Six Impossible Things (10 page)

At the time of the snooping, before we’d even met, I realised that just as my regard for her grew with every word I read, hers for me would surely diminish in far greater proportion if she ever found out what I had done.

Knowing her now, even so slightly, only makes what I did seem more horrible.

I’ve paid a high price for knowledge that should have been earned, not stolen. It’s a bad bargain, and one from which I can’t see an escape. Like all good traps, climbing in was easy, getting out might prove to be impossible.

‘Y
OU KNOW WHO
is
a good guy?’ my mother asks me over porridge, in a tone suggesting we’ve just been talking about who’s
not
a good guy, which we haven’t.

‘No.’

‘Thom Yorke. He is a truly good guy.’ Radiohead’s singer, songwriter. The unnatural interest isn’t going away.

‘What makes you think that?’

‘Because he’s passionate, Dan; he cares passionately about his music. You just have to watch him performing to see it. He looks like he’s going to burst every blood vessel in his head . . .’

‘What’s so good about that?’

‘He’s also an environmental activist.’ She stirs sugar into her tea, a dreamy expression on her face. ‘He cares about climate change. He went to Copenhagen, for God’s sake! He’s helping the planet.’

‘Okay.’ I’m putting my lunch together. I’ve got to get out of here.

‘And he’s around my age, did you know that?’

‘No.’

‘Yep. So, why didn’t I end up with him, instead of your father?’

Who knows the right answer to that one? Er – you live on different continents . . . ? You don’t know him . . . ? He’s short and you’re tall . . . ?

I don’t point out that I’m the result of her breeding with her reject husband. I don’t feel like much of a consolation.

It’s clear I have to protect my mother from the prank phone calls in her current fragile state, so I do something I’ve never done before in my school history. When Mr Pittney finishes morning homeroom with a rhetorical, ‘That’s it, then?’, I stand up and speak in front of the whole class. Voluntarily. Not for assessment purposes. It’s weird – I don’t consciously decide to do it; it’s as though I’m watching myself do something I have no power to stop, even though I know it’s going to hurt.

I walk to the front of the class and hold up a flyer, my face growing red in a rush of embarrassed second thoughts. Too late now.

‘This is my mother’s business. She makes wedding cakes. She’s having a hard time. My father walked out on us eight weeks ago. And he lost all our money. Or we didn’t have any, or something. And so my mother has to make this business work, or we can’t afford to . . . live. I’m not talking holidays or luxury vehicles, I’m talking food. So please do not ring this number unless you want a cake.’

Pittney has obviously only been half-listening, as usual.

‘Thank you. Righto, so, I think if we, if anyone, that is, wants a wedding cake, we all know where to take our business. But no more advertisements in homeroom, thanks, Cereal.’

‘Cereill.’

‘Of course, Cereill.’

Estelle is looking at me curiously. Add inappropriate blurting of private family matters to the list. Jayzo is sneering and aggressive, but I hold eye contact with him in as threatening a manner as I can manage. He’d better get the message or I’m going to have to do something more drastic. What that might be, I have no idea. Until the muscles develop, sharp words are the only other thing in the arsenal.

Jayzo yells out, ‘Who’s up for some pus and raw brains?’ Nice. Now he’s trying to make me faint, hitting me where it hurts. Lou shoots me a sympathetic look. ‘What about some raw liver and snot?’ Jayzo asks.

I just make it back to my seat in time, through sniggering and Mr Pittney’s confused ‘settle downs’.

That night there are five more prank calls. Speaking up seems only to have inspired the few people who hadn’t already called. I answer the phone and tell my mother they’re wrong numbers.

Maybe it shouldn’t be such a big deal, but it is. I hate using the polite business voice and saying the stupid business name, only to cop inane abuse, knowing it’s someone I’m going to see at school in the morning but not knowing quite who. The anonymity turns the whole class into enemies. If someone smiles, it feels like mockery. The calls go on for a couple more nights.

At school I get called ‘cake boy’, arguably no better or worse than dickhead or cereal, but I feel more exposed than before. I’ve appealed to people’s better nature, I’ve made myself conspicuous by telling them about my life and now they’re clubbing me over the head with it.

I’m full of pointless anger towards my mother for her stupid business intruding on my stupid life. I know it’s really my father who started the ball rolling down this bad hill, but he’s not around to blame, and besides, I can’t be any more pissed off with him than I already am. Bashing away at the back of my skull is the obvious – it’s not about my parents, it’s me, and how I’m – not – handling things.

Life in our cold house grows colder. I barely speak to my mother. And she hardly notices. I guess she’s silently communing with Thom Yorke. She and Oliver share an occasional bottle of wine, but as far as I know she doesn’t see any of her old friends.

I’ve decided my mother’s probably right about Oliver. He seems like a pretty average guy who’s unlikely to be up for random killings. He’s got good taste in music, people who visit him leave unharmed, and there are no suspicious, freshly dug areas in the garden.

That’s where he and I have our occasional talks. He tells me that the hedge running along the back of the house with the lemon-smelling flowers is daphne, and my window tree is a
Magnolia grandiflora
.

