:: chapter
ten ::
When our train arrived at Cardiff station just before ten minutes to one that afternoon, spilling Ruby, Sadie, Avery and I along with a handful of others onto the platform, it was to find Zac and Zoë waiting for us. The two of them were sitting on a bench under the station awning – Zoë was perched on its back, legs stretched right out in front so that her bare toes were touching the front of the seat, with Zac sitting next to her knees. I sneaked around behind the two of them and put my hands over Zoë’s eyes. “Guess who?” I said quietly right in her ear.
“Don’t know, it’s lost its tag,” she said, and twisted herself around just as I uncovered her eyes. The blue eyes she shared with me, Jessica and our dad lit right up when she saw me. “Tay!” she squealed, and launched herself off the bench seat into my arms.
“Hello Zoë,” I said, laughing as I spoke. “Miss me did you?”
“Yep,” she replied. “Okay, you can put me down now,” she said, her tone taking on a sense of warning. Instead of putting her down, I threw her over my right shoulder and carried her out onto the platform. “Put me down!” she shrieked.
“Nope,” I said, and walked back over to Ruby and Avery, Zoë’s feet kicking out in front of me and her hands beating on my back the whole way. “Ruby, this is my baby sister Zoë,” I said, introducing the two of them.
“I’m fifteen Taylor – I’m not a baby anymore!” Zoë shouted practically right in my ear.
At these words I let Zoë slide back down onto her feet. “You may not be a baby anymore, but you will always be my baby sister,” I told her, ruffling her hair. “Zo, this is my friend Ruby McCormick – we go to TAFE together.”
“Hi Zoë,” Ruby said, holding out the hand that didn’t have a tight grip on the handle of her walking stick. Zoë took Ruby’s hand in hers and shook it quickly.
“Mum said to bring you guys back to the house soon as we picked you up,” Zac said as he came up beside me. I saw him grin at Ruby. “You’re Ruby, yeah?”
“Yeah,” Ruby replied with a nod. “Zac, right?”
“That’s my name, don’t wear it out,” Zac replied. “Come on you lot, sooner we get back to the house the sooner we can have lunch.”
After we left the station, it was roughly a twenty-minute drive to the house that my parents and Zoë still called home. It was in one of the more rural areas of Newcastle, in a suburb called Black Hill, and sat right at the end of an unsealed road just off Black Hill Road. As we piled out of Zac’s ute into the front yard, I watched as Ruby looked up at the house – she looked like a deer caught in headlights, and I nudged her gently. She looked over at me, wide-eyed.
“You grew up here?” she asked. “Bloody hell, this is really nice…”
“It is pretty nice,” I agreed. The house was two stories of red brick with a green corrugated iron roof, a wooden wrap-around verandah and solar panels on the roof, a games room on the ground floor that my brothers and I had commandeered for our band practices not long after we had all moved in, and plenty of room for all of my immediate and extended family whenever we all gathered for Christmas and various birthdays. “And yeah, I sort of grew up here.” Here I began to lead Ruby closer to the house. “We moved here in 1999 – lived in Broadmeadow up until then.” I pointed in the vague direction of my old neighbourhood. “I’ll show you our old place if you like. But until I moved down to Wollongong, then yeah this was home. My parents and Zoë still live here, mostly because it isn’t far from where Zoë goes to school.”
“And then there’s all the nephews, nieces and cousins that turn it into a madhouse every birthday and Christmas,” Zoë said as she led the way up the stairs onto the verandah. “No way we’d all fit into the old house, that place was tiny. Not that I remember it but I’ve seen pictures.”
“Are you sure I should even be here?” Ruby asked me in an undertone. We had stopped walking at the bottom of the stairs, leaving Zac, Avery and Zoë to barrel their way inside. “I mean, there’s the fan thing to consider. Your parents know about that, right?”
“Ruby, my mum was the one who said it was okay to invite you – she’s fine with it. My dad is too. If they weren’t okay with it they’d have said so.” I shrugged. “And besides, Mum wants to meet you.”
“Come on you slowpokes!” Zoë yelled at us from inside the house. “I’m hungry and Mum won’t let me in the kitchen until you get in here!”
“Yeah, yeah, hold your bloody horses!” I yelled back, before giving Ruby an apologetic smile and leading her around to the back of the house.
Mum was holding court in the kitchen when Ruby and I finally made it inside, the two of us having taken a detour through the backyard so that Ruby could let Sadie off her lead. Avery was sitting on the bench across from where Mum was working, her bare heels propped on one of the drawer handles. She stuck her tongue out at me, and I flipped her the bird in response.
