Feeling Sorry for Celia (11 page)

Dear Ms Clarry,

We hear that you have received letters from the Cold Hard Truth Association and the Society of Beautiful People? We would just like to add our support to their comments.

Only
a true teenager
could catch a guy like Saxon Walker.

A true teenager would have
waited
to see if Saxon wanted to go running again today, instead of starting off right away assuming that he would, just because you’ve trained together for the last few days.

A true teenager would not have got a seriously depressed look on her face when Saxon said he couldn’t run today, so that he
laughed
and said,
‘
Don’t worry, I just have to go to my judo class today. We can go running tomorrow.’ (And instead of grinning like a moron at that, a true teenager would have taken the opportunity to calmly ask about Saxon’s judo. A true teenager would know hilarious judo-related stories to share with Saxon.)

A true teenager would think of new and fascinating directions in conversation, instead of always coming back to the Belongil Trail Run and her new runners and her best times; and Celia’s circus and Celia’s headaches and Celia’s circus manager – as if running and Celia were the only two things in her boring little life. (Which I suppose they are.)

A true teenager would have called out witty things from the window when Saxon got off the bus, instead of pretending to look into her school bag and then staring after him like a zombie so that when he looked around he saw her with her mouth hanging open.

And, finally, a true teenager would find some way to see Saxon when she is dressed in her nicest clothes, instead of just going running with him, so that he only ever sees her (a) in a school uniform, or (b) with her hair all sweaty and messy, her face bright pink, and her white knees sprouting from her running shorts.

You seem to have had a lot of trouble with our earlier suggestion that you get into the refrigerator. We now suggest that you take your new runners out of their shoe box and climb in there yourself. Put the lid on behind you, tightly.

Yours sincerely,

The Association of Teenagers

Degas and Dance: the Art Gallery of New South Wales, 10th October–27th December

LIZZY.

Hi. Things are not exactly great at the Big Top at the moment. Ha. That’s an understatement. Patricia, the girl whose caravan I’m living in? She’s fighting with Miranda the juggler, and they’re both fighting with Ginny the trapeze artist. Pat, Miranda and Ginny all want me to be on their side, but I think they’re all acting like big losers. And
the
circus manager doesn’t seem to be able to take no for an answer. His advice is starting to get on my nerves (so are his hairy hands). It’s exhausting. I feel tired all the time, and my head hasn’t stopped aching since last Tuesday. I think my glands are swelling up again too. Don’t worry though, I’ll be fine. Love, Celia

Dear Christina,

You’re not going to believe where I am. Actually, you’ve probably already guessed from my handwriting that
I’m not on solid ground
. INSTEAD, I am in something that
moves
.

Sorry. I don’t even know if this will get to you. I’m going to send it to my English teacher at my school and ask him to put it in the Brookfield mail box. So I hope he does. I mean, I hope I’m not wasting my words.

Anyway, I won’t tell you where I am yet, I’ll start from the beginning of the story. I don’t know if I mentioned it to you, but I’ve been getting some strange postcards from Celia at her circus. A while ago she started talking about
the circus manager, and how he was being a father-figure to her, and giving her all kinds of advice. I guess she really liked that because her father isn’t around. He left when Celia was about five and she can hardly even remember him (Celia and I have been friends since pre-school and I actually remember her dad better than she does. One time Celia’s family took me with them to some huge country music festival. All around people were eating KFC, but Celia’s mum gave us Vita-Weat biscuits and cottage cheese. BLERK Anyway, Celia’s dad had the longest droopiest moustache you ever saw, and he spent the entire concert massaging Celia’s mum’s shoulders. It was so bizarre. She sat there with her legs crossed like in yoga position, and her eyes shut, and he sat behind her and rubbed her shoulders like he was polishing a magic lamp. Celia and I giggled at them and Celia’s mum had to open one eye to go mad at us.)

ANYWAY, so I guess that’s why Celia liked having the circus manager treat her like a daughter. They played chess every night. (I know. Weird.) They usually played outside, but Celia was starting to get the flu so she asked if they could play inside his caravan. Which turned out to be a mistake because he started making moves on her.

So since then, I’ve been worried about Celia. From what she says in her postcards, her flu seems to be getting worse, and it sounds like she might have glandular fever, which she’s had before and I think you can get relapses from that, and also this circus manager creep won’t leave her alone.

