Posse (2 page)

She goes over to Mrs Lovas and Mrs Ricci, who are supervising us in the dam. They're both hippos. They should be wearing the kind of number Patricia's got on. Something neck-to-knee. Instead, they're spilling out of high-cut one-pieces like white sauce. They're sitting in the shallows of the duck-poo sludge. Didn't anyone tell them about the connection between the duck-poo sludge and galloping thrush?

It's not long before Miss Howell singles me out.

‘Amy!' she calls.

I give a nonchalant wave.

‘One of the camp instructors just told me that they've got some hockey gear in the shed. Why don't we see if we can get a friendly game together this afternoon when the sun lets up a bit?'

‘Yeah, I suppose we could,' I shout back.

‘I saw your father today down at Nepean Hospital.'

I say nothing.

Miss Howell tries again. ‘He'd just delivered a baby.'

I shrug.

‘You really look like him.'

‘I look like a man?'

‘No, no, no. I don't mean it like that.'

I pretend to be hurt because I actually do look a bit masculine, even with the long blonde hair.

‘
You
know,' she continues, ‘the curly hair, the eyelashes, the straight nose.'

‘He's got a big nose.'

‘He's handsome. I told him I'm very happy with the way you're going.'

‘Ooh-ah!' whoops Clare. ‘Miss Howell's got it bad for Mr Gillespie. Meet your new stepmother, Amy.'

Miss Howell takes it well. She laughs and walks back to her hut.

‘Do you think she's a dyke?' asks Clare. ‘You always seem to know when someone's a dyke.'

‘Clare, why don't you do some laps,' I say. ‘Underwater, so we can't hear you.'

The sound of the cowbell peals across the paddock. It's time for lunch, all the devon you can eat.

Bevan's come to the dam in his velcro sandals and board shorts. He's brought one of the other instructors, John, who, if you ask me, has a much better body. He's got a washboard stomach and a back that ripples every time he raises his arm to swish a fly.

‘Come on, ladies,' says Bevan. ‘We're going to the mess hall to sing for our supper.'

‘I wouldn't fart for the supper they serve in this dive,' says Patricia, but the instructors don't hear. We all crack up laughing. It's amazing what you get a bang out of when your body and mind are melting in forty-degree heat.

T
HE THING ABOUT
D
AD IS
that he was nearly deregistered for having sex with one of his patients. The woman eventually disappeared overseas but the complaint hung around for a couple of years and it was in all the papers. Dad denied it publicly but we all knew it was true.

Mum freaked. Not while the affair was happening, though she knew about it, as I discovered later from reading her diaries. She got upset when it all became public. Channel Nine came to our house
with cameras one afternoon. That was when she told me everything, and believe me, everything was not fit for a ten-year-old's ears. At the earliest opportunity, when Dad was next doing rounds, Mum packed up and left, taking me with her. We moved in with Nanna and Tom, my grandparents. That was five years ago and we're still there.

‘He doesn't care that we're gone,' Mum said at the time. ‘He's relieved, you know. But what did we do to deserve having our lives ruined?'

I didn't think our lives were ruined. I didn't mind living with Nanna and Tom at first. I was already going to their house after school every day and sleeping there when Mum and Dad were on call. Tom used to play cricket with me for hours in the afternoons. It wasn't so bad. I missed Dad, but as time went on and I began to understand what was being said about him, I stopped.

What I really don't like about living with the oldies now is all the fighting between Nanna and Mum. They bicker constantly about Mum's busi
ness, which Nanna basically runs. Mum's a general surgeon. She's got her own practice, but sometimes it doesn't go very well. Every time Nanna's sick, Mum closes the surgery. She closed down for six weeks when Nanna broke her hip.

I've worked out that Nanna's a total control freak. I didn't realise it when I was little because I didn't know any different. I read in Mum's diaries that Nanna's got something called a narcissistic personality disorder. I just thought she was a bossy old man-hating bitch with a bad hairdo. Dad used to say she looked like she'd just been dug up. The older I get, the more I agree with him. She does look like an exhumed corpse and she's a real head case.

For example, Mum doesn't have any money. She earns enough all right, nearly half a million dollars a year, but she doesn't have access to it. She doesn't even know where it is. Nanna's got it hidden somewhere and gives Mum pocket money. Mum doesn't even have a credit card.

