Girl Saves Boy
Steph Bowe was born in 1994 and
lives in Melbourne. She writes a blog:
heyteenager.blogspot.com
Girl Saves Boy
is her first novel. She does
not condone the theft of garden gnomes.
steph bowe
girl
saves
boy
TEXT PUBLISHING
The paper in this book is manufactured only from wood
grown in sustainable regrowth forests.
The Text Publishing Company
Swann House
22 William Street
Melbourne Victoria 3000
Australia
www.textpublishing.com.au
Copyright © Steph Bowe 2010
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under
copyright above, no part of this publication shall be
reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval
system, or transmitted in any form or by any means
(electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise), without the prior permission of both the
copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
First published by The Text Publishing Company, 2010
Cover design by WH Chong
Text design by Susan Miller
Typeset by J & M Typesetting
Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication entry
Author: Bowe, Steph, 1994-
Title: Girl saves boy / Steph Bowe.
Edition: 1st ed.
ISBN: 9781921656590 (pbk.)
Dewey Number: A823.4
For my beautiful family.
Thank you for helping me become who I am.
Contents
Prologue
Jewel Valentine
There was a boy in the lake.
At first, I thought he was my brother, but then I realised he was way too big to be a ten-year-old boy. Even in my mind my brother will never get any older.
That’s scary, isn’t it? To realise you’ve lived a whole eight years longer than your older brother ever could.
I wasn’t imagining him. There was a real, flesh-and-blood boy drowning in the lake. No illusions. No hallucinations.
I stopped breathing, paralysed. Panic and fear spread through my body.
And he wasn’t fighting against it, either—he was sinking, down, down into the inky water. Soon only the top of his head was visible.
I kicked off my shoes and splashed in. My jeans dragged and my legs went numb. I swam frantically towards the boy, the water deepening as I got closer to him, the muddy floor of the lake slipping away beneath me. I reached him and, treading water, pulled him above the surface, cradling his head. He looked so peaceful, like he was sleeping, his hair spread out on the water, his eyes closed.
I swam back to the shore, towing him at my side, and in those seconds I felt as if I were making up for what I didn’t do for my brother.
I couldn’t let this boy die as well.
My brother’s last word was: ‘Polo.’
My grandfather’s last words were: ‘I feel better than ever. Stop fussing.’
My grandmother’s last words were: ‘Jewel, pop the kettle on, love.’
As far as I knew, my father was still alive, but the last words he uttered before he left my mother and me were spoken to me.
He said, ‘You should never have been born.’
My father was a good man. My brother’s death broke him. But those six words he spoke when I was eight years old have tainted my life ever since.
I tend to notice the idiosyncrasies of life—the small details, the little ironies. Like engagement rings in pawnshop windows and second-hand wedding dresses advertised for sale, never worn. Or the fat woman in the queue at the supermarket, a six-litre tub of chocolate ice-cream in her trolley, and her Weight Watchers membership card falling to the floor when she fumbles for her credit card.
It’s the small things that show who people really are. Hopeful, hopeless, frail and unsure—they never change, they never learn. They know marriages so often fail, but they take the risk, because there’s always the chance it will work for them. They promise to change—their diet, their lifestyle, their wicked ways—but the next week they’re back at Coles stocking up on high-calorie comfort foods and spending the night sobbing in front of a movie starring Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks.
That’s why I realise I’m an alien.
Don’t get me wrong—I love
Sleepless in Seattle
as much as the next person—but the same rules don’t apply to me. I don’t take risks. I don’t rely on other people for my happiness. I don’t waste my time on Hope or Faith and, if I keep my standards low enough, I’m always pleasantly surprised. I lack the traits that allow other people to believe in illusive, non-tangible things like God and World Peace.
I like the inevitable, not chance. Things that are going to happen whether we want them to or not, things that we can rely on, like Death.
I’m an alien, from somewhere else, looking in. I like it that way. I know my place in the world: on the outside.
You can judge nearly everything about a person from their opening lines, the first time they meet you, or the first time they’ve seen you in ten years.
Rachel’s opening line was: ‘Sorry, I got caught in terrible traffic. A car flipped over on the highway. Awful.’ She was panting through it; she’d obviously run from the car park into Arrivals.
I picked up my suitcase and we hugged awkwardly.
There was a foggy memory in the back of my mind that a whiff of her perfume had awakened (who doesn’t change their perfume for ten years?), of her holding me above her head and spinning around and laughing. But it was the type of memory that might have been an ad I’d seen, still frames linked together, like a muted dream sequence.
