The Industry (2 page)

David Hayward eyed his dinner plate longingly. He refused to start his meal until Kirra's mother, Sandra, was at the table, though at the moment it looked as though it was costing him dearly.

Kirra sat opposite him, still in her school uniform, swinging her legs under the table as she waited. Sandra was upstairs, trying to wrestle Mitchell, Kirra's younger brother, away from his video game and gently attempting to convince Kirra's sister, Olivia, that her fresh nail polish wouldn't be tarnished during the process of eating dinner.

David glanced at Kirra, seeming almost startled to find her sitting before him. ‘So, how was your first day back?' he asked.

‘It was alright,' Kirra replied, nudging the end of her fork with her thumb.

‘Good. Excellent,' he said, pursing his lips for a moment, trying to cover up the enormous effort it took
for him to carry on a conversation whilst ravenous. ‘And … ah … and your special Year Twelve classes?'

‘Pretty good.'

‘Easy stuff for you, right?' He smiled, tapping his foot in an intense percussion solo beneath the table. ‘Easy-peasy.'

For a moment Kirra thought of telling him about the code on that site; about how she'd somehow known the answer, and how it had swallowed up her submission without any sort of explanation; but instead she let the conversation dwindle and die. Her father was busy counting down to the arrival of dinner and the appearance of Mitchell, whom he so loved to talk AFL with. No, Kirra thought firmly, she wouldn't tell him about the code. There was nothing really to tell anyway.

David shot an aggrieved look at his plate, pushed away from the table and strode upstairs to investigate the hold-up. Within moments, Mitchell had been forced into a chair and Olivia sat herself gracefully down beside him.

Amid the commotion, the phone rang from its place by the fridge and Mitchell shot off his seat to answer it.

‘Oi, Olivia!' he barked as he came back to the table, holding the telephone at arm's length. ‘I think it's for you.'

Olivia gave a sharp squeal, clapped her hand over her mouth and flew off her chair. She seized the phone from Mitchell and hurtled around the corner and out of sight, emitting a name under her breath that sounded a lot like
Steven
, only to emerge a moment later looking enormously deflated. She plopped back down in her seat.

‘Who was that, Livy?' Sandra asked.

‘Don't know,' she said, her nose wrinkling. ‘Someone asking if I've entered any competitions lately. I told them about the Hargraves contest, but they hung up. I just … I don't know … I really thought they might be ringing to tell me that my charm design won.'

‘Oh. Well, no matter, darling,' cooed Sandra. ‘They'll ring back, I'm sure. I saw your design, I know how perfect it was. The glitter was a fantastic touch.'

‘It was in the end, wasn't it?' Olivia agreed happily.

Mitchell sniggered into his casserole, but covered it up by pretending to choke on a particularly big bit of potato. Kirra patted him weakly on the back, trying to keep a straight face. In the last few months Olivia's sickly girlishness had well and truly reached galactic proportions, but if they laughed out loud at her their mother would reprimand them for the rest of the evening, especially as it seemed she was nothing short of thrilled with Olivia's irritating developments. Instead, Mitchell settled for a quick knowing look and turned away. Olivia, however, looked up just in time to see Kirra quell her smile.

‘What? What is it?' she asked, her eyes narrowing immediately.

‘Nothing,' Kirra said.

‘You were laughing.'

‘No, I wasn't.'

Olivia turned to their mother. ‘Kirra was laughing at me!'

‘No, she wasn't!' Mitchell piped up.

He stuck a pea on the end of his fork, pulled it back and let go. The pea flew at Olivia and bounced lightly off
the end of her nose. By the time Sandra looked up and caught Olivia on the verge of bursting into tears, Mitchell had managed to look perfectly innocent again. Kirra took a sip of water, just to look occupied, and their father was too busy with his food to be aware of the exchange at all.

‘Mitchell, eat your dinner,' Sandra ordered, peering suspiciously between him and Kirra. ‘Kirra, don't be jealous of your sister.'

Kirra nearly spat her water all over the table. ‘
Jealous?
I'm not — that's not —'

‘Oh, yes,' Olivia said, looking delighted to be getting to the bottom of things. ‘You are. I don't hear Steven ringing here for
you
.'

