The Best Thing Page 2

  We are ages in that queue—so long I think I’m going to faint with the tension and the processed air. Finally we get out, Mum waving Mr Wilkinson a cheery goodbye. ‘Boy, you really are having a fight, aren’t you?’ she murmurs as I hurry her down the ramp. ‘What’s it all about?’

  ‘Her being a shitbag.’ I feel sick. I feel as if I’ll never be free of Lisa, never get out from under her mushroom-cloud of influence.

  ‘Ah.’ Mum nods wisely. ‘So is our junk-food tea still on, or do you want to get as far away from Lisa as possible?’

  ‘Let’s go home,’ I say. ‘Maybe Dad’ll take us out for tea anyway.’

  ‘He’ll be too tired.’ She imitates the way Dad slumps when he says that. ‘He’s always too tired these days to do anything with his family. Old age is creeping up on him, poor bloke.’

  ‘He’s working pretty hard, though.’

  ‘Yeah. For some reason.’

  I grin at her. ‘Like, maybe he wants to earn squillions?’

  ‘Well, I’m still waiting for all this extra effort to show up on the bank statements; that’s all I can say.’

  In the rooftop carpark a pearly-pink sunset (about the same shade as Lisa’s lipstick) lights up the rows of car roofs. Shunting cars fart into the sea-touched breeze. I breathe the whole cocktail gratefully; there is life after Franklins.

  Ricky Lewis, old friend of Mum’s and Dad’s, is there when we get home.

  ‘’Day, Rick,’ says Mum. ‘Why aren’t you out Thursday-night shopping?’ We struggle through the loungeroom with our grocery bags.

  ‘I’m having it delivered these days. It’s fabulous. I told you about this guy. I tick off what I want and he puts it on my doorstep next day.’

  ‘Oh, but you’re missing a marvellous cultural experience, isn’t she, Mel?’ Mum dumps her bags on the kitchen table. Dad’s in there getting glasses out of the cupboard. He looks as if he’s been caught in a blizzard: hair every which way, tie loose, collar unbuttoned. ‘You should come with us next week, like old times,’ Mum says to him.

  ‘Yeah, I should,’ he says, more enthusiastically than you’d expect. Mum and I make surprised faces at each other. ‘You do want a beer, don’t you, Ricky?’ he calls out. ‘You didn’t actually answer me before these people came barging in.’

  She comes to the kitchen door, leans there. ‘Don’t mind if I do.’ She’s wearing quite short shorts and a T-shirt that’s tight enough to show off her breasts. The nipples stand out under the cloth—it’s pretty hard not to notice them. How embarrassing. Why can’t she fold her arms, instead of tucking her hands in the back of her waistband like that?

  ‘And for the workers?’ Dad’s at the fridge, getting out a beer-bottle. He sees me looking at him and smiles a funny smile, bright and self-conscious, with the eyebrows going.

  ‘No thanks,’ I say. ‘Nothing for me.’

  We never pull the bedclothes over ourselves. I often wonder what’d happen if Mum and Dad burst in on us. What I’d do—I wouldn’t scream or sit up or anything dumb—I’d lie there just as I was, my head on his shoulder, my arm around his chest. He’d tense up, but I’d say, ‘It’s okay,’ and we’d both just go on staring at the ceiling, breathing slowly, while Dad shouted and Mum went white in the doorway.

  His hands are big, strong, really male. (I put my hand against Pug’s and it’s a slip of a hand, meant for different operations from his. And I’m a slip of a girl, up against him.) His arm is heavy on my chest and stomach, and the fingers rest as a cage around my breast.

  Sometimes we lie like that for hours. And then one of us wakes up and starts exploring, and then the other, and then before you know it … well, words are hopeless to describe it when it’s good, and it’s always good. I keep on expecting annoyance, that besieged feeling I got with Brenner, but it hasn’t happened yet.

  Scene: Kitchen, last October. MUM is putting away shopping. ME enters.

  ME: Mum, I’ve missed two periods.

  (MUM freezes. Long silence.)

  MUM (turning to face ME): Does this mean what I think it means?

  ME: I think so.

  (Long silence.)

  MUM: Brenner?

  (ME nods.)

  MUM (chirpy, bitter): Well, at least you know that. (Long silence.) Have you decided what you’ll do?

