Sunny Side Up

by Marion Roberts

  I know you’re probably thinking that going for walks with your Mum at night would be a dead bore, and that if I’d had a brother or a sister I could be making prank calls or throwing rotten tomatoes at next door’s roller-blind, but I like going for walks with Mum because of the conversations we have. It’s true. We have really good ones when there’s no one else to butt in. As long as the conversations don’t involve Granny Carmelene, that is. Plus, I had arranged to meet Claud down at Elwood beach, because she had finally come back from visiting her grandparents, in Queensland, who not only had a freezer in the garage full of Weiss Bars but also took her and Walter to The Worlds, three times. Seriously, neither of my parents has ever taken me to see anything bigger than the Giant Worm, which is why I should report them to the Kids Help Line.

  It was almost dark and the whole of the foreshore smelt of burnt chops. The air was cooler, though, and felt like a substance you could actually breathe with. There were people dotted all over the grass and the sand, and bobbing out in the water as if they were desperately waiting for a rescue mission to take them to Antarctica.

  ‘Where did you say you’d meet Claud?’ asked Mum.

  ‘Under the tower thingy,’ I said, pointing to the top of the hill at Point Ormond, which was brown and dry and almost completely bald of grass.

  ‘Poor Willow,’ said Mum. ‘You’ll have to give her a big walk in the morning, before it gets too hot.’

  ‘I will,’ I said. ‘Promise!’ I raced ahead of her, up to the top of the hill, because sometimes it’s easier to run when hills are steep, plus it takes less time. From up top I could see right over the city. The huge scorching sun was making the mirrored skyscrapers all orange as it swooped over the sea to the horizon. It was comforting up there because not only was it breezy but I like the way life feels from above: almost as if you’re looking at a map. My favourite feeling, though, is when you lean your forehead on the inside of an aeroplane window and peer down at the earth below. Everything becomes minute and insignificant, and trees look like florets of broccoli, and your life starts to change shape and feel like a toy-life in a board game, and all your worries go away. That evening, from seat 44K of my imaginary aeroplane, I saw the beach as a big swirling paisley carpet. But I didn’t think about it for too long because I spotted Claud jogging towards me.

  She was wearing new green boardies and her frisbee was poking out of her bag. She’s an absolutely and undeniably impressive frisbee thrower, as well as being good at practically everything, and a tom-boy in general. I, on the other hand, am a wobbly frisbee thrower with incredibly dodgy aim, who always blames it on the wind. Luckily, I’ve since been learning about wrist action and following through.

  ‘Hey, Sunny!’ said Claud, puffing and smiling. She was tanned and her hair was blonder (I think from chlorine, or maybe just from being in Queensland where the sun is a little gentler and you can actually go outside).

  ‘Hi, Claud,’ I beamed. I really wanted to hug her but ended up just giving her a nudge with my shoulder in a leaning-in sort of a way, because Claud’s not the kind of girl who’s into hugging. I also wanted to avoid the situation where I was hugging her but she wasn’t hugging me back. That’s a bad scene. Plus, I was distracted by Mum’s mobile phone ringing and I noticed she was sitting on the bluestone wall kicking off her thongs and looking all smiley and girlie, which meant pretty much for certain she was talking to Carl, who makes her act all teenagey sometimes because she’s in love.

  I was reminded of one of Carl’s jokes that I wanted to tell Claud, but then I realised I’d forgotten the punch line. It’s like that with jokes – I’ve usually forgotten the punchline before I even stop laughing. They tend to go all slippery when I try to make them stick to my memory.

  Ouch! The Tangent Police just blew their whistles really loudly in my ear, which is a good sign because it means they’re actually doing some work for a change.

  Claud and I raced each other down the hill and she beat me onto the sand, where we dumped our bags. Claud laughed at the T-shirt Carl gave me, but I figured it was better than one saying Piping Hot or Superman or Roxy, which is the sort everyone else wears and it makes you feel as ordinary as a number 14 BBQ chicken all basted and lined up in the bain-marie at Tennyson Street Foodworks, ready to be stuffed into a silver-lined bag.

