Friday Never Leaving Page 7

  Mostly, I watched Arden. I wanted her confidence. Apart from her occasional violent outbursts, I wanted to be like her, so at ease in her skin. I felt I could absorb her energy simply by being near her, spinning in her orbit. Every morning, I woke, convinced I would move on; every evening I found myself back in that kitchen, a small part of Arden’s universe.

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  On my ninth morning in the city, I got up early. Bree and Carrie were still sleeping. I went downstairs, expecting an empty kitchen, but Arden and AiAi were there.

  Arden was teaching him to tie his shoelaces.

  “Bunny ears. Look. Over, under, bunny ears, over, under, pull it tight. Do it again.”

  AiAi tried, but his bow fell apart.

  “Do it again. Hold the first bit down with your ring finger, then do the loops, otherwise it comes loose.”

  AiAi sighed and his shoulders slumped.

  Arden went through the motions again, counting each move aloud.

  I was struck by her patience, her tenderness, as she guided AiAi’s fingers in a ritual that was familiar but too distant for me to remember it clearly. Where was I when Vivienne held my small hands like that?

  AiAi tied his first bow, unaided. It was lopsided and loose, but it stayed together.

  Arden tied it off in a double-knot. “See? Now, stop bugging me to do up your laces every morning. Or else get Velcro shoes.”

  She spotted me in the doorway and smiled. When she did that, it was unexpected, and beautiful.

  “You.” She pointed at me. “Me. We got a date later.”

  “What?” I stammered.

  “I need you to do something for me.”

  “Why me?”

  “You’re small,” she said in her cryptic way. “And Bree said you climb trees.”

  “Okay,” I agreed, as if I’d made a choice.

  I went up to the bathroom to brush my teeth. On my way back down, Silence was standing on the stairs, reading the walls. He did that a lot. By now I’d realized that it was him, pasting the clippings to the walls, and that it was more than something he did to pass time.

  He’d started a whole new section, working his way through a pile of newspapers tied together with an old stocking. He ran his finger beneath the words as he read.

  “Can you show me where the university is today?” I asked him.

  He nodded.

  “What are you reading?”

  The clipping was from 1944. There was a photo of a smiling young man standing next to a bi-plane, taken not long before he was killed in action. Next to it was a guy with a Hitler moustache, arms folded over his chest. He didn’t look like a person somebody would mourn. There were more like it—war stories and faded obituaries stuck together in a seemingly random way—but when I looked closer, I could see that Silence had cut the clippings into the shape of headstones. He’d created a graveyard. From a distance, the clippings blurred into a dirty, yellow pattern; up close there were all these interconnected stories, overlapping, joined by an event or a person or an emotion.

  Further up on the landing wall, he’d stuck down advertisements with women wearing flouncy skirts, posed with household appliances.

  “That’s the anti-feminist section,” I joked.

  Silence shook his head. Mothers, I thought he said.

  Carrie stomped past, overtaken by Darcy, who was trying to get to the bathroom first.

  Darcy dropped her toothbrush on the stairs.

  Carrie picked it up and brushed her hair with it.

  Darcy screeched and threw a punch.

  Carrie deflected it with a forearm the size of a leg of ham. She dropped the toothbrush down into the stairwell and dusted off her hands. “My work here is done,” she said and continued to the bathroom, unchallenged.

  Silence rolled his eyes and began cutting out another headstone.

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  The university was closer, bigger and more daunting than I had imagined. I couldn’t have missed it, even if Silence hadn’t come with me. Some buildings just look academic. The sun was lazy and warm. Students were stretched out on the lawn with books on their laps.

  It was obvious I didn’t belong.

  I stopped in the middle of a walkway, jittering about like a haywire compass, getting in everyone’s way.

  Eventually, a man trying to pass me with a cleaning cart asked if I needed help. He directed me to an old, stone building.

  Inside, the ceiling peaked like a cathedral. Rainbows of light poured through high, stained-glass windows and the floor squeaked underfoot. The ceiling was ornate and beautiful, but from eye level the room became ordinary, divided into gray, compact cubicles with desks and computers. Everyone seemed to be busy.

