Looking for Alibrandi (3 page)

Cook High is a public school in the city area. Because it’s the closest school to us, we don’t get on well with them. We think we’re better than them. They think we’re the biggest nerds in the world.

When we were young, they would throw things out of their bus windows at us and in Year Ten, on the last day of school, Jacob Coote and about ten of his friends, male and female, blocked both entrances of a lane we cut through to get to our bus stop. Twelve of us were bombarded with eggs, rotten fruit and vegetables. Everyone said that one day we would look back on the occasion and laugh.

Very unlikely.

“What are you going to talk about?” he whispered in my ear.

I moved away, hoping nobody had seen him speaking to me. My friends think he’s gorgeous. His hair is brown, shoulder-length, not cut into any particular style, and his eyes are green and they always seem to be laughing at you.

He grinned, and by the way his lips were twitching he looked like he was trying to control a laugh. I knew he recognized me from the lane.

“Didn’t I once squash two eggs against your glasses?” he asked.

“I’m flattered you remember. I tripped over a rubbish can, you know, and cut my hand on some broken glass.”

“Oh, come on. We were suspended for that. We didn’t go to school for six weeks.”

“Very funny. We had six weeks’ holiday after that.”

He tapped the Presbyterian girl in front of us and asked her what she was going to speak about.

“University careers.” She smiled, flirting before turning around.

“Great choice,” he said, looking at me and making a face at her back.

Some people spoke about the government’s school cuts, others about careers. The environment was spoken about, as well as the homeless.

I decided to speak about sex education in our schools due to the AIDS issue. I had used it as an oratory speech before and had won, so I knew I couldn’t go wrong.

I spoke for five minutes and accepted the Jewish hunk’s hand when he offered it to me, and the nod of approval from the Presbyterian girl when I sat down. Jacob Coote nudged me, almost sending me sprawling over my neighbor.

“Great speech. Only the seniors have AIDS talks at our school, which is a waste because by that stage most of us have had sex for years.”

I nodded vaguely in agreement, embarrassed that he had divulged that information to me.

“What are you going to talk about?”

He dug into his pocket and pulled out a condom.

“I’m going to show these people how to put one on,” he said seriously, standing up.

I was horrified. I knew he wasn’t a debater and that he probably didn’t have a speech prepared. I was also worried that by sitting behind him I wouldn’t see anything and was ashamed of myself for thinking it. Until he stood in front of the microphone and spoke.

“I’m speaking about the vote today,” he said, digging his fingers into his pockets.

I sighed in relief but was disappointed by his boring topic.

“I think that all political parties are the same,” he began, sounding a bit stilted. He had taken his fingers out of his pockets by then and was kneading his neck with one hand. His white sleeves were rolled up to his elbow and I could see that he was tanned. Not a beach tan, though. More like a working, outdoor tan.

“These politicians, they make the same promises. They tell the same lies, and frankly, I can’t understand why normal voters get influenced by a political campaign. We all know that what they’re gonna say is what we wanna hear.”

I could feel my Jewish neighbor cringing at the “gonna” and “wanna.”

“I used to think that when it came time for me to vote,” he said, knocking his fist to his chest, “I’d put no effort into it. Maybe I would put in a dummy vote. Maybe I wouldn’t even bother registering at all.

“Probably because until recently I wondered what the big deal was.
What’s
great about our political system here?
Why
do we call ourselves the lucky country when half of us can’t afford housing payments?”

He was pointing his finger now and I could feel my neighbor sitting up and taking notice.

Jacob Coote shrugged. “You know, I didn’t know what to talk about today, because I was only told an hour ago that I had to say something. I was gonna speak about the freedom you feel when you ride a motorbike, but that has nothing to do with having a say. When my neighbor up here was talking about ignorance when it came to sex education, I was worried. I couldn’t think of anything to say that was as worthwhile as her speech. Until I looked out and saw everyone.”

He shook his head and gave a little laugh.

“And I felt lucky. Because we have a choice, and I think that we vote, not to get the
best
party in, but to keep the
worst
party out. Because we can stand here and protest. We can get all riled up about the Premier’s ideas. We can say he’s a dickhead even. We can call the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition one as well.

“
We
can scream and shout and protest and even burn our flag if we want to. Because we’re free to do whatever we want to do, and if we break the law we get a fair trial.

“But in some countries, people can’t do that. They can’t go out into places like Martin Place and protest. In some countries people our age can’t concentrate on their schoolwork or their lives because of the sound of gunfire.

