Brothers and Sisters

by Wood, Charlotte

  In a small shop of antiquities and folk art, looking for a wedding present for Leonie and Jeremy, Wendy bought a small beaded handbag. She had not thought before, but she would need something to take to the wedding that was not her workaday leather handbag. This one was small enough to be elegant, but large enough for tissues, lip balm, keys and money. And for the little container, she thought. In case. Why had she brought the ashes, otherwise?

  She had begun to feel a secretive, low-level anxiety about the container, as if she were carrying some prohibited substance with her through the holiday. Above all she did not want Ruth to see the ashes when she came bustling into Wendy’s room, as she would, to rummage through her suitcase to borrow a scarf or a pair of earrings. For since Wendy had accepted the best room it was clear, though unspoken, that Ruth must have anything she pleased for the remainder of the holiday, including choosing for herself the earrings Wendy had planned to wear to the wedding. To keep the little Tupperware tub from Ruth’s appalled discovery Wendy hid it at the back of her bedside table, slipping it inside a shopping bag beneath some holiday brochures.

  As she wandered around the shop, Wendy came across a display case of small beaten-metal votives. The proprietor told her in his beautiful English that these were called tamata in plural, tama in the singular. They mostly depicted a part of the body that was ailing, he explained, and a person would make the tama and take it to the church as an offering, a symbol of what the prayers were needed to mend.

  There was an ear, two separate hands, a heart, a baby, a foot, and a shoulder. Wendy chose the heart. It was made of fine, pretty silver. Leonie would put it on a shelf and think it exotically decorative and romantic. Origins did not matter to people like Leonie and Ruth, who had mass-produced cement Buddhas and ‘Moroccan’ lanterns from Ikea around their swimming pools.

  Ruth liked things that were cute: a dish-scrubber that looked like a giraffe, a knife-block in the shape of a man being stabbed. Wendy knew her private derision of Ruth’s taste was snobbery. But she couldn’t help it. Whenever Ruth showed her some decorated household object—washing-up gloves with fur cuffs and a diamond ring, or a leopard-print doormat, or a chicken-shaped egg-timer—and said gleefully, ‘Isn’t it fun!’, Wendy wanted to shout at her that they were not children. Why must everything be entertainment?

  Standing in the shop with the little beaten heart in her hand Wendy tried to remember if she had always been this ill-tempered with Ruth, or if it was only since Jim died that she had said goodbye to the possibility of trivial, empty pleasures.

  She paid for the little heart, and the man wrapped it in soft green tissue paper. It was a good present; pretty and romantic and Greek. And Leonie would never know that the tama had been made because someone once thought their heart might be broken.

  On the morning of the wedding Ruth’s mobile rang time and time again. In the late morning, women began to appear at their house with their hair held in outlandish shapes by large rollers, giggling and hooting, disappeared again, then reappeared holding an electrical extension cord or a pair of hair tongs, or a paper bag full of pastries.

  Still others came and went with armfuls of olive branches and red bougainvillea, to be dumped for a time in Ruth and Wendy’s bath, and then taken away again. Jeremy showed up briefly, cleanshaven and smelling lovely, and kissed Ruth and Wendy before he left, calling, See you when I’m a married man!

  There was an air of holiday excitement. The house and the terrace echoed with high voices and light laughter, and the smell of coffee and the popping of champagne corks. Wendy stood on her bedroom balcony and looked down at the throng of women seated around the terrace.

  Lucy, her long hair loose and her bangles shoved high on her forearms, sat on a stool in jeans with her legs wide to accommodate the knees of another woman perched on another stool before her. The woman chatted and laughed as Lucy smoothed her fingers upwards over her cheeks, or told her to look up while she painted her lashes.

  Other women were arranged about the terrace, some standing, some lounging in chairs. They held champagne flutes aloft, and munched on pastries held away from their bodies so as not to catch any sticky flakes. Some were half-dressed in slips and jeans, while others wore glamorous frocks that sparkled, and shiny jewelled sandals.

