‘I was about to say the same about you,’ I said.
‘All the important things about me are the same, Jewel,’ True replied. ‘And I’m sure all the important things inside you are the same as well. But, yes, I’m different. I’ve grown up, and you have too.’ She wasn’t looking at me, and she licked her lips. Was she nervous?
I looked True over. ‘You could belong in an ad about teeth-whitener. One of those brush-on ones, you know them?’
‘It’s not about the way people look,’ she said, shaking her head, a small smile on her lips. ‘And besides, you look like you should be playing bass in a punk band.’
‘Oh, yeah,’ I said. ‘Did I tell you how I’m way hardcore now?’
She laughed and shook her head again. I laughed too. I ate another biscuit. I felt electric with nervous energy.
‘Pink is still my favourite colour.’ True smiled properly now. ‘You know, if you want reassurance that I’m still the same person.’
‘I’d be happier if you still liked colouring books and dressing up Baby Born.’
‘Baby Born is creepy,’ said True. ‘And I hate the fact that there are way more white babies than black babies. That’s statistically incorrect, as well as racist. And there are way more girls than boys. What’s with that?’
‘We should write up a petition.’
She nodded. ‘Agreed.’ With each passing second, True seemed more and more like the little-girl True I had known.
‘I expected you’d become something to do with writing, you know,’ I said.
‘Really?’
I nodded. ‘Yeah. But not a journalist. I didn’t think you’d get into factual writing. Something that deals less with the concrete facts. Like a poet or a novelist.’
‘Maybe. Maybe one day.’ She smiled again. ‘What about you? Any creative endeavours?’
‘Obviously the drawing.’ I held up my sketchbook, and then brought out the drawing of Geraldine. ‘Hey, could you give this to your mum?’
True took it and looked at it. Her brow furrowed as she inhaled sharply and stared at it. Then she handed it back to me and looked down at the embroidery on the tablecloth.
‘I think you should give it to her the next time you see her,’ said True. ‘I think it’ll be better if you give it to her directly.’ She smiled at me and looked down again, tracing her finger over the embroidery. I sensed that she was going to say something else, so I concentrated on putting the sketch back in my sketchbook.
Then True looked up, looked directly at me. I tried not to look away from her. She didn’t blink.
‘That’s amazing, Jewel. Really amazing.’
I’m not good at taking compliments, so I just murmured ‘Thank you’ and concentrated on my sketchbook.
We sat and talked for a little while longer and, though it was a stilted and awkward conversation, it was still nice.
I left when the sun was starting to go down. Geraldine hadn’t come home yet.
‘I’ll see you at school,’ True said at the door. ‘Look after yourself.’
I caught a bus to the other side of the suburb, and walked home from the bus stop with an overpowering sense of déjà vu catching me at every corner, and an intense longing for my childhood washing over me in waves.
When I turned into my street, I stopped, because I saw Sacha Thomas standing outside my house.
He was halfway down the tree-lined avenue, on the footpath outside our low fence—he was cradling a garden gnome. The light dipped through the trees, the afternoon sun flushing gold across the smooth nature-strips.
Sacha Thomas, standing on the footpath outside my house, holding a garden gnome.
It was like one of those weird dreams you have before waking and nothing makes sense and you very often cut people up and make them into soup.
Or is that just me?
Sacha Thomas—the same boy I dragged from the lake and resuscitated; the same boy True Grisham told me had been her only friend in the years since I’d left; the same boy who liked me, according to the ridiculously tall one, Little Al (not that I take seriously what ridiculously tall strangers say to me in regards to people whose lives I’ve saved, but it is worth noting all the same).
It was creepy, but it was also intriguing.
Instead of storming over there and demanding to know what he was doing, I watched him. Which made me a creep, I guess, but I was kind of beyond that. For the past decade I’d taken it upon myself to make people feel uncomfortable.
He was so thin that a drawing of a stick figure probably would have been an accurate portrait of him, and so short—taller than me, naturally, but that was no accomplishment—that I understood why I’d thought he was younger than me the other night by the lake.
Then he glanced at me (he had the sort of face that old poets would have written sonnets about, if he’d been alive in Elizabethan times and the apprentice of a gay bard), caught my gaze for a moment, and dropped the gnome.