“In some countries they have one-party systems and they have things called the People’s Army and when the people come out and have a say like we’re doing today—scream and shout and voice their opinion—the People’s Army shoots the people. Young people like us,” he added in almost a whisper.

“So, great. Let’s be apathetic. Let’s not vote. Let’s let anyone run this country. Let’s all be ignorant and let’s all be proud of that ignorance. And maybe we’ll have a People’s Army one day too.”

He sat down next to me and everyone in our row leaned forward to stare at him before they clapped. I could sense where his friends were standing because of the shouting and whistling that was coming from their direction.

I was stunned. Not about what he’d said, but the way he’d said it. I would never have thought that Jacob Coote would be passionate like that.

The Jewish guy leaned across me and clasped Jacob Coote’s wrist in a brothers-in-arms grip.

“I’m impressed,” I whispered.

“You didn’t think I watched the news, did you?” he laughed.

“No, I didn’t.”

“Well, I used to watch the pundit shows, anyway.”

“You’re kidding me? My mother always says that if any current affairs team came to our door she’d slam it shut even though we have nothing to hide. She reckons they’d find something.”

“Yeah, every time I get drunk I wake up the next morning afraid, because I’ve had a nightmare that I was on the ‘Shame’ file.”

I laughed and shook my head.

“How come you got picked for this?”

“One-party voting system. If they didn’t vote me school captain, I was going to break all their legs.”

“You’re school captain?”

“Unfortunately. You?”

“Vice.”

“Too bad. It could have been beautiful between us.”

I opened my mouth to say something, but nothing came out. I wondered if he meant it. As we sat back to listen to the next speech, I couldn’t help being aware of his rolled-up sleeves and tanned arms.

That’s when all the great comeback lines to what he had said came to mind. But like always with comeback lines, it’s too late.

There were a few more speeches after that. Great speeches made by the best orators in our schools, but nothing compared to his. Ours were all polished. We didn’t say ours with passion. We had lost that passion after winning our first few debates. It was all so clinical for us now.

But his speech was said brashly and from the heart.

“I’m in love,” Lee stated matter-of-factly when I stood down. “How could you have sat next to him without throwing yourself on him? He even spoke to you.”

“He’s not my type.”

“Why?” she shouted incredulously.

I shrugged.

“Because . . . I don’t know.”

“Because he’s not Italian, he’s not going to be a solicitor and he goes to a public school, right?”

“I’m not a snob,” I shouted.

“You are so. You might have one hundred hang-ups, but you still think you’re better than the average person.”

“He cracked two eggs on my glasses once.”

“Out of twelve girls in that alley, he picked you to do that to. I think he likes you.”

I laughed, grabbing her hand and pulling her toward the TV cameras.

We weren’t on the news that night. Poison Ivy was, because she was in the group that threw questions at the Premier. As usual she was there in Technicolor, sitting on top of the world. No matter how much I hate Poison Ivy, I want to belong to her world. The world of sleek haircuts and upper-class privileges. People who know famous people and lead educated lives. A world where I can be accepted.

Please, God, let me be accepted by someone other than the underdog.

Three

RITUALS. THEY COME
and they go, but the ritual of having to see my grandmother every afternoon drives me absolutely insane. So I dawdle, because I know it gets on her nerves and my main objective in life at the moment is to get on my grandmother’s nerves. I swear to God that if there is something I am going to escape in this life of rules and regulations it will be my dreaded rituals.

It’s almost the end of February and instead of getting cooler the weather gets more humid as the days go by. Because of the heat, the only thing I was looking forward to at Nonna’s place was the swimming pool. I crossed the road as soon as I reached her street to try to avoid old Mr. Catanzaro who lives on the corner. As much as I love him, he has this habit of grabbing me by the skin under my chin and pinching me affectionately. It’s very hard to smile when tears of pain are welling up in my eyes.

He tends to live in his garden. I’ve never seen him anywhere else. Whenever we go to Nonna’s place, whether it’s seven in the morning or seven in the evening, Mr. Catanzaro is in his garden. His lawn is usually covered with bread because he loves to feed the birds.

That day, though, I managed to escape with a wave and raced into Nonna’s house. I was force-fed when I arrived. Force-fed like every afternoon of my life.

“Eat, Jozzie, eat. Oh, Jozzie, Jozzie. Look at your hair. Why, Jozzie? Why can you not look tidy?”

My grandmother says that to me every afternoon. She says it with a painful cry in her voice as if she is dying. I’m not sure if anyone has ever died of the fact that their granddaughter looks untidy, but I’m sure my grandmother will one day because she’ll strain her voice so much she’ll choke.

