Joel & Cat Set the Story Straight Read online

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Joel and Cat Set the Story Straight

  Nick Earls is the author of twelve books, including a number of bestsellers published internationally in English and in translation. His previous novels featuring teenage central characters include After January, 48 Shades of Brown (a CBCA Book of the Year), Making Laws for Clouds and Monica Bloom. After January and 48 Shades of Brown have both been adapted for theatre, and a feature-film adaptation of 48 Shades of Brown has recently been released.

  Rebecca Sparrow’s critically acclaimed, award-winning first novel, The Girl Most Likely, is currently in development as a feature film. Her second novel, The Year Nick McGowan Came to Stay, has been developed into a stage play. Rebecca is passionate about volunteer work – she is an ambassador for War Child Australia and The Smith Family’s Learning for Life program. You can learn more about Rebecca at www.rebeccasparrow.com

  Joel

  and

  Cat

  Set the

  Story

  Straight

  Nick Earls and Rebecca Sparrow

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published by Penguin Group (Australia),

  a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd, 2007

  Text copyright © Nick Earls and Rebecca Sparrow, 2007

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this

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  penguin.com.au

  ISBN: 978-1-74228-047-9

  – Monday

  There’s even ink in my hair, and that makes no sense. It’s only when I’m washing my hands that I see it in the mirror.

  The leaky pen is in the bin, the wrecked cover of my Maths book is a problem for another time and, in the classroom above, Extension English is starting. Luke is explaining to Mr Ashton that my pen leaked in my bag and I’m here in the toilets, ink still everywhere. How could one little pen hold so much?

  My mother went through a blue-hair phase once, or at least a blue-streak phase – vivid, inky blue. She was rebelling, I think. It was her first serious job in the public service. I don’t know why she had to take it out on her hair.

  I finally turn up to the classroom with my hair wet and some stain from the ink still on my hands. Mr Ashton smiles and nods. Looks at the hair. Says nothing. He’s sitting on the edge of his desk, clicking the cap on and off a whiteboard marker. He looks, as always, like Hugh Grant with a belly. A faded shirt not quite properly tucked in, a limp lick of hair waiting to be brushed from his forehead, his face set with its usual look of worn-out wry amusement.

  The room’s different.

  ‘We’ve changed the seating arrangements today, Joel,’ he says. ‘We’re working on something new.’ I head for the nearest set of empty desks and he says, ‘No, no, we’re all sitting next to people today. Pairs. It’s all about pairs.’

  And the only unmade pair in the room is Cat Davis and the vacant seat next to her. She looks at me. I look at her. We’re like gunslingers in a Western, just for a second, staring each other down on some dusty empty street. Frankly, we’d both take a bullet rather than go with this.

  Mr Ashton’s still talking. ‘No one’s allowed to sit next to anyone they usually sit next to. It’s all part of the task. So, it looks like you’re with Cat.’

  Cat, whose last words to me came out with a witchy hiss about fifteen months ago when she made it plain I was never to talk to her friend again. Cat, who is now glaring at me as if I deliberately basted myself with ink so I could turn up late and wreck her day. Or, as it turns out, her next two weeks. Our next two weeks.

  Mr Ashton writes ‘TANDEM STORY’ on the board while I walk over and sit next to Cat. She treats me like a disease that has just oozed her way. She slides her books across to the far side of her desk, rolls her eyes and sighs. What is she? Six?

  She sniffs. Blows her nose noisily into the crinkly tissue she’s got balled up in her hand. This just keeps getting better. As if sitting next to Cat Davis isn’t enough, now I get to share the cloud of micro-organisms she’s honking out around us. She blows her nose again, then settles back to a snuffle.

  ‘We’ll use the tandem story as a bridge to other narrative forms,’ Mr Ashton tells us, writing ‘HYPERTEXTS’ and ‘OTHER MULTI-AUTHOR NARRATIVES’, and sounding them both out slowly as he does it.

  He mentions that he’s been to a workshop at a conference, as if we hadn’t already guessed.

  ‘This is an exercise,’ he says, warming to his intro and using a voice rather too like the one he uses as Henry V talking to the troops before Agincourt when he teaches that extract in Year Ten English. ‘An exercise to bring to the surface the issues that come up as part of the writing process – narrative, characterisation, tone or voice, observation, questions about opening up possibilities and shutting them down, making choices. And you have to do all that without discussing it. Your only contact about your story should be by email, and the emails can’t include any forward story planning. There will also be a companion essay, which should be partly theory but more an evaluation of what you’ve gone through. You’ll submit both the story and the companion essay, but only the essay will be assessed. I want you to feel free to take risks with the story. Surprise each other. Really make something of it.’

  Cat makes a few notes, but then starts drawing, and the drawing becomes Mr Ashton’s face in a metal helmet with a crown on it. We were both in the same Year Ten class. I almost laugh, but I stop it on the way out. She cups her hand around the drawing, then covers it with her packet of tissues and sits back, sniffing and blinking and playing with her blonde hair, feigning complete attention to the front of the room. Mr Ashton’s rev-up speech continues. Cat Davis and I are partners now. That’s what it all adds up to. Tandem-story partners with an essay ahead of us and, way worse than that, a story to share. Starting tonight or tomorrow, writing the story a paragraph in turn, one paragraph a day until two weeks from Wednesday.

