In art, ‘Very Highs’ were reserved for students whose skill set covered the broad ranging artistic forms from oils to pottery. I wasn’t bad in the sketching and drawing department, but I could no sooner whip a pot into shape on a pottery wheel than kick a winning goal for the local AFL team.
It didn’t bother me all that much as I didn’t like attention as a rule. Not like my best friend, Becky – poor thing, braces did hamper her – who tried out for every play, musical and theatrical recital the school had on offer. I admired her determination, though. And she was good. Really good.
Earlier in the year she persuaded me to go with her – just to keep her company – to the auditions for the school production of Grease and I scored a part in the chorus solely on the basis that I turned up. I was mortified. Little did I know they were short on numbers and as long as you didn’t upstage the main actors and dancers, you were pretty much perfect chorus material. I hated every minute of it. I felt fake and pompous in my bobby socks and loafers, my hair pigtailed, rouged cheeks and bright red v-necked sweater. Typically I said nothing and went along with it. Dad enjoyed it, or so he said.
Eric Barrada was my dancing partner and letting him kiss me behind the hall seemed only fair. Besides, he wasn’t ugly and I was curious. The experience was less than satisfying.
I’ve always thought of myself as more of a one-man kind of girl. I don’t know where or when this idea materialised, but I’d never been much into boys like my friends. Becky could get so excited about boys she almost asphyxiated. She liked us to go through the motions of talking in turn about each of the boys we were interested in. We would sit in a circle at lunch and begin talking about general things, nothing much at all, and then she’d say ‘Right. Out with it, girls.’ That was our cue. Usually I talked about Eric Barrada because he wasn’t not good-looking and until I had a better option, he’d do. Becky usually rolled her eyes, though. I think she smelled a fake.
In my sketchbook I once drew a line that started with Sally, then Becky and me on the end. Between us, I thought, we covered the full spectrum of teenage girl romantic behaviour. There was something in Sally making it almost impossible for her to be satisfied with any one boy at all. Ever. And Becky could be but she had to sift through a whole lot, which was fun in its own way, to find the one. Whereas me, I wasn’t much interested in the process. That’s why I thought there would be only one boy for me. And romance wouldn’t make much sense until I found him. I think that might be the one thing Mum and I have in common – apart from sewing. I think Dad was the one man for her.
Becky initiated a spectrum for boys, too. And each boy we discussed we had to categorise as either a ‘Romeo’ or a ‘Casanova’. Eric Barrada was a Casanova. Likable but Casanova all the same. In fact, we found it hard to think of any boys we’d call Romeos.
‘It’s a dying art,’ Becky said. ‘Romance. Proper romance.’
‘All boys want is a quickie behind the bike shed,’ said Rachel.
‘Well, you would know, sweetheart,’ Becky responded, laughing out loud so her braces caught the sun.
‘No, really. Can you think of one boy that could love a girl so completely he’d die without her?’
All of us shrugged, looked at each other. Considered all of the potential candidates we had available, shared the last of the raspberry snakes and came up with nothing.
‘Well, Mr “Handsome”,’ Rachel said.
But Mr Hanson – a teacher who looked a lot like Brad Pitt and was only six years older than us – was always our default response. That day Becky decided Mr Handsome was out of bounds for those particular conversations. Because, as we all knew, some men were just off limits altogether. And what good did it do a girl to think too far beyond herself. I think Becky liked Mr Handsome. Really liked him. She took home extension maths activities just to please him.
I finished what was left of my sandwich remembering the way Barry had looked at me that night at the pub in Humpty Doo. We had hardly set eyes on each other. But you didn’t hate someone that hard without loving them equally. Barry was my Romeo. Well, not mine, exactly. Just my idea of one.
‘We could meet at the tram and say we’re going to each other’s houses. We could get away with it. Come on, what do you say, Button?’ Becky said one afternoon at school.
