Staying

by Jessie Cole

  ≈

  There was one boy who Zoe liked more than the others. The night the family met him she came and dropped down beside me on the couch in a sighing sprawl.

  ‘Did you see his eyebrows, Jess?’ She smiled at me with the full force of her gaze and I was momentarily stunned. I felt myself fill with such a sudden weightlessness that I thought I might cry.

  She talked to me! About a boy!

  This small moment of union between two sisters offered a glimpse of possibilities I hadn’t yet known.

  The boy visited our house, and I watched as Zoe and he sidestepped each other’s hearts. Older—eighteen to Zoe’s fourteen—sometimes the boy was not where he said he would be. Once, when he came to visit, Zoe disappeared before his arrival, galloping off on her horse and not returning until dusk. He waited and waited and I watched and watched, until finally he got up and stalked away, hitchhiking the long way home.

  Our father shook his head with irritation. ‘They’re playing games with each other.’

  ‘What type of game is it, Daddy?’ I was confused.

  ‘It’s not a good game,’ my father sighed. ‘Sometimes adults play games with each other, but someone always gets hurt.’

  I thought about my father’s words but I didn’t understand them. I didn’t understand why Zoe would leave before the boy arrived or why he’d leave before Zoe returned. It was a tawdry kind of game. An adult game. When Zoe returned from her horseride, sweaty and tired, our father gave her a talk about responsibility. I watched as my sister stormed away, her face red and blurred with tears. The afternoon became quiet then, and even the sounds of the birds calling seemed to fade into the oncoming dark.

  ≈

  The primary school bus got home a good hour before the high school bus, giving Jake and me a snatch of time before Zoe arrived where things were the same as they used to be. We liked to fossick in the creek straight after school. Gathering up kitchen strainers and a few jars, we’d head down the rainforest steps to catch and collect the tiny creek creatures. My mother let us play down there unattended, though we knew she peered over the banks from time to time, checking on our whereabouts. Sometimes she’d call out and we’d call back and then she’d leave us to it.

  Catching creatures with kitchen strainers was often a game of chance. It was hard to see what was beneath the water. You just swiped down and hoped for the best. Speedy-bugs were common but hard to secure. Tadpoles were slow swimmers but infrequent finds. Shrimps were ever-present, not even worth bothering with. Guppies were a bit of a prize. Miniature blue yabbies under rocks were like diamonds. We’d pop all these creatures in our jars, creating mini-aquariums with a few hand-picked pebbles and scattered creek weed.

  ‘What’d you get?’ my brother would ask.

  ‘Just a few shrimps,’ I’d shrug.

  It was a conflict-free zone. We didn’t feel particularly proprietorial about our finds, often filling up each other’s jars. We tipped all the creatures back in before dark anyway. They didn’t survive long outside the creek. Perhaps this was our small way of world building? Tiny environments we could control, if only for an hour or two. And every day was a new day. You never knew what you might find. Any small rock could yield a prized blue yabby. So many rocks in the creek, just waiting to be upturned.

  ≈

  In the evenings, my sister would often seek my father out for some kind of conversation over dinner, but it always went awry.

  ‘Dad, yesterday on the radio on the bus,’ Zoe said, ‘I heard that eighty per cent of Americans don’t have access to free medical care. Like, if they get hurt they can’t just go to hospital. Don’t you think that’s shit? I mean, America’s supposed to be the leader of the free world!’

  ‘Eighty per cent?’ our father queried, unsmiling.

  The light in the kitchen was warm beneath the stained-glass lampshade. My mother placed saucepans of curry on the table and spooned out servings of rice. Jake and I sat side by side with our small wooden bowls. Too little for curry, we ate rice smeared with tangy yogurt. Our father put a forkload of curry into his mouth, and then breathed out in a flustered puff because it was too hot.

  ‘Is it too spicy?’ my mother asked.

  ‘No, no—it’s just temperature-hot.’

