Hating Alison Ashley Page 14
‘Cinderella. Barringa East Hospital. Two plays by Erica Yurken.’ That’s what the title said.
I never ever thought much about the word ‘by’. Such a plain, short word, it gets tucked away inside sentences and lost. It doesn’t have the dynamism of words like osteogenesis or gastroduodenostomy. But right then, isolated like that on the cover of a book, it suddenly seemed to me like a blast on a trumpet. Or a red carpet spread out on a footpath. Or maybe even the sound of hands clapping in a darkened auditorium.
There was only one thing wrong with the cover, and it had nothing to do with Alison Ashley’s beautiful painstaking handiwork. It was my name, Erica Yurken. If I was going to be a playwright, I’d most certainly have to change it, but I’d have to think about that later.
Right then I had an opening night to attend, even though I’d missed most of it.
When I sneaked in the back door of the hall, Miss Belmont turned around and shot me a chilly look, not at all the sort of look that usherettes ought to bestow upon playwrights. There were some vacant seats down among the parents and visitors, but there was another empty seat in the back row where Kangas were sitting. It was next to Alison Ashley. So I sat there. Cinderella was almost finished. They’d reached the part about the glass slippers. It wasn’t too bad at all. In fact, it was a credit to the cast, producer, director and stage manager.
Everyone clapped like mad when it ended. I thought it would look conceited if I did, so I looked modestly down at my book. Then I looked sideways at Alison Ashley, and found that she was looking sideways at me. I opened my mouth to say this dignified speech of thanks I’d prepared coming over to the hall, but somehow I couldn’t get the words out. There was a lot of distracting noise going on, anyhow. Oscar had to come out and take a bow all by himself, and some grown-ups in the audience were stamping their feet and whistling and carrying on. Miss Belmont was frowning at them as though she wished she could order them all to pick up papers in the playground at recess as a punishment.
So what I said instead was, ‘Thanks a lot for the book. It’s great.’
‘That’s okay,’ said Alison Ashley. ‘I couldn’t stand seeing those scripts end up in the wastepaper basket.’
I could hardly hear her over all the noise and the clapping. Lennie’s voice was louder than anyone’s. And I suddenly realised what he was shouting. ‘Author!’ he was yelling out. ‘Author!’
I felt myself turning bright red.
‘Go on,’ Alison said in my ear. ‘Get out the front, Yuk, up on the stage.’
I didn’t want to. I clamped my fingers round the back of the chair in front, but Alison Ashley unhooked them one by one and shoved me out into the aisle. I stood there, staring down at my shoes. Then Alison Ashley, traitor to the last, even though we’d just that minute been smiling tentatively at each other, called out, ‘She’s down here!’ And not only that, she set her hand in the small of my back and pushed me up the aisle and up the stairs onto the stage, with her other hand gripping the waistband of my jeans so I couldn’t nick off.
There was all this clapping, and Lennie yelling out ‘Author! Author!’ and other people copying him, and I didn’t know where to put myself. I couldn’t gawk at my shoes for ever, so finally I had to look out at that audience, and it was terrible! Was I glad I didn’t have to be a professional actor and face that six nights every week! And last of all I glanced guiltily down at my mum, but she didn’t look one bit disappointed. Her eyes were bright with pride. And I was so happy she’d come. I ached with gratitude that I was me, and not Alison Ashley, whose mother hadn’t bothered to turn up at all.
Then Jason and Wendy came onstage and made a speech on behalf of Grade Six, thanking the camp manager for the nice meals, and all the teachers for giving up their free time so we could go to camp. (It wasn’t Jason and Wendy’s idea, that thank you speech; Miss Belmont had told them earlier that as group leaders they had to.) Then they presented the gifts we’d all bought with our pocket money, though Miss Belmont hadn’t told us we had to, that was our own idea. The camp manager was given a soup ladle, Miss Belmont a new whistle, Mr Kennard a compass, Mrs Wentworth a king-sized packet of black jelly beans, and Miss Lattimore a crafty pendant made out of resin with a dead bee in it.
