The Things We Promise

by J. C. Burke

  ‘I’ll give you the money for the call?’

  ‘I said no. End of conversation.’

  ‘You don’t get to tell me whether or not I can call my brother.’

  ‘Yes, I do, Gemma. I pay the phone bill.’

  ‘Billy pays the phone bill.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘You heard what I said.’

  ‘Yes. And I didn’t like it.’

  Now Mum was facing me. Her cheeks were flushed and red. When she tucked some hair behind her ear, her hand was shaking. I realised a freak attack was coming my way.

  I always got a couple of seconds’ warning before Mum unleashed the freak. The first sign was a snarl that came right from the back of her throat. There was never much volume. But trust me, the explosion was only seconds away.

  ‘I am telling you. You cannot ring your brother,’ she began. ‘Did you not hear what I said before, Gemma? That’s final.’

  ‘But that’s not fair!’ I snapped back, ready for battle. ‘Billy promised he’d pick the fabric samples himself. It’s my formal, my dress and I don’t want some—’

  ‘You spoilt little brat! Is that all you can think about? Hmm? Hmm?’ Then the explosion erupted in full force. Shouting, arms waving, spit flying, the psycho eyes. This was going to be the annual technicolour humdinger and murder was not out of the question. My mother’s pointed finger moved closer and closer to my chest. ‘You selfish, selfish, ungrateful girl!’ Mum yelled as the tip of her finger jabbed me with each word. ‘Your brother has been so good to you. So, sooo good to you. Generous. Kind. But at the moment he doesn’t have time to run around New York for your silly formal dress! You brat! You don’t deserve …’

  Sometimes you have to accept when you’ve lost. Except that I hadn’t actually lost. I’d just come up with a new plan. I backed out of the room, grabbed my wallet and made a run for it.

  I had my own money. I could ring my brother, or anyone for that matter, whenever I wanted to. This was between Billy and me, and my mother could go and jab her finger in someone else’s chest.

  Besides, it wasn’t as though I was going to call Billy to abuse him. I just wanted to ask why he was sending someone I’d never heard of to pick the fabric. And did this Claude know that I despised every variation of the colour pink?

  All that was in my wallet was one precious ten-dollar note. I’d been hanging on to it so I could finish the lay-by I had on a pair of earrings, but I needed change for the phone. The corner shop was closed because it was Sunday. So I had to hike all the way up to the junction and buy a packet of chewing gum to break the note.

  By the time I trudged back, none of my questions felt so urgent. Still, I went into the phone box, closed the door and carefully laid the coins along the ledge.

  Seeing the silver stacked up in little piles and thinking about how many times I’d have to scrub the bath to earn the money back had me wondering if I’d overreacted.

  Plus now it was almost midnight in New York. Once when I’d called in the middle of the night, Saul had been cranky that I’d woken him up. I’d definitely lose it if Saul had a freak attack at me too.

  So I stood in the phone box, wondering, worrying and wasting more time. Billy used to call the phone box his ‘office’. He’d come down here every night so he could call his boyfriend, Matt Leong. That was back when Dad was still at home and Billy had to sneak around while Mum and I covered for him.

  I owned part of this phone box too. One weekend, Andrea and I had left a trail of messages here after we’d had a fight in Year 7.

  The words had faded but I could still read them clearly.

  Dear Andrea, You really hurt my feelings when you said you hated me. G xo

  I was cut because you said I was a big know-all. A xoxo

  That’s because you kept saying I like Justin and I don’t! G xoxoxo

  You always sit next to him in Science. Not me. A xoxoxoxo

  That’s because he’s good at science and I’m hopeless at it. But I promise I will sit next to you now.

  G xoxoxoxoxo

  I’m sorry. A xoxoxoxoxoxo

  Me 2. G xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxox

  oxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo

  Me 3 A.xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxox

  When I got home, the door to Mum’s bedroom was shut. I stood outside and whispered, ‘I didn’t call Billy.’ Of course, there was no answer and there definitely weren’t going to be any apologies either.

  So I crept out of the flat and upstairs to see Mr and Mrs C. They’d probably heard Mum and me shouting earlier and they were always good for some sympathy. Their door was never closed. As I came up the stairs I could see the silhouette of Mr C on the couch watching TV.