‘I wouldn't want —' Kirra spluttered. ‘Even if I could, who'd want —'

‘And the Hargraves competition is about fashion, so you'd hardly understand that.'

‘Fashion?' Mitchell interrupted. ‘Hate to tell you, Olivia, but just because something's pink doesn't mean it's fashionable.'

He nodded at the fuchsia coloured jumper she'd changed into before dinner, a sequined pattern on the front.

‘Mum!' Olivia cried, looking distraught.

‘Mitchell,' Sandra said, setting down her fork, ‘be quiet! Kirra, apologise to Olivia this instant!'

But Olivia wasn't finished. ‘You shouldn't laugh at me,' she said, gazing fiercely at Kirra. ‘All
you've
got is maths. All
you've
got is algebra and typography and —'

‘Topology,' Kirra heard herself saying. ‘It's topology, not typography.'

‘Exactly!' Olivia said, looking smug. ‘Exactly. That's all you have and it's nothing really. So you shouldn't be laughing at me. If anything,
I
should be laughing at
you
, but I feel too sorry for you to do that.'

‘Kirra knows that, Livy,' Sandra said, her voice growing stern. Kirra knew their mother detested dinner-table confrontations. ‘I'm sure she's sorry for laughing. Now, tell me about what happened this morning on the bus with Steven.'

Olivia's face brightened, and she acted as though Kirra had spontaneously ceased to exist. ‘Oh, yes,' she said, and launched into a detailed description of her twenty-minute journey to school: ‘I sat down at the back, but made sure the seat next to me was free, and then he got on and sat down and —'

While Sandra listened with rapt attention, Kirra turned back to Mitchell, who gave her an almost imperceptible shrug, a look of saddened camaraderie on his face. Kirra responded with a reassuring smile, the sort that plainly said she didn't care about Olivia or any of the things she had said.

Unsurprisingly, it was David who finished the meal first. He cast his eyes back to Kirra, who was picking absently at her plate. Everyone else was still busy eating.

‘So, do you want to have some friends around on the weekend?' he suggested benignly. ‘You could have a sleepover.'

Kirra grimaced to herself. A sleepover? For a moment she imagined asking Phillipa Corbel and her docile, well-mannered friends, Joanne Gaskell and Sarah Novak, to stay at her house. They were nice enough to let Kirra sit
with them at lunch when she wasn't ploughing through homework, but they generally wriggled out of any further association as politely as they possibly could. Kirra, with all her aggravating cleverness, was considered unfashionable company.

‘Sounds good,' she said in a cheery voice, prodding at a chunk of onion. ‘I'll check if they aren't already doing something.'

She tried to say this as quietly as humanly possible. Olivia had been absolutely right when she'd said that all Kirra had was maths. Kirra just didn't want her to know that.

 

Monday lunchtime, a week after she'd come across the strange code, Kirra settled on a lone, splintery bench in the shade. She spotted Olivia sitting by the basketball court with some other Year Nine girls. She tucked a sandy curl behind her ear and grinned at one of her friends, a stringy girl with teeth so prominent she looked capable of eating her lunch through a tennis racket. The grin changed to a stunning smile as a couple of gangly boys roamed by.

‘What are you staring at?'

Kirra shielded her eyes to find Mitchell standing by her side, frowning deeply and attempting to follow her line of vision. His socks were crumpled around his ankles and his shirt was a good four sizes too big for him.

‘Nothing,' Kirra lied. She looked around as he crouched beside her. ‘Where are your friends?'

‘At the canteen. I've met some guys who've just started at Freemont, which is cool because I don't have to hang
around with Rowan Maretti anymore. He's become an arsehole over the holidays. How 'bout you?' he asked shrewdly. ‘You made friends yet?'

Kirra focused on her sandwich for a moment. ‘Nope. Not yet.'

‘Oh. Well, you haven't been here very long,' he joked. ‘Just got to give it time.'

‘Yeah,' Kirra agreed. ‘It's only been ten years. Can't rush these things.'

Mitchell fiddled with the laces of his polished, oversized shoes. ‘Want me to stay with you?'

‘Stay?'

