Yellow (7 page)

On my way home, I see my shoes tied together and swung over the bus timetable at the front of the school. I grab them, but I don't put them on, my bare feet feel good against the earth today. I start running towards South Beach, sucking the day into my lungs, breathing the seconds in, feeling them tick away in my bloodstream. It's been a good day. After that bloody awful start, it flipped right around and ended up being one of those days when you're just glad you're alive to have lived it. Mrs Thomas even seemed happy with the essay I'd hastily resubmitted, although she did wear her exasperated face when she skimmed over it and handed it back to me.

‘Interesting ideas, Kirra. A sixteen out of twenty. Now imagine what marks you could get if you spent more than half an hour on the thing.'

I think I'm happy.

The phone rings again as I approach it. ‘Did you do that?' I ask Boogie when I pick up.

‘What?'

‘Willow. Have you started – with making me friends?'

I extend the cord and stand as far out of the booth as I can, balancing on one leg and extending the other to try to catch the snatches of breeze that blow by. I don't like being stuck in here, where the air is still like quiet lungs. Where Boogie is, somewhere. Invisible.

‘How would I have done that? I'm not allowed to haunt, remember, so possessing your year into liking you is kinda not in the rulebooks. Besides which, I can't leave this damned space, and nobody can hear me but you.'

Okay. Then Boogie had nothing to do with this.

Willow likes me all on her own.

Sure, she's probably the most unpopular girl in the school, and attaching myself to her isn't going to boost me up to rival Cassie as queen bee, but one friend is better than none. Especially, I think, a friend who'll walk barefoot to class with you.

A hint of happiness creeps into Boogie's voice.

‘So you've agreed to help me, then?' he asks, tentatively.

I think of how good it feels to have Willow by my side, and I imagine how happy I'd be if I were really popular, and if my parents were back together. I nibble at my nails.

‘If you don't have voodoo powers then how are you going to help me?'

I hadn't really questioned the logistics of how this would work. I just figured that the dead had supernatural powers. That's why the ancients spilt the blood of virgins, and flung people into volcanoes, right? To appease those powers?

‘I dunno, I was thinking as a life-coach kind of thing.'

‘What? No! I want miracles . . . what kind of power is that?'

I really don't think that my life's awfulness can be fixed with a life coach. What does that even entail? Chanting positive affirmations as I look into the mirror? Visualising group hugs? Meditation? An organic diet? Our hippy school counsellor had already tried these things, but they just got zapped by my bullshit radar before they could start making a difference. I mean, I can visualise my mother being sober and all that, but I couldn't very well visualise her away from my school social, no matter how many positive vibes I blasted from my chakra on Friday night. Boogie interrupts my chain of thought.

‘Words are the most powerful things there are. Words change thoughts, and thoughts change actions, and actions change the world. Do you know what it's like to hear no words for so many years, Kirra? Maybe that's why we can hear each other, do you reckon? Because neither of us have had anyone to talk to?'

I curl the cord around my finger and chew my bottom lip.

‘I feel so invisible that sometimes I wonder if I really exist,' I admit. The words are so lumpy they almost get lodged in my throat.

‘Me too. God, you have no idea.'

The overhead branches make a shushing sort of sound and somewhere the kookaburras heckle each other. I look up to where the sky dazzles, an impossible blue, and I try to keep hold of how beautiful that is, but loneliness is like a needle, and it picks holes in the sky, and in those spaces the night-time darkness pours in. I want to be liked. I want both my parents living with me. I don't want to be lonely anymore.

‘Okay. I'll help you,' I whisper. ‘Tell me who did it – I'll go to the police this afternoon. Just shoot me the details.'

He's quiet for a bit, and his voice is strained when he answers. ‘You can't, though.'

‘Why not?'

‘Because it was the police superintendent who did it, Kirra. He's a murderer.'

Shit.

I drop the phone for a moment, as his words really hit me.

Superintendent McGinty. The man I spoke to on Saturday morning.

‘Kirra, you still there?'

I put the receiver back to my ear. ‘You're really making me work for this, huh Boogie?'

‘Yeah. I wish there was another way but there isn't. You promised. Please.'

His words sound like they have cracks in them, like the sadness of what he's just told me has scratched them right up.

Superintendent McGinty.

A murderer.

Shit.

‘What happened?' I whisper.

It takes a long time for him to reply, and his voice is strangled when he finally does.

