Music From Standing Waves (5 page)

“Do you want some coconut oil?” asked Hayley.
“Hold up your hair, I’ll do your back.”

I lifted my straggly ponytail and watched her
crimson fingernails skim over my neck. Out of the corner of my eye,
I could see her rings twinkling in the sun; two silver snakes
entwined around her thumb and the diamond on her ring finger.
Sometimes, I wanted to be like Hayley so much it hurt. I looked
down proudly at my shiny brown shoulders and pulled on my sun
hat.

“Do you like my hat?” I asked.

For my thirteenth birthday, Sarah had taken
me shopping in Cairns. The hat I had chosen was narrow brimmed
straw with big yellow sunflowers across the band. Mum said it was
gaudy and tasteless, but I loved it.

Hayley clicked the sunscreen closed and slid
the bottle back into her beach bag. “I like it a lot. Is it
new?”

I nodded. “Birthday present.”

Hayley straightened her towel and lay back on
her elbows. I looked out over the crowded pool. Justin was bouncing
through the water with his arms stretched out to the side.

“Marco!” screeched Rachel.

I pried a strand of my hair out of Oliver’s
fist. “Hayley?” I began.

“Abby?”

“Do you think I’m pretty?”

She peered at me through large round
sunglasses. “I think you’re very pretty.” She smiled as the baby
let out a loud wet gurgle. “So does Ollie.”

I giggled and patted his soft red hat. “Do
you think I could get this guy to ask me out?”

“The mystery man again, hey? Why don’t you
ask
him
out? This is the nineties after all.”

I chewed my lip. “Did you ask Andrew
out?”

“No, he asked me,” she admitted. “But I’ve
asked guys out before.”

I always thought it would be easy if I was
like Hayley. Everything went right for her. It hadn’t occurred to
me then that maybe having a baby at twenty hadn’t been part of her
grand plan. I just assumed Oliver, like Andrew and everything else
around her, was part of her perfectly executed life path; a path
that came easily to beautiful people like her.

If I was that beautiful, I thought, I could
ask Justin out and know he’d say yes. I wished I had that kind of
self-assurance, so I could wear my sunflower hat without worrying
that it looked tasteless, or sing along to the radio when my
favourite song came on.

Hayley was never shy like that. She and
Andrew even kissed in public. Mum said it made her look like a
tramp.

“You remember that when you get a boyfriend,
Abigail,” she said. “No-one wants to see what should be kept in the
bedroom.”

But I secretly hoped I’d have the guts to
kiss my boyfriends in public. I longed to be as confident in the
rest of my life as I was up on stage playing my violin.

Oliver made a face as though he was about to
throw up and I gave him back to Hayley.

“So who’s the guy?” she asked. “Do I know
him?”

“It’s a secret,” I said, suddenly
embarrassed. I began to bury my feet. Sand lodged under my
fingernails.

“Come on,” Hayley sung. “I can keep a secret.
If I guess and get it right, will you tell me?” She reminded me of
a less irritating version of Rachel, and the thought made me
smile.

“Okay.”

She sat up in interest. “Is he at the rock
pool right now?”

“Maybe.”

She began to point to various randoms hanging
around the pool, trying to outdo each other with the size of the
splash they made when they hit the water and the amount of fluoro
on their board shorts.

“Is it that guy? … No, wait, I bet it’s him…
Oh no, definitely that guy in pink.” She clutched my arm suddenly.
“I know, it’s Andrew, isn’t it. You have a great big crush on your
violin teacher!”

“Damn, you guessed,” I giggled.

We were still laughing when Andrew returned,
dripping from the pool.

“What’s so funny?” he asked, splattering
water over us as he reached into Hayley’s bag for a towel.

“Nothing,” I said quickly.

Andrew took Oliver into the pool with him and
I went to play Marco Polo. Justin was It.

“Look at your violin teacher with his kid,”
drawled Rachel as we bobbed awkwardly through the shallow end.
“That’s like the cutest thing I’ve ever seen!”

“Stop looking,” I hissed. “You’re
embarrassing me.”

Justin was edging towards us, splashing
through the warm water. I knew he was peeking. I slowed down and
let his wet fingers slide around my waist.

“Gotcha,” he grinned, opening his eyes.

“Cheater.”

