by Cath Crowley
“She’s dead if she doesn’t,” he says. “Tell her she can do it, Rose.”
I move back to where I can see Charlie. She’s reaching for her guitar with nervous hands. I walk toward her as the first act slides past us off the stage. “Hey. You’re probably still mad, but I wanted to say good luck.”
“I’m more nervous than mad now.” She stares through the curtain. “I think Antony has an egg.”
“He does. It’s his brain.”
“He took it out of his pants.”
“Like I said, it’s his brain.”
She laughs. “Shit. My hands are shaking. You think I should go out there?”
Dave hovers in the background. I turn my back so it’s me and her. “Do you think you can do this? You’re not lying like you did about Dahlia?” It’s brutal, but brutal’s what it is. Better to face this now than out there. “I don’t care. If you let me, I’ll be your friend either way.”
She looks at me and at Dave. She looks out the curtain and strums her guitar. “Yeah,” she says. “Oh yeah. This I can do.”
“Then I think you should go out there.”
Dave walks over as they announce, “The lovely Charlie Duskin.”
“Don’t look so nervous, you two,” she says, and goes onstage.
We watch her walk into the spotlight she’s been hiding from most of her life. Sure, friendship is all about believing in someone so hard they believe it, too. Sure, it’s about trust. But if anyone hurts her tonight, it’s about ripping them apart with my bare hands and really enjoying it.
“You tell her she could do it?” Dave asks.
“She told me. She’s got a little attitude going on.”
“Hi, everyone. My name’s Charlie Duskin. And this,” she says, smiling, “is a song I wrote for tonight.”
For a second, I think it’s going to be okay. Charlie doesn’t look new out there. She looks like she’s lived forever and this is the test of how much she knows. But then she strikes up the first chord, and her hand slips on the strings.
“Get on with it!” Antony yells. “I’m bored already.”
Her hand slips again.
“Charlie Dorkin thinks she can sing,” he calls. If I could reverse time and take back that stupid name, I’d do it. I’d give up my scholarship. I’d stay in this town forever if only Charlie would sing right now and shut Antony Barellan up for the rest of his dumb life.
She sucks in her breath. That guitar hangs round her neck like a noose. Dave stands next to me with his hands in fists. “You better hope she starts,” he says. “Because if she doesn’t, I’m going out there and you’re backup.”
Dave knows two songs all the way through. “J.Lo?” I ask.
“Beyoncé.”
“Shit.”
“We will be,” he says, and then the smallest sound starts.
It’s so soft at first that it’s hidden under yelling and glasses clinking. It’s like feeling the cool change come through your window on a night when you’re hungry for a summer breeze. It’s singing the color of sunrise. I’ve never heard anything like it before, sad and hopeful at the same time, like the beginning and the end all mixed in together.
“She’s amazing,” I say, half not believing it. They’re still calling out stuff over the top of her. She slowly gets louder. Her voice is sweet and even. She knows what she wants to say, and she’s saying it.
Before she’s finished, the whole place is quiet. “I thought that stuff only happened in the movies.” Dave doesn’t answer. It’s hard to talk with your mouth hanging open. He’s got it bad for her, and I can see why. Charlie makes all of us look like shadows tonight. It’s not just because her song is funny and sad and beautiful. It’s because she’s all of those things, too. That’s kind of hard to resist.
When she’s finished, she takes her guitar off and looks out into the audience. I think everyone’s still in shock that such a big voice came from the shiest person in the room. “Shove that up your arse, Antony Barellan,” she says into the microphone, and the whole place goes wild. Charlie’s a little late for Antony, though. She was too caught up in her song to notice that he went quiet before the end. Luke grabbed him by the collar and dragged him out the back. It’s why I started applauding way too early.
I walk onstage thinking, Okay, if I fall, there’s going to be crushing pain and more than a little humiliation. But so what? Life’s a bit of a high-wire act. And then I get out there and look at the crowd looking at me and I think, So this is what it feels like to be alive. This is what it’s like to have sound that echoes round the walls and makes people listen. “Let loose once in a while, kid,” Gus always says. “You’ll be the biz.”
And I am. Sure, my fingers slip a little across the strings. Not ideal, but understandable. There’s a guy in the front row about to throw an egg at me. I could get louder and cover Antony; I could drown him with heavy chords. But that’s not the song I planned to play tonight.
I let my guitar tease at the air for a bit, let it circle, let my voice kick in. I throw it out to the crowd, throw chords into their throats and they catch them. I throw it all straight out of that part of me that hopes for things. That wants for things. At the end my voice rises and I see in their faces that I’m playing the crowd. I’m reaching in and playing them. “What are we waiting for? Love to pay a visit? Say it’s not so fucking hard, is it? To work out what I’m doing at the door?”
And while I’m playing and singing, I’ve got a few things floating around my head. I’ve got Grandpa’s voice saying something about punishment and books that won’t ever balance. I’ve got his voice telling Dad that he couldn’t have known. I think I know what Grandpa meant by that. I can almost touch the thought. It’s something to do with what happens when people die. A thought about patchy paddocks, dry, with nothing living underneath. Until something rises up and starts in them, and they get on with the business of living. Grandpa loved Gran, but he’s getting on with it. If you stay burned out and over for seven years, then there’s a reason. I think I know what it is now.
