Six Impossible Things (24 page)

It’s a stupid thing to ask. Em patiently points out that (a) some people might want a bit of make-out music, (b) I could possibly hook up with someone else (as if), (c) if Estelle wants to kiss someone else, she can and I have to deal with it, (d) if Estelle can’t see what a hottie I am with my new haircut, she doesn’t deserve me (that sounds like I’m up myself, but she said it), and (e) if you’re lucky enough to get DJ Pony doing the music at your Year Nine social, she calls the shots and you say thank you.

M
Y MOTHER IS ANNOYINGLY
mobile tonight as she zips from the kitchen to the upstairs bathroom to her bedroom – up and down the hallway, up and down the stairs. She’s taking cake layers out of the oven and putting the last layer in, preparing snacky things to have with drinks, doing her hair and make-up. Singing. It’s like the one night of my life I’m trying to do something sneaky and she’s turned into three women. Why is she making such a big deal of someone else’s dumb old class reunion? Proof she doesn’t get out enough.

She knocks on my door. Again! I’m popular tonight. ‘Shouldn’t you be going soon?’

‘Soon,’ I call out. ‘I don’t want to be too early.’

She’s right, though. It’s time to go. Estelle and Janie should be here any minute. In fact they should have turned up a while ago. It’s quarter past seven. Five more minutes pass. And another five. Five more crawl by and now they’re half an hour late.

‘Where are they, Howard?’

He sighs and settles, looking up at me as though it’s all so obvious.

‘It can’t just be hair and make-up.’

He resettles and yawns, smacks his chops a few times and closes his eyes.

‘You’re right! Why don’t I just call her?’

I’ve got no credit on my phone so I go out to the hall telephone – it’s a low-tech vehicle with the handset attached by a springy cord.

‘Dan! You need to go, don’t you? You should be there in case Oliver and Em need help with anything,’ my mother says, en route to her room.

Estelle answers. It seems that her father is in the mood for a relaxed chat with the girls.

‘Why tonight? He’s had fifteen years to be sociable! Don’t worry, I’m going to remind him we’re studying and tell him we’ve got hair removal plans for later,’ she whispers. ‘If that doesn’t do the trick, I don’t know my father. See you in five or not at all,’ she ends dramatically.

Estelle is halfway down the ladder and Janie looking down from the manhole when my mother knocks and turns the door handle.

There is no time to close the storeroom door as she steps into my room.

For no apparent reason, Howard starts barking like a maniac so my mother looks down, not through to the storeroom, not over to the window. Howard is jumping all over her and wagging his tail. Because she’s completely occupied with getting him to stop jumping so he won’t wreck her stockings, she is bending down and stepping backwards and I can jostle the three of us into the hallway without her spotting the girls. Close shave. It’s as though Howard knows exactly what he’s doing.

‘If you don’t go now, you’re going to be really late.’

‘I’m on my way,’ I say, heading downstairs.

Janie must have started climbing as soon as I shut my bedroom door, because she’s more than halfway down the tree by the time I get outside. But she didn’t manage to get the guide ropes back to the bedroom and was afraid to keep trying because of the noise they made whacking against the wall. Apparently my mother already stuck her head out of a window once to have a look around.

By the time I get up the tree, Estelle is already climbing across the rope ladder without the guide ropes. She’s halfway over but not moving.

‘Dan.’

‘Yes.’

‘You could break your neck doing this.’

‘All right, so I worry,’ I say, ready to take a bagging.

‘No. You were right. You really could. I really could.’

She is frozen with fear. The trouble with climbing across without the guide ropes is that it’s much wobblier and you have to crawl, which forces you to look down in the ‘plummet to certain death’ direction.

The wind changes, swinging a cold gust through the branches, making the tree and ladder sway and pitch. A glimpse of the dark ground staggering giddily far below brings on the familiar hot and cold nausea that happens just before I faint. I will not, cannot, must not let that happen.

‘I’m dizzy,’ says Estelle. The ludicrous idea of both of us sprawled and bloody at the foot of the tree, all for the sake of getting to a Year Nine dance, somehow snaps me into action.

‘Don’t look down,’ I say in a voice that sounds much calmer than it feels. ‘I’m going to get the ropes to you and you’re going to hold onto them, and we’ll get you to the trunk. It’s easy from there. And you’re really close.’

She looks at me, trying to calm down.

I start quietly singing a song, the first thing that comes to mind: ‘Wild World’. It’s used at the end of the last episode of the first season of her favourite ever TV series,
Skins
, and I know, because of the diary snoop, that she once looked at this sequence five times in a row.

She looks surprised and fleetingly suspicious (or is that my paranoid imagining?) as she clocks the song, but she tries to join in, her voice a reedy shadow of itself, swallowed by fear. I loop the ends of the rope together and throw them to her. It’s a sweet throw. She just has to reach across less than half a metre and she’ll have the guide ropes in her hand. It has started to rain. Big plashy drops that make a racket as they hit the leaves.

‘Come on. You can do it.’

Estelle looks at me, alarmed.

‘I can’t unclench my hand.’

‘Relax. Breathe slowly.’

‘I’m not kidding,’ she says, staring mystified at the closed hand. ‘I’m trying. It won’t undo.’

I move out towards her on the rope ladder, flat on my stomach, until I can reach her hands by stretching right out. Forcing myself not to look down, I unfold her fingers and put the rope into her hand. It’s as though touching the rope undoes a spell. She refocuses, gathers up both rope ends and, holding them tightly, manages to find her balance and stand up. I’m inching my way back towards the trunk as she moves towards me hanging onto the guide ropes as though her life depends on it, which it does.

