by Jessie Cole
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I was seven when Zoe came to live in Burringbar, and she was thirteen. Billie stayed behind. No explanation was offered for this change in living arrangements, though—through judicious eavesdropping—I had gathered it was something to do with a clash between Zoe and her mother’s new husband. The last time I’d seen my sister, I’d asked her to show me a photograph of her stepfather, and she’d replied, ‘Yuck, why would I take a photo of him?’ That was as much as I could get out of her about the new marriage, and no one else was forthcoming.
Once she moved in with us, my sister’s presence dominated the household. It wasn’t that Zoe was demanding or a drama queen, only that her life seemed more centrestage than ours. Jake and I became bit players, always hanging about on the edges. Not big enough to be properly involved, but big enough to notice we weren’t. It was an odd sensation, to suddenly become a supporting actor in my own life. My world turned on its head. Zoe had always had star quality, but now she was the star.
On top of this, my sister observed unpleasant things about me that other people didn’t. Reflected back at me in Zoe’s ever-present gaze was my own badness. She cornered me whenever the adults were gone.
‘Jess, I saw what you just did.’ She seemed to materialise out of the surrounding air. ‘You can’t control the game like that. You can’t make Jake play all the roles you don’t want.’
‘But I’m not.’ Tears pricked behind my eyes. ‘This is the game. It goes like this.’
Zoe smiled. ‘You’re so bossy! You think that no one notices, but I do. Your mum lets you get away with anything. Poor Jakey! I won’t let you get away with it, Jess, even if everyone else does.’
‘But he always wants to play with me. I don’t make him play!’
Zoe turned to Jake, putting an arm around his shoulder. ‘Jakey, do you think Jessie is bossy?’
Jake looked from me to Zoe and back again. ‘It’s okay,’ he said finally.
‘See! He’s frightened to say so, but he does.’
Defeated, I ran out into the garden and climbed into the comforting bough of my favourite tree. Wrapping my arms about myself, I willed back tears. Later, when all was forgotten, I crept inside still throbbing with emotion. I was careful after Zoe came to live with us, careful and alert. I raised my guard like a shield, watching with sideways glances, waiting for her to pounce.
Did Zoe’s defence of Jake, her vigilant patrolling of my bossiness, allow him to come out of his shell? After all this time, it’s hard to say. He seemed as intimidated by her as I was, and certainly not interested in aligning himself with her against me. My brother has always been a gentle soul, seeing other people’s hurts, not taking offence. I suspect that if he’d had his way, he’d have liked us all to get along.
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At school, my nose began to bleed on a daily basis. Sitting in class, suddenly there’d be a bright drip on my schoolbook. My teacher would take one look at me and point to the door. Outside, blood rushed over the cement and I tried various different techniques to stem the flow. Years later it struck me that perhaps this daily nosebleed was a response to my sister’s sudden presence in the house. Before, Billie and Zoe had come and gone. I only had to be wary of them for short periods. But when Zoe moved in, I felt under constant surveillance. The parameters of my existence shifted. I was no longer the firstborn, no longer queen bee. Any authority I had washed away in her company, and the longer she stayed, the worse it seemed to get.
At the dinner table one night, Zoe announced something she’d heard I’d said at school.
‘Apparently, Jessie has been telling her friends she doesn’t like me.’
It was true that I often felt that way, but I was fairly sure I’d never said so. I racked my brain for who I might have told, but there was no one. The other kids thought my sister was Madonna, and I knew I wouldn’t find a receptive audience for my complaints, even if I’d been willing to share them.
‘I didn’t,’ I stuttered out. ‘I … wouldn’t.’
‘So, now you’re lying.’ Zoe turned to our father. ‘Dad, now she’s lying.’
It mortified me that my sister would accuse me this way, but deep down I was terrified that she could somehow read my mind.
‘I’m not lying,’ I said. ‘I didn’t say that.’
‘Yeah, but you think it, don’t you?’ My sister smirked. She seemed to be enjoying herself.
I was bewildered. If Zoe knew I didn’t say it, why did she say I did?
My father sighed. ‘Jess, don’t talk about Zoe at school, okay?’ Not really listening.
