The First Third Read online

  Contents

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Acknowledgements

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Will Kostakis was only nineteen when his first novel, ­Loathing Lola, was released. It went on to be shortlisted for the Sakura Medal in Japan and made the official ­selection for the Australian government’s 2010 Get Reading! programme.

  In 2005, Will won the Sydney Morning ­Herald Young Writer of the Year award for a ­collection of short stories.

  Will spends his time working as a freelance journalist and visiting Australian secondary schools.

  This is his second novel.

  We could have been anywhere. Like sitting at a table in my grandmother’s garden, between the olive tree and the tomato patch – Mum, Yiayia, my brothers and I. Our fingers were greasy and our mouths were full. We were in our own little ethnic bubble.

  You could practically hear the metallic twangs of the bouzouki.

  There was too much food. There was always too much food. Mum and I were grazing, picking from the platter of haloumi cheese resting on my grandmother’s thigh; my younger brother was balancing his carbs, protein and fat, as if one family meal was the difference between being super-fit and morbidly obese; and my older brother was sampling like someone who’d lived out of home long enough to miss having six different types of meat in one sitting.

  A dull beep cut through it all. The bouzouki trills ended abruptly. The bubble popped and the rest of the world roared into focus – the bed, the complicated medical equipment. And the other bed across the hospital room, the old man lying on it and the family exchanging worried, heartfelt looks.

  The old man’s heart-rate monitor beeped again. And again.

  ‘Ma, stop moving,’ Mum said. ‘You’ll knock over the salad.’

  We had lunch laid out on my grandmother’s hospital bed. She was still in it. It was lunch-meets-Jenga, one wrong move and it all fell down.

  We’d pulled our chairs in close and started eating like it wasn’t ridiculous.

  ‘Um, guys?’ I found disguising observations as questions helped me walk the fine line between knowing it all and being a know-it-all. ‘Don’t you think we’re perpetuating some dangerous stereotypes here?’

  Nobody responded.

  Beep.

  Simon, my older brother, asked me to pass him the chicken wings. When I did, it set off a chain reaction of Tupperware handovers.

  The bouzouki started up again.

  ‘Seriously?’ I asked. ‘We’re doing this?’

  ‘Well,’ Simon said, ‘we wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t almost killed her.’

  My older brother was a bushfire – vibrant, unrestrained, unfunny.

  I hadn’t almost killed our grandmother.

  I must have looked wounded.

  ‘Relax, I’m kidding.’ He sunk his teeth into a piece of chicken, moving on and leaving me feeling a little bit worse.

  Behind him, my younger brother Peter was trying to cut the fat off his steak, mid-air.

  ‘It’s easier when it’s on your plate, you know,’ I offered.

  ‘Shut up.’

  If Simon was a bushfire, then Peter was a lit cigarette – all smoke and no pleasant.

  I sighed. ‘Good talk.’

  Mum parented in one fell swoop. ‘Bill, don’t be a smart-arse. Peter, don’t be rude. Ugh, Simon, close your mouth.’

  Simon had an intimate relationship with our grandmother’s barbecue chicken. It wasn’t a pretty sight. He spat a half-chewed wing onto his plate and apologised.

  Since we’d last seen him at Christmas, he’d added purple-and-orange highlights to his fringe, the kind a teenager would add to stir his conservative parents. Only he was twenty and living out of home. Like, way out of home. Brisbane out of home.

  My grandmother had played right into it. Why he do to his hair? Why he no want to look handsome?

  Not that she was really in the position to give styling advice or anything. The hairspray from the night before had worn off and what had once been an impossibly tight grey-and-white bun now looked like a bird’s nest after a cyclone. It was one part Einstein, one part crazy cat lady.

  All things considered though, she was doing okay. She was acting like herself and that was the most important thing. That’s what the doctors kept saying.

  When she’d given up on Simon’s hair, it was my turn. ‘Eat, Billy,’ she urged. ‘You look so thin.’

