by Fiona Wood
‘You don’t even listen. In class. But you get it all. Better than Pittney even. I can stare at it till my brain’s busting.’
‘You’re talking about maths?’
He grunts an affirmative noise.
‘You don’t act like you care about maths.’
‘I don’t, dickhead, but I need it. For carpentry. Apprenticeship.’
We talk on as the rain streams over us, washing away sweat and blood. At the end of our chat I don’t know if he prefers Vegemite to peanut butter on his toast, what his ordinal place in the family is or what his dog is called. We’re not exactly pals, and I’m not exactly relaxed about the idea of Jayzo in charge of sharp tools, but this is a cease-fire, and I hear myself saying I’ll help him with maths. If he’d spend as much time working as he does intimidating kids and terrorising teachers, it’d be a start.
I stand up. It hurts. Everywhere.
‘Sorry about the nose,’ I say, pulling my sodden jacket on.
‘No worse than the average footy game,’ he says, giving me a friendly smack where he’s punched my face in.
I wince.
‘Fucken wimp,’ he says, smiling at me for the first time. ‘Tie the boot tighter.’
Back inside, pizza has been eaten, water drunk, dancing done and amazingly things look more or less the way a well-organised social might actually look. People are having fun. Great fun. Estelle greases me off on the way in, but I’m relieved to see she’s fit enough to be upright and dancing. Janie gives me a sympathetic eye-roll, so I guess Estelle has not yet publicly disowned me. Time enough for that tomorrow.
The music is amazing. Everyone is up and dancing. Em has made it impossible not to be. So I dance for a while, sore, tired, rain drenched, minus a shirt. I let myself dissolve into the crush of sweating, shouting kids, jumping to one beat. And I get what I’m after, a bit of soothing oblivion.
Em settles the beat and moves into a slow dance version of some song I don’t know, but it has the effect of everyone who can, coupling up, and everyone else hugging and swaying in little groups. Settle down and make out music. Em makes eye contact with me, giving me a ‘where is she?’ hands up gesture. I shrug back and she makes sympathetic ‘boohoo’ fists in front of her eyes. Yep, that about sums it up.
After what’s got to be the shortest-ever perfect relationship on record, I have to face the cold reality – I’ve blown it with Estelle. I’ve betrayed her. She knows it. It’s over. And now, despite what I imagine will be a vigorous objection, I somehow have to get her home.
30
GETTING ESTELLE HOME IS not easy. She’s sick three times and otherwise alternating between being very grumpy and very amused.
‘That pizza was off,’ she says. ‘I got pood foisoning.’
‘You’re pissed,’ Janie tells her patiently for the thousandth time.
‘Don’t be riduckulous – redukeulous – ridiculous. I don’t even drink. I had about two drinks. Three. Maybe four.’
‘Half full of vodka,’ I say. ‘Which I warned you about.’
‘Okay smartypants,’ says Estelle. ‘Here’s a newsh flash: you’re not. Smart.’
She spins around to Janie. ‘He read my diaries, an thas not nice.’
‘No,’ agrees Janie. ‘Dan’s a bad boy.’
‘You’d never do tha to a friend, never . . .’
Janie considers. ‘Well, honestly, I’d be tempted. If I fancied the person, and there they were –’
‘Whaddabout do to others as you would do unto you to?’
‘Yeah, only I don’t keep a diary, so that wouldn’t apply,’ says Janie.
‘But he was so lovely, so so so lovely. But reeeally he wasn’t. He was just anotha mean old wolf in clothes,’ says Estelle. ‘He was my disc boy.’
I try to believe in a time when Estelle thought I was lovely, but it doesn’t feel real.
‘Why disc boy?’ I wonder, not really expecting an answer.
Janie takes pity. She talks girl, and decodes after a moment’s reflection. ‘So disc equals CD equals your initials, reversed, add to that you like the same music, or she thought you did. Maybe you were just using your spy material to get into her –’
‘I wasn’t. It’s true. We like the same music. Really.’
‘Yeah, I’m guessing it’s not going to make much difference now,’ says Janie.