While I’d been away, I’d grown taller than her. Only by an inch, and we were both still small (I was a measly five foot two), but the last time I’d seen her, ten years ago, I’d been half her size.
My mother had become a stranger.
My new counsellor’s opening line was: ‘Watch out for the bird shit.’
I liked Geraldine—the day after I’d arrived back in the outer-eastern suburbs of Melbourne that I’d left a decade ago, I’d found someone who wasn’t uptight and constantly on the verge of a mental breakdown. Less than twenty-four hours with my mother and I was ready to take a breather, even if it involved talking about my feelings and other things that hide in my inner cupboards.
Geraldine had dirt on her hands. We sat in the sunroom at the back of her house, looking out onto her backyard, her pride and joy. She told me she was a keen gardener. I thought she was in her mid-fifties, though I’m not good at judging age and she could have been older. She was tall and broad-shouldered, and I got the feeling she could be intimidating if she felt like it. She had hair the colour of steel wool, and when I met her she wore a green velour tracksuit. She was semi-retired, she said. She used to be a psychiatrist, working in an office and earning a hundred and sixty bucks an hour.
‘Better than a prostitute,’ she laughed.
Now she was charging twenty dollars like a ‘trannie turning tricks at a truck stop’—her words, not mine—and talking to moody teenagers in her sunroom so she could afford the mortgage repayments.
‘Since my husband died, I need to be there for my daughter.’ She didn’t say it sorrowfully, like someone mourning. She was disarmingly open, and I liked that.
I also liked her because she swore in my presence, even though she was old and I was young. I liked her because her wrinkles were fantastic to sketch. I liked her because she smelt earthy, even though I was pretty sure it was only horse-dung fertiliser.
We drank sugary tea and I sat on the couch, my knees tucked in to my chest. All afternoon I drew in my sketchbook, while she spoke about herself.
I didn’t speak much. My opening line was: ‘Really?’ which was a weak effort, even for someone like me, who aspires some day to be homeless and anonymous in a big city, owning nothing but a sketchbook.
Probably not the most ambitious goals, but at least I’ve got some.
I’ve never been one to think ahead—it didn’t worry me until that Saturday evening at the lake that I’d be going to a new school the following Monday, where teachers would probably badger me about my mental health and Goths with unfortunate piercings would attempt to befriend me.
That evening, I needed to get out of the house and the lake was my favourite place. I couldn’t believe my mother was still sane after living in our old house for ten years—the red-brick house where we had held my brother’s wake, where that fine April morning my father had yelled those words that broke my heart—the house I had disappeared from. In that house, she had stayed on alone.
It was strange, but for the first time I felt bad for someone other than myself—for her, even though I barely knew her any more.
I walked along the quiet streets, past the corner shop and through the park. It reminded me of one of those lakes you see on TV, advertising those communities that get built in the middle of nowhere, as if they’re fine places to live, with jazzy promotions of people riding bicycles, some kids playing basketball and a young couple cradling a baby in a park near a lake.
Then I saw him. And I don’t think I had much of a choice past that moment, and I’m not talking about how I saved his life.
The boy in the lake’s opening line that evening was: ‘What?’
But I didn’t blame him—he was probably eloquent and funny and smart when he wasn’t drowning and on the verge of unconsciousness.
The first time we met, Jewel Valentine saved my life.
There was sudden and forceful pressure on my chest, and someone pinching my nose and pulling my chin down, and then a mouth against mine, filling my lungs with air.
Had I not been barely conscious, I would have made one of my usual lame jokes that I reserve for doctors’ appointments and sending to the
Reader’s Digest
. Something along the lines of: ‘Maybe you could take me out to dinner first?’
As it was, I had an intense throbbing pain in my head, a lack of sensation in my extremities and the curious feeling that my lungs were filled with water. Everything was dark.
Again, the pressure against my chest—I could hear someone counting unevenly, choking back breaths between each number. It was a girl.
I could feel coarse grass beneath me, a rock jutting into my lower back, and I could hear the water lapping at the edge of the lake. I opened my eyes and spluttered a mouthful of lake water, algae and all, onto the ground beside me.
Night surrounded us like a blanket, and the girl knelt beside me, her eyes filled with concern. Moonlight reflected off the lake and distant streetlights glimmered on quiet suburban avenues. It was autumn: leaves littered the ground around us, and the night was cool.