Brothers and Sisters

by Wood, Charlotte

  ‘Natalie?’ the voice said into my ear. Her fingers touched my wrist, light as fairy dust, and twenty years vanished. I was flung back to the days of Klara, the hot sunshine and tickly grass, our special jokes and the purse full of lucky white stones we collected from each corner of the playground, chanting as we went.

  When I turned I half expected to see the old Klara, her earnest eyes gazing into mine, reedy brown hair wound into the tight plaits that boys at school felt compelled to twitch and pull at every opportunity. Instead there stood a woman with a blonde bob and smooth made-up skin. She shook her head and the hair followed in a perfect feathery swing.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ I said.

  My chair rocked on its wobbly legs. Klara gave me some answer about a connection to my cousin’s funeral as I tried to steady myself with my feet but found them jarring against the stubby carpet. A waiter came to collect the glasses and litter from the table. Once he had left, glasses in a ladder up his arm, the surface was still tacky with spilled beer and wine so that the underside of my arm peeled away from the table’s veneer like a strip of contact paper.

  ‘Natalie and I were at primary school together,’ Klara explained to her husband. ‘But my family moved to the country and we lost touch.’

  I stared at her.

  ‘We used to be best friends,’ Klara said.

  ‘I came to visit you after you moved.’ I had to raise my voice against the clamour of the mourners. My glass was empty. Acid biting into my gut.

  ‘Did you? I’d forgotten,’ she said, tilting her head, still alert and birdy. She leaned sideways so that her shoulder rested against her husband’s chest. ‘Natalie was one of the smart ones at school. She’s probably a doctor now, or a lawyer or something.’

  ‘I stayed at your house for a week.’

  She shook her head as if this was unbelievable to her. ‘I’ve got a terrible memory,’ she said. ‘Haven’t I, darling?’

  ‘You always remember where the credit card lives,’ her husband answered.

  ‘That’s because you let it live in my purse,’ she replied smartly and laughed.

  Of course she couldn’t be like the old Klara. It was a kind of relief. This was not Klara. This person wouldn’t know the answer to the elephant riddle that used to make us laugh until we got a stitch. She wouldn’t know anything about us, or what happened.

  On that day when we were twelve I eventually made my way back to the house. As I stumbled through the hot dry kitchen Klara’s mother asked me what had happened. ‘I fell over,’ I told her and she asked if I was hurt and I said no, just a bruise. ‘Are you sure, sweetheart?’ she asked me and I said yes, I was sure. She told me I should change my clothes and have another shower because I had dirt all down my back and in my hair and she didn’t want my mother thinking they hadn’t taken care of me. The hot water of the shower hurt me in every place. Afterwards I sat on the bed in Klara’s bedroom, wet hair dripping onto the eiderdown, waiting for my mother to arrive and take me home. Klara came and sat beside me. I was too exhausted to push her away. Klara’s mother put her head around the doorway and saw us sitting there side by side.

  ‘Oh, you darling girls are like a pair of beautiful dolls,’ she exclaimed.

  Until that day I’d thought Klara was like a doll made of porcelain, that she was the one who would be easily broken.

  ‘I’m going to get another drink,’ I said to Klara and her husband.

  I wouldn’t come back to the table. I would pretend to fall into conversation with someone on the way to the bar, then slip away home to try and gather everything close again.

  ‘I’ll have a G and T. Give Natalie some money, darling.’

  ‘No!’ I said too loudly. I pushed myself out of my seat and rushed into the crowd of people roaring and jostling elbows around the serving counter. Once I was surrounded by other people, I began to feel better. At the bar I ordered a shot of whisky and downed it on the spot. Above me, the racks of glasses jittered in time with the jukebox bass. I ordered another whisky and moved further along the bar, out of Klara’s line of vision, holding onto the counter with my fingers resting on its damp sticky towel because my legs were still shaking.

  ‘Natalie!’ A man in a grey suit with his tie loosened and his sleeves pushed up emerged from the crowd. He leaned across the bar and ordered himself a beer and me another whisky. He looked me up and down as if he was appraising my value, as if I was a piece of real estate.

