Last week he caught Sophie having a smoke in the Drying Room and Sophie told him her grandmother had cancer and she was so upset she’d had to have a cigarette.
We’re having a Talent Quest tonight, just Year 9s, and everyone has to go in costume and do something. Cathy, Trace, Sophie and I are going as strippers and singing ‘In a Bar in Alaska’. Should be a bit of a cack. Rikki Martin’s staying in our dorm, ’cos her parents are away—she’s sleeping in Marina’s bed. (Marina’s still in Sick Bay). Rikki and Emma are singing this version of ‘Jailhouse Rock’ in Japanese. I can’t wait to hear it.
I had another letter from Peter today. He’s getting serious. He sent a photo—I stuck it over my desk. He wants one of me. There’s one Kate took a while ago, when we were waiting for the bus to go downtown, that’s not as ugly as most of them—I might send him that.
APRIL 12
Went to see Marina again this afternoon after Rowing. There was a thunderstorm about 3.30 and it was too dangerous to go on the water, so we worked out in the Gym and ran a crossie. That meant we finished early.
This Saturday’s the Riverside Gold Cup Regatta, then the CMC Invitation, then the State titles on the 29th. It’s getting close. I’m nervous already. It must be bad being in the Firsts—imagine what they’d be going through. They’re undefeated this season, which would make it harder in a way.
I think I can hold my place in the Thirds. Dad said he’d be coming Saturday. I don’t care if he does or not. He thinks I’m still in the Fourths. I never bothered to tell him I’d gone up.
Marina looked OK, a bit better even. She’d hardly eaten any of the tuck I left her—just an Aero Bar. It’s depressing seeing her like that.
It’s hard to concentrate at the moment—Kate and Soph are having the most ginormous bitch fight. It’s over this party in the holidays that Soph’s going to—some guys from St Patrick’s are having it. Soph said she’d get Kate an invitation but she hasn’t done anything about it, and Kate thinks that’s deliberate. It’s more likely to be Soph being slack, but Kate’s raging like a buffalo on heat. Here’s how they talk—if I can get it down fast enough:
Kate: Well you’re the one who suggested it in the first place.
S: Oh! Good one Kate, really good.
K: Well you did.
S: Yeah, after you’d given me 20 minutes of how ripped off you were.
K: I just thought it wouldn’t hurt you to do something for someone else for a change.
S: WHAT? Kate, you scab food, money, clothes off me all year long and then you say that? Whose top are you wearing by the way Kate?
K: Face it Soph, you’re a tight-ass.
S: Ohhh! I can’t believe you! Ask anyone! Lisa, am I a tight-ass?
Me: No Soph.
S: Cathy? Am I a tight-ass?
Cathy: Well . . .
S: Shut up Cathy. I know you hate my guts anyway. Ann, tell them. And remember who lent you white shorts for PE this morning.
Ann: You are pretty generous Soph. You’ve got a lot of faults but you’re not a tight-ass.
S: Thanks a lot.
K: Soph you’re turning this into a big joke. It’s nobody else’s business anyway. I wouldn’t go to the party now if you paid me. All I’m saying is, you shouldn’t make promises if you can’t keep them.
And so it goes on. Just a typical scene from Dorm B folks!
APRIL 13
Dad rang again tonight, said he’ll have me for the last week of the holidays. I can tell he’s still feeling guilty about Hawaii. Not half as bad as I feel though.
Prep’s ended and nearly everyone’s rushed off to catch today’s episode of ‘Those Around Us’. Cathy and I are the only ones left here. Marina’s still in Sick Bay—I took her over a couple of tapes tonight.
We’ve hardly any Prep all week, then tonight we suddenly got heaps. A page and a half of Maths, a whole chapter of Science, three ‘mini essays’ in History, and a chapter of ‘Lord of the Flies’ for English. I’ll read ‘Lord of the Flies’ in bed, which is where I’m now going.
