Cracked Page 5

  ‘They must have got married young, if Keek’s brother was seventeen when Keek was only seven . . .’ I calculate.

  ‘Yep, they were young. Now go on, off to bed!’

  ‘It’s horrible that Keek’s brother died.’

  ‘I can’t think of anything worse, now go.’

  In bed, I hear Mum take Lucille out for her before-bed toilet stop. It seems ages and they haven’t come in again. I pull back my curtain and see Mum’s outline through the window, another glass of wine in her hand, her other arm wrapped around herself, Lucille a dark lump leaning against her leg, and she’s just standing there looking up at the stars.

  As the need to smoke grows, Keek and I drift into the habit of going down the back during lunchtime. Before and after school too, depending on how many cigarettes Keek can pilfer. His mother is an excellent source because she buys them by the carton, but even so, he has to be careful and we have to make them last. There’s nothing worse than having no smokes. That makes your skin want to crawl off. In a way, I wish I’d never started. For one thing, I didn’t realise it was going to be so time-consuming.

  We sit on our customary logs. Keek blabs on about some bike comp he and Cho are training for, but I’m not listening. I’m thinking about my birthday. At twelve my body was like an outfit my mother bought without letting me try it on first. It looked like it should fit, but didn’t; I avoided being alone with it. Thirteen is way cooler than twelve, but scary, like being transported to another planet. But fourteen sucked. Fourteen was nowhere. Fifteen’s barely any better. I can’t wait to be sixteen. As I light my smoke, it occurs to me that I’m sucking in gas fumes from the lighter as well. And the gas was probably smashed out of the planet by fracking – as if plain old polluting isn’t enough, now they have to shatter the earth’s heart to pieces. They. Who are they? The question sticks like a heavy lump under my ribs: I’m the one using the lighter.

  ‘I wonder if I’m going to die soon?’ I say out loud. ‘With the gas fumes and everything.’ I don’t want to die being fifteen.

  ‘What the hell?’ says Keek.

  At the same moment, Sutcliff comes over the hill and busts us. I burst into tears.

  ‘Tears won’t help you,’ Sutcliff says, and marches us up the hill.

  Because our ‘disgrace’ has taken up most of the afternoon and they’ve organised some special parent-teacher meeting for tomorrow after school, we’re allowed to leave as usual at the end of the day. Most days it feels like forever, walking home. Suddenly it isn’t far enough.

  ‘Walk me to my house,’ I say.

  ‘Your mum will kill us.’

  ‘She’ll kill me less if you’re there.’

  ‘My dad’s going to spew.’

  ‘I’ll go with you to yours, if you like. If Mum’ll let me.’

  But that plan is redundant. Mr McKenzie is standing on my front porch, talking to my mother. It isn’t hard to tell that it’s Keek’s dad because he has the same red hair, but cut short and practically shaved on the sides with a trendy little peak on top. And there’s something about the way he stands that is exactly the way Keek stands when he’s at his locker and I watch him from across the hall.

  Besides all that, Keek says, ‘Shit, it’s my dad.’

  Keek’s dad and my mum. It’s weird. She’s looking up at him and her face seems open and light. I catch a glimpse of what she might’ve been like at high school. Her face changes when she sees me.

  Keek’s dad says, ‘Wow, Pen, she looks like you. Same cheerful expression.’

  My mother hits him with the back of her hand. ‘This is serious, Dave.’

  Why is my mother being . . . playful? She’s supposed to be mad as hell. And that’s not Aunty Jean or Yiayia she’s casually belting and laughing with at my expense. That is Mr Married McKenzie. Keek’s dad. Mrs McKenzie’s husband. I think of Keek’s mother asleep on the couch under her statues, and bristle.

  Pretending to ignore Mr McKenzie, I notice his face is different to his son’s. Longer, thinner, a different nose, but with the same blue eyes. ‘Is there any food?’ I ask my mother.

  ‘Clover, don’t be rude.’

  I meet Mr McKenzie’s eye. ‘Hello.’

  ‘Hello, Clover.’

  Keek says, ‘What’s up, Dad?’

  ‘Well, you tell me, Philip.’

  I have the flywire half-open and am dragging Keek inside, but Mum stops us. ‘Hang on. Dave and I have both had disturbing telephone calls from Mrs Sutcliff. It seems you two have been less than honest.’

