I kick the door shut behind me, and Mum pauses mid-sentence, sees me. She beckons me out. I drop my bag at the front door and walk cautiously through to the deck.
Sitting opposite Mum is a man. He has stubble across his jawline, tattoos, and a bandanna tied round his head.
I am dumbstruck by the sight of him.
On our deck.
I’m very aware that half our species is comprised of these creatures, but to have one sitting at our house, casually sipping wine with Mum like he belongs here, like it’s something he does with her every day, is another matter.
Especially now.
‘So this is Ruby,’ Mum says, like an artist showing off a piece of her work that she’s especially proud of.
I’m not accustomed to Mum showing me off, and a warmth glows like embers inside my stomach, but why is she doing this?
The man stands. On our deck! And leans towards me, extending his hand.
I shoot Mum a look, take his hand. His skin is soft and his hand so large it engulfs my own. I ignore my smallness and give his hand a firm shake. The way Mum taught me. You can tell a lot about a person by their handshake. A strong handshake is confident. ‘Never be a limp fish,’ she says. So even though I am a limp fish, I always shake hands like I’m not.
My hands lie.
‘Helluva name,’ he says, with the edge of an English accent.
Is he some high-school friend of mum’s maybe? Back in town after years away?
‘Ruby Tuesday?’ he says to Mum.
She nods and they smile knowingly, like it’s a private joke. But I already know it. I was named after the Rolling Stones song, after the girl who couldn’t be pinned to a name or a place. Except, the bitter irony is that I am totally pinned. To a name that matches my hair, to our Plan B existence, to this place.
I stand there waiting for the introduction they seem to have forgotten to make. Like who the hell he is and what he’s doing here on our back porch.
‘Ruby, sweetheart, why don’t you boil up a fresh pot of tea and join us?’ Mum says.
‘Tea?’ I eye their wine glasses.
Mum gives me her don’t-be-a-child look.
‘It’s Robbie, by the way,’ the man says, looking briefly at Mum, then at me when he realises no introduction is coming. ‘I’m an old friend of Celeste . . . I mean, your ma. I haven’t seen her for a while.’
I nod. His tattoos are half covered by his shirt sleeves. I see musical notes, words, the face of a woman on his inner bicep, or maybe a mermaid with orange, curly hair.
Mum must notice me checking out his tatts, because she says, ‘Robbie’s a bit more . . . colourful than when I saw him last.’
Robbie mocks offence. ‘And you’re a bit more . . .’
‘Welcoming,’ Mum says.
His cheeks flush, and he looks away.
‘How ’bout feisty? More feisty, if that were possible.’ He doesn’t look back at her but sits down again.
I head to the kitchen. How long has this guy been here? All day? I grab the teapot and start filling it. Decide to make tea for them too. So they’ll stop drinking wine. Tea for everyone.
A man in the house. I glance back out at him. I can’t remember ever seeing a man in Nan’s house. Maybe this is a dream.
Or a nightmare.
I return with the pot of tea and three mugs. Robbie and Mum are in the middle of some story and lean to talk around me as I pour their tea. Steam scalds my hand as I fill our mugs and I realise it can’t be a nightmare.
Three mugs.
I haven’t made three cups of tea since Nan was here.
Mum chats away, not guarded and stiff the way she sometimes is around other people. It unnerves me. Her arms are all loose and she’s resting an elbow casually on the table. Her face is alive and she looks about a decade younger than she did this morning. Maybe this is happiness. A kind I can’t bring her. The kind she had in her old life.
I sit down at the table. Sip my tea. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear she was flirting. But Mum doesn’t flirt.
After a while, there’s a silence and I realise both of them are looking at me. I shift in my seat.
‘Well, if you’re not your mother’s daughter,’ Robbie says at last.
What am I meant to say to that? Yes, I am? We both have red hair? What a lame conversation starter.
‘And how old would you be now, about . . .?’
‘Seventeen,’ I say.
‘Right.’
He looks at Mum, but she’s staring into the forest. Seems to have tuned out.
