‘Lola Pratson?’ Amona said, glancing at Dad and smiling. ‘Mabel? I was at her wedding.’
I dug into the mudcake, shrouding my stupidity with fat and serotonin – I read somewhere that chocolate is full of it (as well as magnesium).
‘So tell me where you met her, Dad?’
Dad focused on the TV before answering. ‘The cocktail bar at the Sheraton Hotel,’ he said. ‘But the reason I hadn’t told you earlier was because . . .’ he paused. ‘Well, I don’t want you thinking it’s all right meeting boys at hotels.’
I burst out laughing.
‘As a general rule,’ he added.
I was thinking of all that Sally had gotten up to and it seemed so suddenly absurd that Dad would be worried about me.
‘I like Amona, Dad,’ I said. ‘And besides, boys are the last thing I have on my mind.’
We were watching On Moonlight Bay with Doris Day from Dad’s collection and I couldn’t stop giggling.
‘What?’ Dad kept asking and I’d shake my head and continue giggling.
Dad started it first. He threw a Cheezel at me and I threw it back. He laughed too and threw more. Soon there were Cheezels behind the cushions, under the couch and in the potpourri bowl beside the curtains. I got up to make tea while Dad collected the shrapnel.
‘But if you do go meeting boys at pubs you will tell me, won’t you, Button.’
‘Yes, Dad,’ I said, kissing him on the nose and presenting him with an Earl Grey.
The next Friday I arrived home late and Amona was already there. I guessed there’d been some conversation about me already when she asked about my dresses. I shot Dad a daggered look, feeling like he’d betrayed me.
‘But what do you do with all those dresses?’ Amona said to me, reaching out to take a glass of wine from Dad.
‘I don’t know,’ I shrugged. ‘They’re in a cupboard.’
‘No!’ she said dramatically, looking to Dad and then back at me. Amona has large eyes and every expression seems magnified and endearing. I could see why Dad liked her. She stepped a little closer to me and touched my arm. ‘Could I see them?’
I could hardly say ‘no’. And for the life of me I couldn’t think of any polite way out of it. After all, why did I make dresses to hang in a cupboard? Sometimes I think we are equally strangers to ourselves as to others.
Amona followed me to the sewing room and as I opened the door I wondered whether the mannequin might distract her from the intended destination.
‘Oh my,’ she said, pushing past me into the room, walking straight towards the mannequin wearing the second midnight-blue dress. I had a moment of looking at it, like Amona might have, seeing it for the first time and thinking how lovely it was, too. But then I retreated back into myself and could only see its faults. How I should have done something different for the shoulder strap and how the tulle – sprouting underneath the raised front hem seemed arrogant and misplaced. Too . . . flaunty. I wanted to stand in front of it, pointing out all the faults and have Amona agree with me, turn from the room and forget about it altogether. Surely Dad should call her back to be with him in the kitchen. Was there no baguette in dire need of buttering?
‘Oh, Ruby.’ She smiled, turning her head over her shoulder to look at me. I decided then that I understood what was happening. Of course, I should have seen it before. She was as bound to this masquerading as I was. She had to say nice things. How could she not? I felt better, knowing that.
‘Can I touch it?’
‘Of course. It isn’t . . . ,’ I stumbled for the word. ‘Well, you know. It’s nothing. Go ahead. Take it off the stand if you like.’
‘You must have made it for someone,’ she said, lifting the skirt a little, touching the fabric, letting it fall back, the air fluting along the hem of the fabric, rumpling slightly – as it was supposed to – across the fixture of tulle.
‘Not really,’ I said.
‘Where are the others?’ she turned to face me fully. Confidently. One hand on her hip, an eyebrow raised, wine glass in the other hand.
Bugger. ‘Um. In there,’ I said, flicking my hand in the direction of the cupboard. I felt exposed. Like I was being opened up and displaced by a woman my father might prefer to me.
8.