  They were beautiful. They shone. They had an ease with sensual pleasure—an unquestioning, guiltless talent for it—that women of Wendy’s generation lacked. Women of her age had either spurned this preening as vanity, or else borne the effort of grooming as something dutiful, hard-edged. But these women were different. Physical delight came to them as naturally as breathing.

  Wendy stepped back into her room and saw her face in the mirror: dried-out, colourless, pinched.

  She sat on the bed for a minute. Then she went down the stairs and out onto the terrace. Some of the women called happy greetings to her as she sidled across the paving stones to Lucy.

  ‘Of course, Wendy,’ Lucy said. She looked at her watch. ‘Get dressed; I’ll do you after Ali, and then I’ll have to get out and get the bride done.’

  Someone handed Wendy a glass of sparkling wine, and she sipped it, and took it up to her room. She felt some flush of freshness tingling over her. She was beginning to enjoy the girlishness of this occasion without, for once, feeling foolish and fraudulent.

  She was sitting in the shade on the little stool with her eyes closed, with Lucy’s cool, moist fingers feathering over her face, when another young woman arrived. She had a blonde ponytail and a pierced nostril, and stood uncertainly, holding a bucket and a broom. The cleaner.

  ‘Oh, I forgot!’ said Ruth. But they waved the girl inside, and she disappeared up the stairs. Soon they heard a vacuum cleaner’s thrum.

  An hour later, when everyone but Ruth had gone, Wendy saw herself in her bathroom mirror.

  The bathroom smelled fresh and her bedroom was orderly, the bed made with fresh pale green sheets and her things stacked and folded tidily on the chair and the bedside table.

  Wendy leaned into the mirror, trying to focus on her earrings as she slipped them through the holes in her lobes, but she could not help sneaking glances at her face. Eventually she straightened, and stared.

  She didn’t look like a man.

  She didn’t appear to be wearing make-up at all. Her eyes were clear and blue, and the planes of her nose and her cheekbones had strength and dignity. She seemed taller. What had Lucy done? Apart from the gloss at her lips Wendy found the make-up impossible to see. Perhaps it was her eyesight. But her face, in the mirror, seemed to radiate some force of life, some charge of beauty that came from being alive, that she had not ever seen in herself before. It was this all the young women had; this blaze of life. And now Wendy had it too. She stared and stared.

  Ruth was calling from the bottom of the stairs, and Wendy trotted about her room, calm and regal, gathering things into the beaded handbag. And then her heart seized.

  The little tub, the ashes of Jim, had gone.

  The bedside table was clean. But the plastic bag with the magazines and brochures was gone.

  The bins were empty. The one in the bedroom, and the bathroom one with its carefully folded wads of toilet paper, all empty and clean. She remembered now the girl leaving, hauling behind her one of the large heavy-duty orange plastic garbage bags Wendy had seen in the streets.

  She sat on the bed, her breath coming fast and cold. She put her hands out flat on the cool bed sheets on either side.

  Ruth shouted up the stairs now, ‘Wendy, they’re waiting.’

  A shivering began to fill her chest. She breathed. She knew the ashes had gone, but still she began to bolt around the room, tearing at things and lifting scarves and bags and hats.

  ‘Wendy! For heaven’s sake!’

  At last she made her way down the stairs and pushed past Ruth, out across the terrace and into the lane.

  ‘Wait for me!’ Ruth called, as she locked the heavy door.

  Wendy climbed into the back sea
t of the car, sunglasses jammed on her face. She clutched her handbag and the straw hat and a tissue, staring out of the window, trying to swallow the lump of pain in her throat, forcing back her rising tears.

  Next to her, Ruth was plump and garrulous. Their arms pressed together, and Wendy could feel her sister’s warm, happy skin against her own.

  She had done something terrible, something she had believed she could never, ever do. She had separated herself from Jim. Distracted by trivial, selfish pleasure, she had forsaken him.

  She wanted to be sick.

  As the car moved Ruth said, ‘What a marvellous day!’ and through the window Wendy saw a pile of the orange garbage bags slumped against a wall in the heat. Three hungry cats licked at a torn corner of a bag, where filth and decay spilled onto the old stone stair.

  At the wedding reception it was Ruth who looked as if she had lived in Greece for half her life, and Wendy was the tight-smiling outsider, sitting at the end of the table with some old people, friends of the groom’s parents who had travelled from England.

