Leaving Jetty Road (11 page)

chapter nineteen

Chocolate cake

S
ofia arrives at my house first, the handle of a big wicker basket over one arm.

“Lamingtons!” I say, peering inside the basket. “And
fairy bread.
Yum.”

She smiles. “You gotta have fairy bread at a birthday party.”

A moment later, we’re letting Lise in through the back door. She’s wearing a big, baggy Windbreaker and running shoes, her hair scraped back into a messy half bun.

“Sorry I’m late,” she says. “I went for a run before I came here.”

Next to me, I see Sofe, her eyes skipping over Lise with sudden alertness: in her track pants, Lise looks pale, tired, impossibly slender. She thrusts a glass bowl at me as she follows me into the kitchen.

“I made some fruit salad to go with the other stuff. Thought we should at least have
something
healthy.”

“What—no soy milk yogurt?” says Sofia sarcastically.

We lay the food out on the kitchen table.

“Mum and Dad’re out,” I tell the two of them. “Went for a Sunday walk. So we’ve got the house to ourselves.”

I rummage around in the kitchen drawers for a box of matches, light the candles I stuck into the cake earlier this morning. Then Sofia and I sing a tuneless version of “Happy Birthday” while Lise blushes and stares at the ground: “You didn’t have to
do
this, guys.”

After we’ve finished singing, she blows the candles out obediently and takes the knife I hand her. I hold my breath, waiting to see what she will do. Without looking up at us, she cuts three big hunks of cake, all the same size. I let my breath out in relief. Maybe Sofia was right, I think; maybe everything’s going to be all right after all.

“It looks delicious,” Lise says enthusiastically.

“And the amazing thing is, it’s totally vegan,” I say quickly, just in case she hasn’t heard me say this the last three times.

Lise doesn’t answer. She grabs a teaspoon and scoops several spoonfuls of fruit salad onto her plate, on top of the piece of cake. Then, while Sofia and I pig out on chocolate cake and lamingtons, she eats her fruit salad, teaspoon by infinitesimal teaspoon, three bites to each spoon.

Sofia eyes Lise’s strange new eating habits skeptically.

“It’s a fantastic cake,” she says to me after a moment, deliberately.

“Thanks,” I say nervously. “You’d never know it has no eggs.”

The thing is, it
is
delicious. Despite the fact that I’d never have made it if I hadn’t been so worried about Lise, it’s actually the best chocolate cake I’ve ever made. It’s moist and chocolaty and dark. I reckon even Josh’d be proud of this effort.

Finally, by the time Sofia’s moved on to the fairy bread and I’m eating my second piece of cake, Lise finishes her fruit salad. She puts her spoon down on her plate, stretches.

“
God,
I’m full,” she says, yawning luxuriously. “That was delicious. Thank you both
so
much.”

She reaches for her mug of black coffee. Wrapping her hands around it, she brings it to her face, resting her cheek against its warmth. Sofia and I exchange glances over the lamingtons and fairy bread. Lise’s slice of cake—the one she cut for herself, exactly the same as ours—sits in front of her, untouched on her plate.

There is a moment’s silence.

“Eat your cake, Lise,” Sofia says abruptly.

Lise puts her mug down, startled; her eyes go strangely wary. She looks almost trapped. My stomach clenches with sudden foreboding.

“I’d love to,” she says. “It’s just—I had so much fruit salad. I couldn’t eat another mouthful.”

Sofia leans across the table, pushes Lise’s plate back toward her.

“It’s a present. Nat
made
it for you.”

“I know—”

“It’s
rude
to refuse presents.”

“I’m
not,
” Lise says quickly. “I’ll eat some later.”

Sofia’s eyes don’t waver from Lise’s face.

“You are
so
full of it,” she says evenly. “We all
know
you won’t eat it later. You’ll throw it in the bin, or feed it to the cat, or—”

“Lise doesn’t have a cat,” I protest weakly, breaking in.

I’m trying to divert her, stem her attack.
I don’t want this argument to happen.

But Sofia ignores me.

“If you want to lose weight—which, by the way, you don’t need to do—why don’t you take up some kind of sport?” she says to Lise. Her tone is belligerent.

