Have You Seen Ally Queen? (6 page)

I turn sweetly to the kids snickering like dickheads behind me.

‘Yeah, we do live near each other.’ I look pointedly at Rel and smile as seductively as I can bring myself to without puking. ‘Don’t we, Rel.’

Turning back to face the front of the room, I can almost hear the mouths dropping open. People
woo-woo
at Rel.

Someone laughs raucously and says, ‘Rel, you’re going red, mate!’

At lunch, Rel hisses at me, ‘What was
that
this morning?’

He looks bewildered, and for a moment I feel bad.

‘I’m just sick of those dickheads hassling me—I had to say something. Sorry.’

He’s still pissed off. ‘Good one. Now they think...’

I giggle. ‘So what? It’s not that bad, is it?’

He does a slow nod at me.

I try not to shrink into my school dress.

‘Don’t flatter yourself, Queenie. It’s bad. It’s bad.’

There’s so much in my head, so much swirling around, that I need to get it down in my diary and think it all through—Rel (what a tool! I blew him right off on the way home), Ms Carey, the way I look, Mum, the kids at school ... everything.

I come in, bringing the weedy seagull breeze with me, and straight away I know something strange, odd, bizarre is going on. When I dump my bag upstairs, Jerry’s sitting at the counter, thumbing distractedly through an electronics catalogue. Dad’s home from his site visits ultra-early. Gulls are squawking around the verandah and Mum’s nowhere to be seen. At this stage, an attractive option is to go to my room and hibernate with my diary.

‘Ally, is that you?’ Dad calls out.

I look at Jerry. I want to escape. It’s too quiet. Where’s Mum?

‘Yeah,’ I mumble.

He comes out of the bathroom and past him I can see the starfish and sea sponges and seahorse skeletons Mum has been collecting from the beach. She saves them so carefully, it’s like a museum in the bathroom. She strings them up on the flywire, and when you have a shower you look outside at the sparkly ocean over the salty remains of dead creatures. I don’t know any other mums who do that. Dad says Mum’s collection is beautiful, a reflection of who she is (a weirdo) and how she enjoys nature (like some kind of middle-aged hippie). I reckon it’s bloody spooky, a reflection of just how screwy this family is becoming.

Dad looks distracted. He asks me quickly, ‘How was school?’

‘Fine,’ I answer suspiciously.

‘Okeydoke. Sit down, Ally. I’ve already told Jerry this. He’s being very grown up about it.’

I throw Jerry a sour look. That’d be right.

Dad’s taking slow breaths, is looking kind of small in his chair. I get scared, then. ‘What’s up? Where’s Mum? Is she still not up?’

‘Your Mum’s taken a bit of a turn. She’s in bed. She’s not very well.’

Oh. That’s all. A turn. Then I get suss. What
is
that?
‘A
turn?
What’s wrong with her?’ I look at Jerry. ‘Have you seen her?’

‘No, he hasn’t, Ally.’ Dad flashes his eyes at me meaningfully. ‘She’s really not feeling very well at all. She’s a bit ... overwrought.’

‘What, stressed out?’

‘Well, yep, you could say that.’

The sound of me slamming the door on her last night reverberates in my head.

I look again at Jerry. He’s just looking down at the floor. He’s not looking very happy at all, actually. Poor little bloke. I take a breath, try to soften a little bit, try to understand what Dad’s saying.

‘Can
I
see her?’

He hesitates, but says yes.

‘Now?’

‘Yep.’

I reach out and squeeze Jerry’s knee. ‘I’ll go and see Mum, Jez. Don’t worry, Dad’s probably just making a big deal out of this, as usual.’ I try to grin at him, but it doesn’t work, not even a little bit.

I follow Dad. He whispers something reassuring to me outside their bedroom, but I don’t feel reassured.

Gulls shriek outside.

I creep in to Mum’s room. The thick smell of her sleep and her breath and her body sticks in my throat. I look at Dad, sitting beside her on the bed. I can’t believe he hasn’t let in any fresh air, or sunlight, and I go over to the curtains and yank them back.

‘Dad!’ I whisper as loudly as I can before it’s my proper talking voice. ‘What’s the story?’ I’m looking at him, looking at the side of his face with its brown-sugar skin and the sharp stubble that moves when he talks.

‘Haven’t opened the windows,’ he mumbles, not looking at me. ‘She said she wanted to ... keep the world out.’

I’m going to have to look at Mum sometime, I know that. I’m not even sure if she’s awake.

I look around for the oil burner. It’s one of Mum’s aromatherapy things. I plink in a few drops of orange oil, her favourite, and light the tea-light underneath.

I turn around. Mum is awake, but she’s not looking at anything. She’s not looking at Dad, who’s rubbing her arm. And it’s like she hasn’t even seen me.

I move a bit closer. ‘Mum.’

Dad says, really gently,
‘Annie.’

She doesn’t say anything.

My knees go a bit, and I nearly fall onto the bed. ‘Mum!’ I insist.

‘Don’t, Ally. She doesn’t want to talk.’

I stare at her blankly. Dad grabs my hand, and we stand there a while, the three of us linked limply like a daisy chain that’s been out in the sun too long.

