THEN
I was in the worst village in Switzerland when I found out my brother had been murdered.
Don’t tell anyone, but I didn’t need much convincing to come back to Perth. I’d been ready to come home one week into what was supposed to be a European adventure with my best friend, Lilia.
Don’t blame Europe, blame my optimism for imagining I could turn up solo to the exchange program that was supposed to be my Best Term Ever with my Best Friend Ever. Better yet, blame Lilia.
I’d been prepared for a quaint village, raclette and sharing a room with Lilia for twelve weeks.
What I got was a bedroom that was too big to heat properly, a host family with a dairy intolerance so severe I couldn’t bring a cheese sandwich home, and no Lilia.
I spent most of my time a) trying not to cry; b) crying; and c) concealing my misery on social media by posting every photo where I didn’t actively have snot leaking out of my nose.
The Swiss village looked exactly like its photos: an AI-generated vista complete with snow, stained glass windows and a view of the Alps.
But if you think it’s impossible to be miserable while sitting by a crackling fire, drinking a warm carob drink and attempting conversational French with your host sister, I can show you the journal entries that prove otherwise. Or I could if I didn’t burn them.
At school the teacher insisted everyone address me only in French (‘or she’ll never learn’), even though pretty much everyone’s English was better than mine.
I survived the days only by thinking of the moment after dinner when I could retreat to my bedroom to watch horror movies on my laptop – the only genre that didn’t make me cry.
The day you cheer yourself up by watching teenagers get dismembered on-screen by a supernatural entity is the day you know your life isn’t working out as planned.
‘What ’orrible news,’ said my host sister when I told her my brother had died suddenly. ‘Does zis mean I can have my bedroom back?’
It’s not like I was happy to hear that Felix was dead.
We’d never been close, but I hadn’t specifically wished for his death since the day he slammed my finger in the car door when I was twelve, because I accidentally broke his favourite mug.
(He was twenty-two – what twenty-two-year-old has a favourite mug?) But going home early? That part was pure relief.
Not until I found myself back home in Mount Lawley with Aunty Sam, poking my finger into the holes of the ripped-up chesterfield and listening to her run cello scales again (and again), did I consider I might have been too hasty. (Maybe carob is something you could learn to love?)
‘I’m not sure you should have come back,’ Aunty Sam had said at the airport, looking like Helena Bonham Carter caught in a windstorm when she tracked me down in baggage claim. ‘The funeral won’t be big.’
I’d said—