Forever Geek

  “Or an alpaca,” Bunty says cheerfully from some distance in front of us. “You wouldn’t believe what they can do on a surfboard.”

  Nat lifts her eyebrows, then looks pointedly at my old, beaten-up school satchel. “OK … Are you telling me you’ve got no plans for the next two weeks? At all?”

  I stick my nose in the air. “Yup.”

  “You’re planning on winging it the whole time? Just seeing what happens? Flying by the seat of your pants for fourteen days? Without strategy? Completely plan-less?”

  A warm fizz is starting at the bottom of my stomach.

  You may remember that last week there was rather a lot of drama caused by my relentless controlling, demanding and organising; by my inability to just let things happen.

  And Nat was right at the front of the I Told You So queue.

  So I promised her I’d work on being more laid-back and free-flowing moving forward.

  “Exactly.” My nose gets a bit higher. “I have learnt my lesson, Natalie. I understand that life doesn’t always do what I want it to do, when I want it to, and sometimes I have to stop trying to force it. In the last few days I have grown and developed.”

  Then I try to walk faster so I can catch up with Bunty.

  “Sure,” Nat laughs, keeping pace with me easily on her long legs. “So what’s in your satchel, Harriet? It looks kind of heavy.”

  “Australian dollars,” I say, walking a bit faster. “Did you know they were the first country to introduce plastic money? Plastic money weighs more than paper, you know.”

  “Can I see it?”

  “What?” I speed up a little more. “No. This is my private property.”

  “I mean,” Nat grins, “it’s almost as if there’s something in that bag you are hiding from me.”

  I’m now jogging and my best friend is effortlessly striding next to me, thanks to her natural levels of athleticism and lower body strength and my complete and utter lack of them.

  In 1996, three neuroscientists were probing the brain of a macaque monkey when they stumbled across a cluster of cells in the premotor cortex: the part responsible for planning movements. They found that the cells fired not only when the monkey performed an action, but when the monkey saw the same action performed by someone else. Then they investigated humans, and found that “mirror neurons” can include sensation and emotion too.

  Which basically means that we are scientifically capable of reading the minds of the people around us.

  I really wish Nat would stop doing it right now.

  It is super invasive.

  “Did you know,” I say, clutching my bag tightly and dipping to the left, “that Roman legionaries carried satchels called loculi. Isn’t that interesting?”

  “Random Distraction Facts won’t work on me,” Nat laughs, dipping smoothly after me. “I’ve known you way too long.”

  See what I mean? Meddlesome.

  I hop to the right. “Why are you so obsessed with me?”

  “Give me your bag.”

  “No.”

  “Give it to me.”

  “NO!” I dodge the other way, then take a few steps backwards, stumbling into a disgruntled fellow passenger.

  Nat abruptly does a sharp twist on the spot.

  And before I can react, she’s tackled me into a firm headlock, undone my satchel and pulled out something heavy and bright.

  “Ha!” she shouts, waving it in the air. “Busted!”

  “Oh, what pretty colours!” Bunty says from where she’s been calmly watching us scrummage at the side of the corridor. “And what neat calligraphy skills, Harriet, darling! How clever you are.”

  You know what it is, don’t you?

  Of course you do: we haven’t known each other for years for nothing. It’s a rainbow-highlighted folder with HARRIET’S TOP SECRET EPIC AUSTRALIAN FORTNIGHT OF FUN “DOWN UNDER” PLAN written across it in big purple and pink letters.

  With Attached Detailed Strategy written underneath in silver.

  And (Don’t Show Nat – I Am Breezy Now) in gold.

  Sometimes I really hate having a kindred spirit who knows me inside and out.

  There’s just no privacy at all.

  “Even dolphins need echolocation guidance now and then,” I mutter crossly, head still clamped under Nat’s forearm like the ghost of Anne Boleyn. “Waves can be extremely disorientating.”

  “Idiot,” Nat laughs, pinching my nose with her fingers.

