“Oh, you know, pretty average. You?”
“Yeah, same.”
Luckily the ice cream shop was very close to the cinema, otherwise I would have had to think of another conversation starter and I had already used up all my ammo in that department.
Annie got two scoops, but I only got one so I could afford to pay for Annie’s as well. She had cookie dough and chocolate. I had cookies and cream.
“So tell me something about yourself,” she said, as we began the inevitable rescue mission that eating an ice cream always entailed. “But don’t make it boring.”
Well that was impossible. Everything about me was boring. My whole existence just screamed monotony. I had no funny little quirks that I could divulge like a boy in a book might do; one who secretly collected yellow clothes because they reminded him of the sun and piled them up in his wardrobe so that on rainy days he could open the doors and let the sunshine fall into his room. No, as you well know by now, I was not that boy.
Annie was still waiting, her tongue darting out to scoop falling ice cream before it trickled onto her hand.
“You first,” I said, and honestly, I was beginning to think maybe I should tell her the sunshine clothes story and spend the weekend at op-shops trying to make it true.
“I cry every time I see a graveyard,” she said matter-of-factly.
“Really?” I said. I mean, I didn’t even do that and I cried all the time. In fact, I could even go to my sister’s graveyard and not cry. At least not until I saw that tiny headstone. But why would I cry for the other people there? The ones I never knew? They never brought me cereal in bed when I was sick and everyone else was working. They never sprayed me with a hose in the backyard on hot days. I couldn’t shed tears for a stranger.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Even if we drive by one in the car, I cry. I guess I just see all those gravestones and I wonder how many of them still get visited and how many are just forgotten faces. Sometimes I go and sit by one, just a random grave. I choose one with no flowers, one that looks like nobody has visited it for a while, and I just cry for them. I cry for them so they know that someone is there to remember them. I guess that’s weird,” she finished. I realised I’d neglected my ice cream and some had dripped onto my jeans.
“It is a bit weird,” I said. “But kind of nice too.”
She smiled. She had ice cream on her face. How someone could manage to look that amazing when they had ice cream on their face was beyond me. The only thing that would have made my face look amazing was a mask with an attractive person’s face on it.
“I guess I have a real grave to cry over now,” she said.
“Have you seen it yet?” I asked, not allowing the silence to build.
“No, I can’t seem to do it. I keep telling myself I will and then I get distracted; find something else to do. My bedroom has never been so tidy, my homework has never been so perfect. I keep filling the time with tedious tasks.”
I remembered doing that. I remembered my parents telling me they were going to Paige’s grave and me wanting to stay home and watch TV. What kind of a person watched TV rather than visiting their sister’s grave?
“You still haven’t told me something about you,” she said, apparently through her serious moment and out the other side.
I could have told her I had a dead sister, I guess. But instead I told her that I’d helped a cow give birth the week before. Stupid.
“It really helped me get in tune with nature,” I said.
“Really?”
“No, it was frickin’ disgusting.”
She laughed, and that was good; making a girl laugh on a date was half the battle. At least, that was what my dad said, and he’d managed to snare a girl like my mum, so I figured he must have known a thing or two about girls.
We decided to walk and talk. I thought for a moment I might try and hold her hand. But she had hers buried in her pockets. She probably didn’t want to touch me because my hands were sticky from the ice cream. That’s what I told myself anyway.
“Let’s play the left-right game,” she said.
“The what?”
“You know, didn’t you ever just go for a drive for the sake of driving?”
I shook my head. I didn’t feel like mentioning the fact that we never really drove anywhere unless it was absolutely worth the use of petrol.
“My dad used to take me out in the car sometimes,” she said. “He would let me choose which direction to go at every intersection just to see where we would end up. And he used to say that each decision could totally change the rest of my life and I started to take it way too seriously and put too much thought into each turn. And we would end up sitting at junctions for ages while I deliberated.”
We reached a side street and I said, “Left.”
But I secretly knew where we were going. Down one of the backstreets in that area of town there was a tiny little park with just one yellow slide and a playhouse. It was difficult for us to get there because we took turns choosing a direction and I had to keep making us double back. I may have missed the point of the game, but I thought it would be romantic to go to the park together. We did make it there eventually, long after we’d finished our ice creams. It was deserted. The children had all gone home for their dinners. We climbed on top of the playhouse and sat together on the roof.
I started to worry about whether she was expecting me to kiss her. My mum used to sing a song to me about not kissing until the third date, although I thought that might have been a bit old-fashioned. But I didn’t want to push things, especially since the last person she kissed was dead and I didn’t want to have to live up to her perfect memory of Charlie.
So I didn’t kiss her. And she didn’t seem to mind. She filled the air with words about her friends and all the dramas with their boyfriends and how they were avoiding the subject because they thought it might hurt her feelings – I wouldn’t have given them the credit of being that considerate – and she told me about her new hat and wanting to save up to buy a car but not knowing where to get a job in such a small town.
I let her talk because there was nothing interesting about me I could have possibly told her. Perhaps I should have mentioned my friendship with Peter Bridges, but I couldn’t seem to find the right time to slip it into the conversation. It wasn’t that she wouldn’t let me get a word in, I just wanted to let her tell me everything she could.
