Have You Seen Ally Queen? (2 page)

At least we’re not stuck inland. Have to thank Dad for that; he still thinks he’s a surf rat. It’s ridiculous, seeing him wax up the malibu on a Saturday morning. Obviously, I don’t go and watch him, in case anyone sees
me.

I email Shel; it’s the first proper one since we came here. Texts just don’t cut it at the moment—I need more than 160 characters for some of this stuff. I sit down at the computer (which Mum and Dad have set up in the living area so that they can
keep an eye
on what we’re
up
to).

Dear Shel,

This really is frogshite. The Killer Pythons at the delihere are STALE and HAVE NO FLAVOUR. To get to the
deli from our house, you either have to trek (taking spare water with you) or catch a light plane. Can you urgently send me down some KPs? How are you and Zo? How’sMax?! Has the bubble on Mr Dawe’s head grown anymore? Peel SHS is absolutely tragic. The boys are either bogans or surfies and the girls are pretty unfriendly. They have 80s hair and worse make-up. No one really wants to know me, and I’m not sure that I mind, to behonest. They don’t have cheesies at the canteen, and the women who work there are hideous. Mum’s been on my back about make-up and shaving my legs and stuff. Can you believe it?! She reckons there’s some kind of conspiracy theory against women, reckons magazines and
consumerism
are to blame for the world’s problems. I’m seriously concerned about her, I mean, what’s going on with her, making us move down here and growing vegies and hair, and Dad and Jerry going fishing all the time—they’ve all completely lost it! I’m on my own here, Shel, please come down and save me! You can sleep in my room ...

I nearly say that I’ll take her to my secret seal spot, but I delete that thought before I type it.
Love Ally,
I key in.

I go downstairs and sneak out the door next to my bedroom; I’ve already made it my emergency exit. The
only problem is when Jerry’s in the shed fiddling with his chemistry set. I tell you, the boy’s sad. He makes Dick Smith radios and intercoms in his spare time. If it weren’t for Dad taking him fishing, he’d never leave the house.

The moon’s out; it’s spilling over the water, slightly blue like Hi-Lo milk. I can’t be bothered scaling the Mt Everest dune, so I sit on a rock with my back to the house. Seals aren’t nocturnal, I reckon. I’m not expecting to see it again, just like to look out at the spot where it rolled and slid through the water, almost oily. Free.

I check my emails before I go to school. One from Shelly:

Ally. Listen up, sister: on no account may you grow big hair of any kind in my absence (or, worse, in my presence). Your mum can smear as much sandalwood oil on herself as she likes, but do not allow yourself to become contaminated. Do you read me?

I can’t come down to stay, not for a while, anyway. Am
grounded
for getting home past dad’s bedtime last week. Bubble size stable.

More soon, Shel xxx

I laugh while I get ready for school.

Maths is the pits. Talk about a complete waste of time. Like I’m really going to need to know how to figure out the length of the third side of the triangle once I leave school. Hmm, that’s an interesting triangle there on
the side of that house; I wonder what precise length its hypotenuse is.
Rii-iight.

English is my favourite subject. There’s room to move in English; you can have ideas and write about them, and you can read what other people have to say.

Most of it’s okay, though some is total shite—some of the questions we get! Oh, man ...
Discuss the significance of the sun metaphor in so-and-so’s poetry.
I mean, how much can you write on that? It’s just the sun! It was a hot day: the sun was out, okay?

The classes at Peel seem pretty similar to how it went back at my old school. I’m having to repeat the
entire
‘Natural and Processed Minerals’ module in science here, though, having only just survived the experience with Bubblehead at home, which is utter frogshite.

It’s after school. Mum’s out in the sun—communing with the silverbeet.
Aerating the soil
is what she calls it. She never used to be into gardening
this
much—not until the accident, anyway. I mean, she’s always loved her garden, but this is way over the top. She says she talks to the plants; she mutters out there in the vegie patch like a loopy person. I feel like calling out:
Good conversation?

