Paper Alice

by Charlotte Calder

I leaned around, trying to look at her face. For a moment I could have sworn she was close to tears.

  ‘Anyway,’ she said after a moment, in a more normal voice, ‘we really liked Andy!’

  My face grew instantly warm.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, biting my lip to stop myself grinning. ‘He’s . . . good fun, isn’t he?’

  Now she was swivelling round in her chair, pretty much in control again, casually and infuriatingly checking out my expression. I shrank back slightly, into the shadows.

  ‘Quite a character. Hope we’ll be seeing more of him.’

  ‘Mmm . . .’

  There was no way I was going to add: I really hope so too.

  The twenty-first century thinks it has Love completely sussed; evidently it’s all down to pheromones and immune-system selection and pair-bonding hormones. A never-ending biological imperative, in other words, to reproduce the species. According to science we’re just infinitesimally tiny cogs in the inexorable onward roll of evolution.

  No wonder it turns you slightly crazy, makes everything else recede into the background. They’ve even discovered that people newly in love have remarkably similar brain scans to people who are mentally ill!

  Anyway, what’s that old song about love being the drug? All that week, and for quite a while afterwards I went around like the proverbial headless chook. The body tingling and fluttering through the days and nights, the brain flooded with the sight, smell and sound of Andy, whether he was present or not. And when we were apart, practically all I could think of was being with him again. Later we discovered that with all the calling and texting we’d both managed to use up a whole month’s phone credit in a few days.

  So in my mad, exhilarated state, when everything seemed funnier or sadder or more vivid than usual, what happened the following Saturday came like a grenade tossed into a glass blower’s studio.

  It was late morning; I’d just walked in from staying the night at Andy’s. And there was Dad, sprawled on the sofa, reading the papers.

  ‘Hey, Pa . . .’ It was practically the first time I’d laid eyes on him all week. I went over and gave him a kiss, then plonked myself down beside him, snuggling into the crook of his arm. ‘So, how’s the job?’

  He grunted noncommittally. ‘Not quite as exciting as the last, but not half as stressful, either.’ I felt him smile. ‘Perfect for an old geezer like me, in fact!’

  I laughed, digging him in the ribs. ‘Rubbish!’

  ‘More importantly,’ he said, turning to me with a quizzical smile, ‘how’s the new romance going? Swimmingly, Mum says!’

  I nodded, trying to keep my tone casual.

  ‘Good,’ I said. But of course, I was never going to get away with just that. ‘What?’ I cried, going pink, yet again.

  ‘Nothing!’ Dad shrugged exaggeratedly. ‘It’s just good to see my girl looking so happy, that’s all!’

  ‘Dad!’ Half-laughing, I changed the subject. And the first one that came into my head was – guess what? It was just about the only other thing besides Andy I’d been thinking about all week.

  And seeing we were both in such a good mood . . .

  I took a deep breath.

  ‘Dad, you haven’t got any rellos tucked away you don’t know about, have you?’

  He looked at me, startled.

  ‘What?’

  I could feel my heart starting to quicken, but now I’d begun, I had to go on.

  ‘Y’know, the Wilda thing. Because,’ I went on quickly, ‘she says you look incredibly like her dad.’

  We stared at one another. Dad frowned.

  ‘Not that I know of,’ he started, but just then we heard Mum’s footsteps coming up the stairs, and here she was, lugging several bags of groceries. We hadn’t even heard the car come in. Her face had that grim look that mothers have when they’ve just tackled Woolies on a Saturday morning.

  Dad hopped up to help her.

  ‘Al,’ he announced, taking the bags from her and hoisting them onto the bench, ‘has decided that Wilda’s definitely a long-lost relative.’

  ‘Dad,’ I cried with a stab of alarm, glancing at Mum, ‘I haven’t . . .’

  I trailed off; we both stared at Mum.

  My apprehension had been well-founded. I caught a second or two of what could only be described as panic in those cornflower blue eyes. A look that was frighteningly out of character, as though my restrained, cerebral mother had suddenly morphed into a hunted animal.

  Then just as quickly she dropped her gaze to the groceries; began yanking them out, banging tins and bottles and packets on the bench.