I heard about Barry close to six months before our seventeenth birthday during a visit to Darwin. According to Sally, Barry was the sweetest guy she’d ever met and out of every boy she’d known he was the one she liked best. But the thought of it scared her. She wanted me to tell her about the times I ‘had done it’. All I had to share was the one time I had let Eric Barrada kiss me after our school performance of Grease that had been earlier that year.
‘He even touched my boobs,’ I said, and Sally laughed and I thought I was, perhaps, the most pathetic girl that ever lived.
‘The trick with Mum,’ she said, ‘is in letting her think you agree with everything she says and does. See,’ she continued, ‘Mum thinks I’m all over the Aberdeen rubbish. Even Brother Daniel thinks so, too. And because they think they have me under their thumb, Mum believes everything I tell her. Friday nights, when I head to the Humpty Doo Hotel, they think I’m going to Trisha’s new Home group. When Mum wanted to ban me from working at the Croc Jumping Cruises, all I had to tell her was how many tourists came through the place and what an advantage that was in being a living example of faith.’
‘She bought it?’
‘Of course.’ Something about the way she said it made me feel like she was scoffing at me, too. Sometimes Sally could be the sweetest person you’d ever known and then, just as she had you thinking that, she’d change. Right there.
That night Sally pulled her mattress from her bed and dragged it into the sewing room beside mine. We lay down, arms and legs spread out from our bodies, our hands almost touching, looking up at a ceiling of white dresses in various stages of completion.
‘I’ve got an idea for your birthday present,’ I said.
‘Yeah?’
I’d decided to try and get the original midnight-blue dress back that I had made for her. I knew the friend she had sold it through.
‘I think he could be the one,’ she said.
‘Barry?’
‘But I don’t want to ruin a good thing. I did something stupid.’
I wanted to understand what she meant. I wanted to ask her what it was like to go all the way with a boy, what was so special about Barry and how she could have grown so far ahead of me when we were twins. I wanted to stitch us back together, the way we used to be.
Sally stretched out her fingers to mine and we pushed our hands against each other’s. That night we slept, closer than we had ever been in years.
I woke the morning of my second last day in Darwin and Sally was already up, having breakfast in the kitchen. When Mum was having a shower, Sally whispered and said, ‘I’ve got a great idea for tonight. We have been twins all our lives and we’ve never pulled the substitution trick. How is that?’ she said, holding her arms up questioningly and swallowing the last of her toast. ‘We simply have to rectify this situation. You are going to meet Barry.’
That afternoon Sally dressed me up, ran a kohl pencil under my eyes, painted mascara on my lashes and stained my lips red. I hardly recognised myself in the mirror. She threaded silver dangles through my ears and swept my hair into a ponytail. I had to practise walking in her high-heeled sandals – I mostly wore Converse Sneakers – though, not surprisingly, her clothes fitted me perfectly. Still, I felt as stiff as a clotheshorse. Sally made me swing my arms – she took my hands and said to imagine a gust of wind blowing through my body.
‘There,’ she said. ‘See, your body is looser.’
I was a little swept up in Sally’s excitement, I suppose, because it didn’t occur to me until we were in her car driving towards Humpty Doo that i
t seemed strange she would play a trick on the boy she confessed to loving. And not only that, but the only reason this would work was because she’d never told her friends about me. That thought swept up through my body, from my feet to my neck, like a cold wave. I spent half my life trying to think up things to tell my friends about Sally and she hadn’t even told her friends I existed. I wanted to yell at her, to demand an explanation. I wanted to throw all my stuffed-down pain at her. How could she? I wanted to cry and rant and I don’t even know what I expected or wanted in return. But I knew, somehow, that if I ever as much as placed a toe in those waters she would fly away. Completely.
Sally pulled over to the side of the road before we reached the Humpty Doo Hotel. The music was blaring and the world seemed too silent when the track stopped, with the engine. The lights lit up a small arc of road in front of us and she pointed towards it, saying the hotel was not far beyond. Just keep on the road, I couldn’t miss it. My heart started pounding and I’m sure my eyes looked terrified but she was too excited to notice.
