Leaving Jetty Road (8 page)

PART III

Nat

chapter thirteen

Alfresco’s

“S
o what are you going to wear to the Formal?” Sofia asks me one day early in the new semester.

We’re sitting in Alfresco’s—Sofe, Lise, and I—enjoying the weekly Year 12 lesson-free afternoon (which is supposed to be for study purposes, but—come
on.
I don’t
think
so). It’s a cold, sunny afternoon, and the café is dark and deserted, the smell of hot, sweet milk mingling with stale cigarette smoke.

I don’t answer Sofia’s question straightaway. After a moment, I say casually—like the Year 11 and 12 Formal isn’t a topic I’ve been absolutely dreading ever since term began—“I’m not going this year.”

“Hey, nor am I,” Lise chimes in, shooting a surprised, happy smile at me across the table.

Sofe ignores her. “What about Josh?” she says to me.

I shrug my shoulders.

“
Nat.
He’s your
boyfriend.

“Yes, I know, but—”

Sofe gives me a shrewd look. “He doesn’t want to go.”

“No, it’s not that. It’s just—”

In fact, there are two reasons I don’t want to go to the Formal.

The first is that after last year, I swore I’d never go to a Formal again. Last year was a
disaster.

For starters, Sofia’s boyfriend of the moment, Sebastian, got drunk and spewed up all over her dress just as they were getting out of the car to go in. She dumped him right there at the entrance to the hall and caught a taxi home by herself before she’d even gone inside. (“Mate, if I’d had another dress, believe me—I’d’ve put it on and caught another taxi right back again . . .”)

Then there was my partner. Simon was one of Sebastian’s mates, whom Sofia had had the bright idea of setting me up with two weeks before the Formal.

“You can’t go by yourself,” she said to me.

“Why not?” I argued. “Lise is.”

“Yeah, but that’s Lise,” said Sofia dismissively. “Now let’s go and find you a dress.”

Simon was five foot three and stank of nervous sweat; and all he wanted to talk about was how he’d taken E once, and how cool it was. Also, he couldn’t keep his hands off me. Even now, if I close my eyes, I can still feel the way his hands snaked up my ribs toward my breasts as we danced.

Finally, breathless and desperate to get free of him, I shouted over the music, “Let’s sit down for a minute, okay?” He took me over to a bench in the darkest corner of the hall, plunked himself down next to me, and
kissed
me. His lips were all wet and rubbery, and his knee inched its way between my legs as he poked his tongue around my mouth. I thought I was going to choke—or drown—in all that anxious, eager saliva forcing its way down my throat.

As for Lise, all I can remember is her standing miserably against the wall in a sweet old-fashioned but
totally
wrong flowery cotton dress, clutching a plastic cup of lemonade. She couldn’t, or wouldn’t, dance. When Simon disappeared to the toilet for a brief, blissful moment, I dragged her out onto the dance floor, and she moved stiffly around for a few seconds before creeping off again at the end of the song. Then, at 10 p.m., she left the hall abruptly to call her dad to come and pick her up. I didn’t see her again that evening.

So that’s one reason I don’t want to go to the Formal. The other is—Josh. I mean, he’s
nineteen.
Do I really want to remind him how much younger (and stupider) I am than him? Besides, I just can’t see him there. It’s so private-schoolish. All those evening dresses, and Year 12 guys in tuxedos and bow ties, and schoolteachers handing out glasses of Coke and orange juice. It’s the kind of thing Josh would have a field day with.

He hates private schools, Josh. He says they’re full of rich kids, the children of elitists—and he can’t
stand
elitists. Besides, he says, they push the belief that studying and being brainy are the only ways to succeed in life. “My dad belongs to Mensa. He’s still totally full of himself. Look what he did to my mother.”

I have a hard enough time myself trying to figure out what makes him attracted to me in the first place. I don’t want
him
to start asking that question.
No way
is Sofe going to talk me into going to the Formal this year.

“Lise isn’t going, either,” I remind Sofia now. “You’re not making a fuss about that.”

“Yeah, well,” she says, looking mildly bored. “Lise never goes to
anything.
”

There’s a sudden, short silence. I think:
Oh, no. I wish Sofe wouldn’t get started on Lise.