‘Wheresh yer nice shirt I gotcha?’ Estelle wants to know.
‘I lost it in a fight,’ I say.
‘Youseee! Fighting, not smart at all,’ she says.
Janie and I persevere. Our ten minute walk turns into fifteen. I’m quickly losing my safety margin. The cake will be in cinders by the time we get home at this rate.
Estelle decides to sit down for a rest. She feels tired.
I have about two minutes left before the cake has to be out of the oven. Or I will be dead. As opposed to my current state of health: three-quarters dead.
I lose it.
‘Get up or the cake will burn and I’ll be in the shit and it’ll all be your fault.’
Estelle leaps to her feet with a new sense of purpose.
‘Do not burn the cake. Shoulda told us. See not so smart,’ she says, taking off. Janie and I run after her.
I’m hoping my mother is not home early – there’s no way we’ll get Estelle up the tree in this condition.
We stumble into the kitchen just as the timer bell on the oven starts to beep. Howard yowls a yawny sound, stretches out his back, wags his tail and hobbles over to say hello.
The kitchen smells great, warm and fruity. But getting a cake safely landed with Estelle in her current state is tricky. Industrial-sized cakes are extremely heavy and ten times hotter than little cakes.
So I’ve got the giant oven mitts on and I’m trying to manoeuvre the massive cake out of the oven and put it on the wooden table in one smooth action. But Estelle is right in my face.
‘How could you? How could you when you’re such a lovely lovely boynextdoor? That smells really good.’
Janie corrals Estelle and I deliver the cake safely. One thing I haven’t stuffed up.
Getting glummer by the minute, I make some coffee hoping to sober Estelle up before the attic climb, while Janie starts moving Estelle in the direction of my bedroom – after we persuade her it’s not okay to go home via the front door.
‘But I’ve got my key,’ she says.
‘But tonight you have to go home through the attic. Because your mum and dad don’t know you’re out.’
When the message finally sinks in, she starts whispering.
‘Don’t tell anyone anything. Because, me and Janie, they ground us. All the time. They will kill us if they find out.’
‘That’s right,’ I say.
‘Up the tree!’ she says, heading for the door.
‘It’s okay, my mother’s not back, we’re going up the stairs.’
‘But then they’ll know,’ she insists, heading for the door again.
Janie shakes her head in disbelief and says quietly, ‘If you wanted to rethink the whole confession thing, I don’t think she’s going to remember much about tonight.’
‘I can’t,’ I say.
‘Your funeral,’ she says.
Estelle has somehow got hold of a knife and she lunges for the cake. Janie removes the knife in the nick of time. ‘Thank God you don’t usually drink, I can’t handle this.’
Back upstairs after we’ve poured as much coffee as we can into Estelle, we need equal parts of persuasion, pushing (me) and pulling (Janie) to get her up the attic ladder. Once there, she decides she should sleep in the attic, so there’s some more persuading and a bit of carrying to get her back down into her bedroom. At least we get there via a properly built fold-down staircase, which Estelle then insists we fold back up, despite the fact I’m going to need it again in a couple of minutes. We humour her. It’s not worth arguing when she’s like this.
Her bedroom is amazing. Like the rest of her house, it looks like a m
agazine shoot popped into 3-D – a state-of-the-art modern opposite of her attic. She has a double bed up on a platform. One open door leads to a walk-in wardrobe, another to a bathroom.
Just as we’re thinking that we’ve made it, unbusted, deed done, we hear Estelle’s parents’ voices right outside her door. We freeze, eyes locking, holding a collective breath. Estelle is shocked into sobriety. Or maybe it’s the coffee finally kicking in. It sounds as though Vivien has just arrived home from her opening and Peter is telling her to keep her voice down because the girls are asleep.
‘Nonsense. They never settle down before midnight on a sleepover.’
‘I haven’t heard a peep all night.’
‘I’ll just see if they’re awake . . .’
We think the same thought at the same time. Janie flicks off the light, and we’re all under the doona in two seconds.
