Leaving Jetty Road (9 page)

chapter fifteen

Blue jeans

W
ho ever heard of studying on a Sunday? I mean, I know we’re in Year 12, but
study
? On
Sunday
?

But this is what Lise rings up to suggest one Saturday night, just as I’ve walked in after the tram trip home from Josh’s place.

“Just for the morning, I promise,” she pleads. “We can go shopping in the afternoon, if you want. I need a new sweater.” She pauses, adds winningly, “I’ll help you with your math while we’re at it.”

I groan. Since we’ve got a math assignment due first thing Monday morning, I can hardly refuse.

“But not before nine o’clock, okay? I need to sleep in.”

I can hear the smile in her voice. “You want to come over here?”

“No, no,” I say hastily. “You come over to my house. Mum and Dad are out tomorrow. We’ll have the place to ourselves.”

The truth is, I’ve never liked going over to Lise’s house. All that stainless steel and wrought iron, and the mirrors—they give me the total
creeps.
Then there’s Lise’s sister, Terri, slinking around the house on the phone to her uni friends, looking unbelievably gorgeous. (Believe it or not, Lise told me the other day that Terri’s just been offered some part-time modeling work.) Not to mention Mrs. Mawson, with her platinum-blond hair and short-short skirts and her carefully painted long red fingernails. Even listening to Tim’s muffled heavy metal through my bedroom walls is better than putting up with that.

Lise arrives punctually at nine—she’s never been one to be late, Lise—and we settle down in my bedroom. I offer her my desk, and spread my own books out on the floor. (My theory with homework is, if I’m not at a desk, I won’t feel like I’m actually studying. Not, of course, that this has ever been known to work for me in the past.) After an hour or so, the door pushes open slightly and Magpie, our old black-and-white Border collie, wanders in, looking cold and arthritic.

“You mind if he stays?” I ask Lise.

She looks up briefly from her books, hesitates. “No, no, that’s fine.”

So Magpie lies down on the floor by my schoolbag, and is soon contentedly twitching and snoring in his sleep next to me.

Lise studies silently all morning, pushing her hair back over her shoulders when it spills across her face. Her concentration is ferocious: she never even yawns. Down on the floor, I crouch over my math textbook, doodling in the margins, dreaming about Josh. Already it seems
ages
since I last saw him.

Finally, at one o’clock, I jump up, walk over to Lise, and put my hands determinedly over the pages of her notebook.

“We
have
to have a break. I’m
starving.
”

Lise follows me reluctantly into the kitchen, her mind obviously still on algebraic equations.

“What d’you want for lunch?”

She hesitates. Lise never tells you what she wants to do. It’s like she’s scared of offending you or something.

“Sandwiches sound okay?” Not waiting for an answer, I get out bread, butter, cheese, and tomatoes, and start making myself a sandwich.

Lise watches me for a moment. “I might have a banana on mine,” she says at last, taking a banana from the fruit bowl on the kitchen table. She takes a couple of pieces of bread, lays the banana in thin slices over the bread, cuts the sandwich into quarters. No butter, I notice.
Weird.

While we’re eating our sandwiches at the kitchen table, Mum comes in through the back door from the garden. She looks grumpy and tired, like she does after she’s had an argument with her mother over the phone, and her eyes are pale and watery from the chilly air outside. In fact, the temperature in here isn’t much warmer: our house is old and creaky, with drafts leaking from every closed window and door, and Dad refuses to put on the central heating until dinnertime. I spend the months from May through to October literally
swathed
in sweaters and scarves, huddled—like now—with my hands and my feet as close to our one ancient electric heater as possible.

Mum wanders over to us at the table, cuts off a slice of cheese for herself.

“So how’s the studying going?” she asks, pulling up a chair.

I pull a face. “I can’t concentrate. It’s
Sunday.
”

Lise nibbles at a sandwich quarter. “I always study on Sunday.”

“Hell, Lise,” I say. “I can’t imagine anything worse.”

Besides, I think, if I did that every weekend, I wouldn’t see Josh: he finishes work after lunch on Sundays. It’s not just Saturday nights I spend with him now: most Sunday afternoons, I catch the tram over to his place so I can be with him for the rest of the day.

