STONE River

Indie is just a kid trying to find a scrap of beauty in an urban jungle.

short story

Image: Banksy, Girl with a blue bird — Artwork: Banksy, *Girl with a blue bird*

At the back of the flats was an alley road of rutted bluestone. It curved like a riverbed along the rigid fence lines and rusting garage roller doors.

Back pressed against a glass door, sitting on the cement steps leading to the flat’s stairwell, Indie scrunched up her legs, her chin resting on her knees. She was barefoot; jeans rolled up, a fire engine red T-shirt untucked. Fine brown hair spilled from an elastic band, and her cotton-grey eyes were fixed on the back alley road.

Do I walk it? Do I dare?

It’s ugly. But so were the seventies, cream brick flats, two-storeys high with the carport down the side. The neighbourhood was crammed with replicas of these flats. Driving past, Indie would see the buildings in a blur and often thought she lived two doors down.

Her bedroom window overlooked the carport and a rusting Ford with four flat tyres. One of the tenants owned it. She didn’t know whom. There’s the woman upstairs who flooded their kitchen floor last week, the water dripping down the wall. She’d been hesitant with her apology. Perhaps it was hers. Or, there’s the middle-aged man who left each morning in a suit, but he drove a floating brown sedan that’s at odds with the two micro cars, one belonging to her parents. The owners of the flats lived at the front in a two-storey apartment, which made the back four flats a strange appendage. Indie’s family was on the ground floor next to Tony’s. His family’s flat was chockers. His word. He had to sleep in the dining room alcove that they’d walled off with bookcases. His sisters, Cara and Maria, had the small second bedroom.

The flat-tyred Ford, Indie decided, was a relic of a tenant who was long gone. It scared her. This skeleton car without an owner; left and uncared for. The landlord hadn’t even bothered to move it, which seemed ridiculous, as the extra space would have been handy for the tenants. She and Tony climbed it, especially to peer over into the backyard of the house next door. But Indie stopped when she realised she kept wanting to look because she wanted the backyard and the house that went with it to be her own. And the fact Tony wanted to perve at the girl who lived there who was about their age. She wore a grey school uniform; her thick, curling black hair tied back. Skin pale as milk. Tony never said she was pretty, but his eyes did.

Indie looked at her bare feet. Soles ash dirty and cracking they were getting so hard.

“Why won’t you wear shoes?” her mum asked curiously. The moment she could, Indie would yank of her school shoes. They were like boats; brown T-bars that her feet swam in. Her dress had a big hem that could be let out. It hung off her frame, a couple of sizes too large. She was meant to grow into it and then out of it, but slowly, because it all cost and Indie knew that was the reason for it. She hated the shoes as much as the baggy uniform. But she said nothing.

“My feet feel better out of them,” was her reply. Her mum knew better to say anything else.

Indie could walk the bluestone riverbed without shoes. But that’s not what stopped her.

Often she’d get as far as the end of the carport and she’d peer round the double-car-wide opening in the fence that led to the laneway. She’d look each way. Left was a bending curve leading somewhere else, and right was a straight run to a side street. There was no security to speak of. Indie could look out at the laneway from her bedroom window she shared with her sister, Tabs. The balcony with potted palms gave a flimsy illusion of screening. Some nights, Indie’s eyes were propped open, willing herself not to sleep as every rustle, creak and scrape became a shadowed threat creeping towards the bedroom window. Tabs slept with her headphones on. Her iPod was her treasure. A birthday gift from Gran, their dad’s mother, who quietly despaired at the peripatetic lifestyle of her youngest son and his wife.

They’d recently moved from Sydney so that their dad could take up a music teaching job at a Grammar school, while their mum did temp work part-time at a doctor’s clinic. Indie knew her Gran helped with her and Tabs’s school fees. It was the sister-school of the boy’s school her dad taught at. They offered discounts to teacher’s kids and everyone knew it.

“It’s a good school,” her mum said on their first day. Indie had shrugged out of her mum’s handhold when they entered the school gates. She couldn’t remember where her classroom was, but they went to Tabs’s grade 3 classroom first. Indie’s was across the playground and a large expanse of grass near the tennis courts. She was in grade 5. Her mum bent to kiss her cheek, but Indie pulled away at the last minute. She wanted to get away from her mum, but she didn’t want to go into the classroom, either.

Rooted to the spot she saw a plump woman wearing high-heeled sandals, toenails painted red, with straw blonde hair waving for her students to come into the room. Mrs. Landie. She was Canadian. The sight of the girls filing in twos and threes, huddled together whispering, talking—knowing each other—gripped Indie’s throat, swelling tears to her eyes. She knew no one. She found a seat in the back of the classroom with another girl, equally alone.

“Psst,” Tony spat in her ear.

“Ouch,” she cried and pinched his skin, twisting the hairs on his arm.

“Geez!” Tony was a squealer and he’d probably run inside and yell to his mum that Indie was hitting him again or something, but he stayed put, plonking himself down on the step and butting her sideways to make room.

