Six Impossible Things (4 page)

And now my plan to avoid nerd and private school refugee status is being dismantled by one careless comment from the teacher.

‘Your academic record at Gresham is very impressive, Mr Cereill. Let’s hope your presence in maths today provides some inspiration to us all.’

Maybe, just maybe, if I say nothing at all in class there’s still a chance I can stay under the radar. I scowl and slouch lower in my chair. Someone behind me kicks the back of it so hard it rattles my spine.

The main differences between my old school and the new one are cosmetic. The old school was fat with generations of fees and bequests funding incessant improvements and maintenance, so the strains of music practice and umpires’ whistles and plocking tennis balls were always accompanied by a background whine of power tools. This school has rundown buildings that look and smell like they don’t get cleaned enough. There’s not much space around it and the oval is bald and muddy, fenced off with cyclone wire choked at the base with nettles and rubbish. They’ve given up on the graffiti front. And the bell is a loud, alarming siren that makes me feel we’re all about to be rounded up and shot.

I’ve successfully zoned out in maths so when the teacher asks me a question, I honestly don’t know the answer.

Coming out of the classroom for lunch, Jayzo heaves his body sideways slamming me into a bank of lockers in the same casual way jocks did that kind of thing at my old school. Prick.

Outside, I sit alone. A nerd-girl invites me to sit with her group but I tell her I’m okay. I’m lying. I’m the opposite of okay. I’m nokay. I don’t even have enough spit to swallow comfortably.

When any new kid started at my old school he was given a year level mentor, a prefect mentor, a house tutor mentor, a teacher mentor, introduced around, signed up for extracurricular activities, forcefully integrated, then fully monitored. Here, it looks like I’m on my own. That means the image makeover will be difficult unless I talk to people. The only things anyone could possibly know about me are: tall, sometimes answers to ‘dickhead’, silent in class, frowns, slouches, surname pronounced ‘surreal’ not ‘cereal’, chews with mouth shut.

Might be easier just to get loser/loner tattooed on my forehead and be done with it.

When school is over I walk off through the screaming, shoving tangle of kids and go to Fred’s. He’s halfway between school and home. Plan B and the Gazelle both work at the university. Fred is the only kid from my old class who lives on this side of the city.

After a day of the impossible, silent image makeover, which boiled down to me trying to look cool when I’m not, it’s a relief to be heading towards Fred, who likes me well enough as the dag I am.

When I get there, I walk right into the middle of Fred vs. step-mother: the acne treatment show down.

‘It’s not getting any better; I want the heavy artillery drugs,’ says Fred.

‘You’ve got to at least give the cream a chance to work,’ says Plan B.

‘Why can’t we fast forward? Cut to the chase?’

‘We’re doing exactly what the dermatologist recommends. It’s not negotiable.’

Fred changes tack.

‘I’m pretty sure Mum agrees with me.’

‘Don’t go there, Fred. Your mother, your dad and I talk; you can’t use wedge politics on us.’

‘That in itself is unfair. I’m the only kid I know from a broken home who can’t win a trick.’

‘There’s me, now, ‘ I say. ‘I’m not winning any tricks.’

‘How’s your mum’s business going, Dan?’ Plan B asks.

‘Mostly trial cooking so far. But I think she’s seeing her first client today.’

‘Smell fixed?’ she asks.

‘They were coming today.’

‘Temperature?’

‘It’s still a fridge.’ I’m playing for sympathy and it works. She offers me a muffin.

‘Say hi for me. And you . . .’ she looks at Fred. ‘Take a coat and get a haircut while you’re out.’

‘What time’s the Gazelle home?’

‘He’ll be home by seven and I wish you’d stop calling him that. He’s trying to lose weight,’ she says.

We walk past the shops on the way to my place.

Fred buys us Mars bars. He’s fully briefed on my family’s finances.

‘Isn’t this like pimples’ favourite food?’ I ask.

‘Nah, that’s crap. It’s all about hormones and genes. I blame the Gazelle.’

We walk along eating and checking out the shop windows.

At the Sacred Heart op-shop, I stop. Just what I need, sitting there, front and centre – a big set of dumbbells.

They’re five dollars, but when Fred tells the shopkeeper about me having no money, she lets us have them for a buck. Fred pays.

We’re walking along carrying them – they’re pretty heavy, five kilos each – when I see Estelle coming towards us. It’s too late for evasive action.

My heart is banging into my ribs. This will be our first actual face-to-face encounter. I want it to be perfect. I know there’s not a hope in hell of that. She gives me a half smile. Or maybe it’s more of a semi eyebrow lift. Instead of eyebrow-lifting back, I stop and blurt: ‘These are not for me.’

‘Who are they for?’ asks Fred, surprised.

‘Well, they are for me, but I’m not using them as weights, I’m using them as . . .’

Fred catches on, better late than never, and comes to the rescue.

‘Doorstops?’

‘Yeah. Doorstops.’

She smiles. ‘Oh, okay.’

She says it very slowly, as though wondering why I’m telling her about them. I’m wondering the same thing.

She keeps walking.

‘Bye, Estelle,’ I say to her back.

She turns. ‘How do you know my name?’

I freeze. Not only do I know her name, I also know she’s named after her godmother who lives in London. I know stuff I shouldn’t know.

‘We’re in the same class,’ I manage to get out.

‘Oh. Okay. Yeah,’ she says, and walks on.

‘Who’s she?’ breathes Fred, through a stretch of fudge and caramel.

‘She lives next door.’

‘She’s hot.’

As ever, master of the understatement.

