Cruisin' Read online

  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1 The Sunsilk Effect JULES' STORY

  Chapter 2 Cruise of the Living Dead THE WORLD ACCORDING TO SUZI

  Chapter 3 Any Number – or All – of the Above JULES' STORY

  Chapter 4 Scarring THE WORLD ACCORDING TO SUZI

  Chapter 5 Survivor's Guilt JULES' STORY

  Chapter 6 Bora Bora THE WORLD ACCORDING TO SUZI

  Chapter 7 Busted JULES' STORY

  Chapter 8 The Phantom of E-Deck THE WORLD ACCORDING TO SUZI

  Chapter 9 A Simple Case of Scared to Death JULES' STORY

  Chapter 10 The Rays of Motu Lagoon THE WORLD ACCORDING TO SUZI

  Chapter 11 Questions JULES' STORY

  Chapter 12 What's Not to Like? THE WORLD ACCORDING TO SUZI

  Chapter 13 The Power-Shuffle JULES' STORY

  Chapter 14 Karaoke THE WORLD ACCORDING TO SUZI

  Chapter 15 Capoeira and Variations JULES' STORY

  Cruisin'

  BRIAN CASWELL was born in Wales in 1954, and immigrated to Australia at the age of twelve. After some success in the music industry, he became a teacher and worked for fifteen years in Sydney's South-West, specialising in English, history and creative writing and indulging his love of basketball by coaching the school teams.

  Merryll of the Stones, Brian Caswell's first novel, was named Honour Book in the CBCA Book of the Year Awards and this success led to a new career as a young people's author.

  Since 1989, Brian Caswell has written twenty-five books, receiving many awards and short listings, including the Children's Peace Literature Award, the Vision Australia Young Adult Audio Book of the Year Award, the Aurealis Award for science fiction and fantasy, the Australian Multicultural Children's Literature Award, the Human Rights Award, the NSW Premier's Literary Award (four times) and he has been included in the prestigious International Youth Library's White Ravens list three times. All his published novels have been listed as Notable Books by the Children's Book Council of Australia.

  More recently Brian has moved into screenwriting and learning development research.

  He lives on the NSW Central Coast with his wife Marlene. They have four children and five grandchildren. He plays and coaches basketball, designs 'cutting-edge' educational programs, listens to all kinds of music (usually far too loud), watches 'an excessive number' of movies and DVDs, binges 'periodically' on fantasy and space-opera and is hopelessly addicted to soda water.

  Also by Brian Caswell

  Younger Readers

  Mike

  Lisdalia

  Maddie

  Young Adult Fiction

  Merryll of the Stones

  A Dream of Stars

  A Cage of Butterflies

  Deucalion

  Dreamslip

  Asturias

  The View from Ararat

  Double Exposure

  Loop

  By Brian Caswell and David Phu an Chiem

  Only the Heart

  The Full Story

  Cruisin'

  Brian Caswell

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including printing, photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's and publisher's rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Cruisin'

  ePub ISBN 9781864714395

  Kindle ISBN 9781864716795

  Original Print Edition

  A Woolshed Press book

  Published by Random House Australia Pty Ltd

  Level 3, 100 Pacific Highway, North Sydney NSW 2060

  www.randomhouse.com.au

  First published by Woolshed Press in 2008

  Copyright © Brian Caswell 2008

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Woolshed Press is a trademark of Random House Australia Pty Ltd.

  All rights reserved.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia.

  Addresses for companies within the Random House Group can be found at

  www.randomhouse.com.au/offices.

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication Entry

  Caswell, Brian, 1954–

  Cruisin'.

  ISBN: 978 1 74166 344 0 (pbk.)

  A823.3

  Cover Photography by Nathan Blaney, Matthew Scherf and Pastor Scott

  Cover and internal design and typesetting by Stella Danalis, Peripheral Vision Design

  Typeset in 11/15.25 pt Granjon

  Printed and bound by Griffin Press, South Australia

  For Hayden and Hayley – Trust your hearts;

  in the end, cool is just an illusion.

  1

  The Sunsilk Effect

  JULES' STORY

  Every time you get into the shower and turn on the water, lather up your hair and start singing (in my mum's case, anything by ABBA, in my case, whatever was on the radio three seconds before I stepped in), either the phone will ring or someone will start banging on the door-knocker, like the hysterical victim in a scene from some low-budget slash-horror movie, desperately looking for a place to escape the inevitable.

  My mum and I call this the 'Sunsilk Effect'.

  The reason people bang on our door, when there's a perfectly serviceable doorbell, is because, for some reason known only to optometrists and psychology professors, no one sees the ornate, black wrought-iron bellpull that my mother had installed instead of the normal push-button – even though it's the length of a regulation baseball bat, and stands out against the blond brick like a giant cockroach on a fridge door.

  We're the only people I know who have a bellpull of any description, but that didn't stop my mother from buying it. In fact, it's sort of the reason she did buy it. She does things like that at times, because although we're constantly short of money, she likes the place to have 'character'.

