ELEVEN
‘So what do you two have in common?’ Judy was asking.
I laughed in the face of the implausible. ‘Can you believe we both love babysitting?’
‘Oh yeah, I can really believe that,’ Judy scoffed, refilling my glass. She was going to need persuading. Yet I had spoken truthfully about the babysitting.
I needed a bit of extra cash when I moved into Cherie’s unit and began to pay her rent. Waitressing appealed, but my mother thought babysitting would be a more valuable experience, advising: ‘It will stand you in good stead if you decide to do teaching.’ Cherie put an advertisement in The Frankston Leader, overstating my merits, and I was inundated with phone calls.
I had no particular interest in small children, but babysitting turned out to be more gratifying than I’d expected. Small children were cute and trusting. When I arrived and the youngsters stomped down the hall screeching my name, they made me feel almost cherished. Towards the end of my first year, I secured a regular afternoon pick-up and feed-themdinner slot for three placid girls aged seven, five and two. It was a babysitter’s dream job. The parents even let me drive the family car.
It was this job that led to my encounter with Jordan last February. As I entered the crèche to pick up little Harriet, I noticed a male carer leaning over a change table in the nappy change room. His hands were deftly clicking a safety pin in and out of a terry-towelling nappy. The guy glanced up as I passed. There was something familiar about his serenity. I was halfway down the main corridor of the Californian bungalow when it sank in: that was bloody Jordan Sinclair back there. Or his spitting image. I took comfort in the fact that it had to be someone else.
As I retrieved Harriet’s Babar backpack from her peg, Alma, the crèche coordinator, approached. ‘You’ll find Harriet in the backyard, Beth. And Jordan just changed her nappy.’
So Jordan it was. How preposterous. Why was he doing this type of menial work? I didn’t go back to say hello. He still made me feel nervous, and I still associated him with my years as a nonentity at school.
I let Harriet and her older sisters play on the jungle gym for a while, then Jordan made an appearance.
‘Hello!’ he said with a puzzled smile. ‘Don’t I know you from somewhere?’
‘Yes, I went to Mornington Grammar.’
‘Didn’t you used to wear glasses?’ he said, vaguely amused. He was now wearing glasses himself, and his once long hair was collar-length.
We discussed what we’d been doing since school. Jordan said he’d studied accounting and had then worked as a bean counter for eighteen months. ‘What a mistake,’ he confessed. After that he’d completed a childcare diploma and had started this job only a few days before.
I responded with a pointed barb. ‘What happened to your sporting career?’
Jordan was unoffended. ‘Too many groin injuries,’ he said, clutching the inside of his thigh. I glanced down. His loose shirt was hanging out over his jeans, so unfortunately you couldn’t see much of his crotch.
The next afternoon, on my departure from the crèche, I was having difficulty unlatching the security gate while holding a wriggly Harriet in my arms. Jordan hurried over to help. He told me that Harriet had been running a temperature that afternoon. ‘I’ll tell her mother,’ I said, nodding responsibly. In the meantime Harriet had struggled free and was waddling across the tanbark to rejoin the nappy clan in the sandpit.
Jordan motioned for me to let her go. He rested his arm along the top of the high gate.
‘So how are you liking your new job?’ I mumbled.
‘Oh, I love it. I’m so pleased I trained in this area.’ He smiled. Surely he was kidding me.
‘I could do without changing Harriet’s dirty nappy,’ I complained.
‘You soon get used to that whiff.’ Jordan lifted his chin and intentionally twitched his nose.
I laughed awkwardly.
‘You were a Sorrento girl, weren’t you?’
‘Uh-huh.’ He’d be thinking about another Sorrento girl, of course.
‘I hail from Mount Martha,’ he continued.
‘Oh really?’ It was the equivalent of Kylie Minogue telling people she grew up in Surrey Hills. The news was already out there. ‘So here we are, both working in the Big Apple of Frankston.’
Jordan nodded sheepishly. Maybe he thought I was putting us down.
