Nine Days (22 page)

That’s what I’m thinking about when, in that fading light in the empty street, I leave her alone for just a moment. No one can see us up this street, even if I yelled my lungs out. I’ll walk as far as the corner, maybe fifty feet away, to find someone who could lift her by one arm while I took the other. To get her on her feet, home to her own bed. I tell her I’m leaving, and to be good until I get back. It’s hot but I’m shaking and I run, then I look up and down Swan Street at the people rushing home, hats held down against the blustering wind. I’m only going to be gone for a minute. That’s the only reason I leave her.

PICTURE THIS: Punt Road at twilight. Leaves blowing along the gutters, bumper shining against bumper, flattened light coating everything in its milky glow. Cars filled with people going home to the bosom of their loving families. The vermillion of glossy paintwork, the emerald of the trees around the oval. Above me the clouds are free, coasting, boasting to the earth of their fluffiness, drifting home with the traffic. Way overhead is a minuscule jet going somewhere better than here. Peace is far away.

Yet here I am. Away from home in a world of strangers. Alone. Forgotten.

I am sitting on the footpath between the pub and the brothel, leaning against a white picket fence. I make a square
from my fingers and hold it up to frame a tree, the edge of a building, the train tracks on the bridge. A futile attempt at composition. I have no easel, no sketchbook. Not even my backpack. I left in such a hurry I brought nothing with me. Nothing except the shutter of my eyelids, the nubbed pencil of my memory.

If I had a mobile I could call the guys and find out where they are, but I, of course, do not have a mobile. Charlotte won’t let me, because Charlotte lives in fear of brain-melting death rays and, more to the point, is intent on making me a leper. Lep. Per. For all intensive purposes, I already am. My foot might as well drop off right here in front of the Cricketers’ Arms.

The guys are probably going out to have actual fun, something Charlotte has never heard of and wouldn’t approve of if she had. Maybe they’re at the movies. Or at Tim’s playing Xbox in the garage. Tim, who has a mobile phone of his own that he doesn’t even pay for. Tim, who has a mother who owns a car that she parks on the street especially to leave the garage free for him and his big brother; a garage that contains a ping-pong table under which he hides the beer his brother buys him.

Dude,
Tim said, when I told him I couldn’t go out tonight.
Bummer.

When I left Rowena Parade this afternoon, Charlotte was all
don’t you dare walk out on me Alec don’t you dare.
She is ruining my life.

Charlotte, in contrast to Tim’s mother who is cool, walks into my room like it’s her own personal property. No knock,
no
can I come in,
no nothing. She won’t even let me have a lock on the door, not that a lock would keep Charlotte out. An iris scanner might do it. That would be wicked, actually. That would even stop Libby. Maybe I can install one myself; how hard can it be? Maybe they have them at Bunnings or Stewart’s or one of those hardware behemoths.

I look at my watch, the symbolic shackle that marks me as the only person in the universe without a mobile phone— though if I did have one, she’d be on it the whole time telling me to come home and set the table for dinner.

Stanzi, on the other hand, would never call. Stanzi understands that I’m almost seventeen and practically a fully fledged adult. Soon I’ll have my learner’s, then in a couple of years, hello freedom. I’ll be off like a shot, just watch me. It’s not logical, the way Charlotte behaves. In two years I’ll be making all my own decisions anyway: it’s patiently obvious she should let me get some practice. I pass all my subjects and top the class in art. I’m not a cone head. No arrests for shoplifting. It’s not like she’s got anything to worry about.

The sun is going down and part of me wants to keep walking. Head down to Richmond Station and hop a train, see where it leads me, watch the landscape reveal itself. Mountains and rivers and deserts and oceans. This waiting for my life to start, it’s driving me mental. I stand and begin walking up the hill. It’s time to go home.

