Brothers and Sisters Read online

  A parcel arrived taped with limp, scuffed paper, and we knew it was from Dad. Inside were two cylinders wrapped in newspaper which was thin and smelled different and was in a different language. As soon as I saw it I imagined taking a few pages of it somewhere—a bus stop, a park bench, the school quadrangle, somewhere public—and sitting, pretending I could read it. As I hesitated, looking at the strange writing on it, my sister unwrapped one of the cylinders and it was a beautiful black-haired doll, with white skin and pink cheeks, a tall slender figure in the Vietnamese national costume fixed onto a black wooden stand. She was wearing a long dress with black velvety designs on it, and little slippers, and unbelievably, that dress was blue. When I saw this I began to unwrap my parcel very slowly, because I knew now, with a thrilled, suppressed delight, what would be inside—an identical doll only in a pink dress. Pink! The parcels hadn’t been labelled with our names, so I’d scored.

  I unwrapped my doll and looked her over carefully. It was immediately clear that she was superior on two counts. Not only was her dress pink, her hair was loose with a small bun on top, while my sister’s doll’s hair was in a cumbersome beehive. It was a red-letter day. I examined her lips and almond-shaped eyes, drawn in with the finest of black lines, and her skin as pale as a peeled egg. She was perfect in every way.

  I couldn’t stop thinking about how I would look if I had a dress like that, long and fitted with the white trousers underneath. That night, I wrapped my sheet tightly around myself, right down to my feet, and looked at myself in the dressing-table mirror, holding up my hair with one hand. Our mother sometimes put our hair up in a bun for special occasions, using a thing like a donut to pull our hair through, then she’d spray it and all day you’d smell that sticky flowery smell and the pins would push into your head. My sister looked great with her hair in a bun, as cute as Gidget, but I knew that with my glasses I looked stupid, the way librarians always looked in comics, like someone to make fun of. I could have a compromise bun, though, like my doll’s. What I wanted most were her serenely uptilting, almond-shaped eyes.

  When I took my glasses off and leaned into the dressing-table mirror and pulled my eyelids just slightly slanted, I looked totally different. It was hard keeping the sheet wrapped tight with both forefingers at the corners of my eyes, but I was oddly compelled towards this new, possible me.

  After we turned out the bedroom light I lay with my fingers against the side of my head, pulling back my eyelids. I could stretch them into place, I thought. If I lay there all night and did it, it would work. My hands started to get tired and I began to experiment with positions where it wasn’t so uncomfortable. It would be worth it, having those beautiful, unusual eyes.

  ‘What are you doing?’ my sister whispered from her bed. She’d learned the perfect modulation required for icy contempt.

  ‘Nothing.’ But somehow, she knew.

  ‘That is so, so stupid,’ she said. She turned over, in her pink pyjamas, and we lay there as stiff as boards in our beds, me with my fingers braced in place, furtive and embarrassed but still soothed, somehow. It was almost like having an important job to do, something special entrusted to me.

  But in the morning, my hands were under the blankets, tucked between my knees, the way I always slept. And my eyes, I noted miserably, were still round. Behind my glasses, they looked exactly the same.

  Our dolls lived on a high shelf in our room, our belongings placed into their designated halves, surveying all that went on below, never played with, never mussed or ‘ruined’. They were too precious. I just had to smell their synthetic dresses and black, lacquered hair to conjure up the olfactory world of Vietnam—a world of women on tippytoes with pure white faces and eyebrows as fine as an upswept eyelash—it was warm and exotic there, and smelled like nylon and plastic and dust.

  Our next presents arrived. Two square boxes this time, wrapped extensively in layers of protective paper and tape, with that same secret, spicy smell. We turned our backs to each other in tacit collusion so we wouldn’t see the other’s first. Under the layers were two identical black and red lacquered music boxes. When you wound up the brass key and turned the snib to open the lid, a tiny pink plastic ballerina pirouetted in front of a wall of mirrors to the tune ‘On the Street Where You Live’. When I heard that song and recognised it from My Fair Lady, a film I’d actually seen down the road at the base cinema, I felt a sudden fierce squeeze of choked recognition, as if everything were momentarily connected—the music-box factory, my father in a market in Vung Tau, the Saturday matinee, Rodgers and Hammerstein, all of it.

  ‘They’re not to play with,’ our mother said. ‘Put them somewhere they won’t get ruined. Imagine how Dad would feel if he came home and they were broken.’

  She made sure that we didn’t overwind them or touch the fragile ballerina on her tiny spring, and after a while the shining red and black music boxes did indeed seem too special to play with, and we put them solemnly on either side of the dressing table in our bedroom, which our mother had decorated with a frilled pink tulle valance. Inside, next to the ballerina, was the little hinged lacquer drawer.

  ‘For all your precious things,’ our mother said.

  I’m sorry to say that, at first, even our precious things were pretty much identical. First to go in were the rosary beads Nanna had given us when we visited her in Adelaide, before Dad went away. She’d let us play with her glow-in-the-dark statue of the Virgin Mary and given us each a set of old silver rosaries. She’d told us why they were so special but I hadn’t been listening; it was my turn after she’d gone to hide under the quilt again with the glowing lady, and in any case my rosaries were soon, inexplicably, broken.

