Stagefright (13 page)

Hailie ignored her and tottered out into the street.

“And you’ll freeze to death.”

Roula hesitated, then went after Hailie. “Better keep an eye on her.”

Velvet followed them. “But where are we going?”

They tried on clothes in the Myer basement until the shop assistant barred them from going into the change rooms. Then they went to the skateboard park to watch Jesus. The rest of the boys there were doing jumps and slides, and falling over, but Jesus was swooping gracefully up and down the curves of the bowl on a borrowed board. Skateboarding was one of the few physical activities he could still do.

“Let’s find the other boys.” Hailie pulled out her phone.

Peter and Drago were in a games arcade, deeply involved in noisy and violent combat games like the ones Peter played on his phone, but bigger and louder. It was a grungy place, and they were the only people there. Roula talked Velvet into trying a game that involved dancing.

Hailie stood next to Peter, offering encouragement and advice. Peter ignored her. After about half an hour watching Peter splatter aliens, Hailie had had enough.

“My feet hurt,” she said. “Let’s go to the Hungry Jack’s next door.”

Hailie and Roula ordered fries and a chocolate sundae. Velvet bought a bottle of water. They sat at a table next to two boys who looked like they were on day release from juvenile detention.

“I’ve given up on Peter,” Hailie said crossly, taking off her denim jacket and leaning forwards on one elbow so the boys at the next table could see down her top.

Velvet watched their heads turn. “Hailie!”

“I don’t understand why he’s never had a girlfriend,” Roula said.

“You don’t think he’s gay do you?” said Hailie.

“Possible, I suppose.”

“Hey, how come he gets out of sport?” Roula said. “Drago and Taleb have got asthma, Jesus’s got a bung knee, Hailie’s got her ankle, I’ve got a rare heart condition. What’s wrong with Peter?”

“There’s nothing wrong with Velvet. She just scammed Slinky.”

“But Peter’s not sneaky like she is,” said Roula. “Maybe it’s his hormones. He might be, like, changing sex.”

“Get real, Roula.”

“No, there was this boy who lived in my grandma’s village in Greece. His name was Georgios. He disappeared for a couple of years and when he came back he had plaits and his name was Georgia. Seriously.”

The two boys in leather jackets came over, one blond and good-looking, the other with a nasty case of acne. They sat on either side of Hailie, ignoring Roula and Velvet. Hailie was soon chatting with them like they were old friends, laughing at their sleazy jokes and telling them her life story.

They bought her a coke, offered her cigarettes.

“Wanna go to a bar?” said the blond one.

“Sure,” said Hailie.

It was starting to get dark outside.

“I have to go,” Roula said. “I’ll get grounded if I’m not home by six.”

Roula caught a tram. Velvet didn’t like the idea of leaving Hailie by herself, but she had to go home too. She went back to the games arcade to tell Drago and Peter to keep an eye on her, but they’d already left.

Velvet was halfway to the train station when she remembered that Hailie hadn’t taken her mother’s shoes to the menders. She hurried back. She was just in time to see Hailie teetering on her heels as she walked into a laneway holding hands with the blond boy. The other boy followed them. Velvet started running. By the time she got to the corner of the laneway, the boy had grabbed Hailie’s bag.

“Hey!” Velvet yelled.

The boys turned, but when they saw it was just Velvet, they laughed. Hailie reached out to grab her bag back, but one of her heels got stuck between the cobblestones. Velvet winced as she watched Hailie’s ankle turn and heard her scream as she fell. The pimply boy walked toward Velvet.

“Get lost, little girl.”

Velvet didn’t move. She took out her phone. She could still only use voice commands. “
Cómo puedo ayudarle?
” said a female voice.

“Help!” Velvet shouted into the phone. “Someone’s robbing us!”

“
He enviado el mensaje de texto
,” the phone replied.

“Stupid phone!”

“I’ll have that.” The pimply boy snatched the phone from Velvet’s hand.

She yelled for help, but the passing commuters took no notice.

“Oh, God,” Hailie screamed, holding her ankle.

“No good talking to God, sweetheart. He can’t hear you.”

The blond boy emptied Hailie’s bag onto the cobblestones and took her phone and wallet.

Velvet needed to protect herself. She picked up something long and thin and hit the boy with it. He laughed as her weapon crumpled. It was a stale breadstick.

“Jesus!” said Velvet.

“Are you two religious or something?” The boy laughed. “Jesus isn’t going to help you either.”

“Yes, he is,” said a voice behind them.

The two thugs spun round to see where the voice was coming from. They both yelped when they saw a tall, dark figure surrounded by a halo of light.

Jesus Mbele stepped out of the lamplight and strode towards them, taking off his hoodie. The muscles of his bare black arms glinted. The two thugs froze like taggers in a cop’s torch beam. Jesus grabbed the blond one under the arms and threw him into a skip as if he was a toy. Velvet had found a more effective weapon – a milk crate. She hit the pimply boy with it until he dropped her phone.

The strains of Julie Andrews singing “My Favourite Things” came from the phone. As Velvet bent to pick it up, the boy started to run, but Jesus took two strides and tackled him into a pile of green garbage bags spewing leftover fast food. Jesus then went over to the blond boy who, in his haste to climb out of the skip, had fallen and lay on the cobblestones whimpering like a child.

“Say sorry to the young ladies.” Jesus ground his foot into the boy’s chest. “I can’t hear you.”

“Sorry,” stammered the boy.

The boys scurried away when Jesus turned his attention to Hailie, who was sobbing and shaking like a leaf.

