He nodded this time.
“Did you ever think my mother went through with the pregnancy?”
He looked at me and I saw him shiver for a moment.
“You’re such powerful human beings,” he whispered.
“Who?”
“Offspring.” He sighed and cleared his voice. “I want to be honest. I would have rathered life to have gone on the way it was going. I feel too old to be a father. I don’t want you to be misled about how I feel about you. I’m not sure if I can love you ever, but I want to know you. I want to be part of your life.
“You see, it’s different to normally having a kid,” he told me. “You see them as lovable babies and then watch them grow. With you I feel as if I’ve started reading a book from the middle and have to try and figure out the beginning.”
“But did you think at any time that my mother went through with the pregnancy?” I persisted.
“Would you believe me?”
I looked at his eyes. They were so dark and similiar to mine. His eyebrows seemed so thick and fierce when he frowned or worried. He was a worrier, I realized. That was human.
“I don’t think you’d be a liar.”
“We discussed abortion as the number-one option because we were scared shitless. I honestly didn’t think she’d go through with the pregnancy. I knew her father. I didn’t think that Christina Alibrandi had the guts to stand up to the bastard.”
I nodded, satisfied with the answer.
“But I want to be honest with you. I can’t promise you that I would have come back if I’d known she’d gone through with it. I had a lot of problems back then.”
I looked at him pensively and shook my head.
“You would have come back. I know you would have.”
I turned and walked away, and this time when I saw that he was still parked there, I gave a wave. He waved back.
I told Mama about Jacob and Michael when I walked in.
I was a bit afraid of her reaction on both counts. Would she never let me out again because of Jacob? Would she be hurt that I was seeing my father? Would she be hurt that I would be working for him?
Instead she hugged me and we both clung to each other for a while.
“Were you in love with him?” I asked as we sat on the carpet in front of the television set.
“As much as a sixteen-year-old can be in love.”
“I’m seventeen years old. I could be in love so deep that it could drive me to suicide.”
“You could also be a great Shakespearean actress, Josie, for all the drama you possess.”
“He’s a very impressive man,” I said, watching for Mama’s reaction. “He has good things to say about you too. He can’t understand how someone as sweet as you could have a daughter like me.”
“Oh, good. At least he’s not feeding your ego.”
“You know that night you went out with Elvis Presley?”
“Paul Presilio,” she corrected.
“Well, I thought you looked fantastic, but I didn’t want to say so because I was angry that my meat loaf didn’t turn out.”
“Oh, is that the excuse we’re going to use for the tantrum?” Mama smiled.
“And I think you could give a lot of women a run for their money.”
“Why don’t you go to bed?” she said, kissing me.
I hugged her hard. “Life could be so great, Mama. I know it could.”
“It’s good enough.”
“Thanks for letting me go out tonight.”
“But do you understand why I hesitate, Josephine? You spent half your night alone on the streets. Anything could have happened to you. Do you understand me when I say that nobody looks after you like I do?”
“Yes, I do,” I said honestly. “I mightn’t like it, but I do understand.”
As I lay in bed that night I thought of Jacob Coote. Deep down I really wanted him to ring and apologize. I’m embarrassed to say that I got out of bed three times to check that the phone was on the hook properly. I gave up after midnight and went to sleep thinking about what my mother had said.
I prayed that we’d all be satisfied with “good enough.”
Fourteen
AFTER A FEW
hiccups at MacMichael and Sons I’ve managed to settle in and things are beginning to run smoothly. I take the bus from school to the chambers three times a week. It is such a relief not to have to put on the McDonald’s uniform and put up with all those psychos. The barristers at MacMichael’s are really nice, although not at all on my level. The things they find funny are so unfunny.
I’ve seen Jacob Coote a couple of times. Once was when he was on the school bus and another time he was at Harley’s, a café at Darling Harbour. This girl with a uniform as short as a T-shirt was sitting on his lap.
