A Strange Fire (Florence Vaine) (12 page)

 I take a detour, in order to,
insane as it sounds, lose my invisible stalker. If this unexplainable
thing
is following me, then it clearly wants to know where I’m going. I can’t allow
it to know my true destination. Even if it is only a book shop. I turn a corner
and walk in the opposite direction, down a street I haven’t been on before. The
following persists.

 I come to a dead end when I get
to the town supermarket, a massive red brick rectangle with a huge car park in
front of it. There’s red lettering above the shop front windows, reading
O’
Callaghan’s Grocery.
It’s surrounded by a similarly red-bricked, low rise
wall. I can still feel the presence so I sit down on the wall and wait for it
to get bored and leave. The supermarket car park is packed with vehicles,
people obviously doing their weekend shopping. I watch as they come and go.

 A red car pulls up into a spot
close to where I’m sitting. Oh crap. I try to duck and hide when I see Josh in
the passenger seat, and a middle aged man with greying brown hair beside him in
the driver’s seat. But the area is too open and there’s nowhere for me to go.
The two of them appear to be having some kind of an argument, so Josh hasn’t
noticed me sitting here yet. I could simply get up and leave, but my stalker is
still with me and I’m determined to bore it to death by sitting here stock
still until it leaves me alone.

 “Fuck! Can’t you do anything
right?” says the older man through gritted teeth. I presume this is Josh’s dad.
I can hear the words clearly because the car windows are wide open.

 Josh appears to have no answer
for him, which is very much out of character. In the short time I’ve known him
he has almost always had a snappy comeback no matter what.

 His shoulders are slumped, his
expression frustrated, when he replies, “Look, I told you I forgot the keys;
there’s nothing we can do about it now.”

 It’s odd, his voice has none of
the confidence it normally contains. Josh’s dad looks furious, as though he
might swing for his son at any minute. I don’t really blame him. If I had Josh
for a son I’d probably want to hit him too.

 “I don’t know what you’re getting
out for, you can wait in the fucking car, I can’t look at you right now,” says
his dad, he seems furious.

 I wonder what Josh did to make
him so angry. Then his dad grabs his wallet from the glove compartment and
walks into the supermarket. Josh stands there for a minute, halfway in and
halfway out of the car. He looks so miserable and I feel excruciatingly awkward
witnessing his misery. If I move now he’ll see me.
Please don’t look this
way
, I beg,
Please don’t notice I’m here
.

 I see him let out a heavy sigh,
shake his head and then turn to get back inside the car. But just before he
gets in, his head snaps up and he looks straight at me. For a moment his
expression is confused, but his usual cockiness returns a moment later as he
smirks at me. Okay, invisible stalker or no invisible stalker, I can’t stay
here. It’s way too awkward.

 I jump up off the wall and hurry
away from the car park. But no, it was never going to be
that
easy for
me to get away. It never is. I hear quickening footsteps behind me, and I know
that they don’t belong to my incorporeal friend. They belong to Josh. A hand
grips onto my elbow tightly and stops me in my stride.

 “Flo,” he says in a smug voice,
“decided to take me up on my offer did you? Although I have to say, I didn’t
expect you to start following me around. You could have just let me know at
school.”

 “I don’t know w-what you’re
t....” The awkward nature of this situation means that my speech escapes me yet
again. I take a deep breath because sometimes that works, but not nearly as
much as I’d like it to. Unfortunately, this seems to be one of the occasions
where it doesn’t. I pull my arm from his grasp and try to walk away again, but
he steps in front of me.

 “Cat got your tongue?” he leers.
His eyes wander over me with aggressive appreciation. “Oh well,” he laughs, “I
guess you can’t answer that can you? Don’t worry, the less talk the better,
I’ve always found that to be the case when it comes to dealing with girls.”

 In this moment I would give
anything to be able to speak, he’s being cruel and he doesn’t seem to have any
kind of remorse about it. Some people just don’t have a conscience at all. Josh
is certainly one of those people. But just as I’m thinking this, my eyes travel
to the very top of his head, the area where a person’s cerebral processes are
most manifest. In my eyes anyhow. And in looking at this area I see exactly why
he is being particularly mean. Shame and embarrassment colour his aura.

