by John Clanchy
‘Toni,’ I say out loud, and I know to people passing, to people hurrying home under the lamps, I must look totally crazy, talking to myself and laughing like this, in an empty park. And two or three people – even a man – step off the path altogether as I go past. But I can’t help it.
If she was going to leave home …
‘Oh, Toni,’ I say, and the pain of not sharing is like a shard of glass that’s lodged itself under my heart. ‘Can you believe it? Can you just believe it?’
She could at least have taken me with her!
15
Days pass, a week. And then, almost without noticing, it’s a month. And time – Mr Jasmyne’s right – can flatten out completely and become a road without contours, or features, or even road signs to warn you that anything’s passing at all. Even your own life.
And all this time I do what Toni asks, and I don’t look. At anything. I spend every evening in my room, and Mum and Philip and everyone just creep round me and push stuff under my door – like bananas, or notes to ask whether the TV’s too loud and whether maybe they should think of moving out of home altogether, or would it be enough if they just got room service installed, like most parents doing the HSC?
And if anyone asks what I’m working on, at the moment, just to get me talking, and relieve the pressure, on everyone … I just say, ‘Zeno’s paradox’ or something, and Mum just says ‘Oh,’ and Philip says he hopes I’ll at least have it sorted out by eight o’clock so I can help Katie with the washing up, and Mum glares at him then because he doesn’t understand what pressure I’m under and he could be driving the answer – right at this moment with his facetious smart-alec remarks – completely out of my head, and that’d be two thousand years worth of wasted effort straight down the drain. To say nothing of Fermat’s last theorem, which might have been next in line, or the Infinite Hotel problem which – if it had been solved in time – would at least have given Jesus a room and a bed at the inn, and think of the straw that would have been saved in the centuries since.
And blah.
And I even turn the mirrors in my room to the wall, so I can’t look at my own ugly face. Though one night, when I think it’s all been too long, and it’s not fair and I’m sick of never looking at another single human being – except your family, who aren’t human and never count anyway – I do … well, not exactly look, but I do kind of peep …
‘New subscribers,’ the operator at the other end of the line says. ‘Surname and suburb, please?’
‘Darling,’ I say.
‘Initial?’
‘A.’
‘A darling?’ the woman says and pauses. They must get lots of hoax calls, I suppose. ‘Suburb?’ she says, sharply.
‘I’m not sure. It could be Glebe.’
I listen to her nails clicking on the keyboard.
‘There are no new subscribers under A. Darling in Glebe. In fact none in Sydney Central at all.’
‘Oh,’ I say. And she must hear my disappointment. Because her voice softens a fraction.
‘Of course, there’s often a lag in getting new names onto the database. You could try again in a few days.’
‘Thank you,’ I say, knowing that I won’t. That doing it this once I could convince myself was an impulse, some crazy thing I’d done without thinking. But not twice, because I’d have to have thought about it in the meantime.
‘I don’t suppose,’ I say, musing aloud, ‘she could have started a business herself?’
‘That’d be “Commercial”,’ the woman says. ‘It’s a different list.’
‘Could you look anyway? Just in case?’
‘What?’ she says, her voice hardening again. ‘An A. Darling under “Commercial”?’
‘No,’ I say, ‘of course not.’ And hang up.
Flowers come, in the middle of all this, for my birthday. Seventeen roses, red and black. Three of them are barely buds.
‘There’s no card,’ Mum says, bringing them up to my room. ‘Only the address label. But just look at them, will you? These black ones … they must have cost a fortune.’
‘Mmmm,’ I say, and bury my face in them. The florists probably spray them just before delivery, I think, because I can feel the droplets of water they leave on my cheeks.
‘Maybe they’re from Philip?’ Mum turns the address label over in her hands. ‘Or what about this Sean who keeps ringing?’
‘I’m not interested in Sean. Or Philip. Or anyone at the moment.’
‘I know.’ I see Mum hesitate before she says anything more. ‘Laura,’ she begins finally, ‘I do sometimes feel like I’m being cast as the dragon guarding the gate, you know.’
‘I don’t ask them to ring here.’
