I Had Such Friends

by Meg Gatland-Veness

  My dad found all sorts at chuck-outs on the side of the road. My bed, the bookcase, I think the dining room table too. I remembered being so embarrassed when he would drive his ute into town and pick up some old thing that one of the kids from school had chucked out. He used to make me go with him to help him. Not that I was ever any help. I used to sit in the front seat with a cap over my face hoping no one would see me.

  My sister had never minded. She’d loved it, in fact. Once, Dad found her a white dressing table with pink ballet shoes painted on it. She was so excited when he brought it home, she couldn’t wait to put all her things on it. He didn’t even scratch off the paint when he put it in her bedroom. She’d begged him to at least leave the shoes, but he left it all. He’d never done that before. Or since.

  He scratched it all off after she died though. I remember him dragging that huge thing outside. He spent two days scratching all the paint off. Even the pretty little ballet shoes. He never put it back in her room, just left it outside on the veranda. It got so weathered that the drawers wouldn’t even open anymore. Some of her things were probably still in there. None of us was brave enough to check.

  9.

  It was lunchtime and Martin and I were sitting in the library. I know, I know, we were nerds. But you knew that going in. Anyway, I was doing an assignment for Business Studies and Martin was downloading anime. How did he manage to rig the school computers to let him download anime, you ask? How the hell would I know?

  So, I wasn’t really concentrating at all. Martin kept looking over my shoulder and trying to give me advice on my work. I really hated it when he did that. He was saying things like:

  “You haven’t even put any subheadings or anything, you idiot!”

  “What kind of font is that? I can’t read a word of it.”

  “Don’t tell me you still use word art. Are you in primary school?”

  But I wasn’t really interested in the assignment. It was some stupid research thing where I just had to copy and paste information from the internet, it didn’t matter. It wasn’t like I was learning anything worthwhile. Nothing at school mattered anymore. All I could think about was getting in Peter’s car at the end of the day and going to the beach. I didn’t even care if he wanted to play football.

  I didn’t know why I hated Martin so much that day. I just couldn’t stand to be around him a minute longer. He was still his usual annoying self, but maybe I finally realised what it was like to have a friend who was normal, and I was starting to see all of Martin’s faults. It was horrible of me, really, casting him aside like he was an old toy or some shit, but you couldn’t blame me. You could only play so much zombies before you wanted to kill yourself. And I had gone past that point a long time ago.

  I say normal, but like, Peter wasn’t normal, he was one messed up guy, but he did normal things. He went to the beach and listened to proper music. He didn’t get excited about cosplay. I bet he didn’t even know what cosplay was.

  But even before I started hanging out with Peter, I felt guilty about Martin sometimes. Like once, a couple of years before, in class, we had to do a survey on what we liked about school. Martin said, Hanging out with Hamish, which was sweet of him. Most people in the class wrote about their friends or playing sport or something sociable like that. I wrote, The garlic bread from the school canteen. You may think that makes me a terrible person, but mate – that garlic bread. They made it on hotdog rolls and then fried it. You have no idea how amazing it was. Also, poor kids like me hardly ever got to buy things from the canteen so it really was a treat when I got to unwrap some warm garlic bread and immerse myself in its heavenly scent. Martin sometimes bought it for me. So really, if it weren’t for Martin, I wouldn’t have been able to have my favourite thing about school. So he wasn’t all bad. Did that make me a bad person?

  Anyway, when the bell finally rang, I wasn’t even sure if I’d said goodbye to him, I just sort of grabbed my bag and left while he was still logging out of all the programs he had running at the same time. And that usually took him a long time. I wasn’t giving him the silent treatment or anything, that would have been childish and the kind of thing Martin did all the time, but I just couldn’t be bothered to be civil to him anymore.

  I had Economics last period, during which I very nearly fell asleep. Something about warm afternoons made me so drowsy at school. I wished I’d chosen more interesting subjects like Photography. I’d had an idea that I might do some sort of business degree when I graduated. But deep down, I knew the farm would never let me be free.

