Music pulsates through the house. My bedroom walls hum with vibrations and the floorboards shake. I imagine Kurt and our housemates thrashing around in the lounge room. The furniture’ll be pushed to one side to create a dance floor, their hair’ll be damp and the room’ll reek of sweat. It’s Saturday night so they’ll be happy — well, happy enough to forget everything in their lives that’s making them unhappy — and they’ll keep telling each other they haven’t been this happy in ages. Kurt’ll be pounding the ground with his feet and punching the air with his fists and he’ll have forgotten why we even fought this afternoon. Ryan’ll be sucking on a homemade bong, probably in the laundry so he doesn’t have to share it with the others. Jay and Mel will be feeling each other up on the balcony and wondering when Kurt’s going to come in and make up with me so they can get some privacy.
I burrow down deeper into the mattress and jam in my earphones, but it’s not enough to block out the noise. I pull the sheet over my head a little tighter.
My phone buzzes. Two unread messages. Both from Milo.
Before this afternoon, he was a discoloured memory with blurred edges and a washed-out palette. Yet five minutes with him and everything came back to me in an instant. I remember riding our bikes around the river until our thighs ached, and sprinting across grass riddled with bindis to catch the Mr Whippy van. He had hair the colour of dust and dirt and once let me dye it royal blue for the athletics carnival. He was my partner-in-crime in convincing the kids across the road that a witch lived in the rundown double-storey house around the corner. When I argued with Mum and Dad, sometimes it was about how long I could stay up ’cos Milo was a special guest and, in my opinion, I shouldn’t have to sleep at all when he was visiting from next door.
I reread his messages.
Milo doesn’t know it — there’s no way he can — but one look at his face also awakened a million memories of Mum. Memories I’ve spent five years trying to block out. Like how when we were busted playing Doctors and Nurses, Mum sent Milo home and gave me an educational talk so detailed I became the go-to girl in the playground whenever someone whispered, ‘Where do babies come from?’ How when I beat him at ping-pong, Mum hollered from the sidelines as though I’d taken out gold at the Olympics.
The last time I saw him was at Mum’s funeral. He was hiding behind Trent as they shuffled down the aisle out of the church with its light grey walls and dark grey carpet. Everything was grey and drab that day.
Everything except our clothes.
Mum hated black, so her closest friends requested everyone wear colour to the service. The bigger and bolder the better. Dad forgot, so Jen, Milo’s mum, took off her lime-green shawl and wrapped it around his shoulders to hide his wrinkled charcoal suit.
At Mum’s request in her will, we also had to suffer Mr Agiostratitis struggling through Europe’s The Final Countdown on the organ. I thought his vocal cords might snap as he squeaked and squawked for the higher notes. I reckon I even saw Dad, who was almost crumpled over next to me in the front row, hide a smile during that. Mum would’ve loved the sight of the stickybeaks and snobs turning up their noses at her unorthodox super-eighties’ pop selection too. Friggin’ loved it.
I read over Milo’s unnecessary apology laced through his texts. I want my sunglasses, I do, but I don’t know if I can see him again now that my chest aches a little more than it did yesterday. It’s not his fault that he makes me feel like this — that he’s triggered this. It’s all so intertwined, so smudged together. But me and Milo aren’t ten any more. His ear isn’t pressed up against my bathroom door while he waits to hear from Mum if my stomach has stopped hurting from eating too much ice-cream so I can go to the skate park with him. He can’t make me feel better by letting me paint his toenails with her purple nail polish, or daring me to jump from the top tower at the pool while Mum takes photos from the grass below, even though he’s too scared to do it himself. He has his own life now, his own mess to wade through. Some things are the way they are, no matter how much you wish they weren’t.
I delete the messages.
I can always buy new sunnies.
* * *
The floorboards creak as Kurt tiptoes to the bed. He snuggles next to me, T-shirt damp with sweat, his hand finding mine.
‘You awake, babe?’
‘Yeah.’
‘We missed ya out there.’ He doesn’t wait for a response. ‘I know I blew up at ya before. Sorry, babe. This whole work sitch’s got me stressed. I don’t wanna stuff it up, ya know?’
I clear my throat, unsure how to reply.
Sparkie jobs seem to have dried up in Durnan, but he’s not talking about that kind of work. He’s talking about the other thing. The thing I can’t even say out loud ’cos it’s so unlike anything I used to be that I don’t even know how I ended up here. Kurt and I are pretty broke — the kind of broke that’s got us eating noodles every night and diving for stray gold coins on the ground — so he’s been dealing on the side. ‘Just a little pot,’ he told me in a calm, cool voice, like it’s not totally breaking the law. ‘Just for a little bit ’til we’re set up.’