The emotions Jordan summoned up in me that day at the crèche were powerful and I longed to use them, but I wasn’t sure that I should be using them with him.
Jordan looked like he was settling in for an extended chat. His arm was still propped on the metal gate. Then he quickly came to the point. ‘Do you want to go see a movie at Southland this weekend?’
Adventurous Beth opened her mouth to say yes but scaredy-cat Beth replied, ‘Sorry, can’t do that.’ It’s not that I was playing hard to get. I had glimpsed the future and had sensed disaster. I would have felt exposed waiting at the top of the escalator for Jordan to arrive at the cinema complex. And when he saw my frailty, all would be lost. And what if he changed his mind and didn’t turn up? A rendezvous with Jordan was a fraught thing.
As soon as I said no, with my fake insouciance, I regretted it. I’d blown my chance and I trembled with rage at myself as I drove the three girls home.
‘Stop, Beth! Look at Harriet!’ cried Jade, the eldest sister.
I slowed the family station wagon and checked in the rearvision mirror.
Harriet was sitting in her booster seat with her seatbelt unfastened. I pulled over and strapped her in properly and did the buckle up and hoped the bigger girls wouldn’t tell their parents on me.
The next day I saw Jordan at the crèche he didn’t shun me, as I half expected he would. Deliberately he prised Harriet from my arms, carried her out into the laneway and stood waiting beside the family car.
‘Doing anything Friday?’ he asked wistfully.
‘Not until half-past three, when I pick up the girls from school.’
‘That should be okay. We’re short on parent helpers for our zoo trip. It’s an early start. Can you be here by –’
‘I’ll come along,’ I interrupted. I grabbed my second chance as if it were a life preserver.
A few things became apparent on the zoo excursion. Firstly, Jordan was a natural with toddlers. He cuddled the little ones, was wily at dealing with tantrums, and astute at understanding Donald Duck speech.
‘Did you have a little kid brother or something?’
We were standing on the overpass looking down into the lions’ den. Each of us was holding up a small child so the infants could see the animals in the compound below.
‘Nothing like it. I was the little kid brother. I’m the youngest of four.’
‘Gosh. So everyone babied you?’
‘I wouldn’t say that.’ Jordan squatted down to pick up a fallen sunhat. ‘But there was a big gap between me and the others so I did get a lot of attention.’
He already had five nephews and nieces. I regarded myself as an experienced babysitter, but Jordan was an old hand.
‘What about you, Beth? What number are you in your family?’
I didn’t like telling people I was an only child because of the general perception that only children think the world is made for them. When your family splits in half when you’re seven, you know the world isn’t made for you alone. And strictly speaking I’m not an only child, as I have a nine-year-old half-brother whom I’ve not yet met.
‘I had a young mum,’ I said, skipping over the question. ‘She was only twenty-four when she had me, and we kind of grew up like sisters.’
The sister stuff was bullshit. Cherie took her maternal role very seriously and although we were close, she was always in command.
Aside from this potentially dangerous dialogue, I emerged from the zoo trip relatively unscathed. It was a much scarier rite of passage for the children we ferried around, some of them encountering gorillas for the first time.
The outing with Jordan meant so much that I could only keep my consternation in check by telling myself it meant nothing at all. Even on its own, a friendship with Jordan would be something special.
‘So he hasn’t made a move yet?’ Judy drained her glass of Lindeman’s.
‘Only holding hands at the Oakleigh ice rink.’
Judy snorted. ‘Well, that could mean anything. What about a run? Has he made you go for a run? Now that I’d like to see.’
‘Don’t be mean, Judy. He’s not into aths anymore.’
Fortunately, a malaise about the value of personal sporting achievements had overtaken Jordan long before I met him at the Frankston crèche. His post-school consignment to the dullest of occupations had meant adopting a less flamboyant set of aspirations, perhaps. At any rate, the days of him coveting brand-name spikes were long gone. Admittedly, he liked to keep fit. In the evenings he would change into some tatty grey shorts with the school monogram faintly visible on the leg. Over his head went a Mornington singlet top that had faded from maroon to pale pink. Maybe he could still dream he was running for the old school when he went bounding along the footpath in the twilight.
