One Step Read online

  That’s the way of things with Hamish Banning.

  When I put it to him he laughed. ‘That’s a good one. That’s comedy, dickhead. About as funny as me rooting your sister.’ I wasn’t sure if he actually thought that was funny or a possibility. Weird. But I had my answer. He was never going to get me a new phone.

  I told Mum and Dad, who were predictably pissed off and instantly wanted to call his parents. I begged them not to because it would lead to all kinds of humiliation and social retardness. But like any parent who wants to shame their kid, they insisted.

  My parents were actually trying to embarrass me to death over a mobile phone. I had to beg them to stop and told them I would get a new phone, even if it meant one of those manky petrol station ones for $29. That led to a whole new line of questioning over where I would get $29 to pay for the phone, and the new SIM card and how I would be able to top the phone up after texting all night. It went on and on.

  And on.

  What was their problem? Why was everything so hard for my parents? Why couldn’t they just relax and go with stuff instead of making everything impossible?

  In the end I said, ‘Fine, I won’t have a phone. I’ll have nothing. Who cares? I don’t. I don’t care about anything, especially a stupid phone. I’d rather not have one. I’d rather not owe you.’

  To be honest, I was bluffing and got double bluffed by Dad who gave me a ‘Fine, Dylan. Fantastic, actually. That’s great news. Don’t have a phone. I didn’t have one when I was your age and I was very happy, you’ll probably find you’re better off as well.’

  I couldn’t work out if he was winding me up. He’s such a tool – how could life be better without a phone? Obviously not having one would be, like, the worst thing in the world. And it was, at first. But then, amazingly, it was actually okay. In the beginning, it was as if someone had cut my hand off, but after a couple of phoneless days, it was kind of cool. Mum and Dad weren’t able to find me as easily – they weren’t able to get hold of me or send me messages with something to do or somewhere to be.

  It bothered Mum the most. She tried leaving me alone, like it had been for her when she was growing up, but it sent her mental. That’s when she got the phone-me-down from her brother. As much as I’d enjoyed being all phoneless and hipster, getting back on line was kind of fine by me. But it would have been better if the handset was just the tiniest bit Smart.

  And my uncle’s music was terrible.

  I got on the bus after Madison and Ashley and sat a couple of rows in front and across from them, hoping to be close enough to hear stuff without having to try too hard. They might even drag me into the conversation, but they weren’t talking much, just listening to music on Ashley’s phone through shared earplugs. Occasionally they’d ‘OMG’ or ‘Love that bit,’ but that was about it.

  I gently ran a finger over the band-aid to make sure it was still there, then remembered I had a sore neck and massaged accordingly. Of course Madison would be watching, and she’d tell Ashley that I had a sore neck, too. I know if I were with one of my mates and Madison had told me she had a sore neck, I’d tell my mate. For sure.

  As school loomed, the bus filled. Big kids, little kids, bullies, bogans, bitches, sucks, slobs and sluts; St Dom’s had it all. I sank lower in my seat, head against the window, and tried to remember what I’d forgotten.

  There was a stirring downstairs, but that was it. Today may be a great day!

  I was in no real hurry to get off the bus, but when I saw Ryan putting his bike into the rack, I went for him. We’ve pretty much been besties forever. Until last year we’d lived exactly eighty-seven giant steps from each other’s front doors, but last year his family moved a postcode away. His place was now one main road and eight streets, or a little over five hundred giant steps from ours: it might as well have been five hundred miles.

  I hardly ever saw him outside school now.

  He’d quit the football team because everyone was too big, and I’d quit debating because everyone said it was too gay. At least, everyone who didn’t do debating thought debaters were gay, and I was spending more time with those kinds of kids.

  Ryan had a knack for arguments, so he was a natural debater. It didn’t matter if he believed in his argument or not, he was always able to come up with a good reason to think he was right.

  Mr Whitehead, the debating teacher, thought he had Ryan cold when he’d got him to argue in the affirmative for letting the Japanese grow their whaling industry to include the east coast of Australia.

  Ryan stared at him for a while, then eventually said, ‘Seriously? There isn’t a good reason.’

