I Am Out With Lanterns

by Emily Gale

  We’re choosing things for a picnic. When we meet up in the cleaning products aisle, Milo has iced tea for me and chocolate milk for him. I have red grapes and cream cheese.

  ‘Where is this going?’ he says, pointing at them.

  ‘It’s a work-in-progress. Leave it with me. You do dessert.’

  ‘Done. Polly Waffle.’

  ‘Who’s she?’

  ‘It’s not a “she”, it’s a chocolate bar. Discontinued in 2009, but I just noticed them on the shelf.’

  ‘Maybe they’ve been there this whole time. Once my dad bought a packet of Wotsits that had gone rancid.’

  ‘What’s a wotsit?’

  ‘A crisp. In your language, a chip. Like a fatter, lighter Twistie.’

  ‘Nice. Anyway, nope, the Polly Waffles are definitely new and it’s crucial for your Australian education that you have one. Here, the taste of nostalgia.’ Milo hands me a bar.

  ‘You can’t taste nostalgia if it’s the first time you’re eating it.’

  He takes it back then hands it to me again. ‘Here, the taste of chocolate, marshmallow and wafer.’

  ‘Yum.’

  Milo turns the corner and I follow, walking straight into some overhanging tinsel that’s come unstuck.

  ‘Don’t these old decorations bother you? You like order and stuff. It’s nearly February, Milo.’

  ‘Not even in my top ten of issues in a supermarket. Let’s hurry this up. Plain chips or chicken?’

  ‘Chicken flavour is an aberration. Why don’t they just take it down?’

  ‘The chickens?’

  ‘The tinsel. Last year’s over. Finito, people! Look at all this … shiny … bullshit, everywhere.’

  ‘Look, there’s a bargain breadstick.’

  ‘How’s anyone supposed to get on with their lives with last year’s Christmas crap dangling in their faces? It’s Year Ten in a couple of weeks. I don’t want all the same crap, I want … different crap. I mean, where do we want to be in five years’ time?’

  ‘Sweden. Cool weather, universal healthcare, one of the fastest internet connections in the world. What about this breadstick?’ He taps me gently on my arm with it.

  ‘You could kill someone with that.’

  ‘So we’re not getting it?’

  ‘Of course we’re getting it; it’s a dollar. Look, all I’m saying is – time to move on.’ I take the overhanging tinsel and pull. A shower of green and red falls from the ceiling and lands in a huge pile at our feet.

  ‘Okay,’ says Milo. ‘That’s our cue to leave.’

  We take our picnic to Milo’s favourite spot by the river – one end of a disused, broken bridge that’s now a viewing platform. Milo knows this area backwards. Mostly I live in his Melbourne.

  It’s spooky that we landed next door to Milo’s family when we left London three years ago, after my brother died. We both love art and wearing black, which is a cliché, sure, but it’s surprisingly hard to find comrades. We laugh at the same things. More importantly, we hate a lot of the same things. Other than that, we’re different. Milo’s a map-maker and the city is his muse. He has a rare sort of patience, plus he always likes to know exactly where he is. Me? I do portraits in charcoal. I like the mix of fast and slow – risky movements for gesture lines; careful ones for contour lines. The way you add layer upon layer, highlighting, blending, adding darkness for contrast. That moment you know you’re done – that if you add a single speck more of charcoal dust, you’ll tip it over the edge.

  ‘Ugh, the chorus from the supermarket keeps playing on a loop in my head.’

  ‘Why do you hate it that much?’ Milo says.

  ‘Because it’s romantic in a Wuthering Heights kind of way – unhealthy bordering on obsessive stalking.’

  ‘You said that was your favourite book.’

  ‘It was. I read it again on Christmas Eve. I thought it’d be comforting but the words looked completely different.’

  That’s happened with a lot of things since Floyd died. You love your brother with the same heart that you love everything else, so once it’s pulverised you’re doomed. I can say it now: Hello, I’m Wren and I’m in a long-term relation ship with grief. That doesn’t mean I’m sad all the time; it makes me a realist. A goth realist, which is a specific and rare kind.

  ‘Listen out, Wren, I just heard a kookaburra. Might help with your earworm.’

