Family Secrets

by Liz Byrski

  *

  Kerry wanders around the little supermarket ostensibly looking for dog food and washing powder but, paying insufficient attention, she keeps missing them. She sighs, stopping for a moment, staring into the freezer filled with vegetables, trying to focus on the task at hand, trying not to think about her mother, trying to find a place in her head that will get the shopping done and get her back home again. She has left Farah and the girls clearing leaves and weeds in Connie’s garden, while she has come to get the things she and Farah forgot when they did the shopping earlier in the week. Right now Kerry thinks it would suit her nicely to climb into the freezer and be cryogenically frozen if she could wake up sometime in the future to find she was normal again.

  She can remember times when she has cursed her feelings, wished she didn’t feel so much, so intensely and so often. But since she slipped into this black hole of depression, this feeling-free zone, she knows that feeling intensely is far better than the alternative. She wonders if she will feel anything ever again, and it seems pretty unlikely – in fact some days it seems impossible. Feelings are all around her, but she is never a part of them, just an observer. She had thought that getting away would make a difference. Chris, Erin, the children all seemed to be thrusting feelings in her face all the time. They were happy, ecstatic even, or sad, or angry, worried, anxious, or spilling over with laughter, and she was a thing apart.

  But even though she’s been at Connie’s for three weeks now, her numbness hasn’t really gone away. The one thing that is easier, though, is that Farah doesn’t keep asking her if she’s okay, or if she’s feeling better. Chris and Erin, on the other hand, had constantly looked at her with concern or sympathy. ‘How’re you doing?’ Chris would ask as they woke up each morning, and she could hear his need for her to be better, and his fear that nothing was changing. ‘Any better today?’ Erin would ask over breakfast, trying to sound casual but her tone was loaded with concern. Kerry had struggled to find something within herself to reassure them, but it just wasn’t there, nothing was there, not better, not worse, just nothing.

  So it is a bit easier with Farah, who seems to understand that this is not something that is going to be better in the morning, so she doesn’t ask. What she does, instead, is to make sure that Kerry works towards getting better.

  ‘I think we could all do with a walk,’ she’d said this morning when she had seen Kerry lying on the sofa staring glumly at the blank TV screen. And Kerry, who would have much preferred to stay put, got up, put on her walking shoes and they all walked right down into Sandy Bay, had a coffee and struggled back up the hill again, after which she did feel more able to get through the rest of the dull and wintry Sunday.

  ‘The exercise does help,’ Kerry had admitted when they got back.

  ‘Good, because I think we must tidy up the garden this afternoon, and we’ve run out of dog food so one of us has to drive down to the supermarket.’

  What Farah is doing, Kerry realises, is keeping her on track. She is kind and concerned but she expects Kerry to pull her weight, and doesn’t count on overnight results.

  When Chris called yesterday evening he’d asked if being in the house was helping, and she had wanted to tell him something to make him feel better, to give him some sort of hope.

  ‘I think it may be,’ she’d said. ‘There are lots of memories, I suppose that’s a good thing.’ It was all she could think of to say but he’d sounded relieved.

  ‘We miss you,’ he’d said. ‘I miss you especially, Kerry. I love you, and I’m thinking of you all the time.’

  ‘I love you too,’ she’d said, because she knows that she does, she must do, even though she can’t feel it. She thinks of him and the children constantly, wanting their hugs, their kisses, their physical presence, without having to try to enter their emotional space. And she thinks of Connie and wonders whether her mother will ever be able to forgive her for being the daughter from hell.

  She sleeps a lot and finds herself dreaming of her childhood, strange muddled dreams in which she is running to catch up with her father who is always just that little bit too far ahead of her. And sometimes she dreams of Andrew, something she hasn’t done for years, and in those dreams she’s trying to catch him too. He stops and turns around and holds out his hand waiting for her to catch up with him and take it, but however fast she runs she never reaches him. Weird, she thinks, but then maybe not really weird at all.

  But it does seem odd when, as she climbs back into the car with her supermarket shopping, her phone rings and it’s Andrew.

  ‘I tried you at home,’ Andrew says, ‘but Chris said you’re at Mum’s. Is … well, is everything okay?’

