Magenta McPhee (3 page)

‘Congratulations!' Mum threw her arms around me as I stepped through the door. She waved a photocopied page at me. ‘Great letter, Magenta!'

‘Who showed you?' My heart sank. I hadn't expected Mum to see it.

‘Some girl in my Year Seven class, of course. They were all huddled around Friday morning. Then one of the braver ones broke away from the flock and showed me. Great letter, darling, pity about the subject.'

‘Well, I am worried, Mum.'

‘He's fine. I think I do know my ex-husband, Magenta. After all, we managed to live with each other for fifteen years. I probably know him better than anyone else in the world, given that his father is some introverted eccentric up the North Coast and his mother is dead. He's fine. Not finding a job, of course, but other than that fine.'

‘The market's tight,' I said, repeating what Dad had told me. I clenched my hands in my jeans pockets. I hated it when Mum talked about all this.

‘Trib has managed to find three jobs in the time it's taken your father to find none.'

‘Trib is younger than you and Dad,' I said smoothly and then held my breath. Mum just gave me a look that said it all – a flash of anger followed by a cloud of disappointment with an edge of anxiety. Actually, to be fair, Trib wasn't that much younger. It was just useful ammunition when she overstepped the boundary into Dad's life with me. It pulled her up. I thought of it as Mum's time-out.

She visibly relaxed her face. ‘I'm sorry,' she said, ‘I just worry when you worry about Max. You shouldn't have to and then it makes me mad that he's letting you.'

‘He doesn't want me to worry either,' I said warily.

‘Well then, why doesn't he do something about it!' Mum glared at me. ‘God, he could get a job in a call centre or something.'

‘Mum!' She knew this was out of bounds. She just knew it.

‘I'm the one paying child support, Magenta!'

‘Tell someone else, not me,' I said and pushed past her to my bedroom, feeling the tears prickle at the back of my eyes. It wasn't Dad's fault. When Mum had left him first, I'd gone with her and seen Dad every second weekend. Then he got retrenched and put all his retrenchment and resettlement package into a small house with a reasonable-size yard that got a little sun. That was pretty important up where we live if you plan to grow vegies. Every second weekend I
went there and we dug a duck pond and prepared the garden.

When Mum met Trib she had one of her meltdowns. She stormed at Dad next time she saw him and said that she had no time of her own and did he know what teaching was like these days and how could she manage to parent me ninety-eight per cent of the time, maintain her professional standing one hundred per cent, and attempt to be in a new relationship as well. Something had to give, she said, and it wasn't going to be her profession and it wasn't going to be her new relationship because after all, she deserved that, didn't she?

So it was me.

All that sounds much harsher than it was meant, by the way. My mother has been teaching for nearly twenty years and she knows how to use her emotions to get exactly the behaviour she wants. Except this time it didn't work. She'd wanted a couple of extra nights off without me – I knew because she'd discussed it with me. She and Trib just needed a bit of extra child-free time to get to know each other.

Instead my dad totally agreed with her and arranged to get me every alternate week. That was fine, until she realised she'd have to pay him child-support payments. Then everything hit the roof again.

You can push Dad and you can push him but when he reaches his limit he is immovable. A mountain. I know.

‘You got what you wanted,' he told Mum. I remember we were standing on her veranda and she was screaming at him. He held my hands warmly between his own two big ones and hugged me against him with his free arm.

‘You'll leave me destitute!' I remember that word because I'd only just found out what it meant and I couldn't imagine it happening to my mother.

‘Hardly,' he smiled. ‘I think you'll find the government is reluctant to take more than they think people can afford. Get a good accountant onto it, Tammy. That will probably ease some of the burden.'

‘I did nothing dishonest.'

‘Did I say you did?'

I should say that this was a stage of their divorce that was less than friendly. I didn't understand and actually wasn't even meant to hear what was said. But I eavesdropped because it was my life, too, and I hated the way they thought it had nothing to do with me. Or, rather, I eavesdropped until it made me too angry or frustrated or sad, and then I'd plug in my mp3 player and play music.

