‘What did she say?’
Declan’s text was inevitable. If he hadn’t already worked out why Calli left before the end of the game, then she was certain Levi would eagerly fill in the blanks. The child seemed incapable of keeping anything to himself. Calli sat at the top of the stairs, contemplating just turning her phone off and holding it gingerly in her fingers while she tried to decide. When it chirped again, she almost dropped it in shock.
‘Don’t make me come over there!’ the next text said.
Calli took a deep breath and typed, ‘How was the rest of the game?’ wincing when the reply came back,
‘Don’t know. I got DISTRACTED and their loose forward wiped me out. Bled so much I had to come off.’
Calli swore softly under her breath. Declan evidently missed nothing of her spat with his mother. Guilt swarmed over her like ants and she closed her eyes for a moment thinking. Then she typed, ‘She said I was trouble. She’s right!’ before turning her phone off and hiding it under a flower display on the landing table.
Calli’s life began to once again resemble a piece of messy artwork, over which she had no control. She sat in the lounge next to Alison, unwinding a ball of wool and mindlessly watching TV while the gentle woman knitted quietly. In her mind, Calli listed off her various problems, concluding there was nothing she could do about any of them. She couldn’t go home, nor could she undo the damage done to Marcia. She couldn’t seem to stop the drug dealer from hounding her without breaking her promise to Declan. She wasn’t yet ready to see Simon and she couldn’t stop Declan’s mother hating her and turning her God on Calli with the help of the other two hundred or so prayer-chain members. But there was something she potentially could do. She could see Jase. Declan had given her the answer and with nothing else going right in her life, Calli was determined to seize it. It would also temporarily stop Stuart from giving her away to Declan. Unfortunately, it would also mean she had to face both Declan and his mother publicly after their text spat and as she had no better ideas, she decided she would wing it, formerly been one of Calli’s most useful skills. Turning situations to her own benefit was one of her specialties. She was just out of practice.
Calli was up bright and early the next morning, dressed, breakfasted and ready to go. Usually she avoided all mention of the church, choosing to remain in her room hiding whilst Allen and Alison disappeared off for a few hours. They hadn’t pushed it, seemingly undisturbed by their house guest’s lack of interest in something of importance in their lives. But they couldn’t hide their surprise when Calli got her shoes and jacket on and went to stand by the front door at their conventional leaving time. She made considerable effort with her appearance, mostly to give herself confidence, but she looked like a knockout stunner.
Callister Rhodes actually applied make-up, accentuating her eyes and glossing her lips so she looked older than her sixteen and a half years. Her hair was washed, gelled and curled obediently in long ringlets around her face, reaching down almost to her waist in dark, glossy coils. A neat, black jacket adorned her torso and shapely black jeans clad her lower half. Calli’s feet were encased in the only decent going-out boots Mary had managed to grab from her bedroom, after breaking the news to her parents that their daughter had put herself into foster care. They were a pair of high heeled black boots, which she could just about manage to walk in and belonged to her school friend, Suzanne. The boots, despite being less than a year old, had already experienced a chequered existence. They were originally the property of Suzanne’s mother, who fell in them on a night out and broken her nose. Thus, the daughter inherited them, infuriating her father with the tiny pock marks which the stilettos left in the expensive parquet flooring he just paid to be installed. Up for grabs, Calli had given them room in her bag and never worn them, preferring trainers or flip flops.
In dutiful respect for Allen’s lovingly restored rimu floor boards, Calli put them on whilst standing on the doormat, aware of the stunned looks darting between her foster parents. Only Beth seemed able to cope easily with the new development, whistling bawdily at Calli and as she passed her, whacking her wholly inappropriately on the backside. The latter might have been funny if it hadn’t caused Calli to wobble dangerously in the boots and almost topple over. As it was, the boots made her misjudge the threshold and almost end up kissing the floor of the porch on the way out of the door.
Church itself was a nightmare of assault course proportions despite its disguise as a harmless, white, clapboard box. The starting line was the car park, beginning with what Calli presumed were the usual greetings and Alison answering a million times she felt much better, over and over again like a broken record. “Thank you, yes, I’m doing well,” she replied again to another well-wisher.
The next major obstacle was the front door, thronged with bodies, shaking hands and an unmitigated degree of hugging, fortunately none of which managed to infect Calli. She did accidentally stand on a few toes as she tottered on her boots, which aided their successful procession through the bottleneck in the porch and then suddenly they were spat out into a long, low building, sporting an impressive ceiling with beamed apexes to die for. Somehow amidst the crazed entrance dance, Calli missed out on the essential sheet of white paper, which both Allen and Alison touted in their hands. Calli wondered if it was part of the hugging ritual and she couldn’t have one without the other. In which case, she would happily go without apart from the fact that the paper contained the order of service and the song numbers.
The girl suffered a moment of panic as Allen kept walking down the aisle, leading Alison carefully by the arm as she clutched the magic paper and wielded her cane. Calli teetered behind, glaring at the beatific image of Jesus hanging on a banner above the altar and daring him to make her sit at the front. Her heart pounded with nerves and she felt confident Jesus was smirking as Allen finally halted next to a wooden pew about halfway down on the left. The nightmare continued as the couple made eight happily seated people stand so they could push past, Calli following behind, losing control in a confined space and standing on a few more feet. She single handedly caused the first Mexican wave seen in an Anglican church, but it wasn’t entirely on purpose.
