The cicadas turn it on, just like that. You can never find cicadas if you look; they go quiet when you walk past their bush. They sound dry, especially while there’s no wind and the ocean is hardly breathing. A big old maraca, filled with grey cicadas. Summer’s coming, isn’t it? Shit, where’s Jerry gone?
Mum looks a bit puffy in the face this morning. She and Dad are having grapefruit halves in a bowl. Yuck, you may as well eat a big cold lemon for brekkie.
‘How are you, love?’ Dad says, without looking up, putting an arm out for me.
I nod. ‘Fine, I s’pose. Where’s McJerry?’
‘Down the beach, I think.’
‘Still?’
Oops.
‘Did you go down there with him?’
I wince. ‘Kind of.’
Dad’s scouring the weather page. ‘Maybe we should take out the dinghy today; the wind’s perfect for it.’
‘Perfect for a whale beaching, too, probably,’ I mumble.
‘Ally.’ He puts the paper down and looks at me. ‘You know ... that was a one-off. I’ve never seen anything like it before in my life. It was—’
‘Hideous,’ I say.
Mum leans over. ‘But you helped them, Ally. And Jerry. We all did. It was ... beautiful.’
‘Not for them, it wasn’t!’ But I look down at my Havaianas. I know what she means.
Dad squeezes my shoulder. ‘How about it?’ he tries again. ‘Give the dinghy an airing?’
I suck in some air. ‘Oh, God, Dad, not the dinghy. All the other kids down here will have proper boats.’
His eyebrows curve up hard. ‘What do you mean, proper boats? What’s not proper about our little boat?’
‘Well, you said it: it’s little. It’s actually Especially for someone like me, I think.
‘Since when did you care about impressing the kids down here? A couple of days ago, you called them ... what was it? Hicks from hell living in the pit of despair.’
There’s not much I can say to that.
He’s totally on a roll now. ‘And what is that stuff around your mouth? I thought Mum told you not to wear lipstick.’
Mum puts on her best puffy grin. ‘Yes, what is that, Ally?’
Oh, God, of course. The morning mulberries I snuck coming back. (I took the long way round but it was worth it.) I run to the bathroom. Purple. All over my lips and chin and pearly whites.
TREATED PINE
My room—in fact, this whole place—is made of Koppers Logs. No wonder Dad loves it so much. You know, Koppers Logs: those halved wooden sausages they built playground equipment with in the eighties, like the fort near our old place in Perth. Kids hang out there after school. It’s a big daggy cubbyhouse for older kids. And it’s made of Koppers Logs, which is what our whole house down here is made of. God, how embarrassing! How can Mum and Dad make us live here—it’s not even a real house. Real houses have concrete walls covered in plaster, or rammed earth like the mulberry house, not Koppers Logs with huge huntsman spiders living in the cracks. Not Koppers Logs from playgrounds. No one actually lives in beach houses; they live in normal houses in the city and drive down to the beach houses on the weekends. Where do we go on the weekends?
I go over to the window. It’s got a view of the water. McJerry’s got a really daggy room upstairs, next to Mum and Dad’s, but I’ve definitely got the best spot. I try to remember that when I feel like killing Mum and Dad—how they gave me this cool room. It’s really big and on its own downstairs, with a shower and loo just next door—so I have my own bathroom. And it’s right near the front door, so I can go out without telling anyone. I remind Jerry about my cool room as much as possible, but he doesn’t seem to mind that much. He hangs around the folks all the time anyway, showing Dad bits of short-wave radios and stuff. Brownnoser.
It’s not that Jerry’s even that bad, as little brothers go. Shelly’s is a shocker, a real whining pain in the bum. It’s just how Jerry hardly ever does anything wrong, how he never gets into trouble with the folks. It’s always me who seems to get the Big Talks from Mum. Maybe it’s just ‘cos I’m older, and he’s got it all coming to him in a couple of years. But sometimes I think: maybe he’s just a better person than me. He never seems to hate anything. I complain about all sorts of stuff. He’s generally pretty happy fiddling around with his electronics kits and things. He never gets bored. Surprise, surprise: I do—especially now, down here. He’s just such a little goody-two-shoes, it shits me! The Golden Boy, that’s what I call him.
Mum walks past my window, carrying a bucket with a mini-spade and fork in it. It looks like she’s wiping her eyes—she is, she’s crying. Oh, my God. She had puffy eyes last week, but I thought that was because of the whales. What’s the story now? She doesn’t even seem to care that she’s got her gardening gloves on; they’ll hurt the skin around her eyes, and they’re dirty, anyway. She’s walking down towards the front patch and she’s fully weeping as she goes. I can’t believe it. Normally, I’d leave her alone, but poor Mum, I’m out there. I force my feet into my blue Chucks (well, they’re lookalikes, actually, since Mum won’t buy me the real ones) and quietly go out the front.
I want her to know I’m here, but what do I say?
She’s making funny sounds in her throat. I scrape a bit of gravel with my shoe, like a horse. ‘Mum?’
She turns around. ‘Oh, Ally, sorry.’
‘What’s up?’
