We spend the next day lazing and talking rubbish, until Sal cracks the whip. She spots my rucksack, chocka with revision books, and drags it over to where I’m sitting on one of the logs, my head in my phone, replying to a message from Georgia… I’ve got a lot of respect for Georgia. There’s more to her behind the red lipstick, and she hasn’t stopped talking to me like some of the others – Slinky, Mike, Greg… I think they’re all under the Violet Brody spell, but not Georgia. She does as she pleases.
“Glad to see you brought your bag of bricks. Never know when they might come in handy,” Sal says.
“Please remove that sack of evil from my vicinity.”
“Nope. Come on, Carla. You don’t have to do it alone. Let me help you. I’m a great teacher. I taught a koala to wink.”
I roll my eyes. “Course, that’s exactly the same as teaching someone.” I open the Psychology textbook to a random page, and read, “about the main features of the sympathomedullary pathway.”
“Totally. Although fair play, the koala had been hit by a car and perhaps suffered some kind of facial deformity as a result, or brain injury or something.”
“You’re really filling me with confidence in your teaching skills.”
“You want the help or not?”
“All right, all right. Please help me, oh wise koala whisperer. But I can already wink.” I throw my best Fonz impression at Sal.
“Atta girl. Now, let’s fill that brain of yours with the good stuff. When we’re finished you’ll be the Einstein of sympo–sympa–homo–meadow–ways…”
“Sympathomedullary pathways,” I say.
“That’s what I said.” Sal pulls a notebook out of the bag and hands it to me, along with a pen. “Now, less talkie-talkie, more learnie-learnie.”
Sal and I spend another day at the Rock, by which time I’m so grimy and gagging for a shower – and to charge my phone – that I practically beg to go back to her house and be reunited with technology, hot water and a meal that doesn’t include:
1. baked beans
2. packet noodles or
3. today’s lunchtime treat, cremated sausages.
It’ll take a hell of a lot of ketchup to make these palatable.
“Shrivelled devil fingers,” I say, stabbing one with my fork and examining its wrinkles.
Sal grabs one from her plate. “Pokey, pokey,” she says, jabbing me in the arm with it. “Eat me, Carla,” she says, in a voice for the sausage. “You need fattening up. Skinny cow. Eaaaaat meeeee!”
I grimace and lean back on the log. “Stay back, I have a mug of cold beans and I’m not afraid to use them.”
“Eaaaaat meeeee!” Sal moves forwards, brandishing the sausage.
“Quit harrassing me!” I start to laugh and fall back on the log, the beans ejecting from the mug and all down my front. Sal breaks into hysterics.
“OK,” I say, “enough wilderness exploration. Time to re-enter society … where they have showers … internet … food not possessed by demons.”
“Right you are, CC,” Sal says, still grinning from ear to freaking ear.
I love that girl.
Back at the house I’m fed and watered and feeling human again. To tell the truth, Janice is a bit of a feeder. Homemade pumpkin bread. Cheese. Blueberry muffins. Like, every hour, the hostess trolley comes by with a selection of snacks. First class.
I sit in the giant armchair, cosy, but not content, rereading the Emily Dickinson poems for the sixty-millionth time.
“Brain food,” Janice says, handing me a packet of Brazil nuts.
But however many goji berries and spinach leaves I eat, I doubt my brain will be ready for what’s coming…
I thought I would be ecstatic to be heading back to the Big Smoke, but I’m not.
Things I’m categorically not looking forwards to facing when I get back, in no particular order:
1. EXAMS
2. DAD’S RUBBISH COOKING
3. STAYING UP ALL NIGHT (CRAMMING, NOT BECAUSE I’M ON DRUGS)
4. VIOLET’S STUPID FACE.
Sal rounds the awesomobile into the coach station. “Call me any time,” she says.
I smile my best brave smile, but I’m sad to leave. I drag my ass from the front seat and my loaded bag from the back seat. Janice has filled any gaps with snacks.
A box of fresh-baked cookies falls to the ground.