“Well, she doesn’t, does she?” Sofia says. She turns to Lise. “You wanna go out with me and Nat next weekend, Lise?”

Lise stares impenetrably down at her coffee—a long black—and stirs the teaspoon round and round in her cup. Eventually, she says quietly, without looking up, “I’ve got to study next weekend.”

Sofia rolls her eyes. “See?” she says to me. “Tell me the last time she went to a party with us, or thought about going to a nightclub, or slept over, or—”

“I came out with you today,” says Lise, almost inaudibly.

“To
coffee,
” says Sofia disgustedly.

“And I slept over with you both at Nat’s for New Year’s.”

“That was six
months
ago!”

Lise traces tiny, endless patterns in her coffee cup. She’s sitting with her legs crossed under the table, and her top foot swings agitatedly back and forth, nudging the plastic leg of the spare chair opposite her.

“I can’t afford to go out anyway,” she says, her voice still barely louder than a whisper. “I don’t get much pocket money.”

“Then get a job, like the rest of us!”

“But I have to study . . .”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Lise,” says Sofia wearily. “Just—get a
life.
”

We all shut up after this. Lise looks down, avoiding our eyes, her foot worrying away at the chair leg. Sofia sighs heavily, scrapes her chair back, stands up.

“I’m getting a gelato,” she says roughly. “Anyone else want one?”

I shake my head out of loyalty to Lise, whose face, as Sofia stalks off to the counter, is tense and sucked in over her empty cup.

“Lise?” I ask carefully. “You okay?”

She takes a quick breath, doesn’t look up at me. “Yeah.”

“Sure?”

“I’m
fine.
”

I try to feel my way forward. “I’m sure she didn’t—Sofe can be a bit—” I pause, trying to think how to put it, how to stay loyal to both of them. “You
do
know she didn’t really mean it—”

Her hair swings across her face, corkscrew curls covering her eyes. “I
said,
I’m
fine.
”

I glance over at Sofe, standing at the counter by the coffee machine, talking away cheerfully to the waiter, acting like nothing ever happened, like she’s forgotten the argument already. (To be fair, she probably has. Sofia never holds a grudge.) Then I look back at Lise. Her teeth are clamped down on her lip; her hand clenches her coffee cup. She looks anything but fine.

Sofe forgetting, Lise stewing. This is how it always is after one of their arguments. With me sitting in the middle of them—thinking, glaring,
wishing.

I
hate
it when they argue. I’m just not
into
conflict resolution (sorry, Mum): I just don’t want to get involved. I mean, whose side would I take? So instead I always sit there and worry about what would happen if they really got started. I’m scared of what Sofia would say to Lise, and I’m scared of the look I’d see on Lise’s face—that look of silent, intractable hurt. I’m scared they’d end up never speaking to each other again.

The thing is, where would that leave
me
? They’re both my friends. I want it to stay that way; I want us
all
to be friends.

chapter fourteen

Saturday night

T
hese days, I don’t call my parents on Saturday nights after work to say I’ll be late home. I don’t have to. They already know: Saturday night is Josh night.

Most Saturdays, we make our way down to the beach after work. Josh loves the beach—the water, the sand, the air, the sky: the wildness of it. (“Despite the litter,” he always says grimly.) We walk along the sea’s edge, where the sand is compact and firm, and he holds my hand, gazing out to the horizon. In the cold late-afternoon air, his cheeks get all red and
—kissable.

When we reach his house, Josh cooks dinner for me. (“Don’t you get
sick
of cooking?” I asked him once. He shook his head: “Never.”) Some evenings he switches on the back-porch light while he cooks, so that while we’re having dinner at his round pine table we can look through the glass sliding doors to the tiny lit-up backyard.

Other nights we sit on the sofa and listen to his music collection. He’s got weird taste in music, Josh. He likes folk music, world music, rhythm and blues; Billy Bragg, Paul Kelly, Archie Roach. But he also likes yodeling. I’m not kidding: at work he even makes Michael switch over to a station on the radio that plays yodel music for a couple of hours every Saturday afternoon.

“You’ve got to be happy to yodel,” he said shamelessly, when I asked him about it. “I mean,
listen
to that. How could you do it if you were feeling sad?”

Yes, but.
“I wouldn’t call
you
the most cheerful of souls,” I pointed out.

