by Jessie Cole
‘Look, kids,’ my father began, ‘your mum and I, we want you to know that it’s okay for you to ask us any questions.’ His eyes filled with tears. ‘We want you to come to us when you need to talk about it.’ He forced down a sob in his throat. ‘We don’t want you to be afraid to talk about anything, okay?’
My mother stayed still and silent. I looked down at my toast and soundlessly pushed my plate away.
My father sighed, his breath uneven, battling on. ‘We don’t want you to think we can’t handle it, because we can.’ He took off his glasses and swiped at his eyes, but the tears kept coming.
Neither Jake nor I spoke. My father tried to rally himself.
‘So, we don’t really know what was happening for Zoe.’ He pulled out a cigarette with shaky fingers. ‘The police couldn’t tell us much.’
I nodded, still staring at my plate.
‘I’m collecting up all the letters she sent, getting Dave to send his from Patmos, trying to get a picture.’ He flicked at his lighter. ‘But the important thing is … we’ve all got to stick together.’
My father was trying to pull us in close, but all I could feel was the distance between us.
‘Okay?’ He stood up and stepped towards the sliding glass doors, lighting his cigarette. ‘Kids?’
My throat was dry. Gulping, I forced out a ‘yeah’. I glanced at Jake, who sat motionless beneath our father’s words.
‘Okay,’ our father repeated, sucking on his cigarette, his face lined and drooping. After a few desperate puffs, he walked away to shower for work.
I peeked up through my lashes at my mother, trying to gauge her emotions behind the tight smoothness of her skin, the strange clearness of her eyes. She was, in that moment, both familiar and unfamiliar—known and unknown—and I was frightened of what I might find searching her face. I could not eat the toast, so I gathered up my schoolbag and walked through the door. Wandering up the driveway, alone among the white pebbles and the overgrown shushing bamboo, the sickness in my belly dissipated, though it did not disappear.
At school a growing whisper whipped around me like a fresh-lit bushfire, and I looked away from all the curious eyes. Words trailed me as I lined up with the others for morning assembly.
‘I heard she was raped over there and that’s why she did it.’
‘That’s her little sister, there with the long hair.’
‘Her dad’s a psychiatrist.’
‘She’s kinda pretty, don’t you think? I like her bangle.’
‘Why would her sister kill herself? Something must have happened to her.’
It had only just occurred, but my sister’s death seemed already to overshadow me. I had become—quite suddenly—that girl.
The sister of the girl who killed herself, you know the one?
And not just in the other kids’ eyes, but inside me too. Whoever I had been before was swallowed by the enormity of what Zoe had done. I couldn’t have a single thought without it pinging back to her.
Zoe’s dead. Zoe’s dead. Zoe’s dead. Zoe’s dead.
Looking down at the speckled cement beneath my shoes, I stood uneasily on a jagged crack that reached away from me like the outstretched branch of a tree. It was only two weeks since I’d started high school but my new black school shoes were already showing signs of wear, the toes chafed to a pale grey and a fine thread poking out along the strap. I fought the urge to bend down and pull at the black thread, to unravel it. The principal’s nasal voice droned overhead, his words indistinct and monotone, and after an agonising wait in the morning sun, we were dismissed to our classes. High school was a foreign land, a giant step removed from the green pasture of my primary school. It was only half an hour’s drive away, but it seemed so far from home. This new school housed over one thousand students and was a grey fortress, equipped with trapdoors and false rooms and a maze-like sameness. All the local primary schools fed into this one big high school, and in my classes I’d been separated from anyone I knew. My ragtag pack of primary school peers were scattered, and it was hard to find a familiar face.
I felt myself curl inwards as I walked, the weight of my bag heavy on my back. I didn’t have an internal map of this ad hoc establishment, and between every lesson, when I moved from classroom to classroom, I was quite often stranded with no idea which direction to go. A Block, B Block, C Block, D Block, the quad, the toilets—all frustratingly intertwining and unrecognisable. I couldn’t negotiate the square stairwells and the dull hallways in their uniformity, and was always lost before my first class. Breathing in, I tried to calm my rising pulse, and kept on walking.
