Family Secrets

by Liz Byrski

  ‘Oh, Flora, I am so thankful to be here with you. I have missed you so terribly for so long.’

  And they cling together just as they had done when they met on the station platform, but this time it’s different – something has changed. Time and distance, age and experience, seem to dissolve in the icy water and they are jumping up and down, splashing and squealing like teenagers, freed at last both by what they remember and what they choose to forget.

  *

  As she drives past the front door and parks at the side of the house Kerry can see that there is no one home. The doors are locked, Scooter is not barking, no signs of life. She gets out of the car and looks around, wondering why she is here. She only decided to come last night, when Chris had suggested they take the kids to the zoo for a picnic.

  ‘You’ll have to do it without me,’ she’d said on the spur of the moment. ‘I’m going down to Mum’s.’

  Chris, who had been unpacking the dishwasher, had looked up in surprise. ‘To Hobart – why?’

  ‘I just – Mum wants me to check it out, make sure everything’s okay,’ she’d said, and he’d straightened up and looked at her and it was clear he didn’t believe her.

  ‘You mean you want to check on Farah.’

  She’d flushed then and turned away. ‘Somebody has to.’

  ‘No they don’t. Connie made the arrangement and she trusts Farah. Don’t meddle, Kerry.’

  ‘Can’t I just have a day to myself sometimes?’ she’d said. ‘You’re perfectly capable of taking the kids on a picnic.’

  ‘Indeed I am,’ he’d said, ‘but that’s not the point, is it?’

  She hates it when he calls her to account like this. In the early days she had admired it, had even felt that it might make her a better, less selfish, more honest person. Now it just pisses her off. He should’ve been a lawyer instead of a teacher; he’d be fearsome in the courtroom, picking up every inconsistency, every lie, every evasion, torturing witnesses like a cat toying with mice.

  ‘I’m planning to leave really early,’ she’d continued. ‘I’ll be back by tea time.’

  She looks at her watch – just after nine, hopefully Farah has taken her children out for the day. Kerry takes the house keys from her bag, snaps open the boot of the car and retrieves two bags of books that she has, over the last couple of years, borrowed from Gerald’s shelves. And leaving the boot and the driver’s door open she lugs them to the back of the house and lets herself in through the kitchen.

  The house is immaculate, spotless; she can’t remember ever having seen it looking so perfect. She dumps the bags on the kitchen floor and wanders from room to room sampling the stillness, the fresh lemony scent of some kind of furniture polish or floor cleaner. How does Farah keep it so tidy with two kids? Kerry wonders, gazing at the red plastic crate filled with children’s books and a few toys, standing neatly in the corner by the fireplace. Even the cushions and loose covers on the sofa, which is too soft and squishy ever to look neat, appear to have been freshly laundered or dry cleaned. Kerry considers lying down on it; these days she’s always tired. But it is not the couch that she wants to lie on, and before she does anything else she wants to see upstairs.

  She goes first to Connie’s room. The bed linen is stacked neatly alongside the folded doona on the bed, presumably in readiness for her mother’s return. The big spare room is still essentially tidy but the toys and books are not packed away like those downstairs. The twin beds are made up, each with a furry nightdress case on it – one a grey and white penguin, the other a pink lion. Some children’s clothes are draped over the chair, others are in a neatly folded stack on the chest of drawers. Twins, of course, Farah has twin girls, Kerry remembers – she’s met them once. They must be Ryan’s age, more perhaps. Well, that’s the children, so where is Farah sleeping?

  Not in Andrew’s old room she sees as she opens the door, and not the other small one which Connie is now obviously using for storage. So it’s Kerry’s old room that has been occupied by the invading force. Farah has brought her own doona cover, a glorious swirling pattern in shades of turquoise and cobalt, with matching pillowcases. Beside the bed is a pair of black satin slippers embroidered in silver thread and on the night table a pair of glasses, a small dish containing a couple of silver bracelets and a ring, and alongside it three books stacked one on top of the other.

