six

Fact: They don’t give you long to get over the death of a sister.

About a week after Amanda died, her younger brother Daniel returned to our class. I had expected he would be away for months. The enormity of what had happened seemed to warrant more than just the kind of absence you might have with a flu.

We were in the maths room, doing a page of logarithms, the overhead fans ticking monotonously as the blades pushed through the thickness of the warm air. I ran my fingers down the columns of numbers, but the heat and the stillness made it hard to keep the rows aligned and I knew I was getting more wrong than right. Next to me, Sonia chewed the end of her biro, the clatter loud as she dropped it on the floor. She bent down to pick it up, but Matthew Digby had already stretched one leg forward and was nudging it towards his own desk.

Mr Ronsen looked up just as Sonia turned around to demand it back.

‘Silence.’ But because he had a lisp, the word came out as ‘thilenth’, and it was a command that always caused a slight ripple of laughter.

‘Enough.’ He raised his voice now, unperturbed by the amusement. He must have been used to it and had, I supposed, hardened himself against any ridicule caused by his speech impediment. ‘Back to your work.’

‘Glad he said work and not exercises,’ Sonia whispered to me.

I was about to answer, when the door to the classroom opened, letting in a stream of burning northerly sunlight. Miss Ingleton was at the entrance, and Mr Ronsen pushed back his chair, heaving his heavy frame up from his seat. We could hear them muttering for a few moments, and then Miss Ingleton told us all to put our pens down.

‘Thank you. I only want your attention for a few moments – just to let you know Daniel Clarke is returning to school. I know you’ll all try to help him through this difficult time.’ She looked around the room, her eyes finally resting on Mikey Hayle, one of Daniel’s friends. ‘Mikey, I’d like you to come with me.’

He stood up in a rush, his exercise book and pencil case hitting the lino, the pens and pencils scattering across the room. Cassie, who was near him, helped him gather them together while Miss Ingleton waited. His freckled face was burning as he hastily tried to stuff everything into his schoolbag.

None of us knew what to say when they came back to the classroom. We all avoided looking at Daniel as he took a seat. Moments later, I stole a quick glance. He had his head down and was scratching the desktop, gouging a jagged line into the softness of the wood.

It was only Cassie who was brave enough to ask him how he was going. He just nodded at her, turning back to his carving.

I admired her in that moment. I think all of us who witnessed that brief exchange did.

At the end of the hour, I watched as Daniel packed his books in his bag. I waited, hoping to catch him alone before I joined the others for lunch so that I too could say something to him, anything to let him know how sorry I was about his sister. But Mikey stayed close, and I gave up, ashamed.

Outside, you could hear classroom doors opening, the slap of sandals on concrete and the shout of kids as we emerged from darkened stuffy rooms into the full glare of the day. That was when I saw Nicky Blackwell again. He was headed to the tuckshop queue and I hesitated for only a brief moment before deciding that I had nothing to lose.

Standing right behind him, I could look without him knowing. His hair was bleached by the sun and hung to his shoulders. His arms were tanned, deep copper. On his left wrist he had three strips of leather tied close. Probably given to him by a girlfriend, I thought. Like all the boys in older years, he never wore shorts, even when the temperature was pushing 100 degrees Fahrenheit for the fifth day in a row. Instead, his cords clung close to his legs, frayed at the bottom, and on his feet he wore black thongs, despite the fact that they were banned.

Nicky was a surfer. He hung with a group of older kids who took a panel van out to the beach on the weekend. He rode his skateboard to school each day, crouching low as he swooped down the hill that led to the gates, curling in at the last minute and leaping off with only inches to spare. I loved that arc. It was, in fact, what had first made me notice him.

‘Hey.’ He turned as I accidentally stepped on the back of his thong, and then seeing it was me, he grinned, teeth white against the darkness of his skin. ‘It’s Joe’s little sister. The one who won’t tell me her name.’

I looked him square in the eye. None of my friends were around, it was just him and me. People die, I thought, thinking of Daniel’s face when he’d come back to class. People like Amanda are just suddenly gone. It was time to take a risk.

‘I’ll tell you my name.’ I took a deep breath. ‘But there has to be an exchange.’

‘Nicky.’ He bowed with mock ceremony. ‘Nicky Blackwell.’

‘I know. That’s not the exchange I meant.’ I could feel my breath, fast and furious, fluttering with a heat I wanted only to dampen, and I had to steady myself.

He was curious now, forgetting to progress in the line, the gap between him and the person in front widening as he waited for me to explain.

‘I want a skateboarding lesson,’ I said. ‘And then I’ll tell you my name.’

He shook his head, his hair falling in his eyes as he looked me up and down. ‘Girls don’t skate,’ he eventually said.

‘Why not?’ I asked. ‘I have two legs, two arms.’ And I wanted to suggest that he familiarise himself with Germaine Greer, but I knew I’d lose him if I went down that track.

He smiled. ‘I could find out your name anyway.’

It was true. ‘Just one lesson.’

And then, as Mrs Judd called out ‘Next’ from the tuckshop window and he realised that she meant him, he eventually nodded. ‘Why not? Friday. At the front of the school gates – four-thirty.’

Sonia didn’t believe I’d had the nerve. Nor did I. The excitement was sparkling and cold each time I recalled the moment, first to her, and then frequently to myself, wanting only to silently recount that conversation over and over again.

