A Little Wanting Song (5 page)

I ride past Charlie at the gas station and meet Luke and Dave out the front of the milk bar. “We missed the last bus because of you,” Luke says, and keeps saying it till I want to glue his stupid mouth shut. “We could be on our way to the movies right now if we’d been a second faster, but no, you had to wave at one last car.”

“She gets it, all right?” Dave says, but he’s pissed off as well. The best way to spend Sunday is at the movies. How was I to know Mrs. Holly agreed to bring us home if we got ourselves there? “No one said you two had to wait. Could have left for the bus without me.”

“Can’t even get chips.” Luke nods his head at the milk bar. “Shop’s closed again. I’m going home. Coming?” he asks me.

“No.”

“There aren’t any more buses, Rose,” he says, and I’m yelling on the inside: Don’t you think I know that, Luke? Don’t you think I know that every day in this place turns out exactly the same as all the rest?

“There’s nothing to wait for,” he says. “No buses or cars. Nothing.” He shoves the last word in my face.

“See, Luke, now I’m sure there’s something to wait for because I’ve known you for sixteen years and you’ve never, never been right.”

“I’m right this time. You could wait all day and nothing’s coming round that corner.” He starts reading from the bus timetable. “Ten-fifty. Last bus on a Sunday.”

“Shut up.”

“Next bus, nine a.m. Monday morning.” I kick his knee out from behind him so he bounces forward. “Right, you asked for it,” he yells, and I start running a second too late. Dave shakes his head and sits down to watch while Luke grabs my T-shirt and drags me back to the timetable. “Say I’m right.” He’s shouting and laughing at the same time. “Say it, Rosie. For once say, ‘Luke, you are right.’” He holds my shirt tighter and hacks up spit in the back of his throat. “Say it or wear it, Rose.…”

Before I give in, I hear wheels on gravel. Luke and I look up as the old blue Ford stops in front of the shop. Charlie stares at us through the window. She hugs her guitar tight. “What were you saying, Luke?” I ask.

“That’s not worth waiting for. Just Charlie Dorkin back in
town. Must be summer.” He hunches over and brushes his hair forward into his face. “Who am I?” he asks.

I open my mouth to laugh but catch the sound in time and push it back in my throat. “Shut up, Luke.” I can’t believe I didn’t think of it before. Charlie arrives for Christmas every year and leaves two or three weeks later. Mum loves her. She’s been on my back for years to make friends with Charlie. The Duskins are probably the only people in the world Mum and Dad might let me go to the city with. I could stay with her. Let’s face it, I’d be doing her a favor. I’ll probably be the only friend she’s ever had.

“Her name’s Charlie Duskin,” I say.

“What do you care?” Luke asks. “You’re the one who said she was weird in the first place.”

“That was before.”

“Before what?”

“Before I started comparing her to you. Let go of my top, idiot.” I push him off and leave both of them at the bus stop. I walk close enough to Charlie on my way past for her to see me smile.

Her eyes always bothered me when we were kids. They still do. They make mine ache trying to see where they end. She used to watch Dave, Luke, and me when she came to visit. Once she spent the whole summer spying on us from her gran’s plum tree, staring out from the branches with those shiny possum eyes. She never asked if she could join us; she hid in the leaves and watched, licking juice from her fingers.

“Charlie’s lovely, Rose, and all on her own when she comes
down for the summer.” Mum said almost the same thing every year.

“She doesn’t want to be friends. She spies on us,” I answered once. “If I spied on people, you’d kill me. She gets to do whatever she likes. She doesn’t have jobs around the house. Nothing.”

Charlie would sit next to her dad in the shop and eat whatever she liked and he never told her it was nearly time for dinner. “I’m going to the river,” she’d say, and he never hassled her about when she’d be back.

“You’ll learn the hard way,” Mum said, and I knew I’d gone too far. I didn’t mean I wanted Mum to die. I meant Charlie didn’t have it as bad as everyone thought she did.

Her gran invited Luke and Dave and me over once a few years back. Mum told me I had to go. She made me wear this dress that itched and shoes that pinched and I was so pissed off that I made Dave and Luke promise not to talk to Charlie when we went inside. I didn’t want to be friends with her and no one could make me.

I remember one time when she came to my house. I think it was in Year 7. Her gran had sent her over with a message for Mum. She knocked and Dave, Luke, and I came out of the door. I told her Mum was inside, and the three of us kept walking. Dave hesitated, but he followed in the end. It felt good to leave her on the step. I couldn’t stand how desperate she was to be part of us. If she’d told us to piss off, maybe I would have liked her more.

She doesn’t spy now. She walks around town looking like
this is the last place in the world she wants to be. Maybe she and I actually have something in common.

Maybe we can use each other to get what we want this summer. I’ll give her a bit of what she’s been staring at all these years and she can take me with her when she goes. I’d do anything to get to the city. Even hang out with Charlie Duskin.

Rose Butler gives the death stare as we pull into town. “Your friends seem glad to have you back, Charlotte,” Dad says. He thinks Louise is my friend, too. It’s hard to believe the restaurant reviewers say he’s got an eye for detail. The man misses everything.

He wears these 1950s glasses, tiny squares that look cool but don’t do much. I tried them on once and the world got soft and lost its edges. “You drive with these things on?” I asked, looking at someone who could have been Dad or King Kong or the coatrack as it turned out. “You’ll inherit my sight, Charlotte,” he said, taking them off me without cracking a smile. “Let’s laugh together then.”