  She tiptoes to the bedside table embarrassed by her own intrusion into what is now Farah’s room, reaches out a cautious hand and pushes the books around so she can see the titles. One has a red and gold cover with a title in an unfamiliar alphabet, there is a well-worn copy of Mrs Dalloway, and a new edition of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, both of which she knows to be her mother’s favourites. Glancing nervously over her shoulder she picks up Rebecca and sees that it is inscribed – ‘To Farah, I hope you’ll enjoy this. Many thanks for taking care of everything for me. Love, Connie.’ Mrs Dalloway is Connie’s own copy, her name scrawled in the top right-hand corner of the title page along with the year, 1974.

  Kerry straightens the books, looks around the room, barely recognisable as hers, and tiptoes out closing the door behind her. At the foot of the narrow staircase to her father’s study she pauses, then turns away. What’s the point? It’s several years since he was able to inhabit that room, although as far as she knows Connie has left it just as it was the last time he used it. Is there something of him still left up there or has every vestige of his spirit departed from the house?

  Sighing, she goes down to the kitchen, fills the kettle and stands staring out at the garden, waiting for the water to boil, wondering what she is really doing here. What she wants to do is to lie on the old chaise longue in the study. To find something of him there, just as she had wanted to lie alongside him in the last few months and days of his life, on that wretched hospital bed that had been set up for him in the small sitting room downstairs. She had ached for closeness then, but been so repelled by his physical condition that she had struggled even to make herself bend to kiss his cool, sunken cheek or hold his trembling hand. The memory of her inability to accept his illness or help with his care fills her with shame. What a failure she is as a daughter, as a woman. No wonder her mother dislikes her; she, more than anyone, sees through the confident, stroppy exterior to the weak, hopeless person she really is. Some sort of wall has grown up between her and other people, cutting her off from everyone she loves, even her children. She is trapped behind it, disconnected from everyone else, watching what happens but unable to feel a part of it. She’s gone through periods like this in the last few years but they have passed; this time, however, it seems to have become a permanent state.

  Kerry pours the water onto a tea bag, finds milk in the fridge, and makes her way to the lounge, but the pull of the study is too strong and she is soon heading slowly back up the stairs, along the landing to the narrow little staircase up to the converted loft that her father had described as his eyrie. The room is as it has always been, piled with books and papers, the 1930s telephone converted into a table lamp, the box files, the stacks of government reports, the framed photographs of family, from sepia studio portraits of great-grandparents to snaps of Andrew and herself as children, a photo of her and Chris’s wedding, and pictures of them with Ryan and Mia. She picks up a yellowing photograph of her parents’ wedding; Gerald in a morning suit, Connie in a full length satin dress with lace sleeves, carrying a bouquet of apricot roses, and then she spots another, a studio portrait of her father taken some time before he got sick. The photographer had captured the best of him, a full head of greying hair, the searching eyes and that cleft chin that Andrew has inherited and she, thankfully, has not. The knowing, half-amused expression, the slightly crooked hint of a smile, his natural air of authority – it’s all there. It is a picture of the father she wants to remember, the man whose approval she had so desperately sought but which always evaded her. It is a picture that restores him, and allows her to ignore the metamorphosis that transfor
med and diminished him, and finally repelled her.

  The old couch where Gerald sat to read, or to snooze on Sunday afternoons, looks very inviting. Setting her cup down on the wonky old wooden stool nearby, Kerry sorts out the faded cushions and lies down. A dodgy spring digs into her hip and she shifts her position, wondering just how long it is since Gerald lay here. Four years, more perhaps? Is it possible that no one has lain here since then? She holds the framed photograph against her chest, folding her arms over it and around herself, trying to recapture him, her mind rambling through the past. All the questions that she never asked, and to which she now so desperately wants the answers, crawl out from the woodwork of her memory. She recalls all the missed opportunities to know him better, to bridge the various stages in both their lives, to reach out as an adult woman, instead of always as a stumbling child. She has spent all her life trying to get to know him, and to make him see her, to notice her, but always being disappointed. What did he really think of her? What would he think of her now? She closes her eyes, willing herself to see him, to feel his presence, but hard as she tries there is nothing. She is cut off from the dead just as she is from the living.

