It’s late by the time I get home, and I crack the last beer open and hand it to Mum. She doesn’t drink from it, she just stares at me really intently, and places it on the floor next to the bed. She pats the mattress beside her.

‘Kirra, you’re shaking, what’s the matter? And where the hell have you been?’

The dam of feelings bursts inside of me and the water gushes from my eyes.

‘I’m going to be in the paper tomorrow, Mum,’ I tell her. ‘They took my picture and everything.’ Then in a huge torrent of words, I tell her about how I was at McGinty’s, and that he went into cardiac arrest, and how I called the ambulance and saved his life. I’m crying so hard that snot is smeared above my lip. Mum hugs me, and I can feel her bones against my cheek.

‘Babygirl, what on earth were you doing over at McGinty’s house?’

I wipe my face against the back of my forearm.

‘I thought he’d killed a kid who’d gone missing. My friend Boogie told me he’d murder again, and he begged me to make sure he was caught, except Boogie said that McGinty had strangled his wife and I talked to the doctor when I was at the hospital, and it isn’t true, and I don’t know what’s true anymore. I don’t know anything anymore . . .’

Mum’s eyes are wide in horror, and they’re darting around my face. She’s pulled me back from her chest and holds me by my shoulders, her fingers digging into my flesh.

‘What did you say?’ she asks me, her voice sounds so tight it’s like a wire that’s about to snap. I hiccup.

‘I thought he’d killed a . . .’

Mum cuts me off.

‘What was the name of your friend?’

‘Boogie.’

Mum’s fingers claw my shoulders deeper.

‘Who is Boogie, Kirra?’

I’m afraid now. Mum has never stared so hard at me in my life, it’s like her gaze has reached out and grabbed on to me with both hands.

‘You won’t believe me . . .’ I stutter. She claws me so hard that I know I’ll have bruises tomorrow.

‘Who is Boogie, Kirra?’ she repeats in that same, strained voice. I don’t know what to say. She’ll think I’m crazy, or a liar, which is worse, because she’s only just started to listen to me for the first time in my life. I want to lie, except her gaze has me locked, and I can never lie when I’m looking somebody straight in the eyes.

‘Boogie is a ghost, Mum. He’s just a kid, like me, and he talks to me from the phone booth down near South Beach. He said that McGinty killed him, and I’ve been trying to prove it, but I almost died twice helping him . . .’

Mum is just staring at me, it’s like all the blood has been sucked right out of her veins. I study her face.

‘Please don’t say I’m a liar, Mum . . .’

She’s staring at me, then she screams and clutches me to her so tightly, as though someone’s going to snatch me away from her arms. I’m surprised the neighbours don’t come running.

‘What did I say, Mum? Please stop it! Please!’ I beg, and I struggle free from her grip. ‘Who’s Boogie? Tell me!’

Her face is like a crumpled tissue.

‘Boogie was my friend . . .’ she whispers, but she can’t say any more. I think she wants to, because she opens and closes her mouth like a fish does, but no sound comes out.

‘Did he speak to you through the phone booth too?’ I ask, but she still can’t answer, she just slowly shakes her head, no, and she lies there shivering even as the evening heat slithers into the room. I crawl into her arms, and we both watch the fan as the blades chase each other in circles. Finally, her words come back.

‘There’s an old diary at the top of the wardrobe, love . . .’ she says faintly. I follow where she’s pointing to and I have to climb up the built-in shelves to reach it. It’s wedged up the very back, behind some shoeboxes filled with old photos. I jump down with it. It’s black leather and old and it leaves dust on my fingers.

‘Was this yours?’

She shakes her head again. No.

I lie back down next to her and I open it up and read the first words out loud. Mum joins in, but she’s not reading them. She knows the words off by heart.

This diary belongs to the loneliest boy in the world. I think I’m going to move to the moon (rocket ship salesmen, enquire within).

When I turn my head to face her, Mum looks like she’s straining to see something that I can’t see, like her breath is fogging up the glass window of her memories.

‘It was Boogie’s. His real name was Robert Granger,’ she begins, ‘but the adults called him Bobby. The kids called him Booger . . .’ her voice cracks with emotion, ‘but not in a nice way, and I felt sorry for him.’