As the door opens, the hallway light shines through the doona stitching. I’m trying to breathe silently and praying that I don’t sneeze. Their voices are at close range.
‘Girls, are you awake?’ Vivien asks in a stage whisper.
‘Vivien . .. I told you. . .’
Janie manages a very plausible snoring noise, and after some shuffled tippy-toe sounds the door shuts. The voices are muffled again but we hear Vivien saying, ‘I need to ask Estelle where on earth she got it.’
‘It can wait till morning.’
They’re gone and miraculously we haven’t been sprung.
Estelle and Janie are in silent fits of laughter, bed-shaking, quaking, tear-streaming, snort-suppressing laughter.
‘I’m going to wet my pants,’ Janie gasps making a dash for the bathroom.
That leaves me and Estelle in bed together. My wildest dream come true. Two small points of difference: it smells like vomit in here and Estelle hates my guts.
I get up, pull down the stairs, and head up into the attic.
‘See ya.’
‘Yeah, sure.’
31
THERE’S NO WAY I can sleep now, so I go out with a torch and a Stanley knife to get rid of the evidence in the tree. I hiss at a couple of possums as I cut the ladder from the trunk. The guide rope I untie and wrap around my body, mountaineer style.
When I get back to earth, clouds have cleared and the full moon cuts sharp shadows of Oliver and Em into grass leached black and white.
‘Hey, ’sup dude?’ Oliver greets me. He’s kidding. He has a way of doing the cool talk in inverted commas that always makes me smile.
‘Thanks again for tonight. Sorry about the drinking.’
‘Seen lots worse,’ says Em. ‘You’re the only one who got violent, and everyone was gone by midnight. Easy gig. Dannii’s brother brought his ute, and the little girls packed up the empties.’
‘And what’s the story with you and Estelle?’ Oliver asks.
‘Shortest relationship in history.’
‘Nah, she’ll be fine tomorrow.’
‘She’ll be sober. But I won’t be forgiven.’
‘What for?’
‘You don’t want to know.’
‘Things never look so bad in the morning,’ says Em.
Maybe that’s true of some things, but me reading Estelle’s diaries can only look worse when the sun comes up.
Underneath the haemorrhaging disaster of my problem with Estelle there’s another niggle of unfinished business. I scroll: The cake is out of the oven. The girls got home undetected. There weren’t any major crises at the social. Howard needs an operation, but there’s nothing I can do about that except buy a lottery ticket. My mother will be home soon. By herself. That must be weird after all those years of coming home with my father . . .
That’s it. My father. Since the deep and meaningful with Estelle, his present has been burning its way into my thoughts. I’ve ignored it for so long, can I really face it tonight?
I put it off.
I pull the rope ladder back in through the window and stuff it in the wardrobe.
I drag the bed back to its right spot.
I scratch Howard’s ears. He twitches them, annoyed. He doesn’t appreciate being used as a procrastination device.
I go to the toilet.
I have a shower and examine my injuries carefully: face, rib cage, shoulder.
I clean my teeth. At least none of them got broken but the inside of my mouth is swollen and cut up.
I dust the present off and put it on my bedside table.
I look at it, my hands shaking. That’s probably just from the fight.
It’s not like it’s a bomb.
I unwrap it. Inside there’s a parcel and an envelope.
In the parcel there’s an iPod.
In the envelope there’s a letter.
Maybe it just feels like an hour that I sit with the letter on my knee, maybe it’s no more than five minutes.
In the end I read it as fast as I read Estelle’s diaries. I fly across the pages, swallowing scraps and gulping down paragraphs with an appetite so fierce it consumes me.
