by Kim Kelly
‘Hm, yeah,’ she said, predictably shying, emptying the contents of her satchel onto one of the chairs in front of the heater’s slatted vents, hoping to dry her books. She sneezed; she was somewhere beyond freezing, lost in the most frigid corner of a Narnian winter.
‘Hey, Addy …’ He was bending over his own bag, its athletic logo glancing at her with the question of exactly how long it had been since she’d partaken of any proper outdoor exercise other than drunk-dancing. Luke was handing her his jumper: ‘You should get that wet shirt off you. Here, why don’t you go and put that on. I’ll get us something to eat.’
‘Thank you,’ she said, taking the jumper. She tried to smile at him; she tried and tried; why couldn’t she fall in love with him? Because he was too nice. Too good to be true.
She took the purple petunia shirt with her – Handy, after all – making her way to the back of the room, to the ladies’ toilet, to change, wringing herself out over how much longer she was going to lead Luke on. They’d met last December, at the tennis courts of all places. She and Roz had been having a hit with a couple of guys, one of whom Roz was shagging at the time; Addy had been wearing her old tennis dress from schooldays, the grip on her racquet worn and sweat-soiled, falsely suggesting a sportiness she’d long since given away. When? She couldn’t say. She simply didn’t play anymore; and she hadn’t picked up a racquet again since that day, either. Roz had decided after five minutes that that was enough vertical bit-jiggling for her, and they’d retired to the pub up the road, the Royal, for a beer. Halfway through her second schooner, Addy’s eyes had met Luke’s across the near-deserted Wednesday-afternoon bar, as he’d walked in through the glass saloon doors, with the sunlight behind him, glowing in his hair; her first thought: How beautiful you are. He’d just played a rather more energetic set; she smelt his salt at ten paces and was just beer-brave enough to think she might want to taste it, too. To dare herself; to try to be normal, cool, whatever. Four more schooeys and a bottle of cider later they were back at Flower Street and in her bed.
Irresponsible.
Yes. It was. Yes. It is.
It was lucky she hadn’t fallen pregnant; they hadn’t used any preventative, not that first time.
You’ll break it off with him today.
I will.
She took a moment to repeat that in the ladies’ mirror, eye to eye, and another to marvel at the fashion effect of Luke’s brown jumper, khaki racing stripes down the sleeves, teamed with wide psychedelic purple petunia collar flopping out above the V-neck.
Hm. Interesting combo.
Outside the bathroom, some sort of blokey joking erupted from a group hanging about by the door. She recognised one of them straightaway, bang in the middle of the uproar: Chubs Keveney was his name, fellow arts-law undergrad, face of a renaissance cherub, halo of sandy curls, body of an adolescent sumo wrestler still stacking on the kilos, last seen lying gob-down in a pool of his own vomit at some otherwise forgettable party – someone had placed an empty chip packet on his head like a little sailor’s cap, and apparently he’d stayed like that for hours, well into the next morning. Now, here he was simulating sex with a sausage roll to the thigh-slapping amusement of his fellow Neanderthals. All rugby players – rugby union, mind, not lowbrow rugby league – and mostly Young Labor acolytes swinging to the right, with their likeminded, unreconstructed fascist mates. All Student Representative Council wannabes plotting out their pathways to power. All dickheads. Was it any wonder she’d not bothered with sport or politics lately? These were the nation’s future leaders; these were the great white hopes meant to save them all from university fees, Liberal–National Party conservatives and terminal disaster. The steam rising off them here in the cafeteria stank like some fetid gas from the bowels of hell – they made her want to run home to wash.
‘Addy Loest!’ Chubs Keveney bellowed at her as she passed, deliberately mispronouncing her name as ‘lowest’, when it was a softer sound, ‘luhrst’, somewhere between ‘lerst’ and ‘loast’ – ‘last’, ‘lest’, ‘list’, ‘lost’, ‘lust’, she’d heard them all, but it was ‘löst’, if anyone could be bothered listening. Chubs kept his sausage roll poking out at groin level: ‘Smile for me, honey.’
