The Accident (14 page)

‘Did you forget that we set a curfew? Because I don’t know how you could possibly forget, when that’s the last thing we said before you went out the door. Did you even do any school work?’

‘We got a whole chapter summary done. But then it ended up a big D&M…April’s having issues with her parents.’ April is my acceptable friend, moderate enough for Terry and Rose-Marie. She’s always a good excuse. They’ve never met Izzy. As far as I’m concerned they never will.

‘D&M?’ Rose-Marie echoes dubiously.

Seriously? ‘Deep and Meaningful.’ Still blank looks. ‘Serious discussion. Peer counselling. That thing friends do.’ Feel like I’m just digging myself in deeper, but they won’t buy it without the details.

Terry speaks. He’s barely spoken to me over the last week. Forget the easy banter, I’ve been lucky to get eye contact. ‘The first night, Eliat, and you’ve already blown it. What do you expect us to do?’

‘I’m only ten minutes late! And what was I supposed to do, just leave her there crying?’

‘Yes!’ He looks frustrated, fed up with my shit. ‘You had a chance and you blew it,’ he repeats. ‘You’re officially grounded for the rest of the holidays. And don’t even bother trying to talk your way out of it. I’m not interested in any more of your stories.’

‘Fine.’ Everything inside me is busting to have this fight but I learned a long time ago that arguing is the least effective way of getting what I want. ‘Can I go now?’

Attic bedroom. Peel off my clothes. They still smell faintly of cigarette smoke, despite the perfume and deodorant. Open my window wide and hang them off the window frame, letting them dangle in the breeze.

Neat stack of freshly folded washing on the end of my bed. Rose-Marie’s work. Pick it up to put on my desk to deal with later. Stop. Bunch of brochures on my desk that I didn’t put there. Local private schools.

That sick feeling stirs up in the bottom of my stomach again. Still don’t know why. After a moment’s hesitation, drop the pile of washing right on top. Blot the whole thing from my mind.

Tash. Go see Tash.

Still sound asleep, face set. Something in that face tells you she’s a tough little bugger, even while she’s sleeping. She was stubborn at dinner, didn’t want to eat her peas. Feels like days ago now.

Sit on the edge of her bed, watch the rise and fall of her chest. Fists are still clenched, as if she’s re-fighting the pea battle in her dreams. The heaviness, the responsibility, starts to settle over me.

Stand. Shake it off.

Three years till Tash starts school. Let Rose-Marie make her plans, if it makes her feel good. Doesn’t mean we have to stick to them, doesn’t mean we even have to be around in three years. Or next year, or even next month.

‘What do you reckon, kiddo?’ I whisper. ‘Have a think about it. We can do whatever you want. You just let me know.’

Think of Jesse O’Sullivan, and that look he’d get in his eyes when the pot kicked in and he started to talk.
Nobody owns me,
he’d repeat.
Nobody owns me.
I used to think that was me too. Except when he said it, it was like he was reminding, promising himself.
Nobody owns me.

Nobody owned me either, but it was different. Didn’t have to convince myself of it. The way I grew up there was nothing else. House to house, family to family, school to school. Only thing that stayed consistent was me. Nobody owned me. Unlike Jesse, that made me free.

before
after
later

Friday morning and I can’t get out of bed. I lie there, hand still through the camcorder strap. It’s a solid little piece of technology: I accidentally rolled over and slept on it and it still looks fine. My ribs are sore, though.

I don’t want to watch the video again but I don’t want to forget about it, either. When Mum comes in to wake me up, I hide it under my pillow and mumble something about a sore throat.

Alan comes in ten minutes later. ‘Are you really sick or do you just need a day off school?’

‘You really want to know?’

‘Well, if you’re sick I won’t offer to make you blueberry pancakes…’

He makes me smile. ‘Is Mum gone yet?’

‘She’ll be out the door in two minutes.’

On cue, Mum shouts a goodbye up the stairs followed by a string of unintelligible instructions. I must make a face, because Alan smiles. ‘A bit like that, huh?’

