The Slightly True Story of Cedar B. Hartley Read online

  I tried a hairclip in my hair, then I took it out at the last minute, opting for the tried-and-true, low-fuss, free-flow no style. Hair out. I looked like me after all that, so I stuck my fingers in my nose—just for encouragement, and just to remind me who I was. Then I grabbed a banana, since I had no time for Weet-Bix, and off we went, Stinky and I, ready for the next training session. Potential, I said to myself.

  I must have it or he wouldn’t be meeting me again.

  Most kids do it the other way round, but I do it this way: if I could get all the way to the oval, stepping on every crack in the pavement or line or stick or leaf or just about anything that isn’t nothing, then that would mean the best possible outcome for me. That would mean that Kite and I would become famous acrobats together. But if I trod on a gap, then Kite wouldn’t even show up. That was the rule.

  I must have done okay with the lines. He was leaning against the pole rail with his feet crossed over. Rather casual. I wished I’d worn just trackies and not the skirt.

  ‘Hi,’ he said.

  ‘Hi,’ I said. And then he laughed, almost, and looked upwards.

  That was how it happened: every day after school, I went to the oval and did ‘training’, as Kite called it. First off, we warmed up by running around and waving our arms, then we did stretches, then headstand and handstand practice, then tumbling, cartwheeling and finally double balances. This is what double balances look like:

  Caramella sometimes came and watched. Kite showed her how to spot for the double balances. Once, he tried to coax her into trying a triple balance with us, but she wedged her feet into the ground and folded her arms in alarm, saying, ‘No way, I’m not going up, I’ll fall.’

  Kite laughed. ‘You don’t have to go up, you can just be a base, like this.’

  He got down on his hands and knees, but still Caramella didn’t want to, because she’s shy and unconfident about physical things and boys make her even shyer. She wears big T-shirts, so she can hide underneath them. It’s a shame, because Caramella’s in the habit of covering up everything, even her talents and potential talents, but I’m working on that. After Kite left, I started teaching Caramella myself, just the simplest of things at first. It made her really happy. I could tell because she went pink and giggly and forgot to pull her T-shirt down.

  What I liked best was the tumbling and the balances. I practised all the time, even at school. In maths lessons I was taking my mind through dive rolls and walkovers because I didn’t care much for maths anyway. Then at lunchtime I went and practised in the yard, and by the time I got to the oval after school I had already improved. Kite hardly seemed to notice that I was getting better and better. It was as if he just expected it. Sometimes, when we managed to hold a balance, he’d say, ‘That’s good.’ Never, ‘Wow, you’re amazing, what potential.’ Usually, he would just try to teach me how to base the balance, but I preferred flying. He said basing was good for building strength and understanding alignment. Alignment of the body, let me tell you, is harder to get when you’re upside-down.

  Mum even noticed something.

  ‘So, what’s going on, Cedy? Ricci says you go down the oval after school every day. Are you getting up to mischief?’

  ‘Nope, I swear. I’m just training.’

  ‘What for?’ She had a potato in one hand and a peeler in the other, and she held them still as if they were waiting for the right answer.

  ‘The Bat Pole Championship.’ I don’t know why I said that. It just came out, because sometimes you have to pretty-up the truth for Mum; build a castle around it, or she’ll worry. Whatever I do, even if it’s just lying on my bed and imagining a tidal wave, or thinking about how I might be if I’d been born in a faraway country like Estonia or Tuva, or even just a town like Wagga Wagga, or even if I’d been born as a polar bear instead of a girl in Brunswick, my mum will immediately find a reason to worry about it. And that gives her headaches.

  ‘What’s a bat pole championship? Is it something to do with school?’ she asked with a slight frown, but she went back to peeling the potato and tossing the skin in the compost bucket. A good sign.

  ‘Not exactly, it’s just a game we play, where we see who can hang upside-down for longest.’

  ‘Oh, Cedy, you be careful. I know you. You’re like a bull at a gate. You be careful you don’t hurt yourself. Remember how you sprained your ankle trampolining. And then just a couple of weeks later you broke your wrist flying off that swinging rope. Well just be careful for godsake. That’s all.’

  For godsake herself. She’s always bringing up those stupid accident incidents. Every time I walk out the door she thinks I’m going to come back limping. I’m beginning to think all her worrying about me is like some kind of jinx; she just worries so much that the world hears her and gets ideas.

  The next day, it seemed like everything happened just so that Mum could say, ‘Now what did I tell you?’

