The Best Thing (2 page)

Brenner isn’t following any more. I refuse to look round, but he sounds distant, incoherent. Stones whizz in the air, but I’m getting out of range.

He’s scared to ask for the truth, to ask properly, one person to another. They all are. You give them the truth and they don’t know what to do with it except use it against you.

Cars stop for me at the Salisbury Road crossing, and I almost cry with gratitude. It feels as if the drivers are being incredibly kind to me, as if they know my leg and head are stinging from the stones and my knees are wobbling, and they’re stopping to help me escape, and maybe block the way if Brenner comes after me again.

I make it home without having a major heart attack. Mum’s in the garden on a flex day, gouging weeds out of our tiny front lawn.

‘Hi,’ I say.

‘Oh, hullo,’ she says, smiling up at me. ‘Just taking out my executive stress on a few dandelions.’ This is a joke—she’s got one of those public-service jobs where her title is longer than her working day. ‘You look hot.’

‘Yes.’ All my injuries are out of her sight. Blood weaves through
the hair on the back of my head. ‘I’ll change and get us a drink, hey?’

Up in the bathroom’s coolness, I shower and rinse my hair, press my finger to the cut to stop the bleeding, put on clean clothes. I can almost forget it’s Tuesday, almost not care about tomorrow.
Bugger Brenner,
I can think.
And bugger Lisa and Donna and all the gossips at that bloody school.
I am not going to
let
them make my hands shake. I’m not going to
let
them make me sick with dread when I open my eyes to face another school day. They can
forget
it.

I can think these things, up here. Now.

I thought Brenner, for sure, was the sort of guy I was supposed to aim for. Good looking in a really wholesome, blond way. Sporty, cool. Muscle-headed. Insensitive. Shit-for-brains. If I put him next to Pug I can hardly believe they’re the same species. The difference is so huge, just between the ways I feel about them. With Pug, I
feel for
him, whereas with Brenner I
thought about
him. I
observed
myself with him. I was always the watcher. I never really cared much. I was too busy being pleased I had someone. Any guy would have done, but having someone so good looking, someone everyone approved of, was a bonus. If he’d died (falling during a rock-climb, maybe, or being run over during a bike race) I could have got off on playing the tragedy queen for a while, but I don’t think my life would have fallen apart.

Don’t I sound cold? It was different when I was with him. It was a big ego-boost, and I was
in love
because every other girl I knew was in love with
someone.
So I floated around, too, I smiled at everyone, I kept a diary full of
movie ticket stubs,
of
pressed flowers,
of bits of
poems
Brenner would have curled up and died to read, some I wrote myself and some I pinched from books. (I burned it over Christmas, ceremonially, in the backyard, when Mum and Dad were out.) I drew our initials twined together in secret squiggly parts of drawings I did in Art at school, and pointed them out to Lisa. I remember she squealed in rapture
and immediately started working on a monogram for her and James, which was out of date by the time those pieces got marked; she was with Terry by then. Oh God, I did all sorts of stuff because it was the thing to do. I thought I meant some of it, but most of it was a big act, a waste of time.

And then life gets
serious,
and you look back and realise what a
kid
you were, playing at being grown up.

pug
/p
g/n.
⁵
slang.
M19 [Abbrev.] = PUGILIST

But for
pug
n
.
²
, other meanings:

A term of endearment: dear one.

A courtesan, a prostitute; a mistress.

A monkey, an ape. Also (
rare
), a child.

A small demon or imp; a sprite.

(
pug-dog
) A dwarf breed of dog resembling a bulldog, with a broad flat nose and a deeply wrinkled face.

A short or stumpy person or thing;
esp.
a dwarf.

(
pug-engine
) A small locomotive used chiefly for shunting purposes.

For
pug
υ
.
¹
t
.:

Dirty by excessive handling.[!]

For
pug
υ.
²
t
.:

Thrust, poke or pack into a space … Prepare (clay for brickmaking or pottery, by kneading and working into a soft and plastic condition).

Thursday night at the supermarket. Cruel place: fluorescent lights (too many), metal shelving, shiny trolleys snarling and queuing, frazzled families, and over all the racket ‘Franklins’ Radio’ smarming on, alerting you to bargains in the meat department, the dairy, wherever, calling you ‘shoppers’ as if you had no other function in life. Too much stock, too many colours and shiny packets; it wears out your eyes.

I report back to Mum with the butter and yoghurt. ‘How come Dad doesn’t come with us any more? We used to get this done in half the time.’

‘Would you come, if you could avoid it?’ Mum watches somebody’s three-year-old tear open a packet of Smarties and send half of them skittering across the floor.

‘We used to have fun, I thought.’ She gives me an ironic look. ‘I mean, I don’t mean we
don’t
have fun now.’

‘Of course not.’ Mum sighs and runs her thumb down her list.

‘I
do-on’t
! Just—it used to be a quick shop and then a big long treat, like going out to dinner. Now it’s spending forever in here and then grabbing an ice-cream on the way out. Bor-ring.’

‘We can eat here if you like, downstairs. We’ll get the frozen stuff on the way out—no, forget I said that. I couldn’t stand another dose of supermarket queues. We can do something, though. Oh, look! There’s your mate Lisa.’

‘Quick! What d’you want me to get? I don’t want her to see me!’

‘Why ever not?’

