“How’s your bike?” Mum asks me, so we start talking about this new U-shaped bike-lock I want that’s made of duralumin or titanium or something and costs the earth but they keep your bike safely locked to the lamp post, rather than being ridden away by some rotten thief with a pair of bolt cutters. Poppa bought me the Malvern Star mountain bike, but he reckons any old chain and cheap K-Mart padlock is good enough to protect it. He’s a bit simple, sometimes, old Poppa. He goes on about how when he was growing up everyone just leaned their bikes against shop windows and came back half a day later and they were still there, just sitting there. And they didn’t used to lock the front door, either, just went out for the day and left the place wide open. Of course they didn’t have computers or videos in those days to steal, or street junkies either. So he doesn’t really understand about bike locks. He thinks if I’ve got to have one, I can make do with an old padlock and an iron chain. I reckon if I lean on Mum a bit, she might come good for the classy U-shaped unit.
While Mum and I are raving on about bike locks, poor Maddy is left to have a conversation with E. Thing. I can sort of hear them in the background, over Mum’s insistence that she isn’t at all sure Carlton and Brunswick are good places to ride a bike in the first place, and how Sydney Road and even Lygon Street are death traps even if you’re in a car. She seems to be trying to convince me that I’ll be run down by some huge interstate 18-wheeler if I so much as put my front wheel out into the traffic, which is true enough in some places; you’d need to be a suicidal maniac to try to ride a bike down Sydney Road.
“I know, Mum,” I say, “but the cool thing about old Melbourne suburbs like Brunswick and Carlton is all the small side streets and back lanes.” We’ve got this excellent networks of back lanes where I live, even if half of them are still cobbled with huge blocks of blue granite and shake you about if you ride fast. “If you know your way around you can avoid all the traffic.”
But Mum is ignoring this and starting on about how I should avoid the lanes and only ride down proper streets because of the risk of muggers and perverts and junkies. In fact she’s getting so worked up I expect her to start telling me to only ride down the tram tracks in the middle of Sydney Road. So I switch off and try to hear what Maddy and Edward Thing are saying to each other. I wouldn’t have thought they’d find anything to say at all, but he’s murmuring away in his posh accent and she’s lapping it all up.
Edward must have asked Maddy what school she goes to. They always do, don’t they, ask you what school you go to?
“North Carlton High,” she says.
“Oh? And what’s it like?”
What does he think it’s like? It’s like a school. But Maddy is really polite, for some reason. “It has a high ethnic component,” she tells him. This is something the Principal’s terribly proud of, and they put it in all the promotional leaflets. It doesn’t make any difference, the funding in schools like ours keeps getting cut.
“Ah,” says Edward, as if this is something very interesting indeed. “I think this is a desirable feature of well-rounded education that my boys have missed out on.”
I’ll bet they do, I think, the little private school dweebs.
“Although,” Edward says carefully, “the place isn’t nearly as homogeneous as it was when I was a boy there. There are a couple of very bright Chinese students in Tristan’s form.”
Maddy says, “Huh, that’s nothing. Our form has more boat people than a Hong Kong ferry.”
I nearly choke on my chocolate. Mum stops going on about riding down Sydney Road without a police escort and asks me if I’m all right. I say yes, I’m fine, but I do need a better bike lock and Mum says, “Oh, all right, what do they cost?” I tell her the exact price because I checked them out in Bike World the day before, and Mum fishes her check book out of her handbag and starts to write me a personal check. And a phone starts ringing in my ear.
E. Thing hauls his little mobile phone out of its holster and snaps the mouthpiece open and says, “Thring!” into it.
That’s exactly what he says. Not “Hello.” Not “Edward Thring here.” Just “Thring!”, like a word in a foreign language. Or as if his name was some famous trade-mark, like “Coke!”
I look at Maddy and Maddy looks at me, and we both have to look away to try to control ourselves. Mum hands me the check, and I’m strangling, trying not to laugh out loud. Mum is gazing at me, rather puzzled. I certainly don’t want her to think I’m laughing at her, especially when she’s being so nice and buying me a bike lock. I sort of nod my head in the direction of Thring! hoping she’s heard him and know that’s what’s breaking us up. There’s all this babble coming from his side of the table: “...don’t move until it reaches four point two oh. And we can always cover the deal with the Brazilian perps—”
It’s actually pretty bloody hysterical sitting in a coffee lounge at the same table as a tacky loon who’s raving that sort of rubbish into a mobile phone. So I push myself away from the table and say, “Look, Mum, thanks for the chocolate and the money and everything, but Maddy and I have to get back to her place to babysit.” This is true, but we don’t have to be there for two hours. I can’t stand to be here for another minute. Mum gives me a perfumey kiss, and says, “See you on the weekend, darling.” And Thring! says, “Hold on a minute, Frank,” and puts his hand over the mouthpiece on the phone, and turns to me and says, “Lovely meeting you, Jenny. And you, too, er...er....”
“Maddy,” my mother says.
“Maddy,” Thring! says confidently. Then he looks me in the eye and says, “Jenny, you must meet Tristan one day soon. I’m sure you have a lot in common.”
I can barely keep a straight face, so I just wave goodbye and Maddy and I more or less run out of the shop.
Gasping for breath, Maddy and I fall about in the Bourke Street Mall, going, “You should meet Tristan one day” in a posh way. Then Maddy was being Tristan, talking with a stuck-up preppy voice: “Oh, hello, I’m Tristan son of Thring! and I’ve got these awfully frightfully bright Chinese chums in my class. They are called Fu Manchu and Ming the Merciless.” I’m saying: “Oh, I say, we’ve got so much in common!” and “Things were far more homogeneous in my day.”
And Maddy says, “We’ve got a homo genius in our form, he’s an Eye-talian called Leonardo da Vinci.” Which is pretty good for Maddy. I wouldn’t have thought she’s even heard of Leonardo da Vinci, let alone known he was gay and where he was from. She’s more likely to think he’s a turtle. So we’re falling about and I’m holding on to Maddy to stop myself collapsing in the middle of the late-afternoon Mall when Maddy says, “Jeez, your Mum can pick them.”
“Pick what?”
“Boyfriends.”
Suddenly I’m cold all over and very, very angry at Maddy. “What are you talking about?”
“Oh, come on, Jen. She’s got to have some fun.”
“Fun? You’re bloody mad, Maddy. That’s a horrible thing to say.”
I feel like bursting out crying. Then I am crying. In the middle of the Bourke Street bloody Mall. I’m just standing there with tears rolling down my face, and my chest heaving as if something solid is stuck in the middle of my lungs. There aren’t any cars in this section of Bourke Street, which is just as well, but they let trams through—and one of them is clanging rudely at me to get out of the way. Maddy leads me to a brick bench, and a fat old Greek lady in heavy black shifts along to give us room. I wipe my eyes on my sleeves and say to Maddy, “Sorry. You’re probably right. That creep probably is Mum’s—”
I can’t finish the sentence.
So I stopped being angry at Maddy and became very angry at Mum instead. How could she?
SATURDAY, 8 APRIL, NIGHT
Anyway, we go upstairs and hang out in my bedroom. Davy sits on