Текст книги "Saving Francesca"

Автор книги: Melina Marchetta

Соавторы: Melina Marchetta
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Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 14 страниц)

chapter 12

I’VE BEEN AT my nonna’s for two weeks and nothing has changed at home. Actually, I think it’s worse, but the first casualty of all this is truth.

My dad rings me one morning and tells me to contact Mia’s university and ask for the rest of the term off.

“I thought you said she was out of bed,” I say almost accusingly, as if my dad’s lying.

“She is, but she’s not ready to go back. Just ring them and we’ll talk about it later.”

“Why can’t you ring them?”

“Because I’d like you to.”

“Papa, they’ve got degrees, not machetes.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

He sounds harassed. With me. Am I the one who’s locked herself in the house? Since when do I have to fix things around here?

“We can’t keep on telling people that Mummy has the flu.”

“Then tell them the truth, Frankie.”

The truth? I haven’t said the truth out loud yet, and I don’t know how to go about doing this. I’m in Year Eleven. I’m sixteen years old. I don’t want to call up my mother’s boss and tell her she’s not coming in for the rest of the term. I don’t want to use any of the terminology out loud. I’ll say it one thousand times to myself, but I can’t say it out loud, because if I do, it means it’s real. Nervous breakdown. Depression. Nervous breakdown. Depression. Such overused words until it actually happens. How many times has Mia said, “I’m having a nervous breakdown, kids”? How many times have I said I’m depressed? Too many times to count. Nothing close to the reality of it at all.

The depression belongs to all of us. I think of the family down the road whose mother was having a baby and they went around the neighborhood saying, “We’re pregnant.” I want to go around the neighborhood saying, “We’re depressed.” If my mum can’t get out of bed in the morning, all of us feel the same. Her silence has become ours, and it’s eating us alive.

I want to stay in bed for the day and not go to school, but I can’t bear the idea of Luca being there alone. So I turn up for second-period English. My teacher, Brother Louis, has set us some study questions based on Henry IV, and we work on our own. I hold my pen in my hand, but I don’t do the work. I haven’t slept all week and I can’t even see straight.

Brother Louis stands by my desk and looks over my shoulder. He’s in his sixties and knows every text we’re studying inside out. I’ve never met anyone who knows so much about literature. I’m not used to Brothers. At Stella’s we didn’t even have nuns. But he’s the kindest man I’ve ever met, and he’s the only person I do homework for because I couldn’t bear it if he was disappointed in me.

“Would you like to go to sick bay?” he asks quietly.

I shake my head.

“Then go to Ms. Quinn’s office,” he suggests gently.

I collect my books and walk out, and I’m so tired that I feel weepy.

Ms. Quinn is on the phone and beckons me in. I don’t know what I’m going to say to her. Brother sent me down because I looked sad?

“Do you want to go to the counselor?” she asks gently. It’s as if she knows what’s going on and I don’t know how, because I couldn’t imagine my father ringing up the school and revealing anything. Then I realize it’s because of Luca.

“Is my brother okay?”

“I haven’t seen your brother. Do you want me to?”

“No.”

“Will said you were a bit down.”

Oh God. Will Trombal thinks I’m a charity case.

“Can I just lie down?”

“I think the counselor—”

“Please, Ms. Quinn. I’m just tired and I want to lie down and not have to talk.”

And that’s how I spend my day. Sleeping in Ms. Quinn’s office. I think, wouldn’t it be great if I could open my eyes and it’s six months down the track and everything’s back to normal?

But when I open my eyes, it’s one day down the track, and for the time being, that seems to be enough.

During a House meeting the next day, when Will Trombal stands in front of us talking, I’m all ears. Whether it has to do with the night at my nonna’s or whatever he told Ms. Quinn, I just can’t be indifferent anymore. I so don’t want to be attracted to him, and the fact that I am surprises me. Sometimes when I get home, I convince myself that I’m just romanticizing anyone who’s actually spoken to me, but then I see him the next day and my heart starts beating fast and I can’t really kid myself. It’s not as if he’s good-looking, because he’s not. Sometimes he’s so plain that he looks bland. But it’s his voice and his mannerisms that fill him with some kind of color. I listen to his voice and its resonance hooks me in. The worry lines on his forehead, his expression when he twists his face into a smile, and the way his whole face lights up when he laughs those short bursts of laughter. When he looks at me, he must see an annoyed look on my face because I get the same annoyed look back. That’s how I feel. Annoyed that I like him.

