by Nina Kenwood
‘We’re telling them to mind their own business.’
‘It’s too late for that.’
‘We say we’re seeing where this is going.’
‘Okay, good, that sounds good,’ I say.
That’s something. That’s a relationship status of sorts. In the world of The Bachelor and The Bachelorette that means you’re getting a rose, you’ll be around for another week. (It’s fucked up that I’m automatically assigning Alex the role of Bachelor in my mind, and me the role of underdog—the unconventional contestant that the audience is cheering for but the one they know will never win.)
I leave Alex’s room, and I go straight to the bathroom, because I can’t face anyone yet and I need a moment to run cold water over my wrists and take deep breaths.
This is what you want, I tell myself.
My throat feels dry. It’s a little sore. I think I’m getting sick. I’ve caught something off him. Glandular fever, maybe. Or scarlet fever, which I thought was an old-fashioned disease that didn’t exist anymore until a girl at my school caught it after kissing too many people at a music festival. Alex probably kisses so many girls that he’s a walking bacteria incubator. He’s probably built up an immunity to all the germs he’s carrying, and I have zero immunity because I’ve been kissing no one, and I will collapse under the exposure.
I need to get a grip. A boy might like me. This information should not send me into total emotional collapse.
I can do this. I can do this.
20
A Great Love Story
Sal is driving us home to Melbourne. Mariella has been careful to divide us into non-couple groups: Lucy and Glenn in her car, and Zach, Anthony and me with Sal. Alex is left to drive home on his own. A part of me wanted to drive off with Alex, windows down, music blaring, sunglasses on (a pair much cooler than the ones I actually own), everyone open-mouthed in the rear-vision mirror as we roar away, but I don’t think Mariella could take it, and she’s been kind enough to host me.
Zach and I sit in the backseat, turned away from each other, looking out our respective windows. We’ve settled into a silent fight. We don’t need to say a single word to know how mad we are at each other. Sal and Anthony talk as we drive, but their conversation doesn’t penetrate the cold, hard tension in the backseat. Zach and I are sealed off in our own little cube of hurt feelings and angry thoughts.
I am arguing with him in my mind (‘You’re selfish and immature and trying to block my only chance at love.’ ‘Natalie, I’m sorry—’ ‘NO, I’M NOT DONE, LET ME FINISH’) when we pull into a petrol station. Sal gets out to fill the tank, and Anthony leaps out and runs inside to buy food. Zach and I are alone in the car. We glance at each other and then away again.
‘Can we talk for a second?’ I say.
‘Sure.’ Zach says, turning towards me a little.
I expected him to say no, and then I could be smug in the knowledge I tried to be the bigger person, and I could text Lucy and say, ‘I wanted to talk but he didn’t’, and she would yell at Zach for me, and everything would be resolved in a day or so. Now I need something to say.
‘Well?’ Zach says.
‘Well, I don’t know what I’m going say yet,’ I say defensively.
‘Okay, let me go first. When did this thing with Alex start?’
‘Two days ago.’
‘So you just started kissing out of the blue?’ he says.
‘Pretty much,’ I say. I mean, if you skip past all my agonising feelings, that sums it up.
‘Because you were in a bed together and why not,’ Zach says flatly.
He’s trying to make it sound as bad as possible, but really, ‘we were in a bed together and why not’ sounds kind of hot to me.
‘Sort of. I mean, we talked first,’ I say. How much detail does he want?
‘Do you actually like him?’
‘Why are you using that tone?’
‘What tone?’
‘You know what tone. That tone. I hate that tone.’
‘Because I’m mad at you. You’re hooking up with my brother behind my back, and you weren’t going to tell me. I’m allowed to be mad.’
‘Says who?’
‘Says the rules of the universe. When have you ever heard of someone being happy with their sibling and best friend getting together?’
‘All the time. The normal response is joy and happiness.’
‘Give me one example of someone being happy in this situation.’
‘I hate it when you do that “give me an example” crap.’ It’s Zach’s go-to move in an argument and it’s annoying.
