Under My Skin
Page 80
I felt like there was an implied threat in that. “And what happens if I don't let you talk to her?” I asked. “You'll out her? And me?”
“I did not say that!” He sounded really frustrated. “Can you stop this shit? I get it, I punched you. I’m on charges because of that. This isn’t about that, I just want to speak one-on-one to my sister! I'm not going to have a go at her!”
Somehow, I didn’t believe him, even if he believed himself. “Here’s what’s going to happen,” I said in no uncertain terms, “either you’re going to tell me what you want to say to Bree, or I’m going to shut the door right now and call security, and—”
“It's okay, Min,” Bree interrupted me. She'd come out of the en suite and rounded my bedroom doorway while I was having it out with Andrej. She'd changed clothes.
Andrej tried to step past me so he could see her, but I blocked him and looked him right in the eyes. Punch me again, I mentally willed him. I'll put you in jail.
Bree came slowly up the hallway toward us, but needed to spend a couple of seconds gathering herself before she faced him.
He was standing on the other side with his arms crossed. When she came up to the door, though, he looked uncomfortable and uncrossed them. Neither of them said anything, they just stood there, watching each other uncertainly for a few seconds. At least he was acknowledging her like another human being. It was something, even if it wasn't much.
“You look terrible,” Bree observed with her usual diplomacy.
I wasn't sure if he'd have a go at her for that. He didn't. “You would, too, if you hadn't slept.”
Still looking really wary, she prompted him, “You wanted to talk to me?”
Andrej glanced up at me and then back at Bree. He was clearly unhappy with me being there, but I wasn't going anywhere. After what he’d done to her and me, I wasn’t leaving Bree alone with him. He obviously realised that. Instead of telling me to go away, he just reached into his pocket and took out a crumpled, rolled up sheet of paper and passed it to her.
She cautiously accepted it. After unrolling it and reading it for a few seconds, she said, “Okay…” like she didn’t understand what his point was.
“I got a job,” he told her, sounding a bit proud of himself, “as an apprentice motor mechanic.”
Bree gave him back the sheet of paper. “Yeah, I saw.” After another silence, she said, “I thought you told Dad you were going to go to university and do law.” She sounded a bit cynical.
He shrugged. “Well, I had a long think last night and decided that we could probably use a bit more money so it would be better if I was working.”
Bree swallowed. “You thought we could probably use a bit more money,” she repeated.
“Yeah. It would be great to have internet at home again, wouldn’t it? I bet it would make it easier for you to study, too. And maybe we could all go out to the movies on Tuesday nights again like we always used to...” For just a second, I saw a glimpse of someone who reminded me of Bree. This was how she talked about the home she so desperately missed.
Bree glanced across at me, visibly deflating. I understood why: despite giving her some tiny shred of hope, Andrej's 'let's all go to the movies again', felt like Henry's 'reservation's for seven' from last night. It went zero percent of the way to addressing the real problem. I could see her dilemma: Andrej was obviously finally acknowledging things weren't great at home. He was finally speaking to her. It must have been so tempting for her to agree with him and leave it.
I knew that feeling so well, and that's why I was so proud of her when she said, “But what's you getting a job going to do?”
He didn't expect that response. “What do you mean? It’s three hundred a week. I'd thought you'd be happy about it.”
She spoke really carefully and her words didn't come straight away. “There's no point in having internet at home if none of us have computers or phones to use it on,” she said. “And, like, we can go to the movies, but are we even going to have a home to come back to afterwards? You have a gambling problem, Andrej, and because of it Mum and Dad owe half a million. What's three hundred a week going to do?”
As she was saying that, I watched his face harden. The kid who wanted to help his sister and have movie nights with his family disappeared. “Well, Bree, maybe if you got a fucking job instead of mooching off other people, we’d be even better off!”
She exhaled, eyes veiled as what he'd just said about her rang in our ears for a moment.
“You know what?” she eventually said. “Forget it. Maybe it's okay for you to pretend everything's fine, but I'm sick of it.” With that, she just closed the door in his face, and it slammed shut to a pronounced click of the lock.
I had not expected her to do that, and I don't think she expected herself to do it, either. We both stood there staring at the door, listening to Andrej's furious breathing on the other side. He was shocked, too, so it took him a few seconds to respond.
“Pretend? I'm pretending?” He yelled through the door with a desperate, raw edge to his voice. “I'm not walking around in a dress and telling people I'm a girl. You'd better take a good hard look at your alleged boyfriend if you think you're the one living in reality here!”
That knocked the wind out of me.
Honestly, I was more shocked that he'd tried to be so cruel than I was hurt by what he said. It was fortunate he'd said it to me now, though, if he'd said it even just a couple of days ago, I would have had the pills in my hand much faster. Now, I was just appalled at him.
Bree mistook my stunned silence for a sign he'd hurt me and looked horrified. “Fuck off, Andrej!” she yelled over him as he went to talk again. “Just fuck off, or we'll call security!” He did actually leave after she'd shouted at him, probably taking threat of security seriously as he was already in trouble with the police.
