Night Swimming Page 4

  When I was fourteen and Nathan was eighteen, he moved in with us permanently. He has grown up with Claire, too, and Claire is a pretty loveable person, as I mentioned, and now they’re engaged and she’s having a baby, and they’re going to rent a place together, as soon as they scrape together enough money to furnish a house. Claire told me she would have preferred them to have their own home before getting pregnant, but they’re happy about the baby all the same. Everyone is.

  So, now, Claire’s part of the family. And I still love her, but I love her differently. How I loved her as a kid would never have worked out for the two of us, expecially not in the way it did for her and Nathan. I’m happy, because it’s as close as I’ll come to being an aunt. I plan on getting the baby addicted to mixed lollies while the kid is still young and impressionable.

  It’s okay for love to evolve like that, I think, from platonic to romantic to familial. All kinds of love have value. I would, of course, like someone to tell me I am the loveliest person in the world and kiss me, but it doesn’t worry me that it’ll never be Claire. I sometimes wonder whether it will ever be anyone, but I’d never say that out loud, because I wouldn’t want to seem sad or desperate. Which I’m not. I just worry, sometimes.

  I could tell Claire about my dad, and I know Claire would be more sympathetic than anyone, though I’m not sure she would be able to understand. Her family history is neater than mine. Symmetrical. Do people whose parents haven’t split up or nicked off understand the sheer fortune of having parents who have stayed together, stable and consistent? Claire’s parents are a matching set. They look alike enough to be siblings, which might be because they’ve been together so long, gradually merging into a single identity. I’m pretty sure they’re not actually siblings because that would be grotesque and the whole town would know about it.

  I’m not going to tell Claire about my dad because Claire is not the right person to tell first, and I’m not sure she’d be able to give me any advice, which is really what I need right now. You know, whether to let sleeping dogs lie, or not. The sleeping dog in question being the photo in the paper that might be of my dad.

  The bell tied to the plastic strips of the entrance jingles as I enter the newsagent.

  Claire’s eyes crinkle when she smiles at me. ‘Kirby!’ She’s sitting behind the register, flicking through a magazine, but gets up when she sees me.

  ‘Claire! How’s the baby?’

  ‘She’s just past four months. About that long.’ Claire holds her hands a book-length apart. ‘Her nails and hair have started to grow. She’s got a sucking reflex and a grasping reflex and a Babinski reflex, which makes her toes curl. How good’s the name? Babinski. I heard her heartbeat.’ She grins.

  ‘That’s amazing.’

  ‘You know what else is amazing? Aliens. You think it’s legit?’

  I tilt my head, considering. ‘Well, no. I still believe in other life in the universe, but I prefer the idea of aliens who just show up and have a chat, rather than wrecking Mr Jameson’s crop with some weird shapes.’

  ‘I think some people are getting a bit carried away,’ says Claire. ‘Judy at the bakery, for one. But she always gets carried away. No harm in it. You seen this new restaurant up the street?’

  ‘Of course. How long do you reckon it’ll last?’

  ‘Dad thinks six months. I think they’re here to stay. Everyone’s so welcoming around here, they’ll start going there soon enough.’

  Claire has a pretty skewed perception of the world. She thinks everyone is wonderful. The people around here are nice, but I’m not quite so unreservedly optimistic.

  ‘Maybe we should have the engagement party there? Samosas and pappadums and…’

  ‘We’ll have to make up some sandwiches or a roast for Grandad,’ I say. ‘He won’t even eat food from the Lees’ place and he’s known them for years. Something suspicious, to him, about food that isn’t Australian.’

  Claire laughs while I select a bag of mixed lollies from the display on the counter. It’s got a good ratio of milk bottles to Coke bottles, green frogs to snakes, bananas to jelly babies. The ratio’s important. Musk teeth are my least favourite; just the notion of eating teeth, even teeth made of sugar, is disgusting. I hand her the exact change and bite a red snake in half.

  Outside, I examine the hole in the brick shopfront where Grandad crashed his car three years ago. He took down a post holding up the awning, but that’s been replaced now. Just put his foot on the accelerator instead of the brake. Totalled the car, had his licence revoked. Pity is, he can’t even remember it. I guess that was the beginning of it, but I didn’t see that then. Sometimes you can’t see anything until time has passed and you can look back on events.