I look up after the last chord and smile. I tell Antony Barellan to shove it up his arse, and I see Dad clapping his hands off. I give him a little wave to show him that it’s okay to be happy. I give him a little smile to show him what it looks like.
“You did it, you fucking did it!” Dave and Rose yell as I walk offstage. I want to stay with them. I want to talk all night to Dave and then kiss him. I want to sing a few songs just for him. There’s something I have to do first, though.
“You get that from your mother,” Dad says when I walk over.
“But I get the ability to make great toast from you,” I tell him. Grandpa gives me some love and then leaves us. The crowd goes a little wild again and then stops. Dad and I go.
We walk on instinct, without words. She’s all around us, voice moving in the leaves and rocks and water and dirt and air. We’re breathing her in. We sit at the river, and she shines on our skin, and we just soak her up. “Do you remember that fund-raising concert?” I ask.
“It’s hard to forget losing the power of speech in front of two hundred primary-school children.”
“The way Mum opened your mouth and sang.”
He chuckles, and she’s there with us, rolling with laughter like she did that day. Dad rocks back and forth, tears falling out of him he’s laughing so hard. When we’ve finished, I move a little closer, and he doesn’t move away, so I move a little closer still.
“When Arrie and I were kids, we came here all the time,” he says. “We went to the falls, too. But it was right at this spot I asked her to marry me.” Dad drifts his feet through the water for a long time. He takes off his glasses and drifts them, too. Cleans them on his shirt.
“It was my fault she died,” he says finally, and his words are in a key I’ve never heard. Sadder than E minor, even. They’re in the key of A minor, A for Arabella.
“I started a new job that day. I couldn’t eat; my stomach was turning. ‘
Just have some toast,’ she said, and I snapped at her. It was the nerves talking. It was my first big city job. I blamed her when I couldn’t find two of my knives. ‘Stop moving my things,’ I said. I found them on the way out, sitting on the kitchen bench. I didn’t tell her.”
A few leaves fall and the wind floats them round. “She was bringing you knives.”
“I didn’t even need them.” He lowers his head. “My sweet Arabella. You should have stayed home.”
We sit side by side in the night. “It was an accident,” I say. “She knows it.”
“You and her,” he says. “The two best things to ever happen to me. She would have loved seeing you up there tonight.”
“I was not entirely uncool.”
“You definitely weren’t. Dave Robbie thought so.”
“He is not entirely uncool, either.”
“I’m very glad that boy lives a long drive from your bedroom.”
“There’ll be other boys,” I say. “Loads of boys, lining up.” I pat him on the back. “Just making up for some lost time.”
“Don’t feel like you have to do that,” he says.
We sit awhile longer, listening and breathing her in because we know that on the walk out it’s going to get quiet. The leaves and the water won’t make so much noise. The quiet of living without her might take some time to get used to. We’re ready for it, though. Ready Duskins.
“I love you, Charlotte,” Dad says after a while, taking his feet out of the water and brushing the dirt from his hands. He moves closer this time, and it’s enough so that we touch. “I love you, too,” I say. No wonder the whole world writes songs about those words.
Dave’s circling his bike around the front of the shop when we get home. Rose’s bike is leaning against the fence. Dad stares at him and says, “Be back by twelve, Charlotte. I’ll be waiting up.”
“I don’t think he’s ever really looked at me before,” Dave says. “He’s kind of scary.”
“He says he was a country boy like you once. He knows what you’re thinking.”
“Nah, he doesn’t.” Dave looks at the ground and grins. “I’d be dead.”
“You want to go for a ride?” I ask. “Maybe back to where we were the other night?”
“I was thinking somewhere not that far,” he says.
We ride along the road together. There are no hills. Flat stretches out on either side of us. Wheels whir in the night; light pushes at the dark as we move forward. He takes a side road and stops at the footy field. “Short grass, no snakes,” he says. We walk over and climb the scoreboard.
Dave reaches into his bag and hands me a little trophy.
“I won?”
“You did. Rose accepted on your behalf to cracking applause. I’ve never seen anything like you up there.”
“It’s not very big, is it?” I hold up the trophy.
“Shiny, though,” Dave says. “I think it’s left over from the award night at the footy.”
“You ever get one?”
“I never scored,” he says. “Not once in the whole season.”
“Don’t worry,” I say. “I have a feeling you’ll score tonight.”
He laughs. “Who are you?”
“Charlie Duskin,” I say. “Trophy winner. A not-uncool girl.”
And then we’re at that moment where you both go and get what you want or you both go back. The moment when you say, Stuff being scared; what’s on the other side is better. That moment when you inch closer to each other little by little, till your skin starts and ends in the same place. Till your faces get so close your lips start and end in the same place, too. Till you taste milk shake and salt and sugar days and the world spins and the stars sound like harmonicas.
“Boys are easy,” I say after my first kiss. “They’re kind of like guitars, without the strings.”
“If I compared you to a car right now, Rose’d say I was insensitive.”
“I think it’s time we said whatever it is we want.”