  Seven

  Dear Nan, Brooke types. Thanks for sending me the photos, those beaches look a lot like the beaches near Hobart, specially the ones with the high cliffs and the pine trees at the back. Sorry I haven’t written before. I’m a hopeless case, aren’t I? I really enjoy reading your emails.

  She stops suddenly, realising that this is probably the first time she’s actually emailed her nan; weird that, everyone does everything by email these days, but she and Nan have rarely been in touch. They talk on the phone occasionally – well, not really talk – just chat a bit if her dad is talking to Nan and he calls to Brooke to come and say hello. When Connie first downloaded Skype they’d had a couple of chats but that was a bit awkward, as though after the first pleasantries and bits about what they’d been doing – Brooke going to school, Nan looking after Granddad – they didn’t really know what to say to each other. In fact, Brooke realises now, she’s had hardly anything to do with her grandmother since she was quite small. Before Granddad got sick, and even when he first got sick, her grandparents often phoned her, and they sometimes came to stay for a few days. They would take her out on a picnic or to the shops and buy her presents. Once Granddad took her in a rowing boat on the Yarra while Nan watched and waved from the river bank, but mostly Brooke and her mum and dad went to Hobart.

  She remembers the house back then when it had seemed so big and exciting, those huge cupboards to hide in, and a garden with all sorts of shady corners under big trees. Brooke remembers Granddad teaching her to swim with floaties, and then the summer when he’d said he thought she was ready to manage without them and she had swum right across the pool on her own and everyone had cheered.

  There were Christmases too; helping Nan to decorate the tree and then stack the presents underneath it, and waking on Christmas morning to find a stocking filled with all sorts of little treasures before they even got downstairs for the real presents. They went once to a carol service and once to a pantomime, on Christmas Eve. When they got back to the house her nan had brought out warm mince pies and they had all sat outside on the terrace in the mild evening, eating them with custard, and Granddad had even allowed her to taste his brandy.

  ‘Just a sip, Brooke darling,’ he’d said. ‘You might not like it.’

  But it was such a treat that when he tilted the glass she had gulped at it. It was disgusting. Brooke thought she was going to be sick and her throat burned but Nan had given her a spoonful of the warm, sweet custard to take the horrible taste away.

  Brooke, sitting now on her bed, her iPad propped on her lap, leans back against the pillows and folds her arms behind her head. She hardly ever thinks about those days now, the times when they were more like one big family instead of three different lots of people all living a long way away from each other and often arguing. In her memories everyone seems nicer than they act now. Brooke feels a surge of longing for those days, a longing for how it felt to be part of that, being the only grandchild, before Ryan and then Mia appeared on the scene.

  It was when Granddad got ill that everything changed, or that’s how it seems. Not that it was his fault of course, but he did get very sort of crusty and unpredictable, and then so sick that she dreaded going near him towards the end. Nan seemed to disappear around then too, to become someone who just looked after Granddad, who was always distracted – even when she was still talking to you and being lovely, she was never quite there. They didn’t go to Hobart so much after he got sick either; her parents, who had always niggled at each other, seemed to get worse and her dad and Auntie Kerry fought whenever they saw each other. Brooke realises now how much everything has changed, how much they’ve all changed, and how her family, which was something wonderful, has turned into something tense and uncomfortable.

