I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t thinking about sex.
But before you go assuming I was some kind of pervert (which I wouldn’t blame you for assuming: I was beginning to be suspicious of it myself ), there was more to it than that, so much more.
Somehow—I was having a freaky out-of-body experience at the time and didn’t quite recall how—Jewel took me to a little smoky café under the haberdashery, the little smoky café that no one can remember the name of and probably breaks all kinds of health regulations.
A tall, broad-shouldered woman wearing a deconstructed Che Guevera T-shirt (it was slashed to the point where I had trouble making out ‘Revolution’) sashayed across the room, handed us a couple of menus and told us to sit wherever we wanted.
There were a few people seated at tables, some smoking, most wearing clothing rarely seen in the respectable outer eastern-suburbs. One man looked like he was wearing a sack.
The walls were painted a deep green; incense was burning. A guy played guitar in a corner, at the same time having a heated discussion with a woman who had short, spiky grey hair. It would have been homely if not for the cigarette smoke.
Though I felt like we were intruding (we could have been in someone’s lounge room, not a place of business), Jewel sat down in an armchair, dropped her bag at her feet and gestured for me to sit opposite her. There was a low table between us. She looked at the menu—handmade paper with vegan dishes and no prices scrawled on it—and I looked at her.
I was very surreptitious about it, naturally.
I was thinking how strangely beautiful she was, and why she’d asked me out for coffee.
I was thinking about leaning over and tucking her hair behind her ear.
I wanted to hit myself for being such an idiot.
She coughed.
‘You all right?’ I asked.
‘Yeah.’ She smiled. ‘It’s just a little smoky.’
I wanted to touch her lips. They were lovely.
Do you see what I mean about thinking about sex? This was the closest I’d ever been to a girl who wasn’t True Grisham (True Grisham, who, in spite of her beauty and intelligence, I wasn’t attracted to in the least. It’s a mystery—maybe it was the height difference, or just the fact that we’d been friends since primary school).
And, I don’t know, there was something so special about Jewel Valentine. A strange sort of fierceness in her eyes, her fingernails trimmed so short, plain silver studs in her ears, and no make-up, like she couldn’t care less.
Every feature of hers was beautiful and unique.
We ordered organic fair-trade soy-milk hot chocolates, because nothing else but coffee was available. When the tall woman with her cut-up T-shirt put them on the table, and I leant forward to pick mine up, my fingers brushed Jewel’s. And my heart wanted to leap out of my chest. I kept on tapping my toes nervously.
It was scaring me, this intensity I was feeling over a near-stranger—a beautiful near-stranger who saved my life, but a near-stranger all the same.
The hot chocolate was, as promised, hot, but too hot, and I scorched the inside of my mouth. When it did cool down, my tastebuds were still burnt, and I couldn’t taste it at all. Not that I could have tasted anything in the state I was in.
The guitarist stopped playing, and was replaced by music that sounded vaguely Bollywood. A few more people wearing interesting hats and op-shop clothes came in.
They smiled at us—Jewel and me, the too thin and the too short one. I felt stupid, sitting there in my school uniform, but Jewel made hers look like a costume—like she wasn’t really a schoolgirl, just dressed like one for fun.
‘Thank you,’ I said to her, trying to break the silence between us.
I wasn’t sure whether the silence was awkward or easy, but I wanted to say something, in case she decided I was boring.
Which I was, but I lied to myself and told myself I could fool her.
She smiled and, after a pause, said, ‘So, you and garden gnomes?’
I didn’t expect that. I probably should have. Maybe she’d only invited me out for hot chocolate because she liked freaks. Should I play it up or play it down?
I wasn’t going to stick with the truth. The truth was worse than anything. I could lie and say I was gay and had a long history of dating older men who resembled garden gnomes, and that would be better than the truth.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Garden gnomes. What do you steal for a hobby?’
She smiled again, eyes flickering from her drink and up to me. I wanted her to keep smiling at me.
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I’m actually quite a fan of plastic pink flamingos. We should start a garden-ornament thieves support group?’
I laughed. ‘So, do you have a real hobby?’
