The Year Nick McGowan Came to Stay

by Rebecca Sparrow

  Mum walks to the bottom of the staircase, throws the tea towel at my chest and says, ‘The wok may need to soak overnight.’

  Nick McGowan and I are alone with a sink full of dirty dishes. In a weary tone I ask if he wants to wash or dry. He chooses to wash. I sigh loudly to convey the inconvenience of this whole exercise. Then I push the plug into the drain hole, turn on the taps and squirt some washing-up liquid into the water – just to get him started.

  I pick up the scrubbing brush and rather than give it to him, I point it at his chest.

  ‘Just so you know, this isn’t one of my regular jobs. I realise you were trying to be polite and helpful and all that kind of thing, but doing the washing-up after dinner completely screws up my study timetable. See, my mum usually does it. And right now’ – I look up at the red kitchen clock – ‘between seven and seventy-thirty p.m., I’m meant to be doing English.’

  He takes the scrubbing brush from me.

  ‘So you really have a study timetable? And you actually stick to it?’ His tone is incredulous, as though I have just admitted to having a tattoo.

  ‘Yes.’

  Now it’s his turn to sigh. ‘Of course you do.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ I put the dinner plate I’m holding down on the bench. ‘What’s wrong with having a study timetable?’

  ‘Life’s too short.’

  ‘To what? Study?’

  ‘You don’t get it, do you? Study, exams, school – it doesn’t mean anything. That’s what I’ve realised lately – that none of that shit makes a difference. The sooner you get that, the better.’

  ‘You’ve completely lost your mind. Of course it matters. It matters if you want to actually get into university next year. Personally, I think it’s pretty funny that you are trying to tell me that study isn’t important. You who just so happened to top every subject last year. I mean just because you’ve changed your mind about doing Medicine doesn’t mean that next year you’re not going to have to do a lot of—’

  ‘Who told you I changed my mind about Medicine?’

  Oh shit.

  ‘Well, I just sort of overheard you talking to your dad on the phone the other night.’

  ‘You eavesdropped on my conversation?’

  ‘No. Okay, well, yes, but—’

  Ohmygod. I look at his face. He looks horrified.

  ‘No, see, technically it was an accident. I picked up the phone to ring Zoë and—’

  ‘First my dad and now you. I don’t want to be a doctor anymore. Okay? Why is that so difficult for people to understand? Just because I wanted to do it for years doesn’t mean I’m not allowed to change my mind.’

  ‘You don’t have to bite my head off. And, whatever. Do Medicine. Don’t do Medicine. I don’t give a shit what you do.’

  ‘So have you taught Nick to play Best Free Feelings yet?’

  Nick and I both turn and stare at my father, who has walked back into the kitchen.

  ‘I have to warn you, Nick, she’s pretty good at it.’

  My dad looks at me and then at Nick, who understandably looks confused. ‘Scratching an itch is always a good one. Or finally getting to a toilet when you’re busting to go.’

  Ohmygod. ‘Dad,’ I shake my head to indicate he should drop this topic. ‘We’re not playing that. Will you just . . .’

  But my father is clearly surprised by my lack of enthusiasm for the conversation at hand. ‘What? You and Caitlin always love playing that game,’ he says, throwing his hands up in the air. Then the penny drops and he says in a worried tone, ‘Was Best Free Feelings on the list?’

  Nick immediately says, ‘What list?’

  I turn and look at him. ‘It’s nothing.’

  ‘The list Rachel wrote out of things her mother and I weren’t allowed to do or say once you moved in,’ says my dad with a grin, and a wink in my direction. ‘Rachel’s worried we’ll embarrass her. But it’s fine, I’m not going to take it personally.’

  Ohmygod.

  Nick turns to me. ‘You made a list? You actually made a list?’

  Ohmygod.

  ‘I’m also not allowed to sing in the shower or whistle in the car,’ continues my father in a jokey tone.

  Ohmygod. ‘Dad!’

  ‘Alright, I’m going,’ says my dad. ‘Realising that your hiccups have gone, that’s another good one,’ he calls out over his shoulder.

