the words first. But then she shakes her head and almost, possibly, maybe smiles. ‘You can swear in Danish? Teach me everything you know.’
I teach her every bad word I know (my favourite is osteged, which means ‘cheesegoat’).
‘Are you going to see Carmen again?’ Zan asks.
I nod. ‘But I don’t know how. I can’t just keep turning up at her shop and not ordering any chicken and I think legally, I am what is known as a stalker. I could go to the concert she was talking about at some place called the Tote except –’
Zan holds up both hands for me to stop. I wait for her to tell me what a weirdo I am being and to stop talking so much, but all she says is, ‘Which band?’
‘Kill the something?’
Zan sits up, ramrod straight. ‘Kill the Club?’
‘Um, yeah?’
‘They’re only the best,’ she says. ‘Three girls. Japanese punk. But not like anything you’ve ever heard before. And they’re playing at the Tote? We’re going.’
‘But what if . . .’
‘What if what?’
‘What if Carmen isn’t going after all? Or maybe when she sees me she’ll be like, What the hell are you doing here? Are you stalking me? Which I totally am. And what if I tell her who I really am, which I should, and then she’s so upset –’
Zan holds up both hands again. ‘Has anyone ever told you,’she says, ‘that you worry a lot? Like, a lot a lot?’
I bite my lip and look at my hands, fingers tightly knitted. ‘Once or twice.’
‘Come to mine after school and we’ll get ready here.’ She gives me the once over. I think – and it’s hard to tell with her brick-wall expression – but I think she finds my human-chameleon look unsuitable for the Tote. ‘I’ll have something you can wear.’
‘Really?’
‘You can sleep over too if you want.’
Holy shit. Holy flying fireballs of shit. An actual sleepover!
‘Okay!’ I say, and I invest so many punctuation swords into that one word. ‘Okay.’
‘Just don’t be an osteged,’ she says.
I look at the darkness around us. Except it’s not dark – there are lights in the windows of the houses and high-rises and housing commission flats and there are streetlights and stars and the moon.
It’s like that glass half-empty or half-full thing. Do you see the darkness or the light first?
‘Thank you for bringing me here,’ I tell her. ‘It’s perfect.’
________
I walk home on a cloud around two a.m.
But the thing about clouds is that they’re super high up and it’s a long way when you fall.
So when I walk past the butcher shop and see that my posters are gone I tumble 100,000 metres to the ground and splat.
All that effort and Leo won’t
even get to see them? What a bust! Some random street punk must have pulled them down. The streetlight glints off the shop window, perfectly illuminating the total lack of my posters.
It’s like they were never there, except . . . in the top corner of the window is the smallest triangle of paper stuck to a loop of tape.
My heart sinks lower and lower until it lands in the pit of my stomach with a wet, heavy splodge.
I feel like someone told me the giant panda is extinct. Or the blobfish (because they’re endangered too but people don’t care about them because they got hit with the ugly stick in a big way – seriously, it’s like someone put eyes and gills on a scrotum).
Should I redo the posters? Leo’s going to think I gave up and he won. Or, worse, he’s going to think it’s my turn and what if we’re just waiting, both of us thinking it’s the other’s turn and nothing happens at all?
What if he thinks I didn’t prank him because I don’t care? A feeling like all the endangered animals in the world suddenly became extinct sweeps over me.
Pip is dressed as a rat. He swings his tail into my shins. It’s surprisingly heavy and ouchy. ‘You’re not listening to me,’ he says.
From the kitchen, Mum keeps shouting, ‘I’m coming. I’m coming,’ but she never materialises.
‘Ouch, Pip.’ I flick the end of his rat nose. ‘What the hell?’
He’s got me cornered in the front hallway where I’m waiting patiently with an overnight bag, ready to head over to Zan’s. I adjust the neck of the dress I took hours to choose. I scoured my wardrobe for the most Tote-appropriate outfit and all I could find was this: it’s black and tea-length. It looks like something you’d find on a cabbage patch kid. One dressed for a funeral. For once in my life I want to stand out in a good way, but in this dress the best I can hope for is ‘meh’. The contents of my wardrobe are still piled on my bedroom floor. I have to fight the urge to burn the lot.
