Half My Luck

by Samera Kamaleddine

  My white cotton playsuit is not wicking any moisture away. It’s short, but not too short. Regardless, Tayta would not approve.

  As I take one last look at my mirrored wardrobe, I wonder what Sufia will be wearing tonight. Her parents are super strict, so there’s no way she’d be allowed out of the house in anything above her knees. And definitely not in something that lets the whole world (read: boys of the world) perv on her boobs. But that’s somehow what she rocks up in every time.

  There’s a part of me that hopes Sufia isn’t going to be at the party tonight. I’d never admit that to Mum. But maybe it would be easier if people didn’t see us together.

  Instead, Maddy is the first person I see after I step into the mugginess that makes the river reek even more than usual. She runs over, links her arm through mine and whispers some party goss into my ear. Well, they’re vodka whispers, which are a lot louder than regular whispers. Apparently, Zara Chen has already hooked up with Harrison Adamson (they had love-heart eyes for each other the whole of term four), and Daniel Mason-Johnson has a bunch of bungers he’s going to let off near the Cedar Army’s spot when they least expect it.

  ‘That’s kinda not funny, Mads.’ But her face says she clearly thinks it is. ‘I mean, those things can bust an eardrum, can’t they? What if someone gets like, really hurt?’ What if Sufia gets hurt?

  ‘Relax! Chill! Have a vodka!’

  Maddy drags me to our by-day sunbaking spot where she, George and a small group of other people from our school have set up on the sand with Eskies. It’s a different view from here at night. Sure, everyone’s in their default positions, but the sky is like an ominous chalkboard, etched with messy white stars and a waxing moon. Too dark to see the white and blue and red of the houses across the way, so it feels like it’s just us and the river.

  In the first hour, Maddy has dangled a pink-filled glass bottle in front of my face seven times, while simultaneously darting her almost-can’t-see-them-in-the-dark eyes up and down. She knows I’m going to say no – I always say no. So, when someone mentions that the boatshed has been stocked with cans of Coke and Sprite – and the door has been conveniently left unlocked – I’m there.

  It smells fishy, like there are remnants of bait lying around from the day’s fishing. And if I thought it was dark across the river, it’s easily a thousand times darker in here. I can only just make out the outline of a big chill chest, that when opened, is full of fizzy gold.

  Cold treasure in hand, I escape with a slight stench of scum attached to me. It’s enough, though, to get me wriggling around vigorously on the spot to shake it off my skin and hair. The gallops and arm-flapping aren’t freeing my nostrils of the gross assault, but my ears are definitely free to sense someone peering around from the tree in front of me. I pause mid-gallop.

  ‘Are you right?’

  I look like a swarm of mozzies has been trying to infiltrate my bone marrow.

  ‘Ah, yeah, I’m good . . . just . . .’

  ‘Really stinks in there?’

  ‘Yes! Exactly. That is exactly . . . what is happening in there.’

  Kiosk Guy’s ocean-blue eyes are smiling. I freeze my galloping legs and flapping arms.

  ‘If it helps, I can’t smell you from here.’

  ‘Ha! That’s the best news I’ve heard all night.’

  His dark, bushy eyebrows frown a little. ‘Not having a good one, then?’

  Night? Year? Life? Let’s go with night. ‘I should be, right? Having a good one. But like, all everyone seems to be talking about is who’s pashing who . . .’ I flinch a little, ‘. . . and how we can dig up even more bad shit to say about people.’

  Kiosk Guy, however, doesn’t flinch. He’s concentrating on me, but doesn’t say anything.

  ‘Ugh. These parties only seem to serve one purpose,’ I continue, because I’m nervous I’ll have an allergic reaction to any silence.

  He points his head to the ground next to him. ‘Well, you’re more than welcome to chill here. No shit-talk, I swear.’

  And that is the best invite I’ve heard all night. I drop bum to ground and kick my legs straight out in front of me. The left-hand side of my chest hurts a little, because everything inside it is moving at the speed of a freight train.

  ‘I’m Jordan, by the way. Jordan Michael.’

  ‘Layla . . . Karimi.’

  ‘Creamy?!’

  His scrunched-up face makes me laugh. ‘With a K . . . Ka-ree-me. Don’t worry, no one ever gets it!’

