Hank was still looking at me, annoyed, and I gathered my thoughts quickly.
“This is June,” I said.
He nodded, but I could see he wasn’t really noticing her. It made for a nice change to see a guy, even if it was my brother, whose eyes didn’t bulge at the sight of her.
“Hey, June,” he said absently. “I’m off to work now. Helen, did you remember to buy dishcloths, like Mom asked?”
I sighed. “I forgot. Can’t Mom do it on her way home?”
“Pep will be closed by then.”
I kicked a few stones of gravel into the gutter, where they sank silently into the rubbish-clogged slush that was welling from the manhole. “Isn’t there anywhere else she could go, like Clicks?” I knew the answer even before I asked.
Our cemented driveway, its uneven cracks being pushed even further open by determined moss, and our low wall which leered at an angle at us over the gnarled roots of the neighbour’s tree, shouted the answer to me. Since my dad lost his job and had to start up again at a construction company, everything we bought had to be the cheapest.
“Never mind,” I snapped. “I’ll do it. When will you be back?”
“I don’t know,” Hank replied.
“I suppose you’ll be practising for the competition afterwards?” I said, resentful that once again I would end up doing the dishes while Hank had another lesson with Madame Pandora.
“What competition?” asked June.
“There’s a yearly piano competition at my school that’s open to all grade elevens and twelves in PE,” answered Hank. “The winner …” He stopped, looking suddenly much older than seventeen.
“Whoever wins gets piles of money,” I said. “Hank will be able to study medicine and become a doctor, like he’s always wanted to.” I turned to look at the cracking driveway and wobbly wall and imagined Hank being able to fix them.
My brother followed my gaze and jumped back onto his bike. “See you later,” he shouted over his back, his shoulders hunched over his handlebars.
“We’ve got a stack of dishcloths that were given to my sister when she got married,” offered June hesitantly. “She doesn’t need them, and they’re just taking up space. You’re welcome to them if you like.”
I chewed the skin on my lip, unsure.
“You’d be doing us a favour, really.”
“Well, if you put it like that …” It sounded better than being given her sister’s old leftovers.
“Do you need to let your mom know you’re coming over to my house?”
I shook my head. She wouldn’t even know that I hadn’t been home.
“Your brother must be really good at the piano,” said June.
“I suppose so,” I said grudgingly. “He certainly should be, considering the time he spends practising. I never get enough chance to play.”
“You must be pretty talented too,” she said thoughtfully, “for Madame Pandora to take you on as a student. Do you enjoy playing?”
I wasn’t sure what to answer, realising that no one had actually ever asked me that before. Even I had never asked myself that before.
“I don’t know.” I tried to imagine my life without playing piano. “I just kind of … do it, without thinking why.”
That wasn’t quite true, but I didn’t want to tell her the truth. I was secretly hoping that I could also go to the Music Academy in Mill Park. In my more optimistic daydreams, I went one up on my brother and became star pupil of the school.
“Ahhhh, she has the heart!” Madame Pandora would at last exclaim in her funny accent, clasping her little bejewelled fingers, which always clicked against the piano keys until she threw off her rings in exasperation.
No one actually knew where she came from. Some people thought she was Iranian, Hank suspected she was from Greece, and Kean maintained she was putting on the accent and had been born in Pofadder. I secretly thought she was like Mary Poppins – no one would ever know from where or how she had arrived, and she would never tell. And one day, when her work was done here, she would just vanish into thin air.
“I like playing when I’m angry,” I said, deciding to tell June a half truth. “I crash the keyboard and drive everyone crazy. Last week the neighbours complained twice.”
“You must get angry quite often,” she said, startled. I felt as though she’d leaned too close, like she’d pried open a sealed corner of my mind.
“Nah, the walls are just really thin,” I said quickly.
“I wouldn’t have blamed you for being angry this morning.” June fiddled with her sandwich paper, unsure whether she should have brought up the topic. “When your satchel broke.”
“What? Oh that?” I laughed, turning my face away so she couldn’t see my cheeks go red. “I’d forgotten it already.”
“I hadn’t,” she said quietly. “When everyone just stood there … It was horrible.”
Why would you care? I wanted to shout. It’s not like you’ve ever had to experience that! I felt like Dr Dolittle’s Pushmi-pullyu, the two-headed unicorn-gazelle freak from the children’s book Mom had read me as a child: I was torn in two directions at once, both angry with June for being so perfect, and grudgingly grateful. No one else cared how I felt.
“Thanks,” I muttered.
June scrunched up her sandwich paper and put it back into her lunchbox. I never even had wax paper around my sandwiches. It was like hers were more delicate, more aristocratic than normal people’s sandwiches and had to be protected against bruising, like in the story of the princess and the pea.
“We kept chickens once,” she said, as we turned into her street. It wasn’t particularly fancy or smart, but I noticed there was no litter on the pavement, and the gutters were clear. “There was one that was a little different from the others. The rest were all brown and well fed. This one was softer, redder and smaller. It never got to the feeding trough in time, so I used to take it extra grain. One day, when I was at school, it injured itself and was bleeding. The others …”
“What happened?” I asked, although I was pretty sure I didn’t want to know.
“They pecked and pecked at it.” It sounded like there were tears in June’s voice. “When I came home, it was just lying there.”
“Dead?” I asked, feeling sick.
“Nearly. I managed to revive it, but it was never the same again. I blamed myself for weeks for not protecting it better. It carried a huge, ugly scar for the rest of its life, where the feathers wouldn’t grow.”
“That was a bit like how I felt today,” I said quietly. I couldn’t believe I was admitting it to her: I never wanted to tell Mom or Dad stuff like this, especially when they came home so late with drawn, tired faces, and I’d be scared to share it with someone else at school, in case they used it against me.
June linked arms with me, like a real friend. I imagined I was a Pushmi-pullyu again, with two heads on either side of my body, one absurdly comforted that someone should care, and the other one straining in the opposite direction because, after all, she could never really understand.