When he finishes speaking, Ms. Quinn gets up and gives us a rundown on administrative stuff, and I look over at him and he’s looking back. Tara Finke, as usual, is nudging me and muttering comments under her breath. But I don’t react. I just keep staring and so does he, until the bell rings and we all file out.

chapter 13

A GUY IN Year Twelve has a party and invites all the girls in Year Eleven. No one in our group of four mentions it until the very last minute.

“I don’t think I’ll go,” I murmur to Siobhan when she asks.

“Why not? It’s two guys to every girl.”

Wow! Two Sebastian guys. Dream come true!

“It’d be good to make an effort,” Justine says.

“Maybe,” I say with a shrug.

“How would you get there?” Siobhan asks me.

I shrug again. “Probably my father. You?”

“Obviously not my father. He’d probably insist on coming in and giving everyone a Breathalyzer.”

Siobhan’s father’s a cop. He runs the station over at Marrickville and puts the fear of God into those who work under him, especially his family. He liked me in Year Seven. “Make sure she doesn’t do anything stupid,” he’d tell me. I never liked that about him. Just that certainty he had that Siobhan was always going to do something wrong.

Siobhan gets wasted at parties. It was always the thing you heard about her in Year Ten. She’s the type that constantly imagines herself in love with some loser and then she ends up getting shit-faced and crying in the toilet.

When I think about it, my mother was never threatened by Siobhan Sullivan’s reputation.

“People with lost personalities will suffer a great deal more than those with lost virginities,” she told me one afternoon after Siobhan was suspended from St. Stella’s for cutting school in Year Ten and going to the beach with a couple of the St. Paul’s guys.

“So you’re telling me to go out there and be a slut?”

She looked up from her marking. “Firstly, I’m not telling you to go out there and lose your virginity. I trust that you’re not going to do it just because you’re hanging out with the Siobhan Sullivans of the world. And secondly, losing your virginity doesn’t make you a slut. I slept with your father when I was your age… .”

“Mia,” my father roared from the other room.

“What? So we’re going to lie to her now?” she shouted back.

He walked in. “What if your mother finds out? Or my mother?”

“Robert, it was twenty years ago. I don’t think there’s much they can do.”

He looked at me, pointing a finger. “No sex for you.” He used the Soup Nazi’s accent from Seinfeld.

“Stop treating this like a joke,” Mia said, irritated.

“You think Frankie having sex is a joke to me?”

“I don’t want her to have sex, Rob. I want her to stop hanging around people like Michaela and Natalia, who suck the life out of who she is.”

The people I’m stuck with in my life now aren’t sucking the life out of me, they just suck. That’s what I’d like to say to her.

“I’m not going,” Tara says, referring to the party. “I’ve got better things to do.”

“You wish,” Siobhan mutters.

“I think we should make an attempt,” Justine Kalinsky says. “I’ve got a piano accordion recital, but it’ll be over by eight.”

“Don’t say that too loud,” Siobhan tells her.

“Making fun of the piano accordion thing is a bit passé now, Siobhan,” Tara Finke tells her.

“So are you, Tara.”

Oh, what a united group we are!

“I’ll pick you up, but after that you’re on your own,” I tell Siobhan. “I’m not spending the night looking for you.”

By the time we arrive, everyone is paralytic. Even Will Trombal.

The guy throwing the party is handing out vodka Jell-O shots, and after a couple the sensation is strange.

On the dance floor, Eva Rodriguez is surrounded by a bunch of guys. Her parents are from the Philippines, with the usual Spanish-and-Filipino mix of caramelized skin and almond-shaped eyes. Most of the guys think she’s gorgeous, but the Filipino guys adore her. I watch them move. Their bodies are like liquid as they dance. When they walk, dance, play basketball, they all seem to glide to a tempo that the rest of us can’t hear or respond to.

