“No. I’m actually a great ass man myself,” Jimmy explains, just to rile her up. “What about you?” he says, turning to Tuba Guy, with that evil/innocent look on his face.
Tuba Guy looks stricken, and Justine looks like she wants to dig a hole.
“The piano accordion thing does it for me,” he mumbles quietly.
Tara, Siobhan, and I look at him proudly. Justine’s face is just about pink.
The band comes and the music is mindless, but I feel on track with everyone in the room. The whole space is a mosh pit and I sway, courtesy of five hundred other people around me and the alcohol. The world from this perspective is strange, and for a moment I stand in the middle of it and just absorb it. I can smell the dope and the body odors and the beer and the spirits and the puke. I can smell Justine’s perfume as she puts her arms around me and we move to the beat and everything is a strange blur of bodies. I think I imagine it, but this one time when I open my eyes I see Tara and Thomas and I’m sure something’s happening between them, some kind of touch, some kind of look, but it’s gone so quickly and the mirror ball spins and my hair is matted to my forehead. And the way I feel about everyone in my life is so clear. It’s almost like an epiphany.
Later, we pull Siobhan away from the bartender at the pub, who’s just walked off his shift.
“What??” she says, looking at us innocently.
“Can we not go anywhere without you picking up someone?” Tara asks, hailing a cab. We all crawl in.
“Am I hurting anyone?”
“Yourself.”
“How?”
“You’re the one who gets upset, Siobhan,” Justine says.
“Only with the name-calling. Not with anything else. That time at the party, it was the name-calling that made me cry.”
I lean against Justine.
“Did he kiss you?” I ask.
“No. I kissed him.”
We grin at each other.
The taxi driver pulls into Tara’s street.
“Oh God,” Tara says, quickly yanking off her seat belt. “There’s a police car outside my house.” She’s almost in tears. “Oh God. Something’s happened to my parents.”
Siobhan grabs her arm. “It’s my father,” she says flatly. “We’re in for it.”
The taxi stops and none of us move.
“You have no idea how much trouble I’m going to be in,” Justine says.
“What’s the worst-case scenario?” Tara asks.
“Try no weekends for about a month, which means I don’t get to go to Canberra with the orchestra.”
“Canberra’s not that exciting,” Tara says.
“Tuba Guy,” I explain.
She nods, understanding, and we get out of the cab.
“I’ll tell them it’s my fault,” I say. “I’ll tell them the truth. That this morning I felt like crap, like I could have just walked in front of a bus. . . .”
“Don’t say that!” Justine says, and under the streetlight, I see tears in her eyes. “Don’t ever think that, Francesca.”
“Promise,” Tara orders me.
“Cross your heart,” Siobhan pushes.
I put my hand on my heart. “I swear on the Holy Bible.”
They still look tense, and I smile.
“Chill. You chicks get hot and bothered about anything.”
I get dropped off home in a police car. Siobhan’s father lectures us all the way about drinking. The epiphany is wearing off and is replaced by a blinder of a headache. I walk into the house and my father is sitting in the kitchen, in the dark. I don’t switch on the light because I don’t want to see the look on his face.
“You got a card in the mail,” he says. “It’s in your room.”
I don’t say anything.
“For your birthday.”
That’s all he says and I figure it out. Realizing that they missed my birthday, he would have rung me at Justine’s, and that’s how they would have worked out our ploy.
He doesn’t shout, he doesn’t say anything. It’s as if we’ve got nothing left to say to each other. So I go to bed and I feel so sad that I have to psych myself out of crying. Think happy thoughts, I tell myself. Think happy thoughts.
I think of Sophia Loren.
chapter 31
THE STELLA GIRLS are on the bus the next morning, and they do the same thing they always do when they see me. They’re theatrical and affectionate and excited for approximately fifty seconds, and then their attention is diverted. I don’t feel like being cheerful or upbeat with them because Justine is so down about her parents’ punishment and I feel guilty.
“Where have you been?” they ask. “We haven’t seen you for ages.”
I shrug.
“What did you do to your hair?”
That means they don’t like it. People who ask that question make it obvious how they feel. Funny how they liked my hair when it stayed the same for four years and the moment I change it they hate it.
“Remember in Year Seven when it was cut really short and everyone called you Frank?”
No. I remember Year Seven when my mother would grab my face between her two hands and say, “I love this little face that I now can see.” Or how Nonno Salvo would ask, “Where did those eyes come from?” I remember being called beautiful for the first time.
Why do they always have to remember the pathetic stuff? Why can’t they ever remember something positive being said about me? I remember Jimmy saying that me being pathetic makes him feel good about himself. From him it’s a joke, but for the Stella girls, it’s true.
“Did we ever play basketball with the Burwood boys?” I ask them.
They look confused.
“Remember? In Year Ten we were going to play at the Police Boys’ Club after school.”
“Why do you ask?”
It’s not that I think they’re mean. I just don’t think they notice when I’m not around.
