I think of Carmen, never mentioning Luis’ death, ignoring the fact that his death anniversary is only a week away. I know, because it’s my anniversary too.
And is that really so bad? Why do we have to deal with the messy, horrible, real stuff? Why does Carmen even need to come to grips with her brother’s death? That’s not going to make her smile, is it?
There’s this writer Mum is gaga for. He wrote all these crazy-weird sci-fi and fantasy books and was working on the third in a series when he died of a heart attack. They released his half-finished novel anyway and Mum rushed out to buy it, and my god did she cry when she read it. Hacking sobs that made me worry she’d stop breathing.
When I read it, I realised why. Not because it’s sad. Because it’s so good.
Weird and funny and bizarre and beautiful and then you get to the part where it just stops, where all the promise of the beginning comes to nothing, just a few blank pages and the realisation that this story will never be told.
I think about that book as we hike through the hospital corridors. All those blank pages.
Luis’ story is over too. There will never be another photo to add to Carmen’s phone.
It’s so much worse, knowing the start but never knowing the ending.
And that’s who I am to Carmen. I’m a reminder of the end. People like me only exist in the world because people like Luis die. Which can only mean one thing.
If I want Carmen to keep smiling, then I can never see her again.
You know that moment when you’re standing in front of Bert’s Quality Butchers wearing a sandwich board that says: If you are what you eat then you’re dead meat and your mum is yelling meat-hating facts and your brother is wearing a Little Bo Peep outfit and people are staring?
It sucks.
All of it sucks.
‘Beef requires one hundred and sixty times more land and produces eleven times more greenhouse gases than a potato,’ shouts Mum, slamming her fist into her palm. A crowd has gathered to listen – if your definition of ‘crowd’ is five people. At least three of them probably think this is a street performance. Any minute now they’ll ask me when the juggling and fire twirling is going to start. I can barely walk in this sandwich board let alone twirl fire.
I waddle up to Mum, avoiding the five sets of incredulous stares aimed my way. Six. Because Zan has arrived. Super. I turn pleading eyes up at Mum, who is standing on top of an actual soap box. It has vegan organic Icelandic mint and green tea soap printed on the side.
‘Zan’s here. I’ve got to go.’
She shakes her head. ‘Work the crowd, Marlowe,’ she says.
‘But –’
‘We had a deal. Ten more minutes. Zan’s a Buddhist; she’ll understand.’
I do an eighteen-point turn to face Zan, who’s leaning against Blissfully Aware’s front window, arms folded, smirking. One of the few occasions she breaks the brick wall for an actual expression and it’s to smirk at my embarrassing family. Like I said, sucks.
With a loud sigh I waddle over to the crowd and hand out leaflets: Ten Deadly Facts About Meat. I hate this part, the actual face-to-face part. People either laugh at me, shout at me or act all dirty old man at me. So I thrust leaflets into hands with minimal eye contact and pray to the Earth Goddess to spare me further embarrassment, like actual human contact with the kind of person who stops to watch a ranting woman and her oddly dressed kids.
‘What’s the score?’ asks a young guy with scruffy hair, bell-bottoms and a Goodies t-shirt.
‘We’re protesting the butcher shop,’ I say while trying to move on because he looks like a talker. They’re the worst. They’ll rant at you for an hour even if they agree with you – they just want to hear themselves talk.
‘Yeah, but shouldn’t you be protesting big brand supermarkets, rather than a local shop?’ he says, ‘They –’
Abort! Abort!
I avert my eyes, shuffling sideways. ‘Keep calm and vegan on.’
‘Would you like to be artificially impregnated every year,’ shouts my mother, ‘simply so you can produce milk? No? Then why make cows do it? Any creature with a nervous system feels pain.’
That’s true, mother dear. Like me. Right now. My nervous system is very nervous.
Because Zan Cheung, currently my only friend, is unbelievably cool and does not hang out with girls who wear sandwich boards.
I look over and she’s still smirking. At least she’s still here.
Last night I’d argued for a straight-up letter drop – I’d create the leaflets and walk around the neighbourhood stuffing them in mailboxes. Simple. Easy. Painless.
