When the kissing stopped, Luke’s face was fond and a little rueful. He touched my hair, my cheek, my lips. I shivered. Nancy had never said anything about feelings, either. She talked in concrete terms. A guy was hot. He made her feel lush. She never said how her head felt. Mine felt crazy; it was as if my world had shrunk and Luke filled the frame. It was too fast and it made me nervous.
I got up and smoothed myself out.
“I’d better lam, I mean, I better go . . .” I blinked and back-stepped and leaned against the door smiling, and I bet my smile looked like a maniac’s smile. I fumbled behind my back for the handle and then opened the door and ran out of the shed. The sun nearly killed me with its sudden brilliance—a thousand flashcubes popping at once. I headed for the beach. How do you feel? I ran along the sand, taking great gull strides as though I could outpace my heart. Happy! My body ringing like a bell. Happy! Happy!
BABY ELEPHANT TRAUMA
I WAS A DAZED girl walking past kids on skateboards and little old ladies with matching pugs. I didn’t have a plan, or even a destination. It was as if my brain had switched off and it was muscle memory sending me south, back to the gray bridge where the garden was crowded with vistas of blooming marigolds. I ventured down to the Purple Onion, looking for Nancy, but I couldn’t see her, just a sourpuss waitress with a bad bouffant. She kept her eye on me as she moved around the tables, and finally came right up.
“Can I help you?”
“Is Nancy working?”
“Who?”
“Nancy Cole.”
The waitress blinked at me. I looked into her blank eyes. Nope. Nothing was connecting. I started trying to describe Nancy but then remembered I had a photo of her on my phone. I flashed the photo, and the waitress shifted her feet. Her new posture was aggressive, her lips drawn in a smirk.
“You mean Lisa. She’s gone. She got sacked. Stealing. Ages ago.”
“Oh.” I froze for a moment. I craned my head past her to squiz inside the dome. The bald, tattooed chef glared up from whatever he was chopping. He looked like he should have been cooking crank, not scrambled tofu. The waitress huffed. “Anything else?”
I shook my head.
“Does she owe you money?”
I shook my head again.
“Well, tell her if she shows her face back here, Milo’s going to rearrange it.”
I’ll tell you a secret. Nancy’s not my real name.
One night, not so long ago, Nancy had danced in front of my mirror in a 1960s cocktail dress. Connie Francis was singing “Where the Boys Are,” and Nancy stopped swaying to say, “Did you know that sharks have to move forward or they die? It’s a fact.” She started swaying again. She made her hand into a fin and weaved it through invisible waves. She kept talking, in that way she had, that always made me feel like I was about to lose my footing. “Like me,” she said. “Always moving forward.”
We were foggy from Dunlops. I was swaying too.
“Consider this: elephants have to be happy or they die. But they have long memories, so if they suffered some baby elephant trauma—like hunters killed their mama—they never, ever, ever get over it. . . .”
Nancy sat down eventually. She dropped flat on her back and stared up at the crack in my ceiling.
“Your crack’s getting bigger.” Her sad half smile.
I lay next to her and imagined the ceiling tumbling down raining chunks of plaster until all that was left was me and Nancy on the bed, like some Grecian ruin, so beautiful and so damaged.
A storm was brewing. The sky had gone technicolor. The sun burned. Heat was rising up from the cement. I took out my phone and didn’t even try to be creative.
Where are you? And, seconds later, Who’s Lisa?
CRACKING UP
GULLY WASN’T WAITING AT the gate. I nabbed a kid from his class, held him by the bag strap. “Where’s Gully?”
“Your dad had to come and get him.”
“What did he do?”
“He wouldn’t take the goggles off.”
The kid smirked. I felt a flash of rage. “Don’t smile, you little shit.” The boy’s face slid. He broke away from me and ran.
When I got to the shop, the CLOSED sign was facing out. I pressed my head against the glass for several seconds, but I couldn’t see Dad in there. I started to feel hot, knotty. I raced up the stairs to the flat, where the silence greeted me like a smack in the face. I searched the kitchen for clues and couldn’t find any. What to do? I tried sitting, but it only made me more anxious. I flubbed around, tidied. I turned the TV on and then off again. I opened and closed the fridge door. I worked away at ancient Blu Tack stains. I thought about playing some records, but it seemed wrong somehow. The phone rang and I jumped. It was a telemarketer. I hung on to the receiver and thought about ringing Eve, but something stopped me.
