Trust (7 page)

You didn’t
have
to go to the social with a date. In fact, the school discouraged it. Until last week, Seb had assumed he and Clarence would cruise in together, cool and casual, dance a bit and just hang, having a good time with
all
their friends, male and female. Whereas a male–female couple who went to the social together was likely to spend a good part of the evening making out. Was that what Sylvia expected? And the other glamour girls?

The mobile phone on his bedside table thrummed. Rolling over to look at the message, he saw it was from his sister, just on the other side of the plasterboard wall.
U awake?
Okay, damn it, any distraction was a good one right now! He rolled back to the other side of the bed and rapped twice on the wall. Two knocks came quickly in return.

‘Whassup, face-ache?’ he said quietly, sticking his head round the edge of her door.

Stella-Jean beckoned him in. ‘Can’t sleep.’

‘Nah, me either.’ With a single long step, Seb crossed the narrow room whose pink walls were barely detectable behind the chock-a-block shelves, the pinboards, photos, stuff from Bali, and fancy dresses on satin-covered hangers displayed like they were in some museum. With some difficulty, he found himself a perch on her similarly cluttered bed. His sister was sitting up cross-legged in her PJs; busy making something, as usual, working some kind of green ribbon around the top of that thing that looked like a kid’s toy. Knitting Nancy: dumb name. He pointed to the lengthening tube spooling from the bottom of the little wooden figure. ‘Old Nancy looks like she’s having a big green poop.’

‘Charming.’ Stella-Jean gave the tube a quick, efficient tug and kept twisting the ribbon in and out round the metal hooks atop Nancy’s head. ‘Like that disgusting old sloth-cloth you’re wearing. You do realise it’s more hole than fabric?’

‘Wouldn’t be a sloth-cloth if it wasn’t full of holes.’ Seb looked down proudly at the T-shirt in question as he settled back against the wall, his long arms around his knees and super-size feet sticking up like paddles in front of him. ‘Why haven’t you got anywhere comfortable to sit in here?’

‘Maybe I would have, if this room was bigger than an iPod.’

‘Oh, poor diddums.’ The door, which he hadn’t quite closed, widened with an eerie creak; they both watched as Tigger insinuated himself through the gap and sprang onto the bed with a soft miaow of greeting. Seb rubbed the big orange cat’s ears. ‘Look, after this place gets done up,’ he said more kindly, ‘you’ll have all the space you want.’

Stella-Jean shook her head gloomily. ‘We’ll be dead before that happens. Dad’s never going to renovate this dump.’

‘Yeah, he will. One day. Ouch!’ He lifted the cat’s front paws from his bare thigh. ‘No claws, Tigs.’

‘Don’t you think it’s weird? Our dad’s this, like, world-famous architect, but we live in a daggy old shoebox. All he ever does for here is draw up plans.’

‘That’s because he
is
this world-famous architect. You don’t get it, Stinker: he keeps changing ’em because he wants our place to be the best. He just doesn’t want to let us down, that’s all.’

‘You think so?’ She snorted derisively. ‘Anyway. How come we’re both awake but him and Mum are dead to the world? We’re the teenagers;
they
should be awake, lying there worrying about us.’

‘You want ’em to worry? Then get a bong at least, for chrissake.’ Seb jerked his chin at the shelves opposite, stacked with containers of Stella-Jean’s jewellery-making materials. ‘Look at all this kindie crap! It’s like being inside the freaking useful box on
Playschool
.’

‘Me and Tess are doing very nicely with our so-called kindie crap, thank you very much.’

‘You and Tess, you and Tess. Anyone’d think you were, like, twins, joined at the hip or something. Except you look like a duck and she looks a, I dunno, a heron.’

‘Shut up.’ Stella-Jean said automatically, but her flying fingers had paused. ‘You know, I was thinking … If Tessa’s family took
her
off to go and live overseas somewhere, I’d be a basket case.’

Seb shot her a lightning glance, but she was looking carefully down at Knitting Nancy. ‘I’m not a basket case,’ he said, then leaned forward to pick at his big toe.

‘I didn’t say you were,’ she said tartly. ‘I just said
I
would be. Anyway. What me and Tess want to know is, who are you going to the social with?’

Seb’s head jerked up. ‘What?’

‘She bet me a king-size Kit Kat it’ll be Princess Sylvia.’

‘How do you know anything about the school social? You’re in Year
Nine
, you should be invisible.’ Fat chance. His sister had never been invisible.