  We waded into the water, being super careful not to kick any rocks disguised as sponges. As soon as it was deep enough we duck dived and came up at exactly the same time. I kicked out to sea a bit, to make some space for a game of frisbee.

  ‘So how was it?’ I shouted to Claud as I threw her the frisbee, meaning Queensland in general, and The Worlds in particular.

  ‘It was so cool,’ said Claud. ‘Even the third time.’ She hurled herself sideways to catch one of my wobbly throws and disappeared under the water, holding the frisbee up above her like a trophy.

  ‘There were these guys,’ Claud said when she surfaced. ‘I met them in the queue for The Tower of Terror, and they were sort of bogans, but one of them was really cute. He went on the Giant Drop with me because Walter was too scared. His name was Mitch, and we hung out for, like, the whole day. It was so cool.’

  ‘Was it really scary?’

  ‘It was so scary! You drop really fast and you scream and scream. We went on it three times, then Mitch said we could go back to his resort, ’cos they were staying at Seaworld Nara, and we didn’t get out of the pool for, like, three hours. Seriously, it was awesome. And the next day he texted me, and we met at Wet’n’Wild and Mitch came with me on Terror Canyon 2.’

  ‘Was Walter too scared again?’ I asked, practising my wrist action.

  ‘Nah, I just wanted to go on it with Mitch,’ said Claud as she lunged out wide to catch another one of my dodgy throws.

  ‘Oh, sorry Claud!’

  ‘Tomorrow’s going to be 43 degrees,’ she said, skimming the frisbee back to me in the straightest line possible. It caught a breath of wind and sailed above the surface of the water like a low-flying sea bird.

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘Not exactly ideal for pizza making, but it’s Friday, we’ve got orders.’

  ‘Business is business!’ said Claud.

  We’ve got a wood-fired oven in our back shed, which is part of the reason Claud and I had the idea for our deluxe pizza delivery business, Pizza-A-Go-Girl. We’ve got regular satisfied customers and a jar full of profits, because if there’s one thing Claud and I are good at it’s having ideas that work.

  When it was getting so dark we could hardly see, we waded out of the water and found our towels.

  ‘Hey, Claud? I did some more artwork for the pizza boxes while you were away.’

  ‘Great. Oh, you should see how much they charge for pizza up on the Gold Coast, and they’re not even good. My grandma nearly had a fit. They charge you four dollars just for a coke. Maybe we should put our prices up? Or maybe we should open Pizza-A-Go-Girl up there when we’re a bit older.’

  ‘Pizza-A-Go-Girl goes world wide,’ I said, drawing a huge circle in the sand with the edge of the Frisbee.

  ‘I can see it now,’ said Claud. ‘Elwood, Gold Coast, Paris, New York, London—’ ‘And Transylvania,’ I said. ‘Don’t forget Transylvania.’ ‘Bags not doing home deliveries in Transylvania. Too many vampires.’

  ‘What about Rome?’

  ‘Forget it. Too much competition,’ laughed Claud.

  It’s the fact Claud is good at absolutely everything that makes her an ideal business partner. It’s not that I’m not good at things, but Claud is good at different things, and she’s especially good at having conversations and making new friends. According to Mum, it’s because Claud’s an extrovert, which is the opposite of being an introvert like me. I read about it in one of Mum’s psychology books, along with a whole lot of other interesting theories by Carl Jung (not Mum’s Carl). Extroverts are chatty and outgoing and enjoy being social, whereas introverts tend to be quieter and think more. We are happier being alone, so that we can thin
k up theories and philosophies, and read.

  Maybe Claud’s extrovert nature is the reason she’s already into dating. But it might also be because she watches The OC. I don’t get dating. I mean, why would you want to hang about with some random boy like Ivan Vandenberg? Ivan asked me to go to a movie with him once. That’s how I know I’m not into dating, because I would much rather have seen the movie with Claud or even with Mum. Going on a date with Ivan Vandenberg was a big yawn. That’s why I dropped him, or ‘nipped it in the bud’, as They say – whoever They actually are . . .