  ‘Can we not,’ she cried suddenly, harshly, ‘discuss . . .’

  She stopped; put the heels of her hands to her eyes. There was an awful silence.

  ‘Tinks,’ cried Dad at last, into the quiet. ‘Darling . . . We haven’t been discuss –’

  But he was cut short by a quite scary sound. A cross between a moan and a wail, and it was coming from Mum.

  ‘My god,’ she cried suddenly, as though to herself. ‘What the hell is wrong with me?’

  Dad and I looked at one another; the fear and bewilderment in his face must have mirrored mine.

  ‘Tinks . . .’ he said again, starting towards her.

  But she was staring up at us, her eyes filled with tears.

  ‘Alice,’ she said in a harsh, choked voice. ‘Can you ring Wilda? See if she can come over – now?’

  Dad went to pick her up; I couldn’t have driven. I felt like a prisoner waiting for a life or death verdict – sweaty and trembly and sick to my stomach.

  But if I was bad, Mum was worse. I’d never seen her like that before. She was moving about the kitchen like a robot, going through the motions of putting the groceries away, rearranging stuff, scrubbing at the odd sticky patch on the shelves, all the time with this completely distracted, absent look on her face. Several times I tried to help; told her to sit down and I’d do it for her, but she waved me away. And there was no point in pressing her for clues. ‘Wait till Wilda gets here,’ was all she’d say. ‘She’s got to hear it all.’

  When I heard the car pull in, my heart rate went through the roof. Mum and I stood there, frozen, as Dad and Wilda’s footsteps came up the stairs. And then here she was, looking haunted, her eyes flying straight to Mum’s. They stared at one another for a moment in silence.

  ‘Wilda,’ said Mum finally, ‘can you ever forgive me?’

  She held out her hands to Wilda, who, eyes wide with incomprehension, still came and took them in hers. And then Mum stretched out her arms, and they were hugging, as though they’d never let go.

  We all sat down and Mum told us her side of the story. That was enough of a revelation – bombshell, more like it – but it was only after Wilda had gone to the study and rung her dad, Rick, that everything completely fell into place.

  She was up there for about fifteen minutes, and when she came down again it was obvious she’d been crying – again. ‘Emotional’ is hardly the word for that day. By the end of it I think we all felt like puppets who had had their strings cut – crumpled into limp heaps. Particularly Mum and Wilda.

  Anyway, here goes.

  Wilda’s mum, Eva, had been living life pretty much on the edge when Rick had briefly known her. From the age of about three or four she’d been brought up in a series of foster homes, some of them reasonably happy, some not. Her life, obviously, had been far from easy. By the time Rick met her in her late twenties she’d been living a hand-to-mouth kind of existence for years, moving through an endless succession of share houses and flats and unhappy relationships; waitressing and barmaiding and cleaning to survive.

  ‘But Dad said her real passion was music,’ said Wilda softly. ‘Her favourite thing in the whole world was this racketty old piano that she’d dragged around everywhere with her, through all her various moves . . .’

  As though on cue we all turned and looked at Mum’s gleaming Steinway, standing in pride of place over near the windo
w, a book of Chopin preludes open on its stand.

  Mum let out a small sound of anguish and buried her head in her hands. From his perch on the back of the sofa Dad put his arms around her.

  I turned back to Wilda. There were tears running down her cheeks.

  ‘She’d apparently never had any proper lessons,’ she said, wiping her eyes. ‘Couldn’t read music – just played things by ear.’

  ‘All those years,’ whispered Mum, ‘I didn’t even know she existed.’ She swung back to Wilda. ‘Or you, darling.’

  I think we were all crying by now. I clutched Mum’s hand in one of mine, and Wilda’s in the other.

  One hand each for the Eva neither of them ever really knew.

  The Eva who was Wilda’s mother, and the Eva who was Mum’s sister.

  Identical, twin sister.

  Eva and Marisa’s mother, Mary, had only told Marisa about Eva’s existence just before Mary died of cancer, a few years after Mum and Dad got married. She and the girls’ father, Heinrich Lichtermann, had met some time after he’d emigrated to Australia from postwar Germany, along with several other members of his family. The couple had married shortly afterwards, and, having little money, had moved in with his elderly mother.