  We started badly because Kite was late and he seemed anxious. He kept staring off into the distance and frowning. I tried to think of a joke, but all I could remember was the one about a nervous wreck and I wasn’t sure it was funny enough, so I just kept quiet. He sat down for a minute with his head bent.

  ‘Did you warm up, Cedar?’

  ‘Kind of,’ I lied again, because I didn’t want to make him any more anxious.

  ‘Shall we try the cartwheel helicopter thing then?’

  ‘Sure.’ I shrugged. We’d tried it the day before, and it was difficult. First, he cartwheels over my knees. While he’s upside-down, I grab his hips and pull them in towards me. I hold on as he stands up and then I’m on his shoulders. Like this:

  He’s holding the back of my knees, and I have to arch up like I do in bird position on the pole. Like this:

  He whirls around and I become a helicopter. He slowly bends down and puts my feet on the ground while spinning. It’s brilliant—when it works.

  Kite stood up with a great yawn and warmed up his arms. I did a handstand. I dropped my head and looked out past my arms. I noticed two figures standing under the willow trees. One of them waved. I stood up and turned around. Marnie Aitkin and Aileen Shelby. They walked towards us.

  ‘What are you doing, Cedar?’ said Aileen. They were both looking at Kite. And he was looking at them. Marnie was wearing one of those skirts that come down smooth and tight, and the way the sun was shining made her hair like a gold halo. She tilted her head on the side and folded her arms behind her and shaped her mouth into a secret-looking smile. Aileen pushed her hip out and opened her snake eyes, as if she’d just eaten a rabbit. Aileen had a ponytail of brown hair that she was always playing with.

  ‘Acrobatics,’ I said, tilting my head to the side, like Marnie.

  ‘Oh really,’ said Marnie. ‘I love acrobatics.’ She smiled at Kite and he blushed and looked down for a minute.

  ‘Mind if we watch?’ said Aileen.

  Kite shrugged. ‘It’s okay with me,’ he said, looking at me. I didn’t say a word. I just nodded slightly, to show that it wasn’t really okay with me, but since I’m cool I’d put up with it.

  ‘What’s your name?’ Aileen said to Kite. ‘I’m Aileen and this is Marnie.’ She used her hand to point, just like a professional. I got this picture in my mind of Aileen as an air hostess with a navy blue blazer and very neat hair in a bun.

  ‘I’m Kite.’ He looked down at his feet and stuck his thumbs in his back pocket. Aileen and Marnie looked at each other, as if to say, ‘weird name!’and then they did a small fluttering duet of giggles and shifting. Kite blushed again.

  Then Marnie piped up, ‘Well, do you know Circus Berzerkus? They’re in town next week and we’re going to see it. We’re going with Harold Barton,’ she added and shot a smug look at me. As if I’d care. Kite just nodded and smiled and said he’d be seeing the show, but he didn’t say a thing about his mum being the trainer. Then he nodded at me and lined up for the helicopter. I stood with my legs wide and my knees bent and my mind feeling h
eavy and complicated like a broken-down television. I was bending low and wondering why he hadn’t told me that Circus Berzerkus was coming to town, and I was annoyed and I was wishing I was pretty and going to the circus, and Kite was cartwheeling towards me, and I had to catch him, and he was pulling me up and I was picturing Marnie at the Circus Berzerkus, and then a sharp feeling stabbed me in my chest and I was up on Kite’s shoulders and whirling, and there were the willow trees and Stinky and then Marnie and Aileen, snake eyes, hip out, and the clubhouse and the willows and Marnie like a kitten and Aileen’s mouth opening, and the clubhouse, willows, Stinky wagging, all whirling around with heads going sideways and hips pushing out, and this pain in my side and I was coming down and my legs went wobbly and I sank to the ground and heard Marnie Aitkin’s voice breathing—‘Wow!’

  I lay still for a moment, checking through my body bit by bit, just to be sure where the pain was coming from. I got up. Each time I breathed in it felt like a big spike was poking in my side. I shrugged carelessly at Kite, as if everything was normal, and took a careful quiet breath.

  Kite looked at me, then at those girls, then back at me, saying, ‘Shall we try again? The landing wasn’t so smooth. Sorry.’

  ‘Actually, I have to get home early, to cook dinner,’ I said. I never cook dinner.

