Brothers and Sisters

by Wood, Charlotte

  ‘Ant, I think you need to see someone,’ I said.

  Charged with carbohydrates, the melee of eight-year-olds fled the debris of the party table. For several minutes Brian and I tried to exhaust them by organising a game of Red Rover under the peppermint trees, but the idea didn’t take hold.

  Weary of manners and adult directions, first one boy then another broke away from the game and began running up the hill and rolling down again. Soon all of them were rolling and shrieking and somersaulting down the slope. Late-afternoon shadows were stretching across the park but the day’s clamminess seemed to have increased. In the heat, with the river so close, this fierce prickly game looked like madness. Over and over, hysterical, they rolled and climbed.

  Behind the main clump of boys, Anthony, less quick and agile, dizzy and red-faced, grass sticking to his shirt, picked himself up and staggered up the incline once more. His legs were wobbly sticks. As he climbed he had to avoid the mob of boys tumbling down, and several times he was knocked over. He was no longer in charge of events and the rebellious horde ignored his angry protests and indignant arm-waving. That urgent noise he was making sounded somewhere between shouting and sobbing. Then he got to his feet halfway up the hill, beat his sides with his fists and started to scream.

  Anthony drained his glass, leaned back in his chair, dropped his hands in his lap, breathed deeply—once, twice—as if willing the dangerous glimmer in his eyes to fade and a suitably serene expression to slide down his cheeks. ‘See someone? You mean a shrink?’

  ‘Well, a psychologist or counsellor or whatever.’ It sounded lame. He’d lost his father at the age of five. I tended to forget that. I’d been twelve when Mum died and eighteen when Dad did. Being five was probably worse. But at least he still had a mother. ‘You might find it very helpful, dealing with old emotional stuff.’

  ‘I have my own spiritual mentors,’ he declared. ‘And I’ve never been more emotionally stable in my life. In fact, I’m so calm that I don’t even resent your bloody gratuitous advice.’

  ‘Just because you’re calm doesn’t mean you’re not fucked up and don’t need help.’

  ‘And you’d be competent to judge that? With your background? A fucking painter who didn’t even go to university?’

  ‘Someone with more life experience and common sense than you, brother.’

  He raised an eyebrow. The resemblance was extraordinary. It could have been our father, towards the end. When he was bitter and hitting the bottle late at night, and always giving Sally and me strange looks; when he realised he’d remarried too soon, the wrong woman; when he was still mourning my mother. ‘Brother? Are you sure?’

  ‘Jesus! Well, half-brother then.’

  He was running a finger round the rim of his wineglass so it made an irritating thin scream. Another bloody circle. ‘You’re sure of that?’ he repeated.

  I could have whacked his smug hippie-lawyer head. ‘What are you getting at?’

  Anthony wore a prim smile, as if an old score was finally settled. ‘You never wondered why you’re short and olive-skinned? How incurious can you be? I hate to be the one to pass on family secrets, but you know your mother couldn’t have children?’

  For a few seconds I couldn’t see. The glare off the harbour, snowy tablecloths, the swirling white ruckus of the seagulls, blinded me. The whole scene was leached of tint and shade. Strangely, I recalled the faint watercolours of Lloyd Rees when his sight was fading at the end of his life. If it were me, I’d have chosen brighter and brighter colours. But his were pale, soft yet urgent paintings that paralleled his life force. Paintings needing to be quickly said before time ran out.

  I remembered how stressful my sister always found those get-togethers of the gingery Millers. The insouciant ways of the Spritzer Sisters, as she called them, the blithe, patronising attitude of Liz’s siblings towards ‘Monica’s kids’ made Sally edgy and self-conscious in their presence, and savagely mocking later. My shy sister always got plenty of sardonic material from family gatherings but they wore her out and in the end she’d given up attending them. My older, smaller sister.

  Anthony was rolling his napkin into a ball. ‘Very commendable of them in the circumstances to take you both in. I guess it must have been spiritually fulfilling in its way to snatch you from the tribe. All Monica’s doing, I’ve been told, and he went along with it because of her infertility problems. Complex legal processes involved, health and cultural risks. Made it easier you two being pale, I guess. God knows that community doesn’t give up its waifs too readily.’