  ME (gigantically grateful that she’s not screarning/ crying/fainting): No.

  MUM (tentatively): Keep? (After a pause, with a catch in her voice) Get rid of?

  ME (ironically): Like, kill?

  MUM (shrugging): It’s an option. These days, in this country. An option and an age-old practice, there’s no getting away from it. I mustn’t talk. (Shakes herself) I mustn’t be seen to …

  ME (bitterly): … to care one way or the other.

  MUM: Oh, sweetheart, care! (Crosses room, puts arms around ME. ME starts crying. Softly): Oh, God. My baby girl. For crying out loud! Darling, darling … (Sits ME down, pulls chair to face me.) I know you must be in a mess, hovering, but I can’t make a decision for you. I mustn’t pressure you one way or another. Which way are you leaning, Mel? Towards Keep or Get Rid Of?

  ME (through sobs): Get—Get Rid Of. It’s too big. And scary.

  MUM: All right, then. Let me think. Let me think.

  Pug tells me I’m beautiful. ‘Beaudifuw’ is how he says it. ‘Your face—I dunno, you look like … like a princess or sumpthink.’ A princess or sumpthink. I love him. I love it how he looks at me as if I am a princess (or sumpthink), way up out of reach, and he’s a foot soldier or a stablehand or some lowly crumb on the footpath, just adoring me. Does Dad ever look at Mum like that, completely adoring, completely lost in her? Did he ever? Maybe once he did. Things must have been better once, before they got bogged down in the suburbs, trekking back and forth to offices, wiping crumbs off kitchen benches, mending broken bloody light fittings, for God’s sake! The idea of them spending time together for the sheer pleasure of being together … sorry, guys, me no compute. Maybe they don’t compute either, any more. Funny how little a person can know about her parents, even after sixteen years and seven months in the same house.

  Pug looks tall to me, me being short. He looks solid, me being skinny. He looks dark-skinned because I am pale.

  He’s stronger than Brenner would ever’ve dreamed of trying to be, from all the training. The sit-ups make his belly hard, hard as bone, the muscles banded like extra ribs. I’ve nearly passed out being hugged by this guy; the blood stops in my head, blackness fogs my eyes, twinkles away when he lets go. And then he’s looking down on me, through squiggling stars. The cleanest eyes, green-grey, with white whites. In a movie once, a boy took a pickaxe to the eyes of a stableful of horses. Looking in Pug’s eyes, I feel like saying, Watch out for that boy, watch out for that pickaxe. They’re so fitted and framed, so shiny in the gloom, it’s as if he’s presenting them for injury. His mouth is the same in its softness, its definite line asking to be blurred or broken. The skin on him! I can feel it on my lips now, under my fingers. It just seems to flow with energy. And he’s always so warm; it’s almost like a breeze of warm atoms coming off him—I can feel it on my face when he’s close.

  It’s a relief sometimes to get out and see old or ugly faces in King Street, faces on which the blows have already fallen, that wrinkle and sag and look tired. There isn’t that tension in my chest, then, of waiting, of having to keep watch.

  Of course, it works the other way, coming from that plain old ugly injured world to this: smooth-carved skin, animal-warm, asking to be touched. It’s easier for my eyes and hands, harder for my heart.

  The gym is perhaps three times the size of Pug’s bedroom. Sometimes there are twenty people in there: six or seven working out, the two trainers, and others resting, along the walls or the bench by the ring. There’s a window, very small, very high up, almost apologising for having to let in some light. Nobody says much, only Jimmy the trainer, moving around the ring with punching pads on his hands, chanting sequences of blo
ws to the boy he’s working.

  You feel as if your brain’s being pummelled, the punishment those pads, the bag, the punchball, the air are taking. It’s crowded just with real people, and then there are all the imaginary opponents, dodging, throwing curly ones, copping body blows. Sometimes it gets so busy I forget it’s Pug I’m here with. And then he’s there beside me on the bench, breathing hard, elbows on knees, T-shirt wet-rippled like beach sand up his back. His guard is up—a carefully immobile face, looking past me if he talks to me, not smiling. I might get a flicker of him now and then, but mostly I have to wait until later, when we go back to his place.