She threw an approximation of one over her shoulder: ‘Fuck off.’
‘Oooooooh,’ the ape chorus applauded him, knuckling the plastic tabletops, a drumroll full of menace, full of unchallengeable masculine entitlement.
For all her chin-up dismissal, they frightened her.
‘Dead-set dropkicks.’ Luke could only offer a statement of the obvious, and a salad sandwich, as he met her back at their table by the heater.
Her inner child looked at the inch-thick layer of grated carrot and said: Nah.
She looked into Luke’s super-nice blue-grey eyes, and she said: ‘I’m so sorry …’
‘Sorry?’ He smiled, so warm, so kind, so … ‘What do you have to be sorry about?’
She tossed between ‘I’m not hungry’ and ‘I don’t love you’ for a hideously long time, with the sounds of the quickly crowded cafeteria scraping and shouting into her, with the sickly hot fumes of the heater gusting around her and Narnian shivers rattling from within.
I’m getting a cold, she told herself. You can’t make a decision to dump someone when you’re in such an addled state.
When are you not in an addled state?
Fair point.
Still, cowardice caught the words, and their truth, so that all she could say was: ‘Um.’
‘Addy …’ Luke finally took up the burden for her, like the gentleman he was: ‘It’s all right. If you want to break it off, I mean. I have sort of guessed already that you’re not that keen. It’s okay. We don’t have that much in common. We’re just kids, doing kids’ stuff. No one got hurt, hey?’
Who was this excellent man Addy was letting go? She’d never know. She hung her head to hide her face again, to hide the forcing back of tears at how very, very hurt she was.
But why? Why was she so hurt and sad and addled and anxious all the time? Whatever the answers might have been, none of this was Luke Neilson’s fault.
She raised her face to him, and, grasping a shred of her best, she told him: ‘You’re an absolute champ. My loss is going to be someone else’s incredible gain. I hope she’s wonderful.’
She began to return her books to her bag; they were not nearly dry yet, but she couldn’t stay.
‘If you ever need a friend …’ he said, as she stood to leave.
‘Thanks,’ she told him. ‘Same.’
‘Take care,’ he said.
And she said, ‘See ya.’ Then she walked away from him, just like that, scattering shards of her heart with every step.
She’d left him no note, no souvenir of herself.
Perhaps that said everything.
Dragging herself home after her last class, she shambled in the front door and curled up on the brown couch with The Fire Flight and a family block of chocolate, sometime around five, with the house empty and the radiator on high. The last line she read said, ‘Ray shut off the engine of the Cessna, thinking only of Sonia …’ Addy wasn’t sure about this mini-series-sexy farmer hero, and what might be in store for the heroine, a shearer’s daughter who seemed to manage to be feisty, irritatingly passive and oddly familiar all at the same time, but she wouldn’t find out this evening.
She fell asleep there and then with fictions mingling, visions of Kathleen McAllister’s outback sheep station, Rowallan’s Run, rolling away as Jay Gatsby’s jazz band played a slow dance.
And then the phone rang, smashing through her warm, dark stillness like an ambulance on its way to a heart attack.
She sprang up off the couch. All was grey gloom but for a crack of yellow light seeping round the kitchen door.
And that damn phone: BRING!! BRING!!
She leapt at it, snatching up the handpiece, near knocking herself out with it as she smacked it to her ear: ‘Hello?’
; ‘Hello? Addy?’
Blood drained to her toes: it was her father’s deep, dark ‘hello’; she immediately expected to be told some terrible news: something had happened to her brother, Nick: he’d had a car crash, or choked on a fistful of his own arrogance, or needed help tying his shoelaces.
‘Yes, Dad, hello,’ she said, her voice croaking with alarm, recent sleep, chocolate-clag and, she supposed, a rapidly developing head cold as well: ‘What is it?’
He said: ‘What’s wrong with your voice? Are you sick?’
‘No!’ Addy’s brain swam in her skull. ‘No, Dad. I just woke up.’
