Lara said, picking them up very carefully, ‘Do you think about your sister a lot?’
I was under my bed trying to find something in a magazine that I wanted to show her, so I don’t think she could see me nodding. ‘I don’t really talk about her because Mum gets too upset,’ I said, as I backed out, trying not to hit my head, ‘but I still miss her.’ I couldn’t really say more than that. It still felt too difficult.
‘I hate my sister,’ she said. ‘She’s a witch. I’d love to be an only.’
I couldn’t explain it properly to her – but I’ll always have a sister. Letty not being alive any more doesn’t make me an only, just half of what I was.
On Thursday Mum asked me to take Mike his breakfast for the third time in a week.
‘Can’t you do it?’ I said. ‘I haven’t done my hair yet.’ It was really annoying as I like to put my hair in plaits before school and if you lose your rhythm as you’re doing it they go all lumpy in the middle. Auntie K said her old fingers were too stiff to do plaits, and Mum never cares what her hair looks like so there’s only me who can do it.
‘No,’ she said. Like, that was that. And she left his tray on the step outside my room.
She was being quite weird. I didn’t know if it was because she didn’t like him but she won’t sit out in the evenings any more and the few times when she did she ignored him, even though he sat out every night like he was waiting for her. I told Lara it was quite childish, really, like some of the girls in our class who pretend you aren’t there even though you’re standing right in front of them.
‘Are you cross with Mike?’ I asked Mum in the end.
She was a bit shocked. ‘No – why do you ask?’
‘You look cross with him.’
She started to fiddle with her hair. ‘I’m not cross, sweetheart. I just don’t think it’s a good idea to get too close to the guests,’ she said. Later I heard her and Auntie K talking in the kitchen, when they thought I was watching telly. The whalechasers were outside and Mum wouldn’t go and sit with them, even though they really needed to talk about whether to raise ticket prices. Fuel costs had gone up again. They were always on about fuel costs.
‘I don’t understand why you’re getting yourself so worked up about everything,’ Auntie K was saying.
‘Who says I’m worked up?’
‘That chip out of my dinner-plate?’
I heard the plate go down on the surface, and Mum’s muttered ‘Sorry.’
‘Liza, love, you can’t hide for ever.’
‘Why? We’re happy, aren’t we? We do okay?’
Aunt Kathleen didn’t say anything.
‘I can’t, okay? It’s just not a good idea.’
‘And Greg is?’
Greg doesn’t like Mike. He called him a ‘sonofabitch’ when Auntie Kathleen was talking to him and he thought nobody could hear.
Mum’s voice was all stressed when she said, ‘I just think it’s better all round if Hannah and I steer clear of getting . . . involved.’ Then she went out. And my aunt made that snorting noise with her nose.
I looked up ‘involved’ in the dictionary. It said, ‘participating in a romantic or sexual relationship/complicated or difficult to follow’. I showed it to Auntie K to see which one it was, but she stuck her finger on both and said that about summed it up.
At school, they were talking about the school trip. Sometimes it felt like they talked about nothing else, even though it was months and months away and sometimes our teacher said if we didn’t pull our fingers out no one would be going. We were all outside sitting on the long bench in the yard and Katie Taylor asked me if I was coming, and I said I might not be. I didn’t want to say anything as she’s the kind who twists everything you say, so of course she stood there in front of everyone and said, ‘Why? Haven’t you got enough money?’
‘It’s not because of money,’ I said, and went pink because I couldn’t say what it was.
‘Why, then? Everyone else in our year is coming.’ As usual, she had two pink patches of skin next to her ears because her mum pulls her hair too tight into her clips. Lara reckons that’s why she’s always mean.
‘Not everyone,’ said Lara.
‘Everyone except the dags.’
‘I’m not coming because we’re going somewhere else,’ I said. I spoke before I’d thought about what I was saying. ‘We’re going on a trip.’
Lara nodded, as if she’d known about it for ages.
‘Back to England?’
‘Maybe. Or we might go to the Northern Territory.’
‘So you don’t even know where?’
‘Look, her mum hasn’t decided yet,’ said Lara. She can put on this voice that says not to mess with her. ‘Don’t be such a stickybeak, Katie. It’s none of your business where they go.’
Later, Lara put her arm through mine when we walked back to hers. My mum was picking me up from there after tea, like she did every Tuesday, and Lara always said it was funny because I liked her house best, just like she said she liked mine. I like the way her family is all noisy and happy even when they’re shouting at each other and I like the way her dad’s always teasing her, rubbing the soles of her bare feet on his bristly chin and calling her ‘Kitten’. Sometimes I think about him when Lance calls me ‘Squirt’ but it isn’t the same. I’d never have a cuddle with Lance the way Lara does with her dad. When Lara’s dad once grabbed my feet and rubbed them on his chin I felt embarrassed, like everyone was pretending to include me because I don’t have a dad of my own. Lara said she liked it at mine because no one went in your room and through your stuff, and the way Auntie K gives us the key to the Whalechasers Museum and lets us wander around in there without watching what we’re up to. Auntie K knew we wouldn’t wreck anything, she told us, because we were such good girls. The best girls she knew. I haven’t told her about the time Lara nicked one of her mum’s cigarettes and we smoked it in the corner behind Maui II until we felt sick.
‘Hannah,’ Lara said, when we were at the bottom of her street, and her voice was really kind, like she wanted to show me how much she was still my friend. ‘Is it really about money? The reason why you can’t come to New Zealand?’
I chewed my nail. ‘It’s a bit complicated.’