Give Me Four Reasons

by Lizzie Wilcock

  ‘I have to go,’ I say to Skye, Christy and the other girls. I put the empty punch jug down on the table and take the food platter that Mum hands me over to the boys. One of the boys has a squashed-up face, a bit like a monkey’s.

  ‘Hey, you’re a mini-Felicity,’ the monkey boy says as he scoops dip onto a chip.

  ‘I’m Paige,’ I say, buoyed by my success at talking to the girls.

  ‘Well, hello, Paige,’ the boy says, taking my hand and kissing it. ‘I’m Justin.’

  My face burns and I smile up at him shyly.

  ‘Paige,’ he whispers conspiratorially, putting his lips close to my ear, ‘is it true that your sister and Adam broke up?’

  I look up at him. ‘Yes,’ I say.

  Justin takes the platter from me and gives it to one of his friends. He puts his arm around me and guides me towards the fence. I see Christy watching me enviously from across the pool. ‘Is Felicity cut up about it?’ Justin asks.

  Across the yard, my sister throws back her head and laughs loudly as she greets a group of kids who have just arrived.

  ‘Well, she was really sad,’ I tell him.

  ‘Do you think I could cheer her up? Do you think she’s ready for a new boyfriend?’

  I remember how devastated Felicity was yesterday. I’d never seen her so down. But there are usually only a few days or weeks before she’s giggling on the phone with the next boyfriend.

  I shrug. ‘I guess so.’

  Justin squeezes my arm. ‘Thanks, kid. I think you’re going to be seeing a lot more of me around here.’ He swaggers off in my sister’s direction. He whispers something in her ear and Felicity laughs.

  I smile, reckoning I might just have helped mend my sister’s broken heart.

  Back at the table, Mum has made more punch. I smile at her and take the tray over to another group of older kids.

  Suddenly, Skye grabs me from behind. ‘Hi, Paige,’ she says. ‘So, who was Adam kissing?’

  ‘I … I don’t know,’ I say.

  ‘Come on, Paige,’ Skye purrs. ‘I’m Felicity’s friend. I just want to watch out for her, you know. I don’t want to be seen talking to her worst enemy. So, was it Katie Harkness?’

  ‘No,’ I blurt out, ‘some girl called Willa.’

  ‘Willa!’ Skye roars with laughter. ‘I’ve got nothing to worry about.’ She runs back to tell Christy and her other friends what I said.

  As I walk back to the table to get more punch glasses for the tray, Christy strides over and pulls me aside. ‘So, Paige. What did Justin have to say?’

  ‘Justin?’ I follow her gaze to the boys, who are now splashing in the pool. ‘Oh, monkey boy?’

  ‘Monkey boy! You’re funny, Paige. So …?’

  I hesitate, wondering if I should tell her.

  ‘Come on, Paige,’ she prods. ‘You’re really pretty. Was Justin asking you out?’

  ‘No!’I say, squirming at the thought. ‘He’s interested in Felicity.’

  Christy suddenly drops my arm and pads back to her friends.

  I float off in a cloud. She said I was pretty. No one has said that before, except my parents, and they don’t count.

  Suddenly the thirty teenagers in and around the pool stop their conversations. Everyone is looking at the boy and the girl who have just walked in through the gate.

  Felicity does not rush over to greet them as she has done for every other new group of guests. Instead, she walks slowly, gracefully, swinging her hips, almost as though she is on a catwalk.

  ‘Hello, Adam,’ she says. ‘Hello, Willa.’

  Adam takes my sister’s hand and tries to draw her aside. She wriggles out from his grasp and notices that all eyes are on her. She glares at Willa. ‘You told!’

  Willa shakes her head. ‘There’s nothing to tell, Felicity. It was just a Merry Christmas peck on the cheek.’

  ‘Yeah, right, Willa!’ yells one of the boys from the pool. ‘We all know what you’re like!’

  Willa shrinks towards the gate. Skye rushes over to her and hugs her. Justin leaps out of the pool and steps up to Adam. He pokes him in the chest. ‘You’ve got a hide turning up here tonight, mate!’

  ‘I knew this would happen,’ Mum says to me. ‘Go and get your father.’

  I hesitate before I set off towards the house. I can’t take my eyes off the argument beside the pool.

  ‘What’s it got to do with you?’ Adam says to Justin.

