Friday Brown (6 page)

I was the centre of my mother’s world for sixteen years. It was a strange feeling, that someone I barely knew could dish out dislike based on a badly timed giggle. It made me wonder whether my opinion of myself was wrong. Vivienne protested too much sometimes. She told me she loved me enough for two, that fathers were overrated. She kept me close, even closer when she was out of love. Was I in fact deserving of dislike? How could I measure my own character with only one reference?

I resolved to be nicer to Darcy with the see-through skin.

Silence led me into the kitchen. Crates were lined up around the table but there was nobody there. Coke sat flat in plastic cups, swimming with cigarette butts. Cold chips—just the overcooked and greenish ones—were lying on a sheet of butcher’s paper. It seemed as if there had been a meeting, abandoned.

Silence scraped together a handful of chips and shoved them into his mouth.

‘Where is everybody?’ I asked.

He pointed up.

‘What’s up there?’

Attic,
Silence whispered. The word seemed to stick in his throat. He cleared it. The effort made him cough and even that sounded like someone had turned his volume down. After a minute of breathless hacking and hoicking into the sink, his face was pale. He collapsed onto the
floor, his chest an over-inflated balloon. I heard his lungs crackle.

I patted him on the back. ‘Should I get someone? Tell me what to do.’
Don’t die, don’t die on me, kid.
I wanted to run for help but my feet felt like they were fused to the floor.

‘He needs his inhaler,’ an Aboriginal girl said from the doorway. ‘I’ll get it.’ She disappeared up the staircase. When she came back, she held a small, blue canister to Silence’s lips and cupped the back of his neck.

He inhaled the mist. Within seconds, his breathing steadied and he leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes.

‘I’m Bree,’ the girl said. She had short, curly black hair, a dimpled white smile that took up most of her face. Bottomless eyes. She grabbed my hand and squeezed it. ‘Relax, will you? He’ll be fine in a few minutes. It happens all the time. Asthma.’

Her accent was warm and familiar, her voice gravelly. Her words rolled over each other like marbles in a cup.

‘Do you need more?’ she asked Silence.

He pushed her hands away.

‘Dust sets him off,’ she said to me. ‘Are you ready? Come on, everyone’s upstairs.’

I thought about what Carrie said.
Pledge. Allegiance. Sacrifice. Virgin.
Well, maybe not the virgin part, but the other things sounded serious and binding. And what I needed then was not to be bound, not by anything, especially people.

‘Arden said you were small,’ Bree said and started up the stairs.

Silence followed. He looked back at me standing by the sink and raised his eyebrows.

I shook my head. ‘I should go.’

‘It’s dark,’ Bree said and kept walking. ‘Come on. I brought rum. Carrie’s got vodka and pretzels.’

Silence clapped.

Pretzels. Pretzels were harmless enough.

The attic space was cavernous, echoing. We entered through a square in the ceiling after climbing a rickety ladder that groaned and flexed under our weight. The windows were blacked out and a sloping roof touched the top of my head in places. The light from two candles drew looming shadows on the walls.

They sat on the floor in a semi-circle.

Arden wore a trench coat that spread like a dark pool around her. Cigarette smoke drifted in a halo around her face. She handed the butt to Malik and he crushed it on the sole of his boot.

‘Here she is,’ Arden smiled.

Joe added to a chain of pretzels by biting the corner off one and linking it to the next.

Carrie gave me a fang-toothed smile and slapped the empty space next to her. She offered me a bottle of vodka and lemon, but I shook my head.

Silence sucked another blast from his inhaler.

‘Sit,’ Arden said. ‘Are you okay?’ she asked Silence.

‘He got wheezy,’ Bree said. She opened a twist-top
bottle with her teeth, chugged and swallowed. ‘He’s better now.’

Darcy shuffled to close the space between her and Carrie.

Carrie jabbed Darcy with her elbow.

I sat next to a young boy with long hair the colour of rain-soaked wheat and shifty eyes that rolled and flicked from side to side. His fingers were bitten and raw, swollen around the nails, like burst sausages. He looked about nine or ten.

‘AiAi,’ Arden said and reached across to tousle his hair.
Aye-aye.
‘He’s the baby of the family. Who else have you met? Joe? Carrie? Darcy, our little ray of sunshine?’

Carrie snorted. She was so big she couldn’t cross her legs properly and her chin touched her chest.