‘Well, look, I can’t help how I feel, and I’m mad.’
‘At who?’
‘Both of you.’
‘And how long are you going to be mad?’
He frowns and my heart lurches a little, in the way it does when you look at someone and suddenly think, wow, this person is so precious to me, while simultaneously thinking, wow, this person is more irritating than anyone else on Earth. I hate you, I love you, I want to slap you.
‘I don’t know. Maybe a while. How long is this thing with you and Alex going to last?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe a while.’
Zach kind of half-snorts, half-grunts.
‘What?’ I say. Someone half-snorting, half-grunting at the idea of me being in a relationship confirms all my worst suspicions about myself.
‘I don’t see that happening.’
‘Wow. Thanks, Zach. That’s a really lovely thing to say.’
‘Not because of you. Because of him.’
‘Still terrible.’
‘Think about it for a minute. Alex likes going out and partying. Most of his friends are awful. He gets bored easily. He’s probably still in love with his ex-girlfriend. He doesn’t go to uni. He works weird hours. He’s on Tinder. You are not right for each other.’
‘We could be right for each other,’ I say, as if this is a solid rebuttal to anything on Zach’s deeply unnerving list. The very word ‘Tinder’ sends a shiver down my spine. The ex-girlfriend mention makes me want to vomit. I am way out of my depth.
‘Can you hear yourself?’ Zach says.
‘Yes, I can hear myself. Can you hear what you’re saying? You’re basically saying there’s no way Alex could possibly like me.’
And I agree, a part of me wants to shout, but I would never give Zach the satisfaction. The more he voices my deepest fears, the harder I am going to push back.
‘That’s not what I’m saying at all,’ he says.
‘Yes it is.’
‘Natalie, I’m saying that I’m worried that this thing won’t work out and you’ll be the one to get hurt. He has a history of stuffing things up.’
‘Do me a favour and stop worrying about my ability to cope with things, thanks,’ I say, as viciously as I possibly can, even though I have admittedly spent years of our friendship establishing myself as someone who can’t cope with things.
‘Fine. But don’t come running to me when he breaks your heart,’ Zach says, as Anthony opens the passenger seat door.
‘Don’t worry, I won’t,’ I say.
You are being a shitty friend to me, I want to scream at him, even while a part of me is worried I am being a shitty friend to him.
Anthony hands us icy poles, and then jumps out of the car again to show Sal where the toilets are.
‘I would never be with a member of your family,’ Zach says, unwrapping his icy pole.
An irrelevant point when I have no siblings.
‘You and Lucy got together, which is kind of the same thing,’ I say.
In fact, it might be worse.
I bite off a chunk of my Frosty Fruit, which I know will irritate Zach, because his teeth hurt when he sees someone biting into anything frozen.
‘No, it’s not,’ he says, visibly cringing at the sight of my teeth on the ice.
‘You don’t think that was hard for me?’
‘That was different.
For a start, we fell in love.’ He swallows after he says this. I know he and Lucy have said ‘I love you’ to each other, I know that they text each other hearts and ‘love you’, but he’s never said it so explicitly to me before. I can’t help making a mental note to tell Lucy later, because I know it will make her happy that he said it, and that his eyes softened when he did.
But right this second, I need to be angry. ‘You think you are so much better than me, don’t you?’ I say.
‘No, I don’t.’
‘Yes, you do. You and Lucy are this great love story, and I’m just a pathetic loser who’s going to get her heart broken and won’t be able to handle it.’
‘I don’t think you’re a pathetic loser.’
‘But the rest of it, you think that’s true, right?’
He stops and looks at me, letting a drip from his icy pole fall into his lap. ‘I don’t think Alex is going to be your great love story, no,’ he says.
We stare at each other, and then Sal and Anthony get back into the car, and we don’t say anything for the rest of the trip.
