Yellow (4 page)

I can't concentrate at school the next day. It's hot; the fat muggy air makes us all like amphibious creatures and it coats us with a slick sheen of sweat. Despite this, I can't stop shivering. I think of the phone booth, and it couldn't have been real. The stress from everything must have pushed me completely over the edge, although if I'm having a midlife crisis at fourteen then it doesn't bode well for my life expectancy.

‘This seat's taken.'

Cassie's dumped her bag on the desk that I usually sit at in English, the one next to Tara. The punishment for walking away from a Circle is nothing if not predictable. There's usually an empty seat in the row in front of where we sit so I walk over and put my bag there. Lou shoves it off with her own bag so mine crashes onto the floor.

‘So's this one.'

I keep my eyes down. Everyone in class is just staring at me now, so I pick up my things and go to the front, where there's a few desks not being occupied by The Challenged Group.

‘Oh my God, like I'd sit up the front, for real!'

‘Nerd.'

And this is high school.

I like my English teacher. She's got spiky black hair and always wears colourful scarves and wacky glasses. From the way she looks you might get the impression that she's a flake, the kind of hippy baby boomer that the tide pulls in to this town in droves, with their camper vans in tow and their heads full of ideas about chakra-cleansing therapy and using meditation to fix unruly behaviour. We're not too far from Byron Bay to have more than our fair quota of mung-bean-eating staff members, but they're usually confined to the art and drama departments. Mrs Thomas is definitely not one of them.

‘Right!' she demands as she enters the class. The heckles stop. Everyone sits that little bit straighter. Such is the power of Mrs Thomas. We're studying
Lord of the Flies
and I copy down the notes from the blackboard. As the teacher writes, her hefty breasts rub against the board, smudging some of what she's already written, but nobody laughs. Not to her face, anyway. She turns towards the class, chalk smudged across her bosom.

‘So I'm assuming that everyone's read the text?'

Silence.

‘And the relief teacher said you were such a talkative bunch!'

We had a relief teacher last week and for the first half of the class we managed to convince him that this was actually the Advanced Spanish lesson and he was hopelessly lost. Cassie even spoke to him in a jumble of made-up words, gesticulating wildly in her best impression of a Spanish señorita.

‘Okay. So since everyone here's read it, can you please enlighten me as to what it's actually about? Damien?'

Damien, a popular surfer with a perpetually peeling nose looks up from graffitiing his desk.

‘You're the teacher, miss, shouldn't you already know?'

The class erupts into laughter, but not for very long. Not with Mrs Thomas in charge.

‘Very good. You can practise your comedy routine picking up rubbish after class. Cassie. Your thoughts, please?'

Cassie scrunches her pretty face up.

‘So like, there's a bunch of kids and they're on this island. And there's a pig. Or something. And then they get off. Edge-of-your-seat stuff, miss.'

Cassie returns to admiring her nails.

‘Well, not everything can be as scintillating as
Cosmo
magazine, can it? What I'm after is not what happens. I want you to go deeper, what's the story about?'

A girl from The Challenged Group who's sitting beside me in the front row is about to burst a blood vessel she's straining her hand so high, desperate to get picked. Mrs Thomas scans the room. I have my head down, my hair a curtain around my face, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible.

‘Kirra. Your thoughts, please.'

Shit.

‘I don't have any, miss.'

She looks hard at me, like I'm disappointing her.

‘Well, you'd better formulate an opinion quickly or you can join Damien picking up rubbish this afternoon.
Capiche?
'

I peek out through my hair, willing her not to make me do this.

‘Ummm . . .'

I hear a snicker from the back of the room and I pause.

‘Go on, Kirra.'

‘I think what the book is trying to say is that everybody is vicious and brutal really, once you scratch the surface. It's only society that makes us pretend that we're not.'

Mrs Thomas gives me a small smile. It only lasts for a microsecond but it's the kind of smile that says, ‘this is why I am a teacher'. Lou coughs loudly into her hands.

Cough.

‘Nerd!'

Cough.

