The Whole Bright Year

by Debra Oswald

  ‘Yeah. Yep.’

  ‘So, you guys are using the break to explore the country a bit, are you?’

  Kieran shrugged. ‘I guess. Is that what we’re doing, Sheena?’

  ‘Have you got a wish list of places to visit?’ Celia asked.

  ‘Oh, not really . . . I mean . . .’

  ‘I suppose it depends how much time you have and if you need to be back by any particular date. Have you got plans for —’

  ‘Oh, well . . . see, things got a bit messy and Sheena thought —’

  ‘Oi, Kieran. Help me move this ladder,’ said Sheena, shifting her body between the two of them, shielding her brother from any more of Celia’s ‘friendly’ questions.

  ‘Sure,’ said Kieran and grabbed the ladder.

  Celia went back to work, rearranging the bins on the back of the trailer.

  Sheena assumed the woman thought Kieran was some kind of thicko – on account of him not finishing high school, plus how he came across generally. Actually, Kieran was of above-average intelligence. Officially. A counsellor at one of the primary schools had tested him. But without a steady family and all the proper stuff that should have been assembled around him, there was no firm ground for any brainpower to rest on. And once you chucked in the brain-frying drugs and the impulsive streak that ran through him, it was no wonder people thought he was retarded. Then again, the part of Kieran that seemed dumb was wound in tight with the part of him that was playful and kind. The way he acted gave Sheena the untold shits most of the time, for sure. But other people, strangers – they had no right to judge or ridicule her little brother.

  Celia was lifting the cooler into a shady spot when Zoe, the daughter, appeared out of the trees.

  ‘Hey, gorgeous,’ said the mother.

  ‘Hi, Mum. I’m nearly finished in that row. Ooh, is that cold?’ Zoe pointed at the cooler.

  ‘Yep. I just filled it with ice.’

  ‘Brilliant.’

  As the girl crouched down to replenish her water bottle, her mother smiled. It struck Sheena that it would be lovely to have someone smile at you like that – good if there could be one other human being on the earth whose face lit up just at the sight of you. A lot of things might be more bearable if you had that.

  Sheena was sticking with her assessment that Zoe was up herself. Sure, yeah, the kid was out there in the heat, working as hard as anyone. She wasn’t being a princess about the fact that she was grimy and sweaty, hair plastered to her skull with perspiration. But even if they were all engaged in the same earthy slog, Sheena still reckoned Zoe considered herself a much higher class of individual than them. Of course she would: she was the daughter of the owner, for one thing. She was unblemished, pretty – you would have to describe her as glowing with prettiness. An academic star at her school, according to the Hungarian lady. The only reason Zoe was out here working and sweating like a loser was because it was school holidays and she could earn some play money. This was a girl who was all set to go to university to land some high-end career and then marry some rich guy; a girl who’d never end up stuck with a job picking fruit because there was no other choice.

  Most of the time, Zoe worked in the next row of trees, away from Kieran and Sheena. And that was fine by Sheena, because whenever the girl was anywhere nearby, Kieran would start showing off something chronic.

  Once – this was the end of the fourth day – Zoe came over to empty her picking bag into the bin at the same time as Kieran.

  ‘How you going this arvo, Zoe?’ he asked.

  She shrugged and smiled, a bit stand-offish.

  ‘I am going gangbusters,’ Kieran announced. ‘Except for . . . actually, you know what I need to do?’

  He darted across to the tractor and grabbed the secateurs from the little toolbox. He whipped off his hat, then took hold of one of the long hanks of hair that kept escaping from the brim of the hat and getting in his face. He used the secateurs to hack the hair off, half an inch from his scalp. ‘Easy!’ He proceeded to move round his head, cutting off every long section of hair.

  When he’d finished, he looked at the hacked-off shreds of hair on the ground around his feet, ran his hands over his unevenly shorn head and whooped a laugh. ‘The self-haircut! A fucking guerilla haircut!’

  Zoe laughed. Sheena was pretty sure she was laughing at him, but Kieran thought she was laughing with him. Encouraged by that, he started to strike extravagant poses like a male model. ‘So, Zoe, what do you reckon? Am I an unbelievable spunk now?’

