by Kay Kerr
I didn’t have any control over my words or my face or my body. That’s what outbursts do; they take over my brain and make me say the truth. I’ve read about compulsive liars, but when I’m having an outburst I’m a compulsive truth-teller and that’s probably worse. The truth packs a much meaner punch. I pushed over an accessories stand that was waiting to be repaired, pushed past Great White Molly and ran out onto the floor. I pulled off the cheap plastic lei that was part of my uniform and threw it on the ground. I legged it out of the shop towards the lift. My mind went into overtime, as it does when I have an outburst, and I cried all the way to the bus stop. I needed that job to pay for Schoolies, and I knew the rules, and I pushed my manager.
I texted Dee on the bus home, and she was waiting on my doorstep with a pink bag of donuts when I got home.
She was half-laughing but in a kind way when she asked, ‘What did you do, Brain? You big goofball.’
I told her: ‘I stuffed up, Dee, maybe worse than ever.’
She handed me the donuts: ‘Let’s go inside. Real Housewives is about to start.’
We watched two old episodes of Real Housewives of Beverley Hills, and I thought about how at least I’m not one of those women, and Dee said she’s going to go to LA one day, and I tried not to think about what had happened, and we didn’t talk about it, and we ate donuts.
Now Dee has gone home, Mum is meditating and Dad has ‘gone to pick up some messages’, which means he’s at the pub. Oliver is playing with his superhero figures and probably wishing he didn’t have an older sister who stresses everyone out so much.
Not everything can be smoothed over, you know. Some people are left to deal with the crap. So it would be great if you came home and sorted yours out, Rudy, because we’re all a bit sick of the smell.
From Erin
14 August
Dear Rudy,
I’m not apologising for that last letter. I know Mum would make me apologise if she’d read it, especially because of the swearing parts, but she hasn’t read it and anyway, I meant every word. These are my letters and if I’m going to write them, I’m going to do it my way and be honest about how I’m feeling even if that feeling is anger, because otherwise what’s the point? I could try Mum’s way, with all of the appointments and vitamins and drops and smoothies and yoga and no wheat or sugar or dairy. Or I could try Dad’s way with the pub and the beers and the barfly friends he calls his family, as though he doesn’t have an actual family here at home. Oliver isn’t trying anything because he’s six and he seems fine, like he doesn’t even remember, and I think that means he’s going to be the most fucked up of all of us. But I don’t want to try any of those things, so I’m trying the letters.
The last time I wrote to someone was to that pen-pal I had from Italy when I was eight and I was obsessed with owning a horse. Do you remember? The horse part I mean, I doubt you even realised I had a pen-pal. It was right around the time you got those blue rollerblades so you had more important things on your mind. I have never wanted anything more in my life than I wanted a horse when I was eight. I wanted it in my marrow and I thought I’d die if I didn’t get one.
I’ve still got those letters from Maria under my bed, in a box covered with pictures of horses cut out of magazines. Did you ever snoop under there trying to find my secrets, like I do in your room? You’d be very disappointed with my winter clothes in vacuum bags and my horse box with letters from an eight year old. They are the least exciting letters you can imagine, listing our favourite lollies and arguing over who was the cutest Jonas Brother. (Obviously it’s Joe.) Far less exciting than the time I found your weed and nudie mags inside a Nike shoebox.
It’s surprising how many times Woman’s Day has featured celebrities posing on or near a horse. My favourite picture is of a TV presenter in a flowing white dress sitting side-saddle on a chestnut Arabian. The blonde woman looks so glamorous and thrilled with herself, while the horse looks kind of pissed off. I guess I would be too, having chunks of metal drilled into my feet and being used as a prop for a fancy photo shoot in a women’s magazine. As soon as I was old enough to think about that, I stopped wanting a horse so much.
