by Tiffiny Hall
Dedication
Dedicated to my husband, Ed
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by Tiffiny Hall
Have you discovered Roxy Ran?
Copyright
Chapter 1
My sister peels the batter off her fish, then says, ‘You’re never going to make new friends with lizard poo on your top.’
‘So what? I breed lizards. Get over it,’ I say.
‘Yeah, like all the other cool eleven-year-olds,’ Fleur retorts.
I reach up and pat the bearded dragon sitting on my shoulder. I have two beardies, Sibyl and Socrates. I roll my eyes at my sister and bite my tongue. At fourteen, she isn’t much cooler.
We sit cross-legged on the living-room floor, eating fish and chips out of the paper. It’s a treat to have takeaway. I wish every Sunday night could be like this.
‘Please don’t ruin our celebration,’ Mum chirps.
Dad smiles, his cheeks full of chips. ‘Julie, what else do we need? We don’t dine at restaurants, but I challenge anything to taste this good.’ He drags a dimsum through a puddle of tomato sauce.
Mum sighs and squeezes his hand. He kisses her on the cheek with sauce on his lips. She giggles and wipes the red smudge off her face.
‘We don’t need anything,’ she says. ‘As long as we have each other.’
Her eyes have dark rings under them from working two jobs: the checkout at the chemist and cleaning rich people’s houses.
‘Who’s got it better than we do?’ Dad asks.
We stare back at him, Fleur shaking her head. We hate saying our family mantra.
‘Come on,’ he coaxes. ‘Who’s got it better than we do?’
I take a deep breath and surrender. It’s better just to get it over and done with.
‘Nooobody,’ we all chorus.
Dad smiles a winner’s smile. ‘I mean, how good’s this house? Look at it!’ he says.
Mum beams. ‘And it’s in the school zone for Hatbridge College, lest we forget.’
Lest we forget those gruelling entrance exams Fleur and I had to sit that made our brains hurt.
Fleur and I skate our eyes around our new home. When you walk through the front door, you enter the living room that opens up to the kitchen with a spiral staircase on the right and a door on the left that leads you down a tiny corridor to my room at the very back of the house. I scored the bigger bedroom over Fleur. She’s still narky that she’s upstairs in the smallest room squeezed between our parents’ room and the bathroom. It’s no bigger than a cupboard, without a window. This is our first two-storey house ever. Dad still can’t believe we found a house to rent this big and this cheap in such a well-to-do area.
‘We are blessed,’ Dad says.
‘Lucky,’ Mum agrees.
Doesn’t feel lucky. I saw a cockroach zip across my floorboards last night, and he wasn’t one of the cockroaches I’m breeding for my lizards. I think the house needs to be fumigated, but as if my parents could afford that.
‘Don’t you think we’re a bit out of our league?’ I ask.
‘Think we’re ahead of it, with such a bargain,’ Mum says, her eyes flashing the way they always do when she’s excited.
‘A couple of Lease Legends,’ Dad adds.
When we moved here last week, we were down to our last hundred or so bucks. Grown-ups don’t think kids notice them worrying about money, but we see it in the creases around their eyes and the tightness of their jaws. Worrying about money threatens to steal Mum’s magic.
I pat Sibyl under the chin and think of the kid I saw today eating an almond croissant from the swanky bakery up the road. He took one bite and chucked the rest. What I wouldn’t do for a six-dollar pastry. Although I shouldn’t be eating pastries when I’m this chubby, nor fish and chips for that matter. I stared at the croissant in the bin. It had landed on a pretty clean-looking plastic container. For a second I thought of taking a bite, then stopped myself. I may not have much disposable pocket money, but I do have standards.
The house murmurs. I’d never seen a blue house before this one, especially a blue weatherboard house that seemed to slope down drunkenly to one side. I look up at the cracks in the ceiling. The house could really do with a makeover by a reality-TV renovation show, or something. The smells of mothballs and mould invade the room.
‘Soooo, your father submitted his PhD thesis today. He is going to be a doctor,’ Mum sings, then claps her hands. ‘He’s finally going back to work full time.’
