The Accident (11 page)

‘Should we tell Morgan?’

A shrug. ‘What would be the point?’

‘Maybe she’d want to see him.’

Morgan was three when he left. If I can’t remember his face, what chance does she have? And does that make her more or less likely to want to see him?

I look at Lauren. If she doesn’t want to tell Morgan, why is she telling me?

‘Would you go see him?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You hated him.’ I can remember that much—her screaming it, not caring who heard. Making all sorts of threats about what she’d do to him if she ever saw him again. Typical Lauren.

‘I didn’t hate him.’

‘You burned effigies of him on the barbeque.’

‘So I was mad at him for leaving. I didn’t hate him.’

‘Try telling that to Morgan’s Ken dolls.’

The ghost of an ironic smile. She looks at me, still with that sad, tired expression, like after all these years she’s realised she doesn’t have all the answers; doesn’t really know anything at all.

‘What’s uni like?’

She’s midway through her second year, but it’s a question I haven’t dared asked before.

‘Just…’ She stares hard at the floor for a moment, then pushes herself up off the couch. ‘Don’t grow up too fast. It’s not all as easy as it looks.’

Morgan doesn’t get home till nearly nine and Lauren gets mad.

‘I thought your rehearsal finished at five.’

‘We went over.’

‘You stink of cigarette smoke.’

‘Shut up.’

I follow Morgan into her room. She kicks off her shoes, tosses her bag to the floor and then kicks it again for good measure. The floor is a mess of dirty clothes, school books, CDs, art supplies. She painted a purple feature wall last year; now it’s covered with photos and pencil scribbling—song lyrics, quotes from artists, little cartoony characters she’s created. There’s a clay sculpture on her desk, a gargoyle-like thing with eyes and limbs everywhere. I pick it up carefully. Weigh it in my hands as I try to figure out what to say. I’ve never been a big brother to Morgan. Even when Lauren took off, I didn’t take over being the boss, I just figured Morgan and I were old enough to do our own thing. Maybe I should have.

‘This is hideous.’

‘You don’t think there can be beauty in ugliness?’ she asks defiantly.

I smile slightly at her earnestness. ‘Don’t worry about Lauren. She’s just in a mood.’

‘She hasn’t changed. She thinks she has the right to come back and tell us what to do.’

‘Actually…’ I hesitate; if Lauren’s relentless bullying over the years taught me anything it’s that it’s not a good idea to even have an opinion, let alone voice it. I push myself. ‘I think she has.’

‘Yeah?’ Morgan’s annoyed with me too, now. ‘She’s still being a total bitch to me.’

Even as I try to find the words to explain what I’ve seen, I know Morgan’s not going to listen. She’s too wrapped up in her own perspective to see it. Empathy has never been her thing.

I move a little bit closer, watching as she starts picking up dirty clothes. She does smell like cigarette smoke. Not just her clothes, but her breath, too. I’m close enough to smell it. And something else—beer, maybe?

‘You know smoking’s a really hard habit to break, right?’

She gives me a look. ‘I don’t smoke.’

‘Morgs…Just don’t get started, okay?’

‘Fine. Whatever.’ She turns away from me, and I know I’ve blown my chance. I don’t even know if I was going to tell her about Dad or not.

I’m on the driveway doing some quick warm-up stretches when I hear a shout. ‘Hey, McAlpine!’

Kayla. She sits on the rails of her front porch sometimes to smoke and watch the world go by. I’ve never quite worked out why; maybe it’s part of her image. Most kids at school can be slotted into one box or another easily enough, but she’s one of the few that defy definition. Sometimes it seems like she’s trying to be punk or goth: eyebrow piercing, drooping cigarette; long, kind-of-creepy stares. But she’s in the top maths class and she does extension English with me, and if somebody says something she disagrees with she’ll practically jump on them. Beat them to death with a scary intensity and an even scarier vocab. She got in trouble last week for calling the head teacher of English an ‘obtuse narcissist whose greatest mistake is thinking that verbosity is a sign of erudition’. She’s the sort of person, to be honest, I wouldn’t ever want to meet in a dark alley. I’ve known her more than half my life and she still makes me nervous.

