I Am Out With Lanterns

by Emily Gale

  About the Book

  One of us is in the dark.

  One of us is a bully.

  One of us wants to be understood.

  One of us loves a girl who loves another.

  One of us remembers the past as if it just happened.

  One of us believes they’ve drawn the future.

  But we’re all on the same map, looking for the same thing.

  From the author of The Other Side of Summer.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part One: Once in a Blue Moon

  Adie: Perfect

  Wren: Nostalgia

  Adie: Cat

  Wren: Promises

  Part Two: The Moon Illusion

  Ben: Alarm

  Milo: Probability

  Juliet: Protection

  Wren: Foolish

  Milo: Lick

  Wren: Incredible

  Milo: Raindrop

  Juliet: Memory

  Milo: Contract

  Sophie: Art

  Wren: Revenge

  Adie: Chair

  Ben: Accident

  Wren: Electricity

  Part Three: Small Shifts

  Adie: Blood

  Milo: Naked

  Wren: Theories

  Ben: Team

  Adie: Friend

  Milo: Snake

  Wren: Crying

  Milo: Hero

  Part Four: Wide Night

  Juliet: Pot

  Ben: Pill

  Juliet: Crater

  Milo: History

  Wren: Dress

  Part Five: A Fire You Cannot Put Out

  Ben: Medication

  Wren: Gallery

  Adie: Tile

  Milo: Time

  Adie: Remember

  Juliet: Breathe …

  Adie: Possessions

  Hari: Fire

  Ben: Hurt

  Milo: Chase

  Adie: Bird

  Part Six: The Truth Is

  Wren: Fickle

  Ben: Pig

  Wren: Plan

  Hari: Camp-out

  Juliet: Past–Present

  Milo: Sister

  Wren: Self

  Adie: Buried

  Part Seven: I Am Out with Lanterns

  Milo: Hijack

  Ben: Confession

  Milo: Dad

  Ben: Brother

  Juliet: Climate

  Hari: Closer

  Juliet: Share

  Milo: Rules

  Wren: Lanterns

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Imprint

  Read more at Penguin Books Australia

  For Aaron

  ‘I am out with lanterns, looking for myself.’

  Emily Dickinson

  ‘There is something about a portrait. It has a life of its own.’

  Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

  ‘Pueri sunt pueri, pueri puerilia tractant.’

  Latin, translation: Boys will be boys.

  ‘As long as I live I will have control over my being.’

  Artemisia Gentileschi

  Tuesday

  It has taken nine years to get back to our front gate. I could just see over the top when we left. Tonight, I reach down to unlatch it. My heart’s drumming because I ran ahead so I could have this moment in peace, but it’s a thin night and I can already hear them arguing.

  The latch slips easily. I make it up the path in four strides and use the doorknocker. It’s a fancy brass woman’s head – someone angry from Greek mythology – which seems like a joke on this beaten-up weatherboard house. Her name is on the tip of my tongue, but I know that hard knocking sound like I know my own laugh.

  Knock-knock. Who’s there? Your old selves. Our old selves, who? I don’t know the punchline; it’s been that long.

  ‘No one’s gonna answer, Adie.’ My dad, Frank, shifts me out of the way. The old key struggles – I can see it in his knuckles – but, finally, the door yawns open. It’s blacker inside than out.

  ‘What are you waiting for? Go in.’ Dara, my not-mother, hates ceremony. This was never her house.

  The hallway is a dark throat with a cool breath. My hand finds the light switch, but the click doesn’t make a difference. Click-click-click-click. I keep going until Dara says, ‘Perfect’. She only ever uses that word sarcastically. Dad takes out his Zippo, flicks the lid and spins the flint wheel. In the flame-lit shadows I hear a split second of rollerskates on wooden floors. A memory: me racing up and down and high-fiving an imaginary friend in the middle.

  ‘The agent said to expect a bit of mess,’ says Dad.

  ‘Perfect,’ says Dara.

  There’s a noise at the back of the house.

  ‘Hello? Anyone here?’ yells Dad. He shrugs. ‘Possums.’

  ‘Rats,’ says Dara.

  All three doors on the left are closed. There’s a riddle about three doors, and I know the answer this time: the middle one. I turn the handle and rush inside. The emptiness hits me like a sheet of glass.

  ‘This doesn’t look like my room,’ I tell nobody. Dad and Dara have carried on without me, taking the only source of light. I dump my backpack on the floor so the room knows it’s mine again.

  Making my way towards the kitchen, I run my hands along the rough walls and think of the eucalypts in Tassie. The way tiny orange droplets oozed from lesions in their bark. Finding the memories in this house will be like hunting for tree sap. I’ll cup my hands and the past will be drip-fed to me. I only have the impression of an old happiness here. Same as being drawn to an abstract painting, I can’t say exactly what I see, but it makes sense.

