Neville was sitting behind his desk and Trevor was leaning over, pointing to some paper or other. I could see them grinning, chuckling. It was a warm sound that made me feel lonely. I suddenly realized I was seeing something private. Neville leaned across and kissed Trevor, really kissed him. Like, I could handle a kiss like that (just … not from Neville). I backed away from the door, feeling like there was a whole lot of stuff going on that I just couldn’t see. On the merry-go-round, in the dark, Bird had said that owls are special because they’re the only birds with eyes that face front; I was like all the other birds who can only see out the sides. I wondered what else I had missed.
Why couldn’t I call Chloe? I had so much to tell her. We’d sit by her pool in our undersized bikinis and oversize sunglasses and I’d relay the whole Greek tragedy of infidelity and betrayal and secrets, but then I remembered: this was Chloe—scandal was her stock in trade, she wouldn’t bat an eyelid. Now, if I told Sarita her eyes would bug out and her mouth would pop. She’d get that crazy giggle going. She’d look at me with awe. It occurred to me that I didn’t want to leave with Sarita hating me. I vowed to spend the remainder of the day getting her back in my pocket.
26
A Basically Hostile Environment
I entered the rec room for Trevor’s talk fully prepared to participate, but when I plonked down among the Honey-eaters, the hate was evident. Sarita, Fleur, even the twins reacted like those weighted children’s toys that start off leaning toward you and then swing wildly in the opposite direction. Soon there was enough space around me for a head spin or an epileptic seizure. So I spread out. I crossed my legs swami style and leaned back on my palms. I lifted my chin and smiled Zenly. Only faithful Bird was being nice to me. He scuttled over with a piece of paper.
“I need you to do something for me.”
“What?” I looked down at the paper. “What’s this?”
“A request list. Dylan is going into town this afternoon.”
“Okay,” I said. “What do you need me for?”
“I need you to ask for spark plugs.”
“Why don’t you ask for them?”
“Please, Riley. Please. ”
He looked so pained I almost laughed.
“I love it when you beg.”
I found Dylan. He looked like he was still shitty with me.
“Heard you’re going into town.” I waved the page at him.
Dylan’s eyes were bleary. “I have to get a new prescription.”
I raised my eyebrows, remembering his portable pharmacy.
“Trevor ‘Parks and Wildlife’ is giving me a lift after lunch.” He shrugged. “Just don’t ask me to get you anything illegal or period-related.”
“You wouldn’t buy me tampons? That’s cold.”
I looked at the sheet of paper.
Fleur: menthol throat lozenges, Evian atomizer. One blue rose.
I guess this meant she was talking to him now. “Is this a request list or a scavenger hunt?”
Dylan shrugged again.
Laura & Lisa: Violet Crumbles x2, family-size block of Cadbury Dairy Milk. 2L Pepsi Max.
Richard: The Financial Review. Time magazine. Ethan: sour snakes.
Sarita hadn’t written anything. I looked at her braids, her bushy eyebrows. I unclipped the pen and wrote:
Riley: metal comb, sharp scissors, Hella Hot Oil hair conditioner, tweezers.
I could feel Bird staring at my back. I turned to see his panicked grin. He was giving me the thumbs-up. I worried that he might cut off his own circulation. That can happen. I turned back and wrote spark plugs. Don’t ask.
I passed the list to Dylan and turned my attention to the stage. Trevor and Neville were bonding over the slide machine. They were talking closely. Could they make it any more obvious?
Neville introduced Trevor in exactly the same words that he’d used in his office. Trevor did his broad Aussie “G’day” and the audience echoed him, ruffling with laughter. Roslyn hit the lights and the first slide came up.
Trevor said, “This picture is what it’s all about. For a while there it looked like we were going to lose the Little Desert. Developers wanted it for farming. If there hadn’t been such a massive public outcry, well, we wouldn’t be here now. It just goes to show you that sometimes the people have the right idea and sometimes the people actually win.”
