Where We Begin

by Christie Nieman

  But the truth wasn’t safe, not at all. The truth was that Mum wasn’t pretending. She wasn’t playing. She was drunk and sick and then she was passed out cold. She was passed out and I was left all alone. I was alone at four. When I had begun to cook dinner I wasn’t playing, I was deadly serious. I was afraid and panicked – someone had to be Mum, there had to be a mum, someone in control. It would have to be me. And when we had all slept together on the kitchen floor, it wasn’t because we were a funny and carefree and kooky kind of family, it was because Dad and I couldn’t move her and we couldn’t leave her. The truth was we were scared she might die. And somehow, in the imperfect logic of the four year old, it was all my fault.

  Dad’s story was much better. I participated in the telling of Dad’s story, laughing at the right times, singing the song for whoever he was telling, all the words, from start to finish.

  Over the years there were other stories to be learned and invented and told. Many stories, covering many events: like the time Mum yanked me out of bed and got me dressed for school on a Saturday morning – Dad said that she was just so busy that she got her days mixed up; or the time she passed out and pissed herself on the new couch, the new couch before the latest new couch, and Dad said that she was just so exhausted from being so busy that she fell asleep there in her clothes and that it was actually Nintendo the cat who had pissed on the couch – I’d kept it to myself when I found Mum’s piss-soaked clothes reeking in the laundry sink, not to ruin a good story. Or there were the countless times I woke up to her yelling about god-knows-what at Dad in the middle of the night – I only ever heard quiet murmurs from him in response: they didn’t even offer a story for those ones, they were simply not spoken about. Or the nights when Dad had to make her go to bed, help her up the stairs – ‘exhausted’ again. Sometimes, on those nights when Dad couldn’t avoid mentioning the obvious influence alcohol was having on her state, he would pass it off as ‘oh, you’ve had one too many, you duffer,’ or ‘maybe you nudged it a bit hard tonight, my love’ as he hauled her off the couch and up the stairs. And the countless times she would not be where she had said she’d be, or back as soon as she’d said she’d be – failing to pick me up from after-school practice, or leaving the house to go and buy milk and turning up hours later with booze on her breath, a ‘plausible’ story, and no milk.

  Or there were the times she could go for a week, sometimes weeks, without touching alcohol, or at least seeming relatively normal about it. She was fabulous when she was like that. Energetic, funny – a whirlwind of efficiency. She was a great sorter-outer: things got done in those moments between sessions. And in those times I would relax. I’d let her in. Like last year when I let Dad tell her about a maths award I had won, and the special ceremony and dinner school was having for all the students who had won awards, and their parents. I’d wanted just Dad to come, but he hadn’t been able to make it. Mum had been really great for three weeks, so he convinced me that it would be fine. I should have known. It was always the worst when she’d been good for a while – it was a waiting game. I should never have risked it on something so important. Clearly the idea of it freaked her out somehow. She preloaded – I didn’t know. And she was great at first – her sparkling self. She charmed the room and I felt more fabulous by association, like I could easily be nobody if she wasn’t around to draw attention to me. And she was my biggest fan. No-one thought better of me than she did. I was her sparkling success story. She was so proud of me.

  But after an hour of sitting at the table with a seemingly never-empty glass of wine in front of her, soon there was dropped food, a broken plate, and some too-close drunken rambling at the father of the science award winner who was sitting next to her. I sat there watching him leaning back from her, obviously trying to extract himself from the conversation, and I felt sick. And then of course she couldn’t drive anymore, and we’d had to stand out on the road, me propping her up, trying to hail a taxi as all the other kids and their parents drove past us and away into the night.

  It was almost as if she’d been afraid of sitting quietly next to me. To be my partner and support at an event in my honour. Like she had to turn the event into something else because if she didn’t she mightn’t be able to think of anything to say to me, or like through quiet conversation she might learn some things about me, some real things.

  The next day Mum had been full of the fact that we were the absolute life of the party, and what a dull event it would have been without the fabulous Krause girls. And Dad smiled and laughed, and I smiled and laughed too.