When I come through the front door, it’s almost six. Libby is standing near the dining-room table, which is pulled into the middle of the room and extended full length. She’s polishing knives and forks and spoons and placing them upright in chipped metal jugs that Charlotte found scouring op shops the length and breadth of Bridge Road because everything we own has to be secondhand so we can be marked as freaks in front of the whole neighbourhood. Also on the table is a pile of cloth napkins of different colours weighted down with a smooth rock. An actual rock, from near the Yarra at Abbotsford. Charlotte Westaway, eco-warrior.

‘Muuuum,’ yells Libby. ‘He’s baaaack.’

‘World Sucking Champion 2006 strikes again,’ I say. ‘I can see why you’re so popular with the boys.’

She turns a plum colour. ‘You absolute prick,’ she whispers, so Charlotte can’t hear. ‘I’ve been stuck here for hours.’ She holds up her fingers in front of my face. ‘I had to peel two tonnes of potatoes. Two. Tonnes. By. Myself. Look at my cuticles. Look at them.’

‘Cry me a river, Justin friggin’ Timberlake.’ She’s turning puce now. I can see the fires of rage burning behind her eyes. I wave my hand in front of my face. ‘Is that smoke coming out of your ears? Libby? I’ve warned you about trying to think before. Quick someone, call triple zero, her neurons are melting.’

She gnashes her metal teeth. ‘This is so unfair. I would
never
get away with that. It’s just because you’re a boy.’

What does she expect me to do? Crawl into the feeble position and beg forgiveness? I shrug. ‘That’s just the way the
chromosome crumbles, Transformer-mouth.’

Libby gives me her
fuck off and die
look. I go upstairs to my room and lie on the bed and take out my sketch pad ready for the face of maternal fury which should appear at my door with digital precision. Yup. After exactly three minutes, the door opens.

‘Come in,’ I say.

‘Don’t you ever do that again,’ Charlotte says. ‘Run off while I’m in the middle of talking to you.’

‘Yes, Charlotte.’
I shall stay here forever, waiting for your command, at your beckon call my queen.

‘And don’t call me Charlotte.’

‘Yes,
Mother.’

‘And why do you have to be so mean to your sister? She’s fourteen years old. She looks up to you. And take your shoes off before you lie on the bed. That doona cover doesn’t wash itself.’

I kick my Converses off and they thud on the floor. ‘Anything to oblige, guv’nor. But I was back in time for roll call. Did the other inmates miss me?’

She shuts her eyes and then her lips start moving. Silent counting, her latest anger-management technique. Or, actually, Alec-management technique. I do a rough sketch in about eight seconds. I’ve seen that face a zillion times before. I can fill in the details later: the colours, the way the edges of her eyes and nostrils flare, the way her face looks like Stanzi’s and mine and only a bit like Libby’s, who has Ben’s eyes. The ways we are all the same, the ways we are different. When she’s finished counting she opens her eyes.

‘Go downstairs and help your sister set the table. They’ll be here in half an hour.’

‘No thanks. I think I’ll stay up here in my room and play with my Xbox. Oh. That’s right. I don’t
own
an Xbox. Never mind. I’ll watch TV in my room instead. Oh, that’s right. I’m not
allowed
a TV up here. Even when I offer to get a job and pay for it
myself.
On account of I live in
Nazi Germany.’

‘I’ll make you a deal. When you’re an adult, you can do whatever you want. You can play computer games twentyfour seven if you like. Shower once a year to celebrate Joss Whedon’s birthday. Pee into a bottle.’

‘Good. I might just do that. But the first thing I’ll do, the second I turn eighteen, is get a tattoo. A big one. Right here.’ I make a fist, roll up my sleeve and trace the outline on my tricep.

‘Yes, that would be smart. Ten years ago you wanted a Dorothy the Dinosaur stuffed toy more than life itself. People change, Alec. A tattoo, that’s for the rest of your life, you understand?’

You understand?
Like I don’t, like I’m an idiot. ‘I’m not afraid of making decisions that affect the rest of my life.’ Unlike her, the quintessential woman afraid of commitment. Ipso facto, two children, no boyfriend.