But at the moment, John Barton is my biggest worry. I was on my way to the Sydney University library on Monday afternoon and bumped into him. He seemed vague and subdued and I wondered if he had decided we couldn’t be friends. We took a detour to a coffee shop, where he embarked on depressing me out of my head. It was one hundred times worse than debating night. He looked as if he had lost lots of weight, which he really couldn’t afford to do in the first place. His eyes couldn’t settle in one place, and if I didn’t know him better I could have sworn he was on drugs. I don’t know whether it was because of Jacob, but I wasn’t as attracted to him as I used to be.
“I hate this shit life,” he said to me out of the blue as we sat there.
I looked up, not knowing exactly what to say. I mean life isn’t a buzz, but I wouldn’t exactly call it shit.
“What happened?”
He shook his head, clamping his mouth together into a thin line.
“My father was home when I got there this afternoon. Went through my mail. He owns my life, so of course he’s entitled to open my mail,” he spat out bitterly. “I didn’t win the math competition. I didn’t even get in the top five percent. Bloody Sydney Grammar dominated again.”
“Big deal, John. It’s not the end of the world.”
He covered his eyes with his hand and then rubbed his forehead.
“It’s not the words that come out of his mouth. It’s the looks, Josie. The disappointment.”
“I’m sure your father loves you, John.”
“Oh, he does,” he said, nodding. “When I shit all over everyone in academic competitions. When I win a debate. When I win a football game. When I get elected school captain. When I win, win, win,” he gritted. “And when I lose he hates me. So I have to keep on winning. I have to keep on being the best in the world. Josie, I don’t want to do law. It’s going to be two billion times worse than this year and it’ll go on for five years.”
“Don’t get yourself so worked up,” I said, watching him closely.
His face looked blotchy and pale.
“My father will kill me,” he muttered. “He’ll kill me.”
“John, calm down. You’re extra intelligent. You can be anything you want to be.”
“But I don’t know what I want to be,” he said, grabbing my hands. “How can I tell my father I don’t want to study law if I don’t know what else I want to be?”
“You have no idea?”
He looked at me hesitantly, his eyes almost glazed.
“I don’t think I want to live this life anymore, Josie.”
At first I misunderstood. I wondered what other life there was to live, and it wasn’t until I was biting into my apple strudel and watching those vacant eyes of his that I realized he meant no other life.
“This life is shit. All we care about is making money and being big. Look at all the injustice and terrorism and prejudice, Josie.”
And for a minute—no, just a second, really—I wondered if he was right. I wondered if it was all one big useless existence. In that tiny second I wondered if I wanted to live this life anymore. If I wanted to have a major heart attack every time I heard an American voice crackling over our news. Americans take their accents so much for granted. Every time I hear it on the radio I think they’ve managed to involve us all in another horrible conflict. I wondered if I wanted to raise my children with that fear in their hearts. I figured that heaven must be a great place to go to get away from the madness, but I’m not ready for heaven yet and I don’t think heaven is ready for me. The terrible thing about it is I find the horrible conflicts and injustices comforting compared to this place where we’re supposed to go to one day where everything is perfect. So my second was up and I went back to liking this useless existence.
“Father Stephen said that peace is a state of mind. We will never have world peace, John, so we have to be peaceful within ourselves and that will make us happy.”
“Father Stephen? What the hell does he know? There is no God, Josie.”
“You don’t believe in God?”
He looked at me incredulously. “God, you’re naive.”
“You just said ‘God.’”
“It’s become a figure of speech.”
I’d never spoken to an atheist before, so I didn’t know what to say.
I made jokes about things and ordered him another cappuccino and hoped that the next time he saw me he would say, “April Fool, Josie,” although it was the middle of June. Sitting opposite him made me desperately want to be with someone as uncomplicated as Jacob who enjoyed his simple life.
I wished I could walk out of the coffee shop and just see Jacob. I could see now that it was my fault as much as his that our movie night hadn’t turned out. I’d had too many expectations. I’d wanted him to be what I wanted and not what he was. My thoughts turned back to John and I reached over to touch his shoulder.
