Joel & Cat Set the Story Straight Read online

  ‘Salsa dancers are just so lithe,’ she said once. Frankly, if Jorge was any more of a slug he’d leave a trail, mostly between the fridge and the widescreen TV.

  But we try, Betty and me, we try. I fetch him beers and I’ve asked him every question I possibly could about his work. Betty brought over pictures of her package tour through Central America, but Jorge just smiled and nodded at them, as if a little embarrassed to see his world brought into the open. I’ve wondered if there’s something bad in his past, bad in the civil war there, so I try to be sensitive. And to make allowances for the mango smell.

  Men are my mother’s hobby. That’s by far the best way to look at it. She has every episode of Sex and the City on DVD. She likes to see herself as a Successful Single – living, working, dating, salsa dancing and generally trying to pack two things too many into any given day. She thinks she’s so good at life that she even gives advice on it. She’s a ‘new singles’ mentor at a counselling centre where she went years ago, back when being single was a new idea that crept up on her and turned real for the first time in fifteen years. She says men should add something to her life now, not become it. With the widescreen TV I get that, but in some other cases I’m not so sure.

  I notice a DVD in her pile of mess on the breakfast bar. I take a look in case it’s for me – Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! Possibly not. It’s Spanish, and she’s printed notes about it from Amazon, which read:

  Perhaps only Pedro Almodóvar could come up with a story about a mental patient who stalks and kidnaps an ex-porn star – and turn it into a tender love story. But that’s exactly what happens in Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, a lively instalment from the Spanish director’s wacky middle period…

  It’s rated R. There are further notes about a bad thing happening with a toy submarine. Jorge and my mother will be back here watching this after salsa class. Okay, nauseated now.

  Her taste in movies has changed, or adapted. Or maybe it’s not about the movie in this case (but that thought’s no good for the nausea). It’s my mother’s posters that are in the hall – Harvey, State Fair, Being There, The Graduate. I haven’t seen Kramer Versus Kramer since we moved out of the old house, and that was a long time ago. So long that I only worked out years later that it had been Kramer Versus Kramer. We have different views on what constitutes a ‘classic film’. The posters in my room are for Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Apocalypse Now. I can quote chunks of those. I could after the first time I watched them.

  I check my email, but there’s nothing from Cat Davis. I don’t know if I was expecting her to start our tandem story tonight or not. That makes things easier – not seeing her name in my inbox, not having to deal with that yet.

  Not that I have a lot else to deal with. My homework’s done and TV’s not doing it for me. Outside, the city lights blaze over West End, a CityCat ferry sweeps around the broad elbow of the river below our block of flats, the St Lucia Reach widening out into the Regatta Reach. There’s a breeze now, so I’ve got the air-con off and the windows open. A bat flaps by, cruising.

  A DVD might be an option, but not that DVD. I can’t watch submarine bondage porn that my mother’s lined up for her late-night entertainment – entertainment that will become submarine bondage oily-plait porn in her eyes. Not even the lively Almodóvar went there, surely? Not even in his wacky middle period.

  One suburb away, at the Davis household, the nineteen fifties continues, and everything is in its place. Dad probably comes home from work to the smell of meat roasting, and the dishwasher gets loaded once the last of the apple crumble is gone. Stories about people’s days are extracted over the dinner table – there’s no rushed interrogation over a stand-up pre-salsa salad there. Does Cat mention the tandem story? Being paired with me?

  I owe my father an email. He sent me one a week or so ago, with the usual barrage of pictures. At least he pays for broadband. But life’s not as simple as my father paying for an IT upgrade for educational reasons and my mother sleeping with franchisees for televisions.

  Everyone’s entitled to relationships that don’t work and my mother, with her low expectations, seems to have notched up a few. My father got married again, years ago, so now I have two sisters in Canberra – technically one step and one half, but that’s never struck me as a good way to think of people. Laurel’s nearly sixteen and Charlotte’s eight. They’ve lived there for about fifteen months now, and most weeks there are pictures. I’ll be back there at Easter – more museums, more long walks in the Brindabella Ranges, Charlotte naming shrubs and flowers and explaining the workings of nature. ‘That’s all very good, Charlotte,’ Laurel said on a walk last December, ‘but can you spell “precocious”?’ She could, and did, without cracking a smile.