By eight o’clock I had sunk into numbness. I was sitting now, and the TV was on, but the sound was turned down. I knew it was irrational, but I was worried that they’d left me. That was why when I heard the key in the door and saw Dad emerge from the shadows of the stairs, my first instinct was to hug him. It was like hugging a statue. I pulled back. His face was gray and his expression was one of weary distaste. Gully was behind him, still in the night vision goggles, LED lights winking. He went straight to his bedroom, and Dad went straight to the Dunlops. He took a long drink and then leaned against the fridge. “We went to see Ross,” he said.
Ross was Gully’s last best behavioral therapist.
“What did he say?”
“He wants us to come back tomorrow.”
I nodded. “Okay. Dad—” I was ready to talk about the shop. We’re going to be all right, I’d say. I can feel it in my waters. But suddenly he snapped. “If you’d been looking after your brother like you were supposed to, we wouldn’t be here now, like this.”
My eyes felt hot. “That’s not fair!”
“Jesus, I thought we were at the end of it,” Dad said. “Everything we do, all the walking on eggshells and the positive reinforcement and sticking to routine, it’s all bullshit! He’s gone backward.” Dad pushed himself off the fridge door and carried his beer out to the living room. I crashed around the kitchen; I started cooking and cleaning as if that would help. Gully’s identikits reproached me from the kitchen table. The composite faces made me want to cry. They didn’t look like anyone.
We made it through dinner. Gully silent. Dad drinking solidly. The sound of his slurping drove me crazy. Then afterward, the room was too hot. Monkey was too loud. Dad rolled a cigarette. He twisted the end and put it in his mouth and looked at me, like there were questions he wanted to ask but he didn’t speak my language. I watched the smoke unfurl in a cloud around his head.
“Why don’t you have any friends your own age?”
“I don’t know. Because I’m weird, Dad. Because you’re weird. We’re weird. It has to come from somewhere. Because Mum makes video art wearing tampons. Because we live here and you don’t stock CDs and you talk about Lou Reed and Bob Dylan like they’re close personal friends, and it’s the twenty-first century and don’t you even know that smoking causes lung cancer!” I grabbed the cigarette from his mouth and pitched it in the sink and then stormed up to my bedroom.
While Janis Joplin screeched and howled, I changed out of my uniform. I put on a dress, blue for my mood. I tugged on furry brown Rasputin boots, the bead necklace, and Luke’s wristband. I packed my phone, my wallet. I swiped my mouth with Mum’s red lipstick and then I was ready.
Dad was waiting on the landing. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“Out.”
“I don’t think so.”
Dad’s face wobbled. I thought he was about to crack a smile, but no, he was just about to crack. Full stop. I tried to walk past him, but he grabbed my arm.
“You’re staying here. I want you at home. You’ve got responsibilities.”
And then I cracked. I opened my mouth and let my insides out.
&nbs
p; “Why is Gully my responsibility? He’s your son! If you want to shout at someone, shout at Mum. She’s the one who left because it was all so hard.”
Dad slapped my cheek. No one saw that coming. It stung and I pressed my hand there. I felt a loud whirring—my brain on spin cycle—Dad’s mouth moving in apology, but I couldn’t even hear him. Then he was staring at his hand like it didn’t belong to him. Then at me, and Gully was in the doorway staring at me too.
“Item.” My voice was clear and loud. “Mum sold the shop.”
Gully stared from me to Dad.
“Sky—” Dad started, but I tore through him.
“Mum rang me and she told me. She’s sold the shop. Boom!” It felt weirdly satisfying to throw Dad’s words back at him, but only for a second, and then we were staring, straight-lipped, at each other. Inside I was falling apart. “You knew.” My voice shook a little. “You knew and you didn’t say a fucking word.”
Gully’s chin began to tremble. He opened his mouth, and a high-pitched wail came out.
I bolted.
“Sky!” Dad called after me. “I’m sorry, love.”
