by S R Silcox
“No turtles tonight?” she asks.
“Rosie didn’t call, so she must have enough people.”
“You know I could help out, if you ever need more people.”
“I’ll let Rosie know.”
There’s a silence that’s probably more awkward for Jo than it is for me. I’m just glad she’s not wanting to talk about our so-called relationship again. I watch as Ben entertains Nicki and Sam and a few of his other friends with whatever story he’s telling. He gets so animated. Uncle Pete used to joke that he must have Italian in him the way he throws his hands around in wild gestures when he talks. Whatever it is he’s talking about, Nicki is completely smitten with him. I can tell by the way she looks at him, lapping up everything he says, and the way she flicks her hair back whenever Ben looks at her. And when she’s talking to him, she touches his arm. I can’t believe he can be so clueless. I’m going to have to do something about that I think, before she gets tired of waiting for him to get the hint and moves on.
Jo touches my arm. “Did you see that protest tonight? Scott was livid.”
I shrug. “I don’t know why they bothered with it. It’s not like it’s going to make a difference now.”
“It would’ve made a difference if more people had turned up,” Jo says.
“What do you mean?”
“Albie put the call out on facebook for people to come and make some noise. Just one last time, you know? He had around twenty people who were supposed to come down from Townsville for it but they didn’t turn up.”
I turn to face Jo. “Wait a minute. You knew about the protest?”
“Yeah. Of course. I thought we could stir Scott up a bit. We’re trying to come up with something to do when the Minister comes up for the sod-turning ceremony, so if you’ve got any ideas, we’d be happy to hear them.”
“No, I don’t,” I say. “And the protesting is over. I can’t believe you’re still doing this. It’s over, and there’s nothing we can do about it now.”
“Of course there is. It gives us a chance to let him know we’re still not happy, no matter what the council says.”
I stand up and face her. “You do know my mother thought I was the one who organised that little protest tonight?”
“No, I didn’t. Why does that matter?”
“Because the protest group was my idea, and you’ve got no right to just start organising stuff without telling me, especially since we all decided to give it up once the plans were passed.”
“No, you decided,” Jo shoots back. “And the rest of us decided that just because you were happy to compromise your principles, we weren’t.”
Before I can say anything about Jo’s hypocrisy about principles, Jason interrupts us. “You better come sort Corey out,” he says. “He’s getting rowdy.”
“Damn it,” Jo says. We follow Jason over to where Jo’s brother, Corey, is jumping around, calling on someone to pick a fight with him. Jo sighs. She walks up to him and grabs him by the shoulder and spins him around.
“Oh, hey,” Corey says, a drunken grin plastered on his face. “None of these losers can beat me.” He turns back to the boys who are supposed to be his mates. “Chickens,” he taunts them. “Buck, buck, buck.” And then he laughs and almost falls over his own feet.
“You’ve been drinking,” Jo says.
“You’ve been drinking,” Corey spits back.
“I’m old enough,” Jo replies. “You, on the other hand, are not.”
“Who cares?” Corey says. He tries to cross his arms in defiance, but they’re like jelly and they slip through each other so they just hang at his side.
Jo turns on Corey’s friends. “You’re all supposed to look after each other. What the hell are you thinking?”
There are a lot of non-committal shrugs and no answers. I decide to step in before Jo loses her temper and makes things worse. “We should get him home,” I suggest.
“Mum and Dad are going to kill us both,” Jo says. She turns to me. “I can’t take him home like this. There’s no way we’ll get past Mum and Dad with him sloshed.”
I think on that for a minute. “We’ll just have to sober him up then.”
“How are we going to do that?” Jo asks.
I grab Corey by the arm and pull him toward the water. “Corey and I are going for a little swim.”
“What? No way!” Corey protests, but he’s so drunk that he’s lost all of his bodily strength. Hopefully the chill of the water will sober him up enough so we can get him home.
