The Year Nick McGowan Came to Stay (2 page)

An hour later and I'm standing in the back corner of a fast-food restaurant wearing a clown suit and getting fries pegged at my head by four-year-olds. This does not bode well. In a week's time I'm competing for the Party Hostess of the Year title at our restaurant. In one week, I'm going head-to-head with Fiona Curtis – a Year 11 girl from some private girls' school that wears far too much chunder green. And sure, I can acknowledge that Fiona's good. But she's no Rachel Hill when it comes to strapping on the clown nose and running a kid's birthday party.

And yet today when I should be switched on, focused, in the zone, all I can think about is Nick McGowan. Not Simon Says. Not What's the Time Mr Wolf
? Not Tiggy or Statues or Red Rover. Just Nick McGowan, and the fact that at some point soon it's fairly likely he is going to see me in my Fido Dido pyjamas. And know that I like to eat tomato sauce on toast for breakfast. And be privy to the fact that because of a one-hour phone call to my sister in France, my phone calls are now monitored by an eggtimer. For the next month I'm allowed to talk for no more than three minutes per call. To anyone. About anything. And Nick McGowan is going to know this – see the eggtimer, be witness to my eggy humiliation.

I think about how much I want to ring Zoë to get her advice. And I look down at my big clowny thighs and think about how good it would be if I could lose three kilos before Sunday
.
And I ponder the fire alarm in the spare bedroom and wonder if Mum and Dad will take the batteries out before Nick McGowan comes to stay. And then I suddenly remember that I am meant to be hosting Jamie Chapel's fourth birthday party. I suddenly remember because one of Jamie's friends – the one who smells like wee – tries to pull down my clown pants.

Someone yells out, ‘The clown has pink undies.' Another kid yells out, ‘Petey dakked the clown!'

I pull my pants back up, inwardly cursing the elasticised waist. Outwardly cursing Petey, who has caused me nothing but trouble since this party started. Petey who apparently wanted to play a game called ‘Burn Clown, Burn' when he held a lit birthday cake candle to my red nylon clown wig when I wasn't looking. Petey who – at the age of three and a half – wanted to know why, if I'm a clown, I have pimples. Petey who has now dakked me no less than three times in thirty minutes. I briefly contemplate bashing Petey, but his heavily pregnant mother steps in and forces him to apologise.

‘Sorry, Clown,' he says.

‘That's okay,' I say, bending down to Petey's height, ruffling him on the head a little harder than is perhaps recommended by the Head Injuries Association. ‘So are you looking forward to having a new baby brother or sister?'

And that's when Petey looks me in the eye with the steady gaze of a serial killer and says, ‘When the new baby arrives I'm going to put it in a sack and take it to see a dragon.' And he says this with just a hint of kiddie menace. And then he skips away. Skips away leaving me to clean up his cake plate, and leaving his mother to contemplate joining a witness protection program.

So far, today is not shaping up the way I had expected.

I look at my watch. Fifteen minutes to go. Fifteen minutes to go, and then I can go home and ring Zoë and figure out what the hell I'm going to do.

Then the faint but sickly smell of wee fills the air and I feel two small hands pull down on my pants.

When I get home I immediately ring Zoë, poised with the eggtimer in my hand, ready to flip it over and talk faster than sand can fall. But Mrs Budd tells me that Zee is on a theatre excursion with her drama class. They've gone to see
Hedda Gabler
, she thinks. At the Princess Theatre. And the bus won't drop them back at the school till eleven p.m.

I put the eggtimer down and drag my feet back up the stairs to my room. I ignore my lovely new desk and sit on the floor and start my French homework, but my mind keeps wandering away from my past-perfect tense exercises and over to Nick McGowan. And I wonder what it will really be like having Nick McGowan living upstairs. And I wonder what he is thinking. Is he looking forward to coming here, or is he whinging about it to the other boarder boys? ‘I can't believe I have to live with Rachel Hill's family – she sucks.'
Was he hoping to get another family? Or is he pleased to be coming here to our house in Kenmore, where he gets his own room and lots of privacy and better meals?

I think about how I – along with every other girl in Year 11 – had a sort of mini-crush on Nick McGowan when he first came to our school last year. How there was that time in French when Mrs Lesage paired us together to have a conversation about buying a train ticket for Bologna. How we both laughed about how stupid the cartoon fox was in our textbook and how if we went to France we'd just put ‘Le' in front of every English word and hope to get by. But then he dropped out and decided to switch over to German, and we never really talked again. A month later I heard he was dating Kerry English, who was – of course – beautiful and popular and nice all the time and loved by everybody. And who, in Year 8, thought that babies came out of your bottom. But that didn't matter to Nick McGowan. Whenever I saw them together it was always like they were sharing a private joke.

