Route 59: Sharmini Kumar
Image by Connor O’Brien
Route 59: School Days Past by Sharmini Kumar
A woman has taken her 12 year old daughter for high school orientation at a school near Essendon train station. As they take the tram home (towards Airport West), the mother tells her daughter about her own high school days, the memories she has of catching the tram, of meeting boys at the Airport West shopping centre, and her experiences of high school.
The optimum place to listen to it is on the route 59 tram, starting at stop 41, Essendon North Primary School & Keilor Rd, and ending at stop 59, Matthews Ave, but it can be listened to on any tram at any time.
Credits
Written and read by Sharmini Kumar
Commissioned by David Ryding
Edited by Elizabeth Flux
Recorded at the State Library of Victoria
Produced by Beth Atkinson-Quinton
With music by Steve Hearne
Tramlines is a podcast created by Broadwave in partnership with the Melbourne UNESCO City of Literature Office.
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School Days Past – Route 59 by Sharmini Kumar
[SFX A tram travels towards the listener. Rumbles along the tracks. People board.]
Intro (various voices): Tramlines, Tramlines, Tramlines (laughs), Tramlines, Tramlines, Tramlines, um T-R-A-M-L-I-N-E-S, Tramlines.
[SFX Tram doors open]
Beth Atkinson-Quinton VO: This is Tramlines: part audio book, part spoken word and part locative literature. These are stories written to be listened to on a tram.
[SFX Tram dings and journeys on. Theme music fades out. Episode theme opens]
Beth Atkinson-Quinton VO: Today’s journey is a new fiction work by Sharmini Kumar: School Days Past. The optimum place to listen to it is on the route 59 tram, starting at stop 41, Essendon North Primary School & Keilor Rd, and ending at stop 59, Matthews Ave, but it can be listened to on any tram at any time.
Sharmini Kumar VO:
Stop 41
Katrina! Over here. I told you I’d meet you at this tram stop for your first day. Nope, if I were trying to embarrass you, I’d be standing up and saying, “Give your mummy dearest a great big kiss!”
I was working in the city today, just coming home at this time. Complete coincidence that it’s your tram too … okay, fine, maybe it’s not. But this is my trip down memory lane, and I want to take it with you. This tram – they were different then of course, they had actual paper tickets that would have the date punched out on it. Anyway, I’d be taking this tram to your nan’s house. No mobile phones so no way to tell if there was a delay on the line or anything.
On the day I had my violin recital – yes, I used to play the violin, not since about year eight though, and I was never very good – but when I had my recital, I had to go home and get dressed for it, but there was a car accident or something up the line, and I was just waiting. I didn’t want to leave the stop to find a pay phone, in case the tram came – I was just hoping your nan would know by telepathy that I needed her to come pick me up. Of course that didn’t happen.
Nothing’s worse than watching those minutes tick past, when there’s nothing you can do except wait. I was gripping the handle on the violin case so hard I thought it was going to make my hand cramp up … but I couldn’t let go … everything in me was tight and it was all I could do to hold it all in … I think now it would be called a panic attack I think, but then I just knew I was stressed and felt a bit sick and I didn’t think I would ever feel better.
The tram eventually came. I should have been able to relax, but I couldn’t. We were late for the recital and my violin teacher was cranky and nearly cut me out of the program. And I didn’t play very well, I don’t think. Mum was really nice to me and tried to tell me it wasn’t my fault and the teacher was being unreasonably mean, and no one can control the trams or the traffic, but … it didn’t really help.
But I assume your nan knew that most of the time when I said the tram had been delayed, what really happened was that Katie and Sarah and I were just hanging out. Doing wild things like getting Bubble O Bill ice creams. Remember those? It was like, ice cream on a stick … no, completely different to Paddle Pops. These were the ones in the shape of a man’s head, I’m pretty sure he was wearing a cowboy hat as well. And for his nose there was ball of bubble gum. I don’t know why he had the nose, I don’t know why … any of it. I think I remember giving you one once? When you were much smaller … maybe that’s why you don’t remember. I definitely took the nose off it … I was worried you’d swallow it whole and choke or something … and it was so disgustingly sweet. You don’t remember? I can’t remember how you responded to it, but I don’t think you ever asked for another one. I don’t know why we were so obsessed with these ice creams. I wonder if they still make them.
