by Toni Jordan
She turns and walks to the door. ‘Stanzi,’ she yells. ‘Come and talk to your nephew before I stuff him in a cardboard box and mail him to the starving children in Africa.’
‘You’ll need a big box. He doubles in height on a weekly basis,’ Stanzi yells back from downstairs. ‘What are the starving children supposed to do with him?’
‘Whatever they like,’ Charlotte says. ‘Target practice. Protein supplement. Scaring off wild animals. I’m not fussed.’
Starving Africans. Another epic bout of predictability from Charlotte Westaway, the last of the bleeding hearts. Case and point: when we were little she brought home lost kittens and baby birds that fell out of nests. She cries when she sees those swollen-stomach babies on the news.
On her way downstairs, Charlotte’ll cross paths with Stanzi, who also comes when she’s called. If she was in the middle of donating a kidney, she’d still come running. That’s because both of them are terrified that Libby or me will suddenly think: Wait a minute! I don’t know how we didn’t notice this before now, but…we don’t have fathers! I mean, I have a hairy old blues musician who lives on an avocado farm near Mullumbimby and sends me birthday cards at random times of the year, and Libby has some hot-shot Singaporean software designer who has this whole other family that she visits for two weeks in the Christmas holidays, but that’s it. Charlotte and Stanzi fill every gap, answer every question. The perfect parental tag team. The smother mothers.
Charlotte will be going down slowly, at peace with the world (except me). I can hear Stanzi running up the stairs, two at a time, as if she doesn’t burn enough kilojoules jogging around like a maniac all day. Why anyone would want to be a personal trainer is beyond me, especially when all her clients are depressed fat people, yet she’s just busting to spend more energy running up the stairs whenever Charlotte yells. What Stanzi has is a fatal failure of the imagination. There is no other possible explanation for why she lives here.
Since the door is already open, Stanzi doesn’t knock either. She doesn’t look around my walls, which are covered in fluoro colours and tags and sweeping shapes left over from my graffiti phase. Pretty good ones actually but still, kind of lame. I need to repaint, if ever I have a minute to myself. Stanzi walks in and spreads herself across the bottom of the bed the way she did when I was little. She’s already in her party clothes: a sequined black dress made from artificial fibres that requires drycleaning on a regular basis. I suspect she does this just to piss Charlotte off. One of the reasons I like her.
‘What’s up, kiddo?’
I groan. ‘You mean apart from my mother bringing me up Amish?’
‘Those black hats, though—so practical. As far as UV protection goes.’ She stretches out on her back, arms and legs reaching to the walls. ‘Hey, you know what would bring out your manly features? A chin beard. Here. Hold still.’ She reaches down to the floor where my pastels are lying and picks up the black one. She wields it with what is intended to be a demonic cackle.
I roll away. She doesn’t understand what I have to content with. ‘Do I get a choice in this house? Ever? Did anyone ask me if I wanted to go to a stupid anniversary dinner on a Saturday night when everyone else in the known universe is out having a life?’
‘It’s very important to your mother. I think she’s planning to reveal that we’re the descendants of a long-lost branch of the Russian royal family. It is time, Tsar Alecovitch, we take back the throne.’
‘It’s not funny.’ I throw myself face down in my pillow. ‘It’s like living in the middle ages. It’s a wonder I have any friends at all. The guys probably think I’m a total freak.’
‘That’s good, isn’t it?’ She throws the pastel up in the air and catches it without even looking. Her hand—eye coordination is awesome. ‘I bet all the kids who went to school with Jackson Pollock thought he was a nutbag. Who does he think he bloody is? Constable?’
‘I guess.’
‘It’s a bitch, isn’t it, being your age? I know. Hormones, girls, school, friends, pressure. It’s a right pain in the arse.’
‘As if you remember. When you were sixteen, pains in the arse were cured by leeches.’
‘Ha. De. Ha.’ She stands. ‘Are you coming down or not?’
I’m coming. Grandpa is nearly here. I’m not cutting off my nose despite my face.
I wish I was a writer. If I immortalised people in words instead of paint and pencil and digital images, I could sit quiet in the corner jotting away and no one would be the wiser. But drawing is a public business. What are you doing, Alec? Oh, isn’t that lovely? What’s it supposed to be? Ad. Frikkin. Nauseam.
