by Sue Lawson
‘Mate, don’t go asking Dad about—’
‘I’m not stupid. That’s why I’m asking you.’
Taj sighed and stared at the ceiling. ‘You know the smell of that hippy shop, up near the supermarket?’
Khaden nodded.
‘Well, that reminds me of her. Don’t know why.’ Taj’s face twisted in concentration, then relaxed. ‘I can remember her hands were soft and her skin was darker than mine—ours—really dark, but that’s about it. I was only four or something.’ He gulped beer.
‘It’s more than I remember.’
‘What about the photos at Nan’s place? Remember the ones on the mantelpiece? There was a picture of Anika sitting on Santa’s knee, nursing us. You would have been about one, I guess. And there was one of her with her mum, dad and brother. She kind of stood out, you know, with the rest of her family being so Irish—red hair, freckles…’
Khaden frowned, working hard to remember the photos. ‘Wonder what happened to them, the photos, you know, after Nan died.’
Taj shrugged. ‘Who knows, mate. Think Nan’s sister cleaned the place up. It’s not like Dad was welcome after that fight.’
Khaden shuddered at the memory of sitting out the back under the lemon tree with Taj. Inside the house, angry shadows had paced and pointed behind the thin curtains. Harsh words had battered the windows. Taj had tried to play Eye-Spy, to distract Khaden. ‘What was that even over?’
‘Nan had heard from Anika and hadn’t told Dad.’ Taj sipped his beer. ‘You were mucking around with Nan’s chess set in the lounge when they started.’
‘Do you think they ever spoke again, before Nan died?’
Car lights filled the lounge room. A door slammed.
Khaden pressed play on the remote control.
Taj leaned towards him. ‘Khade, don’t ask Dad about this stuff, okay?’
Khaden nodded.
Keys rattled on the concrete. Mike swore.
Khaden took a slow, deep breath.
‘You should clear off,’ said Taj. ‘He’ll be blind.’
‘It’ll be right,’ said Khaden.
Mike flung the door open, looked his sons up and down and swayed. ‘I’m going to bed.’
Taj didn’t speak until the bedroom door slammed. ‘Must be windy in the doorway.’
Taj and Khaden broke into quiet laughter.
IM Chat
Sas: Victory!
Khaden: Better be good. Watching Matrix
Sas: Again?
Khaden: :P
Ruby: Did Operation Own Room work?
Sas: So you were listening!!
Ruby: Meh…
Sas: Tell you all about it when you get here tomorrow. My place at 10. Wear old stuff xoxo
Khaden: I’m not painting
Sas: Suck it up, KD!
Ruby
You’re up early,’ said Dad. He was wearing pyjama pants and a face full of sleep-wrinkles.
‘Could you put on a dressing gown or something?’ I said, staring at my bowl of banana and yoghurt.
‘I slept well, Ruby, thanks for asking.’ Dad dumped Corn Flakes and a carton of full-fat milk on the table.
I tutted and shook my head.
‘What?’ he asked.
‘At your age you should be cutting out sugar and fat. And eating more fibre.’
Dad’s laugh scraped against my skin. ‘I won’t add sugar today, just for you.’ He poured milk on his cereal.
‘Suit yourself. It’s not like I care what happens to you. Anyway, I won’t be visiting you in a nursing home that smells of wee. That’s if you survive the stroke.’ I snatched up my bowl and spoon and slammed my dishes into the dishwasher.
‘That’s what I love most about you, Ruby. You’re a little ray of sunshine.’
‘I’m nothing if not honest.’
I stared straight into his eyes, longing to see doubt, or at least a shadow that proved he felt something about what I knew he was doing.
He stared back, eyes clear and blue, and waved his spoon, dismissing me.
I filled a water bottle and grabbed my hat and bag from the kitchen bench.
‘Where are you going?’ he asked.
‘Sas’s place.’
‘Not dressed like that.’
I looked down at my ripped jeans and holey T-shirt. ‘She told me to wear old clothes.’
‘Does your mother know?’
‘Yeah. I told her last night, while you were … out.’
Dad froze, spoon loaded with cereal flakes midway between his bowl and his mouth. ‘What is that supposed to mean?’
