The Girls Page 5

  I don’t know what to do with these fragments that my mind can’t flesh out, so I close my computer and decide to finish work for the day.

  My father moves through the house quietly: from the front door to the couch facing the television, to the fridge, to his bed. At night, he watches multiple episodes of CSI or NCIS.

  Each year, his father’s features accumulate on Dad’s face, their personalities also becoming more and more similar. The fuzzy brown sunspots around his cheeks and ears are multiplying, his hair inches from grey to white, his sentences begin to never quite finish themselves without losing the train of thought. Sometimes he says ‘Um’ three times in a row.

  ‘If there was a God, um, how could he have let this happen?’ he asks.

  It is a cliché that he clings to. At different times, my parents each tell me they are no longer able to sleep through the night.

  When I was two, my mother gave birth to a dead baby boy.

  I didn’t learn this until I was older, after the car accident that claimed my sisters’ lives. But I try to imagine what my parents remember:

  The excitement of bringing their second child into the world. Dad, deciding they’d need more money, throwing his half-packet of cigarettes in the bin and never smoking again. Mum, pushing a tiny body through her cervix, the cord wrapping tighter and tighter around his newborn neck, his body turning blue as he suffocates on the way out. It is 1990, and by the time his head emerges his heart has stopped beating.

  Where is his body now? I want to ask, all these years later.

  But instead, I ask nothing and imagine his absence filling the house for a whole year until Carlie is born.

  ‘You’re going to be a sister,’ I remember them telling me then. It was brave of them, to do that. To risk breaking their own hearts all over again.

  Brendan, they called him.

  It’s December 2016. I’m visiting my parents for a couple of days. I always feel like a child again in their home. I want to tell my mother I won’t spend Christmas with her and Dad this year. While she is in the kitchen cooking dinner, I find my father in his office, explain, and ask how he feels.

  ‘I don’t have a problem with it, you know that,’ he says.

  My mother calls us in to dinner. The three of us take a seat at the dining room table, scoop pasta and bolognaise sauce onto our plates. I tell my mother I’m going to spend this Christmas alone. She starts crying.

  I don’t know how to tell her that this year I am trying to face my feelings, and I need to do it by myself. That this year, I can’t be four children for her.

  It’s eleven years since the accident. I have missed family Christmas only twice before. Once when I was eighteen and off dating a cocaine devotee (my mother was not impressed), and once when I was in the Philippines (this seemed a legitimate reason to my mother, and so she did not make me feel guilty). I haven’t ever made the conscious decision to spend it alone.

  I worry constantly about how my parents are feeling, what behaviours of mine will hurt them, what my mother needs to feel loved and needed, how my father might escape his depression. But at the same time, I feel an impulse to run. To prevent my coming to resent them.

  I tried to explain this once to my mother. She was hurt: ‘Think of all the stuff we’ve done for you, Chloe.’ She mentioned a family friend whose relationship with her mother is more easily co-dependent. ‘Look at Christie. As soon as Gail is alone for even one night Christie calls her up, worried, asking if she should come over because she doesn’t want her mum to be lonely.’

  I don’t know how to respond. I don’t say: Christie has two older brothers, and you never use them as points of comparison.

  But I can’t bear to admit what still feels like my selfishness, so I say nothing else. She sits eating her pasta with a single tear dripping down her left cheek every few seconds, as if her tear ducts are on a timer. As always, she doesn’t wipe them away, just leaves them hanging there, her small sobs audible between the sounds of my father gulping his soft drink, me my pinot noir, and her sucking the strands of spaghetti through her thin lips, one piece at a time.

  Our dog, Princess, jumps on each of our knees, begging for a piece of mince, but no one pays her any attention. She is my dog, a present from Kris a couple years after the accident and not long before we broke up, but I move around so much that she has lived with my parents ever since I left home. When Kris first said he was going to get me a hairless Chinese Crested puppy, my father said if he did, he’d shoot the dog and Kris in the head. My father is a gentle man—it is rare to see him angry, let alone deliberately harsh. But he has an endearing habit of saying whatever comes to mind, no matter how socially inappropriate. This was his way of saying no, but Kris knew he was a pushover.