  Some of the boys on the hill stopped surging and somersaulting to stare at Anthony and his noise. The sisters glanced up from their spritzers and cigarettes, shook their heads wearily and resumed chatting. Anthony bellowed on. Tired of the hubbub, a couple of boys made for the shade, brushed themselves down, drank some Coke and looked around for entertainment. Then they spotted the Slazenger bag, unzipped it, got out the bat and ball, set up the stumps and quietly began playing.

  I joined the game behind the wicket. The bowler bowled properly overarm, using the regulation hard six-stitcher; the batsman struck the ball squarely back to him two, three times. The face of the bat and the panther emblem hit the ball correctly with sharp, efficient cracks.

  Down the hill thundered Anthony. His pallor was gone and his curls were damp and stringy. Muddy tear streaks ran down his cheeks and spit frothed on his lips. ‘Give everything to me!’ he yelled. He raced up to the surprised batsman and snatched the bat from him; he took the ball from the bowler; he grabbed up the stumps. From the bitter ferocity of his glare, I could tell I had betrayed him.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I said.

  From under the peppermint trees his mother sang out, ‘Ant, play nicely.’

  For a moment he stood there undecided, with the cricket gear clasped possessively to his chest. Then he stacked it back into the Slazenger bag, picked up the bag and marched off down the park. He’d gone maybe twenty metres when something apparently occurred to him and he stopped, returned to the party table, collected all his birthday presents—some gifts still unopened—and crammed them into the bag as well. It was a tight squeeze: the panther was stretched to bursting.

  Very businesslike then, a grim smile fixed on his face, he strode down to the river. I watched him go, just as grimly. The sea breeze had finally arrived, sweeping through the peppermint trees, and snappy little waves began breaking on the shore. I followed him but I wasn’t going to stop him. Surely this tantrum would soon play itself out.

  Indeed, the bag must have become heavy because he had to haul it the last few metres across the sand and onto the jetty. Brushing aside skylarking wet children, curious onlookers, he dragged it the length of the jetty until he came to a pontoon just above the deep water. Then he heaved the bag into the river.

  All that wood inside it, and the trapped air; it floated easily. A couple of children dived in and set off after it, then gave up. The tide was going out and the Slazenger bag sailed away into the bay and bobbed into the wide river estuary. I reached the pontoon, and sat down along from Anthony, and we watched the bag in silence until it was gone.

  BEADS AND

  SHELLS

  AND TEETH

  Cate Kennedy

  When my sister was eight, I was almost seven and my precious long-awaited brother was only a couple of weeks old, my father left for a year’s duty in Vietnam. A special car came to pick him up and we stood on the kerb outside the front fence to wave him off and, for reasons I couldn’t fathom, laughter bubbled up in my throat, weird hysterical giggling. My mother looked across at me with disbelief, her own face blotchy and swollen with crying. Later, during that year of his absence, she would refer to the inappropriateness of my reaction. ‘You were smiling when he left,’ she would say with incontrovertible finality, when the topic of missing him came up. ‘You were laughing.’ I was, too—there was no denying it—laughing, while his face gazed with desperate pale sadness at us from the back
seat of the car, as we watched him fasten his seatbelt and grope for his sunglasses, the occasion as solemn as a military funeral. Many times I would remember my laughter rising uncontrollably like the last silvery spheres of oxygen from a drowning mouth. In the moment that bubble rose and burst I became a mystery to myself, and the knowledge of how easily this slip could occur burned like an oozing skinned knee, stiff with the jarring impact of an ignominious, unexpected fall.

  On the wall in the kitchen our mother hung a calendar of a fighter jet, with all the months of the year laid out beneath it. Each morning, after breakfast and before the school bus, my sister and I would cross out another day as it arrived. We had to take it in turns to avoid bickering, taking up the pen ritualistically and making a big solid X. We were scared to bicker, conscious that the smallest transgression in that house, tightly wound around our father’s absence, might cause everything to fly apart. Still, that calendar began to mock us from the wall as we carried days away from it, crumb by crumb, like ants.

