by Cath Crowley
Maybe we can use each other to get what we want this summer. I’ll give her a bit of what she’s been staring at all these years and she can take me with her when she goes. I’d do anything to get to the city. Even hang out with Charlie Duskin.
Rose Butler gives the death stare as we pull into town. “Your friends seem glad to have you back, Charlotte,” Dad says. He thinks Louise is my friend, too. It’s hard to believe the restaurant reviewers say he’s got an eye for detail. The man misses everything.
He wears these 1950s glasses, tiny squares that look cool but don’t do much. I tried them on once and the world got soft and lost its edges. “You drive with these things on?” I asked, looking at someone who could have been Dad or King Kong or the coatrack as it turned out. “You’ll inherit my sight, Charlotte,” he said, taking them off me without cracking a smile. “Let’s laugh together then.”
Rose has gone inside by the time I grab my last bag from the car and put it on the step outside the shop with the others. Luke and Dave don’t take long to follow. The street’s empty as I turn the door handle and bang my shoulder against glass. “It’s locked. Doesn’t he know we’re coming?”
“Sit down a minute,” Dad says, and I know he’s not happy about something because his head tilts the smallest bit to the side instead of staying straight on.
“Grandpa’s okay, isn’t he?”
The door behind us opens before he answers. “Come in, come in,” Grandpa says, and his voice is grass-dry. I lean close to kiss his cheek. He smells like he’s taken a bath in soup and toasted sandwiches and the toilet. The inside of the house doesn’t smell any better. Food’s running low. The place is dusty. I spend the afternoon cleaning while Grandpa sleeps and Dad writes orders for the shop.
At about six, Dad wakes Grandpa and cooks some scrambled eggs. We eat listening to Rose’s family having a barbecue next door. Grandpa goes to bed early. Dad goes for a walk.
I go outside and play my guitar quietly so the Butlers can’t hear me. “I’d like to welcome everybody here tonight; this first song is for my gran and grandpa.” I drag out the chords and slow the tempo of “Smashed-Up World.”
Gran was always at me to sing for people. She wanted me to go in this talent quest they hold here every January. I imagined playing in it and that was as close as I got. In my imagining, I’m onstage, singing an upbeat song to a crowd that can’t wait to applaud.
I don’t play upbeat tonight. I strum “A Little Wanting Song.” E-flat. Low and hollow. Soft and sad. I let the old voice of the guitar rise like the moon and it floats and dips around me.
A Little Wanting Song
It’s just a little wanting song
It won’t go on for all that long
Just long enough to say
How much I’m wishing for
Just a little more
“Hang out the washing for me?” Mum asks when I walk in the door. She doesn’t ask me where I was this morning or why I was up so early. She doesn’t say anything except “Remember to take the clothes in if it rains, love. I’m on the afternoon shift at the caravan park.”
She never used to worry about the washing in a storm. She went outside and danced around. Now she worries about balancing the books or if the workers are cleaning the vans properly.
I can’t imagine her doing it at all anymore, let alone doing it in a car with Dad. I guess everyone’s got secrets. I told Luke and Dave about Mum getting pregnant before she was married. They looked at me, burgers halfway to their mouths. “Unbelievable,” Luke said. “They did it in a car?”
“What sort of car was it?” Dave asked.
“A Holden.”
“That’s a good car, Rosie,” he said through a mouthful of food.
The only thing that mattered to Dave was that they did it in a great car. The only thing that mattered to Luke was that they did it at all. My best friends have their secrets written on T-shirts.
It doesn’t take long for them to walk into my backyard today. I try to leave them behind, but they always follow me. “Dave, get my mum’s bra off your head. Either help or get lost.”
“Stop messing around, dickhead, or we’ll never get out of here,” Luke says, and throws a peg at him.
I’ve known Dave so long that I can tell what he’s going to do before he does it. I don’t want to meet the person who can predict what Luke’s about to do; they’d have to be crazier than him.