“We’ve been asked to write down the way we feel at the moment,” I explained to him. “It’s because everyone is really stressed out about the HSC. We can do it in any style we want. Like a poem or a letter. We have to hand it to someone we trust, and after the HSC we ask that person to read it. They’re to ask us if we still feel the same way.”
“How do you feel at the moment?” he asked me.
I shrugged. “There have been a few changes in my life this year, including a change in the way I feel about people and things. But I need to write them down. It’ll be like some kind of therapy. Can I give it to you? I know you’ll understand the way I feel.”
He took a breath and nodded.
“Can I do the same? Like, give you my feelings on paper?”
I smiled at him and nodded.
We spent the rest of the afternoon writing down our thoughts. We folded the papers and sealed them with sticky tape.
When he passed over his sealed paper, his hand was trembling. When I handed mine over, I instantly wanted to take it back. I had just handed over the deepest of my feelings. Feelings that I couldn’t even explain to my best friends or to my mother. It was as if I had let him into my soul and thinking about it now, I don’t believe anyone should be allowed into your soul.
When I got home I placed his sheet in my jewelry box. Maybe because my jewelry box contained my most worthy items and the soul of John Barton seemed priceless.
I felt guilty in a way. Because I go on so much about my problems, but compared to John and all the other lonely people out there, I’m the luckiest person in the world.
We had confession on Friday. We have it once a term. It’s the same thing every time. I sit there mumbling to myself because I usually forget the “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned” bit. Once I get over that, I go through my sins. The same ones every time.
I was disrespectful to my mother and grandmother.
I’ve been lazy.
I’ve been selfish.
Once, last year, I started going through my sins and Father Stephen said, “Oh, it’s you, Josie.”
Can you believe it? He recognized me by my sins. I’m so boring that I can’t even change my sins from term to term.
I’m a bit in love with Father Stephen. He’s not young or anything. He’s about forty. But there is just something about him. So much heart and soul.
Once he made me say a whole decade of the rosary for penance because I told him that I didn’t believe in God and that the crucifixion was a big publicity stunt by Jimmy Swaggart’s ancestors to raise money. (For a few months in Year Nine, I professed that I didn’t believe in God because sometimes not having a God in your life means you don’t have to feel guilty or scared about so many things.)
Father Stephen is the most learned and advanced of all men in the world. The man surfs at our school picnics and arranged for the Cockroaches to come and perform at our school, free of charge.
He was the first person in our area to arrange for AIDS talks. He said he didn’t want young people dying of ignorance. So confession when he is around is always packed.
Sera is always in there the longest. I don’t know what she says to him exactly, but I can’t imagine her telling a priest that she’s extremely sexually active. At times she drives me crazy because she loves to bait. Like on Friday outside confession.
I mean, she knows I’m a virgin. Lee, Anna and I are, but still she continually loves to make digs. Like she asked me on Friday what type of contraception I use.
“Underwear,” I said. “Keeping it on prevents pregnancy.”
She laughed. Trilled, more like it, but then in her usual Sera way, she stopped.
“Sorry, Josie,” she said in a hushed whisper. “You must be so worried that what happened to your mother will happen to you. Wouldn’t that be terrible? People would have a field day.”
I just ignored her. I’m getting good that way. Things that worried me a few months ago no longer worry me as much. I can’t say that I’m completely oblivious. The gossiping of the Italian community might not matter to some, but I belong to that community.
Sometimes I feel that no matter how smart or how beautiful I could be they would still remember me for the wrong things.
That’s why I want be rich and influential. I want to flaunt my status in front of those people and say, “See, look who I can become.”
Mama says that satisfaction isn’t what I should search for. Respect is. Respect?
I detest that word. Probably because in this world you have to respect the wrong people for the wrong reasons.
Fifteen
BECAUSE WE WERE
allowed out early on Wednesday afternoon, we decided to go down to Harley’s at Darling Harbour to make great career decisions over a cappuccino.
I think if I’m ever asked to recall what Year Twelve was all about, I’ll remember it as one big cappuccino experience.