I sat on his verandah, swilling beer and waiting for him to return. When the gate squeaked open, I put the novella I was reading – The Puzzleheaded Girl – down on the stone tiles. There was no point discussing Christina Stead with Jordan. He had no interest in literature. But he always had a book by his bed, usually a Tom Clancy or a John le Carré. He said reading helped him wind down from the day. He didn’t like to lie in bed thinking about stuff. He wanted to go straight to sleep.
Sweaty and incoherent, Jordan lay down on the verandah bench with his head and shoulders in my lap. His chest was heaving. I used my cardigan to dry his face and neck. When he got his breath back, he reached up and grabbed my stubby. Took a few swigs.
‘Moonface,’ he said. ‘Why’d they go and put a girl who looks like that on the cover?’
He was looking sideways at the Virago Modern Classic lying on the tiles. I should have hidden it more effectively. I wouldn’t have chosen that picture for the lead character myself. It didn’t represent Honor’s raggedness, or her flightiness.
‘Tracy doesn’t run anymore, does she?’ As soon as I mentioned Tracy I regretted doing so. It wasn’t only that my former attachment to Tracy complicated my current relationship with Jordan. I had remembered what I usually managed to forget: that I’d been heavily implicated in Tracy’s decision to quit athletics.
‘Tracy? Nah, she gave up in Sixth Form. Last year she did a fun run, though. With Binny and Mish.’
There was no indication in Jordan’s tone or expression that he blamed me for Tracy’s premature retirement. My fears weren’t warranted.
He sat up and finished my beer. ‘They coached magic out of us at school, you know.’
‘Who do you mean?’
‘The aths coaches. They treated us like their little genies.’
That fitted. Mr Connor was usually in the girls’ victory photos, bandy-legged in his own pair of school running shorts. Such a fostering between student and coach thrived in the starter-gun culture of Mornington Grammar.
Jordan scuffed off his runners, tossed away his socks.
‘You were free of all that, Beths.’
I shrugged. ‘I guess so.’
Then he told me that after he stopped winning and the adulation dried up, it was hard to adjust. Being no-one’s little genie stung.
And I had always imagined that having that kind of greatness, even if short-lived, would hoist you up forever.
Still, I continued to fret that Jordan would prefer a girl with a sportier body than mine. Wouldn’t he be happier with the svelte waterskier we watched clamber off a speedboat on the Patterson River? Or what about the feisty kickboxer who gave a demonstration of her craft at Cherie’s primary school fete?
At that same fete Jordan had pounced on a stained copy of More Joy of Sex at the second-hand bookstall. ‘Hey Beths, this’ll get you going!’ We both pored over the charcoal sketches inside and repressed shrieks of disbelief. The positions were so contorted they had surely been lifted from The Kama Sutra.
Cherie – who was coordinating the fete – approached with a young boy in tow. ‘Can you find Danny some comic books, please?’ I snapped closed More Joy of Sex and hid it at the bottom of a box.
‘What comics do you like?’ Jordan beamed at the boy, happy to let the erotica lie.
Later he grabbed my arm and pulled me in the direction of the food stalls. ‘Let’s get out Twister tonight, Beth, and play it starkers,’ he goaded me.
‘Okay,’ I told him. ‘But we’ll have to buy some Twisties too. That’s what Tracy’s family used to do. Play Twister while eating Twisties. It was a ritual.’
I thought Jordan would forget about the game, but he didn’t. After dinner we played Twister in the nuddy with Jordan leaning over me and swivelling the big clock to put us in the most awkward positions imaginable.
Not long after that conversation about the ‘little genies’, I returned from my Saturday afternoon swim to find Jordan eating a toasted cheese sandwich and watching women’s netball on the telly. I find netball boring to watch, but I joined him for a stint on the sofa. Its springs were so slack we were practically sitting on the floor.
I nudged Jordan. ‘That one’s pretty.’