  “Excuse me,” I asked a woman moving paper around behind a long counter. “I’m trying to contact someone who used to work here.”

  “Name,” she said, peering over the top of her glasses.

  “Professor Green.”

  “First name?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “There are three Professor Greens here.”

  “Oh.”

  The woman resumed her paper shuffling and in desperation I placed the photo down on the counter.

  “He looks—looked—like this.”

  She pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose and looked down at the photo. I counted nine seconds before she answered and I felt nauseous for all of them.

  “Yes, he teaches here.”

  The man existed beyond that square of paper. “Where can I find him?”

  “I’ll check. Wait here.” She went to a desk, picked up a phone and dialed.

  I was a nervous, jangling mess. When she came back, I was leaning on the counter so I could stay upright.

  “He’s on leave. I can’t give you his contact details, but if you write your name and number down, I’ll put it on his desk,” she said.

  I took the pen and Post-it notepad she gave me and scribbled, Friday Brown. I didn’t have a number, so I wrote, Vivienne Brown’s daughter.

  She read the note and raised an eyebrow. “He’ll know who you are?”

  No. I don’t know. I hope so. “Yes,” I said. “Thank you.”

  I went outside. Disappointment mingled with relief. Then I realized I would just be a name on a piece of paper to him. He might crumple it up and throw it away. The element of surprise would be gone—I would never be able to see his face when I said Vivienne’s name, I’d never know if his first reaction was an honest one or a practiced denial.

  A few seconds later, the woman left the building too.

  I went after her. I wanted to tell her I’d made a mistake, to ask her to destroy the Post-it note.

  She stopped and chatted to a man along the way.

  I waited.

  When they parted, the woman went into another building.

  I followed, but I hung back in the foyer.

  The woman trotted down a corridor and tried the third door on her right. She jiggled it, tutted, then continued to the end of the hallway. She reached up and slipped her hand into a wooden cubbyhole.

  I figured it was just as easy to take the Post-it note myself.

  The woman left through the sliding door.

  As I passed the office she’d tried to open, I glanced through the glass window. And stopped. My eye was drawn to a pin-board on the wall just inside the office. I pressed my face up to the cold glass.

  Professor Green was a popular guy. Always smiling, often with his arm slung around people’s shoulders. There were dozens of photos of him with his students, some obviously taken a long time ago. I scanned them all. There were none of Vivienne.

  His desk was untidy. There were books and papers and even a half-empty coffee cup, as if I’d just missed him.

  When I saw the family photo propped on a shelf, it was like a door slammed in my face. He had four boys. A beautiful wife. A tire swing in the backyard. He was smiling and he managed to put his arm around all of them.

  I
felt sick and foolish.

  Maybe, over the years, I’d dreamed up the intimacy in Vivienne’s photo, imagined that they had some kind of epic romance. He hadn’t been pining away for Vivienne; in fact, he’d been loving someone else. And they had plenty of children to prove it.

  I moved away from the glass. A ghostly impression of my face faded and disappeared.

  There were dozens of letters and magazines stuffed into his cubbyhole. I found my note, the latest in a sea of yellow and pink. When I pulled it out, a few others came with it:

  Congratulations, a baby girl is such a blessing, Jill x.

  Finally, a little girl. Well done, mate. Brent.

  Best wishes to you, Caroline and the boys, Ivy and Jack xx.

  I tried to laugh it off. Friday Green had a bad ring to it, and there were a few lame jokes I could come up with about swapping one colored surname for another. Anyway, if there had been a space for a daughter in that family, clearly the opening had been filled.

  I crumpled up the notes and dumped them in a bin outside.

  CHAPTER TEN

  WHEN I LEFT THE UNIVERSITY, I looked for Silence in the glasshouse with the fish. I looked for him in the shadows of trees, in the train station, on the street. I checked his hidden stash, but there were leaves piled up over the box and the empty wallets and purses seemed undisturbed. I saw his face in every slouched, hooded boy but it was never him.