‘After, you have to tell me everything,’ she said. ‘Absolutely everything.’
That was our deal. I got to be her for one night and, in return, I had to tell her everything.
‘This is a blast,’ she kept saying.
I don’t remember getting out of the car or how I managed to walk in those heels – which weren’t all that high really – over the uneven, rocky road shoulder towards the hotel. I was framed in her headlights for a time, then they went black and the light from the hotel didn’t seem all that far in front of me. What the bloody hell was I thinking? This was madness.
The plan was this. I was to go to room number five, knock on the door and wait for Barry to answer. I had to be confident – to remember that Sally was confident – and tell Barry to join me for a drink. I was to make him talk to me – that way there’d be no chance I’d give myself away. Sally described Barry in intimate detail. His dark skin, brooding looks. She said his body smelled of the best man scent she’d ever known and, while he wasn’t much of a talker, he was . . . she fumbled for the word . . . magnetic. Compelling. ‘But’, she had added quickly, ‘you’re only going to talk to him’ – the implication about anything beyond a public drink in the pub was clear – I had to feign tiredness or something to avoid complications.
I approached the pub door questioning why I had agreed to this. I kept imagining Mum finding out, her look of scorn and disgust. I only had a few weeks a year with her and I couldn’t afford to have her hating me. It would have been so hard to go back home with that hanging over my head. I felt like I owed her some sort of loyalty. And yet I walked towards the pub door, feeling nothing like Sally, but looking, I suppose, every bit like her.
The doors to the hotel rooms were exactly where Sally had described them. Lined up one beside the other set back from the grey concrete path joining them together under a fibro canopy. The room numbers were large and black, like the numbers you’d find on letterboxes. I felt the urge to wash my face, which was greasy with makeup. Every time I blinked my eyes I felt them sticking together and worried I’d have trouble prising them apart. I licked my lips, satisfying myself by muting the red.
I was overcome with an urge to turn around, run back to the car in my high-heeled sandals and convince Sally to drive us home. I could anticipate our arrival, Mum grilling me about what we got up to at Bible study – or wherever it was Sally told Mum we were going. Sally promised to tutor me in the art of religious talk on the way home saying, ‘You can learn the gab in under five minutes. Trust me.’
I couldn’t decide what was making me feel more nervous; meeting Barry, whom I’d begun building up in my own mind, or the fear of being exposed and having no idea what to say. I managed to will my feet forward, thinking as loudly as possible, ‘God, Ruby, you’re such a freak. Just do it, will you!’
Before I could knock on the door, I heard my name, rather heard Sally’s name. I froze but turned around, forcing a smile I’m sure Sally would have found natural. ‘I was hoping to find you here.’
I had no idea who this guy was. At first he was shadowed by the backlighting from the street lamp, but as he came closer I could make out his features. I couldn’t ask who he was and felt sure it was going to get awkward. When I could get a closer look at him – he was almost chest to chest with me – I was disappointed. He didn’t feel like Barry, he just didn’t look right, didn’t feel right.
‘Good old Bob knows where to find you, right?’ and my first thought was relief. It wasn’t Barry. Bob grabbed me by the shoulders and led me away from Barry’s door in through the hotel, steering me with his weight through the crowd, past a haze of people to the bar counter. Bob felt like a creep and I was angry Sally hadn’t mentioned him or warned me or prepared me in any way. I felt completely out of my depth.
There was less of a crowd at the bar counter. There were only a few blokes sitting on stools that I could see. Most of the crowd were gathered around the pool tables and outside in the beer garden. The beer smelled strong and yeasty and my stomach churned. Bob had his arm firmly around my shoulders and seemed to be completely comfortable with Sally like this. Me like this. And I felt there was no other option other than to act confident. Overplay it rather than underplay it was what Sally told me. I forced myself to stand tall, I cocked my head to the side like Sally did and leant into Bob, no matter that I couldn’t stand him. Without knowing him I didn’t like him. Like I’d known this forever. What was Sally thinking?