I look around and the rest of the class is laughing, except Noah Willis, Damien's best friend and fellow surfer demigod. Noah's lived down the road from me ever since we were little and we used to play together until he got to the age where he realised that unpopularity was just a little bit too contagious to risk sitting very close to it. His face sits beneath a mop of sandy-coloured hair and under a mass of freckles, and somehow the freckles make him even better looking. He's staring at me like I'm an alien, as though I'm too much of a freak show to even laugh. I do look a bit like an alien, with my small face and my large yellow eyes. That's what Damien says, anyway. He whistles
The
X-Files
theme song whenever I'm near.

I'd rather their laughter, I think. I'd rather laughter than disgust.

When the school bell finally rings, the sound makes me think of the phone box all over again.

As I'm leaving, Mrs Thomas stops me. ‘I'd like to have a word with you, Kirra, if you don't mind.'

It's not like I have anywhere to go during lunchtime anyway. When you're shunned from a group like mine, none of the other groups will take you on, not even The Challenged Group. It's like they can smell the blood on you and they're afraid that if they let you sit with them you're going to attract the sharks. The only alternative is sucking it up and worming your way back into the good books, or changing schools. St Andrew's would go bankrupt without our broken, picked-on kids. The only problem is, my parents can barely afford food on the table, let alone a posh private school.

Mrs Thomas pulls out my last assignment from a pile of papers.

‘I was really disappointed in your essay, Kirra.'

I can barely remember what the essay was on. I handed it in about the same time as Mum found out about Desiree's pregnancy. The problem with Lark not even having the decency to skip town when he left us is that this town is too small. Mum and I ran into him when we were doing the groceries and when she saw him standing in the fruit aisle she snatched the eggs from our basket and started throwing them at him, one by one, across the citrus section. I was grabbing her hands and trying to stop her and our fingers were slimy with yolks and she kept slipp­ing from my grip. When he scampered out of the store quick smart she just crumpled, and she looked so small with her head down it was like someone had just tossed an old dress onto the ground, she hardly filled it. She sat there, heaving, in a pile of broken eggshells and slime, with half the town watching on. A manager came over with a mop and a pail and crouched down close to her.

‘You're going to have to pay for those, ma'am.'

So I wasn't really concentrating on the essay when I wrote it.

‘I want you to redo it – have it in to me by Monday.'

Mrs Thomas pushes the offending paper into my hands and goes back to busying herself at her desk. I look down at it – I received a thirteen out of twenty. Hardly a punishable offence.

‘But miss, I passed . . .'

‘You passed because you're clever and you would probably do a passable job on an essay you wrote on toilet paper in your bathroom break. But thirteen out of twenty isn't good enough for you.'

This is outrageously unfair.

‘Cassie hardly ever gets more than fifty per cent, and she's never had to spend her weekend rewriting an assignment.'

Mrs Thomas leans against the desk and looks me square in the eye. Behind her bright-red square-framed glasses her eyes look surprisingly tired. Surrounding them are small lines like little willie wagtails have hopped around and left tracks on her skin.

‘To be born with few brains, well, that's unfortunate. To be born with brains to spare and to waste them? That's a sin.'

She gathers her things and strides towards the doorway. Just before she exits she turns to me briefly. ‘I see so much potential in you, Kirra.'

There's that word again. Potential. I wish I didn't have it, whatever it is, because it's brought me nothing but trouble this far.

Lunch is spent by myself, studying for the science exam next period. As we're lining up outside the classroom it's obvious Cassie had forgotten about it until now because she looks as stricken as she did that time the hairdressers took five centi­metres too much from her hair. If her grades don't improve her parents have threatened her with St Andrew's, which means that she'll be stuck in unflattering knee-length tartan and a classroom full of kids she's bullied into switching schools.

She rushes over to me and drapes her arm around my shoulder. ‘This is an exam on evolution, right?'

I nod.

‘Do you think I can claim religious exemption because I believe the Lord Jesus Christ Our Saviour created us in seven days?'

‘Probably not, only because you were the one who heckled a pastor at assembly that time, and told him it was all make-believe anyway. And that religion causes terrorism.'

