Rebecca Lim: Exile

The next page is dated 24 August: I need to rob a bank. And after I rob that bank? I need to have someone come in and watch over Mum so that I can have my old life back.

August 28: I love her so much and I’m too scared to imagine life without her. But I’m so angry at her, too. It’s all her fault this happened, and I will never forgive her for any of it. I almost wish she’d die because I can’t do this any more and I don’t think she can either. What am I saying?!?

I flick through several more entries in the same vein. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that Lela’s frustrated by the direction her life has taken, and that she’s frequently angry and self-pitying — and for good reason. There may only have been one fatal diagnosis, but two lives have been taken apart in the process.

The bus draws up with signage that reads City via Green Hill above the driver’s window. I get on behind the blowsy brunette and the grimy skater boy, halting on the top step and holding up Lela’s bus pass like a robot. It says, Lela Neill, 19 Highfield Street, Bright Meadows.

Human place names never cease to amaze me. Bright Meadows? Well, yeah, sure, maybe once. When the earth was created.

‘Morning, darl,’ says the stocky female driver. Her thick ginger hair is cut into an unattractive shag and she stinks of the ghosts of cigarettes past. She looks at me curiously through her tinted driving lenses when I don’t move on straightaway like the others do. Guess hardly anyone ever stops to chat.

‘Can you tell me when we reach the Green Lantern?’ I say haltingly. ‘It’s a café. In the city.’

The woman nods, giving me an odd look. ‘Sit down, love. You feeling all right? Don’t look yourself today.’

I give her an approximation of a friendly smile and take a seat just behind her. As the doors close and the bus lurches away in a choking cloud of diesel, I dip back into Lela’s journal.

What I get from page after page of closely written, desperate, loopy copperplate is that she dropped out of first-year university several months ago when her mum’s cancer returned and the money ran out. And that Andy broke what was left of her heart.

There’s no dad in the picture — he moved ‘up north’ with a much younger, ‘gold-digging floozie’ years before. The terminology brings a frown to Lela’s forehead, me doing it. The words she uses throughout her journal are as unfamiliar to me as the way these people speak; the way Lela herself speaks: with broad, drawn-out vowels, lots of stress on the second syllables of words, truncations, slang, the works.

So there’s only the two of them then, mother and daughter, fighting an unseen war together on the wages of a waitress at a dingy city café. Lela’s essentially a good person, I decide. Because, no matter how much she might complain her heart out in that little brown notebook, there’s that strong tide of grief flowing beneath everything. Still, it’s ten thousand variations on the theme I hate my life and I shut the journal, slip the elastic band back around it, and stare out the window as street after street of old- style, medium-density housing slides by, mixed in with light industrial areas, train crossings and local shopping strips that all look the same — pharmacies, banks, bakeries and places where you can eat, drink and gamble at the same time. Handy.

People get on and off constantly. As I glance back down the bus, I see that those in casual wear are slowly being replaced by those in more formal attire, and the expressions are gradually getting tighter. Sunlight pierces the dirty windows, making pretty patterns on the bus’s rubbish-strewn floor.

The Green Hill we eventually pass through also looks nothing like its name. As the suburbs give way to the city fringe and the traffic around us begins to choke and snarl, the bus’s rhythm changes to stop-start, stop-start. The skater boy lopes past me and takes up position just by the doors, removes the earbuds of his portable music player, props his skateboard up against his leg and takes a momentous deep breath. I turn my head to face him, knowing that the heartfelt exhalation that follows has something to do with me.

‘How’s yer mum?’ he says, shoving his mass of lumpy dreads back over one shoulder, fidgety as all hell. ‘Bad she’s sick, eh?’

‘Awful,’ I reply distantly, wondering where all this is going.

I see him lick his lower lip until it is pinkly shiny, wipe his palms on the front of his long shorts. Nervous? He should be nervous.

I wait silently, without blinking, and he flushes a slow and brilliant red beneath my scrutiny. Then the bus doors swing open and he’s off like a shot, skateboard under one arm, messenger bag bouncing on his hip.

‘Lookin’ great,’ he mumbles as he hits the pavement. ‘You should wear colours more often. Might even ask you out, then. If you’re lucky. Catch ya.’

For a moment, I think I’m hearing things. The door shuts behind him and the bus takes off and I can’t help breaking into a small smile. Wouldn’t have thought I was his type. Couldn’t be sure what his type would actually be.

‘Reckon he’s sweet on you, love,’ the driver says over her shoulder, loud enough for the front half of the bus to hear. She gives me a wink in the driver’s mirror.

No, really? evil me whispers dryly, though I meet her eyes in the mirror and nod and smile.

See, I tell Lela, not sure she can hear me, but addressing her anyway because it’s only polite. Things are looking up already, sweetheart.

I sit back, still holding her journal. Maybe that’s supposed to be my mission this time, should I choose to accept it. Getting the girl a date.

What’s that figure of speech that amuses me so much? I’ll take that.

Well, I would. It’d make a change from life and death.

But the memory of Lela’s mother’s pinched face and laboured breathing wipes the smile from my borrowed features. With my track record, life and death will be the least of it.

The curvy brunette with the hard, tired eyes stops by the door. ‘You wanted the Green Lantern, right?’ she says to me. ‘It’s across the road from the stop where I get off. I heard you talking to the driver. Buy my coffee there almost every morning and most afternoons. And you’ve, uh, served me, like, heaps of times.’

I shove Lela’s journal back into her bag, pull tight the drawstring and clip the flap shut. ‘Degenerative brain disease,’ I reply without missing a beat, my eyes serious, my face solemn.

The woman gives me a sharp look, decides I’m not having her on. I watch her features soften.

‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ she says, expertly bunching the end of her messy ponytail through the band and turning the whole thing into a fat, wobbly bun.

The doors of the bus open and we disembark alongside four lanes of bumper-to-bumper traffic, separated in the middle by a row of parallel-parked cars punctuated at regular intervals by stunted and malformed plane trees.

As the lights change again, the woman shouts, ‘You kind of have to step out and take your life in your hands. Now!’

She grabs a handful of my tank top from the side and hauls me between a taxi that has just pulled into a double park in front of us and a speeding van swerving around it with a blare of horns. We pause for breath at the rank of parked cars in the middle then throw ourselves into the two lanes of traffic going the other way. We manage to avoid a couple of drag-racing sedans but almost get collected by a motorbike coming up on the outside that neither of us had seen.

‘Now you see why I need that coffee,’ the woman says ruefully, letting go of my top and shoving her fingers through her already messy hairdo as we step up onto the kerb outside the Green Lantern. ‘I’m Justine Hennessy. Most people call me Juz. Or Jugs.’ She rolls her eyes.