The First Third Read online

  He couldn’t argue with that. ‘Fine,’ he groaned.

  Mrs P ended the call. I had cleared half the length of the room before I caught myself walking too fast. I took a swig of water and gave Sticks time to catch up. When he had, we continued together. Slowly.

  Mrs P was in the kitchen fanning a tray of party pies with an oven mitt. ‘Bit hot,’ she said as we approached the counter.

  Sticks patted his breast. ‘Thank you.’

  She rolled her eyes. ‘My son the comedian,’ she said. ‘Bill, I’m going to need your help taking these out once they’ve cooled.’

  ‘He can’t. He’s bailing,’ Sticks said.

  ‘I have to take my grandmother to church for Easter,’ I added.

  Mrs P thought about it for a sec. ‘Wasn’t that last week?’

  ‘No, Mum, Greek Easter,’ Sticks said.

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘What I don’t get is,’ he added, ‘why can’t Greek Jesus die on the same day as Normal Jesus?’

  I had no clue.

  Sticks reached for a pie and his mother slapped his hand away. ‘So, Bill, how’s your mum?’

  That was not-so-subtle Mrs P code for, ‘Is there anybody special in her life?’

  ‘She’s good.’ I tried to sound enthusiastic when I added, ‘She’s at an over-40s speed-dating thing at the RSL.’

  ‘That sounds horrible,’ Sticks said.

  His mum glared at him. ‘Lucas!’

  He was right. It did sound horrible. Mum on an assembly line of middle-aged women, hoping to hook the man of her dreams with a five-minute conversation and a cocktail dress. And what if, ridiculous odds aside, she met a quality guy? What were they supposed to do at their twentieth anniversary, regale guests with the story of how they met at a meat raffle? After Dad, I always thought Mum deserved more the second time around.

  Mrs P sighed. ‘It’s so hard to meet people nowadays. My brother –’ She gasped, struck by inspiration. ‘We should set her up with Shaun.’

  ‘No,’ Sticks said.

  ‘Who?’ I asked.

  ‘My uncle.’

  ‘What’s wrong with that?’ Mrs P asked. ‘I think it’s a great idea.’

  ‘You said “terrible” wrong, Mum. It’s a terrible idea.’

  The back door slid open. As soon as I saw the oversized singlet (nipples exposed) and the skinny-leg jeans, I knew we were in for something special. The guy traipsed towards us like he was too cool to walk in a straight line. Or too drunk. He almost tripped over his feet. Okay, definitely too drunk.

  ‘I didn’t know they had douchebags on the Titanic,’ Mrs P muttered.

  I stifled a laugh as the aforementioned douchebag collided with the counter. Mrs P was already fetching him a plastic cup of water.

  ‘Cool, I’m starving.’ He went to grab a pie.

  ‘They’re hot,’ Mrs P said flatly.

  He ate it in one go. Or at least he tried to until he gave up and spat it out into his hand. He stared down at the contortion of mince and pastry on his palm. ‘Ow.’ He was panting. ‘Hot.’

  Mrs P winced. ‘Yes.’ She tore a kitchen wipe off the roll and held it out. ‘Go on.’

  He wiped the half-masticated pie off his hand and exchanged the scrunched-up wipe for the cup of water, which he skolled. Mrs P watched. It was obvious something was brewing. Sticks went to protest pre-emptively, but his mother raised a finger to silence him.

  ‘What’s your name?’ she asked.

  ‘Jared,’ he said.

  ‘Jared,’ Sticks said right afterwards.

  It wasn’t convincing.

  ‘Now, Jared, whose party is this?’ Mrs P asked.

  He seemed bewildered. ‘Sorry?’

  ‘You don’t even have to give me a name,’ she continued, ‘just point. Out of these two boys, whose birthday is it?’

  ‘Oh.’ Jared glanced between us before he pointed at me.

  Sticks sighed. ‘Fine, I’ll show him out.’

  Jared asked, ‘Was I wrong?’

  Mrs P nodded slowly.

  ‘Bummer.’

  We led him out and he shuffled drunkenly across the yard, losing a shoe on the way. I went to say something but Sticks stopped me. Once Jared had hopped over the brick fence (a feat in skinny-leg jeans), he looked back. I expected him to bring up the fact that he was missing a shoe.