“Oh my God,” Michaela says, clutching my hand. “Your birthday!”
I shrug.
“What did you do?”
“Nothing,” I say.
I don’t want to share it with them. I realize at this very moment that if I never see these girls again, I wouldn’t care.
I glance at Justine and she looks hurt, and I’m confused until it hits me that she misinterpreted my answer. It’s our stop and she gets off the bus without a word.
“Wait,” I call out to her, but she’s already gone.
The Stella girls are looking at me, surprised.
“Do you hang out with Justine Kalinsky?”
I nod. “Worse. She has to hang out with me. Poor thing .”
I decide to go and see Will before school starts. I’ve had it with this waiting business. I can cope with another woman, but I can’t cope with being ignored when there’s nothing in his way.
I knock at the prefects’ office door and one of the others answers.
“Will, it’s for you,” the guy says, smirking. I stare him out and he stops smirking and excuses himself.
“Are you okay?” Will asks, standing up.
I nod.
We stand facing each other and that stupid, looking-at-Will heart-thumping starts. Get over it, I want to tell myself. He’s just a gawky guy with a cowlick, not some stud.
“Don’t even think about it, Will.”
“Think about what?”
“Think about what you’re thinking about.”
“Why do you have to do that?” he explodes. “Why do you have to take a perfectly logical mind, with a touch of so-called intelligence, and turn it into mush?”
“You’re about to kiss me, Will. I can tell because I’ve been kissed by you enough times to see the signs. Your face goes all pinched, as if you’re in battle, and you almost grit your teeth. What am I? A nightmare for you?”
He resigns himself to the fact that I’m not going away too soon and sits down.
“You’re like these trays,” he says. “In-tray, out-tray. Unexplainabl
e. You’re unexplainable.”
“You’re comparing me to stationery?”
“I’m comparing you to . . . rugby and . . . my voice breaking . . . and everything I love but don’t understand.”
“To the failures in your life.”
“No. I’m comparing you to all the things I love doing best and I just can’t have when I want them.”
I pull up a chair and sit down in front of him, our knees touching. I take his hands, squeezing them.
“Ask me out, Will. Because if you don’t, I’ll have to ask you out, and I have a feeling that you’re going to analyze why you can’t go out with me and it’ll make you feel like crap to say no.”
He leans forward to kiss me, but I shake my head.
“It’ll be easy,” I tell him. “Next year I’ll be here, you’ll be at college. . . .”
“I’m not going to be here next year,” he says, sounding frustrated. “I told you that at camp.”
“But you had to sort out the plan priority.”
As usual, I get the full impact of his stare, and it’s all there in his eyes. The whole truth.
“So the plan without me won?”
He shakes his head. “It’s not about you . . . actually it is about you, but for all the right reasons,” he says.
“You go out with some girl and you’re so torn about going overseas, but the moment I’m interested, it becomes so clear to you that going overseas is a fantastic idea. Thank you very much, Will. Welcome to the people who have made my week such a great one.”
“It’ll only be a year.”
“How can it be so easy for you to decide?” I cry.
“I can’t believe you think that!” he shouts.
“What am I supposed to think? You spend all your time trying to stick your tongue down my throat, and the moment I want something more, you decide you need to go away.”
“This isn’t about you. It’s not personal,” he says.
A cold fury grips me, but my heart’s already sunk before I can save it.
“Everything to do with me is personal,” I say, hardly able to get the words out.
I walk out.
I need voices of reason and of hysteria and of empathy. I need to have an Alanis moment. I need advice from Elizabeth Bennett. I need Tim Tams and comfort food.
I need to find the girls.
Tara’s the only one in homeroom when I arrive, and I’m kind of relieved. She always looks at things to do with other people’s lives objectively.
“You did nothing for your birthday, did you?” she snaps, furious.
At first I’m confused. Too much has happened since this morning on the bus. I realize that Justine’s told her about my conversation with the Stella girls.
“I didn’t want to talk to them—”
“Why does someone who gives so little think she deserves so much?” There’s a pinched anger in her face. It’s not that bitchy look I remember from the Stella girls when they were picking fights. It’s pure anger, and it’s all directed toward me. I see Siobhan making a beeline for us from the other side of the room, and I’m relieved that there is going to be some kind of reprieve.
“You’re a bitch, Francesca,” Siobhan says when she reaches me. “Why don’t you just go to Pius, where your ‘real’ friends are?”
I sit down at my desk and slowly take out my books. Justine walks in and sits where she usually does, next to me. I look at her, but she won’t look at me. I can tell she’s miserable.
“Justine, I didn’t—”
“I don’t want to talk about it, Francesca.”
I nod, and I feel tears welling up in my eyes and my lip trembling. I haven’t been friends with them long enough to be able to withstand a test. You pass tests like this five years into a friendship. But I think, this is it. This is going to be like in Year Seven. One day they’re going to say, “Remember how we were friends with Francesca Spinelli for two terms in Year Eleven?”
Or worse still, one of them will answer, “No. Who’s Francesca Spinelli?”
