Shauna's Great Expectations Page 11

She reaches across the table and squeezes my hand.

  ‘I understand.’

  But for once, she doesn’t understand at all. She doesn’t have a clue.

  ‘Will I have a failure on my record, Reverend Ferguson?’

  She grimaces. ‘I’m honestly not sure. Let me call the university. See what we can do.’

  Just before dinner, Lou-Anne and I go for a walk around the school. The weather’s cooling down and we’re both shivering in our short shirtsleeves. There are only two more days of school left.

  ‘I can’t wait to see the twins,’ says Lou-Anne, linking her arm through mine and pulling me close to her side. ‘I can’t wait to have them in my arms!’

  Lou-Anne’s nieces, Charlotte and Chelsea, are criminally cute. They’ve got bouncing black curls, deep dimples and skin like cocoa butter. They’re crazy about Lou-Anne. She’s the cool auntie who spoils them rotten. When she’s with them, from the time they get up to the time they go to bed, they have her undivided attention. Whenever I stay with Lou-Anne for the holidays, I’m in awe at her patience, and the way she can just play with them for a whole day without a break. She even gets in the bath with them.

  When I’m with little kids, I get bored after about fifteen minutes, no matter how cute they are. I guess it’ll be different with my own baby. It’ll have to be.

  ‘What was it like for your sister?’ I ask her. ‘Being pregnant, I mean.’

  ‘Oh, it was hell for Beth with the morning sickness, but other than that . . .’

  ‘Did she get a hard time? Did people stare?’

  Lou-Anne shakes her head. ‘The only thing she was embarrassed about was that the boy didn’t stand by her. She was hoping he’d stay in Eumundi to help her raise the girls. He was only sixteen, though. What can you expect from a sixteen-year-old boy?’

  ‘But Beth was only fifteen and she did the right thing.’

  ‘Didn’t have a choice, did she?’

  ‘She could have had an abortion or put them up for adoption.’

  ‘That’s not what I mean by a choice, Shauna. I mean that they’re our girls and we could never let them go.’

  When Lou-Anne talks this way, it’s hard to believe that she’s only sixteen. In spite of her spectacular vocal talents, Lou-Anne doesn’t get good marks, not even in music. But she has this rock-solid emotional intelligence that people at Oakholme don’t appreciate. I appreciate her, though. I know that when she becomes a rich and famous opera singer, she won’t be one of those celebrities who gets photographed stepping out of their limo without underwear. She’s got it together.

  We walk arm-in-arm down the side of the grassy oval, where some senior boarders, including Keli Street-Hughes and Annabel Saxon, are kicking a soccer ball around barefoot. They’re still in their long uniforms, with the skirts tucked into their undies. They’re whooping and catcalling. Someone yells, ‘You’re the boss, Ollie!’ and then I see a flash of white-blonde hair as Olivia Pike breaks away from the pack.

  ‘That kid’s thirsty,’ says Lou-Anne casually.

  ‘I know exactly what you mean. Just wait until they find out.’

  Then I think, just wait until they find out what’s going on inside me, and an icy shiver runs up my spine. I don’t want to think about it.

  We do a full loop of the oval and the boarders ignore us as usual. Keli does a pretty impressive job of head-butting the ball and it comes bouncing towards Lou-Anne and me. Lou-Anne kicks it back and everyone in the group just stands there and watches as it rolls back to them. No one says thanks. Except Lou-Anne and me.

  ‘Say thanks to your dad for me!’ we both call out, just one last time for the term.

  I try to imagine what Keli Street-Hughes will do at home in Coleambally these holidays. Ride her horse in the dam? Zoom up and down rows of cotton on a four-wheel motorbike? Maybe the Street-Hugheses will go to Tuscany for a couple of weeks and Keli will get fat on truffle linguine. I have no idea what she’ll really do. Isn’t that incredible? We’ve been living in the same building for over four years and we barely know one another. (Apart from my cyberstalking, that is.) We know we don’t like each other and that’s about it.

  15

  IS THERE AN easy way for a seventeen year old to break it to people that she’s pregnant? It was difficult enough with Lou-Anne and Jenny. What the hell am I going to say to my parents? And Nathan? I haven’t even worked out how to tell Indu and Bindi.