Stop 42
Maybe it wasn’t the ice cream and bubble gum, though. Maybe it was just an excuse for Katie and Sarah and me to eat sugar and talk about boys … I know, we were such clichés. But they lived closer into town, so they would get the train home. We’d make our day last longer … squeeze the last bit of togetherness out of the school day … by getting the ice cream and laughing and talking very loudly. Then Sarah and Katie would go to the station and I’d go to the tram stop.
God, people must have hated seeing us coming, taking up so much space and being so oblivious to the idea that there were other people in the world who mattered. There were a couple of people who always seemed to be at the bus stop at the same time as we would walk past … a lady with a string bag and a blue rinse and a grumpy expression that we thought was funny. There was a man who was very well dressed, usually a suit and a tie, but who always seemed to have a bottle in a paper bag that he was holding, and who would smile at us but we decided he was creepy and ignored him. We would take up so much space, walking side by side on the footpath so no one could get past, leaving our school bags at the shop entrance for people to trip over … I think I just thought that people should make way for us … or maybe I wasn’t thinking about anyone else in the world at all. No, I don’t think all teenagers are selfish. Just … well, I was, when I was one.
Stop 43
Katie and Sarah, they were both … well, they lived in fancier houses and I’m sure their parents earned more money than mine did. But I don’t think that’s what I felt … I think I felt like they were just trendier than me. Don’t roll your eyes at me. This was before Op Shops were cool and they had new clothes and I had my cousin’s hand-me-downs. I don’t know if they knew that, but I … felt that everyone could tell, just by looking, that I didn’t know how to put makeup on, and I didn’t know what clothes were right until I wore them and someone said something nice about them. I think Katie and Sarah, I think they just kind of knew those things. Sarah especially. I felt like she … she was born knowing the right look and the best clothes. Sarah was … she was the first person in school to wear bell-bottom jeans when they came back in. I remember thinking how weird they looked but within a month everyone was wearing them. That was Sarah. Katie was different … she’s the sort of person who never bothered with bell bottoms since she didn’t like the look of them. I got a pair about six months after everyone else, which means that it was about two months before everyone realised they were terrible and stopped wearing them. No, I don’t still have them. I would have definitely got rid of them.
I don’t think it ever occurred to me then to wonder if Sarah or Katie worried about not being cool enough or … yes, I know that’s not what people say now, thank you very much. No, I don’t want to learn what people say now; you’ll all change it up again in a few months anyway. Sarah was the one who was always trying to be older, talking about getting her own car long before she could have got her license, talking about taking a gap year before university and going traveling, that kind of thing … we both kind of followed her a little bit. Or maybe it was just me … it’s hard to say. Katie was quieter, but not because she was unsure. At least, that’s not how it seemed to me. She went along with Sarah in a kind of way where it seemed like she didn’t care that much. I followed Sarah more like … like a little yappy enthusiastic puppy.
Stop 44
Maybe Sarah just kind of understood that I would do whatever she wanted, basically. So when she told me she was going to stay a night with me after school, I thought it was, you know, me coming up in the world. It always felt to me like they were closer to each other and I was the odd one out, so I thought maybe I was going to be her new best friend … or be more important to her than Katie or something. Katie had a boyfriend … I never met him, though, someone that she knew through her tennis club. No, I don’t think she was making up her boyfriend! Why would she do that?
