Silver Bay (18 page)

It was quite warm, even on the water, and we just wore our fleeces. Lara’s mum made us wear our lifejackets the whole time, just in case, and they kept us quite warm, so we didn’t need jackets. The sea was calm and we were allowed to go between the two nearest buoys and left up the coast as long as we didn’t go out as far as the shipping lane. Lara always does what her mum says. She said her dad knew someone who had strayed into the shipping lane and nearly got sucked under a steel container ship because they weren’t looking where they were going.

The dolphins came out to see us near the point. We had stopped for a moment to get out our chocolate and I recognised Brolly and Brolly’s baby from the pictures on
Moby One
, and I showed Lara her dorsal fin, which was the exact shape of underneath an umbrella. Her baby was so cute that Lara nearly cried. We were pretty sure they knew it was us – they didn’t always go up to the whalechasers, but this was the third time I had been out with Lara and the dolphins always came to us. They always look like they’re smiling. We spent about an hour just sitting out there by the point, talking to them and watching them play. Brolly’s baby had grown about six inches since I last saw her and Brolly came up close enough to the boat for us to stroke her nose, even though she must have known we didn’t have any fish. I couldn’t resist touching her, even though Yoshi said we must never encourage the dolphins to come too close in case they thought all humans would be nice to them. She told me that last year, for no reason, someone had stabbed a dolphin to death down the coast. They just went out on a jet-ski and stabbed it with a knife. I cried, because I kept thinking of that poor dolphin swimming up to the bike with its lovely smiley face, thinking it had made a new friend. In the end I cried so hard that Yoshi had to go and get Mum to stop me.

Dolphins were Letty’s favourite animals. She had four on pieces of different-coloured crystal on her dressing-table that she got for her fifth birthday. I used to rearrange them and she got cross because I’d been in her stuff. We used to fight quite a lot, because she was only fourteen months younger than me and Mum said we were like peas in a pod. Sometimes I still think about when we used to fight and I feel really bad because if I’d known what was going to happen to her I would have tried to be nice to her every day. I say ‘try’ because it’s quite hard to be nice to someone every day. Even my mum gets on my nerves sometimes but I’m always nice to her because I know she’s still sad, and because I’m all she has left. I still have the crystal dolphins. One looks a bit like Brolly, so I called her Brolly and I’ve made the smallest one of the others her baby even though it isn’t really the right size. But I keep them in a box now because they’re precious. And because having them out just brings everything back.

Lara said, picking them up very carefully, ‘Do you think about your sister a lot?’

I was under my bed trying to find something in a magazine that I wanted to show her, so I don’t think she could see me nodding. ‘I don’t really talk about her because Mum gets too upset,’ I said, as I backed out, trying not to hit my head, ‘but I still miss her.’ I couldn’t really say more than that. It still felt too difficult.

‘I hate my sister,’ she said. ‘She’s a witch. I’d love to be an only.’

I couldn’t explain it properly to her – but I’ll always have a sister. Letty not being alive any more doesn’t make me an only, just half of what I was.

On Thursday Mum asked me to take Mike his breakfast for the third time in a week.

‘Can’t you do it?’ I said. ‘I haven’t done my hair yet.’ It was really annoying as I like to put my hair in plaits before school and if you lose your rhythm as you’re doing it they go all lumpy in the middle. Auntie K said her old fingers were too stiff to do plaits, and Mum never cares what her hair looks like so there’s only me who can do it.

‘No,’ she said. Like, that was that. And she left his tray on the step outside my room.

She was being quite weird. I didn’t know if it was because she didn’t like him but she won’t sit out in the evenings any more and the few times when she did she ignored him, even though he sat out every night like he was waiting for her. I told Lara it was quite childish, really, like some of the girls in our class who pretend you aren’t there even though you’re standing right in front of them.

‘Are you cross with Mike?’ I asked Mum in the end.

She was a bit shocked. ‘No – why do you ask?’

‘You
look
cross with him.’

She started to fiddle with her hair. ‘I’m not cross, sweetheart. I just don’t think it’s a good idea to get too close to the guests,’ she said. Later I heard her and Auntie K talking in the kitchen, when they thought I was watching telly. The whalechasers were outside and Mum wouldn’t go and sit with them, even though they really needed to talk about whether to raise ticket prices. Fuel costs had gone up again. They were always on about fuel costs.

