Singing The Frangipani Blues
‘She asked me to stay and she told me to sit anywhere.
So I looked around and I noticed there wasn’t a chair.’
‘Norwegian Wood’ Tuesday. There’s a song for every occasion, and today Paul McCartney is in her ear. Mish holds a firm belief that some higher power controls the shuffle option on her iPod.
As she does every other day, Mish walks past the block of corner shops on her way from the bus stop to her father’s work. Headphones firmly in ears, focus straight ahead. She’s come to realise that her pressed blazer and tartan uniform do not command respect from these girls who loiter outside the dairy every afternoon. That to them her skin, which her mother calls olive and her sister calls depressingly tanned, is white.
***
‘If you think that a kiss is all in the lips, come on, you got it all wrong, man.’
This week, Paul McCartney’s elsewhere and Mish returns to the present with The White Stripes, one of few ‘current’ bands she volunteers to listen to.
She laughs to herself as she ponders the deep meaning of such lyrics.
“What’re you looking at, bitch?”
Mish is a meerkat, scared and frozen. She doesn’t dare turn, instead trying to ignore it, this failing of her mental barriers that is making her want to cry. She picks up her pace and sets her expression to blank.
“Yeah, that’s right, just walk off, ya rich bitch.”
***
‘Excuse me. But I just have to explode this body.’
Mish does not let her mind wander. Today, her one goal is to get to her father’s work as quickly as possible. She is only dimly aware of the irony that she is practically jumping out of her skin as she walks to the rhythm of this Bjork euro-techno-arthouse-whatever-pop. As she stuggles along, toting heavy backpack and clarinet case, she can hear the girls’ laughter above her music, but she can’t turn it up any further.
***
‘All around me are familiar faces, worn out places, worn out faces.’
Mish catches herself, as she descends the bus stairs, contemplating the fact that it’s the Tears For Fears original, not the melancholy Gary Jules version everyone knows, that she’s listening to. It’s a happy-suicidal, kamikaze-fairground-ride kind of song, 80s pop vocals and echoes of Caribbean intrumentals - ‘I find it kinda funny, I find it kinda sad that these dreams in which I’m dying are the best I’ve ever had.’
Contemplation pre-occupies her and Mish finds herself already at her father’s work and climbing into his car.
“So how was your day, Michelle?” he asks her, expected paternal duty.
“Okay. Fine.” Mish also knows what is expected of her, as she slips into her at-home surly teenager monosyllabic dialect.
“Excellent,” he says. “So how was French? Maths?”
“I hate calculus - where are you going?” she yelps as he banks a hard left into a side street.
“I thought I’d get us some takeaways. Like the old days.” The old days? Mish thinks, the epitome of self-righteous teenagers. Isn’t the point that we’ve moved on from the past? But she manages to keep her mind and mouth separate.
“Okay. Cool.”
They pull into a parking space right outside the dairy, and her father makes his way off to the Chinese takeaway shop, leaving Mish alone and vulnerable. The girls are still sitting on the kerb, but this is the first time she’s dared look at them. There are three of them, two in short school uniforms and long white socks. The third girl wears a faded silver puffer jacket and a fake Von Dutch baseball cap. Mish thinks she can see a hole in the sleeve of her jacket, and there’s a black mark on the hood. It’s this girl who sees Mish looking, this girl who gives her the finger.
She looks away, embarrassed, but Mish (poetically, she likes to think) realises, in this moment, that she must seem to have come from across the seas to steal their land from them - she is a foreigner trespassing. She knows that they have no way of knowing it, of realising that once this was her neighbourhood too. Or that their puffer jacket-ed leader once played in a kindy sandpit with her, and talked about their dolls and what they wanted for dessert. And Mish would wave goodbye as her playmate was bundled home by her Aunty Tulia, who wore bright floral dresses everyday and who gave all the girls a piece of mango and a pinch on the cheek and who Mish wished would take her home, too.
Mish finds herself yearning for those days back, when the only colour difference she noticed was ‘Aunty’ Tulia’s dress for the day, and how drab the grey, beige and black business suits her parents wore were.
When she looks up, the girls are walking away, and her father is returning with a bag of chicken chow-mein and spring rolls.
“Why so glum, chum?” he asks as he opens the car door and hands her the plastic bag stash.
Mish switches back to selfish sixteen year old mode. “Glum is such an old person word,” she says with a smile tugging at her lips.
“Well you know me, I belong in a museum.”
There’s silence. “Did you see that girl there, dad?”
“Those girls? They’re always hanging around. That tall one in the jacket is Tina Fa’afoi. I don’t suppose you remember her, but she went to kindy with you.”
“Really?” Mish asks, carefully, as around a crystal display.
“Yeah. And her brother, Robert, too. Their dad’s in one of the gangs round here, he’s been in and out of prison since they were about three. Come to think of it, I think Rob is too, now.”
Mish looks out to the departing silver jacket, as they pull away, and it’s slouching, stone-kicking, swearing owner. Broken flowers, fallen petals, a hibiscus closed through an unseasonably long winter.
The girl, Tina, is an unknown now, but Mish can’t differentiate between the small, pigtailed, dungarees-wearing child with a gap-toothed grin (who helped her make a fortress in the sandpit) and this young woman.
I can’t do anything. So, because it’s all she can do, Mish hides behind her music.
What do the higher powers have to tell me today?
***
‘My baby loves me - I’m so happy. Happy makes me a modern girl… My whole life is like a picture of a sunny day.’
Liar.
The higher powers have left Mish to her devices now, she’s on her own to fix this world of hers.
The car pulls out onto the main road, and Mish lets Sleater-Kinney lull her to a cheek-on-the-window sleep.
It’s been a very stressful day.
