“So how does your family feel about your music and … your hair?”
Velvet could almost hear him shrugging on the other end of the line.
“I get away with a lot more than the others did. I wanted to buy a guitar when I was twelve. Dad said I wasn’t allowed, but my brothers convinced him it would be okay. I saved up for it by delivering papers and collecting cans after the footy.”
When Velvet was twelve, she’d had three rooms of her own, a monthly allowance of $200 and everything she ever asked for.
“Dad cracked it when I started growing my hair. But my sister said it suited me. He gave up.”
Taleb fell silent. Velvet was trying to think of something else to say, when he spoke again.
“I just finished the guitar solo for the dream scene. Do you want to hear it?”
“Sure.”
The house was dark and silent, but in her ear Velvet could hear the sound of Taleb’s guitar, played just for her.
CHAPTER 22
“Guess what?” Roula said when she arrived at T6. “I just heard a kid in French singing the chorus from the coronation song.”
“Yeah?”
They’d spent the last two weeks practising it over and over again.
“We’re practically famous,” Jesus said.
“He must have heard us after school.”
Taleb was flattered, but also concerned. “We better have the after-school rehearsal in the backstage room as well.”
Everybody groaned.
“Why? I hate that little room,” Hailie said. “It smells all sweaty.”
“That’s Drago,” Roula said.
“It is not!”
“We don’t want everyone hearing all the songs,” Taleb said. “There won’t be any surprises when they see the performance.”
“I think there’ll be enough surprises.”
“Hailie’s singing.”
“Drago’s acting.”
“The lack of scenery.”
“Hey, that reminds me,” Roula said. “There’s a sale on at Spotlight. I need to get some material for the dream scene.”
“You can have twenty dollars,” Velvet said.
“Who put you in charge of the money?”
“I’m the sensible one, remember?”
Drago looked uncomfortable, which worried Velvet because normally nothing fazed him. “What’s wrong?”
A sudden hush came over the cultural studies class.
“What have you done, Drago?”
“Where’s the bank book?”
Mei took the bank book out of her bag and gave it to Velvet. “Sorry.”
Velvet couldn’t believe her eyes. “Five dollars!” Drago was unusually quiet. The rest of them were suddenly noisy.
“How come there’s only five dollars in it?”
“I had to leave something in to keep the account open,” Drago said.
“You rat. You’ve nicked our money.”
“Drago, you miserable … ”
Jesus looked like he was going to attack him. Mr MacDonald had to intervene to prevent bloodshed.
“Just a minute. Let Drago explain.”
“Okay, explain why you stole our money,” Peter said.
Drago didn’t say anything.
“He didn’t steal,” said Mei, acting as Drago’s interpreter for a change.
“Where is it then?”
“He lost it.”
“What do you mean he lost it?”
“In horses’ race.”
“One of my foster brothers gave me a certain winner at good odds. I thought if we had more money, we could get better costumes and scenery and stuff.”
“Drago!”
“Isn’t it against the law to bet if you’re underage?”
“My foster brother did it for me. The horse’s name was Gloucester Rose.”
He seemed to think that would explain everything.
“So what?”
“It seemed like a sign. You know, Richard was the Duke of Gloucester, the War of the Roses.”
Everybody started shouting. Everybody but Drago, who for once had nothing to say. After a few minutes they ran out of names to call him and suggestions for horrible things to do to him. An angry silence settled over T6. The money was gone.
“What are we going to do about costumes now?”
“We’ll have to manage without them,” Mr MacDonald said. “Do it in ordinary clothes.”
“We can’t do that,” Velvet said. “It’ll look awful.”
“What else can we do?”
They all scowled at Drago, but no one had any ideas.