  My father now out of sight, Nick turns to me and says, ‘What on earth—’

  ‘Look, my father has a habit of coming to the breakfast table wearing nothing but a bath towel around his waist – so yes, Nick, I made a list of ground rules for my parents.’

  ‘And what’s the hiccups thing?’

  ‘Best Free Feelings is a game my family plays when we’re washing up on camping trips. But I don’t want to talk about it. And I certainly don’t want to play it, right now, with you.’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Well just do me the favour of not eavesdropping on any more of my private phone calls.’

  ‘Fine. And you do me a favour and next time you want to suck up to my mother, volunteer to wash her car or something. I have my own after-school chores that I’m expected to do. And this’ – I wave my arm at the sink and the now-full dish rack – ‘this isn’t one of them. Okay?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Fine.’

  And we finish the washing-up in silence.

  We develop a workable routine that succeeds in keeping us out of each other’s way. I set my alarm every morning for six-fifteen, which gets me up and out of bed half an hour before him. And everyone else. Any time I have to spare before I need to leave for the early, early bus is now spent hiding things from Nick McGowan. I can’t afford to give him any ammunition to start spreading stories about me at school. Yesterday morning I remembered that my Cher aerobics tape was sitting out – in full view – in the TV cabinet outside his bedroom. This morning I moved the ugly photo of Caitlin and me at my twelfth birthday party into the drawer in my bathroom.

  As far as school goes, we seem to have an unspoken agreement to stay away from each other. If I enter the library and he’s there, I leave. If he rounds the corner to the tuckshop and I’m sitting at a table with Zoë and Stacey, he leaves. It could be worse, I guess. He could have found my Cher aerobics video.

  I’m preoccupied thinking about all of this during Monday’s period one – PE – while Miss Perkins is trying to teach us the finer points of archery. Not having listened properly to her instructions, I struggle to load the arrow into the bow. I look up just in time to see Emma P’s arrow hit one of the outer, outer circles on the target. ‘S’your turn, Rachel.’

  Arrow in place, I lift the bow up, pull it back. Someone has their hands over my eyes.

  ‘You’ve had sex with him, haven’t you?’

  ‘Shit! No!’ I struggle free from Zoë’s grip. ‘Keep your voice down.’

  ‘It’s been a week! Come on, tell me you did the funky-funky with him over the weekend. In which case, I hope you used a condom because frankly a pregnancy is going to be a little difficult to hide in this uniform.’

  I wave Megan Howie through to have a turn while I deal with Zoë. ‘What are you doing here? Miss Perkins is going to see you.’

  She points to a group of students on the far side of the oval. ‘My Health and PE class is playing Touch. Just thought I’d pop over and say hello. So are you still V?’ She does a peace sign with her fingers.

  ‘Believe me, Zoë, when I lose my virginity you’ll be the first to know. But I haven’t. For starters, I saw Nick McGowan for like five minutes over the entire weekend. He had detention all day Saturday and all day Sunday as punishment for setting off the boarding house alarms. Mr Tallon made him weed this oval.’

  Zoë makes a horrified face.
r />   ‘I know. Other than that the closest contact we’ve had was doing the washing-up together last Monday night and . . .’

  ‘And he plunged his head in the sink and tried to drown himself in the washing-up water?’

  ‘Zoë!’

  ‘What? I’m joking.’ She rolls her eyes at me, as though I’ve lost my sense of humour. Then she takes a Mars Bar out of her pocket, peels the wrapper off and takes a big bite out of it.

  ‘It is a mystery to me that you are as skinny as you are considering the amount of shit you eat.’

  ‘Bite?’ She asks this through a mouthful of chocolate, pointing the Mars Bar in my direction.

  ‘No, thanks. He keeps to himself, Zoë. He arrives home every night just before dinner and other than meal times, he’s either in his room listening to loud music or out by the pool having a smoke. We completely ignore each other. Anyway, my point is that I really don’t think he did try to kill himself over the summer. He just doesn’t seem suicidal.’

  ‘How does someone “seem” suicidal?’ She does inverted commas with her right hand.