But it was too late. I was down the steps and out the door, where the warm night air almost felt like forgiveness.
MUGS AND MARKS
I WALKED FAST AND didn’t stop until my feet were scuffing the grass outside Nancy’s. Ray’s brown brick cottage sat at the lagging end of the canal, where the water thinned out to a brown trickle, and the sides were crowded with good times had: dead cigarettes and six-pack rings, condoms and potato chip packets. A hundred years ago the area was swampland. The air was sulfurous, and even the ducks looked like they wanted to be somewhere else. I knocked on the door. Ray opened it. I got a blast of leeks. He was in his kimono. I didn’t look up or down. I stared somewhere over his dandruffy shoulder.
“She’s in her room.” He called out, “Nancy? Your little friend is here.”
Ray waddled ahead of me, clearing a path through the stacks of books. Books everywhere! Books on fencing and how to knit jumpers out of cat fur; books on theosophy and the myriad ways to tie a scarf; books on tantric sex and better gun maintenance. They were dusty, smelly, unsorted—I didn’t want to think about the state of Ray’s psyche.
Nancy was bobbing around to some surf instrumental, dressed in a black slip and bare skin. She had a hundred silver bracelets up and down her arms, and her hair looked like thrown flames. I waited until she noticed me, and then she surprised me with the force of her embrace. She crushed her chest against mine, and wheezed. “Dollbaby!” She hit me with kisses. I could smell whiskey on her breath. Then she assessed me at arm’s length.
“Cute dress. What gives?”
“I had a fight with Dad.” I took a breath and thrust my chin forward. “He slapped me, so I walked out.”
“Jesus. Bill slapped you? Bill?”
The way she was looking at me made my cheek hurt all over again.
“Was he pissed?”
I sank onto her bed, and then I couldn’t help crying. I guess I was in shock, and now it all came out. Nancy sat next to me. She rubbed my shoulders. She did it brusquely like I was in the corner and she wanted me back in the ring, and then she moved off and went back to the mirror. She picked up her eyeliner and drew sweeping lines, the perfect cat eyes.
“How’s Gully?”
“He’s not talking. He hasn’t said a word for four days.”
“What’s in the water, kid?”
“I don’t know.”
She turned from the mirror and reached for a joint in the ashtray. She lit it and toked and passed it along. I dragged deeply, had to bury my cough in her pillow.
“Can I stay here?”
“Bad timing. I’ve got someplace to be.”
“Can I come?”
She shook her head.
“Is it a date or an assignation?”
Nancy’s eyebrows went up, and she allowed a small laugh.
“It’s a party.” She seemed to be looking at me from a different angle and reassessing the situation. “It’s a very grown-up party.”
I rolled my eyes, faked insouciance. “What are we talking? Plushies, hot tubs, swinging suburbans?”
Nancy laughed her donkey-honk laugh. Then she sorted out her hair, and I stared at the collage on her cupboard door. It was like a map of her desires: cave houses, Greek islands, wild-looking artists, and femme fatales. One picture showed a tattooed man; he was so inked I could hardly see his face.
“Jack Dracula,” Nancy said. “I always used to wonder what he looked like naked. I used to imagine I was his girlfriend. We’d fuck and then he’d tell me the story of each tattoo.”
Nancy saying “fuck” like that—as a verb—suddenly made me dizzy. When she said it, I saw it. I saw it so clearly I had to work to lose the image of Nancy and Jack Dracula going at it. My eyes raced around the cupboard. I took in the chips in the wood, the ornate handle. I fixed on a photo of a girl in a communion dress, flanked by smiling parents.
“Is that you?”
“In another life.”
I became conscious of the music then. It was the bent, kerplunky intro to “Wishing Well.”
“That’s so weird,” I said.
“What’s so weird?”
“That song. It’s the Millionaires.”
I started to explain the significance, Dad and his Holy Grail, the single that Rocky had sold in, but Nancy had already tuned out.
“A guy gave it to me. You know what it means when a guy gives you a mix tape? True Fucking Love.”
“Was it Otis?”
“No comment.”