‘Why did they tease him? Wasn’t he popular and handsome, with black hair and green eyes . . .’ I ask, confused.

‘No, not Boogie. Jesus, he was picked on and awkward, and he had red hair and brown eyes, but he was interesting, and that’s more important than any of the other stuff, being interesting. But nobody else noticed that about him, ’cos no one around was the type to be interested in much.’

‘Why would he lie to me about it?’

‘I don’t know, Kirra. I think he pretended he was someone else because he never learnt to be proud of who he really was.’

I think of Mum when she was young, how she was the girl who charmed all the town, according to Mrs Darnell.

‘Were you doing him a favour by being friends with him?’

‘No, don’t say that. I didn’t do him any favours.’

She says that bitterly.

I take the diary and I open it at about halfway in. The handwriting isn’t neat, it looks like scratches on the page. It’s boy’s handwriting.

May 12, 1979

I don’t know why Judy talks to me, but I don’t know why the sky burns that colour orange when it sets and I don’t know why ice-cream tastes so good, and maybe it doesn’t help to question good things too much. You might startle the good things away by asking questions, I mean, God knows good things are skittish enough. They never stay. Ray says I should quit with my asking things all the time. He says that a lot. No, my mother hasn’t left the bastard yet.

Mum’s eyes are leaking now, but she doesn’t say anything. She just watches the fan go around and around. I flip back to the beginning of the book and skim through until I see an entry with my mum’s name in it. I begin to read it out loud.

February 23, 1979

I talked to her today! Yes that’s an exclamation mark. It’s an exclamation mark sort of day, most days don’t even deserve punctuation. But I talked to Judy! I’ve wanted to talk to her forever. I’ve wanted to give her a bouquet of pretty words whenever I’ve seen her, but I could never speak. She sucks the air out of me and I have none left for words to form. I was sitting in the library and she was trailing her fingers through the spines of the books and I tried not to stare, everyone says I’m creepy when I stare, but if it’s Lark or someone staring it’s not creepy. Just when I do it. So she pulled out a couple of books and she saw me, and she held the books high against her chest and rested her chin on the top of the pile, and she said, you’re in a couple of my classes, aren’t you? And I couldn’t speak, I just nodded, and she said, you’re Booger, right? And I said no, I was Bobby, and she apologised. Someone like her saying sorry to someone like me! Another exclamation mark. I lost my words again, and she knew I felt awkward, so she asked what I was reading, and I told her I wasn’t reading, I was writing, and she asked what I was writing, and then the pretty words came. I told her how I was writing all sorts of stuff, how I saw the world, like how colours have smells, like how green smelt heavy like mulch, with just the tang of eucalyptus, and the high, thin notes of cicada shells, and that yellow smelt like bed sheets, when they’ve been dried out in the sun. And then I got embarrassed because nobody says weird stuff like that, but she just nodded, and said that my words were beautiful, and she acted like I’d given her a bouquet of flowers. She had that look like you have when you hear a song for the first time that you know is going to be your favourite, the one that makes your eyes focus really hard on a nothing space in the middle of the room, then she looked at me, properly, and she said, Bobby, you can really see the world, can’t you? And I nodded because I didn’t know what else to do and she smiled at me and the whole world lit up and then she left. I think, for those few minutes, I was happy.

I rest the diary on my lap for a moment and look across at Mum, she’s been transported to somewhere else, and her face is so soft right now, I can imagine what she looked like as a teenager. I want to touch the lines on her face to wipe them away and make her fourteen and happy again. I have to bite my fingernails to stop myself. She returns to the present with a jolt and clocks me staring at her.

‘Don’t look at me like that. Yes, I was at the library, your mum wasn’t always a dummy.’

‘I wasn’t looking at you like anything.’

Mum smooths her open hand over the wrinkles in the buttercup-patterned bedspread, and it’s just like how I want to smooth back her face.

‘Keep going, love.’

I keep going.