It's been that way ever since Mum was an intern. Nanna's got it in her head that men are after Mum for her money. She thought Dad was after her money, and – this is really crazy – that he was keeping another family secretly on the side. I don't know what attracted Dad to Mum, but it wasn't her money. Nanna's just obsessed with the idea that she has to protect Mum's money. It's her reason for being.

When they were together, Dad used to laugh it off, until Mum accidentally let slip that she'd bought a house eight years prior without telling him. He knew Nanna was behind it. I remember the blue streak he swore at her. Not long after that, the house was sold and the proceeds swept off to a mystery destination. By Nanna, of course.

And Nanna knows about asset protection. Never having worked, she had no assets of her own until Tom ran off with another woman just before I was born. Tom worked as an electrical engineer in a big factory and fell in love with a girl
in the office. He moved out, and he and Nanna got a divorce settlement that gave Nanna the family house in Beecroft. Once Tom had signed the papers to transfer the house, Nanna got in her old Falcon station wagon – it would have been old even back then – and drove it to Tom's girlfriend's house to pick him up. And, after all that, he went back to her. Except now that it was her house, Nanna charged him rent!

She charges Mum rent for the two bedrooms she and I occupy too. And I know she charges Mum for all the bookkeeping she does. She also makes Mum and Tom pay for the groceries every week, and the cleaner. She is the meanest, greediest old bitch I've ever heard of. But at least her craziness has some purpose – to hoard money and thwart men's attempts at getting their hands on it. Mum, on the other hand, is just flat-out crazy with no explanation. Trust me, she's mad as a cut snake.

I know this for a fact because I've been reading her diaries for a while now. I stumbled upon them
when I was looking for a collection of porno photos that Tom had been keeping under the felt lining of a drawer in a cupboard in the spare room. Instead I found a goldmine: a cache of diaries at the bottom of a document box. Mum had made an entry every single day of her life since New Year's Day 1969. Seeing those diaries was every bit as disturbing as seeing her naked and, like her naked body, I could never un-see them. The entries were usually boring, sometimes funny (unintentionally) and always spiteful. Mum doesn't have a friend in the world. She has something nasty to say about everyone.

Along with her diaries from the last forty years, I found Mum's account books. I had no idea that she was recording every cent she spends. I mean, I saw her writing numbers down with Nanna looking over her shoulder, but I always thought it had something to do with the business.

There's a special account book dedicated to my expenses – right from my date of birth. My
bassinette, stroller, formula. Eighty-five cents for a rattle. And there's a column for the amount Dad spends on me. Some of the items that I never got to see: a hockey bag, CDs, even a mobile phone. No doubt they were seized on arrival. It's just too weird for words. I've thought about moving in with Dad, and threatened it during fights with Mum. But she just reminds me that she has orders from the Family Court that say I have to live with her. I hate him, anyway. It's only since I started hating Mum that I began to write to him. He's a selfish, womanising bastard, a ‘randy rooster with the mind of a two-year-old', as Nanna says. The old girl does crack me up sometimes.

Dad got re-married pretty soon after the break-up. His wife, Lizzie, is some lawyer closer to my age than his. I haven't got to know her at all. She's beautiful and Mum hates her for it.

‘She's so skinny, she must be on drugs,' she'd say. ‘Look at what she wears, she's practically
naked. I feel sorry for women who feel the need to attract attention to themselves like that.'

Of course, if Lizzie looked like Mum she probably would dress like Mum, in homemade sacks. Mum has the biggest bottom I've ever seen. Above the waist she's pretty normal for her age, but from the hips down she just balloons. It's quite frightening. I remember her bottom getting wedged in the bathtub when we were still living with Dad. She made me fetch the margarine from the fridge so she could lubricate the sides of the bath and pop herself out. That's the only time I've ever seen her naked. Her pubic hair was grey and straggly. As I said before, I hope I don't look like Mum when I'm fifty. More importantly, I hope I don't
sound
like Mum when I'm fifty. She's a broken record of nasty commentary.

I think Mum and Nanna hate everyone except me. Everyone but the three of us is supposedly stupid, lazy, lustful or thieving, and some people – Dad, for example – are all of the above.

They do seem to love me, but lately Mum's been fighting with me more than she's been fighting with Nanna. When I bleached my hair, when I got my ears pierced. When Mum ‘found' a love letter from Marina Miller in my backpack.

