‘The Squid and the Whale. It sounds cool.’
Tasha rubbed her hands together eagerly. ‘Perfect. We can have pasta after the movie.’
She’d go and see The Break-Up with Richie. Or Jenna if she hadn’t seen it yet. Or maybe she would go on her own. And pretend. Shut up, don’t think about him. She clutched tightly onto her aunt’s arm as they strolled to the station.
When they got home there was a message from Rosie on the machine, asking if Connie could do some babysitting on Thursday evening. She glanced at the clock. It was not yet eleven, so she picked up the phone.
‘Are you going to say yes?’ Tasha had poured a red wine and turned on the television.
‘Yeah, I think so.’
‘Do you have time?’
She wished her aunt would lay off a little. She could make her own decisions. ‘I can do school work at their place. It’s no big deal.’
She could see that her aunt wanted to say more. She held her breath. But Tasha had turned away. Connie quickly dialled. Their answering machine clicked in and she began to leave a message. There was a loud squeal, an electronic cacophony, and then she heard Gary’s voice on the other end.
‘Connie, that you?’
‘Yeah. I can look after Hugo on Thursday. What time do you want me to come around?’
‘You’re good, aren’t you? You’re a good person, Connie.’ Gary was slurring his words. She figured he was pissed. ‘Come around seven.’
‘Sure.’
‘Bloody Rosie has booked us into some Mickey-Mouse parenting workshop. I fucking hate those things. I always feel like the bad boy at the back of the class.’
She bit her lip. She didn’t have anything to say in response. She couldn’t imagine Gary as a student. She wasn’t thinking of the learning part, he would enjoy that part of school; he read all the time. She thought he probably regretted having dropped out so young, Form Four he’d told her, which was now their Year Ten, but she didn’t have the guts to ask him why he had. She figured a person like Gary couldn’t stand the discipline, obeying rules and following a timetable. He could never sit still. She was always slightly anxious whenever she was alone with him.
‘Okay,’ she finally blurted out, realising there had been a long pause in the conversation. ‘See you Thursday.’ Maybe he was stoned.
‘Yeah, yeah, thanks Connie, you’re an angel.’
Her aunt was channel-surfing, going from Iraq to Big Brother to some American crime show. She took the remote off Tasha and flicked back to the news. A black, charcoal shell of a car was smouldering in a stretch of desert highway. Scarfed women were howling.
‘Please turn it off, Con, I can’t stand watching this.’
She pressed a button. Two women were in a sauna, discussing anal sex.
‘Oh, for Christ’s sake.’ Her aunt tore the remote from her hand. The screen flicked over to the crime story.
Connie yawned, leaned over and kissed her aunt on the cheek.
‘It’s all rubbish, isn’t it? Maybe we should get cable?’
Jenna had cable but all they ever did at her place was channel-surf as well. Connie shook her head. ‘There’s only rubbish on that too. Goodnight.’
‘Goodnight, angel.’
