I Had Such Friends

by Meg Gatland-Veness

  I remember the day my father had to plough over all his beautiful little cabbages because it would have cost him more to try and sell them than it did to destroy them. He was sitting in our tractor crying his eyes out as he killed every single one of those baby cabbages. It broke my heart.

  I’d heard people say that the worst thing to ever see is your mother cry, but that’s not true; seeing your father cry is much, much worse. Someone who is always so strong, like my dad. A farmer who wears boots and flannelette shirts every day. A guy who gets up at four and goes to bed at seven every night. A man who once gave himself stitches when he sliced his gut open with a barbed wire fence while I threw up and fainted. When he cries, that shit is real.

  It was getting to the point where my mother had to start looking for a job in town and my father had to keep laying off workers. Fewer workers meant I had to help out more and I always hated farming.

  Farming was the reason I didn’t have a job. Farming was the reason I didn’t have any money to buy a car or a mobile phone. Farming was one of the many reasons I was bullied at school.

  And the worst part was that, someday, that farm was going to be mine and I dreaded that day like the frickin’ apocalypse.

  At this particular family dinner, my mother decided she needed to address my mental health.

  “Hamish,” my mother said, with no warning or lead up. “We think you should talk to the school counsellor.”

  “What?” I said, choking on my green beans.

  “Your mother and I are very worried about you. You’re so reclusive, you never smile, you need to make more friends,” said my father, who always supported my mother in everything. Poor guy was whipped.

  “I have friends,” I said defensively. I did not want to see the school counsellor. Not at all.

  “Honey, you know we love Martin, but most people have more than one friend,” my mother said.

  “I have more than one friend.”

  “Who? Who else?” she said, cruelly.

  But I didn’t tell them about Peter because I knew what they would say. They would have told me that Peter Bridges was not the kind of boy they wanted me to hang around with. He was no good. He stole, he got into fights, he smoked, he skipped school. So I just shook my head instead and took my plate to the sink. I had only eaten half my dinner but I couldn’t deal with the dining table conversation anymore. Sometimes, with my parents, it was best to pick your battles. But, looking back, I think that was something I should have fought for.

  Back in my room, I pulled out a book and sat on the floor. It was always cooler on the floor, and I didn’t have my own TV so reading was all I had.

  My room was tiny, so it was lucky we were poor and couldn’t afford any stuff or it would have been pretty crowded in there. I just had a single bed and the springs were shot. I had a chest of drawers for all my clothes, but there was nowhere to hang shirts up so my mum ironed them right before I put them on. And because I didn’t have a desk, I had to do my homework in the dining room. I wished I had a bookshelf but all the books I read were borrowed from my school library so I always had to give them back when I’d finished. The walls were covered in a weird patterned wallpaper that I was sure had been there since this house was built a hundred years ago.

  I heard the phone ring downstairs and my mother picked it up.

  “Hamish,” my mother yelled up the stairs. “Martin is on the phone.”

  I stumbled down the stairs and took the phone from her hand. A few years before, when things weren’t quite as bad, we got a cordless phone, and thank Christ. I took it back to my room and shut the door before I said anything.

  “Hey Martin,” I said, sounding exceedingly apathetic.

  “Hamish! Want to come over and play Xbox tonight?” Martin was always excited when he was talking about video games.

  “Fuck off,” I said noncommittally.

  “Come on, man, I just got a new game. There’s zombies!” he said, completely ignoring my disinterest.

  “You know I hate video games, dude.”

  “But Hamish,” he whined. “Zombies!”

  “Fine,” I said. I may have hated video games but they were better than sitting by myself on a Friday night, but then again, that was debatable. “But I’ll have to walk there.”

  “No way, my mum can come and pick you up and we can get McFlurries on the way home!”

  “Dude, seriously, how old are you? But no, I’ll walk. I need the exercise.”

  “Oh yeah, because you’re so fat.”

  “Exactly.” I hung up.

  I grabbed my house keys and walked back downstairs. My mother was washing the dishes and my father was sitting on the couch watching the news.

  “I’m going ’round to Martin’s,” I said.

  “Okay, sweetheart, are you going to stay over there?” my mother said, wiping her brow with her forearm.

  “I dunno, depends how tired I am after playing zombies.”

  “Zombies?”

  “Don’t ask.”

  “Okay, well, have fun, honey,” she said, but I was already out the door.

  Outside there was a warm breeze. It would have taken me an hour to walk to Martin’s usually, but I decided to jog this time. I hated my frickin’ scrawny body so much. I only jogged for about ten minutes before I was dying.

  Honest to god, I thought I was going to pass out. But that’s what you got for spending all your time sitting around reading books and developing photographs. I had to walk for a while, then jog a bit and then put my head between my knees and hyperventilate a couple of times, otherwise I never would have made it.

  The light from Martin’s house was like the frickin’ Holy Grail. I knocked on the door even though they had a bell. Martin came to the door almost instantly. He had probably been sitting in the hall pining for me that whole time. Or maybe he was just pining for McFlurries.

  “Holy shit, Hamish, you look like death.”

  “Thanks, man, same to you.”

  “Did you walk from your house or from Sydney?”