  ‘Hello?’ I called. ‘It’s me.’

  ‘Mia cara, Gemma,’ Mrs C sang back. ‘I’m in the cucina.’

  Mrs C was the most insane cook ever. There wasn’t a better sight than walking into the Carpinettas’ kitchen and finding Mrs C in her black apron, her big arms rolling out enough pastry to feed Southern Italy.

  ‘You can fill cannoli for me, Gemma, when they come out of oven,’ she said. ‘And taste the first one.’

  I groaned in reply. ‘They’re soooooo fattening. But I love them.’

  ‘Gemma, you never fat! And one cannoli not hurt you.’

  ‘I can’t stop at one.’

  Mrs C kissed me on the head.

  ‘Did you hear Mum and me fighting?’ I asked her.

  She kissed me on the head again.

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘It’s okay, darling. Grown-ups get cross. They have a lot on their mind.’

  ‘I didn’t do anything wrong.’

  ‘Come here, mia cara.’ Mrs C began to hug me. She was tall, giant tall, and when she hugged me it always felt like I was going to suffocate in her massive boobs that squashed up against my face. ‘You be good to Mamma. She need you, Gemma.’

  I untangled myself and wandered into the living room.

  ‘Hi, Mr C,’ I said, plonking myself on the couch next to him.

  Mr C was engrossed in his favourite Sunday night TV show, Degrassi High. Mrs C said grown men who watched that show were ‘coglioni’, which kind of meant ‘idiot’ even though the actual translation was ‘testicles’, but I thought it was cute that he watched it.

  ‘Fat Dwayne got a girlfriend,’ Mr C began to tell me as though Fat Dwayne was one of his close personal friends. ‘And Joey is gonna walk through school with no clothes because he want to buy a car.’

  ‘Got it,’ I replied, even though I didn’t. Mr C had a habit of talking me through every episode, but to be honest I’m not sure he really understood it himself.

  ‘They have condong machine in every bathroom,’ he told me.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Condong machine in the school bathroom.’

  ‘Condong?

  ‘Yeah. For the …’

  ‘Oh – condom?’ I spluttered.

  ‘Si!’ Then he whispered, ‘For the disease.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Fat Dwayne, he think he—’

  ‘Spegnerlo, Giuseppe!’ Mrs C shouted. Suddenly she was storming into the living room, standing in front of the TV. ‘Spegni il televisore, stupido idiota!’

  Mr C was usually up for a good shouting match with his wife but he just sat there like a little boy.

  ‘Come, Gemma.’ Mrs C was taking my hand, pulling me off the couch. ‘We need to fill cannoli now. Pronto!’

  ‘Oh? Oh?’ I think I said it a hundred times because I was answering the hundred questions spinning through my head, each one popping up before I had a chance to answer the one before that. And the person asking them all was Polly Pessimistic.

  Louise Lovejoy had watched Degrassi High. ‘It was an amazing episode,’ she told us the next day during our study period in the library. ‘Dwayne found out he’s got AIDS. It was really sad. He went mental and bashed up the condom
machine in the bathroom. He actually ripped it off the wall.’

  ‘What? Dwayne’s got AIDS?’ Andrea asked. ‘But doesn’t he – you know – like girls?’

  ‘Isn’t a poof, you mean?’

  ‘Well, yes, Gemma,’ Andrea replied. ‘But you know I don’t like saying that word.’ It was actually Andrea’s mother who had the hang-up about the word and my brother being one. Mum reckoned every time Deidre asked her about Billy she’d put on this sad voice as though there was something wrong with him.

  ‘My brother’s a poof,’ I explained to Louise Lovejoy.

  ‘I don’t care,’ she answered.

  ‘But he has a boyfriend. They’ve been together five years. They are like an old married couple. Aren’t they, Andrea?’

  ‘You want my theory about Mrs C?’ Andrea offered, although I was fairly sure it was non-negotiable. ‘She probably didn’t want you to watch it because of the condom machine. I mean, they’re old, plus they’re Catholic! Derr Gemma, birth control is against their religion.’