  I glance at the new pictures again, and hit Reply.

  Meanwhile in the subtropical north, the salsa dancing continues unabated. Ay caramba! All is good here, really. I have a tandem-story task to do at school and I’m paired with someone I’d rather not be, but those are the breaks (and don’t even try telling me it’s character-building). The assessment’s on the companion essay, though, not on the story. So, there’s some theory and some evaluation ahead, as usual…

  I’m glad there was no email from Cat Davis. It didn’t end so well in Year Ten. The bit that Luke isn’t aware of is that I didn’t let it rest, not immediately. I needed to know why it was over all of a sudden, when it seemed pretty good to me. I pushed Emma for an answer a few times, right up until Mr Ashton took me aside for a talk. ‘Sometimes girls just aren’t interested, and you have to let it go. It was often like that for me at your age…’ It was maybe the most embarrassing conversation of my life. I was a marked man, desperate and showing it all over school. If Ashtoe had noticed, everyone knew.

  I’ve just gone to bed when my mother and Jorge get home. One of them – maybe both of them – starts going ‘shoosh shoosh’. I’m sure someone’s in the lounge room pointing at my door in a meaningful ‘don’t scare the child with our grubby porn’ way. I want to yell out and tell them we’re not in a pantomime. I hear the DVD start to play, and the volume quickly drops. I shove a pillow over my head anyway, knowing it’s for the best.

  There’s a storm in the night, and it wakes me. It’s about three a.m. While I’m lying there, I notice light under my door. I get out of bed and open it, silently, and there’s Jorge at the breakfast bar with my mother’s Spanish phrasebook. He seems to be making notes.

  – Tuesday

  I feel like crap. What’s worse is that I’m standing in a chemist with itchy eyes and a runny nose trying desperately to remember the brand names that Dad rattled off this morning while he was simultaneously eating a piece of toast, doing up his tie and trying to catch a glimpse of Nat the Newsreader on Sunrise. I can only remember ‘Rhine’-something.

  I hear a suspicious thump and glance left to see Mark punching a red drug-company display balloon as though he’s in a boxing ring and not in the middle of Indooroopilly Shoppingtown.

  ‘Hey,’ I say, giving him a good poke in the arm. He shoots me a resentful look, which I ignore as I turn back to the counter and wait for the chemist lady to return. My nose starts to do that tingling thing it does when it’s being irritated by some invisible enemy and desperately wants to sneeze. It doesn’t help, though – I’ve sneezed about eighty-five billion times in the past two days. My eyes go watery and half close, but then the feeling passes. I let out a deep sigh, fumble around in my pocket for a tissue and blow my nose. I can just imagine how feral I must look. How feral I’ve probably looked since this hay fever hit me like a truck yesterday morning. I can honestly say that right now I would do anything, give anything, to make it go away.

  ‘Nasal-spray is definitely the way to go with hay fever this severe. It’s very effective.’

  Except use a nasal spray.

  ‘A nasal spray?’ I look up at the sullen, twenty-something chemist assistant who has reappeared from wherever she went and is now standing in front of me wit
h maybe half a dozen different boxes. The thought of spraying something up my nose just seems very, very wrong. And, you know, gross. And I can just tell that whatever I spray up there I’m going to be tasting about five seconds later. ‘Can’t I just take some tablets or something?’

  My nose starts to run. Again. I fumble around in my pocket for another tissue. Again. Then, tissue firmly placed on nose, I glance over at Mark who has picked up a five-hundred gram bag of jellybeans.

  He looks up at me as though I’ve caught him shoplifting not simply contemplating the likelihood of me buying him lollies.

  ‘Don’t even go there. Your teeth are going to rot out of your skull if you keep shoving all that sugar into your mouth.’ With my free hand, I confiscate the kiddie heroin out of his little five-year-old fingers and toss the packet back onto the shelf. ‘What would Mum say, huh?’

  ‘She’d say I have to let her eat the black ones.’ He raises his eyebrows hopefully.