  ‘You’re looking good,’ he said. He rigged his sleeves higher up his arms. Rolled his neck before he picked up his beer and drained the glass. He knew I was a likely chance.

  Klara and her husband were waiting at the other end of the room for me to reappear with a gin and tonic and amnesia. My cousin was burning to ash and bone in the crematorium. As the noise around me pulsed in shouts and raucous laughter I sucked in fast desperate breaths, giddy with the unreality of it all. The only reality was Klara, sitting at a table in that room. Klara wearing peach silk. Klara all grown up. I didn’t want her to be Klara, but she was.

  On my way back from the bar with a gin and tonic and another whisky, the muscles in my neck tingled and released. The third shot was fanning through my bloodstream.

  ‘We thought you’d run off,’ Klara said, glancing at her husband.

  I raised my fourth shot to my lips and swallowed. ‘Not this time. How is everyone, anyway?’ My voice rode the hubbub, a punchy voice filled with green light and dust.

  ‘We’ve left Rhiannon with a babysitter. We hate parents who take their children to every inappropriate event, don’t we, Squidge?’

  Squidge—who had been introduced as Lawrence—nodded. He was nursing the same glass of wine he had first brought to the table. Klara nestled up to him again. He smiled as she turned back to me and lifted her glass. The straw bobbed up and down in the fizzy tonic and she followed it with her pursed lips like a baby seeking a nipple. At last she caught the straw between her lips and I saw the old Klara for a moment, focused intently on her drink, frowning. I would have recognised her anywhere, but I was surprised she had recognised me—it was as if she left little Klara behind on that dusty property.

  ‘I meant the people I knew. Your family.’

  Her face rippled, almost imperceptibly. It was the second sign of the Klara who had been my best friend so many years ago. I used to see that deep quiver when Dieter walked by, or when we heard his voice from another room.

  ‘Oh, Mum and Dad have moved to Queensland. Dieter’s married. Has his own salon now. Helen’s still nursing.’ Her eyes blinked, empty, while her hand travelled around her husband’s lap like an animal searching for somewhere to hide. ‘What about your family? I can’t remember—did you have any brothers or sisters?’

  ‘Salon?’ I said. Did Klara remember our pretend salon? How I lay on the bed while she smeared my face with yoghurt and stained my lips purple with the juice of a cherry.

  ‘He’s a barber. He likes to call his shop a salon.’

  A laugh hacked out of my chest. ‘They let him near people with a razor? Does he still throw knives? I hope he got better at it if he does.’

  Klara and Squidge stared at me. Then Klara dropped her gaze. She picked up her purse and began sorting through its contents.

  ‘Sorry?’ Squidge said, speaking directly to me for the first time.

  ‘Dieter loved to throw things at people. Sharp things. Didn’t he, Klara?’

  She pressed her lips together and shook her head slowly, looking down at the table. Her blonde hair flared in the light. Both her hands had disappeared inside her purse now.

  ‘Did he? He was a terrible teenager, I suppose. I told you I had a shocking memory.’ She looked up at Squidge. ‘Didn’t I?’

  ‘Dreadful,’ he answered. ‘Completely vague.’

  I had to close my eyes because I couldn’t stop staring at Klara’s features, trying to find the child I had loved so deeply. We used to lie beside each other on the spongy surface of the playgrou
nd and count each other’s freckles. I would watch as Klara’s bottom lip pressed briefly under her top teeth before she spoke. I thought it made her look like a mouse, a sweet, hesitant mouse. Sometimes I stood in front of the mirror trying it myself, but it never worked for me. I looked like a dumb rabbit. It was the shape of Klara’s face and her mouth that had made her so loveable and vulnerable.

  I rubbed my eyes till they stung, trying to superimpose one Klara on the other.

  ‘I should get you home,’ Squidge said to Klara.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, please.’

  When I opened my left eye she was looking back at me. The blue of her eyes was like the sky shuddering behind a copse of wind-torn trees.

  When I opened my right eye she was looking back at her lap.

