Sister Moon

by Kirsten Miller

  ‘I don’t need those things,’ my father said. ‘My family is the only support I need. I’m done with the booze. With everything. I’m on top of it now.’

  ‘And the gambling?’

  ‘I’ve had myself barred from every casino within a fifty-kilometre radius. I’m saving money now. Please, Marsh, don’t hash this out in front of my family.’

  Marshall looked at me then, as though he could make me an ally, set me apart from my own father. ‘Your family needs to know what kind of man you are.’ Samuel lifted a water glass to his lips and drank until it was empty, and the glass landed again, too hard, on the table. My mother’s eyes fell swiftly upon him and it had the same effect as if she’d held him down with her own hands. He quietened, ran a hand across his face, covered his eyes. ‘I’m a good father,’ he said with the softness of defeat and the sadness of self-doubt. As though he wondered if it was still true.

  ‘Sure,’ said Marshall, ‘you’re a good father. No one’s denying that. So just don’t rock the boat. Stay here, where it’s easier to keep things under control.’

  ‘Whose control?’

  Marshall finished his peas and pushed his plate aside. He leaned back in his chair. Stretched his legs out in front of him. ‘Thanks, Dawn,’ he said to my mother with a satisfied smile. ‘That was delicious.’

  My father nodded slowly. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Okay, Marshall.’

  ‘Well, I’ve had a rough day,’ Marshall said to no one in particular. He pushed his chair back from the table. ‘I think I’ll go and wind down for a bit.’

  ‘You don’t want to stay for some pudding?’ My mother began clearing the supper dishes, scraping the plates and piling them one of top of another. Her mouth was a stretched line and she kept her eyes on the dishes. Marshall picked up his own plate and handed it to her. Then he stood.

  ‘No thanks, Dawn. I think I’ll go upstairs. Have a shower, get rid of the suit. I’ll check on Devin too, if you like, see how her stomach’s doing.’

  ‘I’m sure she’ll be fine. Enjoy your shower.’ She took the plates to the kitchen, while Marshall fetched his case and left the room.

  ‘Well that’s it, Monkey,’ my father said from his chair. ‘We’re here to stay. No adventures for us. No escaping my little brother’s grip.’

  I didn’t really understand. My mother entered the room again with an apple pie and a jug of cream. ‘Samuel, at least he’s helping us,’ she said in a stage whisper when she saw my father’s face. ‘At least we’ve got something solid now, a place to live, and we can start again.’

  ‘Ja. Whatever.’ There was a tired, ironic tilt to his head. ‘Whatever that means in the long run.’ He looked at my mother as she offered him a bowl. ‘No pudding for me, thanks.’ I saw him look backwards into the lounge. I saw him looking at the liquor cabinet. I saw his eyes stay there a moment too long.

  As the years passed in that house, something at the core of our family was sucked slowly outwards like the cooked marrow from a long deep bone. My father worked to please Marshall and my mother worked to please them both, to keep the peace between us all. As Devin grew she disappeared from me, from all of us. She appeared less and less at the table for family meals and my parents learnt that force and rules and discipline only pushed her further away, locked her more deeply in a shroud of silence. She grew thin and dreamlike, and it became more difficult to access that part of her that once I’d known as real. By the time Devin was fourteen, my parents had given up on expecting her to act any differently. They accepted her behaviour as what being a teenager entailed.

  When I spoke to her, she looked right through me as though she could see all the way to the other side of our lives, to the other side of us. I wanted to hold on to what our beginnings had brought us, but she was straining harder to let go, to separate herself and find a kind of life that none of us knew how to access.

  The days grew empty, and Devin never left her room. The hours stretched and I waited in them, my soul travelling up the stairs, my body listless, ears straining for any remaining sounds of my sister. She lived inside herself now, her visions were hers alone and she offered no invitation for the rest of us to join her. As I grew further into my teenage years, I began to let her go.