I don’t know how it came to be that my school friends called me Button. I tried to think back. Sally would have been around at that time, too. We were in the same class for grades one to three. We had intersecting groups of friends. Most of us ended up in high school together and I guess it just happened.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. Something about the risky adventure being proposed didn’t thrill me as much as it should have. I was approaching seventeen, shouldn’t I have been crying one minute and laughing the next? Moody with hormones like all my friends? I began to think there was something terribly wrong with me.
‘Oh, but you’ve got to come, Button. Won’t be the same without you.’
I shrugged and they were placated by the gesture – it was good enough for them. I was in.
Becky clapped her hands together, smiled large around her braces, and leant over to side-hug me. I wondered what Sally would have said if she had been there, instead of me. And the thought made me smile because it didn’t take much imagining to know she would have been leading the charge and anything they suggested would have seemed childish in comparison.
I wondered what my friends liked about me. I never clashed with anyone. Peacemaker, I supposed. And Sally and I had been a double act, until she left. I wondered if they still liked me because I reminded them of her. I told them all sorts of things, when they asked, about what Sally was up to. So no one knew we hardly talked anymore. I told them everything I knew and more. Everything, except Barry. I kept Barry to myself.
We didn’t hear from Sally very often. Sometime after I returned from Darwin after meeting Barry, Sally sent us an email – probably the longest ever – attaching a newspaper article about an incident involving Barry at the Top End Croc Jumping Cruises, where she worked, that had made headlines around the country. Just seeing Barry’s name there in print caused my heart to stir.
The Croc Jumping Cruises gave me something to tell my friends about. Sally had been working there since leaving school. I don’t know how she convinced Mum to let her leave school. But I guessed – not that anyone had said anything to me – that she hadn’t left voluntarily and the option of her returning was not possible. Pretty soon after starting at the Croc Jumping Cruises she had enough money to buy her first car. Dad never thought I knew but, when Sally asked, he’d paid half.
Trust Sally to have found work that made her sound exotic and wild. She had something not one of our friends had, or had even heard of. Even I had a job more unusual than most of our friends who worked at service stations or coffee shops, cafés and McDonald’s. But not Sally. She worked for a place that took people in glass-walled boats for tours along the river to see crocs jumping out of the water. Sally worked in the café and Barry worked on the boat.
I liked the power of telling this story to our friends. Well, I guess they were just my friends by that time. The way their eyes widened, the way Sally sounded so much older and wiser by crocodile association. How the Northern Territory may as well have been another country for how different it sounded. Kangaroos running wild down the streets, Aborigines living on the land, black as ebony keys. Sally’s life was as exotic as any of us ever got. And I knew her. We had shared the same body, once. I was as close to Sally as anyone ever got.
‘You ever have the same thoughts?’ people used to ask me.
‘How much the same are you? You got the same moles? You get the same pimples?’ People always want to know how far genetics extends.
In history when we learnt about the Holocaust I went home and cried.
Over six million people losing the
ir lives for no other reason than they were born into a particular religion was reason enough to cry, I suppose, but my tears were for a small group of children I had read about.
In Auschwitz the most terrible experiments were carried out on identical twins by a Doctor Mengele. One story still gives me nightmares. Two twin girls were literally sewn together by their backs, just to see if they could survive, and whether they shared a mysterious medical compatibility that regular people did not. Imagine their pain. I sometimes think that animals are incapable of the kinds of cruelty that humans willingly inflict on each other.
10.
One afternoon Amona was waiting for me when I finished my shift at Mr Grandy’s. She had come inside the store, just before closing time.
‘Fancy a lift home, Ruby?’ she said.
I was tired and didn’t fancy legging it to the tram home again so it sounded good. A relief, actually. ‘That would be great,’ I said.
Amona leaned on the counter while I wiped everything down and re-pinned bolts of fabric and returned button containers and lace wheels to their places on the shelves. In the office on the second floor, up three stairs, Mr Grandy turned out the lights and left, locking the door, meeting me at the front counter.