  Sometimes, I imagine a whole kingdom of Theys living in a castle in Transylvania. There is a huge stone wall with iron gates and written in magnificent gold lettering over the spikes are the words The Theys. There are enormous, meandering grounds full of spooky trees infested with peacocks that shriek in the night. The Theys spend their day sitting around a long table, having endless banquets where They think up, and make official, all the things that They say. It’s sort of like parliament, although the Theys are dignified and don’t scream at one another or have tanties like the politicians on tellie. Once the Theys have come up with something new that They say, one of them whispers the new saying through the spiky iron gates to a town crier (who is really just a person who loves to gossip and say ‘Ooh aaah, you know what they say, blah blah blah’) and before you know it, the things They say are adopted world wide. Here are a few I can remember off the top of my head:

  They say that sometimes it’s best to nip things in the bud. (Which means to stop something before it starts, like dropping Ivan Vandenberg after one dud date.)

  They say you should wait for twenty minutes after eating before you swim, to avoid stomach cramps.

  They say no two snowflakes are ever alike.

  They say you should keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.

  They say girls’ brains develop faster than boys and that they’re better at maths (well, hello!).

  They say more people go crazy on the full moon.

  They say opposites attract (like introverts and extroverts).

  They say we only use ten per cent of our brains (less in some people I know, like Buster Conroy).

  They say love makes the world go round.

  They say there’s always calm before a storm.

  See what happens? There I was talking about Claud when I ended up in Transylvania in the land of The Theys. The Tangent Police really need to be more on the ball, I can tell you, especially with school going back next week.

  Anyway, I was glad to have Claud back. Sometimes you don’t realise how much you’ve missed something until you get it back again. I don’t always like to admit that I miss people, not even to myself. But I missed Claud a mountain, which I know doesn’t really make sense, but it does to me because it’s much much more than missing someone a mole-hill.

  3 .

  ‘Sunny, wake up, darling, you’ve got to walk Willow. You know dogs aren’t allowed on the beach after nine.’

  I looked over to my bed-side clock. It was seven a.m.

  ‘Mum,’ I mumbled, ‘it’s holidays. I don’t even get up this early on school days.’

  I rolled onto my stomach,

  hoping she’d go away.

  ‘Come on, Sunny. You agreed that if we got a dog you’d—’

  ‘Okay, okay.’ I really didn’t want to get into the dog argument again, because I knew what Mum was going to say and it was all true. I’d wanted a dog, I’d promised to share the responsibility and take her for walks and pick up poo from the yard.

  ‘Well, a deal’s a deal, Sunny. You promised . . .’

  I thought about leaping out of bed even though I was still feeling super drowsy, because sometimes it’s easier to just gather yourself up and spring into things that you don’t really want to do, so that before you know it you’ve already done them. Willow was sitting on my rug wagging her tail, so I had to climb down from my bunk frontwards or jump right over her. If I went backwards Willow would definitely shove her snout up my bum while I wasn’t looking, which is just one of the many naughty things that Willow does.

  Willow is a bum sniffer, it’s official. And because she’s a rather tall dog (and a bendy one), bums are at the same level as her long pointy greyhound snout. You see, as much as dogs can be sweet and lovely, they can also be disgusting and naughty just because they’re dogs. No matter how much you train them, you really can’t stop dogs from being dogs. It just doesn’t work.

  I once tried to train Willow to be a toilet roll holder because her snout is just the right shape for it, and I thought toilet roll holding was a far more useful thing for her snout to be doing than sniffing bums. It was absolutely no use. She just ate the whole roll and Mum yelled at me, not just for being wasteful but because she said having a toilet roll shoved on your snout was undignified for a dog. Can you imagine? We’re talking about a hound who not only rolls in rotting dead water rats but who steals dirty underwear from the laundry basket and hides it in her bed! But don’t get me started because if I was to go off on a tangent about all the disgusting and very undignified things Willow has done, it would take up the whole book. So perhaps just check at the end and I might make a list.