  Whatever that means.

  It's the same excuse she uses to justify choosing the name she chose for me.

  You see, my real name isn't Jules – that's just what I call myself. My real name is Julius – as in Caesar.

  Now Julius is an okay name, if you're a Bernese mountain dog or a Great Dane – or even a Chihuahua – and you're into irony. But it's not the sort of ... impediment you need when you're starting a new school (which I do quite often).

  Or you're trying to impress Jenna Hamilton ...

  But more about that ... her ... Jenna ... later.

  The excuse my mother gives for saddling me with such a handicap is that she was going for something 'unique' that would give me 'character and charisma'.

  'Julius is a strong name,' she said once – more with hope than with confidence.

  'So is "The Rock",' I replied.

  Sarcasm might be the lowest form of wit, but it can win you points in an argument – at least with my mother ...

  Of course, when you're in the shower and the Sunsilk Effec
t kicks in, what you should try to do is ignore it.

  If it's the phone, there's a better than five-to-one chance that it's some guy with an Indian accent (naturally – because he's actually phoning you from a call centre in Mumbai) who miraculously knows your name, and wants to give you some spectacular deal on a new mobile phone.

  When you point out that you are only fourteen-and-a-half years old, and that unless you can pay for it with two dollars a month out of your allowance there's not a whole lot of point in discussing it, he's only going to hang up – without even saying goodbye – leaving you dripping water all over the lounge-room carpet and rubbing shampoo out of your eyes.

  So you might as well have stayed in the shower in the first place.

  The thing is, if it's anyone important, they'll probably ring back anyway.

  On the other hand, should the interruption to your bathroom karaoke session come from someone banging on the front door, then they deserve to wait, if for no other reason than they should have been more observant and used the aforementioned bellpull.

  So, you should yell, 'Just a minute!' then take five minutes to rinse yourself off, carefully rub yourself down, put on whatever clothes you have handy, then make your way slowly to the front door.

  But of course, you don't.

  What you do is step out of the shower, dripping wet, wrap a towel hastily around your shivering form, rush to the door, then try to answer it while standing behind it, so that it's not so obvious that you're standing there with only a towel between you and a public indecency charge.

  Only to find that it's a troupe of Girls' Brigade fundraisers, trying to sell cookies or raffle tickets.

  Which was basically what happened to my mother a few months ago.

  And which is why I now find myself out in the middle of the South Pacific Ocean, on a cruise ship called The Polynesian Queen, watching a bunch of geriatric cruise-junkies lying around on sunlounges or attempting to play shuffleboard – with the emphasis on the shuffle.

  You see, my mother was halfway through 'Dancing Queen', with her hair full of conditioner (with almond-oil and peach-kernel extracts), when the Sunsilk Effect kicked in and the inevitable attack on the door-knocker echoed through the house.

  And, as she always does, she grabbed the nearest towel, knotted it around her chest and dripped her way to the front door.

  Only to be confronted by a couple of uniformed 'tweenies', smiling like used-car salesmen and offering her a book of raffle tickets to fund an upcoming Jamboree – or whatever it is that the Girls' Brigade do during school holidays.

  As she was leaking almond-oil and peach-kernel extract all over the foyer tiles at the time, she didn't pay a lot of attention to what the tweenies were saying.

  She thought that the prize was probably a colour TV, and as she's the type who couldn't win a coin-toss with a two-headed coin, checking the prize wasn't as high on her list of priorities as getting back into the bathroom and resuming her rendition of ABBA's greatest hits. So she paid them the money from a jar that she keeps by the door for just such a situation, filled in the ticket stubs, and threw the tickets into the drawer, along with the hundreds of others that she's bought, under similar circumstances, over the past ten or fifteen years.

  Every time we move she takes the hallstand with us, but she never empties the drawer. It's like an archeological dig, containing in its complex layers a detailed history of charity drives from all across the Sydney metropolitan area.

  This meant that when they called to inform her that she'd won, it took her ten minutes to locate the winning ticket and claim her prize – which turned out to be return air-tickets to Papeete, Tahiti and a two-week 'holiday cruise of a lifetime' for four on The Polynesian Queen.

  Four is an interesting number.

  It's the number of members in the two most successful groups in the history of pop music – at least according to my mother – which are, of course, the Beatles and ABBA. For someone who reads so much (and quotes Tolstoy, Kafka and Freud in casual conversations with shell-shocked parents at the school's monthly P & C meetings), my mother's taste in music is surprisingly middle-of-the-road.

  Four is also my number in the Boundary Park Under-15s soccer team, except when it's my turn to carry the oranges.

  We have a coach who can't say no to parents whose sons have been rejected by every other team in the comp, so our squad has fifteen players – even though you're only allowed three substitutes per game, so we rotate the role of orange-boy. Unless, of course, Toby Sinclair happens to have asthma again, which happens about once every three weeks or so.