‘You just woke up?’ His own alarm shot down the wire. ‘What are you doing asleep in the afternoon?’
‘I was up late last night studying,’ she gave him the automatic lie and fused it to some truth. ‘I came home from uni only half an hour ago and I fell asleep reading a book.’
‘Are you eating enough?’ Her father’s alarm did not abate; it never really abated at all. Was it any wonder she was so neurotic herself?
No.
‘Yes.’ She sighed, and then she softened. ‘Dad, why are you calling?’ She could feel his aloneness, there in the house on Gallipoli Street, the night-sky square of their lounge-room picture window looking out to sea. He’d probably just got in from work, the creases of his knuckles still grey with the coke-grime of his day, turning out sheets of steel, kilometres of steel, and ensuring no one died in the process.
‘Why am I calling?’ he said, bristling at the question, before reminding her: ‘Your father can call for any reason he likes, Adrianna.’
‘Of course you can, I was just —’
‘I can’t get to your brother’s fight on Friday,’ he spoke over the top of her.
Well, whoopee-fricken-doo, Addy’s thoughts spoke over the top of her father’s explanation. Boxing was boys’ business – nothing to do with her.
‘It’s an important match,’ he was saying. ‘The opponent is …’ Addy couldn’t care less who or what her brother was going to beat up next. ‘If Nicky wins, this will mean he is one step closer to qualifying for the Commonwealth Games.’ All Addy heard was ‘Nicky’ – Nicky, Nicky, Nicky – until her father got to the point: ‘I need you to go in my place.’
‘What?’ She was still dreaming, surely.
‘I need you to go to the match – on Friday night. It’s at South Sydney Juniors, the leagues club, at Kingsford. It’s scheduled to start at seven-thirty, but my shift doesn’t finish until seven and I can’t get anyone to cover for me, or not anyone I trust, which is why I can’t get to the match myself. Since it is on so early, though, it won’t ruin your whole Friday night. I understand this is not your first choice of exciting things to do, Addy, but family must be there – for Nicky. For me.’
Family. The three of them were it, in the whole wide world.
Her father was going on: ‘If he wins, he will go out drinking with his friends right away and he might forget to call me. If he loses, he won’t call me until he is drunk, if he calls at all. I need you to get him to call me straight after the fight. I’m disappointed that I can’t be there, Addy, I wish it could be otherwise, but it is not possible to change the situation. Please do this for me.’
Her heart strings didn’t stretch to wisps of gold for her father – these were more like thirty-mil cables of galvanised iron. She couldn’t say no.
‘Okay, Dad. I’ll be there, don’t worry.’
‘Thanks, Sprout.’ She could hear the smile in his voice now; she could hear him opening the fridge door, and imagined him reaching for his pre-dinner beer, the curly cord of the kitchen wall phone just allowing that stretch. ‘I will make apricot chicken for Sunday lunch, for you.’
Yum. Her favourite. The mere sound of the words ‘apricot chicken’ made her both homesick and proud – proud of her father. Finding himself so suddenly and tragically a single dad of two children under five, he’d done everything for them, over all their growing years – cooking, house-cleaning, clothes-washing, homework-nagging, arse-whacking – juggling it all between shifts at the steelworks and, here and there, night-school classes for his operating tickets for this piece of machinery and that, for his framed certificate of metallurgy. They’d had a couple of different housekeepers to help out when they were small, but Addy could hardly remember them; only her father, her amazing, self-sacrificing father, doing it all, leaning over his much-bespattered copy of The Everyday Women’s Cookbook being quietly, everyday heroic.
‘Thank you, Daddy,’ she said. ‘I’ll see you Sunday, then.’
‘You will call me on Friday night, yes?’ he repeated the plea, the demand. ‘Make sure Nicky calls me, yes?’
‘Yes!’ As if I’ve ever let you down – that you know of.
‘Good girl, my good girl. You take care of yourself, hey, my Sprout. For me.’
‘Yes, Dad.’ I’m so fricken good I’m drowning in a very large pot of anxiety soup, a special recipe by Pete Loest. ‘I’ve got to go, someone wants to use the phone, see ya, don’t worry, bye.’