Yes, I have a girlfriend. Yes, I'm a dyke. A big one. It shocks some people, I know. I've come out at an early age. Yet I knew it in my bones years before I met Marina. She's two years younger than me, fourteen, and the most beautiful woman I've ever seen – shapely, flame-haired. She drives me absolutely wild. Marina thinks the world of me as well, and she said so in the letter that Mum read.

‘Who's this piece?' said Mum. She confronted me in the kitchen. I was at the bench pouring milk on my cornflakes. I tried to stay cool.

‘She's just a kid with a crush on me.'

‘You're too young to be doing this kind of thing, Amy. You're a
child
, for chrissakes.'

I told her it was none of her bloody business
and she threatened to tell Marina's father. Dr Miller had been a surgical registrar when Mum was an intern at Newcastle Hospital. He'd been her supervisor, according to her diaries.

‘Fine,' I said, ‘I'll just tell Marina and Mrs Miller how well you know Dr Miller.'

‘What the devil are you talking about?'

‘You know damn well what I'm talking about.'

‘How dare you speak to me like that, Amy!'

‘You slept with him, Mum. He gave you herpes, remember?'

She paused, the blood draining from her long face.

‘Don't you ever talk about that again. You do realise I'm going to have to take your father to court over this.'

‘What?'

‘The Family Court made a non-denigration order. Your father is not permitted to denigrate me in front of you. He's in contempt of court.'

She waddled out of the kitchen and that was the last I ever heard of it. In Mum's family there are some things we never speak about. It's a dirty little deal among the four of us: Nanna's Valium addiction, Tom's porn collection, Mum's venereal disease, and now my girlfriend. I'm really part of the family.

Of course, I never let on that my source was Mum's diary and not Dad. Let him cop it, I thought. She never took him to court anyway.

In the meantime, I've been an avid reader of Mum's diaries and Marina and I have been carrying on very satisfactorily. We're best friends. She's an unofficial member of our posse, even though she's only in Year Nine. I know I'm going to be wretchedly miserable without her this week. I only hope we can wreak enough havoc at this camp to take my mind off her. Thank God for the posse.

T
HE MESS HALL IS THE
coolest building at Riveroak Recreation Ranch. Cool temperature-wise, I mean. There ain't nothin' cool about the Ranch. It's daggier than my mother's wardrobe.

Singing for our supper is cracking us up something savage, though. All the posses are seated at long tables and Bevan and John are trying to make us sing in a round. The song is – can you believe it – ‘The Cock is Dead'. Clare and I, the musical ones, are singing an octave higher than everyone
else, with great, passionate vibrato, like opera singers.

Mrs Kerr gives me the evil eye and stalks over to our table. I ignore her. She taps me on the shoulder.

‘You stand out like a sore thumb, Amy Gillespie.' She jabs her finger into my shoulder with every syllable. ‘I'm watching you and your cronies. Remember that.'

Kerr's a redhead, but not a nice one like my darling Marina. She's wizened and freckly and most unattractive. I lower my voice and sing just out of tune, coming in at the wrong time. Everyone on our side of the hall is completely thrown out and the round is a shambles. At least the instructors have a good sense of humour. They give up and we sing a god-awful cheesy prayer to the tune of ‘Rock Around the Clock'.

I sing loudly and with far too much enthusiasm for an atheist. I raise my eyebrows to Mrs Kerr. I'm having a great time. Only on the last ‘amen'
do I catch Clare batting her eyelashes at Bevan. I note with some concern that he's smiling back. I suppose he is quite handsome. But he's training to be a minister, for God's sake, and at least thirty years old. What interest could he have in her? I point these things out to her as we're lining up at the servery for our devon-and-salad sandwiches.

‘I'm just not into little boys any more, Amy,' she says. She can be so haughty and immature. ‘Look, I'm not planning to sleep with him or anything. I'll just flirt.'

‘Clare, you're a virgin.'

‘So are you.'

‘Oh?'

‘God, you don't count all that muck, do you?'

I feel like slapping her.

‘You're just jealous,' she says.

I roll my eyes and pretend to be above it. I turn around in the queue and talk to Patricia, who still looks like a bloated beetroot.

‘I'm going to waste away on this slop they're
feeding us,' I say. It's true. I looked down at my stomach in the shower last night and it was completely flat. And that was after just one day of camp food.