Robbie clears his throat. ‘You know how hard it was for me and the boys to track down your ma?’ He smiles.
I shake my head. Obviously I don’t, since I’ve never met him or whoever his boys are before.
Mum holds her arms out in surrender. ‘It’s not a crime to move.’
‘No social, no phone, no email. . .’ He ticks each item off on his fingers. ‘Not a trace of her. And then I find her all the way out here in the sticks. Nice sticks, though,’ he says, admiring the view. He reaches across the table, almost like he’s going to take Mum’s hand, but thinks better of it.
‘Your ma is an enigma.’ He smiles proudly, like he’s cracked the enigma. Except I know that nothing about my mother is an enigma, except her talent. And she works damn hard at that. Otherwise, she’s very much a person.
‘Gone. Just like that.’ He clicks his fingers. ‘Do you know what people thought?’
Mum frowns. ‘You know I’ve never cared for what people think, Robbie.’
I have another sip and take in this new information. I was pretty sure I knew everything about Mum’s old life. All her secrets. How she left it all behind – the concerts, the interviews, the road shows, the performing. But I didn’t know she dropped it cold and disappeared. With only me in tow.
I study Robbie’s face and realise he looks vaguely familiar. I’ve seen a version of his face in old photographs. Suddenly I realise who he is. Robbie Vetter, lead singer from Celestial Vendetta – Mum’s band before she had me. What could he want?
I’m really starting to despise this guy for his smugness, and I’m wondering why Mum’s not putting him in his place for tracking her down when she clearly didn’t want to be found.
Then he says, ‘You’re okay out here, right?’
I snort, but Mum shoots daggers at me. So I gulp down the rest of my tea.
‘We’re fine,’ she answers. Not a flicker of doubt in her voice. Not a hint that we’ve ever been anything else. ‘Aren’t we, Ruby?’
I nod. We are apparently brilliant.
‘We love it out here,’ Mum says.
This is too much. We don’t love it out here, and she knows it. I push back my chair, grab my empty mug. Maybe he’ll take this as his cue to leave.
‘Well, I’m just gonna . . .’ I nod towards the door, but neither of them move.
I suddenly feel like an intruder, a stranger on my own back deck when he’s the one who should be leaving.
I clatter my mug loudly in the sink, but they don’t even notice. So I retreat to my room, turn on the fan to swirl the thick hot air around and curl up on my bed as the deep orange sun sets my room ablaze.
The man stays too long. I can hear murmurs and laughter long after the stars creep out from their spaces in the sky.
I cocoon myself in my room. The only safe place left in the world.
It’s not long before I hear a startling, shocking sound. More shocking than the discovery of a man on our deck. And each stroke of each key is a betrayal. Mum doesn’t share her music with anyone but us. And since we lost Nan, that means me. These days we play together or we play alone.
I know I broke the pact first by singing at the party. But she doesn’t know that. And I’ve already paid the price. My eyes burn with jealousy. And as a tear runs hotly down my cheek, I hear another sound. A worse one. A thrumming, strumming, mellow, foot-tapping sort of sound. The man has a guitar. He’s playing with her; a synchr
onicity that’s effortless. From some long ago past I don’t belong to.
This is as bad as it gets. My life can’t get any worse. Except that it does, because our house is suddenly filled with the aching notes of the man’s voice.
If she was still performing, what could I have been? What?
Say it, Ruby. Say it.
I could have been a singer. A songwriter. I could have shared my words, my sound, instead of burying it all away and letting it burst free at the wrong times.
If the accident hadn’t stolen Mum’s career, we wouldn’t be here. Our lives wouldn’t be so pathetically Plan B. It could have been different. Not just what it used to be in the terrace house in Newtown. Something grander . . .
The songs they’re playing are unfamiliar, but only to me. Mum’s not missing a beat.
The man strums something new. Mum responds, playing by memory. Another piece I’ve never heard. The pain is exquisite. These must be the songs that made their band great . . . But before they made it big, she left and Celestial Vendetta went on without her.