As he moves towards the door I pull out the camcorder from under my pillow. ‘Can I show you something?’

He comes back and sits on the end of the bed, waiting for the tape to rewind. I hand it to him in silence, because what would I say? It starts to play and I feel my stomach tumble. Robbie’s voice. I draw my knees up and hug them. Watch Alan watching it. He’s got a good poker face, but I can see his jaw tighten just the tiniest bit.

It reaches the end and he carefully closes the display screen. ‘Where was this?’

‘In my wardrobe. I forgot he filmed it…’

Neither of us is naive enough to think about getting Mum to watch it. But some day we might want to use the camcorder and we can’t just tape over it.

Alan hands the camcorder back. ‘You can copy this to your computer, can’t you? Burn it to a DVD?’

‘Yeah.’

‘That’s a start, then.’ He stands. ‘You go have a shower, I’ll get started on your pancakes.’

We sit at the kitchen table. One of Mum’s favourite pieces: solid antique mahogany…maybe teak. I tend to zone out when she goes on. I do know it was made in nineteenth-century France. That’s the one thing I love about it. A lot of people have sat around this table over the years.

Alan dishes up the pancakes for me and one for himself, then pours us both juice. He seems serious, more so than usual. ‘You need to know that Mum and I have been talking.’

A chill down my spine. I hate conversations that start like this. I dig into the pancakes as if I don’t know what’s coming.

‘You need to know…’ He always starts off that way when he has to break bad news. ‘That I don’t want to leave you, or this house, or your mother. But we’ve talked about it and we’re thinking it might do us both some good to have a break.’

‘Talked about it? You mean Mum went off, as usual. Stop making excuses for her!’ I probably sound annoyed at him, but it’s Mum, really. What a stupid idea. She’s buried so deep in her own self-pity she thinks this will make it better? Really?

‘That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard! She’s so full of crap.’

‘This comes from me too, Sarah.’

I stare at him, try to read his face. ‘You said you don’t want to leave.’

‘And I don’t. But if things keep going at this rate, we might get to the point where I do.’

‘That doesn’t make any sense.’

‘I love your mother. But I can only take so much of this, and she won’t let me help her. So either I step back now and give her the time to work through it herself, or we get to the point where we can’t stand each other and I really do choose to walk away.’

‘You’d never do that.’

He shrugs. ‘You tell me. Am I supposed to just keep being her punching bag?’

‘No! Stand up to her. Tell her to stop being so sorry for herself.’

‘You really want me to pull the pin out of that grenade?’

His answer sucks. But at the same time he’s totally right. That’s probably what sucks about it. I push the plate of pancakes away. ‘It’s not fair.’

‘I know it’s not.’

I look around the kitchen, half expecting to see bags of his stuff piled up, but nothing looks any different.

‘So are you moving out, or what?’

‘Not yet. Nothing’s decided yet. I just wanted to give you a heads-up…let you know what might be coming.’

I think back to how they used to be, when it was Mum’s laughter not her anger that used to ring through the house. She used to laugh so hard she’d have tears in her eyes.

He goes to work. I boot my computer and upload the video. I save the Robbie clip as one file and me dismantling the wall as another. I burn the Robbie clip to DVD and then stash it, unlabelled, at the bottom of my underwear drawer. Sorry, Robbie. Not the most masculine place to live.

I play the wall video through on the screen. It’s almost like one of those silent movies. I mess around with the speed. Zoom through and watch the images falling like rain; slide the playhead back and watch them all jump back up into position. Typical time-wasting. I go back to the start and let it play through, and I watch myself approach the wall, climb up onto the wall, reach up for the first photo…Pause. I take a capture of the screen and dump it into Photoshop. Let it play for another few seconds, then pause again as that first print flutters to the ground. Capture, into Photoshop. And in my mind’s eye, I see an image starting to form. A montage…no, a grid. Stills from the video, mixed with black and white photos. Mixed with stills from the video of Robbie, just a few scattered here and there, the idea of subliminal messages, undertones…

It takes two hours to capture and save three hundred and fifty-five images. I have the worst posture at the computer and I end up with stiff shoulders and a sore neck from hunching over the keyboard. I get up from my chair and stretch, drawing myself up onto tiptoes and rolling my shoulders, feeling the clicking and popping of stiff joints as I do. And I catch my reflection in the full-length mirror.