“Doesn’t it make you feel guilty if you don’t study?” Lise says to me.

“Guilty?” I look at her curiously. “Not really. What about you?”

“Well . . . I just want to get the best marks I can at the end of this year.”

“You must really want to get into law,” I say enviously. Sometimes I forget how determined Lise is: she never, ever loses sight of her goal. Once again, I find myself wishing
I
could be that determined, that sure, about something. Then I tell myself: Well, there
is
something I’m sure about these days
—Josh.

But Lise puts her half-eaten sandwich down and says, frowning, “It’s not that I want to get into law so much. It’s just—I feel so
guilty
when I don’t study.”

“How much
are
you studying, exactly, Lise?” Mum asks sharply.

I groan inwardly. Here we go: another deep Mum-and-Lise conversation.

But Lise pushes her plate away, avoiding my mother’s eyes. “Not enough. Not
nearly
enough.”

Mum pushes on, determined. “You’ve always studied hard, my dear. You don’t want to overdo it.”

“No, no . . .,” says Lise.

“Because there
is
such a thing as
too much
studying, you know.”

“Mum—” I start to say.

She ignores me. “Try not to feel so guilty, Lise. All you can do is your best, you know. You can’t do more than that.”

“Mum!”

“What?”

I can’t
stand
it when my mother gets all heavy on my friends. I mean, did we even invite her to sit down with us?

“Can’t you just—We were just trying to—Listen, we’re going shopping.”

She’s right about one thing, though, I think as I jump up. That word “guilty”: Lise has used it twice in the last five minutes. She says it like no one else says it—strong, and heavy, and emphatic. Like it’s a
sin,
almost.

I shove our plates in the sink. Lise stays at the table, watching me. She looks as cold as I feel: like me, she’s shivering, and there are goose pimples on her wrists. She’s holding her hands so close to the heater she’s almost touching it.

“Come on,” I say, hoisting her up from her seat. “I can’t stand talking about studying anymore. It’s so depressing. Let’s go.”

Magpie pads out after us, leaving Mum alone in the kitchen. He stands at the back door, watching us go with big, dark, reproachful dog eyes.

We spend
hours
searching for the right sweater for Lise. You’d think it wouldn’t be that hard, given that she only ever wears black tops. (Unlike Sofia, who wears every style of clothing under the sun as long as it’s brightly colored, Lise always wears the same thing: jeans and a black top. I’m serious: the only thing that changes is that in summer it’s a black T-shirt and in winter it’s a black sweater.)

But it’s an exhausting process. Every time Lise tries something on, she stares at herself in the mirror, picking nervously at it, saying, “It just doesn’t
sit
right.” She smoothes the top down again over her chest, bites her lip. No matter how many times I say, “That looks great!” she just looks more and more anxious.

Finally, in desperation, I pick out a pair of jeans for myself in what feels like the hundredth store we have been in. I try them on.

“Here,” I say, taking them off and handing them to her over the cubicle wall. “Try these on instead.” I mean, maybe she’ll be less fussy about jeans than she is about tops. You never know—it’s worth a try.

“They’d be too tight for me,” says Lise.

I sigh. “You’re a size 12, too, aren’t you? They fit
me
okay. I’d buy them for myself if I had any money left in my bank account.”

I stand outside her dressing room, waiting impatiently.

“You should come to the Formal this year, Lise. Just—you know—have fun this time and not worry about anything else.”

“
Nat.
I don’t
want
to.”

I sigh. “Why not?”

“What’s the point?” she says quietly, through the cubicle wall. “I hate dancing; you know I do. And it’s not as if I’ve got a partner to take with me. You’ve got Josh now. It’s
different.
”

This is the only time Lise has ever mentioned Josh by name to me. Ever since I’ve been going out with him—and that’s
months
now—she’s never once asked anything about him. I stopped bringing his name up with her long ago. What’s the point? She just doesn’t want to know about him.

But she doesn’t say anything more about Josh now. Instead, she opens the cubicle door to show me the jeans.

“They’re too big,” she says, puzzled.

