Wildlife (17 page)

wednesday 7 november

The sunlight woke me early.

Is this too basic for words? It feels good that bed happens when it’s dark, and I wake up when the sun says it’s daytime. But I didn’t have to do anything in particular, which was an amazing luxury, and I let myself drift back to sleep.

Starving for breakfast when I woke again. I cooked bacon in a little pan on my Trangia and had it in a gigantic pita bread sandwich, with a sliced tomato and a travel sachet of barbecue sauce squeezed inside.

I took my watch off. I was going to have a day without time, the sun my guide.

*     *     *

I decided to document my area. It is encouraged.

Wildlife: The air was full of little things I don’t see in the city. A flying bug with a bright yellow abdomen and black lace wings, black legs and head. Long-bodied black beetles with bright red legs, oh, dear, having sex on my gaiter, I was assuming they don’t usually walk around joined at their bottoms like that.

A lacquer-backed beetle, brown with a purple tinge and perfectly glossy, like a tiny manicured fingernail. Bees. Introduced? I guess so. They were hovering around a clump of everlasting daisies. A drift of very small mauve butterflies. Black beetles with spiky backs splashed yellow and red. Pretty. I went back along the trail to where it was shady and nudged away some leaf litter with a stick.

There I found a slater bug, but not gray or brown, or grown, or bray, the usual repertoire of slater colors. This one was vivid fire-engine red. If it stuck its head above the leaf litter, it would be a neon sign to a bird. I picked it up and marveled at its freaky beauty. Here we go, I thought. Fame at an unexpectedly early age. The Lou Bug. Louisa Slater. How would I get a significant scientific discovery documented? Mild excitement.

In my driveling speculation, the first thing (well, second, after personal fame) I thought of was you, Fred. You would love this. You’d love it. Wish you were here. You’re such a pain in the heart.

I made a leaf-littery fun park for my red friend in a
plastic specimen box. We carry them with us in case we find anything of interest to bring back to the group for Physical World, etc. class.

I got out my sketch pad. Drew and described my buggy finds. I’m sick of you not being here, Fred. So sick of wanting to show you stuff. Sick of restuffing it into my head that you’re not around anymore. It is like starving for a food, and remembering that it doesn’t exist.

I guess I’ll show the slater to Michael. Sure. Why not? He’ll like it. But it is no substitute for being able to show you. Can that be quite clear?

Part of this is that I don’t want to leave you out, and I love you by remembering you. If I don’t think of you every time there’s something important, then doesn’t that mean you are no longer important to me? And how can I let that happen when you were so very much the important one to me?

Part of it is that you are irreplaceable. That is an immutable fact in my life. No matter how long I live.

Touching base with you is like touching something for luck. Touching the sore spot, the tender bruise that misses you. How can I let go, let you go? Why would I want that to heal?

The key is in my pocket. The key that locks us together somewhere on the other side of the world.

Our, now my, photos lock us somewhere else.

Our, now my, texts lock us again.

But my best lock is memory. And if I don’t keep you always in my mind, won’t memory walk away? Or starve thin? Don’t memories need maintenance?

The trouble is that keeping it alive, giving it all that energy, will, determination, stops me being alive in the present.

I’m not stupid, I don’t need Esthers and Merills to tell me that is not a brilliant way for a sixteen-year-old to live.

I know what you would say.

You’d say, get on with it, Lou, m’Lou.

There’s lots more to do than thinking about me.

Don’t hang out somewhere that isn’t anymore.

Don’t haunt the landlost past, you’d say.

Read the Christina Rossetti poem again,
for Chrissake
, you’d say, in homage to Holden Caulfield. No one I know does that now.

I’ve written you a hundred unsent letters.

Maybe if I keep writing and sealing them, they can sit somewhere safely. Our story as a one-sided correspondence—I know that’s oxymoronic—and I can allow that to be it. I can put a lid… I can just go there sometimes… I can know it’s there, safely; we are there.

I haven’t written in a single letter about the time you told me that you loved me.

You didn’t mean to say it. But it brimmed out of you and wouldn’t stop.

Remember we decided that we could probably make some fairly superb puddings in the microwave? It was a big thing at the time—everyone was having a microjunkbake after school. Plan B was at work, and the Gazelle was at some conference. We had the run of the pantry. We thought if
we put cakey stuff with nice-bits in a cup and nuked it, we’d be in the fast lane to pudding heaven.