  ‘Nice try, but no. Do you want to go back to Dr Klatzky and get a filling?’

  Mark grimaces. ‘Doctor Klatzky smells like wee.’

  ‘The nasal sprays have cortisone in them.’

  I turn at the sound of the chemist lady’s voice. She’s looking at me as though I’m supposed to know what that last statement means. She sighs. I readjust the school bag on my right shoulder. The strap is beginning to cut into my arm.

  ‘I’d really recommend a spray.’

  She’s holding out a small box while pointedly glancing over my shoulder at the queue of people behind me. Clearly she wants me and my hay-fever issues out of here.

  I look back at the nasal spray and think about how much trouble this hay fever has caused me already. How, for the last two days, I’ve been a kind of sneezy-wheezy leper. How the cold-and-flu tablets I managed to scrounge up last night only succeeded in making me so tired that I fell asleep at eight, before I’d even finished my homework. How, at the last minute, Prue Wiseman refused to sit next to me in Extension English yesterday in case what I actually had was a cold – or, to quote Prue, ‘Asian Bird Flu’ – so I was paired with Joel Hedges for that dumb-ass tandem-story assignment. The first paragraph of which I’m supposed to email to Joel tonight. I think for a moment about how cocky he looked when he said, ‘Amaze me.’ Who even says that? God, he’s just so arrogant. Our whole interaction yesterday was just further confirmation, fifteen months down the track, that the best thing I did for Emma was convince her to dump his sorry arse.

  ‘Cat. Hurry-uuuuup.’

  ‘All right,’ I say, death-staring Mark.

  I’ve got to get something and I can’t keep taking those cold-and-flu tablets. I can’t afford to be drowsy. Not tonight when I’ve got that damn story to start.

  ‘I’ll take it then,’ I say, against my better judgement, acting as a Judas to my tastebuds and almost tasting the metallicky mixture in my mouth as I speak. Then I look down at Mark, roll my eyes and toss a mini packet of jellybeans on the counter. ‘And I’ll take these as well.’

  Naturally, like the addict that he is, Mark’s eyes light up and he grins at me as though what I’ve just bought him is one of Willy Wonka’s Golden Tickets not a sixty-cent packet of lollies. While my change is being sorted out I toss him the purple packet, which he immediately rips open, jamming no less than eight jellybeans in his mouth. I feel like his personal drug dealer.

  I shove the change in my dress pocket and then, chemist packet in hand, watch as Mark runs ahead leaving his Bob the Builder school bag at my feet. It’s disturbing how often this kid treats me like a sherpa.

  Two and a half hours later and I’m sitting at my desk agonising over my opening paragraph for the tandem story. It’s taken me ninety minutes to write fifteen sentences, none of which I’ll use. This, of course, is ridiculous. The problem was, is, Joel Hedges. I can’t get his smug ‘amaze me’ line out of my head. He is just so totally up himself. And not that I give a shit what his opinion is, but I know and he knows that whatever I send him he’s going to do his utmost to rip to shreds. So this opening paragraph has to be impressive. More than impressive. The best piece of writing I’ve ever done.

  At first I went the romance angle. Obviously just to completely screw up whatever story Joel had in mind for this assignment. I figured it would serve him right – me making him write some syrupy, bodice-ripping story about throbbing manhoods and deep valleys of desire. But then when I emailed this idea to my cousin Brodie she advised against it.

  ‘Isn’t Joel Hedges that total cheating man-whore?’ she emailed back. ‘You giving Joel this to work with is like Mum sending Johnno to his room with a Playboy to read. It’s hardly a punishment. Joel will probably love it and whip it into some kind of porn story.’

  She has a point. About Joel and about Johnno. When Aunty Fiona found his stash of Black Label Penthouse in the attic, she grounded him and sent him to his room, which kind of backfired on her – he had six copies of something called Shaved and Dangerous under his mattress.