I arrived for geography ten minutes late. The teacher’s eyes skidded away from my face as I stood in the doorway.
‘Jessie, come in. Sit down.’
Sitting on a red plastic chair, I pulled out my folder and pencil case, placing them on the desk before me. This teacher knew Zoe and Billie, had taught them both. Out of place in my rural high school, she had the sad face of a French movie star from the foreign films I watched with my parents, movies where the heroines smoked cigarettes and cried with beautiful mascara-lined eyes. I sought in this teacher a compassionate soul, and watched her carefully for a signal that she understood it was the second day that I was alive and Zoe was dead. Listening as she talked about mountains forming and the recording of rainfall, I waited and waited. Her eyes wandered over me, and something inside me shrank tightly away.
After a minute, I raised my hand.
‘Yes, Zoe?’
There was an intake of breath around me, the other kids taking in the teacher’s misstep. My cheeks slackened—a kind of involuntary release—as though all life suddenly withdrew from my face.
The teacher blushed under her foundation. ‘I’m so sorry, Jessie. That was … an accident. It’s just … I always got you and her confused.’
I looked down, away from her sad eyes. Hair falling forward, I hid my face from the other kids’ stares.
‘Did you have a question, Jessie?’
‘No.’ I shook my lowered head and my hair fluttered out around me. Frozen by the unexpected mention of Zoe, I could not think what it was I had to say. Hot-cheeked and exposed, I waited for the teacher to begin again her talk of mountains and rainfall. In time, the electronic bell-horn sounded—loud and unforgiving—and we all trooped off to our next class.
On the way, I was lost again, and stood in the hallway a moment trying to get my bearings. From behind I felt a hand suddenly on my shoulder. Another teacher, her face puffy and red, was grasping at my arm. She held a crumpled tissue at her nose. Behind large dark glasses, the woman’s eyes were disguised. Her fingers pressed into my skin, but she did not speak. She lifted her glasses from her face with a trembling hand. Tears streamed from her eyes, and she shook her head, wordless and distraught. I was startled, and the path of kids around us curved away from me in an unspeaking line. I felt marked, contagious even, as though the kids feared the sorrow around me was catching.
‘Jessie, I can’t … Jessie, I’m so sorry.’ The woman’s fingers felt suddenly limp, and they dropped away from me. With fumbling hands she replaced her glasses, the tears running down her cheeks beneath the plastic rims. ‘I can’t believe she’s gone, that’s all.’
I stared at her and she began to crumble.
‘I can’t. I can’t …’ she kept muttering, then she turned to walk away and disappeared unsteadily down the hall.
Standing at the doorway of my music class, I hesitated, apprehensive of this particular teacher’s forceful manner. She had been Zoe’s music teacher and I had once seen her perform a semi-humorous striptease in a school musical I attended as a young child. Dressed all in black for this class, she had a line of light pink lipstick smeared across her thin lips. I waited for her to notice me, to give me some sign she knew Zoe was dead. Prickling with sensitivity, I was pulsing, electric.
The plastic seats were arranged in a vague curve of rows, the desks removed, and as my classmates filtere
d in they sat down and looked about suspiciously. I sat in the middle row and waited. When everyone was seated, the teacher strode out to the front of the room and looked about, meeting nobody’s eyes.
‘Today I thought we’d try something different and learn a song. Here are the lyrics. It’s the theme song from MASH.’
She handed out sheets of paper, still warm from the photocopier.
‘I’ll play the music on this tape, and you all sing along.’
I looked down at the page and read the first line of the song.
Suicide is painless.
The words rushed at me as though I’d been smacked. On my teacher’s face there was no sign of acknowledgment; her eyes skimmed past mine as if I wasn’t there and Zoe wasn’t dead. Turning the tape on, she glanced about expectantly, and my classmates began to sing. I couldn’t shape the words, my mouth numb and heavy. The song was long, with the awful first line repeated as an incessant refrain. When the voices around me wavered, the teacher stopped the tape and rewound it, starting again from the beginning. I felt I had entered some sort of dreamscape, a world that was elongated and slightly askew. It was hard to comprehend that no one else noticed. I wanted to stand up and walk outside, away from the repeating words of the ugly song, but I was stymied, suspended in time.
