Girl Defective (9 page)

“How's it been?” Dad asked.

Luke and I gave him matching blank faces.

“Why so quiet?” Gully demanded. It was only then that I realized there was no music playing. The last record had finished half an hour ago, and I'd been too distracted to notice. It was a shop rule that we took turns playing records. Dad was a hog. Gully would get stuck on the same track forever. Now Dad turned to Luke like Mr. Magnanimous.

“Put something on. Whatever you like.”

To some eyes this could look like a test. The first track a newbie played might set the tone for his employment. Luke was right to look uncertain. He wandered around the aisles for ages, coming back with Simon & Garfunkel.

I snorted. Even Gully shook his head.

“What?” Luke asked.

“That record doesn't tell me anything about your inner emotional landscape,” I told him.

Luke stayed poker-faced. “Don't have one of those.”

“Bullshit.”

“Sky—don't psychoanalyze the new guy.” Dad turned to Luke. “Gully reads faces, Skylark reads records. We, the Martins, have superpowers.”

“What's yours?” Luke said.

“Dad's able to drink a whole case in a single sitting,” I cracked. The look on Dad's face made me wish that I hadn't. Actually,
that
was his superpower: Dad
was great at guilting me. Simon & Garfunkel's harmonies folded over each other. My brain was squeezing into itself.

Luke's presence put a bump in things. Dad wouldn't stop talking, booming his rock alphabet from Aswad to the Zombies. Gully was infected too, more boisterous than usual, with groaning and fidgeting at a premium.

He crowded Luke, putting his snout up close. “Who do you like?”

Luke blinked. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, what are you into? We're Team Lennon, Team Richards. Dad likes punk and country. He thinks Arthur Lee is underrated and Bono should be shot. Sky likes sixties psych and folk. I'm into space music.”

“I don't think he understands you, Gully,” I said.

“Skylark,” Dad warned.

“I like a bit of everything,” Luke said.

I scoffed again. “People who say they like everything have no taste. And having no taste is worse than having bad taste.” Dad was giving me the evil eye, but I kept going. “I know you. You don't care about history or culture or lineage. If Lonnie Donegan had never made a skiffle, then the Beatles would never have happened, and if the Beatles and Bob Dylan had never gotten stoned together, then John Lennon would never have written ‘Norwegian Wood,' and if Joni Mitchell hadn't mesmerized half the Byrds, then all those LA
singer-songwriters wouldn't have bared their souls and gotten all mellow and flaccid and then morphed into stadium rockers like the Eagles and Fleetwood Mac, and then punk rock would never have happened, and then . . .”

Luke's mouth twitched. He was laughing at me. I turned away, my cheeks hot. It wasn't even my rant; it was Dad's. I heard Luke's voice behind me.

“You don't know me,” he said.

I walked out then. It was four-ish. The sun was climbing and the shoppers were rampant. I felt stupid and hungover. My throat all thick. I clomped along and didn't stop until I was standing on the little gray bridge looking down at the Purple Onion in all its brush-fenced testicular glory.

N
ANCY WAS A LOUSY
waitress. She couldn't hide her boredom. She stood with her pen poised over her notebook and stared past the customers' faces. Even with her mouth all twisted she looked beautiful: her hair piled on top of her head, a big silk rose pinned to one side; red lipstick. Nancy's apron was longer than her shorts. Her skin looked like something you could sleep on. I hung around the spider grass feeling inferior for a while and then moseyed down to the sandbags that skirted the dome. Nancy grinned when she saw me. She urged me over and hollered to no one, “Taking a break!” And then we were arranging ourselves on the milk crates outside, our faces turned to the sea.

“Dollbaby, I'm dying! Do you know how hard it is to be polite to those fuckers? I feel like I'm in one of those boxes they used to lock hysterical women in back before they invented Valium.”

“You don't look hysterical.” I stopped short. Nancy was wearing a silver scarf, same as the girls from Otis's gig. She had it tied like a neckerchief. I couldn't stop staring at it.

“What?” she asked.

“Nothing,” I said. Then: “Where did you go? You just left me there. Anything could have happened.”

Nancy was unmoved. “And did it?”

“Did what?”

“Did anything happen?”

I told her how I'd seen Luke Casey pasting up the picture of Mia, and how I'd gone home in a cop car and Dad was pissed off but yet to hand down his punishment. Nancy nodded, a small smile playing on her lips.

“Dollbaby, I don't know. You say you want to go to the zoo, and then you get upset when the monkeys throw shit on you.” She used her cigarette like a pointer. “You had an adventure.”

“I did, didn't I?” I said in surprise.

“I knew you'd be okay.” Nancy cracked her neck. She looked proud and tough. In the pulp fiction novel of our life Nancy was a doll, a dame, a dizzy broad. But I was soft-boiled. I watched everything from a distance with my knuckles wedged between my teeth.

“What else?” she asked.

I told her about Luke Casey in the shop, on my stool, looking hot, but wholly uneducated in the area of popular music.

“He might be sucking up to Dad,” I added.

“Let me tell you how to handle Luke Casey,” Nancy said. She had a copy of
Neon
open and was systematically
burning holes through random hipsters on the “Seen/Scene” page with her cigarette.

“Tell your dad he's frotting you.”

“What's frotting?”

“Rubbing up against you.”

“There's a word for that?”

“It's French. The French have a word for everything.” Nancy tossed her hair and rearranged her scarf, and that was when I saw the clutch of plum-dark love-bites. She saw me looking.

“Did you have an adventure?” I asked.

Nancy's lips were pressed tight. Then she turned to me and her eyes were shining. “Okay,” she gushed. “I'm in love. I'm, like, annihilated. He's not like anyone I've met before. You saw him, right?”