  “I jogged.”

  He laughed so hard I thought he might piss himself. “You? Jogged? That is just too great for words. You’ve never jogged in your life,” he said, doubled over.

  “Have so, I jog all the time!”

  “That is a huge lie.”

  “Anyway, get me some water, will you? I’m fucking dying out here.”

  He took me inside and poured me some water from this glass jug they kept in the fridge that always had lemons floating in it. I hated lemon in water but I was so thirsty I didn’t even care. Their fridge was covered in tacky Australian magnets and photos of Martin and his big sister and baby brother. Their house was always immaculate; it wasn’t natural at all. Also, all their furniture was new and shiny and covered in weird trinkets and photo frames.

  Martin was watching me with bemusement in his eyes. “So,” he said. “Zombies?”

  I groaned. “Isn’t there anything better we can do? Like kill ourselves?”

  “Come on, Hamish, you secretly love it!”

  “I don’t secretly love anything.”

  “Except men.”

  Martin laughed at his own joke. He often did that, probably because I never laughed at his jokes. I punched his arm but, since I was a twig, it was hardly worth the effort. Also, I kind of walked right into that one – I must have, since Martin was never very quick with one-liners.

  “All right, give me a fucking controller then,” I said as I followed him up to his room. His parents were sitting together in the living room watching tennis on their huge television. It was weird for me to see parents sitting together like that, at night, since my dad went to bed so early and my mum stayed up late watching reruns of American sitcoms. Anyway, I accidentally said hi in response to being asked how I was and then followed Martin to his room and sat on the end of his bed.

  If you can remember what my room looked like, Martin’s was the complete opposite. For starters, it was huge an
d had room for a king bed. He had anime posters on his walls and a computer and a TV. My mum wouldn’t let me put posters on my walls because she said it would peel the paint off. And the paint really didn’t need any extra help in that department. Martin had a lava lamp and an air conditioner and a stack of video games almost reaching the ceiling. Also, everything in there looked brand new, like they bought the furniture specifically to go in his room.

  “So, I’ve been thinking about our yearbook,” Martin said. He was smashing me at the game, by the way.

  “What about it?”

  “About the awards.”

  “What awards?”

  “You know, like, ‘most likely to succeed’, ‘most attractive guy’ and all that.”

  “Oh, so you know neither of us is going to get either of those right?”

  “No way, man, I’ve been writing a list and I’m going to submit it to the yearbook committee.”

  “You have got to be fucking kidding me,” I said. But no, he wasn’t kidding and he pulled a folded piece of paper out of his pocket. I snatched it from his hand straight away. I had time to see that he had voted himself ‘most desirable’, bless him, before he tried to grab the paper back from me.

  “Come on, why won’t you let me read it?” I said, trying to push him away. “Did you give me a shit award?”

  “No,” he said defensively. He grabbed the paper back from me while I was distracted by the noise of my character in the game having his head ripped off by a zombie. “I was going to give you ‘nicest guy’ but I’m not so sure that I will now.”

  I smiled. It was nice that he could make me smile sometimes. Martin really was a good friend. Sure, he embarrassed the hell out of me all the time and he was into the lamest things, but he was all I had, you know?

  Martin’s mother knocked on the door. She had brought us homemade, organic flour cookies with sultanas in them and some juice she had just made with their juicer. Martin’s parents were obsessed with that juicer. The juice was in little jars and we drank it through cardboard straws. Don’t ask.

  It was the sort of thing my mother would never do. Not that she wasn’t hospitable or didn’t like Martin, but she spent most of her time with dirt on her hands. She didn’t have the time to bake cookies or make her own juice. The last time my mother had baked was my last birthday. She always made the same chocolate cake and we reused the same candles every year. I bet you think that’s weird, but if you actually think about it, birthday cake candles burn for like, three seconds, and there is plenty of life left in them after that. We could make birthday cake candles last for years and years, even if we used them on everyone’s cakes. Well, I say everyone, but I was the only one who got birthday cakes anymore.

  I hope you don’t think I was jealous of Martin, because I wasn’t, and I think that was one of the reasons why I was his only friend, because I was probably the only person in the whole school who wasn’t jealous of him. I wouldn’t have minded having more money, but I’d seen what money had done for Martin and that was a big fat nothing. Yep, he had video games all right, but what had that done? Made him overweight, given him acne and deprived him of any social skills he could have possibly had if he’d ever spoken to anyone other than me.

  If I’d won the lottery, I would have bought a car and probably given the rest to my parents for the farm. I hated our frickin’ farm and didn’t get on with my parents, but I had several motivations. Firstly, if they’d had more money, they could’ve hired more workers so I wouldn’t have had to help out on the farm anymore; and secondly, I did want my parents to be happy; I didn’t want them to have to live in our shit-box of a house for the rest of their lives. I wanted my mum to have new cushions on the chairs and my dad to have a new lawnmower – the kind that you could ride on.

  Anyway, when we finished the game, Martin suggested we play some sort of car racing thing. So we did. And when it got to ten o’clock, I called my mum from Martin’s home phone to say I wouldn’t be coming home because Martin’s parents had both gone to bed. I later fell asleep on the floor with the controller still in my hands. It took Martin at least twenty minutes to realise that I was asleep. Apparently I was just as good at video games when I was sleeping as when I was awake.