  The airforce base sat on the flat baked-dry featureless plains west of Melbourne; the base itself and the aerodrome and fields and airmen’s quarters and the mess all secured with cyclone fencing and guard gates at either end.

  A man in a uniform would check your car and open the boom gate for you, and if your dad was driving the man would look ahead into the distance and salute smartly as you drove through. With the exception of the Group Captain’s place at the end of the street, every house on the base was exactly the same. People tried, with different curtains and configurations of furniture, to express a little individuality in these houses stamped from identical prefabricated floor plans. They hung up carvings from their postings in Malaysia or displayed souvenirs and paintings they’d bought in Europe and the UK, but, ironically, because everyone had been to more or less the same few RAAF locations, even these ornaments gave the houses a familiar sameness. Everybody had a few carved wooden animals from Nairobi, and a set of watercolour prints of Paris street scenes. Everybody had lacquered raffia ottomans they’d bought from street vendors in quick onshore visits while crossing the Suez Canal on the boat on the way home, and a set of placemats depicting Britain’s stately homes. The houses themselves were surrounded by square patches of lawn and neatly edged rows of shrubs, zinnias and pansies. People generally planted annuals rather than perennials, things that would bloom for the year or two you were there, flowers that weren’t planted to last the duration, because they didn’t need to be. There was nothing perennial about airforce life.

  We always felt perfectly safe, with the guard gates there—it was a rare occasion we had a babysitter, although social life on the base for the adults seemed generally conducted at a punishing pace of cocktails, dinner parties and dining-in nights. Our parents had already undertaken a posting in England, and so the ornaments and furniture in our meticulously maintained house seemed to have been wrongly set down there from some other posher, bigger house in another era—Wedgwood jugs on spindly rosewood-varnished side tables, copper coal scuttles, an antique chaise longue we weren’t meant to sit on, silver tea and coffee pots stored with dinner sets in the chiffonier. It always felt strange to sit on the lounge suite in the living room, like the cushions had somehow been plumped for someone more important than you, who might arrive at any time.

  I loved my books, and pored over them like they were illuminated manuscripts. It was the stories in books which stayed clear and unchangeable; they were always exactly as I remembered them. In our square prefab house on the base and in the ‘portables’, the shoddy demountable classrooms of our school, it was real life that had a temporary, illusory air, as if every building in our lives could be knocked down or transported elsewhere instantly on someone’s whim. Stories were the constant—reliable and unwavering as a song learned by heart. You were allowed to keep some to put in your box when your dad got posted somewhere new, and even though everything would be strange and scary you could open that box and there were your dear beloved friends, waiting for you, still smelling exactly the same.

  With a new baby in the house our mother required us to be good and helpful and not argue or drive her mad. We tried to stay under her radar and learn the complicated strategies required for survival. In this, like any kids, we were hopelessly outmanoeuvred, brilliantly kept in check—and, in fact, checkmated—by simple adult sophistication. There were eighteen months separating my sister and me in age, but our mother dressed us exactly the same, as if we were twins, although two more unlikely twins you’d never see—my sister was small and dark and pretty; I was fair, wore glasses and always looked untidy. Our childhood photos show us setting off for birthday parties in identical dresses, holding our presents under our arms, our fine hair scraped and coiffed with ribbons, cringing into the full sun for the camera. In others we sit with Santa in mirror-image outfits, smiling sheepish best-behaviour smiles, full of the sad, dutiful obedience of childhood. Our best dresses were squarish white-flecked pink, with a long thin bib of crimson ribbon edged in puffy lace. We looked, frankly, like a couple of Iced Vo-Vos.

  We never questioned this, any more than we questioned the uniforms worn by all men on the base; it was as inviolable and irresistible as the weather. People who bought us gifts of clothes conceded to it as well, and purchased the same items, and our hearts would sink when we saw two presents predictably identical in size and shape appear. Other people seemed to have some instinctual understanding, though, that two sisters eternally dressed the same would nurture a secret longing for a splash of differentiation. They would buy the outfits in two different colours. My sister would receive the pink version, and I would get the blue. (Was I a tomboy? Was that it? Or just a bookish geek with glasses who meekly wore what she was given?) The clothes were always a little big, of course, so we could ‘grow into them’.