Anyway, Sarah said it would just be us two single girls, I don’t know, watching movies and doing our hair or whatever. I had so many plans … I thought so carefully about food choices and music and everything. I don’t think I’ve ever planned that hard for a date or a job interview or … anything, really, since then. I know, I was so insecure. I had to pick things that would be impressive to her, but things that I could pretend I knew all about and were normal for me. I had my tape player paused on the exact song that I wanted her to think I just had lying around. It was New Kids on the Block, okay? They were … I guess you’d say a boy band. Sort of … you remember NSYNC? Not remember like you were there, I know. Or the Backstreet Boys? Or … yeah, you get the picture. Well, I had the tape in the tape player, all queued up to whatever song I thought I could dance to … no, I was a bad dancer, even back then. But it was part way through the song, so it didn’t seem like it was there on purpose … I was so desperate for her to like me. Not even to like me, to think I was … you know. Cool. I had this whole scenario in my head, where we’d be in our pyjamas dancing around and it would look like I hadn’t practiced or choreographed any moves, but, yes of course, I totally had, and Sarah would be like, “Oh, you’re such a good dancer!” And then maybe she’d want me to give her dancing tips before we went out clubbing or whatever … Yeah, I had high hopes! But by that stage no one listened to New Kids on the Block any more … or that’s what Sarah said. She and Katie were into Mariah Carey. Yeah, Mariah has been around forever. She looks exactly the same now as she did then.
Stop 45
So on the way back to my place, on this tram, I was asking Sarah what she wanted to do after tea, and I was hoping she would say that she wanted to watch movies, cos I really wanted to impress her and I had a new VHS of Grease, not taped off the tv like most of my collection, so no ads … but I had taken it out of the packaging so it didn’t look like it was new … Yes, I was always a few years behind everyone else; how nice of you to put it exactly like that. And I was just trying to find a way to kind of weave it casually into the conversation when she said she wanted to make a stop.
I said where, and she said, at the doctor. I panicked – I thought she was really sick, maybe dying … and I was like, “Oh my god, what’s wrong?” And she laughed at me and said I was being a baby. “No big deal,” she said, “I just need to get the pill.” And I didn’t even understand what she meant the first time she said it and she laughed again. “The contraceptive pill, you dope.” Just like that, on the tram where anyone could have heard her … Turns out she was dating some university student, he was four years older than her, and her parents didn’t know, and she didn’t want them to know. I didn’t know if Katie knew, and I didn’t want to ask because this way I could pretend she had told me and not Katie because I was a closer and more trusted friend. I should have been angry at her for not telling me straight out, but … I was even more thrilled. Like I was somehow included in this incredibly adult and sophisticated plot … and was therefore by association a sophisticated adult as well.
Just to be clear though, having sex isn’t what makes you an adult, and it is illegal for someone who is older than … okay, okay, I’m just trying to be a responsible parent here. I don’t think that the age gap occurred to me at all except as something even more exciting and mysterious.
Stop 46
It didn’t feel like she was using me to hide this from her parents. It felt like I was a co-conspirator … I know it’s silly. I’m just saying. I didn’t think that she might be scared or uncertain, I just felt like she was opening a door for me into another kind of world that I wanted to be part of.
We were just sitting there in the waiting room, with the out-of-date magazines on the table. Not the kind of magazines we would read – or that I would ever let Sarah know that I had read. It was more the Women’s Weekly and things like that – that our parents were supposed to read. The receptionist was flicking through one of the magazines. She stopped long enough to put a file in a little stand and tell us to sit down, and then she went back to reading. Everyone else in the waiting room seemed to be parents of crying or coughing children. There were plastic pot plants with dust on the plastic leaves, and wooden children’s toys that had the paint wearing off. The whole room smelled like … medicine. And there were posters on the wall – I remember the one about smoking, with all pictures of all the horrendous things that cigarettes will do to your body … no, I had not at that staged smoked at all, thank you very much. Hey, give me a break, I smoked something like a total of 10 cigarettes in the whole of my twenties, so I must have learned something from it.
It seemed like we were waiting a really long time, but maybe that’s just because it felt so … awkward. It was probably only about five or 10 minutes we were sitting there, but Sarah didn’t want to talk while we were waiting. When they called her name, she said she wanted me in with her to talk to the doctor, and the doctor talked to both of us like we were both equally adult and both had boyfriends and were both having … yeah, you get it. I was like, “ooh, he thinks I could totally be getting some,” which was almost as exciting as actually having sex. In my mind. At that time. Anyway.
