Shauna's Great Expectations Read online

  I know that’s not the way it is with Reverend Ferguson. She’s been my cheerleader from the get-go, since back when I was almost as ragged as Olivia Pike. When she finds out I’m pregnant, she might change her tune. She might have to. I can’t see Mrs Green turning a blind eye. I just can’t.

  When Mum and I sit down for dinner, I feel the same heat and energy come off her as I felt when we were on the lounge. I haven’t seen her this sharp for ages. Maybe not ever.

  We start to work on the problem, which is not something I’ve been able to do with anyone so far. With Dr Baker and Jenny, there was no problem that couldn’t be solved with a quick curettage. With Lou-Anne, there was no problem at all. But Mum and I talk about delivery dates and exam dates. If I have the baby before my exams start, she’ll come to Sydney and take care of the baby while I study and do the exams.

  ‘If worst comes to worst, you could go back to Barraba High.’

  ‘I’m not going back to Barraba High, Mum. I’d rather be dead. I don’t mean to be a snob, but it’s a jungle.’

  I sleep like the dead that night. Between the train trip, the truck ride, spilling the beans to Mum and the eight-centimetre energy sapper growing inside me, I’m wiped out. After so much stress, it’s wonderful waking up in my own lumpy bed. Even if it’s to the terrifying sight of my father standing over me.

  ‘Get up!’ he spits.

  I sit up and see Mum standing in the doorway behind him. It’s eight o’clock in the morning and she’s up and fully dressed, an anomaly in itself.

  ‘Calm down, Jim,’ she says.

  ‘Is it true? You’re pregnant?’

  Honestly, I thought Mum and I had gone over all this yesterday. Now I have to justify myself to Dad, too?

  ‘Of course it’s true. Do you think it’s some kind of April Fools’ joke?’

  ‘Don’t you dare talk like a smartarse to me, Shauna. This is disgraceful.’

  I get out of bed and face him. He’s never spoken to me with an acid tongue before. I didn’t feel ashamed when Mum was telling me off, but now I feel heartily ashamed. It’s different with dads.

  ‘I’m sorry. It was an accident.’

  ‘How do you plan to go to university now?’

  ‘I don’t know, Dad.’

  ‘Is the father going to do the right thing?’ he asks.

  ‘The father doesn’t know,’ Mum pipes in.

  ‘I’m asking Shauna.’ He forces me to look him in the eye. ‘Will he do the right thing?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t even know what the right thing is.’

  ‘Well, let me tell you what it is,’ he says in a raised voice.

  ‘Jim . . .’ starts Mum.

  ‘Jackie, let me say my piece!’ he snaps. Then he seems to make an effort to calm himself. ‘I’m far from happy about this situation, considering your age . . .’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘. . . but I’d feel a lot more comfortable if the fella stepped forwards and took responsibility. I’m not saying you have to get married – I don’t even think that’s a good idea – but the man has to pay for raising his own child.’

  ‘I don’t want to ask him for money, Dad. I don’t want him to think I’m just another Aboriginal teen mother with her hand out.’

  ‘You’re the mother of his child.’

  ‘I don’t want him to think badly of me. And his mother’s a racist pig.’

  ‘If you won’t tell this kid, Shauna, I will.’

  ‘He’s not a kid,’ I say. ‘He’s a man.’

  ‘So let him stand up and be one.’

  I sway and topple back onto my bed. I can’t stand it when Dad’s pissed off with me.

  ‘I’m so sorry. I’m really sick. I just can’t do anything at the moment.’

  Dad gives me one last, long look of total disappointment before tears fill his eyes and he leaves the room. Mum leaves too, but returns a short time later wielding a glass filled with evil-smelling orange liquid. She holds it in my direction.

  ‘Carrot and ginger juice,’ she says, proudly. ‘It’s meant to help with the morning sickness.’

  I take the juice to be gracious, and when I’ve finished it I go out to the kitchen table. As Mum fusses around me with butter toast and eggs, I realise that she must have already been shopping this morning. There were no eggs in the fridge last night, and Mum’s just not the type to have a fresh piece of ginger hanging around the house. I know it can only be my baby news that has given her this shot of energy. She’s happy. It’s a catastrophe, but it’s made her happy.