Harley’s is our hangout. Between four o’clock in the afternoon and six in the evening the place is packed with students from schools all around the inner-city area. It works out well for the owners because they don’t get many businesspeople coming in during those times who would be scared off by loud teenagers squashed together just to be seen. It’s a fiftiesstyle place with a jukebox and pleasing food like hamburgers and French fries. On the wall there’s fifties memorabilia like posters of James Dean and Natalie Wood in scenes from
Rebel Without a Cause
. The music is modern, though, and it never stops. Working with Michael means that I don’t go as much as I would want to, but once a week is enough to catch up on the gossip.
“I’m going to be a fashion designer,” Sera suggested after we sat in a booth that had just been vacated.
“I know so many people doing fashion designing,” Anna said, flicking the page. “You end up working as a sales assistant in some store.”
“Makeup artist?”
“Sera, admit it, you are not artistic,” I told her bluntly.
“Are you saying my makeup doesn’t look good?”
“I knew this would happen,” Lee said, slamming the book shut.
“If I wasn’t thinking of doing law, I’d be a translator for the Italian consulate in some mysterious country,” I told them, dreaming of how exciting it would be. “But I know that the proper Italians would pick out my Sicilian accent. The northerners are snobs just because they’re blond.”
“I’m blond and my parents aren’t from the north,” Sera said, using my glasses again for a mirror.
Lee, Anna and I exchanged glances.
“Should I tell her, girls?” I asked, feigning pity.
“Go ahead, Josie,” Lee said, adopting a sad voice.
I took hold of Sera’s hand gently.
“Sera, my poor sweet disillusioned Sera. You were not born with that color hair.”
“No?” Anna said, horrified, before we all burst out laughing.
Sera grabbed the career book from Lee’s hands and flicked through it again.
“How about teaching?”
“How about the public service? You’d be happy there, Sera.”
Sera looked at me suspiciously, wondering if I was teasing her.
“I’m going to be doing teaching,” Anna said definitely. “The Catholic Campus at Strathfield.”
“I can see you as a teacher,” Lee agreed.
“No way,” I laughed. “Anna will always be a McDonald’s worker to me.”
Anna laughed and then bent her head, urging us to close in.
“Guess what?”
“What?”
“I think Anton Valavic likes me.”
Sera almost fell off her seat laughing and Anna looked wounded.
“Sera, grow up,” Lee said, lighting up a cigarette. “Go on, Anna.”
“Let me go on,” Sera said, wiping the tears off her face. “I’ve seen Anton Valavic. He’s a man. I mean, have you ever seen the way the guy fills out his school pants? Could you imagine our little Anna appealing to him?”
“I think he’s a softy,” I told them. “Well, deep down anyway, and Jacob Coote told me at the dance that Anton liked you, Anna.”
“Well,” Anna said in a hushed tone, looking around to see if anyone was listening. “Every night when I finish at McDonald’s he’s out there, sitting on his bike. When I drive away, he rides home in his direction. Every night.”
Her large blue eyes looked misty and her cheeks were burning red with embarrassment.
“Are you sure he just doesn’t like Big Macs?”
She shook her head.
“He never ever comes inside.”
“He’ll break your heart,” Lee said, passing her cigarette to Sera.
“Speak of the devil. Here he comes with Josie’s boyfriend,” Sera said slyly. “Why don’t we just ask him?”
“Sera,” Anna hissed, putting her head on the table.
We all knew that Sera only needed a dare issued and she would go ahead and embarrass anyone.
“Sera, if you say a word, you will regret it till your dying days,” I told her.
“Are you threatening me, Josie? You of all people can never say anything to embarrass me. People talk about you enough.”
The booth behind us was vacant and Jacob Coote, Anton Valavic and four others squashed in, much to the despair of Anna and me.
One of the girls had sandwiched Anna’s braid between her back and the booth and Anna tried in vain to yank it out.
“Do you mind?” Lee said loudly to them.
The others turned around to look at us with disinterest.
