Gravity Is the Thing Read online

  Do they exercise, eat a lot of Weet-Bix, to build it up? Was it that size because he was seventeen years old, or because he had made it that size?

  That ridiculous size.

  I was just feeling hostile about the number of bananas he ate—he used to bring seven or eight to school with him every day—when his mother tapped on the kitchen window.

  We turned to look, and there she was, waving at us from inside the house, smiling like she knew we’d just had sex for the first time, and she thought it was funny and sweet. We both waved back, thinking: how did she get her car into the driveway and herself into the house without us noticing?

  ‘I was too quick,’ Samuel explained in a low, cracking voice, while he waved back at his mother. He promised he’d never be that quick again.

  I smiled at him, but I was thinking: That’s what he was sorry for?

  And I was thinking: Did he even know how much that hurt?

  The sausages hissed, and I was thinking: It’s supposed to go for longer than that?

  *

  My brother thought it was funny about the sausages. That we grilled sausages afterwards. He kept laughing about that.

  Then I asked if eating a lot of bananas might have given Samuel extra-big equipment, and he laughed so hard he was practically sick.

  My name is Abi, and my brother’s name is Robert, and I tell him almost everything. Robert and I are both fifteen years old.

  So you’re thinking that we’re twins. But we’re not. He’s eleven months younger than me—we’re just in the overlap time. See, he’s a fresh-faced fifteen, whereas I’m a weathered old fifteen. Been sailing this here fifteen-ship a whole lot of year now, me hearties.

  Just about to say goodbye to it, in point of fact. Tomorrow is my birthday and I turn sixteen, and that’s when I leave Robert behind. He’ll be home any moment, and we’ll have our farewell ritual. We always have it, just prior to midnight, the day before my birthday. He’ll miss me when I leave him for sixteen, but someone’s got to break the new ship in.

  *

  The second time I had sex was also with Samuel. This was the thirteenth of April. It was a Friday. So, Friday the thirteenth. Black Friday, which I did a speech about in year seven, and the reason that thirteen is black is—actually, I forget why. In my speech I told a story: there were thirteen demigods, and the thirteenth demigod . . .

  Was full of mischief.

  I think that’s what I said.

  Anyhow, that’s why I remember the date.

  Luckily, Samuel was quick again, but that made him depressed, so afterwards he played Larry at his computer. I sat on his bedroom floor leaning up against his bed and did my maths homework. When his mother opened the door, I was pleased about the picture she must have got: her son at his desk, me on the carpet, both of us working like young scholars. But it really worried me, how quietly she arrived home.

  *

  So now you’re thinking: Can this girl talk about anything else besides SEX?!

  I can. However, as requested, I’m reflecting on 1990, and sex featured.

  But so did many other things! For example, I did year ten, and that’s not a walk in the park. I started writing my first novella (I’ve started novels before, but never novellas). I babysat for the McCabes, the Pulies and the Picellos. I would also have babysat for the Holtzmans, but they never go out, cheap fuckers.

  I went on two family skiing trips: the first one there was no snow, so we skied on the rocks, dirt and grass; the second was two straight days of blizzard and one perfect blue-sky day.

  I played in a doubles tennis tournament with my brother and we got to the semi-finals.

  I watched forty-seven horror movies. I wrote the titles of all of them in my exercise book and gave them star ratings along with statistics such as victim count/authenticity of blood etc.

  I waited for Mum and Robert to get home from doctors’ appointments.

  Also: this last year, strangers named Rufus and Isabelle began sending me chapters from a self-improvement book called The Guidebook. But you already know that, obviously.

  It’s true I tell my brother everything, but I’ve never said a word about those chapters to him.

  *

  It’s 9 pm. I’m going to get a coconut biscuit. Mum made some earlier.

  Okay, I’m back, but I ate half the biscuit on the way here, so it didn’t count, and now I need to get another one.

  Wait.

  Back again.

  Mum and Dad are watching a video. They’re concentrating hard; you can see that through the frosted-glass door. Their sweet little heads are leaning forward, and now and then one turns to the other and asks a question and the other replies in a voice of doubt, and then they turn back to the screen.

