The Things We Promise

by J. C. Burke

  ‘But I wanted to look beautiful, Maryanne.’

  ‘You will. I promise.’

  Oh, Mum, I thought, that’s a promise you’re not going to be able to keep. In three months’ time, Catrina’s going to look like a giant marshmallow walking down the aisle and she’s going to blame you when she does.

  ‘If we let out the seam here,’ Mum was explaining, ‘and I make a tiny tuck here and loosen …’

  I went back to the newspaper and started reading it properly. It was the third week in my quest to search for Uncle Roddy’s name in the death notices. It had been going well too. By well, I mean I hadn’t found the name ‘Roderick John Longrigg’.

  Mum said Saturday was the best day to look because some families waited for the Saturday newspaper even if their loved one died on a Wednesday. It didn’t make sense to me, but Mum knew more about this business than I did. Although I had noticed she’d stopped reading the death notices.

  The prospect of having to read through the entire list of dead old fogies was way too boring. Perhaps I was cutting corners, but I felt like I only needed to look through the surnames beginning with ‘L’. I had a system that was quick, efficient and foolproof. I’d find the start of the ‘L’s and my index finger would scan down the list of names, slowing considerably when it hit ‘LO’. The annoying thing about this paper was that the ‘L’s started at the bottom of one column then resumed at the top of the next. Slowly my index finger slid down to the bottom of the page.

  There it froze at the very last name.

  Matthew Thomas Leong.

  I kept reading. Aged twenty-five. Died after a short illness. Loved by his family and friends. That was it.

  ‘Mum?’ I called.

  ‘Mmm?’ she answered through a mouthful of pins.

  ‘Remember Matt Leong?’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘Do you know what his middle name was?’

  ‘… ohmas? I ink.’

  I waited until Catrina had gone and then I showed Mum the death notice. She took it really badly. I held her as tight as I could and when she folded her body onto the floor I folded with her. We sat, huddled together on the cold kitchen tiles, while Mum cried and cried.

  Maybe Mum didn’t realise, but I guessed how Matt had died.

  In January when it was just Billy and me at home, Billy had started thumping his fist on the kitchen table. He’d been reading the City Star. ‘No! No! No! No!’ he uttered with each thump. ‘Bloody hell!’

  ‘What’s up?’ I asked.

  ‘Another guy I know has died.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Adam Haydele. I met him through Aunty Mame. He was a country boy. Sweet guy.’

  ‘That’s sad.’

  Then Billy said, ‘I hate the way they write Died after a short illness. It’s such a pathetic, empty line.’

  ‘What does it mean?’ I asked.

  ‘It means he died of AIDS.’

  There were two things that stayed with me that day. Occasionally I still push them around my head and wonder. The first was that Billy seemed almost casual about his friend’s death. I don’t mean he didn’t care, it just didn’t seem to be a shock to him. But I’d be really shocked if I heard about someone I knew who died. Even if I didn’t know them that well. Like when the man who lived in the flat downstairs died.

  The second thing was that it was one of the few times I’d heard Billy say the ‘A’ word. I’d assumed he didn’t talk about it because it’d upset him. But Billy seemed fine. Not at all freaked out.

  That morning, I clearly remember saying to myself, Ask him about it now. Ask him all the things you want to know. It was the perfect opportunity because Mum was out and it was such a no-go topic with her.

  Yet it wasn’t the right time. Billy wasn’t hysterical like I would’ve been, but he was still sad. So I didn’t ask. I just said what I knew Mum would say. ‘I’ll put the kettle on.’

  Matt Leong was the first person I really knew who had died. That night, I slept in bed with Mum. I told her I didn’t want her to be alone, but to be truthful, it was me who didn’t want to be alone.

  Mum fell asleep quickly, probably because of all the crying she’d done. I lay there, staring at the ceiling, trying to recall Matt Leong’s face. I couldn’t get the picture right but I could hear his voice and remember the way he used to say Billy’s name, ‘Beelee.’

  A few weeks after Dad left Billy went pyscho. Afterwards, he refused to come out of his room for two days. Mum asked Matt to come over and try to coax him out of his self-imposed confinement. Matt stood outside the door of my brother’s room. ‘Beelee? Beelee?’ he pleaded over and over again. ‘It not your fault. Beelee?’