‘Me and Tess accessorise half the girls in senior school – not that
you’d
know. And we have it on good authority that Sylvia Albanese
and
Georgie Patrakis
and
Chelsea Trumper all want you to be their date. Everyone is like, wow! That dumb jock? That dumb
Year Eleven
jock?’

‘But I don’t want to go with any of them,’ Seb muttered.

‘Crap on,’ scoffed Stella-Jean. ‘What, scared you’ll get torn apart?’ She mimed a tug-of-war with both hands.

‘No, I just don’t wanna … you know … give anybody the wrong idea.’ Still fiddling with his toes, he could feel his sister’s eyes boring into him.

‘What wrong idea, exactly?’

‘Meh,’ he shrugged, trying to sound careless and casual. ‘Like I’m, you know, committed to one of ’em.’

She giggled. ‘They’re not asking to
marry
you, you know!’

Seb ignored her, watching from the corner of his eye as she started working the ribbon on Knitting Nancy again. Suddenly she dropped it into her lap.

‘Oh!
I’ve
got an idea.’ Stella-Jean beckoned him closer; he inclined toward her, further, further, until finally he toppled onto her. She pushed him back to upright and Tigger, who’d got slightly squashed, gave them both an offended look.

‘No, listen. This would really mess with people’s minds,’ Stella-Jean said, gleefully. ‘You should ask
Rory
to go to the social with you.’

‘Rory?’ He leaned back against the wall, gobsmacked. ‘But … Ror’s been my buddy since we were in kinder. We used to have sleepovers, for god’s sake. Like, little kid sleepovers.’

‘So? She can be your buddy and still be your date. Plus she’s stunning-looking.’

Seb looked startled. ‘Is she?’

‘Don’t tell me you hadn’t
noticed
.’ Stella-Jean clicked her tongue slowly, several times. ‘You are hopeless.’

He pictured walking in to the social with Aurora Feng: her ballet dancer’s body, slender and strong, in some slinky dress instead of school uniform, her long black hair
not
in a ponytail for once. Yes, when you actually thought about it, she
was
nice-looking.

‘It’d be so
cool
to go with her. It’d really piss those princesses off,’ said Stella-Jean with relish. ‘They still haven’t forgiven her for having that big scene last year with, you know, that Year Twelve guy who looked like Johnny Depp.’

‘You mean Rob de Clario?’ said Seb, his brain popping up an instant picture of the guy in question. He’d known Rob and Rory were an item, but only vaguely. Too focused on the tennis. ‘The girls paid out on her for that?’

‘Oh yeah, big-time. He was s’posed to be out of bounds to her, she was only in Year Ten. She’s been getting the big freeze all year – it would be too cool for her to turn up at the social with
next
year’s Rob de Clario. Ha ha!’

Seb gave her a questioning look.

‘
You
, you moron!’ she said. ‘Sheesh! You think Sylvia and Co. are after you for tennis tips? Look in the mirror sometime.’

Seb pulled his knees in closer to his chest and tried to look blasé. ‘So … how do you know Rory hasn’t got a date already?’

‘I have my sources. Go on, Seb, ask her. Hey, I’ll ask her for you, if you want.’

‘You stay out of it, face-ache!’ He stared at her shelves, thinking. If Rory was his date … all the questions were answered. Yeah! Good old Rory: she was …
safe
. He unwrapped his arms from round his legs and sat back, inhaling breezy relief. Except — ‘Let’s be clear: you don’t tell
any
of the girls this was your idea. Understood?’

‘Wouldn’t dream of it,’ said Stella-Jean smartly. She dusted her palms together as at a job well done. ‘And now,’ she said, ‘nick off. I’m ready to go to sleep.’

‘I’m almost scared to touch you,’ said Seb, but he knuckled her upper arm hard anyway, and leapt off the bed as she yelped and swung at him. ‘Horrible
dree
-eams,’ he wished her in a syrupy voice as he closed the door.

‘Same to you, fuckhead,’ said Stella-Jean, smiling as she switched off her bedside light.

SIX

‘See you,’ said Susanna, releasing one hand momentarily from her precariously clutched load of bags and books in order to give Gerry, still halfway through his breakfast, a quick wave.

‘You’re off early.’

‘Meeting with Belinda before my first class. Oh, honey, it’s your brother’s birthday today. Don’t forget to call him.’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ said Gerry, forking up egg and tomato. His brother Ed ran a swimming pool supply shop and still lived in the same Perth suburb where he and Gerry had grown up. They had absolutely nothing in common and would probably never have made contact again after their parents died, if it weren’t for their wives sending Christmas cards and the like.
Why do they bother?
Gerry wondered. He had Susanna and the kids, he didn’t need any more family than that. ‘Have a good one, Suze.’