  A man next to Wendy was from Oxford. He leaned across and said, ‘I hate Greek food. I don’t know why they can’t serve it hot, do you?’ And then sneered, showing his yellow teeth.

  Sitting across from Wendy was Derek.

  She watched her sister down the table. Ruth wore a white silk blouse and chocolate satin trousers, and her brown hair was swept up glamorously. Wendy had never seen Ruth with her hair up. She looked twenty years younger. And she wore Wendy’s earrings, citrine and peridot drops, which glinted and shimmered as Ruth turned her head, chatting merrily with a young man in a beautiful green shirt. A woman on the other side of Ruth put her fingers up behind the earring, remarking on it, and Wendy watched Ruth absently finger it and say, Citrine, from Greece actually. She didn’t even look up the table to Wendy when she said it.

  The man from Oxford saw Wendy watching Ruth and the man with the beautiful shirt, and he said in his loud English voice, ‘I didn’t know so many of Jeremy’s friends were homos, did you?’

  Across the table Derek sniggered into his glass. He was wearing the suit again, but without the woollen tie. He drank a lot.

  A little boy dashed between the tables, dumping plates of food in the centre. Mit mit! cried the boy, when he set down the meatballs, and Feesh feesh! when the plate of little fried fish came.

  The man from Oxford had turned away to talk to someone friendlier. Derek looked at Wendy, and asked, ‘What are you doing up this end?’

  He was tugging at his left nostril with his thumb and forefinger. It was quite disgusting, but she liked him.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she said gallantly. ‘They have to put people somewhere, don’t they? I suppose they think old people have things in common. Why are you here?’

  He snorted unattractively. ‘Ah. They put all the misfits up here.’

  She didn’t like him so much now. She watched him drain his glass of the pale red wine they were serving. He reached across his neighbour for the jug and filled his glass to the brim.

  Wendy drew the jug towards her then, and filled her own.

  She understood, as she sat back in her chair, that it wasn’t just Derek’s drinking that had seen him relegated to this end of the table; everybody was drinking a lot.

  It was that sad people were not really wanted at weddings. That was why she had been put up here with Derek.

  The man from Oxford turned to her again. She smelled his sour breath.

  Long after the speeches Wendy sat, not listening to the man from Oxford’s voice drilling into her about his shares, the plummeting price of something or other.

  The sun had set, and in the dusk the awning of the little taverna swung with coloured lights.

  Down the long table, Ruth was surrounded by Leonie’s friends, attentive and sweet, their heads bent towards her and eyebrows raised, smiling expectantly if she began to speak. Now and then Wendy could tell from the friends’ expressions that Ruth had said something ignorant, or mean, but Leonie’s friends did not remark on it; they quickly regained their smiles and changed the subject. Everybody knew their roles here, at a wedding. And the bride’s friends knew Ruth was the bride’s mother, must be cared for and cosseted. So they reached for glasses for her, poured her wine, beckoned a dish back from the other end of the table if she liked it.

  A great tide of savage, bitter envy swept through Wendy.

  She got up from the table and wandered away from the balloon of light, leaving the man from Oxford to turn his droning voice to Derek, who sat stone-faced and drunk in his chair.

  She picked her way across the gravel and the pebbles in her bare feet, and then she reached the water’s edge, her feet sinking to the ankles in the clean grey grit. She stepped back and sat down on the pebbles.

  She did not want to be this maudlin old woman, tearful in the dark at weddings. This afternoon she had seen another woman, very briefly, in the mirror. But that was the terrible thing she had done. She had wanted to be that other woman. Renewed. And because of that she had let poor, beloved Jim—for it was actually him she had disregarded—be left behind. Thrown away.

  She burrowed her two hands up to the wrists into the sand beside her, put her head to her knees, and cried.

  Then someone was staggering up from the far end of the beach, calling, ‘Wendy! What are ya doing?!’

  She didn’t answer.

  ‘Are you being sick?’ called Ruth, who was drunk.

  Wendy stood up. ‘Of course not!’

  But she did feel a little drunk now, having rushed to stand upright, and the sea slurping back and forth.