  Mr Whitehead bowed his head before saying, ‘but if you had to argue the affirmative.’

  ‘Okay then,’ Ryan said. ‘The world needs balance, right? You need Ying and Yang. We only know how sweet things are when we put them against sour. Movies need good guys and bad guys, because in the end, our brains and our hearts want us to side with someone. Even in films where everyone’s bad, it’s all about shades of bad so we can find good. You see where I’m going?’

  If anyone did, they weren’t letting on.

  ‘There’s a lot to like about the Japanese. Sushi, Toyota, Sony, robots, futons and some really weird TV. But to know how much we love them, we need to know what we can hate about them as well. How do we do that? It’s either keep bringing up World War Two and torture, or we let them harpoon something we adore on our own doorstep. We can hate them for that, but love them for the other stuff. Pretty straightforward.’ Ryan held his hands up like scales. ‘Ying and Yang, love and hate. We love the Japanese who don’t eat whales, but hate the dirty Japs who do.’

  Mr Whitehead looked perplexed. ‘I’m not sure that’s going to do it, Ryan,’ he said. ‘And it’s possibly racist. Not a bad start, though, off the top of your head.’

  Ryan’s family are TV-free during the week, so they tend to read the paper and talk more. As a result, they seem to know lots about a lot. And they talk about everything from school to sport to politics, stuff that rarely gets a mention at our place. It’s funny, because he used to come over, just to watch TV. He’d walk in and plonk, never taking his eyes off the box. He’d want to stay for dinner so he could watch it while he ate. He loved it. And I wanted to go to his house to see what they were all yapping about.

  No one seems to talk much at my place, but Ryan and his mum talk about everything. Even things that boys shouldn’t talk to their mums about – personal things mums couldn’t or wouldn’t understand. Nothing’s off limits. He even told her when he had his first wet dream because he didn’t know what was happening to him. He thought he’d wet the bed, only it was more like Clag than piss and it was kind of pumping out of him and it was hot and he was, like, ‘Holy shit, what’s happening to me? Aliens are coming out of my dick.’

  He told her even before he told me, and he only told me because his mum said to ask me if I’d had one, and then we could kind of talk about it together. Weird. I can’t believe he told her, and that he told me he told her! And I really can’t believe that he had a wet dream before I did.

  Then, even worse, his mum told his dad, and the two of them actually sat down and talked about what was going on with his body and his dick and I deadset would have died right there and then. Jesus, can you imagine it? When he went to bed that night, his dad actually gave him a hand-towel that he could use for wanking, ‘cos you’re going to be doing a fair bit of it, from memory’. And his dad told him to put the towel in the wash from time to time and that would be that. Stuff like that doesn’t even happen in movies, but then Ryan’s family’s never been normal like mine.

  In a way I wish my dad had been a bit more sympathetic to my teenageness. During a nit infestation one weekend, every sheet had to come off the beds; it’s what always happens – all the sheets, all the towels, all the PJs, everything goes into the wash. Then we have to go to the bathroom and get the green dream rubbed on our heads and wear those dicky green showercaps unti
l our scalps burn. It sucks. Dad hates it the most, and he’s got nothing to worry about because he’s bald as.

  So on this weekend, Dad came into my room, it can’t have been any later than eight o’clock in the morning. He yelled, ‘Get up, Slobbervich,’ and ripped my doona off. ‘Get your sheets off and go to the bathroom, your littlest sister’s got nits again, we’re all going to pay.’ Then he saw a sock in my bed and asked what it was doing there. ‘Socks to bed, mate – it’s summer, what are ya, putting it over ya dick to keep it warm?’ But I think while he was talking he’d worked out what the sock was for.

  I just looked dumb and he shook his head and walked out.

  It’s not as if I wanted to talk about wanking with him – I’d rather be dragged around Bathurst by the nuts behind a V8 – it’s just that Ryan’s mum and dad didn’t shame him about it. The look on Dad’s face made me feel as if I’d done something disgusting, like I was some kind of pervert. Maybe things were different when he was a teenager. Maybe he didn’t have the urge to purge as often as I seemed to.