  The kitchen is narrow and old-fashioned, with olive-green cabinets and a small electric stove set into what used to be a huge fireplace. The moon out the back makes this room glow. Dara eyes every surface as if she’s at a party with people she doesn’t like. I’ve never known Dara to like anyone except Dad, and then only sometimes. She’s ten years older than me and has been hanging around for two, since Dad rescued her from a backbreaking life of pulling up to twelve pints a day in a small-town pub. Ha.

  Dad bashes the top lock of the back door with the heel of his hand and kicks out the bottom one with his boot, but when he twists and pulls the handle the door stays stuck.

  ‘Push it,’ says Dara, shoving him out of the way and taking the handle.

  ‘Are you stupid, Dara?’

  ‘No, I’m not stupid, Frank, are you stupid?’

  ‘You’re both stupid,’ I say under my breath.

  Dad sticks a foot up on the wall and yanks harder, but it won’t budge. Then it’s the three of us taking turns to rattle the handle and shove the door.

  ‘Could you women give me some space!’ Dad yells.

  We step back as he rams into it with his shoulder. The door falls like a tree and cracks on the stone.

  ‘Perfect.’

  Dad lets out a high-pitched giggle and we both look at Dara. In the moonglow she’s a white marble statue, but we know there’s an incendiary device planted deep inside that head. She looks like she wants to kill someone. Dad pokes her. One corner of her mouth twitches; her eyes shine.

  ‘Look what you made me do,’ he says in his gravelly voice with a note of mischief. She smacks his leather arm as he raises it to defend himself. And then all three of us start laughing so hard in the no-door doorway that we have to hold on to each other, and when it seems as though the laughter’s dying it starts up again so that, after a while, I’m not sure what the hell is so funny.

  The next day it’s up to me and Dad to sort out furniture.

 
; ‘Money’s coming, but we have to be creative till then,’ he says. ‘Follow me, Adie, you’ll be amazed what we can find.’ So we creep around the streets like cats. We score three single mattresses from outside an apartment block. They’re only thin, so we carry them home on our heads in one trip. Then we’re back out for half a round table that Dad reckons he could prop against the wall in the kitchen, and three odd chairs. Now we just need Goldilocks.

  I stay close to Dad because I can’t remember the way without him, but we walk on different sides of the road to cover more ground. In a skip I find a silver wind chime, threads tangled up but probably fixable, and a small radio with a bent aerial, which hisses promisingly when I turn the dial. When I meet Dad at the end of that road, he’s hugging a flat-screen television, wires hanging down like tails.

  ‘Wow, Dad.’

  ‘Told you I was good at this.’

  I look back at a removals van while he carries on. ‘Come on,’ he shouts.

  Back in front of the house, if I squint I can see the weatherboards with fresh green paint instead of that dragged-up-from-the-bottom-of-the-ocean look. The tin roof is a rusty brown triangle like half a jaffle.

  ‘Dad, let’s look for a jaffle maker next.’

  ‘Help me with the bloody key, can’t you?’

  He has to turn sideways to get up the narrow hall. Dara sits on the kitchen counter, tapping her phone screen with a long pink fingernail. At the sight of us, her top lip curls.

  ‘There’s no power, Frank.’ She jumps down and grabs one of the TV wires. ‘Where are we going to stick these?’

  ‘Know what, Dara? You can stick them up your bloody –’

  And I’m out of here. I go to my room before it gets ugly.

  The new mattress sits in the middle of the carpet like an island. I lie on my front and hum to myself as two fingers of my right hand walk over the carpet and onto the hearth tiles, wiggling a loose one. It lifts out of place easily and I turn it over. I must have expected something because my heart sinks when there’s nothing to see. There are no ‘eat me’ or ‘drink me’ notes in this crumbling wonderland. Just Tweedledum and Tweedledee arguing in the kitchen.

  On the fourth day, Dad creates electricity.

  Dara actually runs to have a hot shower. Although she reckons the water pressure is ‘nothing to write home about’, I can tell she’s less repulsed by our very existence. Dad brings home a box of utensils from an op shop, including plates and glasses, a toaster and kettle. No jaffle maker. He plugs the TV into the third bedroom and finds us a two-seater couch that looks suspiciously like one I’ve seen on someone’s porch.

  It’s as if he’s plugged Dara into a power source too – her face gets some colour as she shoves all our takeaway cartons into a bin liner, and the empty toilet rolls that had piled up in the outside dunny going back who knows how long. All those strangers taking a dump in our house. Gross. She cleans the windows with the local newspapers that had stacked up in the front yard, once she’s picked off the snails. I’d like to say ‘It’s still not your house, Dara.’ But I don’t.

  I catch them kissing at the front door when Dad’s going off to the shops. Dara’s bony fingers slide into Dad’s black-and-silver hair. I go into the TV room and try not to mind when she joins me. It’s always strange when Dad’s gone. I don’t talk to her. The house might spit us back out if we’re too sour for its taste.

  Dad’s back. My heart drops at the clink that comes from the shopping bags when he puts them on the kitchen bench. He’s bought bread and a few other basics: cheese, tinned tomatoes, pasta, butter, milk, coffee. I unpack them while Dad cleans a couple of op-shop glasses with toilet paper.

