I wonder if she writes to him. She sits at her desk like a little hamster—I don’t know what she’s thinking, or doing. She writes heaps in her Journal, and has done since the start of the year, but God knows what’s she’s writing about. One time when she was in Sick Bay Sophie wanted to read it, but Cathy and I wouldn’t let her.
Sometimes I think Marina and I have a lot in common, but if I ever said that to anyone they’d just laugh.
AUGUST 2
Only two weeks to go till the holidays. I’d do anything to speed it up—compress the two weeks to two hours. I’m so sick of this place. It’s the petty rules, the little niggling things that get to you. Your life’s not your own, you’re constantly getting picked at: ‘Hurry up, don’t be late.’ ‘Don’t use that door.’ ‘You’ve failed Inspection again.’ ‘Matron wants to know why you didn’t get your medication.’ ‘You’ve had Bank already this week—you’ll have to wait.’ ‘Clean your locker.’ ‘Stop talking.’ ‘Where have you been?’
And when you’re on your own for any time at all—like, up your tree—everyone comes after you. ‘Are you all right?’ ‘Are you OK?’ ‘What’s wrong?’
You feel like you’re suffocating.
Dad rang tonight. He didn’t even turn up on Parents’ Day and when I asked him, he just said, ‘Oh yeah, sorry, I had to go into work,’ as though he hadn’t even remembered he was meant to be here.
I’m staying with him for the first week of the holidays again. Chloe’ll still be there anyway, and I’ll have heaps of time to see Rhys.
AUGUST 3
Kate had to go off with her parents today, to see a solicitor and the Police. She didn’t say much about it when she got back—just that she had to make a statement and the case won’t be heard for a few months. They’ve all told her she’ll get put on a bond.
She’s kind of calmer about it these days, but she’s changed—she’s a lot quieter. You don’t notice her around the dorm nearly as much.
I had tea with Marina tonight. It was good. We chatted away like old buddies. Well, that’s a slight exaggeration. Marina said about twenty words, but they were all good ones. I was talking about Kate, and Marina suddenly said: ‘Kate lives her life on the outside.’ I nearly choked on my baked potato. That’s the most intelligent thing I’ve ever heard anyone in Year 9 say. I know what she meant. With Kate, everything’s public, you see and hear everything that happens in her life. With Marina it’s all private, all happening inside. Same as me.
Everyone seems to be surprising me with wise comments lately, like Mum the other day. They’re all so smart. Makes me feel about as smart as an ironing board.
Marina’s voice is soft but every word is clear. It’s like everything goes still when she talks. You find yourself sitting there with your fork halfway to your mouth, waiting for her to finish what she’s saying.
I don’t even notice the burn marks on her face any more.
We’ve got one more debate this term. I’ve done all the organising again but I’m not in the team. Cait Henry’s taken my place. I’m going to chair it, though. The topic is ‘Schooldays are the happiest days of your life.’ We’re the Opposition. That should be easy!
Marisa just gave me a Prefects’ Det for not putting the laundry bags out. Honestly, doesn’t that prove what I wrote last night? I mean, I know it’s my job, but it’s the first time I’ve missed this year, and I did them in the end. I am extremely cut, in fact I’m chainsawed.
As I was coming out of the year 12 studies I heard Sibella Abbott say to another girl, ‘When you’re doing inverse functions, does the range of g become the domain of f?’ I rushed back here and wrote it down. She might as well have been speaking another language. I figure that if I ever learn enough to be able to understand that sentence, I’ll have made it. But it’s hard to imagine that in three short years I could be talking like that.
AUGUST 4
Another day drags by, another day closer to the holidays. One class after another, sitting in straight rows while a teacher sits (or stands) out the front and talks at us. Do they really think we’re listening, or taking it in? Have I got news for them! Maybe I don’t have very good concentration but I tune in for about 5% of it.
English has the most variety but I think Mr Lindell must be tired because it’s been fairly dull lately. We’re doing a lot of stuff on writing skills.