Will Trombal sees me from the other side of the room and he grins and he makes a beeline for me and my mind is buzzing with the best opening.

Hi.

Hey.

How’s it going?

Great party.

Love your shirt.

Great music.

Crap music.

And he’s coming closer and closer and the way he’s looking at me makes me think that I’m going to have the most romantic night in the history of my life. I open my mouth to say something and he sticks his tongue down my throat.

We’re in a corner, pashing, and I don’t even know what’s got me to this point. A look in the corridor? A flirt outside my nonna’s house? All I know is that no one exists around us. I don’t know whether we’re kissing for five minutes or five hours and my mouth feels bruised, but I can’t let go. Because it feels so good to be held by someone other than Luca. Will’s arms tremble as they hold me and his heart beats hard against me and I know that whatever I’m feeling is mutual. For a moment I taste the alcohol on his breath, and it brings me back to reality.

“Do that sober and I’ll be impressed,” I say before walking away.

Justine Kalinsky is a wallflower all night. I can tell she’s itching to dance, but she just stands there and there’s a worried, pinched look on her face.

“Siobhan’s gone into the bedroom with that Year Twelve guy who’s in charge of the microphones, you know, at assembly,” she tells me. “They’re really drunk.”

“Siobhan’s a big girl.”

“With bad taste in guys.”

“Not our problem.”

Over the weekend, I think of Will one thousand times a day. I think, what if he doesn’t speak to me on Monday? What if he doesn’t ask me out? What if my heart beats at this rate for the rest of my life until he does? Why isn’t he ringing? He knows I’m at my nonna’s place. His nonna would have the phone number.

Oh, ring, ring, why doesn’t he give me a call?

And then it hits me. I’m going to ask him out. Except I’ve never asked a guy out before. Should I wait for him to ring me? He’s made it obvious that he’s interested, even if he was drunk, so why wouldn’t he ring? You don’t kiss me the way he kissed me and not mean business. Do guys shake like that with every kiss? I change my mind one hundred times in a minute. Michaela would wait. Natalia would say, “Let him ring you.” But I feel as if I’ve spent my life waiting. For phone calls from my Stella friends. For Mia to be okay. For someone else to decide that it’s right for Luca and me to go home.

I’m going to ask Will Trombal out! And for the first time in a month, I can see beyond the next five minutes and what I see doesn’t seem so bad.

There’s a lot of awkwardness on Monday. Not a lot of eye contact between the sexes. There’s a bit of snickering as Siobhan walks by, and Tara looks from the snickerers to Siobhan.

“I’m not going to ask,” Tara says.

I’m sitting on my desk, working out my strategy, when Justine Kalinsky approaches us. She has the most distressed look on her face.

“You’re going to be devastated,” she says.

“About?”

“I don’t know if I can tell you.”

“Then why bring it up?” Tara Finke asks.

“It’s not as if I wanted to overhear it.”

“She pashed Will Trombal. And the whole world’s talking about it, right?” Siobhan mocks.

“Not even remotely devastating,” I say.

“It’s much worse than that.”

“Can you stop being so dramatic? I don’t do devastation,” I tell her.

“Will Trombal has a girlfriend.”

Oh my God, I am so devastated.

“I think she’s devastated.”

I try to shake my head. “I’m not… .”

“Yes you are.”

I don’t want to look at them. I don’t want to see the I-told-you-so on Tara Finke’s face or the you-sucker on Siobhan Sullivan’s or the pity on Justine Kalinsky’s.

I feel as if my throat is made out of cardboard, and all of a sudden kissing Will Trombal is the most embarrassing thing in the world. I feel like Adam and Eve when God points out to them that they’re naked.

I feel tears well in my eyes and I can’t even stop them from happening. I can’t stop anything from happening in my life. I just want to get through the day, the week, the year, without ever having to see Will Trombal again.

