She points to my wristbands. Mum hates them, especially the studs. ‘I like your wristbands.’
She has a naivety that makes me smile, though it reminds me of Robbie. ‘Thanks.’
My bus rolls up. Fifty kids run for the door, pushing and shoving, and I wait and watch it happen, not bothered. I don’t care if I have to stand the twenty minutes home. I’m not interested in getting the back seat or who I end up sitting next to. Turns out life’s just easier that way.
I indicate. ‘You catching the bus?’ It’s the last one, I learned that the hard way.
Morgan shakes her head. ‘I was going to hang out with a friend.’ She looks around, as if just starting to realise. ‘Think she’s forgotten…’
‘How are you getting home?’
A shrug, nonplussed. ‘I’ll figure it out.’
Her attitude kicks off the big-sister spontaneity in me. Robbie and I did it all the time, mostly out of pure competitiveness. Dare you to talk to the guard in the big furry hat. Race you round the Colosseum. The Colosseum turned out to be much bigger than it looks.
‘The Archibalds just opened at the gallery. You wanna go check them out?’ I half shrug, as if it’s no big deal.
A grin, as if I’ve just offered her a treat. ‘Really?’
‘Yeah. Wednesdays is Art After Hours. We have to walk to the train station, though.’ My bus goes the opposite direction.
‘I know a shortcut.’
The shortcut involves back alleys and carparks, then jumping the fence of the local pub. Morgan sets a cracking pace, talking the whole time, and not turning back once to check I’m okay. My leg is hurting almost from the start but I don’t tell her. Her not knowing makes it not real. It’s liberating being with somebody who doesn’t think to fuss.
The last hundred metres is a sprint along the platform and into a waiting carriage just before the doors slide shut. It’s already packed with kids in different uniforms and we squeeze into a space against the doors, trying to catch our breath.
Morgan uncurls her hand to show me a brilliant green leaf, crushed a little by her grip, snagged on the way.
‘I love these leaves. Look at the green. Doesn’t that make you think of summer?’
For a moment I forget the pain, forget that I’m out of breath, and just smile.
Neither of us has the entry fee so we have to sneak in when the attendant isn’t looking. It turns out Morgan’s a voluble art critic, worse than me. She analyses each image as we pass it, passing over the more traditional-style portraits for the brightly coloured ones and throwing about artists’ names.
‘That’s
so
Morimura, what a rip-off…Hey, doesn’t that one there make you think of Charles Blackman? The brushstrokes…’
Afterwards, we walk back to St James, hop a City Circle train to Wynyard, then squeeze onto a North Shore train. It’s still peak hour coming home from the city and there’s no seats, but the jam of people helps keep me propped upright. I hang onto the pole and try to keep my weight off my leg as much as possible.
Morgan gets off a few stops before me. She reckons her house is only a five-minute walk from the station and it’s still light outside so I figure she’ll be fine. I’m not so lucky. It’s at least a ten-minute drive home from the station—an hour’s walk at best, and probably twice that with my leg hurting. Hopefully I can get Alan to pick me up.
Part of me feels tired all of a sudden, but it’s a satisfied tiredness. I didn’t think about Robbie, or Mum, or school, for at least two hours. In that space, I felt like nothing had changed.
I pull my phone out to call home. I switched it off in the gallery, because I’ve got into trouble before, but also…Also because even though I don’t have friends who constantly call and text message all day, there’s still something defining about shutting it off, making myself unreachable.
Six messages. Two from Alan, the rest telling me I have missed calls.
Where are you? Don’t forget dinner.
Call me ASAP.
Shit. My stomach takes a dive. Mum’s three-months-late new year’s dinner…
I call Alan.
‘Where are you?’ He sounds calm. In the background I can hear a raucous cry in Italian, not my mother’s.
Guests are already arriving. I’m dead.
‘I’m on the train. I went into the art gallery, with a friend, to see the Archibalds…I forgot…Is Mum mad?’
He doesn’t answer that; just says he’ll meet me at the station.
I’m sitting on the edge of the footpath, leg stretched out in front of me, when he rolls up. The four-wheel drives are impossible to get into one-legged. I step up, gritting my teeth as I put weight on my leg, not wanting to be more of a nuisance by needing help.
‘What did you tell Mum?’
‘She thinks you had a physio appointment.’
‘I’ll need one.’
Alan has lied for me before, but usually little stuff, like saying it was him who knocked the bit of tile off the antique mosaic coffee table. Funny, because he’s such a straight arrow. He must have figured out long ago it was better to appease Mum than tell her the truth.
‘Didn’t she wonder why it’s so late?’
‘She’s busy with dinner. You got lucky.’
I try to stretch my leg out, try to massage the cramp out. ‘Sorry you’re missing the party.’
He smiles at that. An actual smile, because we both know how much he hates Mum’s ‘Italian affairs’.
I manage a smile back. ‘You can thank me later.’
before
after
later
Sunday morning dawns bright, dew on the grass. I’m up early to go for a run, and I find Mum out on the front steps in her dressing gown, toying with an unlit cigarette. She was pacing most of the night—her footsteps above kept waking me up. I study her in the way a meteorologist might study the sky. Scanning for approaching storms. I don’t consciously set out to analyse her mood; it’s just something I’ve learned to do because it’s useful to know what I’m dealing with.
‘How is your book going?’
She doesn’t answer at first.
‘I’m in the “depths of despair”,’ she says finally. She gives me a quick, wry smile. It only takes me a second to place the melodramatic phrase and I smile too. But it’s a careful smile, one that remembers the times she’s been so engulfed by depression we haven’t seen her for days on end.