  Mr McKenzie takes up the slack. ‘Cutting school, Phil? And that’s not the worst of it.’

  I have to sigh. I’d hardly consider missing PE to be ‘cutting school’.

  Mum out-sighs me. ‘Smoking.’

  What are they, a tag team?

  ‘It was our first time,’ Keek blurts. ‘We just wanted to try it.’

  I’m impressed.

  Mum is deeply suspicious. ‘Is that true, Clover?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Dave’ and ‘Pen’ raise their eyebrows at each other. ‘Dave’ says, ‘Well, I’ll take Phil home and we’ll see what we can sort out. I’m sorry it had to be this way, but it’s good to catch up, Pen. See you later, I hope.’

  Inside, Mum’s mood darkens considerably. ‘What the hell is going on? Are you smoking?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Tell me the truth.’

  ‘I’m not smoking.’

  ‘Then how is it that you’re suspended for three days because you’ve been caught smoking? Show me your bag.’

  ‘No way. That’s invasion of privacy.’

  ‘Yes, you’re probably right. Open your bag.’

  Luckily, Keek has the packet and she doesn’t plunder my pencil case where tonight’s smoke is stashed.

  ‘Satisfied?’ I say.

  ‘No, Clover. Worried to death maybe, but not satisfied.’ She marches into the kitchen. ‘Help me with these vegies.’

  While I’m peeling, she broods, chopping like a maniac. Finally, she says, ‘You know love, if you do smoke, there’s no way I can help you. I won’t be able to stop you from getting addicted.’ She fries onion and garlic in butter and the smell fills the kitchen, making me love her even though her voice is driving me crazy. ‘You do know that smoking is inexorably linked with lung cancer, premature ageing and a plethora of hideous diseases, don’t you? And that once you start it’s well nigh impossible to stop?’

  Plethora: my mother is well nigh an alien. ‘I only tried it once,’ I lie. ‘Sorry.’ She looks . . . lost. ‘Sorry, Mum.’

  Mum slides the vegetables off the chopping board into the pot and stirs them through the buttery onions. ‘Three days off,’ she muses with a heavy sigh. ‘That’s a good score.’

  Later, while I’m watching The Simpsons on our stupid little television, the phone rings. Mum answers it, still holding a wooden spoon.

  ‘Hello, Dave,’ she says. ‘This is a surprise. How did you go?’ She turns her back on the lounge, drags the phone down the hall and shuts the door for privacy. I guess they’re meant to be talking about us and the serious crime of smoking, but after a few minutes, she shrieks with laughter.

  I’ve gotten away with nearly an hour of television without her complaining about the quality of the dialogue or the evils of ads before she gets off the phone and says, ‘Oh, God, the soup’ll be mush, and turn off that crap! It’s appalling the way society ignores the detrimental impact of advertising, especially on attitudes to young women. Don’t be a sheep, Clover. The sexism—’

  ‘What were you talking to Mr McKenzie about for so long?’

  ‘What’s with the “Mr McKenzie”? His name’s Dave.’

  ‘What were you talking about?’

  ‘Oh, lots of things. School, mostly.’

  ‘Your school or my school?’

  ‘Both. Here, put this bread on the table.’

  ‘Is Keek in trouble?’

  Mum comes out with two steaming bowls. �
�You both are,’ she says.

  Keek can’t be in too much trouble: while my mum forced me to help her in the garden for the three-day duration of my suspension, his dad took him and Cho to Bathurst for some big bike-nut event.

  ‘Freestyle and flatlands,’ he tells me, back at school on Tuesday with his burnt nose and multiple scrapes and bruises. ‘And skate comps. And downhill.’

  ‘Lucky you,’ I say. ‘I’ve been doing hard labour in Guiltsville.’

  ‘They threatened not to let me go, but it was organised ages ago. Cho and I were both competing, remember?’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ I say, but I’m vague on the details. If I listen to everything Keek tells me about pushbikes, I’ll have a brain haemorrhage. ‘Anyway,’ I ask, ‘how was it?’

  ‘Awesome. Bikes, skateboards and more bikes – and music on the mountain on Saturday night. It was so good.’

  Beats dirt up your fingernails and being asked to admire the ‘generosity of spinach’. I try to squash the jealousy out of my voice. ‘That’s great.’