  ‘Can I try that?’ said Marnie, hair still shining. I felt miserable and mad. Before I had to watch myself being replaced by Marnie Aitkin, I turned away and walked home, without swinging my arms at all, the pain in my chest like a fork digging in my lung with each breath. I must have forgotten to tread on a lot of lines.

  ‘Broken rib,’ said Robert and he sniffed.

  ‘Ah,’ squawked Ricci and her mouth hung open. We were in the boys’ house over the road, because Ricci had taken me there to see Robert, who’s a doctor. The other boy, Pablo de la Renta, was in the kitchen cooking coconut chicken. Pablo wasn’t really a boy. He was a man with hardly any hair left on his head. I don’t know why Ricci calls them ‘the boys’ because they are both quite old, as old as my mum, but their house is much nicer than ours, although it makes you feel like you shouldn’t sit down on anything in case you leave a mark. In the living room, where we were, there were paintings of lilies in Europe, and mirrors with large gold borders, and the carpet was fluffy and creamy. It made me think of England and history, but I knew it was fake, like drawings on a chocolate box.

  ‘Nothing you can do about it, I’m afraid. Just rest and it will mend itself,’ said Robert. He wasn’t wearing a doctorish white coat. He had a silky lilac shirt on, half unbuttoned. He smelled of perfume and he had hairs on the back of his hand, but very clean nails. He smiled at me and looked sorry. The smell of cooking chicken was creeping out from the kitchen. It made me think of Granma, because she always cooked chicken—not with coconut though, just with a can of apricots and a packet of French onion soup, which she scattered on top. I hate eating chicken, because of the bones and the veins. They make me think of my own veins and bones, and then I feel funny.

  ‘She’s a little daredevil,’ said Ricci grabbing my shoulder. ‘You be careful now.’

  Pablo de la Renta came in wearing a plastic-coated apron with little red hearts all over it. He waved a spoon in the air and stood on his toes, and I had a horrible feeling he was about to invite us for coconut chicken. But he didn’t. He folded his arms and tilted his head at me. ‘How’s the little wounded soldier?’

  ‘Broken rib!’ screeched Ricci triumphantly.

  ‘Oh dear,’ Pablo frowned. ‘Dinner’s almost ready.’ He curtsied his head at Robert and then trotted out again.

  ‘How long before it’s better?’ I asked.

  ‘Probably a couple of weeks,’ said Robert flicking at an imaginary speck on his lilac shirt sleeve.

  I didn’t tell Mum. I knew she would just say, ‘Cedar, what did I tell you?’ She loves to have her worries confirmed. It gives her more to worry about. And I didn’t tell Kite, either. What would he care? I pictured him and Marnie doing bluebirds, with Aileen spotting, and that made me feel worse. Instead of going to the oval where I knew he would be waiting, I moped and wished I was there. I secretly, quietly, not-even-to-myself hoped he would be missing me and my potential. Caramella came over with some olives from their tree. They tasted awful, but Mum likes them, so I put them in the fridge for her.

  ‘Aren’t you going to training?’

  ‘Can’t, I’ve got a broken rib.’

  ‘You have not.’

  ‘I have so. Ask Robert, over the road. Ricci took me. He’s a doctor.’

  ‘Well why aren’t you in hospital? Why’s there no plaster?’

  ‘I already went to hospital.’ I lied for dramatic effect, since it was my only chance for sympathy. ‘But they can’t fix it. You can’t have plaster for a rib, you just have to let it mend itself. It hurts like hell, I swear, especially when I breathe in. Don’t tell my mum ’cause she won’t let me do acrobatics ever again if she finds out.’

  ‘Okay, I won’t tell.’

  ‘Promise?’

  ‘Cross my heart and hope to die.’ She licked her finger and crossed her heart, and that’s something for Caramella because she’s a Catholic and has to do communions with God.

  Caramella and I watched television. There was a man building a cabinet out of a dart board on Better Homes and Gardens, but it was a horrible cabinet and I said I’d rather have a dart board. Caramella agreed. So we watched Neighbours for a while because Caramella likes it—but I don’t. All that happened was a girl was arguing with everybody and getting all steamed-up because she didn’t want a traditional wedding in a church. Barnaby says Neighbours is monotonous crap. He likes Seinfeld, but I don’t. I like Great Mysteries and Myths of the Twentieth Century. The thing I hate about Neighbours is that you have to watch the next one to know how it turns out, and I’m too impatient for that. I can’t be bothered. I’ve got better things to do than care about someone’s traditional wedding drama.