After that was all over, the parents put the seats back around the hall ready for supper. Miss Belmont told me and Alison to tidy up the stage, so we wouldn’t get swollen heads, me for being the resident playwright, and Alison for being such a hit in the hospital play, which I’d stupidly missed out on seeing.
While we tidied away the props from the stage, we found Margeart Collins. She was still in the makeshift bed being a hospital patient. The cast of Cinderella had shoved the bed to one side behind the curtain while their play was on, but Margeart hadn’t realised yet that Drama Night was over. She was lying still with her eyes shut, as I’d trained her to do during all the rehearsals.
I poked at her and she opened her eyes and sat up. ‘Oh, good,’ she said. ‘I’m glad it’s all over. Acting’s very tiring.’
‘You can go and get yourself some supper, Margeart,’ I said. ‘Your mother’s looking for you, anyhow.’
Mrs Collins wasn’t, she was having a long discussion with Miss Belmont about all the clothes and possessions and school equipment Margeart had managed to lose during the week at camp. Margeart took one look at them both and got back into bed. She had her cluey moments.
‘You’ll have to get off this stage so Alison and I can clean up,’ I said firmly. ‘If you don’t want to talk to your mum just now, go and chat to mine.’
‘She’s busy talking to her boyfriend,’ Margeart said. ‘I could talk to Alison’s mother instead. Which one’s her?’
Alison Ashley’s face went still.
‘Alison, where’s your mum?’ Margeart persisted.
‘Mrs Ashley isn’t here tonight,’ I said. ‘She’s an air-traffic-control technician, and airports can’t close down just because there’s a concert on.’
Margeart looked very impressed, and went away to get herself a lamington and tell people that someone’s mother was going to be arriving late by helicopter.
Alison went on putting the stage props back into the carton. I carefully didn’t look at her. ‘Listen,’ I said. ‘Your mum might have started to drive up here and found a big tree fallen across the road.’
Alison didn’t say anything.
‘She might have started to drive up here and found an injured Saint Bernard dog by the road and turned round and taken it back to the animal hospital,’ I said.
Alison silently folded Oscar’s fairy-godmother wings and put them into a box.
‘She might have had a very good reason,’ I said. ‘Maybe she couldn’t phone and tell you what it was because there was a gale-force wind and all the power lines are down in Hedge End Road.’
‘It isn’t because of that at all,’ said Alison. ‘She didn’t turn up for the same reason she never does: because she’s not interested in anything I do. She won’t even be there at school tomorrow to meet the bus.’
I looked down at my mum in her apricot outfit. She looked terrific.
‘How are you getting your suitcase back to your place then?’ I asked Alison.
‘Same way I got it to school when we left for camp. I’ll manage. It’s only a five-minute walk.’
‘Lennie’s coming with Mum to pick me up. We’ll give you a lift.’
I waited for her to say that she wouldn’t be seen dead driving round in a truck with someone like Lennie, but what she said was, ‘Thanks, Yuk, that’d be great.’ Then she looked at me and grinned. ‘Lennie’s got time off tomorrow, has he, from being a security guard at your mansion over near Kyle Grammar School?’
‘All right then, smarty,’ I said. ‘He’s not a security guard at all. He’s a trucky.’
‘No, he’s not,’ said Alison. ‘You can do better than that. He’s a circus acrobat who broke his collarbone and your mum’s nursing him back to health seeing she used to
be a bareback rider in that same circus and that’s where they met.’
‘Or a ballet dancer and he wears his shoes with the ribbons criss-crossed up to his knees,’ I said. ‘And he’s got tomorrow off because he had to have a fitting for his pale-blue Swan Lake costume.’
Mum, who had got sick of beckoning to me (only I pretended not to see because I was too embarrassed to face her), charged up the steps onto the stage in a swirl of apricot-coloured accordion pleats, and flung her arms around me. ‘Erica, you’re sly!’ she said. ‘Letting me think you were going to be acting like the other kids, and all the time you were in charge of writing those two plays! I never knew you could write! You could have knocked me over with a feather when Lennie told me just before the curtain went up.’
So I stopped feeling embarrassed and felt proud instead. I showed her my book and she straight away wanted to send it special delivery to a gardener Lennie knew who worked at one of the television channels to pass it on to the management.