I didn’t actually understand what he was saying. There were regular pills and sugar pills, and I guess he was trying to explain about how things like antibiotics decrease the effectiveness of … you know all this, right? I’m just checking. Anyway, I didn’t take it all in then. I wonder if Sarah did? I thought she did. I thought she probably actually knew all that information already. I don’t remember if he asked about other issues like her boyfriend’s age. Or condoms or … no, I’m not trying to lecture you, I’m just … fine.
We had to go a few doors away to get to the chemist. She got the prescription filled and it was like it was a normal afternoon, no big deal. But then she was holding The Pills in a bag and it kind of felt like they were this bomb about to explode. Not just the pills but what I knew about the relationship, the confirmation that they were having or going to be having sex. She didn’t have to brag or to give me details … I supposed after all this time I can say that I wanted details but would have died before asking directly for them. But without giving me details, she had given me the key information, which is that she was, in my mind, doing this incredibly adult thing. And I wasn’t entirely sure how I felt about that.
Stop 47
I think I knew that I should ask about the relationship. Not like I would ask someone who was a teenager now about … yes, I know you understand. Anyway, I knew she wanted to talk about it, and I knew I wanted to hear the details. I think I was hoping she would tell me about the sex. But she didn’t. I don’t know why. Maybe they hadn’t had sex yet. Maybe they had and it was bad … no, I’m not trying to send you messages with every sentence. And if you think I am, then maybe that says more about you than about me? Hmm?
Well, for real, you know that if you ever want to talk, I’m here to listen. No, I’m just saying.
Anyway, I asked, just about him, and how they met and what was he like and all that. It was an internet forum, if you can believe that. They were relatively new, and everyone … that is, parents … thought they were super dodgy and dangerous and … not like now, with actual dating apps and whatever. I don’t remember anything else about him. I never met him. I always pictured him in my head kind of like Brad Pitt in Legends of the Fall, you know, wild and brooding and outcast or something. Yes, that was in the olden days, when Brad Pitt was the pin up poster in Girlfriend magazine and … yes, I know, I am showing my age, thank you very much.
I was so obsessed with him myself though, I remember wondering if he had a younger brother. Well, either her boyfriend or Brad Pitt; they were one and the same in my mind. I remember thinking that if she was telling me all this, it must be because we were really, like, best friends, and I wasn’t just, you know, being used to keep a secret.
Yes, I now know it was pathetic, thank you so much for pointing that out. I’m fully aware that you are much more confident and well-adjusted than I ever was at your age, and I take full credit for that. No, I’m not casting aspersions on your nan’s parenting skills. I’m complimenting you.
Stop 48
Sarah wanted to stop at McDonald’s. She wanted a sundae and chips. Yes, we knew that dipping chips in the ice cream is the best thing ever. It was 1995, not the dark ages. I remember that she seemed happy. Excited. But not that different. I don’t know what I was expecting. Some kind of sign over her head saying, ‘I’m ready to have sex now,’ or maybe that she would be once she’d started the pills she’d got from the chemist.
I remember that we were eating the chips and ice cream and there were lot of people around, lots of high school kids in school uniforms, and lots of littler kids with their parents, and lots of school bags all over the floor. And it was noisy, lots of laughing and shrieking and arguing and just talking. And in the middle of all that, Sarah pushed the chips in my direction and said to me, “You have the rest; I’ll put on too much weight if I have them.” I don’t think she meant anything by it, but … that was before body positivity. Or before we had words for body positivity. Or before we knew that fat shaming was bad. Well, I think people knew. But it was still fine – or at least we both thought it was – for her to say that in front of me, and I didn’t think she did it on purpose. She was thoughtless, maybe. We were both thoughtless. We were all thoughtless.