‘It hurts me to remember, so I've learnt to make myself forget. I don't want to think about it again, Kirra. All I know is that he killed me, and he liked it, and I wasn't the first.'

My heart crashes around in my chest again.

‘So how can I prove it?' It seems like a hopeless cause. I can barely figure out adolescence, let alone this.

‘Nobody'll believe you. They think I'm a runaway. You need to find my body.'

I imagine bones clumped with cloth and meaty with clods of dirt, wriggling with the worms that ate him up. I can't do it. I can't.

‘I have to find your body?'

‘My bones – I mean, what's left of them, in the coral. You can swim down to them with just a lungful of air.'

‘I'm sorry, swim?' I feel like an idiot; all I can do is repeat his words. All of my brain power is being chewed up processing what he's just told me.

‘He wrapped me up in hessian and weights and dropped me out past South Beach. About a hundred metres from the tip of the point, directly across from where the track ends at the big boulder. The reef out there. The back end of it. The coral would have grown over me, but some bones would still be left. Bits of them. Enough to prove it's me. Maybe they'll catch him then.'

I bite the nail of my left thumb. This seems less scary somehow. I don't know how to explain it. The bones picked clean, all white and calcified and poking out crisply like a picket fence. Not having to dig through broken-down bits of him.

‘Please. I don't want to be here all alone anymore. I can't stand it, Kirra. I can't cope.'

It's the way he says please that tears me open. I imagine if it were me, stuck in that ghost space, what I would want. There has to be a reason why I alone can hear Boogie. It's not like I'm remarkable at all, except for my eyes, and they're not remarkable in a good way. People say that they look like cat eyes, and maybe that suits me, because cats, they can see in the dark. I live in the sunniest place in the world, but that's never stopped me from feeling like I'm drowning in the darkness. I can almost feel it gurgling in my lungs. I get why Boogie is desperate to be freed. I get it.

‘Okay. I'll do it.'

I speak the words into the receiver, and they climb out to wherever Boogie is.

‘Thank you,' his voice crackles back. ‘I knew as soon as you answered the phone the first time that we'd be friends.'

The way he says that, it's so needy, and his loneliness clings to me like I accidentally stepped into a spider's web. I want to scrape it off my skin. I'm about to hang up when he speaks again.

‘You have to fight back.'

‘What?'

‘The first request. To be popular. You have to fight back.'

I look down at my skinny monkey arms. ‘Everyone's bigger than me. I can't.'

‘Well then punch twice as hard. Carry a bigger stick.'

‘Girls don't fight with sticks. They fight with words.'

‘Same thing. Those words you don't use because you're afraid of hurting someone, it's like that punch you don't throw because you're afraid of drawing blood. Draw blood, Kirra. Draw blood with your words. Blood's the only thing that'll stop the bastards.'

A crow calls nearby, and Boogie goes on.

‘But learn to punch too. Just in case.'

Lark has skinned the sheets from Desiree's bed and he's shaking them from the front patio when I arrive, flicking away the sand he carts from the beach to the bed each day. He never did this at home, it's something I can imagine Desiree insisting on, her cat's bum mouth pursed as she picks the sand from the corner creases of the fitted sheet. The sheets make that cotton
whump
sound as Lark flicks them with a casual violence, the wind swelling their bellies so they look like sails.

I whistle up to him and he whistles back at me.

‘One Moment or It's Your Lucky Day?' he calls out.

He has his ear resting sidewards against his shoulder as he reads the sports section of a folded-up local newspaper that is sitting on the railing. His words slant down at me from the patio.

Once a week Lark meets up with all the guys at the local pub. They squirrel their coins for happy-hour beers, make cheeky banter with Tina, the middle-aged topless waitress whose reconstructed breasts are pretty much the only things about her that don't droop, and most importantly they all have a punt on the horses. This is where I come in. Lark reckons I'm his lucky charm. I have no idea about jockeys or statistics. I just go on names. This infuriates his mate Macca, who approaches these things with a scientific rigour that could really get him far if he chose to apply it to something useful instead of sitting around, swelling the ranks of the unemployed. He can tell you every horse's vital statistics, how they go on different courses and what their lineage is. I'll just scan the list of horses and choose the name that has the nicest ring to it, and more often than not, Lark will come out on top.

I chew over the options.

‘One Moment, for sure,' I call back. It makes me think of a line from a play by T. S. Eliot.

‘Huh, I woulda gone for It's My Lucky Day.' Lark's still engrossed by the TAB listings.