  The sun seems to be bearing down twice as strong as earlier in autumn. I can feel it eating away at my skin. Mum and Grandad have spent enough time outdoors that their skin finally got used to it, but Grandad’s face is all brown folds as a result. Nathan fares a lot better in the sun than I ever will—his mum is Polynesian. Fifteen minutes in full sun and I start crisping up like a baked potato wrapped in foil and chucked in the embers of a bonfire.

  Across the road and further up, Clancy is sitting at the table outside Purple Emperor. When I get closer, I can see the books spread out in front of him. This year, he’s doing Year Twelve through distance education.

  He knows I’m here, but he doesn’t look up till I sit down across the table from him. He grins. ‘Had to finish the chapter.’ He tucks a bookmark in. I have a tendency to fold back the corner to mark my page, so he thinks I’m a heathen. I like my spines cracked and my books well loved. Clancy likes his possessions being neat and nice and in like-new condition. After Year Twelve, he plans on selling everything he owns so he’s flush with cash when he goes to Sydney. You can’t resell a book with notes in the margins—how I like them.

  ‘What are you reading?’

  ‘Set text for English Advanced. Jane Eyre. I like it, but I’d like it better if it had a musical adaptation I could study instead. Mr Rochester dancing around, jazz hands. That sort of thing.’

  ‘I don’t think he’d be very cheerful after the fire. Once he’s lost his sight.’

  ‘It wouldn’t be a very uplifting musical, but the best ones aren’t. Les Mis being the prime example. Miserable is right there in the title. Hey, hey, how about that close encounter of the…third kind? I don’t know what the numbers signify. Anyway, Mr Jameson had an other-worldly visitation.’

  ‘I’ve heard. From everyone. Except Mr Pool because Mr Pool does not gossip.’

  ‘Do you get the sense that this is the beginning of something huge?’ he asks, very earnest.

  ‘What, like Kirby’s ordinary life as an apprentice carpenter and goat-owner came to an end one fateful day, when everything changed…Aliens came to town?’ I joke. ‘I always imagined it’d be zombies.’

  ‘Please, Kirby. I am not your Asian sidekick. I’m the protagonist. We are at a turning point here. The fulcrum. A new restaurant, a beautiful girl and aliens arrive in town, all on the same evening. It’s significant. We have entered the after.’

  I shake my head.

  Clancy sniffs. ‘You’ll see.’

  He does have a point. ‘The suspense is killing me,’ I mutter, deadpan.

  ‘You fancy heading up to check out the crop circles?’ he asks.

  ‘It’s a bit hot today, isn’t it?’ I say. ‘And I have been working all morning.’

  Clancy sighs dramatically. ‘You are so not an adventure-seeker. Excitement isn’t going to just fall into our laps, Kirb.’

  Clancy digs around in the pencil case on the table (he’s had the same blue pencil case, the letters of his name tucked into the plastic sleeves, since primary school—it’s probably harbouring all sorts of germs) and brings out a black Sharpie.

  I rest my arm on the table so he can draw dot-to-dot with my freckles, another thing we’ve done since childhood.

  When we were kids, his parents we
re sort of obsessed with the idea that he and I were ‘meant for each other’, which didn’t make a lot of sense then and doesn’t make a lot of sense now, since we don’t really have that much in common. My mum’s never really been worried about me dating or getting married or anything like that; my mum is very much of the parenting tradition Leave Kirby To Her Own Devices. But Clancy is one of the best friends anyone could have, and I don’t think I’m too bad at friendship either. We’ve not had a single falling out since Prep; neither of us has ever betrayed or ditched or put down the other, and we’ve always been able to talk about almost anything. Sometimes I think about how much simpler it might be, for us, if maybe we were in an arranged marriage, childhood sweethearts who could grow up, get married and live happily ever after.

