I Had Such Friends

by Meg Gatland-Veness

  “Well you look awful,” he said. “Maybe we should get something to eat. You got any money?”

  “Nope,” I said sadly.

  “Damn, I spent last week’s pay on petrol and breakfast.”

  I felt a bit guilty about that. If it wasn’t for my living so damn far away, he wouldn’t have wasted so much petrol driving me home.

  “I have a peanut butter sandwich in my bag,” I said. “It’s probably melting in the car, but you can have it if you want.”

  He laughed. “Jesus. Must be nice to have someone to make sandwiches for you, hey?”

  “Yeah, but I wish she’d put something different on them once in a while.”

  We got up and started back towards the beach. What I really wanted was water. My tongue felt as coarse as a cat’s.

  “So, since that was a bit of a disaster,” Peter said, “what do you normally do for fun?”

  Play zombies with Martin? “Take photos I guess,” I said, shrugging to show that it was no big deal.

  “Oh right, yeah I forgot,” he said, kicking the water as he walked through it. “Well we can’t really do that.”

  I smiled. He had asked me what I wanted to do. Me.

  When we got back to the surf club, I filled my hands with water from the tap and drank about a litre while Peter washed the salt off his skin in the outdoor showers. My head felt slightly better. But really, I needed to get out of the sun. It was sad that sunshine gave me headaches. Didn’t really seem fair. I wished that I had put on suncream. My shorts were totally dry, by the way; they were crisp.

  We got back to the car and I pulled the sandwich out of my bag and handed it to Peter. It was in one of those seal-top bags. I had to tell Peter not to throw the bag out. My mother washed them out and hung them on the line to dry so we could reuse them. He handed it back to me without making any sort of snide comment. He didn’t even ask me why I wanted to keep it.

  I bet that sandwich was really warm, but he didn’t complain. He ate the whole thing in about three bites. A kid like Peter probably needed at least five sandwiches for lunch. I sometimes struggled to finish one. Okay, that’s probably a bit of an exaggeration, but one peanut butter sandwich was definitely enough for me. Also, my mum didn’t cut the crusts off anymore, so that was like, a tenth more bread than I had in primary school.

  The car was too hot to sit in so we opened all the doors and let it air out for a bit while we sat in the shade of the surf club.

  The surf club, like pretty much everything else in the town, except the dentist, was a piece of shit. The roof had collapsed a few years before and it still had a blue tarpaulin covering part of it. The clock hadn’t shown the right time in months and when the lifeguards tried to speak over the loudspeaker, all you could hear was crackling, even if you really listened hard, like I did, for words like ‘bluebottles’ or ‘shark’.

  Once the car was cool enough, we got back in. I nearly gave myself a third-degree burn with the metal part of my seatbelt. The steering wheel must have been scalding because Peter was touching it even less than usual. Normally he had one hand on the wheel and the other out the window, but now he had his left hand on his lap with just one thumb on the bottom of the wheel.

  We drove through the town and it was funny to think of everyone else at school. Poor old Martin would have had to sit by himself all day. I felt a little bit guilty for a minute then. If I were a better friend, I would have asked Peter if Martin could hang out with us too. But I didn’t ask him. Part of me worried that he might have said no. A much bigger part worried that he would have said yes.

  Don’t get me wrong, Martin was a good friend, but if he’d been there in the car with us, he would have ruined it. If you thought I said embarrassing things, I had nothing on him. He would have sat there in the back seat and talked about his trading cards and video games and comic books, and he would have told Peter to stop smoking because it would give him cancer and commented on all the rubbish in his car and how he should really clean it all out. He would have asked Peter to turn the music down because it was hurting his ears and it was dangerous to drive when you couldn’t hear what was happening around you, like, “What if an ambulance were behind you? You’d never hear it over this din.” And he would have asked to ride in the front seat because he got carsick when he couldn’t watch the road in front of him. He would have asked Peter to shut the windows and turn on the aircon because it was too hot and he was sweating, and I’d have to tell him the car didn’t have aircon and he would make a disapproving sound. And he would have told Peter he could get fined for having his arm out the window like that, or that he really shouldn’t drive so fast because the speed limit was the maximum you should go. And then Peter would have got pissed off and never hung out with either of us ever again.

