by Kate Gordon
My belly flips. Pork bun, Vegemite sandwich and all.
His curls are wet from the showers and so is the top of his school shirt. He looks exhausted. I wish I’d saved half of my pork bun to give him.
I wish I had anything to give him. I wish I’d thought to bring the scones I made last night. Melody’s right, of course. Wally does love my scones.
Roz gets to us first. She skips, jumps, then flops in front of Melody. ‘You’re late,’ says Mel.
‘Double chemistry.’ Roz is literally the only person I know who is made happy by extra science class. ‘I am so close to a break-through. It’s killing me. I just can’t get the temperature right. But I will get there if it kills me.’
‘I thought it already was killing you,’ Mel says.
‘What?’ Roz scrunches up her freckly nose.
‘You’re still in Chemistry Land, aren’t you?’ sighs Melody.
‘I am still in Chemistry Land,’ Roz concedes, with a grin. Her gingery eyebrows shoot up. ‘Ooh!’ she says. ‘Oobleck!’ She reaches into her bag and pulls out a notebook with a picture of Albert Einstein on it.
‘Huh?’ says Mel. When Roz doesn’t reply, she gives up. ‘Wallace, my man!’ she calls out. ‘You got chewy on your boots? Hurry the hell up.’
Wally sits down by my side. ‘Keep your shirt on, Kwong,’ he says, chucking a piece of wadded-up notebook paper at her head. ‘I’m thinking about very deep things.’
‘You have low blood sugar,’ Melody says. ‘Clearly.’
‘I don’t have any treats for you today, I’m afraid, Wally,’ I tell him.
Wally laughs and slings his arm around my shoulder. ‘You know it’s a treat just to see you, Resey. I mean, but your cooking is, like, the meaning of life …’
I catch sight of Melody narrowing her eyes. I ignore her. ‘You’re an idiot, Wally,’ I say.
‘Are you serious?’ he says. ‘About no treats? Not even one bickie?’
I shake my head.
‘FML,’ he groans.
‘You know, nobody says that out loud, right?’ I tell him.
‘What would I do without you,’ he says, ‘to stop me from being a total dork?’
‘You … would be a total dork?’
‘True that,’ he says. ‘Unfortunately, completely true.’
Later, as we walk back to class, Melody leans in and asks, ‘Do you want to talk about it?’
I shake my head. ‘No thanks, Mel.’
I don’t want to talk about it. What’s the point of talking about any of it? All the talking in the world wouldn’t change the fact that this situation is incontrovertibly shit.
Because all I want to do is kiss him, and he doesn’t have a clue. He would never have a clue. Because if Nick Wallace ever knew that I loved him, then I’d lose my best friend.
Dear Dad,
I keep trying to …
I just want to say …
I need you to know …
Why can’t I bloody talk to you?
I need to bloody talk to you.
I need someone to bloody listen.
Hear me.
Hear me.
Chapter Three
My mum was born here—in this town, in this house, on this tiny island, down the bottom of the big one.
My grandparents didn’t plan it that way. Grandma T is not a hippy, even though she’s spent time in an ashram in Marrakech. She’s a biologist, an atheist, a pragmatist. She went to Marrakech to research a project for her science degree.
She thought the chanting was claptrap and fell asleep in meditation.
Grandma T was booked into the hospital up the hill. The doctors thought it might have to be a caesarean because my mum was upside-down.
‘Always heading off in the wrong direction,’ Grandma T says about Mum. ‘But you couldn’t tell her. Never could make that girl go where you wanted her to. Always moving, moving, moving, along whichever path she damn well wanted to move along.’
They were hoping she’d turn. Much as she respected medicine, Grandma T knew that caesareans were hard. With a natural birth, it might hurt like hell for a good while, but then a lovely rush of hormones makes you forget all that. The hormones help your milk come in and the baby pops out wanting it.
With a caesarean, you don’t feel as much at first, since you’re numbed. But you sure feel it after, and for longer. You don’t get the hormones, so making milk is harder. And you’re weak; so weak and sore you can’t hold your baby, sometimes for a month or more.