I look up at the full-length mirror nailed to the back of my bedroom door, and contemplate my size-twelve reflection. It pains me to realise that I look pretty much the same now as I did in Year 10. I turn my head one way, then the other, taking in my thick brown hair, my blue-grey eyes, my too-thin lips, my too-square nose and my too-fat ankles. I know I'm not ugly. But I'm not gorgeous, either. I'm average. Ordinary. Plain.
And sometimes I think that that's way worse. I think about Zoë for a moment with her china-doll skin, her long, lean arms and legs and her mass of brown curls, which she, of course, hates. I over-heard my mum once describe Zoë as ‘striking'.
Striking
. Some days I'd give anything to be described that way.

For just a moment I imagine what would happen if, when Nick McGowan moved in, we fell madly in love. Imagine if I finally had a boyfriend. Imagine if we were the new ‘it' couple at school with our private jokes. What are the chances? Before I know it I'm grabbing a pen and paper and I'm working out those chances. I'm writing out ‘Rachel Hill loves Nick McGowan' and I'm working out our Love Compatibility Score – the way you do when you're in primary school – by systematically crossing off the letters and then adding them up. We're seventy-four per cent compatible. This cheers me up, for some ridiculous reason. But then I look at it and realise what I'm doing. This is ludicrous. So, just to prove that it doesn't mean anything, I start working out my compatibility with all kinds of people. Kirk Cameron. Huey Lewis. Johnny Depp. Michael J. Fox. Each member o
f
Wa Wa Nee.

My mum knocks, pauses, and then opens the door, giving me just enough time to shove the pieces of paper into my homework diary and sit up at my desk.

My mother seems to get distressed when she sees me doing homework on the floor. ‘Are you alright down there?' she always asks as though I was at the bottom of a skanky well and not sitting on one hundred per cent Berber carpeting.

‘I have a cup of tea for you. You okay?'

‘Yeah.'

‘This could all work out much better than you think. You might love having Nick McGowan live here.'

‘Mmmm.' I shrug.

She smiles and nods hopefully. I smile back and say, ‘It's okay, Mum.' She looks relieved. I thank her for the tea. When she's gone I sip the tea in my favourite faded Holly Hobby cup, put thoughts of Nick McGowan aside and concentrate on my homework.

I don't sleep well on Thursday night. I dream that I'm marrying Nick McGowan but that on the big day, when I walk down the aisle, Martin O'Connell (a revolting guy in my Drama class) is waiting for me instead. ‘I'm not meant to marry you,' I say. But nobody listens. They just keep going ahead with the ceremony and I'm standing there realising that I'm going to get divorced. And how bad that will look on my résumé. Then I wake up.

On Friday morning I skulk into school desperately trying to find Zoë, and even more desperately trying to avoid running into Nick McGowan – or Martin O'Connell, for that matter. But with a prefects meeting at morning tea, I can't speak to Zoë properly about Nick McGowan until lunch. We arrange to meet in the library since Zoë has been cajoled into helping her aunt, the school librarian, restock some of the shelves.

In the Ancient Greece section I grab her boney elbow, yank her away from a freckly Year-10 girl with red hair, and start babbling to her about Nick McGowan and the P&C meeting and how, because of my dad and his big mouth, Nick McGowan is moving in to Caitlin's bedroom for the rest of the year.

Zoë's reaction to my news is characteristically Zoë Budd. Her mouth falls open, her green eyes light up and she says, ‘This is great. You get to have sex with him.'

So I hit her with my 300-page
Web of Life
Biology textbook.

‘I cannot
believe
you just said that.'

‘I can't believe you just hit me. I mean, think about it. You can lose your virginity in the comfort of your own home. Think about Lisa Staples who did it with Gavin Piper out by Trudy Garrison's pool. On twigs and shit. No, this is much better.'

I tell her that there will be no sex happening. Not now, not ever when it comes to Nick McGowan. And that code name: NM moving in is a bad, bad thing.

‘What am I going to do, Zee? I don't want him living with my family. I don't want to have him reporting back to his friends on what goes on in our house.'

She narrows her eyes, nods her head and purses her lips and then says, ‘Come with me.' And Zoë drags me through the library mumbling something about keeping your friends close and your enemies closer.

Ten minutes later I'm sitting at a library desk reading all about Nick McGowan. Zoë has found a copy of last year's
Boarder Review
and in it there's a short profile on all the boarders – where they're from, what their interests are, their contact details. And it's a magazine that I've never seen, since, as a day-bug, we don't get a copy.

‘See? We need to find his Achilles heel – his weakness – and then you've got something over him,' says Zoë, perhaps a tad too enthusiastically.

So I sit there in the school library and read the paragraphs that have been written about Nick. About how he loves rugby league and cricket and Dire Straits and the Ramones, and is well known for taking two desserts at the refectory each night. Even on the nights they serve rice pudding. That his favourite film is
Beverly Hills Cop II
. His favourite TV show is ‘Simon & Simon'. That what he misses the most is his dog, Frank, back in Middlemount.