She turns and walks to the door. ‘Stanzi,’ she yells. ‘Come and talk to your nephew before I stuff him in a cardboard box and mail him to the starving children in Africa.’

‘You’ll need a big box. He doubles in height on a weekly basis,’ Stanzi yells back from downstairs. ‘What are the starving children supposed to do with him?’

‘Whatever they like,’ Charlotte says. ‘Target practice. Protein supplement. Scaring off wild animals. I’m not fussed.’

Starving Africans. Another epic bout of predictability from Charlotte Westaway, the last of the bleeding hearts. Case and point: when we were little she brought home lost kittens and baby birds that fell out of nests. She cries when she sees those swollen-stomach babies on the news.

On her way downstairs, Charlotte’ll cross paths with Stanzi, who also comes when she’s called. If she was in the middle of donating a kidney, she’d still come running. That’s because both of them are terrified that Libby or me will suddenly think:
Wait a minute! I don’t know how we didn’t notice this before now, but…we don’t have fathers!
I mean, I have a hairy old blues musician who lives on an avocado farm near Mullumbimby and sends me birthday cards at random times of the year, and Libby has some hot-shot Singaporean software designer who has this whole other family that she visits for two weeks in the Christmas holidays, but that’s it. Charlotte and Stanzi fill every gap, answer every question. The perfect parental tag team. The smother mothers.

Charlotte will be going down slowly, at peace with the world (except me). I can hear Stanzi running up the stairs, two at a time, as if she doesn’t burn enough kilojoules jogging around like a maniac all day. Why anyone would want to be a personal trainer is beyond me, especially when all her clients are depressed fat people, yet she’s just busting to spend more energy running up the stairs whenever Charlotte yells. What Stanzi has is a fatal failure of the imagination. There is no other possible explanation for why she lives here.

Since the door is already open, Stanzi doesn’t knock either. She doesn’t look around my walls, which are covered in fluoro colours and tags and sweeping shapes left over from my graffiti phase. Pretty good ones actually but still, kind of lame. I need to repaint, if ever I have a minute to myself. Stanzi walks in and spreads herself across the bottom of the bed the way she did when I was little. She’s already in her party clothes: a sequined black dress made from artificial fibres that requires drycleaning on a regular basis. I suspect she does this just to piss Charlotte off. One of the reasons I like her.

‘What’s up, kiddo?’

I groan. ‘You mean apart from my mother bringing me up Amish?’

‘Those black hats, though—so practical. As far as UV protection goes.’ She stretches out on her back, arms and legs reaching to the walls. ‘Hey, you know what would bring out your manly features? A chin beard. Here. Hold still.’ She reaches down to the floor where my pastels are lying and picks up the black one. She wields it with what is intended to be a demonic cackle.

I roll away. She doesn’t understand what I have to content with. ‘Do I get a choice in this house? Ever? Did anyone ask me if I wanted to go to a stupid anniversary dinner on a Saturday night when everyone else in the known universe is out having a life?’

‘It’s very important to your mother. I think she’s planning to reveal that we’re the descendants of a long-lost branch of the Russian royal family. It is time, Tsar Alecovitch, we take back the throne.’

‘It’s not funny.’ I throw myself face down in my pillow. ‘It’s like living in the middle ages. It’s a wonder I have any friends at all. The guys probably think I’m a total freak.’

‘That’s good, isn’t it?’ She throws the pastel up in the air and catches it without even looking. Her hand—eye coordination is awesome. ‘I bet all the kids who went to school with Jackson Pollock thought he was a nutbag.
Who does he think he bloody is? Constable?’

‘I guess.’

‘It’s a bitch, isn’t it, being your age? I know. Hormones, girls, school, friends, pressure. It’s a right pain in the arse.’

‘As if you remember. When you were sixteen, pains in the arse were cured by leeches.’

‘Ha. De. Ha.’ She stands. ‘Are you coming down or not?’