  ‘Oh,’ said Ruth. ‘I did.’ She giggled sheepishly, and wiped her mouth. ‘Think I drank too much of that wine.’ She burped. ‘Sorry,’ she said solemnly. They stood looking at the sea.

  Then Ruth, her voice full of emotion, cried, ‘I miss Alan!’

  The swell of bitterness inside Wendy crested, and crashed down. She turned on Ruth. ‘Alan! He could have come but he couldn’t be bothered. You’ll see him next week! You have your children. What could you possibly have to miss!’

  Ruth said nothing, but looked out at the dark water. She sniffed.

  In a little while she said, in a simple, peaceable voice, ‘I’m allowed.’

  She sat down, dumpily, in the sand.

  Wendy stayed where she was. The sea heaved and moved. Jim was dead and gone, and she had no children. She had made her life; now she was lying in it.

  This is all that’s left, she thought. And it’s Ruth.

  She stood over her sister and they both looked at the water. Music from the wedding came in drifts from behind them.

  One day soon, watching the water on the swimming pool in Ruth and Alan’s backyard, thinking back to the wedding in Greece, Wendy would be suddenly tired of being secretive and complicated and alone. She would be tired of her disdain for Ruth. She would be tired to the bone of Jim being dead, but even more tired of missing him, of the watchfulness and diligence it demanded, the effort and duty of it. She would go home and tip the last of the ashes from the cricket palace into a small dip in the garden bed, and press the earth down with her fingers.

  But now, here on the beach with Ruth, she simply stood.

  Eventually Ruth got up from where she sat, letting out one of her long, old-people groans as she rose, and Wendy put out her arm to help her sister steady herself while she brushed the damp sand from the back of her trousers, and they turned and walked back towards the party lights.

  FAMILY RADIO

  Roger McDonald

  A dust storm blew until it reached the riverbank, where it stalled in the sky, a cliff, purple-bruised, highlighting one side of the Louth road as red, the other as green. A steam pump made from an old boat’s boiler drew water from the clay-smelling river, irrigating lucerne in leaky sweeps and flooding lanes of an orchard, where oranges hung in the trees.

  At the Watsons’ ‘Blindale’ on the river road, Tony Watson lay around on
the shady verandah boards like a bog-eye lizard waiting for a fly, turning the pages of a Marvel Family comic and feeling sick with a malaise without name. Happiness was a sensation so rare that it was unrecognisable when it came. Now he had a name for it: Blindale.

  After a shower under the tank stand Tony wiped a sweaty mirror, stared into his grey eyes between the cracked splats of silvering, and made his voice into Churchill’s, fighting ’em on the beaches, the British Bulldog’s vowels and growls rolling from the voice box of a pale-skinned chicken-chested boy; shifting then to a nasal Nazi interrogator promising, ‘We haff ways off making you talk.’

  Tony came into the house and heard the cat snoring. Everything gave him pleasure: the cat snoring, the blanket the cat slept under, design and nap thereof, the ring of damp soil at the tank stand where zebra finches came for water, the sight of the yellow sponge cake with passionfruit icing under the mauve gauze fly cover on the kitchen table. It was a cake to celebrate his hitting his teens. He hummed along to the sound of the wind under the roofing iron. This was home and it wasn’t a dream: knitted tea cosy, butter board, carved emu egg on the living room shelf, Gundabooka Mountain waddy-donger tied to the hallway wall with fuse wire, and Pop’s Velocette motorbike propped at the garden gate when Pop came in for a cuppa. Tony thought himself into the photos the family had, of the son who died (diphtheria, buried in a sky-blue coffin). They’d taken on Tony to fill the gap.

  ‘My brother, Chicka,’ Tony whispered, awestruck by this idea of himself, the way it built and built and might never be covered over, if he lived long enough to see what could happen. ‘Tony Watson,’ he mouthed, looking down at his arms with their light gingery hairs. He reached for a tambourine and gave it a hissing shake at the level of his jug ears. Before this move his name was O’Malley, a little strop of a weedy biffed and bruised boy in a dormitory scrummage. Father: unknown. Mother: deceased.