How it feels to float, p.3
How It Feels to Float, page 3
I guess she watched the movie again this morning, after we went to school, before she went out for drinks. Mum has the DVD on the bookshelf, wedged in with the photo albums, the twins’ art projects, and all the books stacked sideways so we can fit in more books.
‘I love parallel universes,’ sighs Mum.
That she does. And she loves love. And fate.
‘If it’s meant to be, it will be,’ she loves to say. ‘Everything happens for a reason.’ I’ve even seen Mum cross herself. She can’t run from her faith—it follows her no matter what.
Mum and I watched the movie together when I was thirteen. She sat on one end of the couch and I lay down with my feet in Mum’s lap. I listened to Gwyneth’s not-so-great British accent, saw her have steamy sex with a guy (‘I forgot about this part! Look away, Biz!’), and I watched her die. At least in one universe. And when Gwyneth died, Mum and I cried so hard our eyes swelled almost shut.
I cried just as hard the second time, when I skipped school a few months later and saw it again.
Dad sat on the edge of the couch, watching with me. He popped in to see the part where the Gwyneth of the other universe doesn’t die, where she wakes up in hospital and tries her hand at living instead.
He said, ‘I took your mum to that movie. She had a cold and said I shouldn’t kiss her but of course I did, and of course I got sick too.’
I squinted at Dad through puffy eyes.
‘I cried so hard when Gwyneth died,’ said Dad. ‘Even though she had to. I couldn’t stop myself. Your mum too. We were the only ones in that place, thank God, so we could bawl in peace. That’s when I really knew,’ he said, doing his faraway smile.
That you loved her, Dad, right? I wanted to say. That you’d be with her forever. That you would stay till Death wrenched you apart, right, Dad? Isn’t that what you promised?
‘“I’m going to make you so happy,”’ said Dad. ‘Best line ever said to a dead woman. Heartbreaking.’
Dad sat on the edge of the coffee table, in his patterned socks and dressing gown. He said, ‘Shall we watch it again?’
So we did.
The new guy’s name is Jasper Alessio. He is tall and narrow. He has a strange gait, a limp, like his right leg is too slow to keep up—a stubborn dog not done with its walk. He has longish hair like everyone else. It goes over his eyes. Jasper fiddles with it when he’s thinking hard, usually in maths. He bends over the paper. He frowns over the little x’s, the tiny n’s. Doesn’t he know they can fend for themselves? They are everywhere—the unknown owns us. But Jasper taps with his pencil. He fidgets and scribbles. In English he doesn’t seem to care, but in maths, Jasper frets.
Jasper appears to not have friends. No one has claimed him yet. The group at the top won’t. They are beautiful and have no physical impediments. Not even pimples. So even if Jasper is funny, even if he can play guitar and drums, even if he’s had sex with exactly the right number of people, it’s the leg.
The next group down might take him, but it all depends on Jasper’s personality. Is he clever without being up himself? Is he the right kind of funny? Does he keep the teachers on their toes?
He has only a little time to prove himself. He has to make his move soon.
I don’t care, except I mentioned him to The Posse and Evie made a face.
‘He’s kind of creepy,’ Evie said.
Miff nodded.
‘What makes him creepy?’ I said.
‘He breathes really weirdly in chemistry,’ said Stu. ‘When he’s measuring out the hydroxide.’
I looked at Grace and she shrugged.
‘And what do you think is up with his leg?’ said Sal.
‘Have you seen it?’ Evie asked me.
‘I haven’t,’ I said. How would I have seen it? Jasper wears pants every day, even when it’s boiling. He doesn’t do sport; none of us do. He doesn’t look like a surfer. He doesn’t look like a gamer, or stoner, or drama head, or nerd, or anything really other than a boy, tall and narrow. He actually looks a bit like a smudge—like, if it wasn’t for his leg you might pass right by him, like he’s a part of a wall you’ve needed to repaint for years but can never find the time.
‘Well, he seems like a bit of a dick,’ said Grace.
It’s true. He hasn’t made the best first impression. He could be a dick and only a dick. But he also seems a bit lonely.
