With the hope they might catch the afternoon sun, they were sitting in a row on a wooden bench, the skirts of their school uniforms hitched up and their legs stretched long. A group of boys were playing handball against the brick wall of the canteen, and the regular thump of the ball and the boys’ yelps and shouts broke the silence of the deserted school yard. The junior students were back in class. Jo and Ash with Mani and Laura had a free period. They and the boys should’ve been in the library studying.
‘In VCE you don’t have time to waste,’ their History teacher said as she rushed past pushing a trolley of books. The girls waited until she disappeared into the staff room and burst out laughing.
‘Wonder if Ms Sacks heard you talking about nymphs with a fetish for men with big bellies. She’s running to the staff room to tell them about Kinky Jo,’ Mani said.
‘Jo? Kinky, as if,’ Ash laughed.
When the bell rang and they stood up, pulled down their skirts, and rushed off to collect books from their lockers. Jo thought about Ash’s as if. As if anyone would believe boring, anxious Jo could be kinky, is that what Ash thought?
The radio started up again but as the first bars of Lady Gaga’s ‘Just Dance’ came on, Jo hit the snooze button. Moments later, she heard her mother’s bedroom door open.
‘Jo,’ Mandy called out. ‘Are you awake?’
Jo pulled the doona over her head. She felt her mother’s irritation, the silent, seething scent of it wafting down the hallway.
‘There are some things,’ Mandy had taken to saying, ‘that aren’t worth fighting about.’ It had become an automatic response at the end of their frequent arguments. In Jo it spawned an uncontrollable loathing, like nausea brought on by the unexpected swallow of rancid milk. This loathing and the accompanying urge to yell abuse at her mother had become compulsive. Mandy’s inane questions — How was school? Did you hang out with Ashleigh today? Do you want chicken for dinner? — her lame clothes, her boring unhealthy dinners, so irritated Jo that it seemed impossible to imagine a future in which they might get along.
‘I’m always walking on eggshells and biting my tongue,’ Jo overheard Mandy telling Mrs Nguyễn over the fence. ‘Everyone tells me to grit my teeth because surviving the teenage years is tough, but it’s a temporary stage and we’ll get along better when Jo’s older.’
‘Of course. She’s young, a teenager. It’s all those hormones,’ Mrs Nguyễn said.
‘I’ve no idea how mothers and daughters get along, or even if it’s possible. I’m winging it,’ Mandy said. ‘Sometimes I miss my little girl.’ Mandy repeated this too often.
‘The little girl you miss,’ Jo always told Mandy when she brought this up, ‘is in your head, all sugar and spice, it isn’t me. It was never me.’
‘You were such a good child, so —’
‘Mum, for fuck’s sake.’
Little provocation was needed to trigger these fights. The child her mother conjured up in these conversations reminded Jo of the girls in the junk-mail catalogues, in their pink dresses or polka-dot jumpsuits, grinning as they skipped off the page. Jo had been a chubby child, not like the other girls her age, who were either waif-like ballerinas or lanky football-playing, tree-climbing, somersaulting tomboys. She hated being reminded of her ‘fat’ days. She hated that her mother remembered with affection the child she wanted to forget.
From bed, Jo could sense her mother stopping to take a deep breath, and then expelling it. Or maybe she was counting: one, two, three.
‘Jo? Jo!’
‘I heard you,’ Jo yelled back, and in a whisper, ‘Fucking leave me alone.’ She rolled over so her back faced the door.
‘Don’t go back to sleep or you’ll be late. I’m going to jump into the shower — then it’s all yours.’
When Mandy turned on the shower, there was the usual hammering followed by Mandy’s loud cursing. Jo sighed. The house was a dump, no arguing with that, but it was their home and Jo loved it. Her first ever memory was at this house. She was three years old. She didn’t remember any of the back story, but she’d been told the details often: after weeks of fighting, her mother decided to leave her father, packed up all their clothes into two suitcases, and called a taxi. In her memory, it was like a scene from a movie — when they arrived, the taxi door opened, and Grandpa Tom, a tall, lanky man with weathered skin and thick brown hair, was leaning against the verandah post, smoking. When he saw her, he twisted the cigarette butt between his fingers, threw it into the garden, and opened his arms wide. She ran straight to him. He picked her up and swung her around until the world turned into a whirl of shapes and colours. When they stopped spinning, she wrapped her arms around his neck; he smelt of tobacco and sweat. Her small hands ran over the prickles of his unshaven chin.
‘Welcome home, Joey girl,’ he said and he took her to the front bedroom. ‘This is your room.’
It was a light blue, the colour of her grandmother Mary’s hydrangeas that they sometimes made into bouquets to take to church.
‘Blue is my favourite colour,’ Jo said.
‘Is it?’ Mandy said with a laugh.
In the room there was a big bed. At the flat, Jo’s cot was small and narrow, and squeezed into the corner next to her parents’ bed.
‘Where is your bed?’ Jo asked her mother, and together the three of them toured the house. Every time Mandy told this story, she added, ‘Jo didn’t ask for her father, not once.’
Holding Grandpa Tom’s hand, feeling the rough, calloused skin, she was safe. That memory was a memory of coming home. The house was her home. She loved that everywhere the marks of the past, of her grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ lives, were there waiting for her to discover. Not cut away under a cosmetic surgeon’s knife, gone forever, like Ash’s house, renovated several times until the Californian bungalow was a ghostly façade. The inside of the old property had been gutted and a new one architecturally designed. A whole new upstairs floor was added that housed the bedrooms, and downstairs there was a big open-plan living area with a long table and a wall of glass windows and doors that looked out into the landscaped garden. There were new silver appliances, glistening and glowing, and feature walls in colours with foreign names, like aubergine and turmeric.
Jo couldn’t imagine ever selling the house. It would be a betrayal of her grandparents who spent a lifetime trying to pay it off, who died in debt. Mandy owned it now. Uncle John made a few good deals — paid off the last ten thousand and signed the house over to Mandy. ‘An act of charity,’ Aunt Joy called it.
Jo would inherit it and she would leave it to her children.
‘… And what did you skywrite?’
‘Well, I wanted them to write, Jade, you have the sexiest pussy ever.’
The female host, obviously miffed, said, ‘Watch your language.’
‘Sure, sure no offence meant. I thought she’d think it was funny. Anyway, the guy wouldn’t write that in the sky. He said he would get fined or arrested or something. So in the end we agreed it would say, “Jade, I love you. Marry me?” A bit lame but I thought it’d still be romantic. I thought Jade’d get a real hoot out of it being in the sky, you know. Anyway, I paid him the dough and waited. Well, the arsehole — can I say that on radio?’
‘You just did, mate.’ The hosts laughed.
‘Jo, shower’s free,’ Mandy yelled.
Jo hit the off button on the radio. ‘Okay, I’m there.’
On Saturdays, Jo’s shift at the café started at 7.30. If she was out of bed by 7.00, she could manage a shower and breakfast. If she left it any longer, she’d have to skip breakfast, and there was no hope of getting anything at the café until after ten. She threw the covers off, got out of bed, and walked straight down the hallway and into the shower. By the time Mandy called out ‘Coffee?’, Jo was dressed and heading for the kitchen.