Yes

A 4-mm hook to begin

Mum slammed the door, a bit harder than necessary if you ask me, on her way out. Dad and I sit at the table. I don’t feel that I can get up and leave too, so I stay there, sitting silently with him. Keys swing and clatter against the wooden key-holder hanging on the wall beside the back door.

I’d made the key-holder at intermediate. We’d burned the word KEYS into the wood with a soldering iron sort of thing, maybe it was a soldering iron, I can’t remember. Then I start thinking woodwork was really funny because our teacher was called Mr Woods. Me and my mate Legless used to crack up about that. I feel a smile coming on and clamp it down. It’s pretty funny after all; Mr Woods for woodwork. I suck in my top lip a bit and bite it with my teeth because I don’t think now is a smiling time. The flashcard would be Stunned, I think. I don’t call my mate Legless so much anymore, unless he gives me shit. I know now this means he’s not actually going to give me excrement … that’s what I used to think, but I’ve got that stuff all sorted out now. It’s giving a bit of stick, which also doesn’t mean giving a stick at all, in fact even trying to explain how it is that nothing means what it says makes my head hurt. Anyway, I don’t call my mate Legless so much anymore because it’s not strictly true that he’s legless, he’s got a prosthetic limb, although he often refers to it as his ‘pathetic limb’.

Luke is what you would call my only friend. When we were little kids our favourite game was pirates and that’s when I started calling him ‘Legless’, because that’s definitely a pirate name, and he called me ‘Ahoy there, Marty’. Well, he didn’t call me ‘Ahoy there’, but ‘Marty’ with the ‘Ahoy there’ first, get it? Just like pirates, or how we thought pirates would talk. Sometimes he’d say, ‘Ahoy there, Mixed-up Marty!’ Mixed-up Marty, that’s me all right, and Luke is Luke with only one-and-a-half legs.

I slowly let air out of the smallest of gaps between my lips, like a tyre going down, as a substitute for saying anything, while Dad sits, immobile as a statue, across from me. The keys finally stop swinging, and, without the soft scratching noise they made, Dad is totally silent and I’m trying not to break it — the silence, that is.

My butt cheeks are clenched against the kitchen chair and my thighs start to burn. I wriggle a bit to the right. It seems that maybe one of us should say something, but I don’t know what to say so it won’t be me, when suddenly Mum comes storming back in again.

‘Wrong bloody keys.’ She yanks the right set from the holder and misses the hook with the wrong ones and they fall on the floor, and then I can’t help myself. I start laughing. Flashcard: Relieved. Dad and I never know what to say to each other.

‘Don’t you dare laugh at your mother.’ Dad is being mad at me even though I haven’t done anything. He could be getting mad at me because he never gets mad at Mum. Well, hardly ever. He gets mad at me the most, then my sister Mel second-most, but not so much now that she’s moved in with Declan because he stopped talking to her when that happened. It’s reasonably difficult to be mad at somebody you don’t see or talk to anymore and much easier to be mad at me, since I’m still here. Mel’s older than me. Mum had a baby in between us, but it had water on the brain. Don’t ask me what that means, it just means the baby in between didn’t make it, so there’s a gap between Mel and me where the other baby should have been.

Mum and Dad look at the keys on the floor, at each other, and then they burst out laughing, too. Then it’s over, the weirdness. Nobody seems to be mad anymore and nobody seems to be leaving. All the faces are normal again — although there was no flashcard for Normal. Not ever.

Later that night I wake up with my sheets twisted all around me. It’s stinking hot because February is always scorching the minute you get back to school, and January’s only mediocre-hot or raining because school hasn’t started. At least that’s the way it always seems to work out. I push the window open, and a rush of warm air drags in with it the cooler grass-scented air, damp from the pop-up sprinklers that Dad turns on only at night, and I hear my parents talking out on the deck. I don’t mean to listen, but then most of what I do I don’t mean to do. It just happens. People, teachers mostly, say to me ‘How did this happen?’ or ‘How did that happen?’, and when I say ‘I don’t know’, they don’t believe me … but that’s how it is. Things just are, how can you ever know what might happen? So my ears listen … because that’s what ears do. They don’t, however, keep growing throughout your life like some people think, it just looks as though they do. No matter, it’s better to have small ears from the get-go, I think.

‘Women’s Studies. I should have said no way. You are a woman, you don’t have to study it.’ Dad’s got his radio announcer voice on, all smooth and soft. Although he’s not a radio announcer, he just sounds like one right now.

‘It’s got nothing to do with studying.’

‘You wouldn’t have read that book.’