  The Easter holidays have arrived. I’m always tired and sometimes sick, and I don’t know how much longer I can keep ‘the news’ from people who count. There will come a point – there has to, though I can’t really imagine what it will feel like – when everyone will know. But how do I come out with it now?

  ‘You’ve got to tell Nathan,’ says Lou-Anne. ‘Like, today.’ We’re in the bathroom, getting ready to meet Bindi and Indu at the Easter Show. They’ve already packed up and left the dormitory for the holidays. Lou-Anne and I aren’t leaving Sydney for home until tomorrow.

  ‘I can tell him anytime,’ I say, trying to sound detached.

  ‘What are you afraid of, Shauna?’

  What am I not afraid of?

  ‘I don’t know. His reaction, I guess. He’ll probably run a mile.’

  ‘Then he’s a bastard and you don’t want him anyway.’

  ‘I could not tell him. You know, if I wanted. Save everyone the trouble.’

  ‘But then your baby won’t know its dad. That’s not cool.’

  ‘Charlotte and Chelsea don’t know their dad.’

  ‘Their dad’s a dropkick and not worth knowing,’ replies Lou-Anne assuredly. ‘You’ve got to give this guy a chance. Even if you think he’s going to run. You must still like him or else we wouldn’t be going to see him.’

  ‘I do like him, but the stakes are really high now.’

  ‘Maybe he’ll rise to the occasion.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  We catch the train out to Sydney Olympic Park, dressed as aggy as good taste will allow. We’re both wearing white linen shirts, and luckily jeans and ankle boots are in at the moment.

  Bindi and Indu are waiting for us at the gates.

  ‘Omigawd,’ Bindi scoffs when she sees us. She’s wearing a mini-dress and wedge heels.

  ‘You’re going to get cow poo between your toes,’ I taunt her.

  Getting into the Easter Show costs a bomb, even when you’re a student. Luckily Nathan’s mum is on some committee of the Royal Agricultural Society and has access to a certain number of complimentary passes. He’s sent me four, which means we’re all getting a free ride.

  We go through the turnstiles and dive into the overwhelming crowds and noise.

  ‘Look!’ cries Indu suddenly, and all eyes shoot to the direction she’s pointing. It’s a kebab stand. We raid it, even though it’s only ten o’clock in the morning. Everyone buys one except me. I’m too nervous to eat.

  We park ourselves in the midst of the thronging crowd, getting shoved and squashed. We look at each other and stifle laughs. This is the way it is with us when we fly the Oakholme coop. We look forward to outings, talk about them and prepare for them, twist ourselves inside out over them, and only when we arrive at the much-coveted venue do we realise that we were much happier belly-down in our beds in the dorm in our uniforms. All of a sudden I realise that this feeling is a relic, a phenomenon of the past. Everything is about to change.

  ‘So where’s this cow shed?’ asks Indu.

  ‘Just follow the cowboy hats,’ says Bindi.

  This is more or less what we do.

  I get so nervous that I start to have this feeling of not being attached to my legs. I’m just floating along above, carried by the crowd. I have an inkling that something major is about to unfold.

  The incidence of cowboy hats spikes as we enter the cattle pavilion, and the hot, sweet, shitty barn smell hits us like a slap.

  Bindi pulls a face. ‘At moments like these, I sometimes wonder whether I’ll ever eat meat again,’ she
says, pushing the last piece of her kebab into her mouth.

  ‘Really?’ says Lou-Anne. ‘Looking at cows makes me hungry for steak.’

  ‘What colour are Nathan’s cows?’ asks Indu.

  ‘I think . . .’ I begin, trailing off into nothing, taking a few seconds to realise that I don’t know. ‘The breed is called Santa something-or-other . . .’

  Then I see him in one of the wash bays at the front of the pavilion, standing side-on to a huge, chestnut-coloured cow, a brush in one hand and a rubber mitt over the other. I see him before he sees me and I begin to wave as our eyes meet. Nathan’s pale blue eyes soften and crinkle at the edges.

  ‘Shauna!’

  I break away from my friends and plunge into the wash bay.

  ‘Well, here we are,’ I say awkwardly.