‘But that doesn’t seem to dissuade them.’
‘Could you just get me a vase, please?’
‘Do you want to keep the label?’ Mum says from the doorway. And she’s still turning it this way and that, as if some message in secret ink will eventually appear.
‘No,’ I say, knowing there’s nothing on it. ‘Thanks,’ I say. Expecting her to go.
‘You’re not going to become a total hermit on me, are you?’ ‘No, Mum,’ I sigh.
‘An obsessive? You don’t see anyone, you don’t go out. You do nothing but work.’
‘And who do I get that from?’
‘Darling, study’s one thing. It’s important. Achievement. I believe in all that. But –’
‘It’s not the whole world?’
She pokes her tongue out at me. And still doesn’t go. She’s always like this – if she strikes a problem, she’ll work away and work away at it until she gets an answer. My mother’s an obsessive. And I just hate the way her eyes light up and this bubble appears – you can see it – over her head when she thinks she’s figured something out. Like now.
‘You know, don’t you …’ she says in her Sherlock Holmes voice as she comes all the way back into my room. And she still hasn’t gone for the vase. ‘You’re not even wondering who these flowers are from, because you already know, don’t you?’
‘Do I?’
‘And all this time I’ve been asking you, and speculating, and you know.’
‘Who do you think?’
‘Well, it’s got to be someone who knows your birthday obviously, and someone who knows you like roses.’
‘And?’
‘And someone who thinks they know you well enough that you’ll guess immediately who they’re from. So it can only be –’ she says, and stops. ‘Oh,’ she says then. ‘Oh.’
‘Dumb,’ I say. Not nastily.
‘What is he doing there?’ I say. Because Thomas is sitting up at the table in a high chair, being fed some grey gunk off a white spoon.
‘Do you object?’ Mum says. ‘Miss Ask-me-first?’
‘No, I mean eating that stuff.’
‘It’s pureed apple.’ She holds up a green and blue tin that’s vaguely familiar.
‘He loves it,’ Katie says from the other side of the high chair. And it’s like I haven’t heard Katie’s voice or seen her face for ages. ‘Don’t you, Thomas?’
Thomas waves his own spoon in a splattering circle. He looks suddenly much older. A boy, almost. With apple spread on his cheeks.
‘But … he doesn’t eat food.’
‘You mean he throws it?’ Mum says.
‘No, I mean solids. He doesn’t –’
‘He’s been eating them for ages,’ Katie says. ‘Hasn’t he, Mum? You just never notice anything.’
‘He hasn’t,’ is all I can say back to her. ‘And I do – notice, I mean.’
‘I weaned him weeks ago, darling,’ Mum says.
‘What, Thomas?’
Mum fakes it, then, looking around the kitchen for another baby.
‘Oh,’ I say.
‘Dumb,’ she says. Not nastily.
More weeks go by. Another month. While I look for a message, a note, a phone call. Nothing comes. And then, of course, as soon as I give up and
stop looking, it does. A letter, out of the blue. And again, it’s Mum who brings it, but not like she’s bringing flowers this time.
Though the envelope itself is blue.
‘But that’s not from Toni,’ I say as soon as I see it. I know her writing as well as my own.
‘It’s from Dad.’
‘Dad?’ And for one crazy instant, I think she must mean Mr Darling. ‘Whose Dad?’
‘Yours.’
And I see then, it’s a special air envelope, with a logo of the Parthenon in one corner. And Toni, I realize, is hardly likely to be using airmail from Glebe. Though Glebe might just as well be Greece, or somewhere.
‘From Stavros,’ Mum says then. Because we’ve always called him that – Stavros – since we came back from Greece, and I wonder what Mum’s doing, suddenly calling him Dad all over again. Maybe it’s just the shock, I think. It’s seven years since he’s written.
‘Christ, I hope it’s not bad news,’ she says, and holds it out.
‘Haven’t you read it? Even opened it?’
‘It’s not addressed to me.’