  In real life, there’s no such thing as happily ever after, there’s just life passing day by day. After you ride off into the sunset, then you’re just in the middle of nowhere on a horse at night, aren’t you? And Clancy wants a lot of different things in life from the things I want, so he could hardly stay here and produce Kirby-Clancy babies without feeling like he’s missing out on life in musical theatre in the city. And just the thought of producing Kirby-Clancy babies with Clancy makes me feel a bit ill, no matter how hilarious and fun and good-hearted Clancy is. Maybe if he were a girl it’d be different, or maybe it wouldn’t be. But he’s not, so there’s no point ruminating on it.

  Besides, a best friend is a pretty good thing to have. I wouldn’t want to give that up.

  He goes quiet while he’s drawing, focused. I’m working up to telling him about the photo in the paper of a bloke with a name very like my father’s and a face very like my father’s, rolling the words around in my head. In a way I don’t want to say it; if I do I might make it true. It’s entirely possible that I’m not related to the bloke in the paper at all and that I am grossly overreacting—and overreacting is really more of a Clancy thing to do.

  Then I see the girl from the restaurant walking down the footpath, like a mirage. Clancy has got a pretty elaborate mandala going on my right forearm—I have a lot of freckles—so I see her before he does.

  She’s wearing a white sundress with a full skirt, a colourful pattern all over it. When she gets closer I realise the pattern is Russian dolls, the kind that nest together. Her hair is back in a plait and she’s wearing red sandals. I don’t think I have ever seen anyone so dressed up in town except for a wedding. She is so beautiful it’s hard to believe she’s actually there. It would be easier to believe that I am hallucinating in the heat.

  She is headed straight for us, smiling. She raises a hand in a half-wave and approaches. Clancy only looks up when her shadow falls across us.

  ‘Hi, Harry Potter wallet. We met the other night. And you must be Clancy?’

  The swirl he was drawing on my arm has trailed off into a wiggly line. He’s looking very deer-in-headlights. ‘Yes. Yes. Clancy Lee. How did you know?’

  ‘Psychic.’ She is aiming for a laugh but neither of us delivers. We are too stunned by her presence. I am trying not to analyse how perfect the slope of her nose is. ‘Kidding. Everyone’s been telling Mum and Dad and me about you and your family. Our “competitors”.’ She makes air quotes, like she’s amused by it. ‘We’re across the road there.’ She points. The Grand Opening banner is still flapping in the wind.

  ‘I know,’ says Clancy. ‘I’m Kirby’s best friend, by the way. She of the Harry Potter wallet.’

  ‘So that’s your name. I’m Iris.’ She offers me her hand to shake. Her fingertips are callused but the rest of her hand is soft. My grandfather likes to assess people’s characters on the basis of their handshakes, or at least he used to. I think he would give Iris full marks, regard her as trustworthy and suitable for business dealings, on the basis of her handshake being neither too firm nor too dead-fish-like. I don’t share this thought with Iris because it would be a weird thing to say when you’ve just met a person, and also because at the moment I cannot form words beyond a couple of basic syllables.

  ‘Kirby,’ I repeat, like an idiot.

  I notice she’s holding an enormous bag made of multicoloured fabrics woven together, like a bag that a magician might carry. It appears to be loaded with stuff. I wonder what?

  ‘Looks like you’re studying?’ she says.

  Here we are, loitering outside a takeaway restaurant. Does she think we’re wagging, like proper cool, bad kids? Does it seem possible to this beautiful stranger that I am a cool, bad kid who wags school? I feel cooler at the mere thought of it.

  ‘Yeah, nah,’ I say. I am not cool. I am the opposite of cool. How could I even entertain the notion that this girl could think I was cool? I am about as eloquent as Mr Down is after he’s had a dozen beers up at the pub and starts philosophising about life in the newsagency game. Totally incomprehensible.

  ‘It’s pretty much just Kirby and me and a bunch of twelve-year-olds in town during term. I do correspondence. Kirby builds stuff with Mr Pool.’

  ‘Carpentry,’ I mumble.

  ‘Chairs, tables,’ says Clancy. He’s making me sound more boring by the minute. I am boring, but that’s not the point.

  ‘Explains your hands,’ says Iris. ‘I thought you might play guitar or something. I play mandolin, so.’

  ‘Mandolin,’ I say. ‘Cool,’ and nod, as in I think it’s very cool that you play mandolin, I don’t have an iota of musical ability in my body. But three syllables seem to be my limit.