I wouldn’t let her know that, of course.

I eye the cigarette dangled between her index and middle fingers, trying to act casual. ‘You know, nicotine is ten times more addictive than heroin.’

She grins. ‘Who says this is nicotine?’

She likes pushing people’s buttons. I know that. I see it every day in English. So I don’t give her the satisfaction of reacting. I just turn and take off. I don’t get far, though, before I hear pounding footsteps behind me, somebody trying to catch up. ‘Hey, hold up.’

She’s now empty-handed, untied laces on her Converse hightops whipping as she runs. She draws alongside, out of breath from the sprint. ‘Hey, McAlpine, I said slow down!’ Annoyed.

‘If you had full lung capacity you’d be able to keep up with me,’ I say with a shrug, picking up my pace to sprint to the end of the street.

Another thing I know about Kayla—she’s competitive. When we were kids the three of us used to go over to her place to play. She’d treat each game of Connect Four or Hide and Seek as if it was an Olympic final, and she was always, always, determined to win. Any time she and Lauren went head-to-head on something you were pretty much guaranteed fireworks. Lauren was older, but they were both scary smart, and Kayla wasn’t above using her fists when she ran out of words. She still isn’t. These days it just takes her longer to run out of words.

‘I just—wanna—ask—you a—question.’ She pushes just ahead, so I have to accelerate to catch up. I feel the burn in my chest.

‘What?’

‘Chaucer.’

I don’t know if she’s yanking my chain or what. But she’s tiring and I want to rub it in. ‘Meet you at the end of the street,’ and I take off.

It’s a fifty-metre sprint, both of us feet-slapping, breaths coming short and sharp. I can feel her right behind me. My mouth is dry and my chest feels like it’s about to explode but I’ve got some of that McAlpine stubborn streak too, and I’m not going to let her win. I hurl myself forwards, crossing an invisible finish line the winner. She stumbles in behind me.

A second to catch my breath. Pacing. ‘See?’ I manage, hands behind my head.

‘Yeah, you were always faster than me.’

I might not be great at sports—mostly because I just don’t really care about kicking a ball into a net or tossing it through a hoop—but one thing I can do is run. Being in that zone, where your heart is racing and your pulse is deafening, is like being in another world. It’s the next best thing after reading.

We walk for the next hundred metres or so, silent while we get our breath back.

‘What makes you think I understand Chaucer any better than you do?’ We’ve just started studying
The Canterbury Tales
and you can tell the whole class is bewildered.

‘You’re a book nerd. I figured if anybody understands it, it’d be you.’

A spark of annoyance. I know what people think of me, but you’d think if she’s asking for my help she could at least refrain from insulting me for five minutes. ‘Book nerd?’

She gives me a blasé shrug. ‘Ninety percent of the time I see you, you’ve got a book in your hands. I’m not judging, I’m just saying that’s the world you live in, you speak the language. And I need a translator…’

Suddenly I’m over it. If I want to be insulted and demeaned by a girl, I have sisters for that. ‘Race you back.’

I get the lead on her this time but it’s still a battle. We both skid to a finish on my driveway, but I don’t really care who wins. I mutter something about water and take off into the house without looking back.

The house is quiet. Half past ten and Mum’s presumably upstairs, Lauren and Morgan in their bedrooms. I stand in the middle of the living room and look around, suddenly feeling a sort of hopeless claustrophobia. Feeling like if I don’t make myself step out, I’ll stay hiding here, and I’ll end up like my mother and everything I pity about her.

before
after
later

Morning hits. The blast of the alarm, the foul taste in my mouth, the too-much light in the room.

Shit.