  I’d known him for barely two weeks, but I needed his devotion, especially after the Professor Green thing. I knew it was just loneliness and I wondered how many more days I could survive feeling that way, like my heart had caved in and just existing was too much effort.

  The secret garden was starting to bloom but the ground still crackled with fallen leaves. Barefoot, I scuffed through the piles from one side of the park to the other.

  Silence didn’t show.

  I sat outside near one of the brick-arched entrance gates near a bus stop. Not too close that a bus driver would stop, not too far away that I looked like I had nowhere to be. I parked my boots next to me. The footpath was warm from the sun, worn smooth by a trillion feet.

  From beneath a rose bush, I dug up a piece of chalky shale embedded in dirt. It was fifteen different shades, from pale ochre to a deep magenta. I drew a circle that became a burning sun and a slice of desert sky. The shale was so soft it melted onto the concrete and when it wore away to a stump, I dug up more. Traffic became a distant hum and above it I heard the insistent whisper of a memory.

  I started to write.

  At first I couldn’t remember the words—Vivienne’s voice had started to fade along with her face—but, one by one, the lines of her old bush poem came back to me.

  Three roads there are that climb and wind

  amongst the hills, and leave behind

  the patterned orchards, sloping down

  to meet a little country town.

  I wrote two lines in each square, leaving room for people to pass without smudging my work. Each word had depth, as if I’d gone over and over it with a few different colors.

  The road is rough—but to my feet

  softer than is the city street;

  and then the trees!—how beautiful

  she-oak and gum—how fresh and cool . . .

  The first dollar came after I’d completed six squares. It landed with a ping and bounced into a bush. I thought the lady had dropped it by mistake and I scrambled after her and tried to give it back.

  She smiled and shook her head. “I’ll read the rest on my way home,” she said. “It makes me want to skip work.”

  I tucked the dollar into my pocket and kept writing. Four more verses, and I couldn’t recall the last lines but it didn’t matter—by the fourteenth square I had nineteen dollars and fifty cents, including a five-dollar bill handed to me by a young mother with twins in a double pram. Some people pretended to pass without looking, but I could see their eyes, trying to read, while their chins pointed straight ahead.

  The sun was making me feel sleepy. My legs tingled from sitting for so long on the hard ground. My brain hurt from thinking. I learned fast that if I sat in the fifteenth square, by the time my audience had read the other squares they felt obliged to throw me a coin. So the money continued to pour into my cupped hands and the embarrassment—the feeling that I was a beggar on a street corner—passed.

  After two hours I had fifty-three dollars and thirty cents.

  I composed a menu in my mind. I wanted a bowl of steaming chicken and sweet corn soup that didn’t come from a can, and a plate full of battered fish and chips soaked in vinegar. I would finish with a container of chocolate-dipped strawberries and a tall glass of iced tea. Maybe even a bag of hot, roasted nuts.

  Bree was right. This moneymaking thing was easy.

  The sky was starting to fade out and the flow had eventually slowed; everyone was zipped into jackets with their briefcases and handbags swinging and the line for the bus was long. I was still hungry, but past the point of fantasizing over a three-course meal. I was reluctant to leave.

  It took about half an hour to walk home. Home. How quickly I’d got used to the idea that a rat-infested squat on the cockroach side of town was home. I bought a soggy hot dog from a vendor in the mall and chewed it without really enjoying it.

  What’s a hot dog made of? I asked Vivienne, once.

  Pig, chicken, lots of parts, she said.

  Which parts?

  Lips, beaks and arseholes, she replied.

  I smiled to myself. It only lasted a few seconds, but I was conscious that I had dredged up a memory of her and it hadn’t torn me apart.

  I drank from a tap in somebody’s front yard to get rid of the taste and rinsed my hands.

  The others were already at the squat, except Silence and Bree. The kitchen was warm and buzzing and the usual fare was spread out over the door-table: chips and loaves of bread, cans of soft drink and a huge bottle of tomato sauce.

  “Darcy’s got laundry tomorrow,” Arden said. “Make sure all your dirty clothes are in the bag.”

  Darcy whooped and looked around with a smug expression.

  “It’s my turn,” Carrie said half-heartedly, through a mouthful of chips.

