Six Impossible Things by Fiona Wood

bottle of wine, but as far as I know she doesn’t see any of her old friends.
    I’ve decided my mother’s probably right about Oliver. He seems like a pretty average guy who’s unlikely to be up for random killings. He’s got good taste in music, people who visit him leave unharmed, and there are no suspicious, freshly dug areas in the garden.
    That’s where he and I have our occasional talks. He tells me that the hedge running along the back of the house with the lemon-smelling flowers is daphne, and my window tree is a
Magnolia grandiflora
.
    He doesn’t mind when I ask him stuff, for example:
    1 ‘Were you always cool?’
 He just laughed about that. For quite a while.
    2 ‘What makes someone cool?’
‘Not what you’d think. Not the outward stuff. The coolest thing is just to be authentically yourself.’
    3 ‘What if you’re a psychopath?’
‘If you’re a psychopath, sure, try to be someone else.’
    4 ‘What do you think about someone deciding they’re gay when they’re thirty-nine.’
‘It’s one year better than doing it at forty. And he’s being authentically himself.’
    5 ‘How do think my mum’s coping?’
‘Not fantastic, but not terrible.’
    6 ‘What about the Thom Yorke thing?’
‘It’s transitional. She’s not crazy. It’s like eating chocolate when you feel sad. But heaps healthier. And she’s got good taste.’
    He gets on well with Howard and offers to walk him when I’ve got café shifts after school, which I do now on Wednesdays and Fridays, up for review in a week when I turn fifteen.
    He greets me by saying, ‘Hey, man,’ but it doesn’t sound stupid when he says it. When he suggests I could do with a shave, I find myself saying, ‘I don’t know how.’ So that’s how I first come to visit the stables, because he says I can watch him shave. It seems a bit personal, I know, but I think, what the hell, there’s no one else around offering.
    He has converted the stables into one huge space. It’s lined with tall bookshelves filled with books, CDs and DVDs. In one corner there’s a kitchen, in another, a bathroom. Up one set of stairs is a big sleeping platform, up another, an office area. There’s a long table with twelve chairs around it, a giant ‘U’ of squishy sofas and a massive wall-mounted screen. His bike hangs on the wall like a piece of art, and there’s a lot of actual art as well. One look around and I know this is exactly the sort of place I want to have when I’m older.
    ‘You like it?’ Oliver asks.
    I nod. ‘How come you’re here?’
    ‘You know Adelaide and my gran were friends, and I used to do the gardening here, as a student job? One day I asked her if I could rent the stables.’
    ‘Were they like this?’
    ‘No, they were a mess. Broken roof. Lots of birds. We worked out a deal where I’d fix them up instead of paying rent. And she liked the security of having someone else around.’
    ‘Did you know she was leaving them to you?’
    ‘No idea.’
    Shaving doesn’t look that hard. Lather up. Stretch tight the piece of your face being shaved using appropriate contortions. Move the razor up, down or sideways, always moving it in the direction of the handle, not in the direction of the blades. Oliver hands me a new razor, wishes me luck, and sends me on my way. Maybe he’ll break up with his girlfriend, fall for my mother and move inside – then I can live in the stables. Brilliant. I imagine cool, casual gatherings with Estelle and friends. I only have Fred and Lou in the friends department, of course, but small details don’t need to spoil a perfectly good fantasy.

    Work at Phrenology is harder than it looks from the outside. In the first couple of shifts I break a few things, but not too many. I get to know Ali’s temper first hand. He’s an impatient perfectionist, and insults fly around the place like pepper, but he’s just as quick to cool down.
    I’m learning how to use the bench top dishwasher, and to wash by hand