Halfway down the page, the girl beside me reached out a delicate hand and placed it on my knee.
I jerked towards her.
‘Hang in there, Jess,’ she whispered, her brown eyes kind. I felt the strangeness of the room subside the smallest fraction. ‘She doesn’t know about your sister, or she doesn’t know that you’re her sister. I’ll tell her when it’s finished, don’t you worry about that.’
I smiled then, and my eyes filled with tears that I did not want to shed. The girl smiled back and softly squeezed my leg. When the song was done, I sat stunned, the girl’s hand still resting on my knee—one warm skin connection in a world that had become a haze of unbearably shuttered glances. The bell-horn rang again and I stood up to flee.
‘Wait for me, Jess. I’m going to tell her.’ The girl was angry, her cheeks two bright pink spots.
I stumbled outside, dragging my bag, unsure of what to do, of where to be. I was afraid of the teacher—all dressed in black—afraid of how her eyes had skidded over me, afraid of what they might look like if they stopped and took me in.
It was recess and I stood and waited for my new friend, watching my classmates spill out the door. I could hear nothing from inside and I fought the impulse to bolt. After a few minutes, the girl appeared in the doorway, hot and ruffled, her blonde hair sticking to her forehead.
‘I told her,’ she said simply, pulling her bag over her shoulder.
‘What did she say?’
‘She said she forgot. Can you believe that? What a cow.’
‘Thanks for telling her. It made me feel sick.’
‘I know. You were shaking. I heard about your sister. I’m sorry, it must be real sad, hey? How are your mum and dad taking it?’
‘They seem all right, but … everything’s gone weird. I don’t like looking at their faces, and nobody wants to look at mine.’
‘No one knows what to say,’ she said casually, but she herself didn’t seem stuck for words. ‘Do you miss her?’
‘She’d been overseas for a year. It’s hard to tell she’s really dead.’ It was a relief to finally speak. ‘Sometimes I can’t remember her face exactly, because she’s been gone a while, you know? When I look at a photo I remember, but then later she disappears again. I don’t know how to hold her in my mind.’
‘Nobody I know has ever died.’
‘It all feels wrong.’
‘It must be hard. Why’d she do it?’
‘I don’t know. No one does.’
‘You’d think something real bad must have happened to her.’
‘Nothing real bad. Well … nothing I know.’
She paused a second, thinking. ‘Hey, Jess, you want an icy pole? I’ll shout you. Mum gave me a dollar today.’
‘Thanks. It’s hot, hey?’
We strode together towards the canteen and I felt the cloud of isolation that had so completely engulfed me begin to lift. I glanced at the girl beside me, with her doll-like pink cheeks and her dirty blonde hair, and I couldn’t help smiling. Stranded in an alien landscape, I was finally found. At the canteen we paused in the shade, two twelve-year-old girls in our striped school uniforms, licking our icy poles and giggling as the melting drops ran down our fingers.
Standing there with her beneath the corrugated-iron roof, I was visible. One small moment of lightness, the sun shining brightly in my eyes.
≈
Billie’s body convulsed with sobs in the back seat of the car, her arm shuddering against my shoulder, knocking me in a sad rhythm. Across the sea Zoe was dead, and Billie had taken leave from her city life and come to Burringbar for the weekend. The bush was green and large and it loomed over us, as though it had magnified its girth, the sheer voluminous health of the place a sudden affront to our senses. With Billie there, all the places Zoe had once been seemed to goad us through the car windows.
‘It’s not like this in the city,’ Billie sobbed. She pushed the sleeves of her jumper against her eyes. ‘I’m so busy I can go to uni and forget about it for a while.’