APRIL 14
Mr Journal, the funny thing about chocolate is that the less I eat it myself, the more I like to see other people eat it. I’m always telling them to stuff more into their gobs. I give away practically all my own supplies. I have a chocolate calendar on my desk and a chocolate poster above my bed. But I haven’t had any myself for about three weeks.
I’ve been sitting here reading Cathy’s Journal tonight. She said I could. God it’s different from mine. She writes so beautifully, and she decorates it and stuff like that. She writes about so many things—not just school, but home and about her family and how she misses them, and about things like ozone and Greenpeace and dolphins. I think those things are important too but I don’t seem to write about them. This place sort of fills up your mind: being here 24 hours a day you don’t seem to notice much that’s happening in the outside world.
The number one leisure time activity here is gossip.
Cathy writes how she feels about things, too. It’s honest. She wrote quite a lot about me. She said I’m a sort of a leader—people expect me to take charge of things, and they listen when I give an opinion. That all surprised me, but it pleased me too. She also said I’m too reserved—that I never tell anyone what I’m really feeling, and I make it hard for people to get to know me. I suppose that’s like what Tracey said a while back. It’s true. It’s hard though. That’s the way our family is. I’d never know how Chloe felt about the divorce, or ‘Connewarre’, or even getting dumped over the week in Hawaii. I’m a bit scared to say how I feel about all those things. I mean, I can say I feel bad about losing ‘Connewarre’, but that doesn’t say anything. There was that night in the Dorm—that’s the only time I opened up at all, and that was partly to show Trace that I could. I don’t know whether that was a good thing to have done, or not. I suppose it was. Well, I know it was. Cathy wrote about that in her Journal. I was moved by what she said. She does care about people. I don’t know if I do. I think I’m really hard. I don’t know if there’s anyone I love. It’s frightening to say that. I know I should love my parents and my sister and my friends, but I don’t think I do. After I’d been here two months last year we had the Easter break, and I went to my father’s flat at South Mandrill. After I’d been there a couple of days I did something terrible, something so awful I’ve never been able to tell anyone. I can’t, even now. The funny thing was that no-one even noticed—that was the one thing I hadn’t bargained on. Life’s a tricky business. It’s like Sophie and her bad habit of short-sheeting beds. Every night when you check the bed, expecting that she’s short-sheeted it, she hasn’t, and the one night you forget and jump in, she has.
Since those first few months of last year I’ve changed a lot, I think. My life seems to be in a slow spin. I don’t think I’m going to be the kind of adult I dreamed of being when I was a kid. I envy the way Cathy writes. If I could say what I wanted to, about losing ‘Connewarre’, if I could bring it out of myself in words, this paper would be buried under the weight of it. For quite a while I wouldn’t believe it had been sold—when Chloe tried to talk about it, I changed the subject, and when people at school asked where I lived, I told them it was ‘Conne’. I still kid myself I live there sometimes. I tried to talk Dad into buying it back—I offered dumb things, like giving up my pocket money, or leaving school and getting a job. See, he says he can’t afford it. But I think the fees here would pay for a couple of paddocks at least. I can’t see why he didn’t try to share farm it, or lease it, or even sell some and keep the rest.
At least I can write about ‘Conne’. The other things I can’t write about at all. It’s late and I’ll have to go to bed in a minute. I don’t particularly want to, and I don’t know if I’ll sleep much, but I’ve got to try, with the Regatta tomorrow. God I hope we win.
APRIL 16
Dearest Diary, this is what happened. The weather was beautiful, the water was smooth, the wind was down. We drew lane
one, which everyone said was the fastest. With everything going so perfectly I knew I’d catch a crab and fall out of the boat in the first hundred metres. We got an OK start, not as good as University, but not too bad. They had a length on us at the 600 and I was getting worried, but we were long and strong, rating 28, and c, c and c (cool, calm and collected). It was so different from the Fourths, where by this stage Rebecca would be screaming at Kate, I’d be screaming at Rebecca, and Myra would be screaming at all of us. But this time we did ten hard through the bridge and came out the other side just in front, then fought them all the way to the finish. It was great. We had so much power, rating 32 and storming home like seals on steroids. Warrington first, University second, Girls Grammar third and the water foamed around us like champagne.
