Marry Me - Short Film

Little girl likes little boy. Little boy likes BMX bike. Something has to give.

Directed by Michelle Lehman

A nostalgic little short film. "Marry Me" was the winner of the 2008 Tropfest Australia Film Festival.

It reminded of a short story I wrote awhile back. I'm thinking about turning it into a short film script. What do you think? The ending might need a rewrite.


The Gelati Van

by Storyteller

We were outdoor kids, Johnno and I. We didn't have a Nintendo like other kids, which was fine since the heat over the summer break made it too hot to stay inside anyway.

While other boys rode BMXs in gangs, and girls held pretend tea parties in the shade of trees, we spent most of our days playing tennis on the street. We used racquets with broken strings and bald balls that we found in the gutters of our roofs. For lines, we drew on the road with rocks, or yellow pieces of chalk we stole from school. Normally, we played barefoot, but some days we couldn't walk around without getting our feet burnt.

Passing cars often interrupted our game and we would warn each other in advance before stepping aside to the curb. The only time this warning system was not required was when we heard, drifting over the suburban houses, the familiar melody of an approaching gelati van. The music always reminded me of my sister's musical box.

Shouts of delight rang out from kids as they recognised the melody, followed by a mad dash home to gather up pocket money. I heard, through open windows, the noisy rattling of plastic piggy banks, the kind that came with little caps on the bottom so that a withdrawal could be made anytime.

Soon the street was crowded with mothers and their children as they converged on the parked pink and white van. The throng jockeyed around the small serving window and waited in the heat to be served by the sweaty but zealously smiling gelati man.

A flustered mother armed with her purse lined up alongside her fussy urchins, who couldn't be trusted crossing the street without holding hands. They yelled and pointed at the variety of cartoon ice creams painted on the side of the van demanding chocolate or vanilla, then changing their minds again, wanting whatever enticing ice cream that was just served. Other doting mothers sent off their little ones, cash in hand, with a gentle reminder to say Please and Thank you then stood back in groups to watch.

Then there were those other kids who stared with silent jealousy. Kids like Johnno and I. We did this quite often too in the schoolyard. The only times we didn't watch the other kids snack on canteen food was when I could find loose change behind the couch, or when Johnno's mother gave him a little pocket money because she felt guilty about working and leaving him alone so much.

On the third consecutive day that the gelati van came around, Johnno couldn't stand it any longer.
‘We're getting ourselves gelati,’ he declared.
I knew we had no money because we had spent our last ten cents on some lollies down at the milk bar. We needed at least five dollars.
'That's impossible,' I told him.

Other boys got testy when taunted with chicken or mummy's boy. Johnno's word was impossible. He didn't like it when people told him things were beyond his reach, and he often went to considerable lengths to prove them otherwise.
Like the time Johnno claimed to have stopped the microwave, as it counted down, exactly on zero, right before the usual beeeeeep. I told him there was no such thing as a zero in a count down. It was possible, he said, and he was determined to give me a demonstration. He tried at least a hundred times before the microwave malfunctioned.

Or that other time, when we were frying ants by harnessing the power of the sun's rays with a magnifying glass, Johnno said he read somewhere that you couldn't nuke an ant in a microwave, which I found ludicrous. The one at his place was still broken so we went over to my house. At first, we tested on one ant. It was still alive even after a minute of radiation. I was unconvinced so we went and caught a whole army and dropped them in. Imagine my mother's horror when she came home from work to see her microwave covered with ants. The experiment was shelved and forgotten.

Another time I told him it was impossible to beat Angela at times-tables. She was in our sixth grade class. She was a real teacher's pet. Our form teacher was always giving her stickers of every shape and colour in her exercise books.

To keep our times-tables knowledge sharp, our teacher devised a little game. Two students were picked from the class. They then took position behind three lines marked on the classroom floor with masking tape. The teacher would then fire times-tables questions in rapid succession. The first person to answer correctly moved onto the next line. First to three was the winner. What started out as a fun exercise, soon took on a competitive edge. Some kids began adopting battle stances, like cowboys during shootouts.

Angela was the unbeaten champion. Everyone dreaded going up against her. One day Johnno and I discussed the chances of toppling the titleholder. I declared it was impossible, which Johnno predictably rebuffed.
'Nothing's impossible if you try hard enough,' he said, channelling his mother.
So when our form teacher fell sick and a substitute teacher came in for the day, Johnno came up with a plan. Our teacher always left notes on the day's program for the substitute to follow. So during recess, Johnno told me to distract the substitute in the corridor so he could sneak into the empty classroom and steal a glance at the program. It took some persuading, but I eventually gave in.

