The Slightly True Story of Cedar B. Hartley Read online

  ‘Yeah, okay, let’s go.’ Harold pulled out a pair of dark sunglasses and wiped off the rain with his T-shirt. ‘See ya, weirdo,’ he said, without even looking at me, and then all three of them jogged off.

  I had to go as well, but I lagged behind them, feeling a bit droopy and doomed because there would be a crowd of people on the oval for the footy match, and because Harold had called me Der-brain, which really gets on my high-and-mighty nerves since I quite value my brain, thank you very much, and I know my brain would never stoop so low as to tease people for not having fathers or mothers or swimming pools, either. I should have said something. Something like what Uncle John might have said; Harold Barton, you don’t know nothing, you wouldn’t even know if the Salvation Army was up your bum playing the Dead March. But I never remember things like that. I never even remember good jokes. Except the one about the trembling wreck, or the dog—which reminded me, I was about to find Stinky, the hairy chap, my favourite beast. Only now that all those people would be on the oval, how was I going to find the river-voiced boy?

  Trudge trudge I went, muttering and splattering in my mind. But the rain started to slow down and slivers of sun glittered on the wet leaves, and I must have trudged that grumpy feeling right out of me and right into the mud because I could feel something else rising up, all fluttery like a big gulp of lemonade. It made me skip, but only for a little bit, because I wouldn’t want anyone to see me skip. Only little kids skip.

  The footy was in full swing. I swept my eyes around the edge of the oval, following the rail. Groups of spectators huddled under the trail of willow trees that stood by the creek. People held newspapers over their heads and yelled and pummelled the air with fists. A crowd by the clubhouse stood in clumps under the tin roof; some of them were wearing team stripes. I couldn’t see Stinky anywhere, or Harold and the gang (thankfully), so I decided to practise my pole positions, because otherwise I might just have stood there imagining ways of luring one hundred rats into Harold Barton’s bedroom.

  Firstly I got into bird position, like this:

  This obviously requires great strength and balance. You need to become bird-like. You stretch your toes away from the tip of your head and then arch upwards and press your heart forwards. If you try it out, make sure you hang on until you find your balance. Barnaby can’t do this. He hates it that I can. Barnaby thinks he should be always better than me because he’s older and bigger. He pretends he isn’t interested in the pole positions, but I know he’s just jealous ’cause he can’t do them. The second position is bat position:

  You just let your head dip down and your legs fly up. I cross my legs over and let my head dangle. It’s especially good for getting a different slant on life. People walking look much better when you are upside-down. They go loopy and bouncy, like astronauts on another planet.

  Then there’s the bridge. It looks like this:

  Try cooing in this position and maybe a pigeon will nest under your arm.

  I was hanging in the bat position, vaguely watching the footy match upside-down. It looked much better. There was a dad standing nearby who kept screaming, ‘Come on Zebras! Get on the ball!’

  When the other team got a goal, all the Zebras hung their heads. One guy punched the goal post with his fist. I felt sorry for them. I’m glad I don’t have to play footy. Sometimes Barnaby tried to get me to have a kick with him, but I don’t get it. I don’t get how you can know which direction that egg-shaped ball is going to bounce. It’s capricious. And I can’t kick it right. Barnaby says it’s because I’m a girl. If being a boy means you have to play footy, then I’m glad I’m a girl. Barnaby was the best footy player out of everyone. Even Harold Barton’s dad said so when he was watching a game of kick-to-kick in the street. That made Harold sulk. I saw him. He went red and his mouth puffed up like a goldfish. And I gloated quietly, from my tree. Sometimes I’m a secret meanie.

  That dad was getting all worked up and pinkish in the face. He said, ‘Geez! They’re playing like a bunch of women.’ I shot him a glare (since I’m a stark raving feminist) but because I was upside-down I don’t think it got to him. An upside-down glare can’t hit the spot with directness, especially when the man is fat which makes things bounce off instead of slicing in. When Harold Barton gives me a dirty look it glides right in because I’m skinny.

  ‘Why you hanging upside-down?’ It was the river voice asking me. I saw brown hair. A boy. I could almost see up his nose.

  ‘I’m training,’ I said, looking through his legs for some sign of Stinky.

