Alex as Well (3 page)

I’M WALKING UP the street towards my house. Alex and I. Is it ok with you if we keep us separate? It makes more sense. We sound like two ordinary kids. Besties, and sometimes we get along great and other times we disagree, just like you and I are friends. Because the alternative is a little bit freaky. I know. It’s freaky for me too. I guess we’re in this together.

Our house is Tudor-style. And it’s always the same temperature. My dad installs air conditioners, so we’ve got the best available system, usually reserved for maintaining the temperature in commercial wine warehouses, or operating theatres—that kind of thing. Our house is freezing in a constant and predictable way.

It has a turret. It perches on the corner where the two roofs meet. The rest of the house is really badly laid out. Like, the downstairs toilet is next to the fridge, because the kitchen and the bathroom are back-to-back. There’s
a wall there, but it’s still gross. Also, it’s three storeys high but the attic is useless. You have to climb up a ladder. And if you want to put anything up there you have to lift it over your head, or hold it while you’re climbing the ladder. So basically there is no furniture in the attic. It has a million shoeboxes, which sounds interesting. You could imagine a Shaun Tan book of it, couldn’t you? But it’s not that interesting. Just documents and journals and old diaries.

Now you go, ‘Ooh, old diaries, that could be interesting,’ and I thought that too, but they’re my mother’s and they’re full of obscure lists like: Potting mix, light? Anna 10.15. Posted Cindy.

I made that up. It’s been a few years since I have looked, and I can’t remember
exactly
what they say. The point is that three storeys sounds as though it’s grand, but the top floor is a million shoeboxes full of crap. Still, it’s totally worth it for the turret, even if you can only see it from the outside.

And there’s a lesson in that for all of us, Alex says, doing his best TV evangelist impersonation. I suppose he means that I have an inner turret somewhere compartmentalising all my crap and I’m badly laid out downstairs.

There’s no front garden. The house is right on the street. It’s on a corner block. There is an oak out the front on the kerb. It looks as if it’s been there since the beginning of time. I can imagine it standing there through floods and storms and earthquakes, like a time-lapse
movie running in my head. The oak rocks. Some people would look at it and see a thousand coffee tables.

The oak and the turret. Sounds like a pub.

Despite the oak and the turret, which I love, I don’t want to go home. My mother is waiting on the front step. She is all bleary-eyed, wearing a rumpled, pilled and wash-faded tracksuit and slippers. She has grey roots. She’s been through the metaphorical wringer. She’s the anti-Clinique girl.

I stop under the oak, with my hand on its solid trunk. It’s letting through a dappled light, and I have this fleeting connection with the planet, as if I am supposed to be here. That doesn’t happen very often.

My mother holds her arms out and I sit next to her on the top step while she hugs me and sobs.

Alex is not buying it. My mother is not hugging me to make me feel better, she’s hugging me to convince herself that she’s not a bad mother, because she can still put her arms around the perverted little freak.

‘I love you,’ she whispers.

It’s the boy Alex being hugged. I stand back with my thumbs in my belt loops.

This hug is all about my mother. It’s about her granting the love. It’s so generous of her to still be able to love me despite my deformity. I can see her congratulating herself.

She rubs my shoulders. ‘Shall we get pizza?’

Because that will make it allll better.

However, she is trying. I’ve been a girl in my head since as long as I can remember, but this is all new to her, so I’m nodding, and we go inside.

I appreciate that this is difficult for her. It’s like I’m coming out. Except it’s not like coming out, because I’m not gay. Actually, I don’t know whether I’m gay, because I find girls attractive, but when I think about sex, which I do a lot (I’m General Wood), it’s the girl bits that I find, well, you know. Maybe I am a lesbian. Except that I imagine that I am the girl with the bits.

That’s not how other people do sexual fantasies. I don’t know how other people do them, but probably not like that. It seems kind of insular, doesn’t it? Being both parties? But then since it’s all happening in my head, nobody can be offended about not being included, can they. If there’s a place you should be able to put yourself first, it’s in your own sexual fantasies.

I told you it’s confusing. It’s easier to think of me as two, isn’t it.

