FOUR
Even before Tracy and Jordan got together, it occurred to me they were destined to do so. Birds of a feather flock together and all that. Tracy was happier in motion than not, and so was Jordan Sinclair. If not with Tracy, then Jordan would pair off with another girl who owned a pair of spikes and could keep up with him on the training track.
Of course, Jordan was a year older than us so he wasn’t in any of our classes, which meant there were fewer opportunities for him to get to know Tracy. In those days he hung around with a band of pipsqueak boys who tended to ignore members of the opposite sex. We girls knew from the advice pages in Dolly magazine that the boys’ indifference was bound to change. At fifteen Jordan was already getting a lot of heated attention from lovesick girls. Heart-shaped stickers would be pasted on the door of his locker when he wasn’t looking. He’d rip the stickers off, but more would appear the next week. Jordan was dinking a mate down Mount Martha hill one evening and the bike fell over and his mate landed heavily, crushing Jordan’s leg. When Jordan returned to school with his leg in plaster, he was inundated with soft toys. Teddy bears and koalas could be seen peeping out of his schoolbag on the bus ride home. Jordan had no qualms about accepting these cute, fluffy gifts, regardless of who the giver was.
One afternoon in the science lab, our doddery teacher thought we were laughing at him. He went bright red in the face and turned to the blackboard in shame. In fact, our amusement was entirely at Tracy’s expense. Beneath the lab benches she had been using the point of her metal compasses to scratch Jordan’s name into the coating of a relay baton. She was showing the inscription to Penny when a brazen neighbour snaffled the baton and handed it on to someone else. The gold baton did a circuit of the lab, passing from one amused kid to another so we all got to read the mysterious word engraved there: JORDAN. There was only one boy called Jordan in our school, so it had to be him.
Our elderly teacher was still writing project topics and textbook page numbers on the board for us. By the time he turned around, the relay baton was back in Tracy’s possession and she’d hidden her hot face inside her pullover.
You could keep your romantic fantasies secret for a while at Mornington Grammar, but even if you only told one person and even if that person happened to be your best friend, there was no guarantee that the news would not leak out. Normally watertight kids divulged the obsessions of others – spare a thought for the boy who confessed he was sold on Jan from The Brady Bunch – when put under pressure from muckraking future journalists.
Regardless of whether anyone told Jordan about the crush baton, he would certainly have noticed Tracy zipping around the oval in her red-hot spikes. It added to her appeal that she had no obvious tickets on herself. She was the fastest runner in our year but she enjoyed running for its own sake. Yes, she was a tenacious competitor, but I wouldn’t call her an innately competitive person. After all, her passion was for the relay, not the sprint, and as the relay was a team sport, she was obliged to share her successes with her teammates.
‘Do you remember the name we had for Tracy’s relay team?’ I quizzed Jordan when we started going out together.
‘The baton-change girls. Everybody knows that,’ he replied smoothly.
Elatedly I goaded: ‘Well, I bet you don’t know who made up that name.’
I take credit for inventing the name, though Judy claims it was her idea. I say Judy’s wrong, as I remember the words forming in my mind and using them in Judy’s presence and her saying, ‘Now you’re getting the hang of it.’
Not long after Tracy’s science lab etching of the crush baton, Jordan peeled off his big dirty sock and invited her to draw on the disintegrating plaster. She was the only person he ever allowed to do this.
Recently I asked Jordan why he’d been so precious about his plaster cast.
‘I had to live with that thing on my leg for six weeks,’ Jordan told me, narrowing his eyes. ‘I didn’t want people writing obscenities on it.’
Jordan sat with his leg extended across the back seat of the bus. Tracy kneeled down beside his leg. Using a 2B lead pencil she set to work. Pixie Jill and I hung over our seat to watch her efforts. Tracy started with cutesy flowers and the whiskered faces of cats. Then she drew a convincing picture of Gilligan from Gilligan’s Island, her favourite TV show in primary school.
When she was done, Tracy brushed back her fringe and smiled. All that doodling in class had been put to good use. Jordan was staring at her in wonder. I’ve forever believed he was aroused by Tracy’s graceful athletic ability, yes, but he was also inspired by what a sweet, funny girl she could be. He was totally taken with her, just as I had been when I was seven and eight years old.
The bus had stopped in Mount Martha. The driver was waiting. Jordan grabbed his crutches and his bag and shuffled down the back steps. Ten girls’ heads turned at the same time to watch him hobble up a side street towards his house. Nine girls’ hearts were wilting. Jordan was no longer ours for the taking.
Another interruption in the billiards room. A waiter crossed the floor and began opening the cupboards behind the bar. He retrieved a silver cocktail shaker, and on his way out he winked at me. Unsettled, I rose from the couch and began stamping my right foot on the floor, trying to get the circulation going. Was it too soon to retry Jordan’s number? The guys might be home by now. I’d been sitting here for the better part of an hour.
I went over to the public phone and dialled the number, preparing myself for a stab through the heart at hearing Jordan’s voice. But the phone rang and rang. What on earth were they doing? Maybe Jordan was driving down here early in his fatigued orange Datsun. The latest plan was for Angus to drive Jordan here in his station wagon, as we newlyweds would only need one car for our honeymoon. But Jordan could turn up ahead of time. He might want to surprise me, or he might want to tell me what was bothering him in person. Beth, there’s been an –
What had there been? When he called in to see me yesterday afternoon Jordan hadn’t seemed himself. He was looking weary, but that was understandable given it was Friday and he’d just finished his working week. Yet he was also looking sad. He kept staring into his mug of tea as though there was an insect floating on the surface. Something was bugging him. Something he didn’t have the nerve to tell me about on the eve of our wedding.
