‘You’re my best friend,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t tell anyone, whatever it is.’
‘I know.’ I squeezed her arm. I really would have liked to talk to her about it. But I still wasn’t always sure about it myself. All I knew was what Mum had told me – that we couldn’t ever leave Australia and that I mustn’t talk to anyone about that. Or tell them why.
And the next day Katie Taylor started going on about it again. She said I couldn’t come because the Silver Bay Hotel was broke. Then she said she reckoned it was Auntie K who’d killed the baby whale, just like she’d killed the shark, because it had been in the paper then and everyone knew. She said if I had a dad perhaps I’d be able to join in more school trips, then asked me what his name was, because she knew I couldn’t say, and then she laughed in that really sly way until Lara went up to her and gave her a shove. Katie grabbed her hand and bent her fingers back and they had a full-on fight in the yard until Mrs Sherborne came and broke it up.
‘She’s a stupid bitch,’ said Lara to me, as we walked off to the cloakroom. She was spitting on the floor because some of Katie’s hair had ended up in her mouth. ‘Don’t pay her any attention.’ But that was the thing: suddenly I didn’t feel mad with Katie, or any of her stupid mates, I felt mad with my mum. Because all I wanted was to do what everyone else did. I get good marks and I never talk about what I’m not supposed to talk about and I don’t even talk about Letty half the time when I want to because I’m not allowed to hurt anyone’s feelings. So if we could get the money for a trip to New Zealand, like Auntie K said, and absolutely everyone in my class was going – even David Dobbs, who everyone knows still wets his bed and has a mum who takes things from shops without paying – why was it always me who got left out? Why was I the one who always had to say no?
If you don’t count where we came from, I’m the only person in my whole class who has never been further than the Blue Mountains.
I was still angry when I got home. Mum picked me up and I almost said something but she was so busy thinking about something else that she didn’t notice how quiet I was. And then I remembered that we still had this horrible family staying, with two boys who looked at me like I was stupid. And that made me really mad too.
‘Do you have any homework?’ she said, when we pulled up outside the hotel. Milly was chewing Mum’s torch in the back and I had known all the way back but hadn’t stopped her.
‘No,’ I said, then climbed out of the car before she could check. I knew she was looking at me, but Katie’s words were still in my ears and I wanted to be in my room by myself for a while.
When I was going up the stairs I saw that Mike’s door was open. He was on the phone and I hovered for a minute, not sure whether I should wait for him to finish.
I think he felt me there because he spun round. ‘An S94. Yup, that’s it. And he said that should improve our chances a hundred per cent.’ He glanced at me. ‘Okay – can’t talk now, Dennis. I’ll ring you back.’ Then he put down the phone and smiled a great big smile at me. ‘Hello there. How are you doing?’
‘Terrible,’ I said, dropping my bag on the floor. ‘I hate everyone.’ I surprised myself, saying that. I don’t normally say that sort of thing. But it made me feel better.
He didn’t try to shush me, or tell me I didn’t really feel like that, which is what my aunt usually does, like I don’t even know what I’m feeling. He just nodded. ‘I have days like that.’
‘Is today?’
He frowned. ‘Is today what?’
‘One of those days. Terrible. A terrible day.’
He thought for a minute, then shook his head. I thought, as he grinned, that he was almost as handsome as Greg.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Most days are pretty good at the moment. Here,’ he motioned at me to sit down, ‘would one of these cheer you up? I’ve made it my mission to try every Australian biscuit there is.’
When he pulled open his drawer, I saw he had all my favourites: Iced Vo-Vos, Anzacs, Chocolate Tim Tams and Arnott’s Mint Slices. ‘You’ll get fat,’ I warned him.
‘Nope. I go running most morning,’ he said. ‘I have a good metabolism. And, besides, people worry far too much about all that stuff.’
He made himself some tea, then sat on the leather chair and I sat at his desk and he let me go on his computer. He showed me a program that lets you change pictures, so just for fun we pulled up another picture of Auntie K and the shark and we drew a big smile on its face, and then I did another where I gave Auntie K a moustache and a pair of really big feet, and had her holding a sign and I wrote in it, ‘Shark Lady Toothpaste – For a Brighter Smile’.
Just as I was finishing, I felt him looking at me. You can do that, you know, make someone turn round if you stare at them hard enough. I felt like he was staring at the back of my head so I spun round really fast and he was. ‘Did you have a brother or a sister?’ he said. ‘The one who died, I mean.’
I was so shocked to hear someone say it out loud that I nearly spat out my Chocolate Tim Tam. No grown-up talks about Letty. Not straight out like that. Auntie K has this kind of pained look whenever I say her name, like it’s too much to bear, and Mum’s so sad when I talk about her that I don’t like to.
‘A sister,’ I said, after a minute. ‘Her name was Letty.’ Then, when he didn’t seem horrified, or look at me like I should be quiet, I said, ‘She died when she was five, in a car crash.’
He shrugged a bit. ‘That’s really tough,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’
Suddenly I really wanted to cry. No one has ever said that to me. No one has ever thought about what it was like for me to lose my sister, or said that it might have been horrible for me. No one asks me if I miss her, or whether any of it feels like it was my fault. It’s like, because I’m young, my feelings don’t matter. I’ve heard them, they say, ‘The young bounce back. She’ll heal.’ They say, ‘Thank goodness she can’t remember too much.’ And, ‘It’s the worst thing you can imagine, to lose a child.’ But they never say, ‘Poor Hannah, losing her favourite person in the whole world.’ They never say, ‘Okay, Hannah. Let’s talk about Letty. Let’s talk about all the things you miss about her, and all the things that make you sad.’ But I didn’t feel I could say that to him: it’s locked too deep inside, somewhere I’ve learnt it’s best to keep hidden. So when the tears came I pretended I was upset about the school trip and I told him about Katie Taylor teasing me, and about the money and how I was the only person in my whole class who couldn’t go. And before long it had worked so well that I’d managed not to think about Letty, just about the school trip and how awful it would be when everyone went off to New Zealand without me and that made me cry.