  Justin, who’d been busy finishing his Biology assignment, looked up at us and said, ‘Does Dwayne have AIDS or is he HIV-positive? They’re not the same thing.’

  ‘Mr Technical,’ Andrea chimed back. ‘What difference does it make? He’s still going to die!’

  ‘Yeah, but—’

  ‘Maybe not,’ Louise Lovejoy interrupted and we all turned to look at her. ‘They had a sex-ed class on Degrassi High and there were these guys who had AIDS giving a talk. They said it wasn’t a death sentence.’

  ‘Oh, great,’ Andrea said. ‘So they’re going to go around infecting everyone now?’

  ‘Andrea!’ Justin groaned. ‘Get your facts straight. That’s why they use condoms. Don’t you know anything?’

  ‘Oh, go back to Dungeons & Dragons, Justin!’ Then Andrea’s voice dropped an octave. ‘Anyway,’ she started, ‘I don’t think we should be talking about this in front of Gemma.’

  ‘Why not?’ I snapped back.

  ‘I know Billy and Saul are different, but – but,’ she stammered, ‘I just don’t think we should.’

  The bell rang and for four different reasons the four of us jumped out of our seats at the same time. Andrea, because she never liked being wrong. Justin, because he realised Andrea was probably a minute away from going psycho at him. Louise Lovejoy, because she was well aware she’d started the whole thing and she couldn’t afford to make any more enemies. Me? I’m not sure. I just felt weird.

  At home, there was a note under the fruit bowl.

  Out with Penny. Back by 6 p.m. Can you peel spuds in sink? M x

  I wandered into Billy’s room. I knew that I was going to do this when I got home from school today. Even though it wasn’t on my mental list of things to do, like copy Justin’s Biology homework, shave my legs and see what my hair looked like parted on the other side.

  Neat is the word I’d use to describe my brother’s room. Unlike Mum and me, Billy had always been a bit of a neat freak. He’d tidy his room before he went back to New York and it would stay in this pristine state until he came home again.

  While he was away his room felt like a giant vacuum of nothing. When he first left for America, I used to come in here and take deep breaths until the hairs in my nose tingled. Hoping I’d find a hint of him, like the rich coconut smell of his hair gel. But I never did. That’d have me sinking onto his bed thinking, This is what it’d be like if Billy was dead.

  It started to weird me out so Mum told me not to go in there anymore. She’d said, ‘I never do, there’s no need.’ So I told her I’d stop. But I didn’t. Five years later I was still sneaking in to see if I could find a bit of him. There were times I liked to lie on his bed and chat as though he was actually there, lying next to me.

  Today, something looked different on the shelves. The photo of Billy at his Year 12 school formal was on the second shelf, in front of his magazines, not on the third shelf, where it usually sat next to his NSW State Championships swimming trophy.

  Sprung, Maryanne! I thought as I walked over and picked up the picture frame. Mum obviously did make the occasional visit.

  The photo was one big bad fashion moment from 1982. Billy wore a pale blue tuxedo. His date, Pauline, looked even worse in a purple taffeta dress with sleeves like balloons. But what really made me chuckle were their hairdos. It was like they’d got each other’s mixed up. Pauline had short back and sides and Billy’s hair was so long it almost reached his waist.

  That was the night Billy had met Matt Leong. Matt was trying to elbow his way to the front of the dance floor because his favourite band Snake Head was playing. But Matt was short and skinny and it was almost impossible for him to push his way through the crowd. Plus, as Billy said, ‘He was the lone Asian and no one was going to let him get past.’

  Billy scooped Matt up and sat him on his shoulders. Everyone shouted at Matt to get down but Billy said that together they were like one of those dancing Chinese dragons. They were unstoppable.

  Matt became Billy’s first proper boyfriend. When I asked Billy, ‘How did you know that Matt was the same as you?’ he said, ‘You just know, Gem.’

  Billy could barely eat, let alone study, he was so in love. All day, he’d be on the phone to Matt, and when Dad got home from work Billy would disappear down the street to his ‘office’, the public phone box. Some nights, if Matt and he had fought, Billy would still be there after midnight and Mum would be spinning Dad some lie about the library being open late.

