‘Yeah – we’re having chicken, I think.’
‘I love chicken,’ he said with a smile.
His was the kind of face that glowed after exercise, whereas mine opted instead to turn bright red and swollen, like I was having an allergic reaction to the experience of being alive.
‘Sometimes we feed our chickens chicken, but you can’t tell anyone,’ I said.
He promised he wouldn’t, and he rushed off to get changed. This gave me the chance to broach the subject with Mum. I sprinted home, trying not to think about what she was likely to say.
‘I need warning before hosting anyone, it really doesn’t suit tonight.’
Mum had her thick black fabric hairband on, bun slicked back, and probably a luxurious hair treatment doing its work, which reiterated the fact it was not a good night for guests. Still, the situation was salvageable, I just had to tread carefully.
‘That’s okay, Mrs Bailey said we can go there,’ I lied. ‘They have invited me over heaps of times. I just wanted our first dinner together to be here.’
Mum paused her potato-peeling, turned back to me, and took some breaths in through her nose, out through her mouth. These breaths were obviously supposed to calm her, but they always had the opposite effect on me. She went to the pantry and collected three more potatoes, adding them to the sink.
‘You’d better go and change,’ she said, turning to point at my paint-stained T-shirt.
I left while the going was good, while the oven was hot. When Fran knocked on the front door half an hour later, I heard Dad greet him.
‘Lovely to have you, mate. I’ll let Elsie sort those out. Come on in.’
I had changed to a non-paint-stained T-shirt and then got side-tracked by a king parrot watercolour I had been working on at my desk, thus adding fresh stains to the new shirt. They were less pigmented, at least. I hoped Mum wouldn’t notice. When I got to the kitchen, Mum was adjusting some peach dahlias in a small crystal vase. Dad and Fran were out on the deck.
‘Your shirt,’ Mum said, looking up with a frown.
I grimaced to let her know I agreed with her assessment of me as I walked straight past her and out the sliding door.
‘Fran was just telling me he and his brother are going to paint their house this summer,’ Dad announced.
I was not sure if there was some implication there, like I too should be painting a house. Implications were foreign to me – unknown to begin with and therefore none of my business. At that time, our house had recently been painted mint green and from what I understood, everyone loved mint green, so I decided to let the unsaid remain unacknowledged and move on.
‘Cool,’ I said. ‘Do you want to go hang until dinner?’
‘In your room?’ Dad asked, eyebrow raised.
At the time, I did not understand the eyebrow’s implication either. I knew I did not have many friends over, but it had been known to occur. Revisiting the memory, I can now see this was a gender thing, aboything, rather than a ‘you don’t have any friends’ thing. I returned his eyebrow like a volley and directed Fran to the stairs that led down off the deck.
‘Your dad is nice,’ Fran said when we got downstairs, and it felt like a question was hiding there.
Was my dad nice? What did nice really mean? I liked kind people, warm people, butnicepeople could be landmines. They often hid so much behind that word. Harsh opinions rendered with false smiles; a million implications made. Fran sat at my desk, and I sat on the bed. Not knowing how to encapsulate all of that in a spoken response, I shrugged. Fran looked around my room and made comments about the things he saw – the framed print of the sad child with big eyes and a strange hat that I had chosen at the op shop, the watercolour paintings of flowers and birds Blu-Tacked to the wall, the polaroid photos of the chickens, taken like model headshots and with their names written underneath in thick Nikko pen.
‘My brother is actually the one painting our house,’ he said. ‘I guess I didn’t explain it well. Mum and Dad are paying him a thousand bucks. He’s trying to save for a car.’
‘I didn’t even know you had a brother,’ I replied.
We had not spent much time talking about our real lives, our imagined ones being far more interesting to us both.
‘Yeah, Martin. He’s not home much. He’s a bit . . .’ he said.
I waited, and when he could not find the words, I tried to find them for him: ‘Weird? Shy? Mean?’
‘Mean,’ he agreed.
‘To you?’
He shrugged and said, ‘Yeah,’ but in an Alvin and the Chipmunks kind of voice that made us both laugh.