I’m still in my skinny jeans and top from last night; peel them off in the bathroom, leaving red seams on my skin. Grass, both kinds, falls out of the folds of my clothes onto the tiles. A string of tired, hungover expletives. My stomach starts to knot itself up, and I scrub at my skin in the shower till it goes red raw. My head is killing me.

Rose-Marie is alone in the kitchen, sitting at the table with her coffee and newspaper. Tash is nowhere to be seen. Terry’s keys are gone from the hook. Rose-Marie looks up. My heart starts to hammer in my chest.

‘He had an early meeting,’ she explains coldly. ‘He’s dropping her off on his way.’

Feels like I should launch into an apology, or an excuse, but it’s only going to get me into more trouble. I don’t remember anything after about nine last night. Went to The Gap and sat in the back of Tim’s van with a whole lot of beer and dope, weed with an ocean view. Don’t even remember getting home. Been years since I lost it that badly. And I feel like shit.

She stands up. ‘Anything you want to say?’

She’s never really got mad at me before. Frustrated, sure, when I have to be asked three times to set the table or change a nappy. But she’s really angry. Didn’t she do this sort of thing when she was younger? Ha. Dumb question. Terry might have. Private school boy with Daddy’s money to burn, I reckon he was the sort. Not Rose-Marie.

‘Sorry I was late. I lost track of time…’

‘You were off your face.’

‘I didn’t—’

‘Do you even remember talking to Terry last night? He thought somebody was breaking in and it was you, so drunk you couldn’t get your key in the lock.’

Okay, change of tactics. ‘Look, it was a mistake, okay? I got a bad mark for an essay and it really shook me up. I had a few drinks. Don’t tell me you’ve never done that.’

‘How long have you been doing drugs?’

‘What?’

‘We’re not stupid, Eliat. Terry says you were reeking of marijuana.’

Don’t answer that. Don’t give her anything.

‘Terry and I are going to have to talk about what to do. Obviously we’ve been letting you have too much independence and not enough responsibility around here. It’s time for you to start pulling your weight a bit more.’ She sighs. ‘Terry and I accept some of the blame for this. We should have known.’

It’s designed to sting, and it does. Somehow I’m not really surprised by the sudden vindictiveness of it. For all her talk about clean slates and fresh starts, there’s a sort of satisfaction in her words now. She’s been waiting two years to say them.

Long day. Extension two maths at lunch and by the end of the day my brain is useless. All the teachers have piled on homework and I manage to plod through half of it while Tash rides her tricycle in tight circles in the backyard. I know which teachers will check and which ones won’t, but don’t want to give Terry and Rose-Marie anything else to bitch about, so I even do my chem work. God, school work is boring.

Sentencing takes place after dinner: Eliat Singleton’s social life is suspended until further notice. To start: grounded for the next week, including the weekend. No going out with friends, absolutely no parties. That sounds bad enough, but then something else hits me. ‘It’s school holidays!’

‘Then you’ll have plenty of time to study,’ says Rose-Marie coldly.

Terry’s quiet, doesn’t even look at me. Soon as the laws are laid down he mutters something about making sure Tash is asleep, and bolts. I thought he’d be above giving me the silent treatment.

It feels like I have to say something to defend myself, try to worm my way out somehow. ‘It was one time.’

Rose-Marie stares at me. Her face is asking if I actually expect her to take my word for that.

I never had trouble getting myself moved from one place to the next. Always easy enough to please people, be who they wanted me to be. When I got fed up, I just stopped trying. Learned quickly enough nobody wanted a kid around who bit or bullied or talked back. Never anything bad enough to get myself in real trouble, I just made myself impossible. Unlikeable. Keep that up long enough and they’ll find a reason not to have room for you anymore.

In my bedroom I sit and stare at the carpet. Telling myself it’s strategic, I’m paving the way for an exit. Wishing I believed it.

before
after
later

This time I beat him to the cafe. As I wait I wonder if he’ll think I was silly to call him.

‘I’m sorry.’

Dropping into his seat, he raises an eyebrow. ‘For what?’