Rose has gone inside by the time I grab my last bag from the car and put it on the step outside the shop with the others. Luke and Dave don’t take long to follow. The street’s empty as I turn the door handle and bang my shoulder against glass. “It’s locked. Doesn’t he know we’re coming?”

“Sit down a minute,” Dad says, and I know he’s not happy about something because his head tilts the smallest bit to the side instead of staying straight on.

“Grandpa’s okay, isn’t he?”

The door behind us opens before he answers. “Come in, come in,” Grandpa says, and his voice is grass-dry. I lean close to kiss his cheek. He smells like he’s taken a bath in soup and toasted sandwiches and the toilet. The inside of the house doesn’t smell any better. Food’s running low. The place is dusty. I spend the afternoon cleaning while Grandpa sleeps and Dad writes orders for the shop.

At about six, Dad wakes Grandpa and cooks some scrambled eggs. We eat listening to Rose’s family having a barbecue next door. Grandpa goes to bed early. Dad goes for a walk.

I go outside and play my guitar quietly so the Butlers can’t hear me. “I’d like to welcome everybody here tonight; this first song is for my gran and grandpa.” I drag out the chords and slow the tempo of “Smashed-Up World.”

Gran was always at me to sing for people. She wanted me to go in this talent quest they hold here every January. I imagined playing in it and that was as close as I got. In my
imagining, I’m onstage, singing an upbeat song to a crowd that can’t wait to applaud.

I don’t play upbeat tonight. I strum “A Little Wanting Song.” E-flat. Low and hollow. Soft and sad. I let the old voice of the guitar rise like the moon and it floats and dips around me.

A Little Wanting Song

It’s just a little wanting song
It won’t go on for all that long
Just long enough to say
How much I’m wishing for
Just a little more

“Hang out the washing for me?” Mum asks when I walk in the door. She doesn’t ask me where I was this morning or why I was up so early. She doesn’t say anything except “Remember to take the clothes in if it rains, love. I’m on the afternoon shift at the caravan park.”

She never used to worry about the washing in a storm. She went outside and danced around. Now she worries about balancing the books or if the workers are cleaning the vans properly.

I can’t imagine her doing it at all anymore, let alone doing it in a car with Dad. I guess everyone’s got secrets. I told Luke and Dave about Mum getting pregnant before she was married. They looked at me, burgers halfway to their mouths. “Unbelievable,” Luke said. “They did it in a car?”

“What sort of car was it?” Dave asked.

“A Holden.”

“That’s a good car, Rosie,” he said through a mouthful of food.

The only thing that mattered to Dave was that they did it in a great car. The only thing that mattered to Luke was that they did it at all. My best friends have their secrets written on T-shirts.

It doesn’t take long for them to walk into my backyard today. I try to leave them behind, but they always follow me. “Dave, get my mum’s bra off your head. Either help or get lost.”

“Stop messing around, dickhead, or we’ll never get out of here,” Luke says, and throws a peg at him.

I’ve known Dave so long that I can tell what he’s going to do before he does it. I don’t want to meet the person who can predict what Luke’s about to do; they’d have to be crazier than him.

We were all born in the same hospital. I came first, then Luke. “Dave took bloody ages,” his mum says, and winks. She only swears when she talks about giving birth to him. “Twenty-four bloody hours,” she says, and pulls Dave in close. He just acts like he’s annoyed. His dad’s the one he fights with.

Mr. Robbie’s given Dave a hard time for as long as I can remember, like when he made him sign up for the local footy team. Most boys in town are in it; there’s nothing else to do on Saturdays in winter. Most guys weren’t as small as Dave was in Year 7, though. Coach only let him on the ground
because his older brother used to play. Mr. Robbie played, too. Years ago. No one asked Dave what he wanted.

I walked up to the wire fence before his first match and stood as close to him as I could. “You’ll be all right,” I said. Sometimes a friend doesn’t need the truth.

Mr. Robbie didn’t make a sound as Dave fell the first time. He watched his son moving like a scared rabbit running wild and barely blinked. My breath ran crazy with Dave as he zigzagged across the field. He didn’t see Luke grab the ball and swing back with his boot. He got in the way, and Luke kicked him instead, thumped him right between the legs. Luke was really, really good at footy; his boot connected with Dave so hard he almost sent him sailing through the posts. Every boy on the field closed his legs in sympathy. The rest of us closed our eyes.

“For God’s sake, get up,” his dad called out after a bit. I would have loved to test how quickly Mr. Robbie’d get up if I walked over and slammed
him
in the nuts.

At the end of the game Dave and his dad got into the car without saying a word. I would have cried that day, seeing him drive off, except I kept imagining Mrs. Robbie waiting behind the wire door.

Luke and I sat by the river for hours after the match. “I didn’t mean it,” he kept saying, and I felt like I was the one who’d kicked Dave and been kicked, all at the same time. I hate that feeling, worrying about them.

When Dave’s dad gives him a hard time, he goes wandering round the town at night. I see him, scuffing at the dirt,
his arms wrapped tight round himself, like if he lets go he’ll fall apart. He doesn’t want to talk. Luke and I tried once, and he told us to piss off.

Lately I worry about Dave a lot, because every time Luke gets in trouble, Dave gets in even more trying to help him. It used to be that Luke only hung out with us and that kept him kind of safe. But last year I started babysitting, and Dave got a summer job at the garage. That meant Luke had time on his hands.

He started spending it with Antony Barellan. There are two sides of town, and the Barellan kids hang out on the wrong one. They sit outside the fish-and-chips shop near the turnoff to Henderson’s Road. They don’t wait for something to happen. They wait to happen to something.