I packed everything in the trunk this morning. Computer, keyboard, iPod, dock, CDs that I haven’t had time to load, this nifty little record player I found at a flea market, my favorite records. “Do you have everything, Charlotte?” Dad asked before he started the car. I’ve been getting the urge lately to say things that mean something to see if Dad gets it, so I said, “All I’ve got is in the trunk.” He nodded and started the car and I thought about me and him. Words floated in my head like they do when I’m getting an idea for a song. Words like smoke and rain.
“See if you can find anything on the radio,” Dad says after I ask about Gran.
I search around for a station. “Nothing but empty air.” I replay the CD mix I made for the trip.
I’ll miss Gran enough for both of us. She always took a little time off from the milk bar when I visited. I’d play songs for her while she hung out washing or worked in the garden. I sang softly while the smell of lavender drifted across the day. Gran’s favorite was this cover I did of a Pink Daze track, “Smashed-Up World.” Watching her get on down to the explicit version, I used to say that old people don’t always lose their groove. But then sometime the year before last she lost it and seven months ago she died.
Most years I stay in the country till about halfway through January. Dad heads back to the city after Boxing Day. “I have to work,” he says, starting the car before he’s kissed me goodbye. I watch him drive away and I can almost taste the chocolate cake someone else’ll be eating.
This Christmas he’s taken time off from the restaurant to help Grandpa over the busy season, so we’re here together till the twentieth of January. Six extra days might not seem like a lot but it’s a long time in this place without friends or Gran. It’s a long time if Dahlia keeps up the silent treatment she started last week and doesn’t call or text me this summer.
“Who’s this?” Dad asks when a catchy tune comes on my CD. We pass the skeleton tree that never has leaves, no matter what the time of year. Bare gray branches wave us on. “No one you know, Dad,” I say.
It’s me.
Luke keeps skimming my name across the feathered grass. I hate being interrupted at the freeway. It’s my time to be alone, my time to think. Lately, I’ve got a whole lot of things to think about, like how I’m getting out of here at the end of summer. I know I won’t be asking Luke or Dave to help me think of a plan. That’d be a quick way to stuff up everything.
“Stop yelling, Luke. I heard you the first time.”
He’s still shouting when I see the dusty blue Ford coming toward me. Another boring summer full of people like boring Charlie Duskin. I watch her car pull into the gas station on the edge of town. She arrives every year carrying this guitar she never plays, hanging around with her iPod on and looking like the world’s about to end. I’d give anything to leave this town after the holidays. I’d even trade places with her if it meant I could go to that school in the city.
“Today, Rose,” Luke shouts, turning his bike back in the direction he’s come from. “Meet us at the bus stop out front of the milk bar.”
I don’t move straightaway. I close my eyes and imagine what it would feel like to be in that car instead of here. To know that at the end of the holidays my dad and I would escape. “I’m leaving at the end of summer.” I say it aloud to make it real. I want there to be witnesses, even if it’s only the cars and the road and the sun. When I get scared about what I have to do, I’ll think about the cormorants. I’ll remember what happens when you’re born in a place where you don’t need to fly. I stay until Luke’s voice echoes again. And then I open my eyes and pick up my bike and head back the way I came. Just like every other day.
Rose is still on the hill when Dad pulls into the gas station. Luke and Dave rip past me, Dave riding without hands so he can wave. She rides past later, eyes ahead, both hands on the bars.
I used to watch them when I came for the summer. They’d play cricket with the kids from the street in Rose’s backyard and I’d sit in Gran’s old plum tree because I could see it all from there.
“Why don’t you go on over?” Gran asked once when she found me. Because Rose had red silk for hair. Because she laughed like a trumpet, mellow and sweet as mango. She had two boys for best friends and always decided what the three of them would do. She’d say, “Let’s go to the river,” and Luke and Dave followed. I sat high in the branches and dreamed of someone following me like that. I wanted someone to look at me the way Luke looked at her.