Indie didn’t mind. Tony was her best friend. Her only friend.

“Ever walk along that laneway?’ she asked.

It was off limits. Cars. That’s what her parents said. The landlord, Mr. Bishop, kept saying he’d install security gates, but they’d been here a year and nothing had changed.

“Nah. It just goes out to the street.”

“Don’t you wonder—”

“Wonder what?” Tony found a stick and began hitting the bottom step, a kind of rhythm.

“It looks like a river bed,” Indie mused.

Tony raised his eyebrows. Indie said stuff like this all the time and he didn’t get it. He frowned and hit an angry beat onto the concrete. He blamed the fancy school she went to and which he never asked about. From the moment they’d met, she’d talked like this, so it couldn’t be that. His mum said Indie had a vivid imagination, which might not have been a good thing the way she said it. Despite the fact his mother loved Indie.

“River what?”

“The bottom of the river. All the rocks and stuff you find under the water.”

“Never seen one,” he pouted. Tony had never lived outside of the city, but he knew before coming here Indie had lived in Sydney, and before that in Byron Bay. She seemed bigger to him even though they’re the same age. Bigger because she’d seen more than he had. And this hot prickling feeling seethed under his skin, that she knew more, like she had something over him and it should be him, not her, that had more to say.

“Would you walk along it with me?” She had this intense stare that he avoided. Big, grey eyes that swallowed him. He couldn’t hide when she looked at him full in the face. He whacked his big toe and the jabbing pain took him away from her.

“Can’t. Got to do piano practice.”

Indie’s chin dropped to her knees. She looked at the long nutbrown fingers clutching the stick. Tony’s stocky, but his fingers weren’t. They made her think of the slim reeds that went stalk brown in summer down by the creek at the back of the property they’d lived in at Byron.

“Better go.” Tony stood up, threw the stick at the collapsed Ford and it made a clunking twang hitting the metal.

Indie squeezed her eyes against the sun. “See ya.”

“Ma asked if you’d have dinner with us tonight. Cannelloni. No meat.”

Indie grinned. Mrs. Cavelli found all sorts of ways for her to eat with them by having non-meat dishes. The rest of Indie’s family were carnivores, but for her, Mrs. Cavelli made an exception.

“Sure. I’ll tell Mum.”

“Everyone’s invited. I think Ma asked your mum this morning.” Indie hadn’t seen her mum since she took Tabs to her gym class before teaching her yoga classes. Her dad was inside correcting homework and there was the ever-present sound of music, jazz, wafting from the open windows. John Coltrane, he said when she walked out, A Love Supreme. He often encouraged Indie to shut her eyes to hear the music, to feel it, and then she’d get paper and coloured pencils to draw what she felt.

“Don’t go far,” her dad warned as she went outside. But he knew she didn’t have anywhere to go out here. There was the driveway. There was the street out front and then the lane. Without her parents, she couldn’t go anywhere.

“See ya,” said Tony. He slammed the door to his flat and the tinkle of keys became a rippling sound as he began playing scales. He had to practice during the day because of the neighbours. Same with her dad. Which was funny because her dad also taught Tony. He couldn’t play his sax after 8.00 pm. At night, he plugged headphones into his electric keyboard, bypassing the baby grand piano, a Bechstein, he’d bought in Sydney. It was a treasure find. An old lady in their neighbourhood had wanted a home for it. Her husband had passed away and had played it religiously. The lady had tears in her eyes when Indie’s dad had it moved, but she shook her head saying, “It has to be played. It has to be loved.” Indie didn’t understand, but her dad did.

Indie remembered when they’d lived in Bryon, he used to play an ancient, upright piano until late. That she’d go to sleep hearing her dad’s music. It was the soundtrack of her dreams, as well as the distant tune of waves, and in the morning, a cacophony of birds. The house had been basic: a timber shack on stilts, with leaks in the corrugated iron roof and a porcelain, claw foot bathtub she’d dubbed ‘the lifeboat’. Spiders as big as saucers would creep into the house. Her dad never cut the lawn right, shaving the grass to the dirt so it died off in summer. Indie and Tabs had their own rooms and her mum stuck glow stars on the ceiling. At night, their subtle light patterned Indie’s eyes, like she was looking through one of those spyglasses with coloured crystals. On the window she’d tacked white paper cut-outs of animals she’d made with Tabs and her mum. Tabs made puffy clouds she said were sheep. Indie’s cut-outs all had wings: butterflies, dragonflies, seagulls, a sea eagle.

She’d cried when they left.

“Baby.” Her mum had sat on the front veranda step, curling an arm around her, sheltering Indie with the wing of her loose fitting jumper. “We need to move for work. Things are drying up here. I’m sorry. The music program at the school is being cut and a teaching job has come up in Sydney. This is good for your dad.”