This better bloody be worth it, she fumed silently, sinking gratefully into the pew and finding herself pivoted on something hard and unyielding. Calli jiffled around, trying desperately to get comfortable and remembering all the ungodly jokes about pews being deliberately hard in order to keep the congregation awake. “Oh God!” she stage whispered suddenly, cringing as an entire section of the rapidly filling church stared in her direction. “Sorry,” Calli hissed to a smirking Beth, who had done the sensible thing and entered the pew from the other end to sit next to her father. Beth leaned forward to catch what Calli was sorry about, squeaking with laughter as Calli said a little too loudly across a bewildered Allen and Alison, “I just said bloody in my head. Do you think God heard it?”
Allen slapped his daughter unceremoniously on the thigh, perhaps temporarily forgetting she was in her mid-twenties and smacking children was now illegal in New Zealand. Beth sat back and pursed her lips, trying not to look at Calli again for fear of losing it altogether. Calli sighed loudly and craned her neck around, looking hopefully for Jase even as she thought, darn these seats are hard!
“Excuse me,” came a wavering, aged voice and turning around at the tap on her shoulder, Calli was confronted by a collapsed and wrinkly face, peering at her over the back of the pew. It took a moment for her to comprehend that the old man was actually standing up, but was so bent over he only looked as though he was sitting down. She stared expectantly at him. “I think you might be sitting on my wife’s bible,” he said matter-of-factly, waiting patiently as his bottom lip made an attempt to swallow the top half of his face.
Calli felt around under her bottom, immediately discovering the hard backed edges of a book underneath her. She wrenched it out ungraciously, wriggling around in the small space allotted to her and handed it over, noting the seat was only marginally more pleasant without it. The old man dropped it twice, involving lots of help from around him, finally placing it into the gnarled hands of his slightly crumpled wife, who watched the whole scene through large glassy eyes, with apparent disinterest.
“Jesus!” Calli exclaimed as she resettled herself, drawing more looks and a noticeable sucking in of breath from several quarters at her blasphemy. A tiny snort escaped Beth, quickly extinguished for the moment anyway.
The first hymn was raucous and frightening and not what Calli remembered of occasional forays to church for minor celebrations such as christenings and funerals. She hadn’t been expecting the pop band which struck up loudly on stage, nor the enthusiasm of the congregation which waved and bounced like they were at a concert. A quick glance behind her at the elderly couple yielded the amazing sight of Mr Wrinkly bopping around whilst clutching his walking frame and Mrs Wrinkly staring right at Calli, still sat in her seat gripping her grossly offended and probably contaminated bible.
Alison remained demurely seated, her legs too painful to stand for long but Allen and Beth stood dutifully, singing heartily to the heavy rock that the punk on the drums kept time for. Calli closed her eyes and tried to wait patiently for it all to be over. Some kind of disturbance broke out at Beth’s end of the pew and it took Calli a few moments to work out what. As Allen’s body lurched forwards, almost pitching him over the row in front, Jase appeared, shoving and pushing without regard to reach his sister. He looked like an expeditionary cutting his way through the jungle. Calli’s breath caught in her chest at the sight of him, maternalism flooding out towards him and drawing him in. He took off in flight just before Alison’s sore legs and Calli caught him, teetering on her heels and crushing his small body into hers. But her face conveyed not joy, but horror at the state of him. The little boy was emaciated.
Calli nestled the thin body into hers, shocked at the weight Jase had lost and the fragility of his limbs. He wrapped his legs around her thighs and gripped on for all he was worth, so overwhelmed by his proximity to the one person in the world whom he loved above all others, tears ran silently down his cheeks and he squeezed his eyes shut to drink in the safe smell of her. Calli snuggled into Jase’s hair and neck with abandon, failing to notice he was accompanied by someone else until another body squeezed into the negligible space between Calli and Alison.
Feeling an arm around her shoulders, Calli looked up to find Declan staring down at her. His face was a mess. It looked like someone had put him through a cheese grater. He had a purple bruise around his right eye and a burst blood vessel just outside his iris. The cut on his cheek and another one on his eyebrow, matched the one over the bridge of his nose and made an almost perfect scalene triangle. He looked annoyed at her, which was understandable seeing as her mobile phone was still hiding under the silk flowers on the landing and he probably texted all night. Calli gulped nervously as Jase gripped her neck so tightly, he cut off the air to her windpipe and her brow furrowed as Declan leaned in close and said something.
“What?” The music drowned out whatever it was and she pulled an I-can’t-hear-you face and leaned closer to his mouth. Declan should have known better. As a regular churchgoer, Calli would have expected him to know when the music was going to stop and he would have to grab a seat. After all, he had played this game many times and it was only her first. Perhaps it was the concussion gained the afternoon before as the boy ran heroically with the ball, noticing at the wrong time that his mother stood threateningly over his girlfriend and neither looked pleased, which put him off his church-game. Or perhaps God just hated him too now, by association.
Either way, as Declan leaned in and raised his voice to repeat the sentence he had just uttered to his infuriating soul mate, the music stopped and the congregation sat quicker than expected. Which is probably why the whole church heard his deep and echoing voice declare loudly, “I said, you look hot.”