He leans in and the bird on his wrist flaps against my neck and his mouth is warm and the inside of me goes harmonic this time and the whole thing is a million times better than what I imagined. And I imagined it pretty good.
“Sing something,” he says.
I sing him a little version of the song I’ve been working on. “Love’s a funny song. The words don’t make much sense, and the beat comes out all wrong. But it goes a little like this. Sweet, fever, mandolin. Our laughter caving in. Tongues and wanting. Bliss.”
“Nice,” he says.
Slowly
So slowly, really slowly
I’m all the chords there are
So slowly, really slowly
I’m keys I never heard
So slowly, really slowly
I’m spinning song and dancing
Rising voice beneath my skin
Charlie’s left by the time they announce she’s won. I go onstage and hold up that crappy little football trophy like it’s a national music award while everyone claps.
And then five minutes after the whole thing’s done, everyone’s gone. Mum and Dad drove home. Dave went to wait for Charlie. Antony doesn’t have the concentration span to hold a grudge, so Luke probably left with him and his brothers.
I sit outside for a while, staring over the grass, thinking about Dave’s face when he was watching Charlie. Wondering if he’ll forgive me.
Luke walks around the side and sits next to me. “I thought you left,” I say.
“You thought wrong.” He swings his legs. “She was good. I never knew she could sing.”
“Me neither.”
He leans back and looks at the sky. “So your parents found out, huh? Dave says you’re grounded for life.”
“I’m grounded in the afterlife.”
“I can’t believe you cut class and went to the city. It would have been more fun with Dave and me along.”
“I’ve never been there, but I don’t think prison’s fun.”
“You always do that,” he says. “Make out like I’m headed for jail. Like I’m not smart enough to end up anywhere else.”
“You do so many stupid things,” I say.
“You do them, too; I just never make a big deal about it.”
It’s hard to argue with him about that after this summer. “I don’t think you’re stupid,” I say. “I don’t. I think you’re careless. I think—”
He covers my mouth. “For once, Rosie, just say, ‘You are right, Luke.’ Say it.”
He moves his hand a little. “I think maybe.”
He puts it back. “They’re not the three magic words.”
He takes his hand away again and I say, “Let’s have sex.”
“You just can’t say I’m right. You know one day I’ll find a girl who is willing to do it with me, and I’ll forget all about you.”
“You’re right,” I tell him, but I don’t feel so good admitting it.
He holds my hand and pulls me back so we can both see the sky. “Nah, Rosie,” he says. “I’m not right about that.”
* * *
“Dave?” I knock on his window. It’s barely light, but I couldn’t sleep. He sticks his head through. “What do you want?” he asks. I hold up a car magazine. “Come inside,” he says, and I crawl through the window.
I lie next to him. “I should have told you about the scholarship.”
“You should have told Charlie.”
“It’s hard to explain why I kept it from you. I think maybe telling you would have made it real. I think—”
“You thought telling me would have stuffed up your plan with Charlie. And you thought I would have told Luke, and he would have stuffed it up even more.”
“I guess it’s not so hard to explain.”
“You’re not the only one with plans, Rose.”
“You want to be a mechanic,” I say. “I listen.”
“I want to design cars, and don’t look so surprised. You’re not the only one who wants to get o
ut of here.”
I sit up close to the window so I can feel the breeze. “Do you forgive me?”
“You and Luke are my best mates. We’ve been fighting all our lives.”
“I know.”
“You’re just pissed because you’re in the wrong this time.”
“I know that, too.” I lean back. We drift into sleep and dream separate things.
“Hey,” Luke says from the window, waking us up. “I’m gone for a bit and you start getting on with my girlfriend. In bed.”
“I heard she’s not your girlfriend anymore,” Dave says.
“I was talking to Rose,” he answers, crawling in the window and diving between us. He and Dave wrestle. “Davey’s got a girlfriend of his own now,” Luke says, and we laugh, and I tell them they’re idiots till Mr. Robbie yells for us to shut up. “Just ignore him,” Dave says, and smacks Luke in the face with a pillow.
“I thought I’d find you here,” I say, and sit next to Rose at the edge of the freeway. “So this is what the view looks like from this place.”
“Best spot to dream about leaving,” she says, ripping at the corner of her nail. “Which is all I’ll be doing this year. Mum and Dad are too pissed now to even talk about the scholarship. Mum barely talks at all.”
“You’ll be eighteen in a couple of years. Is it so bad to stay here till then?”
“You know the feeling you get when you’re homesick? Things are going great, and then all of a sudden your stomach’s saying, This isn’t the place you’re meant to be. That’s how I feel all the time.”
“Did you tell your mum and dad that?”
“They won’t listen.”
I’d take her with me if I could. I asked Dad, and he said it was up to Mrs. Butler. It’s awful being trapped somewhere you don’t want to be. “Rose, close your eyes and listen.”
“Why?”
“Listen to the cars.” We’re quiet as the trucks crash past us and fade, one after the other. “Hear that sound?”
“I’ve been listening to cars and trucks forever.”
“Listen beneath it, sort of. Hear it rising and falling? That’s the sound of the ocean. That’s the sound of waves.”