Brothers and Sisters

  BROTHERS

  & SISTERS

  BROTHERS

  & SISTERS

  Edited by Charlotte Wood

  Some of the stories in this collection use real events as their settings,

  but they are stories, and the characters and all their actions are works of fiction.

  First published in 2009

  Introduction and selection copyright © Charlotte Wood 2009

  Copyright in individual contributions © retained by authors

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218

  Email: info@allenandunwin.com

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available from the National Library of Australia www.librariesaustralia.nla.gov.au

  ISBN 978 1 74175 822 1

  Set in 12/16 pt Filosophia by Bookhouse, Sydney Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  ABOUT THE OTHERS * Virginia Peters

  PALEFACE AND THE PANTHER * Robert Drewe

  BEADS AND SHELLS AND TEETH * Cate Kennedy

  LIKE MY FATHER, MY BROTHER * Michael Sala

  THE CRICKET PALACE * Charlotte Wood

  FAMILY RADIO * Roger McDonald

  TROUBLE * Tegan Bennett Daylight

  THE SINGULAR ANIMAL: ON BEING AND HAVING * Ashley Hay

  THE YARRA * Nam Le

  ONE GOOD THING * Paddy O’Reilly

  BLOOD * Tony Birch

  THE DISCO AT THE END OF COMMUNISM * Christos Tsiolkas

  BIOGRAPHIES

  INTRODUCTION

  Your brother or sister, it might be said, is your other self—your grander, sadder, braver, shrewder, uglier, slenderer self.

  Your sibling is your most severe judge, and your fiercest defender. You must always rescue them. They always abandon you. They abandoned you only once, and you will never forget it. They are a pain in the arse. They save you. They will not be conquered. They never leave you alone. They always leave you to pick up the pieces. They won’t grow up, won’t let you grow up. They are a gang, and you its weary leader, its exhausted captive. They still get off scot-free. They protect you from evil, from yourself. They are the stone in your shoe, the thorn in your side, the one who remembers things you won’t. They are the special one, your ugly mirror. They will not be fooled by your nonsense. They are the only one who makes you wake and worry in the stark, dark night. They make you laugh more and cry harder than anyone ever has, or will. They withhold things: little, silly things; bad secrets. They will never stop banging on about the past. They don’t care about you. They see through your bullshit. They are an unfillable well of need. They give you everything, and you take it all. They are still angry; you wish they would let it go. They are always telling you to let it go. A certain piece of music makes you lock eyes. You hate what they do to your parents. Your parents love them, not you, and always have. You have not touched each other since you were children. You can destroy their precious, hard-won idea with one glance. When calamity befalls you, they are first through the door. In a crisis they disappear. You only notice them when they’re gone. They will never be gone. They steal your clothes, it doesn’t matter; you own each other. Your friends think they are weird; they don’t understand. Your friends think they are great; they don’t understand. Your sibling is the only person who has ever hit you. You have never really hurt anyone but them. They are the loop, the circle of your life, and you can never break free. They have spent their life trying to break free from you, and it has broken your heart. They make you wish you were an only child. They are the reason you have an only child. They never speak to you directly, nor you to them: your lives are lived sidelong, desperate or tender or both, but you feel your shoulders touching at weddings or christenings or funerals; more and more, at funerals. One day it will be yours. They never mention your childhood. You recognise one another, this is your relief and your ruin. They are your duty. They stun you with the sudden presence and force of their goodness. They give you Christmas presents that show you are strangers. You are strangers. You love them; it cannot be explained why, or how. You can never forgive them, and you will die wanting their forgiveness.

  The writers in this collection are as obstinately different from one another as your brothers and sisters are from you. They have written in surprising ways about the deep bonds—bad, beautiful or broken—between brothers and sisters, and, in one piece, about our abiding suspicion of that happy, foreign creature, the only child. Twelve stories speaking of love and fear, separation and tenderness, confusion and—sometimes—reunion.

  When Patrick White’s sister Suzanne died, he wrote that he and she had nothing in common ‘beyond blood and a childhood’. But for so many, of course, blood and childhood is what haunts us, and always will. This book is for you.

  Charlotte Wood

  ABOUT THE

  OTHERS

  Virginia Peters

  I like the kitchen best because it’s the smallest and darkest room in the house. The little windows are overshadowed by a large pohutukawa tree, its knotted branches peering in through the window, tapping as the wind blows. Inside there is the soft orange glow of the oven light, the hum of the element as the meat cooks.

  I’m sitting on the bench, watching my mother. I can see her hands—large brown hands, the skin slightly loose like a glove, the nails strong and oval, the polish, fading, in a shade called ginger jam.

  She cups a potato and, sliding the knife beneath her palm, she chops four ways then takes another. Once the basin is full of quarters, she starts on the carrots. I watch the rings wheel across the board. She talks to me while she works—or rather I talk to her, coaxing responses from her. She gets into a rhythm with the knife, the soft flow of her voice punctuated by the chop-chop-chop as her arm cranks. Every so often she stops what she is doing, and with a sigh lifts a crystal glass to her lips. I watch the lump in her throat draw back like a syringe and the dark liquid disappearing. I can smell sweet fumes atomising in the warm air as she exhales: dry sherry and Oil of Ulan.