I wanted so much for my sister to like me, but how could that happen if she saw all my badness? If she was able to read my mind? If she knew how angry I often felt? I tried hard to keep my hurt feelings stashed away where no one could see them, but my nose bled every day like clockwork, as though my body had no other way of dispersing the intensity of my unsettled emotions.
Sometimes when my friends from school came over, they asked, ‘Do you think we can get your sister to play?’
I sighed, knowing what it would mean. My friends were too starstruck to speak to Zoe, so it would be me who had to ask. I didn’t even want her to play, because it always involved some degree of humiliation for me, but peer pressure being what it was, I went ahead and asked. Standing at the doorway to her room, my friends in a little crowd at my back, I made my request. Zoe’s response was always the same. She’d smile sweetly at us, and then say, ‘Yes, I’ll play, but only if you—Jessie—only if you say, Zoe is the bestest, most beautiful, kindest, most generous, most amazing sister in the whole world and I love her more than anyone else.’
Of course, Zoe only asked me to say that because she knew I wouldn’t want to, or that if I did say it, it wouldn’t be true. So what she was actually asking was that I lie in front of my friends—lie and grovel—and most of the time I wouldn’t be able to. I would outright refuse, and Zoe would nonchalantly say, ‘Oh, I won’t be able to play then,’ and my friends would all be cross. They’d hiss, ‘Just say it. Why can’t you say it?’
But I couldn’t, because it just wasn’t true.
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I never experienced Billie and Zoe as little children. Years later, staring at my sisters’ baby photos, I try to fit how I first remember them—grown-up and awe-inspiring—with their slant-eyed baby smiles. We still have some of my sisters’ photo albums. In one, entitled Billie 69–71, Billie has scrawled on the title page in childish handwriting, Daughter of two families. Listed in two separate columns are the names of each family member, including pets. In contrast, in Zoe’s album, which has no title, Zoe has gone through and cut out figures from half the photographs, excising them from the proof of her life. It’s impossible for me to tell who they once were, though I am pleased that—as far as I can see—the missing figures are too large to be me. My mother tells me that from the moment Zoe knew my mother was pregnant with me, she was enraged. Through the very act of being conceived, I became the usurper. Zoe was five years old, and I was yet to be born, but we’d gotten off on the wrong foot right from the beginning.
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It’s possible to love and hate someone with equal intensity. I hated the way Zoe needled me, but—more than anything—I wanted to be close to her. Studying my sister carefully, I wondered at her dazzling force. Zoe tick-tacked down the walkway on her skateboard at breakneck speed, her voice welling in song. I watched, holding my breath, as she jumped from the board, landing gracefully on her feet on the pebbled driveway as though no great feat had been accomplished. And when my sister was not there to see, Jake and I copied her skateboard manoeuvres with little success but endless enthusiasm.
Zoe sang, loud and fierce and full, and Jake and I crept nearer. We were afraid of her, but she drew us closer, like puppies to the bright, spark-spitting fireside. Zoe could cartwheel, do the splits, walk on her hands and stand up on a surfboard in the big waves. When she came home from the beach, brown and sand-encrusted in her bikini,
she let me rub moisturising cream onto her smooth, hard back.
‘Can I get the cream? You want me to?’ How I longed for her to acknowledge my usefulness.
‘Yeah, all right, Jess.’
Zoe lay face down and naked on the couch. Scrambling onto her back, I squirted the cream out in wriggly pinkish lines. I sat astride her brown body, concentrating on the disappearing swirls of cream beneath my fingertips. Slowly, I smoothed the cream into the skin of this mysterious big sister, wondering at all her burnished perfection, counting her random moles and freckles, dreaming of the time when I too should be so divine. Zoe had a birthmark on the back of her thigh, in the elongated shape of Australia, like she’d been marked out for something. Something special. My sister was calm in these moments, and I squeezed on more and more cream until finally I could say I had covered every inch of her, and climbed off, triumphant and shining.