  More importantly – as far as members of the prize committee of the Girls' Brigade fundraising raffle are concerned – four is also the number of people in the ideal 'nuclear' family. Mum, Dad, freckled son and pigtailed daughter.

  At least, it was when all the people who sell breakfast cereal and frozen cardboard pizza went to advertising school and learned to make TV commercials.

  But four is exactly twice as many as the number of members in our nuclear family. We're what you might call the square root of ideal.

  Mother and son (minus most of the freckles).

  The way it's basically always been.

  As my mother tells it, my dad developed an urgent need to live somewhere in North Queensland at about the same time as I developed an urgent need to live – anywhere.

  I don't miss him – exactly the same way that a kid in Equatorial Guinea doesn't miss snow.

  Having never experienced a father (except on sleepovers at Tim and Kenny's place, which doesn't exactly count, as Mr Lewis has a ponytail, is an ace on Warcraft and listens to rap music on his state-of-the-art surround system, with the subwoofer cranked up to the max, so he bears as much resemblance to the fathers on the cereal ads as I do), I really don't miss having one.

  For my mum's sake, I miss having a sister though – with or without the pigtails.

  Being the square root of a nuclear family created a minor problem when they presented us with the winner's voucher. Who do you take with you on the 'holiday cruise of a lifetime' for four people, when you only ever have to order the regular-size pizza on Mum's night off?

  She would probably have asked her parents – not ideal, because, nice as they are at Christmas and on special occasions like birthdays and Easter, when they thoughtfully replenish my supply of school socks (twelve pairs in my top drawer, some of them still in their plastic wrapping) and pencil cases (seventeen at last count), being trapped on the open seas with them for two whole weeks, listening to Grandma's account of her feud with 'that woman', or Pop's 'what I did in the Big One' reminiscences, rates pretty high up on my top-ten list of 'Things Not To Do On Your Summer Holidays' – but as it turned out, she couldn't invite them anyway.

  You see, they had already booked a Trafalgar Tour of the Holy Land, visiting the tombs of the martyrs and other places of biblical significance. (A tour on which they would both contract dysentery on the second day from eating a suspect falafel at a food bazaar, and have to be hospitalised in Jerusalem for the balance of the two weeks. Which probably made them feel a lot like the martyrs whose tombs they missed out on visiting.)

  In the end, Mum asked her older sister Prudence ('Aunt Pru to you!') and her weird son, my cousin, Adrian.

  The dictionary defines 'prudence' as: 'being careful, avoiding unnecessary risks or uncertainties'. Anything further from a description of Aunt Pru you couldn't easily imagine.

  A proud feminist, she wears her hair cut short – except in her armpits, which she refuses to shave 'on principle'. She was married once (which is the reason I have a cousin) but never refers to her ex-husband, except as 'Oh, him!' – which is pretty much her approach to all members of the male gender over the age of puberty. 'Them' or 'typical male' are considered adequate descriptions most of the time, with a few more colourful phrases thrown in when the mood takes her.

  Actually, colourful is the word that usually springs to mind when trying to describ
e Aunt Pru – especially as her hair changes shades more often than a chameleon in a paint factory, and her choice of clothes could best be described as 'Lifeline chic'.

  Her hair-colour and the particular 1970s-style print she's chosen this time from the two-dollar bargain table don't always match, but at least there's no way that Aunt Pru will ever be accused of 'fading into the background'.

  As for Adrian ... What can I say?

  At fifteen years old, Adrian has already completed ten years of dance and stagecraft classes. He's auditioned for three hundred and seventy-nine commercials, and actually been selected for three, though in two of them you can't exactly tell it's him.

  In one you get to see the back of his head as a bunch of little kids run towards Ronald McDonald, ecstatic because it's McHappy Day and they get to be on a TV commercial pretending to be ecstatic.

  He was seven at the time, and, being Adrian, he probably really was. Ecstatic, I mean.

  In the other, he got to be one of those kids in the Qantas ad. You know, the one where they're all spaced out in the background across Central Australia while the camera focuses on the cute girl lead singer who got her face on all the posters.

  Adrian is the white-shirted dot three-quarters of the way up Uluru – but he's a total professional, so if you had the kind of imaging technology that the CIA use in The Bourne Ultimatum and you could zoom in on his face, he'd probably be lip-synching in perfect time and smiling like he did on the Macleans toothpaste commercial (which is the only gig he's had so far where you can actually see his face).

  Is it just me, or do you think it's weird that on a commercial whose only purpose is to get you to buy toothpaste, all four characters (another sickening nuclear family, straight out of Pleasantville) manage to clean their teeth, still smiling, without using toothpaste? I guess it looks a lot better on TV than my usual habit of dribbling toothpaste all over the tap, the sink and the vanity, and spraying microscopic white missiles onto the bathroom mirror – which solidify like cement, if you don't wipe them immediately, and have to be scraped off with a razor blade.