“Avery, behave yourself,” Mum said from behind me. I turned around just in time to see her look up from buttering bread for sandwiches, and she gave Ruby and I a smile that reached all the way up to her warm brown eyes. “There you two are,” she said. To Ruby she said, “You must be Taylor’s friend from TAFE.”
Ruby nodded. “I’m Ruby McCormick, Mrs. Hanson.”
“Call me Diana,” Mum said. “Otherwise I’ll start thinking you’re one of my students and I’ll end up setting you homework.” I snickered at this, and Mum pointed the butter knife at me. “Watch it mister. I don’t care if you are thirty now, you’re not too old to be put over my knee.”
“Sorry Mum,” I apologised, before moving away from Ruby’s side. “So where’s everyone else?” I asked as I opened the refrigerator.
“Your dad, Isaac and Josh are at the club getting everything finished for this evening,” Mum replied. “Kate and Nikki are helping out with that. Jess and Chris are playing babysitter for the little ones back at their place, so that they don’t get caught underfoot.” There was a short pause. “Don’t even think about drinking the milk straight out of the bottle, Jordan Taylor,” she said in warning, and I paused in opening the bottle of chocolate milk I’d found in the refrigerator door. “Either use a glass or put it back.”
“I can’t get anything past you, can I?” I asked, and managed to quickly skol some of the milk before putting the bottle back in its place.
“I’m your mother, of course you can’t,” Mum replied. “Get the chicken and the cheese out, please – Ave, can you find your brother and sister, and then duck out to the yard and pick a couple of tomatoes?”
In almost no time at all, we had all sorted out our respective lunches and seated ourselves at the dining table. “Now, Ruby,” Mum said, and I glanced sidelong at Ruby. “Do you have anywhere to stay this weekend? I know it’s a fair hike back down to Wollongong from here.”
“I’ll probably see if any of the motels around here have any vacancies,” Ruby replied. “I didn’t want to impose on anyone.”
“Ruby, you are more than welcome to stay here,” Mum assured her. “You won’t be imposing on us.” Out of the corner of my eye I saw Ruby open her mouth, and Mum held up a hand. “Ruby, I know that you’re a fan of my three oldest. Taylor told me when he asked if it was okay to invite you to his party tonight. He trusts you and considers you a friend, and that’s enough for his dad and I to trust you as well.”
“If you’re sure,” Ruby said, her tone sounding dubious.
“Ruby, take it from me,” I said as I picked a sunflower seed out of my sandwich and popped it into my mouth, “if I trust someone, then Mum and Dad do as well. Intuition’s always been pretty spot-on. If Mum says it’s okay for you to stay here for the weekend, she means it.” I tapped my right temple and went back to eating my lunch.
“Okay. Thanks, Mrs. Hanson – I mean, Diana,” Ruby amended quickly. “That’s going to take a lot of getting used to.”
“You think that’s going to take getting used to?” Zac said, and I let out an almost silent groan of embarrassment. I knew exactly what story Zac was about to tell, and it was almost enough for me to want to hide in a dark corner somewhere. “Taylor’s very first day of Year 7, he’s in Music class and he calls her ‘Mum’ instead of Mrs. Hanson in front of the entire class. He almost changed schools after that.”
“Thanks so much, Zachary,” I mumbled. “You just ruined ten years’ worth of counselling.”
“You went to Merewether High?” Ruby asked, and I nodded.
“Yep. Isaac, Zac and I all did. Jess, Josh and Ave went to Hunter Valley Grammar instead.”
“Yeah, we’d have had the shit teased out of us if we’d gone to Merewether,” Avery said. I scowled at her, and she gave me a sickeningly-sweet smile in response. “Plus do you really think Mum would have let us ride our bikes all the way into Newy just to get to school every day? I’m still shocked she let you do it. When you actually went to school, that is.”
“That’s enough out of you three,” Mum said sharply.
“Sorry, Mum,” Zac, Avery and I all said, not quite in unison.
After lunch, and once the table had been cleared, Ruby and I went back out to Zac’s ute to collect our backpacks. “Your mum’s really nice,” Ruby said as I uncovered the tray of the ute. “I’m kind of surprised she’s letting me stay here for the weekend, though. I mean, she doesn’t even know me.”