Joe and I nodded to each other. He offered the bag of pretzels.

‘We don’t need her,’ Darcy said. ‘The group’s getting too big. We’ll get found if we get too big. If they find me they’ll take me back.’

Arden looked over at Darcy.

The girl shrank.

Arden turned her laser-stare to me. ‘So, tell us about you. Where are you from? And what have you done?’

‘I haven’t done anything,’ I stammered. ‘I’m from the country…’

‘Everybody’s done something, country girl.’ She lit another cigarette and lazily pulled a flick-knife out of her boot. She flipped it open and sliced a ragged tip from her
fingernail. ‘I know it. We all know it.’ She waited. The tip of the knife was pointed in my direction.

Dread made my arms tingle. ‘I ran away,’ was all I gave her.

Her laughter was short. ‘We’re all running,’ she sighed. ‘There’s something you need to understand about us. We’re not a gang. We’re family.’

Family. The word struck like a gong.

‘There are rules we follow so that we can stay together,’ she continued. ‘Some of us are listed as missing persons and that means there are people looking for us. Who’s looking for you? Are you missing?’

‘Nobody.’ I wasn’t missed.

‘Well, you’re lucky. If you want to stay, you need to keep our secrets. Can you keep other people’s secrets, Friday?’ Her eyes glittered.

‘Yes.’

‘AiAi here has a junkie for a mother. He’s had so many broken bones he rattles when he walks. He’s got one leg shorter than the other and he’s missing more teeth than he’s got left. Did Silence tell you why he can’t speak?’

‘No.’

‘His father stood on his throat. In boots. For a long time. And Carrie pretends she’s a vampire dyke to keep the…’

‘Stop,’ Carrie said in a hoarse voice. ‘She gets the picture. We’re all really fucked up.’

‘Speak for yourself,’ Darcy said.

‘Yeah? Hey, Darce, tell us how you earn your keep,’ Carrie hissed.

‘I earn more than you do…’

‘Dysfunction is the new black,’ Joe smirked.

Arden held up her hand and their bickering stopped. ‘Here’s the deal. We all contribute two hundred dollars a week to the family budget. We don’t care how you get it. Nobody will judge you. That money is looked after by me,’ she pointed to Malik, ‘and him. You feed yourself during the day and we meet back here every night at six for dinner. We watch each other’s backs. We are invisible. We’re quiet and we don’t get caught.’

‘I got caught,’ AiAi said.

Arden smacked him on the top of his head and his mouth snapped shut.

‘What happens with the money?’ I asked.

Arden frowned. ‘Expenses. If you need a doctor, stuff like that. It’s for our future.’

AiAi said, ‘Tell her about the place, Arden.’

Arden ignored him. ‘So, can you keep our secrets, Friday?’

Silence grabbed my hand and squeezed it.

Carrie’s eyes were dark with something unsaid and Darcy stared at a crack in the floorboards.

Bree closed one eye and looked into her empty bottle. She turned it as if it was a kaleidoscope.

Only Joe nodded and smiled encouragement.

‘I can’t stay long,’ I said. ‘I need to find my father.’ It felt like a lie as it left my lips.

Arden pounced. ‘I thought you said nobody was looking for you.’

‘He’s not looking.
I’m
looking. He doesn’t know I exist.’

‘Then why do you want to find him? Look, we have a good life here. Nobody tells us what to do or when to do it. It’s perfect.’

It sounded perfect. So why did I feel like somebody had walked through my web, like all the strands of my life were just floating in the breeze? It seemed wiser to hole up in a hotel until my money was gone or until I found a new beginning, whichever happened first. I could at least sleep in a real bed and live by my own rules.

Silence timed his beseeching look perfectly.

My resolve slipped. ‘Maybe I could just stay for a while. If that’s okay with everyone, I mean. I have enough money for a couple of weeks.’ I looked around. ‘Just until I can sort out something else.’

Arden glanced at Malik.

Darcy got up and flounced off.

Malik shrugged as if he didn’t care but his eyes were blinking like a camera shutter on high-speed. I sensed violence curled up inside him, waiting for a nudge. I couldn’t erase the image of him lying with Arden on the bed. He made me squirm, even though he was perfect, aesthetically—built like a fireman on a calendar. His expression was indifferent but he was wound tight.

More rapid, reptilian blinks. He twisted one of Arden’s dreadlocks around his finger and brushed the end over his chin stubble. He looked straight through me.