  In Cathy’s old room I dropped my face into my hands and squeezed my eyes shut against the tears that pushed there. I needed her now. I needed her so much. And I needed her to be different from how she was. I didn’t want to have to be the best, or the sparkliest, or the smartest, just to have her see me, or talk with me, or be part of my world. All the satisfaction I had felt earlier had melted away. And here I was again. Just me. Me. Alone and panicked and everything my own fault.

  In Cathy’s room.

  Catharina’s room.

  Catharina.

  I’d always known that was my mother’s full name but before I met Hessel I had never once heard it spoken out loud.

  I tried it out, quietly, with just my lips and teeth and breath, no voice, saying it the way that Hessel had said it, with the hard T.

  Catharina.

  Catharina van Leeuwen.

  It was the name of a complete stranger.

  A sob caught me by surprise. From somewhere deep, my diaphragm did something weird and I gasped and tears leapt from my eyes. I stood quickly, shaking my fingers and walking up and down, two steps each way in the tiny room, breathing slowly through my nose until the danger of crying had passed.

  That curry. That damn stupid curry.

  I had to get out. I pulled on my ugg boots and slung Nassim’s hoodie around my shoulders, then stepped through the dim and empty kitchen and outside into the moonlight.

  What was that? Why hadn’t I been able to take the pill? Why hadn’t I swallowed it? I would have been done. I could have been done with this. I could have been in control of my life again.

  It wasn’t that I felt it was wrong in any way. I felt fine that this little clump of DNA was no more or less than the bacteria that covered every living thing, just as amazing and astounding and improbable, but also just as oblivious and expendable.

  So it wasn’t a moral problem. It was just . . . something unexpected. I had been surprised to find that I recognised a feeling. It was love, or something like it. Love, growing physiologically inside me. A piece of Nassim. A piece of me.

  I crossed the paddock in the milky light and, with Bette’s revelation about Danny playing in my mind, I carefully sat on the bottom rock of the cairn.

  The stars held their gaze steady. I pulled out my phone. No bars. Using my thumbs instead, I wrote out in our shared message field what I was bursting to actually tell Nassim: the simplest, truest thing I was feeling.

  I love you. I’m sorry.

  I was going to erase it, of course I was. I just wanted to look at it, think about it, to feel like I was talking to him, but at the end of the line, out of sheer habit, my thumb automatically pressed send. Oh god. Instantly an exclamation mark appeared beside the message. Message not sent. Thank god for no reception. I held my thumb down on it, but a bar appeared, and before I could select ‘unsend’, the message delivered. Oh shit. And then the bar disappeared again. Shit.

  Okay. That was okay. It was late at night. That could be undone. I clicked ‘Delete for everyone’ and then waited for a bar to appear. Nothing.

  I turned and looked at the cairn behind me. Was this cairn dangerous? I would be careful. I could be careful. I had to find some reception. I had already done it with Basil.

  But climbing in the dark felt more precarious than during the day. I found rocks that had probably never before borne weight and they shifted and teetered under mine. At the top, puffing,
I pulled out my phone again. No bars. I stood carefully and held the phone up and waved it around in the air. Nothing. Not even the whisper of a bar.

  ‘Shit!’ I stood at the top of the cairn, full of zeal to do the thing I had to do to stop the message going through to Nassim. But ‘the thing’ was not forthcoming. There was a time limit to get the message back, and without reception . . .

  Eventually I stood still and let my hand drop to my side as it became obvious there was nothing at all I could do. In any other app I could have deleted it. But as it was, I was at the mercy of the fickle reception bars and the ticking clock. If there was reception before going to town tomorrow, it would unsend. If there wasn’t, it would stay sitting there in Nassim’s phone, irretrievable, waiting for him to see it. He may have already seen it.

  I sat and panted and looked out over the dense black of the ground below the translucent black of the sky above. I looked down at what I’d written. What a stupid message to receive – cryptic and cruel. Should I send a following message, an explanatory one – but, oh god, explaining what? How?