  ‘What for?’ He was wearing a T-shirt with some writing on it. I couldn’t read it upside-down, so I flipped back up the right way.

  ‘The Bat Pole Championship.’ His T-shirt said Wangaratta Jazz Festival 1993. Not a bad thing to have on your T-shirt, not like Harold’s which always have fashion logos on them.

  The boy scrunched up his nose. I could tell he was dubious.

  ‘What’s a Bat Pole Championship?’

  Fair question, I thought, and for a moment I didn’t know how to reply since I’d only just made it up right then.

  ‘What’s the Wangaratta Jazz Festival?’ I said. It’s a trick I’ve worked out. When you can’t think of an answer, stall for time—ask another question.

  ‘It’s a jazz festival at Wangaratta. My dad got the T-shirt, not me.’

  ‘Is your dad a musician?’

  ‘Nope, not really.’ I hadn’t decided if I was dying to know about other people’s fathers, or if I was dying not to know. Before I could stop it, there were images filling my mind—a dad with a T-shirt on, casually humming and saying, ‘Wanna go for a drive?’ I frowned those dad images away.

  ‘Well, did you bring Stinky?’ I said.

  His eyebrows went up and his eyes smiled. ‘Are you Cedar?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m Cedar. I’m wet, I know. Don’t worry, I’m better when I’m dry.’ I swiftly ran my hand through my hair to check if it had become a post-rain frizz ball.

  ‘You were supposed to be by the pole.’ His hair was short and plain and not fussed-over at all.

  ‘Oops, I forgot about that.’

  ‘Well, Stinky’s tied up over there.’ He pointed back behind the clubhouse and there, curled up under a Melaleuca tree, was Stinky. Lying quite contentedly, it seemed; not a sign of any sense of loss or yearning for me.

  ‘Stinky boy!’ I yelled. And up he stood, wagging his stumpy little tail and doing such an excited continuous stomp that I was thankfully relieved of the need to prove that he was in fact my lost dog.

  ‘He looks happy to see you.’

  Stinky, once set free, raced between us, yelping in confused excitement. The boy was a dog person, obviously.

  The way I figure it, the world is made of two types of people—dog people and cat people. If you drew a line down the middle and said all dog people on one side and cat people on the other, then the dog side of the world would be chaotic and muddy, an exuberant unparticular big kind of a place with many trees. The cat side would be clean and deliberate and full of sunny patches and silk couches. I belong to the dog side, so does my mum, and even Barnaby. But Marnie Aitkin, she definitely belongs to the cat side. It’s the coral coloured fingernails. So does Laura Pinkstone. That’s why I knew that Barnaby had gone stupid asking her out, because it wouldn’t ever have worked out. Even if Barnaby hadn’t been sent away, he and Laura Pinkstone just belong on different sides. Do you think a dog could marry a cat?

  I looked carefully at the boy with the river voice. A long neck. Brown skinny arms. Face that looked away.

  ‘Do you play footy?’ I said, because I felt I should say something.

  ‘Nup.’ He just shrugged.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Don’t like it much.’

  ‘No, I don’t either. It’s capricious,’ I said, thinking he might be impressed with that word capricious. But he didn’t seem to notice. He was still patting Stinky. I could tell by the way he patted that he definitely had the ways
of a dog person. Cat people pat from above with little puffy, pattery pats, and they pull their face away so as not to smell dog smell. When I pat Stinky I like to get really close. I like to put my face in his ears and smell him.

  ‘You’re a dog person, aren’t you?’ I said.

  ‘No, I’m a bird person.’ He said it without even thinking, as if I’d asked him a normal question. Well, I have to admit, that threw me for a moment. I thought there were only two sides to the world. But I was wrong. There’s also the sky. That’s the mystery that surrounds it all.

  ‘Yeah? What makes you a bird person?’

  He looked at me, as if he was figuring whether I was worth telling or not. His gaze dug into me, all serious and intent, the look in his eyes wide and wild and almost knowing. But what could he know? The eyes were on me as if he was examining me for a defect. It made me fidget. He turned away, jerked his head and laughed. Then he jumped up and grabbed a branch, swung himself up and landed on top of the branch. I have to say it—I was impressed.