‘Raised as a heartbreaker?’ He’s referring to her nearnamesake, Estella, in
Great Expectations
by Charles Dickens. We did it last year in Acceleration English.

‘Knowing my luck, I’ll never find out.’

‘Yeah, and thanks for introducing me,’ says Fred.

‘She’s my unattainable girl.’

‘All the more reason for introducing us. She’s probably got unattainable friends who’d be perfect for me.’

We walk on, weighed down literally and metaphorically.

W
HEN WE GET TO
my place there’s a dirty big silver tube coming out of the front door, connected to a truck making a loud noise. Carpet Miracles are working their magic inside and I walk into the house for the first time without feeling sick.

Fred sniffs like a terrier.

‘That’s an amazing improvement.’

We walk deeper into the freezing gloom. Howard comes barking out to greet us, and my mother emerges from the back of the house with a young woman who looks to have been crying for quite a while.

‘Thank you so much,’ she says, holding my mother’s hand. ‘I could have ended up married to . . . my father.’

In response to Fred’s Jerry-Springer-alert look, I say, ‘I think she’s speaking about the personality type, not her actual father.’

‘Come back when you find the right Mr Right,’ says my mother, who looks a bit teary, too.

The woman hiccups and sniffles her way out the front door.

‘You can’t run a wedding cake business if you talk them out of getting married,’I say.My mother ignores this sound observation.

‘How was school?’

Fred tries to take the heat. ‘I’m not back till tomorrow.’

‘Dan?’

‘Meh.’

Not satisfied with a ‘meh’, she’s about to launch into more annoyingly specific questions, so I cut her off at the pass.

‘Is there anything to eat?’

‘Sure. Wedding cake samples. Help yourselves. Only eat the old stuff in the end container. What are
they
for?’ The dumbbells.

‘Doorstops,’ says Fred. What a joker.

‘Good, we need some more junk around here.’ She heads back to the kitchen.

Fred and I make our way along the chequerboard tiled hallway past enormous bookcases full of cracked leather-bound books, ancient orange and green Penguin paperbacks and travel guides, and walls jammed with eighteenth century engravings, wonky maps and framed, fossilised lace and embroidered samplers. Fred pulls out a book,
The Chrysalids
, by John Wyndham, and nearly drops it in surprise.

‘That’s awesome.’

He shows me. A wasp has built its multi-pod cocoon along half the length of the book,the curly,delicate nest gluing the page together like cement. The original inhabitants are long gone. A feather-light desiccated spider nestles in one of the little caves.

‘You can keep it,’ I say.

‘Don’t the books belong to the trust, too?’

‘They’ve taken away all the valuable ones. These are mostly pretty worthless, all filled with mildew or something.’

We continue upstairs. The flowering carpet’s dark colours remind me of a fairy book illustration from somewhere just outside the edge of my memory. Each step has a copper carpet rod. It must have been a pain for Carpet Miracles.

Fred stops for a good look. He’s still getting his head around this joint. Even the upstairs landing is a kingdom of junk. He steps back, kicking into an elephant foot stand full of old umbrellas and walking sticks.

‘It sucks that you can’t sell some of this. You’d be set up.’

‘It’s a very
Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink
sort of bummer,’ I say.

‘Very,’ he agrees.

That’s from a poem we had to study where people are lost at sea, dying of thirst, as if you couldn’t guess.

In my room Howard prepares for a snooze. This involves him walking around in small circles scraping and patting his bedding into shape. He’s very fussy and doesn’t relax until he’s satisfied. Then he curls up, heaves an almighty sigh and is snoring inside a second. I’m getting used to his sounds at night – it’s like having a little engine sleeping next to you.

‘When we got here, Howard ran upstairs and scratched like a maniac at the door of Adelaide’s room. When we let him in, he went and got that and followed me to my room.’

Howard cocks up one ear, as he always does when he hears his name.

‘He remembered where his bed was? That’s pretty good,’ says Fred.

‘And I think it reminds him of Adelaide. It’s a bunch of her old cardigans knotted together.’

Howard snuffles down deeper, listening and agreeing.

‘Who’s that?’ Fred asks, peering out the window.

There’s a guy with luggage, letting himself into the building at the foot of the garden.

‘Must be the stables guy. He gets to live out there for as long as he wants. Like us and the house.’

‘It’d be worth the trust’s while to knock off him and your mum.’

The same thought has occurred to me.

‘I’ve told her to watch her back. She says it’s the least of her worries.’

‘Which side’s Estelle on?’

‘Over there,’ I point to the left.

‘So, you’d be able to hear her if she’s in her garden.’

‘Yeah.’

He looks up and around.

‘You share a party wall with her,’ he says. ‘That’s something you’ve got in common.’

‘Knockout icebreaker, Fred. I’ll try that one.’

‘Where’s your laptop?’

‘School took it back. You know how they’re leased . . .’

I can see Fred wants to kick himself. He hasn’t had much time to adjust to my new no-money life.

‘I was emailing you from our friendly municipal library when you were away.’

‘This is bad.’

‘Bad for me,’ I say, desperately trying to lighten it up for him. ‘Means I have to see you in person . . . actually talk to you.’

‘What about your phone?’

‘Gone. But when I get a job, I’ll get a pre-paid.’

‘Where does that door go?’

‘It’s like a storeroom, airing cupboard, upstairs hot-water service, linen press sort of room.’

Fred tries the handle. It doesn’t open because I’ve locked it, and the key is in my pocket.

‘It’s jammed,’ I lie. Howard snorts. Even in his semiconscious state he’s onto me. How does he do that?