We were all born in the same hospital. I came first, then Luke. “Dave took bloody ages,” his mum says, and winks. She only swears when she talks about giving birth to him. “Twenty-four bloody hours,” she says, and pulls Dave in close. He just acts like he’s annoyed. His dad’s the one he fights with.
Mr. Robbie’s given Dave a hard time for as long as I can remember, like when he made him sign up for the local footy team. Most boys in town are in it; there’s nothing else to do on Saturdays in winter. Most guys weren’t as small as Dave was in Year 7, though. Coach only let him on the ground because his older brother used to play. Mr. Robbie played, too. Years ago. No one asked Dave what he wanted.
I walked up to the wire fence before his first match and stood as close to him as I could. “You’ll be all right,” I said. Sometimes a friend doesn’t need the truth.
Mr. Robbie didn’t make a sound as Dave fell the first time. He watched his son moving like a scared rabbit running wild and barely blinked. My breath ran crazy with Dave as he zigzagged across the field. He didn’t see Luke grab the ball and swing back with his boot. He got in the way, and Luke kicked him instead, thumped him right between the legs. Luke was really, really good at footy; his boot connected with Dave so hard he almost sent him sailing through the posts. Every boy on the field closed his legs in sympathy. The rest of us closed our eyes.
“For God’s sake, get up,” his dad called out after a bit. I would have loved to test how quickly Mr. Robbie’d get up if I walked over and slammed him in the nuts.
At the end of the game Dave and his dad got into the car without saying a word. I would have cried that day, seeing him drive off, except I kept imagining Mrs. Robbie waiting behind the wire door.
Luke and I sat by the river for hours after the match. “I didn’t mean it,” he kept saying, and I felt like I was the one who’d kicked Dave and been kicked, all at the same time. I hate that feeling, worrying about them.
When Dave’s dad gives him a hard time, he goes wandering round the town at night. I see him, scuffing at the dirt, his arms wrapped tight round himself, like if he lets go he’ll fall apart. He doesn’t want to talk. Luke and I tried once, and he told us to piss off.
Lately I worry about Dave a lot, because every time Luke gets in trouble, Dave gets in even more trying to help him. It used to be that Luke only hung out with us and that kept him kind of safe. But last year I started babysitting, and Dave got a summer job at the garage. That meant Luke had time on his hands.
He started spending it with Antony Barellan. There are two sides of town, and the Barellan kids hang out on the wrong one. They sit outside the fish-and-chips shop near the turnoff to Henderson’s Road. They don’t wait for something to happen. They wait to happen to something.
The day Luke got arrested, Dave and I were working. I heard the siren screaming across town from my place. The other kids with Luke were smart enough to run.
Dave and I huddled outside the police station. It got colder and colder and later and later, but neither of us talked about leaving. We found out afterward that they were only keeping Luke to give him a scare. We didn’t know that then, though, and all night we thought about losing him. “How come he does dumb stuff all the time?” I asked while we waited.
“He’s there at the wrong time, and the wrong thing’s happening, and he thinks, Why not?”
“So what you’re saying is my boyfriend’s an idiot?”
I never mind when Dave says stuff like that about Luke. I figure he’s earned the right to, maybe even more than I have.
“How c
ome you never do stupid stuff except with him?” I asked that night.
“My old man would kill me, Rosie. Even I’m smart enough to work that one out.”
Dave talks about himself like that all the time. He’s not dumb, though. He can take a car apart and put it back together in under an hour. “It doesn’t take a genius to do that, Rosie.”
“Not everyone who’s knocked down in their first footy game gets back up and goes in again,” I said to him once.
“Most kids in this town don’t get knocked down to start with.”
I held Dave’s hand outside the police station. He acts like he doesn’t need anyone but he’s looking for someone as much as anyone else; he just doesn’t know how to say it.
Nights like that one make me realize how much I’ll miss Dave and Luke when I go. I think how easy it would be to stay. Dad would love it if I studied by correspondence or went to college in the next big town and worked part-time at the caravan park with Mum.