Stop 49
When we eventually got back on the tram, I worried about what we would tell my mum. I didn’t want to say we’d got detention and had to stay back at school, obviously. I could have said shopping, but then she’d want to know what we’d bought. I guess I could have said a delay on the track, but something that would cause that big a delay would be pretty unlikely. I’d tried that excuse before and she usually saw through it, except that one time it really was true. Maybe I wasn’t as good an actress as I thought I was. Nan wasn’t always the cool grandma, she was … yes, I know it’s always different with your own kids. I fully intend to be the fun grandma when you have kids. In about, say, 30 or 40 years. I was worried about my mum, but Sarah … she just didn’t seem to care and I was terrified she’d just … tell mum the truth and mum would … I don’t know, blame me for … I don’t know, for leading Sarah astray or something.
Stop 50
I asked her how she was seeing her boyfriend without her parents knowing. She said that she had been telling them she’d been staying with Katie. I don’t think that Katie knew she was the alibi. Or maybe she did and just didn’t care. She had her own boyfriend, her own interests … maybe being a tournament-winning tennis player made her not care about what other people thought or said or did? Maybe having a boyfriend made her feel more confident about ignoring some of the, I don’t know, pettiness of the things that used to happen in school friendship groups. I don’t know. Not that dating is the be-all and end-all of … okay, I won’t go into a lecture.
On the tram, Sarah and I were standing up, bags at our feet, leaning against a wall. And she just kept … talking. She kept talking about the movies she had seen, even when she knew that I hadn’t seen them. She complained about the teachers, even the ones she knew that I liked. She even complained a bit about Katie, about Katie’s parents, about her own parents … just … talking. Not asking. Not needing me for anything other than to nod and smile or nod and make sympathetic noises in the right places.
I’m sure it’s not quite as dramatic as I’m remembering it. She probably listened to me sometimes. She probably expressed an interest in my life sometimes. But it didn’t feel like that happened very often, and I think I knew, without consciously realising it, that Katie and I were dispensable to Sarah. We were interchangeable. We weren’t confidants, we were … I don’t know, unwitting accomplices. Too harsh? Maybe. I was very dramatic when I was 16.
Stop 51
Sarah was … look, she grew up with wealth and various privileges. She’d never heard of op-shopping. I told her we should go sometime, try on some bridesmaid’s dresses, get some retro fashions … yes, of course this was before they were called retro fashions. She and Katie had been friends since primary school – kindergarten maybe. Something like that. Their parents were friends, they had been in and out of each others’ houses since they were kids. I wondered about their parents sometimes … like imagined their mothers waiting for Sarah and Katie outside pre-school, wearing sunglasses and matching expensive dresses and probably having chauffeurs who were also best friends with each other. Yes, it was a ridiculous thing to think, but … I think your nan was a bit of an ‘eat the rich’ type of person, that I had all these wild ideas about what ‘rich’ people were like and how they were all completely different from us normal people.
I met them when I started high school … Katie’s last name was also Smith, which meant we were always together in anything that was alphabetical, so we got to know each other, kind of. And Katie was nice to me. She listened to what I had to say, and if we were supposed to be working on a group project or something, she actually contributed and didn’t think it was silly of me to want to do a good job. So I liked her. And she and Sarah were a pair, so I couldn’t be friends with Katie without being friends with Sarah as well … that’s kind of how it happened, I think.
Stop 52
But … like, you know you can talk to me about anything, right? You can tell me about relationships or friendships or … yes, I see you rolling your eyes. I just thought you should know. It can’t be said too many times. Well, it can. But I haven’t. Yet. I’m your mum, worrying about you is my job. Yep, even after you turn 18 and leave home. Your nan never stops worrying about me. No, I don’t think she worries about you as much as she does about me. No, that is definitely not because you do less worrying things than I did. Maybe the worrying skips a generation. Maybe being a grandparent gives you all the pride and joy and less of the worry. Not that I’m in a hurry to be a grandparent. Just saying.
Stop 53
My brilliant idea was to stop off at the library so that we could borrow a couple of books and convince mum that we’d been there instead of, you know, getting the contraceptive pill at the doctors. Mum would totally believe that I would go to the library and then forget about the time. That would be not suspicious at all.