  After last period, I walked to the bus stop alone.

  And there was the car.

  I almost skipped down the hill. But only almost, because skipping was gay. I threw in my bag and sat in the passenger seat. I put my seatbelt on and tried to wind down my window, which, for some reason, Peter had left closed. Looking back, I think he just did it to watch me struggle to open it. He did laugh. A lot. But I was used to the windows in Martin’s mother’s car. They were automatic; all I had to do was push a button to open them.

  By the time we reached the beach, I had managed to get it open all the way. I think the door was bent, and that made the window hard to open and close. At least Peter got a laugh out of it. Especially since I had to close it again almost directly after finally getting it open.

  The sand gnawed at my skin. I thought by now the soles of my feet would have been blistered and calloused enough to take the heat from the sand. They weren’t. My feet didn’t know that I was supposed to be tough now. They hadn’t got that message yet. Although, to be fair, most of my body had been quite slow on the uptake there.

  Peter’s feet were probably thicker than concrete. The sand saw Peter coming and ran for cover.

  The moment of arrival at the beach was always an anxious time for me. Was he going to make me play football? Were we going to risk our lives jumping off the rocks again? Would he force me to swim to the buoy? It’s funny how much I always looked forward to our beach trips when we almost always ended up doing things that resulted in me fearing for my life.

  Of course, he never forced me to do any of those things. If I’d wanted to – if I wasn’t trying so hard to fucking prove myself to him – then I was sure he would have let me wait on the sand for him while he went off and wrestled sharks or attacked bluebottles with his face or whatever it was we were doing there that day.

  We walked to the sand without the football. That was a good sign.

  “I think I’ll go for a run,” he said to me, and I very nearly scoffed.

  “Right,” I said, trying to sound noncommittal when I was actually feeling a little bit breathless just from hearing the word ‘run’.

  I had never been for a run, just for the fun of it, in my life. I mean, obviously I had run before, but there had always been some sort of end purpose. Like running away from someone who was throwing their lunch at me or running to catch the bus or running in PE when my teachers told me I’d never grow up to be big and strong if I didn’t learn to run like a boy. That was only a couple of years ago, by the way. But I’d never ever understood the burning desire people had to just run for no point or purpose. Surely that couldn’t be fun.

  Then Peter laughed. “I’m just kidding, you mug, who the fuck goes for runs?”

  That fucking dick.

  I kicked a load of sand at him since hitting him in any way would have been futile. It didn’t reach much further up than his knees.

  “Oh you should not have done that,” he said and I bailed. Unfortunately, I ran towards the water and Peter, being a very resourceful young man, decided throwing me in face first was the best comeuppance. The water was freezing and I still had my shirt on. Somehow, I didn’t think I would be winning any wet T-shirt competitions. I bet I looked a lot like a dishrag hanging off a tap.

  Peter laughed with that deep, throaty laugh of his and I sat on the wet sand and gave him my best attempt at a death stare. This normally wasn’t difficult for me, at least i
t had never been before. Generally my regular face was a pretty convincing death stare. But for some reason I couldn’t make my features arrange themselves properly and I ended up doing a funny sort of lopsided scowl-grin.

  “I’m going to swim to the red buoy,” he said, and for the record, the red buoy was the one that was pretty much in the China Sea. I nodded encouragingly.

  “Good for you,” I said monotonously.

  He smiled and headed for the waves. The water was rough that day so I didn’t really fancy going in. I did look at the rock pool with a little envy. The little kids in there were perfectly safe from the waves. They could sit on their bums with the water around them and no fear of drowning. I remembered the good old days of playing in the rock pool before the other kids started to judge me for being too old. It was okay when I’d taken Paige in; she’d been a good excuse to have a safe swim away from the terror of the waves.