  Our father wiped his mouth with a tea towel and sipped slowly from his wineglass.

  Zoe persisted. ‘Well, maybe not eighty per cent exactly, Dad, but—’

  ‘Maybe you should make sure you get your facts straight,’ my father interrupted, ‘before you start telling us what you think about American politics.’

  Out of Billie’s shadow, Zoe had opinions and ideas, and Jake and I sat still, compelled by the certainty in her voice, while our father slowly picked apart her theories over dinner and displayed them to her, mangled, on a platter. We watched as Zoe’s distress seemed to envelop the whole room. Our father would not budge. Though he loved Zoe and all her momentous feeling, he could never let her win. Nearly grown, my sister swung between elation and despair. One single hint of impatience from our father, and we watched as she crashed down as though from the greatest height, plummeting at high speed. Unaware of the vastness of these hurtling falls, my father continued on oblivious. Zoe was no sun to his earth, and though he saw her ripen and bloom, he seemed unsurprised. Her beauty, her vital gleaming force—a fact—not worth a remark, and what to say anyway? Again and again Zoe plummeted, crestfallen, waiting for that one sentence from our father that would reveal her as worthy, as integral to his life.

  Nearing adolescence, I watched this dynamic play out and thought, She knows what Dad’s going to say. She knows he’s going to cut her down, so why does she keep going back?

  Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about thirst—how for some people it seems unquenchable. But there is no thirst if you’re not dehydrated, right? I can only assume that for my sister to go back again and again, seeking my father’s approval, she didn’t feel that she had it. She was thirsty. And perhaps that’s how I was with her. Always yearning for something she would never give, but—ever hopeful—going back again and again to try.

  ≈

  In her final year of high school Billie asked to leave Sydney, and her private school scholarship, and move to Burringbar to begin again. Standing in the doorway of the study, I watched as my father spoke to her on the phone. His voice was soft, and I longed to know what it was she said.

  The sound of Zoe singing in her bedroom drifted down the walkway, distracting me from my father’s words. I restrained myself from stepping further inside the study to listen. It was hard for me to understand why Billie would want to leave her other life. I knew the girls’ mother had a new baby, although—despite multiple requests—I was yet to see a photograph. When my father hung up he went to find my mother. I trailed after him, unravelling my school-plaited hair.

  My mother stood at the kitchen bench mixing spices for dinner. My father told her what Billie wanted.

  Wiping her hands on a tea towel, my mother tucked her long hair behind her ear, glancing sideways at me. ‘But what about Zoe?’ she asked softly. ‘She just seems to be settling into it all.’

  ‘I know,’ my father sighed. ‘It felt like a good thing that the two of them were separate for a bit.’

  In the paper at six for having the reading age of a thirteen-year-old, Billie had always been something of an over-achiever. Not just at school but at everything. When they were side by side, it had seemed constantly that Billie achieved while Zoe lacked. The daily grind of being second; the eternal lesson of siblinghood.

  ‘And what about Billie’s scholarship?’ my mother asked.

  ‘She says she doesn’t care about it anymore.’

  My father wondered, in the beginning, whether it was just a whim. But when Billie rang again, her voice soft and broken on the end of the line, he relented.

  ‘We can’t say yes to one and not the other,’ he said, walking outside and leaning down to pull out some weeds that had sprung up in t
he garden.

  I wondered what it would be like having two sisters live with us instead of one.

  ≈

  When Billie came to live in Burringbar there were six of us. We became a Big Family, and Jake and I stepped back to watch our sisters’ lives. My mother made Billie a long, billowing blue school skirt, and when she rode her bike in the mornings to catch a lift to her extra physics class, it flapped like a sail behind her. Billie was elegant and grown up, stylish and worldly, with short cropped hair and certain eyes. Academic and effortlessly popular, she was quickly voted captain of the local rural high school. Billie swept back into Zoe’s life, leaving her sidelined and quiet.