  Kris waited until my father was away for work and brought her to me one afternoon, her tiny body shaking and covered in vomit after the two-hour drive from the breeding farm in regional New South Wales. The next morning, when I woke, I looked down and saw she was missing from her bed. I found my father on the carpet outside the bathroom door, wearing only his red Speedo-like undies, crouched on all fours so his face was in line with Princess’s nose, encouraging her to play. Now, when he watches his nightly American crime shows, she sits on his lap and sleeps until they both go to bed.

  After I tell her I need to spend Christmas alone, my mother doesn’t speak to me for a week.

  I don’t think about the girls.

  My father thinks of nothing else.

  ‘I’m trying to make it one hour without thinking about them,’ he tells me at the Thai restaurant.

  Once, when we were in high school, I came to class bitching about a fight I’d had with Carlie.

  ‘Do you even spend any time with your sisters, Chloe?’ a friend asked.

  I still carry that question with me.

  I don’t know what my mother thinks. When she’s upset and I ask why, she dismisses my question. When she’s angry, I am less able to be inquisitive: I am terrified of being the cause.

  After a property deal goes wrong, Dad loses everything. By 2014, he will be declared bankrupt. By February 2016, my parents will have to sell the house my father built for us, his girls. At the time, I will ask how he feels about everything that happened and the people involved and he will say, ‘Those men came to the girls’ funeral.’

  My mother occupies a lot of space in my parents’ house. My father’s shoulders are broader, his gut a little larger than hers, but his presence is soft and meek. My mother needs to feel both heard and needed. She chatters constantly, fills up the empty space with questions and statements about how our day was, what so-and-so was wearing, how we’ll need to adjust our choice of clothing soon because of the weather. My father nods, and sits quietly at the dinner table, inhaling his food before Mum finishes her opening spiel. I become frustrated; I snap at her when I can’t cope with the incessant talking anymore.

  ‘It feels like I can’t breathe when I don’t get my daily dose of quiet time,’ I say.

  At first, I think it is her way of coping, this need of hers to fill every empty space with noise. But later, when I am pushed to think deeper, to think more empathetically, I realise that perhaps it is not just for her sake. Perhaps her forceful reinstatement of ‘normality’ is also for my father and me.

  She clings to her optimism. The older I get, the more grateful I learn to be for it.

  I am ashamed by how little I remember of them.

  I’ve been reading these books lately where people write their memories of losing a husband to cancer, their eyesight at eighteen, their father to the Vietnam/American War. One thing they all have in common: the books begin by sketching a physical portrait of their lost loved one, and then, through a series of scenes, build a montage of memories, showing who their loved one used to be.

  Sometimes, when I am alone and my emotions are turned up high,
the world becomes a nostalgic film. I think about the past and my memories slow down, take on a sepia tone. But it is a short film. I remember enough about the girls to sketch an outline of their faces and bodies, I remember a few key actions and personality traits, but I don’t remember enough to build the full-length film montage of memories that people seem to think I should have.

  Portraits:

  Lisa. Long, white-blonde hair to her waist, a wisp of a girl with a voice to make up for it. She is staring straight at the camera, her smile dominating the photograph.

  Carlie. Dusty blonde hair hanging to below her shoulders. Her stomach protrudes over her pants, catching her tomboy t-shirt. Her gaze is passive, as she stands quietly smiling in the background.

  Film montage:

  Lisa, age seven, is standing naked in front of the Christmas tree, her thin backside pointing towards us and the camera.

  Mum is teaching her how to throw brown eyes. ‘It’s a good life skill,’ she says.

  When Mum calls out through the house, ‘Family Christmas photo! Get your hats!’ this is how Lisa comes out. With her hat, minus her clothes.