When I was in Year 7, I heard them talking out the front of the shop. “Piss off, Luke,” Rose said, and he brushed his hair back from his face and smiled. He followed her like a long dress dragging in the dirt.
When I told someone to piss off, they did. I know because in Year 8 I told Ayden Smith and he never spoke to me again. “Why’d you say that?” Dahlia asked. “You sort of liked him, didn’t you?”
“It worked for Rose Butler,” I said, and Dahlia looked at me the same way she always did back then. As if I was crazy but she didn’t mind. “Well, Rose Butler’s wrong. There are rules with boys, and one of them is, if you want them to stick around, don’t tell them to get lost.”
Sure, it made sense. But it wasn’t what I wanted to hear. I wanted her to tell me there was some way to be like Rose, some way to be a girl who doesn’t follow the rules. Gran invited her and Luke and Dave over one summer at the end of Year 8. She made sandwiches and cake and we sat in the living room. Rose didn’t eat. She didn’t talk. She kicked the legs of the chair she was sitting on and glared out the window.
Dave was the only one who spoke to me. “Thanks for the food.” He walked to the gate before he turned back. “Rose is only mad because she hates doing what her mum tells her!” he yelled, and ran after them down the street.
I liked how Dave smiled at me before he ran and how his hair hung around his face, half falling in his eyes. I liked that he let Rose bowl him out in summer cricket and laughed when the guys gave him a hard time for it. He hangs behind Luke and Rose like the backbeat to a song. They need him there, though; he fits, and he knows it.
I wouldn’t mind sitting next to Dave on a day when the sky’s a lazy blue. I wouldn’t mind singing him a song where the backbeat is the front beat. A song about a girl who’s been holding it all in for years and finally finds a way to let it all out.
“Ready?” Dad asks, getting back in the car.
“Oh yeah. I’m ready.”
Mum’s the one who understands what I really mean when I say things like that. I cried with her when I got the news about Gran. She was the one who told me to sing “Smashed-Up World” and sing it loud. I did. I punched it at the air before Dad got home. Punched it at the world. Cracked it out till there was no sound left, just an ache in my throat. Mum wouldn’t tell. She’s good at keeping secrets. She should be.
She’s been dead for seven years.
I was nine years old when it happened. I walked out of school and Dad was sitting in the car where Mum should have been. She always picked me up. I thought maybe he was planning a surprise for her. I remember sun and blue sky. I remember the white of the clouds seemed louder than the words when he said them.
He drove home. We sat in the driveway and I wished he would drag out the moment before we went inside, drag it out forever. He unclipped his seat belt and went in the house.
I sat there thinking about this time when Louise had invited most kids to her party but me. On the day she was having it I lay in bed feeling heavy and then this music started up in the living room. I went in and Mum and her friend Celia were playing the Rolling Stones. It was the first time I’d heard them and it felt like that riff was rising from somewhere inside me. Mum and Celia were thrashing around in the music and I thrashed with them. Celia said, “I’m so fucking glad they wrote this song.”
And Mum yelled, “I’m so fucking glad they wrote it, too.” I stopped dancing. She never swore. “Sometimes you got to let go, Charlie,” she shouted, so I did. I shook the wor
ld out and shook something else in and I knew then that I had a way to be happy if I needed it.
The day she died I sat in the car till the world got dark. Till I was sure I heard the Stones playing. I ran inside but the only sound was a tap dripping in the laundry.
Dad didn’t talk about the accident that night or ever. It was Gran who told me that Mum died crossing a road; a truck driver didn’t see the red light and hit her on the way through the intersection. Mum was carrying a set of chef’s knives and a book of guitar music. The truck driver was carrying a load from the country. When they got up that morning, neither of them knew where they were headed.
Dad worked a little less after the accident. He hired lots of babysitters and swapped to mostly day shifts, but it didn’t make much difference. The house was quiet either way.
