Chapter 15 #2
She takes one look at Mum’s face and taps out, taking a long drink from her glass. This apparently requires all of her focus. Mum tries to smile, a thin line that does not reach her eyes.
‘Where is Luke?’
‘He’s gone for a run,’ Mum replies.
I take a moment to look at the windows, and to try and understand what is not being said.
Olivia’s window is playful and chic – snow from a can painted as though it is falling on a Christmas forest of deer and rabbits.
She has used light-up pipe-cleaner trees, so it will glow warmly in the night, and I know Maeve will adore it.
She has framed the top of the window with paper snowflakes, which look as though Maeve had a hand in painting them with blue paint and glitter.
I do not mean that as an insult. It looks beautiful.
Luke’s window does indeed look as though someone threw ALL the decorations they could find into one confined space, but it has a certain charm in that kitsch maximalist kind of way.
Every colour and every Christmas motif has a place, and animatronic Santa dances when you turn him on.
And then there is my window, the tallest of them all but not in a way that takes unfair advantage, I do not think.
Luke did get the one with the window seat, and Olivia chose before me.
On my pane, two children sit in the branches of an old jacaranda tree, birds all around.
Though I am clearly biased, I think it has the most heart. So why does everyone seem mad?
‘It’s very good, dear,’ Mum says, as though struggling to admit to something against her will.
‘But?’
‘But what?’
‘But I’m waiting for the catch, because everyone looks as though I’ve gone and put my head through the window rather than decorating it,’ I reply.
‘It’s just . . . it’s a bit much, isn’t it?’ Mum says, her voice sing-songy now.
As though I should have known better, as though I am obstinate rather than confused.
‘A bit much? Is that not the whole fucking point of the thing?’ Rage sparks in my chest and I want to actually put my head through the glass.
‘You did well,’ Olivia says quietly, with nothing more to add.
‘Nora, sweetie, it’s lovely. Obviously you are the winner,’ Dad calls. I had not realised he was sitting out on the deck.
I join him and sit back to look at my work from the other side. I am quietly thrilled with how it turned out, though unable to really enjoy that feeling on account of the other, more powerful ones clouding it.
‘Why is everyone mad?’
‘They’re not mad,’ he replies.
‘They are acting like they’re mad. I can feel it.’
Dad nods his head. ‘I’d say some people expected things to go a different way, so it will just take them a bit of time to get their heads around,’ he says.
‘Do you include Mum in “some people”?’
‘I do.’
‘That’s pretty shitty of her, then,’ I reply.
We sit in silence for a time, and when the living room is empty I head back inside.
I can hear Mum and Olivia down the hall, talking about outfits for Christmas Day.
I want to be bigger than this, I want to metabolise the injustice and allow myself to rise above it, but I cannot.
Packing up my things, all I feel is quiet, shaking anger.
Another time, I would have taken that pain and used it to destroy my own creation.
Pain is easiest enacted on the self. But today, there is only one thing I can think to do.
Walking across the room, I take my scissors to the wire that connects all of Luke’s synchronised lights to the power source and I snip it.
It is not enough that I have already won; he needs to feel as though he has lost something too.
I take a photo of my window, sure that it will have been defaced in some way by the time I see it again, and keen to preserve its beauty if only in an image.
I send the photo to Fran, hoping to spark something, hoping he will remember how beautiful things can be when I am able to give them my focus.
When I have held a thought in my mind for long enough – turned it over, flipped it inside out and back again, examined it from all angles, and played out every possible scenario that could stem from said thought – a problem often occurs.
I want to explain the entirety of the world I have created around that thought to someone, but I often start at the end.
I can’t figure out the sequence I should be explaining things in, so I give the most important piece first, no context, and thoroughly confuse whoever I am hoping to enlighten.
This is what I did with Fran one night, the summer holidays before my final year of high school, much like I had a few years prior with our conversation about girlfriends and futures.
While drinking was still a mainstay, sometimes tiredness would creep over me in a fog so heavy I could barely lift my head.
It could hang around for days or weeks. Now I know it is burnout, but then I understood it only as failure on my part.
I could human no longer. Christmas was a prime time for these periods, and Fran and I spent most January nights staying in and watching early aughts comedies, finding humour in the cringey parts that had not stood the test of time.
It made the movies that held up well all the more special.
We lounged and ate microwave popcorn and played ‘remember when’ and gave each other those head massages that made your skin prickle all over your body.