‘Without Reservations wasn’t even on the book list, Noel. It was in that box of books Mel found in the Thursday Trader for twenty dollars.’

‘You wouldn’t have met that Sandalwearingfeminist filling your head with ideas of leaving us.’

Dad always says it like it’s her name — Sandalwearing-feminist — but it’s not. Fiona is Mum’s tutor. I like her. She never makes me feel like a complete idiot like other people can do. I don’t know why Dad’s saying she wears sandals, because she doesn’t, not that I’ve ever seen.

‘Three months is not leaving you. You’re being melodramatic. It’ll be good for you both.’ Mum says that in her loud voice. ‘Even better for me.’ Mum says that in her quiet voice. I don’t like her going loud and quiet during the same conversation. It’s too confusing. Loud can sometimes be happy, and quiet can sometimes be angry, but it can take a while before you’re sure which is which.

‘I don’t want you to go. Don’t look at me like that. At least do a tour or something, with proper dates and proper hotels, so we know where you are. In case we need to get hold of you.’ Dad sounds kind of strange, and anyway there would be proper dates — the day she goes and the day she comes back. I think that if I sounded like that Dad would tell me to ‘toughen up’, and ‘be a man’. Come on, Dad, be a man. He says it to me enough. ‘Come on, Marty, be a man. Let’s have some manliness out of you.’ Usually when I’m stuttering and mumbling because I can’t sort out words in my head fast enough for him, or when I’ve dropped a rugby ball, or when I’ve got a hook in my hand and a ball of wool. He’s scathing then — those facial expression flashcards worked. Flashcard: Disgust. I see that a lot. Stuff him, though. See how manly he is with Mum.

Mum makes a noise that could be a sigh. I’m not sure.

‘That’s just the point, Noel. I don’t want to be got hold of, I don’t want to be in charge of, or responsible for, or have to sort out, fix up, fill in, find out, ferry here, there and everywhere anybody. Except myself. It’s too much. I need a break and, thanks to Dad leaving me that money, I can. I will. I’m going.’

Mum’s voice is as cool and smooth as water, which is way better than the angry, key-flinging woman from this afternoon. Better, but serious.

Hot as it is, I quietly get up and pull my window shut. The rubber seal on the aluminium frame makes a hollow thud that’s matched in my chest. I’m why Mum’s worn-out, fed-up and flying off to other countries. Without reservations. Just like the book she read. When exactly she’s going I don’t know, but one thing is for sure, Mum always does everything she says she’s going to do, so … Just me and Dad, now that’ll be interesting. It puts me on such a downer that I end up lying on top of my crumpled sheet, having a trickle about Grandad. A trickle is not to be confused with active crying. I don’t cry that much, not usually, because I don’t feel stuff so well, especially physical stuff; burns, bumps and scrapes. I never cry over those sorts of things. For the record, crying can be manly, under the right circumstances, but a trickle is only a little wetness about the eyes, involuntary leaking really. Like the wind can do to you when you walk on the beach in winter. Grandad being gone is like a sharp wind pressing tears from the tight corners a pair of screwed-up eyes can be. I shut my eyes until my eyeballs ache, and eventually I can’t feel it anymore and even my ears are quiet.

I turn the sign hanging on the door from CLOSED to OPEN. Actually, I have got more than one friend, but I forgot to count Francesca because I never know what’s going on with that girl. One minute she’s my friend — purely chick-mate, you understand — the next minute, well … she pretends she doesn’t know me. I think she only hangs out with me because her parents know my parents, you know, my people will talk to your people, and then we’re suddenly looking after assorted younger cousins and neighbours’ kids, and sneaking capfuls of sherry that was supposed to go in the trifle.

Once, we shared a New Year kiss at Taupo, but that could have been a mistake, because I didn’t know that’s what she was going to do and took a step backwards, so it was more like her lips briefly hit my chin, and she’s never got her face that close to mine again. Worse luck. Anyway, I don’t think she even remembers it, because she’s never mentioned it. Not ever. I unlock the till and put the float, coins and cash into the right places. Then check again that they are the right places. There is nothing floaty about a float, it’s just what it’s called. Really it’s change, even though it doesn’t.

Her face had got pretty close to mine at Grandad’s funeral because she’d hugged me harder than I ever thought was possible, and given me her handkerchief. I wasn’t paying enough attention at the time to enjoy it until after it was long over. I’m a sicko even to think about that, because my grandfather had just died. I still have the handkerchief. I don’t know if I’m supposed to give it back or not. I’m not up with the play on snot-rag manners. It’s another of those things that Francesca has me spending brain-time on. Is she not mentioning the handkerchief because she has heaps of them and doesn’t remember giving it to me anyway? Or is she not mentioning the handkerchief because I ought to have given it back, like, within a week or something and now she’s annoyed that I haven’t, but isn’t saying so? It’s clean again, I’ve been carrying it around in my schoolbag ever since.