So I don’t sketch. Instead I concentrate on the scene in front of me so I can remember it later. Which wouldn’t be necessary if I had a phone with a camera in it instead of an actual camera, an ancient relic which does nothing except take photos.
Speaking of relics: we are all sitting around the dining table. Grandpa is at one end, Uncle Frank is at the other. They look the same but different, the way Charlotte and Stanzi do. On the other side of the table, Libby is sitting between Charlotte and Stanzi. Grandma is sitting next to me.
‘This is lovely, Charlotte,’ says Grandma, around a mouthful of Charlotte’s casserole, which looks like newspaper soaked in milk. She is wearing her pale blue dress, the one with the matching shoes and handbag that make her look like the Queen Mother. ‘I’d almost think it was meat, if I didn’t know better.’
‘It’s not meat?’ says Uncle Frank. ‘What is it then? I don’t eat anything green, Charlotte. Vegetables are too hard on my colon.’
‘Don’t complain.’ Grandpa, always dapper, is wearing a blue cravat that matches Grandma’s dress. ‘A tofu has given up its life for this meal.’ He’s smiling, but he doesn’t eat much. Nothing like Charlotte’s cooking to curve your appetite.
Now Uncle Frank is talking to Libby, which serves her right for being such a suck. He’s telling her stories of the old days: about how they all used to live here. How it was our great-grandparent’s house and then Uncle Frank’s until I was born, and then he gave it to Charlotte and Stanzi and moved into the nursing home because by then the firm had let him go and he wanted to be around other people his own age. He loves it in the nursing home. Bowls, bingo. You name it. Libby’s eyes are glazing over. Soon he’ll get on to how tiny this house used to be before Grandma and Grandpa paid for the upstairs extension where me and Lib’s rooms are.
How lame are Charlotte and Stanzi. There’s no way I’m living in the family house when I’m grown up. I’m going to get the hell out of here and live in a loft in New York. Or India. I could backpack around India and speak Indian and do paintings of temples and the colours of saris and smiling babies.
Listening to Uncle Frank, Libby looks like she’s about to lapse into a coma. Before they arrived she came up to me in the hall and she was all this is so lame. Mission Impossible 3 is having advance screenings, at which I almost laughed out loud. I was all introducing the current Australian lame champion, MB being rank Hollywood commercialism featuring formulaic storytelling with pathetic CGI I want to see Scary Movie 4 and she nods, but it’s out of the question because Charlotte will never let her. She’s too much of a baby. She has nightmares.
The actual meal winds up early because if old people eat after 8pm and you get them wet they turn into gremlins. After we’ve cleared the plates, Grandpa stands up and clinks his fork against his glass and says, ‘Ahem. I’d like to say a few words.’
Here we go. I love Grandpa and everything, but this will be an all-points Bore. Dom. Alert.
He starts to say how fifty years ago today was the best day in his long and happy life, because that was when he married that beautiful girl sitting right there. Annabel Crouch. Grandma blushes and raises her glass to him. Charlotte says hear hear. She has had two glasses of wine and is actually smiling.
‘You’ve always been the lucky one, Kip,’ says Uncle Frank. ‘Midas touch.’
‘And it m
eans everything to me to have my brother here, and our two beautiful girls, and our two wonderful grandchildren.’
Yep. So far, so boring.
‘You’re wearing your mother’s pendant Charlotte, I see.’
She smiles and opens her collar a little wider. Sure enough, there it is: the purple necklace she loves so much. ‘Only for special occasions, Dad.’
‘It has always disturbed me, though,’ he says, ‘that we had only one pendant and two daughters.’
‘I took the money, Dad,’ Stanzi says. ‘You bought my first car. Remember?’
‘Still. Your mother and I have decided that, although it’s our anniversary, you two girls should get the presents.’ Grandma rivals in her bag and pulls out an envelope and a small parcel and hands them to him. ‘Here.’
The envelope is for Mum. There’s cash in it, I can see from here. Enough to make Mum cry. She hugs everyone, even Uncle Frank. The parcel is for Stanzi: inside is an old-fashioned coin, dull silver, with a king’s head on one side. It has a silver chain threaded through a hole in the middle. Stanzi looks like she’s about to cry too.
