‘We’re applying for jobs at Maccas,’ I tell him.
‘I’ll put in a good word for you. We still have to fill this thing up with petrol and get it back to Crazy Dave. He’ll make us eat cockroaches if we don’t.’
None of us moves. ‘I can’t believe you threw eggs at Daisy on her birthday,’ I say.
‘You two have been hanging out since Year 10. You’ve known her since primary school. How do you not remember her birthday?’ Leo asks.
‘I try not to pay her too much attention. I figure if I do she’ll work out she doesn’t want to date me.’
‘That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard,’ Leo says, and I listen while he gives Dylan his women secrets. ‘Don’t ever throw anything at them. Every now and then, tell her something you’re thinking, even if it’s about the rain. Write her some poetry. And grow up.’
‘I can’t write poetry.’
‘I’ll give you one of mine,’ Leo says.
I get this lucky feeling leaning against that broken-down pink free love van listening to poetry. I got Dylan and Leo as friends. I had Bert. I try not to think about how I don’t have Lucy. At least Beth doesn’t hate me. That counts for something.
‘I better call Jake and tell him we messed up. See if he can come down here with petrol.’ Leo turns on his phone. ‘Shit.’ He checks his messages. ‘He’s texted me about fifty times.
Get away from the school. Don’t do the job.
Malcolm’s doing the job
.
I told him the code. Are you there, idiot?
I think my phone’s full,’ Leo says and dials Jake’s number.
‘It’s me.’ Leo listens and winces. ‘Sorry, Jakey. I’ll make it up to you. Really? No, don’t put her on. Don’t
.
Gran, hi.’ He winces again. ‘I had to pay for the poetry classes somehow. You don’t have the money; you’re living on the pension. Okay, I should have asked. No, I’m not coming home yet. I’ll be home when I’m ready. Okay. I’ll be home when you say I’m ready. When is that? Okay, that’s fair. I love you too, Gran. Can you tell Jake to come with petrol to the corner of Flinders Street and Swanson? He’ll see me. I’m kind of hard to miss.’
‘Good news?’ I ask after he’s hung up.
‘Not exactly good. Not exactly bad. But your nipples are safe. Turns out Malcolm paid Gran a visit. She caught him sneaking around the house with his bad men and hit him in the nose with her stick. The screaming woke Jake and his mates. Malcolm told them I owe five hundred dollars and Jake told Malcolm about the job as proof that I’d pay him later.’
‘Are we getting to the good news soon?’ I ask.
‘Jake drove Gran around to the ATM and she paid Malcolm five hundred dollars. Jake gave Malcolm the alarm code when she wasn’t listening to make sure things were really square between us. My debt is paid in full. Lucky we ran out of petrol, hey?’
‘I’m still out rent.’
‘Yeah, but we got a bright future at Maccas and you never wanted to do the job anyway.’
‘No, I didn’t,’ I say, and get that lucky feeling again.
‘Why didn’t you ask your gran for the money in the first place?’ Dylan asks.
‘Because I didn’t know she had five hundred dollars sitting in a savings account. And if I did I wouldn’t have wanted to take it from her.’
‘You’ll pay her back,’ I say.
He nods. ‘After Jake brings the petrol we can stop at Barry’s and grab food before we return the van.’
I wait around. We talk a bit. We yell some things at passing cars till Jake gets there. I don’t go to Barry’s, though. Leo drops me off at Beth’s on the way. ‘You’re early,’ he says.
‘I can wait if I have to.’
I don’t have to. I jump the fence and head to the tree and she’s already there. The sun’s not up yet but it’s coming soon. The world’s thinned to silence. I lean against the tree and the birds scatter. ‘I made them leave,’ I say.
‘They’ll come back.’
‘I want to tell you some things. I know Leo already told you but I want you to hear it from me.’ Anything else is the easy way and I’m tired of that. ‘I never read the Vermeer book. I know all about him because I went to exhibitions and watched documentaries but I never read about him. I left school because it got hard. I don’t have a job. I don’t have money. I’m Shadow. And I’m sorry I broke up with you the way I did.’