  We stood and looked at our acquired personas hanging in the wardrobe, the identities that we would grow into, taken care of on our behalf. We were siblings, and so we were rivals—for favour, for attention, for bitterly contested territories invisible to outsiders. Every assumption that we were keen to wear the same clothes, or be invited on outings together, or be treated, in fact, as a single entity, made this opposition more precise, more obsessive, more intricately maintained. We never mutinied—we barely spoke. Instead, we hunkered down to sit out our childhood with cold-war enmity flowing between us like two opposing magnets. We divided our bedroom and our property into two exact and scrupulous halves, with invisible boundaries separating the floor, the wardrobe space and the items on top of the dressing-table. It was a covert inch this way then a retaliatory inch back that way, like the Battle of the Somme.

  ‘Don’t they look lovely?’ people said as we stood ready for photos, and we turned the corners of our mouths up obligingly, eyes front, neat in our identical dresses. Dreading the instruction Put your arm around your sister.

  How could adults do this—ignore reality and manufacture an instamatic cosiness that existed nowhere else? Were they satisfied with it, content to see their children bare their teeth in such stiff pretence of exuberance and spontaneity? When I look at photo albums now—not just my own, but everyone’s—I wonder about these moments summoned and preserved flat behind cellophane pages, this passing-out parade. I catch sight of an arm carefully around a shoulder, and I hear an adult voice behind the lens, instructing; I feel the duress, the prickling reluctance of skin-to-skin contact. Over here, girls. Big smiles.

  As the weeks of that year turned into months and news of the Vietnam War was on the news every night, my sister and I began to up the ante with the calendar. It wasn’t enough just to cross out a day; we needed more. We took to scoring the pen heavily and thoroughly through the whole week, blocking out the entire seven days with the grim satisfaction of defacement. We’d compete to see who got to make the X on the final day of the month, because that person would win the right to take down the calendar, turn the glossy page towards themselves, and methodically scribble through the
whole month. We approached this task like acolytes undertaking the holiest rite allotted to them. The other sister would watch, mesmerised, as the lucky one would run the pen back and forth, scribbling vertically and horizontally, until the paper began to disintegrate under the ballpoint and the saturating ink.

  I see what we were doing now, because that calendar still exists, with its blue-sky image of a fighter plane, black-nosed and camouflage-khaki, suspended over twelve solid scribbled chunks of misery. We were doing everything we could, with the puny tools at our disposal, to obliterate our enemy—traitorous, intolerable time. Through our vertical and horizontal lines we slashed big extra Xs in jagged diagonal crosses. I can see them there still, with a jolt of nausea, like annihilated targets, like a giant single negation.

  With all that time came awful, belated realisations. I remembered the nights before our father had left, when my sister and I would be in the bath. He’d breeze in, bringing with him the intoxicating scent of the mess where he’d just had a beer or two, mingling with the smell of cigarette smoke and conversation, laughter and weather, exertion and oxygen. The door would open and fresh air would blow through the house with him as he entered, the smell of the outside world pouring through as he hung his hat on a chair and rolled up the sleeves of his powder-blue shirt to splash us clean in the bath. He would indulge us, making the soap jump from his hands like a fish while we laughed helplessly. Once he left for Vietnam, it was like he’d taken the keys to that door, and no afternoon breeze entered the house. The air felt short on oxygen. We lost our familiarity with that hinted-at outside world, or the faint, inchoate sense that we might one day come to live in it ourselves. We ceased to breathe it in, and, like breathing, we missed it with the shock of something taken purely for granted. The Clark’s pool stayed folded in an aqua-blue pile in the garage instead of unfailingly set up there by the Hills hoist, and our school shoes remained just where we left them, scuffed and knotted under our beds, instead of side by side by the back door, dark with polish and the laces magically untied by morning. I couldn’t recall ever thanking him for any of these things, of course; they’d just been there, reliable and unquestioned. Now my heart jumped guiltily like that soap from his cupped hands; recognising, too late, every one of these small things for what they were—gestures of love from an undemonstrative man.