Liking spending time in the library gives you a reputation as a … serious sort of person. Earnest and sexless … not that there’s anything wrong with not wanting to or having … all right, I’m sorry. But I wanted to read a Sweet Valley High book … do you still have them? They were like … they were the YA rom coms of my day. But I hadn’t told anyone I read those books. I mean, except the librarian who checked the books out? I mean … yes, yes, this was before you could scan your own books out yourself. But I would always check out other books, books that I thought mum would want me to read, and I’d put the Sweet Valley High books in between the Wuthering Heights and Pride and Prejudice or whatever. But I wasn’t going to borrow a Sweet Valley High book at all if Sarah might see. I was trying on that day to cultivate an image of myself as a serious adult person, so I randomly picked up a book about Marie Curie ... I can’t remember if I ever actually ended up reading it…
Stop 54
I mean, it worked. I remember Sarah saying about my Marie Curie book, about how ‘smart’ I was. I was pleased but also … ugh, I don’t know, are teens as complex and angsty now as I was? Cos I wanted to be thought smart, but I was also disappointed, cos I wanted to be cool. And everyone knew at that time that you couldn’t be smart and cool at the same time. Especially not if you were a girl. I liked science and maths … I liked that they were problems to be solved rather than, kind of, open ended questions to keep exploring. But I … I didn’t want to be the sincere, nerdy kind of person – or I didn’t want to be seen that way. So I ended up doing things like accounting that they called ‘applied’ subjects … which I didn’t like as much, but I seemed to be good enough at them. Maybe it’s for the best? I like my job. But I do sometimes wonder if … I could have done something different if I hadn’t been so … self-conscious about how other people saw me. I suppose it’s all more enlightened and progressive now. At least I hope so. Reese Witherspoon was smart and cool in Legally Blonde, so it must be possible.
Stop 55
And then we went home. Mum was ironing, I remember, cos she hated to iron, and when we came in, she put the iron down and burned the ironing board cover. It smelled terrible. She was worried about where we were, which is why you’re allowed a mobile phone, but she couldn’t tell me off too badly in front of Sarah. Sarah told her we stopped at McDonald’s, even though I had specifically told her that mum wouldn’t be impressed because she didn’t like me to snack on junk food before dinner, especially if we were spending money … money was a bit tight. Anyway, mum was quiet. The Marie Curie book came in handy, I thought, but mum seemed … sad, more than angry or whatever. She never ended up telling me off, but I … felt bad.
Sarah had the pills in her pocket, and I couldn’t stop looking at the outline of them, wondering if mum would know that we had just got them this afternoon. I didn’t have a chance to tell her to put them in her school bag or whatever. Mum was pretty on the ball … but I don’t know if she knew what we had been doing. I felt like she did … yes, I was a bit of a goody two shoes. You know, a teacher’s pet? Uptight? I suppose it’s pretty typical of the sort of person I was that my big moment of emancipation from my mother was tagging along with someone else’s milestones.
You know you can talk to me about … all right, sorry, I’ll stop.
Mum looked at us, and I thought she was going to ask more questions or say she didn’t believe we hadn’t been up to something else … but she just said that dinner would be 15 minutes and we could put our bags away and get ready, so we went to my room. Sarah didn’t want to listen to music, she didn’t want to look at magazines with me, she just … spent 15 minutes doing her hair and her makeup. And she was really quiet during dinner … she didn’t eat much. Mum didn’t say much either.
After dinner Sarah said she didn’t care if we watched Grease, so I put that on, but she didn’t get into it, didn’t sing or dance along even though I knew that she knew all the words and all the moves. So I felt … I felt silly and childish and I just watched in silence as well. Halfway through she said she needed to make a phone call to her parents, so I said she should use the phone in the kitchen. And she said it was private and I said we didn’t have another phone … so she went to the kitchen and made a phone call. I never asked her, but I assume she was actually calling her boyfriend. But she came back really quickly, so who knows? Maybe she really did call her parents. Or maybe she called the Brad Pitt lookalike but he was out or busy or whatever. But she didn’t seem like she really wanted to hang out with me, that’s what I remember.