  Billy reckoned Matt Leong was the final straw for Dad. ‘Finding out your son’s a poofter and then a week later walking in on him in bed with a gook. That was it for the old man. He was out the door.’

  I put the photo back on the shelf and took a magazine from the top of the pile. It was the January edition of City Star. It was a kind of half newspaper, half magazine that Billy picked up from The Carousel, the dance club he partied at when he was home.

  The first page was an ad for the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras. I flipped over to the next page where there was another big ad. No pictures in this one. Just words covering the whole page. It took several seconds before I registered what I was actually reading.

  Q. Does having just one partner guarantee protection from AIDS?

  R. NO.

  Sometimes your body takes matters into its own hands: the brain switches off and the legs start moving. Right now, that was happening to me. I was closing the door of Billy’s room. Then the front door. I was going down the stairs, out the gate and into the crisp afternoon air.

  My Walkman and my jumper were at the bottom of my schoolbag but I knew my legs weren’t going to take me back upstairs to get them.

  I could sense ‘bad’. I was sure of it. Mum could tell me I was a pessimist all she liked but she wouldn’t be able to sense ‘bad’ if it rang the doorbell and introduced itself to her.

  Mum, in her own words, was a pragmatist. I was the pessimist and Billy was somewhere in the middle. Mum never said I’d inherited the pessimist gene from Dad, but I knew that’s what she thought.

  Well, I had the pessimisms right now. Polly Pessimistic was holding my funeral and no one was going to turn up. That’s how bad I had it.

  I fished through my pocket, checking I had the right coin, because I knew I was headed to the phone box.

  I didn’t make the call straight away. I had to fine-tune my story first. For a moment I wondered if I should call Andrea but I couldn’t talk to her about that.

  My fingers dropped in the coin and started dialling.

  ‘Hello? Louise speaking.’

  The only reason I knew Louise Lovejoy’s number was because the last four numbers were the date of my birthday, then Billy’s – 2127. ‘Hi, Louise …’ I had to catch myself not to add ‘Lovejoy’. ‘It’s Gemma here.’

  ‘Oh? Hi, Gemma.’

  ‘I forgot to bring my Hamlet questions home. Have you got yours?’

  ‘Hang on two secs, I’ll get them.’

 
I rehearsed my line. It sounded okay but I had to find a way to slip it in.

  Louise Lovejoy was puffing when I heard her voice again. ‘You know, I think a short formal dress is way cooler, Gemma.’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘Totally. My mum gets the English Vogue and—’

  ‘So does mine. She’s a dressmaker so she gets all the mags.’

  ‘That’s why your folders look so amazing. I’ve been eyeballing them in English. That picture you have of Madonna is the best ever!’

  ‘It’s from Interview. One of the magazines my brother brings home from New York.’

  ‘Gemma?’ Louise Lovejoy’s tone suddenly changed. ‘I felt really bad after our study period. You know when I was talking about Degrassi High and …’

  Louise Lovejoy had just thrown open the door and invited me in. If it was possible to have squeezed through the phone and hugged her, I would’ve. For a second I actually thought I was going to cry.

  ‘That’s okay,’ I answered. ‘It’s not your fault.’

  ‘Do you worry about your brother? Sorry, is that too personal a question?’

  ‘No. No. It’s not,’ I said. Yet from anyone else, at any other time, that question that I’d never been asked before would’ve turned me into a three-headed monster. But right now, for the first time ever, I wanted to talk about it. ‘I try not to think about it,’ I started. ‘But sometimes it feels like it’s everywhere. Posters or ads on TV. I was in the supermarket the other day and there was a caller on the radio saying, “They all deserve AIDS and God made it on purpose.” Stuff like that.’

  ‘That sucks.’

  ‘My mum says I don’t need to worry about my brother because he’s been with his boyfriend for so long.’

  ‘Five years?’

  ‘Yeah. How did you know?’

  ‘You told me today.’

  ‘Louise?’ I took a deep breath. ‘Can I ask you something? Did … did they say anything else about AIDS on Degrassi High?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Nothing?’

  ‘Not that I can think of. Sorry, Gemma,’ she offered. ‘I know there are special numbers you can call, like the AIDS hotline.’