‘Which one?’ he said, his tongue flicking up melted cheese.
‘Her. Number fourteen. Good-looking, don’t you think?’
‘Er … she’s passable.’
‘Which one do you like then?’
‘All too tall, Beths. I just like watching the game.’
I snorted in disbelief and Jordan smiled.
Virtually any televised sport would capture his attention, including the most macho of all, World Championship Wrestling, which he would watch with grave concern, hugging a cushion at every hard hit.
Seeing Jordan munch and swill his way through hours of sport while ensconced on my sofa really warmed my heart. He was the brother I never had. He was the lover-brother. In July we stayed up all night to watch the Wimbledon finals. By spring we were anticipating the Seoul Olympic Games, but we had to wait until the end of September for those. Needless to say, Jordan’s primary interest in the Games was the men’s middle-distance events. He called the races to me with an insider’s expertise, applauding the skinny Kenyans’ capacity to run from last to first place when the time was right. I adored his animated barracking. ‘I’m going for the Brazilian guy in this race, Beths – who are you going for?’
The morning heats in Seoul were replayed late in the day. Bruce McAvaney was giving a statistic-riddled account of the female athletes warming up on screen, no doubt glancing at a record book for help. When the heats were over, McAvaney had some time to fill. He began rueing the absence of a certain Vera Pavlovska from the line-up of competitors. He showed some old footage of Pavlovska winning a couple of races. Geez, did Bruce wax lyrical. One of Australia’s best two-hundred-metre runners had been a last minute withdrawal due to a hip injury.
‘Hey, the Pav!’ Jordan said, unwrapping himself from my clasp.
‘Oh yes, we know her, don’t we!’ I said, aping his enthusiasm. Indeed, Vera had been in my year at Mornington Grammar. The Pav, as most of us called her behind her back, was the only Mornington Grammar alumnus who had achieved her early promise and matured into a sporting star.
Jordan reclined on the couch. ‘She’d have given it a shake. She’d have been a real medal chance, that girl,’ he lamented.
‘At least she made the team.’
‘Nah, Beth. Getting that far would only make it worse. She’d be gutted.’
Jordan looked gutted himself. Back in the Under-16s he had been a runner of considerable talent too. But there were always taller, stronger, faster boys arriving on the scene. At fifteen Jordan was in the Victorian team but by seventeen he’d been pushed to the fringes of the circuit.
‘They were training on the sly,’ Jordan complained to me.
To be frank, I was hoping that media hottie Pavlovska would fade into obscurity, plagued by further injuries and thus never fulfilling her much-vaunted potential. In all fairness she had done me no particular wrong. Some strife had erupted between us at a running event, and an uneasiness in Vera’s presence had plagued my final year at school. Vera knew something about me that I didn’t want others finding out about. Much had been left unsaid after the incident at the running event, probably because Vera was basically indifferent to me. But seeing her on the TV still made me feel uncomfortable all these years along.
When the coverage switched from the track and field events to the shooting, Jordan grizzled and switched off the TV.
‘What’s say we give your new waterbed a test drive, Beths?’
‘Okay,’ I said yawning, as Jordan yanked me up from the sagging sofa.
In the bedroom we took off our clothes and climbed onto the waterbed. We began squelching around on the bloated mattress that a couple of delivery guys with a hose had pumped into life for me only that morning.
I couldn’t stop laughing. ‘It’s going to spring a leak while we’re doing it.’
‘We’ll do it on the floor then.’ Jordan grabbed the blankets and sheets and threw them in a pile on the carpet.
Later, our lovemaking expended, we fell asleep on the floor for a bit, then returned to the waterbed for comfort.
‘Why couldn’t you have bought a normal mattress?’ Jordan complained.
‘Everyone’s buying waterbeds these days. They’re great for your health. And they give you sensational dreams,’ I told him.
‘Do you mean erotic dreams?’
‘We’ll have to wait and see.’