She pats her pockets with her gloved hands, finds a torn-up old tissue. ‘Sorry.’
‘Mum, don’t be sorry, it’s fine, but what’s wrong?’
A wattlebird wires past us, chasing a honeyeater into another bush.
I’m not sure what I should do. I look at the bucket. ‘What gardening are you doing?’
She takes a big breath, and points vaguely down the driveway. ‘Oh, just down the front, by the shed, you know.’
Poor Mum. She knows I don’t know anything about gardening.
‘Trying to encourage the native bush,’ she tries.
‘Uh-huh.’ I nod encouragingly. ‘Yep.’
‘I’d better get back down there.’ She smiles sadly.
‘Are you sure you’re okay, though? What’s the matter?’
Her eyes go liquid again. She looks down. ‘You don’t like it much down here, do you, Ally?’
The other day in science, Mr Farran told us how many litres of blood we have in our bodies.
Most of mine has just headed straight for my feet.
ANGELGIRL
I’m keeping my head down at school. It’s a New School resolution. No more going LAM. And no more going SAM, either (Smartypants Ally Mode—my term, not Shel’s). I’ve often got some vicious remark on the end of my tongue at school, and at home I’m full of crappy thoughts. I’ve decided: I want to be a kind of angelgirl. Not a fourcorners, but just someone other people describe as ‘nice’. I don’t know why I’ve become so harsh. Half the time I don’t even really mean it, the things I say—or how they come out—but I guess other people don’t know that. Like Mum and Dad. Every time I think about Mum crying on the driveway last week I get a surge of, well, pain. Poor Mum.
I lean back into my plastic moulded-for-no-real-body chair and try to concentrate on Mr Fartistry—there I go again! I can’t help myself! What I should say is that I lean back into my chair and concentrate on Mr Farran, who’s doing his best to teach us chemistry. See—my head is filled with awful stuff. I need to go to one of those silent monasteries and do what people do in there: take a long, hard look. I couldn’t go right now, though, because my eyes are half shut like a frog’s from crying all night with self-loathing, and anyway we’ve got a test at the end of the week.
The guy next to me keeps looking over. I can’t tell if he’s looking at me (and I’m not going to look back to find out, that’s for sure) or if he’s looking past my desk at the guy next to me. I think it might be the guy who catches the school bus all the way from Melros. What is his problem? He’s staring, I can feel it. Rea
lly staring. I can hear someone else laughing through their nose. I can’t stand it. I look over. He is staring at me, and he’s grinning—as much as you can with a moon-shape segment of orange shoved down your lower lip. He’s doing the retard routine at me. I look behind him at the guy who’s about to blow off his nose for holding in a laugh, and what do I do? What should I say? What would Angelgirl say? Nothing, really, she’d just smile witheringly at them, like Dad does when I’ve done something really stupid. It’s terrifyingly effective, the right kind of smile, but I haven’t been Angelgirl for very long and I don’t know how to make that shape on my face.
Mr Farran’s coming over. Shite. I’m history. He’s right here, his silver-flecked pants pressing up against my desk. He leans towards Bus Boy and says, really quietly (and the whole class is listening): ‘That makes you look like the village idiot, Rel. Why don’t you see if you can take it out before you give Alison here the wrong impression.’
He looks down at me. I’m waiting for the blast of hot air. I try to look as much like an angelgirl as possible. ‘Thanks for not lowering yourself, Alison. That’s the level of maturity we like to see in our Year 10 students.’
Total torture! That’s what this is, total and utter torture. Sitting on the school bus, with ‘Rel’ (what kind of name is that?) a few seats behind me. I am now the school square from hell, thanks to Mr Farran and my too-slow response to Orange Mouth. An upstanding member of the school community, a complete suck. There goes any hope of even the chicks with bad hair talking to me at lunch. It’s pertty hard hiding the fact that you’re on your own at lunchtime, when you’re on your own at lunchtime. You can’t exactly go and sit behind a tree and hide until Period 6. You have to sit on the grassed area with everyone else around you, and everyone else is part of a ring of mates. And to top it off, Mum keeps putting snow pea sprouts in my lunch, and if you’ve ever eaten snow pea sprouts you’ll know that you can’t fit them into your mouth in one go, especially when they’re poking out of a sandwich. They’re not good in a sandwich. So when I’m sitting on my own, feeling like a total joke, I’ve also got three or four green sprouts sticking out of my mouth like a cow, and then I have to try to extract them without opening my mouth and flashing half-chewed food at all the people who already hate me anyway.
Shel texted between sprout extractions.
Max has asked Zo out! Now have 2 plan her get-up. Where r u when we need u?
The bus heads over the Dawesville bridge. Blokes are lined up along the Cut, baiting up and casting out. The water’s shine is blinding.
I hate this place.
SEASHELL
We have to choose an ad on telly and discuss it using the principles of political correctness. That’s our assignment for English, due on Thursday. But I can’t think. I’ve got my period and I’m feeling ordinary. I can’t see the point in being fertile when you’re a six-foot flat-chested giant.
I smooth two indents down into the sand, to make space for my bum. The wind makes my hair thick with salt. It’s blasting down here today; there are hunks of seaweed up on the beach from last night. I heard the wind most of the night, and I couldn’t sleep.
