Review of Australian Fiction, Volume 5, Issue 1 by Karen Foxlee

Author:Karen Foxlee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Review of Australian Fiction
Published: 2013-06-30T04:00:00+00:00

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The afternoon passes with no more sales and I leave just after five. I change into my boots and hurry out of the shopping centre before Reeve can find me and we have to have a conversation without the social safety of a large white counter between us. Coming down the escalators the knife guy is there with his display table and he winks at me, his hand resting on the hilt of a dagger shaped like a dragon’s head. For the umpteenth time, I realise I could just reach down off the escalator and pick up a blade and make the news. Not that I ever would, but you sometimes I think it, don’t you, just for the stupid thrill.

I leave through the big sliding doors and the afternoon humidity drapes itself across my face. I’d rubbed off the worst of the makeup in the shopping centre bathroom, leaving on what I hoped was just enough. Eloise had taught me how to apply makeup, but only in a way that suited her strong features. On my whitebread face, the dark eyeshadow and swathes of lipstick just made me look like something from a straight-to-video horror franchise. My bike is there on the rack, still somehow not stolen even though I keep leaving the lock conspicuously undone. Dad refuses to buy me a new one until it ‘wears out’ and so once again I hop on my too-small red BMX with Lightning Lady written in horrendously large letters down its frame and pedal out of the car park. I often consider riding it out of town and abandoning it, but then I’d have no way to get back home and besides I’m a terrible liar and dad would be able to tell and then I’d have no bike.

My stupid backpack keeps hitching up my shirt so I spend most of the ride holding it down before I have to sling my backpack over my handlebars and then it makes it hard to steer and so I have to go really slow and I can feel the drivers of the cars buzzing past judging me but that’s just the way my life is. I turn off the main road and shudder over the dusty path that runs beside the river. I pull up next to the play equipment and fling my bike into the dirt, hoping to elicit an unrepairable crack to its chassis. No such luck.

Soon I’m sitting behind the skate park, shivering out dust and petrol fumes, pretending to read a book. All the guys are pretty much just silhouettes against the sky. One by one, they teeter on the lip of the ramp and drop away, the sight of them replaced by the hum of wheels on concrete. The rest of them are huddled on the other side, making fume-tents with their shirts or smoking or both. It stinks here, but there’s nowhere better to watch the vacant lot across the fence where the cars are.

They’re all parked at mad angles as usual, in some sort of protest against symmetry.

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