  ‘Nice party, man,’ he said. ‘And killer walking stick.’

  Sticks waved the forearm crutch. ‘You be careful, random drunk dude.’

  ‘I will, random birthday dude.’

  When Jared was well and truly on his way, Sticks retrieved the shoe. Another stolen moment.

  ‘To remember tonight,’ he said, ‘when my best friend ditched me on my eighteenth for a girl he’s only ever met twice.’

  ‘Once,’ I corrected.

  ‘That’s worse.’

  ‘It was your idea.’ I was already walking down the garden path. When I got to the gate, I turned back and smiled. ‘Happy birthday, Lucas.’

  He pointed the crutch at me threateningly. ‘Sticks.’

  I was fourteen when my grandmother taught me about love and the difference between moussaka and lasagne. The two were apparently related. She called me into her kitchen where she’d laid them side by side, the moussaka made from scratch, and the lasagne, store-bought and still in its aluminium tray.

  ‘This,’ she explained, pointing to the lasagne, ‘you buy. Easy. But it no special. You get five, ten. No hard. You just pay more. Moussaka,’ she pointed to the homemade dish, ‘is different. The tray keep lasagne together, but the moussaka, look – it break easy. Because it fresh. Less cheese, more eggplant, more oil. It better for you and you make with agape, love. Yes? This,’ she pointed to the lasagne, ‘is Australian girl.’

  It wasn’t the fairest comparison, but Yiayia moved on quickly.

  ‘This,’ she pointed back to the moussaka, ‘is good Greek girl. Hard to find and sometimes messy, but better for you.’

  I was fifteen when I fell in love with lasagne. Her name was Kayla and she hadn’t given me any reason to, beyond the odd polite smile from behind her cash register, or the occasional, ‘Can you cover my shift this Saturday?’

  But I was stupidly, wildly in love with her.

  I told her on a rainy day. We were standing under a bus shelter after work, a veil of water between us and the road and a late-running bus between us and where we were going. I had a captive audience.

  It was the speech I’d expected would make her love me back. It had evolved from a simple, ‘I kind of really like you,’ affair into this epic proclamation. It had been built and re­ordered and refined over weeks. I had rehearsed it in the shower, I had mouthed it while I stacked shelves of office supplies at Staple World. It was perfect. It was powerful. It was . . . not well received.

  She made two attempts at a reply. I barely got more than an exhale. She looked out at the rain. It was bucketing. Someone would need to have a pretty good reason to brave that. She looked back at me like she had a pretty good reason.

  She was sorry.

  My heart sank. Surely the idea of me loving her wasn’t so bad that she’d risk pneumonia to avoid it?

  Yes, yes it was.

  She ran across the street, shielding her hair.

  And she took my breath away, which, despite what every love song had made me believe, was not a good feeling.

  I was sixteen when I met moussaka.

  The night-time Easter service was the social event of the Greek calendar. Recently widowed, my grandmother needed a date. Simon was too old to surrender a Saturday night, and Peter was too young to be a useful chaperone, so the burden, and my grandfather’s jacket, had fallen onto my shoulders.

  My grandmother paraded me through the church before the liturgy. Her chest swollen with pride, she showed me off to all the other yiayiathes.

  Yiayia is Greek for grandmother and yiayiathes is what you get when there’s more than one. Any more than four and . . . well . . .

>   I gritted my teeth as they kissed, hugged, pinched and poked me. All around, there were clusters of yiayiathes performing the same scarring ritual on other embarrassed grandchildren. A little way down the aisle, one girl had yiayiathes huddled by her hemline, checking the fabric of her skirt. When she noticed me watching, she rolled her eyes. It was magnetic.

  Before I could reply with an exaggerated facial expression of my own, Yiayia tugged my arm. The crowd had thickened. The yiayiathes holstered their fingers and began to disperse. I was dragged to a spot up the front. I lost sight of the girl. Until she went to sit beside me and landed on part of my jacket. There was the unmistakable crunch of aluminium foil.

  Busted.

  She apologised and I told her it was nothing.

  My heart raged against my chest, half because I’d been caught with chocolate in my pocket during Lent and half because she’d chosen to sit with me.