  Matt was nice. His parents owned the corner shop and he used to bring me musk sticks and cobbers.

  After Dad went, Billy and Matt could stop pretending they were just mates. But at the Leongs’, they still had to play the game. Billy reckoned Mrs Leong was one of the scariest women he’d ever met. She never spoke to Billy; she just stared at him.

  Mrs Leong definitely looked scary. I could picture her standing behind the shop counter. Her hair pulled back in a super tight bun and her eyebrows drawn in with black pencil like two little upside-down ‘C’s. It was true too that she barely spoke. When you asked her where something was, she’d just grunt and point to a shelf. Matt’s family moved away about the same time Billy left for New York.

  I must’ve finally fallen asleep wondering where they’d moved to, but when I woke up and rolled over in the bed, I could feel that Mum wasn’t there.

  It was pitch black. The bedroom door was closed. My hands fumbled for the lamp. It was 3.24 a.m and the phone that usually sat next to the clock was gone. That meant one thing: Mum was making the call to Billy.

  She’d said she’d have to tell him about Matt. She’d said she didn’t want to, that maybe she’d wait a few days. Obviously she’d changed her mind.

  I crept out. Mum was in the living room, huddled in the corner of the couch with a blanket around her shoulders. She was crying, soft, tiny hiccups. The ones you make when you’ve been crying for a long time. ‘Please, Billy,’ she was saying. ‘Please, Billy. Please.’ Then Mum was nodding and wiping her nose with the blanket. ‘Okay, darling,’ she said. ‘Okay. You too.’

  When Mum looked up and saw me, she gasped, really sucking in the air like I’d given her a fright. ‘How long have you been standing there, Gem?’ she asked.

  To me, right then at that moment, it seemed like a strange thing to say.

  The week didn’t get any better. On Tuesday when I got home from school, Mum was crying. On Wednesday, she hadn’t changed out of her pyjamas. By Thursday, she was in bed and barely able to speak. Matt Leong’s death seemed to have sucked the life out of her.

  But when Friday arrived, it was my turn to have the nervous breakdown.

  Apparently that morning, Martin Searles had fingered Andrea on the bus. Gross. But she was acting like he’d given her a diamond ring and proposed.

  We were walking to a sex-education forum everyone in Year 11 had to attend, but for Louise Lovejoy and me it’d been going all day.

  ‘Andrea! No more details,’ I barked. ‘That’s enough.’

  Louise Lovejoy was pressing her lips together but I was way beyond thinking it was funny anymore.

  ‘Do you think maybe we’re going round now?’ Andrea asked. It was about the twentieth time she’d presented us with this delusionary idea of hers. ‘It has to mean something.’

  ‘Martin Searles is a bit of a user.’ At least Louise Lovejoy was brave enough to hint at the truth.

  Of course Andrea shut her down in two seconds. ‘How would you know, Louise?’ And in true Andrea style she went that bit too far. ‘He’s not the same as Simon Finkler,’ she uttered from the corner of her mouth.

  Louise Lovejoy just shrugged it off, but it must’ve hurt. I squeezed her elbow and she whispered, ‘I’m fine. Don’t worry.’

  A teacher was yelling at us to
form a line so we could walk into the auditorium in single file. ‘You’ll be given a handout at the door. So please remember to pick it up before you go in and sit down.’

  Andrea had the huffs now. She pushed into the front of the line and didn’t look back at us once.

  ‘I said the wrong thing, didn’t I?’ Louise Lovejoy whispered to me.

  ‘Andrea can be a schizo.’

  ‘She’s really sensitive.’

  ‘Only if we’re talking about her!’ I answered. Louise Lovejoy and I took our handouts. I tucked mine under my arm and kept talking. ‘I’m sorry about what she said to you. That was harsh.’

  ‘It’s true though,’ Louise Lovejoy said. ‘Simon Finkler isn’t like Martin Searles. Simon Finkler’s much worse.’

  ‘How do you mean?’ I asked.

  ‘He’s just not a very nice person,’ she answered, then started reading the handout. The silence that suddenly sat between us clearly told me that the topic of Simon Finkler was closed.

  So I started to flick through my How to keep safe handout too. I wasn’t really reading it, just opening the pages so I had something to do because it was obvious Louise Lovejoy had shut up shop for the day.

