She gives me twenty dollars and I head for the bus stop.
The first part is okay. I just catch the bus that says 'City', but then as we get closer it occurs to me that the city is a pretty big place and I don't know all of it very well, just Pitt Street Mall and The Rocks and most of Darling Harbour. I know some other bits as well, because we used to have family friends at Watsons Bay, Balmain and Paddington, but I don't know where they are in relation to other parts, because I've never needed to know.
So I get off near the QVB, which I do know, because those are the only public toilets that Mum will use when we're shopping, and then I stand there looking at the bus timetables until a nice old man tells me to go up to Wynyard. I follow his directions, and I must walk ten blocks! But it isn't so bad, because the buildings are nice and there are interesting windows to look into, and I'm enjoying checking out all the office chicks' shoes. Besides, in that part of the city you don't get those people coming up and begging for money, which can happen down near Haymarket.
And then I have to wait forever for a bus. It's really longer than forever, because the whole time I'm panicking that the old man has told me the wrong thing, and I keep leaning in the doors of every bus that pulls up and asking the drivers where they're going. I have no idea how long the forever is, since I don't have a mobile phone any more, which is what I used to tell the time before, but of course that was one of the very first things to go – even before Foxtel and Mum and Dad's wine club membership.
I don't really understand how come wine club was more important than my safety, which is what a mobile is, when you come right down to it, but anyway, I finally get on the right bus and it goes back down around the QVB and up Clarence Street, so I didn't need to walk all that way after all.
The whole trip is really quite a long one, especially sitting among a whole bunch of old people and freaks. Haven't any of these people heard of deodorant? And I'm so hungry by the end, but I'm afraid to buy myself something to eat, because what if I run out of money? I could say to passers-by, 'Excuse me, I need a few bucks to catch a bus,' but nobody would believe me, because that's what all the bums say. I have to keep reminding myself that it's not just povvos, the A-listers are hungry all the time too.
The whole way to Declan's I wonder how many people I've walked past on the street who actually, truly, wanted a few bucks to catch a bus. How did they get where they needed to go? Are their mums still out at a caravan park near St Marys somewhere waiting for them to arrive?
Declan is at home having another sick day. He sees me out the window, and I can hear his feet running down the hall, but when he opens the door he's all casual. I want to hug him because I've missed him, but I'm being casual too.
'Do you ever go to school?' I ask as I saunter past him into the house.
'Do you?' he counters. 'How did you get here anyway?' He looks up and down the road for a car, but the street is empty.
'I caught a bus.' I sigh, as though it was the easiest and most boring thing in the world. I help myself to a bowl of this noodle salad thing from Declan's fridge, and explain about Mum's one hundred points through a mouthful, and soon we're squatting on the floor in the garage with the filing drawers open.
All of our most sensitive documents are spread across the oil-stained cement floor. I don't know what half of them are about, but I know they're supposed to be private. I feel exposed, kind of like I'm wearing one of those hospital gowns where your bum hangs out – Declan did keep his, by the way. He swears hospital chic is the new black. I can see myself in a scrub cap. It would look really cute with this Anna Sui smock dress that I have. Had.
I tell Declan about the night in the hotel. He loves the story about the French hairy nipples at the pub. He can't believe I didn't tell him about the hairy nipples thing from the beginning.
'Because you would have demanded proof that my nipples aren't hairy!' I say.
'True,' he concedes. There's a pause where I wait for him to say, So are they? but he leaves it.
I tell Declan how Mum has taken up smoking, about the whisperer, and how they beat up Will. I told him about how they stole Will's clothes, and pantsed me in the laneway. Declan's face scrunches up.
'I did that to a kid. Aiden Farmer, his name is. He's a little pain in the arse, and one time he was walking along the promenade in front of me. It's this second-storey walkway that goes from B Block to C Block, and it's glassed in, so you look down into the Junior Quad. I fully pantsed him and then pressed him against the glass so everyone below could see. So they put me on this "program". Every Tuesday morning I had to go in with the chaplain and talk about empathy, so then I stopped going to school on Tuesdays. They changed it to Mondays, so I stopped going on Mondays too. The chaplain asks me questions as if he's trying to find the reason for me being such an arsehole.'
'Well, it was an arsehole thing to do.'
'You think I don't know that?' Declan glares at me. 'But the whole thing happened in about five seconds and I've been on the program for months now. You'd think we could all move on.'
I flick through the folders in the filing cabinet. 'How come it's going on so long?'
Declan grimaces. 'The chaplain says I have to keep going until I agree that I sexually abused a younger boy, and I won't, because I didn't.'