‘Not this copy,’ I said. ‘This copy’s sort of special.’
Then Mum told me her good news. She and Lennie were getting married, and they were going to announce it at a surprise party tomorrow night. I looked down at Lennie, being made to pass cups of tea around by Miss Belmont. He looked nice in his Gold Coast shirt with the hula girls on it, and I hoped Mum would let him wear it to the wedding.
‘Alice, do you want to come to our party tomorrow night, love?’ Mum said. ‘You’d be very welcome.’
‘Her name’s Alison,’ I said. ‘Mum, I wish you’d remember my friends’ names.’
Alison said she’d like to come to the party, and I said off-handedly that if she wanted to stay the night she could, if she didn’t mind sharing a bedroom with a horse. Alison said she’d love to.
Miss Belmont wasn’t letting anyone linger over supper. She went around the hall briskly taking cups away from people who hadn’t finished yet, then she organised team games and bullied the parents into joining in. An hour later she finished the last game and all the parents fell into the nearest chairs choking for breath. Miss Belmont didn’t let them stay there. She thanked them for coming to Drama Night, and said they’d better go home now, and not hang around being a nuisance, as we had to get up early to tidy up the camp. She didn’t use those exact words, but that’s what she meant.
Alison and I said goodbye to Mum and Lennie at the car, then we walked over to the dormitory block. Alison said as it was the last night of camp, I could borrow her kimono if I wanted. So I let her borrow Valjoy’s black transparent nightie, which Miss Belmont hadn’t noticed when she put everything else into that plastic bag.
I hung the kimono up where I could look at it while I had my shower. I propped the book under the kimono, so I could look at it, too. I realised with immense, sudden joy, that I had a chance to get rid of my awful surname. If Mum was changing hers, maybe I could, too. Sometimes kids did, if their mothers remarried. Erica Yurken sounded absolutely terrible for a playwright. I could take Lennie’s surname, now he was going to be my stepfather.
I thought about that. And yelped.
‘What’s the matter, Yuk?’ Alison called from the next shower cubicle.
‘Grubb!’ I howled. ‘Lennie’s last name is Grubb!’
‘Creative writing is like a hunger.’
Robin Nancy Wilga was born in 1936 in Kempsey, a small town in New South Wales. Her family can trace its ancestry back to Irish emigrants that arrived in Australia on the Second Fleet. She grew up in tough times, and was mainly brought up by her mother while her father was away seeking farm work.
Robin had her first short story published when she was only 16. She left school at 15 and held various jobs (including nurse, librarian and teachers aid), as well as raising four children. Pottery, painting and making jewellery were among her diverse interests.
Following the end of her marriage, Robin began to take writing very seriously. Her first children’s novel, The Giraffe in Pepperell Street, was published in 1978, and she went on to pen more than forty books. Her ability to capture character and dialogue with wit and insight are hallmarks of her work, as is her courage in fearlessly tackling difficult subject matter.
She has received a swathe of accolades and awards, beginning when the delightful Thing won the Children’s Book Council of Australia award in 1982. This kicked off an incredible run of short-listed titles, including Penny Pollard’s Diary (1983), People Might Hear You (1984), Seeing Things (1984), Hating Alison Ashley (1985) and Halfway Across the Galaxy and Turn Left (1986). In 1989, Came Back to Show You I Could Fly won a Human Rights Award for Literature and went on to win the 1990 Children’s Book of the Year Award.
It came as no surprise when Robin was awarded the prestigious Dromkeen Medal in 1991 for her significant contribution to children’s literature. She was also awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters by the University of Newcastle in 2004. To this day she remains one of Australia’s most luminescent and celebrated children’s writers.
Hating Alison Ashley has sold almost 400,000 copies, and has been adapted into a play and a feature film. It is one of our country’s best-loved contemporary stories of friendship, envy and life in the suburbs.
VIKING
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First published in Australia by Ward Lock, 1894
First published by Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 1994
Text copyright © Robin Klein, 1984
Illustrations copyright © Allison Colpoys, 2013
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ISBN 978-1-742-53816-7