  Everyone wears the same slack, preoccupied expression. Everyone bar Jimmy and his assistant is running sweat. It has no smell, as if these bodies are rinsed of all toxins and stream pure water. Morning and evening the floorboards are soaked with it, like a ritual; it’s steamed and flung into the air; one boy always spits in the ring, and rubs it into the general sog with the toe of his training shoe; once I was watching Pug spar with Justin Silva and a drop hit me right in the eye. Bodies are like big wet fruit; they thwack and smack and squelch when they collide, and the juice flies out of them.

  I tell him about my bad day yesterday. ‘This guy I used to go out with was hassling me,’ is how I put it.

  ‘He wants you back, does he?’ says my Pug, very serious.

  ‘He hates my guts. He chucked stones at me.’ I show him the mark on my leg, the scab in my hair. I start to feel bad about this, like a sook, trying to get sympathy.

  Well, I get it. He goes very quiet, won’t look at me. Then he does look, and his heart’s going so hard that his head is shaking, and his hands shake too, and I feel like a complete arsehole for having said anything.

  ‘I could kill that bloke,’ he says. ‘And if you told me to, I reckon I’d do it.’ The way he says ‘you’, grabbing my arms, peering in through one of my eyes, then the other—my guts feel like concrete with the guilt. I did ask for all that shit from Brenner, after all.

  I close my eyes and kiss him. He kisses me back very fiercely, and . It’s excellent. The anger and the … well, I guess the guilt helps. I really get lost there for a little while, really forget about my life and the mess it’s turning into.

  After, he wants to talk more about Brenner, but I won’t. I joke him out of it. I don’t want to go into all that stuff with Pug. This is completely different, what I’ve got with him, completely separate. I wanted it to stay like that—what a dickhead for even mentioning it!

  But I had the bad taste of it in my mouth, and he’s the only one. Now my mouth is full of the taste of his, and my nose full of the salty-olive smell of him, and my … yes, I am full of the feeling of him, which isn’t just, like, a plug and a socket fitting together, but ripples all round my body, and my … whatever it is, whatever else there is.

  The question of meeting the family. ‘Oh, man, does this mean we’re engaged?’ I joke.

  ‘I just wanna show you off,’ says Pug, grinning. ‘And I think you and my mum’d get on okay.’

  ‘Oh God, but what about the other three?’

  ‘Yeah, they’d be cool.’

  ‘Going on previous experience …?’

  ‘There isn’t any previous experience.’ My words sound very much mine coming out of his mouth. ‘That’s why they’d be cool.’

  ‘Amazed, eh? Do they think you’re gay or something?’

  He emerges from the shadow at the bedhead. His eyes hold the window-light in their greenness, in their curved lenses. ‘You’re trying to wriggle out of this, aren’t you?’

  I cave in, nodding. He looks at me harder until I turn away.

  ‘Are you really scared?’

  ‘Yeah. I am.’ I shrug off the urge to cry.

  ‘Why, but?’ He’s right up close and unavoidable. ‘They’re just people.’

  ‘They’re your people. And anyway … I’m not all that good with people.’

  ‘Me-el!’ He flops back on the bed, then straight away sits up at me again. ‘What are you, some kind of bloody extra-terrestrial or something?’

  ‘Gee, that’s a big word,’ I snap, so quick and sour we gape at each other. Then Pug cracks up, and I have to too.

  When we emerge from it, he grips my shoulders. ‘You are so stupid (’sjupid’ is how he says it). How could anyone not like you?’

  ‘Oh, look, it beats me.’ I smile straight into his face.

  He’s lying behind me. He speaks into my neck. ‘Jimmy said again I could go professional.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Yeah. Anytime I want, he reckons.’

  ‘And do you want?’

  He laughs unhappily. ‘Can’t think of anything else to do with myself. You know, I could say I’ve got a job, then.’

  ‘You’d lose the dole?’

  ‘I’d make okay money. I mean, I do all right on the dole, but it’d be good not to be on it, for a change. They’d stop hassling me about bloody training schemes and resume writing and shit. Office procedures, they want me to get skilled in next. Christ.’

  ‘So you’ll probably do it.’

  ‘Probably, yeah.’ He lies thinking. ‘Yeah, you’re right—I have decided, really.’