It was Miss Ryan and Velvet’s mum who came to their rescue. Miss Ryan had been offering to help with costumes and scenery all the previous term. Jesus’s dad was a house painter and he had given them a drop sheet and some half-empty tins of paint. Eventually, they’d given in and let her start painting a backdrop. Miss Ryan got the perspective all wrong and she had the worst sense of colour coordination in the world. It looked awful. But she could sew. She had already made headdresses for the girls and told them she could run up a doublet or two out of a bedspread she had at home. They were desperate enough to let her try.
But there were some things that Miss Ryan couldn’t sew. Drago needed a crown, even though no one thought he deserved one. They needed swords, a throne and more paint. That’s where Velvet’s mum came in.
“We need a fundraiser,” Peter said, “like the school has for sports equipment. A raffle or something.”
Peter was unconvinced. “We haven’t got a prize.”
“A garage sale.”
“We haven’t got anything to sell.”
“What about one of those ‘guess how many jelly beans in the jar’ competitions?”
“Roula, just keep your dumb ideas to yourself, will you?”
“You should be the one thinking of something, Drago. It’s your fault we need money.”
“My mother had this idea,” Velvet began, then changed her mind. “No, that was a dumb idea too.”
“What?”
“She said something about a multicultural food thing. She meant a get-together for parents, but we could have a stall at lunchtime. If everyone brought stuff from home we could sell it to the other kids.”
“That is such a lame idea,” Hailie said. “Trust you to come up with it, Velvet.”
“I could bring some spring rolls,” said Peter, whose parents ran a Vietnamese restaurant.
“My mother make dumplings,” Mei said.
“That’s great. Roula, what about some of those vine leaf things and spanakopita?”
“Spanner what?” Jesus wasn’t familiar with Greek food.
“Pasties with feta cheese and spinach in them.”
Roula nodded. “Yeah, my yiayia makes them.”
“What sort of food does your family eat, Jesus?”
“Just normal stuff.”
“What am I supposed to bring?” Hailie said. “Kangaroo tail soup?”
“I’ll make passionfruit tarts,” Velvet said.
“You were right, it’s a dumb idea,” Taleb said. “I’m not gonna stand about selling cakes.”
“Got a better plan?” Velvet was annoyed by his lack of support.
“I’d rather do some busking outside Yarrabank Plaza.”
Jesus offered to go busking with Taleb.
“Let’s do both.”
“I’ll do a flyer about the food stall,” Roula volunteered.
“Sure, Roula,” said Drago, who never believed anything Roula said.
“She can draw, Drago,” Velvet said. “What exactly are you doing to contribute?”
“I’ll think of something.”
CHAPTER 23
Miss Ryan managed to get permission for them to hold a Multicultural Food Stall the following week. They stuck Roula’s flyer around the school. Everyone agreed to bring food, but Peter was the only one who would help Velvet on the stall. The rest of them thought that being seen fun
draising was far too daggy.
“No one will bring anything. They’ll forget, I know they will,” Velvet muttered to her mother as she was filling passionfruit tarts the night before.
But they didn’t forget, everyone brought something. Drago, whose current foster mother was part Italian, brought a slab of pizza. Jesus brought egg sandwiches. Hailie brought some slightly burned cookies. Even Taleb brought kebabs and baklava.
Mr MacDonald borrowed the microwave oven from the staffroom for them to heat up the food. And they set up a table near the canteen with an extension cord running in through a classroom window. Miss Ryan was flapping around, concerned about health and safety issues. Mr MacDonald was their only customer at first. He did his best and bought six different things, even though he’d already eaten his lunch at recess. Miss Ryan bought one passionfruit tart. Velvet was just starting to really panic, when Drago rounded up some Year 7s and threatened them with torture if they didn’t buy something. The queue at the canteen was as long as it always was, so when the Year 7s actually seemed to like the food and none of them dropped dead from poisoning, other students started to buy from the stall. Soon they were doing brisk business. Some teachers bought things as well, since their microwave had mysteriously disappeared. The stall was a success.
Afterwards they all skipped period six and went to the band practice room to count the takings and pigout on the leftovers. Jesus ate the passionfruit tarts two at a time.