So was it eggs, self-rising flour, M&M’s, and Milo? And Nutella? A chopped Snickers bar? Lightly stirred.

We would name it after its inventors: us. It would be Fred & Lou’s, like Ben & Jerry’s, only warm. We zapped it one instant minute at a time.

Smells like deliciousness, we thought, after four zaps.

I put a spoonful in my mouth.

It was super disgusting and still a bit raw-eggy and flour-gluey. And we’d somehow forgotten sugar, a vital ingredient if you want a cake-pudding thing. We didn’t use any butter, either, also probably a desirable ingredient.

And was it just my face as I tasted it? You cracked up. You were looking at me and laughing.

And I said, What? And you said, I love you.

And we were both completely shocked. Because it was a little premature, surely.

And you said it again, as though you were checking the flavor, and it tasted perfectly right. You said it again, softly, I love you; you were looking right into my heart. You said it again, almost shouting. And you were laughing and it was as though you were so happy you couldn’t believe that someone had given you this good thing.

And it was partly that, and it was partly because you were thinking you’d had a premature declaration, whereas guys your age were more generally associated with premature ejaculation. As well as inability to speak “girl” and
commitment problems to anything other than games with buttons.

And the best part was when you said, You love me, too. And all I had to do was nod. Because it was true. Because I could hardly talk, because my mouth was still glued together by the foul and truly monstrous thing we had created in the microwave.

God, when I remember that afternoon every part of me hurts like I’ve been in a car accident; like I’m bashed to pieces inside and out, and bits of me are missing and other bits are put back the wrong way.

So.

Guys your age, hey? Wouldn’t want to be making any generalizations.

But most guys your age get to be older one day.

I love you, too, and I never said it enough.

Lou

XXX

The sky-watchers are already getting prepped for the eclipse. There is a whole truckload of mathematical stuff about where and when and how fast things move through
the heavens above—endless star-mapping and moon phase calculations for the math brains.

For the rest of us there’s the “huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,” generalized literary appeal. I guess it will be a new and strange beauty looking at the shadows and textures of planets and stars, but I can’t get as properly excited as I should apparently be.

We have a super-excellent high-powered Meade telescope that we can use only under supervision. Mr. Epstein has told us that bumping it—which could strip delicate gears—will earn the punishment of weeding the oval with tweezers.

We’ve been warned there are hunters in the mountains again. It’s illegal, but that doesn’t stop some people. There is the odd, unsettling crack of distant gunfire.

Ben and I are plotting and planning an escape, a whole day out together next week during which we will try not to get shot.

Michael is overrunning, doing too much gym, and over-practicing piano, but I am not his freaking mother. Neither is Lou. She told me when she was packing for her solo that he has already run through one pair of sneakers and one set of toenails. They’re growing back (nails), and I keep in mind that he’s not the only one to have messed up his feet a bit, and hope I shouldn’t be getting in touch with his actual mother to say he seems a bit on edge.

Miss having Lou around the house.

thursday 8 november

Tramping back down the mountain felt like flying, gravity on my side. I had eaten most of the weight of my pack; it probably went from thirty to fifteen pounds, and I really needed my poles on the slippery paths so I didn’t go careening down headfirst in a rockslide.

A huge stampeding noise was happening at the outer reaches of my hearing range, and coming closer. Only sounded like one thing, an animal or a person, but I stayed still till I could see what it was.

Michael. And it was not an accident. He ran to meet me.

What flavor would you say blue snakes are, he asked.

Fair question, it’s puzzled me, too, but the closest I ever come up with is “blue,” or perhaps we are supposed to link the color to a food, in which case “blueberry”? Or maybe it is linked to the other hard-to-define non-flavor, “blue heaven”?

But let us be frank, it tastes like chemicals and colors.

He nodded, agreeing, his breathing slowing up, and I realized what a super-fit machine he is turning himself into, because he was pounding, sprinting up the mountain a second ago, pouring with sweat, and it was only a few breaths before he was breathing very easily.

You are a super-fit machine, I told him.

I believe I have run farther than Ben, he said.

But you’re not going to put it like that to anyone but me, right? Because you know it makes you seem a bit vulnerable, or Sibylla-focused, I said.

