TODAY IS A shit pie. A tasty but thin pastry encasing a craptastic filling. I always walk around with a chest full of lead on this day, looking for something or someone to distract me, because a shit pie with no pastry is just a bucket of shit. It’s the day of the first introductory support course at St Augustine’s (pastry) and it’s also the anniversary of the death of my brother, Jamie (filling).
Jenny Bean is crazy-excited. She hopes that the highly sought-after Stephen Agliozzo will be there. I hope he’s not. I hate it when every girl and their sister flock around the same handsome guy.
In English class, Jenny keeps looking at the clock. Like, ten times a minute. It’s really making the period drag.
She must have washed her hair this morning, because it smells strongly of apples. I can tell she’s trying to make herself as appealing as possible to attract Stephen Agliozzo’s attention. But attraction doesn’t work like that, does it? If a guy likes you, he likes you, and apple shampoo makes no difference. Shit-flavoured shampoo might not make a difference either.
Finally the lunch bell rings.
‘Only four hours to go,’ chirps Jenny, with a final glance up at the clock.
‘I don’t think that Stephen Agliozzo’s going to be there,’ I say. ‘I doubt that he has what it takes to do a uni subject and the HSC.’
Jenny pouts. She’s going to defend the smug little prince, I just know it. She’s such a fool for him.
‘You’re only saying that because he’s so good looking,’ she huffs. ‘You’re judging him by his appearance.’
‘So are you.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, you’re not going gaga for his ugly friends, are you?’
‘I’m following my heart, Shauna. Is that a crime?’
‘You’re following something, but it’s not your heart,’ I mutter.
‘Shauna!’ she gasps, clasping her hand to her mouth as if she were the one who made the off-colour joke.
‘And no, following that isn’t a crime either,’ I add in a whisper.
Above her clenched hand and behind her smudged glasses, Jenny’s eyes shine and crinkle. I can tell that she’s up for a gossip-filled lunch together, but I excuse myself. I have a phone call to make. I have to call my parents and talk about Jamie, like I do every year on this horrible day.
I sneak into Miss Maroney’s empty office. Well, to be honest, I don’t sneak. I just walk the hell in because I don’t care how many Red Marks I get today. I’m always reckless on the anniversary of my brother’s death. It’s a day when anything short of death doesn’t seem worth worrying about.
By the time I’ve dialled my parents’ number, there are tears running down my face. My voice is potholed when I speak to Dad. I’ve planned what I’m going to say, but it’s hard to get the words out.
Two years ago, when he’d already been dead for three years, I decided that I would only tell funny or happy stories about Jamie on this day. We’ve raked over all the other stuff enough. Whether it was an accident or suicide. Whether Dad should have let him take the car out. Why the staff at the hospital told us to come and see Jamie without letting us know that he was already dead. How his face was unrecognisable.
‘Do you remember when he put the box of rocks under the Christmas tree?’
Dad laughs. ‘Yeah. How could I forget?’
Jamie liked to mess with my mind on occasions of gift giving. One year he put this beautifully wrapped present tied with curly ribbon under our tree.
‘It’s for you, kiddo,’ he said.
Even though my eight-year-old self had total confidence in Jamie’s fifteen-year-old self, I just had the feeling that the expensive-looking gift was nothing but a pretty box full of rocks.
‘Is it a box of rocks?’ I asked him.
‘Oh no, kiddo. It’s not a box of rocks.’
‘What is it, then?’
‘If I told you, it would ruin the surprise.’
In the week leading up to Christmas, my curiosity ran wild. I could spend an hour at a time handling the box, shaking it, listening to it, weighing it in each hand. I fantasised about what it might be. Jewellery. Maracas. Amethyst crystals.
When Christmas morning arrived, I shot out of bed at dawn and ripped open the box. Lo and behold, the box was full of . . .
Not jewellery. Not maracas. Not amethyst crystals.
Rocks.
Jamie almost pissed himself laughing.
‘I guess I shouldn’t have thrown that rock at him, Dad.’
‘It wasn’t easy finding someone to stitch his lip on Christmas Day.’
‘How’s Mum?’
‘Sleeping. She got up for a while this morning. Then she looked at some photos and went back to bed.’
The photos of Jamie are all we have left of him. Of his overbite my parents never had fixed. Of his eyes that sparkled when he smiled. Of his cherubic nose and lips. Of his coltish, caramel limbs. What’s Mum to do but look at photos and cry herself to sleep? What can anyone do?