  ‘Yeah,’ he says, ‘here you all are. Thanks for coming.’

  My friends gather around cautiously, oohing and aahing about the cow, a two-year-old heifer called Gemma. I don’t know how any creature could get so big in just two short years.

  ‘Our first class is in about an hour,’ Nathan explains. ‘I’m just doing her hair.’

  We giggle at this, and I feel a huge gush of affection for him. This is the first time I’ve laid eyes on him knowing what’s inside me and that, one way or another, I’m going to be joined to him for the rest of my life. As he moves confidently and gently around a beast that must literally weigh a ton, I notice little things about him that I haven’t given much attention until now. The leanness of his body and the lightness of his movements. The way he looks down when he’s listening to someone. Perhaps it’s because he’s in an environment he feels comfortable in, but he seems manlier. Or maybe I just need him to be.

  ‘Nathan!’ a woman’s voice calls out. I don’t want to seem too eager to catch a glimpse of Nathan’s mum, but I can’t help turning and glancing over my shoulder. A short woman with a stubby, blonde ponytail bustles over. She’s about fifty, overheated and smudged in her all-denim outfit. She looks like a scrubchook. I know that she’s his mother before he calls her ‘mum’ because they have the same pale, down-turned eyes.

  ‘Is she dry yet?’

  She arrives with a pump pack of hair gloss in her hand, not seeming to notice us.

  ‘Almost,’ says Nathan, glancing quickly to me. ‘Just a bit damp around the legs. Mum, this is Shauna.’

  Nathan’s mother looks around at us.

  ‘Hi.’ I smile at her, but there is something about the shuddering way her gaze settles on me that knocks all the confidence out of me. It’s an unmistakable double take and of course I know what it’s about. Her eyes pan briefly over my friends and flutter back to me.

  ‘How are you?’ she says without meeting my eye, and she walks to the other side of the cow before I can answer.

  I turn to Lou-Anne. ‘Let’s go.’

  ‘What? I thought we were going to . . .’

  I scowl at her and she stops dead.

  ‘Okay,’ she says quickly.

  ‘We might see you later, Nathan,’ I say in a shaky voice.

  Nathan’s blonde brows gather in confusion.

  ‘Are you coming back to watch the classes?’ asks Nathan, still brushing the cow.

  I don’t smile or even nod. ‘I guess.’

  ‘There’s something I wanted to talk to you about,’ he says. ‘Could we talk in private later?’

  ‘Maybe,’ I answer coldly.

  We leave the stifling pavilion, with Bindi whining about how bad it smells.

  ‘Yeah, the smell really was starting to get to me too,’ I mutter, feeling as limp as a wet sail on a windless day.

  Lou-Anne gives me a wide-eyed, reproachful stare as we sink back into the crowds outside.

  ‘I want to go,’ I tell her.

  ‘You want to leave the show?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘But he gave us the tickets. We can’t just leave.’

  We stop to let Bindi and Indu catch up.

  ‘I think I’m going to go back to school,’ I say. ‘I’m feeling pretty dodgy.’

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘I’m dizzy. I need to sit down.’

  ‘I guess you don’t feel like going on the rides then?’ says Bindi.

  ‘No, Bindi, I don’t,’ I snap, not meaning to. I apologise straight away.

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ says Bindi, folding her arms over her chest. ‘It’s just that you were the one who wanted to come.’

  In the end, Bindi and Indu decide to stay at the show and make the most of it. Lou-Anne can’t be talked out of coming back to school with me.

  ‘What happened just now?’ Lou-Anne demands as we head towards the train station.

  ‘Did you see the way his mother looked at us?’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Oh, come on, Lou-Anne!’

  ‘If she didn’t want to stop and chat, so what? She was busy.’

  ‘I just don’t like being looked at like I’m a piece of dog shit.’

  ‘Did she really do that?’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘Well, she doesn’t know that you’re pregnant with her grandchild.’

  ‘And she’s never going to. Buggered if I let that family have anything to do with my baby.’

  ‘Shauna, I think you’re choosing to take it the wrong way. Was she really throwing shade?’

  ‘Yes, she was.’

  ‘But that’s not Nathan’s fault.’