21
Moving-day Blues
The next day, Dad and I stand and survey his new lounge room. There are boxes everywhere: boxes that have detailed labels like ‘Books—Literary Fiction, A–G’, ‘CDs—Jazz and Classical’, ‘Clothes—Winter’ and then boxes that just say ‘Fragile’, ‘Kitchen’ and, mysteriously, ‘Good Stuff’—they’re the ones from after we got tired of labelling things.
I’ve never moved house before. Not that I’m moving now, but I’ve never experienced anything to do with moving before. I thought packing could be fun (it wasn’t, at all) and that unpacking would definitely be fun, because I like putting things in their places. But now we are staring at the room filled with boxes and it feels like a momentous task we will never get through.
The last time Dad moved house was before I was born, so this feels all new to him too.
‘Dad?’
‘Yeah?’
‘How long has it been since you lived on your own?’
Dad takes off his glasses and rubs his eyes. He looks tired. But even at his most tired, he is patient. He will always answer me, no matter how irritating my question, and his answer will be considered and thoughtful.
‘Well, let me see. Your mother and I got married when I was twenty-eight. And we lived together for a while before that. So, twenty years, give or take?’
Honestly, I don’t know how they could be bothered separating at this point.
‘Honey, don’t sit on the boxes—you’ll break them.’
I sigh and stand up. Dad’s apartment building has a lift, but even so, I am gruesomely sweaty from helping the removalists carry boxes in from the truck, up to the lift and into the apartment. The glasses are still packed so I walk to the sink and drink water straight from the tap.
‘Natalie, no. Please don’t do that.’
‘There are no glasses and I’m dying of thirst.’
‘I should have bought some paper cups and plates.’
‘Or we could just unpack the kitchen stuff.’
But we don’t. We just stand there looking at it all. Some of the kitchen stuff isn’t even in moving boxes—it’s in its original packaging, because Dad went out and bought a whole lot of new stuff. We had a good time discussing the merits of various blenders and toasters. (‘Dad, if you don’t buy this four-slice toaster you could regret it for the rest of your life.’) It felt so important that he should buy the spiraliser at the time, but now it definitely feels like there’s too much stuff.
‘I like the nautical look,’ I say, patting the big blue-and-white striped cushions he bought for his new couch.
‘Oh yes, I’ve had my eye on those for a while.’ I don’t know why exactly, but hearing him say this makes a solid ball of sadness form in the pit of my stomach.
‘Let’s leave everything for an hour and go and get some food,’ I suggest. This is the kind of idea Dad would normally hate. He’s a great believer in ‘getting things done’ and ‘enjoying the reward after doing the hard work’. But not today. Today he’s living on his own for the first time in twenty years and moving sucks.
‘Let’s get food,’ he agrees.
Dad and I walk down Port Melbourne’s main street and I make excited conversation about all the new things he has to discover here, even though surely he knows because he’s the one who decided to move here and I actually know nothing about the suburb. He nods along, but I get the sense his mind is elsewhere. I was planning on getting sandwiches, but Dad says we should get ice-cream.
Dad and I love ice-cream. It’s our thing. Mum will eat it, but it’s never her first dessert choice—she likes cakes and baked goods—but Dad and I have always known that ice-cream is the superior option.
We walk all the way along the beach to Albert Park to get Jock’s famous homemade ice-cream. We walk mostly in silence. Dad seems lost in his thoughts. I’m obsessively thinking about Alex, and then forcing myself not to obsessively think about Alex because I am superstitious enough to believe that if you think about a good thing too much you can turn it into a bad thing, and, also, it has been twenty-four hours since Alex and I last spoke and he hasn’t texted me yet. To balance out thinking about Alex, I dwell on my fight with Zach and the still unbelievably raw fact that my parents are no longer together.