The pizza company has one of those automated ordering systems where you have to speak and the computer guesses what you want.

I say ‘vegetarian’.

I’m sorry did you say…librarian? Alex says in his best computer voice. Was that…agrarian? Did you say… utilitarian?

I roll my eyes. My mother is standing there and her face is white.

‘What about a chicken and bacon deluxe?’ she asks.

‘I’m a vegetarian,’ I say.

I am. I’ve just decided, right now. Actually, it was when I was under the oak tree, reaffirming my place on Earth. I was thinking about how other people would see that tree as coffee tables, and yet to me it’s so much more beautiful being literally a mighty oak.

And then, as if I was hopping across stones in a babbling forest brook, my subconscious went:

I’m

Not

The kind of

Person

Who kills stuff.

And landed on the other side a vego.

My mother is screeching. Her face is all purple, her eyes are bulging and there is a vein in her forehead, like the one Julia Roberts gets, but it doesn’t make my mother vulnerable and endearing, no, she looks like she’s having a forehead hernia. I worry that it is going to burst, and her face will fill with blood under the skin like a big, red balloon which will finally explode and splatter the walls. It’s very distracting. I can’t understand what she is saying.

I think it went, ‘What new cruelty is this?’

Alex calmly holds the phone out to her and says, ‘If you want to have a chicken bacon deluxe then have one. No need to have an aneurysm about it.’

I mean, jeez Louise! It’s a pizza, woman! Get a grip.

She grabs the phone and starts beating us with it. I shrink away, but she hits me on the shoulder about six times and then she misses me and gets the wall. She takes a breath and has another brain explosion. This time she starts crying and trying to hug me again, but she has boogers, and it’s gross. I back away, so the kitchen bench is between us.

My mother screams, ‘Why won’t you touch me?’

Alex says, ‘Because you have halitosis.’

Which is true. My mother has chronic gum disease and it fair knocks me out of the park, and that’s why I haven’t wanted to hug her for years. I don’t even know if I would otherwise, because it has always been that way, and so I’m conditioned to turning my head away from her stinketty-stink breath.

I know it sounds like I am being totally rational through this, but it’s shock, and also I’m not shocked at all. I’m kind of used to it, because…my mother has always been…

Imagine if Uluru is absolute serenity and the ocean is homicidally mental, then my mother has been driving up and down the Pacific Highway for as long as I can remember.

Sometimes she might get as far inland as, say, Mudgee, but then she kind of shakes herself out of it and heads back to the coast.

My mother drops on the ground and she’s rolling
there on the kitchen floor moaning, ‘You’re killing me.’

So we’re back to that again.

Twenty minutes later the pizza guy arrives. I take twenty bucks out of my mother’s wallet and pay him. I tear off two wedges for each of us and put them on a plate and we watch
Bargain Hunt
. The vegetarian is really good. It has feta on it. Salty. It’s as if nothing bad has happened, except my mother has hiccups. We’re good at pretending stuff wasn’t said. We do that all the time.

But I’m still a girl.

IN THE MORNING Alex puts on the shirt with the peter pan collar, the tartan box-pleat tunic, and the knee-high socks. I dab on the shimmery pink eye shadow and the lip gloss. I looked up all these do-it-yourself hairstyles on the net. I’ve pinched my mother’s ceramic straightener to make some soft curls. Then when I’m finished General Wood abuses himself again.

(Whatcha gonna do with all that junk, all that junk inside your trunk?)

Ok, here it is: everything you need to know on the noodle front.

It’s really small.

Or alternatively, it’s really, really big.

Either way, since there will probably only ever be one owner-occupier, if you get my drift, it functions quite economically. Got the picture? I’m not going to mention it again.

Alex and I are nervous and excited about going to the new school. We steal down the stairs smoothing the pleats and tweaking the seams between my fingers. My mother is standing at the window cupping a coffee in her hand.

She glances at me, blanches, and then closes her eyes. She is counting to ten. I can tell what’s going on in there. If she scrunches her eyes up and wishes, maybe I will disappear.

I oblige, but I have a lump wedged in my throat, bitter and lemony.