“Well that was a fun night, right?” I say as we walk back up the road to Jo’s place. Corey is more sober than he was before, but not completely, so we’re still practically carrying him along with us as he drags his feet. He’s borrowed a towel from someone at the bonfire but he’s still shivering. It’s a warm night but the breeze will be making Corey’s clothes feel like he’s wearing an air conditioner.
I have a little bit of sympathy for him, but Jo obviously doesn’t. I can tell by the way she’s been scowling the whole way home. She tips up the water bottle in Corey’s hand and for the hundredth time says, “Drink.”
He does as he’s told. He’s not fighting us anymore at least, and I’m willing to bet that’s because he’s starting to feel hungover and sick. I know how he feels.
When we get a few houses away from Jo’s place, I stop.
“What’s up?” Jo asks.
“We need to see if Corey can walk by himself. If he can walk by himself, getting him inside without your parents suspecting will be much easier.”
Jo lets Corey go on her side and I pull my arm away from him on mine. Corey stands, his head down, his shoulders slumped. “Good start. He can stand up by himself at least. Can you walk?” I ask him.
He mumbles something incoherent.
“Come on,” Jo says. “Just try a few steps.”
Corey shuffles forward and I have to stifle a giggle. Jo shoots me a look. “What?” I shrug. “He looks like a zombie.”
“Yeah, well, he’s going to feel like one in the morning,” she replies.
“So not funny,” Corey says. He groans and doubles over. “I think I’m going to be sick.”
Jo and I grab him under the armpits and drag him off the road and into the nearest garden. Jo walks away leaving me with Corey. “Sorry,” she says. “I’m a sympathetic spewer.” She gags and I almost laugh. Beside me, Corey throws up what I hope is most of the stuff he drank tonight. “Get it all out, mate. You’ll feel much better in the morning.”
When he’s done, and as soon as Jo’s composed herself and is sure she’s not going to throw up too, we haul Corey to his feet.
“Better?” I ask him. He nods. “Good. Let’s get you home. And if you don’t want to get into trouble, you have to do exactly what we say, right?”
Corey nods again. Jo hands him the water bottle and he sips from it, gasping after every small drink.
“Will your parents be up?” I ask Jo.
“Maybe,” Jo replies. “I don’t know. It depends what movies are on TV tonight.”
“Right. So let’s plan for worst case scenario, that your folks are awake.” I think for a minute, trying to remember the layout of Jo’s house. The stairs to the bedrooms are at the end of the entrance hallway, which means we have to get Jason past the lounge room on the right where her parents may or may not be still awake. “So,” I say, “plan of attack. You can’t hold him up and help him walk. That will be a dead giveaway.”
“Okay,” Jo says.
“You’re going to walk the rest of the way to your house by yourself, okay?” I say to Corey. “Just to make sure you can make it to bed without any help.”
Corey nods.
“If your parents up are up, Jo, you’ll have to distract them somehow so Corey can get past without them suspecting.”
Jo nods. “Got it.”
We let Corey go to see if he can walk by himself. Thankfully, he manages to not trip over his own feet, although he’s not loo
king where he’s going since he’s looking at the ground, so Jo and I have to steer him around a couple of wheelie bins and guide him through the gate at their house. We all sneak down the path to the front door, and Jo says, “There aren’t any lights on in the lounge room. Looks like we’re lucky.”
“Great,” I say, relieved for them both. Jo’s parents are pretty good, but Corey can be a real pain in the arse for them so they’d come down pretty hard if they found out how much he’s had to drink tonight.
Jo opens the door and pushes Corey inside with instructions to go straight upstairs to his room. “I’ll bring you a bucket in a minute,” she whispers after him. He grunts in reply.
She turns back to me. “Thanks, Brooks. I would’ve just let him suffer.”
I shrug. “No problem. I know he can be a pain, but he’s alright.”
Out of the blue, Jo pulls me into a hug. When she pulls back she kisses me. It takes me by surprise. Not that I haven’t kissed her before, because I have. Lots of times in fact. It’s just totally unexpected because we’re supposed to be over.