This was my chance to confront him, but instead, I dumped my water bottle and hat into my bag and slung the strap over my shoulder.
‘Nothing.’
Mojo danced around my feet. I bent to scruff her behind the ears.
‘Have you fed her?’ Dad’s voice was stern.
‘Yeah.’ I walked out the door.
‘What time will you be home?’ yelled Dad from the table.
I took my helmet off the seat and wheeled my bike up the drive.
‘Before you,’ I muttered.
Sas
Last night I was so angry I was sure my head would explode and splatter the walls with blood and stuff, but today, my head is light and buzzing. I want to jump, skip, dance and squeal all at once, only, I don’t have time. Ruby’s on her way over and we’re meeting Khaden at the hardware store so we can buy paint and stuff for my new room. Yes—at last! For the first time in months, I can write about something fantastic that is happening, instead of whinging like Ruby.
Last night, after Mum sent the others to bed, she called me into the dining room. After the nail polish thing, I was ready for another lecture. She did give me a lecture, but not about me ignoring Dad or even about my behaviour. The lecture was about turning the back room into an office and playroom, and the dining room into a bedroom for me.
MY OWN ROOM!
I’m so HAPPY!
Operation Own Room has worked, even though I hadn’t started it.
Yaaaayyyy! Ruby’s here.
Ruby
Sas burst out her front door. ‘Ruby! This is so exciting!’ She wore mint overalls and a white T-shirt, with a paisley scarf tied around her head.
‘You look like something from a home renovation show.’
She twirled. ‘Like the overalls? They were Mum’s. Can you believe she actually wore these out in the 80s?’
I leant my bike against the trunk of the birch tree. ‘Seriously?’
‘Yep.’ She nodded, then grabbed me by the wrist. ‘Come see what I’m…’ she stopped and grinned ‘…what we’re doing.’ She led me to the lounge room.
‘It’s quiet. Where is everyone?’
‘Mum went in to work and the girls are with friends.’
I groaned. ‘Hey, we’re not cleaning out the back shed are we?
‘Nope!’ She flung open the frosted-glass sliding doors to the dining room. ‘We’re decorating MY bedroom.’
The dining room, which had been filled with bookshelves, computer stuff, ‘Open House’ and ‘For Sale’ signs, was empty.
‘Where is all the…’
‘Junk?’ said Sas, finishing my sentence. ‘Back room. Mum and I moved everything last night. She’s turning the back room into a study and playroom, so this is now MY space!’ She skipped to the centre of the room and twirled.
‘Cool.’ Only, it didn’t look cool. There were cracks in the cream walls, dents from furniture covered the green carpet, and the glass doors were plain ugly. The windows either side of the fireplace overlooked the carport, empty except for the rubbish and recycling bins lined up along the paling fence.
Sas rushed around the room. ‘Curtains over the doors, for privacy and to block the light, and Mum said I can paint these gross bricks.’
The glossy, brown bricks around the fireplace were worse than gross.
‘So how did you get her to agree to it?’
Sas pulled a
face. ‘Long story involving two stupid sisters, nail polish and expensive, matching doona covers.’ She shrugged. ‘And a full-on tantrum.’ She grinned. ‘The tantrum part was me.’ She grabbed both my hands and jumped up and down. ‘No more Barbies, kitten and puppy posters and crap pop music—no offence, Ruby—and no one talking half the night.’
Her excitement was contagious. Plus, I love colour. Mum reckons I have an eye for it, but Dad says it’s just a distraction and that I should spend more time doing proper homework.
I jumped too, not so much in excitement but to trample thoughts of Dad. ‘So, where do we start?’
‘First, we shop.’ Sas pulled a credit card from the bib pocket. ‘Mum’s! But only to be used on stuff for my room, and I have to bring home the receipts. Khaden’s meeting us outside the hardware shop in…’ She glanced at her watch. ‘We’re late!’ Sas slipped the card back in her pocket and rushed to the front door. Khaden was sending a text as he leant against the hardware shop wall.
‘Who are you texting?’ asked Sas.
He pushed off the wall. ‘Taj.’ Khaden looked around. ‘Where’s your mum?’
‘It’s just us,’ I said. ‘Sas has her mum’s credit card.’