  I raced Willow through the house, because running fast is up there with bum sniffing and dirty-underwear theft as one of Willow’s favourite things to do. She skidded on the floorboards as she ran out the back door, then did crazy ballistic laps around the Hills hoist clothes line before hiding behind Mum’s succulent garden, thinking that because she couldn’t see me, I couldn’t see her crouching down in her commando pose. She had her chin on the grass and her ears flat back, ready to pounce. I snuck up ever so slowly but she leapt out at me and spun around and around on her back legs like a malfunctioning washing machine, before doing another ten laps around the clothes line.

  Actually, you can hardly call it a clothes line any more. Mum’s grown wisteria all over it and now it’s become a tree with curly tendrils that grab you when you run past. Mum loves it even though there’s only enough hanging space left for two wet socks. She thinks it’s ‘sculptural’.

  Mum was in the shed, which is where we have our second (warm-weather) kitchen. I know it’s weird, but that’s just how it is in our house. When it gets cold, we use the kitchen inside the house, which Mum says is ‘dysfunctional’ and built for dwarves. She got so tired of bending over the itsy-bitsy little benches that she built a new kitchen in the shed using giant industrial equipment that she bought second-hand from a restaurant that went broke. The fact is, we’re tall people and we need tall benches. The shed kitchen is as big as a barn. When people come over they say they feel like they’re in the country somewhere, like in Italy or France or Spain. There’s a huge kidney-shaped table in the centre and a wood-fired oven where you can bake twenty loaves of bread at once. There are couches around a fireplace, and piles of wood stacked up against the walls, next to all the normal stuff you keep in sheds, like pogo sticks and bicycles.

  Willow raced ahead of me and jumped on the couch (naughty), panting and laughing. She really does laugh you know. She looks half-jackal and half-kangaroo.

  ‘I squeezed some fresh OJ,’ said Mum, pointing towards a jug on the table. She was doing the crossword and flicking through the paper. I pulled up a stool next to hers so I could look at the comics and the Superquiz and help her with the crossword.

  ‘What time’s Claud coming?’ asked Mum.

  ‘About eight. Her mum’s dropping her off before work. Hey, which British supermodel shares her surname with a non-vascular plant that grows in moist, shady areas and starts with M? . . . I know, don’t tell me . . . Moss, Kate Moss.’ I poured myself an orange juice.

  ‘Well done. There’s some fruit salad if you feel like it.’

  ‘Nah, not hungry yet thanks, I’ll have some later. According to the proverb, what makes the heart grow fonder?’

  ‘Absence. Sunny, just stop for a minute. I need to talk to you.’

  ‘Ab
sence is correct. Go Mum! And don’t worry, I’ll do Willow. I’m just waiting for Claud to get here and we’ll walk her together.’

  ‘It’s not about that. It’s about Carl.’

  ‘Are you dropping him?’

  ‘Sunny, no, it’s quite the opposite actually.’

  ‘Carl’s dropping you?’

  ‘No, nobody’s dropping anybody. Can we be serious for a moment please?’ Mum cleared her throat. ‘Carl and I . . . well, we feel very deeply for one another, and we’d like to share our lives together in a more committed way and—’

  ‘You’re getting married again? How could you? You said you didn’t believe in marriage.’

  ‘We’re not getting married, Sunny.’

  ‘You want Carl to move in then? It’s not as if I haven’t heard you talking about it.’

  ‘Well, I was going to see how the idea sat with you Sunny, how you felt about it.’

  ‘What about Lyall and Saskia?’

  ‘There’s that to consider as well. When they’re not at their mum’s house they’d be here with Carl, and with us.’ ‘Where?

  Where would they sleep?’

  ‘They’d have the front room. Don’t worry, you’d still have your own room, Sunny. No one’s expecting you to share.’

  ‘But the front room’s your consulting room. Where would you work from?’

  ‘There’s a room for rent in Ormond Road, with another naturopath. I could go in there. Anyway, Sunny, that’s not the important part. What is important to me, and to Carl of course, is that everyone feels comfortable. It’d be a big change—’

  ‘What was the name of Norman Lindsay’s Magic Pudding: Alfred, Albert or Allan?’