  Twenty-One

  I’m peeling carrots at nine-thirty in the morning when I get the call. I’m lost inside my own thoughts when the telephone jerks me awake and the knife slips and slices a thin wedge of skin off my thumb. There is nobody in the house and I should be working. I am dressed for it. I put my hand to my mouth and suck at the slow-emerging blood. I have proposals and treatments to write, but the thought of the work they might bring is remote and exhausts me. It’s not enough any more, just to be a mother, and work sits on the edge of my mind like a heavy blanket in summer. Everyone I know wants to be something else. All the mothers waiting for their children at my daughter’s school when the last bell goes. They aspire towards it now that their offspring are walking, talking and eating independently. As soon as possible a woman longs to return to herself, but usually she has long since forgotten who she really was.

  One woman I know has just opened a cupcake shop and employs three people to bake the cakes and to watch the shop when she’s out fetching and carrying and stopping for coffee. Another is a freelance interior decorator between taking her child to dance class, and somebody else wants to get into scrapbooking for profit. One was a doctor but now she reads fashion magazines and longs for a career as a ceramic artist. They all have husbands who earn enough. They all want to do everything and full-time employment will never do; the guilt of not watching one’s child grow up is pitted against a restlessness that who and what they are will never be enough.

  My own mother was never anything other than what was given to her. She woke earlier than we did, fixed our breakfast and brushed our hair, filled our plastic juice bottles with cheap orange squash and made sandwiches squashed together with thick Marmite butter to eat during our break at school. She was there on the steps when the bus dropped us home in the afternoons. We never missed a hot dinner around the table at night, and fast food or instant mash was not ever considered a meal. She worked in the city in the years when things were at their worst, but when my father’s salary at last measured up to the extent of his debt, she returned to the position she seemed resigned to: the caretaker of us. As long as she lived, I never thought to ask if there was anything more that she wanted.

  I’m peeling carrots in the morning now and I’m caught right there, in that space, between being a mother and being myself, between wanting to be everything, and wanting to be nothing at all.

  I wrap my thumb in the tea towel and answer the phone. ‘Hello?’

  ‘Hello Mrs Garret, it’s Sister Avalon speaking, from the home. It’s nothing serious, we just wanted to give you a call and keep you up to speed.’

  ‘Up to speed?’ Was Samuel’s life the racetrack, some kind of competition that I could somehow win if I went fast enough?

  ‘I’m sure you’re aware that there’s been some significant deterioration in your father’s condition. We’ve certainly noticed it here.’

  ‘Actually, I didn’t think it was that bad.’ I thought of the last time I’d seen him, on the beach for a walk with that blasted dog in the distance, probably watching us. He’d been quite lucid then. To be a mother is not enough; one is always a daughter too.

  Would a cupcake business make me feel any better? Perhaps I should switch from film to fabric design. There’s a clock on the wall above the door. One of those with a simple battery-operated mechanism that you can buy at any watch shop, complete with the hands that come in a transparent plastic packet. The face of the clock is a basic block of Masonite, hand painted in fast and furious colours that make me think of a sun-melted box of Smarties. Hayley made it last year at one of those holiday workshops where it doesn’t cost too much to get your child off your hands for the afternoon. She came home that day and told me that she wanted to be an artist. I’m n
ot so sure I want the same for her. I watch the red hand tick, forward, moving. It won’t stop until the battery expires and Auster reaches up and replaces it. He’s the only one tall enough. That clock, the red hand, it’s ticking now.

  ‘He’s started wetting his bed, I’m afraid,’ Sister Avalon says. ‘He’s lost most of his bladder function at night.’

  I think of the puddle under the chair in his room, the pungent smell of ammonia that permeates his clothes. I tend to blame the nurses, tell myself they’re not up to speed with their washing load. I unwrap my thumb and look at it. For seconds the flesh is pink beneath the flap of skin and it looks as though the bleeding has stopped. Then the minute red droplets swell through again.

  ‘Maybe he has bad dreams. Maybe that’s why it’s happening. I’m not sure that he’s happy where he is.’