‘Well, yeah,' he said, determinedly casual. ‘We can hang out together at lunch now because … you know … I'm finally here.'

Kirra smiled grimly. She had indeed been waiting for Mitchell to start at the Freemont high-school campus for some time. Three years, in fact. Now primary school was well behind him and he was a week into Year Seven. The idea that he would stick with her at lunchtimes was touching, but not one she'd ever consider seriously. He had friends to make and things to do without Kirra tagging along.

‘Won't your new friends wonder where you are?' she asked.

‘Probably, but it doesn't matter,' he said, and shoved his hands deep in his pockets. ‘They're new friends. I've had you a fair bit longer.'

Neither of them said anything for a few moments.

‘You'd better go,' Kirra said finally, pushing him away. ‘I've heaps of work to do.'

He nodded, trying not to look too relieved, and knocked shoulders with her before jumping up and racing off, his enormous shirt flapping as he went.

Kirra went back to picking over her sandwich. As she used a bit of lettuce to wipe off the tomato relish her mother persisted in including day after day, she found herself wondering if there was any way she could speed up the three years she had left at Freemont Grammar, or if she could somehow hibernate until it was all over. Time, it seemed, was moving deliberately slowly. She gave a small, humourless smile and tossed the soiled lettuce in a nearby garden bed — and froze. The most alarming sensation pooled at the bottom of her spine and travelled slowly upward, tingling as though the many legs of an insect were scuttling along her vertebrae.

If it weren't for the disturbing incidents of the past week, Kirra might have ignored the feeling, might have passed it off as something else. But this wasn't the first time she'd felt it.

The first time had been the Wednesday evening just gone, when she'd accompanied Sandra to the supermarket to help her with the groceries. As she heaved a bottle of detergent from the trolley into the car boot she'd felt something distract her. It had been an unnerving sensation: almost as though she was being watched. But as Kirra peered around the half-full car park, she realised she was being an idiot. There was no one watching her at all.

‘What are you doing?' Sandra asked impatiently, glancing at her gilded wristwatch and reaching for a bag of cheesy crackers and a large tub of yoghurt.

Kirra did another quick scan of the area. ‘Nothing. Sorry.'

Sandra squinted at her through the dusk. ‘Right. Well … get a move on, Kirra. Olivia needs her shampoo.'

It was ludicrous to think someone was watching her. What possible explanation could there be for such a thing? Who could be that interested in her? No one, that's who.

But as she watched Mitchell play in his under-thirteens AFL game at Maitland Park on Saturday afternoon, it happened again. Standing there between her parents in the sun, Kirra had to acknowledge for the first time that she might actually be going mad. There wasn't a breeze to speak of, no drop in temperature, and yet she felt that odd alteration in her surroundings again, a shiver that she could only equate with the sensation brought on by being under close surveillance.

‘Kirra! Mitchell's about to kick a goal,' David said, shaking her elbow.

She looked back at the field just in time to see Mitchell miss by several metres. He laughed it off and ran back to his position.

‘Sorry,' Kirra said.

‘Better luck next time, champ!' David hollered across the field. He peered curiously at Kirra. ‘You nearly missed it! Everything okay?'

‘Yeah. Yeah, fine.'

He looked concerned for a moment, then smiled. ‘Thinking about all your tricky sums at school, I suppose.'

‘Yeah.'

There were hordes of people on the oval — families, players, kids running around everywhere — and Kirra had no choice but to shrug the feeling off.

Now, in the school grounds, she wasn't surprised to find she couldn't shake the sensation. Looking through the lattice fencing out onto the street, she spotted a couple jogging with their labrador, a rubbish truck doing its rounds and a man walking with a cane. From such a distance she couldn't be sure if any of them had been looking at her or not.

She got up, plunged the sandwich deep into the bin and headed for her next class. As she walked, she decided that the time had come to say something to her parents. She was sure uttering her fears out loud would make her seem nothing short of insane, but enough was enough. She vowed to speak to them that very night.

 

That afternoon, Kirra was one of the last students to leave the school. She had stayed late to finish her homework in the library, instead of fighting with Olivia for the computer at home, so when she got on the bus at five o'clock, she got on alone.