Beautiful Monster

The school bus hisses to a stop. Tessa Edwards looks up from her maths book as Camilla lifts her bag onto her shoulder.

‘Luke is so busted tomorrow,' Camilla says gleefully. ‘Watch Allen go mental about him wagging for a surf.'

Tess nods; she can't believe how brazen Luke is. While the rest of them are trying so hard to fit in to Year 8, Luke does what he pleases. When he pleases. Tess is a little scared of Mr Allen; even though he doesn't shout, he seems to menace with his quiet authority.

Halfway down the bus, Brodie's red hair is glinting in the sun. He's waving something at her.

‘What?' she shouts, irritated. Brodie's lips move, but the bus has started up, rattling and snorting down the road. Tess can't see what it is, but it looks like a certificate. ‘What?' she shouts again.

‘An excellence award.' His lips form the words. ‘Mum's gunna be so pleased.'

Tess smiles at him. He's a pain in the bum sometimes, but he's cute too. Two days ago she'd helped him cover all his schoolbooks, carefully smoothing the plastic so it didn't wrinkle, even finding photos of him and his best friend, Joel, to put on the cover of his school diary. But he'd found one of him and her instead—at Adventure World, both wet and sunburnt but smiling—with their arms around each other.

‘Use this one,' he'd said, dropping it onto the diary. ‘You're an awesome sister—sometimes.'

And today is his birthday, so she's trying hard to be especially nice.

‘Stop using that schoolteacher voice,' Mum had warned her when they left for school this morning. ‘Brodie's only ten—you forget he's not as mature as you.'

‘Bossy Tessy' Brodie calls her when she's like that. But he doesn't get how hard her life is, the pressure she's constantly under to get good marks while still fitting in to this new school structure, so different from primary school. His world revolves around trading cricket cards and electronic toys.

Tess looks out the window at the passing shopfronts and sighs. She's got a science project to finish tonight and a maths investigation—calculate the length of ink an average student writes in a week. It's been troubling her all day. She thinks she knows how to do it—just needs to run it past Dad tonight. But she groans, remembering: he's doing an extra shift at the clinic. Maybe she can ring him. Mum will try to help, but she's more arty than mathematical.

The bus pulls in at their stop. Brodie gets off before her. Tess waves to a couple of girls from her year. ‘Wait up!' she shouts at Brodie.

‘See what I got?' He thrusts the certificate in her face.

‘Yeah—you're just a genius,' she says, watching the traffic, ‘for a brain-dead dead-head.'

Brodie is laughing. ‘And you're just a hairy armpit freak.'

Tess reaches out to give him a quick punch. He's been telling everyone about the hair in her armpits. She'll kill him next time. ‘Shut up, Ranga.' She pulls him back from the kerb. ‘Wait.'

The traffic streams by. It's a seventy zone, but most cars seem to travel much faster.

‘After the blue one,' Tess points to the right, ‘then stop on the island.'

They cross to the middle and wait for another break in the traffic. Their mum has been trying to get a crossing guard on this street for ages. For the first two weeks of school she wouldn't let them cross without her until Tess kicked up big-time. ‘We're not babies anymore, Mum,' she'd complained, humiliated by the gibes about mummy's girls from the kids on the bus. ‘You're giving Brodie a stigma—they're all teasing him.'

Her mum had been reluctant, but hadn't let go of her control completely. Most afternoons she just waited for the bus to leave before she came around the corner to watch them cross the road.

The wind whips up out of nowhere; it seizes Brodie's certificate and fires it up into the air. Tess hears him gasp. His hand reaches up to snatch it back, but it somersaults, taunts him, a runaway kite. He doesn't take his eyes off it, lurches out into the street.

Tess reaches for his backpack. Misses the strap. Pulls the Darth Vader key ring off.

The white sedan hurtles down the street.

The wind drops suddenly and Brodie's certificate falls to the bitumen road. He reaches down to peel it up.

Tess hears screeching brakes.

A bang.

The soft whump Brodie's body makes as it hits the ground.

Then the engine revving, the squeal as the sedan fishtails down the road, its front bumper sparking against the bitumen.

She huddles next to Brodie. All traffic both ways has stopped. Suddenly it's silent. She can't speak and can't turn him over. He looks like a broken bird. People are rushing about them. There's a new noise, and it overwhelms her. Mobile phones, shouting and a high, thin keening. She looks around wildly.

Brodie doesn't make a sound. The side of his face is pressed against the road, covered in blood. His eyes are shut.

Her mum is running down the footpath. Running towards them. Her mum doesn't make a sound either. She drops to the ground. Then moans, ‘Brodie, Brodie,'—over and over again.

They don't touch him. Sirens are getting louder. The keening continues.

‘Tessa, Tess.' Her mum grabs her shoulders. ‘Stop it. Stop.'

But she can't. She can't close her mouth. She can't stop the noise.

‘What was the registration number?' the uniformed policeman asks as he crouches in front of her. His pen is poised over his clipboard; he looks hungry. ‘What did the driver look like? Do you remember the make of the car? The model? Was it a woman? A man? Did they look like they'd stop?'

His questions bounce off her—hard, like missiles. Tess looks at her parents. They want to protect her from the questions, guard her from remembering; she sees this in her dad's tight smile. Her mum stares blankly ahead. But they want the information, too. It will help catch the driver, the one who did this.

