Staying

by Jessie Cole

  Lying awake, I listened to the hissing, rebounding sounds of their argument and wondered where I could go. My brother lay sleeping beside me, his mouth open and slack. I wanted to wake him so I wouldn’t be alone, but I knew he’d be frightened too. Jake would look to me with sleep-fogged eyes, asking to be told that it was all right, and I would have to say that it was. I thought of Billie and Zoe sleeping in the next room, but could not decide which one of them would not reject me if I came and woke her in the dark. My sisters were equally daunting, and equally likely to rebuff. Finally I chose, tiptoeing out the door and into the girls’ room.

  Standing at the foot of Billie’s bed, I watched her sleep-softened face and then slowly climbed up on the mattress, touching her calf.

  Stirring, Billie sat up sleepily. ‘Jess, what’s wrong, baby?’

  I inched up closer, trembling a little. ‘Mum and Dad are fighting. I can hear them.’

  Dropping my head then, I cried, a frightened muffled cry. Reaching out, Billie rubbed both her palms briskly along my forearms, pressing her forehead up to my face and smiling into my eyes.

  ‘Come on, Jess. It’s all right.’

  ‘Do you think they’ll split up?’

  ‘Oh, Jess—don’t worry, it’s not that bad. It’s just an argument. Come and lie with me, in my bed.’ Billie lifted her covers for me to climb under, and I snuggled in beside her.

  ‘Are you sure they won’t split up?’

  ‘It’d have to get a lot worse than this. And for longer.’

  I wondered how my sister knew these things. The shadow of her other life.

  ‘Billie, how come you wanted to live up here?’

  ‘Just wanted something new, I suppose.’ Billie sighed, and I glanced at her face in the dark. ‘It was lonely in Sydney without Zoe, lonelier than I thought it would be.’

  It was hard to imagine Billie lonely.

  ‘But I’ll go to university next year, so I’ll be back in Sydney again for a while. Not for long, though—Australia’s too small for me. When I finish uni I’m going to live in a really big city like London or New York or Tokyo.’

  ‘In another country?’

  ‘It’s a crazy big world.’

  ‘What about Zoe? What’ll she do?’

  ‘She’s moving back to Mum’s next year too. Finish school down there. Go to drama school, maybe. NIDA. If she can get in. You have to be really good to get into drama school, so I don’t know if she will.’

  ‘Zoe will be famous one day.’ Of this I was sure. ‘A famous singer.’

  I imagined all I knew of big cities: cars, people and tall buildings. In my mind I saw Billie and Zoe on a picnic with their mother and baby brother, lazing around in the sunshine on the steps of the Opera House, seagulls fluttering upwards into the sky.

  ‘How long have you been awake, Jess?’

  ‘Since we came home.’

  ‘Ages, hey? Well, you better go to sleep or you’ll be tired tomorrow. We’re going to the beach, remember. You don’t want to be too tired to come out with Zoe and me.’

  I turned over and Billie wrapped her long body around my small frame. A gentle spooning. Safe and comforted in my biggest sister’s embrace, I lay awake and stared across the room at Zoe’s sleep-tossed sheets and splayed brown limbs. I knew soon these mysterious sisters would be gone. Soon they would be adults. Bold and brave, they would go to face the world. Watching the fitful dreams of my other, less trusted sister, I drifted in and out of an uneasy, restless sleep.

  ≈

  And just like that, Billie and Zoe, who’d dominated our world so completely, suddenly moved on. Without the big girls in Burringbar, the house was quiet. My nose stopped randomly bleeding and things settled into their old familiar pace. And though I sometimes missed the excitement of my sisters’ presence, my relief at their departure was palpable. Freed from vigilance, I found myself relaxing, and all the ways I’d been unsatisfactory seemed to matter less. With Billie and Zoe gone, I became, again, the centre of my own existence. We were back to being a Small Family, and Jake and I were left to our own devices. We picked up our games from where we’d left off, though I’d been humbled. In birth I was the usurper, but in life I’d been thoroughly usurped. Probably I was still bossy, my eleven-year-old self still learning how to give and take. But I asked my brother more questions, checking in to see if I’d read his needs right. Before, I had believed his enthusiasm was a given. After being schooled by my sisters, I thought it best to confirm.

