Chapter five

The three new friends spent the last hour and a half of the afternoon playing the Wii. Then Richard looked over at a wood grain clock on the wall. Tracey followed the direction of his gaze and realised what he was looking at, then she looked back at his face; it was pale.

    ‘I got to go out somewhere.’ He announced with a sudden look of depression.

Kayla rolled her eyes. ‘Your Dad’s due home soon?’

Richard nodded. Tracey wasn’t sure why that would depress Richard. She didn’t feel it was her place to ask. She looked at Kayla hoping for a clue. Kayla noticed and shrugged.

    ‘I’m done with this crap!’ Richard snapped angrily.

This was a different side of Richard that Tracey had not seen yet. It made her want to go and wrap her arms around him and comfort him. But she didn’t understand what was so depressing about his father coming home soon.

Kayla tilted her head sideways. ‘Rich, if you are tired of it all, why do you put up with it dude? I mean, we both know why my mother left your father all those years ago and yet you still come here to visit him twice a year every year and you put up with it. I don’t understand buddy.’

Tracey felt like this was one conversation she needed to stay out of so she sat back and slouched into the ugly green couch.

    ‘K, I don’t come here to visit my dad. I come here to see you and your mum. You are both really the only true family I have ever known. You show me such kindness in a motherly and sisterly kind of way. My own mother is so spaced out half the time on her strong pain killers because of her arthritis that I hardly even really know her. I pretty much raised myself. You know that. And Dad… He’s nothing but a drunken abusive shithead with a feral attitude.’

Kayla sighed deeply. ‘Dude if you want, why don’t you come over and we can all crash in the rumpus room at mine?’ She suggested. ‘I mean it’s not like your dad will even notice. You’re due to go home in a couple of days anyway.’

Tracey could see Richard seriously considering Kayla’s suggestion and she hoped that he would say yes. She had just learnt more about Richard in that moment of depressed rambling than she had managed to learn about him all afternoon and she knew now that they had something in common. Shit parents!’

Richard was sitting on the ottoman with his elbows on his nobly knees and his chin rested in his palms. It made his face skew a little and Tracey thought it looked so cute.

    ‘Well I for one am in agreement with that suggestion Kayla, so you can count me in.’ Tracey announced with her hand up.

Richard glanced at her. Something about that look in his eyes just made her scream with joy on the inside. He began to nod his head.

    ‘sure why not.’ He said, and with that he got up and left the room to collect his things.

Richard only had two bags. The three of them left the house and he stuffed his bags into the car with Tracey’s things on the back seat. They all got into the car and Richard started the engine. Tracey felt a little crowded in by the luggage, but she wasn't going to complain.

    ‘Pizza for tea guys?’ Kayla inquired.

Richard looked at her, gleaming with joy. ‘I’ll be in that.’ He said.

Tracey smiled. ‘Sure. I like pizza,’ she told them, ‘I’m not too keen on anything with chilly or creepy sea creatures on it though.’

Kayla roared with laughter. ‘Done deal,’ she giggled, ‘we don’t eat those types either. Normally we have the barbeque chicken or the ham and pineapple.’

Kayla phoned the pizza shop and ordered two pizza’s for them to share. The drive back to Yarrawonga was a little awkward for Tracey who could see Richard looking at her in the rearview almost more than he was watching the road. That can’t be safe, she thought. She was also trying to stop his bag from tumbling into her lap.

When he pulled the car into a vacant spot near the pizza shop, Richard turned off the engine and turned to try and look back and forth to both of the girls.

    ‘This is the life,’ he giggled sheepishly, ‘What man wouldn’t want to be sitting in a beautiful car at dusk with two beautiful women?’

Tracey felt her face flush red. Kayla just gave him a play punch in the shoulder and called him a goof, before getting out of the car to go into the pizza parlor, and finding a stool by the counter to sit on while she waited for their pizza’s to be ready.

