Читать книгу Zones - Damien Broderick - Страница 7

FLASHBACK

Mum and Poppa split up over a year ago. I’d just turned thirteen, and I didn’t really know what was going on. Mum went to stay with her sister, my aunt Vicky. I told myself it was because something had gone wrong with Vicky’s marriage. I thought Mum had driven up to Ballarat to help her poor older sister Vicky get over some crisis in her life. Ha! Well, anyway, that’s what I wanted to believe, so that’s what I did believe.

Mum and Poppa are great ones for being honest and up front about family matters. Full and frank disclosure and all that. But the truth is: they’re not very good at it.

All that time Mum was at Vicky’s I thought she was going to come back home. I took it for granted. I mean, wouldn’t you? If Mum had gone storming out of the house after a screaming row, if she and Poppa had been throwing plates and glasses at each other, well, then, I’d have had a better idea what was going on. That’s how they’re supposed to do it. That’s what happens on telly. But it was all so civilized that I missed it entirely. Didn’t catch on for ages.

Being split-up isn’t why I feel so awful though. There are stacks of other kids at school from single-parent families. Only it’s mostly their dads who’ve run off, not their mothers. God, you ought to hear their stories, some of them. It’d curl your hair. Actually it hasn’t curled mine, but then nothing ever seems to, despite hours down at the hair dresser three months ago when Mum wanted me to look beautiful for Aunt Vicky’s twenty-fifth wedding anniversary party. Ha!

Mostly kids won’t talk about it, but sometimes, when they know you come from a single-parent family yourself, they talk and talk. Fights, smashed-up furniture, the police at the door so you could die of embarrassment, women’s refuges for the mothers and the kids, court orders, the lot. Even broken bones. Lots of bruises they can’t hide very well.

Well, it wasn’t like that round at our place. No, it was like skating on ice, beautiful and smooth and techno music in the air—and then in one hit you’re flat down on the ice with your head buzzing and a nose full of blood. I got home from school one day and Mum was packing her bags, saying she had to go to stay at Vicky’s for a few days. “To sort things out,” she said. “Marriage is a funny business,” she said. “It has its ups and downs,” she said.

Poor old Aunt Vicky, I thought, she must be having trouble with uncle Bill. Mind you, the way Mum hugged me and kissed me and told me I was the most precious thing in her life.... I should have realized something was going on. It was as if she was heading off to spend a year in Antarctica.

But I thought she must be clinging to me like that because she was upset about her sister and that rotten no-good uncle Bill. Actually Bill is really an old sweetie and always gives good cash presents at Christmas and on my birthday, even if he is amazingly boring. He worked in provisioning for the Air Force or something equally dreary, never went near the jet fighters.

You can be a real dweeb-head when you don’t want to look reality in the face.

But hey, I still don’t want to think about the break-up. Maybe I’m a bit like the other kids at school after all, the ones from single-parent families, I hate thinking about it. Not that there’s that much to think about, it was so boring, all that on-again off-again stuff for a year. All those visits. All that “talking it over.” By the time Maddy and I first saw Mum and this Edward character in Bourke Street, I had come to accept that she and Dad aren’t going to live in the same house any more. After a couple of months Mum had come back from Ballarat and moved into a nasty little brick apartment in North Fitzroy, so at least I could go and see her every week. It might seem unusual for the girl to stay behind with the father while the mother goes off by herself, but I was in the middle of exams and besides Mum said she just needed to be completely alone for a while. We assumed that meant a couple of weeks. Then it was a couple of months, including the Christmas holidays. Then a year had gone by. It wasn’t as if I never saw her, of course. She wasn’t living very far from me and Poppa. All by herself, except when I stayed over for the night. I thought. But I could hardly keep thinking that once she shifted to the creep’s place in Kew.

The first time I met Edward the creep it was more or less by mistake.