‘I don’t understand why you’re getting yourself so worked up about everything,’ Auntie K was saying.

‘Who says I’m worked up?’

‘That chip out of my dinner-plate?’

I heard the plate go down on the surface, and Mum’s muttered ‘Sorry.’

‘Liza, love, you can’t hide for ever.’

‘Why? We’re happy, aren’t we? We do okay?’

Aunt Kathleen didn’t say anything.

‘I can’t, okay? It’s just not a good idea.’

‘And Greg is?’

Greg doesn’t like Mike. He called him a ‘sonofabitch’ when Auntie Kathleen was talking to him and he thought nobody could hear.

Mum’s voice was all stressed when she said, ‘I just think it’s better all round if Hannah and I steer clear of getting . . . involved.’ Then she went out. And my aunt made that snorting noise with her nose.

I looked up ‘involved’ in the dictionary. It said, ‘participating in a romantic or sexual relationship/complicated or difficult to follow’. I showed it to Auntie K to see which one it was, but she stuck her finger on both and said that about summed it up.

At school, they were talking about the school trip. Sometimes it felt like they talked about nothing else, even though it was months and months away and sometimes our teacher said if we didn’t pull our fingers out no one would be going. We were all outside sitting on the long bench in the yard and Katie Taylor asked me if I was coming, and I said I might not be. I didn’t want to say anything as she’s the kind who twists everything you say, so of course she stood there in front of everyone and said, ‘Why? Haven’t you got enough money?’

‘It’s not because of money,’ I said, and went pink because I couldn’t say what it was.

‘Why, then? Everyone else in our year is coming.’ As usual, she had two pink patches of skin next to her ears because her mum pulls her hair too tight into her clips. Lara reckons that’s why she’s always mean.

‘Not everyone,’ said Lara.

‘Everyone except the dags.’

‘I’m not coming because we’re going somewhere else,’ I said. I spoke before I’d thought about what I was saying. ‘We’re going on a trip.’

Lara nodded, as if she’d known about it for ages.

‘Back to England?’

‘Maybe. Or we might go to the Northern Territory.’

‘So you don’t even know where?’

‘Look, her mum hasn’t decided yet,’ said Lara. She can put on this voice that says not to mess with her. ‘Don’t be such a stickybeak, Katie. It’s none of your business where they go.’

Later, Lara put her arm through mine when we walked back to hers. My mum was picking me up from there after tea, like she did every Tuesday, and Lara always said it was funny because I liked her house best, just like she said she liked mine. I like the way her family is all noisy and happy even when they’re shouting at each other and I like the way her dad’s always teasing her, rubbing the soles of her bare feet on his bristly chin and calling her ‘Kitten’. Sometimes I think about him when Lance calls me ‘Squirt’ but it isn’t the same. I’d never have a cuddle with Lance the way Lara does with her dad. When Lara’s dad once grabbed my feet and rubbed them on his chin I felt embarrassed, like everyone was pretending to include me because I don’t have a dad of my own. Lara said she liked it at mine because no one went in your room and through your stuff, and the way Auntie K gives us the key to the Whalechasers Museum and lets us wander around in there without watching what we’re up to. Auntie K knew we wouldn’t wreck anything, she told us, because we were such good girls. The best girls she knew. I haven’t told her about the time Lara nicked one of her mum’s cigarettes and we smoked it in the corner behind
Maui II
until we felt sick.

‘Hannah,’ Lara said, when we were at the bottom of her street, and her voice was really kind, like she wanted to show me how much she was still my friend. ‘Is it really about money? The reason why you can’t come to New Zealand?’

I chewed my nail. ‘It’s a bit complicated.’

‘You’re my best friend,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t tell anyone, whatever it is.’

‘I know.’ I squeezed her arm. I really would have liked to talk to her about it. But I still wasn’t always sure about it myself. All I knew was what Mum had told me – that we couldn’t ever leave Australia and that I mustn’t talk to anyone about that. Or tell them why.

And the next day Katie Taylor started going on about it again. She said I couldn’t come because the Silver Bay Hotel was broke. Then she said she reckoned it was Auntie K who’d killed the baby whale, just like she’d killed the shark, because it had been in the paper then and everyone knew. She said if I had a dad perhaps I’d be able to join in more school trips, then asked me what his name was, because she knew I couldn’t say, and then she laughed in that really sly way until Lara went up to her and gave her a shove. Katie grabbed her hand and bent her fingers back and they had a full-on fight in the yard until Mrs Sherborne came and broke it up.

