Girl Saves Boy (5 page)
‘What? Who? Why are you speaking to me?’
‘Maybe I don’t have that many friends myself?’
He looked straight at me when he said this, which was unsettling, and I had to look away.
He offered me an M&M. I shook my head.
‘What brings you here?’ he asked. ‘I’m assuming—and this is an assumption, mind you—that it isn’t our stellar tuck shop, which still has a one hundred to nothing ratio of hot jam doughnuts to healthy diet choices.’
I shook my head. ‘I just moved back—used to live around here when I was a kid. This school’s nearby.’
‘And you’ve taken it upon yourself to be our local suburban superhero?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘You say that a lot. Really, there’s no need to apologise. You know, saving lives and all that jazz?’
‘How do you know about that?’
‘I hang out in trees at night. How do you think I know about that? Like I said, friend of a friend.’
‘I don’t have any friends,’ I reiterated.
‘I’ll be your friend,’ he said, before casting his gaze out across the road. ‘Though friendship means nothing any more. It’s just a number on a screen, bragging rights. Very little human interaction involved. A pity, really. It’ll lead to the eventual breakdown of communication and therefore society, for sure.’
I couldn’t think of anything to respond with.
The late bus stopped in front of us. I stood up and waited for the brass section of the band to get on board.
The boy didn’t get up.
‘Not getting on?’ I asked.
‘I’ve got a car.’ He pointed to an ancient BMW in the parking lot. It was baby-poo brown.
‘Then why were you sitting here the whole time?’ I asked.
‘Talking to you,’ he said. ‘What did you think I was doing? Skydiving?’
I shook my head.
‘Do you want a lift?’ he asked.
‘No, thanks,’ I said. ‘I don’t tend to accept rides from strangers, as a rule.’
He offered his hand. ‘I’m Michael Mitchell, otherwise known as Little Al, child prodigy and a shoe-in for next year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry.’
I shook it. ‘Jewel Valentine. Though you probably already knew that.’
He smiled. ‘See? I’m not a stranger any more.’
I smiled back. ‘The bus stops right where I’m going. I’ll be all right. Thanks for the offer.’
‘He likes you, Jewel,’ said Little Al. ‘I know him well.’
I got on the bus and sat down in the second row, and for some reason I had half a bag of M&Ms in my hand.
By the time the bus reached my stop, rainbow stains coloured my fingers and the bag was empty.
I rapped my knuckles against the front door and clutched my sketchpad tighter under my other arm.
After ten seconds, I debated whether or not to turn around and walk back down the garden path. But the door was opened and it was too late to turn around.
Instead of Geraldine at the door, with her garden-hands and wrinkled smile, there was a tall, blonde girl wearing a pale pink cardigan.
Was I at the wrong house?
She looked about my age, and I felt as if I’d seen her before—maybe I’d brushed past her in the halls during the first two days at my new school.
‘Jewel,’ she said. ‘Oh, my God—Jewel.’
It was beginning to look like I was going for a Guinness World Record for the largest number of disconcerting meetings in one afternoon, with people who knew me when I did not know them.
And then I remembered.
You know that feeling: someone knows you, and you try to match a face to their name, or a name to their face, as you flick through the mountains of files that haven’t been alphabetised since the dawn of time, going, ‘Damn, have we met before?’
You know how you forget about someone who once meant so much to you, forget their face and their name and their favourite colour and the fact that they always wore knee-high toe socks; and then one day you meet them again, and you wonder if that time in between really occurred at all.
You know, you know, you know.
That was me in that moment—searching my brain database for her name, recalling everything, feeling eight years old again.
It was True Grisham, my Grade 2 best friend, who always wore rainbow toe socks, whose favourite colour was pale pink, who had blonde ringlets and who, at eight, had been reading at high-school level.
It was True Grisham, but it wasn’t the little-girl True Grisham that I’d known. There were ten years between little-girl True Grisham and this True Grisham, grown up. And I didn’t know True Grisham, full grown, at all.
My mother was always thin—petite and willowy, all harsh angles disguised by layered dresses. She always had her nails painted red and her waist-length hair dyed a shade darker than mouse brown, her natural hair colour.
