Trust (10 page)

‘You’ve got a really great voice,’ she told the leader, her voice dripping admiration. The boy smirked. ‘You know, my dad’s friends with one of the judges on
Australian Idol
. I could arrange for him to hear you.’ The backup group gasped and crowded closer. ‘What’s your name?’ she asked the leader, but his hard eyes said he’d already picked her for a phony.
Smart kid.

‘His name’s Lucas!’ volunteered one of his little buddies, thrilled.

‘Lucas what?’

The star of the show looked away.

‘Lucas Beal,’ said Finn, and his tone confirmed that he and Lucas had a history – not a pleasant one.

‘And we’re the Breeze,’ said the sidekick eagerly. ‘Lucas and the Breeze!’

‘Lucas and the Breeze. Wow.’ In a fluid motion Stella-Jean flipped out her phone and held it up toward them. ‘How about you guys do that song again. I’ll shoot a little clip and show my dad tonight. Stick it up on YouTube.’ The other boys were just about jumping out of their skins with excitement; only Lucas, sullen-faced, had got it. ‘I’ll make sure everyone sees it,’ she promised. ‘The teachers. The principal. All your parents. Everyone can listen to that great little song. ’Cause it was
so
clever, wasn’t it, Lucas?’

Lucas picked up his bag. Show time over.

‘Yeah, come on, let’s sing it again,’ urged his chatty pal.

‘Shut up,’ snarled Lucas. He pushed past them, heading in the opposite direction, leaving his puzzled subordinates to straggle after him. The onlookers eddied like leaves and began to drift away.

‘Any time you want an agent, Lucas,’ Stella-Jean called after him. ‘I’m watching your career, you know. Every move.’ She could tell by the way his shoulders hunched, shrinking his neck, that he had heard and understood.

‘Come on,’ she said to Finn, nudging his arm in the direction of the park. Once they had crossed the road and were well away she said drily, ‘What a nice boy.’

‘No, he’s not!’ Finn protested. ‘He is
not
nice!’

‘I know, Finnster. I was being sarcastic.’ She saw that he didn’t get it. If Finn was a kid who felt okay about asking questions, he’d’ve asked one now; she answered it anyway. ‘Sarcastic’s when you … when you say something as though you mean it, but you don’t really mean it. Kind of.’

‘But,’ he said hesitantly, ‘when you say something you don’t mean – that’s a lie. Isn’t it, Stella?’

‘No, a lie’s when you say something that isn’t true.’

‘But it
isn’t
true that Lucas is a nice boy!’

See? People said Finn was dumb, or didn’t pay attention, but the thing was, he just didn’t get things the same way other people got them. ‘Being sarcastic’s not telling a lie,’ she said. ‘It’s more like … a joke. A joke that you say as though you’re not saying a joke. Sort of a reverse joke.’

‘Oh, I get it,’ Finn said, but she knew her cousin was just being polite. Yet most people said he had bad manners, he was rude.
Most people are idiots
. They were well in to the park now. Finn looked around to check the coast was clear, then slipped his hard, grubby little hand in hers and gave it a squeeze. ‘Thanks, Stella,’ he said. She squeezed his back and then they discreetly let their hands part.

‘Half an hour on the play equipment,’ she said.

‘I know,’ he nodded. ‘Did you bring the snack?’

‘Yep.’

‘Is it yummy?’

‘No, it’s horrible. There!’ She snapped her fingers. ‘
That’s
sarcasm.’

He grinned and took off, hooting noisily, across the long stretch of grass beneath the canopy of tall, parched elms.
Crazy little monkey!
she thought as she watched him bounding away toward the playground on the far side of the park.
She
could call him ‘monkey’; nobody else.

No one ever said good things about Finn.
D-words
, she had told her mother once,
I’m so sick of hearing D-words about Finn
, and when Susanna asked her what she meant she listed them on her fingers.
Dumbo, dodo, dopey, der-brain:
he copped those from other kids all the time. Adults said he was
difficult
, and
demanding
, and
ADD,
which stood for attention deficit disorder, and she hated the smarmy know-all way they said it.
Dyslexic
, too – oh, and the latest she’d heard mutterings about:
defiant disorder
. Oh puh-
lease
!