They should have had a display on Parents’ Day of how people really occupy their time during classes. Decorating Homework Diaries, decorating rulers and pencil cases, doodling and sketching, writing on people’s arms and legs, tasting every item in a pencil case (Soph did that in Divinity today—she said the liquid paper was the worst), writing notes, seeing how long a strip you can tear a piece of A4 into, seeing how long you can spin a book on top of a ruler, sucking your thumb, counting the number of dots in the ceiling tiles, working out anagrams of your name, trying new signatures . . . You get pretty good at filling in fifty minutes.
AUGUST 6
Well, life just bubbles with surprises sometimes. I’ve had more visitors this year than I had the whole of last year. Today it was Lynette, on her own. I saw her half-way through our basketball match, standing on the sidelines. I ignored her for a while, partly because I had to concentrate on the game, but then the ball went out of bounds right next to her, and I had to get it, so I said ‘Hi’ then. But not very friendly. I was confused by her being there.
We lost the game 34-19. If we’d won and Barwon had lost their match we’d have got into the semis, but we lost and Barwon won, so that didn’t quite work out. It’s good in one way, because the Grand Final’s in our holidays so I don’t know what we’d have done about that. And at least it means that next week I’ll have my first free Saturday for this year.
Anyway, after the game Dr Thorley gave us the usual pep talk, which never works too well because she’s so quiet that if you’re not a lip-reader you don’t pick up a lot. Then I drifted over to Lynette, pretty slow and casual, being rude again. I hate the way I treat her. I hate myself when I’m being like that. But I agreed to have a coffee with her. I didn’t have much choice. She said she was on her way to Kennon to see her parents. She said she’d been born in Kennon, which surprised me—she didn’t seem like a country girl. And a dairy farm, too. She told me how she and her brother had to hand-milk some of the cows and they used the udders as milk pistols, zapping each other with sprays of milk.
She was OK, nice enough. I’d probably quite like her if she didn’t have anything to do with Dad.
Then she asked what I’d thought of her letter. That was awful. I just stared into my coffee, doing a Marina. Finally I said, ‘It was OK, I guess.’ She said, ‘You didn’t answer it.’ I didn’t say anything. Then she said, ‘Well, no-one can say I didn’t try’ and got up and paid the bill and went. That shocked me really—I hadn’t expected her to be so annoyed about it. I was pleased in one way, because I don’t want to be friendly with her, and I want her to hate me. I want to hate her too. But the way she does things makes me feel so guilty. Maybe she learnt that in her public-relations course.
AUGUST 8
God, there was the most awful fight tonight. It started with Sophie and Emma, but everyone got involved. I think it was because last night, after lights out, Sophie was having a good old backstab of Marnie Tull, and today Emma told Marnie. Soph started screaming at Emma as soon as she walked in after tea and she didn’t stop for the Prep bell or anything else. Some people took Emma’s side, some took Soph’s. Cathy said Sophie should think before she speaks; Tracey said Emma was two-faced because she’s always backstabbing people; Emma said Sophie’s two-faced because she’s always repeating things other people tell her. I said that anything said in the dorm should be kept in the dorm, and everyone agreed with that, but I don’t suppose it’ll happen.
So, not a lot of work’s been done. It’s settled down a bit now. I’ve been watching Marina—she always looks so frightened when there are fights.
I was go
ing to write to Lynette, but it’s too hard to concentrate with everyone yelling at each other. I’ve written to Rhys instead—it relaxes me to write to him.
Dear Rhys, light of my fridge, it was good to hear from you. It was a choice between writing to you, writing to a witch called Lynette, or doing my Science Prep. It was a hard choice, but you won by a bow-ball.
Tonight’s been terrible, one of those nights when you wish you were home, lying on your bed eating chocolate and listening to music. Do you know Sophie Smith? I think you do. She says she knows you, from a party at the Cohens’ last year. Anyway, she’s in this dorm. Is she ever in this dorm. She’s in this dorm like a bomb in a basement. She’s spent the last hour going off at a girl called Emma, who I don’t think you’d know, because she’s from Hong Kong. It’s been, like, heavy metal without the music. One thing about Sophie, she lets you know how she’s feeling. She doesn’t hold back. Bit different from me.
