by Penni Russon
‘I’ll see you at the rockpool after dinner?’
We always met there on the first night. It was tradition.
‘Yep.’
I walked back up to our campsite, which is at the quiet end. Mum and Dad like having lots of trees around us. Zara’s mum likes being close to the facilities.
I was still thinking about Zara. You know what my mum’s going to say? She’s going to say that the up side of Mieke not coming till later is that it will give me and Zara a chance to get to know each other better. But is that a good thing? What if we get to know each other and she realises just how many Greek letters there are between alpha and omicron? What if this is the summer she finally says she doesn’t want to hang out with me anymore?
‘What if it is?’ says inner-Mum.
‘I don’t think I could handle that kind of rejection,’ I answer out loud. ‘Besides, I like being an Indigo Girl. It’s fun. And it’s kind of special. Like a holiday from me.’ Inner-Mum nods knowingly and takes a memo for later. Wants to take a holiday from self.
Mum (my real mum, that is, not inner-Mum which is, let’s be honest, just me talking to myself) is a psychotherapist, which doesn’t mean she’s a therapist who’s psycho, because that’s one of those jokes that gets old fast. She’s like a cross between a psychiatrist and a counsellor. She’s a trained doctor (like a psychiatrist) but she believes in something called cognitive behavioural therapy instead of prescribing drugs, which means she tries to make you change the way you think. Anyway, I’m sure having a mum who’s a psychotherapist messes with your head because there I was, walking along talking to myself.
And there was Ivan, watching me talking to myself. ‘Who’s the social reject now?’ I muttered.
‘Pardon?’ he said.
‘What?’ I said. I know, this is classic material. So worth recording for posterity.
‘Were you talking to me?’
‘Oh. Um. No,’ I said. Monosyllabic much?
He looked around. ‘You do realise there’s no one else here?’
‘I know.’ You know there are those girls who can blush a pretty rose colour and boys are apparently enchanted by it and therefore you get away with being a complete idiot? Yeah, well, I can’t do that.
Though, bless him, he looked more confused than scornful.
I explained. ‘I was talking to myself. You know. As you do.’
‘As you do,’ he said, quite kindly really. His eyes even crinkled a bit like he was thinking about smiling sometime this millennium.
I walked away grinning maniacally to myself because you know what? I might have been sprung talking to myself, but in other news, Ivan Sutherland and Tilly Dove just had a conversation.
That night we cooked vegies on the barbeque: potato sliced thin, sprinkled with salt, pepper and rosemary, plus eggplant, zucchini, tomato and asparagus. We argued about whether or not to put salt on the asparagus. I did when Dad wasn’t looking.
Zara’s dad, Tony, came over and cooked their sausages on the hot plate next to ours. The dads all bonded over us when we were younger and they had to keep an eye on us.
They hung out together on the beach while we played. But they don’t actually have much in common. Zara’s dad is a cop. Mine teaches political science at uni. Not completely unrelated, I guess. Still, maybe it’s just me, but conversation doesn’t exactly flow.
We were all standing around cooking, Tony doing his sausages, and me and Dad with our stuff – we both like to be the boss of the barbeque too and we were arguing over possession of the spatula due to a difference in technique (much flipping back and forth versus wait, then flip once, then wait) – when along came Ivan.
‘Hey, Dad,’ he mumbled. ‘Mum wants to know if you want red wine or white tonight.’ Then Ivan turned to my dad and said, ‘Hi, Professor Dove.’
‘Call me Julian, please,’ Dad said waving a barbeque fork around, generally in my direction because I’d won possession of the spatula. He should watch it or Tony will arrest him for being armed and dangerous. Then Dad said to me, ‘Ivan was in my Language and Law class last year.’
I looked at Dad. He was? I sent little telepathic dagger points into Dad’s brain. How could something like that get by me?
‘It was a great class.’ Ivan was looking at me when he said that, so I nodded. Smooth.
‘Are you going on with Political Science this year?’ Dad asked Ivan.
‘It’s my major.’
‘What subjects are you doing?’ I asked. It was as if I was two people inhabiting the one body. As long as I was talking to Dad or Tony I was fine, but anything I said to Ivan made me sound like I was twelve years old. Talking underwater. In a second language.
