by Debra Oswald
‘Sorry, Jycinta … sorry, I –’ mumbled Marissa.
‘No point saying sorry now, is there? Might have stuffed up my chances with Matt for good. Thanks a whole big juicy bunch.’
‘Sorry,’ mumbled Marissa.
While the trophies were being handed out at the end of the day, I saw Lauren go up to the principal, Mr White, armed with one of her best Miss Perfect smiles. Whatever she said to White must have worked because a few minutes later, Lauren stepped up to the microphone on the edge of the running track.
‘Excuse me, everyone,’ said Lauren. ‘Could we just make an announcement?’
She signalled to Corey. ‘We need the model,’ she whispered.
Corey carried the skatepark model over and stood beside Lauren at the microphone. The idea of talking in front of hundreds of people, including teachers and parents, was terrifying to a guy like Corey. To begin with, he was frozen, staring out like a wallaby caught in the headlights of a semitrailer.
Lauren did the speaking for the first few minutes, explaining that there was a new committee to fight for a skatepark in Narragindi. She finished up with: ‘So this skatepark is about giving a share of resources and a fair go to the youth of Narragindi.’ Then she looked at Corey. He was supposed to say the next bit.
Corey leaned towards the microphone. ‘And it would be a great place for kids to meet up with their friends in the middle of town and … uh …’
He’d cramped up with nerves. Poor Corey. I glanced round to see the group of mothers whispering and looking at him. That must’ve made it even harder for him to stand up there in front of them all. Then I saw Lauren throw Corey a tiny smile – a smile so tiny that most people wouldn’t even have seen it. But that was enough for Corey to go on with the rest of his speech about the skatepark.
It’s amazing when you see a friend do something you never thought he could do. And I have to admit that I never thought – before that day – that Corey could do a decent bit of public speaking like that. I was impressed. I looked across and saw that Mr Stepanovic was impressed too.
Finally, Corey said, ‘If you want to look at the plans or the model and ask any questions, just come and speak to me or Lauren or anyone on the committee.’
Lauren leaned into the mike for one last reminder. ‘Remember, everyone, we need to raise a lot of money, so please buy raffle tickets!’
At the end of the carnival, we were all herded like sheep out the main gates and along the road back to school.
Mr Cleveland had confiscated JT’s skateboard and his flippers, so he had to walk barefoot across the sharp gravel of the dirt road. ‘Ow. Ow. Seriously ow,’ he yelped.
Lauren was laughing as she watched JT hop and squawk like an enormous scrawny red bird.
‘Hey Lauren,’ said JT. ‘Top speech. No, I mean it, don’t argue with me, don’t be modest – excellent speeching work from you there today. You don’t reckon we’ll really get a skatepark this time, do ya?’
‘I think there’s a good chance,’ she replied. ‘Especially if we can get the council to give us a section of the park.’
JT splurted out a laugh.
‘Don’t be so paranoid,’ Lauren said. ‘The council aren’t part of an evil conspiracy against you guys. If we put forward a good proposal, they’ll see it’s reasonable.’
‘Yeah?’ said JT. ‘You really reckon Uncle Ray is gonna let the council vote for a skatepark?’
‘Well, my uncle isn’t the only person on the council with a vote,’ she said.
JT shrugged and hopped sideways onto the grassy edge of the road.
I found myself walking just in front of a guy called Brett Mead. Brett Mead wasn’t one of my favourite people in Year 10. When he was a little kid, he was always the dobber, the one who went snivelling to adults. Now that he was older, I thought he was a weasel – the kind of guy who could be friendly to your face but then run you down two seconds after you’d left the room. He was sucky with teachers but you could tell they didn’t like him either. If a rumour was going to spread, Brett Mead would usually have something to do with it. His favourite hobby was badmouthing people.
Brett Mead didn’t realise I was right in front of him because the person he was busy badmouthing at that moment was Corey. It was the usual nasty stuff about Corey’s family (Brett didn’t have enough imagination to think up his own nasty rumours), what a loser Corey was, blah blah blah. I was about to wheel round and give Brett Mead a hard time when Corey came bounding forward to catch up with me.
