Sister Moon

by Kirsten Miller

  I go back to that house sometimes, driving slowly through the narrow roads above the bay. Each time it comes upon me as a shock, a jolt of realisation that once I lived another life, or another life lived me. It looks nothing like it did when we lived there. Countless renovations have changed the face of it, the façade that was once bricks and a wide veranda is now two storeys high and shielded by a giant wall of modern glass. The trees I knew are gone, the roots encroached too much onto the foundations of my childhood, and they were chopped down. Rosebushes front the house now, flowers of affluence that moved into the area long after we moved out. Each family that has passed through the walls in the last thirty years has made its mark, each attempting to claim it and make it their own. But I know that if I stood on the inside and looked out, there would be that view of the mountain, the extensive water of the bay, the fishing boats in the harbour and the blue beyond. These are what really remain after everything else. The things too big to be touched or altered by human hands.

  Recently I took my child there. The car idled outside. ‘This is where I lived when I was your age,’ I told Hayley, but all she gave the house was a once-over, a fleeting glance.

  ‘When can we go to McDonald’s?’ she asked. It stung me for a second, her lack of interest in any kind of life I might have had before this one, but children are hardened egoists by necessity. It’s nature’s design for them, otherwise they might not survive.

  My mother died long before I ever thought to ask if she was happy. I took Hayley to the house because I wanted to answer such questions before she needed to ask them, but she’ll probably only wonder about me long after I am gone. Still, my daughter’s petulance annoys me. It irritates me that she wants things – consumables, instant gratification. Unfairly to her, to one so young; she doesn’t yet know that the only things we really have in this life cannot be held in the hands.

  When Devin was just two years older than Hayley is now, she was already writing poetry. I was only seven and my grip on the pen still immature and self-conscious as I slowly learnt to form my letters. Already Devin was writing fluidly, big and bold scrawls that flew across the pages of her finger-smudged notebooks. Her teachers marvelled at her facility with language. Anything Devin touched – numbers, colours and words – bent themselves to do her bidding. But her poems were secret to her and when she showed me what she had written, I understood that I was important to her private self, called upon each time to bear witness to her world.

  ‘I have a new poem,’ she whispered to me one morning at the

  breakfast table. Mysterious dark rings circled her heavy-lidded eyes. ‘Do you want to hear it?’

  I nodded. I wanted anything Devin wanted. ‘Let’s go to the tree.’

  It grew on the short edge of the L-shaped property and around the corner from the house. When we lounged in the spaces where the branches began at the base of the enormous trunk we were hidden from view, but when we climbed into the branches and were obscured by the leaves we could see out onto the house, into the neighbours’ gardens and over the bay beyond, and it was here that her poetry really happened. Her dark eyes flicked across the words just before they tumbled as sounds from her mouth, her eyes watching and silently noting changes to be made, always critical of her creative work.

  The journey down is one of dreams

  and night is nothing that it seems.

  The days surrender, starlight gleams

  in shadow-ends of ancient streams.

  The places where we close our eyes

  uncover laughter, other lies.

  Retreating footsteps, evenings fade,

  in darkest waters dreamers wade.

  Swept away by sands that blow

  light, forgotten, I will go.

  I stared at her, enraptured not only by the words and the stories caught in the web of her rhyme, but by the fact that she wanted me there for her ritual. She read with the corners of her ruby mouth turned upwards as the breeze played with curls across her face and she ended breathless, as though the effort of reading the words aloud took more from her than heavy exercise.

  ‘I can’t think of a title for it,’ she said as the last stanza finished. ‘What do you think, Cat?’

  I always and only thought one thing: ‘Wonderful.’ And, as always, on my affirmation she began again, repeating the poem slowly and carefully, word for word, line by line, until we’d both memorised it and could repeat it in unison, together and into each other’s eyes, voices competing in intensity and volume until it became a chant beyond its own meaning, until she ripped the pages from the book and let them fly. ‘We know it now,’ she’d say with a flick of her long hair. ‘We don’t need it any more. Someone else might find it, like a secret message, blowing on the wind.’

