Anonymity Jones

by James Roy