‘Can you wake her up?’
‘I reckon it’d be better if I didn’t.’
‘Okay.’
I really do love my parents. I suppose almost everyone does. You love them even when they’re on the disappointing side. It’s shameful to admit that my parents have disappointed me, that I do blame them at least a bit for letting my brother’s life go to hell, but that’s the truth. They never stood up to him. They never said no. After the age of about fifteen, he was never told, ‘No, you can’t do that.’ No, you can’t leave school. No, you can’t stay in bed until midday. No, you can’t have sleepovers with girls. No, you can’t steal from us. No, you can’t get pissed every night.
All he had to do was slam the door or start swearing or punching the wall and my parents would throw their hands in the air and give in. It seemed like nothing was more important to them than keeping the peace and being liked, no matter what the price. My parents both had the crap beaten out of them as children, and they wanted Jamie and me to grow up without violence. We had happy childhoods and they never hit us, but they never really confronted us either. The boundaries got hazier the older and mouthier we got.
When Dad was away on the road and Mum was on her own with us, it was much worse. She could never get Jamie out of bed in the morning, or into bed at night, not even when he was quite young. Rather than have a fight with him, she let him stay up late watching TV or roaming the streets with his friends. It sounds so silly, but I think that’s where Jamie’s problems started – bed, and my parents’ inability to get him into one. Once they lost control of that, they lost control over other areas, too.
Before he hit puberty, Jamie was a beautiful kid. He was fun and bubbly, and I looked up to him like he was Jesus. He was everyone’s favourite – lively, funny and sweet. I was always a serious child and people didn’t take to me the way they took to my brother. I never envied him, though, because he didn’t seem like a child to me. To me, seven years his junior, he was a grown-up. There are photos of him carrying me on his hip when I was baby. According to Mum, he used to carry me around like that all day. When I was on his hip or in his lap, I was always happy. As early as I can remember, I was caught up in his charisma and had a huge appetite for his attention. He was my world, right up until he started to be a man.
I was flattened by Jamie’s death, but I wasn’t broken by it the way my parents were. I think it was because I’d already lost him a few years before he died. It’s hard to say exactly when it happened. I think that the rock incident made me realise that he was making fun of me all the time. I’ve always hated being laughed at and I think that’s where it comes from. At the beginning I did my best to laugh along with him and make out that the horrible pranks he played didn’t hurt my feelings, but eventually I gave up. He became a first-class dickhead, and I say that not because of the thieving or the vandalism, but because he treated me like dirt.
In the end Jamie had no respect for my feelings or belongings. On the night of his death, he’d just stolen my computer after returning from a two-month stint in juvenile detention for burglary. Dad refused to confront him about it, but I had the nous to do it. Jamie called me a bitch and a slut and told me to rack off, before retrieving the laptop, throwing it at me, and then driving off in Dad’s car. Dad gave him the keys.
Jamie had received counselling in juvy as part of his sentence, so my parents had some faith that he’d return to us in better shape. That’s the only explanation I can think of for Dad letting him have the keys. It’s a decision he’s been punishing himself for ever since. Mum blames him a bit, too, but if it was his fault, then it was as much her fault. I wish they’d been stricter with both of us.
After all that’s happened I still love Mum and Dad to bits. I see no point in giving them a hard time because they do a good enough job of that themselves. I try to be kind to them always, even when they drive me up the wall with their feebleness and ignorance. Even if you only have one smile, you’ve got to give it to the people you love, right?
After I get off the phone, I go back downstairs and look for Jenny. In her upbeat, love-struck mood, I’m hoping to find a different reality. Though she knows all about my brother’s death, she doesn’t know that today is the anniversary. I’d never burden her with that. I wouldn’t even dump it on Lou-Anne’s strong shoulders.
The Oakholme minibus hits the road later that afternoon, practically trembling with the anticipation of its occupants.
‘It’s the nerds’ day out,’ I joke to Jenny, and we both crack up. One of the science teachers, Miss Pemberton, is chaperoning us, and Mr Tizic, the school groundskeeper and handyman and apparently the only employee with a minibus licence, is driving. I really do feel sorry for him, getting unwanted, behind-the-scenes insights into the behaviour of overexcited teenage girls.
‘Crank up the radio, Miss P,’ someone shouts from the back of the bus.
