11
TWO DAYS LATER it’s Christmas Eve. But, despite Dad’s placebo speech, we haven’t dragged the plastic tree out from its dusty box in the garage. We’re not wrapping presents and watching terrible holiday-themed movies. Until this afternoon, when Dad started making the trifle we always take to his side of the family’s Christmas lunch, it was as if we weren’t going to acknowledge Christmas at all. And it’s kind of a relief, to be honest, this unspoken confession that things are not okay—even if it is with something as passive as the omission of decorations.
I’m in my room, begging whichever ancient god controls time to make these two days pass quickly, when Mum calls me. I think about ignoring her but pretending to be asleep at 4 pm feels like a red flag, so I haul myself out of bed.
On my way past the living room I see the Christmas tree has been set up, stealthily and silently in the past hour or so, and I try not to groan. I’m half a step inside the kitchen, where Dad is smoothing the cream on the top layer of the trifle, when a blur of red and gold and green bursts out of the pantry.
‘Woah!’ I scoot back and hold a hand to my chest, almost knocking over a monstera.
‘Surprise!’ Mum yells. She’s dressed head-to-toe in a Hawaiian-themed Santa costume and holding up two actual coconuts. They’re cracked open and decorated with an excess of cocktail umbrellas.
‘Yeah!’ I’m breathless and high-pitched. ‘I kinda got the surprise bit!’
I glance at Dad, who’s grinning. He has pulled a third coconut from somewhere. I look back at Mum and take in the full thing: a lei made of plastic holly, a ‘grass skirt’ of tinsel, a palm-tree-frond beard. I’m caught between laughing, cringing and feeling depressed at how hard she’s trying. But the outfit is so absurd, so completely the image of Christmas consumerism gone too far, so ugly that I crack up. This sets Dad off, then Mum.
‘That’s genuinely the worst thing I’ve ever seen,’ I wheeze.
Mum looks so pleased with herself. ‘I knew you’d like it.’
‘It literally blows my mind that it even exists. How much did you pay for that…that thing ?’
‘Almost $200. It was such a rip-off!’
‘Nah,’ Dad says, red from laughing. ‘Worth it for double to see you in that.’
Mum shimmies over to hand me a coconut, which is filled with a surprisingly delicious mixture of coconut water and Passiona. Once we’ve all calmed down, Mum and I slide onto the stools at the island bench. Dad pushes a mixing bowl towards us and we start sticking our fingers into the cream, licking it off and waiting for our sides to stop aching.
Finally, Mum pulls off her fake palm-tree-frond beard. ‘We owe you an apology, sweetie.’
I wipe my lips with the back of my hand. ‘Oh yeah?’
She nods. ‘We almost screwed this Christmas up. It was…’ she takes a deep breath and I know this has been rehearsed so she can hold it together. ‘It’s just so hard to imagine a celebration without Charlie. It felt like it wasn’t worth having one at all.’ Mum puts a hand on my leg, and I fight off the thought that what she actually means is that it almost wasn’t worth doing just for me. ‘But I don’t think that’s right,’ Mum continues. ‘And I don’t think he’d want us to ignore Christmas. I reckon Charlie would want us to try to have fun and be happy.’ She glances at Dad, who nods in support, before turning back to me. ‘He’d love this costume, don’t you reckon?’
Charlie would call it an assault on his eyeballs, I think, but my throat’s shrunk and my mouth is dry so I can only nod. So, we’re definitely doing the Christmas thing. I should have expected this. My parents are fine and we’re all going to try to have fun and be happy . But as much as it whole-body-hurts to imagine celebrating without Charlie, maybe Mum’s right. Maybe this is better than ignoring it, ignoring him , altogether. And for the first time I think: thank God my parents are coping. Because maybe they can drag me out of my mess.
Mum kisses me on the forehead. ‘Merry Christmas, Luce Cat. We love you so much.’
There’s a swelling of warmth in my chest, like a soothing hot water bottle.
‘Merry Christmas, Mum,’ I say.