I pull away and step back.
“Brooks,” she says, her voice husky. “I—”
“No,” I say, cutting off whatever it is she wants to say to me, because I don’t want to hear it. “I can’t believe you. First you take over my protest group behind my back, and now you expect me to forget everything else that happened and kiss you?”
“You still like me though, right?” She runs her hand down my arm. I don’t mean to but I flinch. She pulls back and crosses her arms. “Fine,” she says. “Just go.”
“Are we really going to do this again?” I ask.
She puts her hand up in front of her, like a shield. “I get it. You want to play around. Well some of us want to grow up and be adults.”
I have no idea what she’s going on about, which is just like all the arguments Jo and I have had about our on-again-off-again relationship, which has been off for nearly three months. It’s too late to argue so I turn and walk away. “I’ll see you around,” I say. If it wasn’t so late at night, I know Jo would have slammed the door shut in my face, just to make a point, but she won’t risk waking her parents for the sake of one argument with me.
Eleven
Riley
You really don’t realise how much stuff you have until you’re standing in front of a shipping container full of boxes. The removalists dropped it off early this morning and they want to come back this afternoon to pick it up, but I have no idea what I’m going to do with it all. I just assumed Dad would get rid of the furniture and a lot of Mum’s stuff, but according to Julie, he didn’t know what I wanted to keep and what I didn’t so he just organised for it all to be packed up and shipped here. I have no idea what’s in any of the boxes because I didn’t pack them and I have no idea where I’m going to put it all considering this isn’t my house. I don’t even know if I want any of it.
Jason walks over and stands beside me. He whistles. “That’s a lot of stuff. It’s all yours?”
“Me and Mums, yeah.”
“What are you going to do with it?”
“I’ve got no idea.” Julie can’t help because she’s got some craft class on in town, and Dad has some of his construction equipment and machinery being taken over to the island on a barge today, so he’s busy with that.
Jason crunches on a spoonful of cereal. “Me and Damo can give you a hand to shift it,” he says. “If you like.”
I look at him and smile. “Thanks.”
“No worries. I’ll ask Mum where she wants it and then we can get started. The shed’s probably best, but we’ll have to move Scott’s old building stuff out of the way.” He eats some more cereal and steps forward, peering into the container. He turns back and heads into the house. “I’ll go call Damo,” he calls over his shoulder.
We stack the furniture up in the shed, and most of the boxes are going into the guest room so I can go through them and decide what, if anything, I want to keep. It sounds terrible, but after watching my mother die, and spending our last year together trying to tick things off her bucket list, you realise that stuff is just stuff. With the exception of the photo albums and the ashes box, which I’m sitting on the lounge holding right now, I don’t think I want to keep much at all.
Damo carries a couple of smaller boxes in and stacks them on top of a pile behind the door. “That’s the last of the boxes,” he says. He wipes the sweat from his face and takes a couple of steps towards me. “Hey, cool box.”
I instinctively pull the box away and hold it in my lap, covering it with my hands.
“Sorry,” he says, apparently getting the hint. “I just like wood. I make stuff with it.” He scratches the back of his head and looks around the room.
Thankfully, Jason appears in the doorway. “Hey. We’re all done. You want to head down to the beach for a swim?”
“Count me in,” Damo says. “I’ll take the bike and meet you down there.” He pushes past Jason out the door.
“I think I’ll just hang around here,” I reply, looking down at the box.
“You sure?” Jason presses. “There’s normally a touch game down on the beach on Sundays. Brooks’ll be down there.”
When I look up he smiles at me, and without me having to ask the question he says, “Mum told me you and Brooks used to be friends when you were kids. Plus, I saw you two talking last night, so I thought you might want to catch up with her.”
I think on that for a minute. It would be good to see her when she’s not working. I place the ashes box on the coffee table and stand up. “Give me a few minutes to get changed?”
