The Year Nick McGowan Came to Stay (4 page)

I'm at work by eight a.m. on Sunday morning and I'm relieved not to be home at ten a.m. when Nick McGowan is due to arrive. I don't want to be there for those first few awkward moments. I don't want to even know what kind of hideous clothes my parents are wearing. Whether my mother has lipstick on her teeth. Whether my father starts to whistle or sing out loud like he does sometimes in restaurants just to embarrass Caitlin and me. I'd rather be here, working the fries machine, pretending that Nick McGowan isn't possibly right-this-very-minute becoming my new housemate.

My drive-thru shift ends at eleven a.m. but, after much pleading, Chris agrees to let me stay at work, giving me a dining-room shift. So I spend eleven a.m. till one p.m. at work filling the straw and napkin dispensers, mopping up spills and peeling pickles off the artwork hanging throughout the restaurant.

At one p.m., I am still reluctant to clock off and go home. Nick McGowan will certainly be there now. Doing what? Unpacking his clothes? Looking through our family photos? Being made to sit through the holiday video of
Yeppoon my dad took last year? I'm not ready to go back. Plus, I should really prepare for this birthday party challenge. So I sit around in the crew room watching the American birthday party training videos and taking notes. Fiona Curtis doesn't have a chance.

At three p.m. Chris actually orders me to go home. He says that I have watched the training videos enough times for today, that my behaviour is bordering on obsessive. (This coming from someone who wants to go to Hamburger University.) I get changed and start the long walk home.

Technically, it's not such a long way. Today it takes me thirty minutes. Fifteen minutes of walking, and fifteen minutes hanging around outside the front door of my house trying to psych myself up for what awaits me inside.

I'm not good with change. From today onwards everything is going to be different.

Deep breath.

Two steps inside the front door and the first thing I see is Mum and Dad and Nick McGowan standing in the kitchen – intervention style – as though they have been waiting for me to arrive. The second thing I notice is the plate of chocolate biscuits on the kitchen table.

He gets my room. He's too tall for Caitlin's single bed, so he gets my room. My new bigger room with the air-con and the ensuite. My new cool room that I've lived in for less than a day. And now it's Nick McGowan's. I think about the fact that Nick has only been living with my family for three hours and forty-six minutes and already he's causing trouble. Wrecking things. Having me evicted from my new boudoir.

I sit at the kitchen table and chain-eat the chocolate biscuits while my parents serve up platitudes. They'll turn Caitlin's room into a study for me. They'll buy me a pedestal fan.

‘But it wouldn't be fair on Nick to put him in a bed where his feet hung over the edge, would it, Rachel?'

I shrug.

Nick reaches across the table for the last chocolate biscuit and as he does, I slide the plate out of his reach. Then I give him a look that says, ‘Screw you, buddy. Screw you and your too-long body. You can take my room, but you're not getting the biscuit.'

Mum says that I'm not to worry about how long it's going to take to move my stuff back. She's already moved my clothes and books back up to my old room. My old room with the faded clown wallpaper. I'm back to being the Mayor of Clowntropolis.

‘And I've put your Kirk Cameron and Huey Lewis and the News posters right back up on the wall, exactly how they were before.'

I officially want to kill myself.

I look over at Nick, who is standing now. Nick dressed in a red polo shirt, baggy jeans with a battered brown belt and scuffed brown boots, his curly blond fringe hanging over his eyes in a manner that is blatantly detention-worthy. Nick McGowan who oozes cool. And he's standing in my house, my kitchen, staring at the floor, hands shoved in his pockets, biting his lip. Trying not to
laugh at me
. I feel like giving him a detention.

‘I have Ramones posters on my wall. Those other posters were meant to be ironic. I've had them on my wall since I was little.'

But nobody's listening. Mum has started asking if anyone wants a tea or coffee. Nick McGowan has started humming ‘Hip to be Square'.

Mum, realising she's done something wrong, something that may send her daughter into years of therapy, simply says, ‘Sorry, sweetheart. Well, why don't you go downstairs and move the last of your things up?'

‘Like my Ramones posters,' I say.

‘Right,' she says.

I don't look at Nick McGowan. I don't look at Mum or Dad. I just get up from the table and say, ‘I'll do it now. So Nick can have his room.'

I hate this already.

I stand inside the doorway. It doesn't even look like the room I left this morning. My clothes, books, lamp – it's all gone. My fingerprints have been erased. I'm back to how I was: a loser. And he never got to see it – the me with the cool bedroom. I step up onto the now stripped double bed and try to wiggle the first tack out of Ramones poster
numero uno
.

‘I tried to tell them that I didn't care about my feet. You know, hanging over the side of the bed. For the record, I was prepared to sleep diagonally.'

He's being sarcastic. I look over my shoulder ready to shoot Nick McGowan my best withering this-isn't-funny glare. But he's not even looking at me. He's staring at the big photo frame that hangs above my bookcase. The photo frame that Zoë made me for my birthday last year – full of photos of Zee and me over the years.

‘You're best friends with that Zoë Budd?'

‘Yep.'

‘You've known her since you were little?'

‘Since I was five.'

‘You look close.'

‘We are.'

His eyes slide away from the photo and over to mine. I immediately turn back to the wall.