  Even if she hadn’t died, I wouldn’t have been able to do that anymore. She’d probably be wearing a bikini by now. She’d wear it even though she would worry about her stomach showing. She’d be sitting on a towel watching the lifesavers and giggling with her friends. I guess it was kind of nice that she never got to the stage of worrying about what she looked like. But even that would have been better than that tiny headstone.

  Anyway, I watched Peter dive under the water and power out to sea. He was ten times faster without me there to hold him back. At first that made me feel bad, until I realised that it was kind of nice he went slower for me. Maybe he didn’t mind having me around after all. But the more I thought about it, the more I realised he’d probably just wanted to be nearby in case I drowned.

  For some reason, Martin chose that moment to pop into my head. I wondered what he was doing with his Thursday afternoon. He would probably get into the car and his mother would ask him about his day. And Martin, being Martin, would actually tell her. He would say that he knew all the answers in Maths and he learnt the next row of the periodic table of the elements or whatever the hell they did in Chemistry. And she would tell him that she was going to make his favourite for dinner because he did so well in his Physics test. And then they would pull into their garage. (Their house was quite possibly the only one in town with a garage. Most people were lucky to have a carport.) Martin would run up the stairs to his room and log on to his computer, and before it had even finished loading, his mum would be at the door with a plate of healthy snacks and a glass of juice. And he would manage to do his homework while simultaneously watching anime and playing online games.

  But me, on the other hand, I was sitting on the sand with a wet T-shirt clinging to my bony frame, wondering how long it would be before Peter came back. I could see him out there – he had reached the first buoy and was already flying ahead to the second.

  I suddenly wondered how it was that Peter found out about Charlie’s death. Who could have told him? He hadn’t been at school that Monday when the rest of us found out. So how did he know? Charlie’s parents certainly wouldn’t have called him.

  I was still musing when Peter showed up. He shook his wet hair and the water sprayed on my face. I didn’t mind. He plonked himself down on the sand beside me.

  “Hey, Peter?” I said.

  “Yeah?” he grunted.

  “Who told you about Charlie?”

  “Annie did,” he said. He didn’t seem annoyed by my asking him, or even puzzled. It was almost like he was expecting me to ask. “She called me from the hospital, as soon as she regained consciousness, that is.”

  I was impressed by Annie’s bravery; that would have been one difficult phone call to make. Hi Peter, just calling to let you know that your best friend is dead.

  I imagined Peter receiving the call, wondering why Annie was phoning him, hearing that she was upset and starting to panic, starting to picture all the possible scenarios that would have made his best friend’s girlfriend call him in the middle of the night, crying. He would try to calm himself – maybe they broke up and she needed someone to talk to. And then he would have thought, But why me? Why would she call me? Maybe all her other friends are asleep, maybe she has no one else to speak to. But still that panic. That terrifying panic.

  I guessed it would have been very hard on him. I had a feeling that the reality of Charlie’s death didn’t really set in until that night when we sat by the tree. It’s funny the way grief sneaks up on you like that. It stalks you for days, watching you, out of sight, and then all of a sudden it jumps out to surprise you. And there’s nothing you can do about it. I remember when the grief hit me after Paige died. It was such a stupid little thing. But I suddenly realised that she would never get her money from the tooth fairy for that wobbly tooth that she had been talking about for days. And the new adult tooth would never come through, even though it was probably still there, just waiting to pop its little face out. But it never would. That tooth would never get to chew on a piece of liquorice or open a chocolate bar wrapper or bite a fingernail. Paige may have died young, but that tooth never got to live at all.

  Peter didn’t seem to be in a communicative mood.

  “That was brave of her,” I said, more to myself than out loud.

  “Yeah right,” he said. “All she did was make a fucking phone call, any fool can do that. You know what’s brave? Driving a car into a fucking tree to save your girlfriend. That’s fucking medal-worthy shit.”