Jason grins. “No worries. See you out front.”
It doesn’t take long on our walk to the beach to get sweaty and sticky. I wipe the back of my neck with my towel.
Jason takes his sunglasses off, cleans them with the bottom of his shirt and puts them back on. “Supposed to be storms coming.” He cuts across the road onto the beach side. “What’s it like being back?”
I follow him over. “A bit weird,” I reply.
“Is it the same?”
“Yes and no.”
“How’s it the same?”
“Well, the Burger Hut is still here.”
“It wouldn’t be Roper’s without the Hut,” Jason says, smiling. “What’s different?”
I look over at the new houses on the esplanade that have taken the place of the beach shacks as we pass them. “The houses are different. It used to feel so quiet. Now it feels, I don’t know.”
“Exclusive?” Jason suggests. “Expensive?”
I nod. “Yeah, I guess.”
“I think so too,” Jason says.
“You don’t like all the new stuff?” I ask.
Jason shrugs. “People from out of town own most of the new houses now, and they don’t even live in them. They’re only up here a few weeks of the year, and since people stopped coming, most of the houses stay empty most of the time.”
“Is that why Dad’s so busy? Did he build those houses?” I ask.
“Some of them,” Jason says. “Not all of them though.”
As we head up and over the dune, I ask, “Has he always been this busy? Like, getting called away and not really being home?”
“For as long as I can remember,” Jason replies.
“And you’re okay with that?”
Jason shrugs. “You get used to it.”
“How do you and Julie get to spend any time with him?”
“I learned to paddle board,” Jason says. He slings his towel over his other shoulder and leads me down onto the sand.
I’m a little confused. “What does that mean?”
Jason tosses his towel onto the sand, picks up the sunscreen and starts lathering it on. “Scott loves paddle boarding, and Mum told me if I wanted to spend time with him, I’d have to learn how to fit in with him. So I got him to teach me.”
“Do you like it?”
Jason laughs. “I do now.�
�� He tucks his hair behind his ears. “I hated it at first because I just couldn’t get my balance, but after I got the hang of it, I kinda got why he’d go out in the mornings before work most days.” He looks up at me and smiles. “You should come out with us one morning. See how you go. Julie’s got a board she hardly ever uses.”
“I’ll see,” I reply. “It’s never really been my thing.”
“It wasn’t my thing either,” Jason says with a grin.
Someone calls out to us from down on the beach. I can’t see who it is, because they’re so far away, but I think I can see Brooks and Ben, and I think Reece from the surf shop is there too. I don’t recognise anyone else.
“Are you going to come and play?” Jason asks.
“I don’t really know how to,” I reply.
“It’s not too hard. It’s just beach touch. We make up the rules as we go.”
I watch as Ben takes a pass from someone and then gets tackled by Brooks. It’s a pretty mean tackle and when he gets back up, they wrestle with each other.
“You know she made Australian School Girls for footy?”
“No, I didn’t,” I reply.
“Yeah. She missed out on the tour though because she got expelled.” As Jason says that, Reece spots us and waves us down. “Coming?” Jason asks.
I sit down on the sand. “I’ll just watch for a bit. I’ll mind your stuff.”
“Whatever,” Jason says and runs off down the sand. As I watch him run around with the others, I get a twinge of something. Jealousy maybe? He looks so at home with everyone, even though he wasn’t born here, like I was. Watching them all together, wrestling and tackling and fooling around, I get a glimpse of what life could have been like if Mum and Dad hadn’t gotten divorced, and I hadn’t moved away when I was three. Maybe what it could’ve been like if I’d kept coming to visit Dad instead of just not coming back after the last time.
Twelve
Brooks
I pick up the ball to start again and before I can even tap it, Reece comes in from the side and dumps me. Arsehole. He’s showing off to the girls. Probably Riley too. I pick myself up and threaten to throw the ball at his head. He puts his hands up in protest. “Hey. I thought we were playing again.”