When class resumed, Johnno and Angela were chosen for a times-tables match. He must have scribbled in the names and questions himself because he shocked everyone by answering before the substitute could even finish the question. Had he paced himself a little, he could have won without attracting any suspicion. The second time he did it the substitute looked over her reading glasses at Johnno. She must have worked out the situation because she placed the program notes aside and started making up her own questions. That was the closest anyone came to beating the teacher's pet.
Johnno's first plan to get ourselves some gelati was to head back to our respective homes for a quick search. Because I spent most of the day out in the sun, I was momentarily blinded upon entering the relative darkness of my house. Everything had a distinctive green tint as my eyes slowly adjusted to the difference in brightness, and I had a white static blind spot in the corner of my vision where I faced the sun.
Throughout the house, fans were turned on full blast. The artificial wind rustled the calendar and bits of paper like a poltergeist. The fan’s mechanical heads swivelled from side to side like gapping clowns at carnivals.

After my eyesight adjusted, I went for a futile search behind the couch for loose change. As I was doing this, I overheard my older sister in the kitchen crying on the phone to her ‘secret’ boyfriend of three years. Only days before I had heard her fantasising about marriage and the names of their future children. Now they were breaking up because he was spooked about them getting too serious.

I got scared because if my father found out that she was crying over a boy, there was going to be trouble. My father's temper was directly proportional to the temperature of the day. Luckily I heard him snoring from his bedroom. My mother was nowhere to be found.

When Johnno and I met up in front of his house, he reported the same lack of success. Time was quickly running out.

After a moment, he tactfully asked, ‘Still got your Michael Jordan card?’
The card he was referring to was a limited edition Michael Jordan holographic 3D basketball card, which I kept in mint condition in a clear protective plastic pocket. When the card was tilted to one side, Jordan was in mid-air, arms and legs outstretched in his trademark pose. Tilted to the other side, he was slam-dunking the ring. It was a parting gift my big brother had given me right after he was kicked out of our house. My parents had sent him to the best private school and when he finally made it to university he decided his life was in fixing cars.

‘We could sell it to Freddie,’ Johnno suggested.
‘No way!’ I blurted out, but immediately felt guilty by his crestfallen expression. It was the same look I usually gave my mother right after she denied a reasonable request.
‘Do you want a gelati or not?’ he asked as he watched the dwindling queue.
It has to be said I only taunt Johnno with impossible only when I really wanted him to prove me wrong. His plans often required some support on my part and if I didn’t obliged I would be letting him down.

We were like a pair of chopsticks, one useless without the other.

Freddie was a fat kid with freckles. He was one of those kids whose parents gave him heaps of pocket money hoping he would grow up big and strong. However, he grew fat and lazy.

We found him sitting on the steps of his front porch, his tongue engaged in a losing battle against the multiple melted streams of ice cream down the side of his double scoop choc-mint.

As Johnno handed him my prized possession, I was very aware of Freddie’s sticky fingers taking the basketball card from its protective plastic pocket and examining it. Afterwards he made a show of adding it to his impressive card album, flicking through the pages until he found an empty slot. In return he gave Johnno five bucks.
By the time we had our money together, the gelati van had just finished serving its last customer and was moving on. Johnno and I sprinted madly after it, yelling for it to wait, but the loud megaphone had started up again with its alluring music, drowning out our desperate cries.

I wasn’t as good a runner as Johnno so I gave up after a few blocks. He kept on going. I watched him run all the way down the street. The driver must have seen him in the side-mirror because the van eventually slowed to a stop. Johnno finally caught up, panting, hands on knees, catching his breath, his face red from the effort and unbearable heat. I watched him walked back slowly with two cans of soft drink.
‘I got thirsty after all that running,’ he said, shrugging.

As we sat on Johnno’s fence sipping on our drinks, I stared at a dotted line of ants gathering around the edges of a stain on the cement pavement that looked like a wet puddle, where a little girl had dropped her ice cream and started crying. She had went to pick it back up off the ground but her mother had angrily pulled her away, refusing to buy another one.

I looked at that stain and all I could think off was my limited edition Michael Jordan holographic 3D basketball card.