ANYWAY, so I think I told you about this guy from my school who catches the Glenorie bus? His name’s Saxon Walker and he’s training for the same race as me. We’ve
been running together for the last few days, which makes it heaps more fun. And we’ve been going to each other’s place for a drink after we go running. He’s a really nice guy, and really cute too. He laughs a lot at what I say, but he’s also good at being serious when he has to be. And he started to get really serious when I told him about Celia’s postcards. Kind of scarily serious – I was getting worried, sure, but I thought she’d probably be okay.

But
Saxon
looked like he was going to pull the emergency brake on the bus when I explained it.

‘We have to rescue her,’ he said, all dramatic and kind of in a rush, like we’d better get on our dragons and fly away right then.

I said, ‘Um. We don’t know where she is.’

Saxon thought about it for about one fifty-seventh of a second. Then he goes, ‘Come on! How many circuses can there be in this country? Come over to my place and we’ll try and find out.’

So I got off the bus at his stop instead of mine and he took me into his house and up the hall and into his bedroom (it’s got posters of planets and stars and comets all over the walls; he said he likes astronomy), and switched on the computer on his desk.

I guess that’s kind of a private school thing – a computer on your desk. I have to say right away that I don’t have a computer on my desk. My mum happens to have a computer on her desk, but that’s because one day she got all excited about having a home office, and stole a fax machine and a lap top from work. She never uses them except to type some of my assignments, usually at midnight the night before they’re due, when she suddenly gets guilty about not
having helped me to research it like the other Good Mothers do. (So if you ever happen to see one of my assignments and you think, ‘
Wait a minute
! She said she didn’t have a computer on her desk! This looks to me
exactly
like the work of a computer!’ then your next thought will have to be: ‘Oh, that’s right. Her mum has a stolen lap top. Please forgive me for doubting you, Elizabeth.’)

SO. Within about 27 seconds Saxon’s got the Internet up, and he’s typing the words ‘Australian Circus’ into the search engine, and next thing you know there’s everything you need to know about a circus right there before you. Including information on trapeze artists and clowns and where to buy the sand for the circus floor. I mean, there’s not just stuff on juggling – there’s instructions for how-to-juggle, and interviews with jugglers, and stories about prisoners who reformed from all their murdering and raping because they learnt how to juggle.

And there’s also a list of all the circuses in Australia.

Then, this is the bit where Saxon does his detective work.

He’s sitting there at his computer, leaning back in his swivel chair, frowning away, and he says, ‘You know what? I just don’t see Celia supporting a circus that has animals. You know what I remember? I remember when we did the frog dissection in science class? And Celia got everyone trying to revive the dead frogs with heart massage, and Hoogen-boom’s going “Look, I don’t mean to let you guys down, but these frogs have been in formaldehyde for the last two months”, and Martin Wilson starts making frog noises with the back of his throat, like “riddup, riddup” and going, “Sir! I think I’ve done it! He’s alive! He’s alive!”, and every-one’s going, “It’s a miracle!” and doing ritual dances to
thank the gods and trying even harder to revive their own frogs and Will Stantino starts giving mouth to mouth to
his
frog, and Suzanne Reynolds sees him and throws up in the preserved snake display, and Celia gets up on her desk and demands that we call vets in to resuscitate the rest of the frogs. And anyway. Elizabeth? I just don’t see Celia supporting a circus that uses animals.’

He doesn’t need to tell the science class story. He’s completely right. If I’d thought about it for one half a second I would have realised the same thing.

When we were four years old, Celia burst into tears when she saw the movie
Benji,
not
because of what was happening in the movie, but because she thought it was terrible to make a dog act in a movie without giving it a choice whether it wanted to or not.

(I remember I was really confused about that because I hadn’t worked out the whole acting/film thing – you know, I kind of thought it had really happened just in a kind of big, flat way.)

She’s only written about 300 letters to the papers saying that it should be illegal to keep pet dogs unless you’ve got a 50-acre block of land for them to roam free on (she forgives me for having my dog Lochie because I take him for a run practically every day). She only
rescues
the ants on her driveway by trying to kind of
herd
them onto the lawn whenever her mum’s about to drive into the garage.

As if she would have anything to do with a place that whipped lions and put monkeys in tiny cages and made elephants do cartwheels on tiny little pre-school stools?

So I agreed with Saxon on that one.