This weekend was incredibly average too. Boy do I sound like a grouch in this letter. We got thrashed in our basketball, smeared from one end of the court to the other. Very messy. So we’re out of the comp now—we had to win Saturday.
Thanks for the invitation to the party. Do you really mean it? I’d love to come but it depends who I’m staying with. If it’s Dad there’s no problem. If it’s Mum she wants to know everything, like ‘Who are you going with? How are you getting there? What adults’ll be there? What time does it finish?’ You know how it goes. But I’ll try, OK? And I’ll let you know.
Time for beddy-byes here. I’d better go. See you—soon I hope. I love you more than chocolate.
Lisa
I sent it like that, except I crossed out the last sentence of the second paragraph, ‘Bit different from me’, which just proves the point I guess.
AUGUST 9
Everyone’s so tired and bitchy at the moment. It’s terrible. We just had another big argument, because I like the window beside me open during Prep and Ann wants it closed. She says it’s too cold but I like some fresh air and it gets so hot and fuggy with all the windows shut. I know it’s a cold night but I didn’t have it open very far. I told Ann she could go do her Prep in the Drying Cupboard—that’s the only place where she’d be happy.
Miss Curzon just won a lot of hearts by coming round with a peppermint slice she’d made. Everybody’s out of tuck at the moment.
I wrote a short note to Lynette: ‘Dear Lynette, I’m sorry if I was rude on Saturday. Thanks for the coffee. Lisa.’ I don’t know where that leaves us—probably the same place we were at before.
AUGUST 10
I dreamt about ‘Connewarre’ last night. I was walking up the hill on the other side of the road, where it’s quite scrubby and uncleared. I think I was looking for sheep that might have been missed when we were mustering the paddock, and for some reason Marina was with me. It was cool and shady at the top of the hill and there were no sheep around, so we sat there and talked for a while. But when we were coming down again there were lots of dead sheep everywhere, that we hadn’t seen before—piles of old wool and white bones. It was strange.
I think I have to try to realise that I’ve lost ‘Conne’. I torture myself by remembering things about it, but not as often as I used to, I guess. One of the things that made it so good was that I was useful there. I did things that helped the place run better, even things that no-one else realised or knew about, like fixing fences, and putting plumbers’ tape on all the pumps and pipes, to stop leaks. I did other things too that somehow made me proud—especially building little shelters for the pumps, out of posts and galvanised iron; and building a new chook house. There’s a special feeling about building something—every time you go past it, for ages afterwards, you look at it with a nice glow. Then you come here and you’re not trusted to change a light globe.
I took too much for granted there of course. Since I was eight or nine, if I had a job that was a fair distance from the house I’d take a motor bike or a vehicle to do it. It wasn’t till a year or so later when there were some American friends of Mum’s staying that I realised from the looks on their kids’ faces that there was anything special about that. Now I haven’t driven a car for a year and a half, and I miss it. There’s no feeling quite like it.
Somehow, because of the dream I think, I wanted to ring Dad tonight, so I snuck out of Prep seconds before break, grabbed the phone and was dialling the number as the bell rang. It’s the only way you can get a phone round here—three minutes later there were kids saying ‘Are you going to be long?’ Dad was OK. I was scared he’d be angry because of Lynette but maybe she hadn’t said anything, because he was actually in good form, cracking a lot of jokes. He said he had a surprise for us in the holidays—that could be anything from short-sheeted beds to a week at Disneyland. I asked about skiing and he said ‘Maybe for a couple of days.’
AUGUST 12
We’re getting sent to bed for a compulsory early night. They say it’s because we’re overtired; I always think it’s because the teachers are feeling slack. It must be a shocking life for them—having to teach us all day, then put up with us all night. Still, only four days to go, and two of those are weekend.
I am going shopping tomorrow with Cathy and Marina. I know I don’t have any money and I’m pretty sure Marina doesn’t, so I hope Cathy’s shouting. We’ll find something to do, though. It’ll just be good to get out for a while.