She sobered a little. ‘I like to draw.’ She seemed reluctant to divulge this, cringing after she’d said it, like she was afraid of how I might react.
She went to continue, the words on her lips, but she stopped and looked down, suddenly shy.
Confused but curious, I filled the quiet. ‘Could I see something you’ve drawn?’
She smiled at me. ‘Maybe. One day.’
I wasn’t sure whether this was good or bad.
Beside the table, I could see the edge of what might have been a sketchbook, but it could also have been one of her schoolbooks, peeking out the top of her satchel.
I leant forward and pulled it out, waving it at her, teasing. It was a sketch book.
She leant over and tried to snatch it back. She looked nervous.
‘There’s no problem if I have a look, is there?’ I let her take it.
She sat there, staring at it, weighing it in her hands. Then she stood up and walked around, perched on the arm of my chair and handed it to me, her face blank.
I opened it and began to turn the pages.
There were portraits and nudes and sketches in charcoal and grey-lead. Sparse lines created the images, nothing out of place, everything perfectly in proportion.
They were amazing.
I looked up at her. She leant in, scrutinising each drawing, her mouth open in concentration, and her hair fell across her shoulder and brushed my cheek. She was so close, but not touching.
‘These are amazing,’ I said. ‘Or did I just say that?’
She half-smiled, then suddenly she drew back when she noticed me looking at her. ‘Thank you,’ she said in a neutral voice.
Our fingers touched again as she took the sketchbook, closed it and slipped it into her bag.
She sat down again and picked up her hot chocolate.
A loose leaf of paper had fallen out of the sketchbook. I glanced at it before I held it out to Jewel.
‘That looks exactly like my friend’s mum,’ I said.
‘Yeah.’ Jewel took it from me and tucked it carefully into her sketchbook. ‘Geraldine Grisham. I forgot to give it to her.’
‘You know Geraldine?’ I asked.
‘Yes.’ She drank what remained of her hot chocolate. ‘Are you finished?’
Jewel left a ten-dollar bill on the table.
‘Thanks. Do you have a job?’ I asked.
‘My grandparents left me a bit of money,’ she said, as if she resented this.
Every little thing she said about herself, I put away in a file. I imagined I was an FBI profiler. I took each detail down and committed it to memory. I tried to formulate an identity for her from the things she gave away. I tried to figure out if she kept secrets. What her family was like. Whether she’d had many boyfriends. What she wanted to be when she grew up.
I wanted to know more. I wanted to know everything.
We left the smoke and stepped out onto the street—the haberdashery was closed now, and it was dark. It was very peaceful.
She began walking down the street.
After a few steps, she turned and asked, ‘You coming or what?’
‘I live the other way,’ I explained.
She was surprised, I think. Expected me to live closer to her house, wondered why I’d walked out so far.
I wanted her to ask, and I wanted to be able to talk to her some more, and I wanted her to want to know as much about me as I wanted to know about her.
I wanted too much.
She looked awkward. ‘Oh, all right. Bye,’ she said.
I stood there and watched her walk away. When she was outside the chemist, I called out to her.
‘Are you going to the school fete on Saturday?’
This was what was going through my mind, over and over, like a chant, an incantation: You’ve got nothing to lose.
She turned around, as if she didn’t know whether to walk back or not. She stayed where she was. It was so quiet in the street, we could speak normally and still hear each other, quite a few metres away.
‘Why?’
‘It’s pretty good. Real community sort of thing and all, but they get good bands in at night. And the teacups and the other rides through the day are great.’ I smiled at her.
‘I might come along then.’
‘All right.’
She paused and smiled and glanced at the ground. ‘I’ll see you then.’
I didn’t know whether to feel elated or depressed. I watched her walk away down the street and around the corner.
Then I went my own way, under the streetlamps. And, as unclear as things were before, they only became more clouded.
And I still thought about her eyes and her lips and her hair and her smile and I wondered what was wrong with me, apart from the obvious.
Sacha’s Favorite Foods
His mother’s bacon & eggs breakfast
Chinese takeaway
Cheap Wednesday Pizza, a tradition started by his dad
Barbecues at Little Al’s house
Geraldine’s signature zucchini slice