He stepped back quickly, looked down. The gnome had broken into chunks of ceramic and danced out across the footpath. I cringed at the noise. He looked at me, and bit his bottom lip. He looked like a wounded bird. He looked like a wounded bird that had just smashed somebody’s garden gnome.
My
garden gnome. Or at least my family’s garden gnome.
Not that there was much family left.
I started walking towards him, and I saw him swallow. Then he knelt to pick up the gnome. One, two, three, four pieces. He stood up, clutching them, avoiding eye contact with me.
When I stopped in front of him, he looked at me through his fringe. His hair was light blond and thin.
‘Is this yours?’ he asked.
He held the pieces of gnome out and our fingers touched for a second. His hands were clammy.
‘Was,’ I said, ‘I guess.’ I nodded towards the house. ‘That’s my place.’
‘It’s nice,’ he said, looking at my faux-sandstone House of Painful Memories. ‘Sorry ’bout the gnome.’
There were tiny bits that had fallen off the larger chunks of ceramic and were now littering the footpath. Not worth gluing back together.
Our rubbish bin was still out on the curb after the rubbish collection that morning. I stepped over to it and dropped the gnome inside.
‘I didn’t know this was your house,’ he said. ‘I’m not stalking you.’
He sounded genuine, but, you know, stalkers
always
sound genuine. I wanted to say that to him, make a joke. But I didn’t. I turned towards him and we were silent for a few moments.
Then I asked, ‘Would you like to go out for coffee with me?’ In this light, cheery tone that came from nowhere. Not a hint of monotone sarcasm.
He paused and looked at me, perhaps trying to judge whether or not I was serious. And his eyes were like hollow stars, the way they sparkled, such a pale grey that it didn’t seem like he had irises at all.
He mumbled, ‘I don’t drink coffee.’
I smiled. ‘Me either. I should have asked if you’d like to go for a hot chocolate.’
‘You mean now?’ he asked.
I nodded.
‘All right.’ He smiled uncertainly. ‘And, um, sorry about the gnome.’
‘You already said that. Don’t worry about it. I’ll drop by Bunnings later.’ Not that I’d ever been to Bunnings Warehouse in my life, but, hey, why the hell not? I could get run over by a forklift there and end this farcical existence of mine.
But, standing there with that bizarre boy, I didn’t want to be run over by a forklift.
Instead, I wanted to have coffee, or hot chocolate, with the garden gnome thief, the boy whose life I had saved.
The replacement gnome would have to wait.
I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t thinking about sex.
But before you go assuming I was some kind of pervert (which I wouldn’t blame you for assuming: I was beginning to be suspicious of it myself ), there was more to it than that, so much more.
Somehow—I was having a freaky out-of-body experience at the time and didn’t quite recall how—Jewel took me to a little smoky café under the haberdashery, the little smoky café that no one can remember the name of and probably breaks all kinds of health regulations.
A tall, broad-shouldered woman wearing a deconstructed Che Guevera T-shirt (it was slashed to the point where I had trouble making out ‘Revolution’) sashayed across the room, handed us a couple of menus and told us to sit wherever we wanted.
There were a few people seated at tables, some smoking, most wearing clothing rarely seen in the respectable outer eastern-suburbs. One man looked like he was wearing a sack.
The walls were painted a deep green; incense was burning. A guy played guitar in a corner, at the same time having a heated discussion with a woman who had short, spiky grey hair. It would have been homely if not for the cigarette smoke.
Though I felt like we were intruding (we could have been in someone’s lounge room, not a place of business), Jewel sat down in an armchair, dropped her bag at her feet and gestured for me to sit opposite her. There was a low table between us. She looked at the menu—handmade paper with vegan dishes and no prices scrawled on it—and I looked at her.
I was very surreptitious about it, naturally.
I was thinking how strangely beautiful she was, and why she’d asked me out for coffee.
I was thinking about leaning over and tucking her hair behind her ear.
I wanted to hit myself for being such an idiot.
She coughed.
‘You all right?’ I asked.
‘Yeah.’ She smiled. ‘It’s just a little smoky.’
