Like a House on Fire (24 page)

‘Do you require assistance?' comes the voice at the other end of the line.

‘Yes,' he says. ‘Man down here. Man … inoperative.' Jesus, what's he saying? ‘Over,' he adds hastily.

‘I can't really hear you, Uncle Ant,' says Tom's voice. There's another bubbling of static, the distant squeaking of some other low-band frequency interfering with the line. Anthony thinks he hears Tom add, ‘Can we go and play with the Wii now?'

He means to say yes. He wants just to lose himself in the big benign glowing screen, crack open Cokes for the kids and have that quiet word with Margaret and Ian, have the day mean something. He's exhausted, suddenly.

‘Man down. Mayday,' he hears himself croaking instead. ‘Mayday.'

OK. He's got about forty seconds before Tom comes and finds him. That's all he needs to pull this back together, summon the good energy, get up off his knees and blame the static. But he finds, in the luxury of those seconds, that he can't take his eyes off the cacti in their pots. They don't seem to have grown an inch since they were planted there at the advice of the landscaper six long months ago. Totally unchanged. Zero care.

Anthony puts the handset down onto the stones and gazes at the plants, so steely and barbed and implacable, something that even neglect and drought put together can't seem to kill. He reaches out with a fascinated finger to press a curved spike, hard, against the cushion of skin. He just wants to see a dot of hot, red blood well reliably up, as if he needs proof that such things are real.

Seventy-Two Derwents

Mrs Carlyle has given us all exercise books and said we are going to try to keep a journal this term. This is mine. She says it's better if we don't feel self-conscious so we don't have to put our names on the journals. They will be
anonymous
. She says she would just like to read them.

Mrs Carlyle has two budgies, a boy and a girl, and they have built a nest. If they have baby budgies and if I'm allowed she will give me one. You have to wait until they're old enough to leave the nest before you can take them away from their parents because they need special looking after. In my mind I can picture this. The babies would live in a soft little nest inside the milk carton Mrs Carlyle has put into their cage as a nesting box.

The nest for the budgies is soft because I think the mother bird pulls some feathers out of her chest to put inside. This seems cruel but Mrs Carlyle says she put other soft things in the cage and the mother budgie didn't want any of them. She is using
instinct
. The babies would all be snuggled up inside. If she will give one to me, I would like a girl budgie. I think I would name her Alicia. When I think about teaching her how to say her name I can nearly hear it. I have to wait, Mrs Carlyle says, because she's not sure her budgie is even going to lay eggs yet. She says not to tell the other kids because they would get jealous. After she says this, when I walk back into class and down to my desk, I feel my skin buzzing like someone has stroked it. I hope Alicia is blue.

My mum says do you like him? Shane, I mean. She has on her nice earrings. He's OK, I say. Later on when Shane comes over, Mum is in the kitchen cooking dinner. She's made homemade lasagne and now she's heating up oil in the deep saucepan. She calls to Shane you haven't lived till you've had my home-cooked chips. I'm famous for them. Isn't that right, Tyler? My home-cooked chips?

Once I asked if I could get some money to go and buy a hamburger and she suddenly jumped up really angry and said why do you need a crap takeaway hamburger? I can make you a much better hamburger here at home. She got mince out and made a hamburger in the frypan with onions. It took forever. At last she gave it to me with two pieces of bread holding it all together. Isn't that better than Maccas? she kept asking. Isn't it? Answer me.

Now I just say yes. Mrs Carlyle told us that when you are training your dog you need to say the same thing over and over until the dog gets it. He wants to do the right thing, he just doesn't know it at first. She says it's the same with training a bird to talk, you have to say the same thing again and again so they learn. That's true and maybe it's true for people too.

I'm starving, says Shane and looks over at me with a smile. He is just out of the shower and there are comb marks in his hair. He says you wanna change channels? and leans over to give me the remote. You have to press the button really hard to make it change channels now because it's wearing out. So I change it over to The Simpsons.