Dad makes his way around the island bench. He puts his arm around Mum and tries to kiss her, but she flinches and angles her head away, so fast it’s like an instinct, and he grazes her cheek instead. He pretends nothing happened, but it’s too late. I’ve seen it. Awkwardness blooms between us and that’s when I realise— they’re faking it . Of course they are. I mean, isn’t this what they do for a job? Sell the happy family dream? Mum looks down at the marble bench and Dad’s shoulders droop and the warmth inside me turns cool.
Dad pulls away from our huddle and starts cleaning up the trifle mess.
‘So,’ Mum says, faux-bright. ‘We’ve got veggie and pineapple burgers and Christmas movies lined up. Keen?’
‘Ah,’ I say, my mind spinning because everything feels manufactured and unreal all of a sudden, fake and meaningless, like life is a movie set. Or like the way my parents sometimes re-heat the cookies they make for open houses ten times so they don’t have to make another batch. They still smell and look good, but they’re not even remotely edible. They’d probably make you sick.
I push my chair back. ‘I’ve gotta pee.’
I walk to the bathroom, keeping my footsteps as steady as possible even though I want to run. I knew Christmas Eve would be a shitty day. Then I remember what Jacinta told me in my bedroom, that thing about friends and shitty days. I pull out my phone.
What are you doing right now
I pray she’s not working. Thankfully she messages back right away.
Eating an advent calendar in one go. Why?
Let’s hang out
A few minutes go by before she writes back again. I grip the phone hard.
Sorry. Can’t. I have a thing on.
I type frantically.
What are you doing? Are you Santa? Can I come with you? Promise to be good
Haha. Hmmm. Nah. Zero reindeer involved
You won’t like it. Trust me
I don’t care what it is. It can be anything.
Not this. Sorry.
What could she be doing that she doesn’t want me to see? I thought we were friends. I swallow my pride, letting down my wall a little.
My parents are being really weird. I need to get out of the house. Please?
A minute goes by before my phone buzzes again.
Pick you up in 10
I tell Mum and Dad that because I thought Christmas was cancelled I said I’d watch movies at Jacinta’s house this afternoon. They look awkward and guilty, but also relieved I seem to have a proper friend, so they tell me to have fun.
Eight minutes later Nacho the Volvo pulls up out the front and I jump in.
‘Cute outfit,’ Jacinta says over a gear grind as we take the freeway entrance.
‘Back at you.’ We’re both wearing our Bella Darling hoodies that she sells to raise money for a Trans not-for-profit. They’re deep purple with the word Darling in cursive letters across the front.
‘All right,’ I say. ‘You can tell me now.’ I gesture at the small, neatly wrapped pile of presents at my feet. ‘You are Santa, aren’t you?’
Jacinta throws me an eye roll. ‘Santa is immoral. He’s the Elon Musk of made-up people. I mean, he must be a billionaire right? Anyone with enough money to produce that many gifts but who does nothing to reduce global poverty is a selfish prick.’
I snort. ‘Right. It’s like, thanks for the spaceship-shaped lamp but maybe try funding some renewable energy.’
Jacinta laughs, but it’s a little hollow. A little distracted. She flicks the radio on, then off. Changes lanes, then back again. Is she nervous? I’m about to ask where we’re going but she gets in first.
‘Why were your parents being weird?’
A P-plater with two guys inside zooms past us in the right lane. Speeding would probably be a pretty good life bomb, I think, but then my anxiety zings, picturing the car and its occupants in a mangled wreck. It would only take a second. Alive, then dead. Just like that. Don’t they know? Don’t they care?
‘I dunno,’ I say, trying to hint that I don’t want to talk about it even though I sort of do, but I can’t explain without bringing up Charlie. ‘Some complicated crap that makes me never want to be an adult.’
Jacinta nods. ‘Well, we’re kind of saving each other tonight. Mum’s got a bad cold and I didn’t actually feel like going alone.’ She tilts her head to the left to crack her neck. ‘I mean, we might get a Christmas miracle. But if things don’t go well, don’t say I didn’t warn you.’ She sounds defensive.
I glance at her. ‘Where are we going?’
She lets all the air out of her lungs, and doesn’t have to answer.