  We drove around most of that day and found different bits of shade to sit in. We didn’t talk much at all. Peter didn’t seem to like talking that much.

  When he dropped me off at the school bus bay so I could catch the bus home again, I felt so sly. It was the first time I had ever broken the rules and we hadn’t even been caught.

  When I got home, I tried not to look guilty but I didn’t think my parents would have noticed anything anyway. An outbreak of caterpillars had got to some of the cabbages so they were frantically pulling them off to save what was left of the crop.

  I went to my room and took some photos of the cuts on my hand and foot before covering them in Band-Aids and hoping my parents wouldn’t notice that either.

  They didn’t.

  4.

  The day Annie came back to school was a Thursday.

  Annie Bower was Charlie’s girlfriend. You know, the one who was in the car. The one who survived when Charlie didn’t. The one he saved when he hit that tree.

  She was still covered in bandages, her left arm was in a sling and her face had lots of those clear Band-Aids on it. Her bottom lip was split, along with her left eyebrow and right cheek. Her right eye was bruised as fuck and she was walking with a limp.

  She was also crying.

  And she was still the prettiest girl in the school.

  She didn’t stop crying all day. I watched her. She wasn’t sobbing or anything, her eyes were just relentlessly filling with tears. You should have seen our poor teachers trying to talk to the class while this girl was sitting in front of them, looking like she might shatter into a thousand pieces if they even spoke to her.

  Of course, Annie had a flock of girls around her at all times, but she still looked so bitterly alone. She looked how I felt in the staff common room that day. Surrounded by people but still on the outside. And I know that sounds clichéd, but I don’t know how else to describe it. It was like everyone around her was speaking a foreign language because, really, none of them had the slightest clue what she was going through.

  I wondered if she felt guilty, because if it weren’t for her, Charlie Parker would still be alive. He would still be walking around the school, charming the teachers by complimenting them on their new haircuts, helping out the cleaners by telling off his friends for littering and making all the girls faint just by looking at them a moment longer than expected. But he was dead. He was buried in the ground under a pile of dirt, and that’s all there was to it.

  Annie’s friends would have been telling her stupid things like, “It’s not your fault”, “It’s going to be okay” and “He wouldn’t have wanted you to be sad.”

  I wondered that day if I could talk to her – Annie, that is. I thought she might like to talk to someone who’d felt what she was feeling. Who actually knew what to say.

  My sister died, you see.

  She was such a sweet little thing, my sister.

  She was only seven years old when she died.

  But I’d rather not talk about it at the moment.

  Anyway, I didn’t speak to Annie Bower that day, but I saw her in English and gave her a smile and, if you knew me at all, you’d know that was a very rare gift to get. It was a s
mall smile. A sad smile. A smile that didn’t leave my lips to join my teeth. But it was a smile.

  She didn’t smile back.

  Not that I expected her to. I mean, I was me and she was Annie Bower so she never would have smiled at me on a regular day. Also, her boyfriend had just died. Smiling at losers like me was probably the last thing she wanted to do. She didn’t smile at anyone else though. From what I saw, anyway, and I did try to keep an eye on her that day. Not in a creepy stalker way, just in a concerned citizen kind of way. I wasn’t hiding in bushes or anything like that. There were no binoculars involved.

  I saw her talking to a few of Charlie’s friends. Other popular, surfy, athletic guys. Guys I’d hated my whole life for being everything that I wasn’t. You could tell how much they liked Charlie because they didn’t try anything with Annie while she was in such a fragile state. Some of them hugged her, but they were the ones who looked like they were crying too.