  ‘Felicity’s with me now,’ Justin declares.

  ‘What?’ shrieks Christy.

  ‘What?’ shrieks Felicity.

  Willa and Skye roar with laughter.

  Christy pounces across the pavers to Felicity, and shoves her, hard.

  ‘Hey!’ says Felicity, and shoves Christy back.

  Just then, Adam swings back his arm and punches Justin in the nose. Justin falls backward into the pool and Adam jumps on top of him. They wrestle underwater.

  Dad comes out of the house before I can get to the back door. He strides across the garden and through the gate to the pool area. ‘Stop!’ he shouts.

  The party goes silent. I have never heard Dad yell before.

  ‘Go home!’ Dad says. ‘All of you!’

  The boys stumble from the pool and wrap their towels around themselves. Everybody is on their mobile phones, calling their parents to come and get them. Within minutes all the partygoers are gone.

  Felicity bursts into tears and Mum goes to her. Dad looks at his elder daughter and I hear a faint groan escape his lips. He closes his eyes and I can tell that his teeth are clenched.

  ‘I’m leaving,’ he says.

  Mum doesn’t hear him. She is listening to Felicity.

  ‘But I didn’t tell anyone about what happened between Adam and Willa,’my sister cries. ‘How did everyone know?’

  I gulp.

  ‘I’m leaving,’ Dad says again, louder this time. Mum still hasn’t heard him, or if she has, she’s ignoring him.

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ I say, wanting to get far away from my sister before she realises what I’ve done.

  ‘No,’ Dad says. ‘I’m going alone. I need to get away.’

  ‘What … what are you saying, Dad?’ I ask.

  My father takes me by the hand and leads me over to where Mum and Felicity are sitting. ‘Nicole, Felicity, Paige,’ he says. Mum and my sister finally look at him. Mum bites her bottom lip like she does when she sees something bad in someone’s future.

  ‘I’m leaving,’ Dad says for the third time. ‘Your mum and I have had a talk and we think it’s the best thing for me to do.’

  Mum gets up and goes inside the house. Felicity says nothing. I put my fingers in my ears, as if there is still water in them from all the swimming I did last night.

  Dad exhales, almost as though he’s relieved. ‘We weren’t going to say anything until after Christmas, but I can’t wait that long. And there’s never going to be a good time.’

  Felicity blinks at Dad.

  I pick up a bowl and offer him a chip. I can’t think of anything else to do.

  8

  Felicity and I are banished to our bedrooms. She keeps coming through our shared bathroom and knocking on my closed door, but I pretend to be asleep. I can’t face her.

  I can’t sleep. When the light under our bathroom door goes out, I creep along the hallway to my parents’ bedroom. The door is open and the light is on. Dad is in there. A suitcase lies on the bed and Dad is filling it with clothes.

  I go to his wardrobe and take out his Hawaiian shirt and the board shorts I gave him last Christmas.

  ‘Thanks, Possum,’ he says, and packs them into the suitcase.

  I go back to his wardrobe and grab hold of a pile of t-shirts and jeans and shorts. I place them on top of the other things.

  ‘Hey, are you trying to get rid of me?’ he says.

  ‘The sooner you go, the sooner you’ll be back,’ I say, trying to keep my voice bright.

  I hold up his blue-and-red striped
jumper. ‘You probably won’t need this, but the nights might be cool if you’re out walking on the beach or if you go into the mountains,’ I say. I push the jumper into his hands.

  ‘You should take a raincoat in case you go rock fishing.’ I grab his coat off its hanger and roll it up. ‘And you’ll need your reef shoes so you don’t slip on the rocks.’ I dig the shoes out from the sliding storage box under the bed.

  Dad grabs my wrists and sits on the bed so he is my height. ‘I’m not going on holiday, Paige.’

  ‘Then … where are you going?’

  ‘Well, tonight I’m going to stay with a … a friend and tomorrow I’ll start looking for a new place to live.’

  ‘But what’s wrong with this place? You’ve lived here for nearly twenty years. I thought you liked it. It’s our home.’

  Dad sighs. ‘Remember how we talked about changes and that some changes are good?’

  I nod.

  ‘Well, this is a change Mum and I need to make to start feeling good again. I hope one day you’ll understand and you’ll forgive me for leaving.’

  I nod again, not understanding and not forgiving.