But then I think about spending my whole life with boys who read car magazines and think “amoeba” is the name of a band. I think about spending my life sitting on plastic chairs waiting for fish and chips to arrive. That sort of thinking can kill a person.
So instead I think, Get out, Rose, get out. See nights that last forever in Antarctica. See where the world began.
Today I feel like I am seeing where the world began, right here in my backyard. Dave’s running around like a strange dinosaur with my mum’s bra making two huge ears on his head. Luke chases him, trips him up, and sits on his stomach.
“Got him, Rose. What do you want to do with him?”
“With Dave?” I laugh. “Nothing. Absolutely nothing.”
He grabs at Luke’s ankles then and they tumble over dirt, shouting at each other so loud the whole town can hear. “Bloody get off, Luke,” Dave yells. “I’ve got a prickle in my jocks!”
Luke pulls Dave’s jeans down fast. “That better? God, Dave, what girl’ll ever go out with you in undies like those?”
“If you plan on stuffing around all afternoon, then leave, will you? I’ve got things to do.”
“Get out of the way, Dave.” Luke picks himself up off the ground. “She’s gone from Rosie to bitch in less than six seconds.”
“Better watch out, then,” I say, and chase him. I run till I’m out of breath and the clouds spin above me when I fall. The three of us lounge together under the shade of the huge old tree that’s been here as long as us. “What things other than this have you got to do, Rosie?” Dave asks.
“She’s got nothing.” Luke laughs.
“Well, you got less than nothing,” I say, and point at his open fly. The clouds slow to drifting above us.
I’m sitting on a crate behind the counter having a break when Rose and Luke walk into the shop this afternoon. Dad’s in the kitchen drinking his coffee. We’ve been up since six cleaning the place.
They can’t see me but I can see them. I don’t stand because I’ve been standing all morning. Plus, this is my small protest against Luke and Rose. I can’t serve you if I don’t exist. Get lost in that existential dilemma.
It’s too late to stand by the time Dave walks in, so I sit eating my Mars bar and listening. “About time this place opened again,” Luke says. “Lazy-arse old man should sell the shop if he doesn’t want to work.”
“Lazy-arse old man just lost his wife,” Dave says. “So give it a rest.”
I’ve thought it before and I’ll think it again. Dave is a guy worth writing songs about.
“We should steal stuff while he’s not here,” Luke says.
Luke is also a guy worth writing songs about, but a different kind of song. He rings the bell on the counter over and over. I finish my Mars bar. Dad walks out of the kitchen, flicks his eyes at me, and then looks back at Luke. “Is there some kind of fast-food emergency?” he asks in the voice that he uses when he’s being funny, which is pretty much the same voice he uses when he’s not being funny.
“Yeah,” Luke says. “We need three lots of chips. Three burgers, no beetroot. Three Cokes.”
They go outside. Dad and I go into the kitchen. He doesn’t say anything about me hiding on the floor. Just pulls out meat and buns and chips and eggs and lettuce and beetroot.
“They don’t want beetroot.”
“They don’t know what they’re missing,” he says, and it makes me think of this time in Year 6 when he cooked his special burgers for Dahlia and me. We’d been in a fight with some kids who hung out on the corner near the end of my street. They called us ugly names as we walked past, but Dahlia wouldn’t take the shortcut so we could avoid them. “They don’t own the street, Charlie.”
That day on our way past, one of the older kids sung the word “loser” at us. “Dickhead!” Dahlia yelled. She ran after them, shouting more names while I watched from the end of the street.
“Why’d you let them call us that?” she asked when they’d gone. “You should tell them to shove it up their butts.” She looked so serious, and I tried to look serious back, but I kept thinking that “butt” is a funny word. I started laughing and then she started and we couldn’t stop. Every time we got our breath one of us would say, “Shove it up their butts. Shove it up their butts,” and start the whole thing rolling again.
I made up this song on the guitar, which was basically just one line—“Tell them to shove it up their butts”—with a little harmonizing. Dahlia was belting out, “Shove, shove, shove it up their butts, butts, bu—” when Dad walked in.