It could simply be a man-to-man competition, he said.

But it’s not, and everyone who knows you knows that you don’t care about bullshit like that.

There is a night of entertainment when we return, he warned me.

Oh, dear. They spring this random fun on us. We wake up and find invitations slipped under the doors of our house. We are expected to participate from time to time. Sometimes it’s house-devised group fun stuff, other nights it is individual fun stuff.

Individual fun, or house fun? I asked.

Individual.

Right. I had better do something, or I will start putting myself in the Merill spotlight, I said.

You are very manipulative of that relationship, said Michael.

Not manipulative, I’m just keeping it at arm’s length to as great an extent as possible under the circumstances. I want her to believe that I am making the sort of progress I should be making.

Did you throw away the key?

Not quite, I said. Not quite sure that I ever will be able to, I thought.

What would you propose to do to entertain your new friends? Michael asked.

I think my new friends would enjoy hearing me sing. They will at first hope to ridicule me, and get a laugh out of someone falling on her face, but I will sing something simple, and I sing in tune. I have known this is coming and so I’ll just do it, as the sneaker advertisement exhorts us.

You are a pragmatic soul, Louisa.

What else has been happening in the big smoke while I’ve been hunting the bear?

Michael looks with some concentration into the middle distance. I can’t quite tell you. I’ve been practicing piano and running. Not quite sure what everyone else is up to. Holly appears to be going out with Ben’s friends, particularly Vincent, it seems, as much as Sibylla is going out with Ben, he eventually offered.

So she is happy?

Who?

Holly? Happy?

She seems to have what she wants, which is a slight shift in the sociograph with regard to whom she spends most of her time with.

How are she and Sib getting along?

Michael thinks again. Sorry, pass.

How does Sib look? Easy question. His special topic.

She looks as much herself as she can; she is tired from the sharing with other people.

Hey, that is the best thing about the solo; it’s such a relief, I recommend.

I imagine.

When are you down to do yours?

Two weeks.

Sorry about how I smell.

It could be a lot worse. It’s not too bad.

But you can smell me?

I can smell you.

(later)

New true pleasure.

A shower when you really need it. When you have proper grime, dried sweat and mud, and a thousand little nicks and scratches, a longish hot shower with citrusy soap and shampoo is heaven.

I can sing. But I haven’t felt like singing at all since Fred. It helps to be joyful when you sing. Though, conversely, singing can induce joy. I haven’t felt like I deserve joy, or want it.

So my voice is as rusty as shit.

After my shower, I took a walk far enough away to warm it up.

Hello, voice! You haven’t forsaken me. You’re just sounding a little thin.

I went to the kitchen to scrounge a few strawberries from Priscilla. I explained that they help singer’s throat, and she handed over half a container. She didn’t ask for money, but she has a black-market vibe about her, no doubt.

I’ve looked over my lyrics. The song is short.

I’m ready. As ready as I will ever be. As ready as I need to be to look like I’m joining in. And, hey, I will be joining in. Fake it till you make it. No big deal, just a song to keep the counselor lulled into thinking I’m doing okay.

I am doing okay, low-end okay. Low-end okay is great, considering.

My song is “Blackbird.”

Wow. Lou is bringing down the house. She has an amazing voice. Who knew? She doesn’t even sing in the shower.

She started singing “Blackbird,” unaccompanied.

People were still buzzy and unsettled for the first little bit, but she just kept singing, really relaxed. Her “relaxed” lives deep in the land of “don’t give a shit.” Her voice is pure and perfectly tuneful.

By the end of the song, there was dead silence. And a chant started up: Again, again, again, again. So she sang it through from the beginning.

And now we are all screaming it out with her a third time. Not so tunefully.

It’s a pretty beautiful song. And it’s one of those songs that somehow everyone seems to know.

You could say that for an audience of people who are mostly sixteen it’s the perfect money-shot lyric, punching us right in the heart, given that we all feel like we are waiting for the moment to be free. Or for some other moment to arise. Usually the end of a class. Or someone realizing we are the center of their universe, or something.