‘I loved looking at it, framed in my study,’ says Grandpa. ‘But I’m getting on. It’s more important that it goes to you. It’s a fine old coin, isn’t it Stanzi? Let me have a last look.’
Stanzi passes him the coin on the chain and Grandpa goes through an extended rigamarole of looking for his glasses: checking his pockets and Grandma’s bag. Eventually they decide he’s left them in Stanzi’s car.
‘Alec,’ he says. ‘Can you run and get them? I think I left them under the front seat.’
‘Of course he can,’ Charlotte says. She hands me Stanzi’s keys.
Outside, I take a minute to lean against the fence. I don’t mind running errands for Grandpa. I mean, he’s eighty. What am I supposed to do? Tell him to go get his own glasses?
It’s dark now. Must be well past eight. It’s weird to think of a different lot of Westaways living in this house. I try to imagine it as a 3D painting: Escher-style, one layer on top of another, different times, different people. I think about these other people with their old-fashioned clothes and hair, walking down hallways sleeping in beds. Ghosts walking among us.
Inside, around that table, everyone knows who they are. They know every drop of blood in their veins. Where they’ve come from, the features and gestures and traits that have been passed down. They take it for granted. Me and Libby, we’re half Westaways. We don’t know what belongs to the other side. All this looking backwards, it’s a complete crock. Grandpa can track his blood. Uncle Frank’s right: he’s the lucky one.
I open the car door and kneel. The glasses are right where he said they’d be, but next to them is a parcel wrapped in bright blue paper, with a little card in an envelope. The envelope says: Alec. I open it. The card says, in a shaky old-person hand: Tonight everyone gets a present! Though it’s best to keep this just between us! All our love, Grandma and Grandpa. I open the parcel and almost die of shock. Inside is a brand new Nintendo DS, still in the box.
I don’t know how they knew the exact right thing to get, the perfect thing that would blow my mind, but they managed it. You, Grandma and Grandpa, officially, totally, rock. And Just between us is right. It won’t last two minutes up in my bedroom with Libby and Mum around. I’ve got to hide it somewhere, and fast. They’ll be expecting me back any second.
The front yard is so tiny, there’s nowhere. I can’t bury it, it’ll get dirty. I open the gate and walk down the side of the house. There are some loose pavers stacked against the fence: I think about this for a bit, even move one, but it’s all spiders and shit. I kneel down and run my hands along the bricks of the foundations. One of them looks a little loose, so I push a bit and—hey pesto! I lift the brick out and there’s a decent space behind it. It looks about the right size, but the Nintendo won’t go in. I drop my head for a good look and—hang on, there’s already something in here. Carefully, I slide my hand inside. I lift it out.
Back inside, I give Grandpa his glasses. Then I sit at the table, a little awkwardly. The Nintendo is in the letter box: I’ll move it later, after everyone’s gone. But I found this wicked thing and I have to show them.
‘Get a load of this,’ I say. ‘I found it outside.’
In the middle of the table I place the tin. It’s got a parrot eating a biscuit on the front and it’s covered in tarnish and rust.
‘Will you take a look at that,’ says Grandma.
‘God, it’s filthy,’ says Libby.
‘Open it, Alec,’ says Charlotte. ‘You found it.’
So I do. I have to get my nails under the lid, it’s a good tight fit, but inside, in a brown envelope, is a photograph. An old one, black and white, but the tones are vivid and crisp. There’s a crush of people. A bunch of them are soldiers. In the middle is one particular soldier. He’s leaning out of a train, out the window. You can see him really well: crew cut, uniform. He’s stretching to kiss a girl. The girl is sitting on someone’s shoulder and she’s stretching up to him. You can’t see her so good, just her old-fashioned wavy hair and her shape.
‘Dad,’ says Charlotte. ‘Are you all right?’
First, he stared at the photo. He said nothing. There was just this look on his face, like his skin was melting. Then he stood, he made this weird noise. Then he fell.
For twenty minutes now, we’ve all been still. Grandpa is lying on the couch. Mum wanted to call an ambulance but he said no. Don’t fuss, Charlotte, he said.
