Two
SPENDING HALF YOUR morning trying to pull Sera away from a mirror is one of life’s mundane tasks.
Thankfully I don’t have to go through it every morning, but two days after Mama told me she’d met Michael Andretti, we had the annual “Have a Say Day” in Martin Place. Sera volunteered to drive. She and Anna are the only ones of us who have a license.
For two days I just couldn’t help thinking about my father. I felt sick at the idea of meeting him, though at the same time I desperately wanted to.
But I couldn’t tell my friends about it yet. I just wanted to keep it to myself until I figured out how I felt.
There are four of us who hang out together and we make the most unlikely group. Most of the other students in the school are in clone groups.
They all look similar. Either blond yuppies or European trendies. Either intellectuals or the “beautiful people.”
Our group represents all types, yet we hadn’t fitted into any of them in Year Seven.
Anna Selicic is your typical Slavic-looking girl. Long blond hair and blue eyes and that healthy red-cheek look. She’s the most nervous person I have ever known. She puts her hand up in class and whispers the answer with dread. It’s as if she thinks that if she whispers the wrong answer a blade will come hurtling across the room and decapitate her. She stands like a stunned mullet if guys approach us and still hasn’t been kissed, despite her good looks.
At fifteen, she was the last of us to get her period. I remember the three of us standing outside the toilet cubicle instructing her on how to put in a tampon. She went through two packets of Tampax before she was successful.
We tend to mother her a lot, and if we’re ever in a risky situation, like being squashed at a concert or terrorized by the students of Cook High, she’s the first person we try to protect.
Then there’s Seraphina. It’s pretty difficult describing her. She has to be the most brazen person I’ve ever met. She can look a person straight in the eye and lie her heart out. She can bitch about a person for three hours straight and then turn around and crawl to them. Winning them over with what they see as sincerity. The three of us tend to look on in disgusted fascination. She has black roots and blond hair teased from here to eternity.
She’s skinny yet voluptuous and tends to dress in whatever the latest rock or pop star is wearing. Since she was fourteen she has never been without a boyfriend for more than a week and she’s the only one of us who’s slept with a guy. Her father, like most Italian fathers, thinks she’s the Virgin Mary and like most Italian fathers is dead-set wrong.
I have a funny relationship with Sera. As the only two of Italian ancestry in the group we have a thin bond, and I find that when I’m in her home I crawl more to her parents than to anyone in the world. I’m charming and kiss them on both cheeks, knowing deep down as they kiss me back that they’d think nothing of tearing my family or myself to shreds. I’m not sure why I put up with it. Maybe for acceptance, because I think that if you’re an outcast with your own kind you’ll never be accepted by anyone.
Sometimes I really don’t like her. But other times she makes me laugh more than anyone I know. Those times are mostly in church or class or places where you have to control yourself but can’t. I envy her, I think.
People really bitch about her at St. Martha’s. She’s a yuppie’s nightmare.
Her father’s a fruit grocer. She’s the stereotype of a wog yet she doesn’t give a damn. She just gives the finger.
And last, but never least, is Lee Taylor, whose main objective in life is to hang out with surfers down at the southern beaches and who thinks it’s cool to come to school with a hangover.
God knows why, because her father is an alcoholic. That’s why she’s with us and not them. Because she went to primary school with them and her
father came to pick her up from a birthday party once, blind drunk. Nobody was allowed to go to her place after that.
Lee and I have a weird relationship. We pretend we have nothing in common, yet we can talk for hours on any subject. We pretend we come from two different parts of society, yet both of us are middle-class scholarship students. We pretend that our families have nothing in common because people in her family use words like “wogs” and mine happen to be “wogs.” Yet I respect her more than any of my friends, although I couldn’t tell her that because we both pretend we don’t know the meaning of the word.
One day we’ll pass each other in the street, pretending our lives have gone in different directions, but I can guarantee that our adult lives will be as identical as our school lives have been.
