I have no idea how, but some vague kind of organisation seems to have sprung from the chaos. There are little streets and laneways between the canvas domes, and circles of chairs and beanbags in cheery communal clusters. Rows of cars spill with the bedding and junk of people who clearly could not even be bothered to slap up a tent.
And the people. So many people. More people than I have ever seen in my whole entire life. Bodies stream down to the cyclone fencing that blocks off the Palmers’ house and the rest of their farm. We walk past some guys kicking a footy around, and a group of people suspended in serene yoga poses. There’s an old guy with a ponytail who reminds me a little of Mr Grey, except this guy is sitting on a pile of empty Jack-and-Coke cans and doing that hiccupy, drunken weeping into the arms of a bored-looking friend. There’s a girl twirling a hula hoop around her neck as another girl beats a bongo drum beside her, and, oh – a giant group of naked people covered in body paint who are trying to form a human pyramid –
I have one of my small sketchpads with me, but seriously? There’s no way I’d know how to even begin capturing this.
A little way ahead, beneath the Palmers’ windmills, a collection of vans and water tankers are gathered. A fleet of Merindale CFA fire trucks and police cars are parked just beyond them. Caroline links her arm through mine and Tia’s and pulls us forward.
Suddenly, I’m surrounded by the smells of sweat and sizzling food. We walk past a blue ambulance that’s been converted into ‘Jimmy Baghdad’s Falafel’, and a bright orange van with ‘Tofu Tupack’s Wrap Wagon’ graffitied on the side. There’s a heap of teeny dust-covered carts selling various fried things. In the shadows of a double-decker vegan burger bus, Mrs Ridley is knitting serenely behind a card table of homemade jams and preserves.
‘Where have all these guys come from?’ I yell over the noise.
‘Dunno,’ Caroline yells back. ‘Suppose they figured even the Rapture needs to be catered. We’d be screwed without them though. The grocery store’s down to, like, some cans of oven cleaner and a couple of packs of mints.’ She winks. ‘Shockingly, condoms were the first thing we ran out of.’
We keep walking.
I step over and around groups of people parked on the ground. I manage to crunch a couple of hands, and almost kick this one guy in the face as he’s Instagramming his nachos. But no-one seems too fussed. In the paddock beyond the boho foodcourt, the dancers are doing their thing; not even the white sky and heat seem to be putting a dent in their spirits. I don’t know if there is a handbook for the apocalypse that I’ve missed. But somehow, everyone seems to have just … adapted.
‘Oh hey,’ Caroline says. ‘It’s Eric.’
‘Who the hell is Eric?’ I say as Caroline moseys towards a guy with a Southern Cross tattoo on his chest.
Tia giggles. ‘Yeah. Caroline’s kind of been busy these last few days. It’s worse than that time Merindale pool had diving-team tryouts. Remember?’ She shakes her head. ‘Really don’t think we can compete with this much boy muscle, Alba.’
Tia and I wander to the edge of the foodie area. For a moment I think we’re heading to dance, which I am so totally not in the mood for, but at the last moment Tia veers me around to the right. In front of us is a tarp with a ‘Hairwashing Tent’ sign above it. A bunch of semi-clean people are sitting on fruit crates out front.
‘Look who it is,’ she says lightly. ‘Fancy seeing Indigo here.’
Daniel leaps to his feet from the box he was perched on. ‘Sarah!’ he calls out. He bounds towards us. ‘Thought I was going to have to wait till those dudes finished their ark before I saw you again,’ he says as he hugs me. ‘If we’re marched on two-by-two, promise you’ll be my plus one.’ Even though I can’t see his face, I can tell that he’s grinning.
‘Hey. Look at you, getting your earth-sprite on,’ I say as I hug him back. ‘The girls and I were just looking around, and –’
But when I turn, Tia has vanished.
‘I was starting to think I’d done something to piss you off, Sarah Jane. Why didn’t you answer my calls? Where have you been?’
‘Yeah. Sorry, Daniel. It’s been a … messy few days.’
He slips off his sunglasses and squints at me. ‘Alba, are you okay?’
I shrug. ‘Hey, aren’t people supposed to be all angsty this time of year? Pretty sure a little angst is justified in the face of Armageddon …’ My smile falters. I just can’t be bothered holding it in place anymore. I plonk myself on an empty crate. Daniel sits beside me, seemingly unconcerned about the whirling mass of crazy around us.
‘So. Come here often?’ I ask. ‘What are you doing hanging all by yourself?’