  “Close your mouth when you chew. You look like a cow,” Arden snapped.

  Joe pulled up a crate and gestured for me to sit down. He offered a bag of chips.

  I shook my head.

  Arden draped herself over Malik, lifted his T-shirt, and dipped a finger into his belly button. He looked like he was enjoying himself until she pressed too hard and he doubled over.

  “Did you check out the car?” Arden asked him.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Too easy.” He grabbed her and tried to kiss her but she shrugged him off.

  “The plates?”

  Malik grunted and tried again.

  “You okay?” Joe said to me. He offered a slightly bruised pear and I took it.

  “I’m okay. Have you seen Silence?” I bit into the pear. It was overripe and too soft, but it tasted like an orchard in my mouth.

  “I think he and Bree are picking up some stuff,” he said. “Arden’s talking about moving. We’ve been here too long already.”

  “Where will you go?”

  Joe shrugged. “If she knows, she’s not telling. She’s pretty good at finding places nobody else wants.”

  My pulse was jumpy. I could feel it throbbing in my neck, flickering behind my left eye. When one door closes, another was supposed to open, wasn’t it? Fifty bucks wouldn’t get me far. I’d just gotten used to the idea of hanging around for a while.

  “Oh,” I said. “I might be moving on too.”

  Joe’s head swiveled. “Hey, you’re coming with us, aren’t you?”

  I didn’t get to answer.

  Bree and Silence came up through the cellar door. Bree handed a green shopping bag to Arden.

  Silence trudged in behind her like a world-weary traveler. He leaned over and planted a kiss on my cheek,
then, as if he’d realized he needed to downplay the moment, he did the same to Joe.

  Joe wiped the kiss off with his sleeve.

  “Silence loves Friday,” Carrie sang. “Silence has a girlfriend,” she broke into chorus. Then she clutched her heart. “I’m so sorry, Darce. You must be devastated.”

  Darcy spat. “Dream on, Carrie.”

  “No,” Carrie said. “If I was dreaming I’d be on a plane to Majorca and they wouldn’t find your body.”

  “Up yours.”

  “It’s not like that,” I said. I knew I sounded defensive.

  Arden stalked me with her cat-eyes. What is it like, then? I read in her expression. She put her hand under Malik’s T-shirt, rubbed slow circles on his chest, then moved it further down.

  God, why does she do that? I thought.

  Nobody else seemed to notice.

  I wanted to react, to tell her it bothered me, that I believed sex belonged in the bedroom behind a closed door. Or to tell her that it didn’t bother me at all, that I wasn’t shocked or embarrassed. But I didn’t really know how I felt. I just knew we were playing a game, and I was losing, because I didn’t understand the rules. So I looked away.

  Silence seemed tired, sad. He went upstairs.

  I watched him go and ignored the urge to go after him. I didn’t want to run, not with Arden watching. My skin was hot and prickly so I asked Joe for another pear.

  “Sorry,” Carrie said to nobody in particular. She started clearing up leftover food, scraping chips and crusts into a plastic bag.

  “What did I miss?” Bree asked.

  “Nothing,” I mumbled. I risked a glance.

  Malik was smirking at me, eyes heavy-lidded, while Arden’s hand moved in his jeans.

  I couldn’t stand it. I ran to the bedroom and threw myself on the mattress. Arden’s dirty laughter followed and my head ached. The blanket that Silence had given me was infused with dust and made me itchy all over.

  I put my arm over my face and tried to imagine it was dark. I fantasized about stinging hot water in a bathtub so deep my shoulders and knees were under at the same time. I wanted to hitch out of the city and pick up where Vivienne and I had left off, in a town with salty air. I’d lie about my age and pull beers in the day; in the evenings I’d sit on a beach and drink glasses of wine and wait for morning. Maybe, while I was sitting there, I’d meet a guy. I’d smile and he would sit next to me and we’d wait for morning together. Or we’d sleep tangled and he’d wake first and brush sand off my face. He wouldn’t care that I’d never wear a dress. He’d be all mine, not somebody else’s, and he’d never have to sneak away before morning.