Billy followed her inside. He’d never thought of the library as big or small. It just was what it was.
Rashmi headed for the shelves then paused near the librarian’s desk. “Thanks,” she said over her shoulder.
“See you around, I guess,” Billy said.
He saw her again that afternoon after school, getting into a car in the car park. They nodded and “Hey’d” each other as Billy headed up the street to Glebe Point Road. The blond woman driving the car said something to Rashmi, who just shook her head as she stowed her crutches in beside her.
It didn’t take Rashmi long to get a reputation at the school. Billy overheard Lisa Miller and her crew talking, saying that Rashmi was crazy, that she had been kicked out of a Catholic girls’ school. “The mad cow hit a girl in the head with one of her sticks. Nearly blinded her.”
Rashmi didn’t fit into the school’s social order, not that she had any interest in fitting in. The geeks liked that she was smart but thought she was outright dangerous. The jocks thought she was a freak show. With her coloured hair, she should have been tight with the emo crowd, but she thought they were a bunch of wankers. Belinda and Hank, the current king and queen of emo, tried to make friends with her, but Rash had too much attitude for them. She wasn’t afraid to call bullshit, and Belinda and Hank’s crowd had bullshit to spare. She couldn’t actually stand up for herself physically, so she used her tongue, constantly running a blistering line of sarcasm. She could be funny too, when she wanted, but she wasn’t a party girl, which was by far the easiest way to fit in. So she ended up an outsider and drifted into the orbit of the others who didn’t fit in. Billy, Leroy, and Donno—the awks, as they were universally known, after one of the jocks had come up with the name. The awkward ones.
Although Rashmi spent most of her free time at school in the library, sometimes she ventured out. Clicking down to the handball courts, sitting on the low brick wall, watching whoever was playing. Not saying much. Billy didn’t know what to think of her at first. She was prickly but seemed to want their company. And when she laughed and joked, she was like a different person. Her smile was like a light he wanted to turn on. She could change quickly, though—get angry and say something that hurt. Sometimes it seemed like she didn’t even know she was doing it.
Donno and Leroy were glad enough to have any girl hanging out with them, but they were never really comfortable around Rash. Billy could almost see their brains working, wondering if there was any hidden meaning or sarcasm in her words. When Rash came to the handball courts, Donno and Leroy would keep playing, and Billy would sit by Rash and watch. They’d talk about different stuff, sometimes about Sri Lanka. That’s where her dad was from, why she had dark skin. About polio, how it had messed up her legs. She got that in Africa, she reckoned. After they’d left Sri Lanka, her mum had taken her there while she was working on some aid project.
Nearly everyone thought Rashmi was weird and probably had violent tendencies, but she didn’t care. She seemed to try hard to make everyone stay away from her. Billy asked her why she had left her old school.
“What did you hear?” she said, watching Donno and Leroy argue about how many times a dribble had bounced.
“Not much, just that you hit someone. With your crutch.”
Rashmi nodded. “Emily Phillips. And they kicked me out. Her mum’s a cop, and her dad’s some kind of lawyer. They threatened to sue, so the school had no choice. They cut me loose, even though most of the teachers thought the cunt had it coming.”
“Why’d you hit her?”
“She was always going on about asylum seekers, boat people. Calling them queue jumpers, all that bullshit.” She shrugged. “I got sick of hearing it, so I hit her.” Rashmi knew a lot about the whole boat-people thing. She had family in Sri Lanka who were trying to get out. “Fuck Emily Phillips,” she had said as Donno lunged towards them, missing the ball. Billy picked it up and underarmed it back to Leroy.
They might have been wary of Rash themselves, but Leroy and Donno appreciated it when she turned her tongue on others. The four of them often sat around making stuff up about the other kids, putting shit on the teachers. Just the usual stuff. Rash was clever, in all the top classes, funny too, and good-looking if you could see past her legs.
Billy didn’t know what he expected, hanging around her house. Maybe he’d see her in the window, be able to give her a wave. It was weird not seeing her at all, not since Speech Day. Before that, they’d spent so much time together working to rig her crutches.