  Ryan was going through his usual, excessive bike-locking procedure. ‘Hey,’ I said. ‘You know no one will be able to steal that piece of crap if you lock it up, don’t you?’

  ‘Hilarious,’ he deadpanned back at me. ‘You know the Malvern Star Skidstar is a classic, especially this one with the original GT 3 internal hub. It’s irreplaceable. One day, when you’re ready, you’ll understand cool.’

  It’s funny that Ryan said that, because he is the poster boy for not cool. His bike is a joke. He found it on council clean-up and it must be from the 1970s. His dad got new tyres for it, swapped the handlebars with a different bike they’d found and put new brake pads on it. Perfect, Ryan reckons. But despite what he said, the Skidstar wasn’t cool at all – even if it did get him where he wanted to go.

  I caught myself in the reflection of a window.

  Not tall, not short, not fat, not thin. Just normal, I suppose. I either need to get a bit more muscle on my shoulders or a bit of guts off my guts. But for now, in that particular reflection, I reckon everything looked okay. Pretty normal. Even my zits looked all right, maybe they weren’t as bad as I thought. Mum always said that, but she’s my mum. I pulled my shoulders back the way she always tells me to but let them roll forward again – it made it look like I had bigger chest muscles if I did that, and it was easier to suck my guts in.

  ‘What have you got first?’ I said.

  ‘Tech,’ said Ryan. ‘Shoot me. Seriously. I can’t believe that idiot is spending a week teaching us how to write a paragraph. We know how to write a paragraph, we’re in Year Nine. It’s what English is for. English is for writing, maths is for counting, Tech is for slacking off and making stuff that we’ll never use again. Speaking of which, how is your mum enjoying that breakfast tray you made her?’

  ‘It lives outside on the barbeque.’

  ‘Why would you put it on the barbeque?’

  ‘There’s a hole in the barbeque lid, and the tray blocks the hole. At least it’s useful. How’s yours?’

  Ryan laughed. ‘I thought it would have lasted longer when I put it in the fire, but maybe it was all the lacquer I used that made it burn so fast.’

  He finally finished locking his bike and stood up, getting between me and my reflection. ‘Monday, eh? Only five days to go until the weekend when we count down the days to the new week. So much counting, so much fun.’

  ‘Monday-itis.’

  I heard the psssssshhhhhssst of the air brakes as another bus pulled up and I scanned the kids getting off. A few Year Sevens were first out, then the magic that is Isabella Crentin arrived at the top of the stairs. In terms of absolute hotness, she’s underrated. She’s popular, and she’s definitely in the group of girls I’m not really meant to talk to, but she’s never had a boyfriend because no one seems to like her like that. Or if they do, they’re too scared to do much about it.

  Isabella Crentin is potential plus. Just the way she came down the stairs of the bus was hot. She was watching where she was going, not who was watching her, and once she hit solid ground, her hair flicked back as her head came up and she was looking straight at me. There was no mistaking it. She was smiling as if she meant it, as if she was happy to see me. That upturned curve of her lips screamed that I might be potential plus for her, too.

  She was coming straight for me. Her cheeks gave way to those little dimples as her mouth widened to a broad smile. I smiled, too, pulling my shoulders back and standing up straight, Mum’s way.

  ‘Hey,’ she said. ‘How ’bout that weeg-end?’ She talks like a bit of a bogan.

  It took me by surprise that Isabella was talking to me, that she was actually asking about my weekend. It shouldn’t have, we’ve talked before, about normal stuff, nothing special. ‘What have you got for lunch?’ and, ‘If you could kill any teacher, who would it be, and how?’ But still, it’s not as if she’s ever arrived at school and headed straight for me and asked me how my weekend was, or how I felt about something or anything like that. It was intense.

  How was my weekend? It was okay, I guess. I didn’t do much, there was nothing special going on. Should I tell her about my uncle dropping by with his kids on Sunday? Probably not. That would be boring for her, except that my uncle plays in a band and he had his new CD so we got to listen to it before anyone else. But it’s not as if they’re a big band so she’d know them and be, like, ‘Coldplay? That’s your uncle? You have to have me round when he’s over!’