  ‘Tell me more,’ I say.

  ‘Well,’ she begins, ‘your father’s mother was a lady. Very elegant, despite the fact she’d given birth to eleven children.’

  I’m impatient. ‘Just get to the swimming bit,’ I tell her.

  ‘Well,’ she says, luxuriating in the vowel as she thinks. ‘Your grandma went to Point Chevalier one day. And once there, she took her clothes off, folded them neatly and placed them on a rock near the water’s edge.’

  I lean forward on the bench. ‘Was it winter?’ I ask, though I already know the answer.

  ‘Yes, it was winter. A cool day, quite blustery on the point. That’s why they knew she was not just cooling off, as you might in the middle of summer.’

  ‘And?

  ’ ‘Well, once in the water she swam as far as she could, all the way over the low mudflats until the water deepened; and she kept going, and going, and
going until the sea dragged over her like a silver blanket.’ She puts her knife down and looks at me. ‘And from that day onwards, Grandma was never seen again.’

  ‘Why do you think she did it?’

  ‘Probably because she’d had enough,’ she says, placing the potatoes around the meat.

  It’s always the same unsatisfying response, but it doesn’t stop me from pressing her, as though one day something new might be added, something she’d not thought of before, that will make things so much clearer.

  By the time she is spooning the juices around the pan I’ve moved her on to the story of my father’s brother, Jack.

  ‘How could you cut your own throat?’ I ask, fingering the corrugations in my oesophagus.

  ‘I suppose it would require some effort,’ she says.

  ‘But why would you do it?’

  She makes a line with her lips as she looks at me. ‘Depression. It runs in the family.’

  ‘And what about Aunty Shona?’ I ask. ‘What does pulverised mean again?’

  And when she tells me, I ask her, ‘What about her bones? Would they be pulverised?’

  ‘I’m not sure about the bones,’ she says, and for a moment I picture Aunty Shona’s bones, snapped like branches on the train tracks.

  We hear the door open, my father clearing his throat. So often we forget he’s here. Most of the time he’s not; he’s up-country, travelling between doctors’ waiting rooms with his bag of promotional pills.

  ‘Hello, Mummy,’ he says as he steps into the kitchen. His voice is grave, and has been since he lost his job in management. I would never know the man she married, my mother tells me, for he is certainly not the one she has now.

  ‘Hello, Daddy.’ Her voice is brisk as she dries the chopping board, completely disguising the macabre conversation we’ve just had.

  Turning to me, my father nods. ‘Girl,’ he says in a frowning voice, and I turn my head, showing him the edge of my jaw.

  ‘What’s going on in here, then?’ His voice is a tremolo of suspicion.

  ‘Nothing much, Daddy.’ My mother turns to smile at me. ‘Just chatting with Bubba,’ she says. Her voice is bright, and although I’m just a little girl, I know well enough that it’s a game. I’m inside the circle with her, and my father is on the outside. He’s not got the slightest idea what she’s thinking right now, but I know. I know everything about her.

  My mother has no friends. She says she doesn’t have time for ‘that sort of thing’, as though friendship is a modern fad that won’t last. I am her friend. The best companion any mother could have. A little girl who loves her.

  It seems her other children, years older than me, have amalgamated into one, joined together by their proximity in age and their ordinariness. Boy, boy, girl, boy. I arrived six years later, followed by the announcement there would be no family holiday until Bubba was old enough to travel. My mother tells me they’d not been on a family holiday before, and rightfully suspect that now they never will.

  Rather than dote on me like any decent older siblings might, mine ignore me. When they do speak to me, it’s only to torment. In the early evening, when they arrive home from high school, they barge into the tiny kitchen where I sit quietly with my mother, talking or playing teacher with her as I run through the lessons I learned that day at school.

  I watch as, with her back still turned to the bench, she throws her voice over her shoulder.

  ‘How was your day, boys?’

  ‘That’s good. Tell me all about it,’ she says when they grunt back, but I can tell by the thoroughness of her tone that she is only pretending to be interested in what they have to say.

  I wait as they bang cupboards looking for food, noticing the way the corners of their eyes seem to snag each time they pass me. Sometimes they can’t resist it and they have to say something—the words don’t matter, it’s the gruff jeering voices I can’t bear. When I put my hands over my ears and sing, sure enough they raise their fists and pretend to jab me. I have to scream and scream until my mother is treading on the spot. I can’t stand it, I can’t stand it. I’ll end up in a mental home, she cries.

  ‘Why don’t they like me?’ I ask her when she is calm.

  The answer is always the same: they are jealous of me.

  ‘You’re a very special little girl,’ she explains. ‘Quite different to the others. I can sit and talk to you about anything.’

  The more she tells me this, the more I embody her words, and the more unremarkable my siblings appear to me.

