The Year Nick McGowan Came to Stay (9 page)

I leave for school extra early the next morning so that I can avoid seeing Nick McGowan. Yet all day at school, without me wanting them to, my eyes search for him. Scanning classrooms, skirting over people's heads down long corridors, jumping from person to person in the quadrangle, by the tennis courts, in the library, in the tuckshop queue. I never see him. In English, when we're supposed to be watching the second half of
Hamlet
, I find myself staring out the window, wishing he would pass by. I imagine that Nick McGowan and I are like two characters in one of those old sixties movies starring Doris Day and Rock Hudson, hunting for each other and missing each other by seconds. As I leave a room, he enters it and vice versa. Then eventually we'd back into each other in the library amongst the shelves. Books would fall and we'd laugh and make up.

I allow myself to imagine this scenario right up until Mrs Ramsay taps me on the shoulder outside my English classroom and asks if Nick McGowan is home sick today. I feel sick.

‘Well, I left home early this morning because I was on gate duty, so . . .'
Please drop this. Please drop this
.

‘How is he?'

‘Um, well . . .'

‘I think those phone calls he's been receiving from Sam have come as a bit of a shock.' She flips open her diary and taps the page. ‘He was supposed to come and see me today at morning tea to talk about it all again – how he was feeling about the calls – but just tell him to come to my office at morning tea tomorrow. It's important that he continues to talk this all through with me.'

I say, ‘Okay.' But what I really want to say is,
What the hell is going on
?

Something in my face must give me away. Mrs Ramsay is bending down now, trying to look into my eyes, touching my forearm.

‘Is everything okay, Rachel? How are you finding it all with Nick moving in?'

Oh God, she's trying to do a hit-and-run counselling session on me. Outside my English classroom. With people walking past.

‘I'm fine. Everything is okay.'

‘Just okay?'

‘Good. It's good having Nick here.' I look around as I say this, hoping no one is noticing that I'm talking to the school counsellor.

‘So,' her eyes narrow, ‘is Nick at home sick today? I realise it's a half-day for you seniors but he still can't afford to start missing class.'

This is my chance, I realise. To tell her about the Maths in Society consent form, about the smoking, and the phone calls, about the fact that I am fairly sure Nick McGowan is wagging school today. And it's the right thing to do. It's what I should do.

‘I think Nick may have woken up with a migraine or something. I left early so, I'm not sure.'

Her brow furrows.

‘Pretty sure. I'm pretty sure.'

Her face immediately relaxes.

‘Oh.' She straightens back up. ‘Oh, well that's alright then. Well just tell him to come and see me tomorrow and we'll schedule in a new appointment time.'

I pick some imaginary lint off my dress and say, ‘Absolutely.'

‘Hello?' I walk out of the kitchen and into the lounge. ‘Anyone home?'

It's one-thirty p.m. and the house is completely empty.

I kick off my school shoes and pad barefoot into the kitchen, on the hunt for some food. There's a jar of almond bread on the kitchen bench, with a note from my mother sticky-taped to the lid. I pull it off. She wants me to bring the washing in off the line. I sigh. The fact that I'm in Year 12 and have an extraordinary amount of work to do seems to be lost on everyone these days. I grab three pieces of almond bread and wonder where Nick McGowan is right now. Wonder what he's doing. And that's when I spot him. Through the kitchen window. Barefoot in his grey school shorts, with his blue-and-maroon school shirt unbuttoned and hanging out, Nick McGowan is cleaning our pool. I watch him deftly manoeuvre the long, metallic pole of the scoop through the water, like some kind of
Venetian gondolier.

‘What are you doing?'

He looks up, over the top of his sunglasses and sees me standing now at the top of the steps, which lead down to the pool. I notice that his blond curls look almost white in the summer heat.

‘The pool was dirty.'

‘So?'

‘So I decided to clean it.'

‘Where were you today?'

‘At school.'

‘No you weren't.'

‘Okay, Rachel, so I wasn't. Big deal.' He goes back to concentrating on netting more leaves and twigs from the water's surface, not looking at me when he speaks. ‘I was out enjoying this beautiful, sunny day while you and everyone else . . .' He pauses as he lifts the scoop out of the water, shakes the captured leaves and twigs onto the grass and then returns the net to the water ‘. . . were stuck indoors at desks learning stuff that you'll most likely never use again. You'll never get this day back. It's another day you've wasted.'