I’m not going in the water just yet. No one else is out here; no one else is so crazy. I rack my brain for an ad I can use for the assignment. Mum’s been trying to stop us watching telly recently. She’s put a time limit on it: one hour a night. One hour! Home and Away is half an hour, so then I can only watch half of either Masterchef or The Farmer Wants a Wife, depending on what’s on. Mum’s a freak. No one else’s mum does stuff like that. One hour of telly a night—I’ll have to use all my hour watching for this stupid ad! She says stuff like: It’s tripe. It’s brainwashing, making you think life’s like a Coke ad. I reckon she’s trying to brainwash us. Jerry sucks up to her, no matter what stupid rule she’s pushing. I try to tell him what she’s up to but he’s too dumb to realise.
Someone’s coming up the beach. People always say hello when they pass you on this beach, even if they don’t know you, even old men. I always feel like a dork. I’m not saying anything to whoever this is.
A seagull swoops down to a pile of weed and pecks at it. The wind is bending back its feathers. Its head pops up from the black weed. It has a fish head in its beak. A mulie head, I think. Must be someone’s old bait. That’s rank, chucking it on the beach to rot.
I look over at the figure. It’s a guy. He’s pretty close now. He’s got a surf shirt on, and cord shorts. A surfie loser. They all look the same. I look down at my towel. Strands are coming off the edges like a feral hairdo.
‘Hey!’
I look up.
‘Remember me?’
Oh, God, do I ever. Orange Mouth. Rel. ‘Oh, you, yeah.’ Unfortunately. What’s he doing over here? He should be hiding in shame.
‘It was a bet. Sorry.’
‘A bet? What, to look like a spaz?’
‘Yeah, dumb, hey.’
I push my foot into the sand. ‘Yeah.’
He takes an I’m-on-the-beach-taking-a-deep-breath breath: in through the nose, out through the mouth. God.
I glance up at him. He’s looking out at the choppy afternoon water.
‘I thought I was the only one who lived out here,’ he says, still looking out.
He has a creamy spiral seashell hanging from his neck on a piece of leather.
I yank at the threads on my towel. Something moves in the thinnest part of the water, right up on the beach.
‘Nope,’ I say at the sand. ‘You’re not.’ It’s all I can think of to say. But going through my head on high rotation is the desperate thought: Where are my friends? Why am I HERE ?
SHADOWS
When I get back, Dad and Jerry are in the shed, filling the kero lamp, checking torches.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Going night fishing,’ Dad says. ‘Wanna come?’
McJerry’s got about five different types of line in his bag, some thick enough to catch sharks and Spanish mackerel, but I know they’ll only be fishing off the beach. He’s probably got flies and blobs in there, too. He loves having his tackle bag filled with things he’ll never use—it makes him feel professional.
I look at Dad. He’s testing a tiny folding chair, shifting about on it. ‘You taking a chair, Dad? Jeez, only real old coots take a chair fishing.’
I get a flat look for that. ‘Why don’t you come, smartypants? You always used to come along.’
I know. We always went, all three of us, and it didn’t matter if we didn’t catch a thing. We’d have heaps of snacks—each of us would bring something different; it was a surprise thing, a fishing rule—and we’d talk about all sorts of stuff. I remember how my cheeks ached from laughing one time when Dad told us ridiculous stories about the people he worked with, about some of the sounds and smells they made in the office toilet every morning. He reckoned you could tell a lot about a person from their visits to the loo. Mum would make us huge mugs of Milo when we got home, even if we were really late.
Jerry pipes up. ‘Yeah, Allycat, you should come too—I’ve got some spare line for your rod, if you need it.’
‘Oh ... I dunno.’ I can’t go—I might see that guy.
And anyway, I’d smell of mulie tomorrow; you always do, no matter how much you think you’ve washed it off.
‘Nah, no thanks. I’ve got an assignment for English.’
‘Oh, come on, Ally, you can spare a night off,’ Dad says.
‘Well, is Mum going?’
‘No, she never comes fishing, you know that.’
Mum never goes fishing with the boys. She has some poxy moral problem with the killing. Can’t stand holding down the twisting, flapping bodies. It isn’t much fun, but we always do it straight away, or chuck them back in. I love seeing them power away into the deep, safe water.
Dad looks at me. ‘Well, what’s it to be?’
Jerry’s smiling.
‘Nah, the wind’s up.’
‘It’ll drop off.’
‘Nah. No thanks. I’d better do my assignment.’
Jerry’s shoulders drop down a notch. Dad doesn’t say anything. I pick up my bag and head upstairs, trying to think about something else, trying to keep my eyes under control.
I’ve never figured out how tears work, how there’s an endless supply.
Mum’s got dinner happening in the oven. She’s listening to Radio National. It’s that dark blue time before night, and I hear the front door shut. I go out onto the verandah. Along the wonky limestone path, Jerry’s torch plays up the shadows.
In the almost distance, I can hear their warm voices getting smaller as they trundle down towards the water.
Have You Seen Ally Queen? Page 3
