Not Like Cherries
The summer they built the 7-Eleven, Mary, the housekeeper, found a pack of strawberry-flavoured condoms in Sunny’s dresser and Mr Carson hit the roof. Sunny was fourteen, only a year older than me, but she already had her period, used Glitz gel to style her hair and smoked Alpines. In winter she taught me to blow smoke rings in the back shed. As it poured with rain outside the two of us huddled under a menthol cloud, practising pursing our lips and clicking our jaws while keeping our mouths in a perfect O.
It didn’t matter to Mr Carson that the condoms were a joke, a Valentine’s Day present from Danni Connors. As far as he was concerned a condom was a condom, there were no two ways about it. Besides, he said, ‘If it’s not one thing it’s another. I won’t have it, not as long as you live in this house.’
My parents didn’t mind condoms, though they thought Valentine’s Day was an abomination. My father actually used that word. ‘An abomination,’ he said. ‘Next thing they’ll be commercialising Christmas.’ That was his idea of funny. He and my mother were lawyers and wanted me to be independent. I had a clothing allowance, a taxi card and was responsible for preparing two meals a week. We were all equals in our house.
Before Sunny was grounded, we would spend every Sunday at McDonald’s. We’d go to the trash ’n’ treasure market first, then meet everyone after for a chocolate thickshake and some fries. You could still smoke there then. They had these flimsy aluminium ashtrays, about the size of burger patties, embossed with the golden arches, stacked in a pile on top of the bins by the serving trays. By mid-afternoon the tables would be strewn with them, butts overflowing onto the formica, half-empty thickshake containers like mini rubbish bins, stuffed with paper serviettes, tomato sauce sachets and leftover chips. It was like a party. If Justin was working we’d get free apple pies.
That was the year Mrs Carson was away. She would never have got so upset about condoms, but she worked for Save the Children and was in Sudan because of the drought.
‘But what about The Restless Years? You know Dad won’t let me watch it,’ Sunny cried as they said goodbye early one morning on the front verandah. Mr Carson had already left for work.
‘Don’t be so selfish, darling,’ Mrs Carson replied and she kissed Sunny on the forehead, waved to me, and jumped into the taxi. A Silver Top. We watched it all the way to the end of the street.
Mrs Carson’s first name was Babette and she always said call me Babette whenever I addressed her as Mrs Carson. Dad thought she was flighty, but that’s just because she was a vegetarian and practised transcendental meditation. I went around there once when Sunny wasn’t home and Babette invited me in and lit incense and poured me a mug of chamomile tea. When I got home Mum said my clothes smelled of cats’ pee, but I liked it, the whole experience: sun streaming through the stained-glass windows casting purple and green shadows across the breakfast nook, the low meditative chorus of chanting monks coming from the stereo, the sweet perfume of sandalwood and myrrh mingling with the chamomile steam rising from my cup.
‘She’s going to be a hippie. I told you, the girl needs some discipline,’ Dad said to Mum over dinner that night.
‘You still wash regularly, don’t you, Ali?’ Mum asked, concerned. ‘Let me see your fingernails.’
‘Mother!’
Dad winked at me.
‘There,’ said Mum, like she’d won something, and punched the air with her knife.
Sunny was grounded for an entire month. She could go to school and to the library, but that was it. No phone calls, nothing, other than hanging around with me. I lived down the road, which was most likely why. I guess Mr Carson was so used to seeing me that he forgot.
‘What do you want to do?’ I said as I scratched the remaining ‘A’ from my left thumbnail. Lisa had brought blue nail polish to school and insisted on doing everyone’s initials, one on each hand. It was Sunday, but McDonald’s was out of the question.
‘Your place?’ Sunny suggested.
‘No. Can’t. Scrabble brunch.’
As bored as I was sitting around re-reading Dolly, it was vastly preferable to being anywhere near my parents and their friends during this monthly ritual of scrambled eggs and triple letter scores. They’d probably try to include us, then we’d be stuck all afternoon. That was one good thing about Mr Carson, he left us alone.
‘I know,’ I said. ‘What about the 7-Eleven?’ It had already been open a week and I still hadn’t been there. The place was trimmed with decorative blue and yellow plastic flags fast curling in the February heat. A photograph of a red slurpee filled one window, with the words Only 50 cents! written across in emphatic white type.
