“Crushing pain’s better than crushing boredom.” She stabs her mum’s jeans with the pegs and slaps at the legs. “Don’t you ever feel like doing something different from what you do every day?”
“All the time,” I tell her, but she’s not listening. She’s talking without taking a breath. “I call this Mum’s scuba suit,” she says, holding up underwear. “She gets pissed and tells me I’ll know all about being old one day. Even when I’m old, I won’t wear that.”
Pegs fall. She leaves them on the ground and pulls more from the basket. “I bet you’re glad you don’t have to cook for your cousins. Bet you’re thinking, Thank God I don’t have to hang out my mum’s underwear. Thank God my mum doesn’t make me hang out washing from the caravan park. Thank God my mum doesn’t make me stay at home while she’s out working.” She steps on a peg and cracks its back.
I peg a towel so it hangs between us but her voice keeps going in the background. “It’s like I talk and she doesn’t hear,” Rose says.
I peg another towel.
“It’s like she’s not even there.”
And another.
“Like …” She stops, and what she’s said catches up with her. A yappy dog barks from a yard down the street. We finish hanging the washing in silence. I walk out from behind my towel fence and pick up the fallen pegs. “I might go home now.”
“No, wait. Stay. I’ll cook you dinner.”
“Why?” I ask.
The shadow of a bird passes over her face. “People change,” she says. I’m not sure whether she means me or her. I hang around for dinner either way.
Rose turns on the TV for her cousins. I look through her CD collection while she’s cooking. I don’t have a problem talking to Gus or Beth or the customers at the music shop because we’re talking about things I know. People say, “There’s this song by a girl and it goes kind of like this.”
I listen and say, “Yeah, that sounds like Luscious Jackson,” and I find it for them. I pull out a few other things I know they’ll like and I get a kick out of watching while they listen. They’re thinking, This track is my life. Exactly. The music kicks in and maybe the bad times kick out and maybe the world’s a little better for them than it was before. After they’ve gone, Gus says, “You’re the biz, kid.” But I didn’t find them music for the money and he knows it.
Rose has mostly chart stuff in her collection, the kind Dahlia likes. It’s all fast beats and boppy. I’m not against the boppy beat, but there’s better boppy beats out there. There are songs that swing a person out of themselves for a while.
“Dinner’s ready,” Rose calls, and we sit down to burned chops and lumpy potatoes. “God, this is disgusting. Sorry,” she says, spitting some out.
“You know, I’m really good at making toast because my dad’s a chef.”
“Toast sounds good,” she says, staring at something that might have been a chop in another life if she hadn’t burned it beyond all recognition. “Toast sounds really good.”
While I’m spreading butter, I think about how I like the noise in Rose’s house, lines of music, threaded and knotted over the top of one another. Knives hitting plates, chairs scraping floor, kids screaming, her dad’s slippers shuffling his solo, “Can’t a Man Get Any Sleep Around Here?” Mixed together it sounds like a little kitchen symphony.
Mr. Butler takes over babysitting, and we sit in Rose’s room. She’s got this picture on her wall of tiny churches and dollhouses floating in a dark ocean. “They’re protistan shells,” she says. “Made of silica and lime. We learned about them in science.”
Before today, I never imagined Rose would be the sort of girl to care about school. I imagined her to be the sort to hang around the back sheds, smoking. I guess you have to listen to a person to really know them. “What are protistans?” I ask.
“They’re these tiny organisms that live in the ocean. You can’t see them unless they’re magnified about two thousand times. People look right through them,” she says. “It seems like such a waste for things like that to be invisible.”
I look closely at the floating glass houses. “I hear my old music box when I look at them,” I say before I think that it might sound stupid.
“When I was a kid,” she tells me, “I wanted to know how someone trapped music in that tiny space. I smashed it to see. You ever do that?”
I shake my head. Mum gave me that music box.
“What’s it like living in the city?” she asks. “What do you do when you’re not at school?”
