Ozone

(This is the second in a series of short stories about the lives of girls and women)

Kylie Anderson tried to be good. It was who she was. That and being the first of seven kids. When her father died, she worked after school to help her mother with money, but things just galloped towards Kylie like wild horses. She did her best, as we mostly do.

Most Friday nights it seemed to rain. It couldn’t have, but it seemed that way to Kylie. Just after nine, she would leave ‘Quickes’ shoe shop in the arcade where the plaster giants guarded the plaster clock. Nine gongs for the hour and the last note held. She ducked through lanes and arcades for nearly a kilometre and waited at the bus stop with a newspaper over her head.

Red taillights fan out on the wet road. The bus, a wand of light, pulls up before her and then they head out through the laminated streets. Outside the city, by the cemetery, winged angels rise up over old graves. She cracks the window for a cut of air that smells like flowers. Wet trees slap the bus. Things are changing but she can’t say why. Things are always changing. In the shadows of the seats Kylie Anderson slips her heels out of her shoes. ‘Quickes’ gives her a discount, and this pair were the last in their line, black heels, almost Cuban but just a bit too small. Shoes are meant to hurt you, her boss Suzi always said, that she thought the price of beauty is surely pain. Suzi with her whippet-thin body and her constant sniffles, would probably not live long thought Kylie, unlike Kylie herself, seventeen with the guarantee of forever in every day.

The magic of going over to Dan’s on Friday nights still holds but as the journey progresses, the old thoughts work away in the background, will she get into university? And then what?

Should she just have left last year like the others? After all she was not that smart. Mary Spano was smarter, and she left. But Jessica Diamon was about the same and she stayed on. So how could you tell? She thinks of friends now apprentices with jobs in factories and offices. Least they’ll have money. Still, she’s earning something now and if she gets into the university, she’ll keep the job at ‘Quickes’. She asks for nothing from home but food and half-board, which is something she’s proud of, but still, it’s hard. Her Dad’s been dead three years. She thinks of him on the half-built Westgate Bridge with his mates. When did he see there was no escape? What do you think when you fall so far? When time rides down with you?

Sometimes she thinks the everyday is like falling, only slower but you’re not supposed to say such things. She tells herself, at least Dad went fast. But she doesn’t even know that for sure. What you know and what you don’t know are just fractions of time. She’ll probably marry Dan one day and they’ll have a kid and she’ll have her degree and a house maybe even over this side of the city. And babies. Dan is nice. This seems enough and it’s what everyone wants. Dad wanted it didn’t he? The thought of her father again and the tangling that comes with him, snags her heart. She pushes it away. Stay in the present.

There’s comfort in geography.

Jimmy Quinn, Walter Chun, and Kylie are the entire Year 12 Geography class. Mr. Sigismund sees them late in the afternoons after he’s been at it all day, teaching what he calls ‘the dunderheads’ in other levels. Having Year 12 at the school is an experiment and the teachers are keen for success. They see themselves as saviors. Saving kids from the factories. Mr. Sigi is very passionate and it’s alarming. In the staff room, he deliberates about ‘breaking the cycle,’ to Maureen Keen, the English teacher, ‘that’s what we’re doing here Moz, that’s what this is all about. Getting them to become scientists, getting them to read Flaubert. Madame Bovary! Can you believe it? Breaking the bloody cycle.’ Maureen gets it, but, she thinks, the factories are disappearing anyway, each one gone in a puff of smoke, gone like steam trains. These kids will have to work somewhere or will they sit round reading novels about disappointed women? Highly doubtful. Maybe they’ll be teachers? Lucky, lucky kids. She doesn’t want to put the mockers on his plan for salvation so she gets the last of her tea down and packs her big bag with all the scrawled essays it can carry. She truly likes Steve Sigismund but, God almighty, some common sense wouldn’t go astray. And does he wear the same shirt most days? Surely not but she believes the sallow circles under his arms tell their own story.