  Dad zips the suitcase closed and heaves it off the bed. ‘I’ll come over on Christmas Day, okay? That’s only a few days away. But I’ll call you before then and you can call me on my mobile anytime.’

  He carries the suitcase to the front door, past the spare room. The door is closed and I can hear the lilting sound of panpipe music. Mum is burning frankincense. It’s usually one of my favourite scents, but tonight it makes me feel sick.

  Dad puts down his suitcase and fumbles through his pockets for his car keys.

  ‘Aren’t you going to say goodbye to Mum and Felicity?’ I ask.

  ‘I’ve already said goodbye to them, Poss.’

  He hugs me and I hug him back fiercely, thinking that my physical strength is all that’s needed to keep him here. But he peels my fingers off his back and steps through the front door, quickly pulling it closed behind him.

  He didn’t even look at me. I realise that if I hadn’t come out of my bedroom when I did, he would not have said goodbye.

  I wake up early the next morning with a weird, hollow feeling in my chest. I go to my parents’ room and stare at my father’s side of the bed. It’s empty.

  I go to the wardrobe in my bedroom and dig up my Passport. It’s empty, too.

  Everything that happened in the past couple of days is real.

  I go to the kitchen and start eating fruit rings straight out of the packet. When my fingers are stained pink and blue and purple, and the packet is empty, I start thinking about the long summer holiday ahead of me.

  Dad has gone away, and none of my friends are around, either.

  I have no one to talk to about Dad leaving.

  And then it occurs to me that maybe I’m the reason why everyone has gone away. I’m so boring, they don’t want to spend any more time with me. Even my own father can’t take it. He couldn’t even look me in the eye when he left.

  What if my mother and sister decide to leave me, too?

  I can’t let Mum and Felicity forget about me. And I can’t let them walk out on me, either.

  So I make them both a breakfast tray with toast and cereal. I make herbal tea for Mum and pour out some orange juice for my sister. I run outside to the frangipani tree and pick two flowers. Then I place a flower on the corner of each tray.

  I take Mum’s tray in first.

  She is sitting cross-legged on the floor in the spare room and her eyes are closed.

  I put the tray on the table beside her crystal ball. I glance into it, but all I see is my wonky reflection. Mum hasn’t opened her eyes. I cough quietly.

  Mum answers me with an ohm. It’s the noise she makes when she’s meditating. She says she goes inside herself to find inner peace.

  I cough again.

  ‘Ohm,’ Mum chants. ‘Ohm.’

  ‘I brought you some breakfast.’

  ‘Thank you, darling,’ Mum whispers, but she still doesn’t open her eyes.

  I get Felicity’s tray and knock on her door. There is no answer, so I open it and tiptoe to the bed. Again, I cough quietly.

  Felicity’s eyes snap open. ‘Dad?’ she says. But when she sees me her face crumples.

  ‘He’s gone,’ I tell her.

  ‘I know,’ Felicity wails, ‘and it’s all my fault!’

  ‘It’s not your fault, Fliss.’ I put the tray on her bedside table and cradle her head, swiping her hair off her face.

  ‘It is,’ she moans. ‘He left because of me. Because of my stupid party. He’s tired of all the drama. Tired of having to rescue me and put up with having noisy teenagers in his house. That’s why he’s been spending so much time at work. And last night was just the last straw.’

  I feel sick. I jump up. ‘I’ve got to go, Fliss,’ I say.

  I run through our bathroom into my bedroom and shut the door. Is it true? Is that why Dad left? I know he hates drama and confrontation. If he left because of the trouble at Felicity’s party last night, that means he really left because of me. I caused the fight by telling the older kids about Willa kissing Adam.

  I lie in bed, thinking and crying and cuddling my bears.

  Felicity lies in her bed, crying and making phone calls to her friends.

  Mum sits in the spare room, chanting.

  When evening comes, I make dinner. I’m determined to become indispensable to my mother and sister. As I try to separate the strands of gluggy cooked spaghetti I wonder what Dad is having for dinner. He can’t cook to save his life. I spoon the bolognaise sauce onto each pile of spaghetti, add a sprinkle of parmesan cheese, and a glass of water to each tray, then take the first tray to Mum in the spare room.