“I do. I
have.
” Lise takes a quick, shaky breath. “I run.”

Sofia rolls her eyes. “I mean, like tennis. Or hockey. Or basketball. A team sport.”

“But I’m no
good
at team sports—”

“Yeah, yeah, I know,” Sofia says heavily. “You’re no good at
anything.
How could we forget?”

My breath catches. Lise falls suddenly, heartrendingly silent. She stares at the plate of cake in front of her, her forehead knotted.

“Lighten
up,
mate,” says Sofia simply. “Just
lighten up.
”

Everything goes quiet then. Here we are again, I think: Sofia haranguing, Lise hurting, me wishing they’d both just
stop.

But then Lise lifts her head. The look on her face is unbearable, like she’s
—stricken.
It’s the look I’ve always dreaded, the look I’ve always hoped we’d avoid.

“I don’t mind about the cake,” I say quickly, stupidly, into the silence.

They both swing their eyes to me, uncomprehendingly.

“Lise?” I speak quietly, looking only at her. “I
don’t
mind. Honestly.”

She doesn’t answer.

I stumble on, urgent, clumsy in my need to smooth things out. My words fall over each other.

“All Sofe means is, she’s worried about you. You’ve lost
heaps
of weight. And it’s great—don’t get me wrong; we both think you look great. It’s just—you don’t want to get
too
thin—”

She’s breathing easier now. I can see the muscle in her jaw relaxing as I speak.

“I’m okay,” she says to me. “I’ll be fine. I’m just a bit tired.”

Suddenly we’re talking to each other like there’s no one else in the room. Our voices are soft, secretive.

“I know. We’re
all
tired.”

“It’s Year 12.”

“It’s the pits.”

“I get so
stressed
about it sometimes—”

“Tell me about it.”

Sofia moves her head back and forth between Lise and me. She seems puzzled, like she thinks we’re speaking some other language that she doesn’t understand. Like she’s missed what’s going on between us, and she knows she’s missed it, but she can’t grasp why.

“We didn’t mean to hassle you,” I go on to Lise.

“It’s okay.”

“I mean, it’s good to eat healthily—”

“Nat,”
says Sofia sharply.

I stop. “What?”

She looks at me hard, as if she’s about to say something. Then she changes her mind, shrugs.

“Oh, well. Have it your way.” She turns to Lise. “It’s your life, anyway.”

Then Lise does the strangest thing. She turns to Sofia and she
smiles.
It’s a weird smile: not forgiving or understanding; not apologetic, even. It’s full of secrets, this smile.

“Yes,” she says quietly. “It is.”

Over the last couple of months, people at school have been giving Lise quite a lot of praise about the way she looks.

In a way, I can see why. In her school uniform, she’s lithe and slender; she has no ugly bulges or swellings like the rest of us. Sometimes I even feel a bit jealous of her: I wish
I
could be disciplined enough to get up early every morning and go jogging before school.

Recently, though, the compliments have changed slightly. Now, when people notice her, they say, “How come you’re so
skinny
?” There’s still a hint of envy in their voices, of course (that puzzled, hushed envy that everyone uses on skinny people, you know?), because although Lise must be the thinnest girl in our class by now, she’s not what you’d call bony. Anyway, fragile is—you know
—trendy.

But if you listen carefully, there’s another question in their voices—one that they’re just too polite, or too scared, to ask out loud. It’s
Has she got what I think she’s got?

Sofe didn’t ask, though. She
said
it, loud and clear:
I KNOW you’ve got it.

Sometimes I hate the way Sofia does that—says the things other people don’t say; the things they can’t say,
won’t
say.

It takes guts, that’s what I can’t stand—the kind of guts I just don’t have.

chapter twenty

Julie

W
e lie side by side on the bed, Josh’s leg crossed over mine, my head tucked into his neck. Next to me, on the bedside table, are a packet of condoms (opened) and the photo from the Formal last week. I don’t think I’ve ever smiled so widely for the camera before.

It’s six o’clock in the evening. Josh, the eternal insomniac, yawns.

“Sorry,” he says—and then yawns again. “I didn’t get to sleep until 3 a.m. last night. I’m
so
tired.”