Kylie thinks Mr. Sigi sure does love geography. In the classroom, he lowers his voice as if he’s got a secret. ‘Geography is the world kids. Between you and me, the other teachers will all tell you their subjects are about the world, but that is pure deception, otherwise known as B.S. Pardon my French,’ he smiles and his bowling ball head gleams in a stripe of autumn sun. ‘How many people teach you about the names of clouds? That ‘petrichor’ is word for the smell of rain on dry earth. Show you that the natural world is a poem.Tell you the metallic smell before a storm is called ozone. Wally, look alive boy! You awake?’ He flicks a chalk stub at Walter, and it bounces off his head like a stone. Wally picks it up and humbly offers it back. Kylie sees no need for these small humiliations. Mr. S goes on.’ Think about the sky. Who needs poems when you’ve got geography?’ He snatches the chalk out of the boy’s hand and scrawls on it: Homework! Define Ozone in more than fifty words. Weather maps are handed out. They need analysing and reports need writing.’

Dan lives in Balaclava on the other side of the city, with his mother in a dark brick duplex. Genevieve, his French mother cooks Kylie omelettes and his Scottish dad Jimmy, makes marvellous cakes. He works at Claude’s the best cake shop in town and on Fridays he brings leftovers. In winter they sit in front of the gas fire with mugs of hot chocolate. Dan likes to explain; ‘being a pastry chef is the highest form of chef. Nothing comes close to the level of skill required.

Then she nods and he might offer her an almond croissant or some Madeleines. He gets no arguments from Kylie. Dan’s parents met when Jimmy was in Paris learning to be a pastry chef. In Balaclava she sleeps in his sister Belle’s tattered pink room where magazine pictures of pop stars flap out from the wall when the door opens. Belle moved to Perth last year and got a job as a caterer. Apparently, she’s raking it in. Genevieve hopes her petite Belle does not marry a miner. ‘Ow do you ever get zees miners clean?’ she says pushing her wispy fair hair up with her forearms on this warm night, while she makes crepes suzette in the tiny brown kitchen. Their cat Monsieur cleans himself thoughtfully by the window.

Dan’s orange Beetle’s number plate read: BOB – 290. They call the car Bob. They feel deeply about Bob. When the car gets close to her house the choppy sound of the engine lifts her heart and when Dan comes in with his shy smile and shaggy hair, she feels something she’s never felt before. Later she thinks it might be confidence or maybe it’s gratitude. His attention is a torchlight aimed at her heart. Her family feel it too. She can’t prize him away from them because he’s everyone’s favourite.

At twenty, his hair is wheat-pale, and his eyes are grey. A scale of old acne scars on his cheeks brings a certain toughness which he admits he doesn’t mind one bit. He’s not tall but he’s strong and years of football have made his fingers crabbed. ‘All my strength is in my back’, he says often but then he says it’s inherited and so claims no credit. His pride runs through him like a tartan scarf. His family are from the outer isles of the Hebrides and they were once a warrior clan who fought to hold the world back. He lived in those low washed blue hills till he was ten. There was a mountain inland on their island like a wall, keeping them safe. His name is Daniel Robert Sutherland.

He still speaks with the island in his voice, and it tugs at him sometimes, the sadness of missing a place rising through the cracks. His parents moved because his French mother was never accepted, and this is the tragedy in his life. Shutting out people was the way there. He understands that but he will go back. And he’ll take Kylie. But sometimes he wonders. Will she be accepted? Will he be?

His kindness to Kylie is astonishing. She’ll believes she’ll never see it again. He worries that her head is on the pillow when they make love. And he brings her things; steamed dim-sims in hot brown bags full of salty soy smells (and he likes the skin best too!), a string of green glass beads, a yellow top he thinks will suit her and flowers, always and whenever, peonies and lilies and delphiniums. He never mixes blooms. One colour at a time, he says seriously. He listens to Dylan, Mitchell and Cohen carefully and that’s all. He likes four Stones songs. With his first pay he buys Kylei a portable record player and three albums: ‘Blue’, ‘Songs from a Room’ and ‘Blonde on Blonde’. And a pair of headphones because she shares the room with her two little sisters. The gift elevates her importance in the family, and she sits cross-legged and serious on her bed, earphones bulging like shells, locked into the place of music while she studies maths she barely grasps and her sisters squabble on their bunks like annoying insects.

