Almost Mine (3 page)

I barely remembered a house tucked in the back end of town, loud dance music, pill-popping and a pole in the middle of the room...then all I could remember was Roy taking me by the hand and leading me to a back bedroom where a friend of his was inhaling smoke from a long glass apparatus that I’d never seen before.

‘You want some?’ Roy asked me. ‘It’ll take the edge off.’

His words were sweetness to my ears. He always knew the right things to say.

I’d sat with the two men and continued wasting my life away. But who cared, I didn’t feel the pain, and that was the point, wasn’t it?

‘Do you want to kiss him?’ Roy had asked through a cloud of smoke.

I coughed and spluttered at the unexpected question. ‘Who? Martin?’

He’d nodded.

Why not?

And so I did. I kissed Martin, and tasted his sour-with-a hint-of sweet-mouth, and then I kissed Roy, who tasted no different…or perhaps it was my own mouth that had tasted sickly.

Before I knew what I was doing — or more to the point was too inebriated and just didn’t care what I was doing — I slipped my underwear to my ankles and let Roy and then Martin have their experienced, adult way with me.

In the light of day, I always knew that my behaviour was horridly unacceptable, but back then I was beyond caring about anything, because in those hazy moments I would forget the one thing that would otherwise have consumed my brain. Here I was with not one, but two adult men who had their pick of any girl but wanted to spend the night only touching me. What more could I want?

I didn’t know how I got to the freezing, wet-with-mist lawn with half of my clothes missing. I could recall some things that happened in that back bedroom, but not when it ended or how I managed to get myself home. My brain was still affected by traces of whatever I’d taken and I stared with heavy eyes down at my shivering, grotty hands…and I began to drift.

My head snapped up and my eyes darted to the back door when the toilet flushed from inside my Dad’s cottage, followed by the closing of a door.

Oh God,
I mouthed as I looked down and caught sight of my despicable half-naked self. I knew that my Dad would be out for a cigarette any second.

Fuck.

‘Cate.’ A whispered voice gained my attention. Nick slipped through the gate concealed by lilacs and he held out his hand to me. ‘Hurry.’

I took hold of it and he pulled me up, ushering me through the gate with a stabilising arm around my bare waist. He closed the gate behind us just as my Dad stretched the screen door open.

Nick led me to the back of the garden and helped me up the few rungs of a ladder made of old fence palings and into his cubby house that we hadn’t been in since we were twelve.

‘Wait here,’ he told me once he was satisfied that I was seated as comfortably as I could be on a cold wooden floor.

Alone in a space that I’d spent countless afternoons playing within, my eyes travelled around the cubby as I waited for Nick to return. My attention became transfixed by a dusty pile of comics. Life was so completely messed up now. How great would it be if we could go back to dress-ups and role playing instead of actually having to play a real life role?

After a few minutes Nick returned and handed me one of his hoodies — that was several sizes too big for me — and a woollen blanket that I recognised from the many times I’d sat on his bed while we’d talked and snacked and played silly fun games together. I felt the warmth of his sleep as I wrapped it around myself.

I noted his sweat pants and the thin sheen of sweat over his skin.

‘Did you enjoy your run this morning?’ I asked.

‘Helps clear the head,’ he grinned as he sat with me. He truly was adorable. He eyed my grubby, blood-scraped feet. ‘They must hurt.’

I looked down at them and blushed. ‘I lost my shoes.’

An awkward beat passed.

‘Did Ellis bring you home?’

I lifted my eyes from my feet and gave Nick a long, abashed look. I shrugged slowly.

‘He doesn’t take very good care of you.’

My shoulders lifted and fell again. ‘It was the anniversary of my mother’s death yesterday.’

‘Is that your excuse?’ he said almost inaudibly.

‘Are you mad at me?’ I said defensively and somewhat taken aback by his question, however accurate it was. He said nothing. ‘Because if that’s the case, I’d rather get an earful of my Dad’s disappointment than yours.’

I shoved the blanket from my shoulders and moved to stand, despite the fact that I was instantly freezing again and didn’t want to leave my best friend’s warm haven. The immense relief I felt when Nick reached his hand out to stop me kept me sitting in place.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said and meant it. ‘Can I rephrase?’

