Ruby Tuesday Read online

  About the Book

  Ruby was named after a song about freedom, but she’s far from free. At least she has music, her perfect voice and a deep longing to be heard.

  But that was before Joey Milano. Before that awful party. Now the only thing Ruby’s sure of is that she’ll never ever trust anyone again.

  A gorgeous love story, exploring the heartbreaking realities girls face in today’s world. Ruby Tuesday celebrates strength and healing, the joy to be found in music and creativity, and the power of strong, equal friendships and relationships.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-one

  Chapter Forty-two

  Chapter Forty-three

  Chapter Forty-four

  Chapter Forty-five

  Chapter Forty-six

  Chapter Forty-seven

  Chapter Forty-eight

  Chapter Forty-nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-one

  Chapter Fifty-two

  From the Author

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Inside the Tiger

  Praise

  Imprint

  Read more at Penguin Books Australia

  You only get one chance to farewell a life, so you’re meant to do it right. But the wildflowers on Nan’s glossy little coffin were too symmetrical for her wild wondrous spirit.

  An organ was played, but not by my mother. A song was sung, but not by me. This is the woman who gave us a home, who knitted the seeds of music into our bones. We should have dug her grave with our own hands until our fingers bled. But we didn’t. We stood by that small hole in the earth, watched strange men lower her box into its darkness and threw tiny spades of dirt on top of her coffin. It was far less than she deserved.

  This is what I’m thinking as I drive us home in Nan’s old Holden Colorado – ours now, I guess. Maybe even mine?

  ‘Shit, Ruby!’ Mum gasps, clutching the Jesus handle on the passenger side of the ute. ‘That was red.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘A red light! You just ran a red.’

  A whoop starts up behind me the second she says it. A cop must have been at the intersection as I sailed through. The blue and red LEDs light up a disco through the rear-view mirror. I haven’t been on the road long enough to get a ticket for anything, but this is probably a lose-your-licence grade offence. Pretty much everything is on your Ps.

  My heart flips as the cop gets out of his patrol car. People slow down to rubberneck at us, but they’re the least of my problems.

  I buzz my window down and fumble for my wallet. My licence is jammed in there so tight, I can barely wedge it out. At first I can’t see the cop’s face. Just a gut hanging over a belt, hands on hips in mock patience. He bends down to look in the window. It’s the same cop who gave us a talk at school about the dangers of drugs last year, but I can’t remember his name. It’s one of the things I hate about living in the country. It’s the same people. Over and over and over.

  ‘You in the habit of runnin’ reds, darlin?’

  He looks past me to Mum, who just turns the other way. She normally has a comeback ready, but she’s probably hoping if we’re not smartarses, he won’t book me.

  ‘It was an accident.’ I extend my licence, which he snatches and studies a moment.

  ‘So then . . . Rrruby.’ He peels off his sunnies, looks at my wild red hair and arches an eyebrow as though the colour coincidence is my fault. ‘You want to tell me what happened back there?’

  I think about how we buried Nan without a single note of our own music. How there’s been no music since she died. How maybe Nan took all our music with her.

  It’s not something I can explain. Especially to him.

  ‘Give her a break. We’ve come from a funeral,’ my mother mutters.

  The cop leans in my window. ‘What was that?’

  ‘A funeral.’ She forces the words out.

  The cop grimaces. ‘Well, thank your lucky stars you won’t be attending another one after the stunt she just pulled. I’m gonna run a check on her licence.’

  He walks back to the patrol car.

  ‘Sorry,’ I breathe.

  Mum waves her hand through the air like it’s nothing, but we both know it’s something.

  The cop is alongside my window again, handing back my licence.

  ‘This is gonna cost you three points and four hundred and fifty-seven bucks.’

  A wave of relief washes over me. I can still drive. But I see Mum cringe. We could barely scrape enough together to give Nan a decent burial.

  He opens his book and starts scribbling in it. ‘You daydream like that again though, sweetheart, it could cost you a lot more.’

  I close my eyes. Mum won’t let it slide a second time.

  ‘She’s not your sweetheart.’ Her voice is quiet, but firm.

  The officer smirks. ‘What would you prefer, love?’

  ‘What I’d prefer,’ Mum says. ‘Is no pet names. No darling, no sweetheart, no love. It’s an abuse of your power. And it’s degrading.’

  My cheeks flush as he clears his throat.

  ‘You know what, lady? I’m just doing my job. There’s your ticket.’ He thrusts it at me. ‘One more mistake like that, you’re off the road, kiddo. You take care now.’

  He shifts the holster on his belt and marches back to his car. I turn to Mum and drop my jaw. But she’s back to looking tired and pasty.

  ‘Let’s just get the hell home, Rube.’