APRIL 17
Tonight I thought I’d do something different and write about someone else. So this is my attempt to describe Sophie. Firstly, I’ve got to say that Sophie is incredibly funny. She’s also wild, uncontrollable, unpredictable, noisy and impossible to live with. She’s pretty—she’s cut her hair short at the moment and she looks fantastic—and I love her voice. It’s so husky, like a boy’s when it’s breaking. She doesn’t like me very much—she thinks I’m bossy—but I can hack that. It’s because she likes everything how she wants it anyway. She loves to be the centre of attention. She could be so smart if she worked, but she doesn’t strain her brain—she’s always telling Cathy she hates the way Cathy ‘analyses’ everything. Soph’s got the concentration span of a Barbie doll.
Her best friend and worst enemy is Kate.
What I like about Sophie is that even in the middle of the biggest fight or the worst depression she always stops to laugh at herself, at the way she’s going on. She always says ‘Oh well’ when she realises she’s not acting very logically. For instance, she’ll be ripping into Kate for getting us yet another extra Inspection because Kate wasn’t ready on time, and Soph’ll be burning up about it, and she’ll say: ‘And this is the second time this week we’ve had a 6.30 Inspection! And who got us the last one? Oh, it was me wasn’t it? Oh well.’ But that doesn’t stop her—then she’ll say, in a voice like a teacher. ‘Anyway Kate, I just think you should have more consideration for other people’, and we all crack up, but I honestly don’t know if she’s serious or not when she puts on that voice.
I think under it all Soph has no confidence. You can never pay her a compliment—she won’t let you. She hates her parents. She mucks around at everything—it’s as though she doesn’t want to have a proper go at it, in case she fails. Or in case she succeeds. She takes the biggest risks—she could have been expelled about six times already this year. She and Kate went into town at midnight at the start of last week—they caught a taxi at the roundabout and didn’t come back till about three in the morning.
Another good thing about Soph is that she really is generous. She’d give you anything. You can’t say you like anything she’s wearing, or she’ll try to give it to you. She’d give you the shirt off her back and the bra off her front. I think her parents must have heaps of money—she’s got the best clothes of anyone in the dorm—but she takes the worst care of her stuff. She loses and breaks more things than anyone I’ve ever seen. She’s also the cheekiest student to teachers that I’ve ever seen. When Mr Bostock was giving back tests the other day Sophie didn’t hear him call her name, so he picked up hers and brought it down the room towards her saying, ‘What do you want, Sophie, Room Service?’ She just said, ‘That’s what you’re paid for isn’t it?’
He acted like he didn’t hear, but I can’t see how he could have missed it. Everyone in the room heard.
So, that’s Soph, about the most unboring person I’ve ever met. I don’t know whether I’ll put down to be with her next year, but I know one thing, I wouldn’t have missed it.
APRIL 18
I got a message to go see Dr Whiteley today, which had me a bit worried, but it was only for an Anzac Day service next week—there’re two kids from each year, and she wants Rikki and me to go for Year Nine. It’s quite an honour really.
We did this beautiful poem in English yesterday, called ‘The Good-Morrow’. It’s a love poem, written four hundred years ago.
For love, all love of other sights controls,
And makes one little room, an everywhere.
Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone,
Let Maps to other worlds on worlds have shown,
Let us possess one world, each hath one, and is one . . .
It’s so sweet. I’m going to write it out in full and stick it on my desk—next to Peter’s photo, I think. It’s kind of ironic that the day after we did the poem, Cathy got a phone call from Andy to say she was dropped. So that didn’t last long. She was so upset—I didn’t realise she liked him that much.