So, anyway, Mum does pay Dad child support and I live with Dad every alternate week. The duck pond is finished. We had a bit of landslide trouble back in the heavy summer rain, but it's looking okay now. We just haven't got the ducks yet. The vegie garden's looking good, though. And Mum's relationship with Trib
flourished to the point that they are getting married in a few months' time. That's probably why the discussion has gone back to Dad's failure to get a job. Weddings, as Mum keeps saying, are expensive.

Apart from the financial flare-ups I don't mind living in two places. I imagine I will later when I've got heaps and heaps of homework to do and a bag that's bigger than me, but for the time being, it's pretty cool. I almost get to be two different Magentas.

‘You're breaking the rules,' I told Mum, stuck my fingers in my ears and shut my bedroom door behind me. Everything here was neat. I had a bookcase-wardrobe-bunkbed unit that Mum had put together for me and that I had painted a deep green. My room had a forest theme. On the wall above my chest of drawers, Trib had helped me draw a huge tree with vines looped through the branches. It had taken us six months to get it absolutely right. Trib was patient with things like that, though. He said it was good therapy. Mum and I had painted the trees and some huge yet-to-be-discovered vine flowers that glowed in different colours. I had a collection of rocks piled up on top of another bookcase that held my fantasy reference material.

It was the ideal room for Magenta, teenage fantasy writer.

I threw myself down on the bed and pulled all the cushions around me until I was walled in with pillowed
softness. My favourite cushion had a tapestry picture of a great antlered stag on it. Mum had made it for me and she was now making me one of a young woman dressed in medieval costume with a thin hunting dog at her feet. That was my dog – my fantasy dog, Echo.

I expected Mum to follow me and began counting in my head. Usually I only got up to a hundred before my door opened and Mum came in to apologise. This time, though, the phone rang so it took up to five hundred.

She sat on the end of my bed and stroked my ankle, carefully. I held a cushion to my face so I couldn't see all of her. She stroked for a while in silence. Up and down along my foot and then up to my ankle again. It almost, but not quite, tickled.

‘I'm sorry,' she said eventually. ‘Grown-up life gets a bit tricky, you know. But you are absolutely right, I shouldn't talk about it to you or in front of you. It's just that you're the only person I know who sees him and knows what is going on at his end. Then this problem-page letter of yours! I am only worried, Magenta. Just because you leave someone doesn't mean that you stop worrying about them.'

‘You're worried about money,' I said in the tightest meanest voice I could manage. I had to move the cushion and say it all again because the cushion muffled my first attempt.

‘True,' she admitted. ‘There are things Trib and I would like to do and they require a bit more money than I have available at the moment. But I am also worried about your father. It may not always sound that way, but that's the way it is.'

‘Just don't talk to me about it.'

‘Magenta,' she said and I could hear an edge creeping into her voice, ‘I do try not to. Then my Year Seven girls show me a letter that has clearly been written by you and sent into a public forum. A public forum. So I am now worried about you worrying about your father. Clearly you are the innocent party in all this so I'm not only worried about you, I'm angry that your father has made me have to be. I know this may not make sense to you. At the same time, I'm kind of proud you wrote the letter and doubly proud that it was such a good letter.'

There was silence while we both struggled not to cry. Through the far edge of the pillow I could see she had pressed her fingers against her eyes as though to hold the tears inside. She's good at that. When I try it the tears spill around my fingers so I swallow hard and screw my face up. That was a good reason for keeping the cushion over it!

‘Okay,' she said eventually, ‘let's start again. Magenta. It's great to see you and congratulations on the very fine letter that you've recently had published.'

‘Thank you, Mum. I wasn't going to show you due to the subject matter but I'm pleased it has been brought to your attention.'

‘That phone call was from Trib. He's been held up in Sydney, so we'll have a girls' night. Just the two of us. What do you think?'

‘A DVD?'

‘Oh, definitely with a DVD. And, if you wouldn't mind, I'd love to have my nails painted.'