Jake and I stared at our sister’s crushed mouth. We had never seen Billie cry, and that she should weep so soon, when we had only reached the winding road before our driveway, was somehow unexpected. We sat in the car dazed, unmoving, and watched her, the distress of it unbearable. In the front of the car I heard my father exhale, a ragged sound. My mother shaded her eyes, looking sideways out the window. Billie, loose and trembling, leaned forward to rest her head on her knees, shutting her eyes tight.
What would our sister do when we reached the house?
This gone-ness of Zoe was vast. A tear in the fabric of our family, the tear leaving a gaping hole—bottomless and black—for us all to tumble into. Our indomitable biggest sister’s sobs just the beginning.
≈
When Zoe died there was no wake, her death so shocking, so unexpected, as to render it beyond marking.
‘I miss her already.’ Her mother’s voice was lost and weak on the end of the phone. ‘I can’t believe she’s gone.’
Zoe’s mother travelled to Holland, seeking answers. Scrambling to know how to cope, my parents decided to continue on with life unchanged. My father did not go to Europe for Zoe’s funeral, and at home there was nothing, not even a small ceremony. As kids we didn’t question these decisions. Weren’t they—as grown-ups—the experts? After a while my father erected a huge and beautiful log in the garden in memory of her, but it remained unmarked and lonely. Unexplained. This monument the only dead thing in a garden so lush and lovely, it was almost indecent.
≈
My parents had never put much effort into policing ‘normalcy’. I’d go as far as to say they were both more interested in its opposite. So when it came to examining my sister’s behaviour leading up to her suicide, and whether or not it had been within the range of normal, they were at something of a disadvantage. The method my sister had chosen to take her own life left no room for doubt. There was not a hint of the accidental. My parents could not comfort themselves by believing there had been some terrible mistake.
In the months after Zoe died, my father began the impossible task of deciphering why. Diligently, he collected every letter, every postcard, every stray birthday note, every fragment of poetry that Zoe had scribbled on the backs of scuffed envelopes. Writing to Dave in Patmos, he asked for copies of Zoe’s letters. He collected every scrap of her and he sorted through them all, trying to make sense of the chaotic mixed messages and multi-layered meanings. The letters were full of the places she had travelled through—the Philippines, Pakistan, India, Greece, Italy, Germany and finally Holland. They contained descriptions of the people she’d met and snippets of how she was feeling. They were frank
, in the way Zoe had always been, but there was no trace of any suicidal thoughts. From a distance I watched as my father numbered all Zoe’s letters in order of when they were received, and then, when nothing became clearer, he numbered them in order of importance. Classifying and reclassifying them, he searched for signs, but there was no sense to be made and in the end he found himself tangled and lost.
Zoe’s suicide note, found with her body, had not been illuminating. It was messy and angry and muddled. Less an expression of intent than a drunken mishmash of words, roundabout and indistinct. Reading it left my father nauseous and disorientated. The more he looked at Zoe’s final scrawled words, the less he understood her, but there were three short lines that hammered at his heart.
Listen to the song for me, Dad.
If you can listen to me.
Listen to me, Dad.
These words wrapped their tendrils about his throat. Rapacious and invasive, they climbed over him, their spiny shoots searching out his mouth and nose and ears, slowly breaking within. Zoe’s last words pushed open cracks inside him. In the aftermath of my sister’s death, my father could not make sense of her, but he understood that she had felt herself unheard, and by him most of all.
The last letter my family received from Zoe arrived two weeks after she died. My parents hadn’t known it was coming. When it arrived they expected it to be an explanation. My father gripped the white envelope with shaking hands, falling into a chair at the kitchen table to read it. But it was just a letter, like all the others, full of life and plans. It ended with the request:
Dad, is it possible for you to continue my health insurance another 6 months?
I.S.I.S (STA)
Policy no. 8634324
Date of issue: 27/7/89
Issuing office: SYD LEE ST
Exp. date: 8/1/90
≈
My father had always championed his right to be whoever he was, moment to moment, unashamedly. And when he grieved, it was with the same degree of commitment.
After Zoe died my father was silent, his face flat, and we watched him with care. We waited for small moments of lucidity or brightness. Wary and worried, we waited for the faintest hint of a smile.