She left when she had me. Maybe that’s why she never plays them to me. Why she never listens to the music at home. Not once in seventeen years.
Was it really the accident that stole her career? Or had that already happened? Was it my birth? Without me, she’d have travelled with the band to the UK, surely? Celestial Vendetta hit the big time over there.
But she stayed behind. Rebuilt her life as a solo pianist. And just when she was getting somewhere, the fall exiled us to the forest.
Such a shitty hand. And it all started with me.
For the first time I understand it. My mother had two misfortunes in life: first there was me, then there was the fall. Without the first, she would never have had the second.
I curl into a ball on my bed, hugging my body. Wrapping myself up tighter. It’ll be fine. The man will leave. He’ll take with him all the yearning he has stirred in my pitted heart. I’ll forget the pain of my new knowledge. Home will get back to boring, secure, stable old monotony.
But I know it’s a lie. There’s no going back to the way I was. No losing this terrible discovery – I’m the reason we’re stuck here.
And if I’m the cause, then there is no cure. Everything is lost.
I drag my laptop off the desk jammed up alongside my bed. My visual art essay’s due on Wednesday: The Life of an Artist. I’ve been putting it off because Art is Alex’s thing, and being in her class hurts. She used to tell me all these fascinating things about revolutionary artists I’d never heard of, like Frida Kahlo, who suffered from polio as a child, then had a bus accident and sustained a spinal cord injury that changed the course of her life. She was studying medicine, but became an artist after she was bed bound. The rest is history.
Alex of the Plan A life was all about the silver linings. Maybe that’s why the kiss hurt so much. Alex was the kindest, most loyal friend I’ve ever had. Betrayal from her hurt more than betrayal from anyone else.
Our silence is painful, even though I chose it. We’re in the same class, but we may as well be on different continents.
The Life of an Artist is exactly the sort of assignment Alex and I would have worked on together last year. And she’d have suggested some incredible artist that I’d love.
I’m on my own for this one. I start researching on my phone.
Mary Cassatt, queen of portraits. Will Alex choose her? Alex says every face tells its own story. She falls a bit in love with every person she paints – even when she had to paint Angel for a project in Year 10. Alex said she found a vulnerability when she was painting Angel that’s normally hidden beneath too much make-up and too many loud words. She says faces can’t lie. But then I think of Joey Milano’s face.
They can.
I scroll through a series of sculptors and photographers and painters. I find one that arrests me – women pursued by men. Taunted. Mocked. It’s powerful, it’s chilling, it’s bold. This is her. My artist.
Artemisia Gentileschi, born hundreds of years ago. This woman – painting at a time when women had few rights and fewer opportunities – has her art hanging in some of the most famous museums in the world.
Then I get to the details of her life. She’s as famous for being raped by another artist as she is for her paintings. The artist was a man her father paid to tutor her. He took her virginity without asking when she was sixteen. A year younger than me. The case went to court. She testified, but was tortured with nail screws to test her conviction. She was tortured. Not him. She got her conviction anyway.
Even though it was overturned later and he walked free, Artemisia stood up and was heard.
Her most famous paintings are depictions of women killing men. It’s not hard to imagine where her inspiration came from. The same place songs are born. Deep in the well of our souls. The same place Mum’s pain lives. Maybe the job of every artist is to explore what they are trying to understand.
I fasten myself to Artemisia as validation. Maybe it takes a Plan B life to produce a certain type of brilliance. Artemisia turned her excruciating pain into art. Masterpieces can be born of suffering.
I flip open my laptop.
Messenger is open on my browser. Three messages. I feel sick the second I see them.
Oh god, what if it’s morning sickness? How soon would I start to feel sick if I was pregnant? Surely not this soon?
I ignore the messages and frantically google When does morning sickness start?
I speed-read the first article. Between five to six weeks. It can’t be morning sickness. But it doesn’t mean I’m not pregnant. How long until I know for sure? I check my phone. My period is due in about two weeks. Shit. I shut the thought down. It’s not a possibility that can even be opened a crack.