“You’d have slept okay if
I’d
been here,” I say, digging my elbow into his ribs.

He smiles. “Stay for dinner?”

But I can’t; I just can’t. Homework’s absolutely screaming at me. The exams are less than two months away now, and I’m
way
behind. It’s just that I’ve been too happy in the last few months to do anything about it. Being with Josh makes me feel so good.

It’s weird—whenever I’m away from Josh now, my thoughts rush back to Lise: wondering what I can do, who I can talk to, who could
do
something about her. But the moment I’m back with him, my head fills up with him, only him, and I forget all my worries about Lise. There’s just no
room
for anyone else in my head when Josh is around.

Right now he’s shaking his head at me in mock disapproval. “Planning to cram for the exams, are we?”

“It’s the only way I’ll ever get through them now!” I wail.

But even so, I make no effort to get up. Without even trying, he’s tugging at me, drawing me in; I still can’t break his pull.

Josh half stifles another yawn, oblivious of all this. He folds his arms underneath his head.

“Might go for a hill ride tomorrow.”

“Lucky you,” I say sarcastically.

“Gotta do it, Nat. It’s part of my training.” Then he grins and pokes me back in the ribs, exactly where I poked him a couple of minutes ago. “Anyway, admit it. You’d rather study than go for a hard ride any day—wouldn’t you, now?”

I don’t even bother to answer this: by now, my exercise laziness is legendary between the two of us. Instead, for about the millionth time, I lie there admiring him for his dedication. He’s never once given up on his dream of riding to Perth, Josh; he’s been training so long now, and so hard, it seems to have become almost second nature to him.

It makes me feel left out, sometimes, to be honest—this long-term, high-flung dream of his. It’s like he has a secret side to himself: a side he won’t share with me, that’s all his. I keep thinking:
Where do I fit into all of this?
The answer always comes back to me:
I don’t.

But does that matter? Do I have to fit into
everything
in his life? I don’t know. I don’t want to think about it, to analyze it; I just want to enjoy what I have.

Besides, recently I’ve been dreaming up plans of my own. Instead of saving up to get a car this summer, I’ve decided to buy myself a plane ticket to Perth. I want to, like
—be
there to greet him at the finishing line.

I haven’t told Josh about my idea yet. I’m sure he’d like it, but this is
my
secret. I want it to be a surprise for him.

Through the open window, the smell of barbecued chops wafts in on the breeze. My thoughts drift longingly away from plane tickets to white bread, tomato sauce, burned sausages. I know this is the first year I’ve ever managed to keep my New Year’s resolution for so long—but right now, I’d give anything to break it. Broccoli just isn’t the same.

Josh shifts slightly on the bed, breaking my reverie.

“I bumped into Julie the other day,” he says, hands behind his head, staring up at the ceiling.

My breath catches. Julie, Josh’s ex—the heartbreaker in Vietnam.

“ ‘Bumped into’ her?”

“Yeah. She was at the beach.” He closes his eyes, like he’s not going to say anything more about it.

I stare at the cloth cap hanging off the hook on his door. Finally, I say, “How long’s it been since you last saw her?”

He shrugs. “Not since we broke up. She never spoke to me again.”

There’s a short silence between us.

“She told me she’s started cycling again,” he says after a moment, conversationally. “Remember how I told you she was into fitness in a big way? She suggested we go riding together sometime.” He glances sideways at me on the bed.

I lie still, trying to relax my shoulders.

“As
friends,
Nat.”

“Yeah. I know.” I breathe slowly, in and out, getting my thoughts together. “Okay.”

I lie there next to him, not speaking. Mum has always said that jealousy is a pointless emotion. If you love someone, she says, your love for them—like your trust—comes free of strings. Free of “ifs” and “buts.”

Yeah, but she’s a social worker,
I think now, sardonically.
What would SHE know?

In the end, I can’t help myself. “Josh?”

“Nat.”

“This doesn’t change anything between us, does it?”

“Of course not. Does it for
you
?”

I hesitate. “No.”

The cloth cap stares malevolently back at me from the door. I take another deep breath.

“Are you
sure
it doesn’t change anything?”

He sighs, rolls over onto his side, kisses me. His lips are soft on my skin, and our kisses wander over each other.