Eden Gardens nursing home is an old brick thing with beds of pink roses out the front and automatic doors. When we step inside, the first thing that hits me is the smell: too antiseptic to be someone’s home, but too human to be a hospital.
Before we go further Jacinta turns to me, presents tucked under her arms. ‘By the way, we didn’t shove my dad in here just because he got lost.’ She looks a little like she’s regretting bringing me here now.
I frown. ‘Okay. I didn’t say you did.’
But she seems to need to explain further. ‘He was…’ Jacinta looks down at her feet, lowering her voice. ‘He’d do other stuff. He took a roast chicken out of the oven but just, like, forgot to use oven mitts.’ She exhales hard, like she’s trying to breathe out the bad memory. ‘It just wasn’t…Mum couldn’t do it anymore.’
Wow. I had no idea it could be like that. But I blink back my shock and wait for her to look at me. ‘Zero judgment. Okay?’ I say.
The woman at the desk signs us in with a Christmas tree-themed pen and buzzes us through the locked door into the dementia wing. Jacinta braces herself before opening the door to her dad’s room. A weird fear grips me. If she hadn’t said I was saving her tonight, if she hadn’t saved me, I would probably bolt back to the car. But I follow her inside.
What shocks me is that Jacinta’s dad is my dad’s age. He’s dark-haired and smooth-skinned, not grey and wrinkled like I expect people with Alzheimer’s to be. He’s sitting in an armchair, wearing a collared shirt, staring at his lap.
His head turns when he senses us, face morphing into an angry grimace. ‘I said no bloody Christmas cake ,’ he snarls. ‘Leave me alone!’ Then he descends into a cough.
I’m glued to the floor, feeling sick. This was a terrible idea. I look at Jacinta and I can see the heartbreak on her face. But then she gives her head a little shake, tenses her jaw and steps towards him. ‘It’s me, Dad,’ she says. She puts the presents down on a coffee table and bends to hug him. ‘It’s Jacinta. Your daughter. Merry Christmas.’
I hold my breath, but as she wraps her arms around his neck I see his body soften.
‘Yeah.’ His voice sounds like tissue paper, so different from a second ago. ‘Yeah. I know, love.’ Then he reaches up to hug her back.
After what feels like a full minute, Jacinta untangles herself and sits on the end of the bed. I hover awkwardly in the middle of the room before she jumps back up and drags me over to sit down next to her.
Her dad takes me in, looking subdued and almost happy now. ‘Are you my daughter too?’
I almost choke. ‘Um, I…No, I—’
Jacinta groans. ‘ No , Dad. This is my friend, Lucy.’
He smiles at me, but it’s kind of floppy. I notice his limbs are a little the same. ‘Hello, Lucy,’ he says.
‘Hi.’ I awkward-wave.
There’s some silence, and then Jacinta finally says: ‘So, um, Dad, want to hear what I’ve been up to?’
He nods enthusiastically and closes his eyes and Jacinta starts talking, telling him how she’s decided to make her comeback in professional tennis and that she’s training for a big game against some English player in a few weeks. I’m definitely coming in halfway through this story but it’s very obviously not what Jacinta’s been up to. Still, it sounds weirdly familiar. Then I realise I recognise it from the blurb of some best-selling book Mum’s been dragging around the house for months without reading. Jacinta must have listened to it on audiobook. I frown at her, then look back at her dad who’s smiling and nodding, even saying wow at exciting plot points. I guess when you don’t know the difference between fact and fiction then life might as well be as entertaining as possible. And as Jacinta talks, describing the narrow win she had in her last game, there’s no question he’s enjoying himself. That he’s completely soaked to the bone in this moment like it’s the most important thing in the world.
I close my eyes and listen to Jacinta’s voice and, after a minute, I’m soaked to the bone in this moment too. It’s weird how there can be so much wrong in your life, so much fear and sadness, but that if you can focus on one particular second in time instead of thinking about your entire messed-up world all at once then things can also feel bearable, okay, almost good at the same time.
At the end of her story Jacinta unwraps the presents for her dad: camouflage-patterned socks and a mug that says ‘PISS OFF I mean GOOD MORNING’ that makes him laugh really hard.