‘I've wasted? You're on drugs. So is this what you're gonna do now? Tiptoe through the tulips instead of going to school?'

He pauses, and looks into the distance. ‘Maybe.'

I make a snorting sound in disgust.

‘Why do you even care?' He looks directly at me, eyebrows raised.

‘I don't. I don't care what you do. What I care about is when Mrs Ramsay comes and finds me to ask where you are. “Is Nick home sick today, Rachel? It's just that he hasn't shown up to any of his classes.
”
'

‘Ahhh.' He continues to skim the water's surface with the pool scoop, taking a few small steps to the left as his negotiates the far back corner.

‘Yes, ahhh. Apparently, idiot-head, you had an appointment to see her today. If you're going to start wagging class, try not to make it on days when the school counsellor is expecting to see you in her office.'

I turn to walk back up to the house.

He calls out, ‘What did you tell her?'

But I keep walking.

I don't feel like dinner, so I spend the evening sitting on the floor of my bedroom just staring at my copy of
Hamlet
. Part of our assessment is to memorise a three- to five-minute soliloquy and perform it in front of the rest of the class. Ms Corelli's giving us two weeks to get it done, but I want to get a start on it now. I don't like leaving things to the last minute. I stare down at the words from one of Ophelia's monologues. I don't even understand what half of these words mean. According to my
Cliffs Notes
, Ophelia's telling her father, Polonius, that she thinks Hamlet has gone mad. But Hamlet is only pretending to be mad, because he suspects his uncle killed his father to be with Hamlet's mother and therefore become king. Talk about dysfunctional.

I close my eyes and attempt to recite the first verse for the hundredth time.

‘My lord, as I was sewing in my chamber,

Lord Hamlet, – with his doublet all unbrac'd;

No hat upon his head; his stockings foul'd,

Ungart'red, and down-gyved to his ankle;

Pale as his shirt; his knees knocking each other . . .'

I open my eyes and take a quick peek at the book.
That's right – the double ‘p' line.

‘And with a look so piteous in purport

As if he had been loosed out of hell

To speak of horrors, – he comes before me.'

Why is it that I have been able to memorise all the words to Billy Joel's ‘We Didn't Start the Fire' but I can't even get eight lines from
Hamlet
down? And I've got another dozen or so to go. This is Nick McGowan's fault. I can't concentrate. My mind keeps wandering away from Hamlet and his unbraced doublet and over to Nick McGowan. He's really not even that good looking. I mean, okay, so he has really big green eyes that are, like, I don't know, the colour of sea glass or something. But he has a slightly crooked nose. And his eyes, I'm pretty sure, are too far apart.

I look down at my books. I repeat the ‘piteous in purport' line over a few more times but I keep saying
pitiful
instead of
piteous
. I toss
Hamlet
aside, look around my room. I notice my purse lying open on the floor. That's what I'll do, I'll reorganise my purse. Then I'll make a fresh start on the monologue. Using my foot I nudge my purse to within arms reach. Then I immediately pull everything out of it. For some reason cleaning out my purse always makes me feel better. What I don't expect to discover halfway through my ritual is that my library card is missing. I pull everything out of my purse all over again. Perhaps it is stuck to another card, like my
Video Ezy card? It's not stuck to my Video Ezy card. I pull everything out of my school bag (which includes six textbooks, a plastic container of dried apricots, three school newsletters, a weepy red pen, two old crumpled bus tickets and a hair band). I check the pockets of my dress, my pencil case, Dad's car. I search my school bag again. This is unlike me. Caitlin loses things. Zoë loses things. I'm organised. I have places and systems. I don't
lose
things.

Except, apparently, my library card. Shit.

I sit on the floor and contemplate the hassle of having to report my library card as lost and arrange for a new one. Where did I have it last? Where did I have it last?

The bedside table.

I left my library card in the bedside-table drawer next to the bed downstairs. In Nick's room.

He watches me walk down the courtyard steps to the pool area and as I march towards him he calls out, ‘How now, Ophelia?'