  Robert will be home any moment, like I said. He’s been staying in Glebe, at the squalid student house of his eighteen-year-old girlfriend named Clarissa, for the last few days. He hasn’t been going to school. Too far to commute.

  My friends are all, like, ‘Are you serious? Your parents are okay with this? He’s fifteen and he’s staying with an eighteen-year-old? Is that even legal?’ etc. etc.

  (My parents are as relaxed as a couple of beanbags but they don’t know that Robert’s been staying with his girlfriend in Glebe. They’re not that relaxed. They think he’s at his friend Bing’s place so that he and Bing can work on their piano duet for the upcoming eisteddfod. They’re relaxed in that they have no issue with Robert staying at Bing’s without talking to Bing’s parents about it.)

  *

  Some of my favourite words:

  Windcheater.

  Skyscraper.

  Wolkenkratzer.

  Wolkenkratzer is German. It means skyscraper but, literally, it means cloud-scratcher.

  Cheating the wind, scraping the sky, scratching the clouds.

  Cool, right?

  I’d like to cheat the wind, among other things.

  *

  Wait till you hear what my novella is about.

  I started it in this Workshop for Young Writers that Robert and I did in January.

  Robert plans to be a poet, and I plan to write horror movies, that’s why we did it.

  It went from 9 am to 5 pm, which is too long, you get exhausted.

  There were seven other people besides Robert and me, and the teacher counted us silently. ‘Oh, there’s supposed to be three more,’ she said, and turned expectantly to the door. She waited until quarter past nine before she gave up.

  Then she introduced herself and said she had published a book called Peach Stones. Nobody had heard of it, which made me feel a bit sorry for her. Robert said he already felt sorry for her, because of the expressions that crossed her face during the minutes we waited for the missing students.

  I can’t actually remember the teacher’s name.

  Anyhow, she went around the room and asked us all our names, and why we were here, and when we felt most imaginative, and what our favourite food was, and she wrote all this down on a notepad. Which was either a red herring or bad plotting, because she never used any of that information again, not even our names—she just pointed at us when she wanted us to speak.

  I don’t remember any of the other names either except for this redheaded guy named River, like the actor, who was cute. His favourite food was Special Fried Rice. There was a girl with tiny wrists who said she was there because she wanted to test the waters. I noticed River raising his eyebrows at that, and we had a moment, because he caught me also raising my eyebrows.

  A guy with curly hair and a longish nose said he was not sure that he was there. That made me feel a bit complicated, because I was partly, stupid thing to say, at the same time as: oh, cool, let’s talk. He also said he felt imaginative when he pressed his fingertips together—he showed us what he meant, his knuckles were knobbly—and that his favourite food depended on the ocean. Again, I wanted to enter discussions with him, mainly to get an explanation. And because I liked how he pressed his fingertips toget
her. It made me feel spooky in a good way.

  A girl who was way too blonde and pretty to be a writer said her favourite food was chocolate sultanas. Robert turned right around and smiled at her when she said it. She kept trying to get his attention for the rest of the day, but he’d forgotten her. He’s a handsome guy, my brother, and forgetful.

  Robert himself assumed his (excellent) Italian accent, said that his name was Roberto, that he was from Montepulciano, Italy, where they race barrels on the last Sunday in August, and that he felt most imaginative when he was standing on the ice.

  ‘The ice?’ said the blonde girl, almost breathless now. ‘What ice?’

  Roberto shrugged and smiled. ‘Any ice.’

  The only ice I’ve ever seen him stand on is the rink at Macquarie Shopping Centre. We’ve never even left the country, let alone been to Italy. We laughed about all this later.

  *

  I just went to get myself more biscuits because Robert’s still not back. It’s fine; he just has to be here before midnight.

  Dad was in the kitchen microwaving popcorn and as I walked into the room he shouted, ‘PUT IT ON PAUSE!’ which made me jump. He apologised. He was shouting at Mum because most people, when you walk out of the room, they’ll pause the video, but Mum always forgets and merrily keeps watching.