Mum and I talk a lot, so it almost feels like she never left me. When I visit the country at Christmas, she comes, too, and she talks more than ever. The thing most people don’t know about ghosts is that they travel inside and around you. Mum’s in my head and in the water and the rocks and the grass. She tells me how it was when she and Dad fell in love. How it felt when her mum and dad moved overseas and she missed them. How she found it hard to fit in sometimes.
Dad packed up most of the photos of her but I have two. She wrote her name on the back of my favorite one: Arabella Charlotte Webb. Almost like the character from the book. She was sixteen years old, laughing and spinning on an old tire in the river. She was two years away from knowing me. Eleven years away from dead. She was beautiful. A hundred times more beautiful than me.
I keep my second-favorite picture in my sock drawer. I don’t look at it very often. It’s of Mum and me on a sunny morning. We’re out the front of our house, and it’s my birthday. She’s holding on to the back of my bike. I remember she’d wrapped the whole thing up in colored paper and put it outside my door. It rusted in the shed after she died. I haven’t ridden since.
Whenever I tried, Mum’s voice purred in the wheels. “Miss me, miss me, miss me,” it said. I did. I missed her so much nothing felt right anymore. I feel like we’re chasing each other. I’m chasing her to find the rest of myself and she’s chasing me to show me who I was meant to be.
Gran and Mum are the people I talk to the most. The dead are quiet when it comes to secrets. They keep them in a place that no one knows about and no one can find. They know how bad I want to fit in, how bad I want to meet a boy who’s not put off by an impromptu roll into the pool or the occasional incident of public nudity.
Some nights I want so bad it’s hard to sleep, so I spend the time practicing my guitar. I’m getting really good. Old Gus says, “You’re the biz, kid,” when I play well in a lesson. He’s been saying I’m the biz quite a bit lately. He’s been saying, “You could do this for a living.” I couldn’t, though. Not unless there’s a living in singing to the dark.
That’s when I sing the best, voice spinning into air, spinning silk around me. While I’m singing like that, people dying doesn’t matter quite so much. “Sing it, Charlie,” Mum says, and I do. I sing it to the ghosts in my head.
Catacomb Days
The sky’s a furry blue blanketing
The crowd at the funeral
Clouds bright
Washing-powder white
The wind smells like roses
And something no one can name
A car backfires, kids run
She’s eating tiny sandwiches
Trying to make sense of the sun
And what it thinks it’s doing
She’s lost in catacomb days
She lets a ghost catch a ride
They crack a few jokes about not being alive
And how the music was deader than the dead
She’s thinking words like “dirt bed”
But she doesn’t say
Anyway
The ghost’s hands are warm
And her dad’s hands are clay
The ghost asks what she’s thinking
But she can’t say
She’s lost in catacomb days
She wonders if she’ll come back
If no one shows her how
And the ghost looks out the window
Says wow
I’d die for
One more
Taste of cake and bread and wine
Those little sugar biscuits
With real chunks of lemon rind
I’m aching for the day when I was blood
Aching for some hands to rain some skin across my skin
Aching for that moment when I let a person in
Aching just to want again
The ghost asks, “Don’t you want to want?”
But she can’t say
Maybe one day
For now she’s lost in catacomb days
I ride past Charlie at the gas station and meet Luke and Dave out the front of the milk bar. “We missed the last bus because of you,” Luke says, and keeps saying it till I want to glue his stupid mouth shut. “We could be on our way to the movies right now if we’d been a second faster, but no, you had to wave at one last car.”
“She gets it, all right?” Dave says, but he’s pissed off as well. The best way to spend Sunday is at the movies. How was I to know Mrs. Holly agreed to bring us home if we got ourselves there? “No one said you two had to wait. Could have left for the bus without me.”
“Can’t even get chips.” Luke nods his head at the milk bar. “Shop’s closed again. I’m going home. Coming?” he asks me.
“No.”
