‘Lu can’t stay to work on the project,’ Angelica says as she chews a fingernail.
‘Huh?’ Poppy says distractedly, her gaze drifting to the teenage boys who hang around the school gates, wolf-whistling at the girls they like and slagging off the ones they don’t.
It’s a brutal ritual, and even though Lucy is usually on the receiving end of wolf-whistles she hates it. The teachers won’t do anything about it – ‘boys will be boys’, they keep saying.
Lucy wants to know what that means, what exactly the boys are meant to be. Won’t these same boys grow into men she’ll be told she has to respect when they’re running banks and the government and making decisions for her life? These boys who don’t respect her now and aren’t likely to then?
She’s sick of boys – of men – who just want to be boys. That’s one of the reasons why she likes Madonna so much. To the casual observer it might look as though Madonna’s doing things for men, but she’s not. She does things for herself, on her own terms. Lucy wants to live like that one day. But for now she, Angelica – even Poppy – seem to end up doing things on other people’s terms.
‘Hey, Poppy!’ calls Tony, one of the boys who regularly whistles at both her and Lucy.
Poppy ignores him and turns her gaze to Lucy. ‘Could we come to the shop and work on it?’
Lucy wishes she could say yes. It would be so much easier if her friends could come to the shop and they could finish their project – due at the end of the week – together.
‘Russell,’ Angelica says simply and Poppy sighs.
‘Oh yeah,’ she replies.
Even though he’s twenty-seven, Russell still lives in the family home and works in the family business. Whenever Lucy and her friends have tried to do their homework at the shop before, he’s always interrupted them – usually to say something mean, although once they all went to get a drink and came back to find glue tipped over their diorama.
Russell has been mean to Lucy for as long as she can remember. Never in front of her parents, although he’s left his marks. Pinches that turned into bruises. Cuts that were put down to Lucy being clumsy when she’s nothing of the sort. She can’t avoid him as much as she’d like because they’re on top of each other most of the time, apart from when she’s at school.
When she was a kid, Lucy tried hard to get Russell to love her. She adored him, in defiance of all logic. All she wanted was his approval. And she’s never had it. Never will – she knows that now.
‘How about I come over once we close?’ Lucy says to Angelica. ‘Mama never minds if I don’t go straight home.’ In fact, hermother always likes there to be at least an hour between the shop closing and them all sitting down to dinner.
Angelica looks from Poppy to Lucy and back again, while raising of eyebrows and nods are exchanged.
‘See you at – what, six?’ Angelica says.
‘Yup.’ Lucy smiles. ‘Thanks.’
The friends wave farewell and Lucy continues to the shop. She walks behind the counter and drops her school bag beneath it, glancing around to try to locate her mum, who’ll be here somewhere. She’s always here.
‘Lucy!’ Her name is called from deep inside the section where they keep the bedding – quilts and doonas.
‘Hi, Mama,’ Lucy calls back, then she heads for the kitchenette out the back for a glass of water before she returns to the counter.
Russell comes in the front door of the shop, glowering, milkshake in hand. He always has a milkshake in the afternoons. It’s probably why he’s a little overweight, although you can’t suggest that to him because he gets angry. Even their father has stopped saying anything about it.
‘What are you looking at?’ he almost spits at Lucy, and she looks away.
‘Nothing,’ she says meekly. She’s learnt to do everything meekly around him. It’s what he wants. He must. Why else would he be like this?
Their father doesn’t do anything about it. He feels guilty about the divorce. Lucy knows this because she’s heard her mother talk to him about Russell’s behaviour, ask him why he doesn’t stop his son being mean to his daughter.
‘Does that mean you feel guilty about us?’ her mother has said, more than once.
Her father always says no, but it’s hard to believe him.
‘Get on with it then,’ Russell growls, then stalks out the back.
Lucy doesn’t know what, exactly, she’s meant to get on with but she knows she may well be doing it alone this afternoon.When she’s working her parents will sometimes go out, separately or together, to do shopping or little jobs. They trust her, she guesses, to look after the customers.
Russell looks after the clothes, which is what Lucy really wants to do. Because what working here, being around this business for as long as she can remember, has given her is a love for clothes.
Kids at school have made fun of her for being ‘the drycleaner’s kid’, like there’s something wrong with it, but Lucy has always loved watching the dresses, skirts and blouses, scarves and coats, blazers and jackets and ties come in and out of this place. Working here gives her the chance to observe the way they’re made, the fabrics they’re made out of, the different styles.