Nancy disappeared into the hall. I prowled around her room. My hands floated over tampons, Nag Champa incense, orphan earrings. I bent down and got level with the tape player, watched the spindles turn. The tape in there was one of ours—I could tell by the little wishing well. There was no writing on the label, but it bore the same mark as the tape that Luke had shown me, Mia’s tape.
The Millionaires ended and a raga swirled up. Nancy came back with her hair in a cloud around her head. She made a face, pushed stop. “I hate that hippie shit. Come on, dollbaby. Let’s blow.”
We walked along the canal. Nancy walked a four-four beat. The click of her heels on the cement made me feel like we were in a movie. Around us the sky was turning dark corduroy-blue. Pigeons were returning to their palm tree caves. Gnats hovered above the water, which moved slow and shiny-thick as an oil slick. Suddenly, Nancy stopped. She turned slightly to face the wall. There, on the bricks, was a poster of Mia. This one had writing on it, though; someone had drawn a flower crown, the letters RIP curled among the flowers. Poking in the holes in the brickwork were candles of different colors and lengths; it was a shrine to match my own. It made me feel seasick.
Nancy produced a hip flask from her bag and took a sip. “This is where they found her,” she said somberly.
“How do you know?”
“Ray told me.” She seemed to be on the verge of saying more. She stayed there, silent. Then she toasted Mia’s image and passed me the flask. I sipped. Nancy took her lighter out and lit the candles, and I let the flickering light lull me. I pictured Mia in her silver dress weaving along the road. Cars honking, her giving them the finger. I saw her standing over the canal seeking her reflection in the water. And then . . . did she just fall in? Did she cry out at the shock of the cold?
“Dollbaby,” Nancy said.
The light from the candles danced on the water. I thought I saw something moving down there. I pictured Mia rising, ghostly and calm, but it was just an old beer can bobbing up.
Nancy reeled me back. “Otis asked me to go to America with him.”
“You don’t sound very excited.”
“It’s better if I do my own thing.”
“I think you’re right.”
She started laughing. She didn’t stop for ages.
“What?” I said.
“You don’t know anything about it.�
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Was she being mean? I couldn’t tell. It sounded like she was. Was she mad at Otis or mad at me? I stared at the poster—Mia’s dark, unknowable eyes. The Ugly Mug rose up then. I had pushed him away, but he wouldn’t stay down.
“Nancy.”
“Sky.”
“Who was that guy from the Scenic Railway?”
“What guy?”
“You know.”
Nancy stopped. She shook her head. Then she started walking again, a little faster now. “Okay. I’ll tell you. He’s a mark.”
“A what?”
“A mark. A guy a girl can put the squeeze on.”
I didn’t get it.
Nancy tutted. “I only went with him once. Don’t judge.”
“What did you do?”
“I didn’t do anything. He did it all himself. Then he called me a slut and gave me twenty dollars.” She looked at me sideways. “He knows Ray. That’s how it happened. Sometimes, to pay the rent, I do Ray a favor.” She stopped again. “I shouldn’t have told you. You’re shocked. Look. It’s not emotional. It’s not even me—it’s like . . . You want to know who Lisa is? Well, now you know. She’s my alter ego. Every girl should have one. You let her do the stuff the real you wouldn’t think about.”
“It’s ugly,” I blurted.
“Yeah, well.”
“Is that what tonight is?”
In the shadows Nancy’s mouth looked like a cut in her face.
“Go home, little sister.”
I couldn’t help following her, though. Even as she stepped faster, and shook me away with the backs of her hands. Across the highway, along the beach toward the marina—Nancy had stopped acknowledging me, but still I followed her. I was lagging behind, or she was moving faster. When she reached the gate, she turned and gave me a blank smile and slipped through. Some of the boats were lit up but not all. I took my shoes off and left them on a bench and trod soundlessly behind her. Water moved beneath the wood and slapped against hulls. It was warm out, but I was shivering. Nancy burled up to a white yacht. It had “ZAZEN” scrawled on the side in Japanese-y font. I felt disappointed. Why hadn’t she just said she was meeting Otis? She marched up the steps and rapped on the door. The door opened—all I saw was a dark triangle—and in she went. After a while the light in the yacht went out. I stared at the dark space for a few seconds more before making my way back to my shoes.
Girl Defective Page 15