A few minutes later a nurse comes in and says it’s time for us to go. It’s only then I realise I could have stayed longer.
‘Sorry,’ Jacinta says, pulling out of the nursing home carpark. The sunset lights up her face with a golden glow. ‘He was actually good tonight but…that was still probably super weird.’
‘No,’ I say. It was weird, but not in a way that I minded. ‘It’s all good.’ I glance at her. ‘That must really suck though. Having your dad in there.’ I’m careful not to let any pity creep into my voice.
Jacinta nods, staring at the road, then she wipes her cheek with the sleeve of her hoodie. ‘It really sucks.’
She sounds so sad, but she also sounds like it feels better to admit that out loud.
‘You’re amazing, by the way,’ I say. ‘Like, with him.’ I wonder if that’s why she’s thinking about a diploma of nursing.
‘Thanks.’ She snorts, but not like something’s funny.
‘What?’
‘It’s just…’ she glances at me. ‘Tell that to my ex - friends.’
I wait, leaving the silence for her to fill.
‘When Dad first went there I spent every spare second I had with him. I was so scared he was going to forget me, and I thought I could force him not to.’
My entire body burns with sympathy. ‘Makes sense. Worth a shot.’
‘Yeah,’ Jacinta says, indicating to merge onto the freeway. ‘That’s what I thought. But my friends thought ditching them every afternoon and weekend for six months wasn’t worth it. Eventually I realised it probably wasn’t either. Or, at least, it wasn’t going to work like I’d hoped. But by then it was too late.’
‘Wow,’ I say. I think about Rach, how she’s kept trying with me, and guilt pangs my insides. ‘No offence, but it sounds like your ex-friends are terrible human beings.’
Jacinta shrugs. ‘I dunno. Some of them needed me back then and I wasn’t there for them. I even totally ditched this guy I was seeing. And now we’ve finished school I’ve drifted from them even more. But anyway’—she pokes my arm with a nail-bitten finger—‘then we started hanging out so I’m not a totally friendless monster.’
I do some zombie arms. ‘One-friend monsters unite!’
She gives me a little salute. ‘By the way, heard from Swervey Pervey’s hot zoo son again?’ I’d told Jacinta that Ben and I had been messaging. She’d sent back a link to a YouTube of Koalas mating, which honestly didn’t look as consensual as you’d hope.
‘It’s a sanctuary,’ I say. ‘And no. Still waiting to hear back about the whole wiping-me-from-the-system thing.’
I’ve reread Ben’s messages about a thousand times in the past two days, thinking about his long eyelashes and gentle, endangered-bird-caressing hands with a low-belly burning I definitely haven’t felt since Lockie. I desperately want to dissect the whole thing with Jacinta. But I can’t explain it to her properly. The lie I told her about Charlie without thinking that day we met at the Frank is a wall between us. What started out as a split-second decision has become something that’s probably going to be friendship-ending, eventually. The thought of losing Jacinta fills me with an anxious dread I try to ignore.
‘You should message him,’ she says. ‘He’s obviously not all judgy and misogynist about a girl flashing if he wanted your number, so he’s a winner. Or— ooo!—maybe that’s why he messaged you! Maybe he’s into it.’
I cringe. ‘Oh, um, he actually doesn’t know about the flashing.’
‘What?’ Jacinta says, checking her blind spot and merging before flicking me a look. ‘Why does he think his dad banned you from the zoo then?’
‘It’s a sanctuary,’ I say, then bite my cheek. This is a tiny opportunity to tell Jacinta the truth about something, so I jump on it. ‘And I, um, sort of snuck into a dingo enclosure to hang out with it while Ben was with the vet. I thought maybe I could talk to it. It almost bit me.’
Jacinta’s mouth flies open. ‘You what ?’
‘In my defence,’ I say, ‘I’m usually very good with animals.’
‘And in my defence, I didn’t know you were borderline out of your mind .’
I dingo-howl in response. This time, her laugh doesn’t sound as hollow.
Five minutes later we’re back at my place. ‘So, thanks for saving me tonight,’ I say as I open the car door.
