‘No, it’s cool,’ Rachel said. ‘He’s okay, really. First thing he did, he gave me a TV. Honest. So I could watch it in my room while they cuddled on the couch. But that’s cool. I get to watch whatever I like, and if I turn it right down I can watch when they’ve gone to bed. What about your mum, Millie? Does she have a boyfriend?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘she has Patrick. Well, she doesn’t exactly. They’re just friends.’
‘Are you sure? That’s what they say, you know, before it happens.’
‘Patrick’s my father,’ I said, ‘so it’s already happened, and they’re friends now. He’s overseas anyway. He’s a scientist.’
‘So she hasn’t met anyone else?’
‘No.’
‘Wait until she does. You’ll have to worry more about her then!’
‘Why?’
‘Oh, you know, they forget things sometimes. Mind you, it can be good. Sometimes they forget to make you do your homework.’
I wondered about Mum. She hadn’t even asked me about homework lately. And she’d broken something, too, when I’d told her it felt as though she wanted to get rid of me.
‘Do they break things?’ I asked. ‘You know, just drop them out of the blue?’
‘I don’t think Mum’s ever broken anything,’ Rachel said, ‘but she rear-ended a parked car. I don’t think that was love though. It was more like new contact lenses. She got the contacts just after she met Terry—she thought glasses made her look older. So you could say love caused it, in a roundabout way.’
‘I’m never going to fall in love,’ Helen said. ‘Never in a million years. It makes you do stupid things. My mum started singing. You know, really singing, while she did anything. It was embarrassing. And they’d have these really long phone calls. I could never get on the Internet.’
Mum sang. But she’d always been a shower and morning singer. That’s why we had the CD player in the kitchen.
‘That’s because they’re happy,’ Sarah said. ‘I think it’s beautiful.’
‘But you can say that, Sarah, because your mum and dad are still married. You’d be saying something different if they got divorced and your mum got a boyfriend.’
‘So when you say happy,’ I interrupted, ‘do you mean just happy, or happy happy?’
‘Happy happy,’ Helen said immediately. ‘You know, take-aways because who can be bothered, singing, new clothes, smiling the secret smile all the time.’
Had Mum been happy happy, or just happy?
When Mum met me at the bus she didn’t look any different. She just looked like the same old Kate. She even had her painting gear on. That didn’t seem to indicate boyfriend evidence. She looked, well, messy and paint-dabbed.
‘How was camp, sweetheart?’
‘It was great,’ I said. ‘And I’d like you to meet my new friends. This is Helen-Sarah-and-Rachel, my mother, Kate.’
‘Well, girls, I am pleased to meet you!’ Mum said. ‘You’ll all have to come over soon for afternoon tea.’
‘That would be cool, Mrs ... I mean, Kate,’ the girls chorused in their Helen-Sarah-and-Rachel voice, and I knew that camp had been truly great.
CHAPTER
EIGHT
In the middle of the best week of school ever, Helen invited me to her house for a sleep-over. We were practising netball. Sarah and Rachel were sitting on the grass talking about boys.
‘Saturday night?’ I repeated, fumbling a defence I should have got. ‘Saturday night? I’ll have to ask Mum.’
‘My mum works at the TAFE, too,’ Helen said. ‘She said she’d look out for your mum in the staff room and introduce herself. She works in Access.’
‘I don’t think Mum goes to the staff room.’ I wasn’t sure but it didn’t feel like the kind of thing Mum would do.
‘Everyone goes to the staff room,’ Helen said. ‘That’s where the coffee is. You know what they’re like about coffee.’
Sure enough, when Mum got home from work that afternoon, she said, ‘I met the mother of one of your new friends, Millie. And she says her daughter has asked you to sleep-over. Is that great or what? You’ve got a better social life than me!’
‘I won’t go if you’re going to be lonely,’ I said. ‘It’s okay, honest. I can see them at school.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ Mum said. ‘Of course you’ll go. You want to go, don’t you?’
‘Yes, yes I do. But I don’t...’
‘I’ll be fine,’ Mum said. ‘We’re finalising things for this exhibition anyway, the one I inherited? I told you about it.’
‘Oh, sure.’ I couldn’t really remember but that was okay. If Mum had work to do, she’d be fine without me.
‘And then,’ she continued, ‘I might go to the movies.’
‘By yourself?’
‘Depends.’ She shrugged, turning away. ‘Someone from the exhibition committee might be interested. There’s a good film on at the Valley cinema.’
‘So you really don’t mind?’
‘Of course not. I think this is a great opportunity, Millie. Helen’s mother seems very nice. It was funny really, because we had coffee together only last week but didn’t put two and two together. About you girls, I mean.’
‘I wasn’t friends with Helen-Sarah-and-Rachel last week,’ I pointed out.
‘That’s true,’ Mum said. ‘Things can happen fast, can’t they?’
‘That was the whole point of the camp, to bond us together. You said so yourself.’
‘That’s right, I did. Now, Millie, what shall we have for dinner?’