  Also in the drawer were our round discontinued fifty-cent coins, which we believed were very valuable.

  Then I put in, secretly, some tiny pink shells Dad had sent me from a beach in Vietnam which he’d included in one of his weekly letters. Mum had told me he’d had to walk a very long way for these special shells, right to the end of a huge beach. It had been a hot day, she’d said, and yet that’s what he’d done; that was the evidence that he was always thinking of us. The shells were no bigger than my little brother’s delicate pink fingernails.

  I imagined that beach; a long shining curve of it hazily disappearing into the distance. At the near end the shells were large and ordinary, scattered in their millions, but as you walked further and further towards the horizon, your feet crunching on nothing but shells, they began to shrink in size. It wasn’t until you came to the very end of the sliver of beach, a place a little like heaven, that the tiny, truly precious shells lay, a reward for true devotion. They were the ones that I had, now.

  Years later, when I came across my lacquered music box in a storage carton somewhere, I lifted the lid and checked inside the drawer. I was taken aback to see in there, alongside the shells and the tarnished rosary beads, some small pearly objects I recognised with a start as my own milk teeth. What perverse childlike conviction had possessed me to save my own teeth that year as they fell out? I’d believed them to be something uniquely valuable, something worth saving, to show Dad. They looked a little creepy now, jumbled there with their sharp red edge of root exposed, but I saw my seven-year-old reasoning: the teeth and the shells resembled each other; lustrous with nacre and enamel. They seemed to belong together, like something you could thread side by side onto a necklace, something to wear next to your skin that nobody else had.

  Summer came and we wore our Chinese shortie pyjamas in pastel pink and blue, decorated with dragon embroidery. They were narrow-cut and uncomfortable, chafing our sunburnt skin, but we loved them because they’d come all the way from Vietnam. We pulled them over tight, sunburnt shoulders on Sunday nights to watch Disneyland as heat radiated from our scarlet legs, slick with Johnson’s Vaseline Intensive Care Lotion, watching as Tinkerbell touched her wand to the Disney buildings and our favourite show started with animated fireworks. Adventureland! Fantasyland! Frontierland! We gazed,
transfixed by all of them. Whichever land it was, we wanted it.

  We waited our turn to pick up the pen and make the cross. We tried to entertain and look after our baby brother, bouncing his bassinette, tickling him, dipping his dummy into chocolate Quik or honey to stop him crying. One day Mum told us we had something special to look forward to—a trunk-call telephone conversation with Dad. We learned about it weeks in advance and the night approached like Christmas.

  ‘You’ll have to think carefully about what you’re going to say to him,’ our mother warned us. ‘You’ll hardly have time for anything. I’ll give you the phone and you’ll just have time to say, “Hello, Dad, I’m missing you!” and not much else. Do you understand? Don’t waste time, because it will be terribly expensive. Maybe you should write something down so you don’t go blank.’

  That night in bed I stared sightlessly at my library book, racking my brains. There was so much to say to Dad, about the presents he’d sent and the shells and how careful I was being, how hard we were trying to be well behaved all the time like he wanted and how our little brother had a new tooth, and the pool and the shoelaces. These were all things that had to be said, but I wouldn’t be able to say them because Mum, not to mention my sister, would be hovering right behind me listening to every word. We’d all be eavesdropping on each other, measuring our own self-censorship.

  The date of the trunk call approached and we began to gear up for it, ready for that phone ringing like it was a starter pistol, or a signal to commence an exam. My head felt thick with unsaid things; declarations and anecdotes, secret grievances and pangs of guilt. The night before the call I lay in bed sorting and assembling, evaluating, editing and discarding, sick for the sound of his voice and the knowledge that he would be listening, the words tumbling and ebbing and churning together in my brain. Not the big, expected words, the easy ones, but the small, precious words you only found at the very end. It all seemed so fragile and breakable. I could hear the rustling of paper from my sister’s bed, the sound of a pencil scribbling something out.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I said.

  ‘None of your business.’

  We were as keyed up and jumpy as racehorses when the call finally came the next evening. I watched my mother speak into the receiver, frowning and stopping and starting, her shoulder curving away from us as she listened.

  Nobody to put the pool up without you and I fixed a puncture on my bike by myself your chair looks so empty without you when are you coming home when is it going to be normal again

  then my sister taking the receiver and smiling shyly, listening and answering sweetly in monosyllables, using up all that money Mum had told us about, not saying anything, just replying

  Little Pete’s got a new tooth and I didn’t mean to laugh when you left I was really crying, I don’t know what happened

  then the phone receiver was handed to me and when I listened I heard the whistling empty echo of thousands of miles between us and here it was, my only chance in a year.

  ‘Hello, Dad, I’m missing you!’ I called cheerily, boisterously; the one you didn’t have to worry about, the one who liked blue.