  I wondered then if anyone would have been upset if I were the one who’d been driving Annie Bower home that night. If I had been the one who died. Would the whole school have stopped working? Would those tough, surfy guys have cried? Would everyone have sat in the staff common room looking at photos of me? Me with Martin, me with a tractor, me getting my head flushed down the toilet (I had a feeling there actually was a video of that going around the school). But I guess that was a stupid thing to think about, since Annie Bower never would have been in a car with me in the first place. I also didn’t even have a car.

  I bet Martin would have cried if I’d died.

  And my parents too. Well… my mum would, at least. I don’t know if Dad cried when my sister died. He must have. I cried for weeks.

  Annie had never spoken to me before. She was in that mob of girls all the guys were in love with. The guys would just move from one girl to the other until one of them couldn’t be bothered to reject him. That was the way it worked. What bothered me was that a lot of the girls weren’t even pretty. Sure, they were skinny, they wore make-up and their skirts were really short but they didn’t have a personality between them. Not that any of the guys noticed; to them, they were just a big clump of boobs and mascara, and if they couldn’t get one of them, there were plenty of others.

  Anyway, Martin offered to drive me home that day but I turned him down. Now, I won’t lie to you, a big part of my reason for saying no was because I thought that Toyota Corolla might be in the bus bay again. But the other part was that I almost always turned Martin down when he offered me a lift home. Being seen getting into his mother’s car would have given people more ammunition against me and I also didn’t like being in their car – it still smelt new and I think it was the only new car in the whole town.

  That was one of the many reasons why everyone at our school hated Martin’s guts. Except me, of course. I knew he couldn’t help having rich parents. I knew it wasn’t his fault that he was used to getting everything he wanted while the rest of us just scraped by. But the thing that got me was that he didn’t understand us. He didn’t understand what it was like to be poor. He’d been to my house a hundred times, he’d seen how shit it was. But one time he asked me if we’d ever thought of repainting the inside. His parents had just decided that they were going to redo their house with ‘feature walls’ in every room. Don’t ask me what the fuck a feature wall is because I couldn’t tell you. And I just stared at him, thinking, Have you never opened your eyes before, you stupid fuck? If we’re going to spend any money on the house, we’ll start with the leaky roof, the shoddy power points or the window in the bathroom with the broken pane. We’re not going to frickin’ paint it! But, of course, I didn’t say any of this, I just changed the subject to superpowers. Martin loved talking about superpowers.

  So I caught the bus home, as usual, and leant my head against the window. I knew that was disgusting, but I was very tired that day. There were so few kids on my bus that we all got a seat to ourselves, safely spread apart amongst the chairs. It wasn’t that we disliked each other or anything, but every group of friends at school had their one token, loser, farm kid and to associate with more than your quota was unwise. So we ignored each other. It was kind of depressing now that I think about it.

  There was no one else from my year on that bus, so I was the oldest. I should have owned that bus. I should have walked up those steps like a king and taken up the whole back seat by lying on it with my bag under my head. But instead I sat right up the front with my face to the window and hoped that huge kid in Year Ten who did sit on the back seat didn’t feel like throwing anything at me. He was two years younger than me. He didn’t even have a white shirt, he was still in blue like the other juniors, but he was twice my size. He had sun-dark skin and had benefitted greatly from lugging hay bales around his whole life. His dad and mine were friends once, I think. My parents didn’t really have any friends.

  Don’t get me wrong, they were lovely people; my mum used to do that doorknock appeal thing for charity every year and my dad once rescued a sheep that was drowning in our pond during a heaps hectic storm. It wasn’t even our sheep, it was our neighbour’s, but he hauled it out of that pond and got kicked in the stomach as thanks. By the sheep, that is, not the neighbour.

  I would’ve said they hadn’t really been very social since my sister died, but that would’ve been untrue. They’d just never been all that social. Living outside of town, you tended to get cut out of the loop a bit. My mother used to have lots of friends. When she lived in Sydney and went to school. But gradually her friends stopped coming to visit because the house was too quiet and the floorboards too creaky.