Grandma T was really keen on her baby turning around.
She was making relish when Mum decided she wanted to be in the world.
Grandma T makes amazing relish—it’s her one concession to ‘being old and born during the war’. She makes incredible sponges too, and ginger cakes, but she does it in secret and mostly eats them herself. She only lets me have a slice, sometimes, because she knows I inherited her love of cake. I had to pinkie swear when I was five not to tell anyone that she’s a closeted Nigella Lawson.
She lets Wally have as many slices as he wants, though, because she thinks he’s a prince. Because he helps with the horses and watches Doctor Who with her and laughs at her jokes and tells her she’s ‘cool’.
She is cool. She’s definitely not an ordinary grandmother.
And she does make a mean relish.
And so she was making it the day her baby decided to turn the right way and push herself out into the world.
‘The one day that girl was heading in the right direction,’ Grandma T says, ‘but it was at the wrong time.’
Auntie Kath remembers the glass bowl hitting the tiles, tomatoes painting the kitchen red and the wooden spoon clattering after it. She remembers the bellow, ‘like one of the cows in Bob’s paddock over the road’.
She remembers Grandma T screaming, ‘Get your father, Kathlynn. Get him bloody right now.’
She remembers water all over the floor and thinking it must have come from the pot on the stove, until she saw it was all over Grandma’s bottom as well.
‘Is she coming?’ she asked.
Grandma T nodded. ‘She’s on her way. Now get your father.’
Granda Craig was down at the dam, in his wide-brimmed leather hat and gumboots, looking for ‘a blocked something, or a flooded something else’—Auntie Kath can’t remember and neither can Granda Craig.
All they remember is the moment Aunt Kath said: ‘Mum’s got water all over her and she’s mooing like a cow.’
Granda Craig scooped bare-footed Kathlynn up into his arms and they ran together through the mud and past the prancing horses and back to the house that smelled like tomatoes.
And they heard it. A new bellowing. Not like a cow, this one—more like an oystercatcher in a particularly bad temper.
Mum was already there.
‘Slipped out like a little baby bird,’ Grandma T said, before she fainted.
The ambulance came and took Grandma T and her baby to the hospital. They put my mum in a special crib, with extra air, and put a tube in her tummy because she didn’t have the skills yet to drink from Grandma.
When Grandma T was taken down to see her baby, she told Granda Craig that Mum needed a nature name ‘since you were down the paddock when she came’.
Her name was Laurel. But they called her Birdie.
Auntie Kath says she knew, in that moment, that my mother would be the wild one—the flying one—and it was up to her to be the one who stayed on the ground.
When I was little, I used to say to her, ‘I never want to be a flying thing, like she is. I want to stay on the ground with you.’
Chapter Four
We’re sitting at Banjo’s: Roz and Melody and me in our favourite booth. Melody is dismantling a sausage roll. She eats the pastry first—after tearing it into silk
-thin strips—then breaks off tiny hunks of grey-pink sausage.
Melody eats the way she lives—picking everything apart and examining its pieces, then peeling back the layers to see what’s beneath.
Roz has a large cappuccino. She is scooping up the chocolatey froth with her index finger and licking it off, the way she never would if her strict parents were here.
She’s still prim, quiet and correct, because you can’t change the configuration of a girl just by giving her froth and chocolate. But she’s more relaxed with us. She smiles with us.
At her house, she’s not allowed to wear track pants. She has to wear a skirt to dinner.
With us, she balances a spoon on her nose. Not loudly, and she goes pink when she does it, but it’s something. We are her home. We’re all each other’s home. And we’re all flawed and we all make each other furious, sometimes, but that’s just like every family, isn’t it?
I have an apple scroll and I’m eating it from the outside in. I’ve already picked off the icing. I’ve kept some of it aside, to make a little sculpture—it will entertain Roz and give Melody fodder for her psychoanalysis.
Last time I made a dead mouse, belly-up on the laminex table. Melody had a field day with that.