  He didn’t sound angry; I think he just wanted to make a point. But I felt bad for Annie, because I knew that breaking that kind of news was one of the worst things a person could ever have to do. For the rest of your life, that terrible thing that happened would be associated with you because you were the one who told them. And if it weren’t for you, well, then they might have never had to know.

  10.

  It was the weekend. I was trying to sleep in, but it was too hot to stay in bed. I could hear the phone ringing downstairs but there was no one inside to answer it. Also, when I say downstairs, I don’t want you to think that we lived in some great two-storey house because it was only split-level. Some fool built it into the side of a hill.

  Eventually I made my way down the stairs. Whoever was ringing was persistent which meant it probably wasn’t Peter. My bet was on Martin.

  I was right.

  “Hamish!”

  “Hi, Martin.”

  “What’s up? I feel like I haven’t seen you in ages!” he said, but I was only half listening. Also, for the record, it hadn’t been ages; I had seen him only the day before.

  “Want to come over?” he asked. “We can do our homework and eat Zooper Doopers!”

  It sounded painful. But, Martin’s house had a pool and I couldn’t remember the last time my mum had bought ice blocks.

  “Okay, I’ll come over,” I said in a tone so unenthusiastic I actually felt a little guilty after I hung up.

  I showered slowly and dressed slowly. No use in rushing over there any sooner than I had to. Breakfast was Vegemite on toast. I left a note for my parents, but they probably wouldn’t even see it. There wasn’t much chance of them coming inside until the evening.

  I ambled to Martin’s house; I think that’s the best word to use. The thought of ice blocks and chlorinated water spurred me on. At my house, one of the best things to do when it was hot was lie on the cold bathroom floor tiles. Paige and I used to do that. She was always far more restless than me. I was happy to lie there all day, but Paige… She wanted to be outside. She wanted to climb trees and run and do all those things you’re supposed to do as a kid.

  The thought of Martin and his Xbox controller were what slowed me down. Times like those, I wondered if I was a nice person. Sometimes I thought that I was horrible, right down to my core. Sometimes I thought of the way I used Martin’s friendship and I wanted to punch myself.

  But I couldn’t have been all bad. I had been a good brother. I had never told my parents I hadn’t wanted the new baby. I had never teased Paige or called her names or picked on h
er. She had been my favourite thing in the world. I had been looking forward to being able to beat up her boyfriend when he was a dick to her. I had wanted to stand up for her if she was ever bullied at school. I had wanted to be the first one she told when she had her first kiss. I had wanted to travel overseas and stay in hostels with her. But she had never got that boyfriend, she never had time to get bullied at school, she never had a first kiss and she never got to go anywhere on an aeroplane.

  I had a bag full of schoolbooks on my back. It was making me sweat and I knew when I took it off there would be a huge sweat patch on my T-shirt. I loved that T-shirt. It was black with a picture of an old-school Australian rock band on it. It had been my dad’s. My mum had patched up several holes in it, and the picture had faded from being hung out in the sun too many times. I hated that clothes died. Of all things, you’d think clothes might live as long as we do.

  Paige had a pair of green shoes. Little buckle-up green shoes – a gift from my grandparents, I think. She wore them all the time. Whenever she wasn’t running around in the mud, that is. She was a funny little enigma, Paige. She was such a farm girl most of the time and then she would obsess over something like a pair of pretty shoes. Once, my dad said to her, “It will be a sad day when you grow out of those” and she got so upset. It had never occurred to her that she wouldn’t be able to wear those shoes forever. It was a shame he’d said that to her. She got upset for no reason. She never grew out of those shoes. In fact, she’s still wearing them. I don’t know if that’s sad or not.

  I reached Martin’s house just in time for morning tea. Martin had been waiting in the hall for me again, like a puppy. We set up our books at their dining room table, so that we wouldn’t be tempted to play video games (trust me, I was never tempted to play video games; the precaution was purely for Martin’s benefit). His mother gave us Zooper Doopers. I had fairy floss flavour and Martin had cola. Man, they were good.