  On that verge between childhood and what came next, Jake and I began to seek out places beyond the range of the adults. Under the cover of overhanging trees, a ridge of land grew from our front garden like an arm thrown out in sleep. In its meandering journey, the creek had shaped and carved it, creating a thin strip of unharnessed ground that dropped away sharply at either side. It appeared to point, like a finger, to some kind of destination, but instead ended abruptly in a tapering muddy slope. Below was a secret place, not accessible except by sliding down the mud. The adults never went there. A large tree had capsized down on the flats below the ridge, and Jake and I made the exposed roots our hideaway. We slithered down the slope and settled into the tree’s arms, playing intricate games in the tangled caverns of its roots. Tiny imagined houses and tunnelled pathways, infinite worlds that exploded in our minds until the whole upturned tree teemed with life.

  ‘Where’ve you been?’ my mother would ask on our return. ‘I couldn’t find you.’

  ‘Down the ridge,’ I’d say, vaguely.

  ‘What were you doing down there?’

  ‘Just playing in the tree.’ I shrugged my shoulders. It was hard to explain.

  ‘You okay, Jakey?’ she’d ask. ‘Was it fun?’

  He nodded, smiling, but he had nothing else to add.

  In that time, Jake and I stuck to the things we had always loved: the creek, the beach, our pets, our little gang of friends, all those detailed imaginary games. We weren’t ready to fly—but with the departure of our sisters, we had room at last to flex our wings.

  ≈

  My brother Jake had always had a proficiency in areas I did not. Drawing, a talent that was much prized in our household, was something he did so well from an early age that his pictures were often given special treatment, or at least a more adult critique. When Jake took up playing the guitar it was obvious from the outset that it was going to be his thing. His skill was quickly prodigious; in no time at all he could pluck out the melodies of the theme songs to all our afternoon television shows. A neat party trick. Perhaps, even then, what Jake liked about music was that it gave him another kind of voice. He could express things in melody that he’d struggled to do in words. As the youngest, he’d often been overshadowed. Three older sisters. But once he found the guitar he was very rarely without it, and some part of himself that he had kept hidden began to unfurl. He was less shy, less quiet. Of course, in our family he’d have to fight for the limelight, but he was gathering skills at a disconcerting speed.

  ≈

  Our primary school had always been an odd mix of things. Before the arrival of the hippies, Burringbar was peopled by a bunch of longstanding local families, old-fashioned and traditional. When I started kindergarten there were about sixty kids in the whole school, but in my final year there were more than a hundred and sixty. With the influx of new settlers, things had been shaken up. Considering the radical nature of what these new arrivals had brought with them—drugs, nudity, flexible relationship arrangements, just to name a few—the old guard had been relatively open-minded. The teachers did seem to see us as two distinct groups: those who had head lice and those who didn’t. On nit-checking days, we were separated along those lines, and often the hippie-kids were put into the nit-group as a matter of course. Lice don’t discriminate, so generally we were all itchy, and those in the nit-group felt this arbitrary division to be an injustice. The kids were less judgmental, and at school my peers usually hung out in one ragtag group—though I did once hav
e a local girl say, ‘Oh, I can’t play with you today because I only play with my cousins.’ Of whom, of course, there were many.

  Outside of school Jake and I still mostly spent time with the children of our parents’ friends. We ran together in packs, climbing trees, swinging from the Tarzan vines, splashing our way through the creeks. Going out bush with baskets of fruit from the orchard, we played elaborate games, laughing, bickering and making up again. I’m supposing all the kids from local families spent weekends with their cousins, but as we got older there were occasional instances of crossover, and one of the girls would ask me to stay the night at her house. I loved the ordered nature of these strange suburban sleepovers. These friends had wall-to-wall carpeting, sometimes in pink. They had exotic dinners like sausages and mash. Every night they had dessert. Their mothers laid out the outfits they were to wear the next day on their beds. There were rules and strict routines. Everything ran like clockwork. I came home feeling deeply disenchanted about the black slate and Persian rugs on our floors. More than anything I wanted to be able to roll around on that luscious wall-to-wall carpeting.