Nick and Mum started to argue more after he
turned twenty-one. Mostly about things that didn’t really
matter.

“Were you planning on washing that plate,
Nicholas, or were you just going to leave it to me as usual?”

“I already said I’d do it later… Jesus
Christ… Give me a break.”

“Give
you
a break? I’m the one who has
to run around picking up after you all like a slave…”

“Do you hate her?” I asked him once.

Nick was washing his car and soap was running
into the garden. He shrugged. “I don’t know. Sometimes. Do
you?”

“I don’t know. Sometimes.” I stood in the
river of hose water and squelched my bare feet into the mud.

“You know, one of these days, I’m gonna
bloody move out,” Nick said for the billionth time.

He had started to come home late every night.
Sometimes he would act in ways I didn’t understand; bumping into
the wall and things. Once, his t-shirt was on inside-out and
backwards. I knew he didn’t mean for me to see him, but I was a
light sleeper and he’d wake me up when he’d crash through the back
door into the kitchen. I’d always ask him about it the next
morning, when he’d crawl out of bed, his blonde hair flattened on
one side.

“Where do you go? Why were you acting like
that?”

“Keep your trap shut,” he always said. “You
didn’t see nothing.”

Then he’d announce that was gonna bloody move
out. But he never did.

To my endless delight, I was baby-sitting
Oliver while Hayley and Andrew made an appearance at one of the
Acacia Beach social functions funded by Hayley’s ultra-rich
family.

I hated the way the town pretended it was
some raging social metropolis. For nearly fourteen years I’d been
subjected to countless trivia nights, bush dances and Christmas
parties in which the town gossip- usually consisting of which
no-good young so-and-so had gotten herself knocked up in the
supermarket car park and which senior citizens had recently had
bladder surgery- was bandied around like the secret to eternal
youth. I chucked sickies more often to avoid the parties than I did
to get out of school.

When I arrived to baby-sit, Andrew was saying
“Oh come on Hayles, seriously?” a lot and kept suggesting they go
to the pub instead.

“What is it tonight?” I asked, chasing Oliver
along the carpet on my hands and knees.

“D&D ball,” called Hayley from the
bathroom.

“Seriously,” said Andrew. “Why the hell are
we going to a D&D ball?” He flopped on the couch. “More to the
point, why is this town even having a D&D ball? Surely everyone
knows each other by now. The single people are doomed to stay that
way forever.”

“Andrew!” Hayley swanned out of the bathroom
with a neckline so low that even if she had have been desperate and
dateless, she wouldn’t have been for long. “I promised Mum and Dad
we’d go. Apparently tickets haven’t been selling so well. Dad
thinks it’s because Peter from the supermarket is bringing his
karaoke machine.”

“Kill me now,” said Andrew.

Hayley flashed her best supermodel smile.
“Stay home if you want. There’ll be plenty of dateless men to keep
me company.”

“Okay, okay, I’m coming.”

Hayley scooped Oliver off the floor and
kissed him on the cheek. “You know where everything is,” she told
me, putting the baby in my arms. “If you need us, you know where we
are. Just call the lifesaving club and we’ll come home.”

“Don’t hesitate,” Andrew called as Hayley
dragged him out the door. “And if there’s no emergency, feel free
to create one…”

Oliver let out the obligatory whine as they
left, squealing until I let him play with my troll doll key ring. I
chased him around the carpet for a while, then he fell asleep on my
shoulder, a tiny, squishy fist pushed into my neck. I smiled at
him. He had Hayley’s blue eyes and curls. Andrew’s dark hair. A
slightly turned up nose from somewhere else on his family tree.

I glanced at Hayley and Andrew’s wedding
photo, which sat framed on the lounge dresser. Hayley had only been
eighteen. I remembered the flood of gossip that had engulfed the
town when she had gotten engaged, most of it circulated by my
mother.

“He’s only in it for the money,” she said.
“Can’t make a living with his music, so he’s marrying the rich
girlfriend...”

I had asked in my first violin lesson: “Can
you not make a living with music so you married your rich
girlfriend?”

Andrew had been drinking coffee and had spat
it back into the mug.

Hayley’s parents had invited the whole town
to the wedding.

“Ludicrous,” said Sarah, watching Nick
stretch his feet over the end of the couch and slurp from a can of
beer. “She’s only Nicky’s age. How could anyone that young possibly
know real love?”