March 9, 1979

I don’t know what I was thinking, going to the social. You have to be a social person for it to not be hell, the name says it all, I should have taken the warning. I wanted to see Judy. She smiles at me sometimes in the hallway. I know she’s only being nice, but it’s the only light I’ve got. So I went to the social, got all dressed up and everything. She didn’t notice me, I am invisible, and she had too many other people trying to distract her. I was going to go home, but then Tommy Buckley stole my glasses, and I can’t see without them, and I tried to get them back but he pushed me and threw them to someone else, and then that person threw them to someone else, and there was a circle around me, and everyone was shouting Booger, Booger, and I thought being invisible was bad but being this visible was worse, so much worse, and I wanted to die. I’m not being dramatic, I wanted to die. But then Judy was there. And she yelled at Tommy Buckley and she snatched the glasses back, and she knelt down to where I’d been pushed to the floor and I flinched, even though I knew she wouldn’t hurt me, but she gave the glasses back and she stood up straight and in this loud, clear voice, so loud that everyone could hear, she asked me to dance and she reached out her hand. Everyone wanted to dance with her, everyone, but I was the one she asked. This disco song, ‘I’m your Boogie man’, was playing, and I knew this was my moment, and I closed my eyes and I pretended I wasn’t me, and I pretended I was dancing in the dark where no one could see me, where I couldn’t be laughed at, and when it was over, everyone was cheering, and Judy leaned over and kissed me on the cheek and said that I could really dance, and I should be called Boogie not Booger. Then she walked away and the crowd swallowed her up, but I couldn’t stop looking at the space where she’d been. I know she doesn’t like me in that way, she couldn’t, but at the very least she looked at me like I’m a human. Nobody looks at me like I’m human. I’m never going to answer to anything but Boogie ever again.

Mum closes her eyes for a little while, and softly, she hums. Her voice is rough and beautiful.

‘I’m your Boogie Man, that’s what I am,’ she sings.

I remember that song. It’s the one that started playing on the radio the night of the social, before she got drunk and embarrassed me. It was the song that pried open the box of memories in her heart, and made her pull the radio cord from the socket.

‘KC and the Sunshine Band,’ I whisper. She nods at me.

‘I was dressed in that jumpsuit, that Prussian blue one you wore a little while ago. You looked so lovely in it, did I tell you that? No? I’m bloody useless, aren’t I? I thought Boogie would maybe shuffle side to side, you know. He didn’t look like the kind of kid who could move so well. But sweet Jesus, could he move . . . if you’ve ever seen the movie Saturday Night Fever, you’d understand.’

I think of John Travolta in that movie.

‘Your generation had a really strange idea of what cool dancing was.’

Mum smiles at me for the first time tonight. A tiny one, like a weed growing through a crack in a broken pavement.

‘Ratbag.’

I keep reading, flicking through to the entries where I can see Mum’s name.

March 12, 1979

Judy was teased at school today for dancing with me, but she didn’t care. It was before first period, and they said, what, you’re Booger’s best friend now, are you? They said this like she should be ashamed, but she wasn’t ashamed. She just rolled her eyes at them and said, I’d rather be friends with him than you, and she sat next to me. You could tell they wanted her to sit next to them but she sat next to me. Me! Another exclamation mark! I mean, I know she just sat there to make a point to Tommy Buckley, but I didn’t care. Because I got to talk to her again. I was reading The Outsider and she asked about it, and I forgot to be shy because Camus is my favourite writer and I told her about his other writing and The Myth of Sisyphus and she’d never really heard much about philosophy before and it was so good to just talk. Not just because it was Judy, but it was good to talk to anybody. I didn’t realise how cramped and lonely my words had been all the time, stuck inside of me, getting pins and needles. And when the bell rang, Judy said, you’re not like everyone else are you? And I was embarrassed, because I’m not. But then she said, I think that’s the first real conversation I’ve had in my life. Can I sit with you tomorrow? And I nodded. Even Mum and Ray couldn’t make me unhappy today.

