Chapter 2 #3
I continue to sip and inhale between steps, keeping my eyes peeled for birds.
Three willie wagtails observe us from the lowest fence-wire of the cattle paddock, having a gossip session of their own.
I wonder if anyone they know has painted their nest white, or removed any pretty plants and depreciated the value of their treetop homes, or if the empty nesters have been unpleasantly surprised by the return of their grown offspring.
Black cockatoos squawk overhead, and I remember that this means rain is on the way.
It is something, at least. The last twelve months of my life are accessible only through dreaming, and even then, the most I recall are partial details – smells and sounds most potent.
I can’t remember stories, or certain words, or if the things I think happened to me really happened at all.
I can’t remember communicating with my brother or sister.
I can’t remember why Cleo is no longer talking to me or how long I stayed in that apartment before Mum and Dad organised my flight home.
But little titbits will return to me like gifts, and I try to treasure those in place of the pieces of my life they have seemingly replaced.
For now. My hope is that if I concentrate hard enough, for long enough, and relax my eyes, eventually the full picture will show itself.
Memory as a Magic Eye autostereogram – that is a curious thought. Into ‘my weird brain’ it goes.
‘Thanks for the walk,’ I say, as Elsie heads upstairs and I go down.
‘Any time,’ she replies, and I can see her ticking ‘quality time with psychologically vulnerable daughter’ off her mental to-do list.
I return to my bed, to my loungewear, to my thoughts.
I email Dr Montague to ask for an extra Zoom session, to touch base this week, because it is actually the hardest week – an idea I originally discarded the moment she suggested this might be the case.
And I try to remember the last time my room felt like a magical world of its own.
Revisiting my past so often is perhaps a side effect of coming back, or an inevitability of my particular circumstances regardless of location, but at least in quiet moments I can focus my thoughts on the scenes I wish to examine.
Elsie said he was home – it has to mean something, us both being here.
We were explorers before we were truly friends.
On warm afternoons at the end of spring holidays, when our parents were gardening or exercising or drinking wine on their respective decks, Fran would ask me to imagine us an adventure.
He had the momentum; I had the ideas. We were palaeontologists, magical twin orphans, wildlife videographers, celebrities with a burning secret, world-weary mountaineers, lost children on another planet.
The farm behind our houses was so expansive I did not even realise there was a farmhouse there until long after our last voyage.
There was only a canvas of grass, with a jacaranda tree on the hill in the middle that glowed gold in the afternoons to give us something to paint around.
Fran never wore shoes; I could never take mine off.
He brought walkie-talkies, and paper planes, and snacks in a plastic shopping bag.
I brought as many soft toys as I could hold, somehow knowing he would not make a comment about whether I should still own them at my age.
I had been mourning the transition that other children seemed to be making easily away from imagination and play, and relished the chance to keep it alive with someone so skilled in the art.
When we got tired, we ate seedy mandarins in the bare limbs of the tree, and told each other snippets of stories too big to fully unfold.
‘My mum doesn’t really like your mum,’ I remember him saying. ‘She says she looks down her nose at people too much, or something like that.’
‘Yeah, she does. My mum doesn’t really like anyone,’ I replied.
‘Not even you?’
‘Especially not me.’
‘My mum likes me,’ he said, wrapping his arms around his knees.
‘I can tell,’ I replied.
Another time, he told me about a boy in his class who would splash piss on him every time they were side by side at the urinals, never saying a word. I asked what he did when that happened.
‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘I don’t know how to fight, and he does. He’s always getting in fights behind the bike shed, and he always wins.’
‘I’ll fight him for you. I’m older and probably stronger,’ I said, believing it though it was not likely to be true.
‘I don’t know, I’ll think about it. Thank you.’
‘He sounds like a little prick,’ I said, throwing my peels into the long grass below.
‘He is. He’s a little prick,’ he replied.
‘Little prick!’ I yelled like a coo-ee.
‘LITTLE PRICK!’ Fran screamed like a foghorn.
He later armoured himself with a class clown persona that protected him in a way that would not have worked for me, even if I did possess the wit to quip and jest on the spot, and I very much did not.
People only seemed to laugh when I was being earnest, and my jokes landed like barbs enough times for me to stop trying to make them.
I was quiet, according to me; I was strange, sullen, too serious, according to others.
I did not see it at the time, but looking back, Fran’s comic disguise did not seem to fit him any more comfortably than my mask fitted me.
‘And then I got sent to the principal’s office, and now I have detentions every Wednesday for a month,’ he told me another time, after one of his teacher impersonations had gone wrong.
‘That’s awful,’ I replied, imagining the fear and shame that experience would bring to me.
‘Nah, it’s fine. The guys in my class thought it was sick, and now they’ve invited me to play soccer with them at break.’
‘Oh, okay. Cool.’ I felt confused by his response, sure he would have seen it the same way I did.
It was a reminder the fields and players were different, the games rigged in their own unjust ways.
I could not fault him for adapting as best he could, though I could not understand it either.
Our friendship deepened quickly, I think, because of the liminal space in which it existed, and what that allowed us to reveal about ourselves to one another.
It was private, pure, easy, right. For a time.
Until it wasn’t. We could not have remained vacuum-sealed forever, as much as I would have loved and also personally benefitted from that.
Things had to get contaminated, diluted, complicated, messy, because that was what growing up meant.
I did not wish for it to change any more than ice might wish to melt, and had as much power over such a shift as any other matter.
Which is to say, none. So perhaps it is no surprise the memories from these days are my favourite to revisit; the easiest, the clearest. Moving through them is like crossing a gentle stream, no sharp rocks to catch my toes or heavy currents to unsteady my balance.
There is no need to alter any aspects of these visions to go back and enjoy them.
They are still whole; I could almost reach out and touch them.
Another afternoon, we stayed too long in the tree and a mounting fear stopped me walking back through the grass in the fading light.
The night held too many creatures I could not see and my imagination, armed with a wealth of knowledge as it was, filled every dark corner with venomous danger.
When I started to panic, Fran must not have known what to do, but he said, ‘It’s okay,’ again and again and again.
Until I believed him. Dad eventually came with a torch and lifted me down, and Fran was sorry, but Dad did not seem to mind at all.
Or, if he did, he did not mention it, silence his natal tongue.
We drifted home, gently, unspeaking, watching the first stars come out.