I resettled myself, replacing the warm blanket around my shoulders. ‘Go ahead.’

‘Do you feel any differently about her this year?’

I shook my head. ‘No. I still hate her.’

‘How’s your Dad?’

My words came out as if they tasted as bitter as the bile that threatened to rise at any minute. ‘
He
still loves her.’

‘Sometimes we have no choice in the matter, do we? Do you remember the night that you found out that she had died?’

I swallowed hard as the memories circled in my head.

‘As much as I want to forget that night, there are parts that I will gladly remember forever,’ I said as I pulled Nick’s blanket snug around me. Despite the fact that my face flamed in memory of Nick’s naked body, I was still shivering. ‘And I’m so sorry for what I did to you. I’m sorry that Roy came to town and that I made you think that what we did meant nothing to me. I’m sorry that I am the person that I am and that I treated you in no way that you deserved. I’m just…’ I stopped because my lips were cold and trembling and I couldn’t get the words out. Nick pulled me into the crook of his arm.

‘You know, your life won’t always be like this. One day, you’ll see yourself for the beautiful, graceful and exquisite person that you are; the way that everyone else sees you. Well, almost everyone else,’ he amended.

I snapped my head up to see him through my wet eyes, my brows knitted in defence. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘I’m just saying that some people don’t appreciate you for who you are, and that disappoints me more than you can imagine. You deserve to be free.’

‘I am free. Besides, it’s not as if anybody cares enough to stop me, you know, if anyone thinks that I’m harming myself in some way, you’d think that that someone would try and help me.’

Nick laughed once.

‘What?’

‘You’re nothing if not oblivious.’

I peered up at him. ‘You still love me, don’t you?’

‘I try not to be, but I’m nothing if not obvious.’

I looked down at my dishevelled self. ‘I bet you wish that you didn’t?’

He swallowed hard. ‘Honestly, sometimes, yes. But it will always remain true.’

‘I wish I had enough sense…bravery…’

‘It’s fine, I’m fine. Sometimes it just doesn’t work out, but that doesn’t mean that it won’t ever. Who knows what’s around the corner for the two of us; together or apart, as friends or as something else? Maybe after school finishes in a few months we won’t even keep in touch.’

‘Maybe,’ I said, knowing that any scenario that involved us being apart, at any level, would never, ever happen. We held each other’s gaze as we each thought about it; a silent, unspoken understanding resonating between us that we would always be, at the least, friends.

I shifted closer into Nick’s unmoving hold on me because it felt nice to be in the company of someone who effortlessly made me feel as if I belonged. ‘So I won’t always feel like there’s a black hole waiting to swallow me up?’

He held me tighter, if that were possible, and when he spoke his voice was heavily sombre. ‘It’s already swallowing you, Cate.’

A few quiet moments passed as we listened to my Dad in the yard next door. Finally, he stretched the screen door open and went back inside, telling me that it was safe for me to safely leave if I wanted to. By now, my Dad would have replanted himself in the lounge chair watching Sunday morning news, so, if I really wanted to, I could easily sneak in unnoticed. But I fit so perfectly into the crook of Nick’s arm and when I was in his presence, and he could feel my imminent departure, he would just about do or say anything to keep me close. And I would gratefully indulge him.

‘You can tell me whatever you want to about him, about what you’re going through. I want to help you,’ he said.

I laughed. ‘You’re nothing if not exceedingly generous.’

He shrugged. ‘You’re my best friend. Tell me anything.’

So I told him. I rambled for the next hour about Roy and how impossible it would be to steer him in my direction, rather than his downward spiral. I told him that I knew that I was losing the will to fight for him any longer, and that lately I remembered the limited plans that I’d had for my life that I’d had forgotten since Roy had come to town…but I didn’t tell Nick everything. There were some things that I’d never tell another living soul. No matter how much I trusted them.

Determined not to wander aimlessly through my young life, and determined to bury the irreversible things that I’d done, over the next three years I cleaned up my act. I discarded the pointless pain-relief that I was terrified that I’d become too dependent on, and prayed that Roy would follow suit. We moved into a place of our own and, with Roy flying tandem, we set off on the journey of life.