Cathy and I don’t have any sport, and Marina never seems to have any—I don’t know how she gets out of it, but she does. I think she gets away with quite a lot actually.
Rhys has gone on an Athletics camp for the weekend, so I can’t ring him. He’s a long-distance runner. I like that. I’m sick of sprinters.
AUGUST 14
I got really depressed and awful last night, and desperate thoughts came back into my stupid head and are still there. I thought it was safe to go anywhere and think anything. Maybe I’ll be haunted all my life. God, if you’re up there, keep me safe and alive. Grandma and Grandpa, Nan and Gramps, put in a good word for me.
AUGUST 15
I had a conversation with Marina tonight that I want to write down so I can remember it. It was after tea and I wandered over to the tree out the front that I used to like to sit in. I haven’t been up it for a while. Today was so warm, for winter, and it was still warm after tea, and I felt like being on my own, seeing it’s the last night of term.
When I got there, though, I realised I wasn’t on my own. Marina was sitting on a stump at the foot of the tree, almost out of sight. But I’ve seen her there a few times now. So I sat on a rock a bit further around the trunk. ‘I’ll go if you want,’ I said. ‘Just say the word.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘We’ve shared this tree before.’
I nodded.
Then she said: ‘I’m saying good-bye to the tree, just in case.’
‘What do you mean?’ I asked.
‘I might be leaving Warrington.’
‘What? Why? I thought you liked it here.’
She took a long time between each thing she said, as though she were making sure it’d come out right. Finally she said:
‘I like most of it, and I’m glad I came. I’d rather stay here. But my mother doesn’t like it. And it is expensive.’
I said: ‘You’ve changed a lot since you’ve been here.’
She answered: ‘I don’t know if I have. I’ve started talking, that’s all.’
‘You made contact with your father again.’
‘Yes, I had to.’
‘Why?’
‘If I live my life hating him, then I don’t have a life.’
‘Don’t you hate him? I hate him and I’ve never met him.’
‘No. If I hate him it’s with all of me. And I don’t want to be like that.’
I said: ‘But you can’t just decide you’re not going to hate any more.’
‘No. But I found the more I understood him, the less I hated him. And I realised that he’s so like me. I
f I hate him I have to hate myself.’
I said: ‘You’re different from anyone I’ve ever met.’
She said: ‘I’ve had more time to think than most people.’
AUGUST 16
Holidays at last. I thought they’d never start.
I decided to bring this Journal with me but I won’t be writing in it much tonight. I’m at Dad’s; Chloe’s here too, and we’re going out in a minute with Dad and Lynette, to Giverny, a new French restaurant.
Dad still says he’s got a surprise for us tomorrow, but he won’t tell us what it is. I suppose that’s logical—it wouldn’t be a surprise otherwise.
Lynette, I can’t make her out. She seems like she’s nervous of me now, like kids at school. I don’t want that. I never wanted that. It’s OK when other people are around, but if we find ourselves on our own in the kitchen or somewhere, she gets a bit embarrassed and awkward. It’s awful. I suppose I should have written more in my letter, but I just don’t know what I wanted to say.
AUGUST 17
I can’t believe this day, any of it or all of it. Now at last I feel I understand Marina a little. Dad went out early. He came back at about twelve o’clock and found Chloe and me and told us to go upstairs and put on our very best clothes. He was dressed up himself, and he was being all funny and excited and mysterious. We couldn’t get anything out of him, so we did what he said. Chloe was getting annoyed, and so was I. It took me about twenty minutes, I suppose, but finally I could hear him calling impatiently so I hurried and went downstairs. And I couldn’t understand what I was seeing. I stood there thinking, ‘I’ll make sense of this eventually.’ Dad was there, and Lynette—who was dressed like something out of a shop window—and Chloe looking like she was crying and a man in a sports coat and bow tie, carrying a bunch of flowers. Dad said, ‘We nearly started without you’ then he laughed and said, ‘Only joking. As if we would. Come here.’ I walked over, with my brain completely out of gear with my legs. He said: ‘Now, this is the surprise I promised you. You and Chloe are bridesmaids, so big smiles now.’