A Little Wanting Song (15 page)

“My dad’ll kill me tonight if I don’t mow the paddock and she’s got a while before lung cancer kicks in so I think I’ll let her cool down a bit.” He walks toward the shed.

“Antony was talking about taking alcohol from Arthur’s.”

“Okay, that’s different,” he says, and we run for the gate.

There’s no sign of them at the bottle shop. They’re not at the river, either. “Where do you think they are?” I ask.

“They’ve maybe got some alcohol, and it’s a nice night. Antony’ll be looking for a place to drink it.”

“The quarry?” I ask.

“They couldn’t get there without a car,” Dave says. “You think they’re dumb enough to steal one?” Neither of us bothers answering. We’re talking about Luke Holly and Antony Barellan.

“I guess I’ll ride out and check,” Dave says. “You go home.”

“No way. I want to be the first to kill Luke.”

“I’ll kill Antony and bring Luke back alive. You can kill him then. But you need to ring Charlie’s grandpa and tell him she’s staying with you so she doesn’t get in trouble. You need to be home to cover for her if he checks.”

“Find her, Dave.” Charlie’s been through a lot. She shouldn’t have to add spending New Year’s Eve with Antony Barellan to the list.

Shit. I’m in trouble. When I wished for people to take notice of me, I was thinking concert, not court of law. At least Luke didn’t go through with stealing from the bottle shop. He looked at the dogs and decided it would be better to steal from his parents.

“Where are we going now?” I ask.

“The old quarry,” Antony says. “We won’t get caught there.”

“It’s miles away. We’ll be walking all night.”

“But we’re not walking, Charlie.” He pulls a clip out of my hair and uses it to pick the lock of the car we’re standing in front of. Shit. I’m not entirely unconnected to the crime scene.

“Get in,” Antony says.

“I don’t want to get in. I want to go home.”

A porch light shines and we’re in clear view. “Get the fuck in.” Antony pushes me. “You want to get caught?”

Luke gets in, too, and Antony hot-wires the car. “Remember your seat belts.” He laughs and takes the car from zero to a hundred in a minute. He takes huge swigs from his beer at the same time.

“Charlie, relax.” Antony stares at me in the rearview mirror. “You look like you’re scared half to death.” That’s only because I like my drunk driver to have his eyes on the road and both hands on the wheel. “This is no time for jokes, Charlie,” Mum says.

“I know, I know, I know,” I say, and Antony asks me what I know and I think: I know you’re a dickhead. “Nothing,” I say. “I know nothing.”

I start playing “Where the Fuck Is Dad?” in my head. I’ve heard stories about fathers who can sense that their daughters are in trouble. “Where the fuck is Dad? Dad. Dad. Dad.” My fingers tap the panicked rhythm on the car door. After a while I change my song to “Who the Fuck Am I Kidding?” My dad couldn’t sense me if I was screaming in his face. The only person left to save me now is me. That really makes me wish I had a plan.

The car swoops from one side of the road to the other like a bird dazed by light. My stomach is swooping, too. It’s dark and I can’t see much of anything outside the window. Even if I could get Antony to stop the car, I’d be lost.

He brakes on the road near the old quarry and the car skids
across dirt. “All right!” he yells as he opens the door and jumps out; his voice hits the rocks and splits a thousand times. Grandpa never let me go here on my walks. “Wander where you like, Charlie, but the old quarry’s dangerous. Loose rocks fall on you from nowhere.”

“Woohoo!” Antony screams even louder.

In what world does arriving at a dark place full of rocks call for a woohoo? “Luke, I want to go home.”

“Relax. Have a drink.”

“I’m not thirsty.”

“Not that sort of drink.” He empties the can and reaches for another.

I look across at the car. I must be the only kid in this place above ten who can’t drive. Please send someone to save me. It feels like we sit for hours. I hold my knees and wish as hard as I can on the star that’s sitting on the horizon. All the while Antony and Luke are talking about how they’re going back into town to do some damage; I’m watching that star on the horizon get closer. I’ve never seen one fall horizontally before.

“So, you ready to head back?” Antony asks, and his breath smells like rotten fruit. If he drives now, he’ll kill us. “Make a decision, Charlie,” Mum says, and she’s right. I should make sure Dad doesn’t get another phone call like the two others he’s had.

Antony and Luke walk toward the car. I stand still. I’ve been trying so hard to fit in and do what everyone else is doing, but sometimes doing your own thing is fine. It’s the finest thing there is. “I’m walking back,” I say. They’re too drunk to
notice. I jog over to them. If they’re too drunk to notice, then they’re too drunk to drive.

I put my foot out a centimeter. Antony trips over it. I trip Luke, too, and he takes a little while to work out how the ground hit him. “And you call me Charlie Dorkin,” I say, trying to decide on the next part of my plan. It doesn’t go any further than this, though. Antony stands. I trip him again. It’s going to be a long night, I think. But then that star gets close enough to make a little noise. Thank God. Stars don’t grunt.

“Hey,” Dave calls out, wobbling toward us on his bike. He gets off and looks at Luke and Antony on the ground. Antony stands. I trip him up. “I see you’ve got this under control,” Dave says.

“I could do with a lift.” You owe me that, at least. I walk over to his bike. He shakes his head, goes to the car, and bends behind the wheel. Is hot-wiring a car taught in schools here? I get in the front seat and Dave hits the accelerator.

We don’t talk until he stops the car and kills the lights. “This where they took it from?”

“Yep.”

“You shouldn’t have gone with them, Charlie. Antony’s an idiot.”