I can hear them talking about Justine’s punishment from her parents because of last night. Her parents won’t speak to her, on top of everything else. For Justine, that’s the worst thing.
The bell rings.
I’m numb. I walk the corridors in a daze and then there’s the exit sign and I just walk out. I go past the secretaries, past the front gate, past everything. Through Hyde Park, through the city, down Market Street, over the Anzac Bridge, and up Johnston Street.
I sit in a café in Booth Street and just stare into space until, after a while, I feel someone standing next to me and I look up and recognize Sue, Mia’s colleague from work.
“Thought it was you,” she says. I force a smile and she sits down.
“How’s Mum?” she asks gently. I just shrug, not really interested in lying.
“She gets out of bed sometimes,” I mumble.
“You know what I think?” she asks.
Just what I need. A theory from one of Mia’s friends.
I shrug again.
“The last eighteen months have been tough for her, Francesca, and with your grandfather dying and starting at the university at the same time as the miscarriage . . . Mia needs a vacation.”
She keeps talking but I no longer hear what she is saying. My head is reeling from just one word. Miscarriage.
My mother had a miscarriage? Mia lost a baby. We lost a baby. I can’t work out a word Sue is saying. It’s garbled and in another language. A language spoken by those who just don’t understand.
I stand up blindly and do what I’ve become an expert at today. I walk away.
I’m dead inside and I feel as if the world’s ending and I need to get home and I walk faster and faster because the people across the road will wave to me and only then will I know everything is fine but when I get there, they’re not there like they are every afternoon and every morning and every night and I want to know why because they have to be—because if things aren’t normal with them, things aren’t normal with me and I want to run over and bang at the door and tell them to come outside and eat their dinner on their laps or lean over the fence and speak to their neighbors and I want things to be exactly the same as they always were because if they are, the world is still turning and at the moment I feel as if it’s stopped turning and I can’t stand feeling this way and I go inside and my father is standing there.
“What are you doing home, Frankie?”
I don’t know who he is anymore. I don’t know who anyone is.
“Why didn’t you tell us about the miscarriage?” I ask.
I see him stiffen for a moment and he doesn’t answer.
“Hello?”
“Don’t hello me, Frankie. We didn’t want to upset you.”
“Well, I’m more upset by the fact that you kept it from me.”
“It was over a year and a half ago.”
“I know exactly when it was. It was what I was trying to ask you about the other day, but you lied.”
“There was too much going on and we didn’t want to—”
“Did you ever talk about it with her?” I interrupt.
“She didn’t want to talk about it.”
“She always says that. ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’ She’s said that a thousand times.”
“And I respect that.”
“But it means that she does want to talk about it!”
“I know Mia. I know more—”
“No you don’t,” I snap.
“What are you trying to say?”
“She’s not part of you. She’s part of us.”
“Don’t you dare say that.”
“You know nothing!”
“I’m not going to have a fight with you.”
“I bet she wanted to talk about it.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
His shouting makes me jump, but I don’t back down.
“Yeah, but maybe she did. And maybe she wan
ted to talk about Nonno dying, too. And maybe you didn’t let her. You do that all the time. You blow everything off.”
I’m hysterical. I don’t know what I’m talking about. But I can’t stop.
“You keep her all to yourself. You think you can fix everything by forgetting about it, but you just make things worse. It’s all your fault. You’ve kept her sick, because you don’t know how to handle it. Because you’re a weakling. Everyone says you are, and I believe it and Mummy could have done better than you and I don’t know why you just don’t fuck off now before you make it any worse.”
The look on his face is so devastating, but I don’t care. I want to hurt him.
I turn to walk out but my mum is at the door, looking horrified.
“Don’t you ever speak to your father like that again.”
I run out of there, to the people across the road, and I bang at their door over and over again, but no one answers and I keep on banging until there’s blood on my knuckles and then I run up the road as fast as I can because I need to find them.
But I don’t.
They’re gone.
I hear my father calling out my name, but I keep on running.
Everyone’s gone.
And I need to find them.
chapter 32
I DON’T CARE where I end up. I walk to Central Station and get on a train and then I sit there, watching the stops pass me by, all their names meshing into one, until the stops become infrequent and I know I’m out of the metropolitan area and I have no idea where I’m going or when I’ll get there. It’s like one of those mystery flights, except I’m in no mood for surprises.
I have two dollars on me and, in all probability, a fare evasion fine awaiting me on the other side of wherever. After what seems like hours, the train stops, but I don’t move. There’s not one other person in my car and I feel like the last person on earth. Finally, I step out of the car and look at the sign. Woy Woy. We’ve driven past the sign before on the way up to the coast with my mum and dad and Luca. The Woy Woy sign in the past was a good memory and I want to remember it, but I can’t and I say the words over and over in my head, hundreds of times, sitting there for hours and hours, trying to remember why the Woy Woy sign in the past was a good memory. But I’m not remembering anything at all. I’m just saying words in my head that mean nothing.