“She honestly doesn’t care that you’re a fan, Ruby,” I said, and I reached for the shoulder straps of my backpack. “Really, she doesn’t,” I assured her when I saw the worry that had crept onto her face. “She’d have nixed the whole idea of me inviting you if she did. As far as she and my dad are concerned, we’re friends and that’s enough of a reason to have you stay over.” I hauled my backpack out of the tray, carefully lowering it to the grass so that my laptop and iPad didn’t get jostled, before reaching for Ruby’s backpack. “And before you ask, you’ll get to meet my dad later on too. Probably at the party unless he comes back to the house before we all head into town.” Just as I lifted Ruby’s backpack out of the tray I heard a car coming up behind me, and I looked over to my right to see Dad’s car pulling into the yard. “Speak of the devil,” I said.
“Speak of the what now?” Ruby asked, and I turned her around to face the windscreen of Dad’s car. “Is that your dad?”
“Yep,” I replied. “Hey Dad,” I said as he came up alongside the tray of the ute.
“Hey Tay,” Dad said. “Who’s your friend?”
“This is Ruby – we go to TAFE together,” I replied, putting an arm around Ruby’s shoulders and gently drawing her forward as I spoke. “Ruby, this is my dad.”
“Hi Mr. Hanson,” Ruby said quietly, sounding shy all of a sudden.
“Hello Ruby,” Dad said with a smile. To me he said, “Is your mother inside?”
I nodded. “Yep. Last I looked she was in the kitchen.”
Once Dad had headed off inside, I eyed Ruby. “He’s just my dad, Ruby – you don’t have to be shy around him.”
“He might be ‘just your dad’, Tay,” Ruby said, making air-quotes as she spoke, “but in Hanson fandom he’s a bloody legend. Same goes for your mum. I’m just a little intimidated right now, that’s all.”
“I guess I can understand that. I’ll probably feel the same way if I ever meet your parents.” I cracked a smile and hoisted myself up onto the tray of the ute, propping my feet on the rear bumper. “You know what, Ruby?”
“What?”
“I think tonight is going to be very interesting.”
‘Interesting’, as I discovered roughly five hours later, did not even begin to cover it.
For my birthday dinner that evening, my parents had booked out the Entertainment Lounge at Souths Merewether. It was big enough to hold my immediate and extended family and more than a few of my friends – considering how massive my extended family was on both sides, this was a good thing – and had seen Ruby looking a little shell-shocked when we’d arrived just after six. She’d gotten used to it fairly quickly, though, and I had seen her talking animatedly with Jessica and Avery once we’d all ordered dinner.
Once we had all finished eating and the dinner plates had been cleared away, the overhead lights dimmed and two of the kitchen staff came into the room. One of them carried an absolutely massive chocolate cake that, I saw when it was set down in front of me, had (at a quick glance) thirty metallic blue candles dotted around the edge and Happy 30th Birthday Taylor piped on top in what looked like white chocolate. The other carried a tall stack of plates that had a sharp knife on top.
There was one particular tradition that had been a fixture of birthdays growing up in my family, and that nine times out of ten had resulted in a frantic game of kisschasey around the backyard as Isaac, Zac or I chased down the nearest girl. Over the last fifteen or so years our collective enthusiasm for this little tradition had waned somewhat. But as I took up the knife to cut the first piece out of my birthday cake, once I’d made a wish and blown out the candles, I spotted the evil gleam in Zac’s eye that told me he was most definitely up to something. Don’t touch the plate, don’t touch the plate, don’t touch the plate, I thought frantically as I slid the blade of the knife through the cake, and winced when I heard the unmistakable sound of steel striking china.
“You have to kiss Ruby now!” Joshua crowed, which set everyone else in the room off laughing.
“I do not!” I retorted, even though I knew that he was right.
“That’s the rule, Tay,” Mum said, sounding apologetic, and I fired off a glare in her direction. “You touched the plate with the knife, you have to kiss the nearest girl that you’re not related to.”
And the nearest girl that I’m not related to is Ruby, I realised. This definitely wasn’t the way I’d wanted kissing Ruby for the first time to go. Knowing that my brothers would have a particularly devious punishment in mind if I refused to kiss Ruby, I swallowed hard.
“You don’t have to kiss me, Taylor,” Ruby said, and I looked over at her. She gave me a small smile. “Not if you don’t want to.”
“Oh believe me, I want to,” I assured her. “It’s just…this isn’t how I imagined our first kiss.”
Ruby didn’t say anything in answer to this. Instead, she tapped her left cheek and raised an eyebrow at me. It took me maybe half a second to figure out what she was telling me to do, and I leaned in and quickly kissed her.
“Now was that so bad?” she asked with a grin.