Considering the poor academic stature of the school and the small class, being the best in isn’t saying much. Still, maybe if she does well, she’ll land a job where she’ll get to look at the sky all day in the weather bureau. Then she will live only in nice places. She won’t have to look after her brothers and sisters. They will be their own responsibility.

Travelling over Melbourne to Balaclava eases her into Dan’s life. The original Balaclava she discovers was in Ukraine in Europe. The one in Melbourne has Jewish men with hats and beards and wispy hair around their ears. And it has Dan and his family, whose house has small ceramic tartan figures tucked into nooks with names like ‘Laird’ and ‘Bonnie Lass’.

In the bus, the light illuminates her pale head and after a while the passengers thin out. Once, a boy and girl eating fish and chips offer her a chip and she was so startled, she took one. The girl was in an enviable fringed vest. ‘You wanna finish them?’, she asked, wrapping the newspaper. ‘Oh nah, that’s all right, I’m okay.’ Kylie is moved by the stranger and looks away.

Kylie grew up in Streatham Street, a confusing name for a street and one with no explanation, so people called it Street Street. Just another fact about the Andersons who might once have come from Sweden and so maybe were Vikings. Her mother’s family came from Cornwall and therefore were smugglers. Such facts offer glimpses to the invisible layers. Kylie would love to just leave her mother and the kids, just leave them behind in South Kingsville by the broken bridge jutting in the sky like a single ragged tooth. Seeing the carcass of the bridge here is like seeing her father’s gravestone. Every day there it is, shouting it all over again.

The day it happened, she was at school and walking across the quad with the others and then the earth shuddered for what seemed a long time and then came the collapse and the rise of the darkening dust. Panicky birds swept upwards. The air seemed far too dry. And soon there were helicopters swarming like dragonflies over the remains of the bridge. They could see them from school and the choppers really made them fear. The Anderson kids found each other in the school yard as if they were magnetized. Underneath the swooping, they waited for the news, until the chopping of the copters drove them home. Maybe hope could block what was coming. They held it to them and yet what chance could there be? For their dad’s sake they believed in luck. He’d loved the idea of it. And yet luck bowed out that day. Years later the bridge isn’t even finished.

Eric Anderson was a dogger and a rigger on the big bridge. When the great plains of concrete collapsed, he was killed with another thirty-four men. Eric had loved to work way up in the sky. He talked about clouds as if they were friends and this is where Kylie learned the habit of sky love. Cumulous, cirrus, alto stratus, he would always tell her what he’d seen that day at work if she was around when he took his boots off. He liked the job, organising the lifting of equipment and steel, loved the crane drivers and showed the kids their secret signals. He was extremely superstitious about danger and kept the same boots for seven years because of it. ‘Changing boots is,’ he’d say, ‘is not to be taken lightly.’ The trick was to take the new boot up with you a couple of times at least.

Some days when he came home early, he’d play her brother Jed’s ‘Led Zeppelin IV’ as loud as it would go, the little record player shaking. His favourite song was’ Black Dog’. ‘Drives all the shit outta your brain,’ he’d say. ‘All the mistakes you make, or you might make. Life’s about this’, he’d say gesturing, his boots off and him sitting on a fruit box in the backyard after work, a beer in his pewter tankard, holes in his socks and the grey barely in his hair. Eric was vain about his fair curly hair. ‘Careful of me locks,’ Kylie remembers him saying when their mother cut his hair, ‘not too much off now love, the girls won’t fancy me with short back and sides.’ Kylie thinks about him riding the bridge down into the river, wisps of his beautiful hair lifted by the wind. The useless hard hat. The coroner said his body was destroyed absolutely. When he says this in court their mother Carol’s shoulders shake. The kids have stayed away from school to be in court to respect their father. Kylie looks out at the passing clouds unable to absorb anything.

She doesn’t like to ask anything of her mother now. She’s different now. Her parents had never married because he’d been married before and his first wife Linda, known in the family as’ the prize bitch’ because she wouldn’t give him a divorce. They’d had no kids so, the theory went, no damage was done. Steve reckoned marriage was only a piece of paper anyway and Carol moved in with him and then seven children were born; Kylie, Evie, Jenny, Eric, Helen, Johnny and Robbie. They had their own mock wedding ceremony in the Street with roses donated from all the neighbours’ gardens for the bouquet and the kids as witnesses and he said he’d love her enough to last her though her whole life. ‘You’ll be right with me.’

