When only one, p.1
When Only One, page 1
‘There’s someone in the school. They’re holding something in their hands. Something terrifying.’
1987. Sam lives with his mum, dad and four brothers in a small farming town and life is pretty good. He works as a lifeguard at the local surf club, is saving to buy his first car, trains with his friends for the Ironman, and on Sunday afternoons he and his family take care packages to their less fortunate neighbours. Then, five years since they last spoke, Emily Burrow climbs through his bedroom window and back into Sam’s life.
Emily’s life couldn’t be more different. She lives with her mother, who struggles with mental health, and sometimes her alcoholic father, but it’s better when he’s not there. There’s no hope for Emily’s future, and she seems to be the only one who both knows and accepts it. That’s why, to Emily, help is just not necessary.
The new school year brings a heap of changes. Emily starts to hang out with Sam and his mates. A new girl arrives and Sam is smitten, but she brings with her unexpected adjustments. And Sam’s friend Miles faces the biggest challenge of his life. When tragedy strikes one sunny afternoon, everything they thought they knew about growing up will change and they will be forced to face adulthood head on.
From the bestselling author of I Had Such Friends comes a gritty novel, full of heart, that shines a light on kids who are doing it tough in a rural Australian town.
Also by Meg Gatland-Veness
I Had Such Friends
For Merry
Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
About the author
A violet by a mossy stone
Half hidden from the eye!
—Fair as a star, when only one
Is shining in the sky.
William Wordsworth
PROLOGUE
It is a Tuesday. Period three.
Sitting side by side in an English class there are two girls who, by rights, should be enemies. One has her hair in braids and wears a crisp, clean shirt, shiny school shoes and white socks. The other is in a hoodie and trainers. Her hair is a tangled mess.
They are studying the poetry of William Wordsworth. Not that it really matters, because there’s someone in the school. Someone who is not supposed to be there.
This person is walking towards their classroom. They’re holding something in their hands. Something terrifying.
The school bell rings in small, short bursts like Morse code. Most people don’t even know what it means. Questions fly across classrooms and between toilet cubicles.
‘Is it a fire drill?’
‘No, that’s one long bell.’
‘Maybe it’s broken.’
‘Maybe it’s an alien invasion.’
‘Maybe one of the office ladies is drunk again.’
Then the screams start. The person who is not supposed to be there has walked past a Year Seven science class conducting rocket-power experiments on the quad. Most of them have never seen a gun before, except on TV, like on 21 Jump Street, and this one is an awful lot bigger.
Suddenly, everything is happening at once. Classroom doors slam shut, and each room is filled with the frantic voices of teachers who have just realised that the doors don’t lock from the inside.
Furniture is pulled across rooms. Curtains are closed over huge windows. Coffee is spilled on staffroom floors. Students are stuffed into cupboards and under desks. Kids who were playing rugby on the oval are running for cover with their arms crossed over their heads. People who have never prayed before in their lives are asking God to save them.
And all the while this person is getting closer and closer. Every student and teacher in the school is thinking the same thing.
Please don’t come into my room.
Please don’t open my door.
But they have to go somewhere, and nobody is stopping them.
They open the English classroom door.
The two girls are cowering at the back of the room. One is shaking, the other is deathly still. Their fingers are interlocked. Knuckles white.
The person pushes the desks and chairs out of the way. Kids are whimpering. The word ‘please’ is whispered through quivering fingers.
But it’s not them this person is after. They are looking for someone. Someone special.
When they see the person they want, it’s all too easy.
The teacher is under her desk, crying. Her sobs are barely audible over the heartbeats ringing in each and every eardrum in the room.
They take aim.
‘Don’t,’ she says, in a voice like a blazing fire.
When the shot rings out, no one even jumps. It is too close. Too real. Too loud.
‘I was in the middle of performing my Lady Macbeth
monologue. You know, “Unsex me here” and all
that. And I didn’t break character once, even though
the alarm bells were going off everywhere. I was
actually pretty proud of that. Does that make me a
bad person?’ — Bonnie, Year Ten student
‘I was off sick that day with a migraine. I heard
about it on the seven o’clock news that
night. I couldn’t believe it. I thought it was a
prank. That sort of thing just doesn’t happen
here.’ — Mr Tumbler, mathematics teacher
CHAPTER ONE
ONE YEAR BEFORE
1987
There is a girl standing on the street outside my window.
It’s the end of winter and just starting to get warm enough to sleep with the windows open again. I have been trying to understand the difference between cos, tan and sin for the last hour. Which, as far as I can make out, appear to all be the exact same thing. From my extensive investigation, I believe that they have something to do with triangles – or possibly rhombuses? Does anyone actually know what a rhombus is? I was supposed to catch up on my maths study this weekend but have, obviously, left it until the very last minute. Why on earth would I waste my time on maths when there are waves to catch?