  ‘Greek?’

  ‘Actually, it’s . . . Lebanese.’

  ‘Lebanese!’ Jordan looks excited by the discovery. ‘Do you know I’ve never met anyone who was Lebanese before?’

  I’m about to ask him how that’s even possible given I run into a Leb every second day, but then I remember what Imogen and Carina said about him being from Bega.

  ‘I’m from Bathurst,’ he says. ‘So yeah, not a lot of . . . anything there, really.’

  He’s never even eaten a falafel, he tells me. It’s weird but cute. After we talk about all the Middle Eastern food he hasn’t tried, we talk about how he actually doesn’t mind having to spend his summer holidays on a lame beach with a bunch of strangers.

  He’s lucky, I tell him, before we sit through a brief moment of silence, ’cause that means he can sort of be anyone he wants to be.

  A bunger goes off, and the silence is shattered. A loud, gun-shot kinda bunger. I don’t need to look to know where it is.

  ‘What the . . . ?’ Jordan is on his feet and gaping at the opposite end of the riverbank.

  It’s hard to tell if the bunger landed near, or on, anyone. There are still some tunes making their way across the beach from the Cedar Army’s portable speaker, but they’re drowned out by their squeals (the girls) and shouting (the boys). I search for Sufia in amongst the chaos. I can’t see her. Now all of the noise is blurred out in my ears, just a nervous beat travelling from my gut up into my throat.

  I look behind us and Maddy and George are still at our spot on the sand, watching the action. Carina is rushing from the Suck-ups to the red-gum tree in aid (or gossip-collecting), with Imogen and the other vanilla sister, Shontel, in tow. But it’s like I can’t even move my feet (or my bum, which is firmly stuck to the ground).

  Then there’s a second bang.

  And I run.

  I’m following Jordan, heading in the direction of the bang, across the sand which feels heavier underneath my feet than it’s ever felt. We’re about halfway when Sufia comes sprinting at us, her sparkly gold earrings swinging and her red-lipped mouth making words I can’t hear.

  She grabs me, out of breath. ‘Let’s go, Ricky P is getting us out of here.’

  ‘Wait, but what —’

  She’s got a pretty tight hold of my arm and we’re still running, but towards the top of the beach and the road instead of the direction I want to be going in.

  ‘Did someone get hurt? Tell me what happened!’

  We reach Phantom1 and Sufia is now shouting at me. ‘Get in, Layla. GET IN!’

  The fake news only takes a few hours to circulate. First, it’s, ‘Some psycho Lebbo pulled a gun.’ Then it’s, ‘There was an all-in brawl and Harrison Adamson was glassed in the face.’ It goes on all weekend.

  I can’t even escape it at the dinner table on Sunday night.

  ‘Well, apparently, they all have guns and bombs, you know, those Lebs.’ My grandfather is over because the air-con at his retirement village is broken.

  ‘Grandad, you can’t say that.’

  Mum’s giving me her ‘he’s just old’ eyes. In return, I’m giving her my ‘I don’t care, he still can’t say stuff like that’ eyes.

  Grandad is not paying attention to anyone’s eyes. He’s hopelessly cutting up his Shepherd’s pie and flicking mash all over the table.

  Noah, meanwhile, doesn’t seem to take any offence. ‘Do you reckon Dad has a gun?’

  ‘Oh, who knows with your father,’ Mum says. �
�Dad, you’ve got a bit of mash on your collar.’

  I’m about to launch into a speech about how racial profiling isn’t helping anyone right now, when my phone starts vibrating beside my plate. I open a text from George. ‘Holy shit.’

  ‘Layla, don’t talk like that in front of Grandad.’

  ‘What is it?’ Noah asks, with his mouth full of pie.

  ‘Shontel Meyer is in hospital.’

  My sleep is the worst. Worse than after that time I saw a roving snake in Maddy’s backyard even. My eyes are barely open when I get to Lame Beach. Luckily, no one’s really in the mood to talk.

  Well, except for Maddy. ‘It’s pretty bad. Like, some kind of burns on one whole side of her body or something. Can you imagine? I couldn’t even deal.’

  George grunts a sound of agreement into the towel she’s lying facedown on in between Maddy and me.

