Yellow (6 page)

He makes a sound that's like the first breath of air you take after you thought you were going to drown. ‘You do need help?'

I nod. I think of The Circle. I think of my mother at the social. I think of how my soul feels so trampled that I don't know if it'll last much longer. It feels threadbare.

‘I'll help you out if you do three things,' I tell him.

‘Okay . . .' His voice is hesitant, like he's suspicious.

I fill my lungs and speak. ‘You make me popular, you get my parents back together and you don't haunt me. You can't climb into my skin again.'

‘Whatever you want.'

I cradle the phone between my ear and my shoulder, and bow my head to my hands in relief. ‘Thank you,' I whisper. ‘Now what do you need from me? Do I need to tell your loved ones you're okay, and that you miss them?'

‘Someone killed me and he hasn't been caught, and I think that's why I can't leave here.'

‘What?'

‘You gotta make sure he's locked up, so he doesn't do it again. He'll probably do it again. It's the only way, Kirra. Please . . .'

I weigh up my options. I have no friends. Lark's wet footprints walk home from the surf in the wrong direction. Whatever semblance of a mother I had has been drowned at the bottom of a gin bottle, ever since Lark left.

And yet.

Murder?

Goose pimples crawl all over my skin.

‘I don't know. I'll have to think about it, Boogie,' I whisper, and the wind snatches my words away as soon as they leave my lips. I can almost see them fly through the air and tangle on the overhead branches. I hang up the receiver and I walk home, stomping hard to scare the snakes away. The snakes are the least of my fears right now.

My skin is still goosepimpled when I reach home, like braille all over my body. I run my fingers over the bumps on my forearm and I wonder what those bumps would say if they were really braille.

I know what they would say.

A blind person could run their fingers across the goosebumps on my arm and read the words
I need help
.

I take out the yellow pages again and call the local police station. I count the rings as I cradle the receiver against my chin, and this reminds me of Boogie again, and even more goosebumps crowd the ones that are already there. After ten rings I'm about to hang up when a gruff voice answers the phone.

‘Superintendent Donald McGinty here.'

I know who the police superintendant is. Everyone does. He's in his early sixties and people think he's brave on account of a purple birthmark that clings to half his face, the type that would make most people shy away from local television appearances and school assembly speeches, but not him. His weak chin juts out, high and proud, from the folds of his neck when he speaks, and the eye that glares out from behind the purple part dares you to mock him. Nobody dares. That eye alone has scared countless kids from dabbling with delinquency. He lives alone, has done since his wife died twenty years ago, and his house squats in the middle of a two-acre hobby farm next to the bush, not too far from the school. I'd been there before. There's always a pile of old wood scraps, tarps, Roundup containers and corrugated iron sheets for kids to plunder for tree houses and leaky rafts that only ever get a little ways down the creek before we all have to jump ship. I'm glad that I don't have to speak to him in person. It makes me ashamed, but I don't like to look at his face.

‘Hello?' he asks again, his patience tested. ‘How can I help?' I can hear the muffled sounds of an understaffed, overworked police station in the background. I'm not quite sure what to say. How can you explain that the ghost of a boy who haunts a tele­phone box has just told you he was murdered?

‘Hi,' I stutter. ‘Ummm, I was after information about a kid who might have been murdered. It happened twenty years ago, apparently . . .'

There's a slurping sound in my ear, and I'm pretty sure Superintendent McGinty is swilling a long cup of coffee.

‘I'm afraid I can't tell you that. It's classified under the Privacy Act. Is there anything else I can do for you today?'

I shake my head, and then realise he can't hear me.

‘No, that's all –'

Before I finish speaking he's hung up the phone.

I replace the receiver. It was stupid to think that anyone would bother helping me.

Anybody other than a ghost, that is.

The person in the cubicle next to me has diarrhoea. It's lunch, and I'm hiding out in the school toilets. Even the library isn't a sanctuary today, everybody who sees me lurches about pretending to be drunk. The geography teacher, Mr Gobstopper, wondered aloud if we'd all turned into zombies over the weekend. We call him Mr Gobstopper because he rolls his words around on his tongue, sucking on each of them before he spits them out, me­andering on and on about faraway places and lulling the class into a rockabye stillness. Anywhere that's not my town seems like a foreign country, I think. I can't imagine Russia.

Even in the library some kid whose name I can never remember gave me grief. He's the kind of kid who seems roughly drawn, like he's only a sketch and his features are just quick, brief pen-strokes, so you never remember his face. I'd never heard him speak before, but when I sat down at a table and began to read about French history his friends jostled him, and in a small, mouse voice he peeped, ‘I hear you had a wild party on Friday.' His pen-stroke of a mouth flicked upwards as the rest of his group cracked up.

That's why I'm here, sitting on the toilet seat and breathing in fumes of diarrhoea. After a particularly fruity squirt the person flushes and leaves me alone. A sob breaks free from the heaviness in my stomach and climbs out of my mouth, and I rest my head on my lap so I'm almost completely folded. I can hear someone else enter the bathroom and I hope their stomach's in better shape. Instead, I hear the click of a lighter and cigarette smoke curls up towards the ceiling. After a moment I hear scuffling and I look up to see Willow's head poking out over the stall. She eyes me wryly.

‘I'd offer you scrunched-up toilet paper to blow your nose, but I figured you had your own supply.'

I hoist my shoulder up to wipe my face on my school sleeve, and l look up at the head haloed by smoke.

‘I heard crying. I figured the odds were pretty good it'd be you,' she says as she holds out the cigarette.

‘Want a drag?'

I shake my head no. I feel like an animal being studied in a zoo. Willow blows a perfect smoke circle.