I’ve got on a pair of old trackies, cut off at the knees. I went through and massacred half of my wardrobe last year, needing something that I could wear with the leg cast. I look—like I did before—like a total dag. Only this time it’s the scar I’m showing off, not the cast. My leg is pink because my weight was on it before; the white scar tissue stands out all the more.

Before I can stop myself, I reach for my SLR. It’s still loaded, halfway through a roll of uninspired bush photos. I aim it at my reflection in the mirror, drop the shutter speed right down, and start to shoot. Me, then close-ups of the scar. I keep going till I reach the end of the roll of film.

I rewind it carefully and pop the back of the camera open, and the film cassette tumbles out. I weigh it in my hand, feeling the adrenaline that’s kept me going through the morning die out. Leaving me once again with that feeling of being stuck, broken down on my way to somewhere.

I have a processing tank and equipment but I threw out my opened bottles of chemicals a couple of months ago because they were going off. And even if I did have the chemicals, the momentum’s gone now. I stare at the computer screen, at the thumbnails of video stills, the hundreds of them, and my stomach starts to knot up again. Who was I kidding? I can’t use those. I can’t use any of this stuff, it won’t mean anything to anyone but me.

I toss the roll of film onto my workbench and head downstairs. Mum’s shut Iago outside and I let him in, let him lick me all over with sloppy kisses. He follows me into the lounge room, his claws click-clacking on the tiles, and jumps up beside me on the couch. Mum would go nuts if she knew—it’s a four-thousand-dollar couch she got especially imported from somewhere. But what she doesn’t know she can’t complain about. I flick on the TV and we stretch out to watch. Too early for Dr Phil.

Iago stretches, nudges me with his paws. I look at him and he grins. ‘So, Yago.’ I scratch behind his ears and I think about the canvas and the roll of film up on my workbench. ‘What are we going to do?’

before
after
later

We go three days basically without talking. It’s not hard in our house. Mum is so rarely downstairs, and Lauren takes off most mornings, not reappearing till eight or nine at night. I don’t know where she goes; whether there’s friends she hangs out with, or she fills up her time with uni classes and work shifts. I can imagine her just driving as far as she can. Finding some lonely spot on top of a cliff to sit and think.

I buy three tickets to Morgan’s play, hoping in some vague way it will fix things between us, but she sees right through it, and just gets mad again. ‘I told you, I don’t want them there.’

Still stinging from Kayla’s book nerd comment, I avoid reading. I let Anthony and the guys drag me out to see a movie on Saturday night and then when I get home, I put on my running gear.

Kayla’s out on her verandah again. Not smoking this time, but sitting on the steps with a bottle of beer against her left eye, the rest of the sixpack beside her. I nearly pretend I haven’t seen her, but curiosity gets the better
of me.

‘What happened to you?’

‘Got punched.’

Somehow the answer doesn’t surprise me in the least. My face must reflect that, because she goes on quickly, ‘At kickboxing. One of the new idiots totally botched some moves and got me in the face.’

She lowers the bottle and I can see that the left eye is actually swollen shut, and there’s a dark bruise across her cheek. Though it’s June she’s dressed in just black leggings and a white singlet. Smelling like sweat and deodorant but, for once, not cigarettes.

I feel the tiniest shiver of adrenaline and an odd thought occurs to me. I think she might actually be quite attractive.

It throws me completely for a second. Kayla? Kayla who used to pour chocolate milk into my school bag and steal my maths homework to hand in as her own? We haven’t been playmates for years and we certainly aren’t friends. At the most, she’s been like a weird and annoying cousin. So why am I suddenly looking at her and feeling all warm inside?