  I touched her arm. Her thin white arm.

  ‘Klara,’ I said. I didn’t know what else needed to be said anymore. I tried our old call sign, one of the secret codes we used together. ‘Time flies like an arrow.’

  ‘Very nice to see you, Natalie,’ she responded. She was supposed to reply, ‘Fruit flies like a banana.’

  Squidge stood and stretched, the bones in his back cracking.

  I took Klara’s hand in mine. I wanted to have the sensation of our damp childish hands clasped together under the desk one more time. But her hand was dry. Under the skin I could feel the tremor of her bones and muscles, a tremor that probably never left her.

  ‘I’m glad you made it,’ I told her softly, so her husband didn’t hear, so there was one good thing left between us.

  She stood. Her husband held out his hand to help her and she took her hand from mine and gave it to him like a princess taking the hand of the footman from the carriage step. He held her hand high as she edged her way out from the table.

  ‘Goodbye,’ I said.

  ‘Goodbye,’ she answered.

  Once, we were like sisters. But we were not sisters. She has a real sister and a brother and they are her family. And she owes me nothing.

  BLOOD

  Tony Birch

  Tommy Cole introduced himself to Nez and me wearing a pair of tight jeans, a black T-shirt, a felt cowboy hat sweat-stained around the brim, and a pair of R.M. Williams he spent half of his time spit polishing. The day he turned up we were living in a caravan on the beachfront in Adelaide. Gwen brought him home to the van from a club in town where she was working. The next morning he took a look around the van and told Gwen that a woman of her beauty and talent deserved better, which made Nez laugh; she had decided that Tommy was funny and that maybe he liked her.

  We moved out of the van that day, into a motel further along the strip. Tommy booked two rooms, one for Nez and me to share, and the other for him and Gwen.

  I didn’t like the look of Tommy. He was way too friendly to be trusted. But I was happy with the move, as the motel had a swimming pool, cable TV and room service that let you order just about any meal you could think of.

  The first night at the motel we watched a cop movie in our room while Gwen and Tommy went out drinking and dancing somewhere. They got back late, long after the movie was over and I’d turned off the TV, put the lights out and gone to bed.

  Only a paper-thin wall separated their room from ours and they kept me awake for most of the night. I could tell by the sound of Gwen’s voice coming through the wall—she was just about singing— that she was drunk again. They played music and drank some more, while Tommy screamed out, ‘Trick or treat, baby, trick or treat,’ every five minutes or so, like they were having a Halloween party.

  The next morning Gwen giggled that they were madly in love as she put her arm around Tommy’s neck and chewed at his ear. And within a day or two she was talking about marriage, although I was pretty sure she hadn’t discussed her plans with Tommy. While he was off doing some ‘business’ that Gwen would not elaborate on, she sat us at the breakfast table in the motel dining room and explained how Nez would be her flower girl, ‘A pink satin dress, Nezzie, with fresh flowers through your hair,’ while I would be giving the bride away.

  Gwen then reached across the table and touched my cheek with the back of her hand. ‘You could get yourself a suit, Jesse. With pinstripes and all. You’ll look like a real man.’

  I didn’t like the idea of Tommy becoming stepfather to us, but I wasn’t too worried about the prospect either. Gwen had announced that she was getting married about four or five times before and nothing came of it, so I wasn’t expecting wedding bells in any hurry.

  She and Tommy went hard at it day and night for the next week or so. After breakfast each morning he’d give me money to take Nez to see a movie and eat as much takeaway as we could stuff into ourselves. When we weren’t at the movies or hanging around the beach we rode buses across the city, armed with a disposable camera that Tommy had given us to play with. We took pictures of other passengers on the buses or of people in the street when they weren’t watching us. When Tommy handed me the camera he’d said it was a gift for us, and maybe it was, but I knew he hadn’t paid a cent for it because I’d seen him steal the camera just the day before, from the 7-Eleven around the corner from where we were staying.

  Nez and me came back to the motel one afternoon after a swim in the sea to find Gwen curled up on her bed, sobbing like a baby. She was wearing only her underwear, she had bruises all over her arms and legs, and her make-up was ruined, with mascara stains running down her cheeks.