Bob stepped back from the bar a bit and I turned around slightly so I was side on, looking down the line of the counter. He kissed me on the cheek. Someone was looking straight at me, glaring at me it felt like. And I knew it was Barry. He was exactly like Sally had described him and yet nothing like him at all. I don’t know whether it was instant attraction or anything like that or I’d just built him up in my mind over the last week but there was something I felt. Bob’s arm tightened around my shoulders. I swallowed, remembered to look confident. I overcompensated, laughed and pretended I hadn’t seen him at all, even though I felt Barry hating me from across the room. Even though I wasn’t Sally.
We left, drinks in hand, and went outside. I downed my beer – I don’t know how I got it down so quickly – and said I had to go. Mumbled something about being sick and late and couldn’t explain. I ran in the direction of the car, Bob’s voice in my ears, ‘Oi, you little bitch. Come back!’
Somehow I made it back to the car and Sally opened the door, her eyes wild and mischievous. ‘Don’t tell me yet,’ she said. ‘Wait until we get home.’
Beside each other, our mattresses side by side, with the fan blowing across the room, Sally told me to tell her everything. She reached her hand towards me and our little fingers touched, like we were conjoined, though we splayed our fingers and toes, our legs and arms in an effort to deal with the heat.
‘It’s not very exciting,’ I stalled.
‘Everything.’
She was completely still beside me. The fan grating on its rotator hinge, a moment of breeze and her deep and even breathing.
‘He wasn’t there,’ I lied. ‘But why the hell didn’t you tell me about Bob?’
Sally laughed. ‘Bob?’ she said evenly, as if he wasn’t worth mentioning.
‘He was very friendly.’
She was quiet. The fan struggled.
‘Why did you have to spoil it?’ she said and I didn’t know what to say.
‘Me?’ I stammered. ‘If you weren’t my sister,’ I said, indignant.
‘Too late for that.’ She laughed softly. ‘Bob is the complication between Barry and me. I’ve made a mess of everything.’
I still didn’t know what to say.
Sally fell asleep before me, our conversation unfinished, neither of us completely honest with the other. Her breathing was heavy and regular as I choked with the hu
midity and an overwhelming weight of guilt. I hadn’t told her about seeing Barry and couldn’t decide whether I’d done it to punish her or myself. I couldn’t forget the image of Barry hating me. Not Sally, but me.
On the plane back home the next morning, I imagined a boy called Barry. And how, if you had a hundred boys to choose from, he’d be the only one you wanted. I couldn’t understand why Sally would have let a man like Bob ruin her chance with Barry. And what was she thinking wanting me to play a trick on him? There was so much I just didn’t understand about her. At least back then. None of us knew the real reason she thought she had lost Barry for good. And why she would keep a creep like Bob in her life. And it never occurred to me that I’d never get to ask her myself. For the rest of the flight I felt perverted and strange, stealing Sally’s boy like that, even if it was just in my mind. Though I think I just wanted someone to choose me, like Sally had chosen him.
9.
I wasn’t a standout at school. Despite doing pretty well in home economics and art – English and history were okay – I was never a teacher’s favourite. I was a consistently ‘high-achieving’ student in home economics, however, but it was run by a team of women moulded in the style of my mother. Their pride measured how well a student – almost always a girl (except for Harvey Muffet) – mastered the skills of precision and duplication. A method I preferred to call ‘monkey see, monkey do’. There wasn’t much room for creativity in home economics. At least not at the school I went to. But at least I got to sew clothes, participate in some design, and build a range of techniques and knowledge I felt sure would benefit me in the long run. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to learn the simpler skills of tacking and pleating, but I felt no need to sew entire garments just to prove my knowledge of these skills. ‘Very Highs’ were reserved for students who followed each instruction and delivered each stitch with meticulous care and considerate enthusiasm. Like my mother.
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