‘Love, Family and Sexuality,’ Ivan answered. ‘World Politics in Transition. Australia in Conflict. And Transforming Terrorism.’
How cool are those subjects?
‘Love, Family and Sexuality is one of mine,’ said Dad.
‘And you’ll probably have Nina Rosse for Australia in Conflict. I think you’ll like her.’
‘You teach a subject about love and sexuality?’ I said to Dad. ‘Eew!’
Ivan looked at me seriously. ‘It’s about the interaction between public and private realms in terms of legislation and legal practice.’
Well, der. How stupid does he think I am?
‘Actually it’s all about you and your sister,’ Dad said, winking. ‘I start every year with a slideshow of baby photos.’
‘It’s amazing they let you teach it at all,’ I retorted, ‘considering you couldn’t get a date till you were twenty five. And then you married the first woman who was desperate enough to go out with you.’
Tony was turning over the sausages with this weird half smile on his face and Ivan was staring at me, looking a bit shocked. Dad’s students always take him really seriously, ’cause he’s a professor. I reckon he only became a professor because Dr Dove sounded so stupid. Anyway, I don’t think the Sutherlands muck around like this with each other.
‘Sparkling,’ Tony said to Ivan. ‘There’s a bottle in the esky. Tell your mother the sausages will be ready in five minutes.’
If the sausages are going to be ready in five minutes, you’d think Tony could tell her himself and then Ivan could stay here and talk to me. But Tony was as immune to my telepathic daggers as Dad, and Ivan left, looking longingly behind him. Not at me, though: at our vegetables. Because they smelled, if I do say so myself, pretty damn good. Who’d want to eat nasty suburban mystery bags – lips and bums, Teddy would say – when you can eat friendly organic vegies like these? No animals were harmed in the making of our meal.
Dad and Tony started talking about football. Yawn. With a longing look of my own at the vegies, I left them to the mercy of Dad and went to find Teddy and Mum to oversee the making of the couscous, which we’d left in their incapable hands.
Chapter Three
Zara
I was waiting for Tilly, sitting on the sand, wearing my headphones but my iPod wasn’t switched on. I was looking out at the sea. Sometimes you look at the sea and it’s this amazing powerful force of nature and sometimes it’s just big and blank and empty. It was a blank empty day. There was still an hour or so until the sun set, but the light was already changing into this intensely yellow colour, so everything shone extra bright. Ivan once told me it was the infra-red that made that happen. I don’t know about stuff like that, but I love the light like this, long and yellow.
I wasn’t actually bored, but I could tell I was making the face. Sometimes it creeps up on me, maybe because I’ve done it too many times. Like when you were a little kid and your mum said, ‘If you keep making that face the wind will change and you’ll be stuck with it.’ Which is a totally crappy thing to say. I mean, how freaky! I’m never going to be a mother. But maybe my mother was right and the wind had changed and I was just going to look bored forever.
I couldn’t get ‘number withheld’ out of my head. Was it Marcus sending them? Would he rea
lly do that? Part of me was sure he wouldn’t, not after all the time we spent together. But if it wasn’t him, who would it be? It had to be Marcus. I knew he was angry with me. But if anyone should be angry it was me, right? I didn’t feel angry, though. Looking out to sea, I felt nothing. I felt blank, empty.
Tilly arrived. She sat next to me on the sand. I smiled at her, it was good to see her.
‘I keep expecting Mieke to show up,’ I said.
‘I know. It’s surreal without her here.’
Tilly always uses words like that. She’s really smart.
Not like Ivan, who’s just completely nerdy, plugged into his computer most of the time. She’s smart in an ordinary everyday kind of way, like when we go to the Indigo cinema she always notices extra things about the story and the characters, symbolism and stuff.
‘I even miss their caravan,’ I said. It’s a corrugated tin A-frame that Mieke’s parents made themselves.
‘Me too. It’s a real Indigo icon.’
After we’d talked about Mieke we were silent for a minute.