Three tacks to go. I'm regretting hammering them in. I figure the key is to not rip the poster as I try and pull each tack out. Out of the corner of my eye I watch Nick McGowan reach out and touch the other Ramones poster above the desk.

‘These posters look newish.'

I stop, turn around with my hands on my hips. ‘What's that supposed to mean?'

Taken aback, Nick says, ‘Ahh, it means these posters look newish. I'm just wondering if they're new?'

‘Well, they're not
newish
. They're
oldish
. I happen to have liked the Ramones forever. And I've had these posters for a while. Up in my old bedroom for quite a while. Not that it's any of your business but they're old, not new, they're old. O-L-D
old
, okay?'

I concentrate on pulling the last tack out of my ‘not new' Ramones poster, the poster that has allegedly been on my wall for a while, a poster that should therefore be well creased and rather limp. And as soon as I pull the last tack out, this poster commando-rolls itself up. Back into a cylinder.

Nick stares at the poster. I stare at the poster.

Nick says, ‘Define old.'

I feel my face going red, so I turn back to the wall and pretend to scrape off old bits of Blu-tack. ‘Look why don't you go and watch TV out there or something? I won't be long. Then you can move in.'

I turn around to see Nick McGowan's reaction, but he's already gone.

It takes me half an hour to transform my old bedroom into something that isn't totally humiliating. I glare at the clowns and wish bad things upon them as I cover as many of them as I can with Ramones posters. ‘You're like a virus,' I say to the clowns. ‘Some kind of freaky circus virus spread all over my walls.' But the clowns just grin inanely back at me in return. ‘I'm not your friend!' I yell at them.

I start Blu-tacking my extensive A-Ha and Johnny Depp poster collection back onto the walls. I think of Nick in the room below me. Unpacking his stuff. Putting his T-shirts and jeans and sneakers away. Looking around. Wondering how he ended up in downtown Kenmore.

I realise that in the midst of her earlier redecorating, Mum has left the cordless phone on top of my bookcase. I decide to take the opportunity to ring Zoë.

I push the ‘on' button and put the phone to my ear, only to realise that someone is already on the line.

An older, gravelly voice is saying, ‘This is not up for discussion, Nick. We're not talking about it anymore. I am not going to let you throw your life away.'

Then I hear Nick McGowan say, ‘So what
I
want doesn't matter? I mean, maybe I just want to be in Middlemount. Maybe I'm just going to spend my life working in the mines – like you.'

Just as I'm contemplating whether to hang up or keep eavesdropping, Mum calls out, ‘Rachel, the shower's free. Rachel?'

I quickly hang up the phone. ‘I'm going now!'

‘Don't be too long – and leave some hot water for Nick.'

‘Okay,' I say, and I walk into the bathroom trying to make sense of what I just overheard.

It takes me a good ten minutes to find him. Having searched every room in the house, I eventually decide to look outside, down by the pool. I wander to the edge of the courtyard steps, steps that lead down to the pool area, my eyes leaning over the edge skimming over shapes that could resemble a seventeen-year-old male.

It's the smoke that betrays him. He's sitting on the pool box – a big rectangular wooden box my dad made to keep the pool chemicals in. He's sitting on the box, down the back of our garden, smoking a cigarette. I walk towards him. I see his profile looking up at the night sky.

‘Dinner is in half an hour. It'll be Kentucky Fried Chicken in front of the TV while my entire family watches “It's a Knockout”
.
You have thirty minutes to mentally prepare yourself.'

I turn to leave but his smoking is something that . . .

‘You know, my dad will kill you if he finds you smoking.'

‘He knows.'

‘He knows?
My dad
knows you're smoking? Down here? Right now?'

‘I told him I was going to come down here for a smoke.'

‘You told my father you were going outside for a cigarette? And he said that was
okay
?'

‘I'm not sure he said it was okay. I think his exact words were, “Well, Nick, I'd appreciate it if you used an ashtray”.' He gestures towards the faded Felix the Cat mug that Sarah Klein gave me for my thirteenth birthday. My father who once offered my sister and me one thousand dollars if we could make it to twenty-one without even puffing on a cigarette is now handing out ashtrays to other teenagers. A recruitment boy for Benson & Hedges. This makes no sense to me. But then nothing makes sense to me anymore. I turn back to Nick and look at his face, suddenly mesmerised by the way the cigarette nefariously balances on the edge of his lips.

‘Are you going to try and get yourself kicked out of here? Is that your plan? Because maybe you don't care, but this is a big year. I was looking forward to having a quiet, non-eventful year. So if you're going to start, you know, setting off fire alarms, then could you let me know? Because I'm going to need to factor it into my study timetable.'

He stares at me, as though I have just spoken to him in Greek. ‘Are you always this uptight, or do I just bring this out in you?'

My mouth falls open. My brain shifts like a Rubik's cube as I struggle to think of a comeback.

‘Nick!'

We both turn. My mother is standing on the verandah waving the cordless phone at us. ‘There's a phone call for you.'

‘Jesus.' Nick grinds his cigarette into the bottom of the Felix mug. ‘It'll be my dad. Again.'

‘It's a Sam Wilks for you,' yells my mum, putting the phone to her chest.

I turn and watch Nick's tanned face turn deathly pale as he slowly gets up and goes to the phone.