  Our feet dangle over the rough, steep sides. The city is in full view to our right, but it feels like we’re in the bush. I rest my head against his shoulder.

  ‘Milo, how many days of freedom do we have left?’

  ‘Don’t ask questions you don’t want the answers to.’

  ‘But are you ready to watch me get called a freak every day again?’

  ‘Depends. Are you ready to watch me fail every subject?’

  It’s true that, despite having a brilliant mind, Milo is different at school. Once he goes through the school gates, everything starts pressing in. Most of the time in class when I look over at his laptop, he’s coding Minecraft mods. When he says he’s in ‘survival mode’, he means surviving school, not just creepers and zombies.

  I remember something he told me early on: I don’t suffer from autism any more than I suffer from brown eyes. But that doesn’t mean I don’t suffer. He knows the difference. Other people? Not so much.

  ‘I’ll put a curse on anyone who messes with you.’

  ‘Appreciated.’

  I can tell by the sound of the word that he’s smiling. Milo doesn’t put stock in curses or anything like that, but my interest in such things makes him laugh.

  ‘It’ll be something terrible, with fire and snakes and death and everything.’

  ‘That sounds like a lot.’

  ‘No point everyone thinking I’m the village witch if I can’t have fun with it. Hey, look there.’ I point to the high branches of a tree. ‘A witch caught up in the branches. How spooky is that, right when I said it?’

  Milo laughs. ‘It’s a bin liner.’

  ‘Still spooky,’ I mutter, and take a photo of it.

  After the stale bread and cream cheese, followed by half a Polly Waffle each, washed down with red grapes, Milo and I walk and talk for hours. Sometimes our conversations get tangled, and when he gets onto the topic of Minecraft I only pretend to listen, but I can’t imagine being like this with anyone else.

  My little sister is always asking me if I love Milo. She’s obsessed with love. I tell her: Eww, no, shut up.

  But then I think, Well, der, Summer, of course I love Milo. Just not the way she means. Not like a sickness.

  When we get home early evening, the whole of Milo’s family is in his front yard, and Summer’s on our porch with her guitar and a notebook.

  ‘Idyllic scene at your place,’ I say to Milo. ‘Looks like a brochure.’

  ‘Yep, the kind that gave rise to the invention of “no junk mail” signs.’

  We stop at my fence, under a peppercorn tree that’s a source of tension between Milo’s mum and mine. Julie wants the tree destroyed. She’d take it down with her bare hands if she could get away with it. My mum would chain herself to it in protest. Mum’s an artist and there were several paintings that included the tree in her latest art show at a tiny gallery in Collingwood. Mum says she paints it to annoy Julie, but that seems like a lot of trouble to go to. I’m sure she just said that to be funny.

  It’s not only the tree they disagree on. Julie is permanently dressed for the gym. My mum is a big hippy. Julie irons her husband’s shirts. My mum doesn’t know where the iron is. And one of the best moments of my life was watching Mum’s face when she opened this year’s Christmas present from Julie: an adult colouring-in book. I mean, sure, Mum’s not exhibiting at the National Gallery this week, but she’s a bit beyond colouring in. Mum gave Julie a tea towel that says ‘It’s been lovely, but I have to scream now.’

  Our houses are different species too, even though they were built to be identical double-fron
ted white weatherboards with matching picket fences. The rose tree in our front yard was a neat lollipop when we got here two years ago but now looks like candy floss spun wildly, teetering on its stick. Our grass grows in thick tufts with patches of daisies, clover and crowds of mushrooms. Julie’s lawn is synthetic and her perfect rose trees are scared children lining up in front of their beds for boarding-school inspection.

  Milo’s dad, Mike, is doing the roses right now. ‘Doing’ probably isn’t the technical term. Julie is taking photos of Milo’s sister, Sophie, mid-flip on the trampoline. She’s going to be very famous, that child. Preferably nowhere near me.

  ‘Your face isn’t quite right,’ Julie says to her daughter.

  Nor is yours, lady, I’d like to say. This will be for Instagram. Sophie looks flushed, but Julie will have a filter for that. Their mother–daughter account would make any sensible person puke on Mike’s well-trimmed roses. Look at me! Look at me! Do I really have to? Well, apparently I do, because I hate-follow it.