The Posse started speculating on the cause of The Limp. As Jasper would not be getting an interview, they had to figure out his story themselves.
I find myself thinking about Jasper and not telling Grace I’m thinking about Jasper.
What does he do when he’s daydreaming in English? Where does he go? What makes him fret in maths? What happened to his leg? Was it a tractor tragedy? Was he riding a John Deere through the family farm and did he stop for a huddle of mice snuggling in the wheat stalks? Did he step out to save them, and the tractor, mind of its own, ran him down? Thirteen surgeries later, three steel pins, and five hundred staples, Jasper can finally walk again.
Or is he in fact an arsehole, and did he run over an old lady with a stolen motorbike? Jasper: buzzed on drugs, tattooed and merciless, just released from juvenile detention. Was he a second away from offending again?
I can’t help but wonder.
Mum always says ‘Answers are your friend’. Maybe all Jasper needs is a kind face. I’m sure I can put one on.
I wait for Jasper outside school on Tuesday. He is walking down the steps, tilting a little from side to side, a sailor in a storm.
I go up three steps to meet him and say, ‘Would you like to go for a walk?’
He stops, startled, and stares at me. ‘Sorry?’
I say—slowly, because maybe he’s a bit thick, maybe this is why he breathes loudly in chemistry, maybe this is why he frets—‘I said, would you like to go for a walk?’
‘Are you taking the piss?’ Jasper frowns.
‘Sorry?’ I lean forward.
‘Are you asking me because you think I can’t walk? That’s a pretty shitty thing to do, if you are.’
I’m so surprised, I step backwards and stumble off the step, banging my leg on a railing. My eyes flash with tears. I bend over to hold my ankle. I’ve probably broken it.
‘That’s karma, I reckon,’ Jasper says, and then he walks off.
Turns out, Jasper does ride a motorbike.
He hoons off on it, passing me on the front school steps where I’m sitting, nursing my broken bone. And anyone looking at him would have to agree, empirically, that on his bike, Jasper doesn’t look at all like a smudge.
Dad says, ‘Is it broken, Biz?’ He’s on the stairs, just above the stairs. You can see an inch of air between his feet and the concrete.
I don’t know, Dad.
‘Have you checked? Should you walk? Should you get an ambulance? Maybe you should get an ambulance.’ Dad is pacing. He looks grey. Like he’s been hung on a wall in direct sunlight and has been left to fade.
I don’t need an ambulance, Dad.
‘Just to be sure. You might make it worse. It could be splintered in there. You could get gangrene, Biz.’
I turn my body towards him. He’s in his pyjamas. The ones he was wearing when he died.
‘Dad. I’m just going to go home, okay? Mum will fix it. Relax.’
He looks at me for one beat. Two. And then he blips out.
After I limp home, after I ice my ankle and watch the dark bruise rise, Mum comes back from work. I’m in a chair on the verandah, floating in the twilight. A cluster of mosquitoes circles my head but I’ve smeared myself with repellant, so the mozzies are cranky and whining. The twins are in the living room, watching TV and punching each other.
Mum plonks her keys down on the kitchen counter and sighs. I can hear her; she can’t see me.
‘Hi, Mum,’ I say.
Mum jumps. Peers out the window.
‘Biz?’
‘Outside.’
‘Why?’
‘Because,’ I say.
Mum never goes out in the garden. She rarely goes onto the back verandah. The garden overwhelms her, she says. All the undergrowth and overgrowth and grass and dog shit.
But I like the mystery of it. Somewhere in this foresty jumble is a swing set the twins still use, running a narrow path to it through the high grass. There’s also a jacaranda tree, limbs twisting—it drops flowers every season and turns the garden purple. The twins have laid out toys at the tree to lure fairies. Also here’s the dog, who likes to snuffle for lizards and lilli pilli berries. Right now, Bump is dozing at my feet.
Mum creaks open the screen door. She’s already poured her first wine. Another day done for Mum. She works too hard. Mum wanted to be an artist once. Now she’s a dental assistant. She looks in a hundred decaying mouths a day. Her boss asks her in for extra shifts all the time because Mum always says yes.