  I remember some of these poems because the words were entrenched in my subconscious on a level deeper than I could have imagined. They come back to me still, like a bad song heard too often on the radio, repeating in my head until I cannot stand it any more. Sometimes I’m driving and even a CD in the car stereo won’t drown them out. ‘… night is nothing that it seems …’ They come to me on the back of my dreams, waking me and leaving me wide-eyed in the dark, with only the beat of the repetition of distantly familiar rhyming words. What gets me eventually is not the memory. It’s that I can’t find her voice. The words were hers, the tree was ours, but now, in the verses that haunt my head there is only one voice, my own, chanting those poems alone.

  Five

  Sometimes, after I drop my daughter at school, I avoid going in to the studio for hours. I go to the beach and run sand through my fingers. I go to the mountain to feel the breath of the wind on my face.

  I make my living from the layered lives of strangers. A year ago I did a film on refugees. The subjects of the one I’m currently working on grew up on home soil: child abuse on the Flats, on the fringes of my city and another step closer to me. My husband understands my late-night hours. He cooks supper and tucks our daughter into bed and gives her two kisses, one for himself and one for me. But he doesn’t know how much time I’ve spent with the sand and the wind. He doesn’t know that, once the final edits are cut, I spend hours on the extraneous takes, searching discarded footage for the children’s faces, always coming back to the eyes. I think I see her there, in moments and years gone by. In the faces of these other people, I am always searching the eyes for my sister.

  I’ve developed my script for today, the questions I know I’ll ask. Once we are there and in the moment, answers can spark ideas that are totally different, and the interview takes another tangent. I’ve been doing my job for long enough to trust the process, to know that increasingly there’s a point at which something else takes over. People call it the flow, the zone, when it takes on a life of its own; this is the way that the time put into my profession now serves me.

  Zakes is waiting at the usual busy intersection and I pull over for him to load up. ‘You be careful carrying that thing around with you,’ I say, indicating the camera as he gets into the car.

  ‘It’s not like pickpocketing a cellphone.’ Zakes is a man who laughs easily. At nearly three grand a day, he’s more expensive than most, but I work with him because he’s talented, he understands my thinking and he gets the job done more quickly than any of the others I’ve worked with. He catches stories through the eye, which is more than half my work done for me.

  I push a set of notes into his lap and steer the car out onto the highway.

  He scans down the first page, takes a disposable pen from his pocket, makes a few notes of his own in the margin. ‘Whew,’ he says, ‘heavy. Can’t you just do something on the history of rugby or something for a change?’

  I smile. He’s younger than me by some years and he always lifts my mood. As an independent, mine is a solitary job, but having Zakes with me for the shoots makes it feel more like some kind of partnership, until I take the footage back to the editing suite to work alone and forge my own vision once more.

&n
bsp; ‘So first,’ I say, ‘is the shelter. There are some kids there who are willing to talk, but obviously we’ll obscure their identities, do voice-overs if necessary.’

  ‘And then?’

  It’s all down on the paper, but still he asks so I can fill in more details or direction before we get there.

  ‘We’ll go back to the studio, look at all the footage. Carefully. Because next on the list is going to the prison, to talk to a perpetrator.’

  ‘Jeez, as if today isn’t enough. Talking to a guy who’s actually … That’s hectic.’

  ‘It’s a job. We can’t let emotions get in the way. Focus on the lighting and the sound and that we’re getting good footage. It’s what we do.’

  ‘While suppressing the urge to punch the guy in the face.’

  ‘He’s just a guy. That’s what I love about this job. You realise how human we all are.’

  Zakes’ inward breath is audible. ‘He’s a monster. You touch a kid like that and you’re never “just a guy” again.’

  Slowly the surrounding areas of industry give way to the shanties of the township flats.

  ‘At what exact point does it happen?’ I ask.