Stop 56
About a month after all of this, it was a Monday, Sarah came to school really upset. Over the weekend she had been with the uni student boyfriend. I wish I could remember his name. I’m just going to keep thinking of him as Brad Pitt. Anyway, she was with him, but she had told her parents she was at Katie’s. And Sarah’s parents called Katie’s family to talk to Sarah. The usual story. One thing led to another. Katie ended up having to tell her parents about the boyfriend and they told Sarah’s parents, and they drove over to get her from wherever he was living … maybe it was like a uni student housing, cos I don’t think he was living with his parents. I remember that later, Sarah said her dad had wanted to go to the police, but Sarah wouldn’t let him … I thought at the time that it was, like, an accusation of kidnapping or something … I didn’t realise that the age gap meant that it wasn’t legal for him to be having sex with her … well, of course I didn’t think of her as a child – she’s, like, two months older than me, and I definitely didn’t think of myself as a child. But now I know … and I wish that someone had … are you sure that you are clear about … yeah, I know, sorry.
Stop 57
Well, obviously, Sarah never saw the Brad Pitt uni boyfriend again. At least I don’t think so. She never mentioned him after that. Katie and Sarah got into a fight because Sarah blamed Katie for her parents finding out … I know it’s completely unreasonable, but I … Sarah was upset and … yeah, she took it out on the wrong person. Sarah just came to school that Monday, furious. Before school we used to sit on this small patch of grass to the side of the main building where our homeroom was, so Sarah knew that Katie and I would be there, making daisy chains and just … hanging out, I guess. And she just marched up to Katie, ignored me liked I didn’t exist, and stood over her and called her a bitch and a traitor. Katie was pretty angry too, said that Sarah shouldn’t have dragged us into her lies without asking, and that’s not what friends did. Sarah said that Katie didn’t know anything about being a friend and Katie just … kind of shrugged and walked away. They never even looked my way in that fight. I stayed quiet and afterwards I just tried to stay friends with both of them … yes, I know what that makes me, a peacemaker who doesn’t like her friends to be fighting. Or a completely spineless coward, sure, if you prefer that term. Katie and I stayed friends. We were sort of friends with Sarah, but she … it felt like she blamed us for the thing with Brad Pitt. Looking back, she was probably … maybe she was embarrassed? I don’t know.
Stop 58
Westfield was where we would hang out when either of them came to visit me. The movies. Or shops. Or McDonald’s, yes. My mum taught me to drive in the carpark out here. Yes, I know you have to get your hours up, I promise we will do it this weekend. First thing Saturday morning, you can drive me to the supermarket and then we’ll practice in the carpark. No, I don’t love driving, but it’s a good skill to have. Public transport is … I know you know it’s more environmentally friendly, but I think it’s also more relaxing. I always liked taking the tram home from school. Katie came with me once or twice, stayed the night, after Sarah stopped speaking to her. She was … there was no drama with her. No … I’m not proud of it , but I probably would have said that she was less exciting. She was someone who was happy with her own thoughts, with herself … I probably could have learned from that, if I’d been a bit smarter.
Stop 59
I liked staying on the tram all the way to the end because it meant that I eventually got a seat. I don’t know why I cared about that. But I did. It felt important … and maybe I thought I deserved to be able to sit after dealing with such rough things all day at school. Maybe it’s just nice when the tram gets quiet and you are almost alone and no one is looking at you and can stretch out. Anyway, when you see your nan, feel free to let her know you’re paying me back for all the trouble I gave her when I was in high school. Kidding! Don’t tell her that. I love you.
Beth Atkinson-Quinton VO: Tramlines is an initiative of the Melbourne UNESCO City Of Literature Office with the podcast created by Broadwave.
Route 59: School Days Past was written and read by Sharmini Kumar, commissioned by David Ryding, edited by Elizabeth Flux, recorded at the State Library of Victoria, produced by Beth Atkinson-Quinton, with music by Steve Hearne.