  Both girls began dancing classes. My mother drove them after school along a winding mountain road to a country hall where they danced and sweated and competed. Jake and I came for the drive, a dragging afternoon, and I was shocked by the big girls’ lithe bodies and their sleek, fluid movements. Copying their steps, I was hopelessly lost and out of time. After a few weeks of slapdash effort I resigned myself to the plastic chairs with Jake. Watching Billie and Zoe dance, I pushed aside all hope of such proficiency to another time and place, to the years ahead when I would be grown.

  Standing at the rim of womanhood, staring in, I watched my sisters traverse the terrain and longed to join them. Two long-limbed, taut-bodied queens—regal and sure. There was no hint of the spotty heartbreak, the self-consciousness, the triviality that would prove later to be my teenage world. I saw only their magnificence.

  The theatre of them.

  The colour, whirl and sparkle.

  One afternoon, my parents picked Jake and me up from school to take us to the beach. A treat. A surprise-afternoon-beach-trip, exciting for all its foreign allure. We waited at primary school with the other kids, hot and tired, and then swelled with joy as our sisters’ faces appeared, unexpected, at the car windows. Zoe jumped out and shimmied her way around the car to the bonnet. She lounged on the front of the car, dressed for maximum impact and embarrassment, short skirt and funky sunglasses, playing at movie seduction.

  ‘Jakey! Jessie!’ Zoe called loudly, pointing at us. With the poise of a teenage starlet, she crooked her finger and beckoned us to the car. Billie poked her head from the window, pouting. My brother and I stood frozen between uncertainty and glee. Sidelong glances showed the waiting kids were as impressed as we were.

  ‘Come on, you two little spunk machines! Let’s go!’

  We grabbed our bags and ran for the car, faces ducked to smother our smiles. My sisters grinned, embarrassment accomplished, and Zoe reached out and tousled Jake’s floppy hair as he climbed past and into the back seat.

  At the beach the wind whipped about, blowing against our skin until it itched. The shoreline was long and curved. My sisters laid towels out, and stripped to get that all-over tan. Topless and coppery, sprawled out in their beauty—I was dazed by their daring, their pluck. A line of them—with my mother too—all beaming and aglow. And one day I would join the line. I examined them as though seeing my future, cataloguing every detail. The languid shift of my mother’s limbs, the soft curl of Zoe’s lip when she caught a boy watching her, the way Billie stretched her legs before she stood and walked to the water. Mesmerised, I memorised their movements, and waited for my time to come.

  ≈

  The girls had large teenage parties in the house. Our parents retreated to their bedroom to give them space. Jake and I were supposed to stay away but we always snuck out to watch. Pressing our noses against the glass doors, we peered in, our breath misting up the glass, leaving the world before us foggy and strange. The big kids played spin the bottle, and they kissed, frightening long kisses, and sometimes Billie and Zoe slipped Jake and me inside the circle to play. When it was my turn, I watched the end of the bottle rotate, slow and hypnotic, and when finally it stopped I hid my eyes from where it landed.

  ‘Come on, Jess, you’ve got to kiss him now!’

  Blindly, I rushed over to plant a quick kiss on the unknown boy’s rough cheek, my heart pounding. Billie and Zoe laughed and cheered, and I blushed, a deep red.

  At the girls’ parties there was music and dancing, staged and theatrical, and there were more games—dares and contests. Dressed up extravagantly, my sisters were the centre of it all, and they ran the party like a circus. They were entertainers, they were ringmasters, and I was awed by their glittering routine.

  But in a little while my mother called us to bed, and Jake and I went, clean teeth and pyjamas. We slept in the same island room, our beds coupled at a right angle in the corner, our pillows pushed together and our hair intertwining. Tucking us in, our mother said goodnight, then closed the door to the garden outside. Left alone, we whispered together and Jake’s silences shortened. In the dark of the bedroom, my brother spoke with no stoppers. We lay relaxed but wakeful, gazing through the large windows at the jungle palms in the moonlight, words sliding from our tongues like the water down the rapids.