“Your mum’s amazing,” I say. “It’s a wonder you don’t have to be airlifted out of the house.”
“Blessed with a fast metabolism. Dad was a hummingbird.”
“You’re so weird. But I love you for it.”
Sal gets out of the car and comes around to my side.
“Enough soppy stuff, little one. Here,” she says, handing me the rucksack, “don’t forget your bag of bricks.”
“How could I forget?” I gear up for the goodbye. “Thanks for—”
“No worries.” Sal attempts a frankly abysmal wink, her whole face scrunching.
“And you say you taught a koala to wink? You look like you’re in pain. Please refrain from winkage in the future. For your own safety.”
Sal drowns me in a hug. “I’ll miss you, kid. See you soon, all right?”
“Yeah,” I say.
“You’ll be fine, CC.”
I head to the coach that will take me not only home, but back to reality, and I think about what Sal said. I will be fine. I have to be.
On the journey, I realize that this punishment, this banishment, has been a blessing. I haven’t smoked, except for a couple of rollies while we were camping. I guess Sal provided a lot of distraction. I haven’t had a drink. I haven’t done any drugs or even thought about them. I’ve got on with my schoolwork. I feel like the good Carla but without the shyness. Without the fear.
The thing is – and this bothers me, confuses me – I don’t miss Finn … but I do miss Isaac. Not once did I wonder what Finn was doing, where he was and who with… But Isaac? I thought about him, just a little. Arrrgh. Begone, thoughts. For now, it’s got to be all about my Pre-Raphaelites critical study. No room for that.
I open my laptop, its cursor flashing expectantly…
Pre-Raphaelites were taught the traditional way to paint, but went off and did their own thing. They were rebels who stood out from the rest.
I think about everything that’s happened. If going out with Finn and everything that came with it was my way of standing out, then was it worth it? Have I emerged from the chrysalis a winged beauty? Um, no. I need to be someone, to remove my invisibility cloak, but God knows how. Sometimes I feel I’m right back at the start, a nobody, unreflected in the mirror.
I try to put those thoughts aside and concentrate. It’s easier with Art because it’s a subject I have a handle on. I get lost in it. I’m in the zone, my synapses firing, creative juices flowing, when Facebook Messenger pops up.
Hey
Hey, yourself. How’s life in the real world?
All right. Spent some time with my dad which is pretty cool. Bonding. Talking about man stuff.
Like boobs and power tools?
And football.
You still black ’n’ blue?
I look badass with my black eye. How’s exile in leek and sheep country?
It’s worked out pretty well.
How so?
Fresh air, fresh perspective. You doing OK?
So-so. I’ve got some blues I’m trying to quash.
Deep. Any luck?
A little.
(The cursor pulsates.)
What’s up? Do tell.
Really? It’s pretty heavy stuff.
I’m all ears.
If you’re sure.
Say it already!
OK. I’ve been having these thoughts.
The same thoughts I’ve had this whole time about you. And then – at the park
(Pulsate, pulsate, pulsate…)
you were about to kiss me. I think it means something.
I think you like me too but you’re afraid to say.
(Flash, flash, flash…)
Seeing it committed to type flicks a switch in me. I like Isaac. Oh, God. I think I really do. I understand him. The twist of the gut when you see someone, joy and pain all merged into one super-charged turbo-emotion.
There it goes, the memory, on repeat: Look at me. I think you’re amazing.
I might like you. A little bit.
It’s a start.
The journey’s gone by in a blur. Isaac’s encouraged me about my art, and told me about the books he’s reading, about the films he likes and that he would love to be a writer like Jonathan Safran Foer or Jonathan Franzen or Jonathan Coe, and I tell him that maybe he should change his name to Jonathan then. I tell him I hope to be an artist and travel the world and ride an elephant and maybe one day, just one day, feel free, like I don’t have to pretend to be someone else to fit in… By which time I must have written the thousand words – an essay – just not on nineteenth-century painters. Shit.