“There aren’t any more buses, Rose,” he says, and I’m yelling on the inside: Don’t you think I know that, Luke? Don’t you think I know that every day in this place turns out exactly the same as all the rest?
“There’s nothing to wait for,” he says. “No buses or cars. Nothing.” He shoves the last word in my face.
“See, Luke, now I’m sure there’s something to wait for because I’ve known you for sixteen years and you’ve never, never been right.”
“I’m right this time. You could wait all day and nothing’s coming round that corner.” He starts reading from the bus timetable. “Ten-fifty. Last bus on a Sunday.”
“Shut up.”
“Next bus, nine a.m. Monday morning.” I kick his knee out from behind him so he bounces forward. “Right, you asked for it,” he yells, and I start running a second too late. Dave shakes his head and sits down to watch while Luke grabs my T-shirt and drags me back to the timetable. “Say I’m right.” He’s shouting and laughing at the same time. “Say it, Rosie. For once say, ‘Luke, you are right.’” He holds my shirt tighter and hacks up spit in the back of his throat. “Say it or wear it, Rose.…”
Before I give in, I hear wheels on gravel. Luke and I look up as the old blue Ford stops in front of the shop. Charlie stares at us through the window. She hugs her guitar tight. “What were you saying, Luke?” I ask.
“That’s not worth waiting for. Just Charlie Dorkin back in town. Must be summer.” He hunches over and brushes his hair forward into his face. “Who am I?” he asks.
I open my mouth to laugh but catch the sound in time and push it back in my throat. “Shut up, Luke.” I can’t believe I didn’t think of it before. Charlie arrives for Christmas every year and leaves two or three weeks later. Mum loves her. She’s been on my back for years to make friends with Charlie. The Duskins are probably the only people in the world Mum and Dad might let me go to the city with. I could stay with her. Let’s face it, I’d be doing her a favor. I’ll probably be the only friend she’s ever had.
“Her name’s Charlie Duskin,” I say.
“What do you care?” Luke asks. “You’re the one who said she was weird in the first place.”
“That was before.”
“Before what?”
“Before I started comparing her to you. Let go of my top, idiot.” I push him off and leave both of them at the bus stop. I walk close enough to Charlie on m
y way past for her to see me smile.
Her eyes always bothered me when we were kids. They still do. They make mine ache trying to see where they end. She used to watch Dave, Luke, and me when she came to visit. Once she spent the whole summer spying on us from her gran’s plum tree, staring out from the branches with those shiny possum eyes. She never asked if she could join us; she hid in the leaves and watched, licking juice from her fingers.
“Charlie’s lovely, Rose, and all on her own when she comes down for the summer.” Mum said almost the same thing every year.
“She doesn’t want to be friends. She spies on us,” I answered once. “If I spied on people, you’d kill me. She gets to do whatever she likes. She doesn’t have jobs around the house. Nothing.”
Charlie would sit next to her dad in the shop and eat whatever she liked and he never told her it was nearly time for dinner. “I’m going to the river,” she’d say, and he never hassled her about when she’d be back.
“You’ll learn the hard way,” Mum said, and I knew I’d gone too far. I didn’t mean I wanted Mum to die. I meant Charlie didn’t have it as bad as everyone thought she did.
Her gran invited Luke and Dave and me over once a few years back. Mum told me I had to go. She made me wear this dress that itched and shoes that pinched and I was so pissed off that I made Dave and Luke promise not to talk to Charlie when we went inside. I didn’t want to be friends with her and no one could make me.
I remember one time when she came to my house. I think it was in Year 7. Her gran had sent her over with a message for Mum. She knocked and Dave, Luke, and I came out of the door. I told her Mum was inside, and the three of us kept walking. Dave hesitated, but he followed in the end. It felt good to leave her on the step. I couldn’t stand how desperate she was to be part of us. If she’d told us to piss off, maybe I would have liked her more.
She doesn’t spy now. She walks around town looking like this is the last place in the world she wants to be. Maybe she and I actually have something in common.