  No, I was the same weight I’d been for about two years.

  ‘You want moussaka?’ she asked. When I made it clear that I didn’t, she made it clear that it wasn’t a question. ‘You want moussaka.’

  Yiayia pulled herself up a fraction. Containers wobbled precariously. Mum gasped. My grandmother ignored her and took a pre-sliced piece of the moussaka in one hand, food hygiene be damned, and placed it on a fresh paper plate, which I accepted. Watching the moussaka’s oily layers begin to separate, I was reminded of Maria, the night before and everything that had gone so spectacularly wrong.

  ‘Hey, on the bright side, maybe Mum will find a doctor?’ Simon said.

  Yiayia liked the sound of that, but Mum didn’t dignify it with a response. In last night’s cocktail dress and makeup, she looked like a re-animated corpse at a fancy dinner party. It was pretty obvious that, bar there being a doctor with very specific tastes, my mother would not be meeting her future husband today.

  ‘Are the dolmades vegetarian?’ she asked.

  My grandmother nodded. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is there meat?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s not vegetarian,’ Mum said.

  My grandmother blinked hard, not aware of the problem. ‘Eat with broccoli.’ She pointed to the container of greens. ‘There. Vegetable.’

  While she wasn’t vegetarian, there were some dishes Mum preferred without meat, dolmades being one of them. It was a preference Yiayia neither understood nor catered for. She knew my brothers and I liked them better with mince, and she knew Mum would eat them anyway.

  Mum started stacking the dolmades on her plate. She asked if we wanted any. Simon and I declined.

  ‘Peter?’ she prompted.

  He didn’t respond.

  ‘Peter?’

  He didn’t look up at her. ‘I’m fine.’

  I would’ve given up there. When Peter didn’t want to engage, he wasn’t going to. Mum powered on for two reasons – firstly because this was probably the longest conversation they’d had in weeks, and secondly because she was hard-wired to win.

  She dropped a dolma on his plate. ‘They’re nice.’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘Don’t make a big deal.’

  ‘You’re the one making a big deal.’ Peter passed the dolma back. ‘I said no.’

  ‘You’ve lost too much weight.’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  Mum and Peter had the same face made of hard lines. When they clashed, it was like watching someone argue with their reflection.

  ‘Your grandmother gave Bill food and he didn’t chuck a tantrum,’ Mum said.

&nb
sp; ‘Maybe I don’t need someone telling me what to eat.’

  ‘Just one.’

  And the dolma was back on Peter’s plate.

  ‘Jeez! Stop it!’

  In the interests of conflict resolution, my grandmother reached for the unwanted dolma, shifting slightly as she did and knocking the salad off the bed. She peered down at the overturned bowl and its spread contents.

  There was a heavy sigh. My younger brother had reached his quota of quirky Greek family.

  ‘Right, I’m done,’ he said, brushing the lettuce off his sports bag and standing up. ‘I’m going to the gym.’

  ‘You could stay longer,’ Mum said. Hard-wired.

  ‘You said I had to come for lunch. I’ve had lunch.’

  ‘Don’t be rude.’

  ‘I’m not being rude. It’s a fact, you said –’

  ‘Peter.’

  ‘I have to go to the gym and then work.’

  There came a point when dealing with Peter that it became less about winning and more about losing less overwhelmingly. The more times Mum kept the back-and-forth going, the more times he’d mention only being there for lunch. He probably didn’t mean for it to sound insensitive – after all, it was a fact – but it really wasn’t the best thing for Yiayia to hear repeated over and over.

  ‘Bye, Yiayia.’ Peter bent over and pecked her cheek.

  ‘You leave?’

  ‘I have to go to the gym before work.’

  ‘Ah, okay, darling.’

  When he was gone, Yiayia turned to Mum, brow furrowed. ‘Why he always go to Jim?’ she asked. ‘Who is Jimmy?’

  ‘The gym, Ma,’ Mum clarified. ‘Exercise.’

