Yellow (5 page)

‘What did you say?!' Cassie directs her fury away from me and towards Willow, who obviously has a death wish because she keeps on talking.

‘If you paid half as much attention in class as you do to worrying about your breast size you'd know that the earth revolves around the sun – not you. Newton's law of gravitation and all tha–'

Willow's silenced by Cassie's perfectly manicured hand reaching across and latching starfish-like across her mouth.

‘Ugh, Parker. Can't keep your legs shut, can't keep your mouth shut.'

Willow arches an eyebrow from above the hand, then calmly pours a cup of water over the front of Cassie's white dress. Cassie's not wearing a bra and the water makes the dress stick against her breasts, the pink outline of her nipples peering out at everyone through the fabric. Cassie screams and lets go of Willow to cover herself with her hands.

‘Ooops. Who's the big old tart now, then?' quips Willow, and with a half smile still playing on her face she crouches down towards my mother and places the remaining cup of water against her lips. ‘Drink up, it'll make you feel better.'

I crouch beside her. ‘Mum, we've got to go home now.'

‘But waddabout your party? I came here to give you a party, I have cupcakes for your party . . .'

I begin to tell her there won't be any party, but Noah Willis appears beside me. I notice the way he smells. Male. Sharp. So different from the mudpie and jelly-snake smell of when we were little.

‘Of course we're coming to your party, Mrs Barley. Can you show me the way?'

He pulls her up, like a gentleman, and offers the crook of his arm for her to take. I put my arm around the other side of her, and Willow follows, chattering to her about parties and cupcakes, and the warm night blankets us, this strange quartet, as we follow our feet down the street towards my house.

I look over to Noah. The starlight bounces off his freckles, and he looks like a part of the night sky himself, his freckles a mass of constellations. I bite my bottom lip. There's a sort of kindness that makes you want to cry more than any cruel words slung at you. Both kindness and cruelty will acknowledge you have a problem, but cruelty, at least, lets you don your armour and fight back when you're faced with it. Kindness can be harder. It will look inside of you and hold up your troubles with soft, open hands, and you're standing there, face to face with all the things that you're pretending so badly aren't wrong. You're staring them right in the eye, but you're not allowed to wear your armour when you're dealing with kindness. When someone offers to help you it strips all those defences away. I know if Noah Willis never speaks to me again after this night it won't matter. I will love him. After what he's done for me tonight, the way he speaks so gently to my mother.

I will love him.

That's the truth.

As my mother natters on to Noah, in her broken-thread, slurring sort of way, Willow leans over and whispers in my ear. ‘So your family's as mad as mine?'

And the one eye peeking out at me looks amused.

There's no bigger bully in the world than four a.m. Mum's passed out, the house is a mess, and I'm alone in my room except for my collection of childhood troll dolls lined up on the dresser, my poster of Audrey Hepburn Blu-Tacked onto the wall, and four a.m. is whispering mean things in my ear.

‘Remember the social? How everyone was staring at you? Your mother's pathetic and now everyone knows it.'

Shut up, four a.m.

‘Not even your own father wants you around.'

I said, shut up.

‘You're a dog murderer. And now you're going crazy, imagining ghosts.'

Go away!

‘Nobody likes you. They can't all be wrong, can they? You speck.'

Not even clamping the pillow against your ears will drown out the low whisper of four a.m.'s insults. I pull my covers over my head and squeeze my eyes and try to sleep, but I know, I just know, that loneliness will crawl into bed next to me and snuggle up close. It'll get into bed and when I look over it'll be clutching a ghost Mitzy like he was a teddy bear. I'll hold my breath then, while the ghost Mitzy watches me, because every lungful I'll draw will make me feel guilty, knowing that because of me, the dog's chest stays too still. And despair will hang around, as well. It'll sit at my feet with a bedtime story on its knee, one of the original fairytales, not the Disney versions. The book will be the kind where Little Red Riding Hood gets eaten by the wolf or the Little Mermaid kills herself, because people in the olden days didn't sugar-coat things for kids. They didn't pretend that everything has a happy ending. They didn't lie.

Loneliness and despair.

They're the only two things in this world I can count on to consistently be there.

It's morning and there's a possum corpse in the gutter out the front. Its neck is open and gaping like a lower second mouth, and bits of fur sit in tufts on the bitumen, rolling gently down the street with each small breath of wind like dandelion fluff. It was probably the Bakers' dog that did it. I never did like that dog, I always got the sense that it's only because we're bigger than him that he doesn't take our own necks in his maw and shake until our veins are free from the skin. He's not sweet like Mitzy was.

Mitzy.

Don't think of Mitzy, Kirra. Think of the possum.