  Zoe looked unsettled then. The girl was definitely not comfortable. Kieran was coming on too strong – which he had a habit of doing, especially with girls.

  ‘Uh . . . yeah . . . looks good,’ Zoe mumbled, and quickly scooted away to the adjacent row of peach trees.

  As he watched her disappear from view, Kieran still had a big dumb smile hanging on his face, not realising he’d just been given the brush-off.

  The truth was, his ridiculous self-haircut looked fine. Better than fine. The new choppy hair kind of suited him. Sheena just wished he wouldn’t make a fool of himself over some princess, a girl who would never take a guy like her brother seriously.

  *

  From what Zoe had seen so far, Sheena was pretty much permanently pissed off, like one of those tough cartoon characters stomping through the world, ready for something to jump out at her from any direction. But the thing that made Zoe nervous around her was the way Sheena’s magpie eyes registered everything going on.

  Kieran mostly did what his sister told him to do, but Zoe could see he had his own methods for handling her. It was one of the things she liked about him – the way he worked so hard to cheer up his grim-faced sister, goofing around, not caring if he looked like an idiot, not if there was any chance he could make Sheena laugh.

  One afternoon, when Sheena was looking especially exhausted and testy, Zoe watched Kieran grab three of the overripe peaches off the ground and juggle them, making percussion and trumpet noises with his mouth as musical accompaniment to his performance.

  ‘Sheena, look, look! I could be a busker,’ he said.

  ‘For fuck’s sake, give it a rest,’ Sheena snapped back.

  Kieran didn’t even flinch at the way his sister spoke to him. He just laughed, as the already squashy peaches turned to mush in his hands. Then he turned to Zoe. ‘Hey Zoe, I reckon Sheena disapproves of my new career as a peach-juggling busker. Check out the face,’ he said, pointing out his sister’s scowling expression. ‘Ouch! Who could ever make Mrs Crankypants smile?’

  Sheena was primed to lash back at him, but then she relented and actually smiled.

  ‘Ah-ha! Ha!’ Kieran danced around triumphantly, attempting to juggle what was left of the pulpy peaches.

  Zoe realised she was staring at him, so she quickly looked down to fuss with the picking bag. A moment later she darted back through the trees to the next row.

  She’d hardly said a word to Kieran, even though they’d worked together in the orchard for five days now. Sure, he was staring at her a lot, and a few times he had maybe tried to flirt with her. There was a boy at the bus stop near her school who sometimes had a clumsy go at flirtation, but that felt entirely different, like a kid doing a lame impersonation of transactions he’d seen in movies. It wasn’t like that with Kieran. When Kieran looked at her, it felt extraordinary. It made her skin feel electrically charged. That was why she had to dash away sometimes, so she could settle every nerve in her body. And there was no way she could attempt to flirt back because that would surely turn out an embarrassing mess. If a guy like Kieran actually got to know her, he’d be disappointed. That was why she had to avoid him – so he wouldn’t realise what a tragically inexperienced kid she was.

  This avoidance policy didn’t stop her from holding Kieran in her head most of the time, flicking through images of him in her mind, resisting the urge to hear herself say his name out loud.

  She contemplated ringing her friend Mandy, who was spending the s
ummer with her grandmother in Melbourne. But what would she say? Hi Mandy. Hey, guess what . . . There’s this good-looking guy at our place doing some picking. He’s tall, he has beautiful eyes and the most incredible smile, and he’s unlike anyone I’ve ever met.

  Any wording she considered just sounded like silly, girly blathering. This feeling was too elemental, too special, to be diminished like that, so she didn’t ring Mandy to talk about Kieran.

  And of course she couldn’t discuss him with Celia. She didn’t even dare say ‘Kieran’ in her presence for fear Celia would somehow detect Zoe’s feelings in the way she uttered his name.

  Kieran was all Zoe thought about now, so she ended up saying almost nothing to her mother in the evenings. She didn’t want to devote mental energy to any other subject, so she had grown uncharacteristically quiet.

  ‘You okay?’ Celia asked her over dinner.

  ‘Just tired,’ Zoe responded and, given how hard they were working, such an excuse could easily hold.