April 19, 1979

It said in the paper that McGinty’s wife had died. I was making Weet-Bix and went to grab the sugar but Ray swiped it off me and said not to add sugar because my pimples were bad as it was, but he doesn’t give a damn about my spots, he was just being a bastard and wanted my Weet-Bix to taste bad. Then Mum snapped at me for being so emotional, but how can you be angry with someone for feeling emotions? Ray was reading the paper, guarding the sugar bowl. He was talking about McGinty’s birthmark in the picture in the paper, he said, that bloke’s brave, going out in public with that face. I don’t think he’s brave. I think the monster half of his face is the true half, not the other way around. McGinty yelled at me once when I was little and I had shoplifted a toothbrush because I’d accidentally dropped mine in the toilet and Mum said I should just wash it under the tap and it would be fine and she wouldn’t give me money to buy another one. The shop owner caught me and then Mum took me to the police station to give me a fright. When McGinty gave me a talking to his unmarked side turned purple too, he waved it right in my face. He shouldn’t have been so mean to a little kid. I cried, and from then on Mum used to threaten to take me to McGinty if I played up. The kids at school today were saying McGinty murdered his wife. One of them swears to have seen it happen, he said he was at the scrap pile and saw it through the window, he swears he saw McGinty strangling Margery after a fight. I believe it. Judy rolled her eyes and said to leave the poor bloke alone, he just lost his wife. I know that she can’t see who McGinty really is. She doesn’t notice the dark side of people. I mean, she’s friends with me, isn’t she?

July 15, 1979

Judy and I found a baby Indian myna bird today, it must have fallen out of its nest in the storm. We took it back to my place to find a shoebox to keep it in, and Ray took one look at it and broke its neck in front of us. He said they were bloody pests, an introduced species, and he wished he could kill the whole lot of them. Maybe it’s true but there are better ways to go about it. Judy cried and left, and I’m pretty sure she let out the air from the tyres of Ray’s truck. He thinks it’s me who did it, so he hit me again, gave me a shiner. Or maybe he didn’t think it was me, and just wanted an excuse to feel my face against his knuckles. Call me a loser. Mum just smoked her cigarettes and watched, there’s a pile of butts on the front lawn from where she throws them from the patio. They have her pink lipstick on the end. She took his side again, she always does, she laughs sometimes when he puts me down and just makes goggle eyes at him. Ray wants me out of the house and I think Mum does too. How much of a loser must you be when even your mum doesn’t like you? I think that maybe a few times in my life I’ve been happy, but I forget what happy feels like. I forget what okay feels like. I forget.

October 4, 1979

I had a dream last night. In my dream I was standing in my living room and I lit a match, and I looked at its shadow cast against the wall, and it was strange to look at it because only the matchstick had a shadow, the flame didn’t. I was holding the matchstick and I could see my own shadow too, all slouched like I’m a walking question mark, then Judy was beside me, but the strange thing was that she didn’t have a shadow following her. I looked at the place where her shadow should have laid, next to mine, but I realised that Judy’s the type of girl who glows, she throws out her own light, and I realised that was the difference between us. That would always be the difference between us. She looked where I was looking and she asked me what that dark thing was that was following me around, and I didn’t know how to explain it to her, that my shadow was attached to me. She crouched down, examining it, all confused like she hadn’t seen anything like it before, then she went and grabbed a Chux from the kitchen and she tried to scrub it away, like she could fix it that easily. She couldn’t, of course. I was so embarrassed, just standing there as she was scrubbing and scrubbing by my feet. Evening was creeping in and my shadow was just getting longer and longer and Judy’s knuckles were turning white from the strain of trying to make it go away and I didn’t know what to do. All I could think to do was to throw the match, so I threw it, and the curtains caught alight. The fire gnashed at the cheesecloth curtains and then flames started eating everything around us. Judy stopped her scrubbing and she was scared, but I wasn’t. I was glad for the flames. I wanted to burn everything down.

November 1, 1979

I’m so scared. I don’t think Judy mistakes my blackness for seriousness anymore. I think the darkness frightens her. When I tell her about Nietzsche and nihilism she doesn’t think I’m philosophical and deep anymore, or maybe she does, but deep like a black hole she doesn’t want to fall down. I don’t know how much longer she’s gonna stay friends with me. I feel like the boogie monster who lurks in the shadows. Lark’s sniffing around her like a stupid golden retriever. I want to throw a ball whenever he’s around, make him chase after it. Make him go away.

