Girl Defective (2 page)

Nancy kissed me lightly on the lips. She smelled like tea rose and tasted like Mutha's gravy. A weird combination, but it worked.

“Don't worry. It'll happen for you.”

She put on her mirrored shades even though it was night. For a moment I saw myself reflected. I looked like a small, dark thing. Like a possum or a raisin. I'd never been kissed, never had a boyfriend. I didn't even know any guys other than Dad and Gully and the odd
shop customer. Before Nancy I never smoked or drank; what I knew about sex, you could ice on a cupcake.

We took a last look down just as the guy in the glasses was leaving the shop. He had his hands stuffed in his pockets and a poetic lope and a brooding, care-worn expression on his face. I got all of this in seconds under the streetlight. He paused in front of the girl on the wall. In the dim light it looked like he was part of the poster.

“Hey, pretty boy!” Nancy hollered over the rail. “Want to party?”

He looked up without even the hint of a smile.

Nancy's lips twitched. “Serious boy. Definitely yours.”

She said it like it was the end of something, but actually it was the beginning.

W
HERE WE LIVED, IT
was never quiet. Once upon a time in old St. Kilda, Victorian ladies would promenade and no one made disparaging remarks about their arses from the open window of an unregistered Ford Falcon. Then came wars and sailors and tramlines and the riffraff bleeding in: working class, immigrants, refugees. Then it was all punks and junkies and prostitutes, and then Money moved in. These days the red light still glowed but only faintly. I could live without the tourists, but there were things I loved—like the palm trees and poppy-seed
kugelhopf
; like the monster goldfish at the botanical gardens and the sad song of the marina boats. The wind played their masts like a bow on strings, and the sound was eerie and lovely and more lonesome than anything I could imagine.

Post-Nancy, I trundled around the kitchen, foraging for snacks. Household was my department. That and looking after Gully: making sure he'd put his pants on the right way, and that his lunchbox had approximately three rice crackers with peanut butter (sandwich-style)
and a fruit roll-up (never apricot). He was asleep. I could hear his seismic snores. Dad was still down in the shop, sinking beers, listening to the soundtrack of his youth. He did this most nights. He wasn't a terrible drunk. He just got melancholy. Only occasionally he went too far. Last Christmas he checked himself into rehab. Gully and I had to go and stay with our aunt in the country who made mosaics that looked like monster vaginas. Aunty V was nice enough, but she didn't know what to do with us. We had three weeks of big skies and conspiring cows. Gully was completely out of sorts. When Dad came to get us, his cheeks were rosy and his eyes were bright. He said he'd changed, but he stopped going to AA meetings after a month.

I grabbed an apple and went to my room and flicked through my records. We had record players all over the flat—an occupational hazard—mine was a Sanyo from the seventies that played everything one-eighth of a beat too slow. I put on Tom Rush singing “Urge for Going.” His voice was oceans deep and reminded me of old polished wood. He got the urge for going, but he never seemed to go. I played the song over and over until I tasted the sadness.

Sometimes I thought if it wasn't for music, I wouldn't be able to cry or laugh or feel giddy or wild. Music was a valve. Back in the post-grunge days Mum and Dad played pubs and festivals billed as Little Omie. Dad played guitar and Mum played the
melodeon. She used to empty her spit pipe straight onto the stage. They toured around the country and collected postcards from every stop. I lined my walls with their travels, from the Big Banana to the Black Stump. I also had a picture from an old
Rolling Stone
: my parents at a club, wearing bearskins and grim smiles. They sang murder ballads like the one they were named after, which is about a girl who gets pregnant, duped, and drowned, in that order. Little Omie were going to make it big; instead they made me and Gully.

When I was ten and Gully was six, Mum left us to “follow her art.” She changed her name to Galaxy and moved to Japan, where she lived on grants and investments and the kindness of “pointy-headed art fags” (Dad's term). She kept in sporadic contact. I mostly followed her through her website. For her last show she wore antlers and covered herself in umeboshi paste while lightning crackled on a black screen behind her. I don't know how a person gets to that.

Once, I asked Dad which traits I got from Mum. He looked at me for a long time, but he could only come up with one: “Persistence.”

Mum used to be a thrift shop queen. She could stand for an hour next to a guy who'd messed his pants if it meant getting to the good stuff. And there was always good stuff. My room was like a shrine to her kitsch. I had tiki dolls and Tretchikoff prints, a pair of rocket
lamps, a kidney-shaped occasional table, and a wardrobe full of heart-in-mouth vintage clothes. I wasn't brave enough to wear the angel-sleeve minidress with pompom trim, or the forties black bombshell bathing suit, but I knew their value was higher than money. The clothes were the reason Nancy and I clicked.

A star on my calendar marked August 12. That was the day Nancy opened my wardrobe and almost stopped breathing. She held up a pair of clamdiggers and some Lucite wedge heels.

“Can I try these on?”

Nancy sampled outfit after outfit. She didn't ask me to turn my head. I remember she had on a fancy bra but terrible undies. She tugged the elastic. “Classy, eh? Sometimes you've gotta let your choocha breathe.”

Finally she lay on my bed in Mum's leopard-print playsuit, a size too small. She patted the space beside her. I lay down and it didn't feel weird. She said, “I'll tell you a secret: Nancy's not my real name. My real name is Nana, like Nana Mouskouri. You know, the old girl with the glasses?”