Laura Vassilopoulos, the envelope says. And I can see now it’s Dad’s writing, Stavros’s writing. I’ve still got the card he sent for my ninth birthday. I turn the envelope over, feel it. ‘It’s got something in it, something stiff. It feels like a card. Maybe it’s for my birthday.’
‘It’s a bit late if it is,’ Mum says, though she’s normally not rude about Stavros any more, not in front of me anyway. And I look at her to see why, and find her hands are trembling.
‘Do you want me to go? While you open it?’
‘No,’ I say. ‘No.’
‘Well,’ she says, once she’s seated herself on my bed. ‘Hadn’t you better open it?’
I nod.
‘Do you want me to do it?’
‘No,’ I say, and find I’m suddenly ripping at it.
‘Careful, Katie will want the stamps.’ But I know she couldn’t care less about the stamps, she’s just demonstrating the calmness of her own voice.
‘Look.’ The letter unfolds and something drops out, something square and stiff, and backed with brown cardboard. I turn it over. ‘A photo.’
‘Show me.’
‘Just a minute,’ I say, while my eyes stop jumping and begin to focus on the photo, its poor, washed colours.
‘Oh,’ I say.
‘Laura? What is it?’
‘Aren’t they so cute?’
‘Show me.’ She snatches the photo out of my hand, but the image remains with me. Two tiny, nineteenth-century girls in white party dresses against a blue kitchen wall, two girls from Alexandria or Palestine or somewhere – even India, they’re so brown – with their hair drawn up and fastened in top-knots. Their cheeks are fat and wreathed in smiles.
‘That must be them,’ Mum says.
‘They are so gorgeous,’ I say, and reach out to take the photo back. But Mum pulls away, evading my hand, and pores over the photo, her eyes consuming every detail. I can’t remember ever seeing her look at anything so intensely before.
‘Mum –’ I say eventually, when I think she’s actually going to eat it.
‘Yes,’ she says finally and hands it over. ‘They’re gorgeous.’
‘Why are you so sad then?’
‘I’m not.’
‘You sound it.’
‘What does the letter say?’
‘I haven’t looked at it yet,’ I complain, still watching her face. ‘You’ve hogged the photo so long.’
‘Well, read it now,’ she says, and I know she has to restrain herself from snatching that out of my hands as well.
Which is why I unfold it so slowly.
‘Oh,’ I say.
‘What, for Chrissake? Don’t just keep saying oh.’
‘It’s in Greek,’ I tell her. And I feel as though something has been snatched from me. ‘Why would Dad … Why would Stavros write to me in Greek when he knows I can’t read it?’
‘I’ll read it to you, darling.’
Which, of course, we both realize is the point.
Mum props her back agains the wall for support and starts to read. ‘Agapiti mou kori… My dear daughter,’ she reads, and her voice almost can’t manage that. Not because I’m not his daughter, but because she’s always feared he’d make this claim, that he’d come and claim his daughter. But that’s long gone now. I’m seventeen, and I’m Mum’s daughter. She stopped worrying about that as soon as she heard about his marriage and the twins. His daughters. Which still doesn’t stop her from trembling now, hands and voice.
‘It seems, ’ she reads, ‘a very long time since I last heardfrom you …’ Mum looks up and pulls a sour face. Each year I still send Dad a card for his birthday, a letter to him and Yiayia Irini at Christmas. I never hear back.
‘… and you must now,’ Mum reads on, ‘be … seventeen – ‘Read what’s there.’
‘I am.’
‘Does he say seventeen?’ My mother is the worst liar since George Washington.
‘He means to, darling. He says sixteen but …’ She pretends to look at the postmark on the envelope. ‘I don’t know when this was posted …’
‘Don’t be pathetic,’ I tell her. ‘I’m not a child. Just read what’s there.’
‘… sixteen,’ she reads, ‘and almost grown up. Soon you will be leaving school and getting married …’
We look at each other. ‘He’s lost contact,’ she says, ‘that’s all.’
‘What else does it say?’
‘I thought it was time you …’
‘What? Time I what?’
‘Got to meet your sisters.’
‘My sisters? Show me.’
