Still lying on the grass, Ella watched her friend then turned her gaze up towards the night sky. Norman might be dead during the day but every night the sky would put on the most spectacular of shows. She had spent hours as a girl making up her own patterns in the sky and assigning great cosmic meaning to them all. A small cluster of stars might be a sugar glider and signify the need to take off and trust yourself. Sparse, dull stars peeking from behind a cloud might be the sign of the elephant and signify that she should spray Zeke in the face with the hose. It was all a complicated stellar ballet.

  Over the years, though, the stars had faded for Ella. She thought of Gary, her little brother with the oldest of old man names, somewhere in London at this very moment under those same stars. Or, different stars, she supposed, if he could see the stars at all. God, how she’d love to be in a place with lights so bright they blocked out the night sky. How odd, she thought, to be faced with the majesty of the cosmos and yet hunger to hide it all away.

  Ella blamed the town. There was no drama in Norman. All their problems were depressingly mundane. The only dark secret in the town was that Bettsy Langham, who ran the florist, was hooking up with Daisy Peach who worked at the council, and everyone knew that except for Mr Langham. He was a grumpy old prick anyway, Ella thought. She hoped Mrs Langham was happy.

  Ella remembered the night before. She had been listening to 1228 AM Radio Norman when the announcement came over that Delight was being abandoned. She could read the tea leaves. Ella had known instantly what that meant for Norman.

  It was currently graduation season, and Ella’s social media feeds were full of former classmates celebrating finishing degrees and plotting trips around the world. The lack of reception throughout Norman had frozen her feed on the same obnoxious posts. Cap and gown, white teeth, glasses of champagne. Ella wanted that, too. She wanted a piece of paper that could definitively say that she had done at least one thing with her life. It was long past due that she did something that wasn’t for her brothers, her family or for Norm.

  Never someone to do what she was told, Ella decided she would leave Norman before she and everyone else was kicked out. And so, she had finally sent her application to the University of Melbourne. When the summer was over, she would be studying the stars for real. Or at least, enrolling in a first-year physics course with kids years younger than her and with much more life experience.

  It was a decision she had made in a heartbeat and at a glacial pace. The rest of their cohort had left three years earlier, but she and Norm had stayed behind. He hadn’t wanted to leave and it wasn’t the right time to leave him. She told herself she’d give it one more year and then be on her way. But the tethers were too strong. The weight of her family responsibility. The thought of being another person in Norm’s life who abandoned him. It was all too much. So, Ella stayed, year after year.

  Now, she had no choice. The town was dying. She had to go.

  She would tell Norm eventually. He would probably notice if she just wasn’t around anymore, though slipping away in the night and skipping the whole drama was a tempting option. The news would break his heart. There was no avoiding that. But there was also no need to do that just yet. Anyway, she didn’t even know if she was actually leaving or if some university administrator would send back a form letter in a week snuffing out her dreams once and for all.

  And so, presented with Norm’s hare-brained scheme to build a big thing, Ella had made another split-second decision: she had decided to support her friend. And why not chase Norm’s dream? If it worked, he would have a huge souvenir to remember her by when she left. If it didn’t, well, at least they’d get to have one last perfect summer together.

  Ella watched Norm lift the wheelbarrow with the old dog and slowly make his way down Botany Street. She picked up her bike, hopped on and started to follow her best friend through the streets of Norman.

  5.

  The home of Australia’s only cow race, the Compass Cup, now has its own landmark right in the main street … The cow is made of fibreglass and according to one local, ‘is one and a half times bigger than a big cow!’

  Organisers have plans to eventually make the cow ‘moo’ for the price of 20 cents.

  Victor Harbour Times, 6 February 1985

  Norm had been late to start at the school. For much of his early life, he had lived mostly in the cab of his dad’s truck. There were lessons broadcast over the radio and they’d listen together. Norm remembered one particular day scribbling in a notebook in his lap as his dad proudly called out every answer to the primary school maths quiz, then when the lesson was over, they pulled into a servo with a roadhouse attached for banana milkshakes that they would later regret as they re-emerged on the bumpy road in the 40-degree heat. It was the fourth-best moment of Norm’s life.

