Chapter 23
Christmas Day
I wake up crying – an inauspicious start – from a Frankenstein’s dream collaged with the scraps of a thousand different memories.
They were the missing pieces, the parts I did not remember, and all of them ached.
Something bad had happened; something bad is happening; something bad will happen again.
My body is carrying tension my mind does not seem to be able to immediately comprehend; all this energy is in my chest, in my throat.
Sleep is where most of the feeling happens, because I have given it nowhere else to go.
It causes tension in my jaw and every other joint.
Wading through an unceasing deluge of flashbacks and reminders and newly accessed memories – scenes that were traumatic enough to live through the first time, finding me again when I am at my most vulnerable – is heavy, impossible work.
I am but a brush turkey or a suffocated canary.
And one whose psychologist won’t even text or email them back.
Not only do these moments revisit me, they demand re-examination; I must solve the riddles if I wish to progress unharmed.
It is too much; the edges begin to blur and I now know what that means.
Shutdown and/or delusion are begging to be reconsidered; they soon demand the time is now.
By mid-year, I had dropped out of my course, taking control and making it a choice, not allowing it to have any impact.
I retained the part-time job that had been lined up for me by a lecturer who showed a little too much interest in my academic future – working events at an art gallery owned by a friend of his on the other side of the city.
I printed catalogues and wiped grubby fingerprints off surfaces and poured drinks whenever there was a new opening night.
The pay was shit, the boss was a creep, and I was, big surprise, say it with me now: entirely miserable.
Despondence had begun to feel like a personality trait, one that granted me false superiority over those who cared about anything.
One night, leaving an event for a photographer whose show was made entirely of black and white photos of naked women, full of cheap wine and overstimulation, I saw him, walking right past me there on the street.
‘Fran?’
It was as though I had repressed his existence for so long that my subconscious summoned him to remind me of where exactly I was going wrong.
Or, more factually, it had nothing to do with me at all, and he was in town for the gig of a band he loved that was not coming to Queensland.
Unidentified neurodivergence, emotional detachment, and drastically declining mental health did give me a bad case of main character syndrome there for a while; I was my own unlikeable protagonist, unable to zoom out and see the whole of the mess I had made.
‘Nora, hey.’
Fran seemed genuinely surprised in a pleasant kind of way, rather than a horrified one, which only fed my delusions of self-importance.
‘What are you doing here?’ I asked, falling into step with him and his two friends, a guy and a girl I did not recognise and tried not to form strong opinions about too quickly.
If only she did not possess such nice legs. I could have been more of a feminist about it if she had been ugly. That is how true feminism works, I believe.
‘We came down to see The Sweethearts,’ he said.
‘Their set was incredible,’ she added.
‘Wow. Fun.’ My tone betrayed me with its lack of commitment to the part.
‘What about you, do you live around here?’ The intimacy of Fran’s voice asking such a distant question broke my heart. I wanted to wail.
‘No, I work back there at a gallery. Just finishing up an event. I live on the other side of the river.’
‘Oh, cool. Sounds very . . . cool.’ He cringed at his own choice of words.
‘So, what are you doing now?’ I asked, fumbling in my bag and lighting a cigarette to reward my brain for enduring this interaction without having a full-on breakdown. That would come soon enough. I probably also thought it made me look European and chic.
‘Just heading back to our hostel,’ she said.
I tried to figure out her place in the dynamic – whether she was with Fran, or with the other guy, or if it was a platonic friendship group where no one was fucking anyone else at all. That option seemed unlikely.
‘You should come back to mine, Fran. I’d love to show you my place.
And my roommate Cleo will be there later, probably wasted but she would love to meet you.
My new best friend meeting my . . . old one.
’ I wished, not for the first time, that I could inhale the last words that had come out of my mouth.
‘Thanks, that sounds fun, but I better stay with these guys. We’ve got to get to the airport pretty early tomorrow,’ he replied.