When Indie cried, she didn’t make any noise. A muffled whimper that was all the more heart wrenching as Indie tried to smother it. Her mum had held her tight. She’d rocked Indie in her arms, kissing her silky head. She wouldn’t let Indie see her own red-rimmed eyes hidden by sunglasses. She could find work as a yoga instructor in Sydney, although she was temping to get extra money. Finding a home where her girls could sink roots into the earth was another matter. Tabitha had been born here. Indie kept forgetting she’d been born in Melbourne where both her parents originally came from. Byron had become home. A place she felt safe. A place where she could play, run, dance. Where there’d been endless space, the beach nearby, and a river. A real river, not a river made of bluestone.

Indie opened her eyes. Blink. Her gaze met the hard wall of the timber fence opposite her, the concrete at her feet. She turned to rest her cheek on her knee. Blink. The laneway became a cobbled road of a medieval hill town. She’d seen pictures of the hill towns in Italy from her parents’ time backpacking in Europe. The one with all the towers. The one with the chapel of a saint who loved birds. Her mum let her look through the albums and she’d tell her stories: Of chasing a nun to take her photo in Assisi. Of eating black squid ink spaghetti at a café near the opera house in Venice. Of becoming addicted to espressos because she couldn’t find tea to drink, and how she and her dad ate Indie’s favourite food, pizza, nearly everywhere they went.

“They were often quite plain,” her mum recounted, “but your dad was in seventh heaven, because they’d give you a little bottle of oil with chillies and rosemary in it to pour over the pizza. He loves chillies.” Indie wrinkled her nose at that. She hated chillies, how they set her mouth on fire.

Indie stretched her legs to stand then jumped a step, feet hitting the hot ground sending tingles up her shins. She walked to the limit—the edge where the driveway ended and the laneway began. She and Tabs used to walk the creek at the back of their house in Byron, tracing its way along the property lines, surrounded by verdant bush and tropical plants. There’s not much green here except the peeling paint of the roller door to her right, and tree branches and ivy creeping over fences. Nothing much grew here.

Do I dare?

Left or right?

Her toes stubbed against a bluestone. Ugly. Ugly and hard. Everything was hard here. There’s a smell like fetid water seeping through the ground and Indie spied a grate; could imagine where it went. She fisted her hands and shut her eyes against it. The other night she heard her dad say they could look for somewhere else to live. Her mum whispered about how maybe they should move to Elwood. Near the beach. There were these Art Deco apartments she was saying. Perhaps they could have a small garden where she could grow veggies like she had in Byron. Her dad was holding her as they spoke. Her mum was curled up in his lap; legs draped across the sofa in cut-off jean shorts. Their faces were kissing close. He was gently rubbing her back.

Indie felt this knot begin to twist in her stomach at the thought of moving again. She was thinking of Tony. She didn’t want to move away from him, and she almost yelled out to them: No! But she also felt quiet and anchored by seeing their mouths almost touching. The way her dad bridged the gap, kissing her mum. Indie squirmed, turning away, but warmth bloomed in her chest. She could feel their happiness, their love, and that had to mean something good. Good for all of them.

Indie hadn’t minded leaving the place in Sydney. The brick, semi-detached house had been dark and dank. During the day the lights were left on and the bathroom always smelled like bleach because her mum kept trying to get rid of the mould on the ceiling. In Melbourne there was family, that’s what her mum said when she told Indie and Tabs they were moving again. She’d convinced their dad it was a good move because they’d have more support. In Melbourne they had Nan and her mum’s sister, Janet, and there was Papa and Gran, and her dad’s brother, Neil. There were her parents’ friends from college and suddenly – suddenly there was a bigger world because of all these people instead of the small universe of their family.

“I thought you wanted to escape all of that?” Indie had heard her dad asking, but he didn’t seem unhappy with the suggestion.

“It’s not just about us anymore,” her mum’s voice was soft, a sigh.

Indie’s toe was bloody. She’d kicked the bluestone, tearing skin. She peered to the right, saw the street at the end; to the left, there was the mysterious bend. One step, in either direction, that’s all and then she’d—

“Indie!” Her dad’s voice sang out to her and she jumped back. He’s not smiling, but he’s not angry. He had no idea of what she was about to do, and he’s rushing a little to get to her, wearing a straw sunhat with a faded red T-shirt like hers and a daggy pair of cargo shorts that she remembered from Byron. He swooped her up in a hug.

“How about you get your bike and we go to the park?” Her bike was leaning on the tiny balcony with Tabs’s.

“Okay.” She was holding him around his neck, feeling herself slipping. He walked with her slowly, but she was now facing out towards the other end of the driveway and the street.

“We can make it back in time to have dinner with the Cavelli’s. That sound good?” He’s smiling now and she turned to bump her nose against his before he released her. Indie’s legs jarred with the impact of her feet hitting the ground.

And she’s nodding, happily, catching a glimpse of herself twinned in his eyes. Craning her head, above him, she could see the sky.