Kylie doesn’t like the other kids so much anymore because she thinks they don’t grieve for their dad. Only Robbie, the youngest is her friend. He wants to be a mountain bike champion. He tinkers with bikes on the dirt floor of the shed. Her sisters are not familiar to her now. They wear make-up at fourteen and talk about boys all the time. They love Michael Jackson, but one even likes The Eagles which leaves her speechless. They are into boys in a way she never was. And Evie is spaced out most of the time.

She’s got to get away from all of them. It’s time now. Her expanding life and she thinks she’ll be the first in her family to go to university.

In Belle’s old room, the high window gives the room the feel of a prison and Belle’s small pink bed lies across the room innocent as a child. Late each Friday night the door cracks open and Dan looks in. Mostly she’s glad for the company of him. His hands are warm and dry. He’s kind. He seems to love her. If this is what love is, this giving. She’d thought it was more than just kindness, though this was a good start. In the night he speaks to her in French and though she doesn’t understand him, she’s impressed. Belle’s narrow bed rocks softly and he holds the headboard to silence the knocking and it seems he’s spread above her like an angel or a god and the nights are long, and sleep comes in fragments. Dan doesn’t like condoms. ‘They come between us, and nothing should come between us,’ he says. ‘Nah, truth is, they don’t feel as good.’ Kylie doesn’t notice any difference with or without them, but she doesn’t say that it’s not much to her because it’s over in seconds anyway, hardly worth the fuss. Even then she understands this would not be wise to say.

He seems to need this from me, she thinks, and she believes the only way to keep hold of him is to provide this thing that makes him happy. So, after the Friday nights of making love, he sneaks back to his room and in the morning, she catches the bus back to the shoe shop. During the day she kneels before the customers and slips shoes on people whose feet smell of soil and sweat and somehow, potatoes. Her long hair has a sway in it and at work she always tucks into a pale bun. She never minds wearing the same thing for both shifts, there’s not that much to choose from anyway and most of them her mother made anyhow. All the Anderson kids are fair, but Kylie is smooth and polished as a piece of weathered bone. Even her eyes are pale. When she was a girl, the kids at school called her albino until her neighbour, Mary Spano stepped in.

It was Mary who got her to go into town the night she met Dan. They’d gone in to see a band and the girls walked down Swanston Street under the fluttering plane trees, past the trams clunking and grinding, past the gruesome restaurants with their spruikers and then, coming the other way was Dan and his friend from the police force and it turned out Mary knew them. Seems the friend Nathan was a cop and a neighbour from when they both lived in the country. Another time. Another school. They’d also seen the band. And so, they went into a Greek restaurants and had cappuccinos the size of wobbley lakes. Kylie thought Nathan the better looking of the two, but then dark-haired boys always stirred her. His eyes were nearly black, and they all laughed, and he told strange stories about being a policeman. Dan was planning to become a member of the police too. He was due at the academy in two weeks. Dan and Kylie went back to Mary’s flat in Maidstone and drank instant coffee and talked about everything and he didn’t try a single thing. But he didn’t really stop smiling and he asked questions as if he were trying to fathom her, as if she were a depth he aspired to, as if she were a mermaid. And all this, she thought, just because she happened to show up. In the pauses between talking, they listened to Mary and Nathan in the room next door. This became embarrassing for all the grunting and gasping and so they kept talking and suddenly daylight entered like an accomplice to their feelings and it felt safe now they knew each other, safe enough to fall asleep. And sleep made them friends.

When Dan graduated, she was corralled in the seats at the academy with Genevieve and Jimmy and later, when they threw their hats into the sky, tears welled from her with fear and joy for him. When Nathan came over to say hello, she no longer even thought him handsome at all. Her idea of male beauty had room only for Dan. She stood on the grass with his parents and for a moment on that sunny day, they held hands and she felt joined to them. Dan got posted to a station in the north. He began to understand fear as something personal. But that day they saw Dan laughing and hugging his friends and it seemed that was a good quiet time. Kylie thought of her father and the sudden possibility of death crossed her mind and hovered like the hawk above her. The constant hawk.