Cassie rolls her eyes. ‘But he was so boring! Honestly he was so old I couldn't believe he wasn't dead yet!'

We all start filing in.

‘You're sitting next to me, right?'

I nod again and she flashes me a smile that stretches across half her face. My punishment is over, or at least on hiatus.

During the exam she kicks my leg and when I look across at her she's mouthing, ‘Eight?'

Looking around to check the teacher isn't watching, I lift my paper up for her to see and she scribbles the answer down furiously. The teacher's a bearded man who experimented too much making homemade acid when he was a chemistry student in the sixties, so he doesn't notice and at the moment he's preoccupied with tapping on the glass tank where the lab rats live.

‘Thirteen?'

I scratch my nose, write the answer on a scrap of paper and scrunch it up in my hand. Feigning a yawn I stretch out my arms and drop it on Cassie's lap. I give her enough answers to stave off St Andrew's for another semester at least.

The bell rings.

‘So, umm, does this mean I can sit with you again?' I ask her, biting my lip.

She checks her hair for split ends and rolls her eyes. ‘Fine. But remember not to walk like a retard at the social tonight, okay?'

I nod.

The social.

Shit.

I had completely forgotten.

The social starts at seven and thankfully school's only a five-minute walk from my house. All the other girls will be wearing their mother's make-up and their very best surf-brand dresses. I can't wait for the day I'm old enough to work part-time and I can buy something that's Billabong or Roxy. It's as if clothes have an aura or an energy about them, and when you're wearing the right brands it rubs off on you – as though your life is somehow the same as the ones shown on the posters in the surf shops, all sunny summer days and watermelon-slice smiles and salt that dries stiff like little crystals on your skin. Those surf brands embody everything that's worshipped in this town. It's like your clothes have a language all of their own, and they speak so much about you without you even having to open your mouth.

If this is true then my mother speaks for me, because I have to wear her cast-offs. They're not any brand name. They're not even from this decade. We can't afford new clothes, not on the dole, and whatever's left over goes down my mother's gullet. I've got some things from Vinnies, but they smell like mothballs and old ladies and it's hard to find anything small enough to fit me, so mostly I wear Mum's old things from when she was my age in the late 70s. My mum was beautiful when she was young – you can still see that in her face, when you look past the sadness. She's only thirty-three but those years hang heavily on her. When she was young, in the pictures, she looks like the whole world is dangling on a string in front of her delicate nose, her smile is fearless and her eyes are so bright and completely free from whatever haunts them now. In those photographs all the other kids look at her like they're hoping some of her sheen might rub off on them.

I wonder what happened.

When it all went wrong.

I'm wearing an old jumpsuit of hers – it's Prussian blue and halter-neck and goes right down to the ground so I have to wear heels to keep from tripping over the hem. The material's a light silk and the legs are so baggy that it almost looks like I'm wearing a dress. I tie a rust-coloured belt around my waist and slip on Mum's chunky leather wedges, then I run a brush through my hair and I examine my reflection in the mirror. It's okay. I will never be as beautiful as my mother was, my eyes scare the beauty away, but I'm okay.

‘Brrriiiiiiiinnnnnggggg!'

We're at the school social and Lou has her thumb and pinky fingers resting against the side of her face like a pretend telephone. She stretches her arms out towards me. Panic curls and tightens around my insides. Of course they were somehow behind the phone call at South Beach.

Of course.

Maybe the Telstra woman was wrong, I mean, I think Cassie's dad might even own a mobile.

‘It's the seventies, Kirra. They want their outfit back,' Lou smirks. Everyone else's laughter feels like little slaps. I wait for the punchline.

I wait to hear about Mitzy.

Nothing.

Cassie cocks her head to the side and appraises me. She gestures to the others to settle down and then shoots me a sympathetic smile. ‘I think it's cool. That colour, it'd look so good on me.'

I'm grateful. That's the closest thing to a compliment I'm ever going to get from Cassie.