  ‘This is the best place for him. Here he has set routines, easy to remember if he’s going to remember anything at all.’ Her voice is consoling but detached. Her position grants her a professional superiority, but I resent the assumption. ‘Jeanette was saying this morning, she’s noticed his memory loss.’ Jeanette’s in charge of the floor where my father’s room is situated.

  ‘He remembers me. He remembers my family. There’s a lot that we still talk about.’

  ‘Of course. Of course he does,’ she soothes. ‘Long-term memory takes much longer to go. This is a condition that moves in stages.’

  ‘And he’s not that old.’

  She knows nothing, she understands nothing. She knew nothing of Samuel before I took him to that place. He’s just a job for her; how can she know anything about him, about what he does and does not remember?

  In the silence that follows I hear the second hand tick through the column of sunlight that falls across the wall. I have come a very long way in my life.

  ‘Mrs Garret?’

  ‘I’m still here.’

  ‘We just want you to start considering high care at some point. It’s not immediate, but perhaps he belongs in a different place.’

  ‘Are there spaces open in high care that you need to fill?’ The voice that comes from my mouth is not my own. I want to clamp my lips shut with my hand, but one is holding the telephone, the other is up in the air, trying not to bleed all over the kitchen.

  ‘We’re not a mercenary concern,’ Sister Avalon says. Her voice is calm, reasoned, measured. She has had a lot of practice in dealing with people like me. ‘I understand that you may still be coming to terms with the shock of it. I just wanted to make sure that we are on the same page when important decisions have to be made. You are welcome to come in and have a chat about it, if you feel unsure.’

  I retreat, draw back into myself and my voice is soft. ‘Yes, thank you,’ I say. I don’t mean it. There is no gratitude in me for the woman who clearly believes that my father is on his way to oblivion. I do not think of the fact that she is now taking care of every single need that Samuel has. I do not think that, while I am standing here peeling carrots, she and her team are cooking him food and washing his urine-soaked pyjamas and mopping his floor and lifting his saggy penis in the bath so that they can get the wash cloth where it matters most.

  ‘I won’t make it to see him today,’ I tell her. ‘Work is a bit hectic at the moment. I’ll try and get there by the end of the week.’

  ‘That’s no problem,’ she tells me, her voice calm and measured, practised and even. I am just one of the hundreds of family members she has had to navigate her way through over the years. A prickly guardian of the family fortress. ‘I’m sure he’ll be happy to see you whenever you can find a moment.’

  After the call I wash the carrots off under running water in the sink and place them in a plastic container to put them in the fridge. My thumb is no longer bleeding, but now it stings and I resist putting pressure on it as I seal the lid. I dry my hands off on a tea towel and pick up the telephone receiver again and I dial Auster’s number, then put the phone down. I feel the weight of my heart in my chest, leaden with the knowledge that this is a problem Auster cannot help me with. He is someone apart from me, from what Samuel means to me, and for once he cannot soothe my heart.

  Twenty-Two

  Devin’s shirt was pale pink cotton, short sleeved and edged with a thin piping of lace in a deeper shade of the same colour. I don’t know that she liked it. I don’t know why she wore it even. Her other clothes were older than her age, too mature, and as she grew, she developed a preoccupation with wearing black. But she wore this childish pink shirt until she was fourteen.

  It was an autumn weekend afternoon, the leaves were turning yellow, falling down to create a carpet on the ground. Lunch was over and both my mother and Devin had retired to their rooms to read, or to sleep, and Marshall hadn’t emerged from his study all day. He wasn’t fond of weekends, and didn’t often spend them in the house.

  I was alone in the kitchen with Samuel after the midday meal. Together we packed away the last of the dishes, just dried from the rack. Samuel never considered domestic chores to be women’s work. His hands moved a swift soft cloth across a china plate. ‘Are you going to take a rest this afternoon?’

  ‘I don’t feel like it,’ I said. ‘I’m bored.’