‘Amona,’ I said, turning. ‘Mr Grandy.’
Amona held out her hand to Mr Grandy and they shook.
‘Nearly done,’ I said, moving across the floor quickly to return the last of the items. I thought I’d have had some time to choose a few material samples and buttons for my collection, but I had accepted the lift and didn’t want to make her wait while I made my choices. Anyway, I told myself, no harm in waiting one more day.
Dad and I hadn’t talked about Amona very much, though I knew that they had been seeing quite a bit of each other. This thought felt like a sharp sting, like I’d pricked myself with a pin.
Her BMW smelt of fresh leather, polish and upholstery. It was so neat and shining that I didn’t want to sit on the seats. Dad had money, I supposed, and even though he could have afforded a new car, he got about in an old Datsun station wagon which – right then, at that moment on brand-new leather seats – felt like a hobowagon. Scrapmetal.
‘Now,’ Amona said as she pulled away from the kerb into the traffic. ‘I wanted to drive you home so we could have a little chat. I hope you’re not going to mind,’ Amona continued, stopping quickly as peak hour traffic swallowed us up in a slow and painful, bumper-to-bumper crawl through the city. I realised this trip was not going to be over quickly.
‘But I was so impressed with the dresses you made, Ruby. I mean . . .’ she paused and shook her head slightly while I squirmed on the seat and put my handbag on the floor beside my feet. ‘They are really something.’
‘Ta,’ I mumbled.
Amona laughed. ‘You don’t have any idea how good you are, do you?’ she turned her head to look at me.
I shrugged.
‘What do you do?’ I asked, thinking I might be able to redirect the conversation.
‘I’m a distributer for a pharmaceutical company. We have offices in Melbourne, Brisbane, South Australia. I fly a lot. But I know talent when I see it. You should think about entering the Young Designer of the Year Award. One day.’
‘How do you know about that?’
‘You’re kidding? I watch it every year on TV,’ she continued. ‘I’ve always loved fashion. I love seeing designers showcase their latest.’
I was thinking back to every Fashion Week of every year since I was about eleven. Usually Dad and I were the ones who would stay up to watch the parade and announcements for every category: swimwear, evening wear, kids, and, of course, the Young Designer of the Year Award which was always last. Even before Mum left it was Dad who shared this with me. I could tell you the various winners of each category for the past four years. The winning designs and various notes about each one can be found in my sketchbook.
‘I don’t know,’ I said, having trouble thinking whether anything I had created would be good enough to enter.
‘I took the liberty of looking into it and they are sending out the entry forms. You should think about it,’ she said before turning up the music.
‘So what do you think?’ Amona asked over dinner.
Dad shrugged his shoulders and his meaning was clear. Whatever Button wants is fine by me. I glanced at him to see if there was anything else hiding underneath his reaction but, in true Dad-style, he was genuinely un-opinionated. I couldn’t believe we were actually having a discussion about this. Me actually entering the Young Designer of the Year Award at Fashion Week.
I was having trouble eating. Each bite of food seemed to swell in my throat and no amount of swallowing could get it down. My body felt hot and awkward. I think my hands were sweating. I can only assume that Becky experiences something similar when she is caught up in her latest romantic fascination. I had an immediate and long overdue rush of sympathy for her. It was agony.
Most days I’m so infatuated with these designers that I can’t bring myself to think of them as human. They can’t be, surely. They’re too good, too far beyond the likes of me and the people I associate with to be real. They are the stuff of legend and dreams.
‘You’d have to submit your designs like everyone else,’ Amona said, as Dad filled everyone’s glass of wine. Including mine. ‘But usually you have to go through TAFE and design colleges or industry avenues,’ she dabbed at her chin with her napkin. ‘But the organisers told me you can submit your designs if you have an endorsement from someone in the industry.’ She turned to look at me. My face felt bloated and red. Well, that settled it, then. Who did I know that could possibly provide an endorsement?