  I typed one out: I don’t think we should see each other anymore.

  I didn’t send it and I erased it and punched out another. I can’t do this anymore, I’m so, so sorry.

  It was so harsh, so abrupt. I got rid of it and tried one explaining my side of things more. It has become apparent that this relationship with you, Nassim – despite being one of the loveliest and best things – is not helping me, but is actually holding me back . . .

  Stilted. Weird. Formal. I couldn’t do it. What the hell was wrong with me? I couldn’t do it.

  Take the pill, break off the relationship, leave my mother’s house. That had been the plan, the whole plan.

  And here I was, more in my mother’s space than I had ever been, unable to take the damn pill, and behaving badly to someone who didn’t deserve anything like that, but unable to say what had to be said. Who the hell was I? I was pigeon-livered and lacking gall.

  I yelled out, a wordless, fruitless sound as frustration and confusion forced its way out, and then I sank my back against the rock.

  A small stone skittered away from me on the cairn, and then clattered down the rocks and thudded onto the grass below. It made my hair stand up.

  I hadn’t asked Bette which cairn Danny had fallen from. It hadn’t seemed a sensitive question. Was it this one? Right here, where I was, right now? Had Danny fallen from up here? It couldn’t have been this one. Even if he had been mucking around . . . It didn’t seem possible. But it could have been – what did I know about cairns and safety? And had he died straight away, maybe even right there, on the grass? I just couldn’t make myself believe that something like that could have happened, that it did happen. That it might have happened right here, to a fit and active fourteen-year-old boy. To my mother’s little brother.

  I thought of Basil, standing up here, making fun of me by jumping up and down. I wondered if he knew about Danny. He seemed to know everything else about my family. Imagine if Basil had fallen. Bright and lively Basil, snuffed out, just like that.

  And all of a sudden I just couldn’t fathom it. How could Mum never have told me she’d had a little brother who died? A fully formed fourteen-year-old boy, as alive and healthy as Basil was, right there, flesh and blood, and then gone, just gone.

  Even if it was painful to speak about, even if she was ashamed of herself for leaving her family in the middle of all that, how could she have simply stopped talking about him, her real-life brother who, according to Bette, she had loved with all her heart?

  I put my useless phone back in my pocket then climbed very carefully back down the cairn and trudged back across the paddock in the moonlight. I felt thick-headed and dull. Not even the chill air refreshed me. When I reached the yard I had to stop and lean against the gatepost. A sharp twinge caught my belly, and then a swelling ache with a pointy tail, and suddenly the weight of it all – trying to understand, trying to achieve, trying to escape, trying to be, trying not to hurt, trying to attain a nearly impossible goal – made me feel so heavy, so leaden, that I could barely stand; and then, without warning, I doubled over and vomited on the grass, and before I could stand up again I had to lean right over with my hands on my knees as I vomited again.

  Well, I thought, this is a low point.

  There was a garden tap right by the gate. I ran frigid water over my hands, tried to push it up and over my face, gulped as much as I could, and spat. I attached the hose that sat there and sprayed a jet out over the mess I had made until it had all run off under the bushes. And then I turned the hose on myself, on my face, on my forehead, in my mouth, trying to wash it all away.

  I switched off the tap and shook my numbed fingers dry and slumped back onto the tangled grass of my grandparents’ yard. I looked up at the moon, smiling its shiny face at me, until finally the drifting clouds slipped fully over it and everything around disappeared into a cottony darkness.

  10 January 1996

  The week before that day

  Cathy had always run Danny’s birthday parties.

  She had spent too many years being disappointed at her own lacklustre birthdays – marked only by a slightly-more-special-than-usual dinner with her parents – that she decided when Danny was just a little kid that it would be different for him. Danny wouldn’t miss out like she did.