I can’t quite believe that my father has moved out. I symbolically removed his favourite R2D2 magnet from the fridge and hid it so he couldn’t take it with him. I put it in a drawer where I cruelly hope Mum will one day find it and feel a piercing pain of regret in her heart. I have been trying to work up the courage to say I don’t want you to leave, but I haven’t found a way to work it into the conversation. I kept hearing Mum and Dad having extremely polite whispered conversations about who owns what. (‘You can have the rice cooker.’ ‘Oh no, you keep it, you like rice more than I do.’ ‘Do I?’ ‘Yes, you went through that phase of eating brown rice with everything, remember?’ ‘Oh, I’m over that now.’) I wanted to smash everything so they’d have nothing left to talk about.
We reach Jock’s and that eases my anxiety, because this is like heaven for us. We stand in line and discuss flavours.
‘Hokey pokey?’ I suggest.
‘It’s a highly recommended flavour,’ Dad says.
‘Or peach sorbet. Or fig ripple.’
‘Or chocolate and vanilla. Mix the originals,’ Dad says. He is a big believer in traditional flavours.
‘Walnut espresso?’
‘I do love coffee and nuts.’
‘But I think something chocolate today,’ I say.
‘It’s moving day. We need chocolate,’ Dad agrees.
‘Cone or cup?’
‘You know my feelings on that topic, Natalie. Cone, always cone.’
‘You get more ice-cream with the cup.’
‘But you get to eat the cone.’
‘But eating out of a cup is less messy than eating out of a cone.’
‘It separates the men from the boys.’
‘Mum and I hate that saying,’ I say.
Dad says it all the time, I think to tease us. ‘I know, honey,’ he says, and his voice isn’t cheerful anymore.
We are silent then. Mentioning Mum seems to have taken all the air out of the conversation. I turn to Dad, ready to finalise our order, and his face looks strange.
‘Order for me, will you?’ he says.
‘Okay. Where are you going?’
‘Outside for a second.’ He pushes money into my hand and leaves the shop.
The lady behind the counter is smiling at me.
‘What can I get you, dear?’
I point wildly at options, mixing together flavours that don’t even complement each other like a complete amateur, and ask for both ice-creams in cones. The woman takes a long time to carefully scoop the ice-cream, and my heart is racing every second I’m in the shop and Dad is somewhere outside. His face was weird. Maybe he’s having a heart a
ttack. Or a stroke. I get out my phone and type in 00, so I only have to add one more digit and hit the call button if I do step outside and see him on the ground.
Dad could be dead because I dithered over ice-cream choices.
I pay and rush outside. I spot him, sitting on a bench. His shoulders are a little bit hunched and his hands are resting carefully on his knees. If I walked past him on the street, I would think ‘That man is sad’, and my heart constricts at the realisation that my kind, wonderful dad is the kind of man other people might walk past and feel sorry for.
‘Dad, are you okay?’
‘I’m fine, honey.’
I hand him his ice-cream and sit down next to him.
‘It was too hot in that shop,’ he says, not looking at me. His eyes look a little red and watery.
I’m embarrassed to admit it, but this is the first time I’ve thought about how awful the break-up might be for my parents.
22
The Dating Scene
‘You’re dating now?’ I say, in my most victimised tone of voice.
I’ve come home from helping Dad move and I’m watching Mum twist and turn in front of the mirror. She’s wearing a wrap dress and cute sandals with sparkles on them. Her toenails are painted in a way that I can tell she paid for. I’ve never known her to pay for a pedicure. This is new, and I am not on board with it.
After my time with Dad today, I made a vow to be more sensitive to my parents and what they’re going through. I was going to be the mature, open-hearted, caring daughter they need right now.
That vow lasted for one hour. I have since replaced it entirely with anger at Mum, which is much easier and less taxing on me.
‘It’s not a date. It’s dinner with three other people,’ Mum says.
‘Two of whom are Aunt Jenna and Uncle Ian.’
‘Right. Very boring.’
‘No, I mean, it’s a couple, plus you, and who else? Who’s the fourth person?’
‘A friend of Uncle Ian’s. I told you that.’
‘You’re dating. They are setting you up on a date.’
Mum turns to me and gives me a long look. I stare back at her, triumphant.