  ‘Oh, I dunno. Depressed? Crying a lot? I don’t know. All I’m saying is that as far as the rumours go, maybe they’re wrong. Maybe nothing happened.’

  ‘Yeah? Well, Stacey McMaster said she saw Nick McGowan talking to Pastor Mears after school last week. And Stacey reckons there’s a passage in the Bible that says that if thou committeth suicide, though shalt burn in hell for all eternity.’

  ‘I don’t think “committeth” is a word,’ I say more to myself than to her. Miss Perkins starts walking towards us. I nudge Zoë to leave.

  ‘Apparently Miss Perkins still lives at home with her parents, and she’s twenty-seven! What a loser!’

  I push Zoë in the arm. ‘Go!’

  She starts to walk backwards across the oval, still talking to me. ‘All I’m saying is that people are saying that Nick McGowan might be a bit . . .’ She spins her finger next to her head and makes a crazy sign. ‘He could be trouble.’

  Twenty-four hours later and I realise Zoë’s right.

  I’m sitting in detention – all thanks to Nick McGowan. Nick McGowan who is sitting two rows behind me. I look around. Simon Guilfoyle sticks his tongue into his bottom lip, making a gorilla face at me. I don’t belong here. I’m not one of them. This is loser central. And I’m a prefect for godsakes. I’m supposed to be the one who hands out detentions. Most of the people here are here because of me. What’s worse is that when I walked into the room Ms Michaels assumed I was looking for someone.

  ‘What can I do for you, Rachel?’

  I looked at her. I looked at the other students. I fixed my gaze out the window and forced myself to say, ‘I’m here. On detention. Mr Verney gave me a detention.’

  Then she said, ‘Oh,’ in that obvious ‘I’m disappointed in you’ tone. It was nothing short of humiliating.

  Naturally I tried to point all of this out to Mr Verney, my Maths in Society teacher, but he wouldn’t listen. Mr Verney had been in a bad mood ever since school started back. There were rumours that he was getting divorced, backed up by the fact that he’d suddenly started wearing inane cartoon ties, had grown a goatee and was spotted reading Men Who Hate Women & the Women Who Love Them in the staffroom. So when I tried to reason with Mr Verney, explain to him that I was a prefect and that Nick McGowan was to blame, Mr Verney looked at me, then turned and continued to wipe down the blackboard.

  ‘You and Nick have earnt an afternoon detention like anyone else,’ he said, chalk flying up around him like some kind of dramatic full stop.

  ‘I realise that detention is like a second home to you, but you’ve gotta tell him,’ I said to Nick on our way out of Maths in Society class. ‘You’ve gotta tell Mr Verney that this is your fault. Not mine. I don’t think you understand. I can’t be on detention, Nick. I’m a prefect. What will people think? It will ruin my school record. Plus I have a party shift at work at five p.m. I simply can’t be on detention this afternoon.’

  Nick’s response? He told me that none of this would have happened if I hadn’t started behaving like a banshee.

  So I told him he was an arsehole.

  So he gave me the finger and walked off. Nice.

  Martin O’Connell farts next to me. This fart carries the stench of rotting food. For a moment I imagine a pile of putrid, rotting vegetables and chicken carcasses fermenting in Martin O’Connell’s stomach. I feel like throwing up. I can’t believe Anna Davis ever went out with him. With my hand covering my nose and mouth, I glare at Martin O’Connell, but he looks smug. Typical. So I turn left – in a bid to find fresh air – and watch what the students around me are doing. Some of the younger kids are writing lines. The older ones are just expected to do homework. Two girls behind me are discussing what happened to Dr Terence Elliott in last night’s episode of ‘A Country Practice’. But I can’t concentrate in this environment. I’m still not sure how I ended up here. I go over – again – how events unfolded the way they did.

  There was me, minding my own business in Maths in Society. Then there was Nick, turning up at my Maths in Society class out of the blue, telling Mr Verney that he’s decided to drop down to Maths in Society from Advanced Maths.

  Mr Verney looked Nick up and down and said, ‘Well, Mr McGowan, you won’t be joining us unless your parents sign a form consenting the change. And there will be no more subject changes after this week. So you’ll need to get it back to me by Friday.’