'Yeah, you did.'
'Pantsing isn't sexual abuse. It's only sexual abuse if you touch it.'
'You did touch him. You pulled his pants down. You made him do something against his will.'
'I didn't touch his thingo. And I didn't get off on it either. It wasn't sexual, it was just normal abuse, and if you don't want boys to do that, then you shouldn't put, like, a thousand of them together, and only acknowledge the ones that are good at contact sports.'
'Okay, whatever.'
Declan is getting shirty, so I open the next drawer. 'If you had asked me to guess why you hated school I would never have picked that,' I tell him. 'You look more like the pantsee to me.'
'You're welcome to try.' He grins.
It doesn't take us long to find Mum's passport. It's with mine and Will's, but Dad's isn't there.
'He would have needed it to get to New Zealand,' Declan reminds me.
I stare at the spot where his passport should have been. 'He must have slipped his passport in his pocket and then crept out, leaving his pregnant wife and two sleeping kids. Nice.'
'Classy,' Declan adds.
'This sucks. He should be here. I can't believe we let him off so easy. I'm going to ring him.'
'How are you going to ring him?'
I pull out the drawer above. This one has bills in it. They used to be filed in order by date with receipt numbers written in the top corner in my mother's small, neat handwriting, but for the last few months they are just shoved in. They have big red stamps on them. OVERDUE!
Declan takes a handful of phone bills, and we flick through them till we find the month before Dad left. We're looking for mobile numbers called during the day. That would be when Dad called the Heather woman.
Declan stops. 'What about this one? This number has been called a lot. Five minutes, then twenty-three minutes, then ten minutes. I know this number. Where do I know it from? Look, I can say it without even looking.' He rattles it off twice. 'Why would you have a number on your phone bill that I know so well?'
'Maybe it's in an ad? Maybe it's Pizza Eatza?'
He keeps repeating the number. He makes a song of it, until I crumple up an old envelope and throw it at his head. 'Why don't you just ring it?' I ask.
'I thought we were after the number for this Heather woman? I've never rung her, so that wouldn't be it.' He flicks the bill over and looks at the back. 'My mum has this big thing about the phone company ripping us off. When the bill comes in she goes through every number with a ruler under each line, and she writes down numbers she doesn't recognise in a little book that she keeps in her handbag. How weird is that? I've seen her ringing numbers to find out what they are, which is stupid becau
se then on the next bill, her calling the number will come up as a two-second call, and then she'll be all suspicious of that. Sometimes I think she needs a job.'
'Let's try this one.'
Declan hands me his mobile.
Suddenly there's a voice attached to this Heather person, who had been merely a concept. In my head she's mid-twenties, blonde and goes to the gym, because that's what all home-wrecking secretaries look like, isn't it? But she doesn't sound like that. Heather must be older. She just sounds tired.
I put on the face that my mum used to call bolshie – back when Mum said things, before she was the chainsmoking, monosyllabic, trailer-park lady. I say in a bolshie voice, 'I wanna talk to my dad.'
Heather doesn't say Who is this? or any of the things I had been preparing myself for. I just hear her cover the mouthpiece and then after a few moments my dad's there.
'Yes, Jenna-Belle, what is it?'
I take a deep breath. 'You can't just answer the phone with "Yes, what is it?" as if we saw each other half an hour ago – as if I'm a nuisance.'
Then I told Dad about the sheriff. I skipped the part about our siege. I also skipped the part about the hotel, and went straight to the part where the whisperer was clinging onto the side of the caravan like a monkey. I told him what they said. I used the swear words. I told him how Willem was the squeaky wheel.
My dad didn't speak, but I could tell he was there because he had a whistle in his nose that came through the phone. That made me all choked up in the neck, because when I was small and my dad had a whistle in his nose, I used to ask him to play me a tune. He always did, and it was always 'Good King Wenceslas'.
With my choked-up voice I told him about the passport and how I had pictured him creeping out past his children and pregnant wife.
'What do you have to say about that?' I said. 'What are you going to do about it? Are you just going to pretend we don't exist?'
There was a space where his nose whistled for a while.
'And besides, yelling at the woman from the electricity company is not being proactive. A squeaky wheel is not proactive. It's the opposite, because if it had been taken care of properly, then it wouldn't be squeaky, would it? You know what would have been proactive? If you'd bought a generator, or windmill, or something.'
'Jenna-Belle, you need to understand something important,' Dad said. 'After you were born I had a vasectomy.'
'A what?' I said, but I knew what that word meant. 'No . . .'
