“Frankly, Cheryl,” said Mum, slapping the book shut, “I just couldn't be bothered.”
She poured herself a glass of Fruity Lexia from the cask and clicked the handle on Dad's recliner and put her legs up. She lit a cigarette and clicked the remote control.
“Well,” said Aunty Cheryl, “what the hell's going to happen to these other two? This one here?”
She grabbed me and I became an example.
“This one spends half her days down the creek like a wild thing. Look at her feet.”
She lifted my feet, which were dark brown. She pulled back my bangs to reveal my eyes. Mum looked at me, then up at the ceiling.
“Why don't you try losing one,” she said quietly.
“She's gone,” said Aunty Cheryl.
“Don't tell me that like I don't know,” howled Mum.
Kylie, on the sofa, crossed her arms and started to cry.
Because I was finished being the example I went down the hallway and into my room, where Danielle was lying on her bed crying, and I got the hammer that I had been smashing marbles with and I got my Bionic Woman doll out of the Barbie doll box and I smashed her head in. Her head didn't smash very well because she was made of very strong plastic. It just kept bouncing back into shape and that made me even angrier.
“Stop it,” said Danielle.
She covered up her face with her hands and sobbed. And for the first time I wondered why they could put Jamie Sommers back together again but not just an ordinary girl like Beth.
The worst thing about secrets is that if you let them sit for long enough they grow up and have a life of
their own. If you turn your back on them you can get a very big fright when you turn back. When I didn't tell on Beth from the very beginning it became harder and harder to do it later, even when everything was going wrong. I tried to threaten her.
“I'm going to tell on you,” I said when, for instance, I thought it was Marco she was sneaking out to at night.
I had spent so many afternoons in front of the house on Amiens Road. So many afternoons when I could have been collecting facts about one thousand different topics and reading volume 3 of the
Merit Students Encyclopedia,
which so far was my favorite and which began with “bat” and ended in “Cairo.” I was still angry.
“Don't,” she said. She grabbed me by the arm. “Please.”
She had grown paler. Her hair had changed to the color of white sand. Her freckles had faded into her skin. Her eyelashes touched her cheeks when she closed her eyes against the glare. She had bright red nail polish, which was chipped. She chewed on it between drags on her cigarette on the back stairs.
“You don't even know what I'm telling on you about,” I said.
She didn't care.
There are three different types of tattling. In the first type you are actually looking for something to
tattle on a person for. As soon as they commit the crime, something as simple as burping and not saying excuse me, you walk casually to the nearest grownup and tell. It usually makes you feel good afterward.
The second kind is when you know someone has done something wrong, for instance thrown a rock through the glass window of the drive-in picture theater's ticket box. You have to decide whether to tell a grown-up or not. Mostly this is because someone may have been watching and seen you in the same general area and you would like to make clear that you weren't involved.
The third is the much worse kind, when you know a terrible secret. A secret that is much worse than breaking a window or even maybe starting a small grass fire. And then being asked, begged, to keep the secret.
This is because secrets are terrible things.
Even the simplest ones.
For instance when in winter Angela whispered in my ear, “Tina Litvin wears her undies on the outside of her stockings, it's a secret, pass it on,” then all day I had to think about it. The secret grew and grew inside my mind. Why did she wear her underpants on the outside of her stockings? Was it because her parents were from Estonia? Was Angela telling the truth or just spreading a very bad rumor? Had she really seen the underpants on the outside? How could I get
to see Tina's underpants to verify the fact other than to ask her to do a handstand, which are banned on the playground? Was Angela telling the truth when she said Estonia wasn't really a country but a place like Disneyland where you have to pay for a ticket to enter?
Big secrets are catastrophic. However hard you try to hide them and forget them they bob to the surface and you must go over them again and again. They are taken out and touched so often they become worn smooth as a river stone. You have to carry them around inside you like a baby. The secret grows until you feel like all you are is a skin that covers it, a thin skin, easily split, ripe.
“Tell me what you are going to tell on me about then,” Beth said.