  She stared at the TV for an hour after dinner and Celia had no clue Zoe was really projecting her own imagined footage of Kieran onto the screen the whole time. Then she professed to be exhausted and retired to bed early.

  Already – for some time before Kieran landed in her world – Zoe had been growing skilful at controlling how many of her thoughts she transmitted to Celia. It seemed the best way to manage things.

  Sixteen years ago, Zoe had been born into the narrative of her mother’s suffering. Yes, yes, Celia had made an effort to ensure her daughter’s childhood was not defined by grief. And Zoe considered she’d been given a happy childhood – at least as far as she could judge, in comparison with other kids she observed. Even so, it was always there: the awareness that her mother had faced a terrible loss and lived with the sorrow of it every day.

  Ever since Zoe could remember, she had been able to identify the sadness in her mother’s face and any signs she had been crying in the bathroom. When Zoe grew a little older, she used to try her hardest to imagine what it must have been like for Celia when her husband was killed. At the very least, she could always summon up huge sympathy for her mother, often weeping for her. Sometimes she felt she could achieve small traces of understanding. But mostly it was too overwhelming to comprehend. And Marcus, Zoe’s father – he only existed for her as photographs and a few stories.

  Roza had been a surrogate grandmother to Zoe, with Joe the equivalent of an adored uncle. There had been times when she had yearned for Joe to be her dad. When it was clear that wasn’t going to happen – he was an honourable man who went home every night to Heather and their two sons – Zoe had decided to be glad he was around in whatever capacity, as long as he was around.

  Last winter, Joe was the one who had noticed that Zoe was sulking, chafing against her mother’s nervy scrutiny. There was a Sunday afternoon when he and Zoe were carrying groceries from Celia’s house down to Roza’s place.

  ‘So?’ was all Joe had to ask for Zoe to pour out her grievances.

  He had listened patiently as she described the way Celia watched and worried. Zoe’s complaints were twisted around, intersected with disclaimers and self-reproach, but constantly looping back to frustration.

  ‘I think I can understand,’ Joe said.

  And Zoe knew he did understand a lot of it. Joe was also the child of parents who had suffered. Zoe had been told the stories. In 1938, the anti-Jewish laws were introduced in Hungary. Roza and three-year-old Josef had fled Budapest at the urging of her husband, who planned to join them later. There were years with no word, and then Roza learned her husband had perished. After the war, she met Sandor, an older man, a fellow refugee. Both went searching for their families and found no one alive. ‘We will be each other’s family,’ Roza had said, and eventually they migrated to Australia to make a life together. Joe was their only child.

  ‘When I was your age, I had a list,’ Joe explained to Zoe. ‘Whenever my parents mentioned someone – a person who died, relatives who went missing – I wrote the name on a list I hid in my stationery drawer. I kept a tally of all the dead people, so I could get my head round it.’

  ‘Did it help?’ Zoe asked him.

  Joe pulled a face. ‘Not really. Anyway, the thing is, I always felt an obligation not to add to Mum and Dad’s suffering in any way.’

  Zoe nodded. She knew about that.

  ‘Even just the obligation to stay alive,’ Joe continued, ‘so they wouldn’t have to put one more dead person on the list.’

  It wasn’t exactly the same for Zoe. She didn’t feel pressure to stay alive – dying wasn’t an immediate possibility plonked in front of her. For Zoe, it was the pressure to be happy, so her mother wouldn’t feel bad.

  In recent months, there had been times Zoe felt herself sinking into black moods she found hard to decipher or regulate. Some days at school, she would suddenly, involuntarily, tune into the currents that flowed between the human beings around her, becoming hyper-alert to their meanness and lies, as if she had acquired an extra sense. An unwelcome extra sense. The volume was turned up on the nasty things the girls said or thought about each other. A fierce light was shone onto the faces of her schoolmates so she couldn’t help but see how sad or angry they really were. And Zoe understood she wasn’t a better person than any of them – she could be just as spiteful and scared and selfish and phony. She found herself worn out by knowing this, rendering her feeble, so she would have to push her limbs to move in what would appear to be a regular way.

