Chapter 3 #2
‘Welcome home. Is Maeve asleep?’ I pat the space beside me, and she sits, slowly, as though mine is a waterbed and she must retain her centre of balance.
‘Yeah, she’s completely out,’ she replies, doing a quick impression of a sleeping almost-two-year-old, one arm flopped across her face, tongue out.
She smells like citrus and we do not hug, though I am glad she is here.
Her energy is unexpectedly warm, and I try to recalibrate, integrating our past lives with what I know of myself now, on this day – which is, admittedly, not all that much.
What I bring from our childhood is the feeling that there is comfort in the discomfort that has always existed between us.
Like my favourite pair of swimmers, she might rub me in the wrong areas sometimes, but she also gives me the opportunity to access a feeling I crave – in this instance, familiarity and belonging, rather than the cool compression of submersion.
We sit in silence that is easy for me, but I wonder how it will be for Olivia.
Historically, she wants me to talk, to tell her everything.
Talk, talk, talk – she has always delighted in sharing spoken-word discourse with anyone who would so boldly endeavour to keep up with her rapid, effortless pace.
Today her laser focus is aimed squarely at me.
There is so much she must already know about my current circumstances that she has not yet had the pleasure of gleaning directly from the source.
And has something even really happened if Olivia has not had the opportunity to pluck it from the horse’s mouth, lay it down, carefully dissect it, and stitch it back up, better than new, with her own pithy commentary and sage wisdom, and report back to Mum her findings?
I hardly know. I accept all of this about her, have even come to admire it, because Olivia is nothing if not a professional – she knows exactly the right sounds to make, advice to give, and anecdotes to offer.
She just never wants to be the person whose insides spill.
My mind fills in the blanks about her even as I wish to grant her the space to recast them.
I cannot be sure of her if I am not sure of myself.
‘So, Mum’s in a bit of a state, isn’t she?’ she says with a scoff.
‘Is she?’
‘It’s the time of year, I suppose. All the extra mouths to feed.’
It would be fair to say, upon examining the evidence and decoding the patterns, that Christmas might be Mum’s least favourite time of year, disguised as her most treasured.
Elsie would never admit that, and would likely bombard whoever was so brazen as to suggest it with a detailed list of all the visible indicators of why that could not be true.
She imbued in us as children the specialness of the season, and I have held on to that feeling, despite mounting evidence that she might actually have an entirely contrary belief.
Said evidence is of the emotional and energetic nature, which I suppose is not really evidence at all, at least not any that would stand up in a court of law.
But I can feel it – her energy stays heightened and pulled tight, often hitting a frequency only dogs and autistics can hear, with the fussing and the planning and the chaos of it all.
Two closely timed wrong things would be enough to set her world on fire, which is a dangerous warning sign for someone as upturned and out of depth as I am right now.
I want to avoid being one of those wrong things almost as much as I want to see if an imperfect Elsie would rise from the ashes if I was.
I will stay out of her way – she has things to do, self-imposed tasks as well as community expectations to meet.
She seems entirely fuelled by light neighbourhood gossip and moderately priced white wine, both of which she keeps well stocked.
And when all is over and done, I know well enough she will need to be alone to recover.
This has been the rhythm for a while now, or perhaps it always was.
‘Right,’ I reply.
‘I don’t mean you,’ Olivia says.
‘How can you not mean me? I’m literally one of the mouths to feed. I’m the most permanent mouth.’
‘Sure, but you don’t eat much and anyway, she’s happy you’re here.’
‘I am sure that is what she is telling people.’
‘Come on, give her a break. She’s doing her best.’
I can’t argue with that.
‘So, how’s the UK?’
‘Politically and economically? Absolutely fucked. But personally, pretty good.’
We laugh at the dire state of her chosen home and how little it is impacting her.
‘How about the book?’
‘If you ask me about sales, I swear I will put a new hole in your wall with your head.’
‘Okay . . .’
‘That’s a joke, Nora. People just ask, “How’s sales?
” as though they have any idea, and as if they wouldn’t baulk if I casually asked them about their salary.