  Everything unsaid trickled, repressed, back into silence—an underground tributary, a thread of unacknowledged self, tender as the root of a tooth. This to me defines the sheer haplessness of childhood: the ability to recognise what must be kept hidden to survive. It flows through us while we stand wretched and utterly straitjacketed by a world too complex for us; it is an endless, subdued relinquishing of the will. ‘I could control you with a look,’ is something my mother says now to my sister and myself, with something like reminiscent pride in her voice, that she could keep us in line while her husband was away, leaving her with three young children. They seem like measures of another age now—to never speak unless spoken to, to never answer back or contradict, to garner praise by staying dull and dutiful and inoffensive—like pointless, hard-won medals in a war everyone would prefer to forget. Except for the inexorable secret life that grows away from this dominion, like tiny weeds that grow sideways in the darkness under an unyielding slab of stone, threadlike and white and spindly but still forming somewhere, enduring the deforming pressure but still in complex circumvention towards the light.

  In the year of my father’s Vietnam posting, carefully checking our small treasures in our music boxes and waiting for our turn to mark off and obliterate another day on the calendar, my sister and I understood the difference between his quiet presence and the silence of true absence. That silence, so palpable and heavy, renders you mute in return. You are left with small things, your stored treasures, the brief shocking moment of recognition when you glance at your sister’s face as you hand back the phone, and see sympathy, raw and unmistakable. Then your eyes drop away. You know you didn’t imagine it, but even this—maybe especially this—stays unsaid. Things unsaid fill up every room.

  Before he died I self-published the memoirs my father had been working on for years as a surprise for him, but the timeframe never reached the period of his time in Vietnam. On a tape I have he tries to begin it, his voice a hoarse painful whisper due to the surgery he’d just undergone for thyroid cancer. He describes how the Australian soldiers stationed in Vung Tau with him helped build and maintain the An Phong orphanage nearby, filled with Vietnamese war orphans.

  ‘The army would bring all these little kids down to the back beach which was near our base, for a swim and a barbecue,’ he recalls. ‘There was one little bloke who stands out in my mind, who just stood back on his own. I went over to him, and he held my hand, for the whole day. Poor little bugger. Next time they came back, he ran up to me, and again, he was okay, but again he never left my side. That day when he got up on the truck to go back, he handed me a little parcel, a little hand-wrapped parcel. With a clean folded hanky inside.’

  On the tape I hear my father’s voice crack and break. It wrenches with sobs.

  ‘I’d given him nothing,’ he whispers, ‘but he’d given me this. And these are the things that used to break my heart.’

  The story of that little boy was about the only thing our father ever told my sister and me about Vietnam, and only then because we asked him about the handkerchief, which remained one of his most treasured possessions. In a story in one of my books, I used to think with a savage sense of having been cheated, it would have turned out that we would have adopted that little boy. That was how it should have ended, clicking into place with satisfying story-like inevitability, in a bigger world where bigger hearts ruled. I opened my books after that, and doubted their veracity. They were just pasteboard, really, holding together pages of paper in a certain order; their magic began to seem a little childish. Real life, colourless and hard and demanding to be endured, was the thing that would still be there when you woke up in the morning.

  Over thirty-five years later, I listen on the tape to that poor little boy still breaking my father’s heart, then the sound of him manfully swallowing, trying to continue to speak. The words scrape faintly and huskily through his ravaged voice box, scarred with tumours, like every sentence hurts. In the background of the recording I hear my baby daughter start crying, demanding to be fed, and it seems like the cruellest irony that of all the things his cancer robbed him of, it took away his voice, ensuring that the rest of those stories would never be told, after all.

  My golden-haired, cherubic brother was just over a year old when my father returned. Considering he’d missed his son’s first year of life in its entirety, my mother was anxious to have something, some ‘first’ he could be present for, and so she had valiantly fought a losing battle to keep my brother from toddling before Dad was home to witness it. She’d strapped him, squirming, into his stroller at the airport as we saw the plane carrying our father touch down and taxi towards us. As we waited, craning our heads in anticipation for Dad to appear through the doors at the end of the long corridor, she must have let the baby down for a brief respite from the confines of the stroller. M
y sister and I strained at the barricades we’d been expressly forbidden to step beyond.

  When I saw the figure of my father striding towards us in the distance, thin and tanned and lanky in his fawn short-sleeved uniform, I became, for the second time in my life, a momentary stranger to myself. Heedlessly, I ducked under the barricade to run towards him. I think I remember feeling my sister hesitate, wavering between following me and maintaining obedience, and me running out alone, and my father bending down to sweep me up, the expression on his face one of unutterable relief.

  He rose and kept walking, towards my mother and sister. A few more seconds and we were all over him . . . well, everyone except for my brother, who took one look at this stranger and burst into howling tears. Putting his newly acquired toddling skills to use, he took off in the opposite direction.

  Now that I am a parent myself, I imagine how that must have felt to my father, watching his child run terrified from him, feeling the rest of us cling to him like he was a lifebuoy. I imagine everything he vowed in that moment, to subject none of his family to what he’d been through, to bear it in silence. Pain like this, I can see now, heals in us like an unset broken bone; the fracture knitted together uncertainly under the surface, something you can never quite trust to bear your weight.