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My mother’s two silver bangles were the first thing she put on after waking. They were chunky, but worn smooth by everyday wear, and they made a melodic clinking sound as she went through her day. I found the sound soothing, and it meant I always knew where she was. Often all she wore was a sarong, not even tied together, just wrapped around her and tucked in at the top. As a small child this didn’t bother me, but once I reached school age, it made me self-conscious. I knew she was always naked underneath, and I feared the sarong falling off at inopportune moments. When my mother walked us to the bus stop at the end of our driveway in the mornings, I made her hide behind a tree at the first sound of the bus. She obliged, unconcerned by my embarrassment but willing to respect it. To be fair, this laxness around clothing was normal in my early childhood, and most of my peers have similar memories—a collective horror of our mothers’ loose sarongs.
Much of the gardening work my mother did in the nude—especially the raking, which was never-ending—and Jake and I were always on guard for unexpected visitors. Often it was tradesmen, and we’d call out in exasperation, ‘Mum, the plumber’s here. Where’s your sarong?’
My mother never seemed hurried or alarmed, but we’d try to keep the bloke talking until she’d gotten herself covered. I was less concerned about my father’s nakedness, because generally he wore a pair of underpants, which we considered ‘clothes’. But he always did a nude dash down the walkway after a shower, his penis jiggling while he jogged. When I was little this seemed fine, not even really noteworthy, but once I got bigger it was the cause of some consternation. I didn’t understand why my father couldn’t wrap himself in a towel. When my friends stayed they were all alert to the potential of this naked run. ‘Is your dad in the bathroom?’ they’d ask, pointing at the door. If he was, they’d vacate the vicinity. Sometimes, though, they’d knock on the bathroom door, thinking it was free, and my father would cheerily call, ‘I’m coming out!’ And whichever luckless friend it was would let out a little squeal and rush away. My father was oblivious, waving to us as he jiggled past.
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One of my favourite games with Jake was dress-ups, specifically me dressing him. Always obliging, he donned skirts and resigned himself to pigtails, tottering around in a pair of someone’s old high heels. I liked him to pretend to be my own personal dolly, and sometimes Zoe would spring this game on me.
‘Can I dress you up like a geisha girl, Jess?’
There was, in fact, nothing I’d like more.
I waited in anticipation while she collected up the bits and pieces that would be my makeshift costume. Sitting still, as instructed, lifting my face—eyes closed in rapture—while she smoothed on my makeup. Under Zoe’s fingertips I was becoming something other. Jake would stand by, watching, the tables finally turned. I was now the dolly and he was fetch-and-carry boy.
‘Can you throw me that tie, Jakey?’ Zoe asked. ‘And hold this bit tight?’
When she finished she inspected her work, self-critical as always.
‘The lips are a bit crooked.’ She grasped my chin, turning my head from side to side. ‘But you look pretty cute.’
A wild happiness would burst in my chest. I had done something right! I glanced across at Jake and he was flushed with pleasure too. I was the dolly and he was the helper and Zoe was pleased with her work. When she was done with us we’d scurry off to continue the game, our hearts filled with dizzy lightness.
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In Zoe’s first year in Burringbar we watched as she grew and grew and grew. She wasn’t tall like Billie, but her school uniform pressed in upon her and was soon busting at the seams. At fourteen Zoe was skinny and straight-bodied, and then suddenly she was curved. My mother too saw the sudden shortness of her skirts, her uniform tight under the arms and growing firm across her budding breasts.
‘Do you want me to take you into town to get a new school dress, Zoe?’ my mother asked, but Zoe shook her head, her lip lifting in the corner in a quirking secret smile.
My sister went to the dresser drawer and fished around for some safety pins, pinning up the burst seams of her school dress. Watching her, my mother pressed her lips together in a firm line, but our father only smiled, as though the thought of his safety-pinned and beautiful daughter brought him an easy kind of joy.
Zoe was in the school musical, and Jake and I went with our parents to see her perform. We sat in the hard-backed plastic seats, wriggling with impatience until Zoe walked on stage, all brightness and spark. When she sang I wanted to stand on my chair and yell, She’s my sister! She’s mine!
There were boys sitting behind us, and when Zoe appeared they whispered among themselves, and I strained to hear.
‘Look at her—she’s so hot.’
‘Have you seen the safety pins?’
‘Yeah, hot. I’d have her any day.’