“Oh, look, it’s St. Martyr’s,” one of the girls snickered.
I met Jacob’s eye for a minute and looked away.
Anna and Sera still had their backs to them and one of the boys began to swing Anna’s braid back and forth. He pulled out the silk scarf she had tied around the plait and wound it around his fingers.
“Just grow up and give it back to her,” I snapped.
“Give it back,” Anton Valavic said quietly.
The boy threw the scarf over to Jacob, where it fell on the table just as one of the girls knocked over a bottle of ketchup. Anna stood up, sighing, and reached for it, folding it up and placing it in her satchel. “My grandmother sent this to me from Croatia. It’s pure silk.”
I packed up my books and threw them into my bag, nudging Lee.
“Let’s get out of here.”
We paid for our coffee and squeezed through the crowd that had just come in from Glebe High.
“He really looks like he likes you, Anna,” Sera said sarcastically.
“Shut up, Sera,” both Lee and I said at the same time.
We browsed around for a while looking at all the stalls with their trinkets and T-shirts and spent half an hour in Gap and Abercrombie trying on clothes we knew we couldn’t afford to buy. The crowds got to us after a while.
Lee and I said good-bye to Anna and Sera and walked outside along the pier where the sun had appeared out of the blue. We sat looking out at the water, watching the activity on the other side, where the city center lay.
“What am I going to do with my life?” she asked me in dismay. “You’ve known since you were five. I change my mind every week.”
“I thought you’d decided on advertising?”
“That was last week. I spent three days sick at home, remember. I watched TV all day long and was insulted by the advertisements I saw. I don’t want to be into bullshit. Anyway, to get a foot in the door you have to be glamorous. I’m not into glamour.”
“I think that glamour in advertising, is a myth. They make it look glamorous on television, but I doubt it is.”
“My father started out in advertising, you know. A thousand years ago when he used to be sober.”
I get embarrassed when Lee speaks about her father’s drinking problem. It’s a subject she hardly ever brings up and if something bad happens we don’t find out about it until months later. Lee’s father is one of those charismatic men and his five children absolutely adore him. But when he drinks he’s abusive. Not physically, though, but verbally. Lee once told me that she’d rather have her bones broken by sticks and stones and that words did hurt. She spends a lot of time living with her brother’s family when things get to be too much at home.
“I feel sorry for my parents,” she went on. “They’re forty and their life is shit. She won’t leave him and he won’t do anything about his problem. They tend to think that one day the problem will go away without them having to work on it. I’ll probably be exactly the same.”
“Anyone who takes your attitude deserves a bad life, Lee. We’re masters of our own destiny.”
“That’s rubbish. If your father’s a garbage collector, you’re going to be a garbage collector, and if your father’s filthy rich, you’re going to be filthy rich because he’ll introduce you to his rich friend’s son. People breed with their own kind. Rest assured that John Barton will marry one of the Poison Ivys of the world, just like his brothers have married daughters of the well-known. The rich marry the rich, Josie, and the poor marry the poor. The nerds marry the nerds and the wogs marry the wogs. The western suburbs marry the western suburbs and the north shore marry the north shore. Sometimes they crossbreed, though, and marry into the eastern suburbs.”
She sighed sadly, shivering from the cold breeze that was coming from the water. “And we all end up where we started.”
“That’s not true. My future has nothing to do with what my family did.”
“Josie, whether you want to admit it or not, you are going to be a barrister because of your father. Without being there he’s still managed to be the greatest influence of your life.”
The sun went completely and we cuddled up to each other for warmth.
“This is depressing me.”
“You? I’m the one who doesn’t know what she’s going to do with her life,” she wailed.
We stood up and began walking toward the stairs that led to the main road.
“How about being a cop?” I suggested.
She gave me a sour look. “Your cousin is going to be one. He probably thinks I’d want to be close to him.”
We both laughed, trying to keep the hair out of our faces and having to walk backward for a few seconds to achieve it.