Velvet counted up the money. “There’s fifty-four dollars and seventy-five cents.”
“Is that all?”
“How much did you think we’d make from a food stall?”
“I dunno, but it’s not even enough to hire two outfits.”
“We’ll have to see what the busking makes.”
The busking was successful. The rest of Stagefright went along to Yarrabank Plaza to create an audience. A crowd soon gathered to see what they were looking at. Taleb took his little amp and played some old favourites that he’d selected specially to appeal to old people: “Stairway to Heaven”, a couple of Pink Floyd classics and the Star Wars theme. He also played a guitar-legend version of “Memory” from Cats, which Velvet thought might have been just for her. Jesus did a surprisingly good job of percussion accompaniment, even though he didn’t know any of the songs. When Taleb counted the coins in his guitar case there was thirty-eight dollars and sixty-five cents.
They had a meeting at a cafe afterwards to discuss how they would use the money. It was the first time they’d all been together out of school uniform. Drago was wearing green baggy pants that made him look like a garden gnome; Jesus a soccer shirt; Roula a long velvet skirt; Hailie a tight fitting T-shirt, cut-off jeans and goosebumps. Velvet thought about sitting next to Taleb but changed her mind. They hadn’t talked about it, but neither of them felt comfortable about being seen together in public. Velvet knew that the other members of Toxic Shock would relentlessly make fun of Taleb for having such an uncool girlfriend. And she hadn’t quite let go of being the princess exiled among the plebs. Even in cultural studies class they kept their distance. Velvet didn’t think the boys had a clue, but Roula and Hailie knew something was going on. They’d been quizzing her about it for weeks, even though Velvet had insisted that their relationship was strictly professional.
Mei arrived and distracted Velvet from her thoughts. Without anybody noticing, Mei had undergone a transformation over the last term. She’d cut off her pigtails and now wore her hair in a bob. Her eyes were skillfully made up. She no longer wore little girls’ clothes. Her skirt was tight and her blouse even tighter, outlining her large breasts.
“I get lost,” she told them. “Take wrong bus. Go to Richmond by mistake.”
They all squeezed up to make room for Mei. Drago moved next to her and Velvet ended up sitting next to Taleb anyway. She could see their reflection in a mirror. They didn’t look anything like a couple. Taleb was wearing black jeans and a black Slipknot T-shirt. Velvet had on her light blue jeans and a mauve shirt, and even with her hair down and carefully messy, she still looked neat and ironed. She and Taleb just didn’t go together. Velvet was worrying about whether this was important when someone remembered what they were supposed to be there for, and they started talking about their new funds and what they were going to do with them.
“We’ve got a bit more than half the money we had before,” Peter said, who had nominated himself Stagefright’s accountant. “We still won’t be able to hire costumes.”
There was some general grumbling about Drago and then they tried to think of alternatives.
“We’ll have to take up Miss Ryan’s offer. Let her make stuff.”
Peter groaned. “Do we have to?”
“I’ll end up with an orange cloak,” Drago said, “with big flowers on it.”
“Poor Miss Ryan,” Velvet said. “You shouldn’t make fun of her.”
“Yeah, Drago, you should be grateful,” Roula said. “She’s getting you out of trouble.”
The girls still wanted to wear flowing gowns.
“I’ve got the bridesmaid’s dress I wore at my cousin Kiki’s wedding,” Roula said. “That might look okay if I altered it a bit.”
That gave Velvet an idea. “We might be able to get some long dresses at the War Widows shop.” It was one of her mother’s favourite op shops and it wasn’t far away.
“They’ll all be pink and horrible though,” Hailie said.
“We can dye them.”
Miss Ryan had given them the address of a remnants shop where they could get cheap material. Drago needed a coronation cloak and Roula still needed some streamers of green and blue material for the underwater scene.