My face burned and I turned around to watch the boys through the cracks between the seats. Leaning down, their heads close together in whispered communion, they looked up at Zoe on stage through flopping fringes, with stark, heavy stares. I was entranced. A strange kind of blush crept up from deep inside me, quickening my heart and reddening my cheeks. My mother touched her fingertips to my shoulders and I knew that I was to face the front.
‘Mum, did you hear those boys?’ I whispered.
‘Zoe’s singing, Jess—you going to watch?’
I leaned forward and peered around at my father’s face. He grinned, a knowing kind of smile, and I knew then that they had both heard.
‘I want to tell them it’s us. Can I?’
‘No, Jess. Sshh. Watch the show.’
Turning back to the stage, I watched my hot sister sing, and Zoe’s voice broke over me in waves. I forgot the boys behind us. I forgot everything then but the soaring force of my sister’s song.
A few days later, Zoe came home with a mohawk. A bona fide punk. Most mornings she shaved the sides of her head bald with a disposable razor. If I was quiet, she let me sit on the edge of the bath to watch. Zoe had one brown mole on her head and every day she sliced the top off with the razor and blood ran down in a red stripe. To her end-of-year formal she wore a strapless, netted, multicoloured fluorescent tutu when everyone else was still wearing taffeta. With her mohawk and her tutu and her muscular, nimble, cartwheeling body and all her magnificent bellowing songs, how else would I see her than as a real-life pop star? Alluring, enchanting, but aloof. Always just out of reach.
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Since I was small, I’ve had a repeated conversation that goes: ‘Your mother’s always been such a beautiful woman.’ Meaningful pause. ‘You look so much like your dad.’ With almost a tut-tut, as though this lack of genetic inheritance was mysteriously my fault, or—at the very least—something to be ashamed of. Whenever I reported this conversation back to my mother, she seemed deeply affronted and said, ‘Oh, but your father is so handsome!’
Children don’t care about their parents’ beauty, or perhaps they just find it difficult to judge, but my mother was the type of beautiful that never went unremarked. She had long, honey-coloured
hippie-hair, parted down the middle, and eyes so light green they seemed almost translucent. When properly clothed, she wore long skirts that she made herself from geometric batik cloth. She had dozens of them, like a uniform. Every Christmas my father bought her an ankle-length white embroidered skirt with a matching white embroidered singlet, and she would wear them that one day to please him, and then never again—until the next Christmas, when the whole ritual would play out once more.
My mother has always had an enigmatic air. When I was a child she appeared utterly self-contained. Not emotionless or uncaring, just quietly self-sufficient. She was receptive to my approaches, and always a good listener, but she didn’t give much away. As I grew older, I realised that I didn’t know a single thing about her from before I was born. My mother had no stories, no past. Once this became apparent, I crept into her bed when she was reading and confessed my lack of knowledge. She looked surprised, but she smiled, as though it was nice I’d finally noticed. I lay down beside her and she switched off the light. Under the cover of that darkness my mother asked, ‘What do you want to know?’ I whispered a series of questions. Anything that came to mind. I asked her if she’d had boyfriends before my dad. I asked her how she’d felt about them. I asked her where she’d lived and what she used to do with her time. I asked her where she’d travelled, and with who. I asked her the names of her childhood friends, her pets. I asked her about her siblings, her parents, her grandparents. My mother answered all these questions, but I woke up the next morning feeling as though nothing was any clearer. Even though I had the facts—or some of them at least—my mother still felt completely unknown to me, as though this mysteriousness was a fundamental quality of who she was.
I knew far more about my father than I did about my mother, though he didn’t talk about his past much either. Like my mother, he didn’t tell stories—he was just more upfront about his inner workings. I knew that he didn’t get along with his father, that they didn’t have any kind of relationship. I’d gathered he felt disappointed by his mother, that he didn’t believe she was capable of loving him. He’d told me he’d grown up, at least for some of his childhood, in a country town, and that for some reason at some stage he’d been sent off to live with a relative. I knew he thought his parents had been restrictive—or unwelcoming—regarding who he felt himself to be. Sometimes my father talked to us about his work, or his beliefs around his work. He spoke about how many of his patients were held back or stuck or stagnated because they couldn’t cut ties with very destructive family members. How a lot of the time he wished he could just say to his patients, ‘Don’t speak to your mother anymore.’ For him, cutting ties was the simplest solution.