The three of us are hemmed in by a teetering pile of bags from our shopping expedition. Melody bought a stack of Buffy comics and the new Haim CD. Roz bought a pair of glittery flats and a navy blue dress (‘It is for church,’ she sighed, when Melody told her it looked like a dress you’d wear to church). Roz had stared longingly at a ruby red lipstick in Priceline, but left it on the shelf, with a muttered, ‘My parents would find out, somehow.’
I didn’t get anything. I have enough pairs of jeans, and enough hoodies, to last me a lifetime, and a pile of books beside my bed, so high I might finish them by the time I’m forty.
‘I knew you wouldn’t buy anything,’ Melody growls. ‘You are so predictable. It’s neurotic.’ She pegs a piece of soggy sausage in my direction. I duck and it bounces off the glass panel behind me and into Roz’s cuppa.
‘Gross,’ she sighs, fishing it out. She examines it and pops it in her mouth. She chews thoughtfully. ‘Sausage roll is better with froth,’ she decides.
Melody mimes gagging. She turns, pointedly, away from Roz. ‘Anyway, why do you never buy anything, Resey? You must be loaded, since you work all those hours at the place where dreams die, and you don’t spend anything. Ever.’
‘That’s not true. I bought that Josh Ritter CD a few weeks back,’ I point out. ‘And the new reed box for my clarinet and a new pair of work shoes.’
‘Twenty bucks at JB, ten dollars at the Barrett’s and thirty at Target.’ Melody ticks them off on her fingers. ‘Where do the other hundreds of dollars go?’
I shrug. ‘I mean, we both donate to that school for girls in Sierra Leone—’
‘Totally necessary, but not fun.’
‘–and I spend a bit on books and art stuff too—’
Melody interrupts. ‘And you never have time to read or paint!’
I ignore her.
‘—but mostly it goes in the bank.’
‘For what, Geeves? I mean, I’m all for female empowerment through financial freedom, but there is time for that. Now, you should be living it up.’
I shrug. ‘I’ll use it for uni or travel or … something.’
When I say ‘travel’, my heart thuds.
Because I want to travel. I do. I want to see that school in Sierra Leone. I want to see the Louvre, too, and the Guggenheim in Bilbao. I want to go to concerts at the Vienna State Opera or musicals on Broadway. Heck, I’d love to catch a soccer game in Manchester or Liverpool, just to see why they think their code is better than Aussie Rules.
But …
I’m scared. Of leaving. Of flying. Of letting my feet lift off the ground.
What if getting on an aeroplane is the thing that changes me? What if it’s my trigger? What if it turns me into her?
‘I don’t know,’ I mumble, shrugging. ‘I’ll figure it out.’
Melody inclines her head to one side. ‘That’s the point, Resey. You don’t know what you want to spend your money on. I think that’s a manifestation of your inner conflict, don’t you? You don’t know what you want at all! You don’t know if you want to be a painter or an actor or a musician or—Wally!’
‘I don’t want to be Wally,’ I protest, my forehead furrowing. ‘What are you on about?’
‘No. I mean Wally’s here. There.’ Melody points out the back window of Banjo’s, the one that looks onto the fountain in the middle of the plaza.
He’s sitting, staring at the water.
My heart trembles.
He looks like a painting.
‘Isn’t he meant to be at practice?’ Roz asks, meeting my eye.
I shrug.
But he is. Of course he is. It’s the Hawks’ big game against Clarence on the weekend. Wally should definitely be at training.
I narrow my eyes. He’s holding something. A book, but not a book. Not a reading book, anyway. A notebook?
He’s scribbling in it, furiously.
‘Dunno. Maybe he’s sick,’ says Melody. ‘But going back to what I was saying ...’
And Melody forgets Wally and returns to her favourite topic: my disordered brain.
I tune out; I watch Wally.
He seemed quiet at lunch time. But Wally can get like that. Some days, he goes inside himself. It’s another thing that makes us the same.