Eventually it had to end, though, and we walked back into town. The next day I wondered why I hadn’t tried harder to hold her hand. But there had never seemed to be a moment to take it; we hadn’t even bumped hands as we walked.
I’d asked if she wanted me to walk her home but she said she was getting picked up at the cinema by a friend and staying at her house for the night. As soon as I’d seen the car pull up, I’d bailed. I didn’t particularly want my otherwise perfect night to be ruined by being laughed at or anything else a girl like that might do. Annie said goodbye as she backed away. I didn’t even hug her or anything. Stupid.
But she gave me a smile, so I got to keep that.
13.
It was Saturday morning. I woke up to the kookaburras. I felt great. I had managed to go out with the prettiest girl in the school and not make a complete and total fool of myself. I’d survived my first ever date.
Plus, I had a whole day without any homework to do. Being grounded sure helped me get things finished quicker. I’d never been so far ahead in my life. And that was saying something.
I sat around for a while on the veranda thinking about maybe reading a book before I decided it was the perfect weather to go to the beach. I called Peter’s home phone but there was no answer. So, I grabbed my towel, doused myself in suncream and left my parents a note to say I was going to the beach, by myself. As far as I knew, I was no longer grounded, seeing as they’d let me go on my date. And technically I was going to the beach by myself. I didn’t need to mention the fact that I was hoping to bump into Peter Bridges alon
g the way. I felt kind of bad about dogging him the night before so I hoped I’d see him there. Also, it was simply too hot to do anything but swim. It was almost too hot to do that. You know those days when it’s too hot to go to the beach unless you’re actually in the water? It was one of those days.
On my way to the beach, I walked past the quarry and I saw Peter lugging around bags that looked like they weighed as much as his car. He was breathing heavily and sweat was pouring off him like a waterfall. He looked hotter than me. And by hotter, I mean temperature wise.
I waved at him through the fence. He saw me but he didn’t wave back. I wondered if maybe he was mad at me for ditching him. Then I realised why. Charlie was Peter’s best friend. Of course he was mad at me for dating his recently widowed girlfriend, he was probably mad at her too, for disgracing Charlie’s memory so soon after his death. It then crossed my mind that perhaps he was worried that I might end up just like Charlie. That I might die too. But I didn’t entertain that thought for very long. It was too ridiculous.
So I sat down with my back against the fence and waited for him to talk to me. It was bloody hot. About ten minutes later, I felt the fence shake and I looked up to see him standing beside me.
“So,” he said. “Beach?”
His face looked awful. Worse than the last time. He had cuts around one eye and bruises on the other cheek. But he was smiling.
“Sure,” I said, uncertain.
“Well get in the car, then.”
I did as I was told. I sat down and put my seatbelt on. I threw my towel on the floor. It got covered in sand straight away. Peter started the engine and turned the music on.
“Peter, what happened to your face?” I asked with paper-thin courage.
“I’ll be right,” he said, staring straight ahead. But maybe he was just being a safe driver.
I somehow found the courage to turn the music right down and ask him again.
“Who keeps doing this to you?” I asked.
“Just forget it.” He turned the music back up and threw his cigarette out the window.
“No, I won’t forget it. I don’t know if you’ve looked in the mirror lately, but you look like a train hit you. What is going on?” I said, taking the cassette tape out of the radio and throwing it on the back seat. The speakers crackled around us.
“God damn it, Hamish, why can’t you just mind your own business?” he snapped at me and it hurt.
“Because I’m worried about you,” I said and I couldn’t have put it in a more girly way. Also, I was scared. I was scared of what was happening to him because I felt like there was nothing I could do about it. And if somebody could beat up Peter Bridges, there sure as hell wasn’t any hope for shrimpy, little kids like me.
“Look, it’s nothing I can’t handle, all right?” he said. He might have punched me if it weren’t for the fact that it probably would have killed me.
“Are you sure? Because it looks to me like you got your arse kicked.”
“For fuck’s sake Hamish, I can take care of myself, I have for a long time.”
“Why won’t you tell me?” I asked and it was one of the bravest things I had ever said, because I was still worried that he would say something about me not being his friend and therefore not obliged to tell me anything. And I really, really hoped I was his friend.
“Jesus, Hamish, it was my mum, all right?”
I could tell he was embarrassed, he lit another cigarette.
“Your mum? What? Why would—”
“For god’s sake, shut up, Hamish! You know now, okay? So just drop it!”
I stopped for a second and thought about what he’d said. His mother, his own mother was the one doing this to him. Not some dero drug dealer, not some punk footballer with a grudge against him. His mum.
“But you’re a tank, Peter,” I said finally. “Why don’t you stop her?”
“She’s my mum, Hamish, what can I do? I can’t fight her, I can’t hurt her back.”
“But why would she—”
“Look, we don’t all have happy families like you. My mum’s a fucking drunk and she’s also a huge-arse Maori. Since my stepdad ran out on us, she hasn’t been coping with all the shit in her life so she just drinks.”