  She’d begun when she was nine and he was five. She’d planned the parties meticulously – even then, a natural-born manager of people and events. She’d sorted out the games, the balloons, the cake, the friends, the music. One year she had Danny and all his friends running around in the paddock in the mid-January heat with super-soakers while she wore a whistle around her neck, calling the game. The next year she took over the Dutch Room and put together a grand board-game tournament, with a running tally and everything. She even made take-home lolly bags for all of Danny’s friends.

  Her parents sat back and let her do it. Bette showed some mild interest, as if it was something she had never actually thought of doing herself, as if giving a kid a birthday party was some quirky idea that Cathy had come up with all on her own. Hessel, however, showed zero interest, hiding away in his shed and playing with his motorbikes and his horses.

  That was, until Danny’s eleventh birthday.

  At Danny’s eleventh birthday party – an outdoor military operation orientation game with water balloon grenades – Hessel was there, prowling the sidelines, watching on. Leonie was there for the first time too – the only girl – and she was far and away the best at everything. Cathy remembered Danny being chased by a gang of water-bombing pursuers, Leonie hardest on his heels, and him hollering at Cathy every time he went past her, ‘Blow the damn whistle, Kitty Cat!’ and Cathy, then fifteen, being unable to blow the damn whistle because she was laughing too hard at Leonie’s complete dominance.

  By then Danny and Leonie had been best friends for nearly a year. At the start of grade four they were teamed together in mixed footy and they’d wiped the floor with the rest of their year. They were instant friends and spent the rest of that year practising kick-to-kick, exploring the local creeks, sharing cassettes.

  But that night, after all Danny’s friends had taken their lolly bags and gone home, when Bette, Hessel, Cathy and Danny sat down to their ‘special’ family dinner of lamb chops and sprinkles on ice cream, Hessel picked up Cathy’s invitation list, laid it in the middle of the dinner table, and crossed off Leonie’s name. Cathy had gone to protest – maybe Hessel didn’t understand that Leonie was Danny’s best friend. Hessel was, after all, completely unaware of the social lives of his children. She’d opened her mouth to tell him, but Hessel made sure she closed it again. He made himself clear.

  And Cathy was a fast learner. Quickly, she understood the new line, and where it was, and that she was not to cross it, Danny either. And they never crossed it again.

  But they did find a way around it.

  ‘Danny. Secret Cake next Tuesday,�
�� she said.

  She’d knocked on his bedroom door and opened it to find Leonie sprawled on his rug, reading the back of a record while Danny cradled his electric guitar in his lap, leaning his head towards his tinny practice amp as he played. It was the weekend before Danny’s fourteenth birthday. Nirvana’s unplugged album was jangling out of Danny’s reclaimed speakers from the seventies – monolithic obelisks of fake wood and black-and-gold woven mesh.

  Hessel and Bette were out for the day so Leonie was over, as she often was on days like that – she had been doing it for the past few years, sneaking over, hiding out in Danny’s room. Cathy didn’t know how Leonie could stand it, being cooped up in her little brother’s disgusting room like that. Danny had banned Bette from cleaning in there, and there was a certain odour, an indeterminate fog of something Cathy called ‘Eau D’Stinky Bro’. But Leonie didn’t seem to care. She didn’t seem at all concerned about lying full-length on Danny’s grubby rug. Perhaps fourteen-year-old girls were impervious to the inherent disgusting-ness of nearly fourteen-year-old boys. At the ripe old age of seventeen, Cathy couldn’t remember.

  ‘Tuesday. No problemo,’ said Danny.

  ‘Hi Cathy,’ said Leonie. ‘You wanna come in? Come hang out with us.’

  ‘Ah, no thanks,’ said Cathy, looking with distaste around the room. ‘My room smells better. But any chance of a different spin?’ On these Leonie-days the depressing music they played leaked through the wall from Danny’s front room into her bedroom. Cathy had been making Secret Cake plans and had already banged on the wall a number of times, careful not to rough up George Clooney’s face, and Leonie had shouted ‘Sorry, Cathy!’ and turned it down, but then Danny had just rapped back, a shave-and-a-haircut rhythm, and turned the music up again.