‘Bye, Add—’
She left the rest of her name to roam for eternity in the small dark plastic hall of the handpiece as she returned it to its cradle. She stared through the hazy evening dimness at the dial: Fricken Nicky. She wanted to ring him now, tell him to think of their dad for a change, grow up and manage to make a phone call without having to be taken to a phone and shown how to use it. She’d like to remind him of every effort Peter Loest had made for his Nicky Bratty-pants – all the years of driving him to football matches and boxing training, pacing at the sidelines smoking seventeen packets of cigarettes for every game, every fight. What did Nick ever show in gratitude? Only his gorilla-sized pecs – and his thighs. Addy shuddered: her brother’s thighs were so thick he couldn’t even walk like a human. He hadn’t always been so into himself, so remote; once upon a time, when they were kids, he’d been a champion big brother, a brother who could be relied upon to eat her peas when their dad had his back turned, a brother to save her a handful of her favourites from a mixed bag of lollies. But they didn’t share much these days. They’d grown apart, so apart that although he lived not far away, just the other side of Newtown, they never crossed paths unless they had to. She’d only been to his place on one occasion, to deliver some new gloves from their dad; it was like stepping into a gym – an obstacle course comprised of barbells, skipping ropes and two different varieties of rowing machine, laid out where a lounge room should be. His was a world of raw eggs and cold showers for breakfast, plates of pasta the size of bathtubs, and beer kegs drunk straight from the hose. Ug. His housemate was a carbon copy of same, weightlifter, Dave Douglas. Ug and Ug. She didn’t know how that concentration of testosterone hadn’t blown the roof off their house.
Still, he was her only brother; she’d go to his stupid boxing match on Friday night and try not to think about it in the meantime. Try not to think about the fact that Nicky never had to go to any of her events of note, not when she won the district public-speaking competition, no school prize days or performances, not ever – he didn’t even turn up to her birthday dinner last year. Why? Because he was at a training camp. Somewhere in the jungle. Ug.
She needed a beer herself – this minute.
No, you don’t.
Yes, I do.
She turned to make her way to the kitchen, but as she did, her foot slipped on that copy of The Fire Flight, which had fallen to the floor, and now caused her left shin to bash into the edge of the coffee table, scattering a cloud of ashtray dust across last night’s game of Trivial Pointlessness. I need more than one beer. She picked up her book and two of the sticky-rimmed glasses on the table. Am I the only person in this house who can tidy or wash anything?
A high-pitched whirring answered her from the kitchen. It was Harriet, HRH, doing something with her fancy food processor.
‘Hello,’ Addy said as she nudged open the kitchen door with an elbow: ‘What’re you making?’
I do know what hummus is, Miss Condescension 1985, Addy immediately stiffened, but she kept that snipe to herself. She often wondered if she was being unfair in her judgements of Harriet, if class envy played a part in her dislike of the girl and her preposterously breathy, elongated vowels, such as those still hanging in the air – taaaahiiini paaayste. Addy was never sure if she was being the mean one, if she was rolling her eyes at another’s otherness, like she was having a dig at someone with a speech impediment, rather than someone with a family trust fund, hundred-dollar-designer jeans and med-student boyfriend. Be nice, Addy told herself; she told Harriet: ‘Mmm. I love hummus.’
Harriet, still poking at the sides of the food-processor bowl, as though the making of this hummus were a complex intellectual challenge, replied: ‘I’m making it for a dinner party at Martin’s tonight.’
Aaaaa’m maaaaaking it for a diiiinner paaaaartay at Maaaahrtin’s tchoniiiight. Martin was the med-student boyfriend, and the tch on ‘tonight’ always gave Addy the snorts.
She turned away, placing the dirty glasses in the sink and letting the snort go there, under the running tap and down the drain; then she opened the fridge, beer-hunting. She was sure there was at least half a six-pack in here, but – ah – only one left. Better one than none.
‘Would you like to share?’ she asked Harriet, popping the ring-pull on the can.