So now Dad's lying around on the lounge crying while Mum gave me the little-brother-or-sister speech made a bit more sense.
'They can come undone, you know,' I add.
'It didn't come undone.'
'Oh.' I hang up the phone and sit for a while cross-legged on the floor not saying anything at all, until the suspense sends Declan insane.
'What did he say?'
'Dad had the snip.'
Declan stares at me. 'Then who . . .?'
'Yes, that's what I want to know,' I interrupt.
After that Declan and I did something that I'm not ready to talk about yet.
19
TEXTS
'It's got to be Bryce Cole,' Will says in a low voice.
We're sitting on the edge of the pool splashing our feet in the water. I've just told Willem about Dad's little procedure. The light reflecting off the water makes crazy patterns on Will's squinting face. There are a few women with mini-bogan children down at the other end. Our swimmers are in Declan's garage, otherwise we'd be in the pool.
Mum has taken her points back to Centrelink on her own.
All the way on the bus back to the caravan park I'd been thinking and I decided that Bryce Cole was not the father of Mum's baby. Where would Bryce Cole have met my mother? They don't have a single thing in common. Well, they do now. They're both povvos.
'But why bother pretending? Surely not for our sake?' I say. 'And besides, they're just not lovey with each other. They're more like siblings.'
I know lovey. Declan gave me his mobile when I left and he's written lovey text messages for the last three hours from Messenger on his computer. He started out all about how he was a slave to his silent love for me, but now he is free. Then he realised he could use medical metaphors. I think he thinks it's poetry. He's still fixated on Hansen's disease, and some of the imagery is pretty ripe.
I cud liv w/out my legs
Bt I need my hands
2 rip out my & give it 2 U
It was freaking me right out, so I turned the phone off and stashed it at the bottom of my bag, under Dad's t-shirt and the pinch pot.
'If it's not Bryce Cole, then who?' Will asks.
'I don't know. Maybe it was someone from work.'
Will keeps a wary eye out for those other boys, but we haven't seen them yet. They're probably off playing hacky-sack with kittens.
Bryce Cole left a message for us at reception. He's coming over later. He said he'd take us somewhere for dinner. I'm hoping he had another good day at the track and will take us somewhere nice.
'If it is him we could confront them and maybe he'll stay over.'
'Better still, we can go and stay wherever he's staying,' Will says. 'Where do you think he stays?'
I had wondered about that myself. I bet he sleeps in the car.
'But if we do confront Mum then I'll have to admit that I rang Dad, and then explain that I actually rang Heather.' I think about it. 'It might be worth it. I don't want to stay here another night.'
Will grunts.
I'm so used to thinking of Dad as the bad guy, but now I don't know who cheated on who first. I think it was Mum. She's the bad guy and we're with her. If Dad's the good guy, then he's supposed to save us. We should be with him, shouldn't we? Bryce Cole seems to be doing all the saving, such as it is, but I know he's not the good guy. Maybe there aren't any good guys? It's a depressing thought.
I tip forward, land in the water with a splash and let myself sink to the bottom. When I pop out of the water Will is shaking his head. 'You're an idiot.'
I reach out my hand for him to haul me out, but when he takes it I jerk with all my strength and Will falls into the pool next to me. It's the oldest trick in the book. I can't believe he didn't see it coming.
Neither of us gets out though. It's nice and cool. I hope our clothes will dry before it's time to go out for dinner.
Bryce Cole has a friend who owns a Chinese restaurant in Parramatta, so we go there for dinner. The restaurant is closed, but there are some Asian men sitting at a table at the back. Bryce Cole knocks and they let us in. A waiter sets the three of us a table. She gives us forks and spoons instead of chopsticks as if we're ignorant chumps, and brings us a plate of piping hot spring rolls. She also brings us hot chips and pours soy sauce over them. The whole time she's watching a television. I say thank you, and she flicks me a look. There is no religious flourish or bowing.
After a quick greeting, Bryce Cole joins the others at the back table. There's a clatter as one of the men tips out a box of small tiles. They shift them around on the table, mixing them up, and then start building a tiny wall.
'What are they doing?' I ask.
'I think it's called mahjong,' Mum answers. 'It's kind of like cards.'
'Let me guess,' I say. 'It's a gambling game.' Now I understand why he took so long to get our food that night.
When we finish eating I turn Declan's phone back on. There are twenty-five text messages. They start out lovey and then get more urgent. Thankfully he has reintroduced vowels into his repertoire. The most recent one reads: ur obviously dead. I'm calling the police.
Girl Next Door Page 13