A difficult silence lingered in the car. Richard finally turned around to look straight into Tracey’s eyes. She could feel her heart hammering inside her chest and a small part of her, deep down inside wanted to lunge forward and hug him. His eyes kept a consistent stare.

    ‘Hi.’ he said, with a goofy nervous expression.

Tracey thought that was a very odd thing to say but she smiled and responded anyway.

    ‘Hi.’

    ‘You have such pretty eyes,’ he told her, ‘I’m sorry if I make you uncomfortable. I just can’t help it.’

Tracey was feeling uncomfortable now. She thought that any moment he was going to dive into the back seat with her and she didn’t want to be held responsible for the actions she was imagining might happen if he did that.

    ‘It’s ok,’ she said, ‘I’ll live.’

    ‘Do you have a boyfriend?’

She shook her head. ‘Boys don’t find me attractive,’ she told him, ‘I’m too fat for most of them and the others are jerks I’m not ever going to be caught dead with.’

Richard’s eyes suddenly had an almost wounded appearance.

    ‘I find you attractive,’ he said, ‘I guess that makes me a jerk.’

    ‘oh… Umm… Well I didn’t mean…’ Tracey couldn’t find the words. She felt terrible. ‘I’m sorry.’ She frowned as she looked away from him.

    ‘It’s ok,’ he said, ‘I sort of understand what you mean.’

They sort of smiled clumsily at each other and another awkward silence fell over them as they waited for Kayla to come back to the car. When she did open the door, she dived in handing the pizza’s over to Tracey.

    ‘Can you hold those. I can’t buckle in while they’re on my lap.’ She said eagerly.

Tracey didn’t really have much of a choice. The piping hot pizza’s were sitting on her lap, burning through the cardboard boxes and stinging her knees.

    ‘Where to ladies?’ Richard asked.

    ‘Mine,’ Kayla said, ‘we can picnic and camp out in the rumpus for the night and decide what we’re going to do tomorrow.’

Richard started the engine and edged out of the parking space onto the road. It was getting dark now and Tracey couldn’t see much of the world outside through the shadows that lurked everywhere. Richard navigated a few turns and gave way to a car at an intersection, turned left and kept going for a way and then pulled into a drive way.

In the dim twilight Tracey could make out a quaint looking weatherboard house with a neat garden and a homely feeling radiating from it.

    ‘My turn to say home sweet home.’ Kayla giggled.

They all laughed and Richard got out and came around to the passenger side of the car to open the door for Tracey. He took the pizza’s from her and handed them to Kayla and then he lead Tracey towards the house, following after Kayla.

    ‘We’ll leave the bags in the car for now,’ he said, ‘I can come back and get them after we’ve eaten.’

The girls agreed and they entered the house. Tracey noticed a strong scent of incense the moment she set foot inside the door, that and an inviting sort of food aroma which could have been a casserole or a stew or something similar. What ever it was, it smelled delicious and her mouth was watering. She couldn’t wait to hoe into the pizza.

    ‘Ma,’ Kayla called out, ‘you here ma?’

    ‘In the bathroom honey.’ Came the voice from behind a closed door somewhere deeper in the house.

At that moment Tracey realised that her own mother hadn’t bothered to even call after their argument that afternoon. It was unlike her mother not to start calling, checking up on her, asking when she was going to be home. But it was blissfully peaceful not having to hear her mother’s voice, even if only for a little while. Her mother was such a whining drain on her.

Kayla led the way along a short passageway into an open space at the back of the house. It was a large room. Pretty empty really, with a flat screen tele, a small book case in the corner with some Wii games and CD’s stacked on it and a laptop computer, covered in stickers sitting on a small table in the back corner. In the middle of the room there was a two seater, a bean bag and a recliner and there was a little coffee table on the floor in front of the two seater.

The three of them lounged around and scoffed pizza and chatted for an hour or so. Tracey still felt like she had known these people for a long time. For once in her life she actually felt alive.