  Then she lets go and starts walking towards baggage reclaim with my no-longer-secret folder held against her stomach.

  “Natalie!” I shout after her. “What are you going to do with that?”

  Honestly, it took me ages. I had to hole-punch and put everything together in the bathroom so Nat wouldn’t see that I’d regressed to being an epic organisational wizard all over again.

  “We’ve only got two weeks to tick it all off, you total Control Freak,” Nat yells over her shoulder. “So I reckon we’d better get cracking.”

  re you ready for a particularly awesome new fact?

  In the middle of the human ear are three tiny bones, each smaller than a grain of rice. They’re called the ossicular chain, and they’re the only part of the body that never changes as you get older.

  That’s what I think true friendship is.

  It’s realising that while many parts of you are going to grow and develop over the years, others are going to stay exactly the same and there’s nothing you can do about it.

  Accepting that tiny bits of somebody are what make them who they are, and that they’ll always be there: even if they’re inconvenient or unattractive or sometimes extremely irritating.

  No matter how deeply they’ve been buried or hidden.

  But loving them intensely anyway.

  Which is handy, because I really thought Nat would go off the deep end when she realised I’d planned out the entire two-week vacation in close detail.

  Then laminated a schedule, in case it got wet.

  “Watch La bohème at Sydney Opera House,” Nat reads as we stand by the luggage area. “Inform Nat that its 15,500 light bulbs are changed every year, then tell her about the chicken.”

  She glances up at me with a frown.

  “In the eighties a live chicken walked off the stage during a performance of Boris Godunov,” I say, scanning the bags. “And landed on a cellist.”

  “Oh, I remember that,” Bunty laughs, nodding. “Feathers everywhere. There’s been a net over the orchestra pit ever since.”

  “Throw axes in St Peters?” Nat says, glancing down again.

  “There’s a warehouse where you can pay fifty dollars to do so,” I explain, watching the conveyor belt carefully. “I feel like it’s a useful life skill to develop.”

  “Sure,” Nat laughs. “If we lived in Game of Thrones.”

  “You can never be too prepared for unexpected dragons,” I mutter, still searching for my luggage.

  Nat got her black suitcase more than ten minutes ago, Bunty carried her scruffy floral patchwork bag on the plane with her and I’m kind of impatient to get going. There are 4,775 square miles of Sydney and we have just one fortnight to see them all.

  That’s 341 square miles a day, or more than fourteen an hour.

  According to my calculations, we’ll have to move faster than three Eastern Grey Squirrels.

  “There’s also Mrs Macquarie’s Chair,” I add distractedly. “Made out of stone and carved by convicts who—”

  A loud commotion is coming from the baggage entrance.

  Sugar cookies.

  It appears that my enormous yellow suitcase has started a pile-up: boxes and bags are wedged behind it and there’s a screeching noise coming from the conveyor-belt wheels.

  “Blimey,” somebody laughs. “Anybody missing a dead body or the kitchen sink?”

  Flushing, I leap forward to free my suitcase.

  “There are half a million bacteria in every square inch of a kitchen sink,” I mumble, gra
bbing the top handle. “I really don’t think they would let one through customs.”

  Then I put all of my admittedly limited strength into trying to lift the yellow monster off the conveyor belt. “Umm,” I grunt as it shifts forward and I start being dragged along next to it. “Guys?”

  Still tugging, I’m dragged a few more metres. “Guys?”

  The average fully grown human has approximately 640 muscles, and it’s at moments like this I really wish I’d spent a little more time on those in my arms and a lot less on the ones in my mouth.

  Strangers are beginning to dive out of the way as I’m jerked rapidly along the floor like an obsessive dog refusing to let go of its chew-toy.

  My cheeks are starting to flame; my eyes to prickle.

  Hello, familiar signs of public humiliation.

  “Guys?” I bleat for the third time, desperately clambering on top of my stupidly large suitcase with one foot hopping along the ground like an amputee kangaroo. “Can I get a bit of help over here, please?”