 Having me witness the fight with
his dad has actually affected Josh. Shocking. I didn’t think boys like Josh
ever felt embarrassed over anything. His disposition is always a combination of
smugness, arrogance and cruelty. His vulnerability gives me courage. My words return.

 “What your dad said to you back
there wasn’t very nice.” I tell him quietly.

 His facial expression is hard to
interpret, I guess because that was the last thing he’d expected me to say. His
face becomes a hard shell. “What do
you
care?” he spits, but I can see
in his colours that he’s trying his best to appear unaffected, while on the
inside he is screaming.

 “I – I just know what it’s like
to have an arsehole for a dad,” I tell him, hoping that perhaps he’ll soften if
he sees that I can relate.

 He folds his arms across his
chest and narrows his gaze. “Oh and by the way,” I add, “I wasn’t stalking you,
I’d been sitting on the wall before you and your dad pulled up.”

 “Whatever,” he replies
dismissively, “And for your information I couldn’t give a crap what way my dad
talks to me, I’m not a fucking baby, Christ.”

 He’s deluding himself, because if
I know anything it’s that a parent’s love means everything to their child. I’ve
lived my entire life without it, so I know that no matter how hard you try to
convince yourself that their opinion doesn’t matter, it makes no difference.
Each and every time they tell you you’re worthless, or that they’re
disappointed in you, your heart feels as though it’s been trampled on by a herd
of elephants. It’s hard-wired into our DNA.

 “Okay, well, you keep telling
yourself that,” I answer, and move to walk away.

 “Not so fast,” says Josh, pulling
me back. “Now why don’t you stay and we can go somewhere a little more private.
Have some fun.” His words drip with sexual intent.

 “No thank you.” I reply.

 “Oh so you’re gonna be prissy
now
,
are you? From what I’ve heard you’ve already let Marsters inside those pants,
and you’re barely in town a week. Or is it just that you’re a picky slut? They
have to be ex-criminals before you’ll sleep with them, huh?”

 His aura has turned a nasty brown
colour, and I flinch at the vindictive nature of his words. Ex-criminal? Frank
is hardly that, I thought he was just a juvenile case. Shoplifting, loitering,
vandalism, that kind of thing.

 “W-who t-told you that?” I ask in
a whisper.

 “Came straight from the horse’s
mouth,” says Josh with a cruel grin. “I heard him bragging to his brothers
about it at school.”

 “That’s a lie.”

 “
You keep telling yourself
that
, princess,” he replies, mimicking my words to him earlier. At this I
push him out of my way, my strength surprising me when I actually knock him
sideways off the footpath and onto the side of the road. Then I run away as
fast as I possibly can, but still, I can hear his satisfied laughter drift
further and further away behind me.

 It’s not until I have been
running for at least a couple minutes that I notice the invisible presence is
gone. God, Josh must really be a pain if even a ghost or magical entity can’t
stand his company. I slow my pace, and think about what he’d said to me. Could
it be true that Frank lied and told his brothers that I’d had sex with him? It
just seems so out of character.

 I haven’t known him very long,
but he really seems like a very honourable sort of person. The kind of person
who wouldn’t tell a lie even to save a person’s feelings. But perhaps my
impression of him is all wrong. Perhaps he is just as fickle and self-serving
as every other teenage boy in the world.

 Now that my follower has left me
I continue on to the book shop and the blond woman who’d told me her name is
Hayley is there again. She grins widely and says, “Nice to see you again Flo,”
and it touches me that she remembers my name. I go to the back of the shop
where there are shelves of old novels, I pick up a copy of
Jane Eyre
and
sit down on the carpeted floor to read a couple of pages.

 When life gets too real I always
need to immerse myself in a story. It helps to drown out my worries. I get
through the first few pages before I hear footsteps stop in front of me.

 “You know,” says a cheerfully
teasing voice, “this isn’t a library.” I look up to see Hayley smiling down at
me.

 I drop the book onto the floor,
nervous. “Oh, s-s-sorry, I was j-just...”