  My grandmother nodded slowly. ‘Ah.’

  She re-adjusted herself in the bed, forgetting that tables worked best when they didn’t move. Containers abandoned the bed en masse, tumbling onto the floor.

  ‘Okay,’ Simon said, clapping his hands together, ‘that’s my cue to leave.’

  He just wanted to get out of cleaning up. Mum was on the same page.

  ‘I’ll give you a lift. I’ve got to get out of this dress anyway.’ She grabbed her bag, stood up and surveyed the mess. I knew what was coming. She looked to me. ‘You’ll have to –’

  I nodded. ‘All good.’

  And then there were two.

  The heart-rate monitor beeped again.

  Well, seven.

  I turned to the family across the room. They were staring at the banquet on the floor. My grandmother noticed them too.

  ‘Hello,’ she said, grinning warmly. ‘You hungry?’

  BillyTsiolkas

  Spending Sticks’ 18th hiding in his bedroom with a bottle of sparkling water and a stack of sausage rolls. I’m so cool it hurts.

  18 hours ago

  I made two attempts to escape Sticks’ party.

  During the first, I got into the house only to be intercepted by Mrs P, who thrust a tray of sausage rolls into my hands, led me back into the yard and asked me to circulate, circulate. I circulated once. The girls waved ‘no’ and the guys just gave me their empties.

  When Mrs P turned her back, I made my second.

  Some people needed to stand in the thick of things, but I was quite comfortable with something to eat and somewhere to watch things from.

  Sometimes life just made more sense from a second-storey window.

  The Titanic-themed party played out like a dozen simultaneous games of Pac-Man. Girls dressed as first-class passengers strangled the necks of low-carb beers and moved strategically around the yard avoiding the upper-class gentlemen and seeking out the scruffier Jack Dawson types who didn’t wear shirts under their suspenders.

  Mrs P was far less discriminating. She’d taken a hard-line approach to the responsible service of alcohol, intruding on conversations to ask guests’ dates of birth, to see their IDs and to taste their drinks.

  Sampling his drink for traces of bourbon, she asked a steerage passenger if he’d seen me.

  I pulled back from the window and collided with a giant Chinese ornamental dragon.

  Sticks collected adventure memorabilia.

  It all started in Year Nine, when he’d woken up with a galvanised tin letterbox in his bed and no idea how it got there. As his night-time outings became more frequent, his collection grew larger and more ambitious. It now boasted lawn ornaments, traffic cones and a pair of golden arches from the roof of a certain fast-food outlet.

  Every time he’d nicked something, I’d been there. I’d been the one asking if he really needed a giant Chinese ornamental dragon. (‘Yes.’ The answer was always ‘yes’.)

  These acquisitions weren’t random though, each came at the end of something. The galvanised tin letterbox wasn’t just a galvanised tin letterbox. It was Ed Bellemore’s party. It was Sticks attempting one hundred beer shots in one hundred minutes, getting to forty and needing me to carry him home. It was us passing a galvanised tin letterbox on the way and him insisting he had to have it. And it was him waking up the next morning wondering why he was in bed with a letterbox and me having to explain the events of the night right back to him.

  It was a moment. And when you put all the moments together, the letterboxes, the speed-limit signs and the condiment bottles, you got a sense of how chaotically awesome it was to have Sticks as a best friend.

  He cleared his throat.

  ‘You do know that when you tell the internet where you’re hiding, it’s pretty easy for people to track you down, right?’

  Sticks was standing in the doorway, his weight against a single titanium crutch. He wore a black tailcoat and pants, a white vest and bow tie, floaties on each arm and a snorkel around his neck.

  ‘Well, your mum hasn’t found me.’ I raised a sausage roll. ‘You want?’

  ‘Sure.’ He held out his free hand. The pastry soared over his shoulder and landed a little way down the hall.

  ‘You know, sometimes I really wonder why I’m friends with you.’

  ‘The letterbox, forty shots –’

  ‘Forty-seven, thank you.’