It was my way of creeping closer to that horizon. That and the hormones, probably.
That particular night, we were lying on the floor watching something with a great soundtrack, I remember that much.
When a song he liked kicked in, he would turn to me in delight, as though to say, can you believe the music supervisor chose something so perfect?
I returned every smile, entirely uninterested in the music, or the film.
His joy was what captivated me, so enthralling and real.
And when he reached up onto his bed to grab another pillow, the gap where his T-shirt lifted and bared his stomach enthralled me, too.
His skin looked like it would be warm to the touch, and I wondered if he had freckles on his shoulders from all his time in the sun. This felt important to know.
He caught my eye after readjusting his pillows, and gave a questioning smile. I looked away, feeling sprung.
‘Hey, Rah?’
‘Yeah?’
‘What’s on your mind? You have such a great look on your face right now.’
He was still grinning when I glanced back.
Again, I had been thinking about us, and how much I loved him, and how being around him remained the best part of my life.
I had been thinking about when we used to kiss one another, and how perfect that had been, and how I wished we had never stopped.
I had been thinking about pleasure, and our bodies, and how he was the only person I could imagine sharing my first time with, the only one I could be that vulnerable and exposed around. But what I said was:
‘I was thinking about how I want to have sex.’
‘Oh, right. What’s made you decide on that, then?’ he asked without judgement, but he was no longer smiling either.
‘I just think it’s time. Everyone else has done it,’ I said, trying to sound older and more nonchalant than I was.
‘You don’t have to do something just because other people have done it,’ he replied, quiet and raw.
‘You sound like my mum – “If so-and-so jumped off a cliff, would you?”’ I had not meant to be so defensive, but he was perceiving me wrong, and it inflamed me a little.
‘Sorry.’
‘No, don’t be sorry. It came out wrong. What I meant to say was, I think we should sleep together. It’s something I want to do, with you. We know each other so well, it just makes a lot of sense to me.’
‘Oh.’
The silence stung like rejection until I could no longer bear it.
‘I mean, if you want to as well. It’s just an idea, something I was thinking . . .’
Fran looked at me with those eyes and I wished he wouldn’t because I knew exactly what was coming.
‘I don’t think that’s a good enough reason,’ he said, haltingly.
‘Oh.’
‘Knowing someone well doesn’t feel like enough of a reason to have sex, is what I meant. I think you should really like them, too, in that way. I had imagined my first time being with a proper girlfriend and we would –’
‘No, I get it. It’s fine. Forget I said it. Pretend you have amnesia, like Drew Barrymore on that boat with Adam Sandler the other night.’
I started to sing the Beach Boys song and while it did not make things better, it ended the conversation at least. We kept watching the movie, pretending I had not said anything. Or at least, that is what I thought we were doing.
‘Were you joking before?’ he asked, when the credits rolled.
‘Yeah, of course,’ I replied, reflexively. Sometimes people really needed to think you were joking. I was trying to save face, to give the answer I thought he wanted.
‘Well, I don’t think that’s the kind of thing you should joke about with people,’ he said. ‘It’s confusing.’
‘What kinds of things should I joke about, then?’
Whatever frisson I had felt between us, I channelled into annoyance.
Shame was a renewable energy source, and I had enough to light a city.
I wanted to bring him down a little, not out of vengeance for rejecting me so thoroughly, as it may have appeared, but as a way of levelling the emotional playing field.
Hierarchy held more discomfort than any bodily experience ever could.
‘Politics, animals, the weird ways people act . . .’
‘Right. And is that an exhaustive list?’
‘No. Look, Nora, this is going badly. I was confused by what you were saying, that’s all. I thought you were saying you – I couldn’t tell if you were being serious.’
‘When am I ever not being serious?’
‘But you just said you were joking,’ he replied.
He looked frustrated, and I hated myself for being the cause of that. I only wanted to give him what he wanted, or, more honestly, I only wanted him to want me.
‘I was . . .’ I said, tailing off as I retreated back into my thoughts.
I watched Fran trying to get back on steady ground, and felt equal parts triumphant and contrite.
If he did not want me, then he could have a taste of the discomfort his rejection brought me.
The sourness had risen. I could not see that perhaps he had been trying to communicate something else, only that I had put myself out there, and been rejected.
Below that, I was devastated for having destroyed things again.