  Typically, this was the page I opened. Most cases of HIV are men who have sex with other men … Blah, blah, blah, I said to myself. But I kept reading. … estimated that over 300,000 cases of AIDS have been reported to the World … in the USA … I was just about to turn the page when I spotted the line … New York City has the highest incidence of AIDS in … Suddenly my eyes were flicking across phrases and sentences, just grabbing snatches here and there. Young men … AIDS … short illness … rapid death …

  I’d frozen at the entrance to the auditorium. ‘Come on. Move it.’ Students were shoving but even with the weight of the queue pushing against me, I couldn’t lift my foot to take a step.

  ‘Gemma?’ It was Louise Lovejoy’s voice and I could feel a hand taking my arm. ‘Gemma, are you okay?’

  ‘I … I have to go.’

  ‘I’ll come with you.’ I could see that she was still holding my arm but I couldn’t feel her grip anymore. ‘Gemma? I’m coming with you.’

  ‘No. No, it’s fine,’ I stammered. ‘I’d like to be alone.’

  I think that’s when I started running.

  I didn’t stop. I didn’t even collect my bag. I just had to get away.

  When I got home, Mum was lying on the couch. She didn’t look up and see my red face drenched in sweat and she didn’t hear my panting breath either. She didn’t even speak.

  I didn’t bother telling her what’d happened. Besides, what would I say? That I freaked out over a paragraph in a sex-education booklet? She’d just tell me the usual, that I didn’t need to worry.

  So I went to bed. I stayed there until it was a new day and it felt safe to get up.

  6

  24 weeks to formal

  APRIL 30TH, I WROTE AT THE TOP OF MY Hamlet exam. What a long month, I thought. Mum had got over Matt Leong’s death but now she’d turned totally psycho.

  One day she was on the couch, still in her pyjamas, the next she was out of them and on a crazy bridal frenzy. Now Neuta really didn’t know if it was Arthur or Martha; it had on a new outfit every day. Mum seemed to be up all hours of the night cutting white satin and sewing beads onto bodices that didn’t need to be finished until September. The only dress she couldn’t attack was Catrina’s, because Catrina was growing fatter by the minute with twins.

  Even worse, Mum was on a cleaning frenzy too. Yet, she agreed she wouldn’t clean the house even if the prime minister was visiting. But this week she’d scrubbed the kitchen cupboards, thrown out every old jar of gherkins from the fridge, cleaned the oven, washed the curtains. I even caught her standing on the table, vacuuming the ceiling. That’s when I announced I was going upstairs to Mr and Mrs C’s, where there was peace and quiet and grown-ups who fed and fussed over me.

  The Hamlet exam was a doozy. When I got home, all I wanted to do was lie in a hot bath, close my eyes and pretend I was Ophelia floating down the river, dead.

  Not that anyone would notice. Especially Ralph. For as I had just discovered, I was invisible.

  On the way home from school, Vanessa and Ralph had almost run me down at the zebra crossing in their unmissable lime-green car. Maybe since Literature Circle had ended, Ralph had forgotten I even existed? He had waved at me on the dance floor the night of the Fink’s party. At least, I thought he had. Maybe he had been waving to someone behind me?

  There was no time for self-pity or hyperventilation, which was what I was on the verge of, because my mother wasn’t home to complain to and had instead left me an irritating note about Claude and the swatches.

  Hi Gemma.

  Hope Hamlet exam okay. I’m out with Penny. We’ll be home about six-thirty with pizzas. I promise yours will not contain anchovies. Time is running out and we need to start on your formal dress. Can you go through ALL the swatches (bad salmon pink has been chucked!) and decide which fabric you like best so Claude can buy from the NYC shop. (Yes, the one Madonna’s been seen in!) Also did you want gold braid edging like in the photo? Or just plain? Need to know so Claude can order as well. Getting exciting!!!

  Penny’s reserved the video A Fish Called Wanda. Meant to be really funny and I think we all need a laugh and a big bowl of chocolate chip ice-cream.

  MA xxx

  PS Swatches in yellow envelope on kitchen bench.