  And then he did more things, the kind of things I do on the pole, only better. He could swing in and out of all sorts of crazy positions in the tree. He jumped between the branches and got a momentum going so his body could swing up and hook in. I was mad, mad, mad. Mad with wanting to be able to do that too. Mad that he could do that and I couldn’t. It seemed almost impossible for someone to move like that, like an animal, as if he knew for sure that he wouldn’t fall.

  ‘How did you learn to do that?’ I said. There I was, thinking I’d impressed him with my dumb old bat position, when all the time he was much, much better than me. He was still hooked-up in the branches, but he swung down in such a way, like a prince might jump off a horse after winning an important battle. I pretended I didn’t notice.

  ‘My dad showed me. When I was a kid.’ He poked at the dirt with a stick.

  ‘Lucky you.’ I always used to ask my mum to take me to gymnastics classes (especially after I saw the Olympics on tellie), but she said she couldn’t take time off work and also we didn’t have the money. Once she took me to a jazz ballet class on Saturday in a community hall, but all the other girls were wearing leotards and I felt silly in my trackie dacks.

  I thanked him for finding Stinky, and I told him I owed him a reward.

  ‘Nuh, don’t worry about it,’ he said waving his hand. ‘See ya ’round.’ Then he walked away. I watched him go for a bit, just to see if he walked like an animal. I liked the way his arms swung. Stinky and I walked home and I let my arms swing up and down, just as if I was about to take off. It was brilliant.

  When I got home, Mum’s hands went straight to her hips and her lips hit a straight line. The you’re-in-trouble position. It used to make Barnaby cringe and go all quiet.

  ‘Well, where have you been, Cedar?’ she said.

  ‘I found Stinky. Look.’

  She wasn’t happy.

  ‘Did you get wet? You’ll catch your death of cold. Go and take off your clothes.’

  She said it as if she was just stamping a letter, precisely, with a tight-lipped, end-of-conversation face. I didn’t even get a chance to tell her about the boy who could swing through trees. So I huffed off upstairs and flopped onto Barnaby’s bed. Just like Barnaby used to do. I put on my very necessary Stevie Wonder CD and ran a bath. I poured in the Radox and lay down low with my hair, underneath the water, floating like weeds. I like to feel mermaidish in the bath and make things up. Blame it on the sun, the sun that doesn’t shine, blame it on the wind . . . sang Stevie, and I imagined my father, and what he would have showed me if he hadn’t died. I pictured him lifting me up on his shoulders and sitting me in a tree . . . but my heart blames it on me . . .

  There’s a photo of my dad and me. He’s wearing a hat, a terry towelling fishing hat, and a denim shirt with press studs that’s half open so you can see his chest. He wasn’t a fisherman, though. He was a musician. In the photo, I’m just a one-year-old baby, and I look as unremarkable as just about any ginger-headed baby you see. He’s looking into the camera and holding me on his shoulders. He’s half-laughing and half-smiling. You can’t tell which. But his eyebrows are raised, as if he is asking someone, ‘Is this right, is this what you want?’

  Now there’s a new puddle, I thought—the bird boy by the creek. I was hoping I might bump into him again, mainly because I wanted to learn how to play in trees the way he could.

  I told Caramella about the bird boy, and we practised hanging upside-down or worming out along branches on the plane tree in the street. Actually, Caramella just coached from the ground because her ankle was still sore, and besides she’s too soft and artistic for tree-climbing, but she did make a top-notch coach. Sometimes I thought I might just stay up the tree, because I planned to live an unusual life, but it got too uncomfortable and no one like the bird boy was noticing anyway. Harold Barton came along with a gang of his drongo mates, who only want to look up girls’ dresses, so I spat on them. Mum grounded me for two days. Ricci brought me over some boiled chicory with egg and said, ‘Bloody boys anyway!’

  When I was allowed out again, I hung around the oval after school, thinking I might just bump into the boy, because I did owe him a reward, after all. I practised handstands and hung upside-down on the pole counting out cats and dogs and thinking that he might just show up. But he didn’t, and after a while I began to think despondent thoughts, like how my nose wasn’t refined or how our house was sinking at the foundations. (You can tell because none of the doors close unless you wedge the Iris Murdoch paperback underneath to jam them shut.)

