Yellow (2 page)

‘Are you a homophobe?'

‘I . . . I . . .'

All of my words have run away from me. They've packed their bags and slipped out the back window when I wasn't looking. I look up towards the sky to hold the tears inside my lids.

‘And, like, the biggest thing,' adds Sasha, ‘is that you never have a crush.'

That's not true. I crush as much as the next girl. I just keep these crushes folded up inside of my heart like tiny scraps of paper. I look down and turn my head to meet Cassie's gaze. ‘That's not true. You know it's not true.'

Cassie blinks at me and then she remembers. She remembers. Her face cracks into a smile. The first real smile I've seen from her all day. She throws back her head and laughs. She laughs and then folds her arms like bird wings and she squawks. The others look confused, it takes them a second to get the joke, but then their laughter joins the cacophony and eight bony pretend-wings are flapping at me.

They're squawking. Cackling. Like it's the funniest thing in the world.

I know I should sit and let the rest of The Circle play itself out, Tara and Cassie haven't had their turns yet, but I can't do it this time. I get up and run. I run out past the basketball court, past the duck pond, and the suddenness of my arrival makes a few birds flap up from the water, squawking at me like the others. The back oval is flanked by rainforest. Like I said, it's a picturesque type of hell.

I reach the trees and the path that's been trodden down by generations of wagging kids. The trees will give way to a creek after about a hundred metres, and from there it's an easy trek following the riverbank back home.

The squawking shouldn't have bothered me as much as it did, but it's the reason I never tell anyone who I'm crushing on. Cassie knows this. She started it all.

We were in year six. I had just turned twelve and I had fallen deeply, madly in crush for the first time. I hugged that crush to my chest and it felt like butterflies were going to fly up from my belly and right out of my mouth every time I spoke to him. His name was Omar, he was a boy in my class and he had skin like chocolate, with hooded eyes that made him look like he was always daydreaming. He had a tangle of black hair, but the peculiar thing about Omar was that he had a birthmark, or something, at the very back of his head. Whatever it was, it made a patch of his hair grow completely white, as though he'd had a fright. He was lovely.

The others called him ‘magpie'. They didn't call him that in a nice way.

I crushed on him with all of my twelve-year-old being until one day Cassie came to class with friendship bracelets made from yellow and green and orange wool. The colours of my eyes, she said. She tied one around my wrist and one around hers and when she whispered jokes to me in class our hair fell together. She had never been so nice to me. By the end of the day I thought that I'd be her new best friend. That Lou would have to know what it was to sit on the bus by herself during school excursions. Drunk on Cassie's friendship, when she asked me about Omar, I told her. Then she raced over to Lou. ‘I knew it!' she cackl­ed. Then they both squawked, pretending to be magpies. Omar changed schools at the end of term.

I've just reached the bush, tears trudging down my cheeks, when a particularly gnarly tree root hooks itself over my foot and the ground comes crashing towards me.

Ooooph.

Just great.

As I wipe the dirt off my knees I think it's a small mercy that nobody was around to see that, until I hear a laugh from above. Not a mean laugh, but not a sweet one either. A brittle laugh that sounds rusty from lack of use.

I look up.

To see Willow Parker perched on a branch, smoking a cigarette and peering at me wryly from the one eye that's not hidden behind her spilt-coffee hair. Her legs are swinging back and forth and her smile has disappeared back to that place it had briefly escaped from.

‘Good friends you've got there, cupcake.'

It's a statement.

Sarcastic, obviously.

She blows a puff of smoke to punctuate her words. I look back towards my group, the Circle of them, pretty as a daisy chain. If I don't go back to face my punishment I'm kicked out of the group until they decide to have a Circle again. That could take weeks. I really should go back.

I should.

I should get the pain over and done with, like ripping off a bandaid.

And yet it hurts too much right now.

Willow ashes her cigarette and I don't know what to say back to her so I don't say anything. I turn and, more carefully now, make my way to the creek. Towards home.

I follow the riverbank to where the bush clears to make way for the park. Across the other side of the river is more bush, and then South Beach. This side of the river, up from the park, is all housing commission homes. Where I live. Our houses sit in the shadow of a huge hill and all the people in town know whether you're worth talking to or not depending on which side of the hill you belong.

I'm not on the side worth talking to.

Sometimes, I climb the hill just to stand up there and look around. It's like a cobbled-together island surrounded by green, my town. Past the side that I live, the bad side, and all the way around to the right, there's just a tangle of bush, torn open by the river, and the thrashing green waters of South Beach beyond that, the beach that's not even worth the bother to patrol. South Beach winds its way out to the point and stops at the mouth of the creek – the point that separates the respectable people from us, the housing commission people. The good side is flanked by Main Beach, tame and sparkling. That side of the hill is where all the cashed-up baby boomers have washed in with the tide. The right of South Beach is knotted with more bush that creeps its way to Byron Bay, and past the back is farmland, where sugarcane farmers grow proud, green stalks that they burn after harvest every spring. Through the farmland is a road, like a hairline fracture in the green when you see it from up on the hill. That road takes us to the next town, one with a hospital and a shopping mall. I don't go there very often. From up on the hill my town look so small, like a toy town, with one main road, some fish and chip shops, a police station, a grocery, a library, and a hardware store. But when you're in it, my town seems like the biggest thing in the world.

