Leaving Jetty Road (14 page)

PART V

Nat

chapter twenty-six

Not all right

O
ut of the corner of my eye, I see her. She jumps up in the middle of the exam room, her chair spilling back, and she’s making this funny, gasping, choking sound. The moment that it takes for her to push her way past all the desks to the front of the room seems to last forever.

Then she’s like
—gone.
She doesn’t come back.

After the exam’s over, people mill around in the schoolyard, chatting. (“What did you put for question nine?” “How many pages did you write?” “I just
know
I failed . . .”) As usual, the people who think they’ve done brilliantly wail that they haven’t, while the people who’ve failed stay knowingly, stoically quiet. Personally, I’m just glad it’s over, and that it wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be.

I hang around with everyone else for a while, talking. But all the time, in the back of my mind, the questions keep circling:
What happened to Lise? What was WRONG?

She looked
shocking
this morning. The last time I’d seen her before today was a week ago, at the park. Then she was pale and thin, but sort of okay, you know?—in a fragile, undernourished kind of way. Today, before the exam, she looked—hell, I don’t know
how
to describe the way she looked. It wasn’t just that she’s lost more weight over this last week (although I’m sure she has, a little). There were huge, dark shadows underneath her eyes, like she hadn’t slept in days, and she had this weird, haunted expression on her face. It was like she was terrified. Of what, I don’t know.

Sofia makes her way across the schoolyard to me as I’m mulling this over.

“How’d you do?”

“Okay,” I say, distracted.

“I bet Josh’ll be dying to hear how you did. You dropping in on him this afternoon?”

“I told you before, Sofe—I haven’t seen him for
weeks,
” I say crossly. “We call each other, but that’s it. Till the exams’re finished.”

She sighs dreamily. “I don’t know how you do it. I can’t go without Nick for more than a couple of
days.
”

“I didn’t say I didn’t miss him.”

I
do
miss Josh. When I speak to him on the phone, I long for him so much it feels like he’s almost
there
with me—like he’s lying next to me, holding me, touching my face. His voice in my ear sounds teddy-bear soft.

“You want to go out for a coffee?” says Sofia. “You don’t have an exam this afternoon, right?”

It’s tempting, but I shake my head.

“Did you see Lise?” I ask instead.

She nods. “That was weird, hey. She just
ran.
”

“D’you think she’s all right?”

Sofia gives me an impatient scowl. “What do
you
think? She hasn’t been all right all year.”

She’s right, of course.

“I can’t stop thinking about her, you know?” I say helplessly. “If I could just talk to her—”

I keep thinking—if only I could have stopped this from happening to Lise; if only I could have made things all right for her.
Completely
all right, I mean: not just today, but the whole lot of it—the whole year. If I could just make Lise
Lise
again—

Dad’s in the garden when I get home, puttering around, tying heat-bedraggled tomato plants onto bamboo stakes. He greets me with a smile as I come through the gate.

“Exam go all right, Nat?”

I nod, preoccupied. “Is Mum home yet?”

“She got back a while ago,” he says. “She’s in the kitchen, I think.”

I go straight in.
Lise,
I’ve been thinking;
maybe Mum can tell me what to do about Lise.

But when I tell her what’s happened, she doesn’t seem surprised.

“What a shame,” she just says sadly. “I did wonder . . .”

She lapses into silence, twines her fingers around her glass of wine, holds its coolness up to her cheek. I sit there opposite her at the kitchen table, waiting for her to speak. Warm late-afternoon air drifts over us from the open window.

“Call her,” Mum says finally. “That’s what you should do, Nat.” She nods firmly.
“Call her.”

I shift restlessly in my chair. “You think?”

Images wheel through my head: Lise brandishing the
Cruelty to Animals
videotape, saying, “Think of all the
weight
we could lose.” Lise complaining about the clothes that day we went shopping: “But they make me look so
fat
!” Lise running out of the exam room, skinny arms flailing, cheeks soaked with tears. She hardly
ever
cries, Lise.