 “I’m kidding honey,” she says,
with a lyrical giggle. “I don’t mind you reading the books so long as you don’t
dog ear them or break the spine. I just came to tell you we’re closing in five
minutes.”

 “Oh, right,” I reply, getting to
my feet. “I forgot the time.” I pick up the book I’d dropped and put it back
neatly onto the shelf. I’d buy it only I have no money left after the cinema
last night. Most of the other customers have left, there’s just one middle aged
man standing in the history section browsing.

 A moment later the shop door
opens abruptly and a voice shouts, “Hayley! Come on we came to collect you!”

 Hayley grins. “That’ll be my
boys, loud and boisterous as always.”

 She turns and manoeuvres through
the book shelves which are currently blocking my view of the front of the shop.
I decide it’s probably time I left too, so I follow her out to the front. I
realise just how small suburban towns can be when I find that Hayley’s “boys”
as she’d called them, turn out to be Ross, Alex and Frank. She must be their
foster mum. It
really
is a small world.

 The three of them are standing by
the counter as Hayley grabs her purse from under her stool. The man who’d been
browsing the history section brushes by me, causing me to stumble backwards a
little, then he leaves without purchasing anything. Rude. The second Frank sees
me his eyes lock on mine, in a way that makes me feel like the only girl in the
world worth gazing at. He glares at the man who’d pushed past me. Then I
remember what Josh had told me and my eyes immediately drop to the floor. I
don’t know whether to feel angry or embarrassed or both.

 “Hey Flo,” says Ross with a
bright grin. “I hope you’re not trying to steal our Hayley away, she always did
want a girl to take care of, but she’s had to settle for us boys.”

 “Oh so you know each other,” says
Hayley in a tone that makes me wonder if she already knew I was acquainted with
her foster sons.

 “Florence goes to school with
us,” says Frank, with a strange look in his eyes, the kind of look you give to
your parent in an effort to shut them up before they humiliate you.

 “Yes, I should have known,” says
Hayley, grabbing a set of keys hanging on the wall behind the counter. “Well,
come on, everyone out. I have to lock up,” and she shoos us out the door.

 Ross jumps into the driver’s seat
of the big navy van and revs up the engine while Alex gets in the back. Frank
lingers on the footpath, he looks me up and down before asking, “Were you
looking for any book in particular?”

 My mind is full of the horrible
things Josh told me earlier, like a poisonous snake whispering in my ear. I
don’t know whether I should believe him. I can hardly focus on what Frank has
just asked me because I’m too consumed by the hurt I’m feeling.

 “S-sorry, what?” I ask, blinking
a couple times to focus my mind and also to prevent my eyes from tearing up.

 “Books,” he answers. “Were you
looking for one in particular?”

 “Oh. Books, right, um no, I was
just browsing.”

 “Are you okay Florence?” he asks,
his eyes zoning in on me. I feel like they can see right into my most private
thoughts.

 “Yes.” I reply, all too quickly,
making it clear that the opposite is true.

 I can tell that he’s about to say
something like “Are you sure?” but then thinks better of it. Perhaps my
expression is instructing him not to go there. I glance inside the shop, Hayley
is still in the process of closing up.

 “We’re having chilli for dinner,”
says Frank. “You’re welcome to come back and join us if you’d like?” his voice
lacks the certainty it normally contains. Is he worried that I’ll say no? Well
he should be, because there is no way I’m going to have dinner with a person
who tells lies about me.

 “That’s okay,” I tell him. “I
already had an early dinner today with Gran.” It’s a lie, and I’m starving, but
I’m sure there will be something I can make at home once I get back.

 “Oh, well we could just hang out
if you want?” he seems determined to spend time with me. Probably so that he
can construct more lies about me. Huh.

 “I can’t, I - I have to go,” I
say, just as Hayley locks the shop door and hops into the van with her foster
sons. I turn on my heel and walk away before Frank can say anything else.

The remainder of the weekend
passes and I spend a lot of time taking bubble baths, it’s a luxury I never
knew. In Dad’s apartment in Tribane we only had a grimy shower. Gran is highly
amused at how much I enjoy her bathing facilities. She gives me a bottle of
rose water and tells me to put some in my bath, says that it’s good for the
skin.