At that stage, Mum hadn’t quite got around to mentioning his name in conversation. So Poppa and I didn’t know of his existence. I happened to be in the city with Maddy to see a movie. We were coming out of the cinema complex and there on the other side of the street, across the tram tracks, I see Mum and this guy in a dark suit carrying a briefcase covered in gold catches and combination locks and with this mobile phone in a leather holster clipped to his belt, although I didn’t notice that right away. He was explaining something to Mum, who was listening intently, her face turned toward him in a way that made my flesh crawl.

Well, you have to deal with all sorts of people in this world, don’t you? Lawyers and accountants and all sorts of creepy wheelers and dealers, especially when you’re a woman living by herself because she’s walked out on her family, so I didn’t instantly think, God, who’s Mum’s repulsive friend? I just thought, Poor thing, she’s stuck there having to listen to some wheeler-dealer and be nice to him.

I gave Maddy a nudge. “Hey, Mads, there’s my Mum on the other side of the road.”

Maddy never misses a chance, so she says, “Well, let’s go and cadge a hot chocolate.”

We’re standing on the curb and yelling at her, but it’s Bourke Street in the late afternoon, and even though the Swanston Mall blocks off most of the city through-traffic there’s a tram and a romantic carriage pulled by a lovely old horse with incredibly hairy feet and a few cars that look lost, and Mum doesn’t hear us. I still don’t think there’s anything weird about this. We skip across the road and get clanged at by the tram driver, and by the time we get to the other side Mum and the wheeler-dealer are a bit in front of us with other people getting in the way, and they’re walking slowly towards the lights.

“Who’s the guy?” Maddy asks. “He looks as if he’s loaded.”

“Dunno,” I say, a bit out of breath. “Never saw him before.”

We’re hurrying to catch them up and you can tell, from the way Mum keeps leaning her head close to him, that she’s having difficulty hearing what the wheeler-dealer’s telling her, probably some doubtful scam with money, but her trouble hearing him is pretty much what you’d expect in the middle of the city at that hour, the traffic being what it is and all the other people swarming along, etc. I think to myself, What a nerd, why can’t he wait until they’re up in his expensive air-conditioned office before he starts explaining about stocks and shares or her income tax deductions, or whatever it is? Why does he have to give his client a hard time by trying to make her listen to this sort of complicated detail in the middle of the rush-hour traffic? All this goes through my head in a flash as we’re hurrying to catch up with them, and then Maddy tugs at my arm and pulls me to a stop. I shake off her hand, but she hisses at me in a conspiratorial way.

“What?”

“Let’s watch them for a minute.”

Maddy’s my best friend, but she has some really dumb ideas sometimes. Why do we want to watch the back of Mum’s head in Bourke Street while she’s consulting with some ill-mannered nerd? I just say impatiently, “Come on, Maddy...,” and keep going.

We catch up with them at the corner when the lights go red. I arrive alongside and say, “G’day, Mum.” And my mother sort of jumps, and takes a quick step away from the wheeler-dealer, and lets go his arm which I hadn’t actually noticed she was holding, and is really surprised to see me.

“Jenny!” she squeaks. “Oh...er...hello, darling. What are you doing here?”

“Been to the movies” I tell her, sneaking a sidelong look at the nerd. “We thought we’d hit on you for a hot chocolate or something. That is, if you haven’t got to do something else.” It looks by now more as if they’re on the way to the nerd’s office, rather than having just left it. Anyway, his office would be in Collins Street, wouldn’t it, or Williams Street? One of the business zones? But my mother says hello to Maddy, and then says to me, “Oh, what a good idea. Edward and I were just going to have a drink ourselves. I’m sure we can put off the alcohol for a bit. Let’s go to The Coffee Place.”