His arse was getting sore from sitting in the gutter, and he was starting to think about where to go next, when Rashmi’s mum came out of the house. She was pulling one of those shopping trolley things old ladies use. The wooden gate squeaked loudly as she opened it before manoeuvring the trolley through and letting it slam behind her. Billy waited till she got to the top of the hill and turned onto Booth Street before he came out from between the van and the four-wheel-drive.
He had to ring the bell three times before he heard movement inside. Then a voice yelled, “Fuck off. I’m not talking, and anyway I’m not home. So just fuck off.”
“It’s me. Billy.”
“Billy? What the fuck? Go away, will you? If anyone sees you, you’ll be in the shit too.”
“I saw your mum go. I just wanted to see if you were all right.”
“Jesus, Billy.” The door opened, and Rashmi’s hand grabbed his shirt and pulled him inside. After slamming the door behind him, she stood there staring at him.
“I missed you,” he said.
“Billy…”
He hugged her, fast and awkwardly, smelling her hair then letting her go again. “I know…sorry.” He was grinning. He didn’t care if she didn’t like him hugging her. He was just glad to see her. “There’s no one out in the street. I checked.”
“Mum’ll be back soon. She’s just gone to the shops to get something for tea.”
“I won’t stay. I just…” He sighed. “I wanted to see you.”
“Here I am then. How do I look?”
“Awesome,” he lied. Rashmi looked tired. Her skin was blotchy, and her hair was all over the place.
“Yeah, that’s how I feel. Awesome.”
“I’m sorry.” Billy didn’t know where to put his hands. “I miss talking to you. It’s weird…not being able to just talk.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“How’s your mum handling it?”
“She’s pissed, so pissed. She spends a lot of time in the garden so she won’t have to talk to me. What about John?”
Billy slumped against the wall. “He’s angry. And being a dick. I haven’t been back to his place.”
“What did you expect? Where are you staying?”
“Sleeping at mum’s mostly,” he lied.
“How’s that going?”
“All right, if I stay invisible.”
“I wish you could hang here. Just watch movies with me. That’s all I do. That and read. Mum and the lawyer won’t let me go on the Internet.”
Billy was glad of that, but it had to be hard on someone like Rashmi, who spent a lot of her time online. “My Mum doesn’t have Internet. I’ll have to go over to John’s sometime soon anyway. I left my camera and laptop there. How long before they let you out?”
“They won’t say. I’ll have to go to court. The lawyer says it’ll depend.”
“On what?”
Rashmi looked down at her fingers, winding them around one another. “On Mr. Baxter.”
When Sally returned, Billy slipped out the back door and picked his way quietly around to the front of the house. It looked like Rash’s mother had been taking her frustrations out on the garden. Half the shrubs alongside the house had been dug up and were piled against the fence. The bare soil was lumpy and broken, with a fork and a spade sticking out of the middle of it, signalling that she wasn’t finished with it yet. Billy jumped the short front fence rather than risk the squeaky gate. He headed up the hill to Joh
nson Street, avoiding the shops at Annandale, and worked his way down the other side, using laneways and parks, until he reached Bridge Road. It was a habit he had got into. Kind of a game, trying to stay off the streets as much as possible. Something he had picked up from John.
He was heading for John’s house now, hoping he wouldn’t be there but thinking he probably would. John didn’t have a job or anything, and he still hadn’t finished off the last of the house renovations. All he seemed to do was sit around and worry about stuff. When it was warm out like now, he’d sit on the front veranda, watching the street. Watching who came and went, who parked there. Working out who they were. In the morning he’d see nurses from Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, up on Missenden Road, parking there because it was the closest free parking. They’d be leaving about now, replaced in the evening by students taking night classes at the university, or people going to the park to exercise or use the courts. Billy knew this stuff because John had pointed it out to him. Situational awareness, he called it. Paying attention was all it was really. Noticing stuff, being curious. Looking at the patterns, at the things that didn’t fit. John liked to know who lived in all the houses, when they came and went, what they drove. He was a bit crazy like that.