  ‘My dad’s in Middlemount, sir.’

  ‘Well you’ll have to get your guardians to sign it.’

  Nick said that this wasn’t a problem and that he’d get the form signed. He glanced over at me with my gaping jaw and then boldly took the desk behind me.

  Mr Verney lent Nick a textbook for the lesson and Nick sat in class and started behaving like he belonged there. With those of us who don’t get maths. But he doesn’t belong. He needs to be doing Advanced Maths to get into Medicine.

  ‘What about your dad? What about Medicine? You need to do Advanced Maths to get in to Medicine.’ I hissed all this at Nick when Mr Verney was over at Tim Hammer’s desk, explaining to Tim again the difference between isosceles and right-angled triangles.

  ‘I thought I made it clear to you last week, I’m not doing Medicine,’ Nick hissed back.

  ‘This is ridiculous. You topped Advanced Maths last year. You shouldn’t be here.’

  ‘Why? Because it doesn’t “fit” in with what everyone wants for my future? You know, I’ve thought about it and I’ve come to the conclusion that the only way I’m going to get through to my dad, to you, to everyone, is by making some sort of a statement. So this is it.’

  Mr Verney looked up, his mouth in a suspicious curve, told us to get on with our work, then turned back to the triangularly-challenged Tim.

  So I dropped an eraser on the floor.

  ‘What about the form?’ I whispered up to Nick, my face centimetres from the carpet. ‘My parents won’t sign that form.’

  ‘Well then, I’ll just have to sign it for them.’

  ‘What?’ My head jolted up and that’s when I hit it on the side of my desk and said ‘Shit!’, louder than was probably appropriate for a Christian school. For Mr Verney.

  That’s when Mr Verney busted us. Told Nick and I that if we had so much to talk about then we could do it after school. In detention.

  I look at my watch. I look at Ms Michaels, who is sitting at her desk out the front marking papers. Fifteen minutes of this detention to go. Fifteen minutes and then I get to have it out with Nick on the bus. Followed by a work shift at the restaurant. I put my head on my arms and wish tomorrow would hurry up.

  As soon as Ms Michaels lets us go, I grab my school bag, check I have my work uniform and run to the bus stop. I can’t decide whether I should scream abuse at Nick McGowan when he turns up at th
e bus stop or freeze him out and ignore him. The point is, my ‘no detention’ record has now been sullied because of him. And there is no way that I’m letting him forge my parents’ signature on a form. He’ll get caught for sure. And I’ll probably lose my prefect’s badge.

  When I get to Central Avenue there is only one other student waiting for the later bus. She’s carrying a cello. My face clearly communicates the way I feel because when she recognises me as a prefect she pulls two chunky silver rings off her left hand and shoves them in her dress pocket. I turn away. Who cares about her rings? I’ve got bigger things to think about. My heart is pumping faster than usual. Waiting for Nick to round the corner, I’m feeling revved-up and terrified at the same time. Because when he gets here, it’s game on.

  He turns the corner. Our eyes lock. I glare at him and then turn my back. He walks over to me but I move away. Towards Cello Girl. Things are not quite so easy when the 303 bus arrives. I sit in the old persons’ seat at the front and Nick jams himself next to me. He does two kilometres worth of nagging, all the way to Indooroopilly Shoppingtown.

  ‘What’s your father’s first name? What does his handwriting look like?’

  I stare out the window and ignore him but he keeps at me.

  ‘You know you’ve lived at my house for a week and this is the most you’ve ever spoken to me. And it’s because you want something. If you think for a second that I’m going to help you in any way forge my parents’ signatures – you’re delusional.’

  ‘Fine.’

  I go back to staring out the window.

  Out of the corner of my eye I watch him unzip his school bag, take out his homework diary and start scribbling practice signatures. This is ridiculous.

  ‘My dad’s name isn’t Eddie, it’s Tom. And that signature looks like it was written by someone who’s had a stroke. It’s appalling. Mr Jaffers is never going to believe that that is my father’s signature.’

  ‘Who’s Mr Jaffers?’