I wanted to touch her lips. They were lovely.
Do you see what I mean about thinking about sex? This was the closest I’d ever been to a girl who wasn’t True Grisham (True Grisham, who, in spite of her beauty and intelligence, I wasn’t attracted to in the least. It’s a mystery—maybe it was the height difference, or just the fact that we’d been friends since primary school).
And, I don’t know, there was something so special about Jewel Valentine. A strange sort of fierceness in her eyes, her fingernails trimmed so short, plain silver studs in her ears, and no make-up, like she couldn’t care less.
Every feature of hers was beautiful and unique.
We ordered organic fair-trade soy-milk hot chocolates, because nothing else but coffee was available. When the tall woman with her cut-up T-shirt put them on the table, and I leant forward to pick mine up, my fingers brushed Jewel’s. And my heart wanted to leap out of my chest. I kept on tapping my toes nervously.
It was scaring me, this intensity I was feeling over a near-stranger—a beautiful near-stranger who saved my life, but a near-stranger all the same.
The hot chocolate was, as promised, hot, but too hot, and I scorched the inside of my mouth. When it did cool down, my tastebuds were still burnt, and I couldn’t taste it at all. Not that I could have tasted anything in the state I was in.
The guitarist stopped playing, and was replaced by music that sounded vaguely Bollywood. A few more people wearing interesting hats and op-shop clothes came in.
They smiled at us—Jewel and me, the too thin and the too short one. I felt stupid, sitting there in my school uniform, but Jewel made hers look like a costume—like she wasn’t really a schoolgirl, just dressed like one for fun.
‘Thank you,’ I said to her, trying to break the silence between us.
I wasn’t sure whether the silence was awkward or easy, but I wanted to say something, in case she decided I was boring.
Which I was, but I lied to myself and told myself I could fool her.
She smiled and, after a pause, said, ‘So, you and garden gnomes?’
I didn’t expect that. I probably should have. Maybe she’d only invited me out for hot chocolate because she liked freaks. Should I play it up or play it down?
I wasn’t going to stick with the truth. The truth was worse than anything. I could lie and say I was gay and had a long history of dating older men who resembled garden gnomes, and that would be better than the truth.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Garden gnomes. What do
you
steal for a hobby?’
She smiled again, eyes flickering from her drink and up to me. I wanted her to keep smiling at me.
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I’m actually quite a fan of plastic pink flamingos. We should start a garden-ornament thieves support group?’
I laughed. ‘So, do you have a real hobby?’
She sobered a little. ‘I like to draw.’ She seemed reluctant to divulge this, cringing after she’d said it, like she was afraid of how I might react.
She went to continue, the words on her lips, but she stopped and looked down, suddenly shy.
Confused but curious, I filled the quiet. ‘Could I see something you’ve drawn?’
She smiled at me. ‘Maybe. One day.’
I wasn’t sure whether this was good or bad.
Beside the table, I could see the edge of what might have been a sketchbook, but it could also have been one of her schoolbooks, peeking out the top of her satchel.
I leant forward and pulled it out, waving it at her, teasing. It was a sketch book.
She leant over and tried to snatch it back. She looked nervous.
‘There’s no problem if I have a look, is there?’ I let her take it.
She sat there, staring at it, weighing it in her hands. Then she stood up and walked around, perched on the arm of my chair and handed it to me, her face blank.
I opened it and began to turn the pages.
There were portraits and nudes and sketches in charcoal and grey-lead. Sparse lines created the images, nothing out of place, everything perfectly in proportion.
They were amazing.
I looked up at her. She leant in, scrutinising each drawing, her mouth open in concentration, and her hair fell across her shoulder and brushed my cheek. She was so close, but not touching.
‘These are amazing,’ I said. ‘Or did I just say that?’
She half-smiled, then suddenly she drew back when she noticed me looking at her. ‘Thank you,’ she said in a neutral voice.
Our fingers touched again as she took the sketchbook, closed it and slipped it into her bag.
She sat down again and picked up her hot chocolate.
A loose leaf of paper had fallen out of the sketchbook. I glanced at it before I held it out to Jewel.
‘That looks exactly like my friend’s mum,’ I said.