  Mum presses her lips into a stiff smile. She’s barely touched her dinner. She takes her plate over to the bench and wheels over to the piano. I watch her from the corner of my eye as I move penne around with my fork.

  She strokes the glossy finish on Nan’s antique upright. She’s not played a note since Nan died, and I’ve learnt what silence feels like. It’s the loudest sound on the planet.

  Mum moves towards the piano and lifts the lid. I hold my breath.

  She taps the C major. Testing.

  It sounds the same as ever.

  She moves through the C major scale and I realise I can breathe again. Then she falls into the keys, her body collapsing into the notes until you can’t tell where my mother ends and the piano begins.

  The Steinway is the fanciest thing we own, and when Mum plays Chopin’s Nocturne Op. 72, her fingers caressing the keys, her body l
eaning in and out, it’s like nothing else in the room moves. Not a fly, not a clock hand. She turns that polished piece of timber and ivory into something otherworldly. And tonight, the notes are more ethereal than I’ve heard them before. Or maybe we’re more ethereal.

  I close my eyes as her melancholy flows through me.

  I’d almost forgotten the texture of our music. It’s more than sound, more than rhythm or melody. Mum’s music has a colour, a shape, a taste I can never quite explain.

  Suddenly, the playing stops.

  ‘Play with me,’ she whispers, her voice thick.

  I look at her. But she’s not crying. She never cries.

  Mum can switch from Chopin to The Beatles with the flick of her wrist. Which is exactly what she does, the chords echoing as she stamps them with her fingers. ‘Let it Be’ – the song she played me countless times when I was small and sad.

  When Alex and I stopped talking.

  When I was feeling alone at school.

  I’d stand by her piano and sing, because with Mum and Nan, I didn’t have to pretend to be anyone else. I could just be me.

  It was enough.

  I pick up my guitar where it’s resting against the two-seater lounge. My precious Yamaha. It’s an acoustic with a mean slimline cut away. And it has a great tone. I couldn’t cut it at the piano, but I’m decent on the guitar.

  I take a deep breath. Mum nods in encouragement as I count myself into her rhythm. I can pick it up like jumping rope. My throat is thick as wool tonight, but I open my mouth in defiance and sing.

  Free the bird from her cage.

  Mum pours herself into the piano and I pour my aching soul into our music until my voice merges with the melody and the house echoes with the yearning of all that should be, but never will be again.

  This is how we should have sent Nan off. Not with an off-key organist and a tinny recording of ‘You Raise Me Up’. At least we’re giving her the farewell she deserves now. A private send off.

  And where Nan is, there are no walls, no time, no secrets. If we were only braver, we’d have played like this in that small stone church, but I’ve never pretended to be brave. Besides, only Alex knows who my mother was and who I wish I could become. She’s the one person in this town who knows about our music. And that’s exactly the way Mum wants to keep it.

  Mum stays at the piano long after I retreat to my room. Spilling herself into it the way she and Nan did every night, except tonight her playing is frantic. She moves from piece to piece without a pause, like a marathon runner punishing herself to the finish line.

  An owl calls. I look at the dark forest outside my window and yank the curtain closed, then wriggle back against my bedhead and reach for my phone. Insta usually kills a good hour, but I never post anything. There’s not much in my life worth advertising. I guess there are only so many perfect lives on offer – the Plan A lives. Everyone wants one, but it’s kind of like money. There’s only so much to go around.

  We’re not part of the lucky few and good things don’t fall in our laps so Mum says we need to kick the shit out of Plan B instead. I try, but every time Plan B starts to feel like an okay place to be, a nasty shock comes along to remind us that things aren’t cruisy. The Plan A people have no idea how lucky they are. They sail ahead without any clue that behind them, there’s a whole different race going on. The choppy water of the Plan B lives.

  It’s really a form of torture, Insta – the posts from the House Captain crew, the netball trophies, the Ironman at Port Macquarie, the Regional Athletics Championships. So many times, my finger has hovered over the app. Delete it! You’re better off without it! It makes me resent my life – actually, it makes me hate it. Makes me yearn for the kind of brilliance I will never achieve. I want everyone else’s moments of glory, their holidays and awards and trophies. I want to bundle them up. Make them my perfect existence.

  But if I’m really honest, there’s one reason I can’t delete Insta.

  One person that stops me closing my account.

  He’s my weakness. My crippling, pathetic, weakness. Even the night of Nan’s funeral, I can’t resist.

  Joey beautiful Milano.

  The sight of him in a photo sends a tingle down my arms. I’ve banned myself from stalking his posts, especially if I’m meant to be studying. Some of them I’ve looked at so many times, I should have worn them out. Like the one from a game a couple of weekends ago where he got Player of the Match. He’s grinning, a dark curl falling down the middle of his forehead, one foot resting on top of a soccer ball, one arm flexed in triumph.

