Girl Defective (4 page)

– Police concern over increase in muck-up day antics

– Eli Wallace, 78, camping outside the Paradise Theater, protesting its imminent demolition

PROFILE

The Bricker is under twenty—most likely male and in a high socioeconomic bracket. He has sociopathic tendencies and a nihilistic, destructive attitude. He is possibly a high school graduate or friends of a high school graduate.

ACTION

Crime scene dusted.

Contact council for list of Jeeps registered to local area.

Research CCTV unit for shop (video).

Info-share with SKPD via Constable Eve Brennan.

T
HIS IS HOW IT
was with Dad: I knew he loved me, but Gully was the true star of his heart. Sometimes I'd see Dad look at my brother and feel the acid tang of jealousy in the back of my mouth. I'd flash on Gully at four saying, “I'm a boy and Dad's a boy, but Sky is a
girl
.” And I'd feel cursed and isolated and defective.

Gully's weirdness had always been there. I'd lost count of the times he'd come home from school with a “retard” sign stuck to the back of his jumper. Last year Derek Digby, the scourge of grade six, had a mission to make Gully crack. Because Gully refused to. Despite head flushings, stolen lunches, and sucker punches, Gully just acted like Derek was a bump in the rug he had to step over. One day Gully came home with a spectacular bruise on his cheek. It was my job to walk Gully to and from school. The one day I didn't was the day they got him. I could tell by his uneven footfall that something was wrong. Dad was in the kitchen making spaghetti. When he saw Gully's face, he dropped the pot. The water scalded his bare feet, but he didn't
even register this because all his feeling had gone to my brother.

That night Gully wrote his first memo. He documented everything he remembered about the attack:

POINT THE FIRST:
The attackers had calamari breath.

POINT THE SECOND:
One of them was wheezy and kept puffing on an inhaler.

POINT THE THIRD:
Another didn't want to kick me—his friends called him a pussy.

POINT THE FOURTH:
They all had skateboards.

The next day Dad and Tony Trucker, a regular who loved Merle Haggard and was built like a Hummer, went down to the chip shop and found Derek and two of his “boys” eating calamari rings and kicking their boards around. I don't know what Dad and Tony did, but Derek never bothered Gully again.

“We're Family,” Dad said. “And Family sticks together.”

After the spectacular bruise, we had a visit from a social worker. Paul Bean had a kind face but defeated eyes. He said no to the beer (it was ten thirty in the morning) and delicately moved the festy stacks of
Mojo
and
Record Collector
so that he could sit in the broken seat of the wicker chair. He asked halting questions
about health and family history. He gave Dad information sheets and a speech about how the “functional family unit” thrives on “routine” and “structure” and “support networks.”

Dad had
Sgt. Pepper's
on the record player. He must have seen the glint in Paul's eye, because he cranked it up and by the time “She's Leaving Home” had made us all choky, we knew that Paul Bean the Social Worker had been named after Paul McCartney the Beatle. That in 1964 Paul Bean's mother had snuck into the Southern Cross Hotel, where the Beatles were staying on their first Australian tour. That she had stood in the lift with Paul McCartney and never fully recovered. Dad put
Sgt. Pepper's
(near mint, Australian pressing) back in its cover and into Paul Bean's hand, and we never saw him again.

At breakfast Dad was a happy man. “Sky, my girl,” he said, crunching his toast in triumph. “Always remember, if you can get a man talking about the thing he loves, you can make him forget the thing he came for.”

Dad always told the truth. And he always had a way to say it that made it seem less scary than it was. When I asked him what he thought Paul Bean wanted, he said, “Oh. Just to see how you kids are doing. People can get funny when the mother is out of the picture.”

Mum left in the winter, when everything was dull and gray. Gully and I had our breakfast porridge and trotted
off to school with our cheese-and-pickle sandwiches in recycled brown paper bags, and the day was the day was the day. When we came home, she was gone. She'd left notes for each of us, pinned them to the mantel like Santa stockings. Mine said this:

Become the change you want to see in the world.

Skylark,

I don't remember if it was Gandhi who said that or Uma Thurman. I used to think words become yours, ideas become yours, as soon as you use them. Lately I'm thinking about: how it works that Gully's still wetting the bed; how you've turned out to be this dad-happy whirl of a girl and you don't need me; how your father is. I don't like his beard, do you? And I never liked Nick Cave. I need you to know that this isn't good-bye, but I want to live the kind of life where my thoughts and ideas come first so that I know they are truly mine. I am reconciled to the fact that you will hate me. I hope not forever. Hug Gully every day for me. I know he can't stand it, but do it anyway. There's a reason I named you two after birds, you know. Tell your father to buck up and stop crying. He was always a better mother than I was.

Love,

Galaxy

Mum's letter had infinite creases from being folded and refolded and scrunched and pitched and saved. I couldn't bring myself to throw it away. Mum was glamorous and heartless, but the weird thing was, she was right. We coped. We were okay. Better than okay, we were fine. Dad stopped crying. Gully let me hug him. For a while there I couldn't stop. He drew a portrait of us that Dad ended up framing: three round heads with smiles that went outside the lines.

M
Y BEDROOM WINDOW LOOKED
straight into the Conscious Body Yoga Studio, where the lights were always on and the blinds were always up. At night it was like a version of heaven with gleaming floorboards and birds of paradise and the mirror reflecting infinite space, but from six in the morning it was butt row. When I woke up on Sunday morning, the nine-o'clock class was doing the downward dog. I kicked off my covers and copied the moves until my wrists buckled, and then I got dressed.