It seems like the whole world.

I know there's something wrong when I reach my front lawn. By lawn I mean straggly patches of unwatered grass, choked by bindii prickles. The lawn's in pretty much the same state as our house, a fibro one-storey thing with paint puckered and peeling off. The droopy awning and slightly crooked front patio makes it look like it's forever sighing, so it's pretty much your standard housing commission home, really. I've just stepped in a waxy puddle of melted lipstick. More lipsticks are scattered across the yard in shades of red and pink. Over there is a pot of blush. It looks like our whole front yard has a rash.

This isn't good.

I step inside to see my mother's passed out on the living-room floor, wedged between the couch and the coffee table. There's an empty jam jar beside her and I pick it up and smell the gin. Her hands are stained from where she's furiously gripped the cosmetics before she threw them from the patio.

I hope to God nobody saw.

They probably saw.

They probably all craned their necks and squinted against the sun to get a better view of the spectacle. Not many people have jobs around here. We take entertainment where we can get it.

Mum's face is unpainted though; she's kept it bare ever since Lark left a couple of months ago to move in with the woman who sells cosmetics door to door. Lark's my father, but the whole town knows him as Lark because he's always skylarking about, all winks and jokes. We've always just called him Lark, and any other name, even ‘Dad', seems strange on him, like it doesn't fit him at all.

So Lark's buggered off. It's embarrassing. He didn't even have the decency to do a proper runner, he just left us and moved in with Desiree, three blocks away. I'm allowed to visit, although it's strange, knocking on someone else's door and asking to see my own father.

‘C'mon, Mum.' I shake her. She's so small she reminds me of a bird with a broken wing.

‘G'way,' she slurs, and with her eyes still closed she reaches out to shoo me but bangs her arm against the coffee table. ‘Ooooooowww!'

I slide the coffee table across with my foot and straddle her, arms under each armpit. Like this I'm able to half drag her towards her bed.

‘Get off me!'

She's lashing out and trying to hit me, but she can't reach her arms out backwards. I get her into bed. Finally, she's still. After a beat she calls out from under the covers, ‘Gemme some water, love? I need some water. Be a good daughter and gemme some waaaaater.'

When I get back with the water she's asleep, and the bedroom smells like a distillery.

I can't do this anymore.

Desiree's house isn't too much better than ours, but at least it's clean, and it doesn't reek with alcohol fumes that could ignite if someone lit a match. Lark's sitting out the front in just his board shorts. His fingers are dancing along the strings of his guitar, playing a Cat Stevens song, the palm of one of his hands is tapping against the guitar wood like a bongo drum between chords and his foot is keeping time. That's Lark. So laid-back it'd take him two hours to watch
60 Minutes
.

‘No surf today, huh?'

He looks up at me and his face cracks into a crooked, toothy grin. ‘Yellow! Come give your old man a hug.'

He smells like salt and warmth and of
before
. It would never occur to him to ask me why I'm not at school at one-thirty on a Thursday afternoon.

‘The surf was all choppy, bloody southerlies, so I'm working on me music career.' He punctuates this last statement with a dramatic strum of the chords. Lark's on the Johnny Howard–sponsored surfing team as he calls it, which basically means he's on the dole and surfs all day. He's tried working a couple of times but it wasn't for him. You'd think this would make him a drop kick, but it doesn't. Everyone loves him. He's only young, like my mum, they were just nineteen when they had me, and he's all hulking and brown and smelling of surf wax, with shoulders as wide as an anchor and sun-bleached hair just long enough for him to suck the salt from.

He starts playing the guitar again, and sings to me, ‘Yellow came over to say hellooooo.' He uses the wood as a bongo again and throws me a cheeky grin.

I laugh.

‘'Cos I'm her favourite relloooooo.'

I laugh harder.

In this moment I almost forget everything else: The Circle, Mum, and the fact that Lark's here, three blocks from where he should be. It feels like old times. My whole life he's made up songs about me, just to make me laugh. I never call him Dad and he never calls me Kirra. As soon as I was born and I opened my eyes, I've been nothing but Yellow to him, which is funny, because he's the one who came up with my real name in the first place – he named me after a famous surf beach near where we live. ‘What I loved the most in the whole world, until you were born,' he tells me. And I wonder why he left if he loves me that much.

Desiree steps out from behind the flyscreened front door and when she sees me she pulls her lips away from her teeth in what I think is supposed to be a smile but her eyes tell me differently. She wears a full face of make-up and she always has lipstick on her teeth. I think of it as blood. Lark's briny blood from when she's bitten into his shoulder like an apple . . .