During period five, I’m in class, not listening, looking out the window into the quadrangle, and I see Luca, his head down, walking toward the toilets. I ask to be excused and I wait for him outside and then we find a place, any place, for some kind of time together. Time that’s been taken away from us by everyone. We find a corner in the library and we hold on to each other tight and he begins to cry. I feel the sobs racking his body before I hear them. I can cope with my misery, but not Luca’s. His pain makes me ache, and I’m crying so much that my whole body is hurting.

“Don’t be sad, Luca. Please don’t be sad.”

And I don’t know why I’m saying something so foolishly simple. Don’t be sad.

Worse still, I realize we’re not alone. Thomas Mackee is standing there, staring as if he’s come across some alien life forms. He nods in acknowledgment and I nod back. And then he’s gone with the secrets of my family’s misery locked in his brain, and I wonder when he’ll use them as part of his arsenal, part of his repertoire of mockery.

“You know what I think?” Tara Finke says on the bus home. She’s the first to say anything to me after I’ve done a literal rendition of the sound of silence all day.

Don’t say it, I want to scream at her. Don’t say anything. Mind yourown business, you loser. Don’t intellectualize my misery . Tara Finke knows nothing but words that mean nothing when your insides are in pieces.

“We have an Alanis night.”

I look at her, confused.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Siobhan Sullivan says. “As if that’s going to help. It has to be Pride and Prejudice. I’ve got the whole six episodes.”

“I disagree. Food’s always good. It always helps,” Justine says.

They talk about me as if I’m not there.

“My place,” Tara Finke says.

An Alanis night is listening to Alanis Morissette’s music, where there’s a lot of revenge and anger toward men. We move on to Tori Amos and then Jewel. So much hate and depression is making me feel sick, although that could also be attributed to the Pringles that I sandwiched between two Oreos.

We watch Pride and Prejudice. Mr. Darcy is such a hottie that it depresses me because his sideburns remind me of Will Trombal’s.

Tara Finke’s mother watches it with us. She talks through the whole thing, which gets very tense around the time Colin Firth, aka Mr. Darcy, comes out of his pond, soaking wet.

Tara Finke has had enough. “Mum?” Tara puts a finger to her lips threateningly.

We watch in silence, but I look at the others’ faces. All of them glued to the screen, a dreamy look on their faces. A hint of a smile on their lips. A sense of hope. They’re all the same. Cynical Tara, couldn’t-give-a-shit Siobhan, romantic Justine.

And I want to cry. Because my face looks just like theirs and I haven’t felt like anyone else since I was in Year Seven and Siobhan Sullivan and I did the Macarena in the foyer of the chapel and got lunchtime detention for a week.

Justine catches me looking and she smiles, and with tears in my eyes I smile back.

chapter 14

MY DAD COMES to see me at Nonna Anna’s, and we spend the afternoon on the front doorstep in silence. I keep on remembering what Mia asked him once. “Take us away and who are you, Robert?” Worse still, I remember his answer. “Is this a trick question, Mia? Am I dead?” I want to ask him a thousand questions, but somehow we’ve forgotten how to speak to each other. Does he miss her voice, like I do? Can he remember what she sounds like? Does he not know who he is anymore?

“This is wrong,” I tell my dad. “What’s happened to Mum isn’t right, but Luca and I want to come home.”

“She misses you,” he says.

“We miss you, Papa. We miss us.”

He nods calmly. “Then let’s get Luca.”

Mia cries when she sees us. Although she’s out of bed, she’s still in her nightgown, looking a thousand years old. Later, my dad, Luca, and I sit around the table. It’s back to the horrible way it was before I went to Nonna’s. None of us knowing what to say.

I get the calendar and put it down in front of my dad.

“Wednesday, choir practice,” Luca says, clutching on to Pinocchio, who is beside himself with excitement. “Mum picks me up at five o’clock.”

“I’ll stay after school,” I tell them. “On Tuesdays, you have to drop Nonna Anna off at the Italian women’s thing.”

My dad begins writing. “Next.”

“Nonno Salvo has an appointment at the podiatrist every Thursday. Mummy usually takes him.”

“And Friday is cemetery day with Nonna Celia.”