Why couldn’t they just shut up and figure out what was going on inside Finn’s wacky little head? It wasn’t that hard, really, to see what would set him off, and how to wriggle him around it. Instead, most adults were oblivious till he started to lose it, and then handled things so wrong that Finn ended up flipping out completely.
I can handle him, though
. It was a pretty bizarre thing to be proud of, but she was.

When she arrived at the fenced playground, Finn was on one of the swings, legs flailing as he propelled it higher and higher. Stella-Jean sat at the nearby picnic table and pulled out her Australian History text, getting stuck into the homework essay on federation while the lesson they’d just had on this less than riveting subject was still fresh in her brain.

She glanced up from time to time, checking. There were a few other kids in the playground but Finn was always by himself.
The only place I’ve ever seen him really playing with other kids was in Bali.
The couple of times he and Auntie Ange had come with them on holiday there, he’d hung out all day with the local kids in the village they stayed in, playing complicated games with little stones for markers, climbing trees and kicking balls and spending hours in the rice fields capturing slimy critters. Even though the local kids didn’t speak much English, they were nice to him. So were the adults. Balinese people never yelled at kids, never got crabby. It was the only time she’d really seen Finn
happy
, day after day, his face smiling and opened up. Not the way he often looked here, like he was stuck in a cage and somebody might start poking sticks at him any minute.

By the time Stella-Jean finished the essay, more than half an hour had passed, yet Finn, she realised, hadn’t hassled her for his snack. She stood, scanning the playground, and spotted him hunkered down in the far corner with his back turned, tight as a turtle. Finn was tossing little dusty puffs of tan bark up in the air, first over one shoulder, then the other, in a rhythm, and then she saw him smack his forehead with the heel of his hand.
Uh-oh
. She knew this smack would have come after a certain number of tosses, but didn’t wait and count till the next one. Burrowing in her backpack, she found the bag with the cinnamon bun and hurried over, ripping the paper away from where it had stuck to the thick white cap of icing.

‘Mmm,’ she murmured invitingly, squatting in front of him. ‘
This
looks yummy.’

Finn ignored her. A small clump of tan bark sailed up over his right shoulder.

‘Guess I’ll have to eat this big fat yummy bun all by myself. Or maybe I’ll go find that nice boy Lucas Beal and give it to him.’

Finn’s head shot up. ‘Oh, Stella!’ he cried, wounded.

‘Just kidding, Finnster, I’m just kidding. Come over here and eat this before you whack yourself unconscious.’

He thrust his lower jaw forward, signalling refusal, but she waved the glistening bun before him like a snake-charmer with his flute. ‘Chocolate milk too,’ she crooned, walking backward, and he followed her as though entranced to the bench beside the picnic table. When she handed the bun over he tore into it as though he hadn’t eaten for a week.

‘I saw a film of a shark attacking a surfboard the other day. It made me think of you.’ Stella-Jean bared her teeth and shook her face at him, making savage growly noises. ‘I wonder what’d happen if my hand accidentally got between your mouth and that bun?’

Finn grinned. ‘I wouldn’t
bite
you!’

‘Nah. Not without icing, anyway.’

He ripped open the carton of chocolate milk and drained it in big noisy gulps, wiped off his milk moustache with the back of his hand, and gave a burp so huge and explosive it seemed to deflate him. ‘Charming,’ said Stella-Jean as he slumped back, as relaxed now as he’d been taut before.

‘Hey Stella, guess what? Did you know me and you have got the same middle name?’

‘We do? So what’s
your
name?’

‘Finnbar
Greenfield
O’Reilly.’

‘Oh wow, yeah! That’s just like mine, which is – um … uhh …’ She frowned, looking to him for help.

‘You
know.
Stella-Jean
Greenfield
Visser!’ her cousin cried, delighted.

‘That’s it! D’oh!’

Grinning, he leaned his head on the back of the seat, looking up into the canopy of elm leaves. ‘It’s nice here,’ he said peaceably.

‘It is. But pretty soon we got to go home to my place. You remember what we do there?’

‘The schedule,’ Finn nodded earnestly, ticking off its points on his fingers. ‘First, homework, and after
that
I can watch
Cities of Gold
. Yay! Then I read you my book, then I can do drawing, then we have spaghetti bonayase, and
then
you read me a chapter from a long book. Or maybe two chapters if I try and read some too.’ He exhaled loudly. ‘And then my mum comes and I go home.’

‘You got it!’ Stella-Jean lifted a hand to high-five him, but Finn had suddenly slumped again. ‘What?’ she asked.