‘There.’ Mum points with her finger. She actually rests it right on the paper, to steady it. ‘I adelses sou. Your sisters …’
I pick up the photo and look. Of course, in my heart, ever since I’d heard about the twins, I’ve kind of known we were sisters, in a way. Half-sisters anyhow. But neither Mum nor I have ever used the word. It wouldn’t have seemed real – two girls, thousands of miles away, whom I’d never met, maybe never would, just two more girls growing up. There were three billion of us on the planet. Katie was the only sister I had, really had. And I’ve never looked at the thought – till now – that Katie’s no more a sister, in blood, than these two little girls. And the more I look at them, the more I see myself – they’re black, like me, like Stavros – and the less I see my link to Katie, who’s fair and blue, like Mum and Philip.
‘Darling?’
‘It’s just a shock.’
‘For me too,’ she says. And breathes. Because this is the first time she’s seen them as well. And I know what she was seeing when she pored over the photo like that.
‘My daughter,’ she starts again, but I think at a different place, and I wonder what she’s skipped. ‘You’ll be sad to learn Yiayia Irini is ill, and the doctors cannot do anything now to save her eyes …’
‘What is it? What’s wrong with her eyes?’
‘Hang on,’ Mum says, reading on to herself silently. ‘It looks like glaucoma.’
‘Isn’t that where –?’
‘Yes, the eyes cloud over.’
‘They get all milky,’ I say, and I feel once again this constriction in my throat, as if I was the criminal, as if I had somehow brought this new injury on – just as I had with Billy. ‘You get this milky sort of –’
‘Yes, you see it in Africa, and among Aborigines,’ Mum says. ‘It’s often a condition of dust, I think, sand blowing. And poverty.’
‘And nothing can be done?’
‘It doesn’t seem like it,’ she says, looking at the letter again. ‘But don’t forget, Yiayia Irini’s very old. I’m not sure she’d know her own age herself. Her mind was already going, remember, even when we were there.’
‘Is she going to die? Is that what he’s saying?’
‘He’s just saying she’s very ill, she hardly goes out at all now.’<
br />
‘Except to the Church.’
Mum frowns, scans. ‘He doesn’t mention that, but I guess so. She always did.’
‘She often took me. I remember the paintings best.’
‘Icons.’
‘And the temple.’ Mum looks at me, puzzled, and I know she’s about to say, What temple? ‘Read the rest,’ I say.
And she does, but it’s nothing special, just the news that his garage is doing well, and he’s bought a new car, a Honda, and the village is so much bigger now, they’ve even got a supermarket. A sort of supermarket.
‘Greengrocers,’ Mum mutters. Snootily. ‘You know, it’s amazing – two pages of this, and he doesn’t even mention his wife.’
‘Does he say the girls’ names?’
‘Yes. Toula and Eurydice.’
‘Eurydice, I love that.’
‘It’s not nearly as nice as Laura.’
‘But Laura’s Italian. It’s not even Greek.’
‘No,’ is all Mum says.
‘Is that it? Just the girls’ names?’
‘No, he says they send you their kisses, and he wants a photo of you to show them. I wonder,’ Mum says as if she’s suddenly cheered by the thought, ‘what his wife will feel about that?’
‘The same as you, I suppose.’ I see how this shocks her.
‘Thank you, darling.’
‘And is that the end?’
‘Almost. He just says … something about …’
‘What?’
‘It’s hard to translate.’
‘You’ve had no trouble till now.’
‘This tha itane kala … It’s a complex verb. It’d be nice … I suppose is the best translation. It’d be nice if you could see Yiayia Irini and meet your sisters one day in the flesh …’
‘It’d be nice? Is that all he says?’
‘It’s the best I can do.’
We both sit for a while then, in silence, the letter on the bed beside Mum, the photo propped on my desk. At one point she opens her hand, and I pass her the photo. She’ll sit there all night looking at it, I’m thinking, but just then a cry comes, a summons, from downstairs.
‘There’s Thomas,’ she sighs and pushes herself up off the bed. ‘He’ll want changing.’
Just for one moment, I think she’s going to take the photo with her. Then she remembers, and puts it back on my desk.