Unbelievable. She’s been heading off to some bar with this nerd. First you go to see them in their office about something and then you have to go to the bar with them. I feel like I’m charging in here to the rescue, saving her from a long boring time with the boozy accountant. Maddy is making some sort of face at me and I don’t get it. I grab Mum’s left hand, which I never do, and clutch onto her. After a moment she pats my hand with her other hand, and smiles in a way that I can only describe as nervous. The light changes and we get swept across Swanston Street and into the Bourke Street bit of the Mall, and while we’re getting tugged along by the crowd Mum does these funny formal introductions. Apparently the wheeler-dealer’s name is Edward Thing, which is so ridiculous that I almost get a fit of giggles but actually I’m suddenly not all that sure it’s funny.

“They keep changing the geography,” Mum says brightly to Edward Thing, and he says something about the Mall being an improvement to civic tone and potentially a boost to small business in the CBD, whatever that is, and we end up in The Coffee Place sitting around a little table with black coffee and foamy chocolate and pieces of chocolate to nibble on, and it isn’t anything like what I’ve had in mind—I mean, with this wheeler-dealer, this Thing person being there as well.

“How’s your bike?” Mum asks me, so we start talking about this new U-shaped bike-lock I want that’s made of duralumin or titanium or something and costs the earth but they keep your bike safely locked to the lamp post, rather than being ridden away by some rotten thief with a pair of bolt cutters. Poppa bought me the Malvern Star mountain bike, but he reckons any old chain and cheap K-Mart padlock is good enough to protect it. He’s a bit simple, sometimes, old Poppa. He goes on about how when he was growing up everyone just leaned their bikes against shop windows and came back half a day later and they were still there, just sitting there. And they didn’t used to lock the front door, either, just went out for the day and left the place wide open. Of course they didn’t have computers or videos in those days to steal, or street junkies either. So he doesn’t really understand about bike locks. He thinks if I’ve got to have one, I can make do with an old padlock and an iron chain. I reckon if I lean on Mum a bit, she might come good for the classy U-shaped unit.

While Mum and I are raving on about bike locks, poor Maddy is left to have a conversation with E. Thing. I can sort of hear them in the background, over Mum’s insistence that she isn’t at all sure Carlton and Brunswick are good places to ride a bike in the first place, and how Sydney Road and even Lygon Street are death traps even if you’re in a car. She seems to be trying to convince me that I’ll be run down by some huge interstate 18-wheeler if I so much as put my front wheel out into the traffic, which is true enough in some places; you’d need to be a suicidal maniac to try to ride a bike down Sydney Road.

“I know, Mum,” I say, “but the cool thing about old Melbourne suburbs like Brunswick and Carlton is all the small side streets and back lanes.” We’ve got this excellent networks of back lanes where I live, even if half of them are still cobbled with huge blocks of blue granite and shake you about if you ride fast. “If you know your way around you can avoid all the traffic.”

But Mum is ignoring this and starting on about how I should avoid the lanes and only ride down proper streets because of the risk of muggers and perverts and junkies. In fact she’s getting so worked up I expect her to start telling me to only ride down the tram tracks in the middle of Sydney Road. So I switch off and try to hear what Maddy and Edward Thing are saying to each other. I wouldn’t have thought they’d find anything to say at all, but he’s murmuring away in his posh accent and she’s lapping it all up.

Edward must have asked Maddy what school she goes to. They always do, don’t they, ask you what school you go to?

“North Carlton High,” she says.

“Oh? And what’s it like?”

What does he think it’s like? It’s like a school. But Maddy is really polite, for some reason. “It has a high ethnic component,” she tells him. This is something the Principal’s terribly proud of, and they put it in all the promotional leaflets. It doesn’t make any difference, the funding in schools like ours keeps getting cut.

“Ah,” says Edward, as if this is something very interesting indeed. “I think this is a desirable feature of well-rounded education that my boys have missed out on.”

I’ll bet they do, I think, the little private school dweebs.

“Although,” Edward says carefully, “the place isn’t nearly as homogeneous as it was when I was a boy there. There are a couple of very bright Chinese students in Tristan’s form.”

Maddy says, “Huh, that’s nothing. Our form has more boat people than a Hong Kong ferry.”

