The social starts at seven and thankfully school’s only a five-minute walk from my house. All the other girls will be wearing their mother’s make-up and their very best surf-brand dresses. I can’t wait for the day I’m old enough to work part-time and I can buy something that’s Billabong or Roxy. It’s as if clothes have an aura or an energy about them, and when you’re wearing the right brands it rubs off on you – as though your life is somehow the same as the ones shown on the posters in the surf shops, all sunny summer days and watermelon-slice smiles and salt that dries stiff like little crystals on your skin. Those surf brands embody everything that’s worshipped in this town. It’s like your clothes have a language all of their own, and they speak so much about you without you even having to open your mouth.

If this is true then my mother speaks for me, because I have to wear her cast-offs. They’re not any brand name. They’re not even from this decade. We can’t afford new clothes, not on the dole, and whatever’s left over goes down my mother’s gullet. I’ve got some things from Vinnies, but they smell like mothballs and old ladies and it’s hard to find anything small enough to fit me, so mostly I wear Mum’s old things from when she was my age in the late 70s. My mum was beautiful when she was young – you can still see that in her face, when you look past the sadness. She’s only thirty-three but those years hang heavily on her. When she was young, in the pictures, she looks like the whole world is dangling on a string in front of her delicate nose, her smile is fearless and her eyes are so bright and completely free from whatever haunts them now. In those photographs all the other kids look at her like they’re hoping some of her sheen might rub off on them.

I wonder what happened.

When it all went wrong.

I’m wearing an old jumpsuit of hers – it’s Prussian blue and halter-neck and goes right down to the ground so I have to wear heels to keep from tripping over the hem. The material’s a light silk and the legs are so baggy that it almost looks like I’m wearing a dress. I tie a rust-coloured belt around my waist and slip on Mum’s chunky leather wedges, then I run a brush through my hair and I examine my reflection in the mirror. It’s okay. I will never be as beautiful as my mother was, my eyes scare the beauty away, but I’m okay.

‘Brrriiiiiiiinnnnnggggg!’

We’re at the school social and Lou has her thumb and pinky fingers resting against the side of her face like a pretend telephone. She stretches her arms out towards me. Panic curls and tightens around my insides. Of course they were somehow behind the phone call at South Beach.

Of course.

Maybe the Telstra woman was wrong, I mean, I think Cassie’s dad might even own a mobile.

‘It’s the seventies, Kirra. They want their outfit back,’ Lou smirks. Everyone else’s laughter feels like little slaps. I wait for the punchline.

I wait to hear about Mitzy.

Nothing.

Cassie cocks her head to the side and appraises me. She gestures to the others to settle down and then shoots me a sympathetic smile. ‘I think it’s cool. That colour, it’d look so good on me.’

I’m grateful. That’s the closest thing to a compliment I’m ever going to get from Cassie.

The school hall has been decked out to resemble a disco – that is, if discos had hand-drawn posters of music notes on the walls and an ageing DJ sporting a mullet commanding the stage. He’s wearing lurid green wraparound sunglasses, despite the fact it’s night-time and the only light comes from a disco ball in the middle of the room and some overhead, coloured globes we occasionally use for school plays. He holds his headphones to his ears and sways along to the music like he’s really feeling it. It’s a good thing that he’s feeling it, because nobody else is. The dance floor is so empty I’m surprised tumbleweeds aren’t blowing past.

It’s social suicide to dance at these things – the only reason anyone ever goes is to check out everybody else and be looked at themselves. We all cluster around the edges of the hall and preen and pose and bitch about what everyone else is wearing. Except me, of course. Nobody listens to me anyway, and I try to make myself as small as possible. It’s not hard, I still get asked for ID to get into the local swimming pool where you have to be over the age of twelve.

Tara’s crimped her hair and is scanning the room intently with her blue-mascara’d eyes. She clutches the top of Cassie’s glitter-dusted shoulder. ‘Don’t look now, but there’s Damien Salter by the left speaker. Pinch me now, he’s such a babe!’

‘Your wish is my command,’ Cassie smiles as she digs her painted-pink fingernails into Tara’s arm. Tara yelps.

The music shifts from an 80s ballad to pop and a couple of kids from The Challenged Group make their way onto the dance floor as ‘Don’t Speak’ by No Doubt starts playing. They’re swinging their limbs with an awkward enthusiasm, like they just don’t care at all. And they don’t. There’s something so liberating about having no social status to lose. The girls in my group divert their attention from Damien to sneer at them.

‘We can add “rhythmically challenged” to the list,’ snipes Cassie.

Tara readjusts her boob tube and rolls her eyes at the dancers. ‘As if you’d wear something that short with those legs. Like, seriously, thunder thighs.’

