The Slightly Bruised Glory of Cedar B. Hartley (21 page)

He grinned and whispered, ‘Come and lie on my bed,' and I grinned too, because what could be better than to kiss and press your whole body close all at once?

But what if things went even further? What if he put his hand up my shirt and discovered I had only small boobs? What if he didn't like me anymore after that? Maybe he'd only just decided he did like me and I didn't want him to change his mind now. But if I didn't go and lie on his bed, would he think I was a boring old prude? In fact, was I being a boring old prude? Was I being backward? I breathed in. Come on, Cedar, I said to myself. If someone's going to love you, they have to know you, small boobs and all.

‘Okay,' I said, just like that, just because I didn't want to be a scaredy cat. And just as we began to plunge into the bedroom, Ruben emerged from the bathroom in his blue spot pyjamas and we all stopped moving and stood there in the hall, trapped in this feeling that Ruben had just caught us out, and even Ruben didn't know quite how to act or what to say. The first thing that happened was Kite let my hand drop and Ruben smiled softly and coughed and said he thought we should both be in our
own
beds by now, and he looked at Kite and said he'd assured my mother that he'd take good care of me while I was staying with him. Kite just grinned and turned me by the shoulders towards my room.

‘She was just on her way,' he said.

‘Good night,' I said, and off I scurried, leaving them to sort out their father and son stuff in the hall.

Once I got into my own bed I wasn't sure if I was relieved or disappointed, and even now, as the train chugs along, I can't work it out.

When you really, really want someone to like you, you do everything you can to make yourself likeable. Some people, like Marnie, put on make-up to look more appealing. Others, like Harold Barton, flash their new enviable things around, as if those things are extra limbs of themselves. Whereas someone like Caramella has the opposite strategy. She tries always to deflect attention away from herself by wearing big T-shirts and by being always more interested in you.

It's normal to hide your real self away under make-up, or shirts, or with things or diversions. My way of making myself likeable is to put on an act. With Kite, I act like I'm not jealous or like I'm not scared, and last night I was even prepared to act like I'm not shy about certain possible physical things that could happen between a boy and a girl, when really I am. I'm very shy, actually.

So, what happens if you make a boy like you, but it's the other carefully constructed version of you that he likes; the one with lipstick on, or the one with the Wonder Bra, or the one with the bold, brave, easygoing, very cool act? What happens if he likes
that
you and not the real you, the shy, uncertain you? How long can you keep wearing your lipstick? How long can you hide the real you?

And if boys do it too, what version of Kite am I in love with anyway? What is he hiding from me? Is he really as great as I think he is? For instance, just because he kisses me doesn't mean he isn't kissing Lola as well. When I think about it, Kite sure doesn't give much of himself over. We've never even spoken together about feelings, or us, and that's because I can tell he wouldn't like to speak, so I make it easy for him to keep himself to himself. But, come to think of it, what I really want is to sit down and talk without hiding or pretending or putting on an act.

It's not as easy as you think to be yourself, and I mean your true, quaking, bumpy, hurtable, hungry self. Maybe what you really are is just a shape, like this:

which is always changing, always aiming to become a more defined and certain spectacular shape like this:

though really what you need to become is just more comfortable with the shape that you are:

because even that shape will keep changing:

and changing:

Chapter 37

Aunt Squeezy picks me up from the train station because Mum is at work. She's waiting there on the platform at Spencer Street when I get off, leaning up against a wall with that faraway gaze in her eyes. She looks small and dusty and swallowed by the concrete platform, but she seems to me like a quiet, inspired dab of colour on a hard, grey ground. Aunt Squeezy always wears clothes that float and dangle and waft around her in layers of washed-out colours. I like the way she seems oblivious to fashion. When I land at her feet she jumps out of her dreaming, grins and gives me a big hug. I'm so glad to see her I begin instantly telling her all about my adventure, being sure not to leave out the bit about the wise moment with the trapeze. Then she starts telling me all about her adventure, only hers is a lot longer. She left home when she was only seventeen, and has been travelling ever since.

‘Why didn't you go back?' I say.

She sighs. ‘I never got on well with my parents.'

‘Oh, there's a bit of that going around,' I say, thinking of Harold Barton.

She laughs because she thinks I'm talking about my own mum.

‘Hey, your mum's not mad at you. She was really understanding. You're lucky to have a mum like that. I think when I arrived in your family I was hoping I'd kind of join up, and your mum's been so welcoming. But I've decided to go home now.'

‘
What?
You can't go home now. You
have
joined up. You'd be deserting us. Besides, I don't want you to go.' My head is suddenly reeling or rising up on its hind legs like a horse. Maybe it's already a bit tightly wired with all my own new feelings and hopes, and this comes like a big, final blast to the circuitry.

Aunt Squeezy smiles in her softening way. ‘I'd love to stay. But you know how you were saying about being brave and true? Well, I think I need to be brave now and clear up things with my mum before I become a mum myself. I have to at least try, anyway.'

‘No you don't,' I say petulantly.

Aunt Squeezy puts her hands on her tummy, which is beginning to stick out. ‘It's not just that. It's also this feeling I'm getting about needing to grow up now. Now I'm going to be responsible for someone else, I can't just keep travelling around and leading my own life. You'll understand what I mean when you have a baby.'

‘I won't have a baby, then. I always want to lead my own life.'

She laughs again and her owl eyes shine as if she's just seeing a brand new thing in the field. ‘Oh, Cedar, you're so like me. Or I was just like you at your age. That's going to be good for us. I think we'll always understand each other.'

She throws her arm around me. ‘Don't worry, I'll stay in touch. I may even be back – who knows.'

‘You better move back. You're going to need a babysitter,' I say. And, for the first time ever, I think I almost know what it must be like to have an older sister. I feel close to Aunt Squeezy in a way that's different from the way I feel about Caramella. It's not better, it's just as if Aunt Squeezy and I are two odd red flowers off the same bush, whereas Caramella and I come from very different bushes. Caramella and I have such different ways that it's interesting, it's slanted and far-ranging. What Aunt Squeezy and I have is just a knowing, a plain enduring home-baked knowing that comes out of the simple fact that we grew on the same bush. I feel really good and proud and bouncy as I walk down the street with Aunt Squeezy, just as if we were sisters. I feel almost like it doesn't matter that she's leaving; what matters is that she came and now my family is bigger.

So, when we get home and the phone rings I'm completely unprepared for it to be Ruben and even less prepared for him to say, ‘Cedar, I'm sorry to have to tell you that you didn't get selected for the circus.'

Chapter 38

It's all very well to live your own life, but what happens when your life doesn't want to live you? How do you cope when your life swerves off the course you so determinedly set it on? I felt cheated. I felt that God had just come along and scribbled all over my master plan, and now I no longer had a trail to go along. Before the phone call I'd had a bursting, wriggling, burning line of hopes that were leading me onwards, and now someone or something had erased that line completely and I couldn't go on without it. My life was rubbed out.

‘You're being too dramatic,' says Mum, while I am still sobbing on my bed. ‘Your life hasn't been rubbed out at all. I work with people whose lives really have been rubbed out, and you're not one of them. You're alive and well, just very disappointed, but you'll get over it, I promise you will. It's a feeling, and it will go. We all have to feel disappointment along the way – it's part of life.'

She has a point. She has a couple actually. Firstly the old ‘there's-always-someone-worse-off-than-you point' which, frankly, I think is a bit unfair because I don't want to make myself look better by comparing my misfortunes to greater misfortunes. It doesn't seem right. Feels like you are treading on someone whose face is already in the mud, just so you can get a foot-up. But then there's also the unbearable fact that disappointment is part of life.