Bookmark Days (2 page)
It wasn’t our bike but the Carrington one, heading in our direction. I felt a flutter in my chest and my pulse quickened. There was only one way to communicate with a Carrington and that was with fire in your eyes and broken glass in your words.
The rider wasn’t wearing a helmet, he had on a dark trucker’s cap that held a mini haybale of wavy blonde hair mostly in place. It was the son – Nathaniel Carrington. It was five years since I’d seen him this close – and getting closer – and he wasn’t a boy any more. He was tall, his sleeves were rolled above his elbows and his arms were work-wiry and tanned. He stopped the bike and sprang off, approaching us with a disarming smile. Hoppy didn’t see it, he had his eyes down while he wrestled with the broken fence. Hoppy couldn’t look and I couldn’t drag my eyes away. Thank god for my sunglasses.
‘Wasn’t even our bloody fault,’ Hoppy growled. ‘The fence has been broken from the other side.’
‘Ah, yes. You’re right there,’ Nathaniel said. ‘My fault. Sorry about that. I hit it on my first run around with the seeder and forgot all about it.’
‘And the mongrel has the cheek to ring us and abuse us.’
Nathaniel blushed. The colour swept down his neck and under his collar. He yanked on the peak of his hat. ‘Sorry you copped that. I remembered as soon as I heard Pop on the phone. Came straight out. Thought I might beat you to it.’
‘Bloody Carringtons couldn’t grow ice in Siberia.’
‘Hoppy!’ I snapped. ‘He’s saying sorry.’
Nathaniel laughed and shrugged. ‘Doesn’t matter.’ He took a step closer. ‘I’ll fix it if you want, Mr Stanton.’
Hoppy stood with his jaw set in disapproval. He looked at Nathaniel for the first time. ‘No, I want it done properly. I’ll bloody fix it myself,’ he said. He waved his hand, dismissively. ‘You can get on your bike and go and tell your grandfather to get his facts straight before he starts mouthing off.’
He turned his back on Nathaniel.
My face burned.
Nathaniel looked at me and I mouthed, ‘Sorry’.
Nathaniel nodded, defeated. He looked like a kicked puppy. He got back on the bike and left.
I watched him go, and just as he was about to leave the paddock, he looked over his shoulder at me and waved – a big arm-overthe-head sort of wave – and I waved back.
I’d learned to hate a lot of things about the Carringtons. I discovered with that wave that it was going to be very hard to hate the youngest one.
It’s called a paradigm shift. I learned it in psychology. Like when you’re waiting in line at the supermarket and someone behind you smacks you in the leg. You spin around ready to bite their head off, but then you realise they’re blind. They’ve hit you with their cane. The sudden change you feel in your head – from wanting to punch them to wanting to help them – that’s a sort of paradigm shift, and I had one that day. It was the biggest one in my life and it left me reeling. It was a whole mix of things that messed me up, like seeing my grandfather adding fuel to a fire that he’d always said blew in from the other side of the fence. Seeing a boy I’d been taught to hate and feeling the way Juliet probably did when she first saw Romeo.
I was thinking about this as I was cutting kindling for the fire. It’s not good to be distracted with an axe in your hand, especially the one Hoppy has honed sharper than a kitchen knife. Luckily, the only blood spilled that afternoon was the blood of two roosters for dinner.
Katie and her family arrived when the chooks were roasting. There were the usual squeals and hugs and Nan burst into a round of ‘Happy Birthday’ even though it wasn’t anybody’s birthday.
Nan was the first to notice. ‘Where’s Tim?’
I hadn’t realised my uncle was missing.
‘Tim stayed home,’ Aunty Jacq said. ‘He’s umm . . . doing the bathroom renovations in peace while we’re away.’
We unloaded their stuff from the car. Aunty Jacq helped Mum and Nan in the kitchen, Chooka and Naomi plugged in the PlayStation in the lounge and Katie and I went to my room.
Katie dumped her bags and flopped onto my bed with a huge sigh. ‘Oh . . . my . . . god. It’s so good to be here. So good to see you, Avvie. What have you been up to? What’s the goss?’
‘Nothing much.’
‘How have you been?’
‘Good.’
She frowned at me then. Were we perfect cousins or perfect strangers?
I frowned back and she snorted a laugh. The ice was broken. I sat on her guts and bounced up and down. She shoved at me but I just bounced higher and higher until a dainty little fart squeaked out of her and we both fell about in hysterics.