  ‘Of course, why wouldn’t it be?’ Kerry says, trying to sound normal.

  ‘You and Chris, I mean, you haven’t … ?’

  ‘We’re fine,’ she says. ‘I just needed a bit of a break and Erin’s there so I came down here for a while.’

  ‘Oh good, I just … well, actually, Linda and I have split up, and then when you weren’t home I thought …’

  ‘Oh god,’ she says, ‘I’m so sorry about you and Linda, I’d no idea. But, no, Chris and I are okay, thanks, nothing like that. Are you okay?’

  ‘Yes, well, yes and no. It’s all been a bit of a mess. Linda’s with someone else, and they’re in the house and Brooke and I are renting a cottage until she can buy me out.’

  ‘Shit! That’s all happened pretty quickly. Are you okay?’

  ‘I am now. Relieved really. It’s been a long time coming, and the last couple of months have been bloody awful but the worst is over. We moved in here yesterday and it’s really nice.’

  ‘And Brooke?’

  ‘It’s been hard on her,’ Andrews says. ‘She loathes Linda’s new … er … boyfriend, but she had to stay on in the house with them both longer than was good for her.’

  ‘You should’ve let me know,’ she says. ‘Is there anything I can do?’ She can’t imagine what she possibly could do even in her normal state and as she is now it seems a ridiculous question.

  ‘No, but thanks,’ he says. ‘It’d be good to get together sometime soon though. School holidays perhaps? It seems so long since we actually had a conversation without arguing.’

  Goosebumps take Kerry by surprise and she shivers. ‘Yes, too long,’ she says.

  ‘Are you sure you’re okay, Ker? You sound a bit odd.’

  ‘Just tired, I think, still getting over Dad. We all are, I suppose. Have you heard from Mum?’

  ‘I spoke to her on the phone about the break-up and she’s been in regular touch with Brooke. Helped her through it, I think. Kerry, there’s something I want to ask you. Do you know why Dad kicked Auntie Flora out of the house all those years ago?’

  ‘No idea. I asked once, and Dad just said it was none of my business, and we should all be very glad that he’d sent her away for our sake.’ As she speaks she can see a vague image of her aunt, a tall woman with a nice smile and curly reddish-brown hair, building a sandcastle with her and saying, ‘This bit is the tower where the princess gets locked away.’ ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘Well, it’s just that Mum told Brooke that Dad found out Flora was a lesbian.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I know – it’s weird, isn’t it? I mean, not that she was, or is, but that he reacted like that. Does it make sense to you? I mean, he was always rabidly anti-gay but that …’

  ‘I think I remember something …’ she says, trying to recall how it happened. It was later, years later, and her chest is suddenly tense, her heart beating faster as she remembers another summer. She was fourteen, the summer that Jennifer Mortimer came to stay. Another day, another beach, she and Jen stretched out on towels on the sand. She could feel the heat of Jen’s body alongside her, the sides of their hands were almost touching, and although they were apparently dozing and sunbaking, Kerry knew Jennifer was as alert as she was; the narrow space between them fizzled and crackled with electricity. She felt Jen
nifer’s little finger twitch and shift and link into hers and her heart seemed to swell with the thrill of it as her father’s dark shadow loomed above them blocking out the sun.

  ‘Kerry?’ Andrew asks. ‘Kerry are you still there?’

  ‘Yes,’ she says, ‘yes I’m here, I’m thinking. And I don’t know … but I think it does make sense. Something happened … years ago one summer … it’s just … just so long ago …’

  *

  ‘So d’you think she’d fit in?’ Phillip asks, attempting to cross his legs and knocking his knee hard against the corner of the filing cabinet in the process.

  Bea smiles. He never fails to forget the filing cabinet, she thinks; he must have a permanent bruise on that knee.

  Phillip swears and rubs the knee. ‘This office is ridiculous.’

  ‘You’re telling me,’ she says. ‘When are you going to get that other room fixed up so I can have a proper office?’

  ‘Okay, okay, I’ll get that chap down the road to come in and give me a quote this week.’

  ‘Yes, I do think she’s ideal. We’ve been lucky with staff but the young ones do tend to come and go. We need someone more mature and if Flora says yes it’ll be because she’s really made up her mind to settle here. I think we’d get on well.’

