The Slightly True Story of Cedar B. Hartley Read online

  ‘Hi,’ he said, and my face went red.

  ‘Hi,’ I said back, wishing I wasn’t red. Then we both quickly turned our faces towards Stinky, who is always a great distraction and enjoys the attention. The bird boy was down on one knee.

  ‘Did Stinky recognise you?’ I asked.

  He stood up and nodded. He was wearing the same T-shirt with some loose-fitting old camel corduroys. He was skinny and rough-looking. I liked the way he looked, like a leaf that had just been tossed by the wind and didn’t care.

  ‘I don’t know your name.’

  ‘Kite.’

  ‘Kite! That’s as strange as Cedar. Were your parents hippies, too?’

  ‘Not really. It’s my dad, he’s just original. My folks aren’t together any more.’

  ‘Mine aren’t either.’ It felt all right to say that, like he and I had all along been accidentally humming the same song and we just hit the chorus together. It made me feel suddenly bold, just because of our mutual parental lack. I asked him if he wanted to go for a smoothie, since I owed him anyway.

  ‘Sure. The unique reward, huh?’ he said, and laughed, and his eyes went soft.

  We went to Soul Food, where they do banana smoothies with soymilk and the tables are wooden and the waitresses have nose-rings. When I’m old enough, I might get a nose-ring. Barnaby has a tattoo of a ladybug on his hip, but Mum doesn’t know about it because she’d be mad. She’d think it wasn’t nice. Barnaby says it’s for luck. I said, ‘You can’t tattoo luck on your hip,’ and he said, ‘We’ll see.’

  Kite and I sat on the high stools at the window table and watched the people walking up and down Smith Street. Mum doesn’t like me hanging around on Smith Street, which is exactly what makes me want to hang around there. I think what she doesn’t like is the drug dealers, but they’re just looking for a bloke called Chasen. What I like is Melissa’s, because it’s Greek and they do great spinach triangles for two bucks. And I like the Awareness bookshop, because the books in it are for telling your fortune. And I like the Asian shops because they smell funny and the vegetables have warts. There’s also a shop called Punctured, where you can get pierced. And there is also Friends of the Earth.

  Blue Lips was pacing up and down the street. Blue Lips never stops. He always looks like he’s off to murder someone, or at least give them a good serve, kick in their Hyundai, or stamp on their new shoes. That day he must have been in a good mood, because he wasn’t swearing. I don’t know why, but Blue Lips always reminds me of Jesus. I think it might be his bare feet and long hair, which is quite beautiful (a bit like Marnie Aitkin’s)—golden and wavy and shiny clean. Not what you expect from a crazy guy who never wears a shirt, just leather pants and blue lipstick. He probably gets that lipstick at the Punctured shop.

  ‘Look, Blue Lips has gone in to see Marge,’ I said, as Blue Lips turned into the Op Shop.

  ‘Who’s Marge?’

  ‘Actually, Marge is a very important person,’ I said, accidentally slipping into the philosophical part of my brain. Then I accidentally went and launched into a Life-according-to-Cedar-B.-Hartley theory. Sometimes I can’t help myself. I’m accident-prone.

  The way I see it, Marge really is important. Not in my fake know-all way, but in an especially true way. Quietly, the no-trumpet-to-blow way. I doubt anyone else in the world has even heard of her, or ever will. People mainly like to listen out for big blasting trumpets on television.

  Marge Manoli is an old lady with a hairy mole on her cheek. She works in the Opportunity Shop on Smith Street. She calls you ‘love’ and she talks with you as if she really likes you. I’ve heard her talking just like that to all the crazies and all the homeless people and drug addicts who go in there. She listens to them, even when what they’re saying doesn’t make sense. She doesn’t get impatient with them for going on and on about the same thing. Marge Manoli is the mother of Smith Street. No one ever says thank you, no one pays her for it, and she doesn’t expect anyone to either. I bet there are millions of these kinds of people in the world—kind, caring people disguised as bus drivers or sandwich deliverers or mothers or plumbers.

