Girl Defective (3 page)

“I can't sleep. It's too hot.”

“Did you try sleeping under a damp sheet?”

“That's gross. I'd feel like a pupa.”

“A pupa?” His face puckered. “Keep it simple, Skylark.”

“The pupal stage is just before a caterpillar turns
into a butterfly, when it's all covered in goop. It's the transformative moment.”

“Good name for a band. Pupa. Pew-pah . . .” He mulled it over. “Maybe not.”

I started fiddling, moving papers around the counter. I found a flyer for a rally protesting the demolition of the Paradise, the old theater on the foreshore. Dad's old stomping ground. Nancy went to club nights there—two generations hitting the same sticky carpet. I scrunched up the flyer and moved on to the next piece of paper. It was a résumé—with a headshot—I realized it belonged to the guy Nancy had hit with the potato. I skim-read his details. His name was Luke Casey. He was eighteen. Not much else.

“Forget it,” I declared. “He doesn't even list music as a hobby.” I went to turf the page, but Dad's hand came down like a boom gate. “Too late.”

I stared at him. “What?”

Dad took another long swig.

“You hired him? But we don't need anyone. I can work in the shop.”

“Christmas is coming. You need to look after Gully.”

“I can do both. You're supposed to teach me how to buy this summer.” My voice was bordering on whining.

I had no problem serving; I understood the vagaries of the rock alphabet: Van Morrison under
M
, not
V
; Steely Dan under
S
; 10cc before the 1910 Fruitgum Company. But I wanted to buy. Knowing what to pay
for vinyl was more than just referencing the record collector's bible. You needed instinct and experience. I'd seen customers leave, cashed and dazzled, while Dad marked up their past 30 percent. I'd also seen customers storm out swearing, after being told their dollar picture disk was worth less than that. You had to be sensitive with people, Dad said, because music was personal. But you couldn't be sensitive all the time, because that was bad for business.

“I can still teach you,” Dad promised.

I stared at him. Doubting, doubting.

A fart sounded. Dad and I looked up to see Gully standing where the window used to be. He had given up waiting for me. He was still in his pajamas and snout, but he'd attached his superdetective's tool belt. Swinging prominently were the following: magnifying glass, talcum powder, soft brush, rubber gloves, and notebook and pen.

“Don't touch anything,” Gully ordered. “I have to dust for prints.”

Back upstairs I still couldn't sleep. I reached under my bed for my box of beautiful people. I flicked through them until I found the actress who looked a little like Nancy. She had perfect skin and a beautiful life. I could tell these things just by looking at her.

I started to wallow, and wallowing felt luxurious.
Dark thoughts are like stars, or blackheads—the more you look, the more you find. Nancy was leaving for boys and fun and stamps on her passport; Dad had hired some know-nothing, and I was going to have to spend the summer traipsing after my weirdo brother.

Maybe St. Kilda was just a holiday spot gone wrong. The beach was full of syringes, Luna Park was full of thieves, McDonald's was full of runaways, and those streets so prettily named after Romantic poets were just thoroughfares for BMX bandit drug pushers and their prostitute girlfriends.

When I finally fell asleep, I dreamed about the girl on the wall, or rather, the poster of her. I reached out to touch her tears, and when I brought my hand back, it was black with paint, like she was crying right in front of me.

O
VER THE NEXT FEW
days Dad didn't mention the new recruit, and I didn't bring him up either, but the feeling of him lingered. He was the pith in the orange juice and the burned bits of toast at breakfast. He was the squashed sandwich in the back of my schoolbag and the snot flecks on the tram seat. I wanted to tell Nancy about him, but she'd gone AWOL. She did this from time to time. I tried not to take it personally. I'd send her countless chirpy texts, about boring school and freaky customers, but sending Nancy texts was like sending dogs into space. Nothing came back.

The Wishing Well was always a good distraction. The new window sparkled, revealing lurking scuzz. Gully and I set about cleaning and polishing and de-stickerizing all the solid surfaces. We put zinc cream across Cardboard Elvis's nose and a lei around his neck and moved him into the window. We surrounded him with summery albums—the Atlantics, the Beach Boys, the B-52s—and then we dragged Dad out to admire our handiwork.

“Pretty spiffy, guys.”

“It's going to bring people in,” I predicted.

“People!” Dad harrumphed.

“People! People!” Gully could mimic him perfectly.

People did come in but only a few, and what they wanted, we didn't have. It was the same old story. In anyone else's hands the Wishing Well would have done a roaring trade, but Dad was stubborn. He refused to stock CDs. He didn't care about customer service. If not for our regulars, we'd have died in the dust. They drifted in from the outer suburbs: Mystery Train, the sixty-something transport worker with the Dylan obsession; Big Head and Ghost, hapless junkies hawking grade-three trash; Kylie Minogue's Number One Fan (self-proclaimed by hand-painted sign on the back of his wheelchair); two goth hags we nicknamed the Weird Sisters; and the shop favorite, the Fugg. His real name was Ernst Vella, but he was always roiling and swearing—“Fugg this,” “Fugg that.” He scared the tourists with his beer and balladry. He claimed to have slept with June Tabor, who was folk music royalty and had a voice as sad as evening shadows. She looked fierce and beautiful on her records. I couldn't imagine the Fugg and June Tabor sharing the same air, let alone the backseat of her limo.

