Authors: Isobelle Carmody
Alyzon Whitestarr
For my brother Matthew,
who talked philosophy at seven …
The sky was a soup of colors swirled together, and the sea was restless under it. Waves lapped the shore fretfully, sighing.
A man and woman walked from their car down a steep curving road to the sea, wearing bathing suits, towels slung around their necks. His shorts were too heavy to dry well. Both wore sunglasses for no other reason than because they had worn them all day. As they rounded the road, they saw the shallow beach.
“Well,” the man said, and they both stopped.
There was a naked pregnant woman, wading in the sea; they were both shocked and fascinated. A barefoot man wearing jeans and no shirt prowled the shore, while a big older woman clad in a voluminous dark plum dress and a shawl was seated on a blanket facing the pair. A slight girl with mouse-colored hair seated beside her was almost hidden. The seated woman’s brooding presence suggested some ritual in progress—a spell or an archaic binding. The girl might have been a sprite.
“Well,” the woman murmured at last, shaking herself
slightly to dislodge an inexplicable premonition of danger. “Let’s go down.”
Only when they reached the beach did they realize there were others; a plump youth of some eighteen or nineteen years peering into rock pools; a girl sitting on a rock combing her hair, which some trick of the sunlight rendered faintly green. The attention of these young people, like that of the man and the older woman, was focused on the pregnant woman.
As they drew nearer the strange group, the woman with the sunglasses noticed that the man in the jeans was extraordinarily good-looking. When he turned to smile at the newcomers, she felt the charm of the smile and responded.
It was not until they had come to the end of the path that they saw there was yet another girl curled under a bush at the rim of the beach. She was biting her nails. Even from a distance it was clear she had gone too far and was hurting herself. Unlike the others, her eyes were not on the woman in the water but on the handsome older man.
Feeling self-conscious, the couple piled towels, shoes, and sunglasses together. They swam, keeping carefully to one side of the inlet, leaving the other to the pregnant woman. When they were drying themselves, the woman in plum walked past them to an old van parked in the dunes. She returned with a steaming mug of liquid.
“All the comforts of home,” said the man.
“It’s herbal medicine for her,” she said, nodding toward the pregnant woman. “She’s in labor.”
The couple turned to stare openly at the pregnant woman. She had come into the shallows, and the man was now positioned behind her, supporting her back with his chest. The watching couple suddenly understood. What was about to take place was both extraordinary and utterly common place: a woman was about to give birth. At any given moment there must be millions of them in the world.
The woman resumed her sunglasses automatically and, remembering her own labor in a hospital, felt an echo of the pain, the need to push, the excitement of it all that no one had ever told her about. She could see now that the pregnant woman was doing the shallow panting. Her long red hair was lying in damp streamers down her back and across her swollen belly. It made the woman watching feel both afraid and thrilled.
Tonight she would dream of a woman screaming.
The man at her side wondered at a couple who would offer themselves and the woman’s pain and their unborn child up to that sunset, that sea. What did it mean in a world of hospitals and doctors and nuclear fission? What was it saying to the world? (To him?) He remembered the rank stench as his own daughter was born. How primal the birth, despite the hospital bed, the hovering doctor.
As the couple left, the sun was setting and clouds saturated with night were beginning to reach long fingers over the sky. Again the woman experienced a stab of unspecified danger, and it occurred to her that her fear was not of the family on the beach, but for them.
The man glanced in the rearview mirror as he drove away. Two girls were leading a skittish brown horse between them across the road. They seemed barely able to control it, and he wondered what would happen if it got away from them.
It starts with my family, and in a way that’s the whole story.
There’s my mother, Zambia. You probably won’t have heard of her. She’s the artist, Zambia Whitestarr. Then there’s my da, Macoll Whitestarr. His stage name is Mac, and he’s the lead guitarist in a band you’ve probably never heard of that plays a lot of improvised music. Then there’s us kids: my older brother, Jesse; my older sister, Mirandah; me, Alyzon; Serenity, who tries to make us call her Sybl; and last but not least our baby brother, Luke.
People always raise their eyebrows when I say how many of us there are. “Five,” they say, lifting their voice up at the end to show how they can hardly believe it. I guess we do have a pretty big family by ordinary standards. Mostly people have two or three kids. Somebody told me the size of a normal family is two-and-a-half-kids. I don’t know how they figure the half. I mean, what’s half a kid? A baby? In that case there’s four and a half of us, Luke being the half, only what he lacks in size he makes up for in Starr quality.
Ha ha.
Da always says we have a cast as big as
Ben Hur
, which is this old movie about half-naked muscle men who wrestle lions. Da loves movies. He always says if he had another life, he would be a film director. Not the kind that makes movies about giant dinosaurs or meteors flattening New York; art-house movies where you don’t have any idea what they’re about, but you can’t help watching them because they are sooo weird, and then you come out and the world seems to have shifted a bit while you were inside.
