True Stars Read online

  A row of cars was pulling out of the service station. The last one had just finished gassing up, and the attendant had gone inside with the motorist’s credit card. There were no other cars in sight.

  A Studebaker, 1951, reconditioned engine, painted metallic grey, bonnet like a bullet, appeared from round the corner, cruising for the third time. The kid had time to feel a thrill of happiness, a certainty that she was not alone. Then she tensed up; now, now. The conditions were just right. She turned her cigarette palm out, holding it in front of her mouth, and at this signal the Studebaker slowed, passed, and drew into the kerb a hundred or so metres down the road, engine idling under its cylindrical sheath.

  Larissa walked into the service station, not hurrying unduly, flicking her scarf up round her mouth. Her blue hair stood in a row of spikes along the top of her head, like a dog that is afraid. Only she wasn’t scared.

  The last car left as the attendant checked the till. He was a good-looking young man, clean-shaven and broad-shouldered, a bit on the short side. It had been a busy afternoon; he had only finished his cut lunch ten minutes before, eating on the run. He was thinking about taking a Moro bar off the stand when Larissa entered. She picked up a packet of gum and fumbled change from out of her pocket. The till was still open when Gary and Jason walked in behind her, in their greatcoats, slipping balaclavas over their heads.

  Gary dropped down on the attendant’s wrist before he had time to look up properly, or perhaps his eyes were still on Larissa’s legs which went all the way up to her backside, just out of sight beneath her mini-skirt.

  ‘Don’t fuckin’ move,’ Gary said.

  The attendant jerked his arm up in a reflex which might have thrown him sideways but for the fact that Jason had come up behind him and jabbed a sawn-off shot-gun into his ribs. His head was caught round the neck in Jason’s grip.

  ‘Quickly,’ said Gary; he held out a thin blue plastic bag bearing a supermarket label. ‘I want the lot.’

  ‘Is it a gun?’

  ‘Is it a gun, Je-siss. Look, I don’t want to touch this stuff, will you just pick it up. Nothing funny, no buzzers, no little tricks, because we’re watching, okay?’

  The attendant’s eyes were bulging and he seemed incapable of movement. Jason prodded him from the rear.

  ‘We’re helping you,’ he said, ‘we want you to survive. We’re kind.’

  ‘Thick as pigshit, if you ask me,’ said Gary. The light was gleaming on his shaven skull. He picked up one of the attendant’s limp wrists and held it over the till. The hand dropped and Gary chopped down on the wrist so that it gave a messy crunch on the edge. The man screamed, but the pain had jolted him into action. He brought up the uninjured hand and dipped it in the till, beginning to scoop out the money.

  ‘That’s better,’ said Jason, ‘Faster.’ A frantic edge was developing in his voice.

  Outside, a car purred in the distance. Larissa’s eyes flashed around, lit on the CLOSED sign standing behind the door. She picked it up and banged it down outside, shutting the door fast. The car carried on.

  ‘Ah, clever,’ said Jason approvingly, as she stood, back to the roadway, hands spread against the wall, and starting to look wide-eyed.

  Five, maybe six hundred, had gone into the bag.

  ‘Where’s the rest?’ snapped Gary.

  The attendant whimpered in the back of his throat; Jason jabbed.

  ‘There isn’t any more.’

  ‘Is that all?’ It was the first time since this operation began that Larissa had spoken.

  ‘They do it with credit cards,’ whispered the attendant.

  ‘I ain’t got no credit cards and I buy petrol,’ Gary said.

  ‘It’s enough,’ said Jason. ‘C’mon, we’ve got to move.’

  Larissa noticed the attendant’s lunchbox. It was the same as a kid’s school lunchbox, may even have been one, for it had a Mickey Mouse transfer stuck on its lid. She picked it up, threw it at its present owner’s face. ‘It’s not enough.’

  Sticking her hands in her pockets, she turned away as if she had no further interest in the proceedings.

  ‘What’s the matter, baby?’ Gary was rapidly knotting the top of the bag together by its punched-out shopping bag handles. ‘He offend you?’

  ‘He makes me puke. Lunchboxes. Little kids. Shit.’