What grade are you in? he says, and I tell him Grade 6, Mrs Carlyle's class. 6C. She comes in and says how are you this morning, my treasures? My lovely 6Cs. I've missed you!

I don't tell Shane this. Grade 6, he repeats. When Homer and Marge talk to each other their whole heads move to ask a question and then answer but when Shane talks to me just his eyes move sideways, his head stays watching TV.

He says I bet you've got a boyfriend. I can hear my mum clattering oven trays in the kitchen. On the TV Bart is climbing up into his tree house. He can go really fast, much faster than I could in real life. Just a few steps and he's there. But I always like to see the inside of his tree house. I wish I had one. And I don't want a boyfriend. I want the set of seventy-two Derwents.

They are in a tin that opens out with all the sharp points of the pencils in order and in every colour you could ever think of using. Georgia has some at school and even when you sharpen them they feel special, the wood is so soft and it peels back to leave the pencil good as new. My grandma asked me what I wanted for my birthday and I took her to the shop where they are. The art supply shop smells so beautiful inside, all clean new pencils and paper and brushes. She had a good look at them. For your colouring in? she said. I felt happy when we walked out again, imagining. They have names soft as feathers. Pale Mint. Sea Green. Grey Green. French Grey. Rose Pink. Cloud Blue. Iced Blue. Kingfisher Blue. Prussian Blue. Indigo. Sometimes just when I am walking along the names come into my head like a rhyme in time with my footsteps.

I will put them into my denim pencil case and only take a few at a time to school, but I will invite Georgia over to my house and open up the whole tin so we can do drawing and colouring in together on the table on the weekend. Mrs Carlyle has a special Stanley knife and she could scrape some of the paint off the end so I could write my name on each one. On the tin someone's done a sketch of an old stone bridge going over a rocky creek. It is a very good drawing and it looks like a picture from the old set of encyclopaedias in the library. When I go in there Mrs Bradbury says it's good to see someone still uses the reference section, Tyler. I think she means the lovely way the books smell, which is true, I love that too.

You have got a boyfriend, haven't you? says Shane. I can tell. Cause you're blushing.

Bart and Milhouse are in his tree house and they're talking about staying out there the night. I'm watching and I know that in a few seconds it will be night and you will see the moon and they will get scared.

In cartoons time passes really fast and sudden. Also, things happen that aren't true. Like a cat will be running along and will go through the wall and there will be an exactly cat-shaped hole left behind in the wall. Mum's old boyfriend Gary threw a bottle at the wall once and it didn't leave a shape like that it just smashed.

Bart and Milhouse are still in the tree house but it's night and there are big shadows that scare them. They race down the rope ladder screaming. When they scream on The Simpsons their mouths open way up and their little tongues come out and wriggle and you can see their tonsils. That's meant to be funny, and it must be because Shane laughs. Bart runs back into his room and hides in his bed. I like Lisa but she's not in this one.

I'm not blushing, I say to Shane. Sure looks like it to me, he says. What do you get up to with that boyfriend of yours? See, you're not looking at me, so I know it's true.

I try to think if I've ever seen a Simpsons where a human goes running through a wall and leaves a person-shaped hole.

Wait till you taste these chips, calls my mum.

Shane is under my mum's Subaru in the driveway. What a shitheap, he says. I ask him what he's fixing up and he says the carby. He's out there for a long time even when Mum tells him to come inside and have dinner, which is just pasta tonight. It is those little shell ones. I get a clean one onto the side of my plate and imagine it is something in the sea where an animal lives. Ellie is working tonight at Subway. Shane and my mum argue outside about the car and something in the garage gets knocked over. Whatever you've taken out you'd better put back in because I need it tomorrow, says Mum, and Shane says look it's just not that simple. I could curl up inside this soft shell and it would be like a hammock in there, all warm. That's all I want to write for today.