The school hall has been decked out to resemble a disco – that is, if discos had hand-drawn posters of music notes on the walls and an ageing DJ sporting a mullet commanding the stage. He's wearing lurid green wraparound sunglasses, despite the fact it's night-time and the only light comes from a disco ball in the middle of the room and some overhead, coloured globes we occasionally use for school plays. He holds his headphones to his ears and sways along to the music like he's really feeling it. It's a good thing that he's feeling it, because nobody else is. The dance floor is so empty I'm surprised tumbleweeds aren't blowing past.

It's social suicide to dance at these things – the only reason anyone ever goes is to check out everybody else and be looked at themselves. We all cluster around the edges of the hall and preen and pose and bitch about what everyone else is wearing. Except me, of course. Nobody listens to me anyway, and I try to make myself as small as possible. It's not hard, I still get asked for ID to get into the local swimming pool where you have to be over the age of twelve.

Tara's crimped her hair and is scanning the room intently with her blue-mascara'd eyes. She clutches the top of Cassie's glitter-dusted shoulder. ‘Don't look now, but there's Damien Salter by the left speaker. Pinch me now, he's such a babe!'

‘Your wish is my command,' Cassie smiles as she digs her painted-pink fingernails into Tara's arm. Tara yelps.

The music shifts from an 80s ballad to pop and a couple of kids from The Challenged Group make their way onto the dance floor as ‘Don't Speak' by No Doubt starts playing. They're swinging their limbs with an awkward enthusiasm, like they just don't care at all. And they don't. There's something so liberating about having no social status to lose. The girls in my group divert their attention from Damien to sneer at them.

‘We can add “rhythmically challenged” to the list,' snipes Cassie.

Tara readjusts her boob tube and rolls her eyes at the dancers. ‘As if you'd wear something that short with those legs. Like, seriously, thunder thighs.'

‘Watch out for lightning!' laughs Sasha, then she shifts her weight so that her own perfect pins are properly on display.

Tara taps her on the shoulder and points to the edge of the crowd. Willow Parker has pushed through and she's slinking over to the middle of the dance floor, right underneath the mirror ball.

Lou curls up her lips. ‘Here comes the girl who's had more balls in her mouth than a hungry hungry hippo.'

Willow just stands there for a moment, completely by herself, with her eyes closed like crescent moons and the light from the mirror ball sweeping over her. Then the DJ ramps up the beats and she starts to move. Slowly at first, like the music is whispering to her, then she throws her whole body into dancing. Her hair tumbles into her eyes and a small, quiet smile plays on the edges of her lips. All the kids from The Challenged Group are mimicking the latest moves from
Video Hits
, but Willow moves in her own way. She owns it. I get a pang of jealousy, the way she can move like that, completely unselfconsciously. Completely unlike me.

Sasha and Tara are clutching each other watching her, their faces twisted into laughter.

‘What a space cadet. I can't even think of anything more embarrassing. Nothing,' hoots Sasha.

She doesn't have a very good imagination because the embarrassment stakes are about to go through the roof.

Damien walks over to our group and Cassie thrusts out her breasts but he only gives them a brief glance as he beelines to me.

‘I think your mother's lookin' for ya.'

He gestures with his head to the front entrance, where the silhouette of my mother is leaning heavily against the doorframe.

Oh my God.

Her hair is wild, in a sloppy, puffed-out yellow bun, and she looks like a stick of fairy floss, propped against the door like that. I race outside and she's collected a circle of amused, slouchy teen smokers around her, the ones coming back from sneaking a cigarette in the car park. They're storing away her slurred anecdotes to use when they need something to laugh about at school next week. She steps away from the door to punctuate whatever tall tale she's telling with those exaggerated sort of hand movements perfected by the drunk and the insane. The suddenness of her gestures makes her lose her balance, so the kids take it in turns catching her and placing her neatly back against the frame. From a few metres away I can hear her laughter, horsey and forced, like she's coughing up laughs. The other kids laugh too, and it injures me, the way that she doesn't realise they're laughing at her, not with her.

‘Kirra!'

She lunges towards me and I have to grab her. Her breath has that sour smell of gin and beer and her top's been pulled on inside out and back to front so the tag pokes out at me like a mocking tongue.

‘I wann'ed to say . . .'