We’ve got so much Prep I shouldn’t be writing in this at all. It’s hard to settle down to proper work though—my desk is next to the door into the dorm, and Ann’s in there playing her violin, like she does every night. I know she has to practise, but she always spins it out twice as long as she should, so she can get out of Prep. And it’s so boring. She plays the same tunes over and over, especially that theme from ‘Second Coming’. She sounds like galvanised iron when you’re pulling one sheet of it across another.
APRIL 19
Chloe came to see me again today. It is good that she does it. No guy in tow either, although she says she’s still with Hamish. She said Dad’s getting with someone, too. I really cracked at her, until she said, ‘It’s not my fault. Don’t take it out on me.’ We started talking a bit then. I asked her if she was glad they were divorced, and she said she thought it was better in some ways. She said she couldn’t understand why it happened though—she thought they’d stopped fighting quite a few months before. I realised then that she didn’t know the full story at all. That’s good in one way—that she doesn’t know I caused it. See, she was away a lot towards the end of that year—she’d been getting quite a lot of work catering and cooking and she was saving to go overseas. She didn’t realise that the reason they’d stopped fighting is that they’d pretty much stopped talking. Actually that only struck me afterwards, and I was living at home fulltime. Boy, was I ever dumb.
I asked her if she missed ‘Connewarre’ and she said she did. But . . . well, I know that’s the truth, that she misses it, but I don’t think she misses it the way I do. For me, it wasn’t just land, it was the ground under my feet. The only thing I can compare it to is this: when I was about eight, Chloe, and whichever boy she was with at the time, took me to the Show. Now, they’ve got this thing there that I suppose everyone would have known about except me. It’s called the Gravitron or something—it’s a barrel that spins, and the floor drops away, and you’re stuck to the wall by centrifugal force. But I didn’t know any of that. Chloe and this boy told me they had a big surprise for me, and they made me shut my eyes while they took me in there and got me to stand against the wall, making sure I didn’t get any clues about what was going to happen. Well, the thing started up, slowly at first, then faster and faster. That was OK, then suddenly I felt that I was a few centimetres off the floor. I couldn’t understand how that could happen, as I hadn’t realised that I’d moved, and I looked down so that I could get myself back on the floor. Then I saw that the floor had dropped away, and I had this absolute panic that the thing had malfunctioned and it was all falling apart—that it would fly to pieces around me. It took a few moments to realise that it was doing what it was meant to do. When I saw Chloe laughing, I started to understand. Then it just became a matter of surviving the ride, all the time wishing for death.
I didn’t show a thing on my face though. I’m proud of that—not one flicker of fear. I wouldn’t give them that satisfaction. At the end, when Chloe asked me what I’d thought of it, I just said that it was OK. I hope she was disappointed.
So, that’s the best I can do to describe how I feel about losing my beautiful ‘Connewarre
’—the ground under my feet.
I’m pleased Chloe and I talked a bit though. This might sound big-headed but I think she does resent me a bit. She didn’t do well at schoolwork or sport, then she got expelled from here in Year 11, so when I get good marks in tests, and get promoted in rowing, I imagine her thinking, ‘I don’t want to be outdone by my little sister.’
The thing I resent about her though, is the way she takes advantage of Mum and Dad living apart. She sees it as a good chance to get everything she can. The way she spends Dad’s money is sickening. But I’d never dare say it to her face. I’m just little Lisa.
APRIL 20
Ran so many laps today. I’d normally do a crossie but there’s been the odd car-load of drop-kicks around again and Dr Whiteley has banned crossies unless you’re in a group of three and tell a teacher you’re going. I like to run alone.
I hope we do well on Saturday, at the CMC. We’re up against University again, and Muirfield, who beat the Thirds by half a canvas a few weeks ago.
And this time the Fourths are in the same race, which’ll be interesting.
APRIL 21
Mr L, supposing you did something bad, something really bad, do you think your grandparents would see it from Heaven and be upset and angry at you for doing it? I used to worry about that a lot, but then one day I thought that if they were in Heaven they’d be happy all the time (otherwise it wouldn’t be Heaven). So that must mean they wouldn’t know about it.