  ‘Thanks, Paige,’ Mum says. I wait for her to say more, to start eating, but she doesn’t. She just sits and stares at a pile of shiny black rocks etched with strange inscriptions.

  Felicity allows me to place her tray on her lap. She picks up her fork and starts pushing at the lumpy bits of mincemeat. Then she drops her fork. It clatters onto the tray. She glares at me. ‘Spag bol is Dad’s favourite. You know that, don’t you?’

  ‘It … it’s the only meat we had in the freezer. And it’s the only thing I know how to cook.’

  Felicity pushes her tray away. ‘I’m sorry, Paige. I can’t eat this. Not without Dad here.’

  I sigh and take my sister’s tray back to the kitchen. I sit at the bench, staring into my own plate of spaghetti bolognaise for a long time. I remember what Dad’s face looks like when he greedily slurps up strands of pasta and licks red sauce off his chin.

  I reach for the telephone and dial Dad’s mobile number. ‘I have two uneaten plates of spag bol here,’ I want to tell him.

  But I hang up before he answers. I can’t entice my father back home with food. And when Mum returns her untouched tray to the kitchen a little while later, I’m glad I didn’t try. It’s lumpy and tasteless and boring. Nobody wants something like that.

  On the third day after Dad leaves I wake up and I want to scream. The house is too quiet. Felicity is not blasting her music. Mum hasn’t had any clients. And my father is not mowing lawns or tinkering around the house, making sure everything is in order. I’m usually the quiet one, but this is too much, even for me. I have to do something.

  I make Mum’s breakfast tray and take it into her bedroom. ‘We need to go shopping,’ I tell her.

  Mum sips her herbal tea. It is the first time I have seen her eat or drink anything in three days. ‘I’m not really in the mood for Christmas shopping,’ she says.

  I knew she would say that. ‘It’s not Christmas shopping, Mum. We need to get my new uniform for high school.’

  ‘There’s plenty of time for that,’ Mum says with a wave of her hand.

  ‘No, there’s not,’ I insist. ‘We don’t want to leave it until the last minute. All the clothes in my size might be gone.’

  Mum sighs and gazes out
the window. The sky is cobalt blue and the temperature is set to soar. It’s a perfect day for enjoying the beach or the pool. Mum blows on her tea and takes another sip. Her hands are shaky as she sets it down. ‘I suppose you’re right.’

  It’s only four blocks to Farram’s Uniforms in the main street, but after Mum has showered and dressed she reaches for her car keys.

  ‘Let’s walk,’I suggest. I grab our hats off the hooks in the laundry and almost push my mother out the front door. She puts on her sunglasses and keeps her head down as we walk past the neighbours’ houses. Purple and white agapanthus flowers are in bloom in their front yards. Mum loves agapanthuses but this morning she does not stop to admire them. She is walking so fast that I have difficulty keeping up.

  ‘Come on, Paige,’ she calls from the corner of our street. ‘I don’t have all day.’

  Yes, you do, I want to tell her. I can’t bear for her to return to the spare room and ohm all day. I’ve got to keep her busy.

  ‘Remember how we used to come to this park?’ I say as I catch up to her. I look across the road to the playground nestled under gum trees in the spacious reserve. A father is pushing his two young daughters on the swings. The girls squeal in delight. ‘You used to love playing on the swings more than I did. Let’s have a turn.’

  ‘Let’s just get your uniform, Paige,’ Mum snaps.

  We walk the rest of the way to the shops in silence. The main street is almost deserted, even though it’s a weekday. Most people now shop over at the huge mall near the edge of town.

  Mrs Farram greets us with a tape measure slung over her shoulder and pins sticking out of the corner of her mouth. ‘Hello. What can I do for you?’ she mumbles.

  ‘Paige is starting at Juniper Bay High next year,’ Mum says.

  Mrs Farram wraps the tape measure around my chest, my waist and then my hips. ‘Well, haven’t you grown, Paige?’ she says, looking at the numbers. She struts off to the rack labelled ‘Juniper Bay High’. She returns with a blue and mauve checked skirt and a white blouse.

  ‘These should fit, but I may need to take up the hem on the skirt,’ Mrs Farram says.

  I take the clothes and walk over to the changing room. Mum follows. She stands outside the heavy blue curtain while I strip off. I try on the blouse then step into the skirt and zip it up. The skirt is quite long, but at least it fits. I pull the curtain back.