Afterlight (4 page)

‘Hi,’ I said, sitting up and edging away from her, remembering what she was capable
of, my knees drawn up under my chin for extra protection. ‘You were right, the kid
needed your, my, uh,
our
help. He’s got no dad—ran off with his PA last year. Mum
works two jobs and can’t drive him. They’re going to be a lot more careful next time.’

Eve straightened, shimmering beside the bed in her usual get up, her face all straight
lines. No joy, no anger, no sorrow. Just business.

As though she’d said it, I thought:
Next
.

And she’d laid it all in front of me like a map—in pictures, not words, because like
I said, she doesn’t speak like we do because she’s got nothing to speak
with
, has
she?

I didn’t need to close my eyes to see a T-intersection, a white-haired white guy
in a dark-blue blazer, gold buttons, white shirt, beige trousers, grey loafers. About
to step out in front of a speeding car. A black ute, tricked up with mirror-image
naked girl decals, in disco-ball silver, on the back window. For good measure, Eve
showed me the same
thing, five times. It was like a
Visions for Beginners
tutorial,
but on her terms, and hers alone.

Like it was projected across the walls, I saw:

Kemal’s Kebab Shop, 100% Halal
, on one corner, a charcoal chicken shop,
Henny Penny
on the other.

Across the street, two banks, a KFC, and a TAB. Colours dull in the daylight. Piece
of cake. Clear as crystal. Sorted.

‘It’s not going to stop, is it?’ I said out loud. She didn’t need to nod because
she’s got a better trick than that. She just vanished.

As soon as I fell out of bed the next morning, I called Eric, the twenty-eight-year-old
part-time DJ, part-time uni student, dreadlocked dish pig, and told him to swap Sunday
kitchen duties with me. Even knowing what I was in for when I returned to The Star
didn’t dampen my enthusiasm.

Someone needed help.
I could almost hear triumphal music as I boarded the tram, bending
to get under the dangling fluorescent green handholds while negotiating the mohair-wearing
uni students who smelt of bong smoke, the seniors with faces like cats’ bums, the
God-awful smell of years of trapped BO in the air.

Storkie’s come to save the day!
my inner voice sang. It felt good, doing something.
It took my mind off the panicky feeling of loss that followed me every moment I was
awake. I would be their daughter and do this thing, and maybe that feeling would
one day recede.

Only, when I got to the pedestrian crossing in front of Kemal’s Kebab Shop, there
was no one there. In my excitement I hadn’t registered what time of day the man in
the suit jacket would arrive. Daytime sure, but morning? Afternoon? While the sun
was still in the sky, he could come any time.

It was 10.43am and nothing was happening at that icy intersection except two people
stumbling into the KFC for a Sunday morning grease fix. An all-day stake out was
not
an option. Not with Eric due to clock off at 12pm and Gran liable to blow a gasket
if I failed to show. I loved Gran, don’t get me wrong, and she loved me back with
all her heart, but she wasn’t the most even-tempered lady.

I heard him before I saw him. At least, I heard the ripples that follow everywhere
in his wake because he was the type of guy, I learned later, that can’t resist calling
a passing Vietnamese girl a
chink
or telling a North African taxi driver to go home,
if you know how to get there, you dirty kaffir
. He was a prick, and this was one
of the biggest immigrant suburbs in the inner city, so it was a spark and tinder
situation. But I didn’t know that when I was
loitering with intent outside Kemal’s
Kebabery. All I knew was that an old guy in old guy clothes that matched Eve’s description
exactly was coming my way and I had to save him.

Problem was: where was the car? There was nothing to save him
from
. I scanned the
T-intersection quickly as the old man strode towards the pedestrian crossing, talking
to himself and looking red in the face, like he was about to have a giant heart attack
right there on the spot. Maybe Eve had been wrong. Maybe it wasn’t going to be a
car. Maybe he was destined to drop dead at my size 11 feet. I didn’t fancy giving
this guy mouth-to-mouth
at all
.

Please, please
, I thought to myself as he came up beside me.
Please let it
not
be
that.

He punched the button five times quickly, like that would make the lights change
any faster, while I twitched around nervily on the spot and debated what to do. Behind
us, someone leant out of Kemal’s and shouted something to the effect of ‘Hey, fuckhead!’
while the man beside me swung around pretty niftily for an old fart and gave him
a big, visual
fuck you
right back. Nice.

The lights changed. Still no car. But something told me I had to keep the old man
from stepping off the kerb.

‘You can’t cross now,’ I said desperately, moving to stand right in front of him.
Meanwhile, the pedestrian light continued its demented pinging, about to click over
to red.

Eve had been
wrong
. A red flush whooshed up my neck into my head, which I was pretty
certain would soon blow off with embarrassment.

The old guy reared back, then muscled forward. ‘You with them, you little slut?’
He jerked his head at the shops behind us, moving in so close I could smell strong
eau de armpit
and something that reminded me of wet socks and braised cabbage all
rolled up together and boiled some more. I had a bird’s eye view of the dandruff
that lay along his shoulders like a thick drift of snow.

‘Just trust me,’ I said, looking over the old man’s pink and flaky bald patch for
that bloody, bloody car, which existed nowhere at present except inside my head.
‘You don’t want to do that.’

Maybe it wasn’t supposed to be today. Maybe I had to go home and come back tomorrow
and hope he’d be
right here
for me to accost again. I punched the pedestrian crossing
button on autopilot. Old sewer-breath didn’t bother to reply. I thought we were safe.

When the lights changed for a second time, I was still facing his way, with my back
to the crossing. Without warning, the man whose life I supposedly held in my hands
just shoved me into the street so hard I almost fell on my bony arse.

