Chapter 8 #3
I genuinely cackle at the mental image. The warmth of the night and the glow of the string lights and the comfort of my wine start to collaborate in bringing me back to myself.
I do not want to spook me, so I scan the garden a little more.
Olivia is still talking to Jamie, her smile tight.
She looks tired; Jamie looks as though he is having a transcendent experience.
On the other side of the lawn, Luke is clutching a beer, standing next to Dad and the other dads and I assume talking about footy, or the property market, or people with victim mentalities.
They are all wearing shades of blue, laughing in unison, taking sips from their bottles in unison, and mirroring each other in a million other ways.
When people say ‘thank goodness for the younger generation’, they hardly consider how many are in training with the old guard.
It is a lot to put on one generation, the saving of a broken world.
And I feel guilt at the lack of world-saving I have done thus far, especially knowing there are people with far bigger struggles than mine who have done a lot more.
I could be better, and I want to be better.
I also feel like a baby who just needs her mother.
I do not know where Mum is, but I assume inside helping with the washing-up.
She likes to busy herself at parties and then complain she did not get a chance to catch up with anyone at all.
Fran lays his head on my shoulder, his weight sinking into me.
My eyes close and I try to pause this moment for another second or two, not sure if I will have a chance to touch him again.
It is more than okayness, more than some dull rock.
What a terrible metaphor; no wonder Dr Montague is the professional and I am the person who pays two hundred dollars an hour for her expertise. It is a glimmer if ever I felt one.
‘It’s weird seeing you here, like going back in time,’ he says.
‘Yeah, I know. It’s weird being home. And I can’t even complain about the annoying parts without sounding like a total brat, because at the end of the day, my mum is doing my laundry, you know.’
‘That does sound annoying. I bet she’s ironing things you’ve never once ironed in your life,’ he replies.
‘Of course she is.’
‘What a tyrant.’
‘She’s also incredible at getting stains out,’ I sigh. ‘Like magic.’
We sit in silence for a while.
‘I thought you were gone for good,’ he eventually says, his voice soft.
‘So did I.’
All intention to avoid trying to find the right words disappears. Saying the right words, or trying to, suddenly feels like the very least I could do.
‘Being back in the house, back in my room, I feel like I’m twelve again. And yes, some of that is weird and bad, immaculate washing notwithstanding, but I am starting to sort through things slowly, in my head. And doing that is a good thing, I think. I’m making –’
‘You don’t have to –’ he cuts me off.
‘I know I don’t have to, but I want to. I tried to put it all in that email but maybe it was the wrong time, or too much for you to take in at once, too intense or whatever.
Writing helps me figure out how I am feeling, but I know talking is the better way to handle things for most people.
So, I just want you to know, I get it now, why I have been like this, how I fucked you up; it’s all making a lot more –’
‘Nora, stop. It’s fine, you don’t have to. It’s all good. I’m actually seeing someone.’
My mind has chosen the wrong moment to freeze. I will it to unfreeze, to be simple, comfortable, to be emotionally adept and agile, to be the safe kind of interesting or even the endearing kind of awkward. To be anything other than nothing.
‘Oh, right. Well, that’s cool,’ I finally reply, as though I have just now learned the word ‘cool’ and am desperate to try it out for the first time in a sentence.
I pronounce it wrong – a feat – clumsy, panicked, too much ‘oo’, bookended by consonants that die before they have properly formed in my throat.
‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have blurted it out like that. I’m drunk, that was weird. I just wanted to reassure you I’m fine – you didn’t fuck me up.’
I am aware that now is the time I should be responding to Fran, reassuring him everything is fine and okay and not at all weird, and that I am glad of his lack of fucked-up-ness.
And I am glad, but I am out of words. Mouth literally agape, I am motionless, an old photograph, stored in a box or at the back of some drawer.
I almost laugh out loud at the absurdity of my grandiose thinking, that I somehow held enough power to damage him beyond repair.
I was a splinter in the ball of his hand; he is glad I am out.