  I’m sitting up with my legs stretched out in front of me. The same way I was sitting when the second bunger was set off – just as Shontel walked right into it.

  ‘Have the cops got involved?’ I ask, suddenly getting back my appetite for conversation.

  ‘Yeah, they think it was the Cedar Army,’ Maddy replies.

  ‘Sorry, what?’

  She’s looking straight out over the beach instead of making eye contact with me. ‘I don’t know, that’s just what they think.’

  ‘Mads, we all know it wasn’t the Cedar Army. Everyone knows Daniel Mason-Johnson took those bungers to the party. I don’t know who set them off, but —’

  ‘L, as if anyone is going to dob him in. I mean, no one is actually saying it was the Lebs. The cops came to that conclusion themselves because one of us got hurt, didn’t they? But I guess no one is —’

  ‘Denying it, either.’ I’m feeling a double-whammy of heat from the sun and the anger possessing my body. And I know I don’t feel like sitting here anymore. ‘George, are you listening to this?’

  By now, George is resting her chin on her folded arms, and her gaze is fixed ahead. ‘This bloody river must know that many dirty secrets, hey.’

  I’m not even sure whether he’s free or not when I begin my march down to the kiosk in a hot rage, but with the beach pretty quiet today I find there’s just one lone customer. Once he’s handed over a meat pie and some change to him, Jordan looks up at me and raises his eyebrows with a, ‘Hey.’

  ‘I’m angry.’ I launch straight in.

  ‘Cool, I’m good, too, thanks!’

  He quickly senses I’m actually dead serious. Leaning down on the counter, he asks, ‘What’s made you so angry?’

  I try not to stare too much into his eyes, so I’m darting mine all over the beach (Imogen, Carina and Co. are noticeably missing from their spot today). I fill Jordan in on everything Maddy has just told me. The fact that she – and no one else on this beach – thinks it’s wrong to totally mislead the police about something so serious. And of course, it’s easy for people to just automatically assume the Cedar Army have done something bad. And how if he doesn’t give me a free Killer Python immediately, I’m going to be even angrier.

  ‘Wow. Okay. That’s heavy,’ he says, handing me over a Killer Python without question.

  Just like a boyfriend would.

  Biting off the head, I tell him the worst part of it all is that I feel like I’m stuck in the middle of this whole drama.

  ‘I don’t get it, how are you even involved?’

  ‘I’m not,’ I say. ‘Well, not directly. I’m not a proper part of the Cedar Army, but I kind of am. My cousin Sufia is one of them. She’s almost like their leader. So, I should be sticking up for them. I am sticking up for them. But I’ll cop it from everyone else.’

  ‘Sooooo, you feel like you’ve gotta choose a side here?’

  I nod. He already knows me so well.

  ‘What if you don’t have to choose a side?’

  I’m confused. I don’t see any other way around it.

  ‘This isn’t a game of footy. You don’t have to wear one jersey, or sit on a chosen side of the stand. Stop looking at it like you have to support someone.’ He’s grabbing himself a Killer Python now. ‘Support the truth. Someone did something dodgy and the cops are sniffing the wrong trail. Put them on the right trail, justice gets served. End of.’

  I guess wherever he comes from wrong always corrects itself so easily, no dramas, I tell him.

  He’s chewing and giving me a look of twisted concentration at the same time. ‘You remind me of someone, you know.’

  Oh, God, please don’t say your sister.

  ‘A girl I grew up with, lives next door. Got bullied heaps at the start of high school.’

  I’m confused.

  ‘Totally different situation,’ he says. ‘But these idiot bullies were her own friends, if you can believe it. So many times I sat on the bus with her while they just acted like she didn’t exist. Or spread rumours that even the guys on my footy team started getting in on.’

  His look of concentration quickly turns to a sort of sad face.

  ‘That was her own “side” doing that to her. I kept telling her to ditch them, but she was so bloody loyal. Anyway, you’ve got that in common. But I guess in your case, it’s not necessarily a bad thing.’

  But being a good thing doesn’t make it easy.

  It’s a mid-afternoon scorcher, but I can’t be at that river anymore. As I start walking the twenty minutes home, I realise it’s not that simple. Sure, he’s the only rational-thinking person around here – probably because he’s not even from here – but Jordan Michael doesn’t know. He doesn’t know what it’s like to live with views that can hurt and divisions that segregate opinions. Walking around Lame Beach or the streets and shops, you might not be able to see them with your eyes, but the borderlines are there. And everyone knows what happens when you step over them.