I don’t think the point is to write to you about horses, but no one specified what topics I should write about exactly, so I will just tell you what’s on my mind. Today it’s horses, and also being eight. Being eight seems preferable to being seventeen. Maybe it’s ages ending in eight that are the good years, because I think eighteen is going to be a lot of fun. All that freedom everyone keeps talking about, that’s got to be good. I can’t remember having any outbursts when I was eight, or at least not like the ones I have now. The things I loved most when I was eight were:
Horses
The Jonas Brothers
Swimming in our pool
Writing in my journal
Reading
Learning dances to old songs like the Macarena and the Nutbush
Watching afternoon cartoons
Going to the cinema
Dinosaurs
Hanging out with Dee.
You don’t have to read these letters if you don’t want to. I just have to try something because I was doing nothing and Mum is moving, all the time. She is trying very hard. I haven’t been trying that hard at all. I want to try, though, and I reckon that counts for something.
If it were up to me I would have spent the whole day revising my Schoolies folder and figuring out ways to trim my budget. Maybe meal-prepping would be the difference between affording it and not affording it. I don’t know, though, because Mum insisted on all of us helping her to replant the front garden bed even though it’s not spring yet. It looked fine before, and Dad seemed pretty grumpy about being asked to ‘do work’ on his precious Saturday off, but in the end it wasn’t so bad. Ollie focused on covering as much of his body as possible in soil—he called it sunscreen—and Mum tried to keep the conversation flowing. You know how she likes to ask questions, light and breezy with an agenda hidden just below the surface.
‘You must be enjoying having a Saturday off for once, are you Erin?’
What she really means is, how is the job hunt going? You still have to pay board you know. Get moving, don’t waste time.
Then she turned her attention to Dad. ‘You were up bright and early this morning, weren’t you, darling?’
Translation: you got home late from the pub, potentially in an awful state. I know you’re hiding your hangover. Don’t slack off today or you’ll be in trouble.
I usually answer the surface question, but you have a habit of calling her on what she really means. We need that. There’s less fighting going on lately, without you here, but less candidness too. If there’s one thing Mum won’t talk about it’s the whole blow up. You know. Do you mind talking about it? Or reading about it, to be correct. I’m pretty sure she hasn’t bought a carrot since. We’ll probably laugh about it one day, when things are normal again.
So, needless to say, we planted flowers and a few herbs and some tomatoes in the garden this morning, but definitely no carrots. Maybe you’ll be home in time to enjoy the cosmos. They’re my favourite flowers, and it’s not just because they look exactly like the pink flower emoji. The bees love them, and I love the bees. Dad ended up spraying everyone with the hose and it was a sickeningly wholesome family time. We need more of those I think, after everything.
Mum still calls Dee if I’m having a bad day or a bad week, or if I can’t seem to come out of my head after an outburst. I think they talk about me on the phone, and Mum always feels better and Dee always comes over with hot cinnamon donuts from Donut King. Dee says she can tell how I’ve been going by how tight her jeans feel, I guess because donuts make her put on weight. She knows about calorie-counting, but that’s not really her thing. I had to delete my calorie app because it was making me too obsessed. When I started weighing the butter for my toast in the mornings I knew I’d gone too far. We’ve eaten a lot of donuts since—you know. It’s almost been a
year and it will be my biggest donut-eating year ever. I’m not really keeping track, but I’d estimate a twenty to thirty per cent increase on last year. I’ve got to start having better days, Dee says, so she will fit into her formal dress. I know that’s not really why she wants me to have better days, and that she’d bring me donuts every day for the rest of the year if she needed to. I want to have better days too, for Mum and for Dee and everyone around me.
I know you like to say Dee should ‘talk less and think more’, but I also know you actually really like her and she has been a good friend to me this past year. She’s mostly been a good friend since she transferred from Sydney and sat next to me in Miss Bell’s grade three class right at the front.