Mum’s right, of course, I think. I
should
call Lise. That’s what friendship’s about, isn’t it? Talking to each other; being there for each other—just
being
there. Like I should have been for Lise before. Before, when it still wasn’t too late—

“She must be feeling very lonely right now,” Mum goes on, persuasively. “She probably needs someone to talk to.”

Someone to talk to.

Something shifts inside me then: a memory, half forgotten, shoved to the back of my mind; a puzzle whose pieces never quite fit. That day I came home and found Lise in the kitchen, talking to Mum. I remember how surprised I was:
What’s LISE doing, talking to HER when I’m not here?
I stood in the laundry room, bewildered, unable to move, and I heard Mum saying something like
I think you need help, Lise.

But that was
weeks
ago. If Mum knew Lise needed help back then, why didn’t she do something?

I can feel a bubbling starting inside of me. For years now, I have always assumed my mother knew best. She’s the social worker, remember? Oh, I’ve laughed at her, made fun of her psychological “insights,” resented her efforts to be “deep” with my friends. I’ve yelled at her for being nosy, digging things out of people; for insisting that you should “confront truth” and “resolve conflict.” Those neat, professional phrases she uses: I’ve gone around deliberately doing the opposite of what she’d advise, just because she bugs me so much.

But in my heart, I’ve always thought she was right. That’s why she bugs me so much, you know?—because she’s always so inescapably
right.

I stare at her now across the table (our famous “round” table). Anger goes on rising in me, swift and astonishing. She
knew
about Lise. She knew all along—

“Why don’t
you
call Lise?” I say slowly.

Mum stares at me, bewildered.
“Me?”

For one moment—for one long moment—I hesitate. I’m a conflict
avoider,
right? Then I take a deep, angry breath.
Not anymore, I’m not.

“Yeah, you, Mum,” I say savagely. “
You’re
the one she comes and talks to, aren’t you? You’re her special friend.
You
talk to her.”

Mum sucks in her breath, short and sharp.

“Lise isn’t my ‘special friend,’ Nat,” she says. “I’m sorry if you feel that way, but—”

I interrupt her, my voice rising.

“I heard you talking to her that day she came over. What did she say to you?”

She shakes her head. “I can’t tell you that. It was private. What she told me, she told me in confidence.”

“Private.” “In confidence.” There they are again, more of her beautiful catchall phrases. I am so sick of her soothing terminology, her simple little solutions.

I push my chair away from the table, stand up. Anger washes over me now in strange, hot waves.

“How can you say that?” I shout. “
Look
at her. She’s wasting away! What’s private about
that
?”

We stare at each other across the room.

“Nat,” says Mum. She gestures to me, a small, familiar conciliatory gesture:
Come back. Let’s talk about this.
But there is no way I am talking to her about this. There is no way I’m talking to her about
anything.

I move hastily away from her. In the doorway, I turn back.

“You should’ve done something, Mum,” I say bitterly. “She came to you, and she trusted you. You should’ve
done
something.”

Then I turn and walk out of the room.

My mother, the social worker. The so-called expert. How could she have gotten things so
wrong
?

chapter twenty-seven

Josh

T
hat night, I dream of Josh. I dream he’s riding into Perth and I’m waiting for him at the finishing line. (There won’t be a finishing line in reality, of course: it’s his own private race. But this is the way it is in my dream.) He has his head down, and he’s pushing his pedals harder than he’s ever pushed them before.

I jump up and down, cheering him on, but he doesn’t look up. He crosses the line, and he has this big, huge smile on his face; but
he doesn’t look up—

I wake up, panicking.
It’s only a dream,
I tell myself.
A dream.
It’s just been so long since I’ve seen him.

Then I remember what happened yesterday. I remember the exam, and I remember Lise, and I remember the argument I had with my mother. Anger swells up inside me again.
Hell,
I am so angry with my mother.

In the morning, I think about calling Sofe. But then I remember that she has an exam this morning; in fact, she’d be in there right now, scribbling away. I probably won’t get to see her again properly until the exams are over: we don’t study many of the same subjects. As for Mum’s advice—to call Lise and talk to her—there’s no way I’m following that. She’s wrong, Mum. Talking doesn’t help. It doesn’t help Lise, anyway.