“Plus Mummy has two conferences this year.”

“Frankie, you’ll have to ring and cancel them. We can do the rest, but the conferences are going to be out of the question.”

“She won’t want them canceled. It’s taken two years of lobbying to get these conferences.”

“What about the shopping?” he asks.

“You do the shopping and we’ll work around the rest,” I say.

Lots of nods. Lots of determination. And so much doubt that we can’t even hide it.

My dad comes home triumphant from his first grocery-shopping assignment. As if he’s accomplished God Knows What. I want to remind him that my mum does it every week without fanfare, but I’m too shocked at what he’s unpacking.

“What were you thinking?”

“What?”

He looks stunned. A bit hurt. He’s just conquered Coles. He feels like he deserves a medal.

“What is this?” I ask, holding up the yogurt.

“Yogurt.”

“With six grams of fat per one hundred grams. What happened to nonfat yogurt or ninety-seven percent fat-free yogurt?”

“Are we dieting?”

“Papa, it’s not about dieting. It’s about keeping our fat intake down. Look at this,” I say with a cry in my voice, pulling out some crackers. “What happened to rice crackers, ninety-four percent fat-free as opposed to Chicken in a Biscuit, twenty-two percent fat per one hundred grams?”

By this stage, my dad is looking a bit forlorn, but things only get worse.

“Oh my God!” I hold up the Ice Magic. The stuff you put on ice cream and it hardens like a chocolate top.

“Where did this come from? Do you know what this is? Luca is going to sneak out of bed in the middle of the night and squirt it on his tongue. It’s like drugs for ten-year-olds. Today it’s Ice Magic. Tomorrow, heroin.”

We write out a list that he’s to stick to in the future. Luca is already pigging out on the Cheetos and looks disappointed as we eliminate any source of junk food.

I make us dinner and take a big plate in to Mia. It comes back untouched. I throw it away before Luca can see it, and the cycle goes on.

One morning, she’s throwing up in the sink. Nothing much, as usual. She’s leaning her head against the tap, retching, and the sound becomes as familiar as the music she used to wake us up with. I want to do what she did for me when I was a kid. Hold back my hair and make me cry, not from the feeling of having my guts ripped open, but just from the feeling of being taken care of.

But I stand and I stare. She senses me there and looks for a moment. I don’t know what she reads from my face. Am I angry? Sickened? Ashamed?

I want to say, Please, Mummy, be okay, please be okay, because if you’re not okay, we’ll never be.

But I say nothing.

I just go to school.

It’s June, about six weeks into the term, and it’s getting cold, but they won’t let us wear scarves because it’s not part of the uniform. I walk through Hyde Park behind the rest of the students, where Luca is running around the fountain with his friends ahead of me, and for a moment there’s peace in my heart because he’s happy.

After a moment, I realize that I’m not alone. Will Trombal is walking alongside me and I know he’s not there by chance. It’s been a week since the party. In front of us is Siobhan Sullivan, her arms draped over two boys beside her, her uniform riding up. She lifts herself up and swings her legs in the air.

“I think you should speak to her,” he says to me.

“I beg your pardon?”

“There’s stuff written about her.”

I stop for a moment and look at him. “Would you ask me to speak to a guy about the same thing?”

“Why turn this into a gender issue?”

“Because you made it into one. Would you go up to a guy and warn him if there was stuff written about him?”

“Listen, don’t shoot the messenger,” he almost shouts. “The shit that’s written in the toilets is awful, and if she were my friend I’d talk to her about it.”

“Well, it’s not in my job description.”

“You’ve made it your job… .”

“No I haven’t.”

“I’m trying to work with you here… .”

“No you’re not. We haven’t got one thing on that list except for that humiliating basketball game, and now you’ve decided to be Mr. Moral Policeman.”

“Forget it,” he says, walking away angrily.

“And what’s the name for people who kiss other people when they’ve got a girlfriend?”

He stops and turns around, looking me straight in the eye.

“A weak, spineless prick.”

Oh great, I think. Take the right to call you names right of me,you … weak, spineless prick.