  The relationship, however, soon proved stormy. Heinrich’s habit of heavy drinking grew steadily worse until he’d become an alcoholic, and a frighteningly violent one at that. His mother told Mary that she was sure his grog-fuelled rages were an attempt to blot out wartime experiences, though he would never talk about them.

  Anyway, one day when the twins were only a few months old and things had become completely unbearable, Mary tried to leave with them, for good, while Heinrich was at work. But his mother tipped him off and he came home and caught her. A horrific scene ensued in which she feared for her life. He came at her with a knife when she tried to take the both of them, and anyway, the grandmother, who was underneath it all a decent old thing, assured her that she would look after Eva. So Mary ended up by leaving with just one of the babies, Marisa, and shortly afterwards moved with her to Queensland.

  There was no contact between my grandparents after that, and it wasn’t until years later that Mary found out that her mother-in-law had died, quite soon after she left. She also discovered that Heinrich’s drinking had subsequently become so bad that little Eva had been taken away from him and placed in foster care. He eventually died – burnt in a house fire. While in a drunken stupor a burning cigarette had set fire to his bedclothes.

  ‘But all the time I was growing up, Mum hadn’t told me about any of this – and hardly a thing about my father. She even changed our surname, back to her maiden name.’ Mum’s voice was dreamlike, and deeply sad. ‘Those kinds of things just weren’t discussed like they are today – they tended to get swept under the rug. Except that Mum–’

  She stopped; shook her head again. We waited, making little soothing noises, and after a while she went on.

  ‘Mum told me when she was dying that the guilt – of leaving one of her babies – had gnawed at her, terribly, all her life. But . . . it was hard enough bringing up just one child on her own and she certainly didn’t have the resources to try and reclaim Eva. So she just kind of shut it all out; tried to tell herself that Eva would have found a happy family to be part of . . .’

  She trailed off again; hugged Wilda. Another prickle of emotion ran up my spine; I dabbed at my eyes.

  ‘She told me that Eva had died.’ Mum searched Wilda’s face, her expression anguished. ‘But if she did know about you, she didn’t let on! It must’ve been all part of the bottling-up process. Your grandmother was a very proud woman – she would have considered a child born out of wedlock to be another stain on the family honour. As I’ve said, things were very different in those days.’

  Then she gave a tiny, mirthless laugh.

  ‘And it seems that I’ve inherited that same tendency – to block things out!’

  Wilda shook her head, as if to stop her, but Mum was ploughing on.

  ‘I can’t believe I didn’t try and claim you, from the moment I saw that photo and saw your name! I knew you must be related–’

  ‘Ssshh . . .’ Wilda smiled at her through her tears. ‘It doesn’t matter. The main thing is – we’re all together now–’

  ‘It was just that . . . ever since I can remember, the whole subject of your grandfather was always such a terrible, taboo thing with my mother – I just grew up learning to shut it all away as well . . .’

  ‘Tinks,’ said Dad sadly, stroking her hair. ‘It’s OK – you’re letting it out now.’

  I glanced at his stricken face, suddenly getting a mental image of the skinny little barefoot Marisa under the pepper tree, holding her unsmiling mother’s hand. Dad looked up and caught my eye, and I knew we were both thinking the same thought.

  Things that were so painful she couldn’t even tell her husband about them.

  ‘Anyway,’ said Mum, smiling at Wilda through her tears, ‘it’s just so wonderful to have a niece!’

  Wilda beamed back at her, unable to speak.

  ‘A kind of a double niece, really,’ said Dad, ‘seeing that you and Eva were identical.’

  ‘And that makes us just about real sisters,’ I cried. ‘More than just plain ole cousins, anyway!’

  ‘No wonder we look so alike,’ Wilda said, turning to Dad, ‘if our dads look alike too!’

  Dad gave a short laugh.

  ‘Well I guess it’s not really surprising, considering those stories you hear about identical twins who’ve been separated at birth. Getting the same school marks, going into the same career, marrying men with the same Christian name even.’

