Page 104 of Kiwi Sin
Priya told Aisha, “See? This is what I put up with!”
“So if you’re working every weekend,” Aisha said, “that probably means you’re not going to be able to come over.”
“Not for a while,” I said. “You could still come to dinner at the weekend, though. I can give you a lift home afterward, so your mum doesn’t have to drive you, or you could sleep over. Gabriel’s going to be there Friday and Saturday nights, and I’m cooking, so you could come on either of those nights. Gray says it’s all right for me to invite people, and your parents will like it, because there’s no alcohol. Well, Gray sometimes has a beer.”
“Ooh,” Priya said. “Extreme fun for her, watching you and your boyfriend not notice anybody else in the room. Not to mention Daisy and Gray, becausetheyjust gotengaged. Reallyengaged.Witha ring.You can come talk to me,”she told Aisha.“Somebodyhas to.”
Aisha did, and after that, she spent as much time with Priya as with me, and started helping her with Shakespeare, too. I was sad, and I wasn’t. They liked the same things, and maybe Frankie was right. Maybe I needed to find friends who liked talking about the things I liked, animals and gardening and knitting and babies and flowers.
Wait. Ididhave friends like that, or I almost did. I had Iris, for one. Her conversation wasn’t exactly ordinary, but it was interesting and funny and brutally honest. I had Laila, for that matter, who loved babies exactly as much as I did, and had her own business, too. I wanted to learn things, and Iris and Laila knew so many things.
So—yeh. School. I went through my days like that, ticking off my classes like numbers on a calendar. They were better this year, because in Year 12, you didn’t have compulsory subjects other than English and were meant to study for the career you wanted. I was doing Textiles, Food and Nutrition, Business Studies, and Photography. I already knew almost everything in the textiles and food classes, to my disappointment, but I still had hopes for photography. I wanted to take better photos of my knitwear. So far, it was mostly things I’d learnt from Laila, but hopefully there’d be more later.
The business studies course was more about corporate structures than about setting up your own firm and keeping the accounts, though, and I didn’t care much about bigger things. I wanted to learn aboutsmallthings, so I read ahead in the book and looked up bookkeeping online and found software you could use for it, and wished there was a way I could just study that.
Instead of biology and maths, though, I was doing Digital Technology, because you could learn to make a website. I needed a website, now that Frankie wasn’t going to be here to do it. I knew that none of my studies were likely to lead to university, and Daisy could see that too and wasn’t best pleased, but there wasn’t much I could do about it.
The talk swirled around me before every class—none of which Aisha shared, because needless to say,shewasn’t studyingTextiles and Food and Nutrition—and I knitted until it was time to start, listened to chat about boyfriends and films and shopping, and didn’t feel lonely and embarrassed anymore. Going to school was a job, that was all. I’d done heaps of jobs, and learning to create a website wasn’t working in a communal laundry for ten hours a day. I read ahead in the book in that class, too, and asked the teacher questions and practiced, and felt like in this, at least, I was getting somewhere.
I was alone in my bedroom of the yurt now, too, because Priya had wanted her own room, and I lay in a too-big, too-empty bed every night and missed Gabriel so much, I hurt. I knitted, and worked in the garden, and cooked dinner, and did my homework, and sold my work at the farmer’s market, and …
Waited.
For three weeks.
In the fourth week, everything changed.
44
HIS OWN MAN
Gabriel
The last Sunday in February dawned bright and hot. I went to the beach that afternoon with Hannah and the kids—Drew was on a two-week trip out of the country with his team—and played with the older kids in the water while Hannah held baby Peter and splashed in the shallows. Afterward, Hannah went for a long swim despite the frigid water, and I made a sandcastle with the girls and kept Peter busy with his own separate pile in hopes that he wouldn’t knock the castle down, which he seemed oddly determined on. Not so much a builder as a disruptor, Peter.
As for Jack, he sat beside me, ignored the sandcastle, and told me about his rugby team, and how people thought you’d be as good as your dad when you weren’t. I knew how that felt, so I tried to tell him.
“You can’t convince people with words, not really,” I finally said. “You just keep doing your best and don’t say too much, and people will eventually find out who you are and judge you for it.”
“Judging me is what Idon’twant, though,” he said. “That’s what they alwaysdo.”
“Mm,” I said, helping Madeleine overturn a little bucket to create a tower. “What would you call it, then, when you watch and listen, the way you and I both do?”
“I’mthinking,”Jack said.
“About what?” I asked.
He was silent for a long minute, then said, “I guess that’s judging?”
“Yeh,” I said. “It is. And it’s OK. People will misjudge you sometimes, too. They may think you’re dull when you’re just quiet and responsible. They can think so. Some people probably thought your dad was dull when he was a kid, too.”
“No, they didn’t,” Jack said. “Everybody thinks my dad is awesome. They did a film about him, even, and how good he was at rugby and school andeverythingwhen he was a kid. How he was Head Boy and all.”
“D’you think everybody’s telling the truth about how they felt back then?” I asked. “D’you think they evenrememberthe truth?”
Another long pause, and Jack said, “You mean because he’s famous now and everybody likes him, so they don’t want to say how they felt before. Maybe they think they’ll look jealous if they say that.”
“Yeh,” I said. “See? You understand that, because you’re a good judge.”