I wanted to tell him then that my family wasn’t as perfect as he thought. I wanted to tell him about Paige, about my parents wanting me to see the school counsellor, about how I didn’t think they had touched each other since my sister died and about how the silence in our house filled every room. But I didn’t because I didn’t want him to think I was competing with him. Besides, he would have won. Hands down.
“I’ve tried so hard to help her. But I can’t be with her all the time, and if I leave her alone she just buys more goon and sits in the front yard yelling at the kids in the street who throw things at her and call her names. She doesn’t like it when I try to take her inside, or when I take the cask away from her.”
I looked at the bruises on his face and I wondered if there was anything I could say to make it better. There wasn’t of course. As usual.
“What about your actual dad?” I asked, timidly. Peter had never mentioned his dad and I was worried he might say he was dead.
“That dropkick?” he said. “He dogged us before I was old enough to walk.”
Again, I had run out of things to say. And you know what? I think that was the problem; people always tried to make things better with words, but words were nothing, words were shit, words couldn’t help you. Arms helped, and shoulders and chests. They were what helped. But I didn’t hug him because that would have been weird and he was driving.
Instead, I tried to scramble around on the back seat to reach the cassette with the seatbelt digging into my waist. I couldn’t get it. My tiny little arms didn’t reach far enough. Peter found it very amusing. He found most things I failed at very amusing.
He had to chuck a U-ey so he could stop at the servo for petrol. Then we pulled up at the beach and Peter got the footy out of the boot. I cried an internal tear of impending embarrassment.
We walked across the sand together and I became wary of the people around us. Any one of them could have been a kid at our school. Anyone could have seen me with him and finally someone would know that I wasn’t such a total loser anymore. That I was at the beach with Peter Bridges and we were going to play football like a pair of regular teenage boys.
We didn’t see anyone though. There were lots of children with their parents but everyone our age had probably jumped on a bus and headed to a proper town to shop or see a movie in an air-conditioned cinema. There was a bus that ran about every hour from just outside the video shop and went just about anywhere else there was to go within about twenty-five kilometres. Sometimes the bus was half an hour late and sometimes it didn’t come at all. I liked to catch that bus sometimes. I never spent any of my non-existent money at the shopping mall, I just liked the independence of going somewhere far away from my parents. I guess that was childish. And I guess you think that twenty-five kilometres isn’t that far. But it was for me. It wasn’t the furthest I’d ever been or anything. Before my grandparents died, I went to visit them and they lived miles and miles away.
Wow, that was depressing. I needed to get out more.
Anyway, we walked along the sand, almost as far as the shark tower.
“I was thinking I should teach you how to throw the ball properly,” said Peter.
What a secret sweetheart, who knew.
“You know, because you’re so shit.”
And he was back; that was the Peter I knew and loved.
First, he taught me how to hold the ball correctly with my left hand at the front and my right at the back. Turned out I wasn’t even holding it right last time; I’d had my hands on either side and apparently only total idiots held it like that. No wonder I was so shitty. I mean who the hell invented such a stupid ball anyway? Why did it bounce in every direction except the one you wanted it to go in? Then he showed me how to th
row it properly, spinning it with my right hand by snapping my wrist really fast and guiding it with my left hand in the direction I wanted it to go.
I wasn’t sure if I really saw any improvement. Peter seemed to think I was doing well but he could have just been saying that.
Learning to catch was even harder. His only real advice was to keep my eye on the ball but I felt like that was stupid, what else was I going to keep my eye on? Oh, look at that, there’s a ball flying through the air towards my face, I’m just going to take a minute to look at the scenery.
Somehow watching the ball didn’t really help me to catch it. Often, I would seem to have it in my hands and then it would still end up on the ground. I think my hands were too small to grip it properly. I was like a praying mantis trying to catch a table tennis ball.
We left the ball with our towels after at least an hour and ran into the waves. I was a little bit worried about swimming so far away from the lifeguards and the inflatable lifesaving devices. But I had Peter, so I guessed I would most likely survive if I started drowning.
Peter left his T-shirt on even in the water and I was terrified of the reason.
He didn’t seem worried. I was sure the salt water would have stung all the cuts on his face but he didn’t show it. Instead, he threw a big wad of seaweed in my face. It was like making out with Medusa. By the time I’d wound my arm back in an effort to throw it back at him, he was too far away. Seaweed battles were another thing I could add to the list of things that Peter Bridges was better at than me.
After spending a while diving under waves, I told Peter about my Photography major work. I was focusing on things in my town that I didn’t hate and I was running short of ideas. I’d taken a photo of the dog footprints in the footpath near the general store and the tree near the lake that all the kids climbed because it was leaning over so much you could basically walk up it.
I also liked Annie and Peter and even Martin. But, with the exception of Martin who relished the thought of modelling for me, even when I asked him to sit with his face within licking distance of his TV with a controller in his hand, I had been too embarrassed to ask them for a picture. I felt bad that I had neglected to include any photos from my house, but I was struggling to find anything there that I liked enough to include. If Paige were alive, I definitely would have put her in the folio. I decided to add a picture I had taken of the photo from my parents’ wedding.
I Had Such Friends Page 11