I could have told on her about how she got the bruise, about the house on Amiens Road, about the drinking on the hill. That would just be for starters.
“I will tell on you,” I answered.
I even did some Kylie fist clenching.
“Jenny,” she said.
I knew her secret of finger crossing.
First, only with one hand, for good luck. She did that when she spoke to people. When she said hello. As though something terrible might happen. All of a sudden. And later, with two fingers crossed on both hands. That was to save the doomed. I knew it. I'd
seen it. When she took her seat beside Uncle Paavo at the table she double-crossed her fingers and sat on them.
I knew the secret of her disappearing parts.
Her shedding of skins.
At night when the streets were still, emptied of all the people and all their noise, she changed. Night calmed her. She uncurled herself on the bed. She uncrossed her fingers. Each morning she emerged from the night slightly different, stiller and more serene.
When our mother went to the doctor with bad nerves because of Beth, the clinic sister suggested a nice pamphlet about puberty. The clinic sister said Beth would grow out of the difficult stage. Mum kept the pamphlet on her bedside table. It contained diagrams of girls’ and boys’ genitalia.
“Girls’ gen-it-al-ia,” read Angela, pronouncing it like it was a foreign city and then adding other exotic locations. “Lab-ia minor, lab-ia major, vulva.”
“Vulva?”
“Vull-var. Boys’ gen-it-al-ia. Penis.”
“Don't,” I said, covering my ears.
“Penis,” said Angela. “Pee-niss.”
The pamphlet did not mention the crossing of fingers.
The pamphlet did not mention nighttime riding.
It did not mention the unlocking of hearts.
It did not mention the sensation of doom rushing toward Beth in a wave.
It did not mention smudged mascara and several types of sorrow.
It did not mention the giving away of parts of herself.
It was a very useless pamphlet.
After the pamphlet Mum got the complete
Life Cycle Library
from the one-armed encyclopedia salesman.
She studied them carefully for clues. She read them from cover to cover. She spent a lot of time on volume 6, which was the
Parents’ Answer Book on Drugs.
The girls didn't wear Alice bands or tennis skirts in volume 6. They wore bell-bottoms and ponchos. The boys had hair straight out of
Scooby-Doo.
The volume 6 glossary contained words like blasted, black beauties, coming down, cube head, ripped, roach holder, and Texas tea. We had never heard of these words. Beth didn't use these words. It looked like Mum had been up and down the list one hundred times, underlining some words, circling others.
Angela and I didn't leave any marks when we borrowed
The Life Cycle Library.
We took one slim volume at a time, secretly. Eventually Angela grew tired of volume 1 and the diagram of the pee-niss. We graduated to volume 2, which was about having
babies. We learned that it was possible after all, despite what Anthea Long, with all her expertise in yodeling, said, that a man and woman could have a baby even if they weren't married. Angela was pleased to have it in writing because she had argued it with the white-haired Anthea at big lunch.
“See, I knew it,” said Angela.
All that was needed was some boy's sperm to get inside a girl's vagina.
“What if Massimo Gentili went to the toilet and some sperm came out and it flew through the air and someone was sitting on another toilet in the girls’ toilets, except not me, and some of that sperm flew up into her?” I asked.
“Does sperm have wings?” said Angela.
We were more confused than ever.
“We need to get the facts straight,” I said.
“We need to show this book to Anthea,” said Angela.
I was filled with dread. How could we get it into my schoolbag and out of the house and back again?
Mum read all of the volumes before she approached Beth. They went into Mum's bedroom together and the door was shut. I heard Mum reading straight out of the text in a wobbling voice.
“What is a woman?” she said. “Is she tall or short, young or old? Is she warm and friendly or cold
and selfish? Can she cry, does she kiss boys, is she afraid of the dark?”
It was a strange passage for her to choose because, for example, Mum didn't know that Beth went out at night into the darkness, only I knew it, and somehow when she asked it sounded almost like trick questions. Mum should have asked me the questions. I answered them in my head from the hallway. Beth was neither tall nor short but in-between. She did cry. She did kiss boys. She could be extremely cold, especially when she was bored of people, but also very friendly, which was what Mum wanted to talk to her about.