Ten minutes later, about to head off on the six-kilometre run to the office, he just about tripped over Seb, curled lankily in a patch of sunlight on the living room floor, still in his boxer shorts and a raggy outsize T-shirt. He was nose to nose with Tigger, who was accepting his attentions with slit-eyed graciousness. Nostalgia stopped Gerry in his tracks. How vividly he could recall Seb as a plump toddler, and as an older child, lying on the floor just like this, communing with some earlier feline in the succession they’d owned over the years. He knelt down beside his son, fiddling with the laces on his running shoes, feeling a real pang of loss for that physical closeness he’d enjoyed with the kids when they were little: the small, sweet bodies sitting in his lap while they ate, riding on his shoulders, demanding to be swung around till they were dizzy, or thrown whooping into the air. ‘
Again!
’ they’d shriek. ‘
Daddy! Again!
’

‘What’s on at school today, Sebbie?’ he asked.

‘Just the usual stuff.’ Seb was making patterns in the fur of Tigger’s flank with his fingertips.

‘Morning’s moving along, mate.’ Gerry flexed one foot, testing the tightness of the laces. ‘You planning on getting dressed any time soon?’

‘Plenty of time,’ Seb said, but rolled over to his knees, and then stood. ‘Uh … Dad?’

‘Yeah?’ He glanced up. From this angle Seb positively loomed. He wondered if he was now shorter than his son.

‘Do you … ah … I just …’ Seb started picking at a paint bubble on the wall.

Gerry rose, noting with relief that he was still the taller, though not by much. ‘What’s up?’ he said, giving Seb’s shoulder a friendly squeeze.

‘I was just, um, wondering. How old you were you when … ah, when you had your first girlfriend?’

‘Hmm …’ Gerry rubbed thoughtfully at his freshly shaved jaw, taking his time to answer.
So, he
is
starting to think about girls. I’ll bet some of his mates are way ahead of him; he feels self-conscious.
He liked that his son had come to him for reassurance. ‘Well, you know, growing up back in Perth, I guess it’d be fair to say I was pretty sport-obsessed. I was a serious cricketer, remember. Plus the tennis. And the swimming. Kind of didn’t wake up to girls till —’ Gerry threw him a questioning glance. ‘When you say girlfriend, you mean my first, uh,
real
girlfriend? Sex, we’re talking about?’

Seb grimaced but nodded emphatically.

‘To tell the truth, Sebbie, that didn’t start happening till I came over here for uni.’

‘Really?’ said Seb eagerly. ‘So, how old were you then? Eighteen?’

‘Let’s see … No, nineteen, I guess.’ Gerry chuckled. ‘Yeah. I guess I was a bit of a late developer.’

‘Nineteen,’ Seb repeated. His face had cleared. ‘I won’t even be
eighteen
till March.’

‘That’s right. No rush. You’ve got plenty of time to get your heart broken, don’t you worry. And break a few yourself.’ He put a hand up to ruffle his son’s hair. ‘Well, I better get a move on. Off to the pickle factory.’

‘Cool. See ya, Dad.’ Unexpectedly, Seb took a half-step forward and gave Gerry a quick hug.

Gerry closed his eyes for a moment, feeling immeasurably satisfied with every decision about fatherhood he’d ever made, from having kids in the first place to the story he’d just told his son. ‘Have a good day, mate,’ he said tenderly, stepping back and opening the screen door.

‘You too. C’mon, Tigs.’ Seb set off jauntily toward the kitchen and the cat leapt up, pretending alarm, and bounded after him.

Gerry did his usual warm-up stretches against the gate post of the low brick fence out the front. The ‘not till uni’ story had been spontaneous, but, he thought, just right: the truth would’ve made Seb feel even more self-conscious, inadequate.
Late developer!
Gerry laughed to himself. In fact, he’d just turned fifteen the summer he started fucking. Eileen, a smart, unconventional twenty-year-old, visiting Perth for the holidays; they’d met on the beach. She’d taken one look at the well-built adolescent and scooped him up. He’d barely had his cock out of her all summer. The following year he’d taken up with a teacher at his school, an adventure not as perilous as it would be these days, but still with the addictive frisson of danger, and by the end of high school he’d had it off with three or four women teachers. Some married, some not; all scrupulously secret liaisons. He had never boasted to his mates, never even wanted to. He’d learned back then that possessing such secrets gave him a potent sense of having one over on everybody else, which was far more exciting than mere boasting.