We all clap. Dad stands up and takes a bow.
‘Only took me a decade,’ he says.
‘What type of doctor?’ I ask.
‘A Doctor of Philosophy,’ Dad says. He sits back down and crosses his legs. We are all in socks.
‘So if I break my arm, can you fix it?’ I tease.
Dad winks. ‘Maxine, you know I’m not that kind of doctor.’ He runs a hand over his balding head. He’s missing hair up top but has hair coming out of funny places, like his ears, his nose and between his eyebrows. ‘I can’t cure a cold,’ he says, ‘but I’d like to think I could remedy your sense of morality.’
Fleur dabs a chip on the paper to sponge off the grease. I take a chip and soak it in sauce. Fleur gives me a look, but I can’t resist the chips. Their smell makes me feel like I’m on school holidays. The batter and chips push down all the bad feelings about starting a new school tomorrow. I send her a glare that says, ‘I’m fat, so what?’
Fleur shrugs, then murmurs, ‘Don’t come crying to me when they tease you.’
I hope I hit my teens and shoot up like Fleur did. She used to be pudgy like me.
Mum and Dad don’t hear her, thank God. Last thing I need is a family counselling session on anti-bullying tactics before my first day.
I lean over and give Dad a hug. ‘Congratulations, old man,’ I say.
‘Yeah, congrats,’ Fleur adds in her tiny voice.
‘Thanks, lovelies,’ he says.
Dad drops a dollop of tomato sauce on the rickety floorboards, then mops it with a piece of fish-and-chips paper he is using as a napkin. If we had more spare cash, we could afford a house with shiny dance-studio floorboards, the kind that you can slide on in your socks and use as a mirror to apply your lip-gloss. Our floorboards are fractured and uneven, different colours and textures with slim caverns between them. Fleur has already suffered two earring casualties. I found her with her nose poking between the boards, crying, ‘I can’t pull off just one! I’m not that kinda girl!’ in the loudest voice she could muster, which was still a whisper.
I’m positive if butterflies could talk, they’d sound like my sister. I imagine they would whisper delicately, as if the force of speaking risked tearing their wings apart. People are forever leaning in closer to Fleur when she speaks. It’s a night
mare trying to order fast food at the drive-through. She speaks as if it hurts, as if words will break her wings.
‘I find studying very stimulating but nothing compared to the cornucopia of experiences I glean from teaching children. A teacher lives forever through his pupils,’ Dad says, speaking as someone who long ago memorised his speech in his defence for not taking that corporate job, then adds, ‘I can’t wait to meet my new colleagues at your school tomorrow.’
I cringe. Why couldn’t he take the job at the university or that company? He was offered plenty of positions but insisted on teaching at Hatbridge College because it is a primary and secondary school that Fleur and I can attend together. Plus, it is the best state school in the country and we passed those entrance exams with flying techno colours. Rich people buy houses in Hatbridge just so they’re in the school zone. People would kill for a place at HC. Fleur and I were always going to ace those exams, so Mum and Dad went a bit overboard by moving us here and having Dad take a job at the school as well. Some kids are only social-media smart or environmentally intelligent. But there was no need for Dad to worry about us.
‘School is perfunc …’ I take a breath, ‘tory,’ I say, using one of his big words he taught me last week. He makes me write the word in six different sentences in my notebook to commit it to memory. I’ve learnt words such as ‘cathartic’, ‘pulchritudinous’, ‘serendipitous’ and ‘apt’. Unlike Fleur, Dad is full of big noisy words. He’ll vomit out philosophy words like ‘solipsism’, ‘existentialism’, ‘epistemology’ — words that mean nothing to me but I remember them so I can sound smarter in the playground. He speaks without ‘ums’ and ‘uhs’ or ‘you knows’ or ‘errs’. Always quoting his favourite philosophers, he tries to catch us out on things they haven’t yet invented apps for or, as he says, ‘haven’t yet been swallowed up by the internet’.