‘Just checking things out,’ he says casually. ‘Avoiding my manager, that sort of thing …’ he nods his head at my sketchpad. ‘You carry that with you everywhere?’
‘Pretty much. I probably shouldn’t bother these days though. My comics are a big fat fail at the moment.’
Daniel baulks. ‘Really? Why? It’s not like you have a shortage of material.’ He gestures around him. ‘Your comics might turn out to be the only surviving record of the last outpost of human civilisation.’
I glance around. ‘It’s all just too … much. I don’t know where to start.’
‘Well – how ’bout with that dude?’ Daniel points at a sunburnt guy standing a little way in front of us. He’s wearing nothing but a blue cape and a pair of skimpy, fluoro-pink Speedos. He is waving a half-eaten taco in the air, his cape flapping behind him as he sways to the music.
‘Sure. Okay. Random taco undies guy. I shall call him … Avocado Man. And his superpower shall be –’
‘The ability to blind his enemies with the glow of his pasty arse-cheeks,’ Daniel says decisively.
I laugh. Daniel becomes silent as he peers over my shoulder. I cross one leg over the other and prop my sketchpad on my knee. Though I can’t hear the comforting sounds of pencil scratches above the noise, the lines still materialise on my page. I draw a simple frame around the figure, and it’s like the rough panel somehow manages to keep in check the distractions swirling around him. The edges of my vision become all blurry, with only Avocado Man and his radioactive pink knickers in focus.
My eyes snap away when he is joined by a girl in a denim dress, who grabs him in an embrace and then drags him off through the crowd.
I crack my knuckles. I don’t know how long I’ve been drawing, but I have a half-dozen pages of character sketches, and Daniel has wandered off. I see him standing a little ways away, deep in smiley conversation with a girl in a bikini who feels the need to touch his chest every ten seconds.
I flip open a clean page, and look around again. The air here is slightly less stinky, a combination of jasmine shampoo and wet dog. On the crate beside me, a grey-haired woman in a linen dress is now seated. She’s cooling her face with a paper fan, her eyes locked on a copy of
The Alchemist
. I twist around slightly so that I can see her from the corner of my eye, and I keep drawing.
I doubt any of this stuff is going to be much use; not unless Cinnamon Girl finds herself in the middle of Oktoberfest or something. But as a drawing exercise, it’s strangely … liberating. My head still feels way muddled, but for a moment, I forget about trying to capture everything all at once, and I focus on the minutiae instead. The green gumboots on a stubble-faced hair-washing dude, and the matching felt top hats on a couple of boys entwined in a kiss, and the peaceful expression on the face of a woman building some kind of art installation out of falafel wrappers. I draw till a pair of hands clasps my shoulders from behind.
Daniel leans over me. ‘Sorry. I was talking to you but you weren’t answering and then I got … distracted.’ He grins. ‘So. How goes?’
‘Okay, I think. None of this stuff is gonna win an Eisner. But it’s good. Small, but … good.’
He sits on the ground and takes the sketchpad. ‘I suppose it’s a bit like what I do,’ he says as he flicks through my drawings. ‘Like, finding a character in a script? Okay, I’m not talking about Indigo Lazorio, cos let’s face it, dude isn’t exactly profound. His entire breakdown might as well have read “shirtless and dense”. But, you know, in theory … you just focus on one thing. And you shape the rest from there.’
He hands the sketchpad back and turns his face to the sky. We sit in companionable silence, as I furtively open a new page and lay down a few lines in a sketchy profile of Daniel. I rough out the contours of his cheekbone and the shape of his jaw, and I shade the faint birthmark beneath his eye that must be covered with make-up on
Gum Trees
, cos I’d totally forgotten about it until now. I smudge the lines at the back of his neck, where his auburn hair is damp with sweat. I know I’m just mucking around with character studies, but I have this sudden urge to layer Daniel’s frame with some background; to draw in his shadows a smiley boy in a
Muppet Babies
beanie and oversized tracksuit, waving a thumbed
Lightning Saga
comic in his hand.
‘Alba, can I ask you a question?’ he says lazily.
I run my pinkie over the shading of his eyebrow. ‘Okay. Sure. Go.’
‘You don’t have to answer but … what’s the deal with you and the guy situation?’ He taps my knee with a grin. ‘I know it must have been a total dead zone after I left, but – are you telling me there isn’t a single person here you’re keen on?’
‘Jeez, Daniel, you make me sound like a monk. I’ve … dated and stuff.’