Amona laughed and reached out towards me, taking my hand and squeezing it. ‘I was thinking of Mr Grandy,’ she said, and went on eating her pasta, just like that.
After dinner I left Amona and Dad to their coffee and chocolates in the lounge room. I lingered by the doorway, at first, watching Amona slip her shoes off and place her stockinged feet on Dad’s lap. Dad switched his coffee mug to his other hand and took hold of her toes, kneading them as Amona lay her head on the pillow and made sounds like a purring cat. Dad smiled and the light from the television cast a rainbow glow across their bodies. I couldn’t help thinking of Mum, then, in that moment. And I tried to bring back any memories I could of similar pictures. Dad with her on the couch. A feeling of contentment and rightness in the world. But I couldn’t find a single one. I caught snatches of images of them together, her leaning against him or the occasional hug. But there was no casual intimacy like I saw between Dad and Amona. I hadn’t seen them touch before, other than their hug and kiss hello. And I didn’t think it was possible they hadn’t been more intimate together.
I didn’t want to watch TV or join them for the night. I was so excited, in a surreal, bubbling way, by Amona’s proposition that all I wanted to do was hide away in my room with my torch and sketchbook. I felt like placing out snatches of fabric on the floor, overlaying ribbons and beads and embellishments. I could feel a design creeping up inside of me.
But I also felt a sadness rise up from the pit of my stomach to my throat. Where did I fit in to all this happiness? We had been shared out evenly, all four of us. It was fair and neat, if not ideal. Mum had Sally and Dad had me. And now Dad had Amona. And they shared the two-seater couch.
I don’t know where this sadness comes from. I could feel a tunnel of thoughts waiting for me to catch hold and follow them. To make me feel sadder imagining the two of them growing closer, forgetting about me altogether. And what if Dad couldn’t stand being with me anymore, just like Mum? What if I had only filled a temporary space? Had I only been keeping Amona’s seat warm?
Perhaps if your parents never divorce, you don’t think these kinds of things. I don’t know. But in my situation, something permanent, something you could count on h
ad unravelled. And so when the sadness came on, you couldn’t tell yourself you were being completely stupid. A teenager with nothing better to do than imagine the worst. Because the worst had already happened. And there was no rational reason why it couldn’t happen again. I knew Dad loved me. Dad loved Sally, too. But he was happy enough making a life without her around.
I switched off the light and hid under my covers. I listened to the radio through my earphones and closed out the world around me. My body was a black, indifferent shape, a mountain of bunched-up sheets. Even my sketchbook was only an object in shadow. The only thing I could see, the only thing in the light was the small, oval-shaped illumination of my next design. I could make this perfect. It could be everything I could never be. It would last, like nothing real ever could.
I think that was the first night I thought about my future as something far away and separate from who I was then. Being on my own. And I knew, I knew it absolutely, that nothing lasted forever. If I had to pinpoint that one defining moment, it would be that night. Knowing I would not have my father forever. Or Sally.
I woke up twisted inside my sheets, my sketchbook placed neatly on my bedside table, my MP3 player and earphones curled up in a small, tidy coil on top. My torch rested beside it and underneath this was Amona’s business card. I pulled my legs and arms free and reached over for it. On the front was a small professional logo in the corner, her name, phone numbers and email address. Turning it over I found a message in neat blue biro: Call me anytime, Ruby. xx
I opened my sketchbook and flipped to the very back page. I ran my fingers over the newspaper cutting that Sally left for me the day she moved to Darwin. She was the first person to ever take my sewing seriously, the first person to truly believe in me.
Dad was eating cornflakes in the kitchen, whistling, when I came in.
‘Good morning, sunshine,’ he said and I smiled, despite remembering my own troubled thoughts of the last evening when I’d resolved to be a colder, more distant person to everyone. I filled a cup with water from the tap and blinked against the sun pouring in through the window above the sink. And I couldn’t stop thinking that Dad and Amona probably had sex after making sure I was asleep.
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