  Phillip nods. ‘Me too. So hopefully she’ll make up her mind in the next few days and we can get things moving.’

  ‘How was the opera?’ Bea asks.

  ‘Magnificent, as always, or almost always, I’m very …’

  ‘Actually, I meant how was going to the opera with Connie?’

  ‘Ah, yes. Well, it was very nice to go with someone who really knows their stuff and enjoys it. And it was …’ He stops, as if struggling to find the words he wants to say.

  ‘And it was what?’ Bea prompts.

  ‘It was interesting to hear about Gerry from Connie’s point of view.’

  ‘Really?’ Bea is bursting to know what this means but he will only tell her in his own time.

  ‘Mmmm, I don’t know whether I should …’ Another pause. ‘But I don’t think she said it in confidence …’

  ‘Oh for god’s sake, Phillip, stop farting around and tell me whatever it is.’

  He fidgets in his chair and sits upright, this time banging his elbow. ‘Shit!’ He rubs it fiercely. ‘Well, you know all that stuff Gerry told you about how needy Connie was, and how helpless after her mother died, and how he felt compelled to look after her?’

  ‘Yes, yes, and how much she relied on him – get on with it.’

  ‘Well, I don’t think that was true at all.’

  Bea smiles. ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘Oh, just something she said about letting Gerald persuade her that she might not make it in the opera.’

  ‘Flora said something similar – what she was implying, I think, was that it was Gerald who was afraid he couldn’t make it without a woman who would stand adoringly alongside him.’

  Phillip puffs out his cheeks. ‘That sort of makes sense, I think.’ He pauses. ‘You don’t seem surprised.’

  ‘No, but I was surprised when I met Connie because she didn’t seem to me to be a woman who could ever have been as Gerry described her. It absolutely rocked everything I’d ever believed about the two of them. And then the other day, when I had lunch with Flora, it all started to make sense.’

  They sit there in the office, staring at each other.

  ‘So how does that make you feel now, Bea?’

  Bea gives a short, sharp laugh. ‘Well, Dr Freud, I suppose the answer to that is that I feel strangely relieved. As though something has been put to rest. I realised long ago that Gerry and I would never have lasted in the long term. And I suppose it clarifies something that always concerned me about him – his capacity for self-deception in getting what he wanted or needed. I think I always saw that but tried not to, although it made me uneasy.’

  He nods. ‘Odd bloke, wasn’t he? And I get the feeling he was stuck in a groove, didn’t change much over the years. Anyway, your birthday next week. Lunch at The Ivy as usual? Or do you want to go wild and do something different?’

  ‘Different? Good heavens,’ she grins, ‘why would I do something different? It’s the annual highlight in my pleasantly boring social life. Might be nice to see if Connie and Flora would like to come along.’

  ‘Excellent idea.’ Phillip gets to his feet without bumping anything. ‘I’ll check with them and hopefully book for four. I wonder what would have happened to your publishing career if you’d married Gerry. You probably had a lucky escape.’

  ‘I’m beginning to think that myself,’ she says. ‘And it comes as something of a relief after all this time.’

  Nineteen

  ‘And this is my room,’ Brooke says, walking in, trying to see it through the eyes of someone encountering it for the first time. If this were someone else’s room she knows she’d think it was perfect, like a room from a novel, the buttery late afternoon light from the window falling in all the right places, the view of the garden with the fading purple bougainvillea sprawled against the back wall, her new bed under the sloping ceiling, the new desk of Tasmanian oak and, beside it, the purple leather typing chair.

  ‘Nice chair,’ Donna says, dropping down into it and spinning around.

  ‘But what about the whole room? I just love it to bits.’

  ‘I know, you’ve been going on about it all week.’

  ‘You don’t like the house, do you?’ Brooke says. ‘Not just this room, the whole house.’

  Donna shrugs. ‘Well, it’s a bit old.’

  ‘Of course it’s old – a hundred and fifty years old.’

  ‘Yeah, well, there you go. It’s fine if you like old stuff, it’s just not really on my radar.’