Guys go for her a lot. My cousin Robert, though he won’t admit it, has had a crush on her for six years. She’s one of those people you think is quite plain until you’re sitting in front of her and realize just how attractive she is.
Straight brown hair streaked gold by the sun, freckles on her nose and hazel eyes that never look directly at you when she speaks. Yet you can’t call her a coward. I think she has so much emotion she doesn’t want to show, she makes sure nobody sees it.
We grew up in the midst of the snobs of St. Martha’s and discovered that somehow brains didn’t count that much. Money, prestige and what your father did for a living counted. If your hair wasn’t in a bob or if your mother didn’t drive a Volvo, you were a nobody.
That’s where the problem lies between me and our school captain, Ivy Lloyd, who we call Poison Ivy. I was awarded the insulting task of being her deputy. We hate each other’s guts, probably because we’ve been competitive all our lives. She’s one of those girls with perfect white skin and not one split end in her strawberry-blond hair. She’s a bore, though.
She’s obsessed with schoolwork, and whenever we get assignments back she looks over to me to try to find out how well I did. Sometimes when she’s looking and I know that I’ve probably received the highest mark, I shake my head in a sorrowful way as if I’m devastated. Then as we’re
walking out of the classroom and she has an ecstatic grin on her face, I’ll show Sera my mark and she’ll scream it out hysterically.
Yes, I know. I’m immature and vain about my brains, but you can’t imagine how wonderful it is to beat Poison Ivy. It doesn’t happen very often. I remember the first day of school in Year Seven. She walked up to me in a really snotty way and said, “I hear you’re the recipient of the English scholarship.” I remember thinking that she wanted to be my friend.
I was so thrilled, imagining the slumber parties and holidays we’d be spending together. But I was only given ten seconds to dream, because she looked me up and down and then walked away. The look kind of said it all.
So I sat with Sera, who no one else would go near. Lee joined us so it wouldn’t seem as if she didn’t have friends and the three of us later rescued Anna from vomiting to death, due to nerves, in the toilet. We actually didn’t have our first conversation for a week. We just needed each other’s presence.
I suppose we’ve done well for a group that the elite of St. Martha’s believed shouldn’t be at the school, but I only wish we could have been the best or the worst in the class. Not just somewhere in between.
Purgatory. I hate it so much that when I die, and if God sends me there, I’ll beg him to send me to hell instead.
“You guys ready?” Sera asked, breezing past us.
“I read in a book that your hair can fall out if you put too much hair spray in it, Sera,” Lee laughed as we walked out of the house with her.
“A book?”
“Yeah, you know, those things they lend you in libraries,” Anna said seriously.
“Very funny, smart-ass. If you’d like to know, I’m reading a very good mystery at the moment.”
“Let me guess? The Mystery of the Missing Disco Lights ?” I asked, grabbing her arm.
“Not all people are intellectuals like you, Josie,” she said, shaking me off.
“I know. Isn’t life tragic?”
Anna, Lee and I stood at her car and she avoided looking at us.
“We’re not taking my car.”
We exchanged looks.
“What are you talking about, Sera? We discussed this yesterday,” Anna said patiently.
“We’re getting a lift. All right?” she sniffed, walking down the street.
“No way,” I shouted. “No way, Sera. I’m not getting into Angelo Pezzini’s car.”
“Good, Josie. Walk to Martin Place,” she yelled back.
“Sera, someone will see us,” I shouted. “The whole school will be down there.” She shrugged and walked on.
You’d understand my reluctance if you’d met the guy.
He picked us up at the top of Sera’s street. Remember when I mentioned that Sera’s never been more than a week without a boyfriend since she was fourteen? Well, her parents have never known about them. She’s never been picked up at home.
Angelo Pezzini’s one of those guys who can’t drive a car without sharing his love of bad-taste music with the rest of the suburb he’s driving through.
He sped through Randwick with the latest nightclub music blaring from a set of speakers best suited to a dance hall. Sera danced while seated in the front, and the three of us clutched on to each other in the backseat, ignoring filthy looks from passing motorists and pedestrians. Angelo Pezzini is a
spray painter. The car is black and red with wheels that probably came from an eighteen-wheeler truck and an engine that is certainly eligible for a noise pollution fine.