Mum doesn’t drive anymore, which is a bit of a laugh when you live down here. Even the deli is half a fuel tank away (okay, a half-hour walk). She reckons she just wants to potter around the house and get into her garden—
That’s the beauty of living in the country, Ally, simplicity
—but I know Dad wants to get her driving again. Jerry overheard Dad talking to Aunty Trish about it a couple of weeks ago. Jerry told me he knew a secret but I forced it out of him while administering a Chinese burn. And threatening other tortures. And finally he told me: Dad reckons that Mum’s too scared to drive. And that was part of why we moved down here. I
knew
coming here was her fault, I said to Jerry. But he stuck up for her, the little suck. He likes it down here. He gets to go fishing with Dad.

Mum’s always been ... quirky. But the car accident last year seemed to send her right into bizarro mode. They happen every day, don’t they—car crashes? But this was a hit-and-run, and Mum was the only witness. She was just on her evening walk. Mum wasn’t injured or anything, but she saw the whole thing, and she was the only person around to help the guy trapped in his car. She called the ambulance and the police and they arrived within a few minutes, but I overheard her telling Dad that it was like trying to help someone
who’d stepped on a landmine.

She used to walk every night, before the accident, changing the route slightly each time; she loved looking at the different houses and their gardens. She stopped the walks afterwards, though. I think she was just too scared she might see something else.

I look down the beach from our upstairs verandah. The sun’s almost at the horizon. That’s twenty-two kilometres away, according to Mr Bell (Mr Balls, I heard one of the kids say today—I almost laughed). It’s melting, a big glob of gold ready to cool off in the ocean. I wonder for a moment about the
metaphorical significance
of it looking like gold. I shout bye to Mum and sprint towards it.

She has a circle of small wooden beads around her neck and tiny mirrors embedded in her skirt. Some kids are trading tales from after-school soccer last night, but I’m just staring. She’s beautiful. Her face is brown and glowing and full of smiling skin. She has a wide silver bangle around her wrist and is about to start teaching us about advertising. She is Ms Carey, our English teacher.

I haven’t wanted to stick my hand up and be noticed in class yet. The less I get noticed here the better, I reckon. But right now, I’m popping out of my pants to get one of my ideas up on the brainstorming board. ‘Money,’ I say, and instantly regret it. But she writes it up, alongside ‘products’, ‘business’ and ‘marketing’.

‘Money’s the bottom line,’ I hear myself saying, interrupting the quiet girl at the back. She was saying ‘jingles’. Ms Carey’s eyes swing back my way.

My eyes widen. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt.’

‘No, that’s all right, umm...’ She looks lost.

‘Alison.’

‘Queen,’
I hear someone else add.

‘Thank you.’ She waits for the cackling to stop.

Rather than shutting up, I seem to switch on to autopilot. (Shelly used to call it Loud Ally Mode, or LAM.) ‘It’s all about getting the viewer to spend their money on whatever product is being advertised,’ I say, as the class settles down.

‘Well, yes, it is usually about money at the end of the day, Alison, as you say. Some people also call advertising ‘propaganda’. Does anyone know what that is?’

I smile weakly and slide down in my chair so my tailbone is pressing against the seat edge. I can’t believe it. Not only did I go LAM, but I sounded like
Mum
in one of her raves about materialism! She’s getting to me; it’s working. I’m going to have to keep a check on things. I’m almost glad Shelly wasn’t here to witness that. She reckons I’m always suspiciously
quiet
during maths and science, and only go LAM in English and SOSE. She’s right: I have a disorder! She’d keep me in line if she were here, confiscate my Killer Pythons for a few days, or something.

I try to catch sight of Ms Carey’s left hand from
where I’m sitting. She has a few different rings on, so it’s hard to tell.
Ms.
Hmmm. I wonder where she lives. I bet she commutes. No one cool would live down here by choice. I tried to convince Dad to commute. He runs his own business, designing timber-framed homes, so he could do it, since he works from home and only occasionally has to go on-site. We could all stay in Perth and Mum could come and live down here since she’s so keen on
peace and quiet,
and Dad could just drive down to Melros to check on her as well as his projects—you know, like commuting—and be home in time to cook us dinner. Actually, I did offer to cook dinner, but by then he was angry (I could tell by the way he was stirring his tea) and I shut up. He looked up at me a bit strangely and said that nothing in the world would make him live away from Mum. Jerry looked down at his pre-bed peanut butter sandwich, and I found a crumb to pick up off the counter.