After dinner the phone rang. I don’t mean that was unusual. Sheri often rang us, Patrick rang at least once a week, and there were other friends from our old life, too. What was unusual was that when the phone rang, Mum took the call and then sent me off to the shower and took the phone into her bedroom.
She was off the phone by the time I got out, and was drinking a cup of tea.
‘Who was that?’ I asked casually.
‘Just someone from the exhibition committee,’ Mum said.
‘What is this exhibition anyway?’ I asked.
‘An exhibition for the Diploma students,’ Mum said. ‘It was supposed to be on late last year, but the tutor was ill. So we’re doing it this year, instead. I thought I told you all this. It’s occupied most of my non-teaching time for the past six weeks!’
‘Just refreshing my memory,’ I said smoothly. ‘Any chocolate biscuits left?’
The phone rang again much later. I was in bed reading. I waited for Mum to come in and tell me who had rung up but she was on the phone for so long I went to sleep waiting. She was on for so long it could only have been one person in the world – and that was Sheri.
Helen-Sarah-and-Rachel-and-I played netball practically every fine day. We weren’t on a team or anything. It was just what we did. We weren’t on a team because:
— Helen didn’t like competitive sports.
— Sarah was too short.
— Rachel played badminton and she was only allowed to play one thing after school.
— I didn’t really play netball at all.
‘You should though,’ Helen said, ‘you’ve got the height, Millie, and you’re fast, when you think about it.’
I didn’t like having to think fast, although I loved the feeling when the ball soared out of your hands and went up, up into the air and then straight into the basket, as though it was destined to drop through from the moment it left your hands, tugged there by an invisible thread. The rules confused me, though, and I didn’t like the way everyone shouted at you, ‘Throw it here, here, here!’ I agreed with Helen about competitive sports, although it wasn’t so much the competition as the noise and the pressure.
I liked hanging out with Helen-Sarah-and-Rachel. They talked to each other about ev
erything, even the embarrassing stuff.
‘I like Drew because he’s funny,’ Rachel said, lying back in the grass. ‘Do you see that big cloud, the one over there. I reckon it looks like a dragon.’
‘Like the dragon from The Dragon Piper,’ Sarah said. ‘That has to be the best book ever written.’
‘I haven’t read it.’
‘Oh, Millie, it is so good. You’ll just love it.’
‘You will love it, Millie. Sarah, can you lend it to Millie?’
‘Of course, I’ll bring it to school tomorrow. I know what you mean about Drew, Rachel, he is funny. But he’s too short for you, really.’
‘I don’t care if he’s short,’ Rachel said. ‘I don’t get all that stuff about boys having to be taller. Anyway, if I have to find a taller boy I’m going to be in trouble. That’s what my dad says. He says I should get used to looking down on boys. He says that’s the natural order of things anyway.’
‘You’ll just have to wear flat shoes,’ Helen said.
‘You can wear whatever shoes you want,’ Sarah said, ‘and if he really likes you, he won’t care.’
‘I think boys are overrated,’ Helen said, ‘and we talk about them way too much.’
We got the first term project that day. It was the big one:
‘My Environment—What I Love, What I Hate.’
‘A chance for everyone to get down and personal,’ Ms O’Grady said, smiling around the class as though she hadn’t announced the worse news in the world. ‘I expect to see some really fantastic individual takes on this subject. I expect you all to do some research, but that research can be quite original. You can interview people, use the World Wide Web, look up current environmental news items—anything you have to do to make the project your own. I certainly don’t want to see a lot of half-baked, rushed projects with no thought put into them. I know we have some excellent scholars in this class and I expect to see the evidence!’
‘I hate projects,’ Rachel said, dragging her bag along the footpath after school.
‘My mum hates projects,’ Helen said. ‘She said they should be banned. They’re simply too much work for the parents.’
‘I don’t mind them,’ I said cautiously, ‘but I don’t think I’ve lived in this town long enough to know anything about it, so this project is going to be really hard.’
‘I wonder if I could just do it on my room,’ Sarah said. ‘I mean, that’s my real environment, isn’t it? I wonder if Ms O’Grady would let me do that?’
‘It can’t just be your room,’ Rachel said. ‘It’s an environmental project, not a room project.’
‘Yeah, well, my room is an environment,’ Sarah said. ‘I mean, it’s got its own living systems happening in it. Or that’s what mum says, anyway. Under the bed, you know, and the apple core in my bedside table drawer—the one that went mouldy.’
I shelved the project for the time being as too hard. I had other problems to deal with, problems I didn’t really want to talk about with Helen-Sarah-and-Rachel. Not yet.
First, there was the sleep-over and that was okay. I was looking forward to that. I panicked a bit about what I’d take, but I talked it over with Helen and found out that I’d need:
A pair of muck-around jeans.
One good, going-to-the-movies outfit.
A book for reading in bed on Sunday morning.
A teddy if I wanted one – Helen couldn’t sleep without hers.
My journal, of course.
My mum’s phone number in case anything went wrong.