Dad priced records, nodding to Lou Reed. Gully decided Elvis wasn't happy in the window after all and moved him back to the counter. I checked my phone. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

“Dad,” I said.

“Skylark.”

“We should sell things online.”

He brought his pricing gun down hard.
Thwack.

“We could set up a shop on Goldmine. It would be easy.”

Thwack.

Thwack.

“You're scared of change.”

Thwack.

“It's not safe,” Dad said.

“What do you mean ‘not safe'?”

He put the pricing gun down and looked at me. “Say I get you kids fixed up with the Internet. Next thing I know, some pervert from Oslo's got you on a slab. Or is selling your . . . bits to China. I'm informed. I read the papers.”

I laughed. “You don't. You read
Mojo
.”

Dad snapped his fingers. “The cannibal couple. You can't tell me that would have happened without the Internet.”

“You're ridiculous.”

Thwack.

Gully was watching our spat through two spy holes he'd cut out of the cover of
Record Collector
. He lowered the magazine. “No one's going to eat me.”

“You're ridiculous too,” I muttered.

A police officer came in. I saw red hair against
the blue uniform. Brown lipstick. She approached the counter with a strange smile on her face. Dad's expression mirrored hers. He tugged his jeans up and patted down his hair. Gully, thrilled to see a law enforcement officer at close range, started hissing into his fist. I adopted an expression of nonchalance, but the lady cop only had eyes for Dad.

Her voice was high with a touch of tease. “Is that Bill Martin?”

“Is that Evil Eve Brennan?” Dad's cheeks had gone pink.

“
Constable
Eve Brennan to you.”

They gazed at each other for a beat without speaking, and then Dad opened his mouth. “Fuck me. How long have you—”

“Four years. Crazy, huh?”

“You look good in uniform.”

Constable Eve Brennan glanced from Dad to me and Gully. She didn't flinch at the pig snout. A good sign.

“Are these your kids?”

“Yes. Skylark and Seagull. Their mother liked birds.”

“How is Gail?”

“Galaxy.”

“Are you still . . . ?”

“NO!” Dad coughed. “No, no. Divorced.”

Evil Eve and Dad worked the smiles, and it was all Gully and I could do to clock the pheromones fizzing like fireflies around us.

“Evie and I used to hang out,” Dad told us. “In the old punk days. She had a mohawk then.”

The lady cop rejigged her hat and set her face to serious. “I heard you had some trouble.” She jerked her head toward the window. “I'm just following up.”

Dad let out a puff of air. “So long ago, I forgot all about it.”

“It was the end of school. Could have been muck-up day antics. Silly season. We're canvasing traders. Do you remember anything unusual?”

Gully pushed forward. “I dusted for prints,” he reported. “The boys at the lab are flummoxed.”

Evil Eve's lips wavered.
Don't laugh,
I thought. But she didn't. She just waited. Gully was tracing the air, skywriting. He blurted, “The Bricker was in a white Jeep. Don't ask me to reveal my sources. It will all be in my memo. I'll send you a copy.”

“Great.” She smiled again, unruffled. Then she squinted at him. “Do you want to be a police officer?”

Gully was affronted. “I'm already a detective.”

Eve fixed back on Dad. “Do you have any security? Cameras, an alarm?”

“ 'Fraid not.”

“He's analog,” I said. It came out sounding snarky.

“You can get video cameras, Bill.” The way she said “Bill,” all familiar, made me think,
I bet they did more than just hang out.

Evil Eve gave Dad a card. “Call me if anything comes
to you.” And then she walked out slowly. Before Gully or I could say anything, Dad turned the key on the till. It made a colossal noise as it spat out the end-of-day strip.

I snatched up her card. “Was she your girlfriend?”

Dad gave me an enigmatic smile.

“She likes you,” I said.

“Affirmative,” Gully chimed in. “She was leaning into you. That's a tell.”

Gully was big on tells. His most noted body language giveaways included shifty eyes; hands touching face, throat, mouth; fingers tugging on earlobes; scratching neck; excised pronouns; deployment of monotone; delayed physical manifestations of emotion; and adjunct random observations.

“Get away,” Dad grumbled. “Go fix dinner.”

He shooed us out but not before putting on the Sonics, and that was a tell too. Their bam-bam garage punk being exactly what you would play if you didn't want to think, if your insides were jumping and your synapses were firing all over the place. I went upstairs shaking off the shiver that was
my
tell. Things were changing. Dad crushing on a cop? Life was about to get another layer.

Memo from Agent Seagull Martin

Date:
Saturday, November 29

Agent:
Seagull Martin

Address:
34 Blessington St., St. Kilda, upstairs

POINT THE FIRST:

On Thursday, November 27, at approximately 0400 hours an unknown vandal—code name Bricker—threw a brick through the window of esteemed record shop Bill's Wishing Well, 34 Blessington St., St. Kilda (est. 1999).

POINT THE SECOND:

Bricks were also thrown through the windows of Ada's Cakes and Bernard Levon, Tax Accountant.

POINT THE THIRD:

Asif Patel, proprietor, 7-Eleven, and Ernst Vella, street poet and luminary, both observed a white Jeep doing “blocks.”

POSSIBLY RELATED FROM "PORT PHILLIP LEADER" NEWSPAPER:

– Two women egged on Vale St.