“Never said it would be,” I replied, and proceeded to cut the rest of the first piece of cake – it was raspberry-chocolate ripple underneath all the icing, I could see as I eased that first piece out onto a plate. “Okay, who wants cake?”Out of the corner of my eye I could see Ruby fix me with an inquisitive look. The two of us were sitting in Dixon Park out at Merewether, watching waves crash on the shore of the nearby beach. On the ground between us, the butcher’s paper held down with my wallet and phone, two bottles of water and Ruby’s handbag so that our lunch didn’t blow away on the wind, was a few dollars’ worth of hot chips from the takeaway place on Ridge Street. Mindful of the fact that we had to catch a train back to Wollongong the next morning, I had borrowed Mum’s car and taken Ruby on a quick tour of my hometown, making a point of showing her the parts of the city that only someone who had grown up in Newcastle would know about.
“It’s all good,” Ruby said. “I have brothers as well. Those two can be real dickheads.”
“So how many brothers and sisters do you have?” I asked, roughly half a second before I popped a couple of hot chips into my mouth.
“Four. Two sisters and two brothers – Taleah and Troy are twins and the oldest, and after me are Ben and Gabbie. So it’s almost as big a family as yours.” She frowned slightly. “Actually, scratch that. I’m pretty sure I don’t have nearly as many cousins as you do. Your family is insane.”
“Just a little bit, yeah. That wasn’t even my whole family though. Most of my cousins on Dad’s side of the family live in the USA. I’m not actually sure how many there are but I know it’s a lot. Two of Dad’s brothers and their families are here and that’s it – the rest of them hightailed it back to Oklahoma about twenty years ago. Plus a lot of my mum’s side, we’re spread out all over the east coast.”
“I bet family reunions are interesting.”
I let out a chuckle. “That’s one word for it. We get together out west every few years around Christmas – it gets particularly crazy around that time.” I picked up one of the bottles of water, uncapped it and drank down a few mouthfuls. “Picture your average rugby league team, minus the substitute players, and then multiply that by about twenty – that’ll give you a rough idea of how many of us there are on Mum’s side.”
I could almost see the cogs and wheels turning in Ruby’s head as she worked this out. “Holy shit,” she whispered.
“Yeah. And my family isn’t even the biggest of the lot. One of Mum’s brothers has nine kids.”
She let out a low whistle. “Bloody hell.”
“Mmm-hmm. What about your family though?”
“Other than my mum and dad and my siblings?” Ruby asked, and I nodded. “Mum’s side, I just have an aunt and uncle and three cousins, plus my grandparents. Taleah and Troy also have a couple of kids each. Dad’s side is the crazy one – Dad’s got three sisters and four brothers, plus my other grandparents, and on that side I have an absolute shitload of cousins. I’m not even sure how many there are – I stopped counting after my Aunt Kim and Uncle Ian had their fourth kid.”
This time I let out a proper laugh. “Your dad and my mum would get along well, I think,” I said, earning a smile from Ruby. “Hey, can I ask you a question?”
“So long as I can ask you one as well,” Ruby replied.
“Yeah, no worries.” I pulled at a few blades of grass. “Were you named after a Rolling Stones song, by any chance?”
“Yeah, I was actually. My dad named me after Ruby Tuesday – it’s his favourite Stones song.” Here she broke briefly into song. “Goodbye, Ruby Tuesday…who could hang a name on you…when you change with every new day…still I’m gonna miss you…” She shrugged. “Mum drew the line at using ‘Tuesday’ as my middle name, though. I got Therese as my middle name instead.” She dabbed her right index finger at a few patches of chicken salt on the butcher’s paper and stuck her finger into her mouth. “You don’t have to answer this by the way, since I know it’s not something you like to talk about.”
“If anyone else was asking me, I wouldn’t want to talk about it,” I admitted. “But I don’t mind it when you ask me.”
I could have sworn I saw Ruby go slightly pink when I said this. She fidgeted a little before she spoke again, twisting the hem of her T-shirt around in her hands. “After you made remission the second time, did you do anything to, you know, celebrate?”
“Not right away,” I replied. “I was too terrified that it was going to come back at first – I think I was more relieved that I’d survived, to be honest. But when I finally made it to five years I definitely celebrated. And when Mum found out what I did she almost belted me.”
“What did you do?”
Instead of answering out loud, I pulled the back of my T-shirt up around my shoulders and turned around so that I had my back to Ruby. On the back of my left shoulder was the reason Mum had gone off her head at me – my first and probably my last tattoo.
“It’s Japanese,” I explained. “Seizon-sha – it means ‘survivor’.” I felt a shiver race down my back as Ruby traced the lines in the kanji characters with a fingernail.
