Chapter 14
THEN
Lord Mayor’s Camp was a summer camp a couple of hours out of Melbourne, designated for disadvantaged children. The irony that my parents secured me a spot with a hefty donation appeared to be entirely lost on them.
The camp itself was a relic—faded bunting, peeling signage, and that unmistakable scent of sun-warmed lino and damp towels.
My parents had a holiday home perched on a nearby cliff, close enough to smell the sausages the camp leaders barbecued at lunchtime.
The idea that I might return there each night clearly hadn’t occurred to them—or if it had, it had been swiftly and unapologetically rejected.
“You’re fourteen years old,” Dad had said, on the way down. “I had a job by the time I was fourteen.” His words felt like a lecture from the pages of a men’s magazine, full of hard-nosed advice on building character.
“You’ll have more fun with other kids around,” my mother had said, in a kinder voice. Her voice was warmer, but there was a certain idealism about her, as if she truly believed every child needed the same dose of cheerful camaraderie, regardless of what I might think.
As I stood on the precarious ledge of the flying fox, I wondered if my mother actually believed I’d have more fun here.
“Is this safe?” I called to the counsellor below.
My voice wavered, though I tried to steady it.
The harness—meant for a much smaller child—pinched in odd places and buckled loosely in others.
The timber platform beneath my feet felt spongy, the kind of wood that wouldn’t survive a good thunderstorm.
“You’re the eighth person to take it in the last hour,” the counsellor called back, voice flat with boredom. “Was safe enough for them.”
His tone reminded me of a teacher just counting down the hours to retirement.
As I looked down, I found myself thinking of Anne Shirley. When Josie Pye dared her to walk the ridgepole of the Barrys’ kitchen roof, Anne hadn’t hesitated. She’d had doubts, of course, but she lifted her chin and did it anyway.
“Come on, Big Bird,” a kid called from the ground. “People are waiting!”
I tried to summon some of Anne’s courage, even as the wind tugged at my skirt, a cheerful pastel number my mother had insisted I wear, thinking it would make me “fit in with the other girls.”
And then I stepped off.
The harness jerked, tilted—then spun. I picked up speed at an alarming rate, swinging sideways, then upside down. My hips slid out of the loose straps and for a moment I hung from my knees, gripping wildly at the air.
I heard the collective gasp from below. My knees started to slide out of the harness.
A second before I hit the ground, I recalled Anne’s fate the day she walked on the Barrys’ roof. A great tumble into the garden bed.
“Oof,” I heard someone say, and then pain exploded like a bomb.
In movies, the injured person always blacks out and wakes up in the hospital, unsure where they are.
I didn’t black out. I didn’t wake up in the hospital feeling confused.
There are a few hazy patches where I might have lost consciousness for a few seconds, but on the whole, I was aware of it all.
I still remember it with breathtaking clarity.
The pain was otherworldly. Untouched (or barely touched) by the narcotics they injected and dripped into me (“An adult’s dose,” I heard the paramedic say, “look at the size of her”). It was in my arms, my collarbones, my chest, my pelvis. How I would have welcomed blacking out of this pain!
My mother appeared at my side in the hospital, as I was lying on a stretcher, awaiting surgery. She was dressed in a pale yellow organza dress with a full skirt, delicate white gloves, and a matching hat perched on her carefully set hair. She must have come straight from a garden party.
She looked more distressed than I felt. “I’m sorry, darling,” she said. “I’m so, so sorry.”
It felt like such an odd thing to say. It wasn’t as if she’d built the flying fox or forced me into the ill-fitting harness. She gripped my hand so hard it hurt.
“What can I do?” she asked me. Her breath smelled of wine. “How can I make it up to you?”
“Nothing,” I told her. Because the truth was, she was already doing it. Not just being there, though that might have been enough. But the way she was looking at me. As if she cared. As if she … loved me.
“So you’re okay?”
I was in the sort of pain that makes death seem like a kind option.
Surgery was minutes away. I had never been less okay.
And I’ll tell you something—it changes a person, this sort of pain.
It changed me irrevocably. After I experienced it, I became blacker inside.
Living up to my father’s impression of me, perhaps: not quite right.
“Yes, Mum,” I said to her. “I’m okay.”
“Mum?”
My left arm was broken in two places, and three ribs were cracked clean through—injuries that required two surgeries and enough metal hardware to set off airport alarms for life. Mercifully, I was knocked out cold for all of it.
When I finally came to, I was in the ward, stitched and bandaged, floating somewhere between pain and morphine. My mother was sitting beside the bed. At first, I felt a warm, blurry kind of relief—until I noticed she was crying.
My mother sniffed, shaking her head. “Hello, darling.” She retrieved a tissue from her sleeve and wiped her nose.
“Why are you crying?” I asked.
“It’s nothing, darling,” she said in that tone of voice that meant something entirely different. “I’m just glad you’re okay. I don’t know what I would have done if … if I’d lost you.”
She crumpled under another round of tears. I watched her closely, understanding somehow that these tears weren’t for me.
“Are you thinking about Kitty?”
It was out of the blue and it wasn’t. I’d thought about that name from time to time, ever since I’d first heard my father utter it—and more since I’d heard Cess say it. But I wasn’t fixated on her. I think I had a sense that one day, I would find out more, and this felt like that day.