  ‘What? That a man becomes a monster?’

  ‘No, that a child becomes an adult and it becomes permissible to think about her – or him – in a sexual way. Overnight? Is there some kind of grey area that lasts weeks? Months? Where’s that cut-off, Zakes? What do people do with those thoughts when they’re just inappropriate imaginings in their heads? Sigh with relief when the girl they lust after turns eighteen?’

  Zakes shrugs, staring through the glass of the window, his elbow resting on the door, three fingers against his cheek. We enter the township and kids wave at us from a dusty corner. There’s not a tree in sight. ‘Cat, you’re too complicated,’ he says.

  The child is perched on a stool in the corner. The giant artificial light catches his vulnerability perfectly, makes his nervousness too real. He fiddles with the corner of his shirt, and I notice the dirt trapped around his bitten fingernails.

  I ask him questions. He answers, and sometimes he cries without moving his mouth. He’s perfect for my movie, but something inside me cringes with shame, and then dies. This is wrong. Underneath everything, I still feel it. Underneath my degree, my knowledge of anthropology and gender studies, my examinations of power and society, my films and my awards and social conscience – underneath it all I know that what I am really doing is feeding my ego, creating my art, sustaining my comfort­able life in the leafy suburbs and ensuring the perpetuation of that life for my daughter. I am here to suck this small boy dry of his story, and then to sell it to an international news station for a documentary slot for a small fortune. Awareness, they call it, when I know that the price in dollars is just about equally motivating for me.

  Zakes does his job well, but he’s quieter than usual. He doesn’t fool around with the kids, or try to make them laugh. It’s as though he wants it all over as quickly as possible.

  After the boy, a twelve-year-old girl takes centre stage.

  ‘I know your life has been difficult,’ I tell her. ‘That’s why you’re here, at the shelter.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘If I ask you a question, I want you to try to tell it like a story, okay? For example, if I ask you, “Why do you like the colour pink?” I want you to include those words, so you could say, “I like the colour pink because it makes me feel happy …” something like that. You understand?’

  She nods.

  ‘So, do you think you’ve had a difficult life?’

  ‘I think I’ve had a difficult life because you call it difficult; I don’t know anything else,’ she says. She’s sharp. She gets it first time. Most people keep forgetting that the interviewer is left out of the picture in the final product.

  ‘Tell me why you’re here.’

  ‘I’m at this place because my father killed my mother.’

  ‘Is your father in jail?’

  ‘My father was in jail for six months, then he came out. The jail was too full.’

  ‘Did you live with your father, when he came out of jail?’

  ‘I don’t live with my father, because he likes to make sex with me. He thinks me his wife, but I’m too young.’

  ‘When did your father first do these things to you?’

  ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘Were you old, like now? Or very small?’

  ‘I think small. I don’t remember.’

  It goes on like this, for the whole morning. I don’t find the flow, or the rhythm of it; I can’t enter the zone. Mostly, I feel sick in my stomach; sick for the children, but also at myself. I steel my face, I model it on Zakes’. I refer to my paper frequently, and make sure I leave no question uncovered. With each answer I push a little further, try to uncover another angle, an off-the-cuff that is a more revealing answer. The children’s faces betray what their voices do not, and always I am looking for something else.

  When we leave the shelter, many eyes observe us from the doorway and the curtainless windows. Zakes is quiet in the car.

  ‘You okay?’ I ask him.

  ‘Fuck it, man.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Can we get something for lunch, Cat? I’m starving.’

  We stop at a takeaway and eat burgers at a plastic table beside a window. My cheese burger is unhealthily delicious. Zakes chews with his mouth open, and every now and again I catch a glimpse of his gold tooth glinting in the light of midday. ‘This can be a crap job,’ he says. ‘All the bad stories, we’re always getting them from people who are easy to access. Poor people. Township kids. The old, the aged, the mentally challenged.’

  ‘There are so many stories,’ I say. ‘They need their stories told too.’