  Seeing Nan telling off her dad and Auntie Kerry had been weird for Brooke. Nan seemed as though she’d been taken over by someone else, but if Brooke’s honest, she has known that side of Nan before, a long time ago, the side that is strong and firm. On the morning of the day they left, after the funeral and the ashes, when the two of them had talked in Granddad’s study, it had been like talking to the old Nan. And as she sits here now, about to get back to the email, Brooke decides she’s going to tell Nan what’s going on at home. She can’t talk about it to anyone, but she can put it in the email. Just writing it will help her to find out how she really feels. She clicks the iPad back to life and begins writing again.

  Anyway, here I am, writing now, and there’s stuff I could tell you about school and the play and everything but I want to tell you something important and secret. I’d rather talk to you – just us together – but I can’t so maybe writing to you will help.

  Mum and Dad are splitting up. I did sort of think they would last year, and then things got better for a while. But now it’s all on again. They’re arguing all the time, blaming each other, fighting about money and about the house and, of course, about me, like I’m a piece of furniture or something. Honestly, Nan, you’d think I was only six years old the way they talk about me. They must think I’m pretty dumb, but it’s them that’s dumb because they talk about it in whispers when they think I’m listening to music. Just because I’ve got my earphones on it’s like they think I’m not really there. But I always use earphones even if I’m not listening to anything. It means I don’t get hassled so much. I mean, sometimes I am listening to music even while I’m doing homework but it doesn’t stop me working. But these days I’m mostly just using them like a kind of barrier.

  They don’t have huge fights when I’m in the room, just sort of hiss stuff at each other – stuff from fights they’ve had, or ones they’re waiting to have. They save the big fights until they think I’m asleep. I can hear their voices then but not much of what they’re saying.

  The thing is that Mum’s having an affair with an artist called Zachary something or other. I’ve met him and he’s really gross. He always wears black. He calls himself ‘The Man in Black’, it’s on his exhibition poster, and he signs his paintings that way too. Mum thinks he’s amazing, but just wearing black doesn’t make you cool, especially if you’ve got a beer gut and really bad breath too. I mean, how could she? Dad can be boring, I suppose, but at least he’s nice, and he showers!

  So, the thing is, Dad says he wants a divorce and he wants Mum to move out. He says she should go and live with The Man in Black. She says he should move out and she and Zachary will live here and I must stay with them. Dad says, over his dead body, his daughter will not live with scum like that. So that’s one good thing, I suppose. It’d be all right, just me and Dad here, or me and Mum here, as long as I could see whoever wasn’t here whenever I want. And as long as I don’t have to go to Zachary’s house, because it’s probably as gross as him, which is why Mum doesn’t want to live there.

  I wish they
’d sort it out because it’s really hard living with people who hate each other. I feel like the third point in the triangle, and sometimes they use me to get at each other. Some of my friends have parents who’ve split and they say it’s heaps better than before.

  But the thing is, Nan, they talk about me like I’m a child, like I don’t get to have a say in it. Anyway, I’ve been on the internet and looked it all up and if they do get divorced I would get to decide where I want to go, at least I’d have a say. The judge would talk to me in confidence, and I’m sure he wouldn’t say I have to live with that idiot if I don’t want to.

  Some days I just wish it was all over. But mostly I want them to be like they were, like they used to be when I was little. Do you remember how it was then, Nan? They used to hold hands and put their arms around each other and sometimes they’d be kissing or cuddling in the kitchen. I used to hate this but now I think it was nice and I so want them to be like that again. So really I don’t know what to do and that’s why I’m telling you all this because I have to tell someone.

  I know you can’t do anything and even if you think you can, you absolutely mustn’t because I’m not supposed to know it’s happening. So you have to promise not to say anything to them or I’ll be in big trouble and worse still they’ll make sure I don’t get to hear anything else. So please, please, Nan, promise you won’t say anything to them or to anyone else, like Auntie Kerry, although I don’t think you would tell her really. Can I come and stay with you when you get back? Like we said? The holidays are in June and wherever I end up I’d still rather be with you.

  I hope you won’t be upset about all this. I’ll be okay but I just want it to be over. Writing this has made me feel a bit better. I know the times are all different over there but please write to me soon.