  ‘Even Dad had a go in the veterans’ race – got knocked out in the second eight, but still, he was pretty pleased with himself for qualifying.’

  ‘And Cho?’

  ‘Thrashed me on time and points, every time,’ he says ruefully. ‘I came fifth in my freestyle comp, but she won hers.’ He shakes his curls. ‘Girls get a bit of a hard time, you know, and not all of them do flairs and that, but Cho is fearless: she was awesome.’

  Yeah: awesome.

  ‘By the way,’ I shove a dog-eared paperback at him: Nick Cave’s And the Ass saw the Angel. ‘You can have this back. I hated it.’ We’ve been on an Australian fiction binge since we had to read Margo Lanagan for English.

  His forehead does a jig. ‘But it’s brilliant.’

  ‘It’s sick.’

  ‘Yeah – but sick in a brilliant way.’ A red flush creeps up his neck. ‘You really didn’t like it?’

  ‘Yes, I really didn’t like it.’

  ‘It’s better than Sorry.’

  I’m insulted. ‘Are you mad?’

  ‘You’re mad.’

  My tirade about Gail Jones’s book being a work of genius is surprised out of my mouth because Keek takes hold of my elbow and steps up close. ‘Listen,’ he says. ‘Let me teach you how to ride.’ His hand slides down my forearm to hold my hand. ‘Just ordinary pushbike riding.’

  I swallow and manage, ‘Okay.’

  ‘Awesome.’ He lets go. ‘Cho’s right: it’ll be so good for you.’

  I punch him in the arm. ‘Stop saying awesome.’

  ‘Awesome.’ He runs off, dodging and weaving up the crowding corridor, waggling the book over his head. ‘Awesome!’

  The next weekend Mum relents and lets me go down the bowl. ‘Promise me, no smoking,’ she says with her stern face on.

  ‘I told you, I—’ ‘Promise.’

  ‘I promise.’

  While I’m getting ready to go, my old Steiner-doll Lucy (named by me, after the dog) stares down balefully from where, around Year Five, I stuffed her onto my bookshelf to live. ‘It’s Mum’s own fault,’ I mutter. ‘She makes me lie to her.’ Steiner dolls are made of cloth and stuffed with fleece – Mum made mine when I was about two – and they don’t have fully formed faces: just little sewn eyes and a little sewn mouth. But that doesn’t stop them from having plenty of expression. ‘I have to,’ I tell the disapproving Lucy. ‘It’s not my fault she can’t handle the truth.’

  I snatch Lucy down. Her face is grubby and worn with a hole at the temple, but her no-nonsense short brown woolly hair and blue-jean legs are as robust as ever, even if her red top is a bit faded. I wonder if Alison’s still got Sallyann, the one Mum made for her because she loved Lucy so much. Probably not.

  I chuck Lucy in the bottom of my wardrobe and go out to meet Keek on the footpath.

  ‘New bike?’

  ‘No, it’s my mountain bike.’

  ‘I’m not getting on that thing.’

  ‘I’m going to teach you how to ride it, remember?’

  ‘No, you’re not.’

  He holds up a hand to stop my protests. ‘You said you’d try.’

  ‘Yeah, but—’

  ‘Come on, Clover, I can’t dink you forever: trust me, it’s not that hard.’

  I size up the bike suspiciously. ‘Right here?’

  ‘I think we should get away from the road – on the reserve.’

  We head off, Keek walking the bike as if it were a pet horse.

  On a stretch of flat grass behind the footy oval, Keek tries his best to teach me. I’m hopeless. Every time he lets go, I wobble and tip off-balance, hopping along on one leg and bashing myself with the bike frame.

  ‘Don’t steer with your hands,’ he says. ‘Relax and sort of steer with your butt.’

  I’m surprised by tears, creeping up on me. I’m not scared of his BMX anymore – it’s like an old friend compared to this . . . beast. And it’s nice to ride along feeling Keek’s, literally, got my back. I try again, wobble, hop to the side and drop the bike on the grass, banging the inside of my ankle with the crossbar. ‘Ow. I hate this bike.’

  He gives up. ‘You just don’t want to.’

  I sit on the grass to rub my ankle and wrestle back the sobs. ‘You don’t have to dink me. I can walk.’