  That’s Mum’s words, by the way: Oh, look at me merrily still watching!

  *

  It being 11.35 pm, you’re going to want to get a move on, Robert.

  *

  I have that excited feeling because it’s my birthday tomorrow, and it’s like colours are brighter. And like everyone else, everything else—my OMD poster, my chest of drawers—they’re all looking at me lovingly. Like, with Dad in the kitchen now, little words pranced in the air between us: Tomorrow is Abigail’s birthday!

  Strange that it’s all in my head. Dad was probably just thinking about the popcorn. I mean, he knows it’s my birthday tomorrow, but it’s not likely to be foremost in his mind.

  It means I’m growing up—the fact that I recognise this.

  *

  I like Rufus and Isabelle, and I like their chapters from their guidebook because they seem insane. (The one I got yesterday told me to study the clouds for an hour, draw pictures of them, and tape them to my bedroom ceiling: In such a way, you will learn to see that the sky is not the limit. What? Excuse me, what?)

  I’m finding it hard to imagine sending these reflections.

  I’m obviously not going to send them tomorrow. That’s my birthday, and a birthday is no place for a post office.

  So, it’ll have to be after the birthday, but that seems impossible. How can there be anything beyond a day as important as a birthday?

  Maybe I’m not as grown-up as I think.

  *

  One day, Robert said to me, ‘Do you know where your right foot is?’

  We were watching a movie. Raising Arizona.

  I stuck my right foot in the air. ‘There.’

  We kept watching the movie.

  ‘But do you sometimes not know where it is?’ Robert persisted.

  ‘My right foot?’

  I looked over at him. He had his serious frown.

  ‘It’s always at the end of my right leg.’

  ‘Hm.’

  ‘Not yours?’

  He laughed, but a non-laugh. The sort of laugh Mum uses when we make a joke mid-crisis, say she’s microwaved a tin of soup. She’s not focused on our humour, see, she’s focused on the blacked-out microwave.

  *

  Robert complained about aches in his calves, and his neck. Mum took him to a physiotherapist who gave him exercises and advice about posture. Playing Pictionary, he said, ‘Wait. My eye’s doing that thing where it blacks out for a second.’

  Also, he kept talking about how tired he was. ‘I just need to lean against the wall here,’ he’d say, and once, walking along the edge of the ocean, he fell face-first into the sea. He scrambled up and carried on walking.

  *

  Well, it’s beyond midnight, which means we’re in the land of my birthday. My bedroom light is on and my room’s at the front of the house so Robert will see it when he gets home. It will shine out at him like a rebuke. He’ll see it, remember, and his face will fall. Trip right over and fall.

  The way he does himself, actually, all the time. Which, sometimes, I think he should just try to be more careful.

  *

  Okay, about my novella.

  There’s a bunch of people in a life raft in the ocean.

  The people come in various shapes, sizes and flavours, shoulders sometimes oblong, sometimes droopy.

  There’s a man in a grey suit and grey felt hat, and everything about him is thin: his fingers, toes, his briefcase, which he never lets go of because it’s handcuffed to his wrist. His opinions tend to be thin like him, and he squints towards the horizon, and nobody knows what he’s got up his sleeve, other than the handcuff.

  An old woman in a lilac cardigan wears a broad-brimmed straw hat with a matching lilac ribbon around it.

  A wise boy, about seven, sits in the boat making astonishingly wise observations.

  The older characters turn and look at him.

  ‘Such wisdom,’ whispers the woman in lilac, ‘from one so very young!’

  I have to fill in the wisdom, though. So far, I’ve just got: [wise statement] said the small boy.

  Here is the thing that will blow your mind about my novella.

  The people in the life raft were originally in a novel! Not a novella. It was a novel about a cruise ship, and they fell overboard—possibly during a storm or pirate attack—and were lost. In the world of the novel, they were minor characters. Shadows. No names, no personalities. The protagonist in the novel never gave them a thought except to say sadly, ‘Oh, the lost souls.’

  But, guess what? I rescued them in my novella. Just as the moon is a piece of the earth that has broken away, a novella is a piece of a novel. My novella is a metaphorical life raft. So that’s why they’re in a life raft.