And then Zoë says, ‘Ohmygod, we should photocopy it.'

And I say, ‘Yeah.' Because this seems like a good idea. A good idea for me to have this info on file so that I can refer back to it whenever I want. Remember that he likes rice pudding. And ham and pineapple pizza. And dogs.

At the photocopier Zoë is feeding in ten-cent pieces like a crazy woman playing the pokies, but the page keeps coming out almost black and a little big, as though the
Boarder Review
was written for very old people who can only see words written in a seventy-two size font. So I put my books down, dig around in my purse and pull out as many ten-cent coins as I can find and hand them over.

As the machine keeps spewing out black copies, I say, ‘It needs to be lighter,' and ‘Reduce it by fifty per cent. You're not reducing it enough.'

Zoë says, ‘I don't know what the problem is. This copier worked perfectly this morning when I photocopied my boobs.'

And just when I think the bell is going to ring and we're going to have to come back after school, Zoë says, ‘Perfect!'

She swings around and holds up our now perfect photocopy of Nick McGowan's profile in her hands just as Nick McGowan walks through the library door and over to the photocopier.

‘Hey,' says Nick.

‘Oh shit,' says Zoë.

‘We're just photocopying,' I say. ‘We're just photocopying some stuff for Zoë's aunt.'

‘Because she's the librarian. And she just wanted us to photocopy some stuff for a display about boarders,' says Zoë.

‘Yeah,' I say.

‘Yeah,' says Zoë.

‘Right,' says Nick. But that's all he says.

I look at Zoë. She looks at me. We realise that we've gotten away with it. We're in the clear. Nick McGowan has failed to notice that what we were photocopying was him. His profile and his photo. Like stalkers. Stalkers who photocopy very badly.

‘We're finished,' I say more to my feet than to him. ‘You can have the copier now.' And I wonder if my hair looks as crap as I think it looks. And I try to look calm and still look like someone who'd be fun to live with.

Nick McGowan moves to the photocopier and I begin to walk past him. I can't believe that neither of us is going to say anything about him moving in with my family this weekend. Then he grabs my arm and says, ‘Hey!'

I spin around, and so does my homework diary. I watch it fly – in slow motion – out of my hands, before crashing onto the library carpet. Nick McGowan immediately bends down, picks up the diary and starts collecting up the other scraps of paper that I'd shoved inside, which also fell out onto the floor. Scraps of paper including one that says
Rachel Hill loves Huey Lewis
. The note with the love heart. And the eighty-one per cent rating. The note that I shoved into my homework diary when Mum brought in a cup of tea last night.

Ohmygod
.

Nick McGowan looks down at the note, then at me, then back down at the note.

I say nothing.

Nick says nothing.

Zoë says, ‘I thought the rule was that you had to use the person's proper Christian name?'

Finally, Nick says, ‘Do you listen to Huey Lewis and the News?' And he says this with tone.

I just stare at him. Like a deer caught in headlights. A deer with bad taste in music. A deer that perhaps at one time wrote a fan letter to Huey claiming that he did indeed have ‘the power of love'. And all I can think is
shit
.
Shit
! This is really, really bad. Now he thinks I like Huey Lewis and the News. I mean I did listen to Huey Lewis and the News once, but I don't anymore. And I want him to know that. I just want to
die
. I look at Zoë with eyes that plead
ohmygod, help me
! But Zoë has whipped out a pen and is busy reworking the love percentage using Hugh instead of Huey. So I snatch the note from his hand, shove it into my dress pocket and say the only thing that comes to mind: ‘I've got a boyfriend, actually.'

I've got a boyfriend
?

Zoë looks up. Her expression makes it clear that my best friend is a little shocked at this confession.
‘You've got a boyfriend?'

I glare at Zoë. And despite the fact that she has no idea where this latest blatant lie is going, she says in an authoritative tone to Nick McGowan, ‘She has a boyfriend. And if he knew you were standing this close to her, he would beat the hell out of you. He's a little possessive.'

‘Right,' says Nick. ‘And is his name Huey Lewis, perhaps? And do most of your dates happen on your bedroom floor with a picnic basket under his poster on the wall?'

Zoë laughs out loud. So I kick her.

‘Very funny,' I say. ‘As if I like Huey Lewis and the News.' I snatch my homework diary and the other bits of paper from Nick McGowan. ‘This was a joke. I was trying to make my boyfriend laugh. It's just this little joke thing my boyfriend and I have. You know we're always um, laughing, and I wrote this out. It was a joke. You had to be there. Sort of.'

Nick smiles. And nods. But I can tell he doesn't believe me. Then he says, ‘See you.'

I feel my face go red. So I grab Zoë's arm and walk out of the library in silence and, when we're completely out of sight, I turn to her and say, ‘I'm screwed.'