I believed him too, at first. Yet now he’s getting stressed about it. Now he’s calling it work. Like it’s natural to be doing this. Like I should be alright with it. But the secret’s heavy on my shoulders.
Kurt raises an eyebrow, sensing my discomfort. ‘It won’t be for much longer. Promise. And it brings in money, doesn’t it?’
I shrug.
‘You know it does. Easy money too, no big deal. My folks can’t spare a cent — they’re still up to their eyeballs in Temora — and one of us has to keep things afloat. Right now, that’s me.’
‘Hey. I’m trying. This town is hard.’
‘Take a breath, yeah? I didn’t force ya to come here. Ya followed me, babe, and it’s adding extra pressure on me. Don’t forget that.’
My jaw tightens at the mention of pressure. I had nowhere else to go. No choice.
When your dad drags you through nine high schools in five years, covering almost every kilometre of New South Wales from Albury to Lismore, you don’t exactly end up with mates you can count on — just a stack of almost-strangers telling you to, ‘Follow me!’ and, ‘Add me as a friend!’ on social media. I deleted any trace of my online self after the fourth school. Most people didn’t even bother wishing me happy birthday anyway. Dad’s final move was halfway through last year — back to Durnan, so he and his girlfriend, Shirin, could rent a house before he headed off to the mines. Somehow, he was content to live back here again. He’s discovered peace, but he hasn’t taught me how to find it.
When Dad asked me to join them and return to Durnan High — Milo’s school, Mum’s old school — to finish Year 12, I refused. I couldn’t go back. Not when I’ve spent all these years running from everything to do with her. I’ve been an expert at staying away. I couldn’t handle the thought of looking everyone in the eye. My old friends. My old teachers. People who used to believe I’d go on to do great things — whatever that means now — or at least go on to do more than this. More than this life.
But most of all, I couldn’t face the idea of returning to Durnan High without Mum. She’d walked every hallway of that school.
I begged Dad to stay with me in Sydney, but he wouldn’t listen. Or maybe he couldn’t bear to dredge up all the reasons he’d left Durnan in the first place. He just packed up our stuff and went without me; and left me his old bomb of a sedan — something to ease his mind.
My cousin let me sleep on his couch for a while, so I never used the word ‘homeless’, or even thought about it like that — I was so relieved I wasn’t sleeping in the car like I’ve seen people do on the news — but I didn’t have a home. I didn’t have a fixed address where people could send me mail. I didn’t have a wardrobe to hang my clothes in, or a favourite chair at the dinner table. We didn’t even have a dinner table — we ate curried egg toasties on our laps in front of a tiny old TV that didn’t get all the channels. And I didn’t have a key, so I’d wait on the doorstep until my cousin or his girlfriend got home from uni to let me in.
After a while, I started cutting school because I was the girl without a mum or dad and no-one let me forget it. Girls would say, ‘Hey, Layla, where’s ya mum?’ or mutter, ‘Little orphan Layla’ behind me in the canteen line to see how long it’d take me to crack. And I always cracked, swearing or slapping or shoving just as a teacher walked around the corner. I swear they timed it like that. The girls’d get a warning, I’d get detention.
I dropped out of Year 12 with four months to go. It was hard to care about writing essays or handing in assignments on time when half my days were spent missing my dad, and the other half were spent hating him for leaving me.
My cousin’s girlfriend got sick of me being there all the time without chipping in, so the couch-surfing continued. I stayed on my cousin’s friend’s couch for a few weeks. Then his girlfriend’s couch for a week. When that didn’t work out, I was onto her friend’s couch — which was also Kurt’s couch. A boy from home, of all the possibilities. Turns out Durnan’s a hard town to outrun, even when you’re hundreds of kilometres away, because everyone seems to know someone from that little place on the map. And before long I was creeping into Kurt’s room to whisper under the covers with him once his housemate was asleep.
Kurt left Durnan a few years ago. He grew up on the other side of town — the wrong side, depending on who you ask — so our lives never overlapped as kids. He told me he’d never go back, and for that reason he was the perfect escape. He was also spontaneous and free, a place to stay and someone to talk to, and no-one stuck by me like he did. But none of that mattered as much as the fact that he didn’t have what everyone else from my past had: history. Then he announced his plan to move in with his mate Ryan and sort out sparkie work in Durnan, and the cracks formed. My choices felt non-existent. I couldn’t afford to stay in Sydney alone, so I followed him and he let me. Before then, I’d never followed anyone.
But a lot of things are different from before. Now I’m on the wrong side.