You don’t get much choice as far as your cousins go, so if they’re good ones, you’re in luck. If they’re your best friends in the whole world it’s a double-triple bonus. When Katie is around, I feel like a ten-year-old again and we just go feral. Suddenly it’s like school holidays even if you don’t go to school.
Dinner was a typically rowdy catch-up. Naomi was sitting opposite me wearing a lime singlet top and I noticed she had boobs. Boobs at nine years old! I mean, they were just little bumps but I don’t think I even had that when I was nine. I thought when I lost a tooth, when I found a hair down there, when I got my first period, ‘I’ll remember this day forever’. They were bookmark days, but the only thing I really remember now is thinking that I’d remember.
Katie brought clothes. Der. I mean she brought clothes for me to wear. She gave me a full bag of stuff from her wardrobe. They’re not strictly hand-me-downs because she hasn’t grown out of them or worn them to death; they’re more like hand-me-across-to-the-poor-fashion-deprived-cousin items. After dinner we closed the door on my bedroom, put on Katie’s CDs one after another and held a fashion parade for two. Except for our feet, we’re exactly the same size. She’s a size six shoe and I’m a size eight, which is a real bummer because she has a shoe fetish and lots of great footwear that I would love to share.
My favourite from the bag was a printed cotton summer dress in pale teal and gold. It was low-cut but not plunging and she’d lifted the hem to mid thigh. It made me wish I’d shaved my legs.
Katie noticed and patted my shin. ‘Go on, do it.’
I came back smooth ten minutes later.
‘Looks better on you than it ever did on me and I loved it,’ Katie said. ‘Must be the colour of your hair.’ She’s a sort of rusty blonde and my hair’s nearly black. She grabbed my bedside lamp and lit me up so I glowed in the mirror.
I’m embarrassed to admit it, but seeing that feminine-looking stranger in the mirror, I thought, ‘Wonder if Nathaniel would like her?’
‘I’ll buy it,’ I said, hands on hips. ‘Do you take American Express?’
Later that night – much later – we talked in whispers about her boys and her crazy sexploits. Well, she talked; I listened. She’d not only read the book of lerve; she’d written it. No, she’d
lived
it – every steamy page – and I hadn’t even seen the cover. It was hard to believe that it had all happened to one person in a single year, but she showed me the pictures of her and her boys on her phone and they at least tallied with the emails she’d sent me.
‘This is Parko,’ she said. ‘Underneath those clothes is the body of a god, I swear.’
I lay there, repulsed and enthralled at the same time, feeling stranger and stranger until Katie fell asleep mid-story. I lay awake for a long time after, too, staring into the gloom and thinking how she’d changed. I had trouble fitting together the Katie I’d known forever and the girl in the pictures she’d been painting in my head. At one stage she was whimpering in her sleep.
‘Katie? You okay?’
But she didn’t answer.
It wasn’t just shoe size and hair colour that made us different; she really was from another planet. Part of me wanted an express ticket there, but part of me wanted – what? I fell asleep wondering.
When I did finally fall asleep, my dreams were all broken and nonsensical. One minute I was digging for something (what?) in the sandpit, the next I was lifting a lamb into the back of the ute, only I wasn’t tall enough to get it over the side of the tray (which probably did happen a few years ago). My eyes opened at 5.25, the way they always did. Katie was already awake. We
got
up and ate breakfast with Dad and Hoppy and Nan but I didn’t really
wake
up until Katie and I were on the horses, making long dawn shadows through the paddocks. I rode Zeph and Katie rode Dad’s horse Charlie. Katie wanted to canter as she always does (equestrian rev-head) so we rumbled and raced until the horses got tired. We walked them to the creek, dismounted and let them graze on the patches of green the sheep had missed. We sat on the bank and threw lumps of soil at the shiny black trickle of water. There were birds under the trees along the creek – a family of choughs – and they were chatting to each other, chirring and clucking gently. Sounded like a discussion about lamb prices or the weather.
‘Sorry about last night,’ Katie said.
‘What?’
‘I just didn’t shut up.’
I laughed. ‘What’s new?’
‘It’s your turn now, I promise,’ she said, and zipped her lips.
I laughed again. I thought about the boy next door and my insides tingled. There was no way I was letting that cat out of the bag. What was the tingling about, anyway? We’d been neighbours since we were born but I’d never had an actual conversation with him. The only thing I knew about Nathaniel Carrington was that I felt a disarming lack of hate for him. How would I explain that to my sex queen cousin? ‘I have nothing to say. No stories to tell. I don’t go anywhere, I don’t meet anybody, I don’t do anything.’
‘Yes you do.’
