New fiction
Stepping on cracks
by Sarah Laing
T hrrrr-up, thrrr-up, thrrr-up go her fingers against the chipped turquoise paint. She’s standing alone, stringy hair, corduroy skirt, scabby legs sprouting out of Roman sandals. There’s 20 more minutes of the lunch break to go, and her fingers are cascading against the wooden post, flicking out like the fan my uncle brought me back from Spain. Everyone else is in clusters, comparing hair clips, playing hopscotch, sweeping pine needles into the corridors and bedrooms of imaginary houses. But she’s standing alone, and so am I.
I didn’t use to spend lunch times by myself. I used to have a friend, Stacey. But Stacey went to the Philippines with her family for the year, and now I have no one to play with. It’s partly because I’m shy. Mum tells me I have to say hello to people when I get to school. I whisper it. Hi. He-llo. “No, Rebecca,” my mother says. “You have to say, ‘Hello Monica, hello Kirsty, how are you?’”
I don’t think so. Hello is enough. Hello is as hard as having my teeth drilled, harder than when I ran the school cross-country, across paddocks, past dried cow pats and the scrawny cabbage trees, abandoning my left sneaker in a muddy swamp because I was too tired to retrieve it. Hi, I whisper to the people who sit around me, but they don’t hear me. I speak too softly; I don’t catch their eye.
Mum knows about the girl whose fingers fan out across the turquoise post. She’s just moved next door to her gossipy friend. Her gossipy friend has collected an album of facts about the girl. The fact that her mother died of breast cancer. The fact that her father was knocked down by the truck he used to feed rubbish into, and now he can’t work, now his words run together, are muddied like my paint palette in art class. The fact that she has a sister who’s 16 and had her stomach pumped of rum in the hospital, and that they are all looked after by her grandmother, who has always planted her string beans up against the fence that separates her from Mum’s gossipy friend. Mum’s gossipy friend picks the beans that grow through the fence and hands them back to the grandmother in exchange for facts. Sometimes she just eats them, their furry skin rough against her tongue, still warm from the sun. “You should make friends with Dolores,” Mum tells me. “She’s just moved here; she doesn’t know anybody. And aren’t you missing Stacey?”
Dolores. I turn that word over in my tongue like a boiled sweet. There’s nobody else at school with that name. Dolores. It’s Spanish, like my fan. Her mother was Spanish, before the cancer got her. I see her mother, whizzing around a cul-de-sac on a scooter, hair flying in the wind, her cleavage brown against her white daisy summer dress, a dent in her arm where she was vaccinated against tuberculosis. I don’t see her breastless. I don’t see her dying. I don’t know what that looks like. Dolores. I finger my bag of raspberry drops in my pocket. The white paper feels soft like T-shirt cotton. Dolores hops from one tree stump to another in the schoolyard. I watch her, my bare feet plunged into the green grass, whispering he-llo. He-llo Dolores. I’ve had three bee stings this summer, and although I didn’t need an ambulance like Theresa, my foot swelled enough to invite attention from the girls who never invite me to join them in four-square.
“What are you staring at?”
“Um, nothing. Do you want a lolly?”
“Okay. Thanks.” Dolores steps off the tree stump to reach for one. “Do you want to play?”
“Sure. How do you play?”
“Easy. You leap across to every second stump. If you touch the ground, you turn to stone. I’ll show you.”
Dolores leaps, wobbling as she lands. She turns and grins. I see that her front tooth is broken. “Your turn,” she says.
I climb up onto the tree stump. I leap – I make it. I’m glad for my calloused feet. I leap to the next stump. The next, the next. I laugh. Dolores leaps after me. I leap again – I miss. The stump hits my shin, scraping off my skin as my foot heads towards the ground. I scream, then swallow it. Instead I breathe through my teeth gaps, as the blood beads like droplets on get-well-card roses. Dolores looks pale. “Come on, let’s go to the sick bay,” she says. “Which way is it?”
I point past the hopscotchers and the boys playing tag. I fix my eyes on a small hole in Dolores’ T-shirt as I limp after her, the dribble of blood cooling my leg.
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