‘Hi,’ said Corey, breathless from running. ‘Good day, eh?’
‘Yeah, not bad,’ I said. ‘Good on you for that speech.’
Corey shook his head in disbelief. He was buzzing with a mixture of happiness and left-over nerves. He wasn’t a person who ever boasted about himself but he was so stoked.
‘To begin with, I was packing it,’ he laughed. ‘Ohhh … felt like I was gonna barf. I thought for sure people could see I was shaking. Lauren saved my arse a few times. She was so amazing. But then – I dunno – I got into it and – well, it was okay. It was truly okay.’
‘Better than okay,’ I said.
Corey laughed again. ‘I never thought I could do anything like that.’
Chapter Ten
Over the next few weeks, our house turned into Operation Skatepark HQ. The phone was forever ringing. Our kitchen table was covered in leaflets and plans and application forms. Mum roped Corey into helping, so he was too busy to hang out with me. While Cyclone Skatepark whirled through my house, I hibernated in my bedroom and indulged in some first-grade sulking.
Amy recruited Riley and a platoon of other Year 7 kids to sell raffle tickets. Someone had organised decent raffle prizes, with first prize being an excellent skateboard set-up. Those Year 7 kids bounced around the streets of Narragindi like enthusiastic elves, spreading the word about the skatepark. Bit by bit some older kids got sucked in to helping out too. People started to believe it might really happen. Not me. I’d been one of those enthusiastic elves when I was in Year 7. Back then, I’d got myself worked up into believing it could happen. No way was I going to get sucked in again.
One afternoon, I skated straight from school to the Town Hall steps to meet up with a few mates. Two minutes after I got there, Lauren appeared and set up a fold-out table to sell raffle tickets for the skatepark campaign.
‘Hi Zac,’ she said.
I nodded hello but then rummaged around in my backpack so I wouldn’t have to talk to her. I couldn’t work Lauren Saxelby out. Why was she working so hard on Operation Skatepark? She wasn’t a skater. Her uncle, Ray Stone, was the skaters’ Enemy Number One. Why should Lauren care about Narragindi getting a skatepark? She thought skaters were losers. It made no sense.
Then out of the corner of my eye, I clocked Ray Stone striding down the footpath. There was his niece with a fold-out table piled with leaflets about the skatepark campaign. I was dead curious to know what Ray would say.
‘Hello Lauren,’ he said.
‘Hi Uncle Ray. Would you like to buy a raffle ticket?’
‘No thank you.’
‘I guess not, since you voted against every skatepark proposal in the last seven years.’ She looked him straight in the face, not exactly aggro but defiant.
Stone sighed, letting her know he was really too busy to argue with silly kids, then he launched into the usual bunch of arguments against a skatepark: elderly people getting knocked over and terrified by skaters, the graffiti, gangs, drugs. Lauren did her best to argue back and Lauren’s best was pretty good. But Stone put up his hands to say ‘don’t bother’.
‘I told your parents it’s a shame you’re wasting your time with this rubbish,’ he said.
‘Why won’t you even listen to –’ Lauren began.
Stone shook his head and smiled – one of those patronising ‘you’re a silly girl’ smiles that made me want to tear his face off.
‘What a shame. What a great shame,’ he sighed and then walked past Lauren towards t
he Town Hall entrance.
Lauren spun around and this time she sounded angry. ‘You know what, Uncle Ray? I always thought if someone had a reasonable idea, then they’d get listened to at least. But I can’t believe the negative junk that spins round in some people’s brains in this town –’
When Stone snapped at Lauren, his voice was as hard as steel. ‘I want this town to be a decent place – for everyone – which means making what I think are the right choices. One day you might have the maturity to understand that.’
Stone strode up the steps and into the Town Hall. I watched Lauren breathing hard, her eyes dark with anger.
‘So it’s working then,’ I said in a sarcastic voice. (Okay, I have to admit I was being a creep. But I’m trying to tell this story as honestly as I can.)
‘Sorry? Are you talking to me?’ responded Lauren.
‘I couldn’t work it out before but now I have. You helping the skatepark campaign – it’s so you can be “Lauren the Rebel Girl”, is it?’