If Georgia came over to my house we could make hot Milo and some of that popcorn that you cook in the microwave. She told me she was on camp once and they had toasted marshmallows on sticks over the fire. We could do them under the griller. We have a packet of wooden skewers. We could draw horses and do the colouring in and then we could watch Saddle Club and if she wanted we could put on some of Mum's nail polish. Even just do our homework together. I always do my homework when I come home from school. Mum says I sure didn't get that gene off her. I like to sketch but Mum says that's not going to impress the teachers and she wasn't still paying off a colour printer and a computer with internet so I could just do drawings.

First there is Home and Away then Deal or No Deal. If Georgia came over we could go into my room and Mum wouldn't keep knocking and asking me what I was doing because when you have a friend over that explains it.

And if Shane came over he would leave us alone I hope.

OK, goodbye for now.

Mrs Carlyle said who's been writing things in their diary and nobody put up their hand so I kept mine down too, just in time. Someone said there's nothing to write about and Mrs Carlyle said why not write about something that happened to you when you were little, like learning to ride a bike or Christmas or a favourite toy.

I have a doll that my Aunty Jacinta gave me for Christmas two years ago when we went to their place in the country. The doll has a long dress and hidden under the dress instead of feet is another doll and you can pull it all inside out. She is first of all like Cinderella when she was dressed in patchy clothes and when you pull the dress over the other side has Cinderella in her ball gown and she has a crown on her head. The whole doll is knitted. When my mum saw it she laughed. My older brother Zac had come with us for Christmas and she rolled her eyes at him and nudged him and said see, told you it would be like The Waltons, but Zac just said who are The Waltons? and he wouldn't look at her. I don't know Zac very well because he has lived with another family since before I was born. There's just been Ellie and me even though Mum had three other children before us, Dylan, Zac and Tegan. Anyway Zac was there and it felt strange because the cousins were all like new kids at a strange school, not talking, and my mum said I had so many dolls at home already I was just getting spoiled and to say thank you to Aunty Jacinta for the homemade one.

I said I love her, I love her crown, thank you. Aunty Jacinta leaned over and gave me a hug and she smelled so nice, not like perfume but just cups of tea and shampoo, and she said softly she doesn't have to be Cinderella, Tyler, you can give her a new name if you like. Then my mum jumped up and said are we allowed to have a glass of wine or do we have to say grace first round here.

After lunch when we got into the car to come home Zac said just drop me off at the station and Mum said I thought you were staying for a few days and he just shrugged and shook his head. Mum said there probably won't even be a train on Christmas Day and he said I checked and there is.

After we dropped him Mum said he always was an ungrateful little shit, wasn't he, Ellie? Do you remember, Ellie, how he always took his father's side? Ellie said no she couldn't remember. I wished she had just said yes because then Mum wouldn't have kept going. I knew she would and she did. All the Christmas lunch in my stomach turned into a hard cold stone as she started talking on and on about how Aunty Jacinta and Uncle Matt thought they were so great and they didn't even have a plasma and they'd always been like that, always judging her, and Jacinta had always been the favourite with Grandma and how neither of them had given her any support when she'd got pregnant with Tegan and she'd had to move out of home too young and that's what had started all the problems. Mum said they both denied it but she was sure either Jacinta or Grandma had been the one to dob her in to the department and that was how she'd lost Tegan and she couldn't trust anyone, they were all shits to her even her family.

I looked at my doll's wool hair that Aunty Jacinta had sewed on and made into two little plaits, they were so neat and perfect, tied with thin red ribbon.

When I look at my doll now I remember all this exactly like it happened.

I wrote a card to Aunty Jacinta last year and she wrote a card back to me. Here is what she said: ‘Dearest Tyler, we missed you this year and we're sorry you couldn't make it back here again for Christmas. Remember, Ty, we think you're wonderful and would love to see you again any time
.'
On the bottom of the card was a little arrow pointing to the back where she'd written her phone number and her small writing saying:
‘
If you ever need to ring me for anything at all, here's the number.' Mum already had that number in the phone book, but Aunty Jacinta must have forgotten. I put the card in my box. I called my doll Calypso. It's just a nice word.