  She raised herself off the pew and I pulled my jacket, with its overstuffed pocket, out from underneath her.

  She apologised again as she sat down. She was beautiful. Every blink she took slowed time and . . . And I was probably paying her too much attention. I looked away.

  The service was beginning. I casually slid my hand into my pocket, broke a piece off the chocolate bar and brought it up to my mouth. I thought I’d been relatively subtle about the whole thing. I hadn’t been.

  She leaned into me. ‘I want in.’

  Heart. Raging.

  ‘Oh. Okay, yeah.’ I angled my pocket towards her.

  She checked her grandmother wasn’t watching and reached in, wrestling with the alfoil. When she withdrew her hand, she whispered her name. ‘Maria Cheng.’

  Half the Greek population of Sydney had descended on the church, but she looked nothing like any of the other Marias. She could tell what I was thinking.

  ‘Greek grandmother came over on the boat with her sister, married an Asian,’ she said.

  ‘Oh.’

  Yiayia shushed us.

  ‘Sorry,’ we both muttered.

  At the end of the service, she said, ‘I had fun.’

  She ate half of my food – I wouldn’t have called it fun, but I agreed for the sake of conversation.

  Then she said, ‘I’ll see you next year.’

  It was big.

  When I told Sticks the next day, he confirmed it.

  ‘This is big,’ he said.

  As the only other person who knew I’d never kissed a girl before, he could appreciate how monumental a development it was. He said we had to prepare for it. We. We. Apparently my first kiss was going to be a team effort.

  I had forgotten about it when he brought it up the following March and asked what I had planned. I suggested some kind of premium jacket filling, gourmet muffins and the like.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘you’ll need something more elaborate.’

  He had written up a plan and everything.

  I would escort my grandmother to church like I had the previous year. I’d sit with Maria, but instead of us quietly flirting during the service, we would escape. I’d feign some kind of illness, she’d leave with me and we’d make our way to Gazette – the restaurant Sticks’ older brother managed four nights a week. Sticks knew enough dirt to blackmail Damo into keeping it open later than usual.

  We would have dinner together.

  And then we’d kiss.

  So, with his blessing, I bailed on Sticks’ birthday party and walked the short way to my grandmother’s place. She answered the door and told me I was late.

  Church started at eleven. It wasn’t even ten and she was still in her bathrobe.

  She untied the waist cord and clumsily manoeuvred out of the robe like a four-foot-tall sack of potatoes.

  ‘What are you –? Oh.’

  Yiayia had her church outfit on underneath. She insisted we leave immediately, but I insisted on some time to freshen up.

  Shutting the bathroom door behind myself, I quickly scanned over my reflection in the mirror. There wasn’t much I could do with Dumbo ears and a nose that looked like it was trying to eat my face, but I gave it a shot. I wet my hair and moved some curls around. It didn’t really do anything. I smeared some toothpaste on my teeth with my index finger and rinsed it off.

  ‘Right, Bill,’ I told myself, ‘don’t screw this up.’

  I spotted Maria as soon as we got there. She was sitting in the same place as the year before, with her grandmother on her left and enough room for Yiayia and I on her right. I was keen on heading straight over, but Yiayia wanted to do the rounds. I had to be kissed, hugged, pinched and poked by everyone she had ever met, and for every minute that passed, there were sixty chances for someone else to sit next to Maria. It was as if Yiayia could sense my impatience and she was walking slower than usual just to mess with me.

  Every time my gaze snapped back up the front, I was reminded of everything that had to go exactly right for Sticks’ plan to succeed. I had to sit next to her. She had to want to come with me. She had to remember me.

  Would she?

  Doubt gripped me. Actually, my grandmother’s bingo acquaintance Toula gripped me, but the effect was the same. I was a gassy Coke bottle a couple of shakes away from ­exploding. She shook me. I made a conscious effort not to hurl nervous chunks on her.

  ‘So handsome!’ Toula said.

  Yiayia accepted the compliment, and as they exchanged gossip, I looked past them at Maria. Someone else was trying to squeeze past. Someone was going to sit where I was supposed to and I was helpless to stop it. The plan had failed and all I could do was watch.

