Have You Seen Ally Queen? (5 page)

‘Yeah, dumb, hey.’

I push my foot into the sand.
‘Yeah.’

He takes an I’m-on-the-beach-taking-a-deep-breath breath: in through the nose, out through the mouth.
God.

I glance up at him. He’s looking out at the choppy afternoon water.

‘I thought I was the only one who lived out here,’ he says, still looking out.

He has a creamy spiral seashell hanging from his neck on a piece of leather.

I yank at the threads on my towel. Something moves in the thinnest part of the water, right up on the beach.

‘Nope,’ I say at the sand. ‘You’re not.’ It’s all I can think of to say. But going through my head on high rotation is the desperate thought:
Where are my friends? Why am I
HERE
?

When I get back, Dad and Jerry are in the shed, filling the kero lamp, checking torches.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Going night fishing,’ Dad says. ‘Wanna come?’

McJerry’s got about five different types of line in his bag, some thick enough to catch sharks and Spanish mackerel, but I know they’ll only be fishing off the beach. He’s probably got flies and blobs in there, too. He loves having his tackle bag filled with things he’ll never use—it makes him feel professional.

I look at Dad. He’s testing a tiny folding chair, shifting about on it. ‘You taking a
chair,
Dad? Jeez, only real old coots take a chair fishing.’

I get a flat look for that. ‘Why don’t you come, smartypants? You always used to come along.’

I know. We always went, all three of us, and it didn’t matter if we didn’t catch a thing. We’d have heaps of snacks—each of us would bring something
different; it was a surprise thing, a fishing rule—and we’d talk about all sorts of stuff. I remember how my cheeks ached from laughing one time when Dad told us ridiculous stories about the people he worked with, about some of the sounds and smells they made in the office toilet every morning. He reckoned you could tell a lot about a person from their visits to the loo. Mum would make us huge mugs of Milo when we got home, even if we were really late.

Jerry pipes up. ‘Yeah, Allycat, you should come too—I’ve got some spare line for your rod, if you need it.’

‘Oh ... I dunno.’ I can’t go—I might see that guy.

And anyway, I’d smell of mulie tomorrow; you always do, no matter how much you think you’ve washed it off.

‘Nah, no thanks. I’ve got an assignment for English.’

‘Oh, come on, Ally, you can spare a night off,’ Dad says.

‘Well, is Mum going?’

‘No, she never comes fishing, you know that.’

Mum never goes fishing with the boys. She has some poxy
moral
problem with the killing. Can’t stand holding down the twisting, flapping bodies. It isn’t much fun, but we always do it straight away, or chuck them back in. I love seeing them power away into the deep, safe water.

Dad looks at me. ‘Well, what’s it to be?’

Jerry’s smiling.

‘Nah, the wind’s up.’

‘It’ll drop off.’

‘Nah. No thanks. I’d better do my assignment.’

Jerry’s shoulders drop down a notch. Dad doesn’t say anything. I pick up my bag and head upstairs, trying to think about something else, trying to keep my eyes under control.

I’ve never figured out how tears work, how there’s an endless supply.

Mum’s got dinner happening in the oven. She’s listening to Radio National. It’s that dark blue time before night, and I hear the front door shut. I go out onto the verandah. Along the wonky limestone path, Jerry’s torch plays up the shadows.

In the almost distance, I can hear their warm voices getting smaller as they trundle down towards the water.

The principles of political correctness are used in the ‘Starflower 1000’ advertisement. In it, a woman and man are having an argument. The man suggests the woman is premenstrual and she says, ‘No, I’m angry. If I was premenstrual I’d DO something about it, like take Starflower Oil.’ The advertisement is politically correct because ... because ...

Shite, shite, shite. I’ve got no bloody idea why it’s politically correct. I just get the feeling that it is. Maybe I should write that.
The advertisement gives viewers the feeling that it is being politically correct.
No, Ally, you idiot—you can’t say that. You’ll get two out of ten if you say that. Well, maybe that’s what I need right now—some crappy marks might reverse my nerd status at Peel Senior High.

I go upstairs to the living room. Mum is making her own self-raising flour by adding cream of tartar and bicarb soda to plain flour. (She does it all the time,
makes her own self-raising flour because she reckons the premixed stuff you buy tastes rank and it’s a rip-off, and, besides, she
likes
making her own. See, she’s a complete freak. Other people just pay the extra twelve cents and get the convenience of pre-made self-raising flour, but not Mum.) I plonk in front of the TV. Radio National’s still on and I can hardly just turn on the telly. So I sit and stare at the grey screen.

‘How’s the essay coming along, Ally?’

‘Assignment.
It’s an assignment. Badly.’

‘Oh. Sorry. What do you have to do?’

‘Don’t worry about it, Mum. You can’t help, all right?’

Oh, God, nice one, Ally. So much for Angelgirl. I turn around to her. She was only trying to make conversation. Poor Mum. What a shitty daughter she ended up with.

‘What are you making?’ I ask, nodding at the ingredients she’s got lined up on the bench.

She’s just looking at it, all the flour and all the mess, and says, ‘I don’t know, actually.’ Very quietly, she says again, ‘I don’t know.’

The overhead light is really bright. Everything is under a kind of grey-white glare.

I turn back uncertainly to the not-on telly. I feel
vaguely sick. I don’t want to go back to my room; I can’t go out, it’s night; and I don’t want to be here with Mum being strange. (Maybe she needs some Starflower Oil?) Mostly, I don’t want to be with me.