The cocktail waiter came back, to fetch an ice bucket this time. On his way out he relayed some news. ‘The dining tables are awaiting your inspection, Miss Shaw.’
For heaven’s sake, give it a rest. No-one ever called me Miss Shaw. Not even the primary school kids on my teaching rounds. I was having a hard enough time holding all the flaky pieces of plain old Beth Shaw together, let alone embodying the formal personage of Elizabeth Cheryl who was about to marry Jordan Mark, or (dare I whisper it) the soon-to-beannointed Mrs Beth Sinclair.
My pride at the thought of being Jordan’s bride had never extended that far. I was not going to swap my identity for his. Jordan had been relieved to hear it, too. ‘Mrs Sinclair? Oh God, no. That’s Mum’s name. It doesn’t suit you at all.’
Prompted by the waiter’s entreaty, I retrieved my wedding day notes from my satchel and flicked through the stapled pages. A sheet of A3 paper presented a seating diagram Jordan and I had devised two weeks ago. It was imperative that sworn enemies such as divorced couples should be kept apart. I was supposed to be putting the place cards in the correct spots this morning, so no awkward encounters would arise.
But if I were to shuffle the place cards and assign them randomly so that our guests found themselves sitting at the wrong tables, would it really matter?
Far more disturbing would be for the bride to find herself sitting next to the wrong man. Not really the wrong man, for there was no right man sitting at a corner table, overlooked and unappreciated. Jordan was the man I had loved for a very long time. He should be perfect, but he no longer was. And my smarmy fiancé would have known I wasn’t right for him the day he so rashly and selfishly proposed. Maybe he thought I was half right, and if he kept the lighting dim he wouldn’t notice the difference. Maybe he assumed I’d turn into Mrs Right if he brainwashed himself to believe it was so.
He’s just using her. We heard this expression a lot in high school. It was always the guys who were using the girls, not the other way around. And the girls who were being used were either blind fools, or nymphomaniacs who couldn’t help themselves. In the years since school, however, Judy and I had lost the custom of talking about guys as users. Perhaps our social networks had shrunk, or we now excluded rogues, or the men in question had improved their conduct, or maybe nothing was that simple anymore. I suspected it was mostly this last reason. Once you’d been in a few relationships yourself and seen all manner of emotional play-offs and paybacks, it was possible to argue that everyone (whether guilelessly, ruthlessly or caringly) was using everybody else.
‘What else do you remember about me at school, Beths?’ Jordan had asked me way back in April.
I hesitated. Too much, way too much. His reel of teenage highlights was probably also mine. Better to keep that to myself. Yet contrarily I wanted him to know how much he had meant to me, because I wanted his total acceptance of the unfulfilled girl I had once been as well as the young woman I was now, surely a vastly improved version of my vapid teenage self. The more at home with Jordan I became, the more I wanted to share my lacklustre adolescence with him so he could render it null and void.
‘For a change, you remember me.’
Jordan looked surprised. He scratched his head. Now I was testing him. He wasn’t above making something up to please me.
‘You were the girl with the swap cards.’
‘No, that was Jill.’
‘You never took your blazer off on the bus.’
‘I did on hot days.’
‘Um, you had blonde pigtails that other girls coveted.’
‘Really, are you sure they coveted them?’ I queried, staring hard.
‘Just stuff I heard.’ He nodded, and I laughed.
‘Did Tracy ever mention me?’
Jordan swallowed and looked down. ‘Maybe, once in a while.’
My disappointment jogged his memory. ‘In fact, she was prone to saying, “I went to primary school with that girl”.’
‘She didn’t care about my blonde pigtails?’
‘Nope, Tracy wasn’t envious of anyone.’
Later I remembered it had been me with the swap cards. Jill and I had traded those playing cards with cute pictures of kittens and puppies and elfin children on them. It was a primary school fad that we carried over into secondary school until Judy called us babies for doing it. How on earth did Jordan remember such an obscure detail?
I glanced at my watch again. It had just gone eleven-thirty. What time could I expect our guests to start arriving? Not for ages, hopefully. Maybe by three o’clock some of them would be making an appearance. But for those staying over, hotel check-in time was as early as one o’clock. Yes, Jill and my other Mornington Grammar cronies could potentially arrive at the seaside hotel in ninety minutes.
I’d lost track of some of these girls in the years since school, but we could easily resume relating as though nothing had changed in six years. My memories were thawing, and when I reflected on our imminent reunion I began to feel anxious. Alarmingly soon, these once oh-so-familiar companions were going to step back into my rearranged-for-the-better life. Up the hotel drive would come Skinny Binny with her bag full of rum balls she would later spew up. At her side would glide languorous Pen, the only softball player on the planet who looked good in regulation below-the-knee pants. Tonight was going to be like a high school reunion, with Tracy Breeze a notable omission. We had not had a school reunion yet. This was going to be it.
I folded up my wedding notes in a tight wad and pushed them back into my satchel. My hand fossicked around until I located a packet of paracetemol. My splitting headache had returned. It was cool in the billiards room but I’d come out in a sweat and my heart was pounding and I thought I was having a heart attack. Worrying that I might black out, I lay down on the couch, closed my eyes and began to take slow deep breaths. Once I had marginally recovered, I opened my eyes and saw a fistful of stars. I shut my eyes again and watched the tinsel star flakes imploding on the inside of my lids.
There was to be no let-up, for now I was overcome with such a raw sensation of bewilderment and self-loathing that I found myself virtually cast back in my teenage body, with all the attendant smells and sounds and wallowing sensations of that time whirling around me.