  ‘Like mother, like son. I think he was about to dump me anyway. He said he wanted to talk to me in private. What else could that have meant?’

  ‘Well . . .’ Lou-Anne trails off.

  She lets me simmer for a while, which is probably the right thing to do. When I’m in one of these states, no one can talk to me without getting their head bitten off. And that’s exactly what I’m going to do if she tells me I’m jumping to conclusions because I know I’m not. Jumping to conclusions is something that people like Nathan’s mother do.

  On the train back to the city I fume. Every racist experience I’ve ever had whooshes through the floodgates. The open, barefaced name-calling. The smaller, pettier slights. The nasty looks and the standoffishness. The pity and the overniceness. I hate it all. I hate them all. And now I’m bringing a child into the whole fetid mess.

  When we get back to school I ask Miss Maroney whether there are any messages for me. There aren’t. I want to call Nathan and tell him about the baby but I just can’t. I decide that I’m never calling him again.

  I just want to run to a place where people already love me.

  16

  THE COUNTRYLINK TRAIN service is a peculiar beast. I’m used to catching the train to Tamworth, so I’m comfortable with the kind of rabble you find on a country train on a weekday.

  The weirdest thing is that all the poor people and boarding school students (such as moi) can travel in the first-class cabin. This leads to an interesting cross-section of society, from tourists and wealthy older people, to poor people visiting family, to skid-row drug addicts who come to Central Station to buy cheaper gear than they can get in the country. There are always Aboriginal people in the first-class carriage when I’m travelling on the Tamworth train. We nod and smile at each other and the older women ask ‘where you from?’ That’s how Aboriginal strangers start conversations with one another. Those words, when uttered in a soft, sweet, slow voice, are like music to my ears.

  People generally behave themselves on the country lines, even the junkies, but every now and then something terrible happens. On the Tamworth train, for example, I’ve witnessed some fairly harrowing scenes, caused mostly by drug or alcohol addiction. Once I saw an old man staggering out of the bathroom with a tourniquet still tied and a needle hanging out of his arm. Another time I saw a woman who’d overdosed on heroin being brought back to life on the platform next to my window. I remember her sitting up and abusing the paramedic because he’d given her Narcan and wrecked her high. The worst thing I ever saw was an ic
e-addicted mother with green foam at the edges of her mouth swinging an unresponsive newborn baby by its little bootied foot. The green-foam woman upset me the most because, apart from the unconscious baby, she was Aboriginal.

  I don’t know why I, Shauna Harding, seventeen-year-old high school student, feel the need to take on the sins of other Aboriginal people, but I do. And I don’t think I’m alone. Aboriginal people behaving badly scare and embarrass other Aboriginal people behaving well. Watch the black passengers in the first-class carriage when another black person’s making an ass of themselves. Watch the cringing and headshaking and downcast eyes. Watch the relief on their faces when the black behaving badly gets booted off the train at the next station.

  Sometimes I think it’s a survival mechanism, acting good and quiet and smiling while silently eating shit. It hasn’t got much to do with being good people, though I swear we are. It’s more serious and more basic than that. It’s got to do with keeping our race alive. The older folk, the aunties and uncles, are more awake to it than the young. That’s why they’re still alive while the other people of their generation, far too many of them, have died and turned to dust. If you want to stay alive you shut your mouth, smile and remain in a seated position. Those of us who don’t do that end up biting it in the back of a police wagon, hanging in bedsheets from the door of a jail cell, crucified on a bottle or needle, or tied to a dialysis machine. Or wrapped around a tree, like my big brother.

  So people sit down and stay alive. If you want to stand up and stay alive you’d better have a good education, a quick mind and a lot of white friends backing you up. And most Aboriginal people don’t have all those advantages. I intend to have all those advantages, and when the time is right, I intend to stand up.

  I’ve been racking my brains for solutions to the problem of going to university next year. I know I’m going to have to live at home in Barraba with the baby. There’s no way I’ll be able to afford to live in a big city and pay for rent and childcare, so I’ve been investigating online university courses. There are plenty of universities that offer Bachelor of Languages and Bachelor of Arts degrees online. It’s do-able, if I stay at home.