  Although they are bigger and taller, I cannot look up to them. They don’t excel in any area of study at school, not even sport. Neither do they appear to be unique in any way at all, except for the simple fact one is a girl.

  I can’t complain about her. When my father is home and I can’t sleep with my mother, I share a room with my sister. On the whole I find her an inoffensive roommate, mostly because she is barely here. She spends most of her time working at the dog kennels after school. And when she is here, her face is hidden behind two lengths of hair that are slightly parted, like curtains.

  Sometimes when she is sleeping she opens her lids to find me looking at her from my pillow on the other side of the room.

  ‘Whaddayu want, face-ache?’ she growls.

  I screw up my nose. ‘You’re a real mole,’ I say, and she curls her lip in a way that makes me laugh.

  ‘Shurrup,’ she says, not shut up, like me. My sister has poor elocution. I speak like my mother, who won first prize when she was a little girl for her recital of ‘Daffodils’ by William Wordsworth.

  ‘She’s a funny little thing,’ my mother says, as though it is my sister who is smaller than me. ‘She really has no conversation. I never know what to say to her. Does she talk to you?’

  ‘Sometimes she barks at me,’ I say to amuse her.

  ‘Oh, you’ve got a sharp wit, Bubba,’ she says, ruffling my hair. ‘You’ll go far.’

  Every so often my mother surprises me with the declaration that there will be no school today. Instead, we are going on an excursion. We sit on the train, our shoulders touching as we rock from side to side, looking out the window at the milky bays and inlets, and the oat.coloured sheep on the hills. Once in the city we disappear among the old government buildings, passing ministries, police headquarters, legal chambers, until we arrive at the criminal courts. My mother examines the list with her fingernail for the best case. She has a preference for sexual assaults.

  ‘Nothing like that will ever happen to you, Bubba,’ she reassures me later.

  And I tell her I already know that, for I will hardly have anything to do with such rough types as the Mongrel Mob or Black Power.

  Other times we drop in to see the Prime Minister in the Houses of Parliament, as though he is a personal friend, or we take a tour of a radio studio or newspaper printing press. I am guided around by a staff member like a visiting dignitary, while my mother stands back, her two hands shyly clasping the handle of her bag.

  I have the impression with all these visits she is grooming me for a bigger life than the one she has—one in the outside world of politics, communications and justice.

  ‘You can be anything you want,’ she shouts in my hair as the train roars through the tunnel towards home.

  ‘What about the others? Can they be anything they want?’ I yell back, fisting popcorn into my mouth. I’m testing her theory, for surely if she believes those hopeless lumps can be anything, she is not a reliable source of information.

  I wait as she thinks for a moment, and by the time we have exited the dingy light of the tunnel for the outer world of sky and space, she says, ‘I’m not so sure about the others.’ The disappointment in her voice is reassuring.

  ‘Why?’ I ask, encouraging her.

  ‘Well, they don’t have the same interest in the world as you and me. We’re different. And I suppose I didn’t have the time to give them as I do to you. There were four of them under five. What was I to do? Take them
all with me? I couldn’t possibly.’

  She’s off track. I don’t want to hear about her or we, I want to hear about me, how different I am from them, from her too, for surely she does not think I will ever be like her, cooking, washing and ironing.

  ‘A mother can only do her best,’ she is saying. ‘No one is ever satisfied. Never.’

  ‘But I’m satisfied, Mumma.’

  Her eyes cast down her shoulder at me, sadly.

  ‘You’re the best mumma in the world,’ I say, looking up at her.

  As we face forward again, I see our heads tilting together in the glass at the end of the carriage.

  ‘One day you’ll grow up and leave me,’ I hear her say. It’s spoken lightly, but my response is firm.

  ‘No I won’t. Never. I will always need you to look after me.’

  I like to go into my brothers’ bedrooms when they are out, to check their pockets for coins. I also like to go through their drawers and feel about for things. Sometimes I find copies of the same magazines I find under my father’s side of the bed, ones with large glossy pictures of girls. Their arms and legs are folded up in the creases of the pages, and I like to stretch them out like a picture book, then fold them up again. I know these are the sort of girls my brothers like. Pretty ones. Not the slags and dogs I hear them snicker about.

  I look to the place they split open with their scissor fingers, then their bosoms, and finally I look at their faces. I spend a lot of time peering at their big soft eyes and kind smiles, noticing the way they seem to be looking at men like they love them. I never even look at my brothers, or my father, without turning my head away, just as they, too, avoid looking at me. One day I put my wall mirror on the floor and try to smile just like the girls with my legs open wide, but my forehead looks stern and my tummy thick and white—also I have a birthmark on my thigh that looks like dirt.

  ‘Don’t worry. Everything will grow. You have nothing to worry about,’ my mother says when I show her the pictures. ‘You’re your mother’s daughter, and men love me, I can assure you,’ she adds with a sneaky laugh. ‘But you’re right, Bubba. You must learn to smile more.’ She rubs my cheek with the backs of her fingers. ‘You must learn to look happy and bright. Men like that most of all.’