Da says that’s the whole point of those movies: to put you off balance; to make you see things from a different angle. I always answer: “We Whitestarrs are unbalanced enough already.”
I mean, you get the picture. This is not your common or garden-variety family where Da or Mum goes to work in an office or some place, and you shop and watch TV in the evenings, and go for barbecues on the weekends. For a start, Mum and Da work weird hours. Mum paints at night. She’s what’s called
nocturnal.
She sleeps in the daytime and gets up and eats breakfast while the rest of us eat dinner. The best part of her being up all night is that if you wake up with a bad dream or you can’t sleep, you can go to her studio. She wraps you in her shawls and lets you curl up in the corner of her tatty old studio couch while she makes Vegemite toast and pots of herbal tea, and you eventually fall asleep watching her paint, bathed in moonlight.
Da only works at night when he has a gig. Generally he and his band, Losing the Rope, rehearse four days a week in
the afternoons and some nights. He earns a living arranging other people’s music and giving music lessons. The rest of the time he’s either practicing his guitar or composing his own music.
To say we’re not rich is an understatement. There’s a few good months, a lot of bad months, and the occasional ugly month when we’re not having milk in our tea or butter on our bread and bills with red type and a nasty tone come in the mail because of what Da calls
The Gap.
That means the difference between when you ask somebody to pay you and when you actually get the money.
When I was small I thought The Gap was this big crack in the pavement out front of our place, which had appeared when a truck mounted the curb one night. It was wide enough that little kids needed help to step over it and old ladies with canes were always tutting at it. What used to scare me about it was that you couldn’t see how deep it was, no matter how hard you looked. It was too dark, and I was too scared to reach in and see if I could feel the bottom.
One day the man up the road saw me lying on my belly staring into it and he told me to watch out for the bears. Somehow that gave me this creepy idea that there was a dark underworld of bears and the crack opened onto it, but it wasn’t wide enough for them to escape, although that’s what they wanted to do more than anything in the world. They thought humans were mutant bears whose fur had fallen out, and they wanted to tear out the throats of all us puny, hairless bears living up here in the sunlight. But they couldn’t find a
way to escape. So they would come to the crack and gaze up at us. Whenever I stepped over it, I could feel their eyes glittering with bloodlust and hate. And whenever Da warned us that The Gap was widening, I would have nightmares about the bears, fearing that they had figured out a way to open up the crack enough to escape.
Of course, I grew out of thinking the bears were down there, but I still get a feeling of unease when Da talks about The Gap. Da says it doesn’t matter about being poor because everyone should live on the edge some of the time; it reminds you you’re alive. One bit of me agrees with him, but another bit of me feels like it would be easier if you didn’t live too close to the edge all of the time.
We kids go to school like regular kids. The truth is I like school. I’d get bored if I was home all the time just doing anything I wanted, like Jesse.
Da tutored us all in music, of course. He taught us piano and guitar, but I’m the only one who doesn’t play anything. All that teaching couldn’t seem to take hold in me. It just slipped out as fast as Da fed it in, until he said kindly that maybe I took after Mum. That might be OK if it wasn’t for the fact that most of the others are artistic as well. Mum says it’s because I haven’t developed the right side of my brain yet. Da thinks it’s because I haven’t found my form.
It was different with the others. Jesse plays blues on his guitar, Mirandah plays saxophone in a jazz group with some kids at school, and Serenity plays cello really well. Or she used to, anyway. Da says it doesn’t matter about me and
Mum not being musical because somebody needs to be the audience.
What I’m trying to say here is that in a family of extraordinary and talented people, I am the odd one out—the chicken in a house of peacocks. The worst of it is that the others really
are
peacocks. Mum has stunning blue eyes, masses of wavy red hair, and pale, soft skin. Mirandah takes after her, except she’s blond. Da, Serenity, and Jesse have thick, wavy, coal-black hair and blue eyes. Jesse is kind of overweight, but he’s still really nice-looking. Da is so handsome that some of the girls at school make swooning faces when he goes by, and female teachers always talk to him for longer than any other parent at parent-teacher nights. Luke has only been in the world for half a second or so, so we don’t know how he’ll end up looking, but right now he has creamy skin, a fluff of inky curls, and opaque blue eyes. I have this pale brown, straight hair that won’t grow past my shoulders without splitting, and my eyes are gray. Smoky, Da calls them, but that makes them sound a lot more interesting than they really are. I’m kind of skinny and short, too. Compact, Da says, which makes me sound like the economy size. So maybe
I’m
the half in the Whitestarr family.
I’m a bit ashamed to admit that, although I never minded having no talent, I did mind being plain
and
untalented. But who could I blame? Mum and Da can’t help the way their genes worked together to make me. I guess even genes have their off days.