  Dad’s brother’s band is all right, but they’re definitely not cool enough to mention to Isabella. Not first off. Maybe we could talk about them once we’d settled in and got comfortable. I could just say my weekend was good. Or I could be a bit cooler and say it was shit, or maybe I should just stick in the middle and say it was okay.

  That might be best, the middle kind of cool.

  And as my mouth formed the start of the ‘o’ in ‘okay,’ from behind me I heard the words, ‘You’re not going to believe it, even after I’ve told you. It was mental!’

  Hannah Macrae busted past me on her way to Isabella. She practically knocked me over. Isabella must have been talking to her all along – but I was so certain it was me. Even now, with Hannah hugging her, it felt like she was looking at me and smiling. It’d be just like Hannah to steal one of my moments like this.

  ‘She was talking to me, wasn’t she, Ryan?’

  But sometime during the fantasy fog of Isabella Crentin, Ryan had taken off.

  Onward, I thought. Onward and schoolward. I picked up my trombone with all the bad-ass attitude I could muster and headed for class.

  English with Mr Baird The Beard. He was working towards hipster-cool. He’s got one of those long, skinny beards to offset his short-back-and-sides haircut with the gelled wave on top. He’s always on about feelings. About getting in touch and letting go and being in the moment. When he talks, he uses lots of hands and head wobbling, and the girls love him. I suppose he’s alternative and he’s always pushing us for more.

  Mostly, I like him.

  ‘Dudes and Dudettes,’ he said once the bell had gone and we were settled. ‘I trust you had a gracious weekend, you surfed on your skateboards at the very least. Hopefully one of you got away with something you shouldn’t have.’

  Grinter and Ewan let out a ‘Yeeeew!’, which made everyone laugh.

  ‘Well, I’ll be honest with you, I didn’t do any of that good stuff. I was marking papers. Your papers. I was marking your creative writing essays and I have to say I was –’

  ‘Yeeeeeeew!’ went Grinter again.

  ‘Not feeling very “yeeeeeeeew” as in yeeees, Grinter. In fact it was more “neeeeeeeeeeeew” as in no, actually. Your work was generally disappointing, which is a concern because we’re getting closer to the time when it has to be better. Exams are up soon, you’re about to put yourselves in a position where you have to choose subjects that will affect your futures. Seriously, without wanting to sound like yo
ur parents, the choices you make now will affect the next phase of your lives. We’ve got work to do.’

  ‘It’s all good, Mr Beard,’ said Paul Van Hagen. ‘No worries.’

  Mr Baird tipped his head towards Paul. ‘Not “all good” at all, my cliché-wielding friend, not for everyone, anyway. And possibly “all worries” for some people, if you get me, Paul?’

  ‘All good, yep. Got it,’ he said again. But he’d stopped looking at the teacher and was busy getting a handle on his fairly impressive triceps.

  ‘Now, the usual few did well and we had one unusual to join the fewsual. Congratulations to Dylan.’ I felt a surprising warmth spread through my chest. ‘Mind if I read some aloud?’

  I nodded.

  ‘You mind, or it’s okay? Which is it?’

  Of course I didn’t mind. ‘I don’t care,’ I grunted with a shrug of my shoulders. I was so happy and it sucked I couldn’t show it.

  ‘I’m reading it,’ Mr Baird said. ‘It’s great. It’s a really courageous piece of writing, it’s just the sort of thing I’ve been trying to get you boys in particular to do. I just want you to let go, a bit. To offer yourselves upon the plinth of emotional salvation, to express and challenge and divulge.’

  He had his hands out like a TV preacher. When school first started and he talked like this, we all thought he was a nutjob.

  ‘I just want you to stop being such fricken Johnny Rambos and show some heart. There’s more to life than wrestling and war with the aliens. But this, Dylan’s story, this was good . . . Buckle up:’

  Me, Tree. By Dylan Hester

  They call me many things. Beautiful. Nature. Nuisance. Tree.

  They see me, but do they ever really wonder what it feels like to live alone: dense and deserted and lost.

  I am creative, cunning, very much alive, despite spending the chill looking dead.

  You may never wonder what it is to be a tree.