‘So how was your year?’ I asked Tilly. We don’t really stay in touch away from Indigo. We don’t email or SMS or anything. And Tilly and I even live on the same trainline. Though it’s a long trainline. I’m out in the ’burbs, where it’s all cul-de-sacs and families and enormous houses with three lounge rooms and stuff. Tilly’s sort of on the fringe of the city, lots of groovy little terrace houses and cafes and bars and cinemas and designer clothes. My school’s massive and it’s known for sport and computers and science. You know, just regular subjects. At her school they do philosophy. Plus they have this big sound studio and they do dance for VCE. I know because my best friend from primary school, Jess, moved there after the end of Year 6. Jess and I don’t keep in touch either. I tried at first and so did she, but then we just kind of drifted apart.
‘It was all right,’ said Tilly. ‘The usual. You?’
‘Fine,’ I said.
We asked each other all the same questions we ask every year, speaking the universal language of high school. What subjects did you do, what were your teachers like, all that stuff.
Mostly I looked out at the sea, though sometimes I looked at Tilly while she was speaking. She has a strange face. You could almost think she was ugly, I guess, because she has a really pointy chin and nose. She has heaps of freckles and her hair is a gingery brown colour and sort of frizzy and she always wears it in a ponytail, always. She’s far and away the best swimmer of all of us, though on land she moves kind of slow and heavy. She hides her body shape with loose-fitting clothes – big T-shirts and baggy shorts mostly – which is weird because in bathers she’s sort of strong looking, solid. Not completely girly, but there’s still something cool about her body – like, I remember reading in a magazine once that you don’t have to be pretty to be sexy and at the time I didn’t get it but looking at Tilly, I realised it’s sort of true. Also she has this really amazingly full bottom lip and she always looks like she’s wearing lipstick even though I know she’s not. And there’s something about her face that I like looking at, even though she’s not pretty pretty, if you know what I mean.
A couple of guys, surfers, were heading out with their boards to use the last of the daylight. I watched them stepping through the waves, calling to each other.
Suddenly I was hanging out for it, the first surf of the summer. I’m not a surfie chick or anything. I don’t live to surf, waiting for the next wave. Well, it’d be a pretty pathetic life where we live, a couple of hours drive from the nearest surf beach, and I don’t even have a car. It’s not like Mum and Dad would take me to the beach just to go surfing.
But a couple of years ago Tilly, Mieke and I went to surf school here in Indigo, which was, like . . . I can’t tell you how much fun it was. It’s one of the only times in my life I remember being completely carefree. At first we were all really bad at it. But then Tilly knelt up and caught a wave and we were all really excited for her. And then I got to my feet and stayed standing for a whole minute. It wasn’t a competition. It was funny and crazy and exciting, getting this skill together, making it happen. We kept bobbing up out of the water, being hit in the face with our surfboards and laughing at ourselves and each other. After that I got a surfboard for my birthday and I was so looking forward to more surf school but Chris, the local guy who taught it, was gone, moved up to the city. We still go surfing every year, Tilly, Mieke and me. Sometimes we see Chris out there, back in town, visiting his folks, surfing home waters, always happy to give us some tips, shouting encouragement to tackle the big waves. There’s even surf lifesaving a few times a year at school. But somehow it’s never felt quite the same as it did that summer, when none of us were good at it and nobody cared.
When I got back up to camp, Dad was getting the Land Cruiser ready to take the waveskis, paddles and surfboards down to the beach box. There’s a row of them down on the beach – old fashioned bathing boxes. Mum reckons they cost the earth, like enough to house a whole family, but Dad bought one anyway a couple of years ago and even Mum’s glad he did because now she’s got somewhere shady to sit and we can store our table and chairs and umbrellas. For Mum it’s almost like she’s not really at the beach at all.
‘Want to come, Zars?’ Dad asked. ‘I could use a hand.’
I shrugged. ‘Sure.’
Me and Dad don’t say a lot to each other. Actually Dad doesn’t talk to anyone much, just sort of at the world. Sometimes I think maybe he and I are alike, though everyone always says I’m just like Mum was when she was my age. I know that makes Mum really proud, like we’ve got this special connection, but I hate it when people say that.