December 11, 1979

I’m in love with Judy. I’ve always been in love with her. She’s started seeing Lark, and he’s an idiot, and she’s so much smarter than that, but I think she’s had enough of my black moods. She wants sunlight and Lark is this stupid salty dose of vitamin D. I hate him. I’m gonna make her love me. I’m gonna make her love me.

December 12, 1979

I went around to Judy’s place but she was heading off down the street and told me to beat it, not in a mean way, she just said she was off to see Lark, that she’d see me tomorrow. I asked her what she saw in him and she sighed and checked her reflection in a car window and said to me, what every other girl in the school sees, stupid. It killed me. He doesn’t love her like I do. I told her that. He doesn’t love you like I do. It’s the first time I said those words to her. She looked like she wanted to bat the words away like flies. Then I kissed her. I grabbed her and I kissed her, desperately, like I wanted to swallow her whole. She threw me off her and wiped her mouth with her forearm and she was so angry at me. I don’t like you in that way, Boogie, so back off! She screamed at me. It’s like I had handed her my heart and she just threw it so far, then she looked down at her hands and my blood was all over them and she was angry at me for the mess. We have a connection, I yelled at her, desperate. No we don’t, she said, I just feel sorry for you, like I did for that stupid baby Indian myna bird. Just leave me alone, okay? And her words were like poison. I felt like I was going to retch when they poured into my ears. You’ll regret that, I told her. She rolled her eyes. Uh huh. And she left me. She left me black and broken and sick to go drink milkshakes with Lark. I want to die. I want to die. I want to die. I want to die.

December 12, 1979

I want everything to break. I want everything to be as broken as me. Ray came into my bedroom and he saw the broken mirror, the broken photo frames, the broken radio, and he smacked me on the head and told me to get the hell out, I wasn’t wanted there, and Mum told me to get the hell out, I wasn’t wanted there, and I’ve taken the hint. Nobody wants me. I am a human shadow.

JUDY YOU STUPID BITCH, IF YOU’RE READING THIS – IT’S ALL YOUR FAULT!

It’s all your fault it’s all your fault it’s all your fault it’s all your fault it’s all your fault it’s all your fault it’s all your fault it’s all your fault it’s all your fault it’s all your fault it’s all your fault it’s all your fault it’s all your fault!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The mattress under Mum’s head is wet with tears now, and it’s me who’s holding her.

‘He left the diary on my windowsill, open at the last page. It wasn’t until the next day that it made any sense to me. He hung himself, Kirra.’

She says those words so softly but they still punch me. They knock the air right out of me, and I start shivering now.

‘They found him swinging from the big tree next to the phone box, I think it’s been cut down now. I was at school when they told me, and I couldn’t hear anything they said after that because the whole world sounded like I had a shell against my ear, all whooshed. They asked if I was all right, but I wasn’t all right, and I collapsed, right there in the middle of the quadrangle. And I swear, love, something broke inside of me when I hit the floor. Not a bone. Not something as inconsequential as a bone. Bones can be fixed.’

She wipes her eyes with the faded bedspread.

‘So I was lying on the ground and I couldn’t get back up again, and it was Lark who came and picked me up from the concrete in the quadrangle and he was the one who carried me home in his arms.’

‘It wasn’t your fault, Mum,’ I repeat, again and again. ‘You were just kids, Boogie did it himself, you couldn’t have fixed the blackness. It’s not your fault.’

Slowly, her sobs subside.

‘I can never forget, you know? Except for when I drink so much I can’t remember anything at all. Boogie was the first person to see me for who I really am. A screw up. A bloody disappointment to myself and everyone around me. There are so many bloody things in my life that I regret.’

‘Do you regret me?’ I ask her. ‘You could have been someone if it wasn’t for me.’

She cups my chin with her own small hands and tips my face upwards so I have to stare right into her leaking, pale eyes.

‘You are the only good thing that’s ever happened to me, Kirra Barley. Don’t you ever think otherwise. Never.’

And I believe her, because then she lets my chin free and she knots her fingers with mine and she’s holding onto my hand like she wants to keep me safe.

‘There are people you can speak to, they can help you,’ I whisper to her. ‘Things don’t have to stay this way, things can get better.’

She doesn’t let me go as I pat her forehead and shush her, and slowly we both fall asleep, our blonde hair tangling together.