“You know what? I’d like to join the circus. I’ve wanted to do that ever since I read
Mr. Galliano’s Circus
by Enid Blyton,” she stated.
“How about a journalist?”
“They twist words and print rubbish.”
“A flight attendant?”
“They clean toilets on planes.”
“A teacher?”
“Hate kids.”
“So what would you be doing in a circus?”
“I’d be a fortune-teller,” she said, wrapping her tie around her head. “I would tell the yuppies that the stock market was going to fall and watch them go berserk.”
“Tell me my fortune, Madame Lee,” I said theatrically.
She grabbed my hand and looked at my palm.
“You, my dear Josephine, will travel the world in pursuit of happiness and find it.”
“Where? In Rome? Paris? New York?”
“Redfern. He will make you happy and give you ten bambinos. You will breed with this man and the world will follow your example of crossbreeding. They will call it the ‘Alibrandi’ method and you will become famous.”
“Jacob Coote? Get out of here.”
“He was staring you out like crazy in there. For God’s sake, Jose, I’m envious. He is hot. He is without pretension. He’s the only person I know who will not put up with your melodrama.”
“Melodrama? Thanks a lot.”
“Jose, believe me,” she said when we stopped at the top of the stairs that led to the road. “Your problems are out there, I believe that. But they’re small. They only grow out of proportion when they climb inside your head. They grow because of insignificant people like Carly and Poison Ivy and Sera, who feed on them because they know how you feel.”
I looked at her and nodded with a smile, and we gave each other a small, embarrassed hug.
After we went our separate ways I sat at the bus stop talking to my cousin Robert’s best friend, who goes to St. Anthony’s. His bus came soon after, and before I knew what was happening, Jacob Coote was sitting next to me.
“Who was that?” he whispered angrily.
“Jacob, get lost. That really upset Anna. You don’t know how sensitive she is.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, grabbing my hand. “Listen, we’ll start over again, okay.”
I looked at his clear green eyes, which always seemed so warm and sincere no matter how bad he looked at times. Eyes, my mother told me, never lie.
“Did you end up watching the movie that night?” I asked sulkily.
“No, I went and picked up a girl and screwed her brains out.”
I looked at him, unamused, knowing he was lying.
“That’s what you want to hear, isn’t it?” he asked.
“No, not really.”
“I went home,” he said gently. “Satisfied?”
I looked around at anything but him and he leaned forward and kissed me slowly on the mouth.
“Another chance,” he said. “We were both hotheaded and I said things I didn’t mean. I’ll never say them again. Cross my heart and hope to die.”
“And never lie again?”
He kissed me again and I looked around, embarrassed.
“People will see,” I said, stepping away. “We’re at a bus stop.”
He grabbed my hand and squeezed it, looking pleased with himself.
“You’ll have to come over again and redeem yourself with my mother,” I told him honestly. “She was very unimpressed.”
He shrugged. “I’ve lived through it once.”
I hugged him quickly, noticing that the bus was approaching.
“I’ll meet you at Harley’s at four-thirty tomorrow.”
“I work.”
“Hell,” he cursed. “How about after work?”
“Can’t.”
“Wanna cut?”
I looked around, agitated. I didn’t want to do things behind my mother’s back, but there was no other time to see him.
“Poison Ivy wouldn’t cut.”
“You’re not Poison Ivy. You’re no saint, Josephine, so don’t try acting like one.”
I covered my face and shook my head. “Okay,” I said. “Eight-thirty Friday morning at Circular Quay.”
He looked excited and I was pleased. Captain of Cook High, leader among the boys of the school community and voted sexiest male in the rebel St. Martha’s poll, and he was excited because I was going out with him.
He kissed me quickly this time and looked up when the bus stopped.
“I’ll be waiting.”
I stepped on the bus, waiting for the person in front of me to pay.
“I’ll take you to go and see that prejudice movie,” he yelled.
“Pride and Prejudice,”
I called out. “It’s very romantic.”
I sat on the bus grinning from ear to ear, and wondered if I’d have something interesting to confess at confession next quarter.