‘We’re having a fight! What do you want,
quick
!’

‘Orange juice. And apple. Morningtown!’ She calls out after me. ‘Not that reconstituted stuff!’

The shopping turns into a nightmare of dodging around shelves and trying to keep track of where Lisa is. But at the checkout, as if fate drove us together, her dad calls out, ‘Well, if it ain’t the Dows! Having a night out on the town, are we, ladies?’ He manoeuvres his trolley in behind ours.

Mum jokes back, and I smile weakly. My eyes drag themselves to Lisa. Even in this spotlight-every-zit lighting she looks flawless. She’s all Sixtied up, in a white mini-dress with a chain belt, white sandals with daisies on them, clanking bangles. Her lips shimmer pale in her golden face and her eyes are made up to look huge and luminous. When she sees me, though, she forgets the waif look she’s trying for. She goggles at me, her pink-iced lips pressed together; then she lets her gaze wander away over the checkouts, a superior smile on her face.

Pug’s room is always a pigsty. Dead socks, dead magazines, the bed always unmade. There’s a smell. I guess part of it must be dead-sock smell. Another part is the frangipani tree at the window, its flower-stars’ sweetness complicating the light. Also dust, and the sheets, of course. Sheets, even fresh from the laundrette, can only take so much wear and tear, so much steaming and soaking and drying and being lain on. They start to live, to have their own breath. I couldn’t name for you what his scent is
like;
it’s not like any of its parts. I step in here and breathe it, and it’s relief, it’s excitement. It’s Pug’s own territory. Nobody comes here but us.

We are
ages
in that queue—so long I think I’m going to faint with the tension and the processed air. Finally we get out, Mum waving Mr Wilkinson a cheery goodbye. ‘Boy, you really are having a fight, aren’t you?’ she murmurs as I hurry her down the ramp. ‘What’s it all about?’

‘Her being a
shitbag.’
I feel sick. I feel as if I’ll never be free of Lisa, never get out from under her mushroom-cloud of influence.

‘Ah.’ Mum nods wisely. ‘So is our junk-food tea still on, or do you want to get as far away from Lisa as possible?’

‘Let’s go home,’ I say. ‘Maybe Dad’ll take us out for tea anyway.’

‘He’ll be
too tired.’
She imitates the way Dad slumps when he says that. ‘He’s always too tired these days to do anything with his
family.
Old age is creeping up on him, poor bloke.’

‘He’s working pretty hard, though.’

‘Yeah. For some reason.’

I grin at her. ‘Like, maybe he wants to earn squillions?’

‘Well, I’m still waiting for all this extra effort to show up on the bank statements; that’s all I can say.’

In the rooftop carpark a pearly-pink sunset (about the same shade as Lisa’s lipstick) lights up the rows of car roofs. Shunting cars fart into the sea-touched breeze. I breathe the whole cocktail gratefully; there
is
life after Franklins.

Ricky Lewis, old friend of Mum’s and Dad’s, is there when we get home.

‘’Day, Rick,’ says Mum. ‘Why aren’t
you
out Thursday-night shopping?’ We struggle through the loungeroom with our grocery bags.

‘I’m having it delivered these days. It’s fabulous. I told you about this guy. I tick off what I want and he puts it on my doorstep next day.’

‘Oh, but you’re missing a marvellous cultural experience, isn’t she, Mel?’ Mum dumps her bags on the kitchen table. Dad’s in there getting glasses out of the cupboard. He looks as if he’s been caught in a blizzard: hair every which way, tie loose, collar unbuttoned. ‘You should come with us next week, like old times,’ Mum says to him.

‘Yeah, I should,’ he says, more enthusiastically than you’d expect. Mum and I make surprised faces at each other. ‘You do
want
a beer, don’t you, Ricky?’ he calls out. ‘You didn’t actually answer me before these people came barging in.’

She comes to the kitchen door, leans there. ‘Don’t mind if I do.’ She’s wearing quite short shorts and a T-shirt that’s tight enough to show off her breasts. The nipples stand out under the cloth—it’s pretty hard not to notice them. How embarrassing. Why can’t she fold her arms, instead of tucking her hands in the back of her waistband like that?

‘And for the workers?’ Dad’s at the fridge, getting out a beer-bottle. He sees me looking at him and smiles a funny smile, bright and self-conscious, with the eyebrows going.

‘No thanks,’ I say. ‘Nothing for me.’

We never pull the bedclothes over ourselves. I often wonder what’d happen if Mum and Dad burst in on us. What I’d do—I wouldn’t scream or sit up or anything dumb—I’d lie there just as I was, my head on his shoulder, my arm around his chest. He’d tense up, but I’d say, ‘It’s okay,’ and we’d both just go on staring
at the ceiling, breathing slowly, while Dad shouted and Mum went white in the doorway.

His hands are big, strong, really
male.
(I put my hand against Pug’s and it’s a slip of a hand, meant for different operations from his. And I’m a slip of a girl, up against him.) His arm is heavy on my chest and stomach, and the fingers rest as a cage around my breast.

Sometimes we lie like that for
hours.
And then one of us wakes up and starts exploring, and then the other, and then before you know it … well, words are hopeless to describe it when it’s good, and it’s always good. I keep on expecting annoyance, that
besieged
feeling I got with Brenner, but it hasn’t happened yet.