She gives me a tiny smile. ‘Same. Like, no one’s ever…yeah, just, same.’ Then her face lights up. ‘Oh, wait. That’s for you.’ Jacinta points at the footwell where there’s a present wrapped in shiny green paper. ‘Merry Christmas.’
‘You seriously didn’t!’ I say, but I grab the gift and unwrap it anyway. The smell hits me—it’s a net bag of passionfruit, about twenty of them.
‘Jizz balls!’ we say at the exact same time.
When I get inside, Mum’s in her bedroom and Dad is in his office. The coconuts have been cleared away.
I’m only in bed for an hour before an idea that occurred to me a few days ago taps against my skull, finally reaching the point where it can’t be ignored. I slip out from beneath my covers and into the hallway as quietly as possible.
I haven’t been inside my brother’s bedroom since he died. Given it’s the least-safe space in the house in terms of avoiding terrible feelings, I don’t know why I would intentionally torture myself like that. It’s not like Mum and Dad can face it either. But something tells me that if I want to figure out the aching, longing, wanting, the black hole I can’t escape, I have to get inside my brother’s brain. To think like him.
As I open the door, memories come rushing back with his familiar smell: Charlie hiding his favourite Adidas T-shirt in my room so Mum didn’t wash it and make the armpit rip bigger; Charlie attempting to turn his bedroom into a darkroom to develop photos one summer and the whole house stinking of chemicals; Charlie trying on Mum’s perfume with the theory that it might attract girls but it giving him an allergic reaction. I’m dizzy with grief but I walk inside, close the door and turn the light on.
His room is cast in a yellow glow, everything the same as I remember: the blue-and-green-checked doona cover, the giant computer monitor, the debating trophies, the Tupperware container filled with different-coloured wires and green and black boards he’d messed around with. Charlie was going to be an engineer. Electrical, or maybe systems. He’d also decided when he was fourteen that one of his life goals was to earn a lot of money. I’m sure he thought if he believed both things hard enough there was no way they wouldn’t happen, even though he sometimes questioned out loud what made him want them. And even though he maybe wasn’t fully turning out to be the ‘gifted genius’ his year six teacher said he was, he was still super smart. My parents were still so sickeningly proud of him. And they always encouraged us, told us we could do anything, that there was no limit to what we could achieve. I’m suddenly reminded of Charlie’s favourite movie, an old film about this guy who takes a pill that gives him access to 100 per cent of his brain’s abilities to become this sort of superhero of social skills and intelligence. He wanted that pill. Charlie loved that sci-fi crap.
I psych myself up, walk over to Charlie’s desk and open the top drawer, searching for his phone in the most logical place Dad might have left it, and there it is, gathering dust on top of his graffitied school diary, next to the keyring Lockie made for him in year nine design and technology, as if it was waiting for me.
‘Oi! Lucky!’ I hear Charlie say. ‘Can you seriously not ? I will literally karate-chop you from beyond the grave!’
I ignore him, snatch the phone from the drawer and race out into the hallway. Back in my room, I plug the phone into my charger and wait for what feels like hours for it to turn on. I don’t know what I’m expecting to find. An instantly illuminating internet search history? Some detailed description of his world view in his Notes app? Unsent messages to me explaining my own future thoughts? I’ve tried googling the way I feel, but all the results are about anxiety and depression, offering helpline numbers for Beyond Blue and Lifeline, and I really don’t think it’s that. It’s something so much less clinical. So much more abstract. So much more…Charlie.
Finally the phone lights up, but it’s asking for a security code. Of course it is. I rack my brains, trying to figure out what Charlie would have decided on. I try his birthday. Wrong. I try consecutive numbers from 0. Wrong. I try all 8s, remembering Charlie trying to talk to me all about the infinity symbol once, and the concept of it—the idea of something endless. But, again, wrong. If I put in an incorrect attempt one more time the phone will lock me out.
I stare at it, willing the screen to succumb to my desperate need, before I eventually slump onto my bed and give up. I try not to let it upset me that I couldn’t guess my brother’s code. That there’s probably a million things about him that I didn’t—and will never—know.