Trevor clicked to the next slide. “This aerial view was taken in the winter. Those ridges there are sand dunes. You see those water holes—soaks, we call them—some of them are recurring salt lakes. Fraser—the bloke who used to own this place before Neville’s mob took over—believed that one of the lakes had healing properties.” Trevor looked down and smiled. “He went a bit loopy-loo in the end. He thought the crater on the southwest of the property was caused by a spaceship.”
Neville coughed loudly. Trevor glanced back at him. “Righto.” He clicked onto the next slide. “What are we looking at?”
We all stared. A few dim nothings surfaced. Bird piped up, “Malleefowl. Leipoa ocellata. ”
Trevor pointed to a bird camouflaged in the scrub. Echoes of recognition bounced around the room.
“Right. That fella is a lowan bird, aka malleefowl. He’s indigenous to the area, but you already knew that, didn’t you?”
The Mallees chortled and goggled at their namesake.
“He’s a stately gent, I reckon,” Trevor went on. “You wouldn’t know it to look at him, but he’s just put in a twenty-four hour day.”
More slides followed the mallee through his workday. Trevor provided the soundtrack. “The malleefowl is a megapode. That means he doesn’t have a typical nest—he’s a mound-building bird. Megapodes are rare enough, but the malleefowl is rarer still because they have to incubate their eggs in a basically hostile environment. Think about the extremes in weather you’ve had just in the last couple of days. This land is a contradiction. It’s a desert, but it’s full of life. And all the flora and fauna here are built to survive. Nature adapts. If you ever needed an argument for evolution—”
Neville coughed again. Trevor looked across, copped a headshake and a frown. He readjusted the slides before continuing with a new line.
“In the mornings the male mallee opens the mound to get the sun in and at night he covers it up against the chill. Throughout the day he fills it with leaves and bark and dead vegetation.”
Bird called out, “The mounds are a meter deep, I’ve seen them.”
Trevor smiled. “Mate. If you could bottle that bird’s dedication …”
Fleur put her hand up. “Where’s the female mallee bird while all this is happening?”
Trevor laughed. “Shopping!” Everyone laughed with him. And because I was “participating” I laughed too, but it sounded hollow and at one point, while my mouth was open and my eyes were desperate, I caught Dylan watching. I longed for a mallee mound big enough to hide in.
On the way out I put my hand on the back of Dylan’s chair. “So what happened to your stash?”
“Someone nicked it.”
“You serious?”
He nodded and made to move off. I kept my hand firm and my head wistful. I wanted to feel close to him. I had a feeling that I could tell him anything and he wouldn’t judge me. Dylan turned around and stared at my fingers. “More wheelchair theory: the chair becomes an extension of the body. A less relaxed mutard might think you were trying to invade his personal space.”
“Oh.” I tapped my rings against the metal and then fluttered my fingers up and away.
27
God’s Great Hearth
Because of the rain, all outdoor activities were canceled. The Mallees and Bronzewings got the rec room, while the Honeyeaters were sequestered in a steaming trailer behind the counselors’ annex. I sat in the back with my bunker book. It was just past midday—only ten hours until my great escape. Would I make it? I decided my participation would be a kind of social experiment. All the more to entertain Chloe with when I got ba
ck. Meanwhile, Roslyn was passing around a box of “memory crosses.” She stood at the front of the room, memory cross in hand, looking like she was about to pop.
“Everyone listen—these are ter-rif-ic. They’re interactive. What you do is, you fold the panels over, and each time you ‘switch’ you get a different scripture. The pastor who invented these was trying to find a way to help his children memorize scriptures. I heard he started with a paper plane, but you can guess what happened there.” Roslyn shook her head as if to say crazy kids, and then she performed this fast switching technique with a madman look in her eye that made me wonder if she hadn’t once moonlighted as a croupier.
“See?” Roslyn elicited “Oohs” with her sleight of hand. “Aren’t they nifty? Have a go. It’s easy once you get the hang of it. Ter-rif-ic.”
It was easy. The elementary school version of the memory cross was the paper fortune teller: fold a square in fourths, unfold, turn the corners in, then flip and fold again, put your fingers in the slits, and switch, switch, switch. In between You will be super-famous; Your crush knows you like him, there was always poison. Everyone knows you smell bad, You will die in a terrible accident. Crazy kids.