  Her tenor horn lives in its case in one corner of the lounge room. She stumbles on the way to school, trying to carry the massive thing up the slight incline between our house and her primary school, two hundred metres away. She walks drunk, talks drunk, tries to stand still like a drunk, courtesy of the cerebral palsy she was born with. Playing the tenor horn isn’t any different and Mum is relieved when she eventually gives it up.

  Carlie, age twelve, watching Rage one morning in the lounge room, waiting for the rest of us to get up to leave for our annual holiday with family friends. She is leaning back on the coffee table, the edge of her butt perched on the ledge. She is frozen, staring at the television until my mother calls out to her.

  ‘Carlie, Carlie.’

  She falls off the coffee table, lands on the ground on her side, starts convulsing.

  ‘She has epilepsy,’ the doctors tell my parents.

  She stops having fits, but the medication makes her put on weight because it prevents her stomach from telling her brain when it’s full.

  She follows me around. I am embarrassed by her, and make her catch the bus to school when Kris picks me up in the morning.

  Besides these small details, my mind draws a blank.

  I tell my mother about my shame and my lack of memories, and she says, ‘But don’t you remember? That time Carlie got her foot stuck in the bus door and you helped her and screamed at the bus driver to stop, got the door opened, helped her off and walked her home?’

  I nod.

  ‘Don’t you remember?’

  I don’t.

  My father keeps a stack of leftover funeral cards in his desk drawer, and in a box in the garage. Sometimes, when we have guests over, he gives them one to keep. The cards are pale yellow. Each of the girls’ faces is framed in a circle, their dates of birth and death listed underneath. On the back, the inscription: Too well-loved to ever be forgotten. These cards are littered throughout our lives: Dad keeps one in his wallet and one in his car; Mum has pinned another to the fridge. When I take my first solo trip overseas, my grandmother gives me a travel diary with one pressed inside.

  Eleven years later, I still find it hard to say goodbye. Over the years, I have corrected lovers and friends.

  ‘Bye,’ they’ll say.

  ‘You mean see you later, right?’ I’ll ask.

  I am afraid that their goodbye will become real. During my teenage years I struggled to show affection. Before the accident, Mum once asked why my friends kissed their mothers goodbye but I could not kiss her. I didn’t know how to respond. Even today, I find touch difficult and yet, when I feel even a small connection to someone—an intimate conversation with an elderly lady while waiting in line for coffee, a stranger who lets me sleep in their spare room during one of my backpacking trips—I feel a compulsion to hug them, twice. The first is to solidify our connection, the second is in case they die and I never see them again. It is as if I need to make the universe understand I am saying see you later, and not goodbye.

  Sometimes, people ask:

  ‘Do you talk about them?’

  ‘Do you remember the happy times together?’

  It seems to me that only someone who hasn’t unexpectedly lost a child or a sibling or a partner would ask that. Someone who has experienced such abrupt shock would know that to mention their names in between asking for the salt and passing the mushroom gravy to your mother during the Sunday lamb roast would be more painful and embarrassing than soothing.

  Instead, we make up a shorthand. Call them ‘the girls’, rather than risk mentioning their individual names. This way they are separate from us, an abstract thing on which we need not hang our pain.

  The girls.

  4

  The first time I have alcohol, I am seventeen years old. It is November 2005.

  Before that, my mother tells me, I was that embarrassing kid who’d rip a cigarette out of an adult’s mouth at family functions, asking them, ‘Don’t you know it’s going to kill you?’