  “Madam,” a security guard says sharply from across the room as I raise my hopping foot and perch on my suitcase. “Get off the conveyor belt. This isn’t a fairground ride.”

  I already know that. The world’s oldest fairground ride dates back to the 1870s and was a very regal little merry-go-round with painted horses, i.e. somewhere comfortable to sit.

  Finally, just when I think this is my life – I’m going to go through the flappy plastic doors at the end and disappear forever like Veruca Salt in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – a sympathetic stranger hits the emergency STOP button.

  In the meantime, two of the people I love most in the world are collapsed in a tear-stained heap on the floor. They’re laughing so hard that Bunty’s headscarf has slipped over one eye and Nat’s glossy ponytail has fallen out completely.

  Apparently in Japan you can rent new friends: maybe I should look at how much pocket money I have.

  These two are literally useless.

  “If I’d known this was a suitcase rodeo,” Nat snorts, finally standing up and helping me off, then grabbing the other side of my gigantic suitcase, “I’d have brought my cowboy boots.”

  “Sorry, darling,” Bunty laughs. “But I did tell you to pack light. What happened to the lovely new backpack I bought you?”

  It’s on the floor of my bedroom, where it belongs, given that it’s candy-floss pink and there are no compartments in it for novels, homework, a laptop, emergency planning supplies, staple guns, hole-punchers or a miniature printer.

  I mean, you just don’t know when you’re going to need to change your documents at the last minute abroad, do you? They may not have the same size hole-punchers in Australia.

  “What’s even in here, anyway?” Nat asks as we finally manage to lug the ginormous suitcase on to the floor with a loud crash.

  “Literally everything,” I admit in a small voice.

  OK. I get it. Maybe I should have tried to wing this holiday a little bit after all.

  o I think it’s about time this vacation started in earnest.

  As I haul sixteen years’ worth of belongings across the Sydney arrival lounge, I can feel the sunshine; bursting in bright waves through the windows. Piercing the glass ceilings; baking the outside of the building like a huge loaf of bread; bouncing off the glowing brown and freckled cheeks of the people around us.

  Australia is officially the world’s oldest, driest and flattest inhabited continent. It has the highest solar irradiance of any country, over 3,000 hours of sunshine a year and enough sunlight per square kilometre to power the entire country by solar energy alone.

  It also has the highest incidence of skin cancer anywhere on the planet.

  This is literally the sunniest place on Earth.

  It was raining hard when we left England, and Jasper emailed me a photo of himself a few hours ago: freezing cold in the corner of the cafe with raindrops running down his face.

  What did I tell you? Lucky.

  “Wow,” Nat sighs as we push through the airport doors and a vivid cobalt sky opens up in front of us. “Harriet, have I told you recently how much I love you modelling? Like, I love it. You should do it forever. Maybe in the Maldives next.”

  Then she slips on her gold sunglasses, pulls them down her nose and winks at a really good-looking blond boy to our right.

  He walks straight into the glass door.

  Much like the sun, Nat’s undiluted effect on boys has always been overwhelming, disorientating and potentially physically damaging.

  “Poppets,” Bunty says, leaning against a wall and smiling as we start giggling. “I need a few minutes to tap back into the universe and relocate, or the Aussie Karmic Spirits won’t know where I am. Why don’t you take this and I’ll meet you there?”

  She reaches into what I assumed were rips in her long, floaty orange dress but are actually pockets, and pulls out a rusty key tied with string to a scrap of bark with this scratched into it:

  MAGICAL KOOKABURRA SHANTY CABIN

  Bondi Beach

  Sydney

  There are droopy pink feathers attached to the wood and what appear to be stars etched on it with biro.

  “Take any taxi you like, lovelies,” she adds, handing us a shabby floral purse. “I’ll be just behind you.”

  Nat and I look at the address again, then at each other.

  I don’t need my Oxford English Dictionary to translate shanty cabin. The kookaburra is a native Australian bird: the world’s largest kingfisher, which – unlike other birds of the same family – hunts non-aquatic prey like snakes, frogs, insects, mice and rats.