  ‘Same love of the piano–’

  ‘Yep. They’re exactly the same genetically, so it’s not surprising they’d end up with similar-looking husbands.’

  Wilda looked down at her hands again and took a deep, ragged breath. ‘If only my Dad had been as . . . together as you! He might’ve stuck by Eva.’

  I stared at her, a great shaft of sorrow going through me. Suddenly thinking of that old saying – the one about birth being a lottery.

  ‘Though I guess she wouldn’t have been an easy person to live with. Especially after–’

  She stopped; looked at Mum again.

  ‘Did Mary tell you how she died?’

  Mum stared back at her.

  ‘In an accident, wasn’t it?’

  Wilda shook her head, very sadly.

  ‘Uh uh.’ She swallowed. ‘Dad finally told me – just now. She . . . killed herself. Apparently she came down with this terrible post-natal depression–’ another shaky breath, ‘after she had me.’

  There was a small gasp; Mum and Dad stared at one another.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Dad, ‘what you had!’

  That was just about the saddest thing of all. Mum said that all the time she was growing up, she’d had this vague sense of something, or someone, being missing. And she’d get these dreams . . .

  But when her mother finally told her about Eva – and how she’d only died recently – Mary’s shame and sadness combined with Mum’s own shock and grief sent Mum into a state of complete denial. It was as though she just put a heavy lid on it all; forced herself to carry on as usual.

  Until she gave birth, and all those pent-up emotions boiled up and blew her defences away.

  ‘Tinks,’ said Dad sadly, ‘all those terrible months . . . Why on earth didn’t you tell me?’

  Mum blindly shook her head.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she whispered. ‘I just couldn’t seem to . . . get it out!’ She took his hand again; held it to her cheek. ‘I’m sorry, darling. I’m so sorry . . .’

  My heart snagged in sympathy, and for a moment I got a very clear picture of her. Not as my mother, but as a complex, vulnerable human being. Flawed and loveable.

  Like just about all of us, I guess.

  Speaking of pictures, Wilda’s entrance into our lives has certainly enlarged ours. It�
�s as though a half-closed curtain has been pushed right back, letting in a flood of sunshine and a much better view. For Wilda as much as the rest of us.

  The best thing, apart from having Wilda, has been the change in Mum – it’s as though she’s been cut free from invisible bindings. The process is still going on. Sometimes when she starts getting uptight you can almost see her reminding herself that it’s OK to chill, let down her guard. I guess habits of a lifetime take a bit of shaking off. She’s been going to a psychologist to help her sort through it all, which seems to be helping.

  Anyway, her eyes have taken on a new shine, and she laughs a lot more and gives Dad and me – and Wilda! – plenty of hugs. Even her piano playing seems more lively and fun, not the grim and desperate therapy it used to be. She sleeps in some mornings rather than going to the gym, eats the odd piece of chocolate, and has even gained a couple of kilos, which really suits her. And she’s started thinking up fun suggestions to jazz up our lives. Next weekend the five of us – her, Dad, Andy, me and Wilda – are going camping up the coast, which should be a laugh. Certainly a first for the McBeans, anyway!

  And things are so much more relaxed between Mum and me. Of course like all mothers and daughters we still have our rows, but I no longer get the feeling that I’m constantly being marked on her invisible score sheet. And we talk a lot more – about all kinds of things. Sometimes I find myself forgetting she’s my mum – she seems more like a wise and funny best friend.

  Speaking of which, Milly is still my oldest and (at times maddening) dearest mate. She and Chet, by the way, see quite a bit of one another – even now the revue’s well and truly over. Strictly platonic so far, but I’ve got a feeling that may change. And she hasn’t had a single one-night stand since Paul.

  Wilda, on the other hand, has become like the sister I never had. Plainer-speaking and more down-to-earth than me perhaps, but a sister in ways that go much deeper than just physical similarities. Even if I don’t see or speak to her for several days, we still seem to somehow sense how one another is feeling; what we’re up to. As Mum remarked the other day, it’s almost as though she and Eva have been reunited, in the form of their daughters.