I used to really worship Dad. When you’re in kindergarten, having a dad who’s a policeman is the coolest thing. Well, except maybe if he was a fireman. He’d come to school every year in his uniform to talk to my class about road safety or stranger danger or whatever, and at first I’d be all like, ‘That’s my dad.’ And then later I just sort of didn’t say anything, and then when I was in about Year 5 I begged him not to come. I remember the look on his face when Mum chimed in with, ‘She’s right, Tony, it would be complete social suicide. It wasn’t so bad when she was younger but she’s practically a teenager now.’ Like we’d slapped him.
But then he just looked normal again. He nodded once and walked out of the room. Mum smiled at me, one of her big fake ‘I’m on your side’ mother–daughter, go team smiles. I’d walked out too, disgusted with her, disgusted with myself. But still relieved that Dad wasn’t coming to my school, convincing myself that Dad didn’t care, knowing how much he really did.
It’s almost like I can pinpoint it to that very day that I stopped being ‘Daddy’s girl’. Like he decided that I was my mother’s daughter and everyone else sort of agreed, and that was that.
We were heading up the track that wound back out of the campground so we could take the road to the main carpark where the beach boxes were. It was that grainy time of day, the light was going. He turned into the main road.
‘Dad, look out!’
The Land Cruiser stopped with a jolt, veering left. A huge roo stared into the headlights, then put its front paws down and continued crossing with a lazy hop, like of course we should stop for it.
‘Are you all right?’ Dad asked me.
‘I’m fine.’ My nails were digging into my palms. He clutched the steering wheel for a minute, staring at the deserted road. Then he eased into reverse, straightened the car and kept driving.
That night I lay in my one-person tent. Tilly was wrong. It wasn’t a coffin. It was a cocoon. Beyond the mesh of the mosquito net I could see stars. It was warm, the air clear in my lungs, filled with the smell of eucalyptus and the sea. It was good to be away from the city, from the cars that whined up and down all night on the freeway near our house.
Like I did every night, I thought about what it would be like to drive across the country when I finished school, just me and this swag. I’d
camp by the side of the road, heading north when winter hit the south, following the sun.
It’s been my thing for a year or two now, my plan, but I’d always imagined someone going with me. For a while it was Marcus. We even talked about it, in an offhand kind of way (though for some reason I never mentioned the savings in my bank account: the money I earned slinging lattes at the Loveshack, added to the money my grandma gave me a few years ago). I’d thought about taking Kayla, Sooz, Rio and Tang Yi – though seriously, I doubted they could hack it. Anyway, I wouldn’t want to anymore. Not Kayla. And if Kayla didn’t go, Sooz wouldn’t.
Sometimes last year I even imagined Tilly and Mieke coming with me – it made sense, after all. They were already my camping buddies. Mieke might do it too, but I knew Tilly wouldn’t, not just heading off for a year or more. She’d be off to uni as soon as she finished Year 12.
Anyway, that’s how I used to see it, me and a gang of girls, or maybe just one boy. But when I got the swag the dream changed. Now in the dream I’m alone. Heading for the Northern Beaches or the Red Centre, window down, wind in my face, on an empty, open road. Just driving, really. Who cares where?
Chapter Four
Tilly
Teddy was asleep beside me in the tent and she was making this funny whinnying sound when she snored, like Big Bird. So I was lying there awake, waiting to adjust to it, thinking about what was wrong with me.
And I think I worked it out. This is what is wrong with me: I’m a weird mutant hybrid. (Warning: long and rambling rant to follow. Stay with me on this.)
So, on the one hand I’m still a kid. I’m awkward and gormless, I know nothing about the world. Nothing practical anyway, nothing useful about life. I mean, I know who the prime minister of Denmark is, right? But on the other hand I’m sort of this mini-adult and have been forever. For instance, next year I’ll be eighteen. Which is great, but not for the reasons you think. It’s not the right to drink rum and coke legally at a bar or buy cigarettes over the counter. What excites me is that I’ll be able to vote. Partly because voting’s all about me and what I think, and also because there’s this orderly part of my brain that likes filling out forms. But mostly it’s because I want to be taken seriously by people in power and voting is a way for that to happen. Plus someone has to vote the good guys in and the seriously bad guys out. Am I right? (Colour me a greener shade of green.)