  ‘Oh, well.’ As if I’m saying goodbye. As if he’s walking away down some tunnel I’m not allowed to enter. ‘Try not to get knocked out too often, hey? I’ve heard it’s really bad for your brain.’

  He clears the hair from my neck, kisses me there. ‘Does fuck-all for the ego, too. So I’ve heard. I’ve been lucky so far, anyway.’

  ‘Well, if anyone deserves to have their luck hold …’

  ‘Yeah, like, I haven’t got much brains to spare, hey.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant.’ I’m savage with it, savage with finding I care.

  Whenever I walk home from there I feel so good about myself—confident and beautiful. He makes me that way. I go there to be polished and brushed until I shine, and I walk back shining. It doesn’t matter that I’m in my ‘invisible uniform’—black jeans and T-shirt, hair falling around my face. It doesn’t matter that people don’t turn to look at me twice as I walk past. I know I’m shining. I’m shining inside.

  I can’t stop thinking about him—don’t want to. ‘I love him.’ I only have to think the words, never mind all the memories that spill from them like marbles, and my heart lifts into a higher gear. And he loves me, the way he looks at me, and touches me really carefully as if he’s scared I might push his hand away any moment. I can set my whole self, body and whatever-else-goes-with-it (these are the only times, actually, when I think maybe I might have a soul) practically singing, just thinking back, going from peak moment to peak moment. I sit in school, I lie awake in the dark at home, singing.

  Two hours: Ejected into her fallopian tube, a woman’s egg, or ovum, will float there, fertile, for about twenty-four hours. Nutrient cells halo the hungry egg, and a crowd of sperm cells is busy tearing these nutrients from the ovum in preparation for drilling through the outer egg wall. A dozen sperm, rotating themselves into the wall with strong tail-beats, will be close to penetrating at the same time, but when the first one is through, the wall changes chemical composition to prevent the others piercing it. The successful sperm continues to drill through the inner wall, relinquishing its tail once this is accomplished.

  Midnight. City glare hazes out the stars at my window, framed by twitching ivy. Another weird quiet night. It’s not like Dad’s a really noisy man, but when he’s not here our house is different. Mum just makes a sort-of dinner, scrappy, not a proper meal, and then sits down and writes letters all evening, or goes and has a long bath. If I try to start a conversation she talks back as if she’s not really here—or maybe as if I’m not really here. Since last year, whenever Dad’s around we make a lot of cheerful noise, and whenever he’s not here we’re really quiet, as if we’ve exhausted ourselves. I don’t know what Mum’s thinking about, but I find my mind goes to work on things, from the darkness outside the h
ouse walls to the watch on my bedside table, so that they lurk, instead of just being. They watch. They brood on me. Sometimes I make myself so scared I can’t move.

  God, Dad, you don’t do much these days except go to work and come home and sleep. What a life! How do you stand it? I thought he must be making stacks. I asked him if he was, wondering if he had a different house in mind, or some kind of fancy holiday like he used to talk about. But he said not many of the new clients were coming through. ‘Makes it really worthwhile working late, then, hey,’ I said. But he went on about goodwill, and building up trust with clients, and how he didn’t expect me to understand yet, and that got me off the topic. I got mad at him instead. How old does he think I am, six instead of sixteen? I can’t believe how patronising he was.

  ‘Don’t go slamming off to your room, Miss Sensitive!’ he yelled after me as I ran upstairs, and I heard him going on to Mum. ‘What’s the matter with her these days? You can’t say anything without her doing her block!’ I lay on my bed thinking maybe I had overreacted, but certainly not feeling bad enough to go down and apologise.

  Things with Dad are stuffed. He doesn’t want to understand how things work in my life. I remember, trying to tell him about the way the HSC units work, when I was trying to plan Year 11, and he just pulled away, physically, even. Real distaste came onto his face and he found an excuse to be somewhere else fast. I know he didn’t have a great time at school, but couldn’t he take an interest? He doesn’t have to do the work, just know what I’m doing and be encouraging. But every time the subject of school comes up he dips out. Sometimes he even says, ‘Oh well, school was never my strong point. I left after Fourth Form to work on building sites’—and you can still see the relief on his face from twenty-five years ago! Seems like a long time to carry around a grudge.