‘Do you want a hand?’ I croak.
Say no, say no, say no.

‘No, no thanks, Ally. You do your ess—assignment.’

‘That’s boring as batshit.’

‘Ally!’

‘Sorry, but it is! Everything is.’

Mum looks at me then.

‘Can I ring Shelly on the landline?’

She puts down the sieve. ‘Oh, Ally. Why can’t you just keep yourself occupied? People didn’t have telephones and DVD players in the old days, you know. They just had candles and books and wrote letters and
talked.
Maybe that’s what we should do now, talk.’

God. Candles. Letters.
Talk.
Why can’t
she
live in the twenty-first century? ‘Yeah,’ I tell her, ‘I wanna talk to Shelly!’

She blows out, like she’s trying to stay calm. ‘Well ... you can’t.’

‘What? What! I
can’t?
You just don’t like her, that’s your problem. You never did. That’s part of the reason we came down here, isn’t it? Because you didn’t like my friends.’

‘Ally—’

‘Well, Dad thinks they’re fine. He likes Shelly! You’re just ... You’re such a weirdo! No one else’s mum is like you.’

She slams down the flour sack. (Mum doesn’t buy paper packets of flour. Fabric sacks are
reusable.)
The loose stuff puffs out into a nuclear cloud while she storms into the bedroom.
She’s
not meant to storm off, I think,
I
am! I stomp down the stairs and crack my door shut. It’s really loud. Too loud, really.

I’m walking along one of the long grey corridors trying to ignore the popular kids lining the lockers, when Ms Carey comes out of a room and falls into step with me. I’d die if it were anyone else, like Mr Farran, but it’s pretty cool walking around with Ms Carey.

‘So how’s the assignment coming along, Alison?’

Her arm is long and brown next to mine, and has a beautiful wide bangle on it, and a loose string of sandalwood beads spilling over onto her hand. I know they’re sandalwood because Mum’s got some in her top drawer, though she doesn’t wear them. They wouldn’t be as cool on her, anyway.

‘Umm ... not bad. I did some last night. It’s been a bit hard because since we came down here Mum’s become a bit of a TV nazi.’

‘TV nazi?’

‘Yeah. One hour a day is all we’re allowed. One hour!’

‘Your mum sounds like a smart woman.’

I look across at her. We are almost the same height. ‘Serious? Don’t you think it’s a bit
weird?’

‘No, no! It means she really cares about you.’

I think I wish she cared a little bit
less.
I fiddle with one of my earrings, twisting it around. I want to ask Ms Carey about her mum, but don’t know if I should. I’m transfixed by Ms Carey’s glorious, elegant arm; I want to touch it. I reckon it’d be warm. It looks like it’s fairly glowing.

‘What’s going on in that head of yours now?’ She’s smiling at me.

Oh my god!
I was thinking about your beautiful glowing arm.
I’m purpling with shame. ‘Ah, I ... I ... was just wondering about what your mum was like ... if she was strict or anything.’

A gust of fresh wind comes up the corridor. Something passes across Ms Carey’s face, though it lasts only a moment. I might even have been imagining it, because now she’s smiling again, sun is in her face, she’s saying: ‘Strict! She was
awful
—we had to do so much around the house. We weren’t allowed to go out with boys or anything, not till we were much older.’

‘That’s harsh,’ I say.

‘Yes. She was strict, all right.’

Everyone’s mum is horrible, then. Not just mine.

I’m just following Ms Carey now. I can’t even remember where I was going in the first place when this all started, but it looks like we’re heading towards the office.

‘You moved down here from Perth not long ago, didn’t you?’

‘Yeah.’

She looks at me kindly. ‘It’s a pretty big change...’

We’ve stopped outside the office now. Kids don’t go inside unless they’re in trouble.

I take a breath. ‘Yep. It’s totally different.’ I look at her for a moment, and for that moment, and for a long time afterwards, I think I might cry. I want to tell her how much I hate it, how I miss my friends, my places, how I hate catching the bus and hate who I am and hate my mum but love her too (how does that work?), and how I worry about Mum crying and generally being weird.

She’s looking at me, Ms Carey, waiting for me to say something. Her eyes are sparkling and full of light.

Then she takes a step back. ‘Well, I’d better go and do this photocopying before Period 1 starts.’

‘Yeah,’ I squeak, nodding as she goes inside. I stay outside. Kids move about me, in all directions.

Period 1 is hell. Things started badly. I nearly missed the bus because I had to make my own lunch this morning. Mum was having a lie-in or something—very weird for her; she’s not much into sleeping in.
Lyingaround,
she calls it. Dad calls her the Productive One. She went to bed early last night, too.

Worse, though: someone has found out that I live near Rel, and that we bumped into each other on the beach yesterday. It’s official: we are sand-dune neighbours. I knew it would get out eventually that we live in the same bit of Melros. I don’t care about any of the kids’ stupid shitty stories and goss; I keep thinking about Ms Carey. We have English in Period 8 today. I want to sketch out what she’s wearing—in detail. I love the way she looks; I need to look more like her. I might do the bus+train combo into Perth on the weekend so I can go to the Freo markets and buy some new clothes. If Mum’ll let me. I’m sick of all my gear,
how I look, how I sound, how everyone thinks I am. It’s all going to change. Angelgirl is here. To stay.