As I struggled to keep from going down on the wet bitumen, I saw it, I saw
the car
,
about to run a red into the
T and mow the old bastard down. He was halfway across,
so busy still mouthing off at me over his shoulder that he didn’t see death coming
for him with matching naked-girl decals gleaming in the thin sunshine.

You won’t catch me saying this most of the time, but sometimes being a freak
can
be useful, an unexpected gift. All that Goal Defence I’d been forced to do all my
life was finally good for something. I don’t remember doing it, but people say I
pulled off a feat no one should have been able to pull off that quickly. It was split
second stuff. The guy was already too far ahead. It was already too late. They said
it was superhuman.

They also say that I broke his nose, but based on what I found out about him later—how
much everyone on the street feared and detested him—he deserved that much.

It made the evening news, the next day’s papers. All the locals they interviewed
said it was a nice thing I did, but I should have let him die.

4

The slow clapping and foot stomping began when I entered our form room on Monday
morning. Most faces were friendly or coolly indifferent, which was fine by me. Simon
Pandeli drawled, ‘Nice work!’ and Biddy Cole yelled out, ‘Way to go, Stork. On ya.’

But some were openly hostile. Like Claudia P. and her posse of skinny-jeans wearing,
Napoleon Perdis-abusing, ghd-wielding super clones; the very
bitches
I’d been told
to avoid.

I could see that they couldn’t believe how I’d gone from zero to hero overnight.
I’d been everywhere—on TV, on talkback radio, all positive about
the youth of today
,
for a change. They were calling me
inspirational
and
enigmatic
,
heaven sent
. That
last one gave me a laugh; if only they knew.

A trio of comedians on a commercial radio station had even started a campaign to
get me knighted, they’d written to the Queen and everything. A reporter for
Today
Tonight
had doorstepped me before school when I was still wearing my nightgown and
Uggs, my bad case of bed head a sculpture-unto-itself as I picked up the morning
papers out the front of The Star. Now the whole country knew what I wore to bed and
what I looked like after I got out of it, and I’d been trying to block that thought
out of my mind ever since.

Today Tonight
had taken matters into their own hands because I hadn’t made myself
‘available’ to answer any questions. When the reporter had thrust the microphone
under my nose and said urgently, ‘So give us an insight into exactly how it was that
you happened to be in the right place at the right time?’ I’d muttered, ‘Must be
psychic, mate,’ and shut the door in his face.

But I was like wallpaper. Like grass. No one at Ivy Street could ever remember a
word I’d said after I said it. And any half-clever thing that came out of my mouth
was invariably attributed to the person standing next to me. I was kind of invisible,
which is as mad as it sounds.

Once, I’d overheard my maths teacher say:
If there’s oxygen up where she is, none
of us are breathing it.
But she
would say that. We had a love-hate relationship,
me and Mrs McKendry.

So by second period, what I’d been up to was so ancient history that everyone was
hanging out for recess and news about the latest hook-ups, two-way, three-way, whatever.
As usual, every girl who wasn’t an out-and-out lesbo was waiting to get a look at
Jordan Haig, the most seriously beautiful guy in Year 12 and so off limits that even
Claudia P. and her chain-smoking fembots couldn’t touch him. The way he gave people
the brush-off was an art form and just one more thing to love about him.

I had one class with Jordan—Biology—but that wasn’t enough to get me by, and like
everyone else, I was waiting to eyeball him and his two closest mates as they did
their aloof rebel thing in the corner of the quadrangle that made up the centre of
the school universe. Darwinian stuff went on at Ivy Street High. Every day, there
was at least someone punching on someone else, or getting their extended family involved
so that Asian-Maori, Skippy-Greek, girl-on-girl all-ins were always erupting outside
the school gates—knives, nunchuks and everything—soon as the bell went.

But even the die-hard jocks, the death-metal freaks, the tech-heads, the skateboarders,
the self-starting entrepreneurs and the dorks-who-ran-in-packs-for-safety thought
Jordan Haig was untouchably cool. No one except his two besties knew anything about
him, and they never spilled
their guts. There was a mystery at the core of him that
everyone could see, but nobody could fathom.

He had dark hair, with eyes as grey as rain-washed skies, and he always dressed like
a druggy rock star god, all jangly silver and onyx around his wrists and around his
neck. Some days, he wore cut-off tees that highlighted his incredible tatts. One
of his arms sported a full sleeve of crazy words and symbols, all intertwined and
tricked out in blues, greens, reds and blacks. The other arm was only half-done,
from wrist to elbow. But the guy could clearly stand
pain
and that was enough to
make him object of lust and/or envy No. 1.

And he was tall, taller than me (Yes, there was a God), and when he chose to speak—which
wasn’t too often—they could never catch him out, the teachers, because he always
knew the answer, even though he looked like a hood-on-the-make. He was whip-smart
and nothing ever fazed him, which said heaps about Jordan Haig because when you’re
eighteen, awkwardness goes with the terrain, and he was never that.

So I saw him, finally, that morning I was almost notorious, huddled beside Biddy
Cole and her marginally friendly BFFs. For me, the day had really only started, was
only really bearable, because I’d seen him. As I stared over at Jordan, I wondered
whether my being a household name might somehow make him aware I was even alive,
until I reminded myself what had happened when
looking
turned to
touching
in the
case of Floyd Parker and my face suddenly flamed up so red that Biddy asked me if
I was choking on my apple.

But maybe all the coverage
had
helped because, weirdly, as I binned my morning tea—some
horrible pub-menu experiment wrapped in filo pastry that had gone wrong—Jordan actually
looked up as I passed him by, on my way to Art.