‘I've got some chips and lollies in my bag,' says Patricia, ‘but I don't know if they're going to last me until the end of the week.'

‘What kind of chips?'

‘Twisties.'

‘Cheese or chicken?'

‘Cheese.'

‘Let's go.'

‘What?'

‘Let's go back to the hut and eat some chips.'

‘We're not allowed in the hut during the day.'

Patricia's a goody-two-shoes at heart.

‘Think outside the square, Patricia,' I say, hooking my arm through hers.

Clare looks at us and mouths, ‘Where are you going?'

‘Toilet,' I mouth back.

Clare's pouting. Talk about jealousy. She can't stand it when I'm one-on-one with another girl. I think she sees me as belonging to her exclusively. She's not a dyke, but she knows I think she's gorgeous and she likes my attention. When Marina Miller first arrived on the scene Clare started fluffing her feathers and we had some huge rows.

Patricia is Clare's second-best friend. It sounds so babyish, I know, but there it is. She's a beautiful person, truly considerate and sincere. And there aren't many people I would say that about. In fact, I can't think of any. I think she's a closet Christian, but she's not a neat-and-sneaky. She's big and messy like me, with back fat, thick legs and pigeon toes. Her clothes always show sweat patches under her arms and in the small of her back. Sometimes when she has her period, you can smell it. She can be a little bit gross, but I'd take gross over a neat, sneaky little sap any day of the week.

We walk across the paddock to the row of huts, look both ways and enter our own. It's just as
hot in the hut as it is outside. Patricia unzips her bag, fossicks around and throws me a packet of Twisties. It's a full-size, fifty-gram pack. Exactly what I need.

‘Do you want a Coke as well?'

‘You brought Coke?'

‘I get a headache if I don't drink it.'

‘Sure. No wonder your bag was so heavy.'

We sit cross-legged on the cement floor, eating our chips and sharing the can of drink. Patricia takes big, thirsty gulps, spilling some on her cossie. She burps and her nostrils flare heartily.

‘It hurt when you had that operation on your jaw, didn't it?' she asks.

This question is a little surprising. I rub my jaw self-consciously.

‘Not during the operation. I was unconscious. But it hurt like hell afterwards.'

‘For how long?'

‘Well, for weeks. You saw me all patched up.'

‘But you had painkillers?'

‘I did, but they made me sick, so I still felt like crap. I looked like crap too. Remember? Ugly as a hatful for ages.'

‘No, you weren't.'

In Year Eight during a hockey game someone – I never knew who – smashed a hockey ball into the side of my face. It broke my jaw and I had to have an operation and get it all wired up. It was the worst thing that's ever happened to me. I'm back to normal now, but at the time I thought my life would never be the same. On top of the pain of the injury and the surgery, I had to get braces, which I wouldn't have needed if I hadn't broken my jaw. I had a real vanity crisis, which only ended last year when the braces came off. I didn't smile in photographs for two years. And, to add insult to injury, Mum tried to stop me playing hockey. That was the first time I ever really stood up to her. It was around that time, while I was stuck at home after the operation, that I came across her diaries. I think what I read in those diaries gave me
the ammunition I needed to stand up to her.

‘I'm only asking because Mum wants me to have some operation on my jaw,' says Patricia.

‘To fix your bottom teeth?'

She nods.

‘Won't braces do the trick?' I ask.

‘I'll need braces as well.'

‘You know, you don't have to do everything your mother says,' I say, thinking about Nanna's grip on Mum.

‘She says why look ugly when I could look beautiful.'

‘Really? My mother says why look beautiful when I could look ugly. Ugliness is a virtue in my family.'

‘Maybe we should swap families.'

‘Don't be ridiculous, your teeth are fine.' This is, of course, a lie. Patricia's teeth are a train wreck. Her bottom teeth and jaw protrude ridiculously, pushing out her bottom lip and making her look like a frog. But straight teeth are not going to make
her beautiful. Someone should break this to her, but I'm not going to. I love her. It'd be water off a duck's back for someone like Clare. Beauty is a strange, brutal thing.

We finish off the Twisties thoroughly, splitting open the bags and licking out the corners, sucking each of our fingers. Patricia squashes the empty can with her foot and throws it in a pile of Clare's clothes, which are spread across half the hut. Something only a second-best friend would do. Patricia can be quite funny when she's not being so serious.