  Then, it came to an end. At the start of Year 4, Norm had been told it was time for him to attend regular school. To stay behind when his dad had to travel and try and get a semblance of stability in his life again. He stood on the porch and watched as his old man, water welling in his eyes, reversed the truck, honked his horn twice, and took off alone.

  What counted as a school in Norman was the pavilion underneath the generously named grandstand at the Norman Oval Cricket Ground, which had been deemed a more essential priority than a school during the town’s construction. Each day, students of all ages would be crammed into the hall and would be slow-cooked until they graduated or were tender, whichever came first. After the opening address, junior students would be shifted to the Away dressing room while seniors had reign of the much more comfortable Home dressing room. The top of the grandstand was given to the English and Arts students, with the hopes that the majestic vista of the oval would inspire the next great works to come from Norman. The goal of this facility, other than to provide adequate space for Norman’s First XI to sit in shame and think about how they’d disappointed everyone, was to provide free babysitting. Any education was incidental.

  This suited Norm perfectly. To him, school was a place to kill time until his dad rumbled back into town with a truck filled with fresh supplies. If the rain had picked up and the river overflowed, it could be days before he could cross. Norm hated the rain. He had read once that the human nose can detect rain in the air with the same sensitivity that a shark detects blood. He wasn’t sure if that was true, but he did know that when he sensed the rain coming, he would fall into a deep depression that wouldn’t lift until the clouds parted.

  Norm had learned to live alone but he never learned to enjoy it. The noises at night frightened him. The house groaned like a weary ghost. Something clicked, something rolled. He spent the nights wide awake, yearning to hear heavy tyres tearing at the gravel as the truck eased back home, and afraid that he might hear something else entirely.

  In those early, lonely days, Norm had found an escape through a collection of second-hand books kept in the back of the pavilion in a bookshelf made of cinderblocks and uneven scrap wood. In this makeshift setup, Norm had stumbled across a collection of science-fiction books, all from an author named Rayburn Fink who had written in the wake of the Second World War. The pages were yellowed and had to be handled delicately, lest they crumble to dust in his hand. They were ugly and tattered. Bent from being read and re-read. Left behind by everyone else for that very reason.

  The covers looked like adventure books. Astronauts with ray guns and horrible green monsters with three eyes growling from the dark of a cave. Or a spaceship captain tied to a metal table being forced to answer questions for a squid wearing a crown. Proper pulp.

  Yet, in them, Norm found something that spoke to him. Rayburn Fink understood that everything promised came with a great cost. He knew that a world with great opportunity also invited great terror. He wrote things like ‘a human being is a machine designed to feel embarrassment’ and ‘life is the crime and life is the sentence’, and of course, ‘awful things happen suddenly’. These books did nothing to alleviate Norm’s great anxieties about the world. If anything, they were greatly heightened. But Fink’s words did whisper to him that maybe he wasn’t alone.

  Norm would even sneak down on weekends, when his dad was out of town, to retreat to his corner, hide from the bitter heat, and spend the morning fighting cyborgs in a distant galaxy. The groundskeeper, Mr Gilbert, had told Norm he was allowed to stay inside as long as he liked, provided he didn’t interrupt the concentration of the cricket team, who needed to focus on new and innovative ways to get hit plumb in front. Norm had nodded knowingly, though he didn’t really understand. Still, staying invisible was his superpower.

  One Sunday morning, however, Norm wasn’t given the chance to retreat to his corner of the pavilion. He didn’t even make it through the front door. And yet, Norm from Norman would remember that morning as the second-best moment of his life.

  It began in a burst of delight. Fresh flowers lined the pavilion fence, erupting in pinks and yellows that seemed to awake Norm from some internal slumber. His heart swelled at the very sight, for he could not remember ever seeing colours so bright and vivacious. The sound of laughter cascaded across the paddock. Not just laughter but music. A small band had set up beside the pavilion, led by a trumpet playing a jaunty melody that called Norm down the hill and onto the ground.