She steps onto the branch and into my arms. Safe.

Her heart pounds against my rib cage as she takes some huge, gulping breaths.

‘That was massively uncool,’ she says.

She smiles, relieved but still shaky, and follows me down the tree.

It’s hard to believe how great Estelle looks. She’s chosen a dress with a straight up and down shape, but it’s somehow floaty too, the sort of thing a grown-up elf might wear. No, I don’t think there is such a thing, I’m trying to give a general impression. In fact, the dress looks as though it’s been made to go with the shoes I got for her.

Her hair is shiny, so are her eyes. And her lips, for that matter. She shimmers.

‘So, how do we look?’ asks Janie, spinning around. ‘Freak show, or awesome?’

I think Estelle looks ethereal, otherworldly, elegant, but I settle for ‘awesome’, for once using the word with no sense of exaggeration.

When she smiles right into my eyes, I’m breathless.

I take the satin shoes out of my pocket and hand them to her.

‘I got you these.’

‘Dan, they’re . . . wow –’ she says, looking at them.

‘You don’t have to wear them. They’re just from the op-shop.’

‘No – are you kidding? I love them.’

She sits down to put them on.

‘Exactly my size,’ she says, seeming genuinely pleased. ‘Sometimes it feels like you know way too much about me.’

Smile. Instruct face not to assume guilty expression.

The girls leave their climbing sneakers in the garden and we head off to collect Uyen.

By the time we get to school the girls are definitely in a party mood. Particularly Estelle, deliriously relieved as she is not to have broken her neck.

I, on the other hand, am feeling more miserable by the minute. Here we are finally and that means Estelle’s date, too, will soon be arriving.

The asphalt driveway is soaked with colour as girls totter along in high-heeled shoes. Parents tell their kids to behave or to have fun, to be waiting here or there at pick-up time. Girls are screaming as they run from cars trying to keep hair-dos dry. Music throbs out into the night. With building hostility I watch every guy arrive, trying to assess whether he measures up as a possible date for Estelle. Not one of them does. Then Phyllis turns up, Estelle’s friend from the art class where she volunteers. It stops raining as though a switch has been flipped, and we’re all going inside.

‘Aren’t you waiting for your date?’ I ask.

‘Phyl’s my date,’ says Estelle, linking arms with her.

‘I assumed you asked a guy.’

‘Why would you assume that?’ she says airily, walking off without waiting for an answer.

Huh?

Fred and Lou arrive in time to see Estelle going in with Phyllis. Lou gives me a penetrating look.

‘So, large, unexpected carpe diem opportunity arises,’ she says.

‘Don’t blow it, big guy,’ adds Fred helpfully.

Gulp.

‘You two look stylish,’ I say in a feeble attempt to take spotlight off self.

‘Thanks,’ says Lou.

‘This was once the Gazelle’s,’ Fred says, pointing to his suit with tragic emphasis.

‘You’re not saying . . . ?’

‘I, too, could become a middle-aged fat guy.’

Lou looks at us with amused incredulity.

‘Middle age? Middle age? We’re fifteen. Who cares about middle age?’ she says, dragging Fred inside.

My heart starts filling with helium as I allow myself one moment to wallow in Estelle’s ‘why would you assume that?’ Why did I? But then, why wouldn’t I?

Whoever wrote the book on girls, I wish they’d send me a copy, with a full glossary of terms. I go back to ‘love you big time’ where I’ve spent lots of time recently, and I know one thing for sure: I have to kiss Estelle tonight. Or die trying. I remember my stupid cake instructions. The kiss has to happen no later than twenty minutes before midnight. It seems wrong that the timing of a kiss should be dictated by a cake order. I hope it’s not an omen.

Em has transformed the gym into another world. A smoke machine has turned the floor into a drifting cloud. Lights pick up the ground and mid space only, making the ceiling disappear. The floating mist is shot through with melting colours, purples and blues morph into pinks and reds that grow orange, golden, green and then turquoise. The colours glow, dissolve, then shatter and splinter into strobe. It’s the real deal.

Trestle tables form the ‘bar’, where the transposables are serving drinks. I look around for food but can’t see any. I ask Em if she’s noticed where they’re serving food.

‘I’m guessing it wasn’t their spending priority,’ she says.

It’s soon clear the refreshments budget has basically been spent on vodka. The transposables are busy telling people ‘lemon’s single, orange is double, lime’s triple’. Shots. They’ve spent the whole afternoon emptying part of the contents of all the soft drink bottles and replacing what they tipped out with vodka. People can’t believe their luck. The bar is being stormed.

‘Is there any food?’ I ask. I’m not hungry, just keen for reassurance there’s some alcohol absorption on its way.

‘Totally, but like way later. Gotta let everyone get their buzz on, hun,’ says Dannii.

‘What about people who don’t want to drink?’ I ask.

‘Yeah like that whole end is loser drinks,’ she says, waving a stencil manicure in the direction of one end of the bar.

I’m wondering whether I could get kicked out of school for this. I asked the transposables to take over refreshments, so does the buck stop with me? Probably. There’s not a thing I can do about it now. Getting between my year level and the alcohol would be a suicide mission. No, it’s as inevitable as an erupting volcano. I’m about to be responsible for a heavy-duty, illegal session of underage drinking. Someone might choke on their vomit and die, crowd violence could erupt, children could be conceived, and it will all be my fault. The least I’d deserve would be to get kicked out of school. But how would that mesh with compulsory attendance? Maybe they hold classes at the boys’ reformatory. Is there even such a thing as a boys’ reformatory any more? Would I literally be locked up or could I attend on a sort of outpatient basis, perhaps with an electronic ankle band?