‘What, like last week when I found one of the new lambs head first down a wombat hole, dead, with its tail and half its bum eaten off?’
‘Ewww. No, not like that. Boy action.’
‘Nothing like your life. Not even remotely.’
‘What about Ned?’
‘Ned?’
Then I remembered. I met him at the Forsyth Show last year. He and his friend (the one we called No Name) followed us around with their hands in their pockets, reeking of cigarette smoke and BO and when it got dark Ned tried to kiss me. We had a little accident as I avoided his lips: I head-butted him in the mouth. Drew blood, in fact. And then it was time for us to go home. Thankfully.
Ned was not boy action. Ned was not the stuff of dreams (unless he was the thing hidden in the sandpit). Ned was a joke at my expense.
I smacked Katie’s thigh and she rolled away laughing.
‘What are you going to wear?’ she said.
‘When?’
‘He’ll be there again this year. Him and No Name.’
‘I’m not going.’
Then she was beside me again, her arm over my shoulder.
‘Come on, Avvie, don’t be like that. There’s one guy who’ll show you a good time. One guy is better than nothing.’
I knew she was joking but at some level ‘better than nothing’ stung me. I
was
hungry. Maybe Ned was the one guy in the whole world who’d be interested in me. Maybe he was the best I could hope for. He was probably a nice guy. I hadn’t even given him a chance. ‘I’ll wear my new dress,’ I said.
‘New?’
‘New from the House of Katie Harriot.’
‘Ah, very nice. Shoes?’
I scuffed my foot in the dirt. ‘Workboots, of course. Unless it’s raining, then I’ll wear my wellies.’
‘Your what?’
‘My gumby-gumboots.’
‘Classy,’ she said. ‘Have your mum and dad been into town this year?’
‘What? Yes, of course. Why?’
‘Well, I was thinking, if they hadn’t made their
yearly
trip to the shops we could lobby them on the grounds that you need nice shoes for the Show. Let me be your guide, your fashion consultant.’
I laughed, but I was shaking my head. ‘You can ask Dad if you want but I know what he’ll say. “Shoes are a
want
, Katie, not a
need
.”’
I was wrong.
Over lunch, when Katie turned on her princess act and asked her uncle Lance if he could take us into town tomorrow to get me some new shoes, my dad said yes.
‘Cool!’ Naomi chimed in. ‘Can me and Chooka come too?’
‘We’ll all go,’ Dad said. ‘On one condition.’
‘Look out,’ Nan said. ‘Here comes the catch.’
‘That you kids give us a hand this afternoon to bring in that mob from the big dam paddock.’
‘Shotgun the four-wheeler!’ Chooka said.
‘I’m riding Charlie!’ Katie said.
Dad was smiling and nodding.
‘Can I ride with you, Chooka?’ Naomi asked.
‘Course, but I’m driving.’
‘You can take turns,’ Mum said.
Chooka huffed and crossed his arms but made a swift exit when Naomi got up from the table.
I thanked Dad as we collected the lunch plates. ‘The shoes aren’t that important.’
‘Yes they are!’ Katie said.
‘No worries, Av. Mum and I’d already decided we needed a trip to town before the weekend.’
‘Ohhh!’ Katie said, and slapped Dad’s arm. ‘Cheeky beast.’
Dad recoiled and rubbed where Katie had slapped. ‘Beast? You’re the beast!’ he said, and grabbed her, pinned her hands and tickled her.
Moving sheep takes skill but let’s face it: sheep really aren’t that complex. In fact, they’re not very bright. Dad says they’re
instinctive
. With a capital
stink
.
To move them around, you get behind the flock and pretend you’re the bogeyman. They run away. Sometimes they all run in different directions and they are surprisingly fast, so getting them to go where you want them to takes a bit of planning and the help of a few people on motorbikes or horses, plus a dog or six. We have three working dogs: Rex, Champ and Ning. Rex is Champ’s dad and he’s getting a bit old now but was a grand champion in his day. Ning is short for ning-nong because Dad thought he was a bit of an idiot, but he’s fine if there’s another brighter dog showing him what to do. And Champ is the best working dog we’ve ever had. He’s lightning on his feet, always seems to know where we’re heading for and can go all day. Champ’s only drawback is that he’s scared of sheep. Not all the time, or Dad would have put a bullet in him years ago – but every now and then, when a big merino turns on him, his tail goes between his legs and he runs away. I know how he feels. For all my years shoving sheep around, I’d rather be way up high on Zeph than burbling along on a bike or the four-wheeler.