  Not that he posts much, it’s usually just other people tagging him in stuff, because he’s so busy – always at someone’s party, or playing soccer, or hanging with his mates. He barely has a spare minute to wonder about the sort of lives other people might be living.

  That’s the difference: he’s busy living and I’m busy watching.

  Tonight, everyone’s at a party. After all, Fridays aren’t just for funerals. I can’t help looking. Even though I know I’ll see her on there – Millie. Mil to her friends, but Millie to me.

  Yep, there she is, pouting with the Dubassi twins for a photo. It shouldn’t cut me. I have no right to pang at the sight of her, but when I look at those hands that get to touch him, her lips that have kissed his a thousand times, it hurts.

  Then I see what I dread. His mate Lukas has tagged him and Millie in a photo. They’re kissing. The photo is captioned ‘hot’. Lukas is right. That’s the worst part. I can’t deny that she’s gorgeous. Even the pink birthmark on her forehead is cute. Shaped like a heart. And I can tell by the turn of Joey’s head that he’s into it, the kiss. His hand is halfway up her stomach.

  I want to hate her, but I barely even know her.

  I move on, flicking her off my screen, till I come across another photo of Joey with his mates. Kyle’s to his right – Kyle’s family is loaded, and they throw the best parties. Lukas is sitting to his left, shirtless, showing off his chest.

  Lukas has been weird with me ever since we started high school, but over the last year it’s been getting weirder. I catch his eye sometimes in class, and I’m always the first to look away. He sits with me at lunch, too. Hugs me when he sees me. Holds me a moment too long. Sometimes when he’s talking to me on the bus, he touches my hair. It’s not as though anyone else gives me that kind of attention. I should be happy. I know I should. And he’s nice to me, mostly.

  I’m not stupid. I know Lukas likes me. I really should be flattered, but the only one who shines for me in that photo is Joey – relaxed, laughing, in board shorts and a white t-shirt that shows the bottom of the dragon tattoo he got on his left shoulder last summer. Because Joey’s a guy who knows what he wants. He knows, and he goes out and gets it.

  Looking at this photo, I can pretend he’s mine, imagine myself sitting alongside him, and laughing in the same easy way.

  Mum knew what she wanted once. She knew early on she would be a pianist. And she had the determination to stick with it through the small challenges like the eisteddfods and the big challenges like the Conservatory exams. After her first major gig – The Opera House – it was up and up. By the time she joined Celestial Vendetta and they were touring the world, Mum was all of twenty and at the pinnacle of her success. I’m three years younger. What have I done?

  Mum always hoped I’d be a pianist like her and Nan. Even played to me in the womb. Trouble is, I’m too clumsy. The keys stretch too far, my brain can’t process the cross threading of fingers and hands and feet on pedals. Besides, singing came effortlessly. When I was small, I opened my mouth and the right sounds fluttered out like some exotic butterfly nobody had yet named. Mum stared at me in awe one night and clasped a hand to her mouth. ‘Ruby,’ she breathed. ‘You have perfect pitch!’

  I had no idea what that meant till I was older. Perfect pitch is extremely rare and means I can recreate sounds without a reference tone. It’s something most musicians would kill for, and not th
e kind of thing I can give to my mother as it can’t be learned. She doesn’t need my gift anyway. Perfect pitch shrivels to insignificance alongside a maestro.

  Joey has Mum’s kind of brilliance. He’s no musician, but he is a local soccer star – selected for the Junior Premier League last year and dreaming of making it big.

  Joey doesn’t know what I dream of. Only one person in Cooper’s Creek does. I search her name, even though I shouldn’t.

  Alex Lorenson.

  There she is on holidays with Grandad at the Avalon Air Show – her grandad, not mine. I only ever borrowed him as my own. A lump forms in my throat. His arm is slung over her shoulder, and they’re both looking up in the sky at an aerobatic plane suspended upside-down. I bet they’re smiling. The smiles they used to share with me. Kind, warm eyes. I was meant to go on that trip. Back when I thought of them as my family, too. Funny how even though Alex and I don’t talk anymore, we’re still officially ‘friends’ on social. Neither of us wanted to be the one to sever the cord, and so the status stands. Friends. Ha.

  I knew she’d come to Nan’s funeral. Do the ‘right’ thing, make an appearance. Sit down in the very back pew with her mum.

  But etiquette is bullshit if you don’t do the right thing when it matters.

  A sudden drop, and I’m falling. The checkerboard earth rushing up to meet me. Stomach screaming, teeth gritted, a howling rush of wind.