Half a Morning

"The best conversations in a house are usually with the one who can't talk back."

The bathroom light was bright enough to make me squint. I turned it on and shut the door, dropped my pyjamas onto the bathmat, and stepped into the shower before the water had quite got warm.

Cold first. Cold was a good way to stop being angry. The water hit my shoulders and my chest and my face and did the job of putting my body somewhere other than the kitchen, and after a minute or two I turned the hot tap up and let the whole thing go warm, and I stood there longer than I had time for, forehead against the tiles, eyes closed.

Two things happened under the water. First, the anger receded into something smaller, something I could file. Second, my stomach reminded me, with increasing confidence, that it had been reaching for lasagne for a reason and the reason had not gone away.

A minute more than I should have taken. Then out. Towel around the waist, and a quick look in the mirror on the way past — the kid in the mirror looked slightly red around the eyes and slightly stupid around the mouth, which was fair.

Across the hall into my bedroom, and the room, as it always did, took my temperature down another few degrees just by being itself.

The smell was the first thing. Books, the body spray I overused, the faintly warm electronic smell of a laptop that had been on too long the night before. Nothing anyone else would have liked. Perfect.

The door clicked shut behind me.

"Morning, mate."

Nibbles was already up, because Nibbles was always already up, because the internal clock of a hamster was one of several things about Nibbles I had stopped trying to understand. Up on his exercise wheel he sat, not running on it, just perched there like a small brown commander surveying his kingdom, watching me cross the room with the bright, intent stare of a creature who had correctly identified the approach of breakfast.

Clothes first, then Nibbles. Jeans, a t-shirt, the jumper Mum had bought me at the start of winter and which I actually liked, despite having been contractually obliged to receive it with minimal enthusiasm when she'd handed it over. Socks out of the drawer. Hair scrubbed roughly with the towel until it wasn't dripping. A hand through it called it styled.

The latch on the cage came free in my fingers.

"Bad morning," I told him, digging in my backpack for the rest of yesterday's apple, which was probably in one of the front pockets. "You'd have hated it. Mum was in one of her moods and I walked straight into her on the wrong side of it. On reflection, cereal was the move."

There it was. The apple had gone slightly brown on the cut face, which Nibbles would not care about, because Nibbles's standards for apple were the lowest standards for apple in the household, and this was one of the many reasons we got on.

A piece broken off, held out to him.

He took it from my fingers with the small serious efficiency of a hamster doing the job he'd been put on earth to do, and he settled back on his wheel and got to work on it. For a second I just stood there and watched him, and the whole morning started to recede a notch.

This was the thing about Nibbles.

Nibbles did not care that I had just lost an argument to my mother. Nibbles had no opinion on the eczema question. Nibbles had never once scored a point off me. I could walk into this room after the worst hour of my life and Nibbles would greet me the way he greeted everything, which was with the steady, uncomplicated expectation that I might have food on me. Usually I did. He was usually right. Working system.

"Consider that making up for Mum's torture," I told him — a line I delivered to Nibbles roughly once a week, because it was consistently funnier to me than it probably was.

He chewed.

Over to the desk. Laptop into its sleeve, sleeve into the main compartment. Notes from yesterday's English, which I hadn't looked at and wasn't going to. The scriptures, because seminary. A pen, because I always lost pens and had given up on trying to locate a specific one and now just pocketed whichever one I found first. The zip closed, the bag swung up onto my shoulder, and the weight of it anchored me, the way a bag on your shoulder does, the way something saying right, time to go does.

My stomach made a second loud argument for food.

The apple, when I looked down at it, still had half of itself to go. Four bites bigger than was dignified — standing in the middle of my bedroom with my bag on my shoulder — and the crispness and sugar did a reasonable amount of work against the hollow. Not all of it. A reasonable amount.

The last sliver went back into the cage.

"If I could bring you to school," I told him, and didn't finish the sentence, because he already knew the shape of it. The rest would have been: I would. He was the best conversation in the house and I was going to leave him here and go to a building full of people who were going to want more from me than he ever did.