I had visions of being in a horrific road accident and our photos being on the front page of the local newspapers. “Four St. Martha’s schoolgirls found in Angelo Pezzini’s Valiant,” the headlines would scream.
My mother would have to move to Perth. Mainly to get away from my grandmother’s hysteria. Nonna is convinced that Angelo Pezzini’s mother put the evil eye on her once.
As he drove along Angelo turned around, grinning at us.
The three of us in the back pointed to the road, begging him to turn around. Anna was grasping at her asthma inhaler for dear life.
“Hey, my cousin said he’d like to go out with you, Jose. How about it, huh?”
I’d been roped into going out with Sera, Angelo and his cousin Dino once before. We went to the cinema and watched a blood-and-guts violent movie where everyone shot each other dead at the end. Angelo and Dino managed to get into a fight with the people sitting in front of us. Later on at a café they fought with the waiter and we were eventually asked to leave. To top off the night they picked a fight with the driver of the car next to us and I found myself in a drag-racing competition all the way home.
“Yeah, we’ll go to the movies,” Sera said.
Anna took my hand in sympathy and squeezed it.
“I’ll see,” I whispered quietly, knowing I couldn’t get out of it without having a fight with Sera.
As we approached Martin Place he crossed three lanes of traffic and came to a heart-shattering stop behind a minibus. We heard shouts of abuse, honking of horns and explicit threats from all around.
After five minutes of passion we managed to drag Sera out and she made kissing sounds to the back of his car as he drove away.
“Isn’t he hot?”
Lee looked at me, shaking her head sadly.
“You are a dick, Sera,” she pointed out.
Anna tapped me on the shoulder and turned me round.
Sister Louise and Poison Ivy were striding toward us. I knew they had seen us getting out of the car. I hadn’t prepared any explanation for Angelo Pezzini or the fact that we were late. But I could tell by the look on her face that she would accept no excuse.
“What time did I request you to be here, Josie?”
Why is it that teachers ask questions they already know the answers to?
“Nine o’clock, Sister.”
“And what time is it now?”
“Nine-thirty.”
Then she said nothing. Just looked at me with ice-cold blue eyes and her head tilted back in disgust.
I looked at Ivy, who had a “try getting out of this one” look.
“Sister, I . . .”
“I don’t want to hear it,” she snapped. “The Catholic Education Office has requested that one of our students make a speech. An oratory speech on any subject you prefer. Ivy will be having discussions with other school leaders. Josephine, you will make that speech.”
“Have a Say Day” takes place every year at Martin Place, a walkway in the middle of the city where people sit and have lunch. It has a war memorial and an amphitheater and houses most of the major bank buildings as well as the General Post Office. It runs horizontally across three major streets.
On “Have a Say Day,” schools from all over Sydney come together and do just that. Have a say. It’s something that was organized about ten years ago by some students from a school out west. They came to Martin Place and stood up at the amphitheater and griped about the state of their school due to lack of government funding.
Because it gets too packed with people, only the Year 12 students can attend from our school, so this year was our year.
“But, Sister, I don’t have anything prepared,” I whined.
“Josephine, you are so wonderful at making up stories, I’m sure you can handle it. Now come along all of you, and Seraphina, take off that ridiculous bolero. You are not going to a fashion parade.”
She stalked off with Poison Ivy in tow and I groaned in dismay.
“She’s just jealous because she can’t wear trendy clothes,” Sera sneered, making rude signs at Sister’s back.
Anna grabbed Sera’s hands, giggling.
It was stiflingly hot sitting on the stage of the amphitheater. I managed to make a fan for myself out of the program and tried, at one stage, to take off my blazer. However, Sister Louise saw me, and the look in her eyes clearly said, “Leave it on.”