For a long while, John had been obsessed by a particular car in the street, a brand-new MINI Cooper S. It had appeared one Friday and stayed there without moving for ten months. John had looked it up online. “Forty-thousand dollars on the road. Who leaves a car like that to rot?”
After John pointed it out to him, Billy started watching the car too. It did seem weird, a nice car like that just left there. Not being used, a complete waste. Billy wouldn’t have minded owning it, if he could drive. He definitely wouldn’t let it get filthy in the street like that. After a few months, the black-and-white paintwork was covered with mottled grime and big dollops of bird shit. Leaves and twigs lay across the roof, and cobwebs covered the wing mirrors. In the windscreen-wiper well, the leaves were so deep that they had started to decompose.
John kept coming up with reasons for why it might be there. Why no one was looking after it. Billy said maybe it was stolen and abandoned, but John didn’t think so. Who would steal a valuable car like that and just leave it? They’d sell it or scrap it for parts. Make some money—that’s the whole point of stealing cars. Unless some joyrider had taken it then dumped it here, but the owners would have reported it stolen. Maybe they had, but no one else had noticed the car here. It was a fairly quiet street after all, almost a dead end. Billy told John he should report the car to the police if he was so worried about it. But John shook his head. It wasn’t that important, not really. Since his mother had been killed, John didn’t want anything to do with the police.
Billy had liked John’s mum, Betty. She was a tough old lady who said what she thought no matter what. Even when it hurt people. He supposed she was like Rash that way. When Betty Lawrence was a young woman, she’d lived in Paris, and she’d been in lots of wars, photographing them for newspapers and stuff. Never got hurt all those years. But when she moved back to Sydney, into a retirement village, that was when she got killed.
John had changed after that. Sometimes he was sad, but mostly he was angry. After his mother had died, he never finished fixing up the house; in fact, he began pulling it apart. Starting with the front hall, where another woman, a researcher working on Betty’s photos, had been killed. She had been mistaken for John and shot when she opened the front door. John had pulled up the bloodstained floorboards and replaced them with chipboard. He said it was just temporary, but it had been three years now.
He worried a lot and put stuff off. Billy sometimes wondered if he didn’t want to finish the house because then he’d have to decide what to do next. Everyone thought he should just get a job, but he always had some reason not to.
One morning the MINI was just gone, disappeared during the night. All that was left were the weeds that had grown up around the wheels in the gutter. It never showed up again. John was mad that he didn’t get to see who had taken it.
Waiting at the traffic light at Parramatta Road, Billy noticed the Christmas decorations in the windows of the big camping and toy shops on opposite corners of the intersection. Trying to cash in on Christmas, they both had lots of Santas and fake snow. Even the golf store had gone all Christmassy, with red-and-gold posters up. It was only a couple of weeks away now, Billy supposed. Everyone was getting pretty excited about it.
An old guy who didn’t look like he’d be buying much this Christmas came up and waited beside him. He had a dog on a piece of rope. Billy let the dog sniff his hand then gave its head a rub. “What’s his name?”
“Arthur.”
“Good name.”
The guy nodded and grinned, showing how few teeth he had left.
Billy gave the dog’s ears one more rub before the light changed. Maybe John should get a dog, he thought. Tony had brought a cat with him to the house, but cats aren’t the same as dogs. Tony’s cat was cool, though. A strange-looking thing called Adolf. It had a black moustache and a diagonal black patch on its face that made it look like Adolf Hitler. Billy liked the cat, but it wasn’t much company; all it did was sleep. A dog would be much more fun. Dogs do stuff: chase balls, go for walks. Billy had never had a pet because his mother hated animals. She thought they were dirty, which was funny if you knew his mum.