“It’s the fashion.”

I say that to her every afternoon because I know it gets on her nerves.

On Wednesday, she was wearing a woolen jumper. It was eighty-six degrees outside and the woman was wearing wool on her skin.

Nonna tends to believe that the more you suffer on earth, the better the reward is in heaven. Wearing wool in summer must be one of the suffering requisites. It gets on my nerves that she won’t let me sit in the good living room where the air conditioner is. That room is reserved for visitors she hates but wants to impress with her good Italian furniture. The granddaughter she supposedly loves gets to sit in the boiling hot TV room on a torn sofa.

I walked into the kitchen to see if she had any junk food, trying to block out her rambling about how she wants us to live with her.

Nonna has tried, unsuccessfully, to convince us to move in with her. She can’t understand why my mother says no every single time. She tends to forget that all she does to Mama when they’re together is nag her about the way she’s bringing me up or how she’s disrespectful by not visiting our relatives. She tends to forget that most of her relatives gave my mother a bad time when she had me.

My mother had been estranged from her family for years after my birth. It was only after my grandfather died that we were welcomed back into the fold.

I remember on one occasion playing hide-and-seek with my cousin Robert, who’s the same age as me. We were both huddled behind the laundry door when my grandmother’s cousin and her daughter walked into the room. They spat out my mother’s name in disgust repeatedly and all I remember hearing was “They don’t even know who he is” in Italian, over and over again.

I didn’t understand what it all meant at the time. Until a bully called Greg Sims, who lived next door to us when I was ten, called me a bastard. When I asked him what it meant, he told me that it was when you didn’t know who your father was. I remembered what I had heard in the laundry that day and how they had mentioned the word
“bastarda.”

Illegitimacy isn’t a big deal anymore. But it was back then and I remember the lies my grandmother would tell me. That I did have a father who had died. My mother never lied to me that way. Maybe that’s what I dislike about Nonna. That she couldn’t accept things the way they were. That she probably would have been spitting out some girl’s name and saying “They don’t even know who he is” if it wasn’t her daughter.

Sometimes I feel really sorry for her. I think that my birth must have cut her like a knife and I feel as if she’s never forgiven Mama. But she loves us, even if it is in a suffocating way, and that makes me feel very guilty.

“What were you talking about with Giovanni Gilberti’s boy at the baptism the other night?” she asked, trying to pin back my hair with a comb.

“We were discussing his perm, Nonna. He was contemplating blond streaks and I was advising him against it.”

“Did I tell you that he was a mechanic and owned his own house?”

“About one million times,” I said, escaping her clutches.

“He asks me about you all the time, Jozzie. ‘How is Jozzie, Signora?’ he asks. ‘Is she good?’ ”

“ ‘No, she’s bad,’ you answer,” I said, eating some Nutella out of the jar.

“He is a very well-manner boy.”

“Mannered,” I corrected, knowing that it irritated her, although I’m pretty proud of the way she speaks English.

“He is like your cousin Roberto. He loves his nonna, Roberto does.”

“Meaning I don’t love you, right?”

“I did not say that, Jozzie,” she said angrily. “You always try to put the words into my mouth.”

“You mean it,” I sighed, throwing myself on the couch in front of her.

“You misintrepid everyting, Jozzie.”

“It’s ‘misinterpret everything,’” I corrected, rolling my eyes.

“You are without respect, Jozzie. Just like your mother. Always wit no respect.”

“Mama is good to you, Nonna,” I shouted angrily. “If she is ever rude to you, it’s because you pester her about every single thing possible.”

“Don’t you talk to me like that, Jozzie.”

“Why? You sit there and pick a fight deliberately and then you wonder why I argue back?”

“I did not pick a fight, Jozzie. I just said that you and Christina are rude and should treat me better. I am an old woman now and I deserve respect.”

“Yes, Nonna,” I muttered, bored.

“Now see if you can find my pills. I have a migraine now,” she said, touching her forehead dramatically.

She drives me crazy. Sometimes I have to grit my teeth to control myself. She wants to know why other Italian girls have Italian boyfriends and I don’t. If I want to go out with Australians, she objects. “What do they know about culture?” she asks. “Do they understand the way we live?”

The way we live?

You would think we had a totally different lifestyle, like the Amish or something.

Then she tells me about Eleanora Castano, who married Bob Jones and now they’re divorced.

Why? Because he’s Australian and she’s Italian, of course. Not because she’s a flibbertigibbet and he’s an idiot.