‘That would be a pleasure, Lady Tammy. Perhaps I could request a similar service?'

‘Delighted. A foot soak, too, might refresh us? Not to mention some delicious morsels – cheese and dips or something more substantial?'

‘Takeaway pizza from the Gourmet to Go? There are, after all, only two of us.'

‘Gourmet to Go it is.'

Mum and I settled down with a roast pumpkin, fetta and pine nut pizza with pesto sauce and watched ditsy-blonde movies most of the night. She had another call from Trib and I had one from Polly. She took the call from Trib into her room and I paused the DVD. So when Polly rang me, I insisted on the DVD being paused and taking the call in my room, too.

‘It's up!' Polly said.

‘What? Oh, and congratulations on the rain, by the way.'

‘It was nothing,' I could hear Polly's smile in her voice, ‘a bit of wet rhyme.' She laughed manically at her own lame joke. ‘No, the real thing is that the profile is up. On Two's Perfect. It reads pretty well. I added some stuff after you left, to make him sound more of a catch. I checked with Nanna. She said everyone wanted to sound better than they actually were and you took the profiles with a bucketload, never mind a pinch, of salt.'

‘How can I see it?'

‘You could go on at your mum's place?'

‘Too risky. Trib's been held up in Sydney so she might get prowly.'

‘Okay, tomorrow at my place after school. We've still got some information to fill in. And a photo. We desperately need a photo. I don't think we'll get any hits until we have a photo up. People will think he's gross or something. With bad skin disease. Or a huge hump. It's superficial, but the dating marketplace is. You just have to face the facts.'

I could always tell when Polly had been talking to her grandmother. She just repeated huge chunks of their conversation without changing a word. I thought it might be plagiarism but according to Polly you couldn't plagiarise direct speech. That was really a good thing for a writer, I thought. It even helped me a little, although my characters had to talk weirdly because of the age they lived in, so it was more difficult for me. I mean, as an example, how do you translate this sentence
I over-heard on the train into the Middle Ages?
We had such a totally like awesome night with these random dudes we met on MySpace.
I'd have to write,
The feast was splendid and I enjoyed the unexpected company of my Lord Harry and the rest of his hunting party who had fortuitously stumbled across our smallholding on their way to ...
You get the picture. No wonder fantasy books never come singly. You can't learn the language in just one book. Rabbiting on like that takes up so much space.

I'd be writing the Chronicles while I was at university at this rate. If I get into university and don't fail school because of all the time the Chronicles are taking out of my life. I'm certainly never going to manage a boyfriend.

‘Okay – I'll clear it with Mum. But she'll be fine. See you at school.'

The DVD ended just as we knew it would. The couple got married and lived happily forever.

‘For seven and a half years,' Mum said.

‘What?'

‘The national average length of a marriage these days.'

I shook my head. ‘Why bother?' I asked. Marriage seemed a bit like a fantasy novel to me – but apparently you didn't get to write a trilogy. Unless, of course, that was why people tried again.

‘Do you think marrying Trib is like having another go at the story?' I asked Mum as we cleaned our teeth together.

‘What?' She spluttered toothpaste everywhere. ‘What do you mean?'

‘Well, like fantasy. You've got the language and the characters and a bit of the plot, so you start out on the first book but it doesn't work out. You've still got the language and you've introduced a new character and you've got your plot that could maybe still work?'

‘Magenta McPhee, I think that is the most brilliant definition of a second marriage I've ever heard. Chilling, but brilliant. Go and write it down somewhere. When you're a world-famous fantasy writer, you can sell your juvenilia to some rich American library.'

‘Do people do that?'

‘All the time,' Mum nodded. ‘Keep everything!'

I did write it in my journal. My everyday journal. I added some biting comments on the plight of a child caught in the crossfire of financial strife but I added that Mum and I had had a really good girls' night in and that my face felt as soft as rose petals after using Mum's new face mask. I didn't want anyone from an American university thinking I had issues with my mum. We got along fine. When she left Dad out of it.