I looked out at the crowd, which was mostly made up of students in uniform. There were a lot of businesspeople as well who had stopped to take a look, but most of them were rushing off to work. Everyone seemed to be having a fun time. I saw my friends talking to some gorgeous guys from St. Anthony’s and cursed Sister Louise over and over again.
So I sat there next to a Jewish hunk, wishing he believed in Jesus so we could get married, and behind a girl resembling Poison Ivy who belonged to a Presbyterian school. Seated on my other side was Jacob Coote from Cook High.
Cook High is a public school in the city area. Because it’s the closest school to us, we don’t get on well with them. We think we’re better than them. They think we’re the biggest nerds in the world.
When we were young, they would throw things out of their bus windows at us and in Year Ten, on the last day of school, Jacob Coote and about ten of his friends, male and female, blocked both entrances of a lane we cut through to get to our bus stop. Twelve of us were bombarded with eggs, rotten fruit and vegetables. Everyone said that one day we would look back on the occasion and laugh.
Very unlikely.
“What are you going to talk about?” he whispered in my ear.
I moved away, hoping nobody had seen him speaking to me. My friends think he’s gorgeous. His hair is brown, shoulder-length, not cut into any particular style, and his eyes are green and they always seem to be laughing at you.
He grinned, and by the way his lips were twitching he looked like he was trying to control a laugh. I knew he recognized me from the lane.
“Didn’t I once squash two eggs against your glasses?” he asked.
“I’m flattered you remember. I tripped over a rubbish can, you know, and cut my hand on some broken glass.”
“Oh, come on. We were suspended for that. We didn’t go to school for six weeks.”
“Very funny. We had six weeks’ holiday after that.”
He tapped the Presbyterian girl in front of us and asked her what she was going to speak about.
“University careers.” She smiled, flirting before turning around.
“Great choice,” he said, looking at me and making a face at her back.
Some people spoke about the government’s school cuts, others about careers. The environment was spoken about, as well as the homeless.
I decided to speak about sex education in our schools due to the AIDS issue. I had used it as an oratory speech before and had won, so I knew I couldn’t go wrong.
I spoke for five minutes and accepted the Jewish hunk’s hand when he offered it to me, and the nod of approval from the Presbyterian girl when I sat down. Jacob Coote nudged me, almost sending me sprawling over my neighbor.
“Great speech. Only the seniors have AIDS talks at our school, which is a waste because by that stage most of us have had sex for years.”
I nodded vaguely in agreement, embarrassed that he had divulged that information to me.
“What are you going to talk about?”
He dug into his pocket and pulled out a condom.
“I’m going to show these people how to put one on,” he said seriously, standing up.
I was horrified. I knew he wasn’t a debater and that he probably didn’t have a speech prepared. I was also worried that by sitting behind him I wouldn’t see anything and was ashamed of myself for thinking it. Until he stood in front of the microphone and spoke.
“I’m speaking about the vote today,” he said, digging his fingers into his pockets.
I sighed in relief but was disappointed by his boring topic.
“I think that all political parties are the same,” he began, sounding a bit stilted. He had taken his fingers out of his pockets by then and was kneading his neck with one hand. His white sleeves were rolled up to his elbow and I could see that he was tanned. Not a beach tan, though. More like a working, outdoor tan.
“These politicians, they make the same promises. They tell the same lies, and frankly, I can’t understand why normal voters get influenced by a political campaign. We all know that what they’re gonna say is what we wanna hear.”
I could feel my Jewish neighbor cringing at the “gonna” and “wanna.”
“I used to think that when it came time for me to vote,” he said, knocking his fist to his chest, “I’d put no effort into it. Maybe I would put in a dummy vote. Maybe I wouldn’t even bother registering at all.
“Probably because until recently I wondered what the big deal was.
What’s great about our political system here? Why do we call ourselves the lucky country when half of us can’t afford housing payments?”
He was pointing his finger now and I could feel my neighbor sitting up and taking notice.