We were swimming in her pool after school, the icy water a brilliant chlorined turquoise that stung our eyes and dried our skin into smooth scales. I had been trying to do a backwards flip, each time landing with a slap in the water, while she lay on the pebblecrete, shifting the lines of her bikini to make sure her tan was even.

‘How was that one?’ I asked, emerging from the deep end, my stomach scraping on the edge as I hauled myself out, sprinkling cold droplets onto the heat of her skin.

‘Didn’t see it,’ Sonia admitted, and I scooped my hand down to splash her in frustration.

She grinned. ‘Just ’cos you’re Nicky Blackwell’s girlfriend–’

‘I asked you to give me a score.’ I sat on the warmth of the small fake stones, holding my knees close to my chest with one arm as I leant across to get the bottle of GI cordial we had left tossed in the grass, the plastic sweating in the heat.

She’d finished it all.

‘There’s more in the fridge.’ Sonia pointed to the house.

Upstairs, the curtains were closed and as I tried to wipe the grass off my feet before stepping into the kitchen, I could hear Sonia’s mum, Jude, on the phone.

‘The police are saying there was definitely foul play.’

My eyes became used to the darkness inside, and I could see her, twisting the cord around her finger, one leg up on the chair in front of her as she inspected her toenail polish.

‘I saw Laura,’ she continued, ‘up at the greengrocer’s.’ There was a moment’s silence, as she balanced the phone in the crook of her shoulder and took a calendar off the wall. ‘She’s married to the sergeant, the one who originally had the case. Yep, yep,’ and she nodded as she confirmed whatever the other person was saying. ‘He’s handed it over to the detectives at Ryde. No, no. She didn’t want to say too much. Well, she can’t. But it looks like there was evidence that Amanda hit her head, or her head had been hit.’

She ran her fingers down one of the columns of the calendar.

‘We’re free that night. But why don’t you come here? I don’t feel too good about leaving Sal and Sonia alone in the house at the moment.’ She leant over the desk and wrote a couple of words on the calendar before hanging it back up. ‘I know,’ she added. ‘It makes you worry. I’ve always just assumed they are safe. Sal doesn’t go down there much, but I know Sonia does.’

I let the screen door slam behind me. She looked up from the phone, and smiled as I pointed at the fridge.

Jude was about ten years younger than Dee. She’d had Sal at nineteen, and Sonia two years later.

Dee once said Jude was frustrated. ‘It’s what happens when you have kids too young,’ she warned me. ‘You spend most of your life living for other people and it’s hard to find out who you really are until much later – and by then, no one cares any more.’

Jude hung up as I made another bottle of cordial, this time raspberry, the colour a completely fake crimson that Dee would describe as carcinogenic.

‘Need anything to eat?’ Jude was in her bikini, and I hoped she wasn’t planning to join us by the pool.

I told her we were fine, and to my relief she reached for her sundress, which was draped over a kitchen chair, and said she was just going to duck up to the shops.

‘I’ll lock the front door behind me.’ She had the keys in her hand. ‘And I won’t be gone long.’

I said there was no need to worry. She’d left us often enough in the past.

She shook her head. ‘That was before.’ She put her hands on my shoulders. ‘You girls need to be careful. I don’t want to alarm you. But things aren’t...’ She searched for the right word. ‘Safe.’

As she turned the key in the lock, I wished she hadn’t. I didn’t want to be afraid.

From the other end of the house, I could hear a radio. Sal would be doing her homework already, the exercise books open on the desk, her writing neat and even, as she made her way down the list of problems.

I let the back door slam shut behind me as I made my way across the grass, carefully avoiding the bindies, to where Sonia was still sunbaking. She didn’t look up as she complained about the fact that I was blocking her sunlight.

‘You know your mum reckons the police think Amanda was murdered?’ Even as I spoke I had a sense that I was collapsing several ‘facts’ into one, and that somehow the whole was being distorted.

‘What do you mean?’ Sonia sat up as I tried to relay the conversation I’d overheard.

Her eyes were wide. ‘Who would do it?’ She tilted the cordial bottle back, taking a long swill before handing it over to me again. ‘Do you reckon there’s some maniac or rapist hanging around?’

I shook my head.

‘It can’t have been one of her friends.’ Sonia wiped at her mouth with the back of her hand. ‘Even Lyndon.’ And she shook her head as she voiced what I, too, hadn’t wanted to contemplate. ‘Her poor family.’

I thought of Daniel.

Sonia must have too: ‘Maybe we should write him a card,’ she suggested.

It was a good idea, and although I knew I was meant to head home so that Sonia could start her homework, I didn’t think Jude would mind.

Sonia searched for cardboard and scissors and although Sal protested for a moment at being disturbed, when Sonia told her what she was looking for and why, she decided to be helpful.

‘I’ve got coloured inks,’ she offered, opening up her prized collection of stationery, which she always kept, in perfect order, on top of the desk on her side of the room.

We laid out all we needed on the kitchen table. Sal drew a vase of flowers, while Sonia and I composed a message.

Dear Daniel, we eventually wrote. We are very sorry for your loss.And we each signed our names at the bottom.

The next morning, when I went to slip it in his locker, there were already at least ten other cards, the envelopes crammed into the small gap between frame and door. I hoped that knowing we all cared would help in some way, but I also felt the futility of our expressions of sympathy. His sister had been found dead, her head hit, her body bloodied and drowned. How could our cards do anything to shift that darkness?