Kiss Me, Genius Boy (No More Dreams #1)

2.3 Medical malpractice

2.3 Medical malpractice

After kinder, there passed a last, glorious summer before I went to school and my youthful joy in living was destroyed.

As I’ve said, Mum once worked at Imogen’s father’s firm. She’d been a beauty, and her boss, Morgan, now inheritor of Stone and Son, the only significant law firm south of Mornington, had been understandably attracted to her as his executive assistant. But being a god-fearing man, and married into the bargain, the most he’d been able to do about it was to invite her into his social circle after Dad won the lottery and she quit her job. By the Stones welcoming my parents in amongst their friends, Morgan got to see his former secretary on a social basis as a lunch companion for his wife, Donna, and my parents gained their entry into a world of BMWs, fine food, and weekend tennis.

Mum was never a keen swimmer, and Dad preferred the surf beaches, which he considered too dangerous for me. So until I made friends with Imogen at kinder, I had seldom been a beachgoer even though the bay stood just across the highway from our house. But Donna would take Imogen, and they’d lie out there on the sand for hours, and swim, and Donna would read trashy novels, and when she was attached to me enough, Imogen started asking if I could come, too.

It was in this way I first discovered the distance between our families. I’ve spoken of their friendship, but it predated me. As a child, I saw them as enemies who were forbearing enough not to put their children in the line of fire. They’d fallen out just a few years after they got to be friends, and until I was a teenager, my parents would never explain why.

As I got older and collected inklings of what had happened, I began to imagine that Morgan’s interest in Mum had finally gotten the better of him, that he had made a pass, even that there had been an affair, and that the fallout had divided the Rivers and the Stones forever. At age four, all I knew was that Imogen’s mother, Donna, would never step inside our gate. She’d stay out on the pavement by the highway with her back turned to the house, and look at the water while she waited for Imogen to come to the door and collect me. Then, too, I could remember that neither Mum or Dad would ever come with me into Imogen’s house: they stopped on the road with the car running, and waited until the Stones let me inside before they drove away.

At the beach, Imogen and I swam together. Mum fitted me out in blue Speedos with red and white racing stripes, but Donna sent Imogen out into the water naked. Diving underwater and opening my eyes against the cold, salty sting, I swam underneath her, looking upward, to glimpse the surprisingly unremarkable slit lying black across the wonderful white flesh between her kicking legs.

On lazy weekends scattered through the summer, I’d go to Imogen’s for lunch. Sometimes there were other parents and their children there, but I always went alone, delivered and left like a parcel in the mail.

Walled in glass and plasterboard, the Stones’ house was a heaven filled with glaring whites and blues. At the table there were grapes, strawberries, melons, and mangoes, fresh bread, cold chicken and prawns, grilled white fish and lemon juice, and chips cooked in a real deep-fryer. There was a luxury to their household that ours lacked. They had more money, true, but they’d also had it longer, and knew how to spend it well.

These lunches were the bounty of the rich that I foolishly came to hate, to view as the poisoned spoils of the exploitation of the working class. Imogen and I were born in paradise. Later, books and teachers would embitter us against it.

After feasting, while the adults sat and drank, I played Chivalry on Imogen’s Apple IIe, and when the girl herself felt ignored enough to sulk and complain, I switched to making caricatures with her in Facemaker. Later in the afternoon, there was tennis, during which we annoyed the adults by climbing into the crabapple trees around the court and throwing the hard, sour fruits into the middle of the game.