  The future stretched out before us, bright with expectation. It was quiet in our bedroom, the strains of the big girls’ party only faintly filtering in. I reached my hand beneath my pillow and slid my fingers against Jake’s floppy silk-like hair, the texture of it so different from my own coarse, wavy locks. Jake reached up and softly gripped my arm and we grasped hands beneath the pillow—a singular fist, tight with togetherness—until sleep came at last and grabbed us in a sudden slip into that other, dream-filled darkness.

  ≈

  With the big girls in Burringbar, I imagined their mother and their other family living all that way away. I wondered how it was that they had two of everything and I had only one. Two mothers, two fathers, two sisters and two brothers.

  ‘Why did Billie want to come up here to live, Mum?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, when her mother had the new baby, I think she felt left out,’ my mother said carefully. ‘Billie said when she went places in the car with them, they seemed like a proper family and she felt on the outside. She said it was in the car that she felt the saddest.’

  ‘But the new baby was her brother. How could she be left out?’

  ‘Sometimes when a baby comes it’s hard not to feel like that, even when everyone tries really hard to make sure that everybody feels a part of the family.’

  My mother’s words didn’t make sense to me, but I stored them somewhere inside to bring out and mull over later.

  ‘Is the baby our brother too? How come we don’t get to see him?’

  ‘He’s not related by blood, and he lives in Sydney.’

  ‘But Billie and Zoe are our half-sisters, and he’s their half-brother, so he must be our quarter-brother, right?’

  ‘No, he’s not related by blood.’

  ‘How come, Mum?’

  ‘You and the girls have the same father. The girls and the new baby have the same mother. It’s separate.’

  ‘Well, I still think he’s a little bit related. I want to meet him.’

  I struggled to comprehend the difference between my sisters’ lives and my own. The world seemed to revolve around Billie and Zoe. It was brighter where they stood. These grown-up girls inhabited a place where everything happened, where there was no waiting, where things moved. Their world was wide and deep and free, where mine was small and enclosed. The possibility that Billie or Zoe felt on the outside of anything was perplexing and unfathomable.

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  Often when my father got home from work he sat at the kitchen table and told my mother about his day. Sometimes, after just one look at his face, my mother would close the door to the kitchen so that we wouldn’t hear, and we would know he’d had a difficult time at work, and we should do our best to stay away. All my father’s patients had his home number, and quite frequently they called. He’d tried to train Jake and me to answer the phone by saying, ‘Dr Cole’s residence. Who is speaking?’ And then we were supposed to say, ‘I’ll just go and see if he is here,’ so my father would have a choice to speak or not. But we wer
e untrainable, and what we usually said was, ‘Hello? I’ll just check if he says he’s here,’ or some version of that, which never failed to enrage my father, though we couldn’t be persuaded of the seriousness of the situation. We didn’t know that mostly when his patients called it was because they were thinking about suicide, and it was his job to talk them back from the brink. Some patients called a lot, and we got used to them and knew their names. I can still hear the fragility of those voices, hanging there on the other end of the line.

  ‘Is your father there?’ A broken, ragged breath. ‘Can I speak to him?’

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  Holidaying on the weekend at the coast, the family went to a friend’s house for dinner. Our father drank and drank, his voice becoming slurred, until finally my mother urged him from the kitchen and back to the hotel. It was late by then and we all stumbled off to bed, but my parents’ voices were loud through the thin hotel walls.

  At home, snuggled up with Jake in our island bedroom, I rarely heard them fight. That night my father’s tone was hard and my mother whispered in reply, high-pitched and shrill. It seemed my father was angry and my mother sad, an awful harassed sadness. More than anything, I wanted to go to them and be comforted, but the harshness of my father’s voice forbade me.