There was a long silence.
“What are you doing?” asked Beth.
“We need to talk about things,” said Mum.
“No we don't,” said Beth.
“We do.”
“We don't. I already know about it.”
“You know about it but you don't know it in the right way,” said Mum.
I wished there was a hole in the wall that I could peep through. There was nothing but silence on the other side. I traced my finger over the gold pattern in the linoleum while I listened.
“If you're so clever,” said Mum, “why don't you tell me how it all works?”
Nothing.
“Do you know about using a condom?”
Nothing.
“Are you going steady with this Mark boy?”
“Going steady” was in the glossary. It said going steady usually led to engagement and marriage.
Nothing.
“Because look, look here, there is a whole chapter on dating. Look, it has the pros and cons of going steady.”
“Stop saying going steady.”
“Are you smoking ghanja?”
“What?”
“Texas tea, grass, greefo, hay, Mary Jane, pot?”
“Texas tea?”
“Have you been getting blasted?”
“What?”
“Getting ripped?”
“Can I go now?”
“No,” said Mum.
Mr. Bum Cracker Barnsey made me stay behind in the classroom after everyone left. He said he needed to discuss something with me. He wanted to know why my project on Australian prime ministers was only half finished when I handed it in and why I had drawn a mustache on Malcolm Fraser when he didn't even have one.
“I don't know,” I said. “I thought he had one.”
“Come on,” he said. “You can't just hand things in like this. You didn't even finish your last sentence.”
I had been tired. Dad had been trying to help me before he went to night shift but Aunty Cheryl kept disagreeing with everything he said.
“Don't you know anything?” she kept asking him.
Mum was watching
A Country Practice.
She couldn't help me because she had drunk too much wine but she thought the mustache was funny and then she started crying in the middle of when she was laughing and that's when I decided to go to bed.
“I got very tired and I fell asleep and then when I woke up it was morning and the project was due in,” I said, because everything would be too difficult to explain.
“That's not good enough,” he said. “You're over halfway through grade six, you know? Can you ask your mother to come in and see me?”
I tried to imagine it.
She would be in her yellow Japanese happy coat and her pink fluffy slippers. She would say, “Frankly, Mr. Bum Cracker, I don't give a damn.”
“Yes,” I said.
That afternoon I didn't tell Mum. I'd finally agreed to open the box again with Angela. She said we must have been missing something. The clue to my lost voice, the answer to everything, was somewhere inside.
We made sure Danielle wasn't around. We took the box out from its shelf and walked with it slowly through the kitchen and out the back door. We sat beneath the back steps. Angela bit her bottom lip while she waited for me to open it.
This time I was ready for the smell of fifty-cent-sized raindrops hitting dry earth. Of bicycle tires humming on hot pavement. Of bare feet running through crackling grass. Of the lake breathing against the shore.
I picked up the gladwrapped braid. I removed it from the plastic. It shone in my hands. Angela touched it timidly with just two fingers.
“This is it,” she said, “isn't it?”
“You don't even know anything,” I said.
“I do,” she said. “It's to do with the braid. I can see it in your eyes.”
“I wish you'd get rooted,” I said.
“I wish you weren't such a freak of nature,” she said.
She said that was it.
It was the end.
I'd never step foot in the redback panel van again.
When she was finished shouting at me she climbed out from under the steps and picked up her bike and went.
I wrapped up the braid again and put it in the box. I closed the lid. I walked up the back steps
slowly and into the kitchen. Mum was standing with her back against the kitchen bench waiting for me.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Just looking,” I said.
“Did you ask anyone if you could look?”
“No.”
“I wish you would have asked me,” she said.
It was the most words she had said to me for a very long time. I started crying. I didn't mean to. I cried with my mouth open and my eyes shut and with the volume turned off. I just made small noises in my throat, almost like a grasshopper clicking its wings.