At first I don’t believe her. She’s been fussing around all afternoon about how nothing fits
—yeah, yeah, so what’s new?
Then I inspect her more closely. She’s right: the jeans literally sag at her waist. You could fit a hand comfortably between her stomach and the beltline, and her butt looks almost nonexistent inside all that extra denim.

“Wow,” I say enviously. “You’ve lost weight.”

She looks at me, marveling. “They
are
pretty loose. Must be all the running.”

I still can’t quite believe what I’m seeing. The jeans are at least
two
sizes too big.

“You want to try on a size 8?” I ask slowly.

Lise just laughs and shakes her head. “I haven’t lost
that
much weight, Nat.”

But she has. Oh, yes, she
has.

Outside, the wind’s rushing through Rundle Mall.

“Let’s go and have an ice cream to celebrate,” I suggest. “I mean, hey—you’re skinny now. You can eat all the ice cream you like.”

Eating ice cream in cold weather is a kind of tradition with Lise and me. She told me once, years ago, that she reckoned it actually tasted better in cold weather than in hot: “It lasts longer. And it doesn’t melt all over you.”

Now, though, she shakes her head at my suggestion, and a funny expression crosses her face.

“Ice cream has
dairy
products in it.”

“So?”

Lise pulls her jacket tighter around her chest in the cold winter wind.

“I’ve decided to go vegan,” she says calmly.

I listen to this in utter disbelief. “Since when?”

“I’ve been reading all these articles about veganism recently,” she tells me, and then adds brightly, “It’s the next logical step in vegetarianism, really, isn’t it? If you truly believe in preventing cruelty to animals.”

This is sounding less and less like the Lise I know. She’s breaking all the rules: we agreed to go vegetarian, not vegan. Lise
never
breaks rules.

“How about a soyaccino, then?” I say quickly. “Or an herbal tea, or—I don’t know—something equally repulsive—” I can hear the sudden desperation in my voice.

But Lise shakes her head again. “Let’s skip it, okay? If we run, we could make the five o’clock bus.”

I follow her wordlessly down the brick-paved mall. She walks briskly, looking straight ahead, arms folded to keep in the warmth; her fingertips, sticking out from underneath her arms, are purple. She’s wearing a
belt,
I realize suddenly. It’s buckled in around her old jeans—the ones she bought at the beginning of last year. Back then, those jeans were too tight.

“Slender” is not a word I would ever have used to describe Lise before—curvy, yes; big-hipped;
chunky,
even. But she didn’t look like any of those things back in the shop. I mean, don’t get me wrong—there are definitely girls at school who are skinnier than her. (You know, those lucky girls who eat doughnuts and chips all day and
still
manage to look like they’ve just come off a catwalk.)

It’s just—she’s shrunk, somehow. She looks so much smaller than she used to. So much more
fragile.

“Did you get the sweater?” Mum asks me later, over dinner.

She looks grumpy again, like she did at lunch: she’s definitely rung her mother today. Mum—unlike her two older sisters—doesn’t get on with Gran; she never has. Dad’s theory is that that’s why she was so happy to move to another state with him when they met, despite the fact that she missed the rest of her family. Still, she calls Melbourne faithfully once a week, and she and Gran have these long, painful conversations that you can hear from one end of the house to the other.

“Mum,” you’ll hear my mother say, a few minutes into the phone conversation, “you
know
I can’t move back to Melbourne.”

She’ll pause. Then, a moment later, her voice rising: “Of course I’ll come and visit again soon—”

Pause.

“That’s not true. I come and visit three times a year,
every
year, without
fail—
”

A long silence here.

“Of
course
I care about you—”

Silence again. By now she’s pacing the length of the phone cord, Mum, her face twisted with anger.

“You’re
not
a frail old lady.
Don’t
play those games with me now. I said, don’t play
games
with me—”

It’s the same argument every week. They never resolve it; they never move on; and they never, ever call it quits between each other. So much for conflict resolution, Mum.

The worst thing is when Mum hangs up on Gran. Afterward, she marches into her bedroom, pulls on her track pants, yells out, “I’m going for a run.” It’s the only time she ever exercises: she’s not supposed to anymore, because of her bad knees. But no one ever stops her from going. I think we’d rather she
crippled
herself than sat around fuming about Gran.