I nearly choke on my chocolate. Mum stops going on about riding down Sydney Road without a police escort and asks me if I’m all right. I say yes, I’m fine, but I do need a better bike lock and Mum says, “Oh, all right, what do they cost?” I tell her the exact price because I checked them out in Bike World the day before, and Mum fishes her check book out of her handbag and starts to write me a personal check. And a phone starts ringing in my ear.

E. Thing hauls his little mobile phone out of its holster and snaps the mouthpiece open and says, “Thring!” into it.

That’s exactly what he says. Not “Hello.” Not “Edward Thring here.” Just “Thring!”, like a word in a foreign language. Or as if his name was some famous trade-mark, like “Coke!”

I look at Maddy and Maddy looks at me, and we both have to look away to try to control ourselves. Mum hands me the check, and I’m strangling, trying not to laugh out loud. Mum is gazing at me, rather puzzled. I certainly don’t want her to think I’m laughing at her, especially when she’s being so nice and buying me a bike lock. I sort of nod my head in the direction of Thring! hoping she’s heard him and know that’s what’s breaking us up. There’s all this babble coming from his side of the table: “...don’t move until it reaches four point two oh. And we can always cover the deal with the Brazilian perps—”

It’s actually pretty bloody hysterical sitting in a coffee lounge at the same table as a tacky loon who’s raving that sort of rubbish into a mobile phone. So I push myself away from the table and say, “Look, Mum, thanks for the chocolate and the money and everything, but Maddy and I have to get back to her place to babysit.” This is true, but we don’t have to be there for two hours. I can’t stand to be here for another minute. Mum gives me a perfumey kiss, and says, “See you on the weekend, darling.” And Thring! says, “Hold on a minute, Frank,” and puts his hand over the mouthpiece on the phone, and turns to me and says, “Lovely meeting you, Jenny. And you, too, er...er....”

“Maddy,” my mother says.

“Maddy,” Thring! says confidently. Then he looks me in the eye and says, “Jenny, you must meet Tristan one day soon. I’m sure you have a lot in common.”

I can barely keep a straight face, so I just wave goodbye and Maddy and I more or less run out of the shop.

Gasping for breath, Maddy and I fall about in the Bourke Street Mall, going, “You should meet Tristan one day” in a posh way. Then Maddy was being Tristan, talking with a stuck-up preppy voice: “Oh, hello, I’m Tristan son of Thring! and I’ve got these awfully frightfully bright Chinese chums in my class. They are called Fu Manchu and Ming the Merciless.” I’m saying: “Oh, I say, we’ve got so much in common!” and “Things were far more homogeneous in my day.”

And Maddy says, “We’ve got a homo genius in our form, he’s an Eye-talian called Leonardo da Vinci.” Which is pretty good for Maddy. I wouldn’t have thought she’s even heard of Leonardo da Vinci, let alone known he was gay and where he was from. She’s more likely to think he’s a turtle. So we’re falling about and I’m holding on to Maddy to stop myself collapsing in the middle of the late-afternoon Mall when Maddy says, “Jeez, your Mum can pick them.”

“Pick what?”

“Boyfriends.”

Suddenly I’m cold all over and very, very angry at Maddy. “What are you talking about?”

“Oh, come on, Jen. She’s got to have some fun.”

“Fun? You’re bloody mad, Maddy. That’s a horrible thing to say.”

I feel like bursting out crying. Then I am crying. In the middle of the Bourke Street bloody Mall. I’m just standing there with tears rolling down my face, and my chest heaving as if something solid is stuck in the middle of my lungs. There aren’t any cars in this section of Bourke Street, which is just as well, but they let trams through—and one of them is clanging rudely at me to get out of the way. Maddy leads me to a brick bench, and a fat old Greek lady in heavy black shifts along to give us room. I wipe my eyes on my sleeves and say to Maddy, “Sorry. You’re probably right. That creep probably is Mum’s—”

I can’t finish the sentence.

So I stopped being angry at Maddy and became very angry at Mum instead. How could she?