In September, Mary Spano hears Kylie vomiting in her small spartan bathroom. Mary’s cat, Euripides disturbed by the heaving. He pushes between Kylie and the toilet bowl. The cat is black as a night river. Mary has a job in the office at the peanut butter factory as a junior bookkeeper.

When Kylie comes out of the bathroom looking like churned butter, Mary says,

‘second time I’ve seen you doing that. You right?’

‘Ah, I always chuck a lot. Must have a virus or studying too hard I suppose.’

‘Might be something else Kylie. Think about it. Dan bin wearing protection?’

‘Nah, he doesn’t like it. Says it’s not as good.’

‘Yeah right, they all bloody say that. Tell him tough luck. If you’re bloody well preggers, it’s down to him.’

‘I can’t be. Mum said it took her ages to have me. She had a lot of trouble getting pregnant but then once she had me the others followed like the six dwarves.’ She smiles which annoys Mary.

‘And what’s that go to do with you? This is not funny. Listen Kylie you have to go to a doctor and get a pregnancy test.’

‘Well, I’m not doing that. I can’t be. This can’t be happening to me. I’m not even putting on any weight.’

When Mary asked her if she had missed any periods, her face goes blank.

‘Yeah well, maybe.’

There’s no such thing as privacy in that little house full of children in Street Street. Kylie spends time in the variegated pink bathroom aiming prayers at the face in the mirror. The freak of the family, the one who wants a big future instead of a job and a Holden like everyone else. Most nights though they leave her alone and she gets the kitchen table to herself for study. She doesn’t believe she’s pregnant. She can’t really be. So, she goes on a fast and soon the girl in the mirror no longer looks like her, thinness is her disguise. No one at home says anything, though Dan thinks she looks better, more like Joni Mitchell and they agree this could only be a good thing. He hasn’t noticed anything downstairs, so she thinks this is confirmation that she’s okay. He knows more about this than she does. He slept with another girl before her. He said Angela Mayer had long dank pubes and weird rubbery nipples. She thought this was a disloyal thing to say. She wonders what’ll he say about her? But he didn’t say that he’d loved her or hated Angela. He told her that Angela dumped him at the bus stop and then still took the bus into town for the rest of the date at the big Cineplex. They saw ‘Jaws’ and he got a box of popcorn and when he’d finished it, he didn’t know if he should hold hands with her. He decided against it.

Dan charges out to kick the footy in the street with her brothers and she takes a blue knitting needle into the bathroom. She sits on the edge of the bath and slides the needle into her and then it meets resistance and will go no further. Something stops it. She’s weeping and there’s a wrenching somewhere inside but maybe it’s only her heart. She hears Dan and her brothers yelling and laughing outside. She tries again and penetrates further with this stabbing of herself. And it seems this must have done it just in case she is pregnant. There’s not much blood but some of the red of it drops like rain onto the black and white lino tiles. An old towel lies beside that blood. She grabs some toilet paper to blot it and she holds it between her knees. She turns to the bath and prays like a small child against her bed. Please let this not be. Please don’t stop everything now. Please let my life go on. I cannot be anyone’s mother. She’s got a practice exam tomorrow and the swat vac is approaching. Her sister Evie bangs on the bathroom door and shocks away the tears. She jumps up, silent and busy, mopping and flushing. ‘Hurry up wacker! I’m busting out here. Get on with it Kylie-Oakley, Kylie-Doakley.’ Two thumps and long pause as she leans on the door and slides down to the floor and tries a plea. ‘Come on Anne. What ARE you bloody doin’ in there? Taking forever, that’s what you’re doin’.’