. . . understand . . . don’t want to talk to me . . . pretty thick . . . not know . . . gay . . . I’m sorry . . . cold and miserable there . . . how could I not . . . somehow kept it in a different room from the rest of my life . . . how . . . my crazy parents . . . why . . . your mum . . . best friend . . . loved her, still do . . . fun . . . so happy . . . pregnant . . . so this is how it unfolds . . . both so excited . . . dear little you . . . best thing ever . . . you’re cool with . . . different sexuality . . . lie . . . more like not the whole truth . . . our relationship . . . always true . . . always . . . cracking my heart . . . you might be feeling . . . let down . . . embarrassed . . . like I’m a big phoney loser . . . not that simple . . . your nice life . . . move schools . . . good thing . . . how I lost the family fortune . . . too much debt . . . my mistakes . . . idiot . . . people I trusted . . . I let a lot of other people down . . . whenever you’re ready . . . understand . . . time . . . I love you . . . under the anger . . . you know it . . . Mum not too thrilled . . . best for all of us . . . music for you . . .
I start breathing again, slow myself down. The letter ends:
None of this is offered as an excuse, Dan, but I hope it starts to be an explanation. I need to talk to you, so call me when you’re ready, even if it’s just to yell at me. Any contact will be welcome.
We’re going to be fine, all of us. We just need to find a new shape,
Love from
DadXXXOOO
I’ve missed him so much.
I get into bed and read his letter through three times slowly. It bangs me over the head with some of the things I love most about him – honesty and confidence and affection and humour.
Rummaging under the bed, I find the diary I kept when we first moved in here, and on the last page, the list of things I’d thought impossible.
32
THE LIST, AGAIN:
1 Kissing Estelle. Unbelievable, but it happened. And I can remember every moment. It’ll never happen again.
2 Getting a job. Done. It’s not like I’ve made anything like the amount of money we’d need as a safety net if I Do Wedding Cakes folds, but we’re getting by. And I know how to wipe down a table. It was a bit of grandiose mad anxiety if I really thought it was up to me to support us.
3 Cheering my mother up. Didn’t I even realise that how she feels is up to her? I helped her find a job and she’s started cheering herself up.
4 Not being a loser at school. Turned out to be possible, with lots of help. I’ve just organised the Year Nine social. Thanks to Em it was great. Thanks to Oliver I’ve got non- loser hair and clothes. Thanks to my fear of getting beaten up, I’m fit and strong. I haven’t fainted in a while. I’ve fought Jayzo and survived triumphant as his maths tutor. Hmmmm.
5 Talking to my father. He’ll be here in three weeks. Still scary, but definitely not impossible.
6 Being good. As opposed to my father. What a judgmental little git. I’ve lied now twice to help
friends do what they wanted to do, stuff I figured they were entitled to do. I’ve pinched clothes from school lost property. I’ve eavesdropped on my mother and her friends trying to find out what the hell was going on in our life. I listened in on Estelle and Janie when they were talking about me. I read Estelle’s diaries desperate to get to know someone I decided I loved before I even met her. Then I read them again! Good? I figure the best I can do is sort things out on a case-by-case basis as I stumble along.
33
THE iPOD IS CHARGED and loaded with a playlist – songs for Dan. My dad has written down the song titles and why he likes them. The first one is from way back when he was my age, ‘Walking on the Moon’ by The Police. Giant steps.
As I listen, I realise I have to go up to the attic one last time. There’s something I need to give Estelle. No excuses, just the beginning of an explanation.
I climb the ladder and sit at her desk in the attic for a long time, deciding what my note should say. In the end I write just one line. And finally I can haul my aching body to bed.
I wake swinging from a tree, tied by one foot, trying to free myself so I can get to the church and stop the bell so Estelle and Janie can get out of the elevator in time . . . But the bell pushes insistently through layers of consciousness. It’s our doorbell, a Big Ben chime.
I jump out of bed forgetting about the fight, and feel my face, my shoulder, my back and every rib screaming out their protest as I limp to the window and open the curtain, trying to figure out what time it is. It looks early. I pull on some track pants and a jumper, stop in the bathroom to reassure myself that the texta scrawls disguise the worst signs of the fight – kinda – and head downstairs, starving.
Ali is in the kitchen. I barely have time to register this bizarre fact when my mother comes in, leading Vivien.
We’ve been sprung after all.
Now I’ll have to face the music for sure. All those false assurances I made about being a responsible friend . . . I meant them at the time.
I look down at my grazed hands. How am I going to explain this?