I remember being nine or ten when I went with my parents to the cemetery, where Mum’s grandparents were buried. Later—six years or so that felt like a lifetime and a moment at once—she was buried in the same plot. At the cemetery, we set out a picnic blanket and ate sandwiches, and Dad painted the scenery. Mum sat with her back pressed against her grandfather’s headstone and she and I were raucously loud.
Dad kept trying to hush us up—scared we’d get in trouble for being so loud—but I think her disregard for social standards, and for the things that grown up people do, was what he loved about her. Or what made him first fall in love with her. I don’t know. I’m not him, so I don’t know.
After the picnic, we explored the cemetery, and she was like a child, laughing and skipping, taking no notice of the fact that we were dancing on top of coffins.
I remember it so fondly because it was one of the few times I was out of hospital, and healthy enough to run around and play. Dad lifted me up and spun me in the air and I felt real, true joy.
I have a photo of Mum and me on that day— Dad dabbled in a bit of photography in addition to his painting—my hair short and fuzzy, and a grin so wide on Mum’s face it almost touched her ears. We were in front of a tree, vast branches casting a shadow over gravestones, and Mum’s arm was wrapped around my shoulder.
Before she died, I only saw her as my mother. Since she died, she has actually become more of a real person to me, rather than just someone who existed for my fulfilment.
I only asked myself ‘why’ after she was gone: Why did she do that to herself? Why didn’t I stop it? Why would something like this happen to people like us? Aren’t we good people?
I blame myself. You would too. Your mother, thinking so poorly of herself, starves herself to death. Who else would be to blame?
And then, with Dad coming out as gay, things kind of made sense—in the twisted way that all terrible things make sense, like world war makes sense, like child abuse makes sense, like school shootings make sense. I thought of Mum trying to make Dad notice her, wanting him to find her attractive again. I’d grown up knowing Dad was distant and lost in his own world, and I got used to him sometimes painting for days on end and forgetting about me. That was who he was. But Mum had grown up differently and remembered a time when he loved her and she was the only thing he cared about. I think he always did love her, but the way he did so changed over time.
He isn’t a bad person. That has to be understood. But he’s done some stupid things. He wasn’t solely to blame for Mum’s death, but he sure didn’t help. She was too dependent on what other people thought of her, and that was her downfall. She cared too much. She was only what other people saw in her—that is, what she
imagined
they saw in her.
And near the end there was barely anything of her to see.
Shit, I’m speculating so much here. Sometimes I think I understand her, I understand why she did what she did. Sometimes I think I understand Dad, and why he’s always escaping reality. But most of the time I don’t understand anything. I don’t even understand myself.
Now I’m sick again—the leukaemia back after years in remission. I’d almost made it through high school without a stay in hospital. But I’m not to blame for this illness—though maybe I somehow deserve it, a karmic retribution from a higher being for letting my mother die. I’m sick, I’m dying, it’s killing me, and things are gradually making less and less sense.
When I was younger, being sick meant months in hospital, drugs and injections and constant tests. My parents were always stressed out. I felt like I was to blame. I imagined myself somewhere else. While other kids fantasised about growing up and becoming astronauts or singers, I just wished I was normal again. I wanted to go back to school, to spend time with my friends. True visited, but it wasn’t the same. All I wanted was not to live every day of my life totally exhausted, in pain and in fear of infection. So when I was too sick to attend school, I watched TV and did homework when I could, and True spoke to me on the phone and told me what was happening with all of our classmates.
I couldn’t play soccer, or attend Art lessons (and I refused to be taught by my dad). Most other activities were impossible, too, even when I was out of hospital. I couldn’t risk getting sick. By the time high school rolled around, although I was better, I couldn’t seem to find anything I was good at. Outside school and friends, I didn’t have any hobbies. Away from friends, after school, I felt as if I was nothing. Illness had taken up so much of my life for so long, I didn’t know what to replace it with, or how.
But now I’m dying. Soon I won’t have to worry about this hole in my life, or the guilt over Mum.
‘You spoke to her?’ I said, incredulous. ‘Why?’
Little Al’s voice was soft on the other end of the phone line. ‘Hey, hey, hey, Sacha, I was doing you a favour.’
‘I ought to hang up right now,’ I said. ‘You my friend are a…’
‘Child prodigy?’
‘Not exactly what I was thinking.’