The girl smiled at this, his choosing of her over me, or I imagined she did.
It was perhaps more of an implied smile, sent via her ghastly aura.
Whether or not she smiled was less pertinent than the fact that it felt like she did.
Or it felt like she wanted to, or it felt like she could have, if she had so desired.
I mean, what a bitch. She could only dream of looking this European and chic.
‘Oh, right. You’re all welcome, of course, but can’t argue with an early airport check-in.’
We had walked past my bus stop by that point and the lateness of the night finally registered its intent as sinister. Plus, Fran was clearly going back to the hostel to have sex with one or both of these people and I wanted to let him get to it.
‘Well, I’m actually back that way a bit, but it was great to see you. And nice to meet you both.’
It was a script I had used often, and did not need to think about. Great to see you, lovely to meet you, have a great night. I could be nice if I needed to be, even to heinous pick-mes with rotten vibes, basic clothes, and an annoyingly perfect body.
I turned on the spot and started walking in the opposite direction.
Goodbyes have never been my thing, clearly.
A fresh cigarette gave me focus as I willed my tears back into their jars, spinning my pain into anger so I did not have to keep it.
How dare he come here without letting me know?
Yes, I had moved to another state and stopped returning his calls, but he had to know it was because I loved him too much and did not want to ruin him with that love any longer.
And here he was, coming all this way just to rub his repulsive threesome in my face.
‘Rah, wait up.’
When I turned, Fran was alone, rushing to catch up.
The others were fading off into the darkness, and I found a scrap of goodwill burgeoning in my heart for them.
I hoped they made it safely back to their lodgings.
I hope they enjoyed their Fran-less sexfest and both managed to achieve orgasm.
I was basically Mother Theresa, as I turned my attention back to Fran.
Of course he followed me, because he was Fran and he made good choices, from the heart, all the time.
He did not have to force himself to be altruistic, because he had that nature by default.
The sheets are strewn around me as though there has been a scuffle, and the blanket is on the floor.
It is this day, the one that has always brought me the most excitement and the most anxiety – I am unfortunately a lot like Elsie in that regard.
Christmas morning was too much anticipation for me as a child; I could never eat or sleep or speak in the lead-up, every present a disappointment because my imagination was too vivid.
And now, it feels like a marker of time in all the wrong ways.
I should be more together by now; I should have figured out how not to be such a mess.
I have woken up agitated, all senses preloaded, skin itching across every inch of me as though I am allergic to being alive.
Sometimes I have days like this before my period, and other times, it is brought on by an accumulation of ongoing overwhelm.
My brain is swarming in that way that does not allow room for listening or watching.
My phone cannot help me. I could not read a single word if I tried.
A shower does not work its magic, and I can only assume Mum will not be going for her walk. There is too much to do. For her.
For me, there is not enough that warrants doing as distraction that I could undertake alone.
Or, if not alone, without the perception or input of other people.
Youngest adult child at Christmas is the most cursed rendering of the birth order, one I would not recommend.
Olivia will have opinions if I make a salad, and Luke will make jokes about any poor attempt at desserts.
Mum would rearrange my table setting, and Dad is too practical to allow fake chores to be done again.
If I watered the plants or swept the veranda, he would only tell me not to bother, as it has already been done.
And if any single one of them corrects me in any minor way, I might start crying because last night one piece of my dream was about being fourteen, when all my soft toys were taken to the op shop and I never got to see them again, or even say goodbye.
Do they not understand that I now have the key to absorb this pain further, and feel it all anew?
Every memory is here, being experienced again for the first time all at once.
Sweat runs down my sides like seams, the humidity dialled all the way up.
Grandma Sue will be here in a few short hours, and for that I must clean up the mess spilling out of me.
In Melbourne, I stood still on the street facing him, and tried to give my best version of relaxed and aloof.
‘Hey,’ I said.
The mascara running down my cheeks probably did not aid this impression.