  It was a fete! The usually small and dour crowd had been replaced by a flurry of activity the likes of which hadn’t been seen since Mick Batchen’s 135 not out, an achievement immortalised by a mural on the pavilion wall of a steely-eyed and well-built batsman leaning down in a forward defensive shot. Underneath, Mick Batchen had even laid and signed a fresh slab of concrete like it was the Mann’s Chinese Theatre and wrote 135* with a flourish of pride. The match score hadn’t been included. The Norman XI lost by an innings and 68 runs.

  Now, stalls had been erected all along the ground, aside from a patch of dirt in the centre of the oval laughably roped off so as to not damage the entirely grass-free pitch. One of the older kids called it Brazilian cricket. It would be a number of years before Norm understood that joke and even then he wasn’t entirely sure he got it. If he did, he didn’t like it.

  The smell of blueberry muffins wafted through the air and Norm could feel himself practically floating over to a stall packed with an impossible number of treats and pastries, each glistening as if begging him to reach out and take them all. Norm reached his small hand up towards an almond croissant that was hanging tantalisingly close to the edge of the table, his mouth already salivating.

  ‘Don’t even think about it,’ cautioned the man behind the stall, his moustache flaring over his curled upper lip, his eyes narrowed as they watched Norm suspiciously. The boy shrank behind his backpack as if it were a shield that could protect him from dragon’s breath. The man leaned over the top of the counter to survey his prey, only to recoil as an elbow hit him with some force in the ribs.

  ‘Arthur, let him have it.’

  A kindly woman was now standing by Norm’s side, the type of person who radiated joy from her mere existence, plump and rosy, with curly brown hair and a blue apron that matched the moustachioed man’s own fetching number. Arthur was immediately exasperated. ‘It’s a fundraiser, Maria. How am I supposed to raise funds if you keep giving away my food for free?’

  His concerns were shushed away with no further debate, and the next thing Norm knew he was being handed that almond croissant with a bonus vanilla slice on a little cardboard tray. He had the worrying feeling that seizing that tray would lead to a lot more trouble than it was necessarily worth but his stomach won out, and with a grateful smile he took it with both hands.

  As he turned and happily stumbled away, the crumbs already accruing on his cheeks, Norm heard the kind woman, her voice now distinctly less sweet, admonishing her partner.

  ‘Don’t you think today is tough enough for the boy, Arthur?’

  The comment washed over Norm, absolutely lost in the flurry of activity surrounding him. All around him kids were being pulled this way and that, stalls were filled with cellophane- wrapped hampers and the kinds of crafts that tested the limits of the phrase ‘it’s the thought that counts’.

  Norm stood at a stall displaying colourful knitted blankets, not exactly a heavy seller as Norman’s autumn rarely dipped below 35 degrees, along with a series of handmade cards decorated with ornate crepe paper flowers. He chewed on his croissant, a pleasant warmth slowly growing in his stomach. He would often put off eating as late as he could in the mornings. There was a kind of hunger that sat dormant in your stomach until the first bite of food roused it with a vicious anger. The longer Norm could stave it off, the less he would need to eat to get through the day. His thinking was that if he saved as much food as possible in the pantry, then one day his dad might not need to leave for more supplies. If only he wasn’t such a burden, he would never need to be left alone again.

  Slowly, ever so slowly, the pieces came together in Norm’s mind. This wasn’t a fundraiser for the cricket club or a harvest celebration. It was Mother’s Day, a holiday that Norm’s father had protected him from every year with some kind of elaborate distraction. One year a pirate map trapped inside a glass bottle somehow managed to wash up in their front yard. Another year, Norm had woken to find an alpaca in the living room. The year after that, it had suddenly become very important that, as father and son, they try to tunnel to the centre of the Earth from their backyard. But this year, his dad was on the road and Norm was all alone.