  I’m not particularly happy, though I assure Mum that I will both see a doctor when I get back to Sydney and let Nathan in on the news. The truth is that I’m swinging between never talking to Nathan again, because I’m frightened of what he’ll think, and wanting to fall into his arms. I know his family will think that I’m just a lazy, greedy boong who’s trying to hitch a free ride on a white man. They’ll think I’ve trapped him deliberately. I’m sure that’s what they’ll think. And I’m afraid that’s what he’ll think, too.

  I say I don’t care what white people think, and sometimes I really believe it, but when it comes to white people I care about, it’s simply not true.

  17

  WITH THE BABY news off my chest, I’m hoping we’ll have a pretty good Easter.

  Julie, Mick and their family are going to arrive on Easter Saturday and stay for two nights. Mum and Dad decide that it’s best not to tell them about my pregnancy until later on. At first I don’t really understand the reason for the secrecy, but Mum explains.

  ‘Julie’s always had an opinion about you going to Oakholme College. It upsets her. She says that we’re disrespecting our culture by sending you there, trying to turn you into something you’re not – blah, blah, blah. But I think Julie’s jealous of you.’

  ‘Oh, Mum, she’s not. . .’

  ‘No, listen. I think she is. I think she wishes she could do something better than bake bread at the back of Coles, and she’s ticked off that you are on your way. I don’t want to give her the satisfaction of knowing that there’s been a bump in the road.’

  ‘But who cares, Mum?’

  ‘I do. She might call your school and tell them, just to spoil things for you.’

  ‘She wouldn’t do that. Would she?’

  ‘Julie’s a great person to have around when things are going badly. When your life’s going to hell in a hand basket, she loves to help out. But when your life’s going well, it’s much harder for her to take.’

  ‘But she seems like such a nice person.’

  ‘And she is. Don’t get me wrong. At least she cares enough about you to have an opinion. But not everyone who loves you wants the best for you. Some people want to keep you in your place so that they can stay in theirs.’

  I don’t really get where Mum’s coming from, but I agree to keep things quiet. This applies to my friends around Barraba, too. Not that I have that many left – just two out of four I used to go around with at the time Jamie died. Melinda is dead (she died in a car accident) and Kiara is missing (she disappeared with her deadbeat boyfriend). The other two are still in Barraba. Ashley’s a young mother who lives with her boyfriend in the same street as her parents. My neighbour Taylor is the only one who’s made it to Year 12.

  I feel like such a snob when I admit this to myself, but I have a tolerance span of about an hour at a time for both of these girls. Being with them is exhausting because I feel like I have to cut myself in half intellectually to come anywhere near to fitting in with them. They rake over the same small, smelly gossip every time I see them. The most exciting thing that’s happened to either of them is Ashley’s baby, Bella.

  Before I tumbled down the rabbit hole of pregnancy and babies, I had been finding Ashley increasingly hard to take. This holidays, though, when my old friends swing by to visit (Taylor just has to walk through a gate in our shared fence), I’m full of warmth and conversation, and it’s completely genuine. I play with eighteen-
month-old Bella, interrogate Ashley about sleeping and feeding, and even congratulate her on the great job she’s doing.

  ‘It’s the hardest job in the world,’ says Ashley. ‘And the most important.’

  ‘I’m sure Shauna will find a harder job,’ says Taylor, who has a habit of swinging at me every now and then. She could have gotten the Indigenous scholarship, but she refused to want it. ‘Splitting the atom or some such crap.’

  I pull a fake greaser at her. ‘I think you’ll find that someone’s already done that Tay-Tay. I’m only interested in breaking new ground. I’m going to split the electron.’

  Taylor scrunches up her button nose. ‘Is that even possible?’

  ‘I don’t do physics. You tell me.’

  Taylor’s eyes narrow as she considers whether I’m having her on.

  ‘I don’t think so. It’s a single particle. There’s nothing to split.’

  There you go, Taylor is better at science than me. But I’m guessing she’ll probably take all her intelligence and spark and funnel it into a job at a petrol station and a guy who doesn’t appreciate her. Hopefully she’ll prove me wrong.