The book is fine. It’s its own thing now; I hardly think about it at all.
My days revolve more around whatever illness Maeve has brought home from nursery, and how we survive the onslaught of vomit or shit or spots that comes with it. And emails.’
‘Sounds glamorous. Well, you look great.’
‘Thanks – I did a juice cleanse last month, got rid of the last of the baby weight. So, anyway, tell me about you. Melbourne didn’t end up being any good?’
‘Politically and economically mostly fine, but personally, absolutely fucked,’ I reply.
‘I’m sorry, Nor.’ She squeezes my forearm in an uncomfortably tight grip. ‘Did you really get fired, or did you actually want to leave your job? Did something happen with Cleo, or was it the hospital stuff?’
‘I don’t really want to talk about it,’ I interject, a reflex.
‘Well, I’m here if you change your mind.’
My mind is immediately changed; I want to talk to her. There are few people I feel as desperate to connect with as my sister; actually, there is only one. So, I try to reset.
‘I think I got fired on account of repeated no-shows, so I suppose I wanted to leave. And I’m not sure about Cleo. I maybe blew things up there, even before hospital and the wedding and all that. I suppose I let her go. Did Mum fill you in?’
‘A bit,’ she admits, though not keen to expand on exactly which bit.
‘So, you know about my diagnoses, then?’
‘I do.’
We hit a conversational dead end, despite my efforts.
She could map a little section of the new path, the piece that I need in order to find my way to her.
She could throw me a lifeline, or some crusts of old bread.
She could hold out her hand, and we could course it together.
Telling her as much is more than I am capable of right now, though I am aware that is not necessarily fair.
My insides are swimming, though outwardly I suppose I am quite still.
Stalling at this crucial moment is unbearable.
‘Well, I better go shower and unpack. Come up for lunch, when Maeve is up?’
‘This mouth needs feeding,’ I reply, feeling petulant again, suddenly angry that she did not act in the way I had hoped she might.
Olivia looks at me with a drooping expression I cannot decipher, perhaps frustration, and closes the door gently behind her.
It is clear she also desired more from our interaction and I let her down.
I hope as I chart a bit more of my emotional topography, I can find a way to explain to her that it is a desire to be known as I am rather than a desire to disappoint with my lack of words that fuels this.
There has to be a waypoint where we can eventually meet.
My sister is my familial starting point, I now feel, her residing outside this country for the entirety of my undoing only working in my favour.
I have not let her down the way I have so many other people.
And, of course, by that I mean mostly one particular person.
The first time Fran came over for a meal was during the Christmas holidays.
We had been hanging out for months and months, after school and on weekends when he did not have other plans.
He had given me a nickname – Rah – sometimes roaring it like a child pretending to be a lion, and other times using it more like punctuation for his free-flowing thoughts and ideas.
I just called him Fran. Fran had invited me to his house for dinner loads of times and I had always declined.
I was embarrassed by my restricted and peculiar dietary habits, and how tired my hands got when trying to use a knife and fork.
After years of failed corrections, Mum and Dad pretended not to notice when I used my hands, but I could not expect that from anyone outside of my home.
I also wondered what Fran’s parents might think of me, and guessed it would not be positive.
I had curated an acceptable version of myself for them with small doses – waves over the fence, polite greetings, and smiles through the car window – that I knew could not be sustained for the entire length of a meal.
Better aloof than degenerate. It was only one afternoon when we were kicking the ball with Ranger that Fran said, ‘I was going to ask you to come for dinner, Rah, but I know you’ll say no.
’ It made me sad and felt like a challenge all in one.
‘You could come to mine,’ I threw out in a casual way, as though this was something I could have asked any time, if I’d wanted to.
‘Really?’ He pushed his hair, to his shoulders by this stage, out of his face.
‘Yeah – we’re having chicken, I think.’
‘I love chicken,’ he said with a smile.
His was the kind of face that glowed after exercise, whereas mine opted instead to turn bright red and swollen, like I was having an allergic reaction to the experience of being alive.
‘Sometimes we feed our chickens chicken, but you can’t tell anyone,’ I said.