My brow furrows in response.

‘Your window's open.' His eyes flicker up to my room. ‘It's been a bit like Shakespeare in the Park down here. If I didn't know how much you hated my guts, I'd think you were serenading me.'

‘In your dreams.'

‘So, do you like it?'

‘What?'

‘Shakespeare.
Hamlet
.'

I shrug.

‘I like
him
. Hamlet. I like him the best out of all of Shakespeare's protagonists,' he announces, with more conviction than I expect.

‘How come?' I ask, trying to remember what protagonist means.

‘Well . . .' He searches my face, as though he suspects the answer is written in faint pen on my forehead. Then he says, ‘Miss Kennedy explained that Hamlet's feeling a certain amount of guilt and doesn't know how to cope with it. So really it's about him struggling with making the right decision. He's complex and flawed and . . .'

‘And a wimp. And a procrastinator who sits around all day complaining about his life but never doing anything about it. And you're going to get lung cancer if you don't stop smoking.'

With that he takes a long drag and then exhales the smoke, blowing it this time into one big billowy circle.

‘What are you doing?'

‘I'm offering you a friendship ring.'

‘I'm not signing the form, Nick.'

‘I know.' I can tell from his tone that he's not going to hassle me about it anymore.

I don't know what else to say, so I turn to leave.

‘So was Mrs Ramsay suspicious?'

I turn back around.

‘No. Because I covered for you.'

He nods his head, slowly. ‘Where did you say I was?'

‘I said you were at home with a migraine, okay?' But I don't wait to hear his reaction because I'm not interested. I just walk straight back up to the house.

It's not until I'm walking back up the courtyard steps that I realise I never asked him if I could go into his room to fetch my library card. I stand outside his bedroom door. I look out the window and see him hugging his knees and staring up at the sky. I look back at his bedroom door. Bugger him. I'm going in.

I push the door open and tentatively take a few steps inside. Looking around I feel a little disappointed. His room is not so different from the way I left it the Sunday he moved in. There are no posters on the wall, no photo frames adorning the desk. Just yesterday's school uniform lying in a heap on the floor. His school bag is dumped in the middle of his room, and I can see one of his German books sitting on top. It's disappointing. There's nothing much to see. I walk over to the bedside table and pull open the drawer to get my library card. I'm not sure why but I'm a little surprised when I see stuff – his stuff – in there. A watch. Some loose change. A small, red plastic photo album. My library card is sitting in the far back corner. I immediately grab it and push it into my pocket and go to shut the drawer.

Except I don't. I sit on the edge of his bed, slide it back open and stare at the contents the way I used to stare into my mum's jewellery box when I was little. My fingers stroke the plastic cover of the photo album. I pick it up. There's only half a dozen photos in it. The first pic is a photo of a cattle dog. This must be Frank. The photo is close up. Taken of Frank as he's straining to lick the camera. Then there are a couple of photos of Nick and another guy – some mate from Middlemount. In one shot they're sitting on the back of a ute, squinty-eyed and grinning. The friend is wearing a beaten-up Akubra. Nick looks different – more country, or something. I stare at the photo and think about what Nick said to his dad on the phone that first night. About wanting to go back to Middlemount, back to his real life.

In the next photo Nick and this boy are dressed in Broncos jerseys. His friend has him in a playful headlock. What is it with guys and headlocks? And farting for that matter. I keep flipping. There are some photos of Nick with a man who has to be his father. They have the same mouth. His father has kind eyes. And a big belly hanging over his jeans. And there's a photo of a young woman with long blond hair cradling a baby in her arms. I realise this must be Nick's mother. She's beautiful.

But that's it for photos. There aren't any more. I put the album back. I slide the drawer closed. Bounce up and down on the bed gently. Look around the room. I turn behind me and lift up his pillow. There's a pair of blue Garfield boxer shorts there. I drop the pillow back down. Then I realise I have my left foot on a booklet of some sort on the floor. I pick it up. On the cover in big blue letters it says,
Feeling Blue: The Facts on Depression
. I stare at the cover and then notice some brochures sticking out from inside the booklet. I pull them out. One's a brochure on handling grief. The other is on suicide prevention.