I held up my memory cross. The panels were illustrated with bright colors and dull Scriptures, and I’d had mine in hand for maybe seven seconds before I let loose with my Sharpie. On the panel that read My father’s house has many rooms, I changed “rooms” to “goons.” I chuckled at my wit and wished I had someone to share it with, but even Dylan had taken off his biker gloves and was studiously switching. His hands were smooth and pale and his skin looked tissue-paper thin. I wondered if it was true that the physically impaired developed heightened perception in other areas to compensate for what they’d lost—like how a blind man can hear better. I liked thinking that Dylan’s hands were high voltage. I pictured sparks flying as our fingers brushed over his cigarette pack. I wanted to touch his hand then. I wanted to so much that my mouth went dry.
“Riley?” I nearly jumped. Roslyn was at my shoulder, eyeing my handiwork. She took the defaced cross out of my hand and sighed. “You think you’re being funny, Riley, but all you’re really doing is advertising your ignorance.”
Her words stung more than they should have. It could have been because she said it so loudly. I asked, “Why does this make me ignorant?”
She shook her head. “Godless fools know nothing of scripture.”
The whole idea of participation went out the window.
“Well, I just can’t see how any intelligent person can believe in God,” I declared. “You can’t seriously tell me He’s up there watching everybody all the time. If the big man’s so powerful, why doesn’t He do something about the world going to shit?”
“Let’s talk about it,” Roslyn said. “What does everybody else think?”
Lisa or Laura piped up, “I think God made man and man made the mess—but if we pray hard enough, He will forgive us.”
“Nice.” Roslyn nodded.
“And then what will He do?” I asked.
Lisa/Laura looked at me like the answer was obvious. “He’ll start again, like He did with Noah. He’ll take only the best people.”
“Who are the best people?” I demanded. “You?”
“Well, yeah.”
“It says in the Bible—,” Richard started, but I stared him down.
“You can’t believe in the Bible,” I snapped. “If you believe in that, then you think that women should serve men and that gays have something wrong with them.”
“Yeah!” Craig was grinning. I wanted to slap him.
Ethan whirled around in his chair. “The scriptures are the word of the Lord. If you don’t accept Jesus’ teachings, then you can’t enter the kingdom of heaven. You’ll suffer in the long run.”
“I’m already suffering.”
Dylan spoke in a low voice. “You don’t know what suffering is.”
Everybody was quiet. I was stunned—I didn’t expect to get shit from Dylan. And then I started to get angry. I stumbled over my words. “You of all people should understand what I’m talking about.”
“Riley,” Roslyn warned.
“What kind of God does that!” I pointed to Dylan’s chair.
“Riley, that’s quite enough!”
I pressed my forehead on the desktop. “I didn’t mean … Forget it.”
Roslyn swayed. “Let’s cool it down, Honeyeaters!” She tried to distract us with more cardboard. “These are blank memory crosses. I want you to fill these in. You don’t have to use His words, you can use your own. Use ‘positivisms.’ Write down the nicest thing a person’s ever said to you, or the happiest holiday you can remember.”
Dylan put his hand up. “What if you don’t have any … posits?”
“Positivisms.” The word had reverb, and Roslyn suddenly looked doubtful. I saw what she saw. Apart from the glossy-ad perfection of Fleur and Craig, we were a motley crew. We were the unwanted or unruly, bullies and bed wetters side by side under God’s great hearth.
“Everybody has a positivism,” Roslyn insisted.
Bird burped and then clapped and laughed.
“You reckon?” I muttered.
I opened my blank cross and wrote on the panels:
Sorry about Craig
But seriously, you’re not missing much
Really
We could both do better
I have an idea for your new look
Let’s talk
Smiley face
Hugs
And then I flicked it so that it landed on Sarita’s desk. Sarita’s hand closed over it. Roslyn swooped down and held out her own hand. Sarita kept hers clenched. Roslyn stared at me. She jerked her palm-tree head and I waited for the coconuts to fall. “Riley, I want a word with you outside.”