  I don’t know if I’m brave enough.

  I remember the hashtag someone started last night. #Brave4Shontel is trending all around the river today. What a joke. No one is being brave in the name of Shontel. No one is being brave at all. More like cowardly, blind, unfair.

  I’m dripping, forehead to toes, in sweat. My singlet and shorts are totally soaked, and I feel like I’m going to pass out. In a few paces up ahead, I know I’ll be walking by the Meyer house. And I know I need to talk to someone who remembers exactly what happened that night.

  ‘How are you, Tayta?’

  ‘Ah, my kidneys hurt me.’

  Tayta’s kidneys are always hurting. Regardless, her duties are never neglected. She’s mixing a combo of raw mince, onion and parsley in a stainless-steel bowl bigger than my head, her hands folding over and over to the same exact rhythm she’s probably followed for fifty years.

  ‘Why your face is tired?’ She glances up at me sternly, looking pretty tired herself. Wisps of her grey hair are poking out from her faded blue headscarf, which is tied in a knot at the nape of her neck. When she landed here forty years ago, it might have looked to some like a fashion accessory – but to others, it was a sign of a ‘takeover’ of their streets. Well, that’s what my dad reckons, anyway.

  ‘I don’t know. Just not enough sleep, I guess. Nothing bad!’

  ‘Is very, very hot, Layla. Tell your mum . . . tell her to fix air-conditioning.’

  I have no idea why Tayta presumes our air-conditioning doesn’t work. I tell her it works just fine.

  She dips her mincey hands in a small bowl of water, then back to her giant mixing bowl to continue kneading. Given she lives alone, I don’t know who she’s even cooking for half the time.

  I start work on the sink-full of dishes. I’m three mixing bowls in, when a familiar voice sings out from the kitchen’s entryway.

  ‘I thought we were buying her a dishwasher?’

  ‘Sufia, habibi! Why you never come? I miss you.’ Tayta has her arms in the air, inviting an embrace.

  Sufia rolls her eyes at me over Tayta’s shoulder, after she’s given her the obligatory th
ree-kiss greeting (left cheek, right cheek, left cheek again).

  ‘I’m just putting my bag down in the bedroom,’ she says, motioning for me to follow her. ‘I’ll be back to help, Tayta, don’t worry.’

  ‘I don’t believe it! Cousin Sufia has turned up to family duties!’ I tease as she rushes me into the furthest bedroom down the corridor and shuts the door behind us.

  ‘As if! We need to talk, Layla.’

  I know what she wants to talk about. I feel a bit sick in my stomach.

  ‘You’ve gotta tell them to own up.’

  ‘Them?’

  ‘Yeah, your friends. The ones who are letting everyone think we hurt someone. You know the cops have been to see all the guys, all my friends? It’s bullshit.’

  ‘You reckon they’re going to listen to me?’ I know they won’t listen to me.

  ‘Please, cuz, just try?’ Sufia’s falsies are flickering.

  I want to try. But out of a fear of success or a fear of failure – I can’t be sure which at this point – I feel stuck.

  ‘Layla?’

  I nod. It’s not a convincing nod, but Sufia takes it. ‘Alright, I’m getting out of here before our grandmother matches me with the vacuum. There’s only one sucker in this family.’

  CHAPTER 3

  I hate hospitals. They’re too clean. It’s like your footsteps are infectious, and your face is so exposed. Being here makes me feel weak. So weak that I can’t even get myself to go into that room. Loitering around a nearby vending machine is a more appealing option.

  ‘Layla?’ Imogen Meyer is holding a jug of water in one hand and two stacked plastic cups in the other.

  ‘Imogen, hey.’

  She looks different. And not just because her hair is swept up in a messy topknot. Or because her makeup-free face is acknowledging my existence.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘No one knows I’m here.’ Why did I say that? ‘I just wanted to . . . I just want to see how your sister is doing. If she’s okay. Is she okay?’

  I can’t tell her that I just need to see it, what was done. To use it as a driving force to correct the contaminating lies.