“Sweet Nat,” he whispers into my ear.

PART IV

Lise

chapter twenty-one

Hungry girl

T
he exams are so close now, you can almost smell them. Every time I open my books to study, a hot, sick wave rushes over me.
I’m going to fail.

The Fear comes almost every day now. It hits at any time: not just during tests and exams, and not just at school, either; some nights, it even stops me from getting to sleep. Generally, it only lasts for a few minutes—perhaps half an hour, at most—but it
feels
much longer than that.

Sometimes, if it comes on in the middle of a lesson, I blank out completely. I sit there, covered in sweat, knees trembling uncontrollably underneath my table. I swallow huge gulps of air, stare down at my books so no one can guess what’s going on. And I say, over and over again inside my head, as if it’s some kind of private mantra,
Please let this go away. Please let this go away. Please let it go away . . .

I don’t understand. It’s not as if there’s any good reason for me to feel this way: my life is totally secure and comfortable—privileged, in fact. My parents are still together; they have plenty of money, and they love me. And I don’t have any sicko uncles or cousins who raped me when I was a kid. Why am I making such a
fuss
about everything?

But no one else I know seems to experience this kind of feeling. What is the
matter
with me?

One Monday morning, in the lesson before lunch, the Fear lasts the whole lesson. By the end, as the last of the sickness ebbs away, I am exhausted. My hair clings in damp tendrils to my forehead, and the aftershocks still tremble all the way through me. It’s all I can do to stand up and make it to the classroom door.

Nat comes over to me as I stumble toward my locker.

“You look exhausted, Lise,” she says gently. “Are you okay?”

She’s been asking me this a lot recently. I don’t like it. It makes me wonder what she knows about me. And it confuses me, too: one moment she’s all sweet and caring; the next she’s laughing with Sofia over some secret joke about their boyfriends. It seems ages since Nat and I laughed together about something.

“I’m just tired,” I say, truthfully enough. “I didn’t sleep very well the last couple of nights.”

Immediately she’s concerned. “Why don’t you go to the infirmary? Have a bit of a lie-down?”

I shake my head. “I’ll be all right. I just need to go outside for a moment and get some fresh air.”

She opens her mouth, and I can see her words coming before she says them:
I’ll go with you.
But I’m still cloaked in the aftermath exhaustion of the Fear, and desperate to be alone.

“I’ll catch up with you and Sofe in a sec, okay?” I say hastily.

I leave the locker room, come out into the schoolyard. It’s lunchtime: people are sitting around on benches in the early spring sunshine, eating sandwiches, pies, pasties, doughnuts. Smells of tomato sauce and hot, flaky pastry waft toward me, and my stomach, despite the recent nausea, feels suddenly hollow. I take a deep breath and push out my abdominal muscles so that my stomach swells and hardens against the waistline of my skirt. You can do this without anyone noticing: it’s a trick I discovered recently. When you suck your stomach in, it feels empty, but when you push it out, it stops rumbling (temporarily).

Anyway, I tell myself calmly, I can’t eat things like pies and pasties and sandwiches anymore. Apart from the fact that they’re too fattening, they’ve also all got wheat in them. Since last week, when I read an article in an alternative health magazine about wheat, I’ve cut down to eating it only once a day. The article said that it’s bad for you. It bloats you up, apparently.

I lean against the brick wall of the school building in the sunshine, taking deep breaths. The trembling slows. I tell myself,
will
myself, to relax. For a moment—just a moment—I close my eyes, feeling the sun tickle my skin. The last traces of the Fear recede, and I’m safe again.

At least for a little while . . .

From the pavement, Nat’s house looks achingly familiar. The white paint on the wrought-iron lace around the porch is rust-stained and peeling, and someone has used a discarded piece of wood to wedge open the window of the living room, which looks out onto the street. One of Tim’s steel-cap work boots lies side down, abandoned, by the front doorstep. (The other, bewilderingly, is nowhere to be seen.)

I push open the front gate, squeeze my way past the fruit trees, shrubs, flowers, and creepers that spill riotously over the garden Nat’s father works so passionately on. Not for the first time, it occurs to me how different his idea of a garden is from my parents’. Our house is all neat flower beds and fastidiously clipped, weed-free front lawn.