No shit. “Maybe I went because I’m Charlie Dorkin, Dave. Charlie Dorkin, Charlie Dorkin.” I sing a bit for him in case he’s forgotten. “I heard it all.”

“You heard wrong.”

“There’s really only one way to hear Dorkin.”

“They were talking about what they used to call you.”

“Nice.”

“You never spoke to us. You sat up in that tree.”

“Because you were calling me fucking Charlie Dorkin.”

“You didn’t know that. I tried to talk to you all the time, and then one summer you arrived with your Walkman on and that was it. You never took it off.”

“I don’t get why this summer’s any different. I was still Walkman-wearing weirdo chick when Rose asked me to the river.”

“I never said you were Walkman-wearing weirdo chick.” He’s laughing, but I’m not ready to laugh. “I don’t know. I thought maybe Rose was playing a joke.”

“I’m loving this brutal honesty.”

“But I don’t think that anymore. She wanted to rip Luke’s head off tonight,” he says.

“And you?” I ask, staring through the windshield at a sky naked of smog and city lights.

“You can’t really think I’ve been hanging around you for a joke?” he asks, and I know what Gus meant when he said the air drummed. The world’s drumming tonight. I wind down the window.

“I remember this time I saw you dancing with your mum,” Dave says. “She was singing into a tomato sauce bottle and you were playing air guitar.”

“I was eight.” I’d been crying because I knew that Rose didn’t want to go swimming with me. “Do I have to ask her?” she’d said to her mum out the front of the shop, and I knew she was talking about me.

“Charlie?” Mum had said as I walked back inside. I was so angry, and she was the first thing I saw to throw my voice at.

“Get away from me.” I tried to walk past her to my room but she caught me.

“Some people aren’t worth crying for, Charlie.” We sat on the floor of the shop for a long time. I remember feeling so tired I couldn’t move. And then she let me go and turned on the music.

“Mum, don’t,” I said. But she was so funny singing into that bottle, and the guitar solo started and she pointed at me and I let go. For a second or two I didn’t care what the Rose Butlers of the world thought of me.

“That was the Christmas before she died.”

“I bet it’s been a while since you played the air guitar,” Dave says, and laughs. I don’t tell him that I think of that memory every time I play a song. The one thing I’m glad about is that I didn’t let Mum go solo that day. Every time something humiliating happens to me, I hear her calling out in that stupid voice, “Air guitar, Charlie.” I imagine her like she was that day, shaking her long hair down over both our faces, laughing loud enough to wake Dad from his afternoon nap.

“I reckon you just needed to get your balance. You were sort of like a car without a spoiler.”

I have no idea what Dave’s talking about, but I want him to keep going. “What’s a spoiler?”

“It uses the wind to push the car down so it’s got grip when it goes round corners. It’d fly right off the road without one.”

“Well, flying’s a good thing, though, when you’re racing?”

“Flying’s good if you’re a plane. You fly when you’re a car, you’ll go off the road and explode. You got to have balance between speed and grip.”

“You think I’ve got balance now?”

He grins. “Sometimes.”

“I guess sometimes is better than never.”

“So you’re okay, then?” he asks as a torch shines through the window.

“Dave Robbie,” the policeman says.

“Constable Ryan.”

“What a surprise, stealing cars and driving without a license. And who do we have here?” He shifts the small spotlight onto my face.

And now, ladies and gentlemen, give it up for Charlie Duskin, the girl who just can’t seem to get a break. She’s about to sing her own rendition of the jailhouse blues.

Mr. Robbie and Grandpa arrive at the same time. “We’re letting them off with a warning,” Constable Ryan says. “They’re lucky.”

I don’t feel lucky staring through the bars at Grandpa, who’s still wearing his slippers. I’m not in as much trouble as I could have been, though, because Dave lied for me. He gave me a long, hard shut-up glare and told the police it was his idea. “Charlie was in the car trying to stop me.”

I let him take the blame. I don’t say anything, even when Mr. Robbie comes up close to Dave and twists the lobe of his
ear round tight. “Don’t worry, Bill,” he says. “He’s grounded for a bloody lifetime.”

Grandpa doesn’t say anything on the way to the car. He gets in and fastens his seat belt and then sits there, staring at the road. “Fasten your belt,” he says, and I do, but he doesn’t start the car.

“I kept thinking about all the things that could have happened,” he says. “Car accident, getting lost. Worse.”

Maybe it’s not right, but I’m glad that he’s frightened. I’m glad that he’s here in his slippers, not driving yet because his hands won’t stop shaking.

“From now on I want to know where you’re going, who you’re going with. I haven’t told your father yet. He wasn’t home when the police called.”

I nod.

“I didn’t think Dave was that sort of boy.”

“He’s not that sort of boy,” I say. “I got in a car with Luke and Antony after they’d been drinking. I went to the quarry with them. I’m the idiot, not Dave.”

“Why, Charlie?”

“I guess I was born one.”

“Not why are you an idiot. Why did you get in the car?”

Because it was too late to say no. Because I’m tired of being on the outside. “Dad barely notices me,” I say, which comes from nowhere and has nothing and everything to do with tonight.

“He still misses your mother.”

“I miss her, too.”

“It’s a different kind of missing, though. You’re trying to remember, and he’s trying to forget.”

“He’s forgetting me along with her.”

He taps on the steering wheel. “Give him time.”

“It’s been seven years.”

“Maybe you should sing him your new song, ‘Where the fuck is Dad?’” he hums, and starts the car.

“You should have seen Antony’s face tonight when I tripped him up so he couldn’t drive.”

“That’s my girl,” Grandpa says, and laughs. I laugh, too, but then I remember Dave’s ear twisting in his dad’s hand and I stop.