  Little Jean-Pierre whizzed past on his bike.

  ‘Hey Cedar, you know what?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Harold Barton says you’ve gone batty like your brother, ’cause you hang upside-down. Look what I can do.’

  He took his hands off the handles, folded them behind his head and tore off down the track.

  Maybe I was turning the world up the other way a bit too much. I went home. There was a card from Barnaby:

  I got out Mum’s Silver Convention record and sang along to Fly Robin Fly very loudly in the bathroom—because it sounds better in there. I know another thing I won’t be infamous for—singing.

  There are two main differences between me and Barnaby. The first is that he’s a good singer and I’m a bad singer. The second is that he conceals things and I reveal them. He says I blab. I think he is uncommunicative. He says I’m nosy. I think he suffers from a lack of healthy curiosity. After all, if you don’t ask the world questions, then you won’t ever work out where the rainbow begins.

  Barnaby was five years old when our dad died, so he knew him more than I did and that’s why Barnaby can sing. Our dad used to sing songs with him. I always ask Barnaby to tell me stuff about our dad. He says he can’t remember, only that Mum had fights with him because he smoked cigarettes, and once he took Barnaby to the beach—just him and Barnaby, and they were there when it was night.

  Barnaby has a guitar which he took with him when he went. He used to walk around the house, with it strapped around his shoulder, singing the Memphis blues. He made up words, like:

  Mum laughed. And I laughed. And there was a light feeling in the old house. Then Barnaby got distracted by more serious things, like Nirvana (the band, not the possibility), and girls. And I mean older girls, like Marnie Aitkin, not little sisters like me. Also sometimes he smoked, which I’m not supposed to know about, but I think that made him lazy. He was growing plants on the roof. Secret plants that Mum didn’t know about. At least not until that man who cleaned the drainpipes told her. I heard him. He came downstairs in his blue overalls, smelling of sweat and cars and old cigarettes, and he said, ‘Ahh, Mrs Hartley, did you know there’s marijuana plants growing out on yer roof there?’

  Mum brushed her hands downwards on her skirt and she looked funny, as if someone had just asked her to spell a hard word. She sighed and said, ‘Thank you, no, I didn’t know.’

  Our mum is
always polite with doctors and workmen and people in the shops.

  Boy, Barnaby was in a lot of trouble then! Mum was so angry she could hardly even speak. She just went up, climbed out the window and yanked those plants out herself. Then she stuffed them in the bin. There was dirt trailing from the roof, all the way down the stairs. Normally Mum wouldn’t let dirt fall off everywhere like that. Afterwards she vacuumed it up. I could tell she was mad—she was vacuuming like a woman with a bee up her nose. I don’t know what she said to him when he got home. The door was closed. But it wasn’t long after that when Barnaby went away.

  For a while I went about trying to concentrate on singing, instead of being upside-down and hoping to meet the bird boy. I wasn’t doing that well. I decided it must be because I didn’t have a guitar. Stinky and I went hunting around Smith Street looking in the second-hand shops. There weren’t any guitars that cost twenty-three dollars, which was all I had, so I gave up and went into Safeway to eat some grapes. Mum doesn’t like to shop at Safeway. She says it supports corporate greed and globalisation, so mainly we do our shopping at Friends of the Earth. It’s much better, because they have hand-made lavender soap and they’re not greedy. What I like about Friends of the Earth is that you fill up your own bags with things, so if you only want a tiny bit of agar agar for making jelly, then you only take a tiny bit, but if you eat loads of muesli and roasted almonds, then you fill a whole big bag up. There are only two reasons to go to Safeway: for garbage bags, and to escape the weather.

  Stinky waits outside Safeway while I go in. Usually when I come out again he acts like he hasn’t seen me for ages. He wags his whole body. But when I came out this time, there was no little body wagging at me. Stinky was being patted and all I could see was a little furry stomping bum. And who should be doing the patting? Amazing, I thought shaking my red curly head. Life is like that. You try and try and try for something and then, the moment you give up, there it is. The bird boy.