  *

  My best friend, Carly Grimshaw, lives two doors down.

  She’s from New Zealand, which makes her a slightly exotic friend, and she’s always got a little packet of travel tissues in her pocket, which makes her a handy friend. She wears her hair in a plait that she keeps at the front, over her right shoulder. Just toss your plait over your right shoulder there, Carly. (That’s what Robert says to her sometimes, because he’s noticed that she places it there. She looks annoyed/embarrassed/sort of pleased when Robert says this.)

  Also about Carly: she’s got a four-poster bed in many shades of pink (the canopy, the quilt cover, cushions), and she’s got an older brother named Andrew, who is useful in that he is nineteen. So Carly sometimes steals his licence from his wallet and lets Robert borrow it for ID.

  Otherwise, he’s pretty pointless, Andrew. He gets terrible acne and that’s his identity.

  (I expect he has thoughts and dreams beyond his acne; he probably sees himself as having more scope than his skin.)

  Also, Andrew and Carly have a baby sister named Rabbit.

  Not really. The baby’s name is Erin. Rabbit’s one of those nicknames people pick up.

  My family attended Rabbit’s first birthday party this year.

  Afterwards, Robert and I talked about how, when you turn one, it’s the first time you have a birthday, and everyone’s making a big deal out of it. So you get socialised into thinking birthdays are a big deal. But they’re not. They’re no big deal (we agreed).

  I see now that this was a stupid discussion to have. Birthdays are a big deal. The day you’re born? I mean, come on, what bigger deal is there? That’s your existence on a plate.

  I pointed out that maybe Rabbit didn’t know it was her birthday. All she might have noticed was that everyone was suddenly paying attention to her.

  ‘And so she’s trying to figure out: what did I do right today?’ Robert said. ‘How can I do it again tomo
rrow?’

  We agreed that that’s how we become the people we are. Let’s say we’re quiet people, well, it just happened we were being quiet, having a think and a reflection, on the morning of our first birthday, and then—bam!—people were bombarding us with presents and cake! So we decided to be quiet from then on.

  Same with people who were wild that day, or fretful, or giggled, or slept a lot, and so on. Tiresome people, you know? Trace it back to the source.

  The first birthday is the key to identity.

  *

  Have I told you what the birthday ritual actually is?

  Well, it was supposed to happen just before midnight, as you know, but that ship has sailed. Still, I don’t see why it shouldn’t happen at 12.47 am, if he would just walk up the front driveway.

  Anyway, when he does, this will happen: Robert will clap his hands onto my shoulders and say, ‘Godspeed,’ and he’ll say, ‘Thank you, Abi, for taking the road ahead, the unpaved road of sixteen—and paving it for us.’

  He’ll start getting hoarse as he says, ‘If I could come with you, I would, you know that, don’t you?’ and I’ll say, ‘I know it, Robert,’ and we’ll shake hands, tears in our eyes, and he’ll say, ‘Oh, to heck with it,’ and give me a quick hug, then I’ll say, to cover the awkwardness, ‘One last drink before I go?’ and he’ll say, ‘Why not?’

  We’ll pour ourselves some of Mum’s single malt whisky, then we’ll toss it back, making our eyes tear up even more, clasp each other’s upper arms, and I’ll say, ‘We will meet again in eleven months, my friend, I swear it.’

  Then I glance at the clock and, right as it hits midnight, I open the door. Then, without looking back, I walk out of the room.

  But again, I guess it doesn’t have to be midnight.

  Usually, I go right back in, and we both go, ‘Oh, hi, how are things?’

  Funny.

  Anyway, very funny to us.

  We’ve done this since we were ten. And we drink a bit more whisky every year. It gets better with age. By the time we’re twenty, we’ll be chugging a bottle each, I predict.

  Our parents were not distressed when they found us with the whisky a few years back. That’s a good example of the kind of parents they are: we’re supposed to make our own mistakes. I remember they did suggest we try a different drink—Dad thought that billy tea would be just the ticket—but we disagreed.