CHAPTER SEVEN

When Arden dismissed us all like children at nine o’clock, I discovered that Darcy had made up my bed with a blanket and pillow. My backpack was lying next to the mattress and a corner of the blanket had been turned down. This unexpected kindness left me confused but grateful. I climbed in and waited for my body heat to build up, but the cold kept getting colder and my toes went numb inside my socks.

Nights were the worst. Insomnia came when Vivienne left—just as I felt the descent into sleep a switch would trip in my brain and my eyes would spring open. My body had turned traitor. The harder I chased sleep, the further it drifted away.

I’d been lying awake for hours. I shivered in bouts and remembered vaguely that it was the body’s way
of increasing blood flow and temperature. It wasn’t working. My jaw was clenched so tight I was waiting for a tooth to crack.

Outside, a branch scraped against the window, caught by the wind, and the headlights of passing cars projected shapes and shadows onto the walls like a scratchy silent movie. When it was quiet, I could hear the rhythmic breaths of Carrie and Bree.

I couldn’t count the number of different beds I’d slept in. Mostly they were motel mattresses, warped and flattened by too many bodies. Often they were doubles and Vivienne and I shared. We’d drifted from town to town for sixteen years before she finally took me back with her to Grandfather’s house. The way she’d spoken about him, like he was a ghost of the past, I’d assumed he was dead. That first night, I couldn’t sleep. I wasn’t acquainted with luxury. The sheets were new and slippy and everything glowed white in the dark, like I was drifting in a cloud.

I sneaked into Vivienne’s room.

She was still awake, lying on her back and staring at the ceiling.

‘Can’t sleep? Me neither,’ she said and made room for me beside her. ‘Damn ghosts.’

I could feel her bones through her skin. She stroked my hair because she had none of her own, and I prayed. I prayed to rewind back to the last time she was whole, really alive, jigging to her favourite song while her beer slopped all over the dance floor and men turned to watch. Sometimes I got tired of moving on and all I wanted to
do was stay—if I found a new friend, or settled into a school where the teachers found some promise in me, or fell in love with a town that made us feel like we’d lived there forever. But leaving was worth it every time—to see Vivienne emerge from her blue funk or whatever it was that brought out misery in her. Beginnings were always exciting.

‘He can give you things I never could,’ she whispered. ‘I’m so tired. I can’t run anymore.’

‘Tell me why you left.’ I could feel the familiar frustration of unanswered questions warring with my need to protect her.

‘It’s complicated,’ she said. Then, as usual, whenever I asked the wrong question at the wrong time, she steered me off in another direction. ‘Everything you need for the rest of your life is right in here.’ She pressed her finger into my chest. ‘When I’m gone, never forget who you are.’

‘Who’s that, then?’

‘Friday Brown, you are a twentieth generation direct descendant of Owain Glyndwr, a man revered in Wales during the fourteenth century. He was the Welsh equivalent of King Arthur. Or William Wallace.’

I’d heard this one before. So many times. ‘William Wallace?’ I asked to keep her talking. But that night I had no desire to play along.

‘Braveheart,’ she said. ‘The guy with the blue face. He turned back a whole army. He led a revolution.’

‘Well, shit,’ I replied. ‘A dude with a blue face would frighten the crap out of anyone.’

‘Don’t swear.’ She swatted my shoulder. ‘Owain Glyndwr was the last true Prince of Wales, before the English claimed the title. Shakespeare wrote about him in
Henry IV
two centuries later. They say he was as brave as Hector, as magical as Merlin, elusive as the Scarlet Pimpernel.’

‘The Scarlet Pimpernel sounds like a skin eruption.’

She sighed. ‘Owain Glyndwr was a hero to his
people.’

‘Oh.’

‘Is that all you have to say? Oh? Friday Brown, you are descended from kings.’

‘That’s like saying a flu capsule is pure heroin.’

‘I didn’t raise you to be a cynic,’ she huffed and withdrew her arm.

‘You used to tell me there was magic everywhere. There’s no magic here. I don’t want to stay.’

‘So, now you’re a sceptic, too,’ she said. Her tone was heavy with exhaustion. Or perhaps it was disappointment. ‘I didn’t say magic was always a good thing. Others will give it another name, like serendipity, or irony. Bad juju, good luck, premonition, omens. It’s all magic to me. When there are things we can’t explain, we give them a name. I call it magic. It happens.’