She is standing under the streetlight that sometimes keeps me up at night. It is always a toss-up between leaving the blinds open to let the fresh air in or closing them to keep the light out.
I’ll be honest. For a second I am positive that she is a zombie. I’m not ashamed to admit that reading Pet Sematary has kept me up on more than one occasion and left me permanently scared of my neighbour’s Burmese cat, Mittens.
It’s raining in that misty way where the water swirls through the air, suspended, rather than falling from the sky as it normally would.
There are tiny droplets perched on the girl’s hair, which make her look like a sad Christmas tree, like the kind you see abandoned on the side of the road in the last weeks of January with a couple of lonely bits of tinsel still stuck to the branches.
She is shivering. The night air cuts through the holes in her jumper, clinging straight to her pastel skin. She has her eyes fixed on my bedroom window. If she does blink, I miss it. Her face is unreadable, but I know why she is here. There is only one thing that could bring her back to me tonight. Her hair is rattier than I remember, plastered over half her face like a wet glove. It might have been called golden brown if things had been different for her. But, instead, it’s mousy at best.
It’s unclear how long she has been standing there. Perhaps she has been watching me figure out the square root of a rhombus for hours. Maybe she’s been there since the last time we spoke, five years ago.
I let her in, of course. What else can I do?
She moves like fog towards the house. I open my bedroom window and pop out the flyscreen. The clasps are rusty – it’s been a long time since I last did this. She climbs in like a stray cat. As I help her through, I hold her hand. Touching her skin is like accidentally brushing against a frozen drainpipe, but I don’t let go. My hands are still sandy, which makes it easy to grip. She weighs as much as a rag doll.
I remember that Emily was always cold. She would tell me she was used to being cold – that it was comforting in a way because it reminded her of home. I never understood why being reminded of home would be a comfort to her, but I never understood much about her, and that’s a fact.
On her face is a thin layer of dirt and grime, mottling her skin like a lizard’s. The wispy rain was unable to break through its force field.
‘Hi, Sammy.’
That’s right. She used to call me Sammy. No one else ever calls me that. Not even my own mother. My mum doesn’t believe in nicknames. She thinks they are blasphemous. I will always be Samson to her.
A blanket of air falls between us and coats us in quiet.
She doesn’t say sorry. Maybe she doesn’t have to. Thoug h I can’t help but think it would be nice.
I help her take off her soggy trainers. They seem to be made of more holes than shoe. She isn’t wearing any socks. Her feet are pale and wrinkled from the wet. I consider offering her a warm drink – that’s what a nice person would do. Instead, I tie her shoes to my doorknob. They start to drip onto the floor. A poetic person might say they look like they are crying, but I won’t.
I don’t know what to say to her. There was a time not all that long ago when we could talk about anything, but now there is a tidal wave of silence between us. It seems impossible to burst through.
‘Can we just sleep?’ she asks finally.
I nod and she curls up on my bed in a ball so small you would think she was still a child. Still the twelve-year-old girl who I shared my childhood with.
I try to cover her with the doona, but she refuses.
‘Keep it,’ she says.
I settle into my beanbag, my feet resting on the bookshelf, my head partially in my bin and the doona on my chest. One thing to be said about Emily: she would never take a man’s blankets.
‘You can stay as long as you like,’ I say. It’s a lie, but a harmless one. We both know she’ll be home again tomorrow night.
I lie awake staring at the ceiling.
‘What happened?’ I whisper, quiet enough for the air to hear.
She doesn’t reply, even though I know she is still awake. I remember that Emily always liked to keep secrets. I guess she likes having something that belongs to her.
Once, when we were young and freckled and sending newspaper boats down the gutter to another world, I promised Emily I’d marry her someday. She even let me put a plastic ring that I’d made from the inside of a milk-bottle lid on her finger.
I’m sure she has forgotten all about that day.
I can be really dumb sometimes.
My room is pretty clean. My mother washes the sheets every Saturday and hangs them in the sunshine to dry. They are so crisp that you can snap them like peanut brittle. I have posters on the walls of Ironman champions Grant Kenny and Trevor Hendy, with motivational slogans like Don’t give up and You can do it! There is a laminate desk, a lightbulb with a cover on it, a mum-made rag rug on the floor, venetian blinds on the window, an alarm clock on the bedside table. I fall asleep listing in my head every item I own that Emily doesn’t.
I wake to the sound of Tina Turner pumping from my youngest brother Charlie’s room. I knew I shouldn’t have made him that mixtape for his birthday. There are five of us Parker boys in total. My parents aren’t big on the whole contraception thing. Classic Catholics. I am the eldest and therefore the only one with my own bedroom. The others go two by two in bunk beds that my dad built begrudgingly one Christmas holiday. I was supposed to help, but all I did was paint them to look like the ocean. Benny still has nightmares about the octopus with two heads I painted on his bedhead.