‘She’s a stupid bitch,’ said Lara to me, as we walked off to the cloakroom. She was spitting on the floor because some of Katie’s hair had ended up in her mouth. ‘Don’t pay her any attention.’ But that was the thing: suddenly I didn’t feel mad with Katie, or any of her stupid mates, I felt mad with my mum. Because all I wanted was to do what everyone else did. I get good marks and I never talk about what I’m not supposed to talk about and I don’t even talk about Letty half the time when I want to because I’m not allowed to hurt anyone’s feelings. So if we could get the money for a trip to New Zealand, like Auntie K said, and absolutely everyone in my class was going – even David Dobbs, who everyone knows still wets his bed and has a mum who takes things from shops without paying – why was it always me who got left out? Why was I the one who always had to say no?

If you don’t count where we came from, I’m the only person in my whole class who has never been further than the Blue Mountains.

I was still angry when I got home. Mum picked me up and I almost said something but she was so busy thinking about something else that she didn’t notice how quiet I was. And then I remembered that we still had this horrible family staying, with two boys who looked at me like I was stupid. And that made me really mad too.

‘Do you have any homework?’ she said, when we pulled up outside the hotel. Milly was chewing Mum’s torch in the back and I had known all the way back but hadn’t stopped her.

‘No,’ I said, then climbed out of the car before she could check. I knew she was looking at me, but Katie’s words were still in my ears and I wanted to be in my room by myself for a while.

When I was going up the stairs I saw that Mike’s door was open. He was on the phone and I hovered for a minute, not sure whether I should wait for him to finish.

I think he felt me there because he spun round. ‘An S94. Yup, that’s it. And he said that should improve our chances a hundred per cent.’ He glanced at me. ‘Okay – can’t talk now, Dennis. I’ll ring you back.’ Then he put down the phone and smiled a great big smile at me. ‘Hello there. How are you doing?’

‘Terrible,’ I said, dropping my bag on the floor. ‘I hate everyone.’ I surprised myself, saying that. I don’t normally say that sort of thing. But it made me feel better.

He didn’t try to shush me, or tell me I didn’t really feel like that, which is what my aunt usually does, like I don’t even know what I’m feeling. He just nodded. ‘I have days like that.’

‘Is today?’

He frowned. ‘Is today what?’

‘One of those days. Terrible. A terrible day.’

He thought for a minute, then shook his head. I thought, as he grinned, that he was almost as handsome as Greg.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Most days are pretty good at the moment. Here,’ he motioned at me to sit down, ‘would one of these cheer you up? I’ve made it my mission to try every Australian biscuit there is.’

When he pulled open his drawer, I saw he had all my favourites: Iced Vo-Vos, Anzacs, Chocolate Tim Tams and Arnott’s Mint Slices. ‘You’ll get fat,’ I warned him.

‘Nope. I go running most morning,’ he said. ‘I have a good metabolism. And, besides, people worry far too much about all that stuff.’

He made himself some tea, then sat on the leather chair and I sat at his desk and he let me go on his computer. He showed me a program that lets you change pictures, so just for fun we pulled up another picture of Auntie K and the shark and we drew a big smile on its face, and then I did another where I gave Auntie K a moustache and a pair of really big feet, and had her holding a sign and I wrote in it, ‘Shark Lady Toothpaste – For a Brighter Smile’.

Just as I was finishing, I felt him looking at me. You can do that, you know, make someone turn round if you stare at them hard enough. I felt like he was staring at the back of my head so I spun round really fast and he was. ‘Did you have a brother or a sister?’ he said. ‘The one who died, I mean.’

I was so shocked to hear someone say it out loud that I nearly spat out my Chocolate Tim Tam. No grown-up talks about Letty. Not straight out like that. Auntie K has this kind of pained look whenever I say her name, like it’s too much to bear, and Mum’s so sad when I talk about her that I don’t like to.

‘A sister,’ I said, after a minute. ‘Her name was Letty.’ Then, when he didn’t seem horrified, or look at me like I should be quiet, I said, ‘She died when she was five, in a car crash.’