“I play guitar and write songs. I work at a music store on Acland Street, down on the beach. It’s close to where I live, close to loads of places to eat. Luna Park’s near the water. From the Ferris wheel, Mum and I used to look over the ocean on one side and the city on the other.”
“I’ve never been to the ocean. I want to go there. Go to the city. Go somewhere that leads places.”
“The river leads somewhere,” I say.
“Yeah, but I can’t see further than the bend.”
Gran used to tell me where the river went. She described the way one small trickle met up with another, how eventually you’re at a roaring mouth. She loved to talk about where she and Grandpa had traveled before Dad was born. “My gran’s been heaps of places. She said this town was as beautiful as any she’d seen.”
“Yeah, but she got to see all the others.”
“You’ll see them,” I say.
“How do you know?”
I look at her poster and think about it. “Because you want to.”
Down the hall, one of her cousins cries. “I can’t stand kids screaming,” Rose says.
I plug my iPod into her computer and play a different mix than the one in her kitchen. I play some stuff to make her feel like she’s someplace else, someplace better.
A minute into Moloko and Rose is up and dancing. Apart from Mum and occasionally Dahlia, I never dance in front of other people on account of me being so shit at it. But I watch Rose jumping around and she doesn’t look all that much better than me. She looks kind of like Dahlia does when she bounces on my bed. “You got to cut loose once in a while,” Mum says. Five minutes into Moloko and I’m on the bedroom dance floor with Rose. I’m someplace else, someplace better.
I dance to Charlie’s music, spin and spin and forget about my cousin screaming and my mum pissing me off and how sick I am of this town. She loads songs onto my laptop and I need her to be like that, to want to be my friend, but I’m thinking at the same time, Why would you do that? Why give yourself away to someone who said the things I did in the backyard this afternoon? I said them by accident; I didn’t mean to hurt her, but I still said them.
“This song was my gran’s favorite,” she tells me, and I’m expecting some old guy to come on but instead “I’m gonna smash up the world” screams from the speakers. “We didn’t play it at the funeral,” Charlie says, and almost laughs.
I wouldn’t go to her gran’s funeral and it was practically next door. “I barely know the Duskins,” I’d told Mum when she asked, and it’s the first thing she didn’t push me on. I guess she figured she couldn’t make me care. Dave went with his parents and I gave him shit about wearing a suit.
Charlie and her dad stayed for about a week. Dave and I were sitting at the bus stop when they left. We weren’t waiting for anything; we were filling in time. She kissed her grandpa goodbye. He barely kissed her back. I looked at Dave to say something, but he was staring at his shoes. “Let’s find Luke,” he said, and took off ahead of me up the street.
Old Mr. Duskin still ran the shop after that, but there wasn’t much you could buy in the place. Mum sent me in for things like cans of tomatoes and pineapple that we didn’t even need. I started sneaking into the supermarket when Mum sent me for things. The only time I went back into the Duskins’ shop was when Dave wanted something. “You can get that at the supermarket,” I told him.
“I know,” he said, and went inside to buy it from Charlie’s grandpa.
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“Thanks,” I say before Charlie goes. “For the music. For hanging out.”
She acts like it’s no big deal. “I’ll burn you some more stuff,” she says.
“You should bring your guitar next time. Sing me some of your songs.”
“Nah. They’re just things I write to make me and Dahlia, my best friend, laugh.”
“If Dahlia laughs, then I probably will.”
“Dahlia’s not hard to make laugh,” she says. “She still cracks up when you say ‘butt’ to her.”
I think Charlie might be lying. I don’t think she plays at all. “Well, I’ll listen when you feel like it.”
After she’s gone, I play the music she left me. I watch the tiny protistan shells, and I think about her telling me I’ll leave here. The light makes them look like old blue Fords and guitars drifting through the ocean. The last song on my laptop is about a night with no moon. The singer’s voice is velvet and sad. “Silver dots in darkness,” she sings. “She’s miles away from morning. Midnight blood is thick with longing.”