She lay in bed and listened to the muted sound of the television. She kept the light on and looked at all the pictures on her wall. Last summer she had stripped the room bare of all her posters, all the images of movies stars, celebrities and pop stars; she chucked out Robbie Williams and Gwen Stafani, Missy Elliot and Johnny Depp. The only picture she couldn’t bring herself to part with, was one she had ripped out of a TV Week, a small black and white photo of Benjamin McKenzie from The OC. It reminded her of Richie and she kept it Blu-Tacked at one edge of her bedroom mirror. Across from her bed the wall was dominated by a large print of nineteenth-century London that her aunt had bought and framed for Connie’s sixteenth birthday. Her desk sat underneath it. There were only two posters on the walls now. One was of a clear blue desert sky shot through with razor wire, protesting the inhumane detention of refugees in Australia. She had snaffled it at an anti-racism rally the year before. The other poster was a stark image of an Arab child with a petrol pump murderously aimed at his head. In Arabic and in English the stark red lettering read NO TO BUSH’S WAR FOR OIL. Zara had sent it to her for her sixteenth birthday. The walls were now full of photographs of real people, people she knew: Tasha in a blue raincoat holding an over-sized black umbrella; Richie grinning maniacally at the camera, wearing his daggy Thank Drunk I’m a God T-shirt; she and Jenna and Tina dressed up for a party; Zara in a long-sleeved white hoodie with an image of Kurt Cobain stenciled across the front; her own Year Ten school photo, the one in which her legs didn’t look fat. Then there was the photograph of her mum and dad, looking like she had never known them. Her father was pencil thin, his hair cut short except for a greased quiff at the front and dyed a peroxide salt-white, her mother in garish eyeliner and lipstick, her hair in a mohawk. They looked like gangsters, not like in rap videos and ads for Coca-Cola, but like romantic outlaws from deep in the last century. Her mother wore white lace stockings and had a brooch of the Japanese imperial flag pinned to a cup of her exposed bra. Her dad was smoking a cigarette, had a white shirt on, the top button done up and a thin black tie; he was leering comically into the camera as her mother gave him a look of open adoration. Just above the photograph of her parents she had stuck a photo of last year’s work Christmas party, everyone a little drunk, smiling stiffly into the camera. They all formed a semi-circle around the table, Aisha in the centre, with her and Hector at either end. He wore a suit, elegant as always, and he looked so good. He looked so good it hurt. Her eyes drifted from her father to Hector, and then back to her mother and then to herself. In the photograph she was looking at Hector with the exact same expression as on her mother’s face. How was it that she had never noticed it before? She blushed, and quickly turned off the light.
Lisa, who was asleep on her pillow, miaowed in indignation at being disturbed. Sorry, girl, she whispered, and tickled the cat underneath her chin. There was a scratching at the door. She waited. Bart pushed opened the door and she heard him scampering across the carpet. He jumped on her bed and she lifted the covers, making a space for him to nestle into. Lisa jumped off the pillow and onto the dresser. She could hear the cat lapping at the water in the glass. Bart curled into a ball and began purring.
She tried to think of schoolwork, she tried to think about the movie she had seen—the actor reminded her of her father and she wondered if that was how her dad would have looked now if he hadn’t died, if he had lived to fifty, gotten fat, maybe grown a beard—but she couldn’t stop thinking of Hector. Bart edged further under the sheet and blanket; she could feel his purring, the rise and fall from his breathing, the warmth of him next to her stomach. The sound of the television was just audible from the lounge room. She closed her eyes and fantasised.
She was in the Big Brother house. It was the first episode of a new series and the house was filled with the contestants she had liked from previous series. She was sitting on one side of the couch, Hector on the other. She looked older and thinner. Hector was only about twenty-five. Big Brother was speaking, explaining the house rules. The other contestants were excited and abuzz, interrupting, squealing. She and Hector were silent, they could not avoid continuously glancing over at each other. The cameras were picking up the stares and everyone knew exactly what was going on. Hector winked at her and she blushed. The cat was purring. She fell asleep.
‘Jordan’s having a party. He wants you guys to come.’
‘When?’
‘Saturday night. You want to go?’
Last period on a Wednesday was meant to be study time in the library but, as usual, she, Tina and Jenna had skipped class and gone to the Juice Bar on High Street instead. Connie slurped from her watermelon and ginger drink and looked out the window. The weather was cruel, one of those Melbourne days that reminded
her of the savagery of London’s weather. She had put on a skirt that morning and the wind had nipped at her legs all day. She shivered.
‘I said are you coming?’ Jenna, her voice indignant, was frowning at her.
Connie apologised and turned back to the conversation. ‘Maybe.’
‘Good. And you?’
Tina nodded lazily.
Shit. Connie remembered that she had just promised Richie to go out to the movies with him on Saturday.
‘Has he invited Rich?’
‘How the fuck should I know ? I’m not his social secretary.’
Connie and Tina shared a quick, surprised raising of their eyebrows. Tina stretched back on her chair. ‘Hey bitch, just cool it. She was only asking a question.’
To their horror, Jenna burst into tears. Tina, mortified, glanced around the café, then put her arm around her friend. Connie played with her straw. Jenna’s heaving slowly came to a finish, and she sniffed, took a napkin off the table and blew her nose.
‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered. ‘I’m a fucking retard.’ She breathed in heavily and Connie thought she was going to start crying again. Connie grabbed her friend’s hand and squeezed it.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘I had sex with Jordan last night.’
Tina rolled her eyes and withdrew her arm from around her friend’s shoulders. ‘So why are you crying? You’ve been wanting to sleep with him for ages.’
‘It was just a sympathy fuck.’ Jenna had emptied the contents of a sugar sachet on the table and was sifting the grains between her fingers. Tina looked across at Connie in confusion. Connie shrugged.
‘What’s a sympathy fuck?’
A sympathy fuck is when a straight guy lets you blow him or fucks you up the arse because he knows you are in love with him and he feels sorry for you—had she heard her father say this once or had she dreamt he had said it? Or was it something she thought he might likely have said?
Jenna didn’t answer Tina, she was busy playing with the sugar.
‘Jenna, what the hell do you mean?’
‘Have you got a cigarette?’
Tina shook her head.
‘I need a fucking cigarette. How much money have we got?’
The girls checked their pockets. After what they owed for the juices they had five dollars thirty cents between them.
Jenna stood up, and swung her schoolbag over her shoulder. ‘I’m going to rip some off now.’
They paid the bill and followed their friend through the mall. Jenna marched into the tobacconist but the woman behind the counter took one look at their uniforms and mouthed, Out, out.
‘Bitch.’
Connie debated taking off. Jenna had a foul temper and when she was in one of her moods she didn’t care what trouble she got herself or her friends into. She was almost running to the supermarket. When Connie and Tina caught up with her, Jenna was leaning over the unstaffed smokes counter. The girl at the nearest cashier was oblivious, serving a customer, an old giagia, who suddenly looked up disapprovingly, catching sight of what Jenna was doing. The old bitch pointed to the smokes counter and the cashier turned around. Connie pulled her friend back.
Jenna screamed at the girl. ‘Well, if you losers employed enough people I wouldn’t have to get them myself, would I?’ She then poked her tongue out to the old woman and added a few curses in school-yard Greek. The giagia pursed her lips in distaste. She had no teeth and so her mouth looked exactly like a shrivelled prune. Through the glass doors of the mall entrance Connie could see Lenin walking towards them, still in his school uniform, his untidy black curls bouncing around his head in time with his loping, gawky walk. The glass doors opened, he walked through and she called him over.
‘What’s up?’
Jenna swung around and glared up at him. ‘Have you got any fags?’
‘Nah. I don’t smoke. It gives you cancer and makes you impotent.’
‘Fuck off.’
Lenin looked at Jenna and then across to Connie.
‘What’s up with her?’
‘Can you get some?’
Lenin looked nervously across to the girl at the cashier. He nodded slowly. ‘I don’t start my shift for another fifteen minutes,’ he whispered. ‘Come back then.’
Jenna’s mood lifted immediately. She raised herself on her toes to kiss the boy, but even then Lenin had to stoop for her to reach his cheeks. Connie marvelled at his clear white skin. He had the palest skin she had ever seen. It was like milk. They watched him as he sauntered down the aisles to the storeroom out the back. His tall, thin body jerked sluggishly to a rhythm playing only in his head.
The girls wandered the mall, checked out the music shop and the pet shop. When they returned to the supermarket, Lenin was behind one of the registers in his soiled orange work vest, scanning a man’s groceries. His nametag sat lopsided on his chest.
Jenna called out to him and, without turning his head, he dropped something off the register shelf and kicked it towards them. A packet of cigarettes slid across the floor. Jenna stooped, pretending to tie her laces—which looked completely suss, thought Connie, since her runners had velcro straps—and picked up the smokes.
They blew a kiss to Lenin, who ignored them, and ran laughing across the carpark, up the rise of All Nations Park where they fell, giggling and panting, onto the bench at the top of the mound. They sat looking down at the city below. Jenna passed the smokes around. Connie looked at the gold packet, opened and shut the box, then took out a smoke and let Tina light it for her. The first gulp of nicotine and smoke tasted foul.