Celia would not be at a circus where they have animals.

Then Saxon got this list up on the screen, of the circuses touring Australia at the moment which don’t have animals.

Then
I
remembered the postcards and that the first one was from Byron Bay. So I said, ‘Maybe there’s somewhere that gives the tour dates and places for these circuses.’

And next thing he found
exactly that
and suddenly we had the exact name of the circus (it’s called Firecrackers) and the exact place where it was scheduled to be for the next week.

And guess what?

Saxon started hyperventilating.

Well, that’s what it looked like anyway. He was sitting there looking at this address for the circus, and breathing in big wheezing gasps of air, and I was shouting, ‘Lean forward! Breathe into a paper bag!’

He ignored me, picked up a ventolin puffer, and sucked it into his mouth. It turned out he’s an asthmatic. I never knew that. All this time doing training with him and I never knew he had asthma.

Anyway
, so he got over his asthma attack and said, ‘My Auntie Robbie lives there!
Let’s go!’

Next thing, he was on his phone to his mother, his auntie,
my
mother, and the
school principal,
and he had the whole thing organised.

I never saw anything like it. He was like the bit in the movie where Tom Cruise is a lawyer and he’s decided he’s really going to win this case, for the sake of justice and the American way, and that? And it’s suddenly like bang-bang-bang – grabbing files off shelves and slamming them down on the desk and punching numbers in the telephone and shaking out the phone cord dramatically, and you know,
snapping out instructions to all the assistants around the desk, like: ‘get me
all
the phone records of the President of the United States for the last fifty years’, and ‘get me the names of
every
client who ever ate a banana’, and ‘Let’s get some Chinese take-away up here, on the double!’

This kind of thing to our
school principal.
‘Good afternoon? Mr Derby? Saxon Walker here. In relation to missing pupil, Celia Buckley.’

GIVE ME A BREAK

(But
very cool
. I mean, it was kind of a turn on.)

With my mother he got me to do the talking, and then he spoke a bit himself, like a super polite private school boy, and then he asked if – get this – he asked if ‘he might have his own mother phone her and assure her of my safety!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!’

Which put my mother in this really difficult situation, because she happens to
hate
his mother. (His mother’s a local councillor and my mum had a kind of full-on fight with her about rollerblading in the shopping mall.) (I know. Rollerblading.) (I know. In the
shopping mall
.) (I know.
My mother
.) Anyway, my mother was in this dilemma, because she
hates
Saxon’s mother, but she had to be a good parent to me and ensure my safety.

So you know what she came up with? She
gave Saxon my FATHER’S phone number and said Saxon’s mum had to call my FATHER
.

My God!

So my father must have been confused out of his mind. With some strange woman calling and saying ‘Can your daughter go away with my son?’

Actually I felt a bit sorry for him. He really wanted to do
the good parent thing, but he didn’t have a clue who Saxon was or who Celia was. (He probably had a bit of trouble figuring out who I was, too.) But he got a bit annoying, trying
too
hard, see, getting me to explain the whole story, and talking to my mum, and Saxon, and Saxon’s mother again, and even asking to call the
aunt
and talk to her.

But finally, it all worked out.

Everyone said it was fine, and Saxon phoned for train tickets.

So now you know where I am.

I’m on a train.

I’m on the way to Coffs Harbour.

And Saxon and I are going to stay with Saxon’s aunt.

And we’re going to rescue Celia.

But right now I’m going to stop writing because Saxon’s saying we have to eat our chocolates and Pringles, and he’s telling me I have to stop talking to you and start talking to him.

I’ll get him to say hi to you before I stop. This is Saxon:

Hi Tina. SORRY. Liz just told me you hate being called Tina. SORRY. Hi, Christina. Can you make Liz shut up and talk to me for a change instead of you? No offence, but I’m bored and starving. And she just wrote the longest letter I ever saw to you, so you’ve had her attention for like the entire trip, and I’ve just been sitting here neglected. I thought she was writing a novel or something. See you around. Saxon.

PS Liz just told me I had to apologise
again
for the Tina thing, but I can’t really believe you’re still angry. OKAY, OKAY. Sorry, Christina.

Hi, it’s me again, and I really have to go, I’m actually feeling a bit train-sick. Maybe I just need some Pringles. Oh well, wish us luck with our Quest to rescue Celia.