We sneak like serpents back across the bare, dry paddock to the mess hall and slip in the double doors. I'm horrified to see Bevan sitting next to Clare at our table. They're huddled close, leaning in, animated in their gestures. I glare at Deborah, who's looking bored. She shrugs.

As we're walking to our table, Bevan gets up, pats Clare on the shoulder and walks back to the instructors' table on the other side of the mess hall.

Clare is grinning stupidly when I sit next to her.

‘What the hell did he want?' I ask.

‘You, actually,' says Clare.

‘Don't talk rubbish.'

‘I'm not. He wants to set up a hockey game this afternoon. Miss Howell told him you were the best hockey player at school. He wants you to pick a team of girls, and he's going to pick a team of instructors and teachers.'

I'm suspicious. I look to Johanna for confirmation. She doesn't make up stories.

‘It's true,' she says. ‘You have to put me on the team. I wouldn't mind tackling Bevan. He's so cute. And a minister!'

‘
And a minister!
' mocks Clare, wiggling her head from side to side.

I'm quietly pleased by the prospect of a hockey match, but not thrilled that Clare and Bevan are getting cosy. Why does that bother me? I'm not jealous. I don't want either of them. I just have this feeling, like I used to have all the time when Mum
and Dad were at each other's throats, that something dangerous is around the corner.
Globus hystericus
. Mum and Nanna get it too. It's like a tennis ball in your throat and butterflies in the stomach with the volume turned way up, sometimes until you can hardly breathe. It's a psychological thing, I think. It's why Nanna started taking Valium. These days I only get it every now and then.

My posse and another group are on clean-up duty for lunch. We have to stack all the plates in a stand over a concrete drain outside and spray them with hand-held hoses. Of course, with my posse in charge, everyone ends up getting soaked before a drop of water falls on the plates. Mrs Ricci, who I sent twelve volts through in a science class in Year Seven, waddles over and yells at us. We look solemn until she's out of earshot and then we're at it again. I have enough self-control to refrain from squirting her retreating back.

I often wonder what makes me such a naughty
girl. Mum reckons it's the ‘stupid, fancy private school' and Dad's well-publicised peccadilloes. Dad reckons it's the crazy, oppressive, man-hating environment at home. I think I'm just an honest girl in a dishonest world. Better to be honest and the butt of the odd joke, if you ask me. It's much more fun than taking yourself so seriously that you have to cover up all the stupid mistakes you've made because they don't gel with the image you're trying to project to the world. I feel sorry for people like that, and that's most adults. It's pathetic.

Two girls in the clean-up group are known as ‘Toni-and-Joey', as if they're a single entity. Like Clare and me, they've been best friends since primary school and all through high school. Unlike Clare and me, neither of them has any other close friends at school. They do everything together. They're in all the same classes and play the same sports. One can't move without the other. That's also quite pathetic.

I let them hang out with my posse sometimes, for their own good, but also because I used to have a little crush on Toni. She's really beautiful. She has this gorgeous olive complexion. The skin on her face and body is so smooth you can't stop looking at it. She looks Spanish, actually, even though her parents are both bog English.

Now that I have Marina and realise what a conceited little cow Toni is, I prefer Joey. Joey's a mousey little thing, also English, with a long, narrow face and turned-up nose. She's quiet and serious, but I've had some good, long talks with her about life. I admire people who know what they want. Joey wants to be an exotic animal veterinarian. It's not my thing, but at least it's
some
thing.

I decide to pick Toni for this afternoon's hockey game. She's fast and strong and plays dirty as hell. She's the kind of girl who'd smack a hockey ball into the side of someone's face and never admit it.

‘I don't know if I really feel like it,' she says. ‘I think I'll spend the afternoon in the dam.'

‘It'll be a laugh. We'll thrash the teachers.'

‘I just don't feel like it.'

‘Ah, come on …'

‘Jesus, Amy, if she doesn't want to play, don't beg her,' says Clare. She doesn't like Toni. They clash. And Clare likes to be the prettiest girl in every scenario. ‘But I wouldn't mind playing,' she says.

I point the hose at her and spray. She squeals. She looks down and sees that her bra and singlet are completely transparent. Clicking her tongue, she starts drying plates without attempting to conceal her nipples. She can be such a flirt.