And his mum didn’t know that if Josh wasn’t such a screw-up, there would have been three little people asleep on the shell-patterned pull-out in her bungalow’s spare room, not two.
Josh pushed his palms hard against his eyes for a moment, then pulled them away and shook his head from side to side, loosening that thought away.
Still, maybe this was going to be a good year. He stood up and stretched, slipped his thongs back on and started towards the bedroom door.
Tap-tap, tap-tap. Josh turned, looked at the window.
That bloody tree, it was going to smash into this place one day. He’d get on to cutting it back tomorrow.
Lou
Graduation Day
1 November, 2005
If Lou’s parents mentioned her brother Rob’s medical degree one more time, she was going to whip them with the tassel of her mortarboard.
‘Is your brother a heart surgeon or something?’ Gretchen hissed in her ear as Lou’s mum, just a few feet away, told the bored-looking parent of another graduate that the teaching department’s shindig was not a patch on the one over at the medical school.
‘Better class of finger food, if I’m being honest,’ Annabelle was saying, her English voice just one notch too loud for the setting – the glass annexe of the university’s great hall. ‘Not so . . . fried.’ As she said this, her eyes were passing over the tray of mini spring rolls being offered to her by a stoned-looking undergrad in a greying white shirt.
‘No,’ Lou said. ‘He’s training to be a GP. My mum’s never been so excited about anything. Ever.’
Lou’s dad Brian was on Lou’s other side, also talking about Rob, but with less focus on the canapés, more on the convenience of having a doctor in the family. He was telling Gretchen’s dad, a crumpled-looking ex-rocker in a biker jacket and five days of stubble, that it was ‘boys like my Robert’ who were going to save them all.
‘Cancer’s going to get sixty per cent of us, you know, um . . .’
‘Zeke,’ said Gretchen’s dad, looking past Brian’s right ear as if searching for someone less depressing to talk to. ‘I’m Zeke.’
Gretchen hissed at Lou, ‘He’s already had it. Throat. Too many ciggies. Speaking of which . . .’ She started rummaging in the shoulder bag she was wearing over her black graduation gown.
Lou groaned. ‘My parents are the most embarrassing people in the world. When will this fucking thing be finished?’
Gretchen widened her eyes and looked around with an exaggerated crane of her neck. ‘Your parents? Look around, love. This place is heaving with the people we’ve been hiding for four years. They’re at peak embarrassing. Today’s the validation of everything they’ve been bloody paying and praying for all our sorry little lives. We’re finally qualified to do something.’
‘Annabelle and Brian haven’t been paying for anything, Gretch; Rob sucked up all of that gravy. Haven’t you seen my student loans?’ Lou put her head on her friend’s shoulder and leaned a little, lifting one of her high-heeled feet off the floor. ‘How do people walk in these, like, all day?’
‘We’ll never have to know, Lou-Lou, we’re teachers.’
‘Darling . . .’ It was her mum, suddenly at her shoulder. ‘Don’t be showing everyone your stockinged feet. I think you can manage a proper pair of shoes for one day.’
Gretchen grimaced at Lou and began to move towards the door, waving her packet of cigarettes behind her back. Lou watched Zeke excuse himself from Brian’s cancer lecture and follow his daughter outside.
Annabelle slipped her arm around Lou’s waist, her fingers just a little too firm on the flesh above the waistband of Lou’s long, flowy skirt. ‘You feeling happy, BB?’
‘Don’t call me that, Mum.’ BB was Lou’s family nickname. Baby Bear. She hated it. Rob, of course, was Bear, the original. ‘I think we can all agree that I’m not a baby anymore.’
I’m being a bitch, she thought. To my mum, on my graduation day.
‘Oh dear.’ Annabelle’s arm tightened a little around Lou’s waist. ‘I’ve upset you again.’
‘Can’t do much right by you, can we?’ said Brian, at Lou’s other side now that his audience had fled.
The three of them stood together, looking around the room at all the other young women (and it was overwhelmingly women) in black, and all the family members holding drinks and eating the deep-fried spring rolls. For a moment, none of them spoke.
And then Annabelle said, ‘I suppose this is it, really, isn’t it?’
‘It?’ Brian wasn’t following.
‘Both of you, off. Gone into the world.’ Annabelle’s voice had dropped back to her ‘real’ English voice, not the one she’d been using on strangers, modelled on that of Princess Di.
The accent was all part of Annabelle’s obsession with reinvention, something she still hadn’t let go of in the almost three decades since she had left northern England in pursuit of sunshine and upward mobility. She’d worked hard to knock the flat northern vowels off her accent, to pick up her dropped H’s. And now here she was, with two children who’d graduated uni.
‘Mum, I’ve been living out of home for a year,’ Lou pointed out, irritated.
‘Yes, but now you’ll get a proper job. Meet someone. Start a real life.’
I’ve already met someone, thought Lou. And I can’t bloody wait to get away from this damn party to see him. Luca would be at the pub in an hour, waiting to see Lou in her cap and gown. He had some ideas about what he wanted to do with that, he’d told her. Luca said things like that. It made her blush. It was making her blush now, thinking about it.
‘Maybe another teacher.’ Brian was getting on board with Annabelle’s vision.
‘Or a deputy head,’ Annabelle added, aiming high, as always.
‘No, darling, they’re a bit too old for –’
‘Dad! Mum!’ Lou interrupted. ‘Can we not? I want to teach children; I’m not husband-hunting.’ She lifted her heels out of her shoes again. ‘This isn’t really such a big deal, you know. In fact, if you want to leave . . .’
‘Leave?’ Annabelle’s voice rose back up an octave. ‘But we’re taking you and Gretchen out for dinner! Rob’s coming too.’
Shit. Lou had missed this arrangement somehow. ‘But I’ve got plans. You know, with my friends.’
‘You can have plans with your friends after dinner,’ her dad said firmly. ‘Your brother has changed his plans to be with us tonight, so it’s the least you can do.’
Lou doubted that Luca was prepared to wait. In the three months they’d been seeing each other, she’d got the distinct impression that if she wasn’t available at precisely the moment he summoned her to his side, she would be swapped out for the next available candidate. And tonight the pubs of Sydney’s Newtown were going to be heaving with young women in the mood to cast off the shackles of parental expectation. Possibly in Luca’s direction.
She pulled free of her mother’s pincer grip and reached into the pocket of her gown for her Nokia. ‘Okay. I’ve just got to make a call.’