Tess racks her brain, desperate to give them something. But she has nothing.

‘I don't know,' she says. That's all she says. ‘I don't know.'

She sits in a plastic chair on the linoleum-floored waiting room, her black shoe tracing the chequered pattern over and over again. She can trace it in different ways and it becomes like a kaleidoscope—though the colours never change. And every image is Brodie. Lying on the road, like he was sleeping.
Maybe he was sleeping,
a voice in her head says.
And soon he'll wake up.

They sit in the hospital waiting room. They wait. It occurs to Tess that they are the patients, not Brodie. She says this to them, her voice inappropriately loud. ‘We are the patients, see. We have to be patient.'

Her dad murmurs and squeezes her shoulder. Her mum is rigid, her face a grey mask. Tess wishes she'd take it off.

Brodie's been in surgery for hours. And then the doctor comes. Her dad rises. He knows. He turns to her mum. She knows. No one needs to tell Tess anything, because she knows too.

She looks at their faces. She squeezes her eyes shut. ‘Make it all right!' She runs at her dad—he's a doctor, he can fix anything, it's his job. ‘Change it,' she pleads with him. ‘Go in there and change it.'

He holds her tightly. ‘Tess,' he whispers into her hair. But she won't have it.

‘No!' If she's loud enough, someone will come. Someone will make it right. ‘No!'

And then her words are echoed back at her.

‘No, no, no, no, no.'

Mum has collapsed. She's on the floor, in a ball, her arms are wrapped around her legs. She is rocking madly on the spot. ‘No, no, no, no...'

The house is silent, the air thick and heavy. Her mum spends her first medicated night in bed, alone, while her dad paces the kitchen floor. Tess watches him—back and forward. He stops every now and again to stare out the window, watching the headlights come down their street. She wishes that it was Joel's mum about to drop Brodie home after T-ball, or the movies, or a sleepover. Dad sinks slowly into the wooden kitchen chair and clutches his head.

The ringing phone jolts him. They have told only a few friends, who rushed around immediately and then were sent away by their next-door neighbour watchdog, Mrs Olsen.

‘Not today. Give them some space,' she cooed so firmly that decade-old friends turned away.

The phone rings again—shrill, obscene.

Her dad lifts the handset. ‘Yes?' His voice a monotone.

It's a woman. Her voice is so loud. ‘I'm terribly sorry to bother you. I just wanted to know ... the little boy who was run over today? Someone told me his name and ... I can't stop thinking about him. Is he ... is he okay?'

‘Were you there?' Dad shouts into the phone. ‘What did you see? Do you have any information? Anything at all?' He stands up—the chair falls backwards. ‘Hello?' he shouts frantically. ‘Hello?' But the woman is gone.

Tess watches him carefully through the turned posts of the banister, hugging her knees to her chest. She shivers in her thin nightie. It's so cold. But he has slumped again, into another chair. The phone is loosely cupped in his left hand. His right hand is pushing hard against his mouth. In the morning they gather in the kitchen and watch each other warily. They move around silently and ever so courteously.

‘Excuse me...'

‘Please, may I...'

‘Would you like...?'

It's as though they are strangers in a familiar environment. Or familiars in a suddenly strange one. No one wants food, and bowls of Cornflakes bloat in milk, while toast toughens, becomes brittle. They sit across from each other at the kitchen table, drinking coffee, not speaking. Nero, the black Labrador, shuffles from one to the other, his nose intrusively probing their legs. Distracted, they brush him away.

Tess finds it comforting to wipe the granite benchtop—over and over and over again.

Suddenly the phone rings, startling them all out of their own thoughts. Tess is glad—hers are horrible, unbearable. So graphic.

She watches her mum, who has assumed the movements of the living dead, shuffle to the handset. She lifts it to her ear and murmurs, ‘Hello?'

Tess is close enough to hear the voice. Excited, she thinks, hysterical.

‘How is the little boy who got hit yesterday?'

Her mum doesn't even pause. ‘Dead,' she says flatly and hangs up the phone.

The word hangs in the air. It's so loud.

Dead.

Brodie.

Dead Brodie.

They sit in shocked silence. Mum looks at both of them, her eyes begging for forgiveness. But she has said it and made it real. Dead. Brodie is dead.

In their warm kitchen, light streams through the window; in another room disc jockeys are laughing at some woman's reaction to a crazy call. They watch each other. There's a knock at the door.

Her dad moves first. He jumps up, as if whoever is on the other side can make things right. He twists the handle, more light pours in, but nothing will ever make them warm again.

It's Aunty Sue, holding a foil-wrapped dish.

‘My darlings,' she says, bustling in and enveloping her dad in a tight embrace. Her eyes flit from Tess to her mother, who now leans against the bench, deflated. ‘My poor, poor darlings.'

Aunty Sue's offering is the beginning of the casserole onslaught. So much food, so many meals no one is capable of eating. The Edwards are on hunger strike. Tess wishes she could paint a sign:
Please do not feed.

The other one she'd really like to paint is her automatic (unvoiced) response to the question,
And how
are
you Tessa?

That sign would read:
I am totally fucked. So fuck off.

But no one says what they are thinking. No one can voice how they feel, because if they do, what might happen next? Better to just shut it, move on, pretend all is well.

And they do.