Kylie hears her tell their sister Jenny, ‘she acts like she’s the only one who needs the dunny. There’s seven of us not counting Dan and one dunny. What a joke.’ So, she bangs on the door again and rattles the knob and Kylie says quietly. ‘I’m coming Ev. All right. I’m coming.’ She pushes her face into a stripy towel trying to stop the weeping that has seized her. As she brushes past, Evie pinches her arm. ‘Drama queen from New Orleans’ she sniggers. Then Kylie snaps and she shoves her sister hard against the door jam, pins her there and with all the venom she can find, says ‘yeah, and I fucking hate you too Evie.’

At school the trees are natives trees that attract squeaking red and green parrots. Three weeks till final exams. It’s Friday and her busy day. This afternoon she must leave home all dressed for work by four, so she gets to work by five. She dreads it. She sits on the seat under the branches of the fly swat trees and her eyes range around the concrete block at school. The exam won’t be here. They’ll go to the big high school in Essendon because they don’t have a big enough hall or enough students here and anyway, the basketball court is needed that day anyway.

In her studies she’s learned about clouds, about Anna Karenina and the desperate sadness and judgement that comes when you step outside boundaries. About history. About Australia and its damned history of colonisation. About scarifying unfairness. About Economics and what makes markets such temperamental beasts. But she is still pregnant and has not learned about how to ask for help. She has to speak to Dan. He’s her best hope even though he’s a Catholic, only thanks to his mum though, the religion means nothing to him. There must be something that can be done. Otherwise, she will die. This, she knows without studying.

In the night in Belle’s room, they lay together on the small bed, barely covered and the Friday rain pounds on the roof. She’s so thin, people mention it. He places a hand on her shallow hip. She’s a feather. ‘Dan, I think I’m pregnant. He laughs. You can’t be. Look how thin you are. You crazy girl.’

Tears pour from her. I am I know I am and it’s going on and I can’t stop it. I tried.

She tells him about her attempts. Once with the knitting needle and another time with a coat hanger. She’d managed to cut herself with the coat hanger.

He turns the light on. Shock has whitened him and raised his voice.

‘What? Why didn’t you say?’

‘I didn’t believe it. I just didn’t. I don’t want to be pregnant. I want to have my life.’

He pushes her hair back from her face.

‘I’ll help you, Kylie. You don’t have to be anything you don’t want to be.’

He speaks to a sergeant at work, the one called Sergeant Blue because he often seems a little down and he rings someone and then an appointment has been made and on Friday. Kylie must take a day off work. They squeeze her in after hours. She takes the tram to the place and passes protesters outside holding red signs saying, ‘Mercy on The Little Children’ and ‘Stop the Slaughter!’ As she passes, a man says, ‘think again sister’ and grabs her arm and at his touch, she believes that if she had a gun, she might just kill him. She is filled with simplicity. In the waiting room, there are many forms and she waits for Dan and when he comes in still in his policeman’s trousers with a green windcheater over his blue shirt, she thinks this must be love because only people who love you help you.

The doctor’s room is big and square with windows facing the trees. The green of them is all she remembers. He asks her how old she is. Seventeen. She speaks slowly now, and words are harder to find. The doctor seems so old. Older even than her dad would have been. His beard is grey. He puts his hand on her shoulder. ‘Kylie, you’re not alone. We will help you.’ He must get another doctor to sign this life away. He helps her down from the examination table. ‘Go with Nurse Rennie.’ Dan stays in the room with the doctor.

When she sees him two hours later, it’s over. The world is darkening, and her eyes are full of anaesthetic and the trees seem like negatives. They go out to the car and though she is against it, tears keep on coming. He holds the wheel and says what should we do? and the negative trees and the light sky and dark earth and the protesters with their red signs press towards them.

She says, ‘take me home. Just take me home.’

The car pushes through the light evening. Dan is steadfast. He reaches over to her when he’s not changing gears and she watches the docklands pass like a painting. ‘Don’t come into the house. Don’t kiss me.’ She has made up her mind about Dan. He sits in the car weeping as he watches her head go inside the wire gate past Birdy, the old black dog, their father said they needed to balance them. ‘Too much light, will be the end of us,’ he’d say. She passes her mother, Carol playing patience in the evening at the kitchen table. It’s what she does after work at the supermarket. The insurance from Steve’s death paid off the house but there’s nothing to live on, apart from her pay at the grocery store. And there are so many mouths.