  ‘Are you gonna get married, Cedar?’ said Caramella, her chin bent down to her chest as she fiddled with her cross necklace, trying to make it sit the right way. Sometimes it goes back-to-front and then you can’t see the little pearly roses all over it.

  ‘How should I know?’ I made out I was easy-come, easy-go by sighing a little and shrugging.

  ‘You want to?’ she said, still grappling with the necklace.

  ‘Only if there’s someone I like enough.’

  ‘What about Harold Barton?’ Caramella looked up with a broad grin. She got her cross nice and flat on her chest, and then she stroked it as if it was a cat that had just sat down. She giggled and her shoulders crept up to her ears.

  ‘Are you crazy?’ I said. ‘No way. Not even if you paid me a million dollars. Harold Barton’s a big ego tripper. That’s what he is. And he pulled a swiftie on Barnaby.’

  ‘What kind of swiftie?’

  ‘I don’t know exactly, he ratted on him or something.’

  ‘Well, would you marry . . . ummm,’ Caramella looked upward, as if asking the heavens above to offer her another likely suspect. I could tell she was about to go right through everyone in the street. Just for a laugh. But she didn’t. She said, ‘What about Kite?’

  ‘Kite?’ I said, and accidentally bit my lip.

  ‘Yeah, Kite.’ She fluffed up the cushion, banged it with her fist.

  ‘He likes Marnie.’

  ‘No, he likes you. I can tell.’

  ‘Does not.’

  ‘Does so. See on a daisy.’ Caramella and I always did the Loves me, Loves me not test on a daisy. You tear off the petals one by one, and as you go you say, ‘He loves me,’ then, ‘He loves me not.’ The last petal is the final verdict.

  ‘No, I’m not into him anyway,’ I said. ‘Who are you going to marry? Frank Somebody?’ We both roared with laughter at the thought, and my broken rib hurt like mad, which made it even funnier because the more I tried not to laugh, and the more I groaned and clutched at my side, the m
ore hilarious it got. Sometimes there’s nothing as funny as laughing. It makes you feel mad, mad, mad. We got so mad with laughing that Caramella forgot about the daisy test. She just whacked me with the cushion. Afterwards, when she went home, I went out and got a daisy. But I didn’t do the test. I just put it in my sock drawer where Moby Dick used to live.

  The truth is, I hadn’t even kissed a boy. Once, I saw Barnaby pashing Laura Pinkstone on the couch in our living room. Normally our living room was the room where the least living went on. It should have been called the fancy-dead-room-with-dust, since no one was allowed to go in there, not unless you were a guest or the doctor. We never had guests, not proper ones, only Caramella and Ricci.

  In the living room there’s carpet and it’s clean because no one goes in there. The couch and the chairs match. They have pink flowers and green leaves that curl all over them. I know they’ve been there for ages because there’s a photo of Barnaby when he’s just a kid and he’s asleep on the pink flower couch. When Mum’s not home, sometimes I go in there and lie behind the couch where there’s a white rectangle of sun on the clean carpet. Through the window you can see the dusty beams of light reaching down towards you, reaching all the way from heaven or the sun or from an angel’s own eyes or whatever it is that watches over us from up there. I lie in that sunny patch and it makes me go quiet and small and as still as the dried-up bugs on the windowsill. I have the feeling that time is falling on top of me, and slowly I’m getting old and still. I watch the air sparkling with falling dots of dust, and I don’t think a single thought. I just let things come to me; time falling, the rays of warm air, the rumble of outside, fuzzy thoughts about dried-up bugs and vampires, and being born in Bangladesh. I can see the faded back of the pink-and-green-leaf couch where it faces the window and the sun has made it lighter than the rest. If you lift the covers on the arms (like when you pull a bandaid off a sore) you can see what the real colour was, when my mum and dad first bought it, when it was rich and tropical and everything was new and ripe, before time slowly dried everything up and quietened it down and drained out the colour and the juice . . . That’s what time did to our Granma, left her with a withered and faded covering of skin, without much juice left inside. She didn’t even get hungry, much, only for ice-cream with me. Especially Blue Ribbon boysenberry ripple. (Mum said Granma wasn’t allowed to eat ice-cream because of her diabetes, but Granma said, ‘blow that,’ and she ate it anyway, on the side.) Sometimes it makes me sad to feel the way time keeps going, and you can’t ever really stop anywhere, just because you like it there. Not even a couch can.