The only sound on the drive home comes from the tinny speakers of Dad’s radio. Usually, he’d have it on the horse racing or the Greek station, but Steph changed it on the drive up. Dad lowers the volume. Bon Jovi’s ‘Born to Be My Baby’ fades out and Melissa Etheridges’s ‘Like the Way I Do’ starts.
I try to puzzle out my future – partly because of Jim and partly because I was meant to see the school counsellor today – but instead my mind goes straight back to my funeral. Who’ll mourn for me? The thought nags at me.
I’ve been to other funerals: my maternal grandfather when I was five (heart-attack: I got to kiss his cold cheek, because it was an open coffin at the church service); my other grandfather when I was seven (cancer wasted him away, so there was no open coffin); and Uncle George (also a heart attack, at sixty-three) when I was ten. Last year, my grandmothers passed away within six months of one another. Now Aunt Mena.
‘Did you see your cousin Jim?’ Mum asks.
So it begins. You won’t get the full effect. Mum and Dad only speak Greek to Steph and me. I’m not going to remind you of that all the time. I will tell you that what they say loses something in the translation. You don’t get tone, either. Greek condemnations should be acted on stage as some great tragedy, even when the things you’re talking about aren’t that tragic. Also, this is coming from people who left Greece in the 1950s, got menial jobs because they couldn’t speak English and worked tirelessly to build lives for their kids, so every word comes from this fountain of sacrifice that you bathe in every day until you reek of the guilt.
‘He’s going to have a good job,’ Mum goes on. ‘He’s going to be married.’
Steph glowers out the window.
‘He’s going to be a doctor,’ Dad says.
‘A doctor!’ Mum says. ‘Do you know what people think of me when they see you, when they find out you dropped out of school?’
‘Mum, they don’t care–’ Steph says.
‘I’m embarrassed to be seen,’ Mum says. ‘Even at your poor Aunt Mena’s funeral, I know that they’re thinking of her and looking down on me.’
‘They’re not looking down on you, Mum.’
Mum’s sigh is overdone. Everything about her is sad: her eyes, her face, the way she slumps, the air she exhales, the seat she sits in. A tear slides down Steph’s cheek. But it’s not sadness; Steph’s happy with who she is. It’s anger. She doesn’t want to be made to feel this way, like all she’s ever doing is letting them down.
‘Mum, can you please–?’ Steph says.
‘You don’t shout at your mother!’ Dad says, glancing back at her.
His own anger gets the better of him as he remonstrates. The car swerves – not a lot, but enough that it’s a momentary fright.
‘You watch your driving!’ Mum says.
This is how things unfold. Nobody’s ever safe during these times. Dad tries to support Mum and then he gets it. It’s not that they hate each other – this is the way they communicate.
Dad flicks the radio back to his Greek station. I don’t know the song that plays – they all sound the same. I hope it’ll mellow Mum and Dad, but I know that some new recrimination is building.
Mum pats her chest, like she’s trying to soothe a pain in her heart. ‘It’s all right,’ she says. ‘We came here to give you a better life. And now…’
Steph’s jaw clenches.
‘You take the opportunities we give you and you throw them,’ Mum says. ‘You throw them away.’
Mum goes on. None of it’s malicious. Every parent wants their kids to do better than they have, but with Greek parents it’s rocket-fuelled. And whatever we achieve, I always feel like it’ll never be enough.
When we get home, Steph flees into the bungalow Dad and the uncles built for her in the backyard, right by our lemon tree. Steph was always complaining about privacy, about the way Mum and Dad would storm into her bedroom without knocking, about the way their shouting disturbed her when she was studying, so this is what she got: this bungalow. Six months later, she dropped out of university.
I follow Mum and Dad up the stairs to the back door. A fence – narrow side passages to either side – separates our house from the neighbours’. Their yard is manicured, the grass so neat and bright because they water every night. Rows of tomato and corn fill their garden. You could get lost in there.
The screen door at the back of their garage swings open and Olivia, Steph’s best friend, comes out and heads up the stairs. Olivia’s the same age as Steph, but worldly. Steph hasn’t left the state. But when Olivia graduated high school, she backpacked over Europe for a year, sending Steph postcards. Now she works as a hairdresser. She’s tall and athletic and always dragging Steph to stuff like yoga and pilates at the gym. Her dark hair is cropped short.
I lift my hand to wave, then stop myself, because waving would make me look like a dork. I’ve just started noticing Olivia. I mean, we’ve lived next door to one another for eight years, but she was always just Olivia. Now, she’s Olivia. I want to be cool. But that’s when Mum chimes in.