  At the end of the class, after another fierce blow of her nose, Cat gives me a hard look and says, ‘I’m starting. I’m writing the first bit…’

  �
��Sure,’ I tell her, like someone who couldn’t care less – who couldn’t care less that these are the first words between us in fifteen months. ‘Amaze me.’

  ‘That’s not a bad line,’ Luke says later when we’re talking about it. ‘“Amaze me.” Sometimes mere surprise is not enough. Where does she get off telling you she’s going first?’

  ‘She’s being Cat Davis. It’s her job to be annoying. I don’t know who gave it to her, but that’s how it is. And now we’re story buddies for the next two weeks or so. Excellent.’

  Luke should have been my partner. On any normal, non-ink-stained day when Ashtoe hadn’t been inspired to mess up the room, that’s where I would have been sitting. Gearing up for another school week, soaking up the Monday-morning chlorinated smell of Luke Pickett, who would have knocked off a pool job with his father on the way in from Jindalee.

  His parents have a pool business, and Luke helps on weekends and holidays and whenever else he’s made to. He’s somewhere between slave labour and a hired hand. His father has actually said to him, ‘One day all this will be yours,’ but they were pulling the last rancid bits of a drowned possum out of a filter at the time, so there was probably irony involved. The prospect of that future helps Luke keep his marks up. He’s told me that he’s already explained to the school careers counsellor that his number-one criterion for a job is ‘must feature no contact with runny possums’.

  ‘Jeez, how’s it going to be?’ he says, and laughs. ‘A story with Cat Davis. You of all people.’ I don’t want him to go there. ‘Maybe this’ll sort out the mysterious ugly end with Emma.’ He’s gone there.

  ‘And maybe it won’t,’ I tell him.

  I know he’s got an old tennis ball in his bag, and I make him play handball. As we’re slapping it across the concrete, he starts to laugh again.

  ‘“And maybe it won’t,”’ he says in a whiny voice, and juts his lip out in a big sad pout.

  I grab the ball and chuck it at him, and it ricochets off his shoulder and into the bushes.

  It’s all that’s in my head on the walk home from school – going out with Emma Marchetta for a few months in Year Ten, and the abrupt end to it all, with Cat as the go-between. The annoying best friend at her annoying best. Actually, she hadn’t been so bad until then.

  ‘Emma’s going out with Troy now,’ she’d said, ‘and that’s all you need to know. You’ve blown it, buddy. You don’t need me to tell you how, but you’ve blown it.’

  And she walked back across to the science block, to Emma who was sitting under a frangipani tree, holding her lunch but not eating it, looking my way. It was anger, mostly, that I could see on her face.

  Emma does something else when we do Extension English. Who knows what? Not me.

  I turn off Gailey Road into Sandford Street, where life goes on in its usual meandering way outside the towering yellow-brick riverfront apartment blocks. An old woman in a broadbrimmed hat is down on her knees pulling up weeds. A man near her is defying the water regulations and hosing some plants even though it’s only late afternoon. Someone else is leaning on a walking frame and scowling at a car that’s been in visitor parking a bit too long.

  My mother’s the fire warden in our building, since she’s the only adult under seventy-five. We live with such a stoic bunch of oldies that their contribution to the evacuation plan was mostly, ‘Don’t you worry about me, love – you save yourself.’ She had to organise a meeting to tell them that wouldn’t do – that an evacuation plan actually had to involve a scheme for getting everyone out of the building or she’d be letting her red warden’s hat down.

  I pull the mail out of the box and catch the lift to the sixth floor. Our neighbour’s there when the door opens, poking at a high cobweb with a long orange dusting device. Betty Frost, OAM, longstanding Rotarian and Meals on Wheelser, deputy fire warden, habitual wearer of slightly lurid make-up, bra straps always on show.

  As she steps down from the stool, she goes for the inevitable quick breast shuffle just to keep things in order. She has a front that behaves like two grapefruit in a string bag. There’s always breast wrangling going on to maintain some semblance of symmetry. I’m well used to looking the other way, not that I’m sure she’d care.

  ‘Hello, love,’ she says, catching her breath and putting down the duster. ‘Why don’t I make you some tea?’

  She looks tired. It’s time to be a good citizen.

  ‘Why don’t I make you some?’ I say to her as I’m reaching for my keys. ‘My mother’s bought something new, some kind she hasn’t tried before. It might be Central American.’

  ‘Well, it would be, wouldn’t it?’ Betty says with a lift of her pencilled eyebrows. ‘If it’s at all possible.’

  ‘Si,’ I tell her. ‘Si señora.’

  The air in the flat is still and thick with the heat of the day, so I get the air-conditioning pumping. My mother’s Spanish phrasebook is in the kitchen, and Betty picks it up and orders train tickets to Barcelona while I boil the kettle. Train tickets to Barcelona, Señor Hedges, return, ida y vuelta.