The problem with a waterbed is that you can’t forget you’re lying on water. As you shift positions you hear plonking sounds inside the bladder. The water is never still; it is forever relocating itself. What I had assumed would be relaxing and feel natural turned out to be neither. Admittedly we all used to sleep in a fluid sac, but in the intervening years we have definitely unlearned the habit.
On waking in the morning I tried to catch the tails of my unconscious, but no dreams of any kind were retrievable. I had been cold during the night and I’d had to get up and find some extra blankets. I rolled out of bed and pulled on my tartan winter dressing gown and found my slippers. After sipping tea and doing some reading for an education essay, I returned to the bedroom. Jordan was still asleep, lying in the middle of the bed. I wondered if he was involuntarily worried about falling over the edge, as if on a raft at sea.
While searching my wardrobe for something Jordan had never seen me in before, I spotted my old Mornington Grammar summer uniform, which I had intercepted and saved just as Cherie was about to dispose of it. I hadn’t worn the dress since school, but I felt I deserved another go at assimilation – this time with the eyes of everyone’s favourite guy focused exclusively on me. I threw off my dressing gown and took a hot shower. Afterwards I pulled the school frock over my head and did up the fabric belt with the plastic buckle. The dress still fitted. The pink and grey pinstripes on cream cotton had never looked finer. Into the kitchen I went, feeling very pleased with myself. It was the second of October, and a pool of sunshine came through the window and lit up yesterday’s crockery sitting unwashed in the sink. I had just finished some Vegemite on toast when Jordan emerged in my dressing gown, the green tartan stretched taut across his shoulderblades.
Boy, did he look fetching in green tartan with his weekend stubble and his flossy hair. ‘That bed’s going to kill us next winter,’ he said, wrapping his arms around himself, shivering.
He was assuming we’d be together next winter?
I hid my delight. ‘You should have let me switch the bed heater on.’
‘Are you kidding? Electricity and water don’t mix.’ So far he hadn’t noticed my outfit. He walked past me to grab a bottle of milk but wheeled around in shock after opening the fridge.
Quickly recovering, he sat down, ducked his head and concentrated on opening the single-serve packet of Corn Flakes I had put on the table for his breakfast. I only bought these mini packets for Jordan; I prefer Weet-Bix myself. Now he was scooping crinkly orange pellets into his mouth without looking at me. The dessertspoon clicked against his teeth.
‘I’m not wearing it outside the house, if that’s what you’re worried about.’
‘Well, no. But why put that ol’ rag on?’
‘It’s not a rag,’ I objected.
‘Looks like it to me.’
I stood up and pulled the skirt out wide and flat. ‘Aren’t you curious as to who all these girls are?’
It was a last-day-of-school custom. We wouldn’t be wearing our dresses again, so we invited our friends to autograph them.
Jordan eyed the scribbles suspiciously as he finished his cereal. He went over to the sink and began to prepare himself some toast.
I sat down, wondering how I could redeem myself. While Jordan was waiting for his toast to pop up, he rounded the table and shook my chair aggressively to make me stand up. I complied, wondering what was going on.
He bent over and took a close look at the names on my skirt. He started to read what he could decipher, but his tone was insincere.
‘Gosh. Lynne B. Forgot about her. Jill G. Blast from the past …’
He deciphered some of the names before asking me, ‘Did Tracy sign?’
‘You’re out of luck.’ I said, sitting down and forcefully halting his inspection.
But Tracy had signed. It was at the end-of-school barbecue paid for by the school. By chance I encountered Tracy in the toilet block. Her uniform lay discarded on the cement floor. She was getting dressed for an evening out. Staggers jeans. Red halter-neck top. Coloured toenails. Sparkly studs. The lot.
I took my opportunity. ‘Will you sign my dress, Tracy?’ I held out a texta. She nodded, took the pen and glanced over my frock. ‘Where’s a spare place? It’s full up.’
I tried to find a spot big enough for her to sign. Tracy shook her head as if I were wasting her time, then she lifted up my skirt and signed on the flip side, pressing the hem against my leg for support. When she finished she gave me back the texta. She didn’t ask me to sign her uniform in return.