She leans in and whispers that she knew, that she missed me, that she doesn’t care if I have money or not. She traces the blue around my hands, traces the bits of sky left there.
Daisy, Jazz and I lie in the bushes near the Media block. ‘What’s the time now?’
‘Four o’clock,’ Daisy says, her eyes closed. ‘A minute later than the last time you asked me.’
‘We’ve been waiting here for over an hour. They’re not coming.’ Jazz stands and stretches her legs.
I look past her and see some shadows get out of a van, walk across the grass and crawl through a window. ‘They’re here.’
We move quietly and I get a tingle that I’m pretty sure comes from the thought of Ed, not the thought of illegal activity. We stand at the open window and Jazz sticks her head through and whispers, ‘Get out here, Leo.’ He doesn’t answer. ‘
Leo
,’ she says a bit louder. He still doesn’t answer. ‘They must be unplugging things in the computer room. I don’t want to go in there unless I have to. I’ll try calling his phone again.’
I keep watch while she dials. ‘Leo,’ she whispers. ‘You answered.’ She holds the phone out and we all crowd and listen.
‘Yeah, I answered. I’m sorry I ran before. Sorry I lied, too.’
‘We’ll talk about that later. For now, get out of the Media block before the police come.’
‘I’m not in the Media block,’ he says. ‘I’m at Barry’s having a burger.’
‘If you’re at Barry’s, then who’s in the Media block?’ she asks.
‘Jazz,’ Leo says, ‘get out of there. We’re coming but you need to run, right now.’
‘Hello, Lucy,’ Malcolm says, leaning his arms on the window. I look into his two black eyes.
‘Run!’ I scream.
We take the short cut around the girls’ toilets and past the staffroom. I’m running the fastest because I’ve had experience with Malcolm and, judging from his face, I can’t rule out that he doesn’t want to kill me.
‘Are they behind us?’ Jazz yells, and I tell her I don’t know; I’m not wasting time on looking.
‘Go, go!’ Daisy yells, and takes the lead. ‘I think they’re behind us.’ She keeps running and looks back and there’s no time to warn her. She smacks straight into the security guard and falls over. ‘Okay,’ she says, shaking her head. ‘That was unexpected.’
The security guard looks at us and we look at him and my future looks dim and then Jazz says in her most innocent voice, ‘Thank goodness we found you. We were taking a short cut through the school and noticed some men robbing the Media block. We told them we were calling the police and they started chasing us.’
It’s not exactly a performance worthy of a Golden Globe but he buys it. ‘Stay here,’ he says. ‘You might need to give a statement.’
As soon as he’s out of sight, we run again. I’ve seen enough of Malcolm Dove to last me the rest of my life. We don’t stop moving till we’re a couple of streets away from the school. ‘At least they decided not to do the job,’ Jazz says, the run still moving through her voice. ‘Things could have turned out way worse tonight.’
‘You got your action and adventure.’ Daisy leans against a fence. ‘And then some.’
‘I wouldn’t have minded a little romance.’ As Jazz says that a pink spot appears at the end of the street, moving through the night like a dot of sunrise in fast forward. It’s them, I think. It’s Ed.
It’s Ed and I’m finally going to have the chance to make things right. To tell him he’s smart and if he can’t read then there’s a reason. And if there isn’t a reason I still don’t care. I’m going to tell him that I’ve never had a better night than this, laughing and talking behind our hands. I’m going to say that I want to hang out with him today and tomorrow and the next day. And on one of those days I want to take him to Al’s studio and show him all the things I’ve made. Show him how glass works, how you can heat it and change it. How you can add colour. Show him how after you’re done and it cools, it becomes this beautiful thing that you’ve made.
‘Hey, you feel that?’ Jazz asks. ‘The change is here.’
‘At last,’ Daisy says. ‘I’m so sick of sweating.’