I could talk to the Bakers about their dog but they wouldn't believe me – they haven't before, even when I showed them the place at the wire fence where a dog like theirs could wriggle under.

The possum will smell soon.

The ants are already eating out its eyes.

Even this early, beads of sweat are gathering at the nape of my neck and making a wet moustache across my upper lip. It's the kind of hot where you'd press your glass of morning orange juice to your cheek and against the side of your neck. But I'm only holding a jam jar filled with lukewarm water from the tap, it wouldn't do much good.

I wonder what to do with the possum. Lark usually takes care of these things, but it doesn't seem right to call him, and I'm worried that I couldn't lie if he asked if I'd seen Mitzy.

Mum is no use.

I walk back inside and the battered flyscreen door gives me a friendly whack on the arse on the way in. I look around.

Jesus.

When I take the garbage outside it's like New Year's Eve, the way the bottles crash.

I dig out the vacuum cleaner, a dinosaur of a thing that screams in pain when you turn it on. Pulling the cord out all the way and plugging it into a yellowed socket, I bang my way into Mum's room where she's clearly losing her battle with a hangover. Her blinds are closed and it's dark except for the efforts of a few shards of light that bleed into the room through small cracks.

Zrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!

I crash the vacuum around Mum's bedroom and fling open the blinds so that the light careens in with a thump onto her eyelids. She wakes with a start.

Zrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr! Thwack! Bump!

I'm particularly vigorous at cleaning the spot on the carpet next to the double bed, and I bang the nozzle again and again on the foot of her wrought-iron bedhead.

‘Sweet Jesus, Kirra, get out of here with your cleaning, will you? Your mum's sick.'

Mum looks like she's been all wrung out, and guessing from the retching sounds coming from the bathroom last night she was, in a way. I learnt in biology that starfish have two stomachs, and they can turn one completely inside out. I wouldn't be surprised if Mum's stomach could do the same, from the sounds of things.

I keep banging the vacuum against her bed again and again and only stop when she musters the energy to roll over and hit the power button. It dies with what sounds like a complaint.

‘What the hell, Kirra?'

I throw the vacuum hose on the ground. ‘What the hell? You're asking
me
what the hell?!'

I'm incensed. I'm livid. I have the mean reds and I want to throw hateful word upon hateful word at my mother.

She embarrassed me.

Mum tries to look up, but she's scrunching her eyes against the light. ‘Don't be mad at me. I'm sick.'

‘Well, whose fault is that?'

She tries to sit up a bit in bed and she reaches her arm out to me, but I'm too far away for her to touch and I don't step forward.

‘You never bring your friends around – I just, I'd just had a bit too much, and I thought it'd be fun for you to have some people over.'

I can't believe the hide of her.

‘Last night wasn't about me. It was about you, not wanting to be alone with your own head!' I scream. I'm crying now and I think how I've had a gutful of the taste of salt water. I can see another wave of nausea washing over Mum's face, and she pulls the cover over her head so she becomes a lump under the blanket, like a small child who's terrible at hiding.

‘Stop being mad at me. I like you better when you're nice,' says the lump.

I rip the blanket from the bed.

‘It should be me with a hangover, copping an earful. I should be the teenager, and you should be the mother, and I should be experimenting with getting too drunk, because teenagers are stupid and they don't know any better. But you should.
You
should know better!'

Mum looks so unprotected without the blanket, like a hermit crab pulled from its shell, but I can't stop. ‘I'm sick of it – I can't be stupid like everyone else my age because it's not safe. You're supposed to be my safety net. And look at you. You couldn't catch me. I'd crack my bloody head open if I had to rely on you.'

Mum's bottom lip trembles, and I think she's going to cry, but she just pushes past me and I hear her spewing her guts up again, and again, and again.

I find the shovel and use it to poke the dead possum, the creature's head lolling backwards in the place where it's only just attached to the body by a wedge of skin the size of my wrist. It's not too decomposed yet, the maggots haven't eaten holes in the flesh, and the body holds together when I scoop it up. Like this I carry it down the street, and the blowflies keep it company. Yesterday Desiree stuck Missing Dog posters to the telegraph poles and the photocopied pictures of Mitzy watch me accusingly. I want to be glad that Desiree's hurting. I want to be glad that she knows what it feels like to lose something that she loves, the way Mum and I are hurting because Lark isn't here. Instead, I just feel guilt and shame. With my spare hand I rip a poster from the pole.

‘Getting rid of the evidence, hey?' The voice comes from Noah's bedroom window, which faces out onto the street. He doesn't sound friendly or unfriendly; he has a deadpan way of speaking. My heart headbutts the inside of my rib cage. Does he know that I killed Mitzy?

‘The possum. The Bakers' dog'll get away with murder if you tamper with the crime scene, you know.'