‘Watch out for lightning!’ laughs Sasha, then she shifts her weight so that her own perfect pins are properly on display.

Tara taps her on the shoulder and points to the edge of the crowd. Willow Parker has pushed through and she’s slinking over to the middle of the dance floor, right underneath the mirror ball.

Lou curls up her lips. ‘Here comes the girl who’s had more balls in her mouth than a hungry hungry hippo.’

Willow just stands there for a moment, completely by herself, with her eyes closed like crescent moons and the light from the mirror ball sweeping over her. Then the DJ ramps up the beats and she starts to move. Slowly at first, like the music is whispering to her, then she throws her whole body into dancing. Her hair tumbles into her eyes and a small, quiet smile plays on the edges of her lips. All the kids from The Challenged Group are mimicking the latest moves from Video Hits, but Willow moves in her own way. She owns it. I get a pang of jealousy, the way she can move like that, completely unselfconsciously. Completely unlike me.

Sasha and Tara are clutching each other watching her, their faces twisted into laughter.

‘What a space cadet. I can’t even think of anything more embarrassing. Nothing,’ hoots Sasha.

She doesn’t have a very good imagination because the embarrassment stakes are about to go through the roof.

Damien walks over to our group and Cassie thrusts out her breasts but he only gives them a brief glance as he beelines to me.

‘I think your mother’s lookin’ for ya.’

He gestures with his head to the front entrance, where the silhouette of my mother is leaning heavily against the doorframe.

Oh my God.

Her hair is wild, in a sloppy, puffed-out yellow bun, and she looks like a stick of fairy floss, propped against the door like that. I race outside and she’s collected a circle of amused, slouchy teen smokers around her, the ones coming back from sneaking a cigarette in the car park. They’re storing away her slurred anecdotes to use when they need something to laugh about at school next week. She steps away from the door to punctuate whatever tall tale she’s telling with those exaggerated sort of hand movements perfected by the drunk and the insane. The suddenness of her gestures makes her lose her balance, so the kids take it in turns catching her and placing her neatly back against the frame. From a few metres away I can hear her laughter, horsey and forced, like she’s coughing up laughs. The other kids laugh too, and it injures me, the way that she doesn’t realise they’re laughing at her, not with her.

‘Kirra!’

She lunges towards me and I have to grab her. Her breath has that sour smell of gin and beer and her top’s been pulled on inside out and back to front so the tag pokes out at me like a mocking tongue.

‘I wann’ed to say . . .’

She forgets what she wants to say for a moment and looks confused, then catches the end of her thoughts by the tail and continues.

‘I wann’ed to say we should have an afterparty! With all your friends!’

She flings her arm out and grabs the flannel collar of some nearby eleventh grader with stoner eyes and an eyebrow ring, pulling his ear towards her foul breath.

‘Whass yer name?’

‘Dave.’

‘Dave, you should come to our party!’

She lets him go and leans against me, speaking in a loud, conspiratorial whisper. ‘Youse can even drink alcohol if we keep it a secret! Shhhhhhhhhhh!’ With her index finger pressed against her lips she ‘shooshes’ everyone, which she obviously finds hilarious because she loses herself in a fit of giggles and I struggle to keep her on her feet.

It’s the least funny thing in the world.

I should have known Mum wasn’t in a good way when I left the house. She was sitting cross-legged on the fish-gut coloured carpet, leaning against the couch with her head back, eyes closed, listening to her favourite radio station – hits of the 70s and 80s. Her face was relaxed, almost happy, as she was taken away by the music to a time when the world dangled before her nose, when it was her wearing the Prussian blue jumpsuit, laughter bubbling up from her throat.

Leaning against the couch like that she looked softer and younger, except that around her eyes were little creases that people call laugh lines, but they’re not laugh lines, not on her.

‘Can I have five dollars for the school social?’

I’d pulled her back into the present, and she frowned for a second, like she didn’t want to be there, like she’d gotten lost and there was nobody around to ask for directions.

‘You have to listen to this song first.’ The ice clinked as she pointed her glass towards the radio. She gets like that with songs, especially when she’s been drinking, which is all the time now. She wants me to feel them in the same way she does, and she gets upset when I can’t; that even though I’m half her, I don’t have the memories that she does, and a particular set of lyrics can’t open a box inside of me where memories curl out like wisps of smoke – first kisses or the way I looked at her when I was first born. She can’t understand that it’s not the song that’s making her feel, it’s the memories. She thinks I’m just not listening hard enough and that I need to open my ears like the way a fish opens up its gills.

‘Are you listening?’