We got two slurpees and Sunny bought a pack of Alpines. This was a boon. Usually I’d buy her ciggies for her because George at the milk bar knew Sunny’s dad. But the guy at the 7-Eleven didn’t know our parents. He didn’t know the law either, or he didn’t care, because he didn’t even ask for ID.
The slurpees lasted all the way to the park. Sunny got a lime one, and I had a cherry, just like in the picture. It was sweeter than I expected and didn’t really taste like cherries. By the time I got to the bottom most of the flavour was gone. I poked at the ice with my straw. We sat on the seesaw and Sunny lit up, her batik wraparound skirt hitched under her floral Cottontails, the snow-white Alpine hanging from her mouth. She held up the match and let it burn right down to the end, the blue flame lingering defiantly against the background of eucalypts that bordered the neighbouring houses.
Dave, or Wimple as we called him, was one of the teachers coming on this year’s camping trip. Everyone knew he was a pervert and had been fired from his last school for making the students go skinny-dipping on a boating excursion near the Otways. This played on my mind as I posed for a photograph on the front lawn, trying to stand up straight under the weight of my backpack as Mum mucked around with the camera settings.
I would have been more excited if Sunny was coming along, but she was banned from the camping trip too. Instead, she was going to have to spend the week in with the first-formers. Mr Carson said it would give her something to think about.
‘I hate him,’ I said.
Mum let out one of her sighs.
‘Christ, Leslie, give it to me,’ said Dad. ‘She’ll be back before you’ve figured it out.’
The bad things about school camp were driving for three hours in a bus to get there, and having to use outdoor toilets for a week. The good things were sleeping in a sleeping-bag, eating barbecued sausages for dinner, and playing Red Rover after dark. Our team won two nights in a row.
On Thursday morning we all got back on the bus and drove another forty minutes to Euroa High. We were to spend the day there getting to know the students, seeing what life was like for them. After the first painful hour, where we were stuffed in a classroom, two to a desk, with their teacher, Mrs Clark, and Wimple standing side by side up the front sweating and asking dumb questions like, ‘Where does your family get their milk?’ and ‘Who here has driven a tractor?’ we went outside to the toilets for a smoke.
My hostess for the day, Shelley, checked under each cubicle, then handed me a Winfield Blue. Shelley was ten centimetres taller than me and wore a tiny little skirt with a skin-tight forest green V-neck T-shirt on top. She and Mandy (her best friend) laughed a lot and told us which of the guys they’d fucked, and how on Saturday nights they went to the pub and got pissed on tequila sunrises. I did the drawback perfectly. I could see Lisa watching, trying to copy.
To celebrate my return Dad cooked lasagne, my favourite. You could smell it right through the house. I took a shower. I put on 3XY as loud as it would go and stood under the water until the hot ran out.
Everything at home was just the same, the bathroom window opened a crack to let the steam out, my Fiorucci jeans freshly washed and folded in the top drawer of my dresser, my parents drinking white wine, carrying on in the kitchen.
‘There she is,’ said Dad as I joined them for tea. He pulled out a seat for me at the table. ‘Wine, madame?’ he asked, like it was a restaurant.
I nodded. ‘That’s mademoiselle, thank you,’ I said and took a mouthful, making a great show of smelling it first, then sloshing the chardonnay around in my cheeks before swallowing.
After dinner we went for a walk. The air was still warm. The jasmine smelled even sweeter after dark. Mum linked her arm through mine. She said the hot air pockets were happy ghosts. We counted nine. We walked up the hill, past the milk bar and the park, past Sunny’s. The lights were on but Dad said it was too late to drop in. I could see that Babette’s orchid had bloomed. We walked right through the neighbourhood, then looped our way home, down past the church and the 7-Eleven.
It was strange to see something so bright at the end of our street, and at this time of night when most people were tired and starting to think about going to bed. Up by the park we’d heard the rustle of the leaves and the slow rattle of gumnuts as they dropped from the trees. But here you could barely hear your own breath, and the smell of jasmine disappeared under the car exhaust and petrol fumes as strangers pulled in off the main road to fill up.
Sunny said her mum called. It was in the middle of the night, but Babette couldn’t help it because the phone service in Sudan was so unreliable and she didn’t get many chances to ring.
‘Did you tell her about the orchid?’ I asked.
‘God, Ali, no!’
This is how it had been pretty much since I got back, me trying to be nice and Sunny snapping my head off for no reason. Mum said Sunny had some issues to deal with and that I should give her some room, but I thought she was being a total bitch. Danni agreed. ‘It’s not like she’s the only person in the world,’ she said. Though in a way she was the only person to me.