  Julie takes a break from making Sophie into a global superstar and calls over to my sister. ‘You know, Summer, I could Instagram you.’ She sweeps her hand in an arc – Julie sees magic sparkles.

  ‘What for?’ I say.

  ‘To build her profile,’ Julie answers, hands on hips in her high-performance black fabric. ‘A lovely, pretty girl writing her own songs. She’d get thousands of likes.’

  ‘But what’s the point?’ I go on. ‘You can’t cash in the likes at Coles.’

  By the look in Julie’s eyes, what she really wants to do is headbutt me. But this is the suburbs.

  ‘I’ve been running an Instagram account for several years, Wren. There are people out there who’ve been following Sophie’s life story since she was a tiny baby. Haven’t they, Mike?’

  ‘Sure, love.’

  ‘But, Mum,’ Sophie starts to say, when she’s interrupted by a jewelled hand going up in front of her face.

  ‘Hang on a minute, Soph, I’m talking. Wren, your Instagram game is hardly an example of how to do it.’

  ‘My game.’

  ‘Deliberately ugly things to be controversial. What’s the point of that? I know social media.’

  O, sweet, ignorant, middle-aged human. I check to see if anyone’s on my side, but Summer looks uncomfortable and Milo’s staring at his shoes.

  ‘Fine. But I don’t think that my sister is the kind of person who would want to be exploited.’ I unlatch our gate. ‘Come on, Milo.’

  We walk up the path to my house in silence. There’s only one person out here who looks keen to give me a round of applause, and that’s Sophie.

  Mum’s cooking a roast for dinner. This is usually a side effect of having a good day at the artists’ market, a few suburbs away, where she has a stall.

  ‘Did you sell a painting or something?’ I lean against the counter, clutching my big sketchpad, and bite into a raw green bean.

  Mum looks like the sun just rose in her face. ‘How did you know?’

  ‘Wild guess. Who bought it?’

  ‘A nice couple who said it would look perfect in their beach house.’

  ‘Ugh.’

  She laughs. ‘What’s wrong with that?’

  ‘People with beach houses.’

  ‘Wren, sweetheart, you can’t automatically hate all rich people.’

  ‘That’s one of the few joys of not being rich, Mum. Don’t take it away from me.’

  ‘We are rich. In many ways.’

  ‘Great, I’ll head down to the beach house now.’

  She tuts at me, opens the oven door for a peek and shuts it quickly. ‘Anyway, love, you hate the beach.’

  ‘Not true. I like it in winter when no one else is there.’ Mum scowls at me in a friendly way. ‘You look pale, sweetheart.’

  ‘I’m a goth.’

  She rolls her eyes. ‘I know that. Grumpy thing. Here, strain the potatoes.’ I attempt to pick up the heavy saucepan with one hand. ‘Just give me the sketchpad, Wren, you can’t manage both.’

  ‘Nice try, Mum.’ She’s a chronic stickybeak, always trying to get a look at what I’m drawing. ‘Strain your own potatoes.’

  ‘You used to show me your drawings all the time.’

  ‘And I used to write my R’s backwards and draw people without noses. Things change.’

  ‘Yes,’ she sighs, ‘they do.’ As the potatoes pound into the colander, she flinches away from the steam.

  Mum’s always telling me about how I used to be. You used to live in the folds of my skirts. You used to hug me more. You never used to be like this. Sometimes I think that, as each day passes, I get further away from being the daughter she’d like me to be. If Mum was in a time-slip novel, she’d do something really dull like go back ten years to her own past.

  Instant guilt-rush: of course she’d go back to her own past, because ten years ago she had three children and now she has two. We’d all go back with her if we could, to be with Floyd. Sometimes my own thoughts shock me.

  Mum rolls the steaming potatoes in cornflour, pulling her fingers away to blow on them when they get too hot.

  ‘I’ll show you my drawings another time, Mum.’

  She looks up, wipes her hands down her old t-shirt and locks me in a hug before I have time to duck. I have to admit that her hugs are intoxicating. She’s Charybdis, sucking me into her whirlpool. And, honestly, I am happy for her that she’s sold a painting.