When she finishes, everyone is up yelling and cheering and whoa-ing and whistling. And Holly (of all people—but then again, it is an opportunity to put herself in the middle of it) gets up and leads another chant: Bennett, Bennett, Bennett. And we Bennetts get up and do our dance. Usually it’s an in-house private affair—just for when we manage to get all our jobs done, or someone gets a letter they’ve been waiting for, or someone gets a contraband food parcel, or we don’t have prep, or someone just farted—yes, okay, that is gross, but it is the wilderness. The dance involves some pointing—at each other, at the stars, nodding, gyrating hips, smacking own arse, pulling bits of nothing down from the sky, and doing some arms-out fists-together stirring. Vary and repeat as required to imaginary funky beat.

Michael has gone onstage—thankfully he is doing a piano piece. You never know with Michael, he could have decided to recite a poem or perform a Gregorian chant or do any number of things that would make him a total mockery magnet. Not that he would care, but I would.

He is playing something obscure, very dramatic, with odd pauses. Rachmaninoff? Hats off, and I’m sure it’s perfect. Who’d know? Half the audience is using it as a chat interlude. Not that he notices. But I do. Lou is sitting next to Van Uoc, and giving Michael’s performance complete attention and trying to ignore people who are telling her that she’s a good singer.

Like she hadn’t noticed already. But they’re being all make-an-effort nice—which has not happened so far this term, as far as I’ve seen. She has gone from quiet, invisible new geek girl to indie-singer geek girl, a handle everyone understands. To this point, with rare exceptions, she has maintained her distance, not given any sign that she wants to be friends with anyone, apart from Michael, and maybe me, to a lesser extent, more by friend association. And she manages to show solidarity to anyone Holly is mean to. Mmm, maybe that’s why she’s nice to me, not the Michael-friend link? Maybe I need to explain that Holly’s mean is not really meant to be mean—it’s just Holly. And you get used to it. I try to imagine encountering the Holly treatment now, for the first time. I have to admit, it’s not something anyone new might want to get used to.

Lou seems to have in common with Michael that thing of not caring at all about other people’s approval.

It’s a cold night again, and they’re too tight to have any heating on in the assembly hall. Ben and Holly are talking. I shush them and get the looks.

Ben whispers to me, “Have you still got my scarf?”

His scarf? I had it at the Beeso party but haven’t seen it since. “Sorry, you can have mine.”

“No, don’t worry.”

I remember waking up hot, still wearing it that morning, and taking it off. But since then…?

“Oops, I’ve got it,” says Holly.

I must look blank.

“You left it at Snow Gum Flat, Sib. I packed it and brought it back.”

“Thanks, Hol,” says Ben.

When Ben kisses me—risky (lights will be turned up, sirens will blare, nets will drop from the ceiling, we’ll both be suspended, plus I’m trying to listen to Michael)—I pull away and he says, “Jeez, relax. The whole world is not always watching you, Sib.”

“That’s not what I think. It’s as much for you as for me.”

“Well, how about I decide what I want to do?”

Only a few days since our freaking monthiversary, and here we are bickering.

Holly leans in. “Guys, come on, no trouble in paradise, please. You two are my camp parents.” She pulls a pathetic face and crosses her eyes.

Ben smiles. So do I. For someone who makes a lot of trouble, Holly also knows how to smooth things over and put people in a good mood—when it suits her. She’s had years of practice, living with the moody, hungry, dissatisfied Gorgon.

*     *     *

The last act is Hugo and Vincent, who are wearing suits and ties, doing a recitation of the lyrics of “Changes” by David Bowie in urgent newsreader voices, in robotic unison. They do it straight, both quite serious drama students, and it’s surprisingly good.

A couple of houses are going through a complete David Bowie craze at the moment. They have “discovered” him. They find his genderflex look to be cool. They love his voice. They love his characters. They love his mismatched eyes. They love his art. They love the movie his kid made,
Moon
. They are madly out-retro-ing one another and also digging into the Smiths, the Ramones, the Go-Betweens. It’s such a relief from the metal and the crap rap.

Holly hasn’t exactly said it, but it’s pretty obvious she and Vincent have something going on, so I expect her to be basking right now, but she looks a bit closed off.

“He’s an idiot,” says Ben.

Holly shrugs. “He’s got to work out what he wants.”

I give Ben a
what?
look. He whispers, “Later.”

Turns out Vincent has a girlfriend in Melbourne he hasn’t exactly decided if he’s going to break up with yet, and Holly is understandably cut up about it.

I thought we were back on okay terms, but I must still be getting the partial cold shoulder.