‘What are you doing home my girl? You should be at work.’ She flips a line under the red king and drawers on her fag.

‘Bit sick mum, I’ll be all right. Just hop into bed.’ She leans over to kiss her creased mother. Her bright hair is dry and light, and the girl wants to be held, but there’s no holding for people like her. This is something she must carry alone.

A week later at the exams in Essendon, Jimmy Quinn offers her his spare pencil sharpener when they’re waiting on the steps the four of them. The little group from the high school. She takes it for luck. He’s got a spare. ‘How d’ya reckon you’ll go?’

‘Don’t know. Hopeless probably. You?’

‘I reckon we’ll all get the scholarship and go to uni and be teachers.’

‘Geez Jimmy. Got it all worked out eh…’

They call them in for English, the first, the longest, and she looks over at him and he clenches his fist and puts it over his heart. She sees the weather changing through the wall of windows. Clouds all stirred up and about to change.

Dan tells her it cost two hundred dollars. ‘The doctor said you were depressed. Did you really tell him you wanted to die? You told him everything, I can’t believe you would tell anyone that.’ She looks at him astonished that he doesn’t understand. It was all true. More than true but she says nothing.

On results morning, Jimmy Quinn calls to congratulate her. He’s seen her name and her marks in the paper. ‘See you at uni. Kylie. Yay! Can you believe it? We got there. Paid for too. Little wackers like us without any dough. How good is Gough?’

‘Yeah. university. What D’ya reckon it’s gonna be like?’

‘It’s gonna be like everything.’

Still, she didn’t finish university. She needed money and she couldn’t concentrate.

She qualified for the police force and passed through training. She worked for a year at a station in the outer west. Gradually, she began to hate the job, and the person she had to make herself be for it. She quit and the shoe shop took her back.

At ‘Quickes’ when things are quiet and there’s time for a chat, she sometimes calls Jimmy Quinn. He dropped out of university too and became a newspaperman. ‘Too many wankers at uni in the end,’ he says. They meet in cafes and his stories are funny and not unlike own her police stories, still she didn’t miss it.

After work these days she goes home and she does not think about the future. The future can look after itself. She doesn’t often go to Dan’s though they think they might move in next year. It’s a way of getting away from her brothers who, as they get bigger, get even more annoying.

She met Dan at the local Chinese to tell him that it was over. He was not in uniform, and his hair had grown. She saw what had attracted her to him, there was a kindly geniality in him. They ordered their usual meals. ‘How have you been?’ he asked shoveling fried rice with a fork.

‘Yep good, I suppose.’

‘You’re still so thin Kylie, we have to feed you up.’

She waited until they had finished and were sipping Chinese tea.

‘Dan, I need to talk to you. The thing is I don’t want to be your girlfriend anymore. I don’t want to be anyone’s. I can’t be coming and going. I have to help mum’.

He asked why she had quit the police force. She looked at him, at his bland, reliable face and said ‘the strangeness of people’s lives became disturbing. It didn’t suit me. I’m back at the shoe shop in town and I like it. It’s easy and the people are lovely. So, I’m sorry and I did love you Dan.’

He’s shocked. He raises his hand to touch hers and knocks over his tea in its tiny cup. They grab at small inadequate squares of paper to mop it up. He gives up and looks at her. ‘But Kylie, I thought we had a clean slate now and that we could get married and have kids one day.’ To even mention that astonishes her. It will be a very long time before she could even consider such an idea.

Dan insists on paying for dinner. They walk to the car. ‘Let me give you a lift home.’

‘Thanks, but I’ll be okay, there’s a bus along soon.’

And though she feels sorry for him, she kisses his cheek.

Standing at the bus stop she thought, breaking up with him would allow her to look forward even though she couldn’t leave home; her mum needed the money she gave her.

That last night with Dan, was stormy with rain soon to fall and the bus came toward her all alight, glowing against the black road and she got on. She would not see Dan again, it was all over now, all of it. That night there was a smell in air, a clean bleached smell and she knew it was ozone. She’d been coming back to an idea; one she knew her father would like. She might become a teacher, maybe teach kids about ozone and the meaning of clouds.