  There is Marge, and then there are all these very famous people with more money than they need, who are famous for the silliest thing, like being born with a big inheritance, a newspaper, a beautiful face, or a good serve. I don’t really get that. Why should someone who is very good at hitting a tennis ball

  All those very famous, rich, powerful people just seem to spend their time trying to get even more so—hit the ball harder, change their nose shape so it looks better, get new bosoms once theirs get too old, or get more money, even though they’ve got plenty more than they need. Now that’s crazy. It leads me to think that those famous attributes must be kind of dangerous things to have. That’s why I’m glad I’m not unnaturally beautiful or gifted or good at whacking a ball.

  ‘Rich people,’ I explained to Kite, thinking of Harold Barton with some alarming show of compassion, ‘are crazy too. You can’t blame rich people for being greedy—it’s like they’re on a drug. Crazy as Blue Lips. I don’t know, maybe they need a lot of attention, like Barnaby. Mum was always worrying about him. She used to make him kiss her when he got home late, just so she could smell his breath, to check if he’d been drinking or smoking. Barnaby called it the kiss test.’

  ‘Is Barnaby your brother?’

  ‘Yep, but he went away and he hasn’t come back. I know where he kept his cigarettes. I saw him get them out from his sock drawer sometimes. I had a terrapin in my sock drawer. Its name was Moby Dick, after a book that Barnaby was reading. Barnaby said it was a classic. My terrapin was also a classic. Barnaby says classics don’t do much, they just are. They have a timeless quality. Moby Dick, the terrapin, was so timeless he forgot to wake up sometimes.’

  Kite sighed and slid his body forward onto the table and rested his head on folded arms. He said he knew how Moby Dick the Terrapin felt. There were days when he couldn’t be bothered waking up, either. He said he didn’t like school much and one day he was going to start a circus.

  ‘Can I join?’ I said, and he laughed. A deep river laugh.

  ‘I’m not joking. I’ve been practising in trees,’ I said. ‘We could go to the oval and I’ll show you. Or you could teach me something.’

  Kite screwed up his nose, as if he was trying to fit the idea in his mind, but it wasn’t quite the right shape. He started going on about how it can be dangerous and you have to know basics first and you need a certain amount of strength and flexibility and you need to be prepared to do rudiments and so on. But I talked him around. I learned how to do that from Barnaby who could talk his way in and out of any trouble he wanted. My mum said Barnaby could talk the legs off a wooden table. Barnaby used to start talking to the table in the kitchen, just to show her he couldn’t. But that always made her laugh and give in. Eventually Kite laughed and gave in, too.

  ‘Okay, okay. I’ll try showing you some basics, and if you’re good I’ll train you for my circus.’

  ‘Okay.’ I stuffed my excitement down in my throat and looked at the crumbs on the floor. There was grated beetroot on the leg of the stool.

  On the way to the oval, we dropped in to see Marge.

  ‘Hello, loves,’ said Marge. She was singing along to the radio. My God is real, yes God is real, she sang as she arranged a blue bead necklace around a foam head that was sitting on the counter. ‘There, what do you think? Ooh, I like your T-shirt,’ she said to Kite. ‘You like music, love, do you? Do you know Mahalia Jackson? That’s her on the radio.’ Kite shook his head as she sang out, Yes God is real, oh he’s real in my soul . . . ooh his love for me is just like pure gold. Marge opened her eyes wide. ‘Look, love, I’ve got some new woollen beanies in here. Look, they’re beauties.’ She waddled off like a clucking chook and came back with a handful of beanies, because she knows I like them. I get them for Barnaby, too. I can feel him in my soul, she was singing. I tried feeling something in my soul but I wasn’
t sure where my soul was. I put my hand on my chest to see if it was thumping, but I couldn’t be sure, so I bought an apricot beanie with two blue stripes around the edge, because it’s a good cause and it only cost a dollar. I gave it to Kite, since I’ve got some already. He put it on, even though it wasn’t that cold.

  I walked along a fence wall. When I see a wall I can walk along, I have to get up on it. It’s a rule. I hold out my arms like a tightrope walker. This time when I got up there I went a bit uppity, like a preacher, only I didn’t go on about God and righteousness, since I know nothing about that. I just started madly casting round inside my mind for something very important to say. Whenever I most want to make a good impression I get like a maniac digging around for gold. I have to sift through a lot of garbage. I open my mouth and let words tumble out, just because I’m desperate for some marvellous thought to surface. But it’s like taking the lid off the compost bucket and letting out all the scraps and smells. There I was, suddenly telling how once I had a guinea pig called John Newcombe, and then I went off on a bee tangent. I said I like bees and Barnaby likes them too but only because they have yellow and black stripes (which is the same colour as his footy team, the Tigers), but I like them because they wear pollen stockings. ‘Did you ever think,’ I said, ‘how a bee has a sweet part and a mean part, a honey basket and a sting? I will probably write a theory about that one day when I’m smart enough.’