  ‘But Mum, you can lie down anywhere and it’s comfortable,’ I’d say, longingly.

  My mother just shook her head. My parents had fled the suburban aesthetic of their own childhoods as though it was actually toxic, and our house was all earthen colours and geometric designs. To me, it seemed so ordinary, so drab, so unglamorous. Our house had no sparkle, no lace, no frills, and I yearned potently for its opposite. I don’t think I wanted to be ‘normal’, it was more that I saw these local girls’ houses as deeply foreign, and hence alluring. I entered those spaces wide-eyed at the suburban splendour.

  On top of this, a self-consciousness about my parents’ choices was starting to leak in. Hanging around on a street corner after school as an almost-teenager, I spotted my father doing a lap of town, ghetto-blaster on his shoulder, wearing his bright yellow Esprit shirt, on an afternoon errand.

  Glimpsing him in the distance, I hoped he wouldn’t come my way.

  ‘Isn’t that … your dad?’ my tittering friends asked. When he jogged right past calling, ‘Hi, Possum!’, it was a hard question to evade.

  ‘What’s he doing?’

  Now, I suspect he was rushing about trying to get that beloved ghetto-blaster repaired, and jogging with it on his shoulder was just a natural time-management strategy, but the yellow women’s Esprit T-shirt was harder to explain.

  My father loved that shirt. ‘Esprit is French for spirit!’ he’d proclaim. ‘S-P-I-R-I-T! You know, spirit, life, strength. That’s me!’

  ‘But why does it have to be bright yellow?’

  ‘That’s my favourite colour!’

  ‘But it’s a girl’s shirt, Dad.’

  All I got in response was a slight roll of the eyes. For my father, gendered clothing was irrelevant.

  There were advantages to growing up in a family with a high tolerance for eccentricity. Boundaries were loose, undefined. Odd fashion choices were celebrated, experimental artworks were encouraged, and socially inappropriate expressions of authenticity were never shunned or derided. But sometimes—especially out in public—I was starting to wish my parents played by the rules.

  ≈

  Billie was at uni in Sydney, ensconced in her own life. We rarely heard from her. She had well and truly flown the nest. Zoe had moved back to her mother’s, finished school and started uni, but a little while in she hatched a plan to go travelling, and in the months before she left Australia, she came back to Burringbar to say goodbye.

  Zoe had dislocated her knee dancing and so arrived with a long canvas splint on her leg, held together by thick straps of velcro. Limping around the house with a defiant smile, my sister was restless and jittery.

  Our father was angry. Angry that Zoe had given up uni. Angry that she was planning on travelling alone. Angry that he couldn’t stop her.

  We sat around the kitchen table while my mother prepared dinner. It was my final year in primary school, and I felt myself grown. I wanted to join the adults but didn’t quite know how. I was watchful, looking for a way in.

  ‘You can’t head overseas with a bung leg!’ My father drew on his cigarette. ‘What if it doesn’t get better?’

  ‘It’ll be fine,’ Zoe said. ‘The doctor said it would take a few weeks. I’m not going for another month.’ She looked at him across the table, sipping her adult wine.

  ‘What about money?’

  ‘I’ve been saving all year in Sydney—I’ve got enough.’

  ‘Because I’m not financing your holiday, Zoe.’

  I could see my mother’s lips tighten as she ground the spices.

  ‘Dad, I never asked you to.’ Zoe’s face reddened. ‘I’m going to work when I get there.’

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘Dave said he’d get me a job once I got to Patmos. He said everyone wants to hire Australians.’

  My father’s best friend had recently moved to Greece.

  ‘What would Dave know about working? He hasn’t had a job in years.’

  ‘Dad, he’s your friend.’ Zoe tapped at the tabletop, a tense rhythm. ‘He said I’d get a job easily.’

  ‘But what about uni?’

  ‘Maybe I’ll come back to it.’ She curled her fingers into a fist. ‘It just wasn’t what I thought it would be.’

  ‘It’s a bad idea, Zoe. I’d support you through uni like I do Billie, but I’m not paying anything towards this.’ My father stubbed out his cigarette.