My reckless, thoughtless, increasingly bizarre behaviour has had a catastrophic impact on my own sense of self, really putting the ‘mental’ in mental breakdown, but to him, in the scheme of things, it is nothing more than a mild disturbance.
Shoo fly, don’t bother me. And this feels both better and worse than my previously assumed path of destruction.
No, it is better, I think. Better me than him who acquires the career-ending injury.
He will live to play another day. I am all too aware of the lack of words I have spoken, and the length of time I have been nodding my head.
Maeve breaks the silence with a cry from her cocoon. When I jump to check on her, she is still asleep. It must be a scary dream. Maybe if I redirect our conversation, it could be as though I did not hear the horrific, wonderful thing Fran told me, as though it was never spoken at all.
‘What kind of nightmares do little kids have, do you think, if they haven’t seen or experienced anything traumatic?’ I ask.
‘The same kind as us,’ Fran replies. He is now leaning back against the tree instead of on me, his eyes closed.
‘But they don’t know about scary things at that age.’
‘Of course they do.’
I think about it for a little while. All kinds of things cornered me in the dark rooms of my dreams when I was small.
Did Jamie plant that fear, or only embody it that one time?
Fran would have the answer, or at least a perspective that would help me form my own.
I can’t ask him, though; I am not sure if I ever told him that story.
He would be the only one I would have considered disclosing it to, the only one I could trust. If I did, we are no longer close enough for me to trace over it again, and if I did not, we may never be again.
There was a time, though, when things were exactly how they were supposed to be.
The kissing continued for a long time after that first time.
We kissed in my bedroom and Fran’s bedroom and in the park and most of all, we kissed in our tree.
I remember kissing in the winter months, rugged up in jumpers and beanies, and kissing all through the summer, when we were sweaty, and sunburnt, and the mosquitoes were out.
It did not go further than kissing – I don’t think either of us was ready for that.
I had heard stories of a couple of people in my grade doing the thing, and I was scared of it.
I could not imagine a time I would ever be ready, entirely sure it was not for me.
That made our kissing feel rare; I have never again had a kiss that did not feel like pressure for something more.
It was a part of life that kept me functioning, as much as sleep, and learning new things, and animals, and movement, and the increasingly difficult task of remembering to eat.
Kissing Fran replaced talking to Fran as a way for me to verify that there was something unbreakable between us, a thread of energy and light and hope.
It got to the point faster than talking ever could.
It coloured everything we did, everything I did, even outside of being with him.
I had synced up my body and mind, for what felt like the first time in my life.
And lucky timing, because I was also, by that point, experiencing the utter hell of getting my period and all the hormonal fluctuations and sensory horrors that came with that.
And I remember when the kissing stopped.
I can see it clearly now, the way I am starting to see everything more clearly – the dust settling, the mist dissipating – my diagnosis plus time and rest is hindsight on steroids.
That sacred, shared space we had built was buried under an avalanche – one conversation, entirely mishandled by me.
I would laugh at the memory of my very autistic misstep if the outcome had not been quite so emotionally devastating.
It was the end of summer, and school was due to go back in a matter of weeks, or perhaps days.
While summer was always my favourite season as a kid, this transition at the end of the school holidays was my least favourite time of year.
Starting a new grade, with a new teacher, and a whole new set of rules to navigate – there was never enough time to prepare, not even if the Christmas holidays had stretched out for a year.
My sleep would start to break, and I would find something new to pick – my skin or my eyebrows or my scalp.
I was going into Year Nine by that point, and Fran into Year Eight at his school.
We did not talk about it, but Fran must have noticed this change, even if he missed the picking, and I think my anxiety spread to him, only he seemed to let it build around us, and more particularly, what our kissing might have meant.
He brought it up one afternoon, in our tree, just before it was time to go in for the night.
My legs were across his lap and I was looking up, watching the light dancing through the leaves.
‘Have you ever thought about, you know, having a proper boyfriend?’ he asked.
To me it was a purely hypothetical question, and I was not yet well practised enough to temper my immediate, knee-jerk, no-thought response.