“No manners, Jozzie,” I heard her say. “That is Christina’s fault because if she was a good mother, you would be a good daughter and granddaughter and respect me. But there is no respect left wit the youth of today.”

I gave her a glass of water and pills and picked up my bag.

“It’s not the youth of today, Nonna,” I said angrily. “It’s you and people like you. Always worrying about what other people think. Always talking about other people. Well, we get spoken about as well, Nonna, and that’s your fault because you have no respect for other people’s privacy, including your daughter’s and granddaughter’s.”

“It is Christina’s fault that you are speaking to me like this. A daughter’s behavior always reflects on how good a mother is.”

“Well, I guess that means you did a pretty hopeless job as a mother because look at the life your daughter ended up with.”

We looked at each other coldly for a long time. I knew I had gone too far. Maybe, by the look on her face, she knew that I had hit the truth.

It scared me looking at her so close. I don’t do that too often and I realized that she was getting old. Because of her vanity and the fact that she constantly dyes her hair black she can get away with looking like a woman ten years younger. But today she looked like a woman in her sixties. She looked tired and I realized that I loved her as much as I disliked her.

“Go home, Jozzie,” she said icily. “I do not want you here.”

The doorbell rang and we both ignored it for a few seconds. I tried hard not to think of the trouble I would be in with my mother. Nonna went to answer it and I stayed in the TV room, wondering whether I should go home. I heard her call my name, so picking up my bag I walked into the corridor where she was standing with a man.

“This is my granddaughter Jozzie, Michael.”

Michael! My heart began to pound at one hundred miles per hour and I could feel the hairs at the back of my head standing on end.

“I will just go and get that address, Michael,” she said, walking up the stairs. “Jozzie, show Michael to the living room and turn on the air-conditioning. It is boiling hot.”

I looked at him and at that moment every image I had of my father flew out the window.

I had thought he’d be tall.

He wasn’t.

I thought he’d be good-looking.

He wasn’t.

I thought he’d look like a weakling.

He didn’t.

He had a sense of strength about him. A kind of tilt to his head when he looked at me. He looked like an intellectual and so sure of himself. Somehow I figured that women would really go for him. He was very solid, and when I looked into his eyes I saw an obvious resemblance.

“You’re Christina’s daughter?”

He had a deep articulate voice, which was cool and very impersonal.

“Yes.” I watched him tilt his head even more and I slowly began to enjoy his oncoming discomfort.

“I didn’t expect you to be so old.”

I picked up my schoolbag and walked past him, opening the door.

“My mother had me young,” I said, turning around to face him.

His face kind of fell. It went pale. I had never seen anything like it before. He looked at me in absolute shock, and if I had it in me I would have said more to make him feel even worse.

“Goodbye, Mr. Andretti.”

I walked down the steps of the house and along the pathway and only when I reached the road did I turn around. He was still watching.

Before I could even walk through the door, my grandmother had rung my mother recounting every single word of our conversation. I was ordered to apologize. Wouldn’t you love to receive an apology from someone because they were ordered to?

I was so stressed out about the whole affair. I couldn’t believe that I had stood so close to this man who I have spent all of my life slotting into the furthest part of my mind. I wanted to go to Mama and tell her how I felt. I wanted to ring up Sera or Lee or Anna. Anyone. Just to tell them how I felt. Except I knew that if I walked into Mama’s room or rang up one of my friends I would open my mouth and nothing would come out. Nothing right, anyway.

I had a one-hour “hating Nonna” session. I hated her because she never had anything nice to say about Mama. I hated her because she’d never let my mother forget the past. I hated her because I had to go to her place in the afternoons. I hated her because she tried to act like my mother. I hated her because she was being friendly to Michael Andretti. I hated her because she rang up Mama to keep her up-to-date on everything I said and did wrong so she could say, “You’re a bad mother, Christina.”

I vowed like I do every time we have a fight that when I turn eighteen I’ll leave and never have anything to do with my family again. Not with my grandmother or meddling great-aunts or cousins or gossiping family friends. I want to run from all of them.

They stifle me with ridiculous rules and regulations they have brought with them from Europe, but they haven’t changed with the times like the Europeans have. There’s always something that shouldn’t be said or done. There are always jobs I have to learn because all good Italian girls know how to do them and one day I’ll need them to look after my chauvinistic husband. There’s always someone I have to respect.

I hate the word “respect.” It makes me sick to my stomach. I’ll run one day. Run for my life. To be free and think for myself. Not as an Australian and not as an Italian and not as an in-between. I’ll run to be emancipated.

If my society will let me.