This is the person she was hiding from, he realised, and I don’t want her to go home with him. The thought shocked him, gave him a little jolt. What’s that about?
Coldplay was over. The busker started singing something by Ben Lee. Josh had spent way too much time the past winter working through this album on the bed with his guitar, and obviously so had the busker.
‘We’re All in This Together’.
The girl kept looking at him. Bandana kept talking at her. And then she looked back at Bandana for a moment, raised both her hands – she had a little backpack on her back, and a silver charm bracelet on her wrist, Josh noticed – and pushed him away, gently but firmly, and walked past him.
She’s walking towards me, Josh realised, as the girl passed the kebab queue and the busker and kept going, still looking at him. Shit. What now?
And then she was there, right in front of him, and Josh could see that her eyes were still wet and her nose was running, just a little. He was about to say something – he had no idea what – when she pushed her hair back from her face and said, ‘Pretend I’m with you. Let’s walk.’
He liked her voice; it was deeper than he’d expected.
The girl grabbed his arm, pulled it out of his pocket and grasped his hand. She gave him a tug. ‘Let’s go.’
‘Okay.’ As Josh closed his fingers around her hand and began to turn, he glanced back at Bandana, who was watching them, exhaling a cloud of smoke. The last thing Josh saw before he and the girl started walking away down King Street hand in hand was the bandana guy pulling his hand away from the cigarette in his mouth and giving them both the finger.
When the busker, the kebab shop and the angry middle finger were a couple of blocks behind them, the girl said to Josh, ‘Nothing is going to happen. Between us, I mean. I just needed to get away from that guy.’ She let go of his hand and wiped her nose on the sleeve of her black jacket.
‘I know,’ said Josh quickly. You were the one who kissed me, he thought but didn’t say. Instead he said, ‘I don’t even know who you are.’
They stopped to cross the road and both looked back over their shoulders at the same moment, catching each other’s eye for a fraction of a second as they did it. And Josh felt suddenly ridiculous, because he was being rejected by this girl before he had even decided he was interested in her, and why was that such a familiar feeling?
‘Why don’t I just get you a cab?’ he suggested, turning towards her as a group of stumbling students fell past them into the road, crossing against the lights he was obediently waiting for.
‘I don’t live far away,’ she said. ‘I’ll be fine.’ Then she looked up at him and said, ‘I’m Lou. I graduated today. I’m going to be a teacher.’
‘Nice.’ Josh wasn’t sure what else to say, so he said, ‘I’m Josh.’ I’m a . . . what am I? A musician? A carpenter? Whatever.
‘I just had a bad night,’ she went on in her deep voice, and her eyes, even behind the rings of smudgy black crap around them, had something like a laugh in them. She raked her hands through her long dark hair and shifted a bit in her sparkly little shoes. ‘And I just needed to get away from that guy. And I probably shouldn’t have kissed you.’
‘It’s okay,’ he said. ‘I have weird nights too.’
She smiled at that.
The lights changed and they both stepped onto the road.
‘I’ll walk you home,’ Josh offered. ‘Make sure you’re safe.’
Lou laughed, and her laugh had a little gravel in it. ‘Look, that’s nice and everything. But I don’t know who you are either. I have no idea if I’m safe with you.’
‘You are,’ said Josh. ‘I’m one of the good guys.’
And as he said it, he believed it, even as he hated himself for it, just a little. His mum’s face suddenly came into his head, talking to him in the car on the way to every teenage party he’d ever gone to. ‘Girls are people too, Joshy,’ Emma would say. ‘I’m a person, right? And your sisters, they’re people, right? Don’t forget that when your body’s telling you girls are just things for you to take. Don’t be your dad.’ He could feel how much he’d wanted her to stop saying that. How it made his stomach clench and his teeth grind. Still, treating women like people had served him pretty well, as it turned out. They seemed to like it.
‘That is exactly what a bad guy would say,’ Lou said.
But she kept walking alongside him anyway.
Lou
Lou stood squinting into the sun, searching for Gretchen across a heaving mass of sandy, salty, barely clad bodies.
Rita was holding her hand and twisting forwards and backwards, straining Lou’s wrist with every turn, and Stella was standing two feet away, sulking because her mother had enforced a hat-wearing policy.
‘I’m taking it off the moment you stop looking at me,’ she huffed.
‘Then I won’t stop looking at you,’ Lou replied, her hand shading her eyes as she scanned the beach.
‘You’re not even looking at me now!’
‘I’m always looking at you, I’m your mother.’ Lou shot her a stern stare. ‘Stop moaning and help me find Gretchen.’
‘Will she be with JoJo?’ asked Rita, still spinning.
I hope not, thought Lou. Gretchen had broken up with Johanna’s father almost a year ago, but Barton still asked her to take his twelve-year-old daughter from a long-ago relationship for occasional weekends and holidays, and Gretchen, who loved the girl, was glad to oblige. Lou respected her friend’s commitment, but the presence of JoJo, needy and at a deeply observant age, really impeded adult conversation.
‘I don’t know, darling. Can you stop twisting my arm off, please?’
It was hot. Finding a park had taken thirty nightmarish minutes, with the volume of the girls’ complaints escalating in the back seat with every loop of the packed suburban blocks.
‘I just want to go swimming!’ Rita started twisting again.
‘There she is, Mum!’ Stella cried.
Lou’s eyes followed her daughter’s pointing finger and there was Gretchen, in a broad straw hat and a polka-dot one-piece, her sailors’ tatts on full display under the shoulder straps and peeping from its boy-legs. She was leaning back on her arms surveying the beach, headphones in, nodding her head to a silent beat.
She’s looking for us, too, thought Lou, and a surge of love for her friend welled up inside her. God, I’m happy to see you, she thought. And God, I need to talk to you.
‘Come on!’ Stella ran towards Gretchen as Lou hoisted her giant beach bag onto her shoulder and bent down for the sun umbrella at her feet, Rita still clinging to her.
By the time she’d picked her way through pinkish backpackers and toddlers wielding giant plastic dump trucks to Gretchen’s tasteful palm-patterned towel, her friend and Stella were hugging.
‘My favourite nieces!’ Gretchen was shouting.
‘Gretch, you have actual nieces,’ Lou reminded her, as Rita let go of her mother to join the embrace.
‘You know I like your girls better.’ Gretchen looked up at Lou. ‘Hello and happy new year to you too, lady.’