Do you remember her back then? She was so cute and tiny. Sydney is only 915.6 kilometres from Brisbane, and then it’s another 29 kilometres out here to us on the bay at Cleveland, but it may as well have been the other side of the world for how exotic Dee seemed to everyone. She had two earrings in each ear and wore a hair wrap all year round, even when she wasn’t on holidays. Other girls liked Dee because of her four earrings and her hair wrap, but I liked her because she smiles with her eyes and says what she means and she laughs like a Disney villain. Her laugh gets away from itself and makes me laugh, even when I’m so far inside my own head I forget how to walk properly. Last Monday I walked into my locker on the way to home room and spilled my coffee all down the front of my uniform. Dee laughed so hard she said she peed her pants a little. She was bent over and laughing so much Mr Sharp sent her to the principal’s office for ‘disrupting the class’.
I questioned how laughing could be considered a disruption, especially when class hadn’t even started, and he sent me to the office too. I think Mr Sharp wishes I were you, or more like you. He is not kind. He always says you were funny in class, and I know I’m not funny. Well, I’m funny like ‘what’s that funny smell?’ not funny like ‘haha good joke, you’re so funny’. I wish I was better at telling when someone is joking—it’s hard when their face is the same as when they are being honest. When I try to make a joke and keep my face the same as when I’m being honest, people don’t realise I’m joking and they get upset by my jokes. I’m still trying to get the hang of it. I think it’s less to do with my delivery and more to do with who I am to begin with.
Do you remember when Dee started bringing me donuts when things got hard at the start of high school? My head was in a funny, foggy way and the principal had promised Mum I’d be in home room with Dee but then she put me in a completely different home room instead. When I got there I realised and I got pretty upset, and screamed at my home-room teacher that she didn’t know anything, and my wrists did circles and the Jessicas stared. Ms Wright tried to call the roll and I wouldn’t sit down, and she looked at me like she was scared of me, and that made me more upset. I remember thinking for once it would be nice to have someone look at me like they understood when I was having an outburst, instead of like I was a new species of animal, potentially dangerous and definitely not to be approached.
If I ever see someone having an outburst I’m going to look at them like I understand even if I don’t really. It was a bad day that first day of school, an outburst-in-front-of-everyone, meltdown-and-shutdown kind of day. Dee brought the donuts after school and we ate them lying on the trampoline. I don’t even know where you were. Ollie was inside with Mum. After that I tried to get through each day doing less than ten bad things.
I started calling it my cringe list. I try not to think about the list, but I can’t help seeing all of the things play over in my head like a movie. It hurts my stomach and makes me want to be sick. I think that’s why the donuts are so good; they push those horrible sick feelings down and fill my stomach with something else.
Now the teachers let me lie on the top bunk in sick bay and stare at the ceiling until I feel better, and if it’s a really bad day they call Mum and send me home. Sometimes with her, and sometimes with you. I preferred it when it was you. Here, it’s the same as ever. Dad finds an important job to do in the garage and Mum makes peppermint tea and calls Dee. Sometimes Mum says she has ‘had enough’ and yells and cries and sits on the back deck until Dee gets here. Other times she strokes my back or reads to me in bed. Usually Narnia or Harry Potter books because they are home for me, and also an escape. I know you think it’s because she loves me more or something like that. It isn’t; she doesn’t. I’m just more work.
Before the carrot incident, you never seemed too bothered by anything, even when you’d been in trouble or got hurt or when you were really sad. Words bounced off you like they meant nothing. I think maybe Mum and Dad just figured you were fine, so they left you to it. It was easier not to ask. Their guilt about that could drown us all. I think you are fine though, I don’t think there’s as much to read between the lines as they are finding. Time has given them too much perspective.
Anyway, Rudy, my hand is starting to cramp so I’m going to go to bed. I can’t promise I will do this every day, but I’ll try my best because ‘consistency is key’, or so I’m told. And if it doesn’t work I might have to try my hand at volleying vegetables through the window. (That was a joke. I thought it might work better without my face in the equation. What do you think?)
Miss you.