‘Being a nauseating turd – that’s your special gift, is it?’ she shot back.
‘Pissing off your family: that’s why you got into this.’
‘Maybe a bit. To start with. But not now. Now it’s about –’
Lauren stopped mid-sentence, suddenly distracted. I followed her eyeline and realised what she was looking at. Corey and his mum, Trisha, were down the street about fifty metres, on the footpath outside the Imperial Hotel. Trisha’s arm was in plaster and her shoulder was still strapped up. Right then, she was drunk or upset or both. Corey was obviously trying to calm her down and persuade her to walk away from the pub with him. Trisha was arguing, crying, slapping Corey’s hands away one minute and clutching on to him the next.
Lauren and I both stood there staring. It felt wrong for the two of us to be seeing this little scene with Corey and his mum – like we’d sneaked in and read someone’s private diary or something.
I especially hated that Lauren was watching this. Corey really cared what she thought of him. He was always talking about her. ‘Lauren said this amazing thing.’ ‘Lauren thinks such-and-such.’ ‘Lauren blah blah blah.’ He’d fallen for her hard.
Neither Lauren nor I said a word until Corey and Trisha disappeared around the corner, heading in the direction of the Matthews’ house.
‘Is Corey all right?’ Lauren asked. ‘I mean, at home?’
‘It’s none of your business,’ I said.
‘I know but I just …’ Lauren murmured. ‘Look Zac, even though you’re a total creep, I know you’re a good friend of Corey’s.’
‘He’s a good guy.’
‘I’m not arguing with you,’ replied Lauren firmly. ‘I like Corey too.’
Lauren was about to go on but I wasn’t listening. I scooped up my board and warned her, ‘Yeah well, don’t even think about mucking him round. He’s got enough hassles as it is.’
The skatepark campaign powered along for another four weeks with a lot of people working their guts out. The committee sold a pile of raffle tickets and scrounged donations. They even managed to get the Narragindi Council to hand over a little corner of the park to build the skatepark, if the committee got the OzYouth grant and all the other money.
More and more people got involved in the campaign: Stella, a bunch of kids in Year 8, quite a few of the Year 11 guys and even Mitchell helped out a bit. The closer it got to the crunch, the more people talked as if it was a real goer this time.
I saw Amy walking around the house with her fingers crossed. I saw Corey staring at the skatepark model in his locker as if he could somehow make it spring to life right there in the school corridor. After all that hard work and hoping, I truly wished they wouldn’t be disappointed.
That Friday, Corey missed school (nothing unusual about that). Lauren wanted to get an urgent message to him about the arrangements for a campaign meeting. She hadn’t been able to get hold of him on the phone. A fair percentage of the time, the phone at Corey’s place was disconnected because the bill wasn’t paid.
‘Are you going to see Corey this afternoon?’ Lauren asked me on her way out of the main school gate.
I shrugged. No idea.
‘Oh … I don’t know if I should take this note to his house or –’
‘Don’t do that,’ I answered quickly. I knew Corey didn’t want anyone going round to his place and especially wouldn’t want Lauren there. ‘I’ll take the note to him.’
‘You sure? Okay … thanks,’ she said and handed me the piece of paper with meeting gumph on it.
‘No worries,’ I said and headed off on my board towards Corey’s place.
The Matthews’ house was right out past the silos on the western edge of town – out of town really, with no other houses closer than five hundred metres. A bunch of Matthewses had lived in that house for a long time, back to Corey’s great-grandparents at least. The place was – well, let’s just say the Matthewses hadn’t put a lot of effort into home renovation and interior decoration.
It was originally a fibro house but in spots where walls had been damaged or windows broken over the years, they’d nailed on sheets of corrugated iron to patch holes. That’s why gossipy types in town liked to say the Matthews ‘lived in a tin humpy’. The block of land sloped down to a creek which was more like a swamp really. The swampiness oozed up and turned the yard into a muddy mess. Old car bodies and unidentifiable rusted junk sprouted in the long grass around the house.
I’d never been inside the Matthews’ place. Ever. That might sound weird: that I’d never been inside my best friend’s house. The thing is, Corey always quietly arranged things so that no one – not even me – came to his house. You can understand why. We never talked about it directly – it was sort of an unspoken rule.