‘So how do we get the stuff back to Sas’s place? Paint’s heavy.’
‘You know about Sas’s room?’ I asked.
‘Yeah, we talked about it last—’
‘On Facebook,’ snapped Sas, cutting him off. ‘Remember, Khaden? The three of us were on chat.’ The look that passed between them was almost electric.
‘That’s right—chat.’ Khaden smiled. ‘So let’s do this.’ He led the way through the sliding doors into the cavernous store, past power tools and ladders, to the paint section. Sas chatted to him about colours as though I wasn’t there. I trailed behind feeling alone.
At a wall of paint samples, Sas groaned. ‘Where do I start?’
‘Pick a colour you like,’ I said.
Sas shot me a dur look and turned back to the wall of colours. She grabbed a green circle. ‘This is cool, but…’
A picture from one of Mum’s magazines flashed into my mind.
‘That colour would look great as a feature wall. You could mix blues, green, purple and pink with it.’
As though I hadn’t spoken, Sas held the green disc to Khaden. ‘Too pale?’
I gritted my teeth and handed her an aqua, called Glacier.
‘They’re perfect together,’ said Khaden, taking the sample from me and resting it against the green.
‘Not too dull?’ Sas asked Khaden.
‘Ask Ruby, she’s the colour guru.’
Sas looked me up and down.
‘I saw this picture in a magazine…’ Sas nodded, so I kept going, ‘…of a room with a feature wall with different colour dots, circles really, across it, and written above the dots in funky script was ‘Love to Dance’. But, you’re into music, so we could write song lyrics or something instead.’ I lay green discs on the floor as I spoke, and dotted Lolly Pink, Prose and Snow colour chips over them. ‘That’s the feature wall. The rest of the room would be Glacier.’
Sas squatted down and studied the colours. ‘That looks amazing.’
Khaden whistled. ‘You’re good, Ruby.’
‘Yeah, you should be an interior designer or something,’ said Sas.
‘Yeah, like my dad’s going to let that happen.’
Sas scooped up the discs. ‘Let’s get this paint mixed up.’
Khaden and I waited by the exit while Sas paid for paint, rollers, masking tape and sandpaper.
‘How cool did it look when that guy squirted the colours into the white paint?’ I said.
Khaden groaned.
‘What?’
‘Have a look.’ He nodded at Sas, who was wheeling the loaded trolley towards us. ‘Where are the carry bags? I am NOT carrying paint tins to the bus stop, then Sas’s place. Those wire handles hurt.’
I rolled my eyes. ‘Carry bags?’ I marched to a bin filled with cardboard boxes and chucked three into the trolley. ‘These are better.’
‘I guess,’ said Khaden. ‘But they’ll still be heavy.’
‘Stop whining, you baby,’ said Sas. She wheeled the trolley through the sliding doors and into the car park. Outside she pushed it faster, lifting her feet off the ground and coasting towards the road. A car horn blasted. Sas lowered her feet, regained control of the trolley and bowed to the driver.
Panic pressed in on me. ‘She’s going to push that to the bus stop, isn’t she?’ I said.
Khaden shrugged. ‘Better than us carrying it.’
I looked around me. ‘Yeah, but…’
Khaden’s laugh was so loud, I jumped. ‘Ruby, ease up! It’s a trolley, not a bomb.’
‘There are fines for taking trolleys out of the car park.’
We’d caught up with Sas, who shook her head. ‘Ruby, you need to toughen up.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘You’re chicken shit.’
‘No, you are,’ said Khaden before I could say anything. ‘You’re scared of getting into trouble. I thought you were going to cry at the pool yesterday.’
‘You should have seen her face when I handed her my phone at school, Khade.’ Sas checked for traffic, before pushing the trolley to the median strip. ‘What did you write for that essay, Ruby?’
‘Which essay?’
Sas sighed. ‘The “do one thing a day that scares you” essay.’
‘I wrote about how we need to challenge ourselves, try new stuff.’
‘Exactly!’ crowed Sas. ‘And that’s what we are doing!’
‘But—’
‘Come on Ruby, doing stuff like the phone thing at school and making Khaden talk to that girl at the beach—it’s fun.’