He doesn’t mind when I ask him stuff, for example:

1 ‘Were you always cool?’
 He just laughed about that. For quite a while.

2 ‘What makes someone cool?’
‘Not what you’d think. Not the outward stuff. The coolest thing is just to be authentically yourself.’

3 ‘What if you’re a psychopath?’
‘If you’re a psychopath, sure, try to be someone else.’

4 ‘What do you think about someone deciding they’re gay when they’re thirty-nine.’
‘It’s one year better than doing it at forty. And he’s being authentically himself.’

5 ‘How do think my mum’s coping?’
‘Not fantastic, but not terrible.’

6 ‘What about the Thom Yorke thing?’
‘It’s transitional. She’s not crazy. It’s like eating chocolate when you feel sad. But heaps healthier. And she’s got good taste.’

He gets on well with Howard and offers to walk him when I’ve got café shifts after school, which I do now on Wednesdays and Fridays, up for review in a week when I turn fifteen.

He greets me by saying, ‘Hey, man,’ but it doesn’t sound stupid when he says it. When he suggests I could do with a shave, I find myself saying, ‘I don’t know how.’ So that’s how I first come to visit the stables, because he says I can watch him shave. It seems a bit personal, I know, but I think, what the hell, there’s no one else around offering.

He has converted the stables into one huge space. It’s lined with tall bookshelves filled with books, CDs and DVDs. In one corner there’s a kitchen, in another, a bathroom. Up one set of stairs is a big sleeping platform, up another, an office area. There’s a long table with twelve chairs around it, a giant ‘U’ of squishy sofas and a massive wall-mounted screen. His bike hangs on the wall like a piece of art, and there’s a lot of actual art as well. One look around and I know this is exactly the sort of place I want to have when I’m older.

‘You like it?’ Oliver asks.

I nod. ‘How come you’re here?’

‘You know Adelaide and my gran were friends, and I used to do the gardening here, as a student job? One day I asked her if I could rent the stables.’

‘Were they like this?’

‘No, they were a mess. Broken roof. Lots of birds. We worked out a deal where I’d fix them up instead of paying rent. And she liked the security of having someone else around.’

‘Did you know she was leaving them to you?’

‘No idea.’

Shaving doesn’t look that hard. Lather up. Stretch tight the piece of your face being shaved using appropriate contortions. Move the razor up, down or sideways, always moving it in the direction of the handle, not in the direction of the blades. Oliver hands me a new razor, wishes me luck, and sends me on my way. Maybe he’ll break up with his girlfriend, fall for my mother and move inside – then I can live in the stables. Brilliant. I imagine cool, casual gatherings with Estelle and friends. I only have Fred and Lou in the friends department, of course, but small details don’t need to spoil a perfectly good fantasy.

Work at Phrenology is harder than it looks from the outside. In the first couple of shifts I break a few things, but not too many. I get to know Ali’s temper first hand. He’s an impatient perfectionist, and insults fly around the place like pepper, but he’s just as quick to cool down.

I’m learning how to use the bench top dishwasher, and to wash by hand when that’s full – squeaky clean glasses, no trace of lipstick. I get the hang of sweeping methodically, every chair up on a table, starting around all the skirting boards and counter edges and working my way into the middle of the floor. Ali goes ballistic when he sees my first attempt at wiping a table.

‘What’s this?’ he growls, running a finger through the beaded smear I’ve left on the surface.

‘I don’t know . . .’ I haven’t got a clue what I’ve done wrong.

‘It’s laziness. It’s blindness. It’s sloppy. It’s out the door if you ever do it again.’

He shows me how to do it properly. Scalding hot cloth, wrung out till it’s nearly dry. Catch all the crumbs and goop in your hand, don’t sweep them off the table onto the floor.

‘And the essential ingredient?’ he asks with a look of dire threat.

I’m mute.

‘Elbow grease. Work it! Put some muscle into it.’

I practise that first week until my back is ready to break. Then I’ve got it. Never need reminding again. So just when I’m used to Ali’s barking, it stops. We spray and wipe all the tables at the end of the day with a eucalyptus oil and water mixture. That freshness blends with the morning smells. My first Saturday morning shift, I meet Ali’s mother, Anne. She starts cooking at six. I walk into the warm baking smells of lemon peel, pistachios, walnuts, honey and rosewater. Mingling with the smell of cakes is the first coffee of the morning. Ali is the only one allowed near the coffee machine.

I clear glasses and crockery, learning how to move around the tables and chairs and people and not trip over myself. It’s like working out dance steps. You’re moving quickly all the time, but always hesitating for a fraction of a beat to check the way is clear. ‘Behind you,’ we say over and over again, avoiding collisions with other people weaving through the same space.

Anne cooks with ease and grace, usually working with her friend Irena. They chat and laugh as they roll, peel, pound and stir. It looks as though they’ve been doing what they do every day forever – so different from my mother’s focused, frowning, scientific approach.

Phrenology is thriving, but I Do Wedding Cakes is not managing to get off the ground. Despite our recent rational discussion, my mother has counselled two more would-be customers out of getting married. And they’re just the ones I know about. Who knows how many others she’s put off.