  I woke up to the sound of him swearing at the screen. Martin hardly ever swore except when he was playing video games. It was actually really amusing how angry he got.

  There was enough room in Martin’s bed for about five people, maybe four if Martin was one of them. Shit, that was really mean of me. Anyway, it meant we could sleep far enough apart for it not to be weird.

  Martin had only stayed at my house once and he had to sleep on a mattress on the floor in my room. I would have given him my bed, but honestly, the floor was probably more comfortable.

  The next morning, Martin’s mother made pancakes and we all sat together at the dining table to eat them. And by all, I mean me, Martin and his parents. I know, weird, right? But they did things like that at Martin’s house. Also, Saturday mornings were always pancake mornings. Saturday mornings, like pretty much every morning at my house, were Vegemite-on-toast mornings.

  Martin suggested we play another game but I declined. I said something about having homework to do and left to walk home.

  I was still in yesterday’s clothes and I felt pretty gross. I considered going to the beach for a swim. But I was worried that I might see Peter there with his other friends and they might make fun of me so I chickened out and went home to shower.

  My mother greeted me when I finally got home. I didn’t even attempt to run this time, I had well and truly learnt my lesson and didn’t plan to ever run anywhere again. She asked me how the zombies game was and I lied and said it was fun. I think she got upset sometimes when I had a good time at Martin’s. She felt like she should have been able to make pancakes on a Saturday and buy me video games. So I gave her a hug and told her that I much preferred taking photos of her hibiscus flowers than playing some zombie game. I think she thought I was just being nice, but I was serious.

  Dad was out on the farm as usual. It never ceased to amaze me how different I was from my father. He wasn’t happy unless he was covered in shit and sweat but I, like most people, I would imagine, was usually uncomfortable when covered in shit and sweat.

  6.

  The day I first spoke to Annie Bower was the hottest of the year. She was at the general store in town and so was I. It was a pokey little place with groceries piled on top of each other. We sold some of our crops there, and our milk. Annie was wearing a pretty little white dress and brown sandals. Her hair was up in a ponytail but there were a few loose bits hanging around her purpled face. I never knew whether girls did that on purpose or not. She had a silver bumblebee pendant on her necklace and her arm was still in a cast. It looked like the whole school had signed it. The whole school except for me and Martin, of course. And, for the record, Peter Bridges hadn’t signed it either.

  Just when I had worked up the courage to speak to her, I realised she was buying tampons so, blushing like crazy, I hid behind some chips until she left. Then I bought my mum her loaf of bread and followed Annie outside into the sun.

  At first I thought I might have lost her but then, there she was, standing outside the hairdresser’s, like a flower, looking at her reflection in the window. She didn’t look very happy. But that wasn’t really a surprise. The love of her life was dead.

  I very nearly walked straight past her, but there was this sudden gust of wind, you see, and she smelt so good, you can’t even imagine. She smelt like pancakes and maple syrup and melted butter. So I did it, I spoke to her.

  “Hi Annie,” I said, a little too high pitched.

  “Oh, hey…” she said, and I had a feeling she didn’t know my name but I wasn’t going to ask her because that would have made me feel even worse about myself; also, it would have been awkward.

  “How are you?” I said and instantly felt stupid. What a dumb question to ask a girl whose boyfriend
had just been killed in a horrific car accident.

  “Oh, I’m fine thanks, how are you?” she said and I died.

  “Yeah, good. You thinking of getting a haircut?” I didn’t know where I found my words that day.

  “Maybe. It’s just so hot having long hair in the summer, you know?” she said, flicking it out of her eyes and looking at me. “Well, no, I guess you wouldn’t.”

  “No, not really.” My words were fumbling all over the place. God, she was beautiful. I wished I had more experience talking to girls – they were seriously a foreign species to me.

  She looked so unbelievably sad. The kind of sad that fills your whole body and weighs you down so you can’t move. The kind of sad that makes it difficult to stand up, walk or talk. And yet there she was talking to me, of all people.

  “I think I might go in and get it done. Want to wait with me?”

  I could not believe what was going on in my life. It was like since Peter Bridges had picked me up in his shit-box Toyota Corolla, my whole world was turning around. I had a cool friend who liked to do things other than play video games. I was talking to a girl and that girl had just asked me – me – to do something with her. Not the other way around. And not just any girl, mind you, but Annie Bower, the prettiest girl in school.

  “Sure,” I said. “I’ve got time.”

  So we went into the hairdresser’s together and sat down together and looked through hair magazines together.

  She didn’t talk to me very much. She only pointed out haircuts and asked if I thought they would suit her. I said yes every single time. If she wore a dead squid on her head it would suit her.

  Eventually she chose one of those super short pixie haircuts that lesbians get. I wasn’t sure about it, but I didn’t want to say something sexist so I told her it would look great.

  You’ll never believe this when I tell you, so I don’t know why I’m even bothering, but when I got up to leave, as the hairdresser showed Annie to her seat, Annie said, “No, wait, stay with me, won’t you?”