Secretly, when I walked down the stairs, I wanted her to think I was pretty. I wanted her to touch my hair, and be proud of me, and wish me good luck today. Because this is the girl I want to be. Not slutty, or dumpy, but feminine and confident. I like this me.

I enjoy being a girl on the train. I flick my hair out of my face and cross my legs. I inspect my nails. Nobody seems to be questioning my gender. One man even says, ‘Excuse me, young lady,’ as he moves past, which is a total trip. This young guy up the back is checking me out. He slouches and stares. I look demurely into my lap, but when I look back he is still staring. He holds up his phone and I’m pretty sure he is taking a photo of me.

Which reminds me. I pull out my moby and look at it, just in case. No messages from my dad.

I tap compose and then I sit there for ages. Eventually I type
hey you
, really quick and press send. I dump it in my pocket. It will buzz if he answers.

As I look out the window I can’t help thinking about the pizza incident.

What the hell was that?

My mother does try to love me. They both do. Why is it so difficult for them? Am I so unlovable that they have to work that hard? I don’t know what it’s like to be the child of other parents, but I don’t think loving your kid should be such a chore.

No new messages.

You might be wondering about all my friends from my other school. Truth is I’m a loner. I have always been a little bit ashamed, because it’s been clear, as long as I can remember, that there is something really wrong with me. Kind of like the seagull with the fishing line wrapped around its leg. You know you can’t do anything about it so you try not to look at it.

Also, this very bad thing happened, and I can’t go back there.

Very bad.

But I’m not going to tell you any more about that because you’re already feeling sorry for me, and I don’t want that to tip over into something else…like irritation. Instead I am going to tell you something good about me.

I can clap really fast.

Imagine the fastest clapping ever: well, I can do that. I can do six or seven claps in a second. I’m like a hummingbird. My hands are a total blur. You’re trying it right now, aren’t you?

Ok, so maybe you can do five claps in one second, but can you do six or seven claps a second every second for a whole minute? No, you can’t, because that takes a special aptitude and a dogged commitment to fostering it.

I’m not going to do it right now, because there are other kids who have hopped off the train at the same station, wearing the same uniform as me. I follow them through the big sandstone gates, smiling my head off at the giant girl on the billboard out the front, because she could be me. I could be her.

There are good things about me. There are probably as many goods things as there are bad things. I am pretty as a girl. I’m really tall as a girl. I bet I could arm-wrestle any chick here, and half the guys too.

They’re having an assembly. There’s a sea of kids sitting in the quad. The seniors are in seats up the back. I stand at the side hugging myself because I’m not really sure where I’m supposed to go. A few kids stare at me, but mostly they don’t, because I look normal, and since I’m in uniform, they don’t know that I’m new.

Someone touches my elbow. She’s my buddy, she tells me. Her name is Amina. She’s eye level with me. I’m five nine, so she’s really tall for a girl too. She has a deep,
melodic voice and a mild accent. She’s Somali. She’s House Leader and Sports Captain, according to two little pins on the lapel of her blazer. Amina is the most beautiful Earthling there has ever been.

The teacher at the front talks about zone athletics, the library fashion parade, and then makes a long speech about how we’re not supposed to bully by Facebook.

After assembly and on the way to class Amina looks through my timetable. She frowns, draws her hair back from her face and tucks it behind her ear.

We stop outside a room. Amina slouches against the wall. She tells me a story, which I can’t remember, because I am too busy watching her lips. They are really pink on the inside. Sometimes I get little glimpses of tongue, and when she’s finished she shrugs and says, ‘and that’s the way the cookie is crumbling.’

Isn’t that adorable?

She tells me where to meet her at recess.

You can see what’s going to happen, can’t you? I’m going to fall in love with Amina (who are we kidding? I’m already in love with Amina) and it’s going to be really, really complicated and totally unrequited, and I’ll probably end up with a broken heart—worse, because Amina won’t just reject me, she will be
repulsed
by me. She will tell everybody about my noodle, and then I’ll have to top myself in a really brutal man-way.

I can see it too.

Maybe it will end up a different way. Maybe I have
happened on the only other one of whatever it is that I am. We will be hooking up and I will discover that she has a noodle.

And we will laugh and laugh!