She was busy buckling on some platform shoes with cork soles.
‘Where’re you off to, Tracy?’
No response. Maybe she was afraid I would invite myself along.
‘Heading up to Sandy to hear a band,’ she eventually conceded.
‘But Tracy, we’re on swot vac!’
Grabbing her comb she stood close to the metal mirror and attended to her hair, saying primly: ‘I was ready for my exams back in May, thank you very much.’
It wasn’t an empty boast. Her HSC results were better than any of us had expected. Four Bs and an A for chemistry. Of course she had the advantage of her pharmacist father to help her with chemistry.
I left the toilet block without using the toilet and without saying goodbye.
‘Beth!’ She called me back.
‘Yes?’
‘What did you put down for your first preference?’
‘Rusden Teachers College.’
‘Primary school teaching, like Cherie?’ she asked, perfectly respectful.
‘Mm,’ I replied. Another option was more appealing. ‘But I’m also thinking of going to uni and doing Arts.’
Tracy made an encouraging murmur. She was applying mascara. I noticed she’d plucked her eyebrows. I have never been game to start plucking mine; I imagine it would hurt too much, and aesthetically I can’t see much advantage. What’s the big deal about having super-thin eyebrows?
‘Yeah, change your preferences, Beth. Give Arts a go.’
‘You really think so?’
‘Yep. I would.’
‘Because you shouldn’t follow in your parents’ footsteps?’
Tracy paused. She had opened a container of blue eye shadow and was dabbing some on with her fingertip.
‘I think you’d be more suited to Arts. That’s all I meant.’
‘Do you?’
She turned to face me.
‘Uh-huh. You’ve got it up here,’ she said, tapping her forehead. ‘You’re a brainy girl.’
I laughed nervously. This was an absurd thing for Tracy to say. No subject at school grabbed my fancy; I just did them because I was supposed to. Well, sometimes I fluked a high grade, but my marks spiralled up and down for no obvious reason.
Was Tracy mocking me? Judging from her expression, the compliment was genuine. Indeed, she was very sweet to give me this reinforcement right before our exams. And in the years since, her advice has proven apt. It was much easier for me to score high marks at university than it ever was at school. She must have seen something in me that I didn’t know was there.
‘Well, thanks for the advice.’
She shrugged her shoulders as if it were no big deal. Or was she simply shrugging me off? I would have liked to have talked some more, but Tracy was already zipping up her makeup case.
‘See ya, Beth.’
This time she really did mean goodbye, so I scuttled away. No-one could accuse me of hanging round when I wasn’t wanted.
At home in Chelsea, two months ago, I guessed it might excite Jordan to see Tracy’s name on my school frock, so I let him look for it in vain.
‘Why didn’t Tracy sign?’ Jordan wanted to know.
I ignored him.
Jordan buttered his toast and turned sarcastic. ‘Why don’t you put your hair in pigtails too? Go preppie all the way.’
I wasn’t really sure why I had put the school uniform on. I did kooky things sometimes for kicks. Yet standing in front of my mirror half an hour earlier, I had felt a spring-like rejuvenation in the old galah pink and grey. I probably looked much the same as I had when I was sixteen, but that morning, at twenty-four, I saw a prettier girl. Oval face. Soft features. Loose blonde hair. I hadn’t lived fully in my uniform back in high school, so I was making up for it now.
Jordan’s scorn made me uptight. I couldn’t explain to him what going on inside my head.
He ate his toast, gulped down some coffee and then glanced at his watch. He’d overslept and he was running late for basketball practice. Jordan played basketball with a shambolic team of mates called The Crowded Court. He wasn’t tall enough to be a great basketballer, but the times I saw him play he seemed to be a central cog in the team, bouncing the ball frenetically from one goal circle to the other.
After he left, I mooched around doing nothing much, wishing I hadn’t regressed. There was no point in taking off the dress now, though. I knew I might have done my dash with Jordan. I wondered if it might be over between us. If it was going to happen soon, best if it was now, I said to myself back then.