Today is a typical Sunday afternoon. Classical music drifts out an open window in the house across the street, and next door two men peer under the hood of a car in the driveway, beers in their hands. I walk down the mossy brick-paved driveway to the Jordans’ back door.
Please don’t let Nat be here. Please let her be at her boyfriend’s house . . .

Last night, I didn’t sleep for hours. I sat at my desk in my bedroom, drowning in Fear: wave after wave of it. When at last it passed, everyone else had gone to bed. I stumbled down the stairs to the kitchen, opened the fridge door. I don’t think I knew what I was doing: my legs felt watery beneath me, and my mind was awash with fatigue. I pulled out cheese, butter, bread, Nutella.

And I ate. Slice after slice, I ate. I couldn’t seem to stop. I don’t even remember what it
tasted
like.

Afterward, I put everything neatly away (what was left of it) and crept back up to my room. I lay in bed, switched off my light, stared up through the darkness to the ceiling. I counted calories over and over in my head, trying to work out how I could make up for everything I’d just consumed. My stomach felt huge, tight, swollen under my hands, but I still felt hollow inside.

Is
that
where this Fear is taking me? I can’t do it anymore. I can’t go there alone.

This morning, when I woke, I didn’t go for a run. My stomach growled, and my body ached with tiredness and unshed tears. And I felt so
guilty.
These days, I always feel guilty about all sorts of things: whether I’m studying enough, or exercising enough; whether I’m eating too much, or sleeping too much. Sometimes I just feel guilty about whether I’m being
nice
enough to everyone. But this morning the guilt was unbearable.

That’s when I thought of Nat’s mother, who used to chat for hours with us whenever I came over. Who used to say to me, “If you ever need to talk about something, Lise, you only have to ask.” With Nat groaning
(“Mum, shut UP”)
and me saying brightly, “Thanks, Mrs. Jordan. I will.” Thinking,
Why does she say that to me? Does she say that to ALL Nat’s friends?
I never followed her up on it, of course.

Now I push open the screen door, which is half open, and steal through the laundry room into the kitchen. Unbelievably, Nat’s mother is sitting right there at the kitchen table, reading the newspaper, wrapped up in a thick quilted jacket. The house, despite the arrival of spring, still feels icy.

“Lise!” she exclaims, glancing up as I come in. Her eyes flicker over me briefly, oddly, and then she rushes on. “How nice to see you. How
are
you?”

“Good, thank you, Mrs. Jordan,” I say politely, as I always do. “How are you?”

She pushes her chair out from under the table, goes over to the kettle and switches it on, gets out the tea bags and milk. All the time she’s doing this, she keeps up a stream of friendly chatter:
How are your parents? How’s Terri’s modeling going? Are you still enjoying running? I know how you feel; I used to LOVE it.
I’d forgotten how interested in you Nat’s mum can seem to be.

“Milk?” she offers, handing me a steaming mug. “Cookie?”

I shake my head quickly. “Just black tea, thanks.”

We go back over to the table together. Sitting down, Mrs. Jordan falls suddenly silent; she’s waiting, I think, for me to speak. To explain why I’m here; why I haven’t asked where Nat is; why I didn’t just turn around and go home again when she told me Nat wasn’t here. I wrap my hands around the warmth of the mug, stare down at my tea.

Now that I’m here, I don’t know how to start. I’m ashamed of everything I can think of to say about myself, ashamed of all the fear. Ashamed of all this sudden
neediness.

“What is it, my dear?” Nat’s mother says finally, putting her mug back down on the table.

And it’s almost as if she
knows
why I’m here.

“It’s the exams,” I blurt out, because this is easier to say; and because this, too, is true. “My grades have gone down this year. I think I’m going to fail.”

“Are you studying enough, do you think?”

I hesitate. “Yes. No. I
think
so . . .”

I tell her my current studying timetable: an hour before school and four hours afterward, as well as all day during the weekend, including after dinner. I look at her anxiously: the thought occurs to me suddenly that maybe I
should
be squeezing more in, somehow. Then I remember that day at Nat’s house—the day I went over to study with her—when Mrs. Jordan lectured me on doing too much schoolwork. She went on and on about it, to the point where I just wished she’d stop.
I KNOW I study more than most people,
I kept thinking;
I HAVE to, to keep the Fear at bay.