I shake my head at him. ‘Too obvious.'

Lark shrugs and looks up at me. ‘You're the charm, Yellow. Twenty bucks on One Moment.'

His arms suddenly jolt and he glances down at the paper, a look of annoyance making a small dent in his laid-back mask.

‘Oi, stop it. Oi you!'

Another jolt and the sheet is tugged from his hands and cascades down the stairs towards me, flapping and dragging across the ground. A lump marches underneath it, as though something small is pretending to be a Halloween ghost. It pauses at my feet and with a wriggle the creature shrugs off his costume and . . .

It's Mitzy.

It can't be.

And yet.

Black dots swim a jagged butterfly stroke in front of my eyes, and everything sounds echoed and whooshed, like I have a large conch shell pressed to my ear. I think I'm about to faint. If this is Mitzy, if he somehow survived, then who is Boogie? Did I make it all up? Has everything awful in my life sent me completely over the edge?

Please let me not be mad . . . I think.

Please let me not be mad.

The dog nips at my ankle and flops onto his back, snapping at the grass and sneezing when he swallows a mouthful. The next thing I know I'm swallowed up by Lark's arms, and my legs dangle uselessly below me. Lark's usually goofy face looks concerned, and he bends down so close to me his hair is tickling my forehead.

‘Hey . . . are you okay?'

The black dots swim away and everything comes back into focus.

‘Mitzy . . .?' I ask.

My legs wake up and I can stand again.

‘What? No, Mitzy ran away, little bugger. Just when I thought my shoes'd be safe from now on, Desiree goes and brings this one home. Say hello, Tinkerbell.'

Lark lets me stand by myself and he crouches down to lift up a paw and wave it at me. My father's like a small child, I think, as I watch his tongue peek-a-boo from his mouth, the way it always does when he's concentrating hard. He mock wrestles the dog, taunting it by blowing on its nose, and he's rewarded with small puncture wounds to his hands.

Now that I look closer, now that the shock's worn off, I can see that this dog is different. This one has a small diamond patch of grey on its chest, and it's bigger than Mitzy, younger too, although I can bet the wooden furniture won't be any safer.

I still can't bring myself to pet it, the shock's too raw, but I pull my mouth up into a small smile to appease Lark, and I remember what I came over for. I need to get out past the breakers at South Beach to find Boogie.

Mitzy is still dead.

Boogie's real.

‘Can I borrow a surfboard?' I ask when my words return. Lark's got a couple – he always has spares in case he snaps one, and that's not such an uncommon occurrence, the way he surfs, chasing the monsters out to where it isn't safe.

He cracks out a smile that almost breaks his face.

‘We're gonna make a little surfer chick outta you yet.'

He scampers into the shed and comes back with a dinged-up Coolite – one that's been relegated to a shed for years because Lark might be poor, but he wouldn't be seen dead on a board like that. He might stand for hours in the Centrelink line every fortnight and he might cut his own hair, hacking at the ends so they fall onto the front lawn in uneven clumps, which the magpies and kookaburras will later snatch for their nests. He might consider baked beans a full, nutritious meal, but to ride a Coolite? Lark would shake his head scornfully. He has standards.

For me, though, it'll do. It's light, so I can carry it without the wind knocking me sideways. I can ding it as much as I want, and if I lose it, well, Lark'll be happy to have the extra space in his shed. I grin up at him.

‘Thanks!'

‘Want me to give you more lessons?'

I shake my head no, he's tried to teach me loads of times, and I know that nothing would make him happier than to have me out there, chasing the swell with him in the early mornings when the sun hasn't yet fully risen, and the sky's still a bruise amidst the sneaking yellow. The thing is, he's a terrible teacher. The pull of the ocean's such a strong thing for him he'll forget me when he senses a good set rolling in, and while he dances on the lip of a clean six-foot break, I'm left pounded and pummelled until I'm dumped, spluttering onto the shore, sand wedged in my ears and right up into my swimmer bottoms.

Lark's a bit disappointed that I've refused his offer, but also relieved. As much as he'd like to teach me again, he's not really one to commit to anything. Besides, the surf might be pumping on the afternoon we've arranged it, and then he wouldn't want to be stuck with me in the shallows.

‘Fair enough, but make sure you stay at Main Beach. And where the lifesavers can see you, yeah?'

‘Yeah, of course,' I reply without meeting his gaze, and he musses up the top of my hair where it turns up into a cowlick.