  The swatches weren’t on the kitchen bench. There was no yellow envelope to be found. I went through the pile of mail and newspapers twice, searched the drawers, even checked inside the fridge because Mum sometimes hid bills in there when she couldn’t deal with them.

  The only other place they could be was Mum’s room. But they weren’t on her bedside table or her chest of drawers or her basket of things to file. I checked the top drawer, which was my go-to place when I needed spare change. No yellow envelope, just the usual tangle of earrings and chains that hadn’t been worn for years.

  The next drawer was underwear, so not a likely spot. But I opened it anyway and began to rummage through Mum’s bras and undies that were seriously old and gross. Straight away my fingers found the edge of an envelope, wedged in a far corner under the winter socks.

  I pulled it out and lay on Mum’s bed. I was fairly sure I was going with black velvet but I wanted to look at the others in case I had a sudden brainwave.

  I turned on the lamp, got comfy and opened the envelope. But instead of swatches, I found photos. Only two, but I’d never seen them before.

  It took me a while to figure out that it was Saul I was staring at. He was at a fancy dress ball. The room was crammed with people and red balloons covered the entire ceiling.

  Typical Saul had taken the ‘dress up’ theme seriously. He was wearing a black-and-white all-in-one suit and his face was painted in black and white stripes like a zebra. He even had pointed fabric ears stuck over his own.

  I held the photo under the lamp so I could study it better in the light. Billy had gone beyond ‘working his magic’ on Saul. He’d created a work of art.

  The stripes on Saul’s face were painted exactly the same as on a zebra’s hide. Each one was different in width and length yet all came to a pointed end. But what finished it off was the black circle my brother had painted from the tip of Saul’s nose to the bottom of his chin. Billy was a genius.

  The other photo in the envelope was of Billy and Saul. Billy was dressed up as a circus ringmaster with a curly black moustache and a top hat. Alone he would have looked pretty good, but next to Saul he was dead boring. Written on the back of the photo in Saul’s handwriting was, Thanks to my love, you’d never know.

  I put the pictures back in the envelope and left them on Mum’s bedside table. Then I went and ran a bath. Mum hated me using the phone in the bath. She said it was dangerous and I’d get electrocuted if I dropped it in. But Mum was out. After I’d eased myself into a steaming bubble bath
, I telephoned Louise Lovejoy.

  ‘Hi. It’s Gemma.’

  ‘How hard was that Hamlet exam?’ she exploded. ‘Who gives a fluff about Rosencrantz and Guildenstern! They’re hardly the main characters.’

  ‘Not according to Justin.’

  ‘What’s happened to Justin? He’s always in the library, these days.’

  ‘Justin’s turned into a nerd That’s what’s happened. Anyway, don’t worry,’ I told her, ‘I flunked for sure.’

  ‘That makes two of us then,’ Louise Lovejoy said. ‘My father will kill me.’

  ‘Over flunking a Hamlet essay?’

  ‘Yep. He’s a freak.’

  ‘Don’t worry, so’s my mother. She’s already hassling me about my formal dress. Acting like it’s tomorrow, not six months away. This is what happens when your mother makes your dress. Sometimes I wish I could just go to a shop and buy it like a normal person.’

  ‘Are you still going short?’

  ‘That’s exactly what I was ringing you about! Are you?’

  ‘Totally. My dress is going to be exactly like the Roxette girl’s.’

  ‘Good. If you’re going short then I will too,’ I said. ‘I just didn’t want to be the only one.’

  ‘So should I find a hairdo too?’ Louise Lovejoy hesitated. ‘For your brother to do? That’s if he has time. I mean, it’s fine if he doesn’t. I’m just stoked about the make-up.’

  ‘Start going through the mags,’ I told her.

  ‘I’m beyond excited! Thank you so, so much, Gemma.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid. You don’t need to thank me. Andrea does though. I’ve spent ages going through magazines for her and now she’s decided she wants a French roll. She thinks it’ll be very Liz Taylor. Vomit!’

  ‘What’s with her obsession with Elizabeth Taylor?’

  ‘Her mum and grandma worship her so she joined the fan club,’ I answered. ‘To be fair, Elizabeth Taylor was really beautiful when she was young but I reckon she looks like a transvestite now!’

  Louise Lovejoy was laughing. ‘I wouldn’t know,’ she said. ‘I’ve never seen one!’