“You’ll have to have a cardboard and aluminium foil crown though,” Roula said.
Drago opened his mouth to complain.
“Shut up, Drago.”
He did his best to look apologetic. “Can I choose what colour cloak I get?”
“No.”
Peter gave Roula forty dollars and Miss Ryan’s instructions for how many metres they’d need. Drago insisted on going with her.
“If you don’t come back with everything we need and change …” Jesus left it to Drago’s imagination what he would do.
Hailie had a date (she’d just dropped Jesus). Peter had to help in the family restaurant. Jesus wanted to watch his old soccer team play in a semi-final. No one seemed interested in going to the War Widows op shop with Velvet.
“I’ll go with you,” Taleb said.
“Thanks.” Velvet tried to look like it was no big deal.
Taleb picked up his guitar with one hand and took Velvet’s hand in the other. They said goodbye and the others stopped arguing about which tram to catch as they watched them walk away hand in hand.
“Geez, Roula,” Velvet heard Hailie say. “When are you going to get a boyfriend? Even Velvet’s got one.”
That was the end of Velvet’s reputation as the aloof princess. Everyone would know she was going with Taleb now. She didn’t mind at all really.
The op shop had two racks of dilapidated ball gowns and bridesmaids dresses in hideous colours. Velvet tried some on. Taleb was supposed to be looking around for anything the boys might be able to use, but when Velvet wanted to show him a dress she thought might work, she found him fossicking through a pile of sheet music. He didn’t like the dress. Velvet tried on some more. There was one that hung beautifully but was an awful shade of green, another was made of lovely silky material but stuck out too much. Another two had a vague medieval look and might have looked okay if they were dyed darker colours. They were marked at fifteen dollars each, but Velvet bargained with the little old lady behind the counter and got the price down to twenty dollars for the two, with a lace curtain thrown in to use as a veil. Taleb bought a peculiar selection of sheet music ranging from ABBA to Miles Davies.
“What are you going to do with those?” Velvet asked.
“Learn how to play them. I can use bits in guitar solos
or make heavy-metal versions.”
Afterwards Taleb walked Velvet home along the river. A couple of months earlier Velvet would never have believed that she would soon be walking along a bike path hand in hand with a boy – especially one with hair the same length as hers whose idea of a musical genius was Jimi Hendrix. What would her friends at St Theresa’s think? Her ex-friends.
They sat under a willow tree with their backs against the tree trunk, inside the curtain of branches that brushed the ground as the breeze caught them. They talked for a while and then abandoned conversation. Velvet learned how to kiss someone who had bands on their teeth. Not that she’d had any experience at kissing anybody without them, apart from a kid she’d played kiss-chasey with in Grade 3 whose name she couldn’t remember. Velvet was amazed at how quickly she’d taken to kissing. Swapping saliva with someone had always sounded gross. It was actually very pleasant. She still wanted to make sure that she knew where she stood with Taleb.
“So, does this mean we’re going out?”
Taleb shrugged. “What do you think?”
“I just wanted to make sure.”
“Would you like something in writing?”
“Very funny. I was just wondering about …”
“What?”
“About Sofia Ritano.”
“What about her?”
“You were going out with her a few weeks ago.”
“I’ve never been out with Sofia Ritano.”
“I saw you. You were wrapped around each other.”
“She was wrapped around me. She does that with all the guys in the band. I don’t even like her, but she does the sound and lights for our gigs. And anyway, she’s a lesbian.”
“Is she? Okay. It’s no big deal. I just wanted to know.”
It wasn’t quite the formal request and acceptance that Velvet had imagined. When other girls talked about boys asking them out, she’d thought they’d meant it literally. Boy meets girl. Boy asks girl out. Girl accepts. It seemed a shrug was the best she could hope for. She’d also thought it meant you actually went somewhere. Out. It was the twenty-first century. Velvet decided it was time for her to take the initiative.
“Do you want to go to the movies tomorrow?”