  I momentarily give up on the paragraph, saving what I’ve written in my Drafts folder, and let my mind wander to the more important question of how exactly I should send this to Joel. We haven’t spoken a word to each other in fifteen months and now, NOW, the school is forcing us into contact. So, do I even acknowledge him when I email the opening paragraph through? I mean, it was pretty clear yesterday that we’re turning this joint assignment into our own personal Vietnam. He was far from friendly. Which leaves me with the question: Do I write a short, clever email and acknowledge his presence? Or should I merely write something cold and perfunctory, like:

  Joel

  You are dead to me. Para attached.

  Cat

  My mobile beeps. I flip it open, imagining for half a second that it will be a message from Joel Hedges. It’s not, of course. Instead it’s a message from Emma who, at five thirty-seven p.m. on a Tuesday, feels the need to announce the following: ‘I have the eyebrows of a man.’

  I sense a quiet desperation to this message and suspect it’s only a matter of time before she calls. The fact is my best friend of six years is a little insecure about her looks. Currently she has a thing about her brows and regularly finds herself anguishing over them when she should be, I don’t know, say, cramming for next week’s Biology exam like the rest of us. But then Emma’s world is vastly different from mine. Physically she’s built like Megan Gale, complete with swishy, long, chestnut hair, perfect figure and blazing high-wattage smile. Intellectually, she has the IQ of a ham sandwich. But she scrapes through somehow, mostly because her father – Dr Frank – pays for his daughter to be tutored in practically every subject bar PE and Jesus 101.

  Some days, when we’re sitting in the Senior Girls’ locker room, flicking through Emma’s latest copy of WHO Weekly, even I struggle to reconcile the fact that I’m best friends with someone who owns a Paris Hilton CD. But opposites attract, as they say, and that’s certainly true when it comes to Emma Marchetta and me. She’s the beauty and I’m the brains. She loves all forms of reality television, would donate a kidney if it meant she could pash Andrew G, is constantly being invited out to parties and other schools’ semi-formals, and likes any movie featuring Lindsay Lohan. I, on the other hand, have shoulder-length blonde hair, too many freckles and – thanks to years of swimming the fifty-metre butterfly event – swimmer’s shoulders and no boobs. In other words, I look like an ironing board with a blonde wig.

  As for taste, I’d choose Audrey Hepburn over Lindsay Lohan any day. I collect old movie posters and prefer spending my spare time reading Neil Simon plays and looking for grammatical errors in restaurant menus (I guarantee you, there’s always at least one). I’d probably spew into Andrew G’s mouth if he tried to tongue me. I’m more of an Orlando Bloom girl, myself.

  Still, Emma and I somehow struck up the type of friendship that lasts through primary school and high-school cliques, and our fathers are both doctors, although my dad is a GP and Dr Frank is a gynaecologist (or,
as Emma’s two older brothers prefer to call him, a ‘box mechanic’). In many ways, I think Emma and I balance each other out – at least, I hope we do. She forces me to be less cynical and bitter. And I’m on hand to remind her that, as long as she has two eyebrows rather than one, she has nothing to worry about. I text her back: ‘Call me when you can plait them.’

  I sneeze and grab at a tissue, just as the whiny singsong voice of Paris Hilton fills the air. I have no idea why I let Emma choose her own ring tone on my mobile, and I still haven’t been able to bring myself to use that nasal spray. I flip the phone open.

  ‘You don’t have the eyebrows of a man.’ I push back on my study chair far enough so that I can rest my size-nine feet up on my desk – my heels indenting chapter twenty-three of my Web of Life Biology textbook. ‘They looked fine this morning.’

  She doesn’t respond.

  ‘You all right?’

  Emma mutters, ‘Okay, so don’t be mad at me.’

  ‘Why would I be mad at you?’

  There is silence while the penny rolls around and around and around in my head. Then it drops.

  ‘OH MY GOD! YOU TEXTED HIM? YOU TEXTED HIM, DIDN’T YOU?’ I sit bolt upright in my chair, scrambling to get my feet back onto the floor before I fall off.

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Oh my god,’ I mutter, my forehead now resting on my desk. ‘You totally promised me you weren’t going to. You promised me on Sunday and on Monday and just a few hours ago in the locker room that you would not contact him again and that if he contacted you, you wouldn’t respond.’