On the nights when Corey went home after he’d been at our place, Mum would insist that she drive him. He always said thanks and jumped quickly out of the car in front of his house. So I’d mostly seen the Matthews’ place at night from the road.
Going up the front path that Friday afternoon, I noticed that Warren Beggs’s van wasn’t parked out the front. That was a relief. I knocked on the front door a few times. No answer. I figured no one was home or they were asleep or out of it. I bent down to push Lauren’s note under the front door but as I accidentally brushed the flaky brown paint with my knuckles, the door swung open.
‘Hello?’ I called out. ‘Corey? It’s Zac. Anyone home?’
No sound came from anywhere in the house. At that point, I should’ve left the note and gone home. But the curiosity was just too strong. I wanted to check out where my friend lived. I’m not proud of it but that’s what was in my head.
The inside of the house was pretty much a wreck, with rubbish and bottles and car parts piled everywhere. There were holes in the walls where it looked like someone had put their fist through. It was dark because so many of the windows had been boarded up with roofing tin and there was the damp, sour smell of a place that doesn’t get any sunlight into it.
The lounge room had two scabby couches and a table covered in more empty booze bottles along with a few bongs, bits of aluminium foil and other gear. Everyone in town knew that Warren was a major pothead plus whatever else he was into. Whenever some guy in Narragindi talked big about dope around us, Corey wouldn’t say anything out loud. But he’d flash me a look and groan. He was more against drugs than anyone I knew.
The two bedrooms I could see were dark as caves and sour-stinking. One was strewn with motorcycle parts, waiting for Corey’s uncle to get out of jail and reassemble them.
I’m no clean-freak but the kitchen was pretty disgusting. More bottles everywhere plus plates covered in congealed fat and crusty chunks, some of it furred with fungus. Maybe it was hard for Trisha to clean up with her broken arm and that explained the mess. But there was nothing about that kitchen to make you think a person ever cooked proper food in it.
I peeked into the tiny bathroom. Behind the festy shower curtain, I coul
d see the shower recess was filled up with boxes of brand new DVD players, cordless phones and other electrical stuff. The shower must’ve been where Warren stored some of the items he pinched. But where were people in the house supposed to wash?
Out the back, the floor sloped away where the house was sinking into the boggy ground. Tacked on to the side of the kitchen was an old verandah that had been turned into another small room. I could tell straightaway that was where Corey slept.
It was a narrow space just big enough for a single bed and a row of cement-block shelves. Photos ripped out of skate magazines were blutacked onto the wall beside the bed, just like in my room at home. There wasn’t much stuff there. Anything Corey cared about – like the skatepark model or the sketchbooks with his drawings – he kept in his locker at school.
The thing that really hit me about Corey’s little space was how neat it was. The bed was made perfectly, like a bunk in an army barracks. Over the end rail of the bed, a bath towel was hanging smooth and straight. Clothes were folded and stacked, super-tidy, on the shelves. It was Corey’s neat little survival capsule in the middle of all that chaos and filth. I guess he preferred to be right out the back of the house too. I bet Warren didn’t bother coming back that far very often so it was safer and quieter.
Suddenly just being in that house gave me the creeps big-time and I decided to get out of there. Heading through the kitchen, I noticed the laundry off to one side. By the laundry tub, there was an old purple lunch box stacked with toothbrush, shampoo and other bathroom stuff. That must’ve been what Corey used as a bathroom. Far out, it must’ve been icy to have a wash at the laundry tub in that cold, cold house.
I was almost at the front door when I heard the car: Warren coming home, swinging his van onto the grass out the front. As he walked up to the front door, I shot back through the house and ducked into Corey’s verandah room.
Warren Beggs’s runners made a wheezing plastic noise on the floorboards as he made his way through the house. I considered sneaking out the back way but then remembered I’d left my skateboard propped inside the front door. Why was I such an idiot? I hoped Warren wouldn’t spot it. I couldn’t leave it behind without Corey knowing I’d been stickybeaking. So I was stranded, waiting for a chance to grab my board.
