Chapter Three
I didn’t usually sit at the back of the bus. That was where all the popular cool kids sat.
I wasn’t popular or cool.
I always sat at the front.
Today, however, I was pushed to the far back by the other kids because the bus was busy.
‘Can you all move down,’ the bus driver shouted out. ‘Come on, we haven’t got all day.’ I felt awkward being at the back but it was the only place to go.
I always envied the popular girls and wanted to be popular myself but I had clearly been dealt phobias and obsessions before looks. I got the luck of the draw with those.
My older sister, Sam, thought differently though.
‘You’re really beautiful, Keisha, you know. I wish I had your looks,’ she said to me one day when we were looking in the bathroom mirror and I was putting on some of her lip-gloss.
‘Are you kidding? No way. Trust me, Sam, you wouldn’t want to look like me. Not in a million years.’
‘Oh yes I would! Look at that gorgeous long dark hair you have and those beautiful blue eyes. Why wouldn’t I want to look like you?’
I was embarrassed.
I didn’t like people commenting on my looks.
I had three sisters. We were called ‘the Morgan sisters’ because our last name was Morgan. Original, I thought.
Sam, the oldest, was the sister I had the strongest bond with. She had always looked after me, especially after Mum died.
I had a connection with Jessica, the second oldest Morgan girl, but she was as temperamental as an inside aerial. She was kind and compassionate one minute and so elusive the next I thought she must have bi-polar. She was a big girl too.
Alex, the youngest of us, thought Jessi looked fat in the overgrown orange jumper she wore almost every day like she was homeless.
‘You look like an orange on steroids,’ Alex said one day when we were eating breakfast.
Jessica scrunched up her big nose, pouted her tiny lips and said, ‘well, look at you. You look like a blonde bimbo. You’ve definitely overdone that peroxide and push-up bra.’
Jessica always gave as good as she got.
Alex huffed. ‘At least I’m a thin bimbo, which is more than I can say for you.’ She strutted out of the kitchen twisting her hips as she went.
Alex always gave as good as she got too.
Jessi continued to eat chocolate and chips. Actually she ate anything, and it multiplied in her body like the fat virus and added large morsels of fat to her cottage cheese cellulite. It was like she ate to spite Alex. Maybe she was just past caring though or maybe it was Mum’s death that had made her immune to worrying about consuming copious amounts of junk.
When Mum died we were all very depressed, except for Alex that is.
Alex was the reprobate in our family.
‘Mummy, why is Alex so different to us all? Does she belong to our family or to someone else’s?’ I remembered asking when we were little and after Alex had pretended she wanted to push me on the swing but pushed me off instead.
‘It’s because she’s the youngest, Keisha. It’s difficult for her.’
It was difficult for us all.
I often wished I could stay back in my childhood where it felt much safer and where I felt protected and unharmed. I wanted to go back to believing in everything. It was way too fast moving from six to sixteen. It was like the Christmas holidays you wait so long for but which seem to go nowhere by the time you’re back at school and in another grade.
I weaved in and out of the sweaty kids to get to the back of the bus trying so hard not to touch them but that was as impossible as trying to turn off a tap in a public toilet without using your fingers.
Then I saw him.
Craig Foerster.
He was sitting right at the back.
He was a God.
He had sandy blonde hair that reminded me of Barbie’s locks, only shorter. His eyes were like blue marbles against white china and his body like an upside down elongated triangle. He had such pure delicate features.
‘Excuse me, please,’ I said as I put my head down to move between two boys.
‘Hey, you’re that nerd who hangs out with that Harry Potter nerd, aren’t you?’ one of them said and laughed.
I didn’t answer.
‘Cat got your tongue?’
I brushed past him and my bare arm touched his sticky shirt.
Hot and disgusting.
Germs always prospered in heat.
Sometimes I panicked when I saw Craig. My chest tightened and I felt like I couldn’t breathe. My ribcage was closing in on me, acting like a clamping device.
I kept my head low and sat down. I was only three people away from him. I looked at his hands. It was safer than looking at his face.
‘Yeah, when I leave school I’m going to get one of those Skyline GTR’s and mod it,’ I heard Craig say to the boy next to me.
‘Ah, cool. What are going to do to it?’ the guy said.
‘Ah, man, what am I not going to do to it?’ From the corner of my eye I saw Craig smile (and what a beautiful smile he had) and shake his head slowly. ‘I’m going to give it eighteen inch chromies, a three and a half inch exhaust, cannon muffler, Momo gear, Alteza lights and I’m going to get it lowered.’
‘Wow, that’s going to look totally mad!’
‘Yep, it’ll be the best car on the road. It will stand right out.’
Craig didn’t need a car to make him stand out.
He did that all by himself.
I watched his hands the whole time. They were beautiful. His long fingers wrapped around the straps of his bag would have been able to span across ten piano keys. That was two more than an octave. I played the piano when I was younger but became frustrated with not being able to play perfectly that I gave up.
Craig didn’t play piano.
He played football.
I hated football.
But it was Craig so I didn’t care.
‘My God, he kicks that ball well. Look how fast that thing goes,’ I said to Doug one lunchtime when we were watching the footy from behind the bike shed.
‘Yeah, that’s why he’s mid-fielder.’
‘Watch how he kicks. He’s so amazing.’ I was mesmerised.
His legs were magnificent. They were firm and hard like the seat he sat on. I could tell just by looking at the contours beneath his school pants. And then I looked at his crotch.
Even that was appealing.
What was I thinking?
I quickly turned my head.
I remembered when I was about nine Mum took me to the gym with her to do yoga. She thought it would help with her sickness. I sat against the back wall with my legs crossed and watched the women fling themselves into a mental delusion like they were doing some kind of sanctimonious ritual.
‘Push your feet into the ground, feel the earth,’ the instructor said almost too seductively while lunging and swaying her arms first to the left and then to the right. I never knew why but I always associated the movements, the way she spoke and the musky smell of the room with sex.
I wondered if women did yoga because they didn’t have anyone to give them sex, and yoga was their means to filling a void. When they closed their eyes and breathed in heavily I thought about this show I once watched at night on SBS with a man giving a woman sex.
My bus trips reminded me of the sweaty, musky smell of the yoga room. If it weren’t for Craig getting the bus I probably would’ve walked home.
Every inch of him was perfect.
Every cell of him was perfect.
He had no mutations.
‘Dad, do you think I have one big mutation in my genes because of my illness?’ I asked after studying genetics at school one day.
‘I don’t know, Keisha,’ he said and laughed. ‘I really don’t know much about genetics. Ask one of your sisters.’
He always passed me off
to one of them even though they knew less than me about medical matters.
I stepped off the bus, and steered clear of the curbs and cracks in the pavements.
I knew the pavements and cracks off by heart. It was a five-minute walk to my house and I always kept my eyes glued to the ground in case some new cracks or a pile of vomit had surfaced since yesterday.
My obsessions were like Dougall’s compounds.
Kneaded together and ready to explode.
That was my mind in a nutshell.
*****