  I’m guessing there’s lots of the above at this “shanty cabin” too.

  And possibly, judging by the hand-drawn stars, no roof either.

  In fact, knowing my grandmother, we’re going to be sleeping on a rough, splintery wood floor, covered in hessian sacks, surrounded by hundreds of lovingly nicknamed pests.

  Which doesn’t particularly bother me – although Australia does have more deadly spiders than anywhere else on the planet – but it’s going to massively bother Nat.

  For once, I might just keep my knowledge to myself.

  “Magic,” Nat reads with another delighted grin at me. “Coooool.”

  I don’t have the heart to tell her that this means there’s no electricity and her mobile phone will have to work via “happy vibes” and “high energy auras”.

  Still – we’re in Australia!

  Hopping with excitement, we grab our suitcases and wheel them towards a shiny white taxi.

  Then I pause and turn round.

  Bunty’s shielding her eyes against the harsh sunlight and searching for something in the patchwork bag strung across her front. Her pink, fluffy hair is backlit by sunshine, and sparkle is flickering from the sequins on her purple flip-flops, the orange beads on her dress, the blue glitter on her scarf, the amethyst rings on her fingers.

  She looks like a flamingo dressed for its first prom.

  Impulsively, I run back. “Thank you,” I say gratefully, throwing my arms around her. “I know we wouldn’t have been allowed to come here without you.”

  My parents may have gently relaxed the reins and resigned themselves to the jet-setting demands of my fashion career, but agreeing to two sixteen-year-olds hanging out together, unchaperoned, on the other side of the world?

  They’re more flexible; not clinically insane.

  Bunty hugs me, then taps her hands on my shoulders. “Don’t be a silly-billy,” she says, nudging me towards Nat. “I’m just thrilled to share a little bit of the world with my granddaughter. Now, off you go.”

  ou know those moments when life feels like a film?

  The world is ordinary and everyday, then – with an unexpected pop – suddenly it’s not. Colours are brighter and air is lighter and you somehow know you’re exactly where you’re supposed to be, doing exactly what you’re supposed to be doing, with exactly who you’re supposed to be doing it
with.

  And for a second you detach and frame it in your mind.

  Capturing the scene; saving every detail so you can play it back when something is happening in real life that you don’t know how to close your eyes to or turn off.

  Well, this is one of those moments.

  And as the taxi sails through the clean, broad streets of Sydney – as we open the car windows and stick our heads out so that our hair whips upwards like Sulphur Crested Cockatoo feathers – Nat feels it too.

  I know, because she’s wearing the ridiculous duck-face pout she claims she doesn’t have, but which she’s been using every single time she puts on sunglasses since she was nine years old.

  And – with a bang – I can suddenly feel the happiness radiating from us both like summer.

  “G’day, Sydney!” my best friend yells jubilantly at the sunlit streets. “Aren’t you a little ripper?”

  “Strewth,” I shout, laughing. “Sydney, you are bonzer.”

  “Reckon!” Nat bellows, black hair streaming behind her.

  “Deffo!” I roar.

  “Fair dinkum,” Nat screams at a passing dog, “put some snags on the barbie!”

  I knew my Ace Australian Catchphrases and Words!! book would come in handy at some point: despite being clichéd and culturally insensitive and inexplicably fronted by a photo of an outdoor wooden toilet.

  “British, are you?” the taxi driver smiles wryly, turning up the radio so we have a suitably glorious soundtrack for our ride. “Never have guessed.”

  Grinning, Nat and I turn to each other: hair floating, imaginary camera whirring, fictional director giving us a big thumbs-up.

  There are only 27,375 days in the average lifetime.

  That’s 657,000 hours, or just under forty million minutes. Two and a half billion seconds each, if we’re very lucky.

  And we don’t get to keep all of them.

  Thanks to the finite capacity of human long-term memory, we only get a limited selection of choice moments to play over and over again: whenever we like, for the rest of our lives.