Love, Erin
15 August
Dear Rudy,
I’m getting the feeling you’re not planning on replying any time soon and I’m pissed off. That was some really big stuff I wrote in those last two letters, about my job and my life. Stuff I haven’t even spoken to Mum about, some of it. You kind of owe me a response here, bro. Not to pressure you or anything, but I’ve done a lot of listening to you in my seventeen years of life, and not a lot of talking in return. I’ve logged my hours, so now I’m cashing in. Remember how good I was at listening when you dropped out of TAFE and Dad was so mad about it and Mum couldn’t stop crying about how she ‘wanted more for you’? You told me everything in one big go, and I was so happy you felt like you could. I hope these letters make you feel happy too, but more than that I hope you reply.
Mum took Ollie to his friend’s party today, and Dad said he had some people to meet. He never outright says ‘I’m going to the pub’, but it’s always what he means. It’s weird to me that you never went with him. You both love drinking, it could have been a bonding thing. There’s shame mixed up there that I don’t fully understand.
I tried to take a look at the meal-prepping stuff for my Schoolies budget, but the internet was down so I couldn’t look up any recipes. I ended up going to the antiques centre for a bit. It’s kind of my new favourite place. I should probably apologise to you for calling it boring all those times. You were always going on about it, and it annoyed me. I hated it when you dragged me there. I guess I decided not to like it before I’d given it a chance. It doesn’t even matter because I probably won’t even be allowed back.
I wasn’t going to tell you, but in the spirit of being open in these letters, I will. I had a weird run-in with the old guy that runs the place. Your mate. Maybe I should have mentioned you are my brother. Like, ‘Hey I know you’ve just sprung me doing something totally weird, but my brother spends heaps in here on records and other old stuff and you seem to really like him so maybe just let this one slide okay?’
Let me just say, at least I wasn’t expelling bodily waste. I wasn’t wrecking anything, or doing anything gross. I was just enjoying the smell. That’s not bad, right? People do that all the time, at the beach and at the botanic gardens and whatever. It’s only weird because most people don’t enjoy the smell of old coats. I hadn’t even meant to go upstairs where the clothes are, but then I saw the coats and I had to go for a little peek. Or, more accurately, a little sniff. Yes, I should have been more subtle, but smell is linked so strongly to memory, and given everything, and the coats, I guess I lost myself a little. I climbed into the middle of the rack and I sat and I stayed there with my eyes closed, smelling, until it was past
closing time.
I probably would have been locked in there overnight if it weren’t for the person who left a heap of clothing in the change rooms. The old guy brought them back upstairs to be hung up and I guess that’s when he saw my feet sticking out from the bottom of the rack and got a fright. It probably was a little scary, in the darkened room when he thought he was alone. He screamed, and I screamed, and it was a whole thing. I think he thought I was trying to stay until after closing to steal something, because he called me a thief even though I hadn’t taken anything. He was more than a little rough pushing me out the front door and he said he would call the police, but if he was really going to try to get me arrested, he probably should have kept me inside, so I think that was a bluff.
That shot straight to the number-one spot on my cringe list. Maybe if I do my hair a little differently and wear something generic he won’t even recognise me next time.
Oh, and by the way, while you’re gone I’m borrowing your old iPod. I’m going to go into your room, even though I know you hate that, and I’m going to grab it and then get out. I won’t touch anything or poke around in there, don’t worry. I’m done with that, you’re too good at hiding stuff now anyway. No one is poking around in your stuff. It’s not like I’m asking permission because letters take so long to be delivered, and who knows if you’re even reading these anyway. I’ll look after it, your iPod. I just need to listen to something that isn’t so sad. I still like sad music most of the time, because it brings all my sad feelings to the surface where I can see them and feel them more clearly.
Your music, with all the trumpets and saxophones, is like children’s music for adults and that’s what I need. I don’t have my work shifts to go to anymore so I have more time for lying in bed listening to music. Mum thinks lying in bed listening to sad music is a bad thing, but she only really listens to music on the radio when she’s driving so she probably just hasn’t ever done it right. I think she’d feel a lot better if she just lay still and listened to some Joni Mitchell.