I drift, almost sleeping, and the voice drifts around me. A thought about silkworms drifts as well. Mum bought me some a long time ago. They spin silk inside the cocoon, but to get at it you have to boil them alive before they hatch. One of my teachers told me and I came home and asked Mum if it was true. She nodded. “But we just won’t use them for silk,” she said. “We’ll keep them as pets; that’s all.” I ran my hand over the rough cocoon. I wanted so bad to see the silk.
The singer spins the chorus one last time.
Sunny notes from an open window wake me Christmas Eve. That and a couple of dead women yelling at me to get Grandpa and go pick out a tree.
That’s not so easy. Mostly he sleeps till late afternoon. He gets up and sleeps some more in front of the television. The curtains stay closed, and the light from the box throws this eerie blue glow over him. If I wrote a sound track to the life we’re living now, it would be a slow note echoing from a saxophone.
He’s asleep when I look into his room late this morning. I shake his shoulder but he doesn’t wake up, so I get close to his face and check that he’s breathing.
“Is there something you want, Charlie?”
“Shit, Grandpa. You nearly gave me a heart attack.”
“It’s strange, but that’s almost exactly what I was about to say. What is it?”
Now that I’ve woken him, it doesn’t seem so important. “It’s Christmas tree time.”
“There’s an old plastic one in the cupboard under the stairs. We’ll use that this year.” He closes his eyes, and that dusty note rises again.
I let him sleep. I know a few things about ghosts. The only way to stop them getting inside you is to spend every second of the day thinking about something else. Fighting like that makes you tired, and it doesn’t matter how hard you fight anyway. They chip till they make a crack, and before you know it there’s a ghost squatter in your living room. It’s hard to get them out. Hard because they settle in. Hard because you like the company. If Grandpa’s too tired to get a tree, then I’ll go and bring one back for him. Someone in this family has to make contact with the Christmas spirit. “That’s funny, Charlie,” Mum says. I’m a funny kind of girl.
Dad’s working in the shop. I walk in and tell him in a way that’s meaningful, “Our family needs tinsel.” He looks at me and says there’s some in the third aisle. I go for the tree on my own.
It’d be a great plan if it included a map and a mobile phone. I left both at home. I’m about halfway to nowhere, taking a break under a tree and singing a punk version of “White Christmas” to distract myself from the heat of my nowhere-near-white Australian Christmas, when Mrs. Robbie’s car pulls up.
Dave leans out of the passenger window. “What are you doing?”
It’s a Christmas miracle. My words are back from vacation. “I’m just out enjoying the burning heat of the day.” He grins, and I walk over to the car. “How’d you know it was me from the road?”
He doesn’t answer my question, just flicks his eyes over Grandpa’s old yellow rain boots, my short dress, and this hat that Gus says makes me look like the revolution’s coming. I see his point. “You need a lift somewhere?” he asks.
“I’m going to the pine plantations for a tree.”
“This road doesn’t lead to the plantations. It doesn’t really lead to anywhere.”
I open the car door. “In that case, I’m going wherever it is you’re going.”
“Hi, love,” Mrs. Robbie says. “Come to our place. You can have one of ours.”
On the way to Dave’s, we drive past the skeleton tree. There still aren’t any leaves. But there’s one bird sitting on a branch.
“So which one do you want?” Dave asks. The back section of the side paddock is covered in pine trees about the size of me. “Dad thought we could make some extra money at Christmas.”
“I want that one.” The tree I pick is breaking all the Christmas rules. It’s lopsided, and one of its branches is longer than the rest. “It looks like it’s giving us the finger.”
“I’d be fairly pissed, too, if someone was about to hack me off, stick me in a living room, and throw me out come New Year’s,” Dave says.
“I’ll decorate it.”
“Then it should think itself lucky.” He starts chopping. “Mum says she’ll drive you back after lunch. You can ring home when we get to the house.”
I watch the tree falling. “Dad and Grandpa won’t notice I’m gone.”