  I looked around the room, at the empty bottles, the overflowing ashtrays and coke foils, and the clothes and underwear lying on the floor. It was a mess. Nez was standing behind me, breathing heavily. I could tell by the rattling noise in her chest that her asthma was playing up, like it did whenever she was nervous.

  I told Nez to leave the room and go next door and watch some TV, but she wouldn’t. She ran past me, jumped onto the bed, lay down alongside Gwen and held onto her as tightly as she could.

  It turned out that Cowboy Tommy had vanished just as quickly as he’d arrived. He left Gwen with a black eye and an unpaid bill for the rooms, as well as a bar tab fit for a football team on an end-of-season trip.

  Tommy left us with no choice but to do a runner from the motel.

  Later that night, after Gwen had put Nez to bed, I helped her load the boot of the car with two garbage bags stuffed with our clothes, her make-up case, and Nez’s few toys. We then raided the housemaid’s trolley, stealing packets of sweet biscuits, a cardboard box full of bottled water, blankets and pillows, some soap, and a toilet roll and towel.

  The next morning we ate breakfast, took a final swim in the pool and ordered a lunch of roast chicken, baked potatoes and chocolate ice-cream. Gwen added the meal to our tab, along with a tip for the young waiter she’d flirted with over lunch. We then snuck away from the motel by the rear car park.

  Our getaway car was a shit-coloured Commodore without a straight panel and tyres worn smooth as racing slicks. It was a bomb, for sure, but it had never broken down on us in the two years we’d had it, and kept us dry and more or less warm when it was the only place we had to sleep for the night.

  After leaving Adelaide we drove to the border and crossed into the far west of Victoria. I sat in the back with Nez, who kicked me as she lay on the other side of the car, sulking over something she wouldn’t talk about. I was pretty sure it would be over Tommy having abandoned us. He’d paid Nez a lot of attention that week and she’d lapped it up like a spoiled kitten.

  The sky was big, blue and empty except for a ball of sun tracking us, while the land we drove through was as flat as an iron, and bone dry and brown.

  I got thirsty just looking out of the car window at it.

  There wasn’t much we saw along the way that wasn’t stone dead. We drove through one small town totally deserted and another just as empty except for an old man sitting in a rocker on the verandah of a rundown weatherboard house. He was wrapped in an old blanket and had shoulder-length white hair and grey skin. While he looked more like a ghost tha
n a man and frightened me, I couldn’t take my eyes off him as we drove by.

  We also saw sheep and cows dotted here and there in the dry paddocks, and some farm machinery, most of which was rusted and looked like it hadn’t been used in a long time.

  It was a hot day on the highway. The air-conditioning in the car, which had never worked properly anyway, hummed and grunted so loudly I couldn’t make out a single song on the radio, even though it was turned up full blast. Gwen made things worse by chain-smoking all the way with the car windows wound up.

  I could hardly spot Nez through the smoke so I coughed a couple of times in the hope that Gwen would get the message and put her cigarette out. But she didn’t, so I leaned over the seat, tapped her on the shoulder and yelled at her to turn the radio down and the air-conditioning off.

  ‘What?’ she screamed back at me.

  ‘The radio. Can you turn it off? And the air?’

  She eventually punched the ‘off’ button on the radio, but wouldn’t touch the air-conditioning.

  I started telling her about a science article I’d read in a magazine when we were back in Adelaide, in the laundromat at the caravan park. It was all about passive smoking and how it killed more people every year than the road toll and most known diseases combined.

  ‘That’s not true,’ she interrupted, as she defiantly lit up another cigarette, turned around and blew smoke in my face.

  ‘You always think you’re a wealth of information, Jesse, but that story can’t be true. What about cancer? Those numbers couldn’t include cancer. They wouldn’t have counted all them deaths, I bet. It’s killed almost everyone I know over the age of fifty. It took your grandfather. He didn’t even see his fortieth. Cancer’s like a fucking plague.’