All morning, I try to study for my own next exam, which is in two days’ time. (I mean, that’s what exam week’s about, isn’t it? Cramming in, before each exam, all that work you should’ve done during the year?) I put my books on my desk, then spread them out on the floor, then pile them up on my desk again. Nothing works, though. I just keep thinking of Josh.

He’d understand, I think. He’d understand how I feel: about Lise
and
about Mum. He knows me. He does: he just
knows
me.

In the end, a couple of hours after midday, I pack up my books, leave a note on the kitchen table:
Caught the tram to Glenelg. Back for dinner.
The exams can wait. I
have
to see him; I have to
talk
to him. It’s been too long.

Outside, it’s hot: waves of heat splash against my skin as I traipse down to the tram stop. In the tram, my flesh sticks to the red vinyl seat through my clothes. My thoughts are dazzled, heat-drenched: I think of Josh, and of Mum, and of Lise, and of the exams to come. Then I give up and just think about Josh. Right now—right at this moment—he’s all that matters to me. All I can think is, If I can just see him, things will be all right.

But when I arrive at the café, its door is locked and the “Closed” sign is up in the window. I peer through the glass: the lights are all off and the chairs are stacked on the tables. An early finish for Josh, then, because of the heat. He’s probably at home right now, listening to one of his yodeling albums, lying on the floor with his shirt off and his feet up on the wall. (I can hear him saying, in that sexy, teasing voice of his, “It’s cooler on the floor, Nat. Didn’t you know? Heat rises.”)

Hot waves of longing rush over me. I stand there on the pavement, hesitating. Josh’s house is five minutes away, if you stick to the street instead of going via the beach. But we always used to walk the long way home together, via the beach, after work. Suddenly I want to prolong this moment on Jetty Road, prolong the pleasure of thinking about him, getting excited about seeing him again.

I head down toward the beach. At the roundabout, I cross over the tram tracks to the brick-paved plaza just in front of the beach. I walk slowly across it, past families eating ice cream at the green picnic tables. Seagulls circle and swoop in front of me, scavenging for leftover chips and discarded hamburgers. Ignoring them, I drift on, dreaming of Josh, past the last table and out onto the beachfront lawns.

A couple of women in their twenties are sitting at a table on the terrace outside the hotel; they glance up at me as I head toward the jetty. They’re sipping at colorful drinks in tall, ice-filled glasses, gossiping. One of them rests her elbow on the table, leans over, says something, and the other one laughs—a long, languid, summer-lazy laugh. I think again, sharply, of Lise: of the times we came here, the secrets we told each other. (What about the secrets she told
Mum
?) Hastily, I look away from the women, back out to the beach.

It’s then that I see him. He’s sitting on the brick wall that borders the sea, not fifty yards in front of me. He has his back to me, but I’d know that tall, slight, broad-shouldered back anywhere. At the sight of him, I feel the old, familiar flurry of wings in my stomach.

It’s Josh, and he is not alone.

The girl beside him on the brick wall is small and wiry, with dark, curly hair. They’re sitting
very
close to each other. So close, in fact, that his hand is on her thigh. As I stand there, taking this in—trying to think, trying
not
to think—he leans into her and they kiss.

Deeply.

On the mouth.

All thoughts of Lise flee from my mind. For one long, sickening moment, I stand and watch them. My mind tumbles, stumbles on the truth.
Julie.
I know instantly that it’s her.

Then, slowly, I turn around and trudge back toward the tram stop. I don’t run; I don’t hurry; I don’t look back. I notice, surprised, how heavy my feet have become, dragging on the hot afternoon pavement. My stomach lurches and rolls. In my head, there is only one word:
Josh.
That’s all I can think.
Josh.

Back at the roundabout, while I wait for a gap in the cars, the world suddenly heaves. I bend over and throw up, onto the street. It feels like my whole
soul
is being wrenched out of me. Afterward, I straighten up, cross the road. I wait quietly at the tram stop, then sit with my head smearing the window on the way home. I can still taste the vomit in my mouth; I can smell it on my breath.

Josh—