The smell of the orange oil reminds me of our old place, out the back next to the mandarin tree, where Shelly and I used to hang out after school with a packet of caramel buds and the day’s goss. On the weekends, Mum would always be out there, turning the soil and mulching the flowerbeds. And Dad’d be in the shed, tinkering away on his funny projects. He fiddles around with all sorts of stuff, reckons he’s ‘fixing’ things. An old fridge motor. Jerry’s Dalek. Dad calls himself the Queen Machine when he fixes something. It used to be so
completely
embarrassing when Shelly came over and there was another new gadget to figure out,
like a dog-proof latch on the gate, or something (even though we didn’t have a dog—it was ‘just in case’, Dad reckoned, ‘you never know!’), and Dad would be, as usual, hopping about like a garden gnome, virtually patting himself on the back.

Tonight, Dad’s shed time has turned into Dad’s
chef
time—and none of us are too happy about it, to be honest. He makes us a foul dinner of gluggy risotto, since he doesn’t know that you’re meant to use arborio rice. He uses jasmine rice instead. Mum saves that for Asian food, stir-fries and Thai curries and stuff. Jasmine rice tastes pretty weird with parmesan cheese, I must say. Luckily Dad doesn’t make nearly enough. We each force down a few mouthfuls before hitting the TV, where none of us has to talk.

Jerry quizzed me about Mum when we came out of her room. I was glad to get out of there; it was horrible. I didn’t know what to say to him, so I lied.

‘Mum’s fine. She just needs to rest.’

‘Did she ask about me?’

‘Yeah, yeah, of course, Jez. She said to give you a big hug, and she’ll see you soon. I don’t think we should bother her too much right now, though. She really needs to rest and sleep a lot, and just chill out.’

He looked a bit unsure about that. ‘Okay,’ he said,
looking right into me.

Sometimes I reckon that kid’s got a special radar detector installed, the way he senses things.

Jerry’s gone to bed and I’m looking around for Dad. There’s a line of light coming from under the shed door, and I can hear the chinking of tools.

I go in, and he’s standing over his toolbox, moving a screwdriver from one compartment to another.

‘Dad?’

‘Hmmm?’

I take a breath. For a minute I want to say
nothing
and run out onto the beach.

‘Is Mum gunna be all right?’

He shuts the box and goes to the little chairs, pats one for me to sit on. He doesn’t look very good, kind of pasty and tired.

He looks at me, as though he’s wondering how to explain something.

‘It’s since the accident with that guy, isn’t it,’ I mumble.

‘Yeah,’ he says finally. ‘It’s since the accident.’

‘But the guy’s okay now—Mum told me ages ago. The pins are out of his leg and he’s pretty well back to normal, she said.’

‘Yeah, Ally, but it took its toll. It affected her quite deeply.’

I remember. It really knocked her around. She was pretty out of it for a few days. We thought something was wrong, but the doctor said it was shock. It was like she’d changed a bit, afterwards. She was less ... relaxed.

‘Wasn’t she just in shock, though?’

‘Well, yes, but it went on, and the doctor reckons it triggered something. Ever since, really, she’s been feeling very up and down. Mainly down. I don’t think she’s ever been this bad, though.’

‘Will it go away?’

‘I bloody hope so—but it might take some time.’ He twiddles a drill-bit between his fingers.

‘Well...’ I feel a bit desperate now. ‘Can we
do
anything to make her better?’

He begins to shake his head and then stops himself. ‘Ally, this is a particularly bad spell, you know. She doesn’t ... she doesn’t want to go out or anything.’ He looks at me.

‘What do you mean, “go out”? Like where?’

‘Anywhere. She doesn’t want to go outside the house.’

‘What? Not even the garden? She was out there a couple of days ago—she was fine!’

‘I know. But this has been going on for a while, Ally.’

‘What, even in Perth?’

‘Yeah, even in Perth. When she’s having a really low patch, she can’t face dealing with anything at all—even the garden.’

Jesus. I have to take this in. Mum doesn’t want to go
out?
How long will she be like this?

‘I’m taking her to the doctor tomorrow.’

I look at him. ‘But that’ll be going out. Won’t she ... spin out?’

‘Shit.’ He puts his head in his hands.

Shit.

I wanted to come down to the beach earlier than this, but the torch is upstairs and I’d have woken everyone with my creaking about on the wooden floors. So I held tight till 5.30, when the first grey glow of the day whispered the arrival of morning.

I am deliriously tired. Things that are not moving are moving. The sand dunes are jittery and the reef’s shifting in the water.

Last night was bad. I couldn’t sleep. I tried reading my book and playing Little Birdy and leaving on my bedside lamp and all that stuff, but my head would not stop. This thing with Mum is weird. Staying in bed. Not talking. And Dad’s spooked too—that’s what’s really making me scared. Since we got down here, apart from that one time I found her in the garden, crying—and that puffy-eyed time after the whale beaching—Mum’s seemed okay ... Well, that’s what I thought. I guess it just goes to show: from the outside, you have
no idea
what’s going on for people. Jerry never said anything, either, radar detectors and all. It makes me realise how obsessed I’ve been with how
I’m
feeling.

Anyway, these are the thoughts I’ve been having all night. I thought maybe getting up would help them go away, but it hasn’t. They’re all still there, swimming around so much I almost feel dizzy. Mum’s freaking out, and Dad’s got to take her to the doctor today and I’ve got to go to school. Well, I’m meant to. But, shite, surely not today! No, I’m not going, no way. I can’t face everyone with this bizarre stuff happening.

I look at my phone. I can’t even bring myself to tell Shel. How would I explain it? I still haven’t replied to a text from her a few days back and I can’t now: if I don’t mention this thing with Mum, it’ll feel like I’m lying.