  ‘On your radar? What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘I just don’t rate it, that’s all. I like everything new. Your other place was much better.’ She spins again in the chair and when it stops she tilts it backwards and swings her legs up, resting her feet on the desk.

  Brooke is wishing she hadn’t invited Donna to come and see the house. She hadn’t particularly wanted to, wanted to keep it to herself and her dad, at least for a while. Donna has been acting weird since she started hanging out with Danny Philpot, changing almost overnight. And what Brooke hadn’t realised until she first went to catch the bus from here is that Danny Philpot lives about five minutes’ walk further down the same street, in a big flashy house with pillars by the front door. A house that looks as though it’s too big for the block it’s built on. And he gets on and off the bus at the same stop as her.

  ‘It was, like, out of some magazine, your old house,’ Donna says. ‘Not as good as Danny’s place but pretty cool. I could just see your mum with her crimson hair …’

  ‘It’s called claret, not crimson.’

  ‘Well, claret then, and one of those cool tent things she wears with black leggings, and those orange glasses, sitting on the lime green sofa being photographed, with that Zachary, all in black leather in the background. She won’t like it here, I bet.’

  ‘She doesn’t have to come here, and nor do you. Nobody has to come if they don’t like it,’ Brooke says pointedly, looking straight at Donna. She wants to tell her not to put her feet on the desk but the conversation is already going downhill and she decides not to make it worse. ‘I like it, Dad and me, we both love it.’

  Donna shrugs and says nothing, just takes a bottle of black nail polish from her pocket and unscrews it.

  ‘Don’t do that in here,’ Brooke says. ‘You might spill it.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  ‘You might. Come in the kitchen and we’ll sit at the table.’

  Donna pulls a face and gets up. ‘You are soooooo uptight, Brooke.’

  ‘I am not,’ Brooke says, ‘I just want to keep my room nice, and I don’t want your Doc Martens on my desk, or black nail polish on the carpet.’

  Donna looks down at her calf
length lace-up boots, white with red laces, patterned all over with bright red poppies. ‘Only you would think these are Doc Martens,’ she says, swinging her legs down and following Brooke out to the kitchen. ‘Nobody wears Doc Martens anymore, but you wouldn’t know that, would you, because you know nothing. And you hate boots, unless they’re boring black leather up to your knee.’

  ‘Oh shut up,’ Brooke says. ‘D’you want hot chocolate?’

  ‘Why don’t we have some voddie instead?’ Donna says. She casts a glance around the kitchen and starts opening cupboard doors. ‘I bet your dad’s got some here. Ah, look, just what we need!’ and she pulls the bottle of Smirnoff out of the cupboard and unscrews the cap. ‘We can have a housewarming party.’

  ‘No,’ Brooke says. ‘You can’t drink that, Dad’ll kill me.’

  ‘He’ll never know unless you tell him. It’s not like he marks the bottle, is it?’

  ‘That’s not the point,’ Brooke says. ‘Give it to me,’ and she reaches out to grab the bottle from Donna’s hand, but Donna, slightly taller, ducks away holding the bottle by its neck above her head.

  ‘You are so fucking uptight, Brooke,’ she says. ‘Danny says you need to loosen up. C’mon, we can get rat-arsed on this and we’ll just fill it up with water.’ And she tilts the uncapped bottle out of Brooke’s reach.

  ‘I don’t care what that loser says.’ Brooke reaches for the bottle. ‘Give it to me.’ She feels like crying but something tells her that this is just what Donna wants. For some reason, she is deliberately goading her. ‘Why are you being like this?’

  ‘Like what?’ Donna says, pulling a stupid face and then taking a big swig from the vodka bottle.

  ‘Stop it!’

  ‘Stop it, stop it,’ Donna mimics in a nasty sing-song voice. She’s gathering steam now. ‘You are so fucking up yourself, Brooke. I bet you don’t really like living in this poxy old house. You should’ve stayed with your mum and that Zach bloke. He’s hot, and he thinks I’m hot too – he told me. He was feeling me up in the hall at your other place, and down at Danny’s.’

  ‘You’re just being stupid,’ Brooke says. ‘You’re making it up.’ Donna’s eyes look funny, a bit mad, as though she’s taken something.