The latch clicked back into place.

"Back this afternoon."

One last look around — not in the sanctum of my soul way the narrator of my life occasionally seemed to want me to, but in the practical way you look around a room when you're about to leave it, checking for keys and phone and anything obvious you were about to forget. Nothing obvious. Phone in pocket. Keys on the hook by the door.

Back across the hall for teeth.

Thirty seconds, maybe forty, spitting into the sink and rinsing the brush and putting it back in the cup too quickly for it to settle properly. The brush fell over. I left it there. Mum would stand it up later, the way Mum always stood the toothbrushes up later, and somewhere in that small act of hers I knew there was a forgiveness I hadn't yet earned.

Out into the hallway.

The hallway at six in the morning was a different hallway to the hallway at five-forty-three. Scientific fact, observed over three years of seminary, now reportable with confidence. At five-forty-three you were rushing. At six in the morning you were running late. At six-oh-four, which was where I was now, you were already composing the excuse you were going to give the person with the car.

Fast walk, bag knocking against my hip.

Mum and Dad were in the kitchen — audible without being visible, their voices pitched the way voices got when the argument was between two adults who had decided the kids didn't need to know about it. Not shouting. A good sign. Not laughing. A less good sign. Something about Broken Hill drifted out as I passed the doorway, and something about phone, and the shape of a question Dad wasn't answering, and I decided quickly that I did not have the time or the emotional budget to stop and figure out which sibling was currently in trouble.

The front door swung open under my hand.

"I'm off!"

No waiting to see if anyone answered. The door pulled shut behind me and the cold hit across the face the way cold hits you when you have just had a warm shower and forgotten that outside still existed.

The reserve was a lungful of eucalyptus and damp grass.

Across the front lawn, out through the gate, and onto the footpath through the reserve. My parents thought I walked the fifteen minutes to the chapel for seminary. I did not.

Overhead, the sky was doing the bruised-grey thing it did before sunrise in winter. Breath visible in front of my face — the small childish pleasure of seeing my own air, never quite grown out of — and then out onto Blair Park Drive.

The Bakers' car was at the kerb, engine idling, exhaust visible against the cold. Half-jog for the last bit. The back door pulled open.

"Morning, Charles."

Brother Baker said it without turning around, his voice the low even voice he used for everything — the same voice he used to lead the prayer at church and to ask you how school was and to point out that you'd left your scriptures in the back seat last Tuesday. Brother Baker was a man who had decided at some point in his life to be kind, and he'd committed to it, and he'd been kind every morning since for as long as I'd known him.

"Sorry I'm late," I said, pulling the door shut behind me and dropping the bag at my feet.

Brother Baker's eyes stayed on the road. "You're not late."

"I was late in my head."

"That's between you and your head." He pulled away from the kerb.

Ahead in the passenger seat was the back of Chloe's head — hair up in the loose not-quite-ponytail she wore on mornings when she hadn't wanted to put any effort in. No turn-around greeting. Chloe did not turn around for entrances. Chloe made you come to her.

"Good morning, Charles."

"Good morning, Chloe." The warmth of the car was beginning to work its way into my legs through the footwell.

"You sound like you've had a morning."

"I've had half a morning."

A beat while she worked out what she wanted to do with that. "How's the other half looking?"

"Better, now that I'm not in it."

The small noise she made was her version of a laugh at that hour — one sharp breath through the nose. She still hadn't turned around. She didn't need to. "You've got apple on your jumper."

"I do not."

"You do."

Down went my eyes. Apple on the jumper, a small damp crescent near the cuff where the last four-bite assault had gone wrong. My thumb scrubbed at it, doing no useful work. "First round goes to Chloe," I said.

"First round always goes to Chloe."

I settled back in the seat, head against the window, the cold of the glass a small perfect thing after the warmth of the car. Craigmore went past in the grey pre-dawn dark — the low brick houses, the empty front lawns, the streetlights still on — and the kitchen and the lasagne and the eczema line started, finally, to recede.

It was, I thought, going to be a normal day.