Disappointingly, though, Roy wasn’t very good at living up to my expectations. Before he left for the last time three years later, the plan had been for us to find a place to live on the coast, line up jobs, and then we’d be all set up to get married and start a family. We’d live happily ever after, loving it up in the sun until it made us old and wrinkly. Instead, he’d ignored me that night, not counting the abrupt grunts that were indirectly thrown my way, and packed everything that he felt important enough to take with him, which
apparently wasn’t me. I had sat on the edge of our bed, initially confounded by Roy’s sudden backflip, but then I shook myself back to reality.

I am disposable.

‘Will you at least tell me why this time?’ I asked him, pointlessly. I didn’t expect that I would get an explanation; he never bothered to give me one any of the other times of the past, I guess, all up, five years, that he’d behaved this way. So, when he’d stopped in the door way that he was about to walk out of and turned slowly back toward me, glaring at me as I sat anxiously, I held my breath, begging him to give me something, just a hint of how I could make him change his mind. And only after his eyes burned a scarring hole in my heart, did he answer my perfectly reasonable question.

‘I’m twenty-eight and you’re barely twenty-two, Cate. I’m just sick of feeling so fucking old.’ He let out a deep resigned sigh and held my astonished gaze for a second. Then he left, closing the door to our flat, and to me, and moved to the coast on his own. And once again Nick was steadfast at my side, openly willing to give me anything that I needed.

About a month or so later on a cold Wednesday morning in April, I fell to my knees in the bathroom, vomiting so hard that I thought my spleen would be next to splash into the toilet. Staring down at what I hoped were the last remnants of my stomach floating in the bottom of the porcelain bowl, I tasted the sour aftermath and shuddered at the bitterness. As I tried to decide whether or not the vomiting had subsided — and as disgusting as it was to see regurgitated raisin toast in the Caroma — I read the regurgitation like tea leaves. I began thinking about my life and how, after Roy had left me, I had found myself in this less than ideal, but not at all unwanted, situation.

By now you know enough about me to understand that I wasn’t very good at making the “right” choices. In all honesty, Roy had pushed me toward dependable, trustworthy, ambitious Nick, to finally repeat the perfect performance of five years earlier. It’s not like I cheated on Roy when I’d spent those nights wrapped up in Nick’s arms, wrapped up in his body, creating this baby that made me throw up every ounce of food that I was lucky enough to feel like eating. So why, now that Roy had returned from the sunny coast a few days ago, begging for my forgiveness, did I feel as if I had betrayed him?

I wiped my mouth with the back of my wrist before flushing, and pushed myself up from my knees. After taking a short sip of water from the bathroom tap, I took a long hard look at myself in the small cabinet mirror in the small bathroom of the small cottage that I still shared with my alcohol-dependant Dad. I wouldn’t dare call him an alcoholic; we Alexanders never admitted defeat. What we did do, though, was bury our truths deep, covering them with tid-bit nonsense that distracted the people that we knew; watch our right hands sing and dance while our left hands wilt lifelessly. Dad muted himself with alcohol to disguise the loss that tore him to shreds, and I would do anything, sacrifice anything, to keep anyone in my life who loved me, all the while pretending that I didn’t care for love at all.

I peered closer into my reflection and tried to envisage myself with Roy years from now. I tried to imagine him without his innate ability to make me feel worthless, and I didn’t know if it was a good or bad thing that the image just refused be conjured. It just wasn’t there. And so that only left Nick’s face, remaining the only certainty as to how my life could play out. But could I use whatever affection that he had for me as a means to get what I want? Could I use the only person who said nice things to me like that?

I watched my face as my brows crinkled with indecision and I shook my head free of the clouded mess. The only matter that left no room for discussion right now was that I was starving for a crispy bacon sandwich smothered in tomato sauce. The rest could wait until I’d had enough perspective to make the right life-changing decision, which at twenty-two was a daunting position to be in.

I spanned my fingers over my abdomen and instantly a smile spread across my lips. Roy or Nick, as harsh as I sound I didn’t really care. My baby was alive and growing within me and that was all that mattered.