‘Who needs school when we have YouTube?’ I say. Or very, very slow YouTube — our family computer is one of the oldest, slowest computers you have ever met. We wouldn’t dare ask for a new one. We know all ‘extras’ are off the menu at the moment with Dad trying to catch up with work after taking time off to finish his PhD and all the expensive medical appointments Nanna has needed. Mum has been working really hard to support us all.
‘Yeah,’ Fleur pipes up. ‘Science is more fun with videos of gross stuff, like giving birth, and seeing how black holes work in the universe.’
‘So no one is reading philosophy on the internet? Is that your point?’ Dad asks, holding up a chip like a gavel.
We laugh. ‘Guess so!’ we say in unison.
Sibyl crawls onto my chest and hangs there like an ornate brown brooch. Fleur looks at me and shakes her head. I prefer my accessory to her sense of style. She’s wearing a fluorescent pink T-shirt with high-vis yellow shorts. She looks like a banner in a discount chemist.
Dad motions to feed Sibyl a chip, but I swat his hand away (she’s on a strict breeding diet of crickets and cockroaches). I look up at the cracked ceiling again with the paint peeling off in the corners, and it reminds me of when Socrates sheds his skin. The house creaks. We sit in front of an old fireplace flanked by two sofas we picked up at a really decent garage sale. We may not be well-off enough to afford new furniture, but at least our house is always spotlessly clean. After all, Mum is a professional. The iron fireplace is so clean Mum’s blonde hair reflects in it like yellow flames.
‘One day you’ll get philosophy,’ Dad sighs.
I try to philosophise about this new house. If a tree falls in the forest and you don’t see it, did it ever exist at all? I do my best to not look at the house, to blind it into disappearance. But Fleur’s eyes are all over it, creasing it into memory and making it more real and alive with every look.
‘The only argument I understand is by that Occam bloke,’ Mum says, waving a wrist of clanking jewellery. ‘He has a good point.’
‘William Occam coined “Occam’s Razor”,’ Dad starts, but we yell playfully, ‘Nooo, please!’ to stop him before he gets going with his rant.
Then, seeing a flint of disappointment in his eyes, I say, ‘He didn’t like OTT stuff, yeah?’
‘OTT — that sounds like a disease for a real doctor,’ Dad says.
‘Over The Top,’ Fleur whispers.
‘Yes,’ Dad agrees, ‘he despised superfluous arguments, preferred an economy of words.’ Dad takes a breath to continue the fourteenth-century thinker’s line of thought until we all chorus ‘nooo’ again, like a pack of howling wolves. This time he smiles with his eyes and holds up ten greasy fingers, surrendering. ‘Okay, okay,’ he says. ‘Do you want to watch some reality TV? Turn the level down a notch?’
We laugh. I love Dad, but maybe if he were a different kind of doctor and did less philosophising, we could afford a huge flat wide-screen 3D TV or one of the beautiful mansions here on Graham Grove in Hatbridge.
‘We should make gingerbread for the staff tomorrow, a little Edwards welcome,’ Dad suggests. ‘Will you help me, Max?’
‘Don’t ask me or anything,’ Fleur says. She has turned her attention to a second-hand Vogue magazine. It’s the size of the old phone book we use as a doorstop in the kitchen.
‘We all know you hate cooking,’ I say. ‘“Heat oil” does not mean “boil oil”. Remember when you nearly burnt the house down?’
Mum and Dad laugh. Fleur doesn’t like that; she prefers to think of herself as perfect in and out of the kitchen.
‘The recipe clearly said “heat oil”,’ she retorts. ‘Anyway, you don’t like cooking, you just like eating.’
‘Hey,’ Dad interjects. ‘Fleur, you could help us decorate the gingerbread?’
‘Hmmm …’
‘Dad, can we make them in little badge shapes?’ I ask. ‘We could write cute sayings on them, like “time for recess”, “stay calm and mark those essays”, “I have an A plus attitude”?’
He chuckles.
‘You’re an A plus suck, sucking up to the teachers already,’ Fleur informs me. She flips to the horoscopes and starts to read Libra.
‘Not my fault one of our teachers is also our dad,’ I point out.
Dad knocks shoulders with Fleur and she pulls a silly fake pout.