  ‘Forty-seven then. You threw it up in my hair.’

  ‘You were in the way.’

  ‘You made me give you a piggyback.’

  Sticks scrunched his eyes closed. ‘Well, I’m sorry some of us aren’t as able-bodied as you.’

  We had been friends since the very beginning – Buckley’s College Orientation Day, December 1999. The graduating kindergarten put on a production of Chicken Little. A light morning tea followed and parents mingled. I presume lots of mothers said, ‘My so-and-so is very bright for his age,’ and lots of fathers exchanged looks that said, ‘I need a drink.’ In the dying minutes someone tapped the back of my shoe.

  I turned around.

  He had four legs, two of which were some kind of metal. He’d hit me with one by mistake.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said.

  I wasn’t bothered. He was already infinitely more interesting than the kid my parents were trying to set me up with. He. Had. Four. Legs.

  ‘Are you a robot?’ I don’t remember how I asked it, but I imagine my eyes were slightly narrowed as I was equal parts excited and nervous to meet a real-life C-3PO.

  He shook his head, his blond bowl cut moving with a two-second time delay.

  ‘Then what are they?’ I asked, pointing at his navy-blue forearm crutches.

  ‘My legs won’t listen,’ he said.

  I stared at them for a moment. They bent out after the knee. ‘Cool.’

  He was called Lucas until high school. But by then he’d caught on to the fact that cerebral palsy made people uncomfortable, so he rebranded himself like a shamed corporation after a PR crisis. When people asked what he had, he called it CP. When they asked his name, he called himself Sticks.

  We’d been friends long enough to catch each other’s bad habits. When he started biting his nails, his mum blamed me, and when I started cocking my eyebrow in photos, my mum blamed him. We weren’t the exact sa
me person, he was three times four and I was two times six. We both equalled twelve; we were just made of different parts.

  Sticks crossed the bedroom. The more he drank, the more his walk resembled an interpretive dance – his joke, not mine.

  The party was in full swing below us.

  ‘Excited about tonight?’ he asked, grabbing a sausage roll.

  In the hierarchy of my feelings about tonight, it went: fearful, nervous, then excited.

  ‘Yep,’ I said.

  ‘What time do you have to leave?’

  ‘Soon.’

  ‘Boo. Hold on.’ His phone was ringing. He polished off his sausage roll, licked his fingers and struggled with the contents of his pocket before plucking out his mobile. He consulted the screen. ‘Crap.’

  Mrs P was underneath the Hills hoist. Her scowl was illuminated by the fairy lights she’d draped over the rotary clothes line. She had her phone to her ear.

  ‘Hi, Mum.’

  Her voice carried up through the window. ‘Humour me, Lucas, I was looking around for my darling son and I couldn’t find him. Where is he?’

  ‘Look up.’

  She looked to the night sky.

  Sticks sighed. ‘Yes, Mum, I’m floating in thin air. Well done.’

  She lowered her gaze and noticed us at the window. ‘Well, I looked up. You know, there’s no harm in being specific,’ she said. ‘What are you doing up there?’

  ‘Small deviant things.’

  ‘Lucas . . .’

  ‘Bill was looking down girls’ tops,’ he said, briefly glancing my way.

  ‘Am not.’

  ‘It’s a serious addiction, Mum. He’s totally obsessed with airbags. Can’t get enough of them.’

  ‘Well, he has my condolences,’ Mrs P said, snatching a captain’s plastic cup from his hand as he walked past. She gave it a whiff and shook her head. The captain kept walking.

  ‘Thanks, Mum, because I totally don’t need friends,’ Sticks said.

  ‘Who are these people?’ She glanced around the yard.

  ‘They’re mates.’

  ‘All of them?’

  ‘Yes. Be glad your son is popular.’

  ‘Come down, will you? The two of you.’

  ‘But, Mum . . . airbags,’ Sticks pleaded.

  ‘I know for a fact that you don’t like airbags.’