“I’ve wanted to talk to you about that, but—”

“But what?”

At the moment his face is red, and he’s looking at me as if I’m at fault. “It’s not as if I planned you,” he blurts out.

Planned me?

“Oh, like you really plan drunken snogging at parties,” I say.

He has the audacity to look hurt.

“Is that all it was to you?” he asks.

“Thinking about it now, yes.”

Liar, liar, pants on fire.

“Fine. Then I think I’ll stick to my plans in the future. I get results out of my plans.”

“Really. Like your rugby game plan? That really works.”

“Oh, that’s very low. Is that why you come along and watch? To remind me of my failures?”

We don’t speak for a moment, but I’m not ready to walk away yet.

“You won’t understand about that night,” he mutters.

“Try me.”

“Okay. I—”

“If you even dare say it was because you were drunk, I can’t promise you where this will go.”

“Why not? You did. Anyway, I thought I was going to be justifying my actions without you interrupting.”

“Then hurry up.”

“I don’t want you to think I do that all the time,” he says, sounding a bit strained.

He’s very stressed. I have caused that stress. I am jubilant that I have caused that stress.

“Why would I think otherwise?”

“Because,” he says.

Because?

“Don’t you do legal studies? Aren’t you in mock trial? Does the argument ‘because’ usually work for you?”

He doesn’t even have the decency to be shifty-eyed. He just stares straight at me.

“You were drunk, Will,” I say after a moment. “I wouldn’t expect you to even remember anything.” I turn to go.

“If I was sober, you would have been impressed,” he says, repeating my words from that night.

“But you weren’t. And I’m not,” I say firmly. “And if you think that I am praying at night for you to ask me out, just dream on.”

I walk away, so proud of myself that I can hardly contain it.

Dear God, please please please let Will Trombal split up with his girlfriend and ask me out.

The prayer becomes my mantra all night. By 6:30 in the morning my eyes are hanging out of my head and I trudge to the bathroom, half-asleep.

On the way back I pass the living room, where the CDs are lying around on the floor.

They’re a combination of my mum’s and dad’s and mine and Luca’s, anything from the Jam to Britney Spears (not mine, I swear to God).

I come across the Whitlams’ Eternal Nightcap, and it reminds me of being in the car on one of our road trips to the Central Coast, when the four of us would sing the whole way. Our favorite song was “You Sound Like Louis Burdett,” and we’d sing it at the top of our voices. My mum would even let us sing the line “All our friends are fuck-ups,” and Luca would sing it the loudest because it was the only time we were allowed to swear.

I loved those times on the beach at the end of the day, when the sun was gone and our sunburn would make us shiver in the cool breeze. Luca and I would lie against my parents, licking the salt off their arms, and we’d stay like that until twilight. They’re the magical moments I remember. The moments of brown bodies and salt water– curled hair, of fish and chips on the sand, of sunblock smelling of coconut, of stinging cuts on our feet from jagged rocks, and mostly of the four of us not needing anyone else in the world.

And I remember the nights of listening to their heavy breathing from the other room through the paper-thin walls of the rented house we were in. Listening to their cries and groans.

“Why is Mummy crying?” Luca would ask me.

“Because she’s so happy,” I’d answer.

I put the CD on and lie back on the carpet, closing my eyes, but then I hear the thumping of running footsteps and I open them to see Luca standing at the door, a look of excitement turning to disappointment, and I know that he would have thought it was my mum.

I beckon him over. “You put one on,” I say.

He looks through the collection and then holds one up. “Not until tomorrow, though,” he tells me.

My mother’s rituals become ours. One morning it’s You Am I’s “Heavy Heart,” and another time my dad puts on Joe Jackson’s “A Slow Song,” because that was their wedding waltz.

We play Smashing Pumpkins and Shirley Bassey and Jeff Buckley and even Elvis. I try to find music that belongs to me, but I realize that Mia’s music has become mine. Mia’s everything has consumed us all our lives, and now Mia’s nothing is consuming us as well.

After we play our music, we get ready for school, going through the motions, getting on with our lives.

And then the worst thing happens.

I get used to it.