“March fifth 2003 and May sixth 2006 – are those the days you made remission?” Ruby asked.
“Yep,” I replied. I was pulling my T-shirt back down as I spoke. “I got the full all-clear on the sixth of May 2011, and I went out and got my tattoo a week later. I’m still not totally sure how Mum found out, but she threatened to get the wire brush from the garden shed and scrub it off. I had to promise her that I’d never get another tattoo for as long as I lived to get her to back down.”
It wasn’t until after we had finished our lunch and driven back into town that I worked up the nerve to ask Ruby something I’d had on my mind for at least the last month. Almost on impulse I had turned right off Glebe Road onto Gordon Avenue instead of heading toward home, our route taking us to one of my favourite places in all of Newcastle – the Cold Rock Ice Creamery in Hamilton.
“I hope you like ice cream,” I said as I parked the car outside the noodle shop across the street from Cold Rock.
“I love ice cream,” Ruby said. “If you give me a spoon I will quite happily eat almost half a one-litre tub of Sara Lee rocky road in one sitting. Well, any ice cream flavour really, except for liquorice,” she amended, “but rocky road’s my favourite.”
“Peanut butter’s mine,” I said. We crossed Beaumont Street once I’d locked the car, making sure to look out for any cars, and joined the short line of people that snaked its way out of Cold Rock onto the footpath outside. “Hokey pokey a close second. The hokey pokey has to be the one from New Zealand Natural though – nobody else can make it as well as they can.”
The line moved quickly – surprising for a Sunday afternoon – and we soon had our ice creams in hand. I had gone for my usual – peanut butter ice cream with Maltesers and choc-chip cookie dough in a waffle cone – while Ruby had rocky road with raspberries and gummy bears. Once we had paid for our ice creams we left Cold Rock and headed down Beaumont Street, crossing Cleary Street at the zebra crossing as soon as there was a lull in the traffic. At some point between Cold Rock and the intersection of Beaumont and Lindsay Ruby’s left hand found its way into my right, with neither of us realising what had happened until we went to cross Lindsay Street. She quickly snatched her hand away from mine, and over the rims of my sunglasses I could see her turning bright red. “Sorry,” she said quietly, her voice barely audible over the afternoon’s traffic.
“No, it’s okay,” I assured her, and took her hand into mine once more.
It wasn’t until we got to the Wesley Uniting Church on the corner of Beaumont and Denison that we decided to start walking back to where I’d parked the car. Before we started our walk back, though, I sat down on the low wall that ran around the church on two sides and stretched my legs out onto the footpath. Ruby joined me after a few moments, and I pushed my sunglasses up on top of my head so that I could see her better.
“So what do you think?” I asked.
“I can see why you love it here,” she said. “It…it’s wonderful. I can’t believe I’ve never been here before. I almost wish we didn’t have to go home tomorrow.”
“Reckon you might want to come back?”
She nodded. “Oh, definitely. I might even go for a ride on the ferry next time.”
“I knew we forgot to do something. Next time, yeah?”
“Next time,” she agreed.
The two of us were quiet for a little while, watching people walking past and cars driving along the street. It took me around five minutes to finally get around to saying what had caused the detour in the first place.
“Ruby?”
“Yeah?”
“D’you want to go out with me?”
“Like boyfriend-girlfriend?” Ruby asked. She sounded a little startled by my question, and I wasn’t entirely sure I blamed her for it. I supposed it wasn’t every day that a girl had someone famous asking her out.
I nodded. “Yeah. I really do like you Ruby – I wasn’t just saying that yesterday. And I want the whole world to know it.” I cracked a smile at her. “So what d’you reckon?”
She seemed to think this over for a little while. “Yeah, okay.” She let out a quiet laugh. “Taylor Hanson is my boyfriend. I never thought I’d ever get to say that.”
We were both quiet for a few minutes, content to just watch the world go by. “Ruby?” I asked to break the silence.
“Yeah?”
“Can I kiss you?”
For maybe a few seconds I was almost certain Ruby would say no, and I almost unconsciously held my breath waiting for her to answer.
“Yeah, you can kiss me,” she replied at last, and she gave me an almost shy smile. I returned her smile and leaned over, and for the first time kissed her properly. She tasted like chocolate and raspberries, and it wasn’t long until she started to kiss me back, her hands on my shoulders. “Wow,” she breathed when we finally broke apart.
“My thoughts exactly,” I agreed. “So, us?”
Ruby nodded. “Us.”