  ‘Only boring people are bored,’ he said. ‘What will make you interesting?’ He flung the dishcloth over his shoulder, sat down on a kitchen stool and peered out of the window at the bleak mountain and the duvet of cloud that covered it. ‘The weather’s bad,’ he said when I suggested the beach. ‘It’ll blow a gale later on.’

  ‘I don’t mind. We don’t have to swim.’

  ‘You’ll freeze your little butt off if you go into the sea at this time of year.’

  ‘We used to swim any time, when we lived at home.’

  ‘Not really, Monkey. That’s just the way you remember it.’ He was quiet. He put his head in his hands. ‘It’s been three years already.’

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked.

  ‘Nothing.’ He lifted his head, focused his eyes on me. ‘I feel like a cigarette, that’s all.’

  ‘You don’t smoke any more.’

  ‘I don’t drink either.’

  He spent his nights with his family now. That place with its horseshoe logo had receded from my world, and his also. I had more of him now. More of his time. He had a new energy to his every day.

  ‘Your mother threatened me,’ he said. ‘With my life.’

  ‘Mom threatened you?’

  ‘She said she’d take you away if I carried on with my old ways, the things I want to do all the time, even when I know they’re bad for me. For us.’

  ‘Like smoking?’

  ‘Like anything else that’s easier to do than live your real life.’ He spoke to me like I was an adult. As though I was the real partner in his life.

  The weather was turning outside; a storm was coming.

  ‘But where would Mom have put me?’

  ‘What?’ He looked at me.

  ‘If she took me away from you. Where would she put me?’

  He laughed, his head thrown back, his eyes squeezed tight with mirth. ‘Not you, you silly,’ he said. ‘Not you on your own. She would have packed up and left me, taken both of you girls.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘To wherever women go to when they leave their bad old husbands.’

  I was too young to understand the intricacies of adult relationships and the responsibilities of parenthood. I knew only that I couldn’t imagine life without him. He was the peg on which I would always hang my past. He breathed down audibly at me through his big nose; thick hairs sprouted from his nostrils and the insides of his ears. I loved his hands most of all, with their thick strong fingers.

  I leaned into him, cupped my hands around his ear. ‘Let’s go out,’ I whispered.

  He imitated my gesture and his hands covered most of the side of my head. ‘Okay,’ he whispered back. ‘Let’s sneak out before they know we’re going. Go put your jacket and shoes on. Dress up warm.’


  I ran from the kitchen, through the long tiled corridor with its red Persian rug and old pictures that lined the wall. I bounded up the flight of stairs two at a time, but I kept my weight light and buoyant to prevent making any noise.

  In my room I put on a pair of thick woollen socks and lace-up shoes that could withstand any kind of wetness. I took my blue waterproof jacket from the cupboard and pushed my arms through the thick sleeves. It was slightly oversized and covered the top of my long trousers. As I descended the stairs I went slower, tiptoed my way down, holding onto the rail with my left hand.

  The door at the bottom of the stairs, Marshall’s private room, opened, closed again, quietly, deliberately, but I heard it loud and clear. There she was at the bottom of those stairs, a look on her face that was wild, staring, terrified. There was no doubt that she’d been in there with him, no doubt that she’d tried to slip out, quietly, and with no idea that we were there. It was then that I noticed her shirt. Pink, thin cotton, with lace trim at the edge of the collar. Short sleeves, clear opaque plastic buttons, but they were not done up properly. They started second from the bottom, she’d missed the first one, and the top two gaped open, exposing too much of her chest. I stared at her. There was something wrong, but my mind couldn’t find words for the feeling that rose inside of me. Her face like a mask, pale and staring, her eyes unable to hold mine. Then I knew that all we shared now was the wish to be anywhere else but in that moment, with the other as witness. Her head snapped as she heard a sudden sound.

  ‘Devin.’ My father stood in the arched entrance of the hallway. I’d been staring so hard at my sister I hadn’t noticed him there. He saw her too. He knew where she’d just come from, he must have seen her shirt and known who it was that she’d been with on the other side of that door. He must have known what to say, what words would be right, but he didn’t say them. Samuel and me, we both knew.