For several seconds after he’d gone, we both stood in silence behind the closed door, trying to process what had just happened.
Bree looked up at me, and instead of being proud of herself, instead of being happy she’d stood up to her brother, her face crumpled and she burst into tears. Gingerly, I put a gentle had on her shoulder. In a tiny, bitterly disappointed voice, she said, “I just wanted it to be like your pitch...” as she cried.
I scooped her up into my arms, hugging her tightly against me. Andrej was... I shook my head. I wanted to say 'delusional', and I thought that was probably an apt description, but he'd been really stressed out in the beginning and I couldn't help thinking I knew why that was: there was a real person in there, a real person who'd once been a member of a close-knit family. Somewhere deep inside him, deep, deep down, buried in the recesses of his mind, I think he knew what he was doing. He knew, and it made him sweat at my door and lie awake at night. But how the fuck did you even access that part if he lashed out so aggressively whenever you tried to?
Ironically, Henry would have been a great person to ask that question of. He'd know how to approach Andrej, this kind of stuff was what he used to do for a living. I hoped I'd get a chance to ask him one day.
“I feel really stupid,” Bree confessed. “I was thinking, 'maybe he'll say sorry', 'maybe he'll stop' and I had this hope inside me that everything could go back to normal and I hate it. I hate it, I hate it, because everything's not going to be okay and I hate that he made me think for a second that I could have my family back. It's worse than having no hope. It's worse than anything.”
My heart ached for her. “I kind of thought things would change, too,” I told her. “After he punched me and police arrested him. I just assumed it was the start of things going back to normal for you...”
“Maybe this is normal for me now,” she said, leaning against me. I kissed her head. “Maybe he'll never change and this is it.” As soon as she said that, she sighed. “But then, like, he talked to me just then. That's different. Maybe if he's an addict and there's rehab or something, he can do it and then we can all go back to the way we were.”
That upset her again. “It's just so awful, though, to think that,” she said. “We used to do everything together when we were little. Everything. It's just so awful to think that's over. There won't be any more fun Christmases or Easters or birthdays. We'll never sit around the dinner table again. If that's the truth, then I'll never get my family back.”
“Henry told me he needed to grieve over losing me,” I said gently. “Maybe that's what you need to do: just let go of that wish. The Andrej you had fun with is gone. Grieve for him, grieve for the fun you had together and grieve for the fact you won't have that same happy family again, so you can finally move on.”
That made her cry again. “But I want one,” she said. “Min, I want one so much. I hate feeling this all the time. I just want to not care anymore.”
I hugged her close to me. I want to give you one, I thought, knowing it wasn't the same. I still wanted it, though. I wanted Bree to have her happy family and her Christmases and her Easters and her birthdays and all the other things she wanted. I just wanted to give her everything that would make her happy.
“You want to do something nice today?” I asked her, hoping I could cheer her up. “We still have the rest of the afternoon. Maybe we could go for a drive, or go lie in the sun somewhere, or go shopping? Would that make you feel a bit better?”
She exhaled, shaking her head against me. “I've got a thing at school this evening. I need to go home and get changed.”
Oh, right. “Is that what you were talking about taking me to before?”
She nodded. “Yeah, but you'll probably find it really stressful because all the girls in my year will be there. I just thought maybe it would help you see that things are different now...”
“I'd be happy to come.”
She laughed once. “You're only saying that to try and cheer me up.”
Was it that obvious? “You know, I used to think that I was kind of mysterious.”
I could feel her smiling against my middle. I liked it. “Nah, it's okay,” she said. “I'll just catch the train, it's not very far and it's a nice day, so...”
I held her away from me so I could make her look at me. “I'm not happy about leaving you like this.”
She'd stopped crying. “Then don't. Walk with me to Circular Quay.” She made a face. “When I walk past that hairdresser in the daytime, I keep thinking the woman in there will recognise me and be angry about her flower pots. And I haven't seen that debt collector guy for ages but he can't be gone...”
Well, I knew what I was going to lie awake in bed and worry about for the next few nights. “I'm driving you,” I said firmly.
I didn't end up driving her, though, because she was surprisingly stubborn and was already out of the door and down the lift before I could figure out where I'd left my car keys. I caught up with her in the lobby, and we walked hand-in-hand out into the street.
“This is nicer, anyway,” she said, looking at out clasped hands and swinging them a bit. “Don't you think?”
I thought whatever she liked was fine by me. I was just glad she looked a bit happier.
There wasn't any sign of Andrej, and there wasn't any sign of the debt collector. There were just a king's ransom of tourists and a whole lot of business people, and none of them gave us a second glance. I loved it.
I did worry what was going to happen to her when she got back to her house, though. “Is Andrej going to be at home waiting for you?” I wondered aloud.
Bree shook her head. “He's never home during the day.” At the mention of him again, she frowned. “It's so fucked what he said to you, by the way. Not everyone thinks like that. That you're pretending, I mean.”