  That frame of mind would pass and she could barely remember seeing such things or feeling like that. And then some time later, another dark mood would sweep through her, inescapable and snaky as the sinuous lines of a weather map. Zoe suspected there was something wrong with her, something inside, right down into the cells of her body. She realised she wasn’t physically ill. She wasn’t afraid of that. She feared another kind of wrongness. And if any person were to come close, close enough to know her, they would surely detect the wrongness and find her repulsive.

  People looking at Zoe, on the bus, at school, at home, wouldn’t notice any difference. They would just see cheery, considerate, well-behaved Zoe. And often – most of the time – she really was that girl. But sometimes, she was secretly performing an acrobatic trick while keeping the smile steady on her face.

  She could not let on to Celia, nor could she tell Joe or Roza or her aunt Freya in case they said something to her mother. She would just have to manage on her own and so far, she had managed it.

  Now Kieran had arrived and shaken Zoe up in a way she could not manage.

  She couldn’t risk giving away any hint to Celia about her fixation on Kieran, because her mother would worry. (Even though there was no need for her to worry, because a guy like Kieran would never be interested in a kid like Zoe.) But more than that, more than any of that, Zoe didn’t want to hear Celia discuss Kieran. She didn’t want any more of Celia’s thinking patterns installed in her brain – patterns full of warnings and boundaries and logical reasons why this guy was a concern. Zoe wanted to be left alone to think about Kieran. He was like an electric charge, but in a good way, connected to some energy or – whatever – whatever this feeling was.

  In bed, in the dark, Zoe imagined running her fingers up Kieran’s arm, along the lines of the tattoo and then beyond the tattoo to the unmarked skin of his shoulder and chest. Would it feel different? No, that was silly. The surface of his bare skin would feel the same. But she imagined doing it anyway.

  Celia couldn’t put off a supply run to Narralong much longer. And she had agreed to pay Sheena and Kieran in cash, which would require a visit to the bank.

  ‘I’ll head into town when we break for lunch,’ she said to Zoe. ‘Want to come with me?’

  ‘One of us needs to drive the tractor in the afternoon,’ Zoe pointed out. ‘You don’t want Kieran or Sheena driving it, do you?’

  ‘No. But we could make it snappy and get back in time to —’

&nbs
p; ‘But if I just stay here,’ said Zoe, ‘you won’t need to rush.’

  Celia could hear the delicate thread of excuse-making in her daughter’s voice. The two of them had their favoured routine on trips into Narralong – playing pinball at the milk bar, flicking through stacks of second-hand records at the St Vincent de Paul, then trying on whatever new garments had appeared on the racks at Faye’s Frock Shoppe, before attending to the list of supplies to take back home. Celia had no doubt Zoe enjoyed those days in town together but it also seemed fair enough that she might want some time on her own. And anyway, there was sense in what Zoe said about managing the day’s picking tasks.

  If Celia felt uneasy about leaving the place today, even just for a few hours, she couldn’t be sure if this was an instinct she should heed or just noise from her constant low-level buzz of anxiety. She asked herself, as she often did, What would a Reasonable Woman think about this situation? And then she laughed out loud at the ridiculousness of her own imagination. She had developed a mental picture of this Reasonable Woman: an individual who looked a bit like Celia, but with more smoothly groomed hair and dressed in a diaphanous white garment for some reason that could probably be traced to an illustration from a childhood storybook. Sometimes the Reasonable Woman gave Celia the shits, with her smugly beatific smile, dripping with tranquillity. But the Reasonable Woman had her good points, always urging Celia to make judgements based on evidence.

  And the evidence of Celia’s eyes was that Sheena and Kieran were not a problem. They’d been doing well with the picking all week. The boy could be boisterous but not in a way that created trouble. They largely kept to themselves during the work day and retreated to the cabin during the break. At knock-off time, Sheena would hustle her brother straight to the shower, and that was the last Celia and Zoe would see of them until dawn the next day. They had proved to be surprisingly hassle-free workers. So, according to the Reasonable Woman, there was little risk in leaving the place for a few hours.

  At midday, Celia handed Sheena scrap paper and a pen. ‘Why don’t you make a list of food and whatever else you guys need and I can pick it up for you in town.’