‘You okay?’ she says.
‘Broke my ankle,’ I say, gesturing to my foot.
‘Really?’ Mum steps out. Already she’s got that note in her voice. The I don’t think so, Biz tone. You could make a song of that sound, after all the stories I’ve told her.
‘It’s the size of a basketball,’ I say.
Mum stands over my foot, looks at it. ‘That’s a nasty bruise,’ she says.
‘See?’
‘Can you move it? Can you wiggle your toes? Can you bear any weight?’ She’s leaning over it, touching my ankle, and already it’s better, just for the touching and looking.
They say observation affects reality, that it can pin an electron into place. Until then, the electron is just a possibility, just an idea. Until it’s seen, it might as well not exist.
Mum has pinned me all my life. I’ve tried to dodge her sometimes, but she has me. And I’ve had her. Two electrons eyeing each other, moving wherever the other moves.
I think Dad was harder to spot. He always went so fast, Mum said. He hardly slept. He’d be up before five, making to-do lists, drinking coffee, pulling on his sneakers, and heading out the door for his morning run.
He had so many plans. They were always travelling—job to job, town to town, house to house.
Mum would say to Dad, ‘Shall we stay here?’
And Dad would say, ‘But what about there?’
Dad worked as a carpenter, a gardener, a fishing-boat mate, a youth worker, an office assistant, and a teacher’s assistant, and Mum looked in mouths.
Were they happy?
I’ve asked Mum more than once.
She says, ‘Yes, Biz. Lots of times we really, really, really were.’
Mum has me tilt my foot, up and down, all around. Turns out, it’s probably not broken. I hobble inside and she straps it, her hands moving around my ankle until it’s giftwrapped.
We eat flavoured tofu on soggy white rice for dinner, with a few stalks of broccoli planted hopefully on the sides of the plate. The twins go and get tomato sauce from the fridge and turn their dinner into lava.
I persuaded Mum to go vegan from vegetarian a few months ago, but I don’t think her heart’s in it. Nothing much has changed in the nutrition department. Dinner used to be some kind of cheese with some kind of carbohydrate with some kind of vegetable. Our new meals are not so much a step up, as a step sideways.
Sometimes I think about making a better, brighter meal and surprising Mum. I think about it and I go to my room after school, open my laptop, and fall into the internet. I look up, and three hours have passed and Mum is home, making dinner. We sit and eat: something boiled, something grey, something green.
I move the food around my plate. The twins gobble it down. They talk and talk, and Mum nods and laughs. Sometimes I wonder if she’s really listening. She looks like she is, but maybe every time we’re having dinner, half her mind is here and half is in Tahiti.
My mind is almost always elsewhere.
How can Jasper’s parents let him ride a motorbike? Aren’t they worried he’ll die? Does he even have parents or is he with caregivers, having just left kid prison? Is he hungry? Is he homeless? Is he holed up in a cardboard box right now, shivering and gnawing on dumpster bones?
After dinner and washing up, I go to my room and look for Jasper online.
He barely exists. There’s almost nothing to pin him down, just a shadow-self on Facebook. That’s it.
I almost send him a friend request; I have my arrow pointed on the button and my finger ready to click, but wait—what are you doing, Biz? He’s a dick, isn’t he? And what makes you think he’ll even accept? He thinks you’re a bitch.
I move the arrow away. I take my hand off the keyboard.
In his profile picture, Jasper is a silhouette against some kind of sunset. His cover photo is a windmill in a field. The photo is beautiful; he could easily have stolen it from someone else (who probably stole it from someone else).
Maybe Jasper steals everything. Maybe his motorbike was pilfered from a front yard, with some biker out looking for it, furious and weeping. Maybe Jasper’s bag and books and phone and clothes are all stolen. Maybe his limp is fake. Maybe Jasper is a lie.
I’m at the beach with a bunch of hooligans. Everyone’s drunk. I think I’m also drunk? I had three ciders and then something from a bottle, which burned. It was whisky; I think it was whisky. And then we did tequila shots out of medicine cups, which was funny.