‘Hurry up, Mum,’ I shout. She’s supposed to be walking with me so she can ‘meet the parents’. I pull out my phone and text Zan to tell her that my mum is ruining my life.
Pip whacks me with his tail again. ‘I said, are you going to watch it with me? Tonight?’
‘Huh?’
‘The Project Runway finale!’
‘Oh god.’ I can’t believe that a) my brother has such crap taste in TV, b) my mother lets my brother watch such crap tv, c) my brother is allowed to watch any TV at all. We used to only watch SBS and ABC, but then last year Mum gave into Pip’s relentless campaign to get Foxtel for the style channel. He’s definitely the favourite child.
‘Can’t,’ I tell him. ‘I’m sleeping over at Zan’s.’
Mum finally comes into the hallway and makes a weird, high-pitched eeeeee! noise. She’s been smiling and eeeeee!-ing at me since I asked this morning if I could stay over at my friend’s house.
‘Friend?’ She said it like it was a strange new word she was testing out for the first time. ‘You have a friend?’ It was like I’d told her I was off to join Sea Shepherd. Or that Zan and I would be raiding a caged egg farm. She’s even forgotten that I’m supposed to be grounded for the swimming sports disaster because I told her Zan’s family were Buddhist and vegetarian, which I might have sort of based on the one time Zan refused to kill a money spider crawling over my English workbook. But it could be true and Mum didn’t take much convincing and now she’s president of the Zan Appreciation Society. But Pip is not.
‘We always watch it together,’ he whines.
‘You mean you always make me watch it with you.’ I give his rat nose another flick. ‘Record it and we’ll watch it on the weekend, okay?’
He makes me pinkie promise but he seems happier.
‘Don’t forget to ask Zan to come to your anniversary party,’ says Mum, looking through her bag for I don’t know what. ‘Or I’ll just ask her when I meet her. And her parents can come too.’
Someone turns on a washing machine in my stomach. ‘I don’t think that’s a good idea.’
‘You said they were nice people.’
I’ve never met Zan’s family, but that’s not what I mean. ‘You know I don’t want a party.’
She gives me a look that’s one part disappointment, one part frustration and all parts I-know-better-because-I’m-your-mum. The look does nothing to dissipate the thunk thunk thunk in my stomach.
‘It’s been a year, Marlowe. You need to celebrate these things.’ She does a hip-wiggle shimmy to demonstrate what celebrating means in case I had no idea.
If she makes me a heart-shaped cake I will scream.
‘And we will celebrate,’ I say, without the hip-wiggle. ‘But just us. Privately.’ And by ‘privately’ I mean ‘not at all’. Not ever. No chance.
I know the subject will be raised again later, but Mum grins at Pip. ‘My gorgeous little rat,’ she says.
We walk around to Blissfully Aware so we can drop Pip off with Vivienne. He’s very enthusiastic about using his glue gun but he’s less enthusiastic about turning it off so there’s no way we can leave him home alone. There have been too many almost-burnt-down-the-house moments and glued-fingers moments and Mum’s-new-jacket-ripped-up-for-costume-parts-and-accidentally-glued-to-the-sofa moments.
Mum drops Pip inside while I glower at the posterless front window of Bert’s Quality Butchers. I look for Leo inside, but it’s just Bert (who glares at me) and some guy I don’t know. No posters, no Leo, no fair.
Mum reappears and follows my eye-line. ‘Oh, honey.’ She squeezes my shoulder. ‘Don’t worry about them. I know it’s awful but I’ve sent a letter to council and I have more protests lined up.’
Maybe if I send Leo the photo? But then I’d have to ask for his number and that thought sends a weird little shiver up my spine.
Mum hugs my sleeping bag to her chest and grins, a fat, sloppy proud-mother grin. ‘A sleepover,’ she says. ‘Eeeeee!’