Mum said, ‘Great idea, Marlowe! You can do that after we’ve done the street protest.’
So now it’s thirty degrees and in ten minutes I’m supposed to walk the neighbourhood handing out leaflets no one wants. Zan didn’t care that I volunteered her to help with the letter drop – she’s still at the stage where she finds my family entertaining. When Mum ropes her in to play the back half of a cow for a protest in the middle of Fed Square she’ll change her mind.
I reach Pip and find him explaining his outfit to an old lady. ‘If Little Bo Peep was real she’d be live-exporting sheep and stuffing chickens into a living space no bigger than a piece of A4 paper. Do you want to hear about Old MacDonald?’
‘Oh. No. Well, blue’s a pretty colour on you,’ says the old lady.
I hand a chunk of leaflets to Pip – ‘Take over, Bo Peep’ – and I waddle off to stand next to Zan.
She expertly twitches an eyebrow in greeting. ‘So this is what you do for kicks,’ she says.
‘You think this is hilarious, but I believe it counts as child abuse.’
‘You don’t agree with your mum?’
‘Ideologically? Yes. I just wish we could protest without . . .’ I wave at the street. ‘. . . all this spectacle.’
Zan shrugs. ‘I don’t know. Can you protest without causing a scene?’
I consider suggesting a family swap, but then I remember Zan’s dad and his cold way with her. Maybe the grass isn’t greener on the other side, maybe it’s just a different kind of grass but equally scratchy and annoying and sneeze-inducing.
I check my watch.
There’s a ping. Zan pulls out her mobile. Since the gig, all of our conversations have been punctuated by text alert pings. I’ll be mid-sentence and . . . ping! Zan will pull out her phone, type and hold onto it, waiting for the reply.
She won’t tell me who’s texting. But I know. She also won’t admit that when she reads the texts she goes all dreamy-eyed and lovey-dovey (well, the Zan version anyway).
‘How’s Kari?’ I ask.
Zan rolls her eyes.
‘You should have asked Kari to help with the leaflet drop,’ I say. ‘Or would it be too hard to do that while you’re k-i-s-s-i-n-g?’
‘You should have asked Carmen to help,’ she says.
‘Oh, you mean Carmen who works in a chicken shop? Yeah. Good call.’
While Zan might not be ready to spill the beans on Kari, she’s been sloshing beans all over the place on the topic of Carmen. She won’t let up about it, ever since I told her I didn’t think I should see Carmen again and Zan said it wasn’t very nice to just vanish on someone. Every time she brings it up my chest tightens and it gets harder to swallow.
‘Apparently it’s her uncle’s shop,’ says Zan. ‘And they source the chicken ethically.’
‘Sourcing the chickens ethically would be not sourcing them at all,’ I snap before I can help it.
Zan raises an eyebrow at me. ‘You’re really filling out that sandwich board nicely,’ she says.
‘Ha, ha.’
Zan’s phone pings again. She taps away madly for a few seconds before turning back to me. ‘So have you decided when you’re going to tell Carmen the truth?’
‘The truth about the fact that “free range” only means a stocking density of twenty-eight kilos of live birds per square metre – that’s
about thirteen chickens and sounds pretty cramped to me – and doesn’t count for shit when you’re going to kill the chicken anyway?’
‘Ha. Ha. I mean about her brother. That you only walked into her shop because you thought maybe her brother was your donor?’
But that wasn’t the plan. Not at first. I was never going to tell her I thought her brother was my donor – I was just checking up on her, making sure she was doing okay. And if it turns out Luis isn’t my donor then there’s no truth to tell. I’d only be forcing her to accept things she doesn’t need to think about.
I’m saved from having to tell Zan anything because the bell jingles and someone steps out of the butcher shop. Not someone. Leo.
A tingle sweeps up the back of my neck and across my face. A bit like goose bumps but like a super-hot version. Like the geese were fed jalapeños. I haven’t seen him since the night at the Tote, since our truce and his hand on my arm and his lips brushing my ear lobe, and did the temperature just spike twenty degrees or is that just me?
Leo is full to the brim with smug. ‘H–’
‘Don’t. Say. Anything.’