‘Do you want to go to the park?’ I suggested, changing the subject.
We went to the 7-Eleven instead. Sunny bought a pack of Alpine 20’s and we wandered around the side. A red Commodore was parked opposite the men’s. Heat reflected off the new cement. We leaned against the propane tank as we smoked, watching the way the ground seemed to move as it shimmered in the midday sun. Sunny pulled some Tiger Balm from her pocket.
‘Want some?’ she asked as she unscrewed the tiny glass jar. It had a picture of a tiger on the label and smelled like sports medicine, a balm for achy muscles.
She carefully dotted the ointment beneath her eyes and blinked hard as they began to water. It was supposed to look sexy to have watery eyes, but to me she just looked like she was crying.
Sunny stubbed out her cigarette. ‘I’ve got to use the loo.’
As she walked to the bathroom the employees’ door opened. A man came out. He was tall.
‘Watch it,’ she said. ‘You nearly got me.’
The man didn’t move. ‘You watch it,’ he replied.
Sunny held his eye for a moment then walked around him and into the ladies’ and slammed the door. The man laughed and got into his car. He beeped his horn twice before driving away.
‘Fuck.’ I stubbed my big toe on the dresser. I was vacuuming up spilled glitter from the rug and forgot to look where I was going. Dad appeared in the doorway.
‘Is everything all right?’
I was bent over, massaging my foot.
‘Let me see,’ he said. We sat on the floor opposite each other. He placed my heel on his knee.
‘You know there’s no point beating yourself up,’ Dad said. ‘You’ve got to let people be.’ He was referring to Sunny and the fact that I’d been shitty all week, ever since I went around to her place and she wasn’t home. Being grounded for a month is a long time, but then it passes. I just assumed she’d want to spend her first day of freedom with me.
Dad kept squeezing my toe gently like he was milking a cow. He said, ‘Things change, Ali, and that’s okay.’ He was talking softly in his mellow voice, the one he’d use on the telephone sometimes when clients would call at home after hours. It was meant to make me feel better, but it didn’t. He tried another tack. ‘Are you meeting the McDonald’s gang today?’
I shrugged.
Dad said if I finished up the vacuuming he’d drop me at the train.
Silver glitter still speckled the carpet, but I didn’t care. I put away the Hoover and waited in the car.
Clouds hung over the station. They hung over the houses and the shops and on the rise of the horizon. From the platform I could see right into town. Dry leaves scraped across the sleepers, collected on the inside of the tracks. There was dust everywhere, on the seats, on the handrails, swirling in little eddies on the ground. I was thirsty. When I got to McDonald’s I was going to order a giant Coke with ice.
Sunny’s new boyfriend was twenty-three. He had his own apartment and because of that, she explained, she was never home on the weekends. It was strange talking to her on the telephone in this way, but since she’d changed schools we didn’t see each other anymore.
‘What have you been doing?’ she asked.
I told her about the excursion to the International Fair at the Exhibition Gardens and how I got my ears pierced at the Indian Culture & Society stall, two round silver studs that I had to rotate and dress with hydrogen peroxide every morning so the holes would heal. The woman at the stall dotted each lobe with a ballpoint pen then lined up the gun, like my ears were birds being tagged before being released back into the wild. She was wearing a sari and had a red dot between her eyes and she had to hold the gun with both hands to keep it steady. When she squeezed, it sounded like a real gun. Everyone was standing around watching. I could see Danni startle at the sound.
I didn’t tell Sunny about after, when the teachers saw me and freaked out. Wimple drove me home so he could explain to Mum and Dad, but of course they were still at work, so I had to make him a cup of tea with milk and three sugars and wait with him for hours until they got back. He looked weird sitting at our kitchen table, not like a child molester at all. He tapped his foot and made slurping sounds as he drank his tea. When he put the cup down, I could see his moustache was all wet. Mum said that the school was worried because they didn’t really supervise me properly on the outing. That meant that if anything went wrong with my ears we could bankrupt them with lawsuits. Then she gently pulled back my hair and squinted at my studs and said, ‘Not bad.’
I didn’t tell Sunny about the Indian lady either, how she reminded me of Babette, and that when she leaned over to dot my left ear with her pen I could smell the sandalwood perfume in her clothes, and I thought of the drought in Sudan and what it would be like if it were my parents getting the divorce, and of the flowering orchid in the Carsons’ front yard, and wondered if Babette got back in time to see it.