I hold out my arms and let the change float across my skin. The lightning never came in the end. Just the breeze. I feel like that
Winged Victory of Samothrace
sculpture that Mrs J showed me. It’s marble, held at the Louvre in Paris. A statue of the winged goddess, Victory. She lost her head along the way but she still looks triumphant. Half angel, half human, wings spread wide. I turn to Jazz. ‘I’m going to kiss Ed,’ I say, and she smiles.
The van pulls up and Leo and Dylan get out of the front. Leo walks over to Jazz and grins and in his grin I see what I didn’t see at the start. He really likes her. She gives him the serious finger. ‘I don’t date guys with prison records.’
I watch him take one of her plaits and twist it slowly. ‘I will not be going to prison,’ he says. ‘I’m thinking about growing up.’
I open the back door of the van, my zing re-reversing. ‘It’s empty.’
‘Because we decided not to rob the place,’ Leo says, still twisting Jazz’s plait.
‘But where’s Ed?’
Leo stops twisting and looks at me. Without him saying anything, I know Ed’s with Beth. ‘Good for him.’ I sit in the gutter. ‘Good for him.’ I lie on the footpath. ‘Good for him.’
Jazz lies next to me on the concrete. ‘I’m looking at the stars,’ I say.
‘Are you doing that thing where you try to feel small so your problems seem unimportant?’
‘Nope. I’m looking at them just because they’re not covered in smog. I want nothing else from them but to be in clear view.’
‘Are you having a breakdown?’
‘Nope. I’m upset. But at least I know the truth about Shadow. I’m pretty sure I know the truth about my parents. At least, I will when I ask them about the divorce this morning.’
‘I’m sorry I pushed you into tonight,’ Jazz says. ‘I’m a pushy friend. I’m always making comments about your mum and dad when I don’t even know them that well.’
‘You were right, though. Real is better. The truth is better.’ Painful, but better.
‘Is she okay?’ Leo asks.
‘She’s fine,’ Jazz says. ‘Come and join us on the footpath. We’re checking out the stars.’ We lie side-by-side and listen to Dylan and Daisy talking in the background.
‘I’m sorry I threw eggs at you on your birthday,’ he says.
‘Just write the date somewhere so you don’t forget it next year.’
‘Okay. What was the date yesterday?’
‘The nineteenth of October,’ we all shout.
‘So does this mean we’ll still be together next year?’ he asks.
‘It means you can be hopeful,’ Daisy tells him. ‘But you can’t lie to me again.’
‘If I can’t lie, you can’t call me stupid,’ he says.
‘That’s fair.’
He takes a piece of paper out of his pocket and reads. ‘If my like for you was a footy crowd, you’d be deaf cos of the roar. And if my like for you were a boxer, there’d be a dead guy lying on the floor. And if my like for you were sugar, you’d lose your teeth before you were twenty. And if my like for you was money, let’s just say you’d be spending plenty.’
‘You didn’t write that, did you?’ Daisy asks.
‘They’re my ideas. Leo made them rhyme.’
‘Good enough,’ she says, and puts the paper in her pocket.
I get up after a while and take my bike out of the back of the van. It’s a bit bingled but still in working order. I untie my helmet and put it on. I ride down the streets slowly, a cool wind on my skin. The glassy darkness will be gone soon and the day will be starting up. Birds go crazy and the world belongs to them for now. And to me. I ride from one side of the road to the other. I’m not thinking of last night as the time I got dumped for Beth. Or the time when I almost kissed Shadow. I’m thinking of it as an adventure. The start of something real.
5.30 am
Here
She says she’ll forgive me
She says just this one time
She says get on with it and kiss me
She says do that twirling thing with my hair
She says that was exactly what I was after
She says she’s glad the cool change has come
I say I’ll see her tomorrow
She looks at her watch and says
It’s here
While those birds fly I hold Beth’s hand. She stops whispering in my ear because she knows like I do that something’s different. That I came here to say sorry and to say that we’re really over. I can’t be with her if I’m thinking about Lucy.
‘At least I got to say goodbye. You were so awful when you left me.’