“Maybe that’s why I like it,” he said, shrugging.

But sometimes, now, we don’t bother with dinner, or even with music. We just go straight upstairs to his bedroom. We sit on his bed, fooling around and—you know
—exploring.
Josh brushes my eyelashes with his lips and whispers “Sweet Nat” in my ear. He kisses my nose, mouth, breasts. His lips taste salty and make me think of the sea, but his breath is sweet, like the chamomile tea he drinks to help him get to sleep at night.

We kiss a lot. All over. Once we’ve started, it’s like we can’t stop kissing each other. Sometimes I have to pull myself away from him physically, saying, “Not yet, okay? Not yet.” There are times, to be honest, when I don’t even know why I say that. I just know that—for now—this is enough.
For now.

But during the week, when I’m drawing diagrams in biology, or gossiping with Sofe, or lying in bed at night, drifting off to sleep, I think about Josh’s room. I think about being there with him again—about being there and never leaving it. Sometimes I think his room is like a magnet—stopping me from drifting, giving me direction; drawing me on, drawing me in.

That’s how I feel about Josh, too. Like I’m drawn to him and don’t ever want to let go—

One evening, lying next to Josh on his bed, I notice his cloth cap (the one he wears every day at work) hanging on the hook on the back of his door.

“Where’d you get it from, that cap?” I ask idly.

“My ex.”

“Julie?”

“Yeah.”

Josh hasn’t had a girlfriend since Julie; it had been almost a year since they broke up when he first met me. He doesn’t talk about any of his old girlfriends much, but from time to time I ask him about them anyway. I kind of like it, to be honest. It adds color to him, somehow: to who he is, what he’s done with his life. Also—and I know this’ll sound weird—it makes him more precious to me. As in, now he’s with
me.
Even though he’s had other girlfriends,
I’m
the one he wants to be with now.

I still can’t believe that’s true.

“Is it from Thailand or somewhere?” I ask now.

“Vietnam.” He sees the question in my eyes. “Julie went there at the end of the first year of our apprenticeship. For a holiday. We were going to go there together, but I couldn’t afford the plane ticket.”

“Was that why you two broke up?” I ask curiously. “Because she went there without you?”

He sighs. “You really want to know?”

“Well—” I hesitate. “As long as you don’t mind talking about it.”

He closes his eyes, rolls away from me to face the wall. “She sent me all these e-mails and postcards and letters and things while she was away, right? Something every day, pretty much.” He takes a breath. “So anyway, I roll up at the airport when she gets back, all excited—you know, like, I haven’t seen this girl for two whole
months—
and we drive back to my place. Then, just as we’re sitting down on my bed, she tells me she ‘spent a weekend’ with some American dude in Vietnam.” He stares at the wall. “ ‘Just a weekend,’ she said. ‘It didn’t mean anything.’ ”

I wince. “So what did you do?”

“Broke up with her. Straightaway.”

“Just like that?” I say. “No second chances?”

“You don’t screw around when you’re in a relationship, Nat,” he says heavily. “You just
don’t.
”

Not unless you’re Josh’s dad, of course, I think grimly. Then you can “screw around” for three
years
and get away with it.

I lie there quietly next to him, propped up on my elbow, knees curled up tight into the back of his. I stare at the cap on the door, dream about buying him a new one for Christmas. He’d like that, I think. Then I say softly, “Josh?”

“Nat.”

I smile, the way I always do when he says that. “Um—have you ever been to a school Formal?”

He rolls back to face me, grimaces. “No. Why?”

I hesitate. “Do you want to come to mine?”

I know, I know. I said I wasn’t going to go to the Formal. I don’t even know why I’m asking now, to be honest, except that suddenly I just
have
to. I shouldn’t be lying to Josh about the things I do, the school I go to. He’s had enough lies in his life.

Besides, I don’t want to be the kind of person who shuts herself off, who’s ashamed of who she is. I want to stay open. I want him to love me for being
me.

“Do I have to wear a suit?” he asks.

I start to smile. “Yep. With a white shirt and a bow tie.”

“And you’ll be wearing a dress. I mean, like—a
real
one.”

“Mmm-hmm. Satin, or silk, or something.”

“Now that I have to see,” he says, grinning.

I take that as a yes. It looks like I’m going to the Formal after all.