  A presence at Norm’s side shook him out of his daydream. He jumped, fearing that perhaps Arthur had returned for the vanilla slice, and in the process Norm sent a cascade of croissant crumbs into the air, dousing himself in buttery flakes. It was in that moment, when he was as humiliated and delicious as he’d ever been, that Norm met Ella.

  She was leaning on his shoulder, a gesture so familiar, though she’d never spoken a word to him. To most, you would attribute this to her youth – still too young to know awkwardness or fear. But the answer for Ella was something different entirely. Nanna Doris liked to say that Ella arrived fully formed, that something in her eyes said she’d been here before and wasn’t too impressed to find herself back again.

  ‘Sucks, doesn’t it?’ she said, shoving a handful of fairy floss in her mouth and pointing the opening of the bag towards Norm, who was too frozen to respond.

  She looked at him with those large brown eyes he would soon know so well. It wasn’t as if she was waiting for a response but rather as if she were reading him without needing one. Norm had the uncomfortable feeling of being noticed in a way he’d never been noticed before.

  ‘You lost your mum, too, didn’t you?’

  This wasn’t entirely true. At least, not in the sense that Norm felt Ella had meant it. But he was scared that the wrong answer might scare this person away and he would be once again relegated to invisibility. So instead, he said nothing and nodded his head.

  ‘Everyone says it gets easier but they’re lying. I don’t get that. When I lie, it’s bad. When they do it, it’s for my own good. Makes no sense.’

  She thrust the fairy floss bag into his side again. Norm reached in and pulled out an overflowing handful. Embarrassed by his own apparent greed, he tried to destroy the evidence by shoving the whole fist of floss down his throat at once. The result was Norm very nearly choking on his own fist. When his eyes stopped watering, he saw Ella observing him with great intent, like someone would a bug in a jar.

  ‘I like you,’ she said. ‘You’re proper strange.’

  It was the sweetest sound Norm had ever heard. He wanted to reply but what was there to say? Even if he knew, there was no way he could regain enough control over his body to form the words. He was dumbstruck. He was in awe.

  As would become their tradition, Ella carried the conversation for them both.

  ‘Funny that we would run into each other on this day of all days. It must be fate.’ A brilliant, shimmering smile erupted across her face, the likes of which Norm had never seen. With a friendly elbow in his ribs, she cackled. ‘It must be fate! Ha! Get it?’

  It took Norm more than a second to follow her fete joke, but when the pieces finally fell into place the ripple of laughter rising in his throat shocked him so greatly that he snorted, a great bubble of snot erupting from his nose and bursting like chewing gum. In shock and shame he gasped and froze, his ghostly complexion turning siren red.

  This incredible eruption caused an equal but more dignified eruption in Ella, who burst into uncontrollable laughter. Norm, of course, had been laughed at before. But this was different. She wasn’t laughing at him in derision. She was finding him joyful. No one had ever found him joyful before.

  ‘It must be fate!’ he repeated. These were the first words he’d said to her so far, and they were her own words repeated back.

  Still, Ella smiled.

  ‘Yeah, you’re weird as. We’re gonna be best friends,’ Ella said, reaching down and taking the vanilla slice from Norm’s cardboard tray then skipping off happily.

  This was devastating for Norm. Not the loss of the vanilla slice, which he had hardly remembered existed. What hurt him most was hearing that they were going to be friends. After all, he was already in love.

  6.

  Farnham was coming through the speakers, singing about paradise. Sandy whistled along in the empty bar as she scraped half-eaten food into the bin and hosed down the plates.

  The sound of laughter from outside caught her attention. It was far from a common noise in Norman. Joy in general was discouraged. If you were happy, you didn’t know enough. Drying a plate with the towel in her hands, Sandy surreptitiously approached the window, slowly as if she might scare away what was on the other side.

  At the base of Vodafone Hill she could see Norm and Ella, clambering over one another. One word came to mind to describe them: frolicking. It had been years since anyone had frolicked in Norman. Perhaps it had been made illegal. Billy must have cracked down on frolicking like that mayor from Footloose who outlawed dancing for some reason.

 

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