I'm carrying a dead possum.

Shit.

I get so embarrassed that I drop the damn thing and it takes me three goes to scoop it back up onto the shovel again. By the time I look up, he's gone.

The possum's ant-riddled eyes watch me as I dig a hole in the park and then roll the thing into the grave. I think of Mitzy, washed up on the sand. I imagine the crabs eating his little eyes and I know that he deserves to be buried, too.

Past the park there's a path down to the creek. I follow the bank until I get to the bridge, which is a single-lane old thing. It doesn't have a pedestrian walkway, so when there's traffic I have to balance on an adjacent pipe welded onto its outer edge to cross as the cars and trucks whoosh by and make the wooden beams rattle like a percussion instrument. I've done this walk a thousand times, I don't need to hold the rail to balance but I do anyway, out of habit. Once across, I turn the opposite way from the road and follow the track that cuts its way through the wind-slapped bush.

I walk up and down South Beach to see if I can find him washed onto the shore. The southerlies have barrelled on to somewhere else overnight and the waves yawn and stretch out into the still air, clean and deliberate, then they flop lazily down onto the shore. Whitewash doesn't mess the polished blue today, there isn't a froth of fluffy white.

Mitzy isn't here.

A reef shark probably ate him in one big gulp. All I can hear is the steady thump of waves, and the sound of each crash feels like it's digging little holes inside of me. He didn't deserve to die. He was innocent. He was annoying, but annoying things can be as innocent as anything else. It frightens me, how he was here one minute, snapping at his own tail, and then he wasn't. It's frightening how hungry the world is, how it just eats things up. Not the strong, not usually. The world has such a big appetite, and it's the ones who are too small, who trip or who stop to trust that get chewed up.

Mitzy should never have trusted me.

I leave the shovel on the sand and I pick up a stick and examine it. It's as long as my arm and smooth. Mitzy would have liked it. I scream at the world and throw the stick into the water in a long, round arc. A wave catches it, mid bite. I hope that somewhere, somehow, he gets to play with it. Tears are falling freely down my cheeks now and I look for sticks for Mitzy. Short ones he could prance about with. Long ones he'd have to drag and cut shapes into the sand with. I throw them into the spot where Mitzy drowned until my arm is sore, then I crumple down into the shoreline and I don't even care when the tide reaches out to grab at my ankles.

I know this feeling. The four a.m. feeling. Like loneliness is living in that space where my soul meets my bones.

Walking back up the track I stop at the phone box and I sit down on a nearby tree stump, one that came from a tree much larger than the ones that stand spindly and bent-backed around it. I wonder who chopped it down, although I'm not surprised that it happened. This town has a habit of cutting things down that stand too proud and too tall. I feel stupid for feeling afraid. I feel stupid for believing that the phone box was haunted. I chew on the end of my hair and kick the dirt, and I'm about to leave when I hear it.

The phone begins ringing to itself again.

I sit watching it, terrified, and I think of the words he spoke to me last time: ‘There's nothing more real than the things that can haunt you. And there's nothing more powerful than deciding not to be afraid.'

Slowly, I step towards it. Slowly, I reach out towards the receiver. It feels solid.

‘You came back . . .' the boy says. He's the one crying now.

I nod as the sound of the waves keeps up its steady rumble, even this far back from the brunt of things. My hands are shaking, like Mum's do in the mornings sometimes. ‘So I'm not going mad . . .'

‘You might still be going mad, I couldn't say. But I know that I'm real.'

‘I was going to bury Mitzy, and I threw sticks for him into the sea,' I say, and I think of how ridiculous that sounds. He keeps crying. I don't know what to do. ‘Are you okay?'

The boy isn't okay. It's so strange to hear a guy cry. They punch and yell and rage, but they're never allowed to cry if they're male. Not in this town, anyway.

‘The dog's gone,' the boys says, after a few runny sort of breaths. ‘They never stay long enough to keep me company, no matter how nice I am to them. God, I really wish he'd stayed, all I ever get is magpies and cane toads and skinks. I thought because he was bigger he'd stick around for longer. I just wish something would
stay
. I'm so
alone
.'

‘You can feel alone when you have company, too,' I whisper.

‘I don't feel alone when I'm talking to you,' he replies softly, and I don't know what to say to that. Thankfully, he fills the awkward silence. ‘My name's Boogie.'

‘Like the boogie monster?'

‘No. Like how you dance to disco music. What's your name?'

I suck in a clump of air and try to find my nerves. They've scampered. They've always been slippery little suckers, never around when I need them. I twist the cord around my fingers. ‘Kirra. I'm Kirra Barley. You said the other day that I was a bad liar. I am.'