Miss Pemberton, who, in spite of her youthful title, is a little old lady, does as she’s told and we all sing along to some unspeakably lame chart-topper until we arrive at St Augustine’s.
With such a mammoth build-up, there’s no way the revision session can be anything but an anticlimax. There’s no meet-and-greet, no cordial and Tim Tams, just a bunch of clean-cut boys in blazers sitting on one side of a classroom that has a million-dollar view of the harbour. It’s not that view we’re interested in, though. I can’t help stealing a look at Stephen Agliozzo’s rower’s shoulders as I pass by. Jenny alternates between gaping at his Romanesque curly hair and fiddling with her pencil case.
‘There you go,’ she whispers, wriggling and squeezing. ‘There he is! He is smart enough, after all.’
‘Paris,’ I remind her in a whisper.
One of the St Augustine’s teachers, who introduces himself as Dr Peters, hands out a roadmap of Introduction to Legal Systems and Methods and a proposed study timetable, then gets right to the point. He talks about the style of assessment at university and how it differs from the HSC.
By the end of the hour, my brain’s starting to hurt and Jenny still hasn’t stopped looking at Stephen Agliozzo. Miss Pemberton manages to corral us back into the bus, avoiding even minimal fraternisation with the opposite sex.
‘I thought you were wonderful ambassadors of Oakholme College,’ she sighs as she counts heads in the minibus. ‘You comported yourselves with grace, dignity and intelligence.’
The phrase ‘ambassadors of Oakholme College’ is often bandied around, usually during assemblies and by Mrs Green. It used to irk me that I should be an unwilling representative of a school I didn’t fit into, a school that felt so sorry for people like me that it waived my fees, but now that I’m a seasoned old biddy of seventeen, I’m beginning to see why it matters. Behaviour matters. Manners matter. Even when people who have no manners seem to rise to the top of the pile, it’s about what you do.
Actually I think that Miss P is just happy to have all of us back on the bus in one piece. The teachers are always so tense at ‘mixed’ events like these, and I’m sure it’s a contributing factor to the rampant boy craziness. The politeness and etiquette have a tension, an edge of danger.
The excitement in the minibus on the trip back to Oakholme is just as loud and flappy as it was on the trip to St Augustine’s. It’s hard not to get caught up in it, because the trip to St Augustine’s wasn’t just about Year 12 boys in blazers, it was also about our future. A future that’s becoming wider, further-flung and less fathomable. It’s giddy-making.
As we drive along New South Head Road, I look out onto the harbour, shimmering brilliantly under an early autumn sun. The sun usually shines on the anniversary of Jamie’s death, or something wonderful happens. It’s like the world is mostly cruel, but just kind enough to think of something to stop me losing all faith. If I believed in magic, I’d say that Jamie was trying to cheer me up. Or rub my nose in it.
On this day and many others each year, I want to forget about Jamie’s anger. I don’t want to think about the three-day benders and the fights in the street and the Children’s Court. One of the reasons I try to invoke good memories on this day is to crowd out the bad ones. My brother was a lovely kid who became an angry young man. My parents didn’t know what to do with his anger, how to channel it or break it down. There was nowhere for his fury to go except around and around our house and finally into a gum tree.
Even some of the happy memories have angry roots. Why fool a little kid with a box of rocks for Christmas unless you’re mad at the world? He obviously wanted me to taste the disappointment he felt all the time.
Still, today, the sun is shining. And I will believe that it’s Jamie trying to make it up to me.
Then we get back to Oakholme, and just as I’m powering past the reproving eyes of the Reverend Doctor Sterling McBride, Miss Maroney catches me on the staircase. She’s in her netball gear and seems to be in a rush.
‘Phone call for you this afternoon from someone called Nathan O’Brien.’ She can’t help but smirk as she says his name. ‘Number’s on the call register. You can phone him back, but no more than five minutes, okay? The queue’s huge.’
At times like these it gets up my nose that the girls who can afford their own phones aren’t allowed to use them. I have an important call to make to a cute boy, and I have to wait for everyone else to finish their banal conversations.
I force myself to go upstairs and unpack my bag before running (almost squealing) back down to Miss Maroney’s office, my friends trailing and teasing me. Like everyone else in the dorm, they know about Nathan’s call.
Today’s been quite the shit pie. Very high quality pastry. At Oakholme College there is nothing quite so hallowed as getting a phone call from a Real Live Boy. Especially if you’re not around to take it.