‘So you can totally stay here if you want to, but it's a sunny day outside and I'm going to pursue my raging love affair with cancer,' she gestures to the cigarette to illustrate her point, ‘by soaking in some melanomas on the back oval. You're welcome to join, but I can't promise the duck pond will smell much better than here.'

A half smile tiptoes onto my face.

‘Yeah. Okay.'

The head disappears, and moments later so does the smoke as the cigarette is flushed down the toilet.

Willow's searching for four-leaf clovers and I'm lying on my back, watching the clouds as they gently stroll across the sky and bump politely into each other every now and then. Our shoes and socks are kicked off a little way away from our feet, and the sun is staining everything.

Willow's nice. I'd never really spoken to her before, and all the things I've heard about her over the years don't seem to match the girl lying next to me. She's funny, dry as all hell, and a bit rough in a way that no amount of sandpaper could ever smooth over. But she's clever. And she honestly doesn't care what anyone thinks of her, in a way that I find almost shocking. It's beyond my comprehension, that attitude, like trying to understand quantum physics. I can't quite twist my brain around it.

‘Cassie and everyone's looking at us . . .' I warn her. And they are, gawking. Willow looks over and arches an eyebrow, then curls her lips above her teeth in a fake smile and waves. They return her greetings with raised middle fingers.

‘What do you care what Nipples thinks of you, anyway?'

Cassie acquired a new nickname after Friday night and the blame is squarely on Willow's shoulders, and mine too, by association. Willow's watching them, amused, as they pick at their calorie-conscious lunches. It's hard work trying to stay below size eight.

‘Christ, have you ever seen a carrot stick split four ways?' she asks incredulously, and returns to the clovers. ‘I don't know how you stood it for as long as you did. Do you cut yourself as well? Because really, you have to be a masochist.'

‘What? No. And speaking of masochism, why are you goading them? You'll just make it worse.'

‘Oooooh, I'm trembling in my boots, cupcake. Honestly, what can they do?'

How can she not get it? I try to explain. ‘They can make you feel as small as a flea. Smaller than that. A flea atom. What's smaller than that?'

‘A quark?'

‘That too.'

Willow rolls over and looks at me seriously, her eyes a gunmetal steel. ‘Let Aunty Willow give you a piece of advice, little one. People only have the power to make you feel small if you let them. Don't give them permission.'

I swallow her words. They make sense. It's easier said than done, though. I wish I were a boy sometimes, so that any disagreement could be played out behind the basketball courts after school, in a jumble of limbs and fists and blood, but over in ten minutes. The girls' way, the way they pick at your self-esteem with painted nails, year after year, that's worse.

Don't give them permission.

I lay back down and the clouds look back at me.

‘How's your mum?' asks Willow, after a beat.

‘My mother is mad.'

She throws a clover over to me. ‘All mothers are mad,' she replies.

And we lie there in a silence that feels safe.

I close my eyes for a second and I hear a flash of footsteps pass by. I open my eyes and Lou is disappearing towards the quadrangle with my shoes in her hand. Cassie, Sasha and Tara are following, but their pace isn't nearly as quick, probably due to the fact they're almost falling over themselves with laughter.

The school becomes blurry and the edges bleed into each other. Everything turns the colour of shame, and the air becomes thick to bursting with laughter as I chase after my shoes. I follow them around a corner, then another one, and then they're gone.

I'm standing in the middle of the quadrangle and the heat crawls out of the concrete, into my naked feet, and climbs its way up to my face so my cheeks burn red.

A bindii clings on near my left toes.

School kids prickle with their words.

Lou and my shoe are nowhere to be seen.

The bell rings and kids scatter, the classrooms eating them up. My shoes are nowhere to be seen, but what can be seen is Willow walking in from the oval, carrying my bag, and in her other hand are her sneakers. When she gets to me she squats down on her bare feet to shove them into her bag, and when she hoists herself up she pushes my things into my arms.

‘So it's maths,
Bush Tucker Man
style, huh?' she grins. ‘Mr Bryant will have a fit!'

She does a skip towards the classroom and a small jump where she claps both her heels together in the air, like Fred Astaire does in black-and-white movies.

I'm not quite sure what the feeling is that's washing over me, but I'm sure the Germans have a word for it. It's something like relief at the fact that I won't have to face this alone, but it's more than that. I think it feels like friendship.

Lou, Cassie, Sasha and Tara look smug as we enter, late. The class is seated and everyone's relieved to have a distraction from working on quadratic equations or something equally exciting, especially as Mr Bryant's face turns bright red when he sees us, and he blusters towards the door to block us as we're trying to sneak in.

He points to our feet. ‘Where are your shoes?'

The kids crack up, but Willow just flicks her hair and eyeballs him. ‘We're housing commission kids, sir. We're too poor for shoes. If you kick us out, you're denying us the chance to better our situation through education.'

The kids crack up again, but this time it's with us, not at us. The laughter has an entirely different sort of sound to it, and it washes over me instead of scratching me with its edges.

‘It's true, sir, I've seen them waiting in the dole queue with their olds,' pipes up one of the kids.

You can see Mr Bryant struggling between anger and pity: it makes his face turn even redder. The kid that called out before starts to hum the Elvis Presley song ‘In the Ghetto'.

Willow widens her eyes and sounds really earnest. ‘Sometimes, I feel like a child in a Dickens novel.'

The class starts up again, laughing with us. The shame shrugs off me.

‘All right, all right. That's enough everybody.' Mr Bryant gestures towards two free desks. ‘Sit down, ladies, and make sure you're wearing appropriate footwear tomorrow.'

We scoot over to our seats. Willow makes sad eyes towards the teacher. ‘Oh we will, sir. We're going straight to Vinnies after school.'

And again, laughter.

Cassie's wearing that furious expression of hers, the one that could almost make her look ugly. This isn't how she imagined the fallout to be at all.