  ‘Cedar, you know you’re doing it wrong with your arms?’ he said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  He leapt up onto the wall and showed me.

  ‘When you’re off-balance to one side, like this, you lean your arms towards the other side. See? That takes the weight back in towards the centre. You were doing the opposite. Like this.’ He wobbled to one side.

  ‘Oh,’ I said. I stopped talking about bees then. I just shut the lid and started thinking about the circus.

  First thing he showed me was how to roll. We did forward and backward rolls, and sideways ones, which are called aikido rolls. They come from a martial art. He talked a lot about softening into the ground and spreading weight out like honey and making the spine long and holding tummy muscles inward and upward. When we got into headstands, he put his fingers on my tummy and said, ‘Squeeze here,’ but it made me laugh and I fell down.

  ‘How do you know all this stuff?’

  ‘My parents taught me from when I was young. They were acrobats. They were in a circus for a while, then they just had their own show which they did at festivals. I was in the act sometimes. They taught in schools, too, and I went with them to demonstrate. So I’ve seen them teaching and spotting kids.’

  ‘What’s spotting?’

  ‘That’s when you use your hands to support someone, so they don’t get scared, and so they feel where their body is supposed to go. Like I was doing with you before.’

  ‘Are your parents still in a circus?’

  ‘My mum still tours around. She’s a trainer with Circus Berzerkus. Do you know it? It’s famous.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I lied, because I wanted him to think I’d had a life-long dream to be a circus performer. Which is just a small variation on the truth, really, since I’ve always been leading up to it. First, I wanted to be a vet, then a nurse, then an actress and then a gymnast, but now I’ve finally decided for sure. I want to be a circus performer, an acrobat.

  ‘What about your dad?’ I added quickly, to deflect any questions about Circus Berzerkus.

  His head dropped.

  ‘My dad had a fall four years ago and got a back injury, which meant he had to leave the circus. Now he works in a library.’

  ‘Libraries are good,’ I said, but I felt it was a limp thing to say, so I went up into a headstand to lift the mood.

  ‘What’s your dad do?’ Kite asked me. I came down out of my headstand and lay on my back, looking up at the sky and following the clouds with my eyes.

  ‘He died of an illness. He was a musician. But I never really met him. I was only one, when he died.’

  Kite lay down, too. And for a while we both just lay like two old towels on the grass, and looked upwards. Then I told him about Barnaby. I don’t know why. Probably because I blab, as Barnaby says.

  After the marijuana plants on the roof, Mum sent Barnaby to a boarding school in the country. It was his final year of school, but Mum said he needed discipline, which she couldn’t give him, and the influence of wholesome country people, which she also couldn’t give him. It really mashed up my heart when we took him there. He had this little bed, in a long room of little beds, that looked like a slice of toast with a grey blanket. There were boys everywhere; a whole bunch of them lounging on someone else’s bed, laughing and fooling around. They glanced over at us when we walked in, and then they just kept fooling.

  Barnaby sat on the bed and put his head in his hands. I thought maybe he was going to cry. But he didn’t. He just said from inside his hands, ‘Well thanks for the ride.’ I think he wanted us to go. You can feel a bit like a baby when your family is standing over you, trying to be cheerful. So of course I cried instead, since I’m a girl and I’m allowed.

  All the way home I kept thinking about those thin beds and him not knowing a single person—no one to even say hi or goodnight to, or ask where the toilet is. No street to hang out in. I wondered what he would have done after we left—lain on the bed, crossed his legs over and looked at that funny picture of Jesus on the wall? The Jesus had his hands praying and he was looking upwards. On his head was a crown of thorns that looked like flames, and you couldn’t help wondering if the Jesus thought he was going to burn.