  She didn’t have a big family either. My mother was an only child and both of her parents had died. Neither of them ever got to meet my sister and all I really remembered about them was having to choke down boiled lollies (does anyone actually like boiled lollies?) and that they never stayed over when they came to visit. I always wanted them to – I could have made them Vegemite on toast for breakfast and sliced it into triangles and taken it to them in bed. I didn’t think farming was really their cup of tea. They also both smoked like chimneys and my dad wouldn’t let them smoke in the house. Grandad had a stroke and Grandma died of throat cancer. It really is true what they say in those ads.

  Anyway, my dad’s family was ridiculously huge. I couldn’t tell you how many uncles and aunties and cousins I had in farms all over Australia. They still visited, and when they did, the house got riddled with stubble and ocker accents. They usually sat around drinking beer and laughing about when they were kids. I wondered if one day I’d look back at my life and find things to laugh about. I doubted it.

  It was never quiet when the house was full of that mob. The silence that normally dripped from the walls was tucked away into the cupboards and the drawers. But it always crept its way back when the utes pulled out of the driveway in a cloud of dust and the beer bottles clattered into the garbage truck. But it wasn’t that bad, really. My parents were happy enough. They still looked at that photo on the wall from their wedding day and smiled, so that was good.

  When I got home, I let myself in. My mum must have been out on the farm. She had made soup for dinner three days ago and we were still eating it—who cooks soup in the middle of summer, I don’t know—but it lasted and it went far if we kept adding water. But each night it had a little less flavour than the last. I did my homework as quickly as possible and then sat on the floor in my room with a book and a bottle of water that I had to refill every ten minutes. I could drink a lot of water on hot days.

  Poor Annie. Guilt like that wasn’t fair. It wasn’t her fault that dog was on the road. It wasn’t her fault that when it rains in Australia, it buckets down. It wasn’t her fault that Charlie had valued her life over his own. She wouldn’t have understood that. She would have remembered Charlie and thought he was the greatest person who ever lived, that he was good at everything, liked by everyone and the nicest person she had ever met. Then she would have looked in the mirr
or and wondered why he had saved her life. Why she deserved to live when someone that amazing was dead. She wasn’t good at anything, she wasn’t nice, she was selfish and vain. She would start to hate everything about herself. She would look at her face and wonder how she could ever have believed she looked pretty.

  I didn’t want that to happen to Annie. Because I knew that she was a good person, deep down. How did I know that? Well, once, she sat next to Martin on the bus. What was Martin doing on a bus, I hear you ask? Well, it wasn’t the school bus, it was an excursion bus. We were going on a Geography excursion, I think in Year Nine, to look at rocks or some shit and somehow the only free seat left was next to Martin. And this boy, a friend of Annie’s, made some comment about sitting on his lap instead. But she didn’t sit on his lap, she sat next to Martin.

  I had to stand up and several people bumped into me on purpose and tried to trip me over. But I was still happy on the bus that day because Martin couldn’t keep the smile off his face. She didn’t speak to him or anything because one of her friends was in the seat behind, and Annie had turned around to speak to her the whole time. But that’s how I knew that Annie Bower was a nice girl, because she sat next to Martin on the bus instead of on that other boy’s lap. And that was a big deal, because Martin smelt kind of weird, and I don’t think I would have wanted to sit next to him. Also, he would have made me play Corners or Spotto or sing ‘99 Bottles of Beer’ with him.

  5.

  My family had dinner at six o’clock every night, sometimes earlier. Dinners were usually quiet at my house. I never spoke about anything, ever, and my parents had nothing interesting to offer except for what was happening around the farm, and that was almost always depressing. We weren’t doing that well, you see.

  The market was bad, the crops hadn’t been great the past few years with the summers getting hotter and hotter, and with imports coming from overseas at cheaper prices we just couldn’t seem to keep up.