It was ‘One’ by Metallica. The song’s about a soldier who was fighting in a war when a mortar blew up in his face. He can’t see or hear or taste or smell or talk, and he’s lost his arms and legs, so he’s stuck in this dark, frightening prison which is his own body. Mum listens to that song a lot. She’ll grasp my hand tight when she’s listening to it.

‘Did you really listen?’

‘Yes, Mum. I listened.’

I thought she was going to make me listen to another one – most songs from the 70s or 80s will be terribly meaningful to her, which is funny because it was the era of disco and power ballads, not particularly deep stuff. The cheesy announcer called the next song – something by KC and the Sunshine Band. Mum did a small jolt and stumbled over to the radio as the opening funk beats sounded.

‘Turn it off!’ She struggled with the dial before ripping the cord out from the socket. I wondered what box of memories that song pried open, and I knew that even with the radio silent the song was still sitting there like a ghost in our living room. The silence was fat with it.

‘Can I have the five dollars now?’

She didn’t answer.

So I took it from her handbag and I left her there, with the spirits that lingered in songs, and with the ones that filled the bottles lined up in our liquor cabinet.

I wanted some time with the living.

Cassie and my group have come over now, and their faces are ashen. I don’t want to be here, holding my mother. No amount of hair draped over my face can hide me from this. I want to fling my mother to the ground and separate myself from her. I don’t want this drunken woman to have been the person who carried me inside of herself like a babushka doll for nine months and made me in her own image. I don’t want her to be my mother.

‘Oh helloooo Casshie, Kirra’s having a party!’ chirps Mum.

Cassie curls her lip upwards. ‘Kirra shouldn’t be throwing a party, Kirra should be throwing an intervention.’

We’ve gathered quite a crowd now. Cassie pulls me over towards her so that my mother falls and becomes an awkward jumble of limbs on the ground.

‘This is so embarrassing. How can you do this to me after I let you back into the group?’ she hisses.

Willow appears from behind her, sipping from one plastic cup of water and holding another in her other hand. ‘What’s embarrassing, Cassie, is your ego.’

‘What did you say?!’ Cassie directs her fury away from me and towards Willow, who obviously has a death wish because she keeps on talking.

‘If you paid half as much attention in class as you do to worrying about your breast size you’d know that the earth revolves around the sun – not you. Newton’s law of gravitation and all tha–’

Willow’s silenced by Cassie’s perfectly manicured hand reaching across and latching starfish-like across her mouth.

‘Ugh, Parker. Can’t keep your legs shut, can’t keep your mouth shut.’

Willow arches an eyebrow from above the hand, then calmly pours a cup of water over the front of Cassie’s white dress. Cassie’s not wearing a bra and the water makes the dress stick against her breasts, the pink outline of her nipples peering out at everyone through the fabric. Cassie screams and lets go of Willow to cover herself with her hands.

‘Ooops. Who’s the big old tart now, then?’ quips Willow, and with a half smile still playing on her face she crouches down towards my mother and places the remaining cup of water against her lips. ‘Drink up, it’ll make you feel better.’

I crouch beside her. ‘Mum, we’ve got to go home now.’

‘But waddabout your party? I came here to give you a party, I have cupcakes for your party . . .’

I begin to tell her there won’t be any party, but Noah Willis appears beside me. I notice the way he smells. Male. Sharp. So different from the mudpie and jelly-snake smell of when we were little.

‘Of course we’re coming to your party, Mrs Barley. Can you show me the way?’

He pulls her up, like a gentleman, and offers the crook of his arm for her to take. I put my arm around the other side of her, and Willow follows, chattering to her about parties and cupcakes, and the warm night blankets us, this strange quartet, as we follow our feet down the street towards my house.

I look over to Noah. The starlight bounces off his freckles, and he looks like a part of the night sky himself, his freckles a mass of constellations. I bite my bottom lip. There’s a sort of kindness that makes you want to cry more than any cruel words slung at you. Both kindness and cruelty will acknowledge you have a problem, but cruelty, at least, lets you don your armour and fight back when you’re faced with it. Kindness can be harder. It will look inside of you and hold up your troubles with soft, open hands, and you’re standing there, face to face with all the things that you’re pretending so badly aren’t wrong. You’re staring them right in the eye, but you’re not allowed to wear your armour when you’re dealing with kindness. When someone offers to help you it strips all those defences away. I know if Noah Willis never speaks to me again after this night it won’t matter. I will love him. After what he’s done for me tonight, the way he speaks so gently to my mother.

I will love him.

That’s the truth.

As my mother natters on to Noah, in her broken-thread, slurring sort of way, Willow leans over and whispers in my ear. ‘So your family’s as mad as mine?’

And the one eye peeking out at me looks amused.