‘Omigod, I hope this is true,’ she exclaims suddenly, eyes glued to her horoscope. ‘A new adventure … great wealth coming my way … oh, all my dreams come true.’
Mum leans over to read too. They love that stuff, especially because they share the same star sign.
‘Come on,’ Dad says to Fleur. ‘Help us make gingerbread. Don’t be an A plus killjoy.’
Fleur looks up from her magazine and rolls her eyes slowly, but she’s smiling. ‘Okay,’ she agrees.
Mum and Dad grin at each other, proud of themselves. Family time.
‘Unless those soldiers carry engagement rings in their cargo pants, I’m not into it,’ I say.
‘Yeah, I hate those films Dad makes us watch, all deserts and camouflage,’ says Fleur. She rolls onto her stomach, props her heart-shaped face in her palms and exhales. Her breath ruffles her eyelashes like a breeze through lace. ‘What’ve we got?’
‘We haven’t seen Romeo + Juliet in a while,’ I say.
‘Awesome! Love tear-jerkers,’ she says.
Our DVD player is still a novelty. When our previous neighbours decided to downsize to an apartment (their thirty-something kids had finally left home), they gave their daughter’s DVD player to us, along with her DVD collection. Go us!
We sprawl across the floorboards in the theatre darkness of the living room, the lingering smell of fish and chips intermingling with the aroma of baking gingerbread. The foggy fatigue of night wraps around our shoulders in a purr of comfort. Our cheeks reflect the colours of the film as our hearts soak up the romance. It’s movie night, and as always, I’m wishing I was the heroine, aching for the moment to be in love and loved.
‘Who cares if you’re the CEO of the world?’ Fleur says. ‘If you’re fifteen and single, then
you’re still a loser.’
‘Oh, come on, Fleury,’ I say. ‘That’s not you. You’re not fifteen yet.’
Fleur’s eyes are pools the colour of wet moss. She blinks, shuttering every breathing pore of light in their reflection. ‘I’m too tall,’ she whines. ‘Even if I could find another boyfriend, he couldn’t reach me for a kiss.’
We laugh, then Fleur shakes the midnight layers in her hair. Being tall has to be better than being chubby, I think.
‘One day I want someone who would die for me,’ I say. I would die to be rich, famous or thin. But imagine having someone who loved you so much that they would give their life, like Romeo, for you to be together.
‘No one dies for anyone any more. It’s out of fashion,’ Fleur says. I can hardly hear her over the film and turn it down. ‘These days if you died for love, people would just Instagram someone else.’
‘That’s sad,’ I say.
‘Sadder than a lost puppy?’ she asks.
‘Sadder than shell choker chains?’ I respond.
‘Sadder than shedding tinsel?’
‘Snap!’ I shout. ‘I out-sadded you, I win. Tinsel isn’t sad. I love it. Especially on cat collars at Christmas.’
‘Anyways, I want the I-can’t-live-without-you kind of dizzy love, you know?’ Fleur says.
Oh, I know. Her words whisk the loneliness in my stomach. But I’m way too young for a boyfriend. Right now I’d be happy with one true friend at Hatbridge College.
I swallow hard and take a handful of popcorn from the bowl sitting between us. Fleur smiles in the inky darkness. She folds her slender legs under herself like an ironing board and arches her back into a bridge. As her chest rises to the ceiling, I can’t believe how grown-up her body has become in the last few months. I reach over and pinch her. She yelps and collapses out of her yoga position.
‘Oh yeah? You wanna fight?’ she asks, jumping up and performing ridiculous kicks gleaned from martial-arts movies. ‘Ay-ya, wa-ya, iy-ya, ya-ya!’ She laughs, throwing a fake punch. ‘I’m one talented Kung Fu Panda!’
I stand to the challenge. We bow to each other and begin to circle the room with our hands up in a boxing guard. Fleur picks up one of the pillows we’re using as seats and swats me with it. I grab another pillow off the floor and hit her back. Soon we’re pillow fighting, feathers flying into our hair. Fleur leg-sweeps me onto the floorboards and tickles me. I’m screaming for her to stop but am too weak with laughter to fight her away.