But I was studying
heaps
less back then.

Now she tilts her head to one side, questioning. “What about other stuff ? Is there anything else you can think of that might be affecting your marks?”

I take a breath. Now, I think.
Now
is the time to tell her.
There is this Fear,
I will say.
It gets so bad sometimes, I think there must be something wrong with me . . .

But the words are hard to get out. They stick in my throat. I struggle desperately to speak.

“Because, you see,
I
can think of something,” she continues. And she gives me that odd, flickering glance again.

I close my mouth quickly. Is it
that
obvious what’s going on inside my head?

Nat’s mother settles comfortably back into her chair, as if she’s getting ready for a long session. She even folds her hands on her lap.

“You’re very
thin
these days, Lise,” she observes conversationally.

I stare at her, taken aback.

“You never used to be so thin,” she goes on. “Are you sure you’re eating enough?”

“Of course,” I say immediately.

“It doesn’t
look
like you are,” she says calmly.

I rub the sole of my shoe up and down the leg of my chair, confused. This isn’t at all the conversation I was planning to have with her. It’s pretty ironic, really: here she is going on about my weight when that’s the only thing about myself that I am sure of, the only thing I know is (sort of ) okay. Can you imagine how good it feels, knowing your clothes are getting looser on you? Dropping a couple of dress sizes, feeling the way things hang so straight on you all of a sudden? It’s the
best
feeling in the world. It’s a feeling of—yes,
power.

“Tell me, Lise,” Mrs. Jordan says gravely, “are you on a diet?”

I shake my head quickly. “Diet”: it’s such a strange word, isn’t it? That’s what I thought this eating plan of mine was once, way back when I started it. And yet somehow, somewhere along the line, it stopped being that. Now it’s just something I have to do. A set of rules I
have
to follow . . .

“Lise.” Mrs. Jordan’s voice breaks into my thoughts. “How much do you weigh now, exactly?”

Bingo.
The million-dollar question. This morning, when I weighed myself, I was 93 pounds—down from 121 pounds at the beginning of this year.
(Yes, Mrs. Jordan, I HAVE lost weight.)
And do you know what I found out the other day? Terri’s 108 pounds—15 pounds heavier than me. Isn’t that bizarre? I’ve always thought of Terri as so
thin.

But “thin,” I’ve discovered, is another one of those strange words: a relative concept, not an absolute one. Recently, I’ve realized that what other people see as thin just isn’t thin enough for me. Nowhere near. It’s to do with the way you feel, I guess, rather than the way you look. And I don’t feel thin yet at all.

It’s not that I don’t care what other people think, it’s that I just can’t seem to see myself as they do. And for once in my life, I want to meet my
own
expectations. I’m aiming for 90 pounds, which, by my reckoning, will look thin
on me.
Not anorexic ( Jessica Fuller got way lower than that), but definitely thin.

Nat’s mother sits forward in her chair.

“I asked you a question, Lise,” she says sharply. The sudden sharpness bewilders me: she’s always seemed so friendly before. So
nice.

I look up at her at last, defiantly. “I don’t know how much I weigh. I don’t have a set of scales.”

“I think you know
exactly
how much you weigh,” she remarks, undeterred. “And I think you are a very hungry girl.”

Her words bring a sudden stinging hotness to the back of my eyes. A voice murmurs unbidden in my mind:
I AM hungry. Can you IMAGINE how hungry I am?
I swallow, hard. This is
not
what I came here to talk to her about. I thought she was on my side.

“Lise . . .”

I wait, wary now.

“You have to
do
something about this.”

I don’t say anything.

“Have you discussed this with your parents at all? Your mother?”

I shake my head, horrified at the thought.

She sighs. “Lise, I think you need help.” She spreads her hands out on the table before me, palms down, firm. “I’m really worried about you. You need to see a counselor, or a doctor. I can give you some names, if you like.”

I shrug. She can give me all the names she likes. What help are they? I thought she said that
she
would talk to me.