I nodded. I knew.

We were so close I could hear her breathing.

“Your turn,” Nancy said.

I sifted through possibilities: When Dad was zonked, I'd pour his homebrew down the sink (he always made more); I left nasty asides on the message board on my mother's website (she never replied); I had a shoebox
under my bed where I'd been collecting pictures of beautiful people (boys and girls). I could have said any of these things, but when I opened my mouth, this was what came out: “I'm lonely.”

Nancy looked at me for ages. “We can fix that.”

We lay still. Connected.

Then she smiled brilliantly. “Can I borrow something?”

After that, the pilot light was lit. Nancy's presence gave Mum's stuff meaning. She got it—that everything old was good. And now we were retro girls together. I never dared dream of such a friendship. We listened to old records; we read old books. We watched old movies and filched the dialogue:

“I wonder if I know what you mean.”

“I wonder if you wonder.”

I did wonder about lots of things, but there was one thing I knew: when Nancy wore my mother's clothes, she looked fucking beautiful.

I
WOKE TO THE
sound of breaking glass. I sat up in bed, my heart beating like a bird in a box. The air in my room was stale and hot. My alarm clock glowed 4:03. Outside my window everything was still, like a monster god had sucked the world in and forgotten to exhale. Then I heard movement: Dad lumbering about, the buzz of the kitchen light. I heard him clump down the stairs. The front door needed oiling. His voice rose up from the street: “Fucking shit.” And he wondered where my mouth came from.

I headed downstairs, nearly colliding with Gully on the landing. He was in his pajamas with his pig-snout mask pushed above his forehead. He pressed his back to the wall and spoke out of the corner of his mouth. “Sounded like a gunshot. I think it's the Melbourne mafia.”

“They don't go south of the river. Wait here, okay?”

“Roger. Send coordinates ASAP.
Chh
.” Gully pumped his fist and then tapped the wall behind him, all the while looking around suspiciously. Then he pulled his mask back down over his nose and gave me the two thumbs-up.

Gully was ten, but he looked seven. He was a ninja, a detective, a secret agent. He'd throw a wobbly if I bought the wrong cereal, then seconds later be mugging like nothing ever happened. Lately he'd been getting into Mum's video collection:
Dragnet
,
Joe 90
,
Get Smart
,
Monkey.
He loved Pigsy most of all. If you know anything about
Monkey
, you'll know that Pigsy is fat and sloppy and wholly un-crush-worthy, but maybe it was Gully's role in life to love the unlovable. For sure he loved Dad and me.

It was Mum who'd sent Gully the mask—one of her random, inappropriate gifts. It was made of latex and hair, and it looked real enough. Did she know he'd never take it off? Dad said we should ignore it. Martin family credo: “If we don't acknowledge it, it doesn't exist.” But it was there. Right there, over his nose, stuffing his speech and sending us spare.

The shop window had been smashed. Shards of glass sparkled under the streetlight. I stepped carefully over the shrapnel to where Dad was sitting under the neon sign that said
NOTHING OVER 1995
. Illuminated by the record-cleaning lamp, his skin looked as cracked as a dry dam. Two lines came down from the wings of his nostrils, bracketing his mouth, closing him up.

“What happened?” I asked.

He held up a brick. “Anarchy.”

“Did you call it in?”

“You sound like Gully. Yes, I called it in. The glass guy's on his way. The cops, too.

“Exciting,” I said. Dad rolled his eyes.

I perched on the second stool. With the glass everywhere and the wind riffling in, the shop looked post-apocalyptic. My eyes traversed the four corners of our kingdom: the listening booth/tardis, the Hall of Fame, the Wall of Woe, and Lifesize Cardboard Stand-up Elvis. He was in his gold suit from
50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can't Be Wrong
and carrying a tray of our custom blank cassettes, each with a little wishing well stamped on the label. They were cute, but they didn't sell. Not much did.

Gully said if you looked into Cardboard Elvis's eyes for long enough, you could see the future, but Dad was only interested in the past. He wore all black and smoked Champion Ruby. He'd seen the Boys Next Door at the Seaview Ballroom. His old girlfriends all had Bettie Page bangs and dug hotrods and the Cramps. He lived in share houses where everything was art and statement—they made garlands out of public transport fines and burned the furniture when the electricity got cut off. Dad's stories about the past made the present look like a painting by a five-year-old with no imagination or glitter glue. But when Dad stopped talking, when the needle came off the record, the past was just the past and the future looked bleak. We couldn't really afford St. Kilda. Mum owned the
shop (but not the flat). She had some agreement with Dad that I never understood—I don't think he even understood it—but it meant we could live where we lived, on vinyl and tinned spaghetti, as long as luck (or Mum) would allow it.

“One day at a time.” Dad cracked the old AA adage at the same time as he cracked a beer. Ironic.

The police came first. They took a couple of photos, asked Dad a couple of questions, put the offending brick in a plastic Baggie, and then moved on to more exotic crimes. Dad and I waited silently for the glass guy. Over the stereo Neil Young was playing “Cortez the Killer.” His guitar whined; it fell down holes and climbed back out again. He sang about Montezuma, the Aztec god of communication, and I was thinking I could use his help. Dad and I used to be fine, but I couldn't remember the last time we'd had a conversation that didn't involve directives about Gully.

He creaked to his feet and snagged another beer from the back fridge. “You don't have to wait up. Go back to bed.”