  Zoe’s splinted leg stuck out stiffly from her body and she picked absently at the velcro straps. ‘I know, Dad. But I’m going anyway. It’s what I want.’

  ‘But what about your leg?’ My father lit up another cigarette. ‘You can’t go with a bung leg.’

  I sat and listened as the conversation went round and round. My sister smiled across at me, but her eyes were sad. She fiddled with her damaged leg, and every now and again she loosened the velcro straps and rubbed cream into her swollen knee.

  The next day my mother took us to the beach. Hobbling down to the water’s edge, Zoe signalled for me to follow.

  ‘I’m going to take the splint off so I can get wet. Can you hang on to it for me?’

  It was a job, and I was thrilled to take it. Zoe undid the straps and eased out of the canvas. Handing the splint to me, she carefully sat down on the sand and then nudged forward into the white wash, holding her knee straight. The waves slid up the beach, lapping around Zoe’s body then sucking back out. She held her knee firmly against the steady pummelling of the water and stared out at the horizon.

  I stood behind her, watching, but Zoe didn’t look around. Since she’d been back, I had longed for her to somehow acknowledge how much I’d grown. In that moment on the beach, I wanted my sister to turn around and tell me something secret—something adults told each other—but she just stared out at the ocean.

  I wandered up the sand, back to my mother and Jake.

  ‘Why’s Zoe so quiet?’ I asked, still holding the white splint. ‘What’s going on?’

  Jake was digging in the sand. He stopped and peered at our mother’s face.

  ‘I don’t know, Jess.’ My mother lifted a hand to shade her eyes. ‘Sometimes it’s hard to do what you want to, when other people don’t like it.’

  ‘The trip?’

  ‘Dad’s been giving her a bit of a hard time.’

  I squinted down at my mother in the bright sun. She rarely said anything about my father when he wasn’t there.

  ‘Do you think Zoe should go?’ I asked in surprise.

  ‘No, no,’ my mother sighed. ‘I can see why Dad’s worried. I just think he’s being a little hard on her.’

  I waited for her to say more, but she didn’t.

  ‘Jess, you better wait down there.’ My mum pointed to the shore. ‘She won’t be able to get up by herself. Jakey, you go and help her too.’

  The two of us ran down the shore, our towels flapping in the wi
nd behind us. We waited there for Zoe until finally she turned around, ready to go.

  Lifting her brown arms to us, she was like a broken bird spreading its wings. We pulled her gently from the waves, patting her leg dry with our towels. Leaning on Jake for balance, Zoe awkwardly fitted the splint, and I bent down to fix the straps.

  ‘Thanks, Jess,’ she said softly. ‘You’re a real star.’

  ≈

  On the day before she left, Zoe asked me to play a game of canasta.

  ‘This is a proper game, Jess,’ she said. ‘I’m not going to let you win like when you were little.’

  A challenge.

  I found the cards and raced up to where Zoe was waiting in the pavilion. I sat down and stretched out my legs. I could feel myself mimicking my sister’s movements: rubbing my knee, lifting a hand to smooth back my hair, glancing sideways into the bush as though there was someone important watching.

  I had played canasta since before I could properly hold the cards. My mother used to set me up behind a cardboard box so I could lay the cards flat and nobody could see. For me and my mother it was a friendly game; we had always played it for the pleasure of collecting the sets of cards, the canastas. But I understood that this game with my sister was some kind of test. Zoe watched me through narrowed eyes. My fingers jerked nervously as I arranged my cards, sensitive to her every judging glance. I felt my blood pound in my ears. Finally, I chose one to throw out.

  ‘You’re not collecting them, are you?’ I asked as nonchalantly as I could manage.

  ‘Well, I just might be …’ Zoe replied, but she didn’t pick it up.

  I was getting increasingly nervous.

  ‘Jess, do you remember how mad you used to get when I won this game?’ Zoe’s voice was light, but her eyes were cold.

  ‘Yeah.’ I was ashamed. ‘But we never played the way you did. We always played for fun. I wasn’t used to playing your way.’

  ‘Playing to win? Playing properly?’ Zoe grinned, but I felt in that moment that she wanted me to fail the test.

  The game went on.