  ‘It sucks riding as slowly as you walk.’

  ‘Well don’t bother then.’

  ‘I won’t.’ And he snatches up the bike and rides off, leaning forward, standing on the pedals.

  It takes me about half an hour to realise he’s not coming back.

  Walking home past the oval, Robbo calls out, ‘Had a fight with your boyfriend, Jones?’ I’m so annoyed, I even feel pissed off with Rob Marcello.

  ‘He’s not my boyfriend,’ I snap, but as Rob runs up to the boundary and leans on the metal piping fence it’s as if all the angry air is sucked out of me and replaced with fairy floss.

  ‘Is that right?’ he says.

  ‘That’s right.’

  Rob bounces on the spot, his knees as high as my waist.

  ‘And how’re things going with you and Rosemary?’ I ask.

  ‘Daniels?’ Rob stops bouncing and stretches his thighs. ‘Nothing going on with me and Daniels.’

  Someone from his knot of friends calls, ‘Come on you lazy prick,’ and he winks at me and runs back to their social match. I watch for a while, but even though he looks my way a few times, he doesn’t come and talk to me again.

  I’m bored and as Mum’s always telling me, life’s too short for bad moods. I ring Keek.

  ‘I’ll walk faster.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid.’

  ‘I’m not being stupid.’

  There’s a silence.

  ‘Have a nice complain about me to your boyfriend?’

  I feel my face heat up. ‘What boyfriend?’

  ‘Neanderthal man.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid.’

  ‘I’m not being stupid.’

  The space between us on the phone is like a vortex, sucking us into oblivion.

  ‘You’d be independent,’ he says. ‘It would make your life heaps easier.’

  ‘No, it would make your life heaps easier.’

  ‘Why don’t you want to learn to ride a bike?’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘You can.’

  ‘I have no balance.’

  ‘You would if you didn’t keep freaking out.’

  ‘I’m going to freak out now if you don’t shut up about it.’

  There’s another silence. Mum pokes her head into the hall. ‘You okay?’ she mouths. I nod and she disappears.

  ‘What are you doing now?’ he says.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Want to come out?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘I’ll come and get you.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘I swear, I won’t try and teach you anything.’

  I stop to kiss Mum on my way out. ‘Don�
�t forget you’ve got exams coming up,’ she says. ‘A little study wouldn’t go astray, so not too late.’

  ‘Yes, Mother,’ I groan.

  When Keek arrives, he shows me the pegs he’s fitted on either side of the front wheel. ‘They should make it more comfortable,’ he says.

  I could kiss him, but settle for a hug. ‘Thanks, Keek.’

  ‘Yeah, well,’ he embarrassedly wriggles out of my hug. ‘Just until you get a bike of your own.’

  It’s only the beginning of November, but radiant heat from the hot concrete where we’ve been lying sends us down to the shady creek.

  ‘I’ll race you,’ I yell, and run.

  Without even working up a sweat, he and his bike are too quick for me.

  A path runs through the trees. I think in the old days it led up through the grassy reserve, but now it’s blocked by a fallen tree and a dismantled fence of old poles, like the one around the footy oval. A narrow track leads around the blockade into the dwindled forest: a stand of trees that stretches for about eight kilometres until the creek empties through a giant concrete pipe into the Yarra and, presumably, down to the sea. Mum and I followed it to the pipe a few times when Lucille was young and thrived on a long walk. I’d almost forgotten that the dog used to run everywhere at top speed and leap effortlessly into her chair; now she can barely manage it without a leg-up.

  The path is overgrown with ivy and crisscrossed with peeling bark from the old gums – not old-growth forest, but venerable in their own way – sprinkled through with ferns, wattles, spiky native currant trees and blackberries.

  We push through to the water’s edge. It’s another world, of tree ferns and mossy logs, the water over the rocks cold and daring us to drink. It’s cool, though sunlight filters through the green, and quiet in a different way, like stepping into the past. We sit on a hoary long-ago fallen tree that juts almost to the other bank. Birds flit between branches and chorus in a strange jazz rhythm. The bubbling water sings too, swirling over rocks and stagnating in blackly shadowed pools dammed by bark, waterlogged sticks and an ugly smattering of rubbish. Upstream, an old kitchen chair looks surprised, as if it just tumbled in, its rusty legs angled skyward.