We carry it slowly up the hill, Dave leading the way. “So what’s with the rain boots in summer? Is that some city thing?”
“Yeah, Dave. Plastic yellow rain boots are very in at the moment.”
“Really?”
“Not really. I hate snakes.”
“They’re more scared of you than you are of them,” he says.
“I don’t think that’s possible.”
“In those boots, it’s possible.”
“Don’t make me laugh. I’ll drop the tree.”
“This tree could only look better if you dropped it. You picked a shit tree,” he says. It’s not even that funny but we’re laughing and I’ve got that crazy rubber hand thing happening so I can’t grip the trunk. “Wait, wait. I need to stop.”
We sit in the shade and catch our breath. “So, Rose says you’re making her some music mixes.” He leans back on his elbows. “Can you make one for me?”
“What sort of music do you like? Thrash, heavy metal, grunge?”
“Rose said you gave her some girls playing guitars. That sounds like something I’d like.”
It feels like maybe we’re talking in code, so I say, “I really love girls playing guitars.” I lean back like he’s leaning. Cool. Relaxed. But then I realize if we are talking in code, then I just told Dave I really love myself. He’s not acting like I’ve said anything stupid, though. He’s smiling.
“You ready?”
“I’m ready.” I’m changing my name legally to Ready Duskin.
“What are you thinking?” Dave asks. “You’ve got a weird look on your face.”
“But weird good, right?” I ask, picking up the tree.
“Right. Of course.”
“I was thinking about changing my name. What would you change yours to?”
“I’m kind of comfortable with Dave.”
“But if you needed a stage name, to give yourself some kick. Like Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers.”
“He changed it to Flea?”
“I guess. I always figured his mum didn’t name him Flea at birth.” Bold move if she did. “I’d be Charlie Arabella Bird Duskin.”
“Bird because you sing,” he says. “Is your middle name really Arabella?”
“Yep. My mum’s name is Arabella Charlie. I’m Charlie Arabella. She used to say I’m her turned inside out.”
“I could be Dave Rolling Robbie.”
“No you couldn’t. That’s a bad name. I can’t let
you have that name.”
His dad walks out of the house. “You left the gate open. The cows could have been all over the road, you idiot.”
Dave goes quiet. I put the tree down and stare at him. “Idiot doesn’t really suit you, either,” I say, and he’s laughing as he walks into the house.
At Rose’s place, dinner was this concert of laughter and noise and mess. Lunch at Dave’s is quiet. Every time I clink my knife against the plate, it sounds as loud as if I’ve dropped it on the floor. “They didn’t get out,” Dave says when his dad goes on about the cows. He keeps going on, though, until Mrs. Robbie looks at him with concrete eyes and says, “They didn’t get out.”
Everyone eats quickly. His dad talks about work and the things that need to be done, about the snakes in the back paddock. It’s not until he leaves that I realize I’ve been holding my breath.
“So, Charlie,” Mrs. Robbie says while Dave clears the plates and puts on the kettle. “You look exactly like your mother. God, she was gorgeous.” She pats my hand away from my face. “Stop that. Your smile’s beautiful.”
Mrs. Robbie waits in the car while Dave carries the tree into our living room. He spends ages putting it in a bucket, steadying it with bricks. “That should stay now.”
“Thanks, Dave.”
“So we’re all going camping on the thirtieth. We’ll be back on New Year’s Eve.” He waves and walks out the door.
I watch him go and try to remember the exact tune of his song. So we’re all going camping. So we’re all going camping. So we’re all going camping. He could have meant a million things. He could have meant nothing at all. “Maybe he was asking you to go with them,” Mum says.
“Maybe he needed a line to get out of the house,” I say.
“Maybe if you worried less, you’d have more than two ghosts for friends,” Gran says. Harsh, sure. But not entirely untrue. I start in with the tinsel.
I watch Dave heaving and dragging a Christmas tree into Charlie’s house. Looks like he’s finally working on something other than cars.