I grimaced. “I know...” I said, and then thought about that whole guy-in-a-dress comment he'd made. I wasn't pretending, not anymore. At least, not in the way he'd meant it. But I still felt a bit off about it, and it was difficult for me to try and pinpoint what caused that.
Bree stopped me. “Why did you say it like that?” she asked, as if I was being insecure and she was comforting me.
It wasn't that, though. I wasn't being insecure about it. I looked down my front at the packer inside my pants. “It's really hard to explain,” I said, and then presented myself. “This is how I feel comfortable. That, I'm sure of. I feel right and, well, safe when people think I'm a guy. But I still say 'think' and 'assume', don't I? I mean...” I swore. “Fuck, Bree, this stuff is really complicated.”
She just looked up at me with those big eyes, waiting for me to continue.
I exhaled, checking around us in the street to make sure no one could hear. “When I was with you three girls earlier I was definitely the odd one out, and did you see how Gemma looked at me when Sarah went to take her top off? People can tell I'm not a woman. And I know I look like a guy, in some ways I feel like I am one, but… that’s not the whole story, is it? I never fit in with the boys at work, never, and I’m not like Rob or Henry. I don’t feel like I’m the same as any of them.” I sighed. “So, I guess I'm fucked. I don't know whether I’m a man or a woman. Sometimes, I don't feel like I'm either.”
Very matter-of-factly, Bree said, “Well, maybe you aren't either.”
I laughed, but it sounded a little bleak. “Fabulous. I'm stuck in limbo forever.”
She squinted at me for a moment, and then in the middle of the street she felt me up for my phone. Once she'd got it, she turned away from the sun and started flipping through it and then held it up for me to see.
There was a long list of words on the screen, and I took the phone from her so I could read them. They were adjectives, but I'd never heard of any of them before. I could clearly see they were related to gender, though, because they were words like 'agender' and 'transmasculine' and 'androgyne'.
“Where's this?” I asked her, checking the site and wondering if the words were just made-up by someone.
“Wikipedia,” Bree answered.
My eyebrows went up. “Oh,” I said, and then read them more carefully. “What are they?”
“Other genders,” she said, like this was common everyday knowledge that everyone had. Then, she laughed at my expression. “It's so weird how you're going through this and you're not all over the internet about it,” she told me. “If I felt like I wasn't a girl, the first thing I'd do is Google it.”
“I did a couple of times. But only for stuff related to being a guy. I didn't even know there was anything else.” I stopped for a second, and then looked down at her. I seriously had never heard of these words before in my life. “People use these words for themselves?” I asked for clarification.
She nodded. “Heaps. There's heaps of sites and blogs and stuff. Google them.”
That was a novel thought. I kept reading down the page for a second, because I was so spun out there was a whole section of the community that I'd never heard of. The page all the info was on was headed 'Genderqueer', and then the section underneath had another list of about a million different types of pronouns that I'd never seen. Pronouns, I thought, and hated them all immediately. English overcomplicated things so much sometimes.
“I bet my mother would die of pride to hear me say this,” I told Bree, putting the phone back in my pocket and taking her hand so we could keep walking, “but Korean is way better for these things. In Korean you can seriously go a whole conversation without using a single pronoun and that's completely normal.” I sighed. “That's what I kind of wish I could do. Just let people assume whatever they want and never have to clarify.”
“I could learn Korean,” Bree offered. “You could teach me.”
I squeezed her hand. “Thanks, but since we're in Australia I don't think that's going to solve the problem.”
“You look better,” I said, reaching down and tucking her hair behind her ears when she turned around to say goodbye to me.
She smiled. “I feel a bit better,” she said. Then, because I was wearing a tie again, she gave it a tug and pulled me down to kiss her. I did, soundly, in front of everyone coming in and out of the station. Someone made a disgusted comment about us and we both ended up laughing to ourselves about it.
I gave her my Opal card again, and tried to give her a twenty, too. She wouldn't take it. “Are you sure you don't want me to come to your school thing?” I asked her. “If it's an awards night or something, wouldn't it be nice to have company?”
She shook her head. “Nah. It'll be boring. It's not worth it to stress you out.”
I appreciated that. Being around judgemental high school students brought back things I'd rather not remember. “Okay,” I said, and hugged her. “Are you coming back tomorrow?” She nodded. “Good, because I've got something really fun we can do: pack all my stuff into boxes. Wild, right?”
She pushed me. “Dag,” she said, and then gave me a little smile and tapped through the barriers.
I watched her go with a grin, but I could see her smile was gone by the time she reached the top of the stairs. I wanted to run up there and hug her again, but she had my card. While I was looking at her platform above my head and trying to decide if I should just buy another card and go with her, the train came and left and it was too late.
I sighed and then headed home, thinking about all those genders and pronouns she'd just shown me.
I'd moved on to worrying about Bree and Andrej as I walked back into the hotel lobby, and thinking about Bree reminded me how excited she'd had been about getting mail. With that in mind, I went up to the front desk and collected mine, half expecting there to be a dick-shaped package or something equally humiliating waiting for me there. Fortunately, there wasn't. There was just a stack of nondescript envelopes.