You can go to the chemist for the morning after pill. I know that much. But I’d rather dig a hole and bury myself than answer questions from Sue the pharmacist. Even Amy who works in the chemist in Willaware knows me. She’s the twin’s cousin and there’s no way I’ll risk them finding out.
I turn my attention to the real reason my stomach is churning. Three new messages.
There’s a part of me hoping for a message from Joey. Just a one liner: ‘Are you okay?’ or ‘Sorry about the other night’ or ‘Can we talk?’ There’s no way he hasn’t seen that clip of me. There’s no way he was drunk enough not to remember what he did. I just want one line to show that he’s given me a single thought since he left me under that maple tree. It wouldn’t make it right, but it might help.
My heart sinks. Even though I knew, deep down, there would be nothing from him. The sinking feeling is quickly replaced by panic when I see who the messages are from.
I start with the easiest one. If you can call it that.
The one from Alex.
Hi Ruby,
Just wanted to see how you are. I’m guessing you’ve seen the clip. If it’s any consolation, your voice has matured since I last heard it. It’s beautiful. If anyone gives you grief, chalk it up to jealousy. Anyway, here if you need me. x
The sight of her name stirs both yearning and desperation. I do need her. I want to answer. I want to call her. But I can’t go back there. I can’t undo the damage done on both sides. I don’t trust her anymore, and she probably doesn’t much trust me. I don’t know what level of energy it would take to sort things out, but I’m pretty sure I don’t have it. I need to accept that our friendship is done and move on.
Panic rises like a small bubble in my chest when I open the message from Lukas.
Hey Ruby,
You weren’t on the bus today. Where were you at lunch? I was looking for you. You want me to kick the shit out of the bastard who filmed you singing?
I’m pretty sure the bastard who filmed it was Kyle. He was certainly the bastard who posted it.
Would Lukas be willing to beat Kyle up? A bad idea, but kind of tempting. The message was Monday, though. I highly doubt he’ll be willing to defend my honour now. He sur
ely knows what happened with Joey. If he doesn’t, he will soon. And even if I said yes, what would I owe Lukas in return?
The same thing every guy wants.
I’m one hundred percent sure his protection comes at a price. It’s far too high.
I force myself to confront the message I’m dreading the most. The one from Millie.
Hey Ruby,
I heard about what happened on Saturday night. Not the video. Not the singing. I’m not pissed at you. But I thought I should warn you this is what Joey does. Part of the reason we broke up. You should be careful, okay? Things get messed up quick and there are rumours. Thought I should warn you.
It’s signed from Mil. Not Millie. Mil.
I feel like shit. Joey wasn’t ever my boyfriend, and I turned against Alex for kissing him. Instead of cutting me off, Millie is reaching out. She doesn’t sound hurt, even though she must be. She sounds . . . worried?
Millie’s kindness stirs a deep shame in me about the way I treated Alex. I was hurt and I had a tantrum. Was I really so blinded by my own pain? Alex should have known better. Alex was always the dependable, stable one. She wasn’t allowed to mess up. Not once. Not ever. But I guess there’s more than one way to betray someone.
Now Millie’s throwing me a lifeline where I would have left Alex to drown. What kind of person am I?
How much should I tell Millie? She could share this with anyone.
I write in a flurry so that I don’t back down.
Thanks for your message, Millie. I’m so so sorry. I was drunk . . . and it happened fast.
Drunk. The lamest, most clichéd excuse pulled straight from the book of worst-excuses-ever-for-having-sex-with-someone. But it’s not an excuse, it’s the truth. And I’ve been blaming myself for it since Saturday. Because it’s what the world will do. Don’t get drunk if you don’t want to be taken advantage of. That’s what they say. It was my fault for being vulnerable. For having that crush on Joey. For not screaming. For drinking too much. For singing him that song. I wanted him. I just didn’t want that.
Ruby Tuesday Page 7