  When it feels like a minute might turn into two, I ease myself out of her arms and head upstairs so I can put my sketchpad safely out of sight.

  ‘Pass the mint sauce,’ says Summer.

  I oblige with an eye-roll. It’s against my belief system to eat the stuff because it’s homemade by Milo’s mum. Every time I open our fridge there’s Julie’s creepy handwriting on jars. I swear she drops off food all the time to prove that she’s better than Mum. My mum’s food shits all over hers.

  It’s a shame because I actually love mint sauce.

  After dinner, the four of us flop onto the comfy chairs and sofa around the large chest we use as a coffee table, complaining about how stuffed we are. Our giant dog, Bee, is stretched out on the floor, tummy bulging with the perfectly cooked lamb Summer fed her under the table.

  Dad’s the first to get out his phone, then Summer, then me. Mum isn’t a phone person.

  ‘Dad!’ Summer holds her phone up to his face. ‘When did you post this?’

  ‘What’s wrong? It’s lovely.’

  ‘Delete it! Right now!’

  I open Instagram and scroll to find it. It’s a blurry shot of Summer playing the guitar. ‘What’s the big deal? I thought it was going to be something funny. It’s just you. Being you.’

  ‘I do not look like that! And I didn’t give him permission!’

  ‘Why do I need permission?’ Dad says. ‘It’s my daughter playing her instrument, looking lovely as usual. No harm done.’

  ‘I look awful! Mum, tell him.’ Summer spins around to Mum, tears in her eyes. She cries at almost everything at the moment. It’s annoying, like she’s saying ‘I have more feelings than the rest of you’. And it usually results in her getting her own way.

  ‘If it upsets you that much, I’ll take it down, love,’ says Dad.

  As I was saying.

  Summer goes upstairs and Dad heads off to his room, citing an urgent need to watch Air Crash Investigations. I stay with Mum. We try to watch a comedy show on TV, but above us Summer has started to sing a love song that she wrote this Christmas. It’s about being in love with someone who remains completely oblivious.

  ‘Emergency intervention,’ I say, rising from the sofa.

  Mum holds my arm. ‘Don’t, Wren. You know how she gets.’

  ‘I can feel a brain bleed coming on. Why should I have to suffer just because she is?’

  ‘She’s in love. Leave her.’

  But she’s miserable. Society says: Take your dose of love! Don’t be put off by the way it makes you feel like nothing in
side! When Mum says ‘in love’ it sounds like she’s proud of Summer. As if love is a sweet baby animal that her youngest daughter has brought home, while her oldest daughter snarls and pokes it with a stick.

  I’m always the last one to sleep in this house. At eleven, sitting on the floor in front of my mirror, I have a make-up wipe in one hand and I’m scrolling through Instagram with the other.

  There’s the photo of Sophie that Julie took earlier, midair with her legs apart, touching her toes. Julie has used the Clarendon filter like always. I hate Clarendon. So falsely cheery. I scroll straight past – the Instagram version of ignoring someone in the street.

  Dad’s photos are old ones of the family or new ones of Summer and Mum. He knows better than to post anything recognisable of me, which means photos taken before I turned eleven are fair game because that’s when I bought every baby goth-girl’s dream toy: My First Black Eyeliner.

  He always uses Nashville. Today’s post is of me, Floyd and Summer in our tiny back garden in London. It must have been warm because we’re in undies, with smudged pink mouths.

  After Floyd died, journalists came sniffing around his social media. When you die the way he did – a bomb in a train station – the media thinks they’re owed a story. Dad asked me to shut down all of Floyd’s social media so we could keep him to ourselves. I archived what I could and deleted the rest – as much as you can delete anything. Journos still found scraps. They even ran a story about Floyd being a ‘keen supporter of cancer research’. He did one sponsored run when he was twelve, after our grandpa died. My brother was good enough, and his death was sad enough, without the papers having to write him a new mythology.

  What I didn’t tell Dad is that I kept Floyd’s Instagram going. I’m the only follower and it’s set to private. There are over six hundred photos that he took, and since he died I take pictures of things Floyd would have liked. Maybe it’s ghoulish, but then that’s me.