  In the end, Mum does almost all the cooking for our Easter Sunday lunch. All I have to offer is inspiration and two desserts that require no cooking. I make a Toblerone cheesecake and a lemon meringue dessert using shop-bought meringues and a jar of lemon curd. Mum roasts three chickens and tray after tray of vegetables. Unaccustomed to the workload, she heaves and sweats around the kitchen all Sunday morning, and collapses on the lounge after lunch. Luckily the Kiprioses (Julie’s husband, Mick, is Greek) have brought loads of cold meat and bread with them, and Mum doesn’t have to do any more cooking until Monday.

  I spend the weekend hanging out with my cousins and their squeezes-du-jour. I’m a little miffed that Andrew’s new girlfriend ‘Frizz’ (who doesn’t even have frizzy hair but whose name is Caitlin Frismond) is in attendance. She shows me a furry Easter bunny toy he gave her, which has RED HOT LOVERS sewn across its chest in shiny red thread.

  ‘It’s true!’ she says with a sleazy lurch of her eyebrows.

  This dumb present provokes a shamefully sharp stab of jealousy in me. It’s not just that I’d prefer to have Andrew to myself. It’s that Nathan isn’t around to give me cringe-worthy gifts, which I’d dearly love to receive.

  I shoot Andrew a withering look, which he blushingly shrugs off. He still hasn’t lost his hallowed status as My Favourite Cousin. I can’t help but adore him, silly girlfriend or not. He’s an acquired taste – old fashioned and masculine. Not everyone takes to him, but I love him because he’s smart and he doesn’t suffer fools. Not unless he’s sleeping with them.

  At lunch on Monday, Julie tells us that Andrew’s been offered another promotion, but it depends on whether he’ll do a business degree, which his employer’s offered to pay for. It’s obvious that Julie’s proud of Andrew, but she’s also dead-against him doing the degree.

  ‘People in our family don’t go to university,’ she says.

  ‘If the company’s paying for you, why not?’ says Dad.

  ‘I was really bad at maths at school,’ says Andrew. ‘How am I going to do all the maths involved in accounting and finance?’

  ‘I’m good at maths,’ I tell him. ‘I could help you.’

  ‘You’ve got enough on your plate, Shauna,’ Dad says softly.

  Julie throws her head back and laughs, high and loud. ‘Oh, Shauna, you’re funny,’ she titters.

  ‘What’s so hilarious?’ I ask, more confused than offended.

  ‘Do you really think . . .’ she scoffs, shaking her head, but she doesn’t finish the question. Instead she turns to Andrew. ‘It’s just a piece of paper. It’s not worth anything. Your skills and experience are the important thing.’

  I start watching Mum, finally having some insight into her warning about Julie. Mum’s looking between Julie and Mick. Mick’s a soft-spoken, hardworking man who often gets steamrolled by Julie’s brassy personality.

  ‘What do you think, Mick?’ Mum asks.

  ‘I don’t see the harm,’ he says cautiously.

  ‘The harm is that he fails,’ says Julie, gesturing wildly. She’s still smiling, but she’s almost shouting now. ‘Why fail if you don’t have to? Especially if you’re on the kind of salary Andrew’s on.’ She looks at Mum as she mock-whispers, ‘Six figures and he’s only twenty-three.’ Then she continues at normal volume. ‘There are plenty of successful people who didn’t waste years of their life pushing pencils around at university.’

  ‘I’m going to university next year,’ I say, aware that I’m stirring the pot.

  ‘Well, I hope that works out well for you, Shauna,’ says Julie. ‘I hope they treat you the way you deserve.’

  Though my aunt’s tone isn’t taunting or even all that insincere, I think I finally have a perspective on what Mum was saying about her earlier. A part of Julie is hopeful that I’ll fail. And not just me, but anyone who breaks the mould that has held her in shape since she started making decisions for herself. It’s the mould that she’s forced her own children to fit.

  After lunch, I manage to prise the dreaded Frizz from Andrew’s side and get him alone on the back porch. I want to encourage him to do the business degree. It’s impossible to turn him around, though.

  ‘I’ve made up my mind. I’m not going to do it. I don’t know why Mum keeps rattling on about it.’