  ‘Do you have to?’ I say quietly so that neither of them can hear. I know how this goes. Clink and drink. Clink and drink. Glug, glug, glug.

  Dad gestures towards the groceries with his glass and looks at Dara.

  ‘What?’ she says. Her marble cheeks pink up again. ‘You think I should cook because I’m the woman?’

  ‘Hell no, you can’t even boil an egg,’ says Dad.

  I laugh for no more than a few seconds when the wine hits my face. Dara slams her glass on the counter and walks out.

  On the fifth day, Dad comes home with an easel.

  We’re in the TV room watching Dara’s favourite show about midwives in 1950s England. I understand literally nothing about my not-mother. Dad comes in the front door and our heads turn as he carries the easel past us like a stiff body.

  ‘Just Adie today.’

  ‘Perfect,’ Dara says, and I leave to the ffft sound of her lighter.

  But this was inevitable. Sometimes Frank is my father, sometimes not so much, but he is always an artist. The last place we lived in Tassie was an artists’ colony run by an older woman. I think she was in love with Dad because she bought him whatever he asked for. He only packed the smaller stuff when we left, like paints and brushes.

  Dad paints me, mainly, and whichever woman is living with us at the time. The whole reason we came back to Melbourne was because Dad has been selected as a finalist in a national portrait prize. He’s ignoring certain details (there are forty-five other finalists) and focusing on others (this is a huge milestone in his career, he’s been overlooked for decades). The portrait is of me and Dara.

  The back garden is overgrown and the ground rises and falls as if giants are buried there. At the end is a small glass-house: Dad’s studio. He sets up the large easel – battle-scarred with someone else’s paint, patches of algae and tiny cracks. It doesn’t look as if anyone has come into the studio the whole time we were away. The cobwebs are legendary, the dust as thick as fur.

  Dad’s in a moth-eaten t-shirt that sags around the neck and clings to his belly. He’s unshaven and his beard has come through like morning frost. His skin looks grey, flecked with tiny red capillaries. He doesn’t sleep enough and drinks too much.

  I perch like a sleeping bird, dead still; my head turns to face him, my chin resting on my shoulder. The beginning of a sitting is always the same – I’m conscious of every inch of skin. My mind wants to wander, which makes my body twitch.

  Dad’s head appears from behind the canvas and hides again. He stares. He scowls. He huffs. Is it me or his sketch that makes him angry?

  Dara’s in the garden, stepping around without much purpose, smoking. She appears close by, briefly, then goes back to the house through the no-door doorway. Part of me wishes he’d only paint her. The other part likes to piss her off.

  In the second hour everything’s an ache. The scrape of pencil on paper gets into my veins. I close my eyes.

  ‘Adie. Eyes, please.’

  ‘Why? You know what they look like.’

  They’re his eyes, someone used to say. Someone pre-Dara, maybe even as far back as my mother, but I don’t remember her and Dad says it’s for the best.

  I open them. Because when Dad’s art goes well, everything goes well.

  Dara’s mood has made the air toxic.

  ‘Here, take this,’ says Dad, as he hands me a five-dollar note. ‘Go out for a few hours. Give me a chance to smooth things over with D.’

  Gross. As if I don’t know what that means.

  But after I start walking, my first time alone since we’ve been back, this feels familiar. Being sent to the shop when I was half the size. Dad’s voice: Run all the way there. See if Aslan will sell you my tobacco. Aslan was the owner of the shop. I remember thinking, Narnia. I’m not even sure how I knew about Narnia back then.

  I try to run ahead in my mind, through blurred streets, feet un-touching the ground. Will the shop still be there? I carry my fragile memory in the hot sun. There are lots of people about and at first I feel conspicuous, which is normal after a sitting. But soon I realise that it’s the opposite: out here no one sees me.

  A vast tree that looks like it’s burst out of the bitumen – I get the urge to turn left.

  A house on the corner with reflective glass – now I turn right.


  Past the pub. Past the post office.

  There it is.

  The sliding doors think about me for a moment and finally open up.

  I swear the aisles ran east to west, but now they’re north to south. The memory I had before can’t exist in these conditions. The lights are bright, the floors are weird, the smell is wrong, and apparently it’s still Christmas.

  No Aslan.

  I stand in front of the sweets, trying to remember what I used to buy. And then I see it: a Polly Waffle.

  ‘They discontinued those about nine years ago,’ says a tall boy with dark shoulder-length hair, big boots and a long, thin coat that almost skims the floor.

  Is he talking to me?

  He takes one and drifts past without another word.

  I’ve got to have a Polly Waffle. Discontinued years ago but now returned, just like me.

  Saturday

  A terrible love song is playing in the IGA.

  I turn around to tell Milo how much I hate it, before I remember he’s in the next aisle over. The chorus is a boy telling a girl that he definitely loves her more than anyone else ever could. Negative. If she’s that great, surely quite a lot of people are likely to love her just as much as this dude. ‘No one else could ever love you like this’ will never be the clincher for me. Come up with something half-decent, mate, or take a very long walk off a very short pier.