“She’s broken her ankle again,” Velvet said. “Can you carry her?”

Jesus gently lifted Hailie into his arms. “You need to be a bit more particular about the company you keep.”

He carried her all the way to St Vincent’s Hospital.

“I didn’t know you knew Spanish,” Jesus said, as he and Velvet waited for Hailie to have her foot put in plaster again.

“I don’t.”

“But you texted me in Spanish.”

“My phone only texts in Spanish, and it was just a fluke that it decided to send it to the only person in my contacts list who could understand it.”

Hailie limped out on crutches. Velvet rang her father on a payphone and he delivered them all home.

The holidays hadn’t been as bad as the last ones. Velvet had worked on the script as well as finishing an English assignment. Her dad had found her a cheap Casio electric keyboard in an op shop, so she’d practised her piano pieces. She’d kept the plastic clarinet from Mr MacDonald’s music cupboard and joined a woodwind ensemble organised by the local neighbourhood house. But the highlight of the break had been going to see
Annie
with her aunt. It wasn’t Velvet’s favourite musical by a long way, but there were some good songs, and she always loved the experience of a live performance. Afterwards, over coffee and cake, she and Aunt Evelyn had a lot of fun working out why the second act was so flawed. The holidays had been quite satisfying, and Velvet no longer cared that her old friends never called her.

Velvet’s first lesson that term was Mandarin. She stood outside the classroom as the other students streamed in, talking about what they’d done during the break. The other thing Velvet had done over the holidays was worry about her woeful Mandarin grades. She’d tried to study, but it still made no sense to her. It wasn’t fair. She was two years behind everyone else, but weeping in the deputy principal’s office had failed to get her out of Chinese.

She’d come up with a plan. It was so radical, she wasn’t sure if she could go ahead with it. Getting a D in a test was bad enough, but what if she failed the exam? She couldn’t bear the thought of having that on her report. Pulling herself up straight, she marched into the classroom and sat down. Next to Drago. A murmur passed through the class. No one ever sat next to Drago.

“’Sup, Corduroy?”

“I need help.”

She took out her books.

Word had spread about the drama of the last day of term, and Drago called a meeting at recess.

“Don’t go around blabbing about what happened to Hailie, okay?” he told them. “If Slinky finds out, he’ll blame Mr Mac and he’ll be in big trouble.”

“And he’ll cancel the play,” Peter added.

Earlier in the year, they would all have been delighted if the play was cancelled. It was different now.

“I spent practically the entire holidays doing physio at the Fracture Clinic,” Hailie complained.

Once the others found out about Jesus’s heroics, they treated him with more respect, especially the girls. Hailie had gone off boys for at least a week, but Jesus had visited her over the break to see how she was, and she’d asked him if he’d go out with her. He’d said yes.

“You’ll never guess what I did over the holidays?” Roula said.

Nobody guessed. They knew that no matter what bizarre things they suggested, Roula would top them.

“A film crew was in our street, filming a scene for a new movie. The director asked me to audition for a part!”

Jesus was worried that the two thugs would come looking for revenge, so he appointed himself the girls’ bodyguard. He insisted on walking them to the station after school for a couple of weeks, just in case. He also wanted to give them self-defence lessons at lunchtime.

“I’m gonna show you girls how to use your elbows as weapons and how a knee can make any guy cry like a baby.”

Taleb had written a new song and, for once, they were all keen to go to lunchtime band practice to hear it.

“It’s the one about the prophecy,” he said.

Velvet was pleased. That had been her idea.

“It’s when Clarence is talking to the murderers and he realises he’s been framed.”

Taleb played an introduction that sounded like it was from a murder mystery.

“
Did you hear the rumour that’s going around town?

There’s a murderer amongst us. I hope he’ll soon be found
.

How will we know him? Who could it be?

There’s only one clue. His name begins with G
.

It could be Gianni from the kitchens, or Gavin in the forge
.

It isn’t either of my brothers. Me? But my name’s
…”

“And then the murderers say together …
George
!”

Everyone loved it. “That’s great, Taleb.”

“It’s a bit short.”

“You can do a guitar solo and sing that verse again.”

“It’s terrific,” Velvet said, “but we might need more medieval-sounding names like Geoffrey and Giles.”

They made Taleb play it again with the new names.

“I did some work on the play over the holidays,” Drago said.

“Really?”

He pulled something out of a plastic bag. Everyone gasped. It was Hastings’s head, perfectly sculpted from clay with a clump of hair glued to the top, a purple tongue hanging out and blood around its severed neck.

“Gross.”

Peter picked it up. “It weighs a tonne.”

Taleb made them spent the first two weeks of term practising the prophecy song, working out each band member’s part and going over it again and again. Velvet was learning how to loosen up and improvise. Hailie mastered her saxophone piece. Taleb had relented and let Roula play something simple on the recorder. Jesus had discovered a talent for percussion, and every week arrived with a new piece of junk to bang, ring or rattle. And Mei’s contribution with her French horn made them sound more like a band.

An ad in the school newsletter had failed to unearth a single drummer, so Taleb decided they would manage with Jesus as percussionist. Mr MacDonald remembered that he’d taught flute to Peter in Year 7, and Peter was able to regain his skills enough to play a flute solo just before he was executed. Drago revealed that he had a talent for drama, although he did have a tendency to overact. Taleb spent more time with the Cultural Studies band than with Toxic Shock. Hailie still couldn’t sing, but no one expected her to.