Sundays were ritual days. Dad opened late so we could have a family breakfast. We'd pick up coffee and toasties and take them down to the gardens near the market. Every week was the same. At a certain point under a certain palm, Dad would fix on the white tents and sigh, “St. Kilda really used to be someplace.”

The market started at the laughing mug of Mr. Moon, the clown-face entrance to Luna Park, and wound upward past art deco flats and the posh hotel and the old Esplanade Hotel, site of untold puke-ups and hook-ups.
The tourists came in droves and Birkenstock sandals. They had no sense of personal space; it was as if they were
designed
to bump breakfast out of you or trip your rhythm by tramping on the backs of your flip-flops. They dawdled and dithered over whether to drop coin for a hand-painted boomerang or a sheet-metal mermaid or a five-minute massage or their name on a grain of rice.

We found our bench opposite the fountain and sat and imbibed. Seagulls squawked and the sun scattered stars on the asphalt. Behind us the Scenic Railway rattled its first go-round, the volley of screams rocketing down. Gully checked his watch. He held his fist as if it was a walkie-talkie and crackled static into it. “
Chh
.” Then he unhooked his notebook, pushed his snout up to his forehead, and began the meeting:

“Date: November 30. Time: 0947. Location: O'Donnell Gardens. House Meeting actioned.”

Dad and I wore matching flat smiles. The house meetings were Dad's idea, a way of keeping us in check, but Gully had taken over. Now they were less about us and more about crime-fighting. Gully's focus was unswerving.

“Item: Does anyone have any questions about my memo?”

“Nope,” Dad said. I shook my head. I had the opera glasses on a string around my neck. I was itching to use them. Past the fountain Ray would be setting up
his blanket of books. Some days Nancy sat with him. I kept my eyes open.

“Item: CCTV. I have researched some models, and this is the one we should buy.” Gully flung a piece of paper at Dad, who caught it and frowned.

“Drago says he might have something.”

Gully shook his head. “That means inferior product.”

Drago was a fence. He “acquired” stolen goods and moved them on.

Dad mimicked Gully. “Item: We have a new staff member.”

Gully's eyes popped and then narrowed.

“Name, rank, serial number,” he demanded breathlessly.

“His name's Luke. It's just for Christmas. Don't get excited.”

But Gully was beside himself. He knee-walked over to Dad and bobbed around him. “Where's he from? What are his credentials? When's he starting?”

Dad lifted his hand, spread his fingers, and made a cage over Gully's face.

“South Australia. None. Soon.” He pushed lightly. Gully sat back down.

“How soon?” I asked.

Dad chewed on his toastie and stared up at the sky as if he was trying to memorize the precise location of clouds. “Next week.”

In front of the fountain the Fugg navigated his shopping trolley with the beer-can train. He positioned the green milk-crate podium and started coughing and gurgling, which was a prelude to poetry. Gully fixed his snout back over his nose. “I'm going to give Ernst a memo.” He scrambled to his feet and raced over to the Fugg.

Dad gazed after him. “I guess House Meeting's over.”

I didn't reply. A bud of annoyance was starting to bloom. I had hoped Dad had forgotten about the new recruit, recognized it as a bad idea. I said, “What makes you think this guy's going to be any different from the last?”

“Just a feeling,” Dad said. “You'll like him, Sky.”

“I don't want to like him.” I stood up and made my way to the small gathering at the foot of the Fugg, who was wobbling on his crate and reciting a poem about the moons of Jupiter.

The market was starting to swell. I scanned the crowd through the glasses: the fat girls in skinny jeans, the caftan women and knee-socks men, the backpackers with their morning beers—you could always pick the Poms showing skin at the merest hint of sunshine. I checked Ray's again and my heart skipped. Nancy was there. She was wearing a burnt-orange pinafore with gladiator sandals and sunglasses that would have put Jackie O. to shame. I ambled over, trying to look casual, feeling anything but.

“Hey, girlfriend. We were just talking about you.”

“No,” Ray corrected her. “We were talking about Mia Casey.”

“Who's Mia Casey?” I asked.

Nancy winked. “The girl on the poster. Ray knew her.”

I waited for Ray to elaborate, but he sighed and bent over to pick up a book; his jeans dropped, revealing ample crack. I whispered to Nancy, “The moons of Jupiter.”

She giggled. “Let's walk.”

W
E WOUND UP ON
a patch of green on the Lower Esplanade. Across the road sat the Paradise, all peeling walls and potbellied gargoyles and promises forsaken. A man was camped on a fold-up chair out in the front. He had a blanket over his lap, and a hand-painted sign:
SAVE THE PARADISE FROM THE GREASY PALMS OF MONSTERS.
I figured he was Eli Wallace from Gully's memo. I went to point him out to Nancy, but she had already started giving me the specs about the mystery girl.

“Ray said she went to a party Christmas Eve. Next day some guy walking his dog found her floating in the canal. She was only seventeen. It was in the papers. You don't remember?”

I didn't want to tell her about Dad and rehab, so I just shook my head.

“Ray said she was a party girl. That's Ray-speak for hooker.”

Nancy was an authority on prostitutes. She said they charged thirty for a hummer and eighty for a throw, and most of it went up their arms. They were stupid, she said.
They should have been playing the stock market. I knew their streets: Vale and Gray and Greeves, the cul-de-sacs around the gardens. The girls I noticed were never as flashy as on TV movies. Some were decrepit, but some looked younger than me. They could have been waiting for a lift home from working a shift at Macca's. From the tram I'd see my bored expression reflected in their faces, and wonder what set of circumstances meant I was off to school while they were off to do what they were going to do.

Nancy lit a cigarette that turned out to be a joint. The acrid smoke filled the air and made me nervous. I took a drag for show, but my cough gave me away.