His elbow bashes against my sandwich board as he reaches across, offering a hand to Zan. ‘Leo,’ he says. ‘You were at the gig the other night, right?’
Zan screws her nose up at his hand. ‘Whatever,’ she says and looks away.
‘That’s a very fetching outfit,’ he says to me. Twinkly, twinkly eyes.
‘Stop talking.’
‘No really. The crazy-guy-on-the-street-corner-proclaiming-the-end-is-nigh look is very flattering on you.’
‘Go away.’
‘Seriously. You look cute.’
My cheeks burn. I am acutely aware of Zan on the other side of me and I feel a sudden and violent regret at ever having teased her about Kari. She clears her throat.
I elbow her.
‘Why are you out here?’ I ask Leo.
‘I’m bored,’ he says. ‘And you’re pretty good at making me feel less bored.’
I’m so flushed, every part of me is sweaty. Like inside my ears and the backs of my hands and all sorts of body parts that should know better than to sweat.
‘What’s he doing here?’ shouts Mum.
Gulp.
She’s spotted Leo talking to me. ‘Is he bothering you?’ She looks like any mother animal you’ve ever seen in a nature documentary whose babies are being threatened by a snake. She could pounce and rip his throat out with her teeth any second.
‘I’m explaining the dairy industry to him,’ I shout back.
‘He’s being surprisingly receptive to the information.’
Mum’s eyes narrow. ‘Tell him about factory farming,’ she says and turns back to her crowd.
Leo nudges me. ‘You could have thrown me to the wolves, Ray,’ he says.
I muster my best glare and fire it at him. ‘Just mind games, Butcher Boy. Remember when I gave you back that cricket ball? And when I pretended to like talking to you at the gig?’
He leans side on against the window and watches me. It’s like being a speck of bacteria under a super-powered microscope.
‘Stop looking at me.’
‘Isn’t that the point of you parading up and down outside our shop? That I look at you?’
‘No. I mean yes. I mean not you. Everyone else can look except you.’
Leo brings both hands up to cover his eyes like we’re about to play hide-and-go-seek. ‘Now are you happy?’ Just his nose and lips are visible between his two hands.
‘I’ll be happy when you stop talking to me,’ I say, but I can’t take my eyes off his lips.
‘So aside from pretending to enjoy my company,’ he says, ‘what did you think of Kill the Club? I know you’re a massive fan. All five albums.’
‘I hate you.’
Zan clears her throat. Loudly.
‘Aw, come on,’ says Leo. ‘I don’t think that’s true. I think you tolerate me.’
‘Tolerate?’ I snort.
‘You might even,’ says Leo, ‘say that you kinda like me.’
My whole body burns, like just-walked-through-the-desert-naked kind of burns.
‘Go on,’ says Leo. ‘Admit it.’
‘Like you?’
He nods.
I open my mouth but nothing comes out. For a second I’m terrified. This again? Am I going be awake at three in the morning regretting all the things I didn’t say?
But then, in one of the few magical moments in my life, I think of what needs to be said in the actual moment. I stand on my tip-toes and lean in, my lips dangerously close to his neck and say, ‘If you’re sure I like you so much, Butcher Boy, count to ten and see if I’m still standing here when you open your eyes.’
I stand back and watch as Leo grins. With dimples.
Despite myself I revel in a wave of satisfaction: I made him smile like that. Me.
‘All right,’ he says, peeking out ever so slightly between his fingers. ‘Ten, nine, eight, seven . . .’
I grab Zan’s hand and pull her away, feeling cool, calm and sophisticated until I realise that I’m still wearing a sandwich board.
‘We’re leaving?’ says Zan. ‘But are you sure you’ve flirted with the carnivore enough?’
‘Don’t even.’
‘Hey, Ray,’ calls Leo with the smile still in his voice. ‘Better tell your mum my dad’s calling the cops.’
________
Without the sandwich board I feel ten degrees cooler. But I still have to hike through most of Clifton Hill shoving leaflets in mailboxes that say no junk mail, please. And I have to put up with Zan smirking at me.
