Six Impossible Things

Fiona Wood has been writing television scripts for the last ten years on shows ranging from
MDA
and
The Secret Life of Us
, to
Home and Away
and
Neighbours. Six Impossible Things
is her first YA novel. She lives in Melbourne with her husband, two YAs and a very bad dog.

First published 2010 in Pan by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited
1 Market Street, Sydney

Copyright © Fiona Wood 2010

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

‘She Walks in Beauty’, George Gordon, Lord Byron, 1815

‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1798

The title
Six Impossible Things
is from an exchange between Alice and the
White Queen in Lewis Carroll’s
Through the Looking-Glass

‘Rock and Roll Friend’
Words and music by Robert Forster and Grant McLennan
© Complete Music Ltd. administered in Australia/NZ by Universal
Music Publishing MGB Australia Pty Ltd
All rights reserved. International copyright secured
Reprinted with permission

National Library of Australia

Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Wood, Fiona Anna.

Six impossible things / Fiona Wood.

ISBN 9780330426060 (pbk.)

For secondary school age.

Boys – Fiction.

Adolescence – Fiction.

A823.4

Typeset in 11.5/16 pt Minion by Post Pre-press Group Australia
Text design by Liz Seymour

Printed by McPherson’s Printing Group Australia

Papers used by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

These electronic editions published in 2010 by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd
1 Market Street, Sydney 2000

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. This publication (or any part of it) may not be reproduced or transmitted, copied, stored, distributed or otherwise made available by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical) or by any means (photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise) without prior written permission from the publisher.

Six Impossible Things

Fiona Wood

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For Zoe and George

T
HERE’S THIS GIRL
I
KNOW
.

I know her by heart. I know her in every way but one: actuality.

Her name is Estelle. I yearn for her.

She walks in beauty – yes, like the night of cloudless climes and starry skies – with one iPod earbud in at all times – the soundtrack of her life.

She’s stopped biting her nails, except for the left hand little finger.

She sometimes nibbles the inside seam of her school jumper cuffs.

She’s an only child. Like me.

She plays the cello.

She likes mochaccinos. And banana milkshakes – made with syrup, not real bananas. And Cherry Ripes. She has a friend in New York she sends Cherry Ripes to. You can’t buy them there.

She has more than one friend. Unlike me.

She lives next door. To where we live now.

She laughs a lot.

She and I have a three- band overlap in our top five bands.

Her favourite writers are Georgette Heyer and J.D. Salinger.

I can’t tell you how I know all this stuff about someone I haven’t met.

I
F YOU CAN FORGET
that it means someone just died, inheriting something is a good thing, isn’t it? A stroke of luck. Improved circumstances. But when it happened to us it had the opposite effect. Everything got a whole lot worse. Quickly.

Things had been going wrong at my father’s work. Even in a place the size of ours I could hear the fights. Our apparently comfortable life was an illusion propped up by some massive overdraft. It was all about to come tumbling down. And we to come tumbling after.

Money problems were just the beginning. Listening in from the upstairs landing one night, I understood in a single sick thud of my heart that my parents didn’t even seem to like each other any more. But since when?
Smiiiiiile!
That’s us. We
look
happy. Suspended on the Brooklyn Bridge, eating felafels in the Marais, underwater with blue-lipped clams off Green Island . . .

What went wrong? When? And how did I not notice?

Was I like that frog not realising the water’s getting hotter till it’s too late and he’s soup?

When my mother’s great-aunt Adelaide died and left her a house I thought it might take some pressure off the situation. And it did, but not in the way I hoped. It was about a nanosecond later that my father dropped the bombshell – the family business was in the hands of receivers, he had been declared bankrupt, he was gay, and he was moving out.

Guys, please, one life-changing shock at a time, I felt like saying.

There was a mortgagee’s auction of our house. That’s when the bank sells you up because it basically owns the house. The creditors – people to whom my father owed money – sent in liquidators who came and took all our stuff away. It’s pretty much like moving only you never see the removal truck again.

Josh Whitters from school pulled up on his bike when the truck was being loaded.

‘See you’re moving, Cereill,’ he said.

‘Your powers of observation are impeccable, Whitters.’ I wondered if he knew the whole sorry story.

‘Hear your dad’s gone broke.’

He knew.

‘Yep.’

‘Loser.’

He took off.

I’m almost sure he didn’t see them load my Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle beanbag. I know, I should have given it away years ago.

Usually in a business meltdown like this one people get to keep their personal stuff, but in our case every single thing we had was owned by the company.

My mother and I had stashed some stuff at her friend Alice’s house – kitchen things, books, clothes, my comics, and a TV. And we’ve kept the photos, but not the silver frames. Our entire life in a couple of boxes.

The liquidators went through the place like a plague of locusts. It was horrible walking through the empty house. I hadn’t heard that echo-y sound since we moved in. Back then it sounded like excitement and things to find out. Now it just sounded like The End and stuff I wished I didn’t know.

We’d been uprooted. Liquidated. Terminated. Not to mention deserted. Whitters was right. I sure felt like a loser.

T
HE LIST
:

1 Kiss Estelle. I know. I haven’t met her. Technically. But it gets top spot regardless.

2 Get a job. We’re in a complete mess financially. It’s down to me to tide us over money-wise if my mother’s new business crashes.

3 Cheer my mother up. Better chance of business not crashing if she’s half okay.

4 It’s not like I expect to be cool or popular at the new school, but I’m going to try not to be a complete nerd/loser.

5 Should talk to my father when he calls. But how, when the only thing I want to ask is something I can’t bear to hear the answer to: How could you leave us like this?

6 The existential one. Figure out how to be good. I don’t want to end up the sort of person who up and leaves his family out of the blue.

Impossible.
Impossible.
Impossible.
Impossible.
Impossible.
Impossible.

W
AKING UP, IT’S NEVER
more than a couple of seconds before it washes back over me, what’s real. Wham. A sucker punch to the guts – anger sits there with an evil grin. Misery is beside it, weighing me down like a brick. A month since my dad left and my mother and I moved into her great-aunt Adelaide’s house. Former great-aunt. It’s freezing here. My fingers are so cold I can’t make a fist.

The windows have to stay open because of the smell. Heaters are emergency-use-only because of finances. The only time I thaw out is in bed and it takes ages because the world of electric blankets is past tense.

There are six bedrooms here including the one Adelaide actually died in. That door stays shut. Choosing my room is easy; I go for the one that stinks least. I’ve been spending a whole lot of time in bed since we moved in. It’s like my body is telling me to hibernate, and I’m listening. It should make for a riveting essay on what I did in the school holidays.

It turns out that we don’t even
own
this house, either. What my mother has inherited is a lifetime
use
of the house. When she dies, it goes to the Historic Homes Trust, not to me.

So if she dies any time soon, I’m on the streets. Or back with my father. I guess that’d force us onto speaking terms, at least. Pity she can’t sell the house. It’d be worth heaps. I’ve checked out the window of the local real estate agent. To make the inheritance even more oddball, there’s some guy who gets to live out the back, in the old stables building. That’s in the will, too, apparently. We haven’t met him yet. He’s away.

My mother’s not exactly thrilled with the arrangement. But it’s like she says, at least we’ve got a roof over our heads. Which is more than we would’ve had. We don’t have a cent left. We won’t even have a car when the lease runs out at the end of the month.