‘The bombs at the pool were epic,’ said Khaden. ‘And Sas, her name was Erica.’
Sas glared at him before speaking. ‘So doing this stuff makes life interesting, Ruby, makes us interesting.’ She thrust the trolley at me. ‘Your turn.’
I stared down at the tins and rolls of tape. My heart beat faster.
‘It won’t explode,’ said Khaden.
‘I know.’ I grabbed the plastic handle. Two lanes of traffic rushed by. When a small gap opened up, I shoved the trolley off the grass median strip and onto the bitumen. The paint cans clanked against the chrome of the trolley. Teeth gritted, I ran. My hat flew off my head, but I didn’t stop until I reached the other side. At the curb, I pressed down on the handle so the trolley wheels left the road and landed on the nature strip. Safe, I turned to look at Khaden and Sas. They stood open-mouthed back on the median strip. Cars drove over the top of my now flat hat.
When the lights changed further down from us and the traffic cleared, Sas and Khaden ran across the road. Khaden bent and scooped up my hat and thrust it at me.
‘Do you know how close you came to ending up flat like this?’
‘So? There’s your scare for the day.’ I took the hat from him, pushed out the crown and, with shaking hands, I steered the trolley to the bus stop. After we’d arranged the stuff into cardboard boxes, Sas pushed the trolley down the road and left it in the middle of an overgrown nature strip.
Sas sat on the seat beside me and play-punched my arm.
‘Daredevil.’
I hugged the box of paint cans to my chest. ‘Just proving I’m not chicken shit.’ I might have fooled her, but not me.
Khaden
The TV was on, but neither Khaden nor Taj were paying attention to the bad Sunday night movie. Taj was texting. Khaden stared at the space above the TV, thinking about Sas, and Ruby.
The three of them had been best friends since Year One, when Sas punched Zac Robard for teasing Khaden about hanging out with girls. From then on, they did everything together.
In Year Five, after Sas fell off the monkey bars and broke her wrist, he and Ruby had waited in the sick bay with Sas until her mum arrived. In Year Seven, the three of them had talked
the sports coordinator, Ms Jonas, into choosing them to represent the school at a tenpin bowling competition, even though none of them had played competitively. They lost every game.
From the time they were in Year Two, Khaden, Sas and Ruby had sleepovers at each other’s homes most weekends and over the holidays. When they turned eleven, Khaden had to sleep in a different room to the girls, but they still managed to talk and play games until four in the morning.
So why had everything changed between him and Sas and not between him and Ruby? And why now? Khaden first noticed something was different a few months ago, while they were watching a chick-flick Ruby had insisted they see.
Sas cried silent tears for the last half of the movie, which made something flutter in Khaden’s stomach. Ruby had cried too, loud sobs and sighs, but that just made him smile.
Ruby was his friend—the one who helped him out with maths, laughed at his Ferris Bueller quotes and always brought an extra snack in her school lunch for him. But Sas…
He couldn’t stop thinking about Sas—her laugh, her sleek silhouette shimmering beneath the pool surface, the way she flicked her hair back when she was concentrating.
What did Ruby do when she concentrated? He’d never noticed.
Khaden sighed.
‘Crap movie, isn’t it. Want to watch the next Matrix movie?’ said Taj.
‘Again?’
‘Never get enough Matrix, Khade.’ Taj glanced at Khaden. ‘So, what did you get up to today?’
‘Nothing. Hung out at Sas’s place, painting her room.’
Taj grinned. ‘You and Sas—is she your girlfriend now?’
Khaden shrugged.
‘You’re blushing.’
The front door swung open and banged against the wall, a full stop to their conversation.
‘Here we go,’ hissed Taj.
‘Hey Dad,’ said Khaden, trying to sound normal. ‘Whatcha been up to?’
Mike stood in the doorway, his shoulders seemingly filling the doorframe. ‘What do you reckon? The only thing I ever do—work. Not that you two bums care.’
Khaden turned down the TV volume with the remote. When Mike was like this, the simplest thing, like a loud ad, would set him off. The plastic tarp over the family room window snapped in the night breeze.
‘What the hell is my tarp doing on that window?’ said Mike. It had been there for days and he hadn’t commented on it until now.