  ‘They. The other. It’s like … I don’t know. It’s hard to explain. I suppose it just feels patronising.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean we’re well-to-do film-makers, always prowling around for a subject, going where stories are easy to find.’

  ‘So?’

  He takes a sip of his soft drink. ‘So what about the rich white guy in the suburb who rapes his kid? What about the private-school girl who is molested behind those big high walls by her father, her brother, her generous and magnanimous uncle? Don’t they need their stories told?’

  My throat is dry. I reach out and pick up the can in front of him and drink and I don’t look at his eyes.

  ‘Why did you become a camera guy, Zakes?’ I ask him.

  ‘A technical college came to recruit at my school,’ he says, swallowing more of his burger. He’s eating at twice the speed I am. ‘I got a bursary for a year’s course. That’s it, really. I knew I needed something to do to make money, and I needed to know early what that would be.’ He puts the last of the burger into his mouth and finishes chewing before he asks me the same. ‘And you? Why did you want to make films?’

  The midday sun lands on our table, warm and still optimistic. ‘I thought I wanted to tell stories,’ I answer. I gather up the packaging garbage we’ve accumulated on this one small table. ‘But now I’m not so sure.’

  Six

  Each year we waited for the whales. The first sighting of the season was significant beyond time and what the rest of the daily grind had to offer. The first sighting was always ours, accompanied by the feel of my hand inside his. I ran to the bedroom and pulled on the small red boots with rubber soles that Samuel had bought me to protect my feet against the rocks. I took my dark weatherproof jacket with its towelling lining from the cupboard, a hand-me-down from Devin, and put it on. Samuel waited at the front door with his hand on the shiny brass of the polished handle.

  ‘Ready?’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘We’re going out for a bit,’ he called to my mother. ‘I’m taking Catherine.’

  ‘You’ve just been out,’ her voice came back at us thinly from the bedroom, but my father hadn’t heard, or he didn’t wa
nt to. He opened the door and took the lead for me to follow. I glanced backwards at my sister.

  Devin watched us with those deep wide eyes, her body cut in half by the table top, pen poised and about to launch into another series of words, now halted by the sight of our leaving. Her eyes flicked away from me, cool and dark, moist as though sheltered by the shadows of trees and conceding nothing, protecting all that was inside her. I knew it was wrong. I wanted her to see me, and I scarcely concealed the look of gleeful triumph on my face as I closed the door.

  We crossed the road and found the rhythm of our footsteps that would soon beat in time with the rain. He had my hand and he pulled me along too quickly, impatient to show me, to know that he’d not been mistaken in what he’d seen. We turned left at the main road and all the way I stole glances at the sea that tumbled between the buildings. The road took us higher and offered a panorama from a point of land, all the way across the bay and into the next. The beach itself could never give us the same view. At the top, beside the railing, an old couple were already staring out at the whipped-up water. The man leaned into the woman and pointed to a place midway between the horizon and the sand, in the centre of the bay. We stopped before we reached them. I stood in front of Samuel and he put his giant hands upon me, one on each shoulder. We said nothing, but we each watched the ocean’s edge, silent and straining our eyes.

  The giants were difficult to find. The wind chopped and whipped the water. I saw a dark patch that I mistook for a fin and then exhaled when I realised there was no point in crying out. I watched the couple to our left with furtive glances in between my own search. Life, Samuel had taught me time and again, was a serious competition.

  We saw them simultaneously as it turned out, and it couldn’t be helped. We had all been watching too far out. In front of us, to the right and closer to shore, there was a spray of salt and sea and the sound of a whale breathing as the blowhole opened and closed. Out-in. Bwoah-whew. When I close my eyes at night, often in the dream-like mist of early sleep, it is the last sound that my mind’s ear remembers. There’s a poignancy to it now, as slowly the whales become less, and they can do nothing but sigh. Breathe and sigh. Bwoah-whew. Sigh and breathe, above the surface of the sea.