‘Listen,’ I snap. ‘Don’t get me started on you and your texts.’
I stop out front of a row of double-storey Victorians opposite Rushall Station and pull out my phone, doing a near-perfect impression of Zan and her secret-lover texting.
‘That’s not cool,’ she says.
I clutch my phone to my breast and sigh. ‘Oh, Kari, you’re so funny and charming and grammatically correct. Have my babies.’
She greases me off. ‘I do not swoon.’
‘Oh, but you do. And I bet you giggle.’
Zan narrows her eyes, her voice low and threatening. ‘I do not giggle.’
‘You giggle,’ I say, matching her look, ‘like a tween at a Justin Bieber concert.’
Zan grabs a handful of leaflets and sighs. She keeps walking and I follow. ‘Don’t make a big deal about it but I was thinking about asking Kari out.’
I jiggle up and down beside her. ‘Like a date?’
‘Is this you not making a big deal out of it?’
‘Are you kidding? Did you not just witness the sandwich board thing? This is me being restrained.’
We walk in a sun-happy, life-happy, love-happy cocoon of bliss. Well, I kind of skip.
A block of leafleting and smiling and being delirious later, I realise Zan isn’t smiling. I don’t think she’s sharing my cocoon feeling.
‘What?’ I shove a leaflet into a mailbox, this one already crammed with catalogues and envelopes that say You’re a winner!
Zan frowns, staring at my hands instead of me.
‘Spill,’ I tell her.
‘It’s just . . .’
I feel my cocoon breaking apart, the happy, buzzy, sunshiney air seeping out like a deflating balloon.
‘It’s just that I like her,’ says Zan. ‘And what if we start dating? And what happens when she finds out I knew about you the whole time?’
Zan looks up, but I can’t meet her eye. Next up is a block of flats. In silence I stuff leaflets in the sixteen mailboxes. When I’m done I turn and find Zan still watching me.
‘You have to tell Carmen the truth,’ she says.
I bite down on my lip. Is there a Hallmark card for ‘sorry I’m making you lie to your new girlfriend by not coming clean about being an organ transplant recipient’?
I turn and walk to the next house. The happy buzz that buoyed me only se
conds ago is so far gone I can’t even remember how it felt when it was there.
On Saturday Mum takes me out for lunch. ‘Just us girls,’ she says and we leave Pip with Vivienne at the shop. He warns me that we still haven’t watched Project Runway. He’s dressed as Diana, Princess of Whales (yes, he is half whale, half Diana) so it’s pretty funny when he tries to grease me off.
‘Later,’ I promise.
We go to the Salvos first. While Mum’s in the dressing room I wander the aisles and find myself in the ‘retro’ section. I haven’t been able to get Zan’s mum’s dress out of my head. I liked the way it looked; I liked me in it. I run my hand along the clothes, mostly dresses and mostly that rough, polyester material you know is going to itch and make you sweat. Most of the dresses look like something from a costume box (and therefore more Pip’s style than mine) but there’s one that draws my eye and refuses to let go.
It’s a maroon pinafore with bright red cherry-shaped buttons. I can imagine Twiggy wearing it in a photoshoot, her short hair pressed down with gel, heavy eyeliner and painted eyelashes. I run my hand up and down the dress and it’s not rough or heavy or sticky; it feels soft. I pull the hanger out and look at it. Is the neck too low?
‘That’s cute,’ says Mum, coming out of the fitting room. She’s got bright-green harem pants on.
‘Not those,’ I tell her. She looks down at her pants.
‘I like them.’ She pouts. ‘Can I please buy them, Marlowe? Pretty please?’
‘Do you want me to send you to the time-out room?’
‘You should try that on.’ She nods at the pinafore before retreating into the fitting room. ‘I’m buying these pants.’
I do try it on, in the change room next to Mum.
She raps on the wall between us. ‘I want see what it looks like.’
I stare at myself in the mirror, hand running up and down the front.
I pull my long hair up to see what it would look like if I had short hair, if I cut it into the Twiggy-cut I’ve always wanted but never had the courage to get. I could wear a white t-shirt underneath, and my black Mary-janes.
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