Grace is here and Stu and Miff and Evie and Rob and Sal. We are ‘The Intoxicated Posse’ hahaha. Other people are here too. We are all together. The youth are congregating. We are the Church of Youth. Let’s pray.
The ocean looks enormous and inky. You can see the white of the waves where they break. You can see our feet where the firelight touches them. You can see our bright, happy faces.
Someone’s playing guitar and everyone’s singing along. Everyone’s shouting all the swears in the song: Fuck! Fuck!
Why is shouting the word fuck so satisfying?
It just is.
It. Just. Is.
I’ve got my head in Grace’s lap. Grace is kissing theguywhosentthedickpic. I can hear their tongues slapping around in each other’s mouths. Grace twists to mash her face closer to his. Her knee keeps bouncing my head.
I can feel the ciders and whisky and tequila swirling around in my stomach along with the two hash browns from McDonald’s. The food and liquids aren’t loving each other.
‘I’m gonna throw—’ I say. I get up. Grace isn’t listening. Whatshisname has his hand on her boob, under her shirt.
I go to the dunes where the bushes and rabbits are. The rabbits must be covering their ears right now because we, the youth, are too loud. I bend over a bush and decorate it. I step two steps to the left and decorate another.
Lucky bushes. They will look like Christmas trees in the morning. Hash brown baubles on the branches and maybe some of Mum’s dinner too, noodle tinsel—that’s funny but also my head hurts. I step down the dune, away from the bushes and rabbits and back towards the fire, but the fire hurts my eyes and the singing too (why are they singing the same song over and over?) and the sight of Grace with her tongue down whatshisname’s throat, and Evie, who is flopped over some guy called Tim, and Stu, who is all heart eyes at Jamal, who’s in Year 12 and plays rugby and is super talented, Stu says. Everyone’s all tongues-down-throats-and-drinking-and-wanting-and-singing. They’re all mouths open, laughing at jokes they won’t remember, and no one cares that I’ve gone.
I go down the beach away from the fire and the noise and them.
I stand at the edge of the water. I look out at the white of the waves and the dark of the ocean. I imagine all the sleepy fish. I imagine how warm they must be.
The water’s at my ankles and it is warm; those fish aren’t wrong.
Then the waves are at my knees and they’re having a chat.
‘Sigh,’ sigh the waves. ‘We’ve been waves for so long. We get so bored, rolling and rolling. What’s it like to be a girl?’
‘Not bad,’ I say, but that’s not true, and I don’t want to lie to the ocean. ‘Actually, it is bad sometimes,’ I confess. ‘Sometimes it’s been very bad.’
The waves nod. ‘We thought so. We see all sorts of things.’
‘I can imagine,’ I tell them. The waves are at my hips now; we’re having a lovely time.
‘We’ve seen sharks and drownings and shipwrecks and plastic. Ratio of sharks to drownings to shipwrecks to plastic, 5 : 2 : 1 : 1,000,000,’ say the waves at my waist.
I shake my head sorrowfully.
‘That’s so sad,’ I say.
‘It is sad,’ the waves say from under my boobs. ‘Why don’t you do something about it, Biz?’
‘Me?’ A wave slaps at my chest.
‘Yes, you, Biz, what the fuck are you doing just scrolling the internet when the sea is suffocating?’
Whoa. The waves are getting stroppy. The waves are at my shoulders, whapping. They’re yanking at my arms, tugging at my chest and hips, grabbing my knees and ankles and feet.
‘No need to be like that,’ I say, or try to say, but a wave shoves into my mouth and slops around trying to see why I can’t be bothered to get the fuck off my chair and save the ocean.
I choke. I try to twist away but the waves have me gripped. They’re whooshing into my eyes, my open mouth. My tongue tastes only salt and wet.
I wish I could save the ocean; I want to tell the waves that, but they’ve pulled my words away. I wish I could save the oceans and the glaciers and the rhinos and I want to save the rainforest and the Pacific islands and Dad. I want to tell the ocean how useless I’ve been, but the waves already know. The water sees everything.
