Chapter 7
Julia was, of course, an absolute scrubber. There’s not a whole lot more I can say about her. A scrubber (in case you don’t know) is a girl who might be described as kind of slutty or festy, yet still without being a complete prostitute or anything like that. She chews gum a lot. She might drink excessively and smoke for show. She’ll call you a faggot, poofter, or wanker with a lovely smirk on her face. She’ll wear tight-arse jeans and good cleavage and she won’t care too much if her headlights are on. Jewelry: moderate to heavy, maybe with a nose ring or eyebrow ring for rebellious originality. Then there’s the makeup. At times it’s bucketed on, especially if there’s a bit of acne involved on her face, although more often than not, a scrubber isn’t too bad-looking at all. She just has a tendency to make herself ugly, by what she says and what she does.
And Julia?
What can I say?
She was beautiful. She w
as blond.
And she was a scrubber and a half.
“So this is Cameron,” she said when she first saw me. She was chewing that low-sugar gum that dentists highly recommend.
“Hey,” I said, and Rube winked at me. I knew what the wink meant. Something like, Not bad, huh? or, You wouldn’t knock her back, would y’? or even simply, Pretty good handfuls, ay? The bastard.
As you can imagine, I got out of there pretty quick smart, because that girl annoyed the crap out of me very bloody fast. My only hope was that Rube wouldn’t take her to see me staring at that Stephanie girl’s house. Octavia, I could handle, because she at least had a bit of class about her. A bit of niceness. But not this one. She’d most likely call me a bit of a lonely bastard as well. Or maybe she’d say something like, “Get a life,” or repeat something Rube had previously said, hoping his charisma would rub off on her. No way. I wouldn’t give her a chance. Not this one (even though Christ, I thought at one stage, take a look at her. She had an Inside Sport body if ever I’d seen one).
But no.
I’d made up my mind.
Rather than hang around them like a bad smell, I decided to go to the movies and hang around like a bad smell there instead.
On a cold, windy Saturday, when Dad didn’t need me, I saw three movies on the one day, before going over to Glebe a while, and then home. In the night, I went down to our basement and wrote for a while, feeling everything that was me shift and turn inside.
I was in bed for quite a while when Rube came in and slumped down on his own bed across from me. When I got up to turn off the light, he said, “Well Cam?”
“Well what?”
“What are your thoughts?” “On what?” “On Julia.”
“Well,” I began, but I didn’t want to congratulate him on her, and I didn’t want to interfere either. The injured darkness of the room swayed and stumbled and I said, “She’s okay, I guess.”
“Okay!?” He raised his voice excitedly. “She’s pretty bloody brilliant if you ask me.”
“But I didn’t ask you, did I?” I stated. “You asked me and I told you the answer.”
“Smart-arse.”
I laughed.
“Are you tryin’ to start somethin’?” “Of course not.”
“Well you better bloody not …”
Rube’s voice trailed off and he fell asleep, letting the night throb around me, alone.
I lay there, not sleeping for hours — thinking about the cover model on the magazine at the barber, then an exotic supermodel I saw on an ad at the movies. In my mind, I was with them. In them. Alone. For a while I even thought of Julia, but that was too much. I mean, there’s perversion and there’s perversion. Even for me.
In the morning, the previous night’s conversation between Rube and me was forgotten. He ate slabs of bacon in the kitchen before going out again, while I stayed in because I had work due in at school next day.
Of course, I knew Rube was with Julia, and the pattern continued.
About two weeks went by, and everything was normal. Normal routine.
Dad was working hard, plumbing.
Mrs. Wolfe was the same, cleaning people’s houses and doing a few cleaning shifts at the hospital.
Sarah did some overtime.
Steve kept winning at football, working in his office job, and living in his apartment with Sal. Rube went out with Julia
And I still wrote my words, sometimes in our bedroom, sometimes in the basement. I also went over to Glebe quite a few times, more out of habit now than anything else.
Soon, though, a day came that changed everything.
It … I don’t know how to explain it.
It all seemed so normal, but slightly off-center at the same time.
I walked the city streets, as usual.
I made my way over to the suburb of Glebe, without even thinking about where I was walking.
I went there, sat there, stood there, waited there, even begged there for something, anything to happen.
It was a Thursday, and in the dying moments of day, when the last rays of light stood up to be killed in the sky, I could feel someone behind me, just to the side. I could feel a presence, a shadow, standing just obscured behind a tree.
I turned around. I looked.
“Rube?” I asked. “That you, Rube?” But it wasn’t Rube.
I was sitting down against the small brick fence when I saw the person step into the last remnants of light, and walk slowly toward me. It was Octavia.
It was Octavia and she walked over and sat next to me.
“Hi Cameron,” she said.
“Hi Octavia.” I was shocked.
Silence bent down then, just for a moment, and whispered to each of us.
My heart threw itself to my throat.
Then, down.
Down.
She looked into the window I’d been staring at. Stephanie’s window.
“Nothing?” she asked, and I knew what she meant.
“No, not tonight,” I answered.
“Any night?”
I couldn’t help it.
I promise you, I couldn’t….
A huge stupid tear rose up and fell out of my eye. It stammered down my face to my mouth and I could taste it. I could taste the saltiness of it, on my lips.
“Cameron?”
I looked at her.
“You okay?” she asked.
And all I did from there was tell her said, “She’s not comin’ out tonight, or any other night, and there’s nothing I can do about it.” I was even moved to quote Rube. “Y’ feel what y’ feel, and that girl doesn’t feel a thing for me. That’s all there is to it….” I looked away, at the dying sky, attempting to pull myself together.
I began wondering exactly why I’d chosen this Glebe girl as the one I wanted to please, to drown in. “Cam?” asked Octavia. “Cam?”
She kept wanting me to look at her, but I still wasn’t ready. Instead, I stood up and stared into the house. The lights went on. The curtains were drawn, and the girl, as always, was nowhere to be seen.
Yet, there was a girl next to me, who’d stood up now as well, and we were both beside the brick fence. She looked at me and made me look back. She asked one more time.
“Cam?”
Finally, I answered, quietly, timidly. “Yeah?”
And Octavia’s face cried out to me in the silent city night as she asked, “Would you come and stand outside my house instead?”
THE CHARCOAL SKY
Sometimes you go to the wrong place, but the right way comes and finds you. It might make you trip over it or speak to it. Or it might come to you when a day is stripped apart by night and ask you to take its hand and forget this wrong place, this illusion where you stand.
I think of the mess in my mind and the girl who walked through it to stand before me and let her voice come close.
I remember brick walls.
There are moments when you can only stand and stare, watching the world forget you as you remove yourself from it — when you overcome it and cease to exist as the person you were.
It calls your name, but you’re gone.
You hear nothing. See nothing.
You’ve gone somewhere else. You’ve gone somewhere to find a different definition of yourself, and it’s a place where nothing else can touch you. Nothing else can swing on your thoughts. It’s only yourself, flat against the charcoal sky, for one moment.
Then flat on the earth again, where the world doesn’t recognize you anymore. Your name is what it always was. You look and sound like you always did, yet you’re not the same, and when a city wind begins to call out, its voice doesn’t only hit the edges.
It connects.
It blows into you, rather than in spite of you.
Sometimes you feel like it’s calling out for you.