  Barnaby mustn’t have liked it that much. All those wholesome country boys and thin toast beds. After a couple of months, the school rang us and said Barnaby had run away. He called up a couple of days later from Perth! That’s a hell of a long way, far across the desert. We don’t even know how he got there, or what he’s doing, because he must have run out of coins for the phone. Now all we get is these funny cards every once in a while.

  This is a picture of Barnaby trying to do a cartwheel:

  He’s lousy at cartwheels and writing letters. But he’s brilliant at cards.

  ‘You got any brothers or sisters, Kite?’ I said.

  He shook his head slowly. ‘Nope.’ He didn’t look at me. He just kept looking at the sky, and for a moment the world seemed very quiet.

  Kite said he’d meet me at the oval the next day. He didn’t make a fuss about it, though. Didn’t say, ‘Nice to have met you, you’ve got potential.’ Didn’t pat me on the back. Just waved his hand and turned up the street. ‘See ya,’ he said. ‘Yeah, bye,’ I said, and then I walked back home with Stinky.

  I often have to walk by the creek with my eyes half-closed, so that when I see all the plastic bags hooked and trapped in the trees they look like blurry white shapes. That way, I pretend they’re decorative foreign birds come to visit on their way to the snowfields in Siberia. I thought about Siberia and Kite’s circus. I practised cartwheels. Boy, you really should see Barnaby try a cartwheel! That makes me laugh.

  All day at school, I could hardly concentrate. Mrs Mayberry made me write I must not gaze out the window one hundred times. I’d been busy picturing myself striding past all the kids puddling around in the street. Me, looking very Lana Monroe, not even stopping to check out the street action, but moving past with animal grace, just tossing a vague look over my shoulder in Harold Barton’s direction. And then I come on all Shirley Bassey and start singing in perfect confidence, Walk on by. My hand is twirling and I’m thinking about how I’ll take Caramella Zito along with me, not that day, but when her ankle is better, and Ricci will become our manager, and Barnaby will come back to be the musical director and—

  ‘Cedar Hartley, have you been listening?’ There’s the booming, irritating voice of Mrs Mayberry landing right on top of my lovely thoughts. Rats.

  At home, I got all in a knot, just trying to decide what to wear to the oval
. I’d never thought about it before. I even went and looked in Mum’s cupboard, but there was nothing that fitted. I put on my blue check dress, and then I took it off because the buttons down the front were too big and old-fashioned, so I put on jeans with a green singlet. But I felt a bit bare in the singlet, since my boobs just looked like big itchy bites, so then I took off the singlet and put on a pink T-shirt, and then I thought it would be more interesting to put the singlet on top of the T-shirt. Then I took off the jeans and put on an old flower-print skirt, because my bum is really too skinny for jeans, and then I put some grey cut-off trackies underneath the skirt, because I would probably be hanging upside-down and I didn’t want to flash my undies. Then I put a roman sandal on one foot and a Dunlop volley on the other, and walked about a bit and decided that the roman sandal felt better, since I would have to wear socks with the Dunlop, and the only clean socks I could find had tennis stripes on them. Tennis stripes are definitely no go. Then I went to the mirror in the hall. I have to stand on a chair if I want to see my bottom half, and then I can’t ever get a complete effect—only one half at a time. Boy, it’s a lot of work trying to get your clothes right. And I still wasn’t sure.

  Was it Lana Monroe? Brown eyes, chubby nose with splattering of freckles and a generous mouth. A skinny redheaded girl in a lot of clothes.

  Not quite Lana, but at least I wouldn’t say I’m ugly. Not that I can say I’m pretty, either. Marnie Aitkin is pretty. She has neat hair that shines in the sun. But that’s not what makes her pretty. Just a lucky arrangement of eyes, nose, mouth and ears, I guess, though I don’t think ears have much to do with it. Once, I went to sleep with a peg on my nose. I figured it might make my nose not so chubby, more pointed, like Marnie’s. See, if braces can straighten out your teeth, then surely a peg can straighten out your nose? At least give it a dainty point. Well if it does, I swear it’s not worth the pain and lack of sleep. Prettiness isn’t that important. I have other winning features, like brains and high arches. (Marnie Aitkin can’t jump for nuts.) Besides, there are pretty girls everywhere and I’m quite unusual, you know. Kings have married red-haired women. Not that I want to get married. I’m not even sure I want a boyfriend. Sometimes I think I do and sometimes I think I don’t.