Jacob Coote shrugged. “You know, I didn’t know what to talk about today, because I was only told an hour ago that I had to say something. I was gonna speak about the freedom you feel when you ride a motorbike, but that has nothing to do with having a say. When my neighbor up here was talking about ignorance when it came to sex education, I was worried. I couldn’t think of anything to say that was as worthwhile as her speech.
Until I looked out and saw everyone.”
He shook his head and gave a little laugh.
“And I felt lucky. Because we have a choice, and I think that we vote, not to get the best party in, but to keep the worst party out. Because we can
stand here and protest. We can get all riled up about the Premier’s ideas. We can say he’s a dickhead even. We can call the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition one as well.
“We can scream and shout and protest and even burn our flag if we want to. Because we’re free to do whatever we want to do, and if we break the law we get a fair trial.
“But in some countries, people can’t do that. They can’t go out into places like Martin Place and protest. In some countries people our age can’t concentrate on their schoolwork or their lives because of the sound of gunfire.
“In some countries they have one-party systems and they have things called the People’s Army and when the people come out and have a say like we’re doing today—scream and shout and voice their opinion—the People’s Army shoots the people. Young people like us,” he added in almost a whisper.
“So, great. Let’s be apathetic. Let’s not vote. Let’s let anyone run this country. Let’s all be ignorant and let’s all be proud of that ignorance. And maybe we’ll have a People’s Army one day too.”
He sat down next to me and everyone in our row leaned forward to stare at him before they clapped. I could sense where his friends were standing because of the shouting and whistling that was coming from their direction.
I was stunned. Not about what he’d said, but the way he’d said it. I would never have thought that Jacob Coote would be passionate like that.
The Jewish guy leaned across me and clasped Jacob Coote’s wrist in a brothers-in-arms grip.
“I’m impressed,” I whispered.
“You didn’t think I watched the news, did you?” he laughed.
“No, I didn’t.”
“Well, I used to watch the pundit shows, anyway.”
“You’re kidding me? My mother always says that if any current affairs team came to our door she’d slam it shut even though we have nothing to hide. She reckons they’d find something.”
“Yeah, every time I get drunk I wake up the next morning afraid, because I’ve had a nightmare that I was on the ‘Shame’ file.”
I laughed and shook my head.
“How come you got picked for this?”
“One-party voting system. If they didn’t vote me school captain, I was going to break all their legs.”
“You’re school captain?”
“Unfortunately. You?”
“Vice.”
“Too bad. It could have been beautiful between us.”
I opened my mouth to say something, but nothing came out. I wondered if he meant it. As we sat back to listen to the next speech, I couldn’t help being aware of his rolled-up sleeves and tanned arms.
That’s when all the great comeback lines to what he had said came to mind. But like always with comeback lines, it’s too late.
There were a few more speeches after that. Great speeches made by the best orators in our schools, but nothing compared to his. Ours were all polished. We didn’t say ours with passion. We had lost that passion after winning our first few debates. It was all so clinical for us now.
But his speech was said brashly and from the heart.
“I’m in love,” Lee stated matter-of-factly when I stood down. “How could you have sat next to him without throwing yourself on him? He even spoke to you.”
“He’s not my type.”
“Why?” she shouted incredulously.
I shrugged.
“Because . . . I don’t know.”
“Because he’s not Italian, he’s not going to be a solicitor and he goes to a public school, right?”
“I’m not a snob,” I shouted.
“You are so. You might have one hundred hang-ups, but you still think you’re better than the average person.”
“He cracked two eggs on my glasses once.”
“Out of twelve girls in that alley, he picked you to do that to. I think he likes you.”
I laughed, grabbing her hand and pulling her toward the TV cameras.
We weren’t on the news that night. Poison Ivy was, because she was in the group that threw questions at the Premier. As usual she was there in Technicolor, sitting on top of the world. No matter how much I hate Poison Ivy, I want to belong to her world. The world of sleek haircuts and upper- class privileges. People who know famous people and lead educated lives.
A world where I can be accepted.
Please, God, let me be accepted by someone other than the underdog.
