The Slightly Bruised Glory of Cedar B. Hartley (5 page)

‘He's got a new girlfriend at the moment. So he's always out with her. You'll meet him tomorrow, probably.'

‘Is she nice?'

‘She's a Goth,' said Mum.

‘Her name's Ada,' I said.

‘She's a bit troubled,' said Mum.

‘They're in a band together,' said I.

‘I see,' said Aunt Squeezy, nodding understandingly, but both Mum and I knew it would take a lot more than that for her to really understand either Barnaby or Ada, let alone what they were together, but we didn't say.

Once I was in bed I was glad to be able to finally plummet into my despair in private. It was as if the suffering sat squelched inside me, like a cork, and nothing else could get in and out until that cork had been let loose.

Oh why, I wailed to myself, as I lay in my favourite pondering position on my back, staring at the ceiling, why must I constantly adapt? You work so hard to get things just right and then they spill out in exactly the direction you hadn't counted on. And you have to start all over again. It's as if you are a hungry little beetle who has spent days trudging towards a pile of crumbs it has spied in the distance. It has made great growing plans for those crumbs. It has been thinking up crumb recipes…it will feed its whole family on these crumbs and there'll be crumb dinner parties for all its friends, enough crumbs for the whole of winter and no need to work, just a lot of sleeping in the slivers of sun, rocking on fat blades of grass and baking crumb casseroles. ‘Oooh, what a lucky beetle I am,' thinks the beetle, and then, just as

it's getting near, a human wipes away the whole pile of crumbs with a pink sponge Wettex and they're gone.

So the beetle must turn around and go back. It isn't lucky anymore. Now it's unlucky.

Before it saw the crumbs it was neither. Not lucky or unlucky. Just a beetle.

I wish I was just that, just a beetle with not a crumb in sight. Imagine if you could live without little hopes always budding. Imagine if you never looked ahead and never expected great things to happen, never hoped for a greater pile of crumbs than what you already had. No doubt about it, I was a dreamer, but worse, I was a greedy dreamer. I was a small, skinny girl dreaming giant, fat, champion dreams, I was dreaming piles of circus and love – but how do you stop it?

Maybe it's not about stopping, it's about choosing the right pile.

All I knew was that Kite must have been holding up my dream, and now it was sagging like a tent without its pole.

I wasn't ready to prop it up with new poles, so I let my mind sink into the withering, watery wretchedness that I knew was waiting for me. I knew I had to feel it. Just lie there and feel it.

Then I started to cry. Just a little bit. Just a few fat tears rolling down my face like little slugs.

Chapter 7

I must have cried myself to sleep because the next thing I remember is being woken up by a very strange guttural noise that moaned through the house and oozed under my door. Before I had a moment to figure out what it was, Barnaby flung himself into my room.

‘You awake? Cedy? What the hell is that? Who's in Granny's room? Sounds like a cow, a mournful one.'

‘Must be our new aunt. She's come from India.' I sat up. Stinky poked his nose in the door and I patted the bed, which signals to Stinky that he's allowed up. He runs and leaps and then takes his time to decide which ripple of doona is the best one for him to nestle into.

‘What? Are you kidding?' Barnaby plonked himself on my bed too, and rubbed Stinky on the head.

‘Nup. She's Dad's half-sister. Her name is Tirese. She can play drums and do headstands and Mum seems to like her a lot.'

‘Dad's half-sister?' He frowned and thought about it a while and tapped his foot on the floor. He always tapped quickly when he was figuring something. ‘Yeah, right. I remember now, she was the one in India. Do you think she's okay? She sounds kind of woeful.'

‘She's meditating.'

‘They did mention her when I was in WA. What's she like? Look like Dad?' His sneakers kept thudding on the floor.

‘She smiles like Dad, but actually she looks like me.' I found myself beaming for a minute, as if I'd just won something. I'd won myself a family resemblance. Suddenly I realised my new aunt must have somehow belonged to me; we had a thing we shared and that was special. Maybe I even liked her, even if she did make strange noises in the morning.

‘You!' Barnaby laughed and I crawled out of bed and thumped him.

‘Yeah, and I'm depressed, in case you want to know.'

He laughed again. And then, when I persisted with my depressed frown, he tried to be serious. He stopped tapping his foot.

‘What's up?'

‘The circus is over. Kite's moving to Albury to join the Flying Fruit Flies. His dad is going to be the new artistic director.'