“Hello, Dahlia, Charlotte. Can I ask to whom this song is dedicated?”
“Some boys down the road called us losers, Mr. Duskin.”
He put his hands in his pockets and took them out. Looked at them and didn’t find the answer written there, so he made us two of his special burgers. “The secret is the beetroot,” he said. “Nobody liked it when I first started making them. Now everybody wants beetroot.”
“You’re right,” Dahlia said after she finished. “It’s different, but it’s good.”
That night, just before I fell asleep, I felt Dad kiss me so soft I thought maybe I was dreaming. “Being different is the only way to live,” he said. I opened my eyes and he was gone.
“Take these orders out for me please, Charlotte?” Dad asks today when he’s finished. Mum’s somewhere humming that song Dahlia and I wrote. I’m humming it with her as I open the door.
“There’s beetroot in this,” Luke says after I put his burger on the table in front of him. “I hate beetroot.” He lifts the top off the bun and sniffs it.
“I can get you another one,” I say.
“I’ve already been waiting half an hour.”
I stand there while Luke slowly spins every piece of beetroot from his burger onto the ground at my feet. A bird comes along but doesn’t peck at it. “See,” he says. “Birds don’t even like that shit.”
You didn’t even try it, I think. “Shove it up your butt.” Shit. I didn’t mean to say that out loud.
“What did you say?” Luke asks, pushing his burger to the side.
Dave laughs. “She said shove it up your butt, mate.”
“Shove it up your own butt,” Luke says to him.
“Funnily enough, I don’t feel like doing that.”
Luke gets madder and starts going on about how I’m a waitress and how the customer is always right while Rose stares at me like any minute she’ll slap me from here to the other end of the street.
“Shut up, Luke,” she says instead. “Charlie said you could have another one.” Then she smiles, which makes me think her plan for revenge might be more involved than a simple slapping. “Are you working here all day?” she asks.
“No.”
Rose Butler’s more predictable than Wham! lyrics. Any minute now she’ll say something like “You should work here all day. There’s nothing else for you to do.”
“Why don’t you come down to the river with us after you finish?” she asks. Luke looks
at her like she’s talking to a pet dog and expecting it to answer back. Dave’s mouth hangs open for a bit and then shifts gear into a smile. I’m thinking back over Wham!’s greatest hits.
“Charlie?” she says.
“Maybe.” I clear rubbish from the table next to them before I go inside. Dave says to Luke, “Stop complaining. One day you’ll work out the beetroot’s the best part.” Dave saying that doesn’t surprise me. The thing that does is hearing Rose agree. I watch them through the window, with my iPod turned up loud.
“Why’d you invite her?” Luke asks for the fiftieth time on the way down to the river, like asking me over and over will make me change my mind.
“She doesn’t know anyone in this place.”
“She never has. You weren’t nice before.”
“Maybe I feel sorry for her. Anyway, it might be fun to hang out with someone new.”
“New girls are trouble.”
“Luke, you talk to two girls. One’s me and one’s your mother.”
“What’s your point?”
“My point is, shut up and be nice to Charlie or you’ll only be talking to one.” I don’t have to say anything else because he sees the river and sprints toward it.
“So how come you really invited her?” Dave asks.
“I don’t know. She might be fun. Maybe she’d be a good girlfriend for you.”
“Rose, her gran died this year. Don’t make fun of her.”
“Maybe I’m bored with you and Luke.”
“You’ve been bored with us before. You never talked to Charlie.”
“I only asked her to go swimming. She must get lonely.”
“I reckon she must,” he says. “I have to get my stuff. Meet you down there.”
Dave’s felt sorry for Charlie ever since we were kids. Whenever I’d call her Charlie Dorkin, he’d look at the ground till I stopped. He’s like that in everything. When we go fishing with Dad, he never keeps what he catches. “Too small,” he says when I see him throwing his fish back into the river. They’re usually twice as big as his hands.