Peter reckons he’s thinking about footy, replaying marks and kicks and tackles. I think it’s more than that. There’s more than footy in Wally’s head. It’s just that I’m the only one who knows it. I’m the only one he shares it with.
There’s the shape of clouds, and the sound rain makes on Grandma T’s tin roof (‘like a hundred thousand little heartbeats or tiny wings beating’), and what happens when we die.
Wally has this idea that heaven and hell are just a place your brain goes to in that moment when your heart stops beating. He reckons those couple of seconds stretch out into infinite years and you spend all that time reliving your life—the things you did and, more importantly, the people you loved.
The good people—the ones with lots of friends and family who loved them—remembering their lives is a joyful thing. So that’s heaven. The nasty people spend eternity going over all the bad stuff they did, and knowing they never really loved anyone; they were never really loved.
That’s hell.
He says that the afterlife is golden or grey and it’s up to you, now, what colour it becomes.
There’s more than footy in Wally’s brain.
Of course, he talks about the scout, too, and the AFL, and how he’ll play for any club, as long as it isn’t Collingwood. He talks about the Brownlow medal and the best-and-fairest trophy and premierships and glory.
And that’s what other people see. They see the boundless smile; the excitement. But when it’s just us, his face changes. It clouds, and he asks what he should do if the scout doesn’t love him; if the AFL doesn’t want him. I reply, because I’ve said it before, ‘You’ll do maths, remember? You’ll be an engineer, like your dad.’
And Wally always says, ‘Maybe. Maybe I could, Champ. That would be the sensible thing to do, wouldn’t it? But I’d never be as good at maths as my dad was. I’ll never be as good a footy player, either, but I reckon if I tried hard enough I could do okay.’
And I think about how I’d quite like to be an actor, even though it’s not the sensible thing.
Doing the sensible thing always makes me feel hollow inside, but at least it’s not scary.
‘Maybe it’s good,’ I tell Wally, ‘to just do the thing that’s okay. Maybe that’s an okay thing to do.’
Wally doesn’t reply, because he’ll probably get what he wants. The
special thing; the wild thing; not just the okay thing.
Because he’s Nick Wallace.
‘So, you still love him?’
‘Hmm?’ I drag my eyes away from Wally, sitting at the fountain. Melody has a cat-like grin on her face.
And a smear of sauce on her chin.
‘What?’
‘You still totally in love with Nicholas Alexander Wallace?’
Of course. Because he tells me things he tells nobody else. Of course, because he quotes poetry, but never seems like a dick when he does it. Of course, because he’s Nick Wallace.
‘Shut up.’
‘Mel, drop it,’ says Roz. I smile at her, gratefully. Sometimes I think Roz gets me more than I give her credit for. She smiles back. ‘Do you think I should get my hair cut?’ she asks, blowing on her auburn fringe so it puffs up and out of her eyes. She’s trying to distract Melody.
I love her so much.
But Melody, of course, being Melody, will not be distracted.
‘Resey,’ says Melody. ‘This Wally thing? It’s starting to get pathological. She’s been in love with him for, what, three years, eight months and ...’
‘Melody!’ I moan.
‘Leave her,’ Roz says, gently. ‘Let’s just talk about something else.’
‘I love your hair,’ I tell her. ‘You look like Lizzie Siddal.’
‘It’s boring,’ she sighs.
‘You both suck,’ says Melody. ‘Shave your head, Roz. Live a little. Both of you, live a little, before you’re old or dead.’
Down at the fountain, Wally stands up. He tucks the book inside his backpack, runs his hand through his curls and shakes his head like a dog drying off after a bath. He walks away towards the Mount Street exit.
‘So you do still love him?’ Melody won’t let it drop. She’s a pitt bull.
I look away from Wally’s retreating back. ‘Auntie Kath says that what people call love is just a chemical reaction that compels animals to breed,’ I say. ‘I think it’s a quote from Rick and Morty, actually ...’
‘I’m never falling in love,’ says Melody, licking the top of her sauce packet. ‘It’s a totally unnatural state of being. Humans aren’t meant to be monogamous. And besides, it just makes you miserable.’