  ‘I’ll fix it. In a minute.’ The bag was tied up, a harmless-looking little bundle. Gary reached for the phone, started dialling.

  ‘Don’t muck around, Gary.’ Jason was scared shitless now.

  But Gary poked the phone towards the attendant, wiping it down at the same time with a grease rag. ‘Tell the cops there’s some people hanging around the service station who bother you. Tell them, there could be trouble if they don’t get over fast. Speak nicely to the policeman.’ He nodded to Jason.

  Jason pushed the weapon into the man’s back. ‘Do as he says,’ he said softly. ‘I can’t help you if you don’t.’

  The man did as he was told, his voice as much glazed as calm, the pain hovering behind his words. It was five to three in the afternoon.

  ‘Okay?’ Jason asked.

  Gary nodded and Jason stuffed the gun under his khaki greatcoat.

  ‘Right, move, nice and easy but fast,’ Gary said to the others. He turned to the attendant and sliced his face with the side of his hand, and then the top of his head with a tyre lever, and they all walked out the door together, leaving the man slumped across the counter.

  ‘That was for you,’ Gary said to Larissa as they piled into the car.

  ‘Why did you get him to make that call, bro?’ Jason asked, as they turned off the road. In the distance they heard sirens.

  ‘Why not? Say, man, look at it this way, it’s his voice, the guy at the service station’s, and according to him the robbery hasn’t even started. Finesse, that’s what it is. Doubt and confusion in the mind of the enemy.’

  ‘Hmm. I suppose he smacked his own head in?’

  ‘Maybe, maybe he did. Or one of his partners in crime. You never know do you?’ He stroked Larissa’s thigh with the tips of his fingers: they jutted out of black fingerless mittens. She was sitting very close to him, almost in his lap. Her face was feverish with excitement; he knew she couldn’t wait to get at him. As he switched off the engine, he said, ‘Besides, it was a joke on O’Meara. A real joke, he’d have thought he was going to make an arrest. I like to play jokes on O’Meara. We should have fun when we go out, doncha all think?’

  In the ablution block at the camping ground Larissa let the water run through her hair for a long time, sluicing out the blue rinse that she had put in it that morning. She was sorry the colour was only temporary; she liked having blue hair. She wondered what colour she might turn next. Maybe pink. Or how about an ordinary blonde? She had enjoyed having all the colour bleached out of her hair at one stage, a snowy cap moving swiftly and lightly through the streets of Weyville, earrings hanging nearly down to her shoulders. That was when she got kicked out of Weyville High. Thank God. She’d have killed someone if she’d stayed there any longer. She could still hear her aunt up-herself Rose preaching, po-faced, about what a good mind she had and what a waste it all was.

  Here her head switched off-course for a moment. Her aunt, she supposed, was an improvement on her mother. One thing was for sure, she’d never have black hair, not as long as she lived. Which, more or less, she hoped would not be for too long. The idea of anyone having fun after they were about twenty-two at the outside was over the top. Really off the wall.

  She leaned her head against the small rectangular mirror glued to the concrete wall. She felt tired and rather small. It occurred to her that Jason, hers and Gary’s best and neatest friend, who took chances with them whether he liked it or not, was maybe twenty-four. But look at him, stumping along on a wooden leg. It didn’t make sense. If she was Jason she thought she would probably rather be dead. She towelled some bruises on her shoulders and left thigh. They still hurt.

 
The trick was not to cry out when Gary did this to her. Living in a caravan park everybody got to know your business unless you were real careful. If she made any trouble Gary would kick her out. And then where would she go? And to whom? Without Gary there wouldn’t be anything. Nothing in the world that she could imagine, just a great void like the sky at nights when they slept outside the caravan in summer without even the benefit of stars. Sometimes Gary pulled the awning over when it got cold and then it was simply dark and still and she got lonely, even though he was there. That was what it would be like if he sent her away.

  Sometimes she dreamed that she would go up to her father’s house and it would be all right, that he would open the door and say Oh hi, it’s you Larissa, come along in, and he would cook up some crumpets and stuff, and make her some Milo, and maybe show her to a bedroom with a primrose-coloured duvet for her to sleep under on the bed; when she woke up it seemed like a good joke. The last time she had been near Paul’s house she had broken three windows and the cops had come down and interviewed her about it. Or one cop, anyway.