She forgets what she wants to say for a moment and looks confused, then catches the end of her thoughts by the tail and continues.

‘I wann'ed to say we should have an afterparty! With all your friends!'

She flings her arm out and grabs the flannel collar of some nearby eleventh grader with stoner eyes and an eyebrow ring, pulling his ear towards her foul breath.

‘Whass yer name?'

‘Dave.'

‘Dave, you should come to our party!'

She lets him go and leans against me, speaking in a loud, conspiratorial whisper. ‘Youse can even drink alcohol if we keep it a secret! Shhhhhhhhhhh!' With her index finger pressed against her lips she ‘shooshes' everyone, which she obviously finds hilarious because she loses herself in a fit of giggles and I struggle to keep her on her feet.

It's the least funny thing in the world.

I should have known Mum wasn't in a good way when I left the house. She was sitting cross-legged on the fish-gut coloured carpet, leaning against the couch with her head back, eyes closed, listening to her favourite radio station – hits of the 70s and 80s. Her face was relaxed, almost happy, as she was taken away by the music to a time when the world dangled before her nose, when it was her wearing the Prussian blue jumpsuit, laughter bubbling up from her throat.

Leaning against the couch like that she looked softer and younger, except that around her eyes were little creases that people call laugh lines, but they're not laugh lines, not on her.

‘Can I have five dollars for the school social?'

I'd pulled her back into the present, and she frowned for a second, like she didn't want to be there, like she'd gotten lost and there was nobody around to ask for directions.

‘You have to listen to this song first.' The ice clinked as she pointed her glass towards the radio. She gets like that with songs, especially when she's been drinking, which is all the time now. She wants me to feel them in the same way she does, and she gets upset when I can't; that even though I'm half her, I don't have the memories that she does, and a particular set of lyrics can't open a box inside of me where memories curl out like wisps of smoke – first kisses or the way I looked at her when I was first born. She can't understand that it's not the song that's making her feel, it's the memories. She thinks I'm just not listening hard enough and that I need to open my ears like the way a fish opens up its gills.

‘Are you listening?'

It was ‘One' by Metallica. The song's about a soldier who was fighting in a war when a mortar blew up in his face. He can't see or hear or taste or smell or talk, and he's lost his arms and legs, so he's stuck in this dark, frightening prison which is his own body. Mum listens to that song a lot. She'll grasp my hand tight when she's listening to it.

‘Did you really listen?'

‘Yes, Mum. I listened.'

I thought she was going to make me listen to another one – most songs from the 70s or 80s will be terribly meaningful to her, which is funny because it was the era of disco and power ballads, not particularly deep stuff. The cheesy announcer called the next song – something by KC and the Sunshine Band. Mum did a small jolt and stumbled over to the radio as the opening funk beats sounded.

‘Turn it off!' She struggled with the dial before ripping the cord out from the socket. I wondered what box of memories that song pried open, and I knew that even with the radio silent the song was still sitting there like a ghost in our living room. The silence was fat with it.

‘Can I have the five dollars now?'

She didn't answer.

So I took it from her handbag and I left her there, with the spirits that lingered in songs, and with the ones that filled the bottles lined up in our liquor cabinet.

I wanted some time with the living.

Cassie and my group have come over now, and their faces are ashen. I don't want to be here, holding my mother. No amount of hair draped over my face can hide me from this. I want to fling my mother to the ground and separate myself from her. I don't want this drunken woman to have been the person who carried me inside of herself like a babushka doll for nine months and made me in her own image. I don't want her to be my mother.

‘Oh helloooo Casshie, Kirra's having a party!' chirps Mum.

Cassie curls her lip upwards. ‘Kirra shouldn't be throwing a party, Kirra should be throwing an intervention.'

We've gathered quite a crowd now. Cassie pulls me over towards her so that my mother falls and becomes an awkward jumble of limbs on the ground.

‘This is so embarrassing. How can you do this to me after I let you back into the group?' she hisses.

Willow appears from behind her, sipping from one plastic cup of water and holding another in her other hand. ‘What's embarrassing, Cassie, is your ego.'