My real problem was a boy at school. I could hardly even say his name, not without feeling myself go red. I couldn’t write it in my journal, not properly. I called him by his initials and then disguised them by doing them in fake Elizabethan writing with lots of curls and loops:
He had this curly mouth, curly hair and crinkly eyes, and he smiled so much that everyone called him Smiley. He was good at everything. Well, not everything. He was lousy at Maths and Italian, and he couldn’t sing to save his life. But he was great at soccer, basketball and football. I liked him because he smiled all the time and he was one of the popular kids who didn’t seem to care that he was popular.
I had a crush on him. I knew it was a crush because I could tick off every single crush indicator on the list Helen had compiled. Helen knew all about crushes. She had her first crush when she was in Preps, she said.
Helen’s Seven-Point Crush Indicator List
You look at the boy all the time.
You tease him a lot.
When other people tease him you defend him.
You blush when people use your name and his name in the same sentence.
You worry about your clothes and hair more.
You try to get interested in the stuff he’s interested in.
If he’s popular, you act stuck-up.
I did everything, even the last thing. I did act kind of stuck-up around him. Not mega stuck-up, not I’m-too-posh-for-you-to-clean-my-shoes stuck up, just I’ve-got-better-things-to-talk-about-than-your-game-of-soccer-but-if-you-ask-me-twice-I’ll-answer kind of stuck-up.
I had a crush on and I felt like all the things that were on Helen’s ‘How You Feel When You’ve Got a Mega Crush Six-Point Indicator’:
Airy fairy
Bad, really bad
Good, really good – particularly when he looks at you
Scared – that he doesn’t like you
Scared – that he likes someone else
Scared – that he likes you
I had my first crush and I had it badly. Maybe it was like those diseases that if you don’t get them when you’re a kid you get them three times as badly when you’re an adult. I was a late developer when it came to crushes and it was like killer chicken-pox.
CHAPTER
NINE
When I got home from the sleep-over, Mum seemed weird. Usually if I’ve been away she’s all questions, questions, questions. This time she opened the front door and looked almost surprised it was me.
‘Oh, hi Millie,’ she said, ‘you’re home early.’
‘No, I’m not,’ I said, dropping my bag so I could hug her. ‘It’s about five past six, actually.’
‘Of course, so it is.’ She hugged me quickly. ‘Have a good time?’
‘It was brilliant. Really great. We stayed up until late last night, watching videos and talking. Helen’s mother’s cool, too. She’s a low-maintenance mother. You know, here’s the popcorn, girls, don’t burn it. And Helen’s bedroom is fantastic. She’s got all these posters everywhere—not just movie star posters, although she’s got some of those, but animals, too. It’s great.’
‘Good. I’m pleased you had such a good time,’ Mum said. ‘I think we’ll have noodles for dinner, take-away noodles. Is that okay?’
I followed her into the kitchen.
‘I haven’t quite finished cleaning up in here,’ she said. ‘Millie, why don’t you unpack your bag and sort out your washing.’ And she almost shooed me out of the kitchen, but not before I’d noticed the mess.
‘What were you doing?’ I asked, peering over her shoulder. There was a pile of stuff on the sink—saucepans, wine glasses, plates. ‘Mum, it looks as though you’ve had a party!’
‘No party,’ she said, trying to block my view. ‘Not a party, really. Just dinner, that’s all. Come on, Millie, I need that washing.’ Mum looked flustered and quite pink.
‘How many people came over?’
‘Oh, you know, just a couple of people from the exhibition committee. That’s all. It was pretty impromptu, really.’
‘What does that mean?’
/> ‘When something happens on the spur of the moment. Come on, Millie, washing!’
‘I need a drink first,’ I said and pushed past her into the kitchen.
On the kitchen sink there were:
- Mum’s good heavy casserole dish from France
- two wine glasses
- two of the best plates
- two of the lettuce-leaf plates Sheri gave us one Christmas
- two coffee mugs
- two tea cups, the cobalt blue ones Patrick gave us one Christmas
- two bowls with leftover porridge sticking to the sides
- two ordinary glasses
- one porridge saucepan
- one bowl with leftover salad sticking to the sides
- one milk jug
- the orange juicer.
‘How many people?’ I asked pointedly.
‘One,’ Mum said, sighing, ‘just one.’
‘And they stayed over?’
‘Would you rather someone stay over or drink and drive, Millie?’
‘Well, stay over, of course,’ I said. ‘Did you change my sheets?’
‘Your sheets? No, of course not.’
‘Well, I don’t want to sleep in used sheets,’ I said.
‘Oh, okay. Well, you change them then,’ Mum said. ‘Put them in the wash with your other washing. Now, can you get out of my hair. I have to get rid of this mess.’
‘Did you have a nice dinner?’ I asked. Mum looked stressed and tired and I thought she needed cheering up.
‘Yes, I did. Thanks, Millie. It was a lovely evening.’ She turned away from the sink and hugged me. ‘And I’m really pleased you had a good time, too.’
When I went to get my sheets I was pretty surprised. The bed was exactly as I had left it.
Nothing looked disturbed at all. Whoever had spent last night in my bed had even replaced Merlin exactly where I had left him, half tucked under the doona.
Millie and the Night Heron Page 6
