Girl Next Door - Alyssa Brugman [2]
I'm beginning to suspect that adults who get to a place in life where they need to rent rooms in other people's houses are all a little kooky. I'm not talking about the uni-types. Mum won't have them because she believes they would corrupt my brother and me – nor backpackers, because Mum thinks they'll steal our stuff and disappear. I'm talking about proper adults with frown lines, who listen to Radio National. They wear shapeless clothes in drab colours, and have the types of haircuts that don't need any styling, which is why I question their need for so much bathroom time.
Maybe it's a bowel thing.
We live in a monster house – I'm talking truly ginormous, with a billiard room, a bar, a media room and a foyer. It's a house with wings.
It's not as big as Jasmina Fitzgibbon's house. Her dad is some kind of billionaire property developer and they have a helipad and a ballroom with a grand piano in the corner. I appreciate that her dad travels a lot by helicopter, but I do question whether they host so many balls at their house that they need a special room for them.
The Fitzgibbons have staff. We don't have staff. Jasmina also has a stepmother who's about twenty-three. Jasmina tells us stories about the dumb stepmother all the time and it's funny because it's such a cliché and I thought she made half of it up, but then one day I saw the stepmother in real life when she came to pick up Jasmina from school and she looked exactly the way Jasmina described. At the time I was so glad that my dad was still with my mum and that they're the same age and that my dad doesn't have a pathetic comb-over – not that there is a non-pathetic comb-over.
Tanner Hamrick-Gough has a house that's about as big as ours, but it's olde worlde with ivy on the walls, and a garden that people take photos of and put in magazines. Her house is a genuine contender for having treasure in the ceiling. It has secret doors and passageways – well, just one off the library, but it's so cool. If I wasn't so mature and chic I would definitely want to play a game of smugglers, or vampires, or something like that.
Okay, I have thought about the secret room a little bit. Except I wondered if their cleaner goes in there and vacuums, which would make it less mysterious.
Tanner Hamrick-Gough's mum and dad are still together, and they're so old that they both have comb-overs. They live in Dubai for half the year. Tanner lives most of the time just with her older sister, which sounds as though it could be a riot, except the sister is doing a PhD in ancient Polynesian nose-flute music, or something like that, so you can imagine. She's not exactly an A-lister.
I used to feel all smug because our family had a giant house without a ballroom, which is just tacky, and my parents had a functioning marriage and two full heads of hair and were actually in the country most of the time, and if they weren't then my brother and I were with them on holidays, and my brother Willem is a cadet, which is annoying, but much less annoying than a nose-flautist.
But now we're eating two-minute noodles and canned soup. We don't run the air conditioner any more. I caught Mum dyeing some clothes to make them look new again. She'd already put a lock on the phone so we can only receive calls. And we're renting out our spare rooms.
She bought our school shoes from Vinnies. There were two ways of dealing with that. I could have been mortified, but instead I put on my face that Mum calls 'bolshie' and showed them to everyone at school and told them they were 'vintage'.
We're tightening our belts.
See, what happened was, our lives were going really well. About a year ago, or maybe a little longer, my mum got a promotion, so she was earning all this extra money, and then my parents had a great idea that Dad would start his own business, but the mortgage broker said that banks don't like to lend you money when you're just starting out on your own, so they should borrow it now (as in, then), while Dad had a long record of full-time employment.
They borrowed as much as they could,