I glance at my bed and, miraculously, Emily is still there. The pillow has a wet stain across it from her hair.
I almost ask her to climb back out the window before my parents find her, but my conscience still itches from failing to offer her a warm drink last night, so we walk down the hallway together.
Mum is measuring out five equal bowls of Nutri-Grain with full-cream milk for our breakfasts. My coach, Mr Anderson, lectures me at least once a week about the importance of calcium.
Mum takes one look at Emily and, without saying a word, bends down to pull out a sixth bowl from the cupboard. The only sign that she is fazed by the sudden reappearance of my childhood friend is her pinched face and the creases from her smoking days around her mouth. Mum used to smoke before she had us. Dad says she quit cold turkey the moment she found out she was pregnant with me. She’s got a lot of strength of character, my mum.
My brothers appear as if from nowhere. They, on the other hand, are full of questions.
‘Where did you come from?’
‘Did you sleep in Sam’s room?’
‘Are you Sam’s girlfriend?’
I respond by giving them all a good knock to the back of the head. Emily says nothing, but I think I catch the twinge of a smile in the right-hand corner of her mouth.
The older two, Andrew and Gideon, vaguely remember her, but the littlies, Benny and Charlie, have no idea who she is. Charlie tries to braid her hair, but it is too matted to work with and he gives up. Don’t ask me why one of my brothers knows how to braid hair. All I can say is he didn’t learn it from me.
Mum eats her fibre-full breakfast before anyone else is awake. Dad’s breakfast is a cup of coffee in the car on the way to work.
My mother likes it quiet, and my father likes it at work.
Emily and I are in our last term of Year Eleven. I don’t even know what subjects Emily is doing. We aren’t in any of the same classes. I wonder if she has aspirations for the future. Or is she just surviving? I think she only goes to school each day to get out of the house for a bit.
We catch the bus to school. I have been saving up for a car for six months, working at the surf club every spare minute of my life, but I am still short by several hundred dollars. We sit with my friends on the back seat. Yeah, we are that cool. We’re the ones with coins in our pockets and shampoo in our hair. Emily isn’t one of us, and she contributes nothing to the conversation about whitewash and barrels.
As far as I know, Emily has accumulated a new group of friends since primary school, when all we had was each other. They’re the kids who steal Golden Roughs and Mint Patties from the corner shop even though it’s a little family-owned business, smoke roll-your-own cigarettes behind the demountables at lunchtime and wear hoodies with holes poked through for their thumbs all year round, no matter how hot it is.
They used to ride their bikes to school around period two. Sometimes I saw them out the window of my maths room. I spend a lot of time in maths looking out the window.
Taking advanced mathematics was my father’s bright idea. I think he wants me to follow in his footsteps and drive to an office every day to count things. As far as I’m concerned, I’m going to be an Ironman champion or nothing, and rhombuses don’t seem to be a pivotal part of the Ironman training program.
Now that I think about it, those kids probably dropped out of school after Year Ten. Emily must be all alone now. That’s why she came to me last night; not because I am her oldest friend, but because I am the only one still around. She could have dropped out too, but she is still here. I look at her and smile, but she is staring out the window and doesn’t notice me.
After school I wait for her on the hill by the busses, but she never shows. I wonder how she’s going to get home. There is no shade here, but it’s too risky to wait under the gum trees – we might lose our spot on the back seat.
I catch the bus to work at the surf club. There isn’t a lot to do at this time of year – we haven’t even put the flags back out yet. I spend the afternoon watching the surfers through my binoculars and wishing I was out there with them.
There’s time for a quick surf after work before I have to run home for dinner. The water is still freezing, but I’m used to it. Just have to get past that first immersion when it feels like tiny blades are swimming through your veins.
When I get home, my mother is making roast chicken, potatoes, vegetables and Yorkshire puddings. You’re probably thinking that most families have roast dinners on a Sunday, but we spend our Sunday afternoons and evenings taking care packages to our far less fortunate neighbours. Yeah, we are one of those families. Mum collects donations of money, food, drinks, clothes and other stuff at the church on Sunday mornings. After lunch we sort through everything, package it in baskets and off we go. People usually donate canned goods like beans and spaghetti, but sometimes they’re generous enough to leave a packet of biscuits or even fresh fruit. The best days are when Mrs Singer down the road goes on a new diet, which is at least once a month, and she fills the donation basket with all the unhealthy food in her house so she won’t be tempted to eat it.
Every Sunday afternoon we knock on the doors of houses sagging under the weight of poverty, stained mattresses stacked in their front yards, windows with broken venetian blinds like toothless grins, and holey green shade cloths draped on their front porches. Whenever it’s my turn to stop by Emily’s house, which you can smell before you see – a combination of feet and stale beer – I leave the basket on the steps and leg it around the corner. This is partly to avoid seeing Emily.