John did seem to like having Adolf around the house. The two of them were home together most days, and Billy had overheard John talking to it a few times. Shasta was the only one who didn’t like the cat. She was always having a go at Tony about Adolf sleeping in her room, shedding all over her clothes. She said the black and white fur was the worst of both worlds, showing up on her clothes no matter what colour they were. Billy reckoned Adolf wouldn’t go in there so much if Shasta spent more time sleeping in her own room instead of with John. Most nights she slept in the big front room with him. Adolf seemed to have figured that if her room was empty, he might as well use it. One time when Billy and Tony were playing a video game in the living room, they’d heard Shasta shouting and a door slamming. Adolf bounded down the stairs, followed by Shasta, who was waving a small black dress with a large patch of white fur rubbed into the middle of it. “Look what your Nazi cat has done!” she shouted at Tony. “Keep him the fuck out of my room.”
Tony shrugged as she stomped her way back upstairs. “All she has to do is keep the door closed.”
Adolf sat in the middle of the living room, licking his paws, as though he were wondering what the fuss was about.
At Camperdown Park, a couple of guys in the bandstand were boxing with a trainer. Their gloves slapped loudly into the mitts as the trainer kept shuffling around the circular space, making them use their feet.
Shasta was the first girlfriend John had since Billy had known him. He supposed she was a good match for John. Both of them were a bit nuts. Billy had tried to like Shasta, out of loyalty mainly. John liked her, and Billy liked John, but there was just something about her. She was nice to look at, though. Very fit and always wearing tight exercise clothes. She was mostly happy too, except when Adolf was around, but there was something about the way she talked that set Billy off, made him want to leave the room. With Shasta, everything was always “awesome,” and if you stopped to think about the things she said, a lot of the time they didn’t make sense. She talked about people having energy. They either had positive energy, which was good, or negative energy, which meant they sucked. And she talked about Rashmi like she was sorry for her, with her polio legs. “Oh, the poor thing on her crutches. Such a pretty little thing too.” That really pissed Billy off. Rash might not be able to run, but she was so much smarter than Shasta that it was like they were different species.
Since Shasta had moved in, he and John had done less stuff together. Which was okay because Billy had Rash to hang out with. Up until now anyway.
As he walked up Broughton Street towards the house, Billy saw John sitting on the fr
ont veranda. Keeping lookout, Shasta called it. She could get away with saying stuff like that.
There was that awkward thing as he approached, where you can see another person, but you don’t know the right time to say hello. Billy waited until he got nearly to the house. “Hey.”
“Hey.” John picked up his mug of tea and took a sip, watching Billy over the rim. “What’s up?”
“Left my laptop here. My camera too.”
John nodded but didn’t say anything. He leaned forward and put the mug down beside his chair.
“I’ll just go up and get it then,” Billy said.
“You know you can stay here if you want. The other night…” He ran his hand over his close-cropped hair. “I was angry.”
Billy nodded. “Yeah.” He bumped his fist on top of the gatepost. “I should’ve told you what we were doing. And Tony too. I’m sorry for that, for the way it turned out.”
John nodded. “Would’ve been better if you’d told us.”
They looked at each other for a moment. Billy waited.
“Well, shit’s happened,” John said. “Have to deal with it now.”
“Yeah.”
“Tony’s out back, with his tomatoes. Might be good to talk to him too.”
“Yeah, okay.”
Inside, Billy dropped his backpack on the lounge and went through to the back veranda. Tony was bent over in the vegetable garden, tying up little tomato plants to rows of bamboo stakes. He was always doing something in the garden. He’d only been in the house two weeks when he’d asked John if he could dig up part of the lawn for a vegetable garden. Said it was in his blood because his grandfather was Italian.
As Billy came down the back steps, Tony straightened up, his long gangly frame slowly unrolling. Tony was pretty chilled most of the time, but now, through his beard, it was hard to make out his expression.
“So at least now I know what the tubes and pumps were for,” Tony said, rubbing his hands on his shorts. Part of his standard uniform, along with thongs and a faded T-shirt, usually with the name of some heavy metal band across the front. He had a whole collection of them.
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