‘We got a new sharer moving in,’ he said, gloomy as Eeyore. ‘Today, I think.’

‘You do? Have you met the kids?’ Poor Finnster, always having to cope with new people coming and going. ‘Are they nice?’

He shook his head. ‘There’s no kids. It’s a
man
, and I don’t want him!’ Finn crossed his arms tightly and hunched over them. Why was his mum changing everything around? Their lounge room didn’t even feel like the same place any more. A few days ago, a truck had brought a huge metal bin and left it out the front. Every time he looked, his mum had thrown more stuff into it. This had never happened for any of the other sharers. ‘And he
sings
,’ he said, his voice spiky with suspicion.

Like Lucas Beal
, thought Stella-Jean. ‘Hey, not everybody who sings is bad, you know,’ she said gently.

Finn looked at her as if she should know better. ‘Why does everybody think if someone’s got a nice voice it means they’re a nice person?’

‘You don’t think that, Finnster?’

‘No! I think they’re just trickers!’ said Finn, his jaw thrust forward again. He stared at the ground for a few moments and suddenly burst out, ‘Stella, you know
what
? I am
never
gonna suck my thumb again!’ He jerked one hand free of his armpit and smacked himself on the forehead, hard.

Stella-Jean flinched and grabbed his arm. ‘Whoa, buddy, whoa! No whacking yourself!’

‘I’ve got to get it through my thick head,’ he explained darkly.

Who had urged Finn to get things through his thick head?
Just about everybody.
Stella-Jean stood and started loading up their bags.

‘Okay, cuz, let’s move it on out,’ she said in a hokey cowboy accent. ‘City o’ Gold’s a-waitin’.’

With his backpack slung over one shoulder, Finn followed her moochily from the park, thinking about what was happening at his house, and wishing it wasn’t. At least Robo-Boy was watching out for him; Robo-Boy and Stella-Jean, between them, had stopped Lucas and his gang today. Finn raised his arm, slowly, stiffly, the way Robo-Boy did when he was summoning his powers to keep everything safe.

So, this is the music dude from Faith Rise.
As Auntie Ange – who’d arrived late, well after she and Finn had eaten their spaghetti bolognaise – introduced him, Stella-Jean thought,
Yeah, he kinda looks like a musician.
It was the long curly hair, mostly: a bit hippie-ish, and definitely way cooler than any of Angie’s other friends from Faith Rise.

Finn, who’d leapt for the front door yelling ‘Mum!’ when he heard her arrive, fell back when he saw who was with her, and was soon slumped on the couch again watching
The Incredibles
for the four hundredth time.

Angie relieved Gabriel of the bulging plastic garbage bag he’d lugged in and dumped it in front of Stella-Jean. ‘Ooh, just wait till you see what’s in
here
,’ she said. The excitement in her voice was a dead giveaway. Stella-Jean dropped to her knees, tore open the bag and started pawing through the contents like a terrier. ‘Oh. My. God,’ she said with awed fervour as a riot of fabric spilled across the floor. ‘This is
fab
ulous! Wow, look at this jacket! Where did
this
come from?’

‘The emerald velvet? Flea market, Barcelona,’ said Angie, watching with a two hundred-watt smile. Stella-Jean held a flowered crepe dress up toward her. ‘And I got
that
when I was about your age, in an opportunity shop in, um, Hawthorn, I think. Oh, Stella, the op shops back then!’

‘Wowie ka-
zow
-ie!’ crowed Stella-Jean. She jumped up and hugged her aunt ecstatically before throwing herself back into the treasure trove. ‘But you’ve never even
shown
me this stuff. Where’s it all
been
?’

‘I’ve kept finding things all week, stuffed in cupboards, out in the shed. Anything that was worth keeping I put aside for you. But you wouldn’t believe the
tons
of rubbish I’ve got rid of! By the time they picked up the skip today it was completely chock-a-block. And now the whole house is cleared out.’ Angie turned her glowing face toward Gabriel, who smiled back at her. ‘Every single room is ready now.’

‘
Thank you
, Ange! This stuff is so cool!’

‘I knew you’d be thrilled, sweetie. Oh, I’ve got some things for your mum too. Is she here?’

Stella-Jean shook her head. ‘Book group.’

‘Mum!
Mum!
’ said Finn, pulling urgently at Angie’s arm.