“I saw him.”

“So after the Paradise he takes me to this penthouse, and it has three-hundred-sixty-degree views and everything in there is, like, new. I was scared to sit down.”

I couldn't imagine Nancy being scared of anything.

“He had his friend with him. The fat guitarist. Rocky. He had a girl too.”

“Sounds cozy. What did you do?”

Nancy sighed. “Everything.”

I forced a smile and waited for the story. Nancy's stories were like the little films I played myself when no one was watching. But for once she wasn't telling.
We sat in silence, me with my smile, she with her secret, while the tide rolled in and tourists took photographs of each other posing with the sea and the city behind them. I was jealous. Of him, of her and him. And I couldn't think of anything to say. The day had gone flat. Seagulls wheeled in the sky. Behind us traffic undulated, a steady hum. I could see steamer ships and the smudge of the western suburbs across the water.

“So are you going to see him again?”

“Of course.”

“When?”

“I don't know. Soon.”

“What about us?” I blurted.

“We can still hang out. You can meet him. Maybe you and Rocky—”

“I'm not doing anything with anyone called Rocky.”

I stared at the hole-eyed hipsters and the tin full of sand and lipsticky cigarette butts. And then I changed the subject, pointing across the water.

“I lived in Newport once, for about a month. My grandparents live there. Mum's parents. We don't see them anymore. Dad took us there after Mum left. They had labels all over the house. Light switch here, that kind of thing. Also heaps of tinned food. Dad said it was because they lived through the Second World War.

“My great-grandpa lost his nose in the war,” Nancy said. “His whole nose, clean off.” A frown marred her face, and she drummed her foot into the dead grass.

“Is he still around?” I asked. It was the first time Nancy had ever said anything about family.

She shook her head, staring dully.

“What about your mum and dad?”

Nancy moved her mouth around. “They were arseholes. End of. I'd better get back in.”

“It's my birthday next week,” I reminded her. Then it was my turn to scuff the grass. “Dad probably won't let me out of the house.”

“Do you want me to talk to him?”

“You'd do that?”

“Sure.” She shrugged. “We're friends, aren't we?” Nancy leaned into me. “Hey—do I smell?”

I sniffed. Her hair smelled musky.

“I came straight here. I didn't even shower.”

“Gross.”

Nancy grinned and pinched my cheek. I felt a seize inside. This idea that Nancy was getting further and further away. But she jumped up with renewed energy. She kissed both my cheeks and then went back for a third. And once again I felt a rush, a hum, a thrill.

I walked home confused. What was wrong with me? Was I crushing on Nancy or crushing on Luke? I was like a dog with its tongue flopping out, ready to give everything to the first person who patted me. I had to protect myself. I couldn't keep going with all my nerves on the surface of my skin.

Luke was out on the street having a cigarette. He
had one foot back against the plane tree and a dreamy look on his face. I didn't acknowledge him, just stuck my head in the door and announced to Dad that I needed to lie down.

“I want to talk to you,” he said, wagging his finger.

“Later.”

Up in my room I put on Kraftwerk's “Neon Lights” and flopped onto my bed. The song was so long and glittery-sad, it made me feel like I was falling off the face of the earth. I pushed my face into my pillow and slept straight through till morning. If I had any dreams, I didn't remember them.

S
KYLARK, YOU'RE GROUNDED.”

“I'm grounded?”

“Yes. School, shop, home. That's it.”

“I hate to break it to you, but those three things, that's pretty much all I do.”

“Don't be smart, it doesn't suit you.”

“You're crap at this, Dad.”

He sighed. “I know.”

It was Sunday morning. We were in the kitchen, surrounded by a mess presided over by two empty Dunlops bottles.

Dad smelled pickled. His eyes were rheumy. I stared at his tear troughs, the flecks of gray in his beard.

“Alcohol is very aging,” I reported. “Alcohol and sugar.”

“I'm not worried about my age,” Dad said. “I'm worried about yours. You're only fifteen—”

“I'll be sixteen next week.”

“You're only fifteen and Nancy's . . . older.”

“But she's pretty immature.” I was angling for a smile. It worked. Dad's eyes crinkled almost to extinction.

“Don't,” he said. “I'm serious. I didn't know where you were. And then you come in with Eve and you looked all . . .” He waved his hand around. “You can't be walking home alone like that. That's the worst of it. This isn't the country. Bad things happen to girls out there.”

“I know,” I said, thinking of Mia, and then suddenly I was talking about her, putting her on the table.

“Did you know about Luke's sister?”

Dad looked wary. “How do you know about that?”

“I worked it out.”

“Don't tell Gully.”

“I won't.”

“Jesus, imagine what he'd do with that. We'd never hear the end of it.”

“I said I won't tell him.”

“And don't go talking to Luke about it.”

“Why not?”

“Because she's dead, that's why not. Don't be an idiot, Sky.”

I pondered this. “He might want to talk about her. Not everyone is as closed up as you are.”

“Closed up! Who's closed up?”

“You are. Vesna said it. She said you were like those Chinese boxes that no one can figure out how to open.”

“Vesna said that?”

Dad was smiling fondly—maybe an image of Vesna
in her Daisy Dukes was scrolling across his mind. Vesna had been his pub-friend-turned-girlfriend. She'd moved in for a little while after Mum vamoosed, and tried to sort us all out. Vesna was addicted to Zumba and beauty products. She watched infomercials with religious zeal. She had this facelift device that she used to wear strapped to her cheeks while she did the dishes. It made her look like an anglerfish. When she moved out, Vesna bequeathed us her Fitball. For a long time it migrated from room to room, and no one ever went near it. I was sure this was symbolic.