Impulsiveness, when paired with brutal honesty, was a dangerous brew.
With Fran, I had thought I did not need to moderate myself, had assumed he would always understand exactly what I meant, that whatever thread existed between us communicated everything and more than made up for the times my clumsy words left gaping chasms for wrong implications to take shape.
‘Yeah, I don’t want one,’ I replied.
‘Oh.’
I felt Fran’s body go rigid, his hurt only decipherable to me at that stage as unhappiness, and I sat up, internally frantic but outwardly still. It was chaos in my mind, as I turned every dial and knob like a radio, desperate to tune back in to his frequency and figure out what mistake I had made.
‘Did you mean us?’ I blurted out, panicked.
‘Well, maybe.’
‘Do you want that? To have a girlfriend?’
‘I would like to, one day.’
‘So what, you . . . you think you’ll get married one day too?’ I was quickly starting to reach a frenzied state, disbelieving, sickened.
I wanted to get to the point, to know how far down the road he was thinking, because all I could feel was pressure, pressure, PRESSURE.
‘I think so, yeah.’
‘And kids?’
‘I mean . . .’ He laughed, looking at me as though I was being absurd, which did not help. ‘I’m thirteen. I’m not really thinking about that, Nora. But maybe, one day. It might be cool.’
It was hard to comprehend why at the time, though I do understand more now, that those fairly normative hopes and dreams felt like an intimate rejection, especially when I sensed Fran was talking specifically about his simple, adolescent hopes with me.
And that is what it was, what he had that I was lacking: hope.
He was not asking me to sign an unbreakable contract.
He wanted us to ‘go steady’, as they might say in an old movie; to call each other girlfriend and boyfriend.
That was it. But all I knew, all I felt in that moment, was fear.
I mean, I was thirteen. Thirteen-year-olds do not know shit.
But I already knew I was struggling, that more expectations could not be the answer.
I did not imagine my life in five years’ time, I did not imagine a wedding or a baby or a white house in a lane of white houses.
I did not imagine growing old at all, only assumed I would not be one of those who made it that far.
I had thought Fran was with me in my spurning of all those ideas, even if he planned to live to old age, and he was betraying me by hinting that he wanted a part of any of it.
‘I don’t want to be your girlfriend,’ is what I said.
Behind that, of course – what I assumed he understood, and what I should have added – was ‘you are the most important person in my life, and I want to continue to build on our closeness and share everything together and be there for one another and chase our dreams together, but I do not want to be forced into someone else’s idea of what that might look like.
I want to stay autonomous, and free, but I want to stay autonomous and free right next to you in this tree. ’
I do not know why I did not say that, other than the fact I was thirteen and, as previously mentioned, did not know shit.
I had no concept of who I was as a person, so how could I imagine being anything to anyone else at some imagined point in the future?
I had yet to understand which parts of me were even real and which were imposed by outside forces.
Fran nodded; I can still picture his face, darkened with embarrassment. I remember feeling puzzled that he did not lean across to continue kissing me, because I definitely had not said I did not want us to kiss anymore. He untangled himself from me, climbed down and started back towards his house.
‘Wait, where are you going?’ I called, and what I really meant was, ‘Come back.’
My brain was overfilling with stress and I was left gasping as the waterline rose. Saying the wrong thing had caused this, and therefore it felt only logical to now say as little as possible to try and salvage the situation.
‘It’s all good, Nora. I understand,’ he replied, though it was not all good and he clearly did not understand at all. I didn’t understand. It was un-understandable – static and dead air.
‘Are we still friends?’ I shouted, my voice crackly and weak.
‘Of course,’ he replied, with a sad kind of smile.
He walked home alone, and I stayed frozen there for quite some time.
I guess I took his word for it, and things went back to normal, without the kissing.
I knew it was my fault for how I had handled things, and for not finding the right way to say things, so I took the loss.
But from that moment, there was not a time I looked at Fran’s lips when I wasn’t thinking about kissing them.