  ‘Because she’s proud of you.’

  He shrugs.

  ‘Maybe she doesn’t want you to do it because she’s afraid you’ll do too well?’ I suggest.

  Andrew shakes his head. ‘She’s just looking out for me, and I think she’s right. You stick your head too far out and there’s always someone with a machete waiting to hack it right off.’

  ‘But who’s got the machete, Andrew?’

  ‘The bosses. White men.’

  This is not the way Andrew usually talks. Generally he’s reluctant to blame white people for anything.

  ‘So why don’t you become one of the bosses?’

  Andrew takes a long time to answer. All the while he’s shaking his head. ‘Life is not like boarding school, Shauna,’ he says eventually.

  ‘I’m not an idiot, you know. I realise that. And thank God it’s not like boarding school.’

  ‘Wait till you get out into the real world. Then you’ll understand. Everything is stacked against us. They’ll let us come only so far. And anyway, who wants to be like them?’

  ‘And you’ve come as far as you’re ever going to? At age twenty-three?’

  He pauses for even longer this time.

  ‘I reckon I’ve done pretty well,’ he says finally.

  ‘Well, there’s no doubt about that,’ I agree. I know that I’ve pushed him as far as I should. Any further and it will be none of my bloody business. I drop it for another subject. With a sheepish smile, I hand him the envelope he sent me with the five hundred bucks in it. Andrew looks confused.

  ‘What? You’re not going to Paris anymore?’

  ‘I’m gonna leave it to another year.’

  He pushes the envelope back in my direction. ‘Keep it. Go and buy something you want. A phone.’

  ‘I don’t need a phone.’

  ‘Then keep it for uni next year.’

  ‘I don’t want it, Andrew. I really don’t. Why can’t you just respect my wishes?’

  Andrew laughs bitterly, stuffing the envelope into his jacket pocket. ‘Why can’t you just respect mine?’ he retorts.

  We exchange fed-up smiles and settle on the porch as the sun sets over the back fence.

  ‘Hey,’ I say eventually, looking down at the grass, ‘I’m not as perfect as I seem.’

  Andrew smiles wryly.

  ‘Oh, you don’t seem that perfect to me, Shauna,’ he teases. ‘There are plenty of things I could point out, but I’m much too polite.’

  ‘And I suppose Frizz is perfect?’

  ‘She’s pretty great.
’

  ‘So is it serious between you guys?’

  He gives me a sidelong look.

  ‘I’d say so, yeah.’

  I take a moment to summon the courage for my next question.

  ‘What would you do if she got pregnant?’

  ‘Shauna! I don’t wanna have this conversation with you!’

  ‘I’m not talking about sex. I’m talking about pregnancy. What would you do?’

  ‘Well, we’ve worked out that one leads to the other. And we’re careful. So I don’t have to ask myself that question.’ He elbows my arm. ‘Next topic, please.’

  I’d like to confide in him, but his prudish, brotherly attitude just knocks all the will out of me. If I can’t tell someone apart from my parents who I love and trust at home, who will I be able to tell at school? Dread of the new term at Oakholme seeps in and soaks me to the bone.

  While the Kiprioses are still staying with us, I sneak onto Mum’s phone and plunge to the hilt into Keli Street-Hughes’s gloriously unprotected social media accounts. She’s in Margaret River, Western Australia, staying on a vineyard with her extended family. There are lots of gastro-porn shots of fancy food on huge, white plates, and people huddled with their arms around each other on a background of endless rows of grapevines running up green hills. I envy the girls and women in the photos their empty wombs and squeaky-clean consciences. For once it’s not their wealth and impressive friends and followers lists that bother me.

  I get so wretched that I even look up Andrew’s girlfriend, and when I find a photo of her in an embrace with another man, I take it straight to my cousin, pulling him into the kitchen by his shirtsleeve.

  ‘She’s two-timing you!’ I shout-whisper.

  Andrew combines a deep sigh with a soaring eye roll. I shrink.

  ‘Is that her ex-boyfriend?’ I whisper, mortified.

  ‘Her brother,’ says Andrew at normal volume. ‘What’s going on with you, Shauna? Why are you in such a funk?’