She taps the cigarette lightly against her knee. ‘Do you remember how I used to read
Anne of Green Gables
to you every night before bed? You loved those books until Lauren told you they were for girls, then you refused to have them anymore.’
I suppose that’s something I have to thank my sister for. It had just never occurred to me that boys shouldn’t be reading stories about girls. I don’t know if I would have ever worked that out without her. I just loved books. I loved characters and places that came alive, and it didn’t really make much difference whether they were boys or girls or alien superheroes.
‘I used to read those same stories when I was younger. Before you were born I thought you were going to be another girl. I wanted to call you Anne.’
I nod, awkward. What does she really expect me to say to that?
In the early days of Mum’s writing she would be hidden in her room for days on end. We’d hear her footsteps and the clicking of typewriter keys, day and night. After her first book got published, when I was nine, it became more sporadic. She’d achieved some level of success, but I guess she was becoming disillusioned with the process. She seemed to write less. To spend just as much time reading or sitting upstairs, thinking. She took to coming downstairs more often, too. If she found me alone she’d always stop to talk to me. It was odd in a way, none of us were used to just chatting with our mother. I felt she must have thought of me as an ally or a protégé, maybe both. I wrote more, and though it was done in shame and secret in my bedroom, never shared with anybody, somehow Mum seemed to know.
‘I know you do it too,’ she mused one day. ‘You see the way light comes through a window, and you find yourself searching for a word to describe it, that
is
it… You understand that words are beautiful.’
I read, too. Mostly I reread all my old books. Mum’s never offered to buy me any new ones and I have a surprising aversion to libraries. I don’t like the idea of reading something that doesn’t belong to me. Books are personal, too personal to just borrow and share. I’d sooner lend out every other possession I own than a single one of my books.
Her moods were always up and down. About six months after her first book was published they reached a new low. One afternoon, I got home from school and ventured upstairs to ask for money for an excursion, to find her still in bed.
It wasn’t a good sort of still-in-bed. She wasn’t just having one of those days where she would put on comfy clothes or stay in her pyjamas and sit reading. It was dark in her room and the air reeked of stale cigarette smoke, and when she answered me her voice sounded dull and tired.
‘Mum?’
‘Not now, Will.’
I didn’t know what to say then, so I left again, stop
ping at the bottom of the stairs to breathe in the fresh air. I could feel the sick smoky smell clinging to my clothes and hair.
‘Mum’s still in bed,’ I told Lauren when she got home from school. She was in year seven, and her school finished half an hour after mine.
‘So?’
‘It’s afternoon.’
‘Who cares? She probably stayed all up night writing.’
I went away, not convinced by my sister’s argument. All that afternoon and evening I kept expecting to hear the clicking of the typewriter start up, but it was quiet upstairs.
It went on that way for a week. Then I called Aunty Jen.
‘Will! How’s school?’
The bright smile didn’t fool me; I could see the concern in her eyes. She was still in her work clothes, and I knew she’d rushed straight over because she normally took off her high heels the first chance she got.
‘We don’t have any food left in the house,’ was all I said.
All three of us followed her up to the stairs, hanging out on the landing as she went in to talk to Mum.
‘God, Sandra, it stinks in here. I thought you quit.’
Mum, nothing more than a bunch of shadows and blankets, murmured something and Aunt Jen forced a laugh. ‘Yeah, sure.’
She came back over to the door and gestured at us to shoo. ‘I’ll be down in a bit.’
We sat grimly at the kitchen counter for the next hour or so, waiting for her to come down. I stared hard at a plastic orange bowl full of burnt popcorn, not wanting to speak in case I tipped the scales in some terrible way.
Lauren looked at Morgan, then at me. Her eyes were piercing, her jaw set. ‘We’re not going into foster care.’
I didn’t ask her how she could be so sure. Somehow I just believed her: she would keep that promise, however she could.
And somehow, she did. We didn’t go into foster care. Aunty Jen stayed for a month, taking over running the house. That didn’t go over much better with Lauren, who was used to doing things her way. But Aunty Jen’s reign, as friction-filled as some moments were, was a brief escape into my old life of packed lunches, bedtime stories and goodnight kisses. I knew it wasn’t going to last forever, but I clung to each tenuous moment, trying to store up what I could.
I was sitting on the front step reading when I encountered my mother for the first time in almost two weeks. I’d fled to escape an argument between Aunty Jen and Lauren. I pulled my book close against me as I felt the front door swing inwards, expecting a violent flurry of movement and the angry strides of my sister. But it wasn’t Lauren’s tread. It was still crisp, but more careful; a little hesitant. Mum.
She paused. My head was still down as I pretended to be deep in the book, but I could hear her quiet breathing behind me. The clipped footsteps moved past, and she stopped a few metres away with her back to me. I could tell from the way she searched her pockets and then cupped her hands to her face that she was lighting a cigarette. Finally she turned around, meeting my gaze and shuffling a little.
‘What are you reading?’
Her voice was surprisingly clear, casual. I’d expected her to look different, ill somehow, but Aunty Jen had been making her eat properly and it looked like she’d just show
ered and washed her hair.
I held my book up to show her, and she raised an eyebrow. ‘You need some new stuff.’ Again she shuffled, stamping her feet as if it was really cold, and she came forwards, reaching for the ashtray that I had nudged aside with my feet. ‘That’s not challenging for you.’
This wasn’t at all how I’d imagined this meeting would go. I wanted to say something, to tell her how unfair she’d been on us, but I wasn’t brave enough. When I did speak, my voice was shaky: ‘Aunty Jen says…you feel like you’re letting everyone down.’