Within a week or so of Grandad dying, her parents split and she probably could have done with a handkerchief. The thing is, you can’t just turn up at a chick’s house after something like that. Right out of nowhere her dad suddenly ran off with this twenty-year-old. Dad and I were way impressed for a moment, the moment before Mum saw our faces, and it’s been drama, drama, drama ever since, and Francesca got all thorny for a while as well. Dad talks to her dad, but not her mum, and Mum talks to both of them, but doesn’t mention the girlfriend, and I, well, I just try to keep my head down because, whoa, either the twenty-year-old is really dumb, or Frannie’s dad is like some kind of stud or something. You can’t tell by looking at him, that’s for sure. Luke reckons it’s all wrong and we shouldn’t even be exposed to that sort of disgusting imagery. That’s what he says.

Francesca walks past the side window of the drycleaner’s. I try to get my mind back on the job, because she can tie me up in knots if I’m not careful. I know ‘tying up in knots’ — for me it means I’m confused. I’d like to tie her up in careful knots, but that’s something else altogether. Something more like Luke would say, and, even though my brain thinks it, I have no idea what it would mean because people aren’t bendy enough to tie into knots in the first place. All I know is, Francesca does something to me. Something that has me thinking cold showers quick-smart, and gets me confused in the head. The bells jangle as she pushes the door open.

‘Hi, Marty … they’re new.’

‘Er … what?’

‘The bells, Quasimodo, the bells.’

‘Oh, yeah.’ Mum’s into feng shui, and apparently when there’re more windows than doors you need bells for harmony, but not musical harmony — like, for peace. They make a nice sound, I reckon. Dad says they’re a nuisance, but you won’t see him taking them down. Especially not while the travel negotiations are going on. Do I say all this? No. I stand there like a big doofus.

‘I’m here for my blazer.’

‘Have you got your ticket?’

‘Marty, do I ever have my ticket?’

Francesca never has her ticket. ‘Francesca, if you don’t have your ticket how do I know which blazer is yours, and whether or not it’s been paid for?’

‘You don’t. I do. That’s my blazer.’ She points to the middle of the second rack of clothes where there is a small collection of the distinctive mustard-colour blazers with forest-green trim from Duart College ready for collection. I’m sure some of them have been there since the start of third term last year.

‘And we always pay when we drop it off, you know that.’

I do know that, now that she’s reminded me. ‘Which blazer exactly?’ I turn and look at the rack as if I haven’t a clue. This has worked for me several times; it results in Francesca or whoever getting their own blazer, dress or pants for themselves, and then I don’t have to worry about knocking off half a dozen things or tripping over anything. Mum taught me that strategy, and it’s perfect for Francesca because she makes me nervous enough that even if I wasn’t already a total klutzoid, I’d probably do something clumsy.

‘Marty, I know what you’re doing.’ She moves around the counter and flicks through the blazers until her hands settle on one that must be hers. I hope it’s hers. ‘You’re just trying to look at my butt.’

‘Um, er, what? No. No way.’ Enter blush, stage face and uncomfortable itch at the back of my neck. The flashcard would be: Embarrassed. For sure. I am embarrassed. I think. Because I wasn’t trying to look at any one part of her any more than any other part. I think her whole self is perfect.

‘What? You don’t think my butt’s worth looking at?’

‘Yes. No. Um …’ I have no idea, I think she’s just made fun of me, but I don’t know for sure.

She laughs as she drapes the blazer over her arm. ‘Gotcha.’

‘Yeah. Right.’ A nervous laugh — almost a cricket’s chirrup that Dad would not consider manly — escapes out of my mouth. How humiliating. ‘When does that poncy girls’ school kick into action then? We’ve already been back two days.’ My voice begins to sound marginally normal.

‘Tomorrow. They had a teacher-only day yesterday and a day for the boarders to arrive, and we start tomorrow.’ She seems to drag each word out of her mouth reluctantly. I feel all confused in the head again. It’s like she’s not so keen on the new school after all. She’d changed schools in the last term of last year and you would’ve thought it was the best thing ever, in fact no doubt about it because she’d said that, she’d used those exact words, ‘It’s the best thing ever that I’m going to go to Duart’, and now she’s acting like she’s got to go to the dentist. People act funny about the dentist. Calling it the murder house is going too far, though. I thought I was really going to be murdered the very first time and ran away from school when my