The thing is, I understand what it’s like to be different because I’m just slightly different myself. In some ways I’m exactly the same, of course. For instance, I’ve got skin and it hurts when someone pokes it. And the main way I’m exactly like everybody else alive and breathing and pooing is that I don’t like it when I’m sad or lonely or angry – I much prefer to be excited. If I had it my way, I’d always be just about to do something lovely, like a cartwheel.
Also, if I had it my way, everyone, absolutely everyone, would love me. Not up-close, and not in the way the big guns like Jesus and Saint Francis of Assisi and Gough Whitlam were loved; not even as much as Cathy Freeman is loved for being a fast runner who doesn’t show off and who carries the flag for Aborigines. I just want the people who know me to love me just for being me, in an everyday kind of way. They don’t have to sing songs about it.
Aunt Squeezy says that doesn’t make me any different from anyone else, because all people want to be loved, even if they wear safety pins in odd places. Even if they say mean things or forget to take a bath, they still want to be loved.
But I don’t have it my way, and so some people don’t love me at all. Like Harold Barton. He doesn’t love me; he thinks I’m a no-hoper. And Marnie thinks I’m so uncool, absolutely in every way, and sometimes Barnaby thinks I’m a pain. And Kite can’t be sure if he loves me or not, because he just went off and left.
But no one has it all their way. Aunt Squeezy says we think we’re steering the ship, but really the ship is steering us, so we may as well let go of the wheel. You can’t make people like you, you can only try to like people. Even Harold.
So, in that way I’m still exactly the same as everybody.
But I’m sure I’m different in some way. I feel as if I am. I told Aunt Squeezy that I was and she just looked at me with her owl eyes and grinned. We were in the kitchen, and she was cooking. She had a pale green scarf tied in her hair and she looked like an exotic bird, because of the way she hopped from one position to the next.
‘Everyone thinks they’re different.’ She waved a wooden spoon at me and then dunked it in a pot. I was lurking and leaning in the doorway, not quite ready to go or stay. To tell you the truth it was beginning to bug me that she kept pointing out how I was just like everybody else.
I stood up straight and said, ‘No, but I really am different. I’m slightly unusual. I’m not in the main swell, I’m in a puddle.’
‘Oh, you mean you feel left out. You feel like you don’t fit in.’
‘No, I feel like I make my own puddle because I like it better there.’
‘I know that feeling.’ She sighed a big earth-moving sigh.
I was suspicious. I felt she was stealing my feelings. My unique feelings. She was flouncing round, tipping spices into a big pot of lentils and stealing my feelings. It was kind of great having her around because she cooked food all the time, and since Mum was always at work and too tired to cook, and Barnaby only knew how to make spaghetti with a can of tomatoes, and I only made cheese and tomato Brevilles, it was exciting to have someone making a big deal about meals. She even made porridge in the morning, with dates in it and grated apple and almonds on top. But, best of all, she was always up for a talk. And I mean a real talk. A chewing and burrowing and blazing-up kind of talk, not just a how-was-your-day kind of talk. She and I got to talking about real things. I’d never met someone who wanted to talk about life as much as I did; about the big stuff like love and difference and hope and lentils and the nervous system and bigotry. And if you don’t know what that means (I didn’t either), you should find out because there’s a lot of it going round and I believe it’s catchy, and if you get it you become very mean spirited, especially towards people who are different.
‘But I’ve always been slightly unusual. Ask anyone. Mrs Duffel said it on my school report.’ Mrs Duffel was my grade four teacher and she had red hair too, and she wore short dresses covered in swirly patterns. She was lovely.
Aunt Squeezy said, ‘Oh Lord, Cedar, we’re all slightly unusual.’ And she giggled.
I bit my lip and sulked for a moment. I plonked myself down at the kitchen table as I could tell we were heading for a session. Sometimes she really got me thinking in ways I didn’t want to have to be thinking.
‘So who is usual then, if everybody is slightly unusual?’ I was quite pleased with that bit of logic. I felt I had laid a very fine trap. In fact I was so pleased with the excellence of my trap that I forgot that my slightly unusual life was under siege, and I sat back and grinned.
Aunt Squeezy stopped moving for a minute.
‘Hmmm. Maybe you can be. Then you’ll be the only usual one and you’ll be special, for your usualness. Imagine that?’ She laughed. ‘Cedar B. Hartley, the only person in the world who is usual.’
‘I’d be an outcast!’ I pronounced.
She laughed again but she didn’t say anything, and I knew I was meant to do the thinking. Just as I got going she butted in.
‘Oh, but really, don’t you think it’s the most perfectly beautiful thing in the world to discover the tiny singularities that are stitched into the seams of our souls?’ She sat down opposite me and her eyes lit up as if she was seized by a great excitement. ‘There’s nothing more necessary and beautiful than the differences between us.’ She gazed through the window and her eyes flickered out. I knew her mind was floating back to something else, something that made her quiet, maybe the same something that had made her stay on with us. When Mum had told her we’d love her to live with us as long as she liked, Aunt Squeezy got tears in her eyes and hugged my mum, and since then it just seemed as if she’d always lived with us, even though it was only a month. I knew it was a month because I was counting the days that I hadn’t heard from Kite. Every time the mail came I was disappointed. I’d even tried to pretend to myself that I wasn’t expecting anything, but that didn’t work.
So Aunt Squeezy was gazing out the window and I was gazing inwards at my tiny singularities when Barnaby and Ada walked in.
‘What’s going on, ladies?’ said Barnaby. He had his arm around Ada, but she didn’t have her arm around him. She leant into him and smiled at us, just a tiny smile.
‘Cedar’s trying to work out how she’s unusual and I’m cooking lentil soup. Are you two in for dinner?’
Barnaby looked at Ada, who shrugged. She never stayed for dinner, so it was hard to read the shrug. Maybe it meant she didn’t care. I liked her long black hair, which went all the way to her elbows and spread out like a curtain over her red jumper. Somehow she always managed to look dramatic, to look like tragedy and glamour.
‘Maybe,’ said Barnaby.‘We’re just going to rehearse a few songs in my room first.’
Typical, I thought. Non-committal. I hardly ever tried to talk to Ada. In some way she scared me. She didn’t appear to love me at all, and that made me feel bad around her, so I didn’t care if they weren’t in for dinner anyway. Well, maybe I did. I liked it when everyone sat down together. It made me feel like we were a gang.
Of course I quizzed Barnaby on what he was talking about with Kite, but he claimed not to remember. I don’t believe him, but I’ve had to give up because if there’s anyone who can match my persistence with resistance it’s Barnaby. I think it actually amuses him to beat me.
He ruffled my hair, even though that also annoys me, and as he was walking out he said, ‘You were just born unusual, Cedy. You came out upside-down.’
‘At least I didn’t come out with a big mouth,’ I yelled after them, and I think I heard Ada let out a little laugh. I was glad about that. I was glad she laughed because she sometimes seems to be made of glass instead of skin. But see, we all have skin and it hurts when you poke it. Even Ada. Even Harold and Marnie. Even that strange family that arrived in the night at the Abutulas. I was thinking about them, when I wasn’t thinking about Kite, that is; when I wasn’t ‘moping’, as Mum said, or limping around lovesick, as Barnaby said. I was thinking about that family and I didn’t even know why. I started to figure that maybe I had to find out who they were and then I’d know why I was thinking about them.
But for once it wasn’t me who worked it out.