  She shuffles from foot to foot, then goes, ‘Well, it was nice meeting you guys. Again. Sort of.’

  I panic. We’ve made her uncomfortable. I want to know more about her. I want her to sit and chat. I can’t seem to bring myself to say we should hang out! for fear it will sound insincere or presumptuous. I still don’t know how old she is. Maybe she’s a proper grown-up, like twenty-three or something, totally uninterested in me. Us.

  Iris turns to leave. Clancy shouts, as if suddenly struck by a brilliant idea. He does this a lot.

  ‘Kirby! We should invite Iris.’

  I am at a loss. ‘To…what?’

  His eyes flash. ‘To…to…join our youth amateur theatre troupe.’

  Iris turns back and smiles. Her eyes crinkle. ‘Oh, thank you. For the offer. I’m not really an actor. I’d probably let you down.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ says Clancy. ‘Amateur is right there in the name. We’re putting on a musical, aren’t we, Kirb?’

  I am so confused right now. ‘We…are?’

  He nods. ‘Yep. Haven’t made the final decision yet, though. We’re considering…’

  I rack my brain for the name of a musical. ‘Grease? Cats? Hairspray?’

  ‘If you’re taking suggestions, I like Little Shop of Horrors,’ offers Iris. I have never heard of it, which is surprising, given that Clancy talks about musicals constantly. Maybe I just block it out after a certain point. ‘You know the one with the plant from outer space that eats people? There’s an unpleasant florist, and there’s a psychopathic dentist, and the only girl character is a total ditz, which is revoltingly stereotypical…but I still like it.’

  Clancy gives a Cheshire-cat grin, cheeks dimpled. ‘Awesome. It’s in the top three. We’re going to have auditions. We’re putting it on at the pub. Are you keen?’

  She’s still uncertain. ‘I…yes. Sure. Could I paint sets or something, though?’

  ‘How fortunate. We have a set-painting position open. I mean, we’re so pleased.’

  ‘Pleased,’ I echo. My language skills have taken a hit in the last ten minutes.

  A woman emerges from Saffron Gate and walks across the road directly towards us—without looking both ways—an enormous smile on her face. Within moments, she is upon us. She stops at Iris’s side and waits expectantly, her smile never fading.

  ‘This is my mum,’ says Iris. ‘Mum, this is Clancy of the Purple Emperor and Kirby of…’

  ‘Kirby of the Goats,’ offers Clancy, in the most unhelpful way possible. �
��Goat Kirby.’

  At first glance, Iris’s mum doesn’t look like her daughter. She’s white, with dark-blonde hair and green eyes. But their faces are the same: similar thin, long, ski-slope noses, wide eyes, plump lips and narrow chins.

  ‘Delightful to meet you both,’ she says. She has a New Zealand accent. There is hand-shaking. ‘Such a lovely town! So great to be in the restaurant business so we can meet people!’ She is relentlessly enthusiastic. ‘Sorry to drag you away, sweetheart, but there’s something stuck in the dishwasher. It won’t go on, and you have the smallest hands.’

  Iris nods. ‘All right.’ She gives us a quick wave. ‘I don’t have a phone at the moment, but you know where I’ll be.’ She smiles at me last, glancing at my scrawled-upon arm. That probably means nothing.

  I reckon Iris is the most enchanting name I have ever heard. I try not to watch her disappear into the restaurant. I could find out in no time where they’re living—Judy at the bakery would know, she’s got all the town information, because she’s willing to offend people to get it—but that would feel creepy. The last thing I want to be is creepy.

  I turn to Clancy when they’re gone. ‘Did you tell me about this play and I forgot? Or was that all made up?’

  ‘You’re not that forgetful. I’m clearly a great actor if you think I didn’t just make that all up on the spot.’ He pops the lid back on the texta. ‘Sorry about the arm. Was looking pretty good till then.’

  ‘I don’t reckon they’ll let you put on a musical at the pub.’

  He is staring into the middle distance, as if in a trance. ‘She knew my name. She knew my name. I think I’m in love.’

  ‘I’m actually sort of excited about this.’ I clarify, ‘The amateur youth theatre troupe, I mean.’