‘Albury!' he sucked the air between his teeth as if it was painful.‘Well, look at it this way, no one could last long in Albury. He'll be back. And in the meantime you can go train somewhere else and you'll be just as good as him when he comes back. Or you can learn something else. Like drums. We could do with a new drummer. Atticus is a big pain at the moment. He's just got no manners.'

Atticus is Ada's younger brother. The band is just Ada, Atticus and Barnaby. Both Atticus and Ada are dark and unusual. Their mum is a jazz singer and they live way out in Sunshine, and I don't think the sun shines any more in Sunshine than it does here in Brunswick, because Ada says Sunshine is a hole. Atticus has a long black fringe, which hides his eyes, and he never wipes it out of the way so he looks like a sheep dog. Ada has the same hair, only hers is very long and you can see her face. She's pretty, but she usually wears a tough expression by putting her mouth in a line and staring in a hot, accusing way, which makes you feel as though she might not like you. Neither Atticus or Ada have friends, though Barnaby says they're really bright, and Ada is reading
The Heart of Darkness
, and when there's no one else around they even laugh and make jokes. Ada sings, and the weird thing is she sings all sweet and ethereal, like an angel, even if the song is called Thanitos, which means hate in Latin. Mum and I aren't sure about Ada, but she's the first girl Barnaby has really liked. He's kind of crazy about her in fact. He says she's creative.

‘Where were you last night?' I said.

‘Rehearsal. Looks like the tour's going to happen. In fact we'll be doing Albury, on the way to Sydney.'

Their band is actually doing really well. They have a record company and a CD and they're called Badlands.

‘Oh, so Badlands plays Albury. Great. That's just great.' Just what I needed. As my circus was dying, Barnaby's band was flying and somehow the dreaded Albury was in the middle of it. I guess I was also a little bit secretly proud, but I didn't want to say that. Kids at school thought I was cool because Barnaby was my brother and Barnaby was in Badlands. It was an easy way to get respect. But I wasn't cheating. I never asked for it. There's a song by Badlands on the radio. It's called ‘I don't live in the same places' and I think it's about being different. But that song is how they got to be known. You couldn't say they're famous, because they're not popular. They're alternative, which means that mothers and tennis players and people with briefcases will never buy their CD. But still.

‘Yeah well, Cedy, if you learned to drum in a month or two, you could get in on the act. Imagine that.' Barnaby laughed and I snorted.

‘As if.' But some part of my brain had a wriggle going in it, and I got out of bed feeling a bit better than I did when I got in.

Chapter 8

This is how my thinking went as I walked towards school that morning.

Albury.

Boy, I hate that place. I mean, why would anyone start a circus way out there? Stupid.

Albury. Boy.

I'm going to kick that stone as far as I can.

Not a great kick. Never mind. More important things to mind about.

Like Albury.

Such a long way away from me. We drove through it once on the way to Sydney for a family holiday. It would probably take about four hours on a train to get there, and it's not exactly a ripping part of the country. Okay, let's not be rude about Albury because actually it's got a great raging river running through it, which is about ten times as wide as the Merri Creek and about ten times more exciting and scenic and swimmable, so there you go, that's a big plus. The problem with Albury is just that it's far away from me.

Now, some people might say that's exactly what's great about Albury; not its distance from me exactly because, let's face it, most people in the world don't even know who I am (though they will one day, once I'm infamous). For now, it has to be admitted, I don't even have an ant-sized amount of importance in the lives of the Albury-dwellers in general, but what they like about Albury is its distance from the city, which makes it a country town and not a major urban centre of much cultural activity and smog and stressed people honking. So in the end you have to just say, ‘Oh well, horses for courses,' or whatever that saying is. My mum, for instance, would probably love Albury because she likes to think she's the earth mother of Brunswick, though she really isn't. Look at our backyard compared to Caramella's. Ours is neglected and flapping. Caramella's is all abundantly organised with beds of vegies and lines of fruit trees. But then again, Mum's a single mother and she has a lot of other stuff to do before she can even think about gardening. Mum and I simply couldn't live in Albury (and let's not even consider Barnaby, because he'd just laugh in a scoffing way at the idea). The reason we couldn't live in Albury is that Mum wouldn't have her friends there and, more importantly, I wouldn't have mine. I mean, who knows, Albury could even be a great place, and you could probably find a paddock for your horse, but what it doesn't have is Caramella, Oscar, Ricci, Pablo and Robert, and all the rest.

So that rules out Albury.