‘You’re depressed, I can tell,’ said Al. ‘Come over to my place. We’re probably going to get takeaway Chinese. Mason’s got the hots for that girl at Lucky House, and he tries to flirt with her while he’s ordering dim sim. It’s quite funny.’
‘I don’t know, Al.’ I stared at the back fence, peeling paint, and the washing line shuddering in the wind. ‘I’ve got stuff to do.’
‘Duck?’
‘Yes?’
‘Come over.’
‘I don’t—’
‘I’m coming to pick you up right now. Stay there!’
‘Al—’ I tried to protest.
He’d already hung up.
Ten minutes later there was a knock, and I opened the door to Little Al scoffing hot chips on our veranda.
‘I got hungry on the way,’ he explained, and handed the chips, bundled in newspaper, to me.
‘I’m not coming over,’ I said. ‘You can’t make me.’ I tried to ignore the fact that he was almost a foot taller than me and if he wanted to he could throw me over his shoulder and take me with him against my will.
Al smiled. He stuck his head through the doorway and yelled, ‘Mr Thomas, do you mind if I abduct your son for the evening?’
‘Not at all,’ Dad yelled back. ‘Keep him if you want.’
Sacha’s list of Strange Ways to Die:
Poisoned by daffodil bulbs
Repeatedly struck by lightning
Crushed by a rogue satellite
Drowned in a bowl of cornflakes
Choked to death on a cheeseburger
Al’s family has a big house in one of the less respectable parts of town. You don’t walk down the street at night, but all the kids play kick-to-kick barefoot in the street during the day. There are broken-down cars in front yards, and an alcoholic or two in every household.
People who are richer have as many faults, sometimes different ones, sometimes the same, but they hide them better (most of the time).
Next to his house there is a caravan. Al’s sister and her boyfriend and their baby son are staying there for a few months. ‘Before they get back on their feet,’ Al’s mother says. There are about five bedrooms in the house, filled up with more brothers and sisters—mostly older than Al, except for his younger sister, Maddie—as well as his parents (who are separated, but live in the same house, his father with his new girlfriend—which is completely normal for Little Al and his family, but seems completely bizarre to me, not that I’d ever say that aloud) and a couple of aunts and his grandma.
Little Al is comfortable in his family—they are all massively tall—but he isn’t like the rest. He would be the first person in his family to finish high school, and the first to go to uni instead of going for an apprenticeship. His father is a bricklayer, and a couple of his brothers are carpenters and electricians, and most of the women in his family are hairdressers or beauty therapists, except an aunt who is a builder as well. She wears sensible shoes, has a short haircut, and never has a boyfriend, and, although everyone assumes she is gay, nobody talks about it. The Mitchells are nice—loud and friendly, always throwing a barbecue, setting up a bonfire, inviting you round for dinner when they barely know you.
Little Al’s older brother Mason caught us at the door on his way out. ‘Mate,’ he greeted me, drawing out the ‘a’. ‘How’s it goin’?’
‘I’m good, thanks. Yourself?’
‘Great, mate, great.’ He turned to Al. ‘I love this little dude.’ He pointed at me.
Al laughed. ‘Yeah, Mason.’
We walked through to the kitchen, where Al’s mother was slapping around pots and pans, a cigarette dangling from her mouth. She was large and friendly, with sharp little eyes. Al’s older sister, Miri, was spooning green mush into her baby’s mouth. The little boy (Nathan, I think) spat it out over his bib and chortled happily.
Al’s mum banged a pot down on the stove. ‘Johnny’s bloody well shot through again,’ she told Al. ‘Some son-in-law he is.’ Then she noticed me. ‘Sacha! Didn’t see you there. How’re things with your dad?’
‘Great, Mrs Mitchell.’
‘Why don’t you ever call me Sal?’ she laughed. ‘Let your dad know he’s welcome round any time.’ She winked at Al’s older sister. ‘You should meet Sacha’s dad, Miri. He’s a bit of all right. Gay, though. All the good ones are.’
Little Al laughed.
‘Speaking of a bit of all right.’ Miri pointed the baby spoon at Al. ‘Where’s this True Grisham?’
‘You can have her round here, you know. You don’t have to hide your relationship from us,’ his mum said. ‘You embarrassed by your mum?’