  And then Maria pointed to her side and shook her head. The guy started to argue, and she shrugged her shoulders. Exasperated, he threw one arm up in the air and shuffled back towards the aisle.

  She was saving the seats. She had remembered me.

  Maria looked around. She noticed me standing a little way down the aisle. She rolled her eyes. It was still magnetic.

  ‘Come on, Yiayia, it’s starting,’ I lied.

  Yiayia and Toula hurriedly wrapped up their conversation and I led my grandmother up the front.

  ‘Hi,’ Maria whispered as I squeezed past.

  Our knees knocked together. ‘Hi.’

  It was a little harder for Yiayia to get seated. She had eight decades of Greek diet to contend with. She got settled, eventually.

  Without saying anything more, Maria reached into my pocket for food, but instead found a note. She read it, then looked up with a grin.

  I gripped my front and doubled over. ‘Ow.’

  It wasn’t a performance that was going to win me an Academy Award, but it did the trick.

  ‘What the matter?’ Yiayia asked. She had boiled the English language down to the bare essentials.

  ‘My stomach.’

  ‘Ah, me too.’ My grandmother clenched her fist and tapped her side. ‘Air.’

  I looked over to Maria and she nodded slightly.

  ‘I think I need to go outside,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll take you.’ She was already helping me up.

  ‘I come?’ Yiayia asked.

  ‘No!’ we both said in unison.

  We walked briskly down the aisle as the mass began. Maria was giggling and I couldn’t believe I was pulling it off.

  The street had been closed to traffic. It was just us, a few stragglers and some volunteers selling candles.

  ‘Where to now?’ she asked.

  ‘This way.’ I didn’t look back at her, scared my face would betray my nerves.

  There was a taxi waiting at the barricades. The driver ­lowered the passenger window. ‘You Billy?’ he asked.

  There was a strip of small restaurants on the western side of the Grand Parade. Gazette was sandwiched between a gelato emporium and a tapas bar. It had an uninterrupted view of the shore, which in the daytime was quite something, but at night amounted to little more than a few specks of gold (the container terminal at Port Botany) against a whole lot of black.


  When Maria and I arrived, Damo met us at the door. I didn’t need to ask where we were sitting. The restaurant was dark, save for underneath one solitary pendant light by the window. It lit a table set for two.

  ‘Wow,’ Maria said. ‘This is . . . something.’

  It really was. I didn’t know whether I was supposed to take full credit for it or not. I went with a faint smile. I wasn’t claiming to have done it, but I wasn’t admitting my best friend had been part of it either.

  Sticks had a definite flair for the dramatic. He’d never admit it though, for fear of seeming stereotypical.

  As per his younger brother’s instructions, Damo was cordial enough to seem welcoming, but not enough to seem like a viable alternative. And he didn’t make any crude jokes, which was big for Damo.

  Before we sat down, Maria said she needed to freshen up. Damo pointed to the door in the corner and Maria excused ­herself. She crossed the freshly mopped floor.

  The bathroom door closed and Damo released his breath. ‘Mate,’ he said.

  Sticks and I couldn’t pull off ‘mate’. We practically choked every time we tried to say it, but Damo . . . He was made for it. He could give it meaning on its own. That had been a wow-the-girl-you’re-with-is-hot ‘mate’.

  ‘I know, right?’

  He punched my arm. Meant affectionately or not, punches still hurt.

  ‘Ow.’

  ‘The menu,’ he announced, laying one in front of me.

  It wasn’t the poorly laminated sheet of paper I was used to. They’d upgraded to a fancy folded card.

  ‘Wait, what’s this?’

  ‘Sylvain is trying to class up the joint.’

  There was no shortage of letters with squiggly accents.

  ‘I don’t know what half this food is. Where’s the –?’

  ‘With the kids meals,’ Damo said, turning my menu around and handing it back.

  There it was, third dish from the bottom. ‘Oh, thank Christ.’

  A couple wandered past the restaurant and I couldn’t help feeling like the main feature in an elaborate department store window. Meanwhile, Damo was staring at the door to the ladies room.

  ‘I still can’t believe it. Nice work, nice.’ He kept his voice down when he added, ‘You never told me you liked them, you know . . .’