‘So, what is a sympathy fuck?’
‘A sympathy fuck is when someone sleeps with you because they feel sorry for you.’
Her father had said it. He’d said it to her mother. Her mother had been weeping, distraught, crying about some man, and her father was comforting her. Connie was painting with watercolours in the middle of the room. They must have been in the house in Islington that they shared with Greg and his boyfriend Clem, and Shelley and Joanne. She had loved that house even though it was cold and the hot water never seemed to work properly. It was full of places to hide—it even had an attic. She had three mothers and three fathers in that house.
Jenna seemed to smoke the cigarette in a few quick drags then threw the butt into the shrubbery. Connie resisted the urge to tell her off. Jenna knew what would happen to that butt. It would end up in the sea. She got up from the bench, picked up the butt and put it in the side pocket of her backpack. She’d dispose of it later.
‘I’m sorry.’
Connie dismissed the apology with a shrug. ‘Why do you think it was a sympathy fuck?’
‘Because all night all he could do was talk about Veronica. He’s still crazy for her. We were meant to be working on the prac but all he wanted to do was talk about Ronnie. Then his mum made us dinner and we went over to the park across the road from his house. He had half a pill from the weekend so we shared it and he talked some more about bloody Veronica. He was so sad. He was so sweet. I just had to kiss him.’
Tina and Connie were silent.
‘He said that I was his best friend. That we shouldn’t do anything. I told him I wanted him to fuck me.’ Jenna shook her hair defiantly and threw another cigarette to her mouth. ‘So we fucked.’
‘In the park?’ Tina sounded so shocked that both Jenna and Connie broke out in laughter.
‘No, we went back to his house.’
‘Where was his mum?’
‘I dunno.’ Jenna looked like she wanted to hit Tina. ‘Don’t be such a wog, bitch. She was probably asleep.’
‘He does know that Veronica’s with another guy, doesn’t he?’
Connie drifted. She nodded occassionally, but she had stopped following the conversation. Jenna had been in love with Jordan for years. On, off. On, off. She wasn’t quite sure if her friend really wanted a relationship with Jordan or preferred the drama and emotional pain of unrequited love. Did Jenna really know what lo
ve was, how much it hurt, how intoxicating it was, how sick it made you feel? Did she know that love was being drunk and stoned and sick all at the same time? Absent-mindedly Connie took another cigarette from the stolen packet and bent over for Tina to light it.
‘Was it good?’
Tina had never dated a boy, and was fascinated by sex. She wanted descriptions, intimate details. Jordan Athanasiou was probably the best-looking guy in their year. He had a great body without being at all sporty. Which they preferred. He always wore band T-shirts, The Cure or Placebo or the Pixies, and his skin was gorgeous. He was hot. All the girls thought so—even her aunt Tasha had drawn in a breath when she’d met him: My God, Connie, that boy looks like a young Elvis. Your father would have loved him.
Jenna started to cry again. Connie put her arm around her and Jenna curled into a ball and sobbed.
Connie stroked her friend’s hair while Tina whispered, ‘It’ll be alright. It’ll be alright.’
It was bitterly cold and Connie’s teeth had started to chatter. Jenna got up, dried her eyes, and blew her nose on her shirt sleeve.
‘Sorry’, she whispered to the girls, without looking at them. She sniffed. ‘So that’s why you have to come to the party. You have to.’
There was no getting out of it. They promised.
‘Nick Cercic was asking heaps of questions about you. Heaps.’
She and Richie were studying in her room. She was cross-legged on the floor and Richie was lying across her bed. He had thrown his shoes off and had his feet up against the wall, just under her photographs. He was looking at the picture of her mother and father, his book closed beside him. The last two buttons of his untucked school shirt were undone and she could see fine blonde hairs on his belly. Richie found concentrating hard. She always had to be the one getting him focused back on work. She ignored him. He twisted his head around and looked askance at her. ‘Did you hear me?’
‘I heard you.’
‘Do you like him?’