Kirra, stop! I don't want to think about her biting his flesh. I try to be nice to her and pull the end of my own lips upwards into a tight, closed-mouth smile.

‘How nice of you to visit us, Kirra.'

I reply with a further upward pull of my lips. I try not to focus on the small bump growing out from under her tight white blouse.

She's four months pregnant.

Lark only left us three months ago.

Do the maths.

‘Aren't you supposed to be at school now?' Her voice is sickly sweet.

‘Ummm . . . free period.'

I focus on my chipped nails – I can't ever look anyone in the eye when I lie. My own eyes give me away every time; there's too much of them to keep anything hidden. She smiles at me again like she doesn't believe me, but decides to hold her tongue anyway.

‘Well, I'm making sandwiches for lunch. You're welcome to join us.'

And with that she disappears inside, leaving behind a cloud of talcum powder and cheap perfume. Lark winks at me.

‘In we go, Yellow.'

Mitzy tries to jump up on my lap as I'm eating my ham and lettuce sandwich, but Desiree grabs him and coos, letting the small dog lick her face. Mitzy is exactly the kind of dog favoured by women who wear too much make-up. He's a small, white fluff-ball with a nervous disposition, probably caused by being crammed into Desiree's handbag for much of his life as she knocked door-to-door selling clumpy mascara.

‘Top feed!' says Lark.

My sandwich almost gets stuck in my throat. It's now or never, I tell myself. I keep my eyes focused on my glass as I speak.

‘Mum got so drunk last week that she passed out while she was cooking, and when I got home the stove had been on for a couple of hours, and the pot was burnt all the way through.'

Lark looks concerned.

Desiree jumps in. ‘Let's not gossip about people. I've accidentally left the iron on all day once or twice myself. We're all only human, you know.' She forces out a light and breezy laugh that is anything but light and breezy.

‘Your mother's always liked a tipple, Yellow. She can handle herself.' That's Lark.

‘But it's worse now.'

Mum's drunk most nights of my life, but not in the daytimes. Not like this. These days, when I see her sprawled and still on the living-room floor, she reminds me of one of the creatures pickled in formaldehyde and lined up in glass jars at the science museum I visited once for school – seemingly alive, but not. Not really. She doesn't seem to be my mother.

‘Can I stay with you?'

Before Lark can answer, Desiree cuts in. ‘We'd love to have you, sweetheart, but there's no room, and you have such a lovely big room at your mother's house. You know you can come and visit whenever.'

I turn to face Lark, but his pupils are like two blowflies buzzing about in his skull. His gaze darts around the room, settling on the windowsill, the kitchen bench, everywhere but me. His silence is louder than any sound I've ever heard. It clangs.

‘What about the spare room?' I ask Lark. Again, his blowfly eyes won't let me catch them, they're too quick and they don't want to be caught. Again, he keeps up that screaming silence, which almost drowns out Desiree's strained chatter as she talks for him.

‘That's the baby's room.' She smiles at me with the kind of smile that looks like a grimace. ‘We need to paint it and decorate it. I'm sorry, Kirra, you know we really would if we could.'

I hate her painted, lying mouth.

Lark reaches over and takes my hair from my face and places it behind my ear. Finally, he speaks. ‘A teenage girl needs her mum around, for all that girl stuff. I'm no use.'

‘Mum doesn't live there anymore! She's been possessed by a raging alcoholic!'

‘Let's not exaggerate, Kirra.'

That's Desiree, of course. Lark's pupils do that blowfly thing again. I'm so full of emotion that I've lost my words. It's like when I get upset all of my feelings cause a blockage in my vocal cords, so that when I try to speak they can't get out. Desiree keeps chattering on.

‘It's not like I'm calling you a liar, nothing like that. Of course not, Kirra. It's just that everything can feel very dramatic when you're a teenager, and things can seem much more exaggerated than they actually are.'

I take a long gulp of water to try to clear my throat, and it takes everything I've got to keep my voice steady. Getting hysterical isn't a great way to prove you're not a dramatic teenager.

‘I'm not exaggerating. She can't look after me.'

Lark cracks out his crooked smile again and gets up to open the window, to shoo the tension from the air. ‘It's bloody hot, ay? You were born sensible, Yellow, you don't need looking after. You're a teenager, enjoy the freedom.' He musses the top of my hair where it turns up into a cowlick. ‘Anyway, we didn't raise you to need your hand held all the time, did we? You're a free-range child.'

Desiree unconsciously pats her stomach when Lark says that and she purses her mouth like a cat's bum. You can tell this next one won't be a free-range child. Things will be planned and prepared and measured in doses. Things will be done correctly. I'm the practice child, like the first pancake in every batch, the one that never comes out right. The one you throw away. Desiree will get her way, I know. Lark's too much of a coaster to go against the tide. He won't even look at me. I glare at Desiree.

‘You have lipstick on your teeth, you know.'