  It is four months since the accident. I have not been doing well. My teachers suggested I skip the trial exams I missed and that, instead, I could be given a mark based on my existing class rankings and the other students’ results. This felt like cheating, and so I insisted I sit the trial exams like any other student. We set a time for me to take two or three trial exams, and I got to work studying. This was not an easy thing. While my parents and our visiting friends and relatives gathered in the lounge room to speak and grieve, or sat in the kitchen eating the zucchini slice left at our front door, I holed up in my bedroom and forced myself to continue as if nothing had changed. I felt distant and isolated. It reminded me of that feeling you get walking home late at night, alone in the cold, when you look through the window of a house and see people gathered around the dining room table, warm and laughing. I longed to join them, but for some reason I still don’t fully understand, I could not allow myself to. After sitting my first trial exams a couple of weeks later, my marks came back below what my class ranking would have predicted. After that, I decided to go along with my teachers’ suggestion. I would skip both the trial and main HSC exams, not because this was the kind thing, but because I would get better marks this way. Being kind to myself does not come easily.

  Now, one of the girls in our grade is turning eighteen. The theme of the party is pimps and hoes, because everyone needs an excuse to pretend they have no choice but to dress sexy. My parents are at home, in the midst of their early grief, surrounded by people still in hyper-help mode. Before the accident, my friends and I would go for drives, or visit friends, or attend birthdays, and so my parents don’t question this party. What is changing, but what they don’t see, is the reason I attend these parties, and my behaviour once there.

  My best friend Anna and I have just finished high school. We decide that this night will be the first night we drink alcohol and I convince Kris to buy us a four-pack of Vodka Cruisers—guava flavour—for us to take to the party. I am beginning to push him away. I tell him I’m having a night out with my friends and I don’t want him to come. He doesn’t like it, but eventually agrees. He was in the grade above us at school, and so his friends won’t be there anyway. He makes me promise not to have more than one Cruiser and I assure him the four-pack is for four of us to share.

  Anna and I have a great time. We set ourselves up on a little patch of fake grass in a corner of the back courtyard of the community hall where the party is held. We have two Cruisers each, and accept sips from various other people’s drinks. For two high-school girls who’ve never had alcohol before, this is no small amount, and the night goes quickly, in a blur of laughter, pink lips and giddy conversation.

  This is the beginning of a more sustained act of forgetting. It is easy to not notice
who is missing when time moves so quickly. Even now, alcohol is an antidote to stillness.

  ‘This is the best party we’ve ever been to,’ we tell several people.

  Anna and I sleep at another friend’s place and wake the next morning when her mum calls up the stairs that we should come down for breakfast. I am too sick to get out of bed and Nicole tells her mother I have the flu while the others eat their pancakes.

  An hour or so later, Kris picks me up. I assure him I only had one drink but have a headache from not getting enough sleep. I am quiet on the way home until I ask him to pull the car over. He does so, and I vomit out the door, into the gutter.

  We are not far from my house, on a wide suburban street. Behind a nearby fence is a German shepherd, quietly watching.

  ‘How was the party?’ Kris asks.

  ‘Good,’ I say. ‘There were heaps of people there.’

  ‘Really? Because I heard there were only twenty people there, the party was shit and you and Anna were the entertainment.’

  In March, I start university.

  The first thing I notice is that everyone is carrying paper cups with lids. After the first week or so, I sit next to a girl in an early lecture and ask what she is drinking.

  ‘Coffee,’ she says.

  I have never tasted it before. My mother doesn’t drink tea or coffee and my father only drinks tea at home. It is not until I am twenty or so that someone shows me how to make tea and instant coffee.

  A couple of days later, my first class starts mid-morning. The coffee cart I always walk past is deserted. I wander up, standing close enough that I can read the large menu printed on the outside, and far enough that the ladies inside won’t ask if they can get me something. The only thing on the menu that I recognise is hot chocolate. I take a step forward, and order one. Then I walk to class, take a seat and casually sip at my cup.

  During these years, time acts strangely. Or perhaps it is my memory of it that is strange. My descent will be gradual and fragmented, over the course of several months. A couple of Cruisers on a night out to forget about my home life. A cigarette here and there because why the hell not? Life is short! And, slowly, the line of what I will and won’t do moves further and further from my pre-accident self.