Bird swung around in his seat. He looked stricken, but I was playing Roslyn’s fool, bride-stepping down the aisle, acknowledging each of my “fellow” Honeyeaters with a neat, mechanical nod. Ethan and Richard were glowering at me; Sarita was wide-eyed; Fleur’s face was all screwed up, like someone had farted. Craig was smirking. Dylan was leaning back with his arms folded, his eyes as flat as when he’d been handed his token YL vest onstage. I felt myself wilting. I dropped my pose. What had I done?
My dressing-down happened outside on the plain in the pouring rain.
Roslyn was “concerned” for me. She said she understood from Neville that I’d lost my mother and that I was having difficulty “adjusting.”
“You don’t have to tell me being young is difficult—I used to be young,” Roslyn said earnestly. I snorted.
“It’s the time when you most often feel like you can’t talk to anyone, but truly, Riley, talking is the best thing for you. If you don’t want to talk to me, then talk to God. That’s what He’s here for. Outside you’re laughing, but inside you’re screaming, right?”
Right.
Roslyn made soothing sounds. “Riley, I feel your pain. Look at you—you’re like this …” She did an impression of somebody in a straitjacket. I wanted to claw at her crow’s-feet and spit on her halo.
She rubbed my shoulder. “You’re all closed up. What are you thinking? Just say it.”
So I said it. Or rather I started saying it, but ended up shouting it.
“I don’t believe in you, Roslyn. I don’t believe in Spirit Ranch. And I don’t believe in your God. He let my mother die a week before I got my first period, when I really could have used the girl-talk. He gave me a wonky cycle. Which in turn made the doctor put me on the Pill. Which in turn made me fat. Which in turn made me anxious.”
Roslyn had her hands on my shoulders but I. Could. Not. Stop.
“So then I’m fourteen and on the Pill, do you think HE stops the rumor mill? NO. So boys are starting to notice me—great—until AFTER when said boys bark at me like I’m a dog. HE could have done something about that. Don’t you think?”
Roslyn’s mouth was open. She winced and twitched and
her eyes looked like lines, just lines jumping around a page.
“And just when things are starting to get normal and I have a friend who does crazy stuff and a guy who likes me, HE sends me here. So you tell me, Roslyn, because I can’t see, I just can’t see what HIS divine plan is unless it’s to drive me completely fucking crazy.”
Somebody clapped. Someone else giggled. I looked up. Every single window of the trailer had a face in it. All of the Honeyeaters knew my pain. I had laid myself open, but Roslyn was wrong on that score, too, because I didn’t feel better, I felt a hundred times worse.
28
Assorted Guys
The sun was back out on this most schizophrenic of days. I skipped lunch and the off-site activity and went back to Fraser’s house, where I smoked and read Utopia and schemed a running order for my great escape. Dinner would be finishing around seven, and then there’d be campfire jollies. Dylan would have returned by then, so I could pack up Sarita’s makeover kit with instructions and she’d still get to be beautiful, and maybe might forgive me. There was going to be a movie later. That gave me just over an hour to walk to Nhill. Thank God I’d brought my combat boots.
But time seemed to stop at Fraser’s house. I couldn’t hear anything except birds. And the excitement I was feeling about my future escape kept bumping up against worry. What if night never came and all I had was this day—this series of humiliations? What if what happened at camp didn’t stay at camp?
I ground my cigarette into the sand and sent myself on a lazy spin on the merry-go-round. Craig’s face, blank and bastardly, circled my mind. I pushed it away and tried to concentrate on my imminent freedom, but his face came back laughing. More faces came—assorted guys from adventures past, Noah “Krakatoa” and Murray from the ice cream parlor—tumbled all the way back down the conveyer belt to Aaron Becker. All those guys and they all had the same expression, because none of them really liked me. And I didn’t really like them. I just liked to feel liked. I knew all this. I wasn’t stupid. I also knew that just because I could get a guy off didn’t mean I was skilled. “It’s not rocket science, Riley,” Chloe had said. “It’s friction.”
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