I’m walking home from the bus stop a different way today. I hate walking along the road, with cars hurling past, and that rank feeling of being checked out by each driver. I cross the road and head into the bush. From our upstairs verandah, you can see how the firebreaks run through the scrub, so hopefully my mind has stored
that info somewhere. Magpies curdle way above me and banksias fling their cones into the undergrowth. My bag’s a lead weight on my shoulder. I still haven’t figured out which teachers want you to bring which books to class, so I just take them all. I swap shoulders.

The roof of a house pokes through the bush. It’s a tin roof, one of those ones that sound really cool when it’s pouring with rain. I peer through the bush, no one seems to be about, so I proceed with caution. This place is amazing. It’s made of rammed earth and has its own water tank. There’s a beautiful wood door and the garden’s all messy and rambling, except for one big tree, which looks like it’s got fruit on it. I go over there to see: yep, fruit. As purple as the Doc Martens Mum won’t let me buy. (She says they’re too expensive and that I shouldn’t feel that I have to adorn myself with a
marketed identity
—it’s
my
personality that counts. All the more reason for the boots, I think. My personality stinks.)

Mulberries. There was a mulberry tree in our street at home. Every summer, squashed fruit stained the footpath, and every winter, the rain washed it clean again. There’s no one around now, and I drop my bag and reach up to taste them. They’ll probably be hard and sour, so I put just one in my mouth. I crush it
slowly against my tongue and feel the juice soak into the fleshy part of my cheeks. It’s the best mulberry I’ve ever tasted. I look up. There are thousands of them. I grab a couple more, pop them in. I don’t want to hang around; I start collecting some to take home. The last thing I need is to be busted in this town for picking some old granny’s mulberries. The kids at school’d know about it before I did. I put about thirty in the side pocket of my bag, being careful not to squash them. I’m reminded by the look of my hands—stained, like I dipped them in shoplifter ink—that mulberry juice is not something to be taken lightly. I’ll have to use Dad’s special mechanics’ soap to remove the evidence when I get home. Right now, though, I reckon this tree is just about the best thing in Melros. I pull off three or four more berries and cram them into my mouth for one last hit. They are soft and sweet and probably make me look like Dracula.

As I get closer to home, seagulls whirl above me. If I hurry, I’ll be able to clean up before anyone gets back.

I’m lying on my bed. I’ve got the covers up around me. It’s seven in the evening, and Mum’s been in here, hassling me. She’s drained me of all my energy. I feel as floppy and tired as the leaves on the peppermint tree outside. And because of her, I missed the sunset. I haven’t missed one yet and it’s almost like I’ve let someone down. I mean, obviously the sun wouldn’t give a rat’s whether I’m there or not, but
I
know I wasn’t there. And I might have missed the seal. All because of Mum being on one of her missions. She keeps telling me not to worry about things like boobs and clothes and hair and guys, but she doesn’t understand, let’s face it. It’s not important for her anymore—it’s not like she has to look good for Dad, or anything. I’m really tall and skinny and shapeless and my waist—well, it just doesn’t exist. I press my T-shirt against my chest. Mosquito bites. I tell you, I get mistaken for a boy all the time. Especially since Mum
conned me into getting my hair cut short last year. I can’t bear growing it out—that in-between,
nothing
stage you have to go through. So it’s short hair and no boobs. A great look. Thanks, Mum. I’m not like most girls. I’m big and skinny and loud, and I really want a boyfriend but no one’s tall enough. And everyone knows the guy has to be taller than the girl. You see short guys walking around with tall girls and you do a double-take, like something’s definitely got to be wrong with one or both of them, apart from the fact that they look totally ridiculous together. Mum just doesn’t have a clue. Look at her and Dad: Dad’s taller than Mum. See? Even
them.
Ms Carey’s not tall. No one good is tall, apart from Steve Hooker and Ian Thorpe—and guess what? They’re
guys!