  All this is due to Jorge Rivera, the new man in all our lives, my mother’s nuevo hombre. Betty’s bangles rattle on the bench top as she turns to another page.

  ‘Cobran ustedes por el bebé?’ she says, in her best bus-tour Spanish. ‘That’s “Do you charge for the baby?” Let’s hope Sandra doesn’t find herself asking that one too much.’

  ‘Let’s hope. Ay caramba. No bebé, por favor.’

  Her lipstick and bangles are both scarlet today. Thought’s gone into this. None of the other eighty-year-olds in the building present themselves quite like Betty. She used to babysit me a few years ago. I’d sit in her flat doing my homework while she would paint watercolour cards to sell at markets. ‘Cash only,’ she told me. ‘You’ve got to fly under the radar sometimes.’ As if it was high-level espionage rather than a low-level tax dodge.

  Do you charge for the baby? It doesn’t bear thinking about. Betty takes her tea white with none – that’s the only thought I want to be dealing with at the moment.

  My mother sweeps in around six, a cyclone of papers and keys and things she picked up at the shops. Fresh bread, a punnet of coriander seedlings that may not live long, part of today’s work copy of The Courier-Mail, and a plastic conference satchel with her name tag clipped to it, ‘Sandra Hind’ in bold black letters.

  ‘So, you’re okay then,’ she says, like it’s a tick falling in a box. She’s looking around the room for signs that I’m not okay. There will be none.

  ‘I’m okay,’ I tell her, ‘but The Simpsons is starting, so your enquiries are limited to the ad breaks, all right?’

  ‘Charming. Charming boy. Remember how hard I worked to get you that widescreen TV?’ She piles her things on the breakfast bar. ‘Or maybe we shouldn’t go there.’

  ‘No. There’s a tiny heart at Retravision that’s probably still broken.’

  ‘Yes, well…’ she says, and leaves it at that. ‘Anyway, plenty to do, right?’

  She puts a casserole in the oven to reheat for me and tosses a salad for herself, eating it standing at the breakfast bar watching The Simpsons. She asks about school. I don’t tell her much.

  ‘No, really, I’m interested,’ she says, mildly affronted. ‘I want some content.’

  ‘It’s school. It’s not big on content. My pen leaked.’

  ‘Happens to the best of us,’ she says, in a thanks-for-nothing kind of way, even though we both know there’s no time for conversation now. ‘That wasn’t seriously the biggest thing in your day?’

  Biggest thing in my day? Two weeks partnered in story, and probably disease, with Cat Davis – maybe that’d be number one.

  ‘I went to school,’ I tell her. ‘I did the regular school things. Six classes, three sausage rolls. I came home. Solid but unremarkable progress, ink on my hands.’

  If I mention Cat Davis, there will need to be context offered. Context would include Emma. Emma is a topic we will not be d
iscussing.

  The ad break ends.

  ‘Well, good for you,’ she says, happy now that she thinks she’s drained me of all my news. ‘Good for you and your regular day.’

  She leaves her bowl in the sink and goes to change for salsa dancing. Jorge awaits, but there’s some preening to be done first. Full costume would be wrong for the venue, and that’s a good start since it wouldn’t be right for her. She’s hardly the salsa look. She has hair that is short, teased and spiky. Hair that means business, in a drama-teacher kind of way. It used to be black with flecks of grey, but the flecks seem to have mysteriously blackened up again. She thinks her lips need more volume and gets stuck scrutinising herself in the hall mirror all too often. The hall mirror is there for decoration, I’ve told her, and because it creates an illusion of space and breaks up the row of old framed movie posters, but still I catch her there sometimes, raking her teeth over her lips in case it’ll make them larger.

  Jorge, I’ve assured her, thinks her bonita just as she is. Jorge, it’s distinctly possible, is an extreme loser, but I try to be supportive while it lasts. In most cases, anyway. Terry Whidborne, last year’s guy from Retravision, wasn’t worth keeping once we had the TV. Okay, it wasn’t quite that callous. My mother’s not just in it for merchandise, and she did pay at least something for it. Cost price? Maybe. But he was awful, in a clammy painless sort of way. English, downtrodden, brown teeth that he blamed on the National Health and a beige kind of life that set them off nicely.

  My mother’s a blur as she heads for the front door, five minutes after she should have, with her dancing shoes in her hand.

  It was some time late last year when she started going to salsa classes at Graceville. ‘I’ve cut down on my social calendar where it doesn’t offer access to single men,’ she told me. ‘Single straight men. My friends are half gay and half coupled. That’s my world, and where does it get me?’

  With all the strategy of an admiral pushing a wooden ship across a map, she manoeuvred herself months ago into position for battle. The salsa crowd at the church hall in Graceville didn’t stand a chance. She went there looking for Antonio Banderas and came away with something, by my reckoning, a fair way short of Fabio. She tells me he was the pick of the bunch – Jorge Rivera, the lead dance teacher’s brother and assistant. Does the pick of the bunch ever have an oily black plait, a smell like old mango and a deep heartfelt sigh that tells you he can do nothing for himself? Not in my world.