‘If your father says he’s fine, he’s fine.’ Grandma stirs his tea, clinks the spoon on the side.
‘You collapsed. That doesn’t sound fine to me,’ says Charlotte.
‘Stood up too quickly, that’s all. Blood pressure,’ says Uncle Frank.
Grandpa makes a face. ‘Blood pressure? What rot.’
‘Mum. What is it? What’s going on?’ says Libby.
‘Don’t, Kip. Not right to speak ill of the dead,’ says Uncle Frank.
Grandpa sits up and pulls Libby half on to his lap. ‘It’s a love letter, sweetie. Except it’s a photograph.’ He says that in the olden days, things were different. No one expected a grand passion, you see. He squeezes Grandma’s hand. We aimed for smaller things: the health of our family, being warm, being safe.
‘I remember Ma saying that when Dad was alive we were so rich, it didn’t matter how thickly she peeled the potatoes,’ says Uncle Frank.
I hold the photo in my hands. It was the first one he ever took, Grandpa says. It was what made him decide to spend his life taking photos. From what he says, it seems like all kinds of stupid things had to be kept secret back then. When he says that his sister didn’t die from the flu, Stanzi just nods. Charlotte gets on her high horse about ridiculous sexist taboos and lies and nothing to be ashamed of. Grandma smiles. You can’t imagine what it was like back then, she says. So much pain, all covered over.
‘And all this time you knew it was him,’ says Uncle Frank. ‘You never told a soul.’
‘She asked me not to. I never knew she had this developed. She must’ve hid it herself.’ Grandpa takes my hand: not like he’s holding a little kid’s, like he’s shaking it, like I’m a man and he’s pleased to meet me. ‘This photo won’t be out of my sight from now on. You’ve given me my sister back, Alec. She’d have liked you, and your art. Wherever she is, I’m sure she’s looking out for you.’
Grandpa is feeling better so it’s time for them to go home. Charlotte is bustling around getting Uncle Frank and Grandma into Stanzi’s car, keeping Uncle Frank steady when he steps down from the footpath, folding Grandma’s walker and fitting it in the boot, when she realises Grandpa’s missing.
‘Alec,’ she says, and this means Slave boy! Find him, toot sweet!
Grandpa’s not so good with stairs so he must be outside and that’s where I find him, in the backyard, standing under the tree, feeling the bark like he’s never seen a tree before. He looks about a thousand years old. He’s
skinnier than I remember and he bends over like his shoulders are too heavy. I want to tell him to push his chest out but I know he can’t help it. I force my own shoulders back.
‘The party bus is leaving. All aboard.’
‘This is where I last saw her. Just here. Leaning against this tree, talking to my mother. She never met your mother or Stanzi. Never saw me marry Annabel. She was nineteen when she died. He must’ve been twenty-one.’ He waves one arm at the trattoria across the lane.
‘Grandpa. It’s time to go home.’
‘Right here. Under this tree.’
I take him by the arm and walk him back through the house. In the hallway he stops. He grabs my face with both hands, holds it tight and close with stronger fingers than I would have figured. He’s strong for an oldie. I’m forced to look right into his eyes.
‘Alec. You must know this. People disappear. They just go puff. Thin air. Every time you see someone, you never know if you’re seeing them for the last time. Drink them in, Alec. Kiss them. It’s very important. Never let anyone say goodbye, even for a little while, without kissing them. Press your lips against the people you love. Hands, they can touch anything. Open doors, hold cameras, hang clothes on the line. It’s lips that matter.’
‘Thin air. Last time. Kiss them. Lips. Got it.’ I try to get him moving before Charlotte calls out again.
‘You don’t get it.’ He releases the zombie death grip around my head, and he kisses me. ‘Well, that’s all right. I hope you never will.’
I think he’s going to say something else, but he just keeps walking down the hall.
I watch him go. Standing beside the tree he looked frail. His skin is blotchy and dry like the bark, like someone has taken a fine brush and painted veins and bruises, white spots and dabs of red. Next to him my skin looks varnished, smooth.
When me and Libby were little, Grandpa was in charge of all the dad stuff. He took photos of us, hundreds of them. He still has them over at their apartment at the retirement village. He was the one who taught us to play poker and took us to the football.