Mum broke out of her tear-filled trance and stared at me. “Mabel … you know about Kitty?”
I didn’t know about Kitty, of course. But one could make assumptions, and I felt more sure than ever that my parents had had another child at some point.
“I’ve … heard some things.”
“Okay. Well … I’m sorry about that. We didn’t think you remembered her. And it’s not the kind of thing you want to remind a child of.”
“What isn’t?”
Mum exhaled as if she were blowing out a candle. “Kitty—Katharine—was your sister.”
My sister. It felt impossible—and yet oddly familiar, like something I’d always known.
Even while hearing of her for the first time, little memories rose unbidden: a cream-knitted blanket in my mother’s arms; the whisper of baby hair (blond, not red) against my cheek; chubby wrists screwed on like doll parts; a single, razor-sharp bottom tooth.
“What …,” I started, before having to clear my throat. “What happened to her?”
“Poliomyelitis,” Mum said. “She was only a year old. Darling child.”
I knew about polio, of course. Everyone did. Rose Keaney, down the road, had been relegated to a wheelchair because of it. Cate McDonald from three doors down had died of polio, and so had her brother Garry.
“I had polio too,” I said.
Mum nodded. “When you were three and a half. You must have picked it up at kindergarten. It was a terrible time. It spread through contact, so everything was closed for weeks on end—public swimming pools, libraries. But trying to stop kids from playing—you might as well try to stop water from flowing downstream.”
She fished a packet of Peter Stuyvesants from her purse and lit one with a shaky flick. Her red lipstick blurred at the corners as she exhaled. She wasn’t a smoker—not really. Only at parties. Usually.
“I remember walking down the street and seeing all the neighbors’ kids out on their porches,” she said.
“That’s what the doctors told us to do. You had to be isolated from the family, but especially from other kids.
” She took a deep drag. “So when you got sick, we set you up on the patio with some picture books and dolls. You were a good child, you never complained, just sat happily out there in your own imaginative little world. Cess or I ferried out food and water when mealtimes came around. Do you remember this?”
I gave the faintest shake, barely more than a tremor.
“Well … one day, I came outside and found you on your knees, playing with Kitty.”
A nurse appeared in the doorway, hesitated at the sight of Mum, then quietly retreated. Mum took another slow drag, unfazed.
“How did she get out there?” I asked.
Mum turned her head and blew smoke over her shoulder, then gave a small, helpless shrug.
“We’d locked the door, so we don’t know how she got out.
” Her eyes fixed on a point beyond me—distant, unblinking.
For a moment, she looked like she might say more.
Instead, she gave her head a slow shake, like trying to clear a fog.
“Anyway … she caught polio. It got into her brain and spinal cord. By that night, she was paralyzed. She died within the week. And you made a complete recovery.”
“But why? Why did I recover, and she died … if she caught it from me?”
“That was the thing about polio,” Mum said, stubbing out her cigarette with slow, deliberate pressure. “No one knew why one child recovered and another didn’t. Maybe she was younger. Smaller. Who knows?”
She rose and walked to the window. I sat with the weight of it, trying to piece it together. As heartbreaking as it was, the story wasn’t unfamiliar. It was the 1950s—everyone knew someone who’d died or been left crippled by polio.
“But … why didn’t you tell me?”
Mum glanced back at me, just for a second, then turned away again. Her eyes found something far off, something safer than my face. “You were so young. A year or so after she died, you seemed to forget she existed. I didn’t see the point of forcing you to remember.”
The words of the woman at the dinner party—Susan—floated back into my mind—woven into the clink of glassware, the polite murmur of guests, the scrape of dishes—when she’d said, “I expect you regret what happened to Kitty.”
“What did I do?”
Mum glanced at me. “Pardon?”
“A woman said to me once … ‘I expect you regret what happened to Kitty.’ What did I do?”
Mum looked away. She was quiet for long enough that I thought she wasn’t going to answer.
As I was about to repeat the question, she spoke.
“As I said, the door was locked. Dad says he heard you calling her. He believes you unlocked the door.” Mum walked away from the window and to my bedside.
“Perhaps you did call her? You were three and it wouldn’t have been criminal for you to want a playmate. ”
There’s a slightly pleading tone to Mum’s voice. As if she’s trying to make herself believe it.
“He blames me?”
“It’s the grief talking. He was besotted with Kitty.”
(All these years later, that comment still cuts hard.)
“We told him you couldn’t possibly have unlocked the door from the outside. Even if you’d been tall enough to reach, you didn’t have a key!” my mother continued. “But he thinks you were jealous of her.”
I took in this new piece of information. “Wait … he thinks I unlocked the door because I wanted Kitty to get sick?”
Mum lifted her hands, and then let them fall back to her sides: a nonanswer. I stared at her in disbelief. “Do you think I wanted her to get sick?”
She shook her head. Then a moment later, she said: “You didn’t, did you?”
“No!” I said. “Of course not.”
Mum looked relieved, even though she must have known that I didn’t remember. For all I knew I did unlock the door. Maybe I was jealous. Maybe I even wanted her to die.