‘Babe,’ Kurt says, snapping me back, ‘that came out wrong. Ya know I want ya here.’ He sighs. ‘I’ve gotta ask again: have ya reached out to your dad or step-mum? Maybe we need to borrow some cash, just to get another top-up since Chrissie, ya know? Then we can do this right. They said they’d —’
‘I know what they said, but they’re not made of money. And they’re not married.’
‘Huh?’
‘She’s not my step-mum. She’s just … Shirin. And no, I can’t call them. I won’t.’
Boxing Day with Dad and Shirin was a nightmare. I endured two hours of pushing soggy beans and burnt potatoes around my plate while attempting to duck questions I didn’t have answers to. Why I dropped out of school before sitting the exams, living with a boy they barely knew, waiting until late on Christmas Day to tell them I’d moved back to Durnan in mid-December, having zero idea of what to do next — and all before Shirin served up the pav and cream. I stopped listening when they suggested repeating Year 12.
The part that stung most was hearing all this from the man who’d bailed on me. Who’d cocooned himself in grief after Mum’s death, pushing everyone away. Dad dissolved into a shadow, losing himself in anything that didn’t involve her. That counted me out — I looked too much like her. The same nose, frizzy mahogany-brown hair, olive skin.
Kurt sighs again, just in case I missed his annoyance that I won’t call Dad to stick my hand out for money.
‘It was just an idea,’ he says, grabbing his pillow and standing up. ‘I’m gonna sleep on the couch, babe. You’re way too on edge.’
I sit up. Anger throbs in my chest, sharp and hot. ‘Yeah? Well, stop calling them “mates” like you mean something to them.’
He stops, his frame filling the doorway. ‘What?’
‘The customers. You called them “mates” today.’
‘So?’
‘They don’t care about you — only if your pot’s any good.’ It’s out there now. I’ve said it.
He scoffs. ‘Have ya forgotten how we got together?’
‘Once. Barely once. And I liked you.’
‘Yeah, you did.’
A moment of stillness.
Kurt comes back to bed and wraps his arm around me. I let him. The tension evaporates, like someone’s pricked the air with a pin.
‘By the way, I remember,’ he adds, kissing the base of my neck. ‘I know what’s really going on. Five years tomorrow, right? I know ya think I’ve forgotten, but I haven’t.’
I snuggle into him. He’s forgotten my birthday and my phone number, but when it comes to Mum he never does.
‘I reckon you should go,’ he continues. ‘Don’t people talk about “getting closure” or something?’
Here we go again. The urge to put me back together. I wonder whether I have a Fix Me sign taped to my back.
‘It won’t help her come back. What’s the point?’
‘C’mon, we’re in Durnan.’
I know what he’s really saying. The cemetery is barely fifteen blocks away. We’re that close we can probably see it if we get up on the roof. What are you waiting for?
‘I’ve seen photos,’ I say. ‘Looks the same as the hundreds of other graves — depressing.’
‘Yeah, but it’s hers.’
That sinks in as Kurt waffles on about visiting the grave in the morning so we can go to brunch together afterwards.
‘Why would I want to go?’ My words are soaked in frustration. ‘Why would I want to imagine her body, her mouth, her hair covered in dirt?’
‘Lay, shit, stop that.’
‘Why would I put myself through it?’ I ask, overpowered by a raging blackness. This is what happens when I remember. It’s why I don’t want to remember. ‘No-one seems to get that I have no choice but to live without her, yet everyone keeps trying to make me look back. She’s gone. Stuff brunch.’
‘We don’t have to go, not if ya don’t want to … it’s fine.’ He says it in a way that suggests it’s not fine. ‘And you’re right — stuff brunch. Stuff bacon and eggs. And sausages.’
‘And pancakes.’ It sounds so ridiculous that I don’t know whether to burst into tears or crack up laughing. ‘And stupid little muffins. They never have enough blueberries in them.’
‘And corn fritters. Stuff corn fritters.’
‘No, you love those things.’ By now my body’s aching with exhaustion. ‘I think I need an exorcism.’
‘Go to sleep, babe. It’ll be better tomorrow.’
There’s a deafening pause, like he’s remembered all over again that tomorrow is the day.
A warm orange light floods one corner of the room. The bedside lamp is on, the sheets are crumpled and Kurt is out of bed. I watch him as he walks to the two-metre-wide whiteboard we’ve hung on the wall and scribbles the words And stuff omelettes.
The whiteboard is our way of stitching things up. Kurt started it with a post-it note scribbled with a cartoon version of him holding a bunch of flowers, then we progressed to a shared notebook, which we filled with so many messages and drawings that we splurged on the whiteboard when we arrived in Durnan.
He crawls back into bed and my body feels heavy, like I’m being pulled down into the mattress. I wait for him to drift off before I close my eyes to shut out the black.