‘Hello, Olivia, love,’ she says.
‘How’re you?’ Olivia stops at the back door to her house. ‘Steph told me she was going to a funeral.’
‘Our cousin.’ Mum clutches her chest. ‘Cancer.’
‘Oh, that’s horrible.’
‘It was very painful.’
Mum’s English is fluent, but I’m unsure how much she really understands. She knows what to say and when and where to nod, but I don’t get the sense she’s taking anything in. Or maybe she’s just not listening.
‘I’m so sorry,’ Olivia says.
‘Thank you, love.’
As Mum goes on, I burst into the house and retreat to my bedroom.
As far as bedrooms go, mine’s simple – the single bed (with its new gold doona) sits by the curtained window, adjacent to a wall closet. Opposite it is my desk, flanked by a set of drawers on one side, and a narrow bookcase angled against the corner in the other. There’s nothing on the walls – not like my friend Riley, who has pictures of Madonna, Kim Wilde, and Samantha Fox topless; or my best friend Ash, who has pictures of Guns’n’Roses, Metallica, and his footy team. Mum wouldn’t want to spoil the room that way.
I change into a T-shirt and a pair of shorts, then sit on the bed, trying to figure out what I should do. Whatever happened at the funeral still buzzes through my body as a weird sense of restlessness. I check my clock radio: 2.22. I’d catch up with Ash and Riley, but they’d still be in school.
I grab my folder from my school bag and flick through it. I’ve done my book report on I Am the Cheese for Mr Baker’s English class, the report for Mr Tan’s computer class and the legal quiz for Mrs Grady’s Legal class.
That leaves my writing.
Three orange A5 exercise books sit at the top of my bookshelf. I’ve gone through four exercise books – Steph’s reading the other one – writing short stories about Jean Razor. I grab the top exercise book, find a pen, lay down on my bed, and flick to where I left off.
The Soulless Lords have cornered Jean Razor at the top of the Temporal Tower, by one of the Mirror Portals. I reread the last paragraph. My handwriting is a scrawl – sometimes, even I have trouble reading it.
I force my pen down onto the page. The ideas come slowly at first, but I focus on Jean Razor getting through the Mirror Portal. A new world opens to him – and me. And with the new world comes a new story. Now, my writing grows quicker – and uglier. The Soulless Lords have minions – the Grave Shadows. They’re dispatched to catch Jean Razor. Jean Razor escapes to the Forest of Volcanoes.
I keep writing, until my hand cramps up over an hour later. I’ve written six pages – a lot, even for me. Most of it is a mess, but it feels good to spill the story out onto the page. I was even able to forget about what happened at the funeral. But the moment I think that, it’s there again – faint, but unsettling.
I storm from my bedroom and open the kitchen door. ‘Mum–!’ I’m going to Ash’s. That’s the plan. But Mum’s lying on the couch. If she were a volcano, she’d spew sadness and pain over the neighbourhood. Now, it smothers not only what I was going to say, but even the intention of going to see Ash. On the chair to the right of the couch, Dad studies the form guide as he drinks a beer.
‘Get me one of my pills,’ Mum says.
Mum’s pills: she keeps two sets in a sugar canister where she stores her knickknacks – one pill is a tiny, round blue thing, the other a small, flat oval with a pink cast. She’s been taking either (and sometimes both) for as long as I remember – I’m not sure why. I asked Steph once. Her answer: ‘For her nerves.’
‘Which one?’ I ask Mum.
‘The blue one.’
I grab a blue pill, a glass of water, deliver it to Mum, then get out of there, sliding the kitchen door quietly closed behind me.
Dad bought a pool table when I was a kid and set it up in the garage – that’s where I go now. Usually, I can play alone for hours, finding creativity in the way I can get balls in, but now I can’t help but think of Mum. For all her bluster, the funeral has shaken her. I don’t want to go see Ash now because I know Mum will worry once I’m out.
One day, she’ll be gone. Steph and I will bury her.
Then, it’ll be Steph.
Then me.
Unless I go first.
The thought jags into my head so I deflect it by thinking about what it’d be like to kiss Olivia. I’ve kissed three girls in my life: Justina Marino in Year 7 behind the school portables (she tasted like cherry gum); Mary Hatchet several times throughout Year 8 when we were like boyfriend-girlfriend (she was an awesome kisser, and I was shattered when she dumped me for Ethan May, the captain of the school soccer team); and Penny Coates at a Year 8 dance (a very wet kisser, like she was slurping on me – that didn’t last). Olivia would kiss with the confidence of a woman – not that I know what a woman kisses like.
But, for now, I can lose myself in the fantasy.