In fact, the sum total of my Eden Valley romantic history consists of three guys: Alex Chapman, who I kissed on a dare in year seven and who tasted like stale chicken Twisties; Joe-some-guy, a city friend of Tommy Ridley’s, who hit on me by recounting the entire sucky plot of the
Green Lantern
movie, and who I kissed in the dark at Anzac Park, partly out of curiosity, partly to make him stop talking; and Brendon Ryder, who I met at one of Grady’s basketball games, and who looked exactly like Chase from
Runaways
. We went out for two weeks early this year, but we didn’t do much except watch
Ice Road Truckers
, and snog on Merindale bus. Yes, he was uninspiring, but a brief, and, okay,
hot
distraction, until I got tired of Grady’s grumbles that I was ‘consorting with the enemy’. Mixed-town relationships are a
big
Valley no-no.
My hands are still on the page. ‘Honestly? It’s … just not something I’ve spent a lot of time worrying about. Believe me, I’ve had other things on my mind.’
Daniel stands and squishes his butt beside me on the crate. ‘I’m getting that. But I’m also going to go with this hunch I have that maybe those things … aren’t totally unrelated?’
I blink at him. ‘I don’t know. I can’t really explain it. The boy-thing, commitment-thing or whatever. But I guess …’ I wipe my hands on my knees. ‘Do you remember when we were in grade five? I went through that whole boho phase? I was listening to lots of Mum’s Stone Poneys records and was really obsessed with linen dresses? And it lasted all the way until the rock-chick phase, which, you know, only lasted till I got sick of studded collars and wrecking perfectly decent tights. And then there was the phase when all I wanted to be was Wonder Woman? I used to wear Mum’s bra outside my T-shirts?’
Daniel laughs. ‘And randomly throw your headband at people on the street. I remember. Mrs Garabaldi was pissed. But I don’t get what that has to do with –’
‘Because when you hook up with someone, don’t you sort of just … stop? Like, you’re with a person who’s decided they like you one way, but then, what if you’re only that way for a little while? And what happens if you’re not even sure what you’re going to be next? What if you want to dye your hair purple or you get really into the bagpipes or you decide to get a face tattoo –’
‘You want a face tattoo?’
‘I don’t know! But that’s my point! It’s way too much pressure, choosing someone, having someone else’s life and whatnot mashed in with yours, when you don’t even know what you’re doing with your own stuff and – gah. This probably isn’t making sense.’
He narrows his eyes, like he’s thinking extra hard. ‘Yeah, okay, so some people will never be able to see beyond the hot guy with a smoking bod and great hair …’ He nudges me before becoming semi-serious again. ‘But someone else might be totally on board with whatever crazy comes next. Cos it’s all you, isn’t it? Face tattoo and everything.’ He shrugs. ‘It’s not impossible that someone would get that,’ he says lightly. ‘Maybe you just haven’t been looking in the right direction.’
‘Daniel – what happened to you?’ I say with a laugh. ‘You disappeared from the Valley a kid whose most intense conversations involved dissecting
Spider-man
, and you came back some sort of weird mystic guru. Albeit a slightly sleazy one.’
He thuds my arm with a boomy laugh. ‘
Sleazy
? I’m giving you my best stuff here, Sarah. It’s actually hurting my brain to be this deep.’ He wraps an arm around my shoulders. ‘But what happened to me was … I totally freaked about things changing. You remember? That day Mum told us we were leaving, it was like … I thought my life was over. Then I left, because I didn’t have a choice. And I was fine.’ He squeezes me tightly. ‘I was more than fine, Sarah Jane. I was awesome.’
I close my eyes. My brain feels like it’s pushing against my skull, like it just doesn’t have room to process everything churning inside it. Somehow, through the noise, I swear I can hear the
thwack
of my own heartbeat, as thunderous as if a comic-book sound-effect were floating right in front of me. With my eyes closed, the sound seems to make everything else around me dim and hushed. Which is why I practically fall off my apple box when the music dies mid-song, and Daniel jumps up quickly.
A collective groan emanates from the people in the field. Daniel glances in their direction. A flash of nerviness passes over his face. ‘I can’t remember, Alba. Are all the brownouts you guys have been having here normal?’
I swallow. ‘We have? I hadn’t noticed. I think I may have been a wee bit navel-gazey recently, Daniel.’
He pulls me to my feet. ‘You wanna bail? My folks are having lunch with the Ridleys and my manager’s found someone in Merindale to give him a pedicure. I think his biggest worry about the world ending is the effect it’s gonna have on his cuticles or something. But – you want to hang out at mine?’