‘You’re such an embarrassment.’
‘Right back at you, kid.’
I link my arm through hers and we walk. Mum points out trees and makes up scientific names for them. ‘That one is a Trunkus Nobliosus,’ she says. ‘And that’s a Beardy Dorkus.’
I snort with laughter. ‘Stop it. You’re so weird.’ I squeeze her arm and when she turns to smile at me there’s a shiny glint in her eyes that catches my breath.
‘Mum? What’s wrong?’
She blinks too much and points out a rose plant. ‘Thornus Arseholus,’ she says.
I realise she’s trying to make me laugh so she doesn’t cry.
‘It’s okay, Mum,’ I say. ‘It’s just one night.’
‘I know,’ she says and sighs. ‘I guess I never thought I’d get to share this sort of thing with you.’
She gives me a teary smile and I look away, her happy-sadness tightening my throat. I know she never thought I’d live this long. I know about all the times she thought she was watching me do something for the last time and all the things she thought she’d never see me do. I get that she must have cried herself to sleep asking why her body couldn’t create a child with a fully functioning heart.
It wasn’t just me who was broken and glued back together – the shadow of death leaves everyone around you in pieces too. Except for Pip. That kid is bombproof, I swear.
‘Okay. You can take a celebratory picture,’ I tell her. ‘One picture.’
I grab the sleeping bag out of her arms and I smile while she takes a billion photos of me holding it. ‘That’s enough.’
‘Just one more.’
‘Mum!’
‘Okay, okay.’
I shove the sleeping bag back at her.
‘You’re my favourite daughter,’ she says.
When we get to Zan’s narrow semi, Mum’s eyes grow huge. The backyard jungle spills around the edges of the house like unruly hair, impossible to slick back into a neat ponytail.
‘Is it organic?’ she asks. ‘I read this fascinating article about biological pest control. You sh
ould have told me they gardened. I could have brought it with me.’
I knock on the front door and a very handsome man answers. I mean, he’s clearly Zan’s dad, but he looks like he’s been chiselled out of marble by a master sculptor. He’s much too handsome to be someone’s dad.
‘Hello. You must be Marlowe.’ His accent clips his vowels and when he smiles he gets these perfect creases around his eyes. Like they were ironed in exactly the right place.
‘Your garden is amazing.’ Mum presses the sleeping bag into my arms. ‘Do you use companion planting?’
‘Mum!’ This is peak Mum behaviour, but seriously.
‘Shush, Marlowe. I’m talking to Zan’s father.’
‘Li Wei,’ he says, reaching out to shake her hand.
Mum smiles but she’s got one eye on the garden. Hot dads hold no sway over her. ‘Kate,’ she says. ‘So nice to meet you. Have you thought about becoming vegan?’
‘Mum! Pip is waiting for you. And I have sleepover business to attend to.’
Mum rolls her eyes for Zan’s dad’s benefit.
‘I know teenagers become embarrassed by their parents, but I never thought it would happen to me. Oh, how wrong I was!’ She laughs and Zan’s dad laughs. I think he’s just being polite.
‘I’ll pick you up tomorrow morning,’ she says to me, laying a hand on my shoulder. It’s a protective hand.
‘It’s ten minutes away. I’ll walk home myself.’
She gets that teary look again.
‘Mum,’ I say. ‘Thank you for walking me here and thank you for letting me stay over and I’m not embarrassed by you and I love you very, very much, but please?’
She holds up both hands in defeat. ‘Okay, okay. I get the message.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Here’s a list of her doctors and their phone numbers.’ Mum pulls an A4 page out of her bag and hands it to Zan’s dad. ‘And my number and the shop’s number and Vivienne’s number.’ She backs down the path. ‘And Heather’s mobile.’
‘Mum.’
‘I’m going. I’ll embarrass you no more. Don’t forget your medication. And your positive affirmations.’ She backs through the path, eyes flicking between me and the garden. ‘It really is a lovely garden,’ she says.
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