But I secretly hoped that when I was eighteen
I’d have the same exciting romance as Hayley.

“Love at first sight,” she told me one day.
“We were only together for two months before he asked me to marry
him. We were at the beach in the middle of the night…”

Sometimes, I wanted to be Hayley so much it
hurt.

A tourist got stung by a box jelly that had
broken through the stinger net and my mum decided swimming at the
beach was too dangerous.

“Can we still go in the rock pool?” I asked.
“There’s no jellyfish in there.”

“They can get in the rock pool just as
easily,” said Sarah. “As well as Heaven only knows what other kinds
of animals…”

“But Mum-”

“Abigail, stop arguing. If you want to go
swimming, you can go to the swim centre.”

The swim centre was a shallow
twenty-five-metre pool at the back of the lifesaving club that no
one ever used unless a jelly got through the stinger net. Justin
and I sprawled across foam kickboards and watched a lifeguard with
bleached blonde hair strut up and down the pool deck. Rachel, who
had seen the poor bastard froth at the mouth all over the pier, sat
cross-legged on the edge of the pool, vowing never to swim
again.

“This sucks,” said Justin. He dived under the
surface and grabbed me around the ankle. I kicked him off. He
resurfaced and shook the water from his hair like a dog. “Nick’s at
the beach, you know.”

I nodded. Nick never listened to Mum.
Whenever she tried to yell at him, he would tell her to piss off,
then jump in his car and go for a drive. It was so easy for him, I
used to think. Easy for him to just disappear for a while. Not as
simple for me, or for Tim, who was only ten. We had to stay behind
and listen to Sarah get angrier each time Nick sped off down the
highway. Angrier with us as though it was somehow our fault. I
hated Nick’s drives.

“Well I think your mum is right,” Rachel
piped up. “If you went to the beach you could die. Die like that
German guy.”

“That girl’s got massive tits,” said Justin,
pointing to the lifeguard. “When are you going to get tits like
that, Abby?”

I narrowed my eyes and slithered my shoulders
under the water, self-conscious of the flat chest beneath my
bathers.

“Come on,” said Justin. “Let’s go to the
beach. This is completely lame.”

“I can’t. It’s not worth the trouble.”

“Your mum’s such a tight-arse,” he said. “You
should stand up to her more like Nick does.”

I sighed. “Yeah. Well hopefully I’ll get out
of here soon. Then I won’t have to deal with her anymore.”

“Abby!” cried Rachel. “You’re not actually
thinking about what that violin guy wants you to do are you?”

“No,” I mumbled, sorry I had said
anything.

Justin turned to me. “What does the violin
guy want you to do?”

“Nothing.”

“He wants her to go to the city,” said
Rachel. “To study.”

Justin let go of his kickboard and it drifted
down the pool. “Abby?”

“I’m not going anywhere,” I said quietly.
“Sarah won’t even let me go to the beach, let alone to
Melbourne.”

“To
Melbourne
?” Justin repeated.
“That’s a million miles away.”

“I’m not going,” I said again.

“But you want to.”

I didn’t answer. Justin swam to the edge of
the pool, leaving me bobbing in the shallow end. I sucked in my
breath and followed him out of the water.

“Jus? Are you shitty?”

He didn’t answer.

“I’m shitty,” said Rachel.

I glared at her. “I wasn’t asking you.” I
grabbed Justin’s arm. “You know how much playing the violin means
to me. You know how much I want to make something of myself.”

“Fine,” he said. “Can we just stop talking
about it? You said you’re not going, so that’s that. Let’s just
leave it.”

We pretended our conversation in the pool had
never happened. Violin became a part of my life that I no longer
mentioned in Justin’s presence. For months, I practised in my
bedroom with the windows closed, afraid the sound would drift into
the street and remind him of things we were trying to forget.

A lot of the people that stayed at our park
drove enormous, scruffy campervans. They slept on air mattresses in
the back, drank juice straight from cartons and hung wet board
shorts out the windows to dry. One van had a map of the world on
the back, dotted with stars to mark off all the places they’d
visited. I saw it out of my bedroom window and laughed at the
thought of what my map would look like. I’d mark Antarctica with a
star just to make myself feel better.