  O’Meara, that was the guy’s name, O’Meara. Gary said the guy was a bit of a card, made you laugh, that joker. Cunning as a bunch of shithouse rats you lot O’Meara said, last time he came round; shithouse rats.

  Afterwards, they all laughed. ‘Shithouse rats, that’s what we are.’ They called themselves that, though sometimes, thinking about it at night, Larissa began to shiver violently at the idea, and when she had to get up for a pee she picked her way really carefully out to the Portaloo dunny.

  Jason said O’Meara was a guy you couldn’t trust, which they all agreed was so from the very fact that he wore a uniform; you couldn’t trust any of the fuzz.

  But you could sort of get along with him.

  Larissa gave her hair a final rub and examined it carefully in the mirror; there was hardly a trace of blue left in it. She pulled on her jeans and a clean T-shirt; she reckoned she could pass for just about any ordinary teenager in Weyville. What a laugh.

  Flicking a comb through her hair and pinching her cheeks a bit, she decided she was ready for whatever interviews were in the offing. Come to think of it, she felt pretty good. Gary had been really nice to her after they got back, kind of affectionate. He’d sent Jason packing real fast and told him to get some beer out for them, they’d be over in ten minutes. ‘And tell your old lady to go take a walk or something, we don’t want the old bitch hanging around,’ he called after Jason’s departing back.

  Then, later, she said hadn’t she better be doing something about changing her appearance, the way they’d agreed, weren’t they wasting time, and he had said, Don’t worry, time’s never wasted with you kid, as if she was still special to him and more important than doing time, if they did get caught. Only he seemed relaxed and not too worried about it, as if he knew it was going to be all right. She’d done a real good job, he told her, making sure that there were no cars around, her timing was just perfect, and that was important for them with the Stude which he loved but was a dead giveaway.

  Still, if the mutt in the service station had come round yet he might have said something about her hair, so in the end she’d come over and taken a shower. She stepped out into the afternoon light and looked down the length of the caravan park.

  At the head of the park just behind the gates stood Herbert’s lodge and the office and camp store. Herbert decided who could enter the reserve and who stayed out. There was a cattle stop at the gate so that he always heard the clank of approaching vehicles even if he didn’t see them, which was not often. He was talking about having surveillance cameras installed so that he could watch people coming and going wherever he was in the house. Grilles had been put up in front of the window where people came up to make enquiries. It seemed a bit of a laugh to Larissa that there were so many security precautions in force for people like them who wanted to live a free life out in the open air, but Herbert was a bit of a fanatic. The other night there had been a bunch of bikies through and he had chased them with a hammer. The fool, they all said afterwards, he could have got himself killed, rushing in like that. They all whooped and hollered around him, so that he thought they were helping, but what the idiot didn’t realise was that none of them was actually doing anything, just making a noise. The cops had been cruising and it was settled pretty smartly. O’Meara again.

  Just as well he was around.

  The caravans were parked in two rows facing each other. Some had been there longer than others. The ones on either side of theirs had gardens around them. Jason and his mother, Poppy, lived in one of them, and alongside them were a couple of housetrucks. Jason had gone to school from the caravan. He said the kids at school called him a gypsy. When he tried to tell them that his home never moved, just stayed in the same place all the time, the same as theirs, the kids laughed. He was glad to get out of school, he said. She could understand that. It was one of the reasons she got on that well with him, even though he was older.

  ‘Isn’t there anything you liked at school?’ her aunt had asked her when she was having the big soul-searching rave to her.

  ‘Yeah. Brighton Rock.’

  ‘Brighton Rock?’

  She was like a parrot, repeating you all the time. Poppy hung brightly coloured felt parrots outside the caravan on fine days, just like it was an aviary. She brushed them regularly instead of feeding them. Aunt Rose would look good hanging outside on a hook.

  ‘I liked Pinkie.’

  ‘Pinkie?’

  Jesus, you’d think she was doing indecent exposure, maybe that’s the sort of pinkie she thought she was on about.

  ‘The bloke. He’s like my boyfriend Gary.’

  ‘Gary.’

  ‘Jesus.’ There she’d said it that time. ‘Yeah, like Gary. Cool.’

  ‘But. Pinkie was a, yes. Well, Gary’s your first boyfriend. You’ll have lots of boyfriends.’

  Larissa thought then how dumb her Aunt Rose was. She didn’t seem to understand that she was telling her something about life, about her taste, about, like, the way she was. She took Gary round to see her aunt once, but it was useless. Aunt Rose had taken her aside and offered her some Clearasil for Gary’s spots. Larissa said to her, at the time, that she liked his spots.

  Which was true. She liked picking them, it made her feel close to him, getting stuff out of his body, like monkeys playing with each other. She got to hurt him a bit when she did it, in a way that he didn’t seem to mind.

  Poppy put stones round her garden and painted them white; she grew flowers and vegetables. Her trailer wasn’t nearly as big as hers and Gary’s, being old, but as Jason said, it was almost like a real house. She had knick-knacks all over it, a black Sambo to stick pencils and knitting needles in, and a yellow felt donkey with a sequinned bridle that she kept in the china cabinet along with her vases, nine of them, coloured yellow, violet, green, pink, and the rest were crystal. She shook her mats every morning with cracks like whips. You had to keep mats in their place, she said, because they always moved towards the rising sun. She looked about seventy though Larissa figured she couldn’t be that old and still be Jason’s mother. Maybe she was really his grandmother. Larissa didn’t care much about things like that, who was related to who. Families, as such, were a bore.

  Their caravan was bigger. It was just about the biggest in the park. It was a thirty-foot Gulf trailer. She couldn’t remember what it was in metres and anyway nobody in the camp understood metrics — ‘I’ve got a thirty-footer,’ (or a twenty-eight footer) they said when they were bragging. Never anything fancy; the caravan made its own statement. She kept it tidy though. People thought they lived like pigs in the caravan park, but it was a lie. They’d get kicked out if they didn’t keep things tidy. Herbert had standards and that was that, even if he was a hammer-wielding idiot. And the thing was, though Jason and his mother had lived there for yonks, and never moved, it was always there, the possibility that you could. Just get up and go one morning. That’s the way the
people in the bright chimneyed housetrucks did it. Just came and went. And maybe one day they would. Just hook up to the Stude and go somewhere. Her and Gary, and maybe Jason could come for a bit, though it wouldn’t be too good if he stayed for long. Just came and went a bit.

  That’s what she’d like, though, she said to Gary when they lay out under the awning in summer nights. She couldn’t understand why he didn’t jump at the idea, why he kept sticking round in Weyville, but he worked things through in his own time, Gary did, and sooner or later, she guessed, he’d wake up one day and it would be like it was his idea.

  In the meantime, he said he still had a bit of work to do on the Stude, and it was no good taking the old girl on the road until he was sure she was shipshape, and sending all that work down the drain.

  She walked down between the rows of caravans, heading for Poppy and Jason’s trailer. She expected to see Jason and Gary sitting outside with some tinnies on the table. That was the best possible scenario. But Poppy was sitting outside with a shawl wrapped round her shoulders, and even though the sun had gone in, a broad-brimmed shiny basket-weave hat on her head, and a pale pink chiffon scarf wrapped right around its crown and under her whiskery chin. She was talking to the parrots as they swayed in the breeze.

  Larissa experienced a stab of fear, more like a thrill. Her eyes travelled up the lane, expecting to see the fuzz parked outside hers and Gary’s caravan.

  Instead, she saw a once dark-blue Metro that had had its paint rubbed down. Her aunt leaned against it, smiling and nodding to Gary as she spoke to him, even though he sat on the caravan step, staring dead pan at her, right through her in fact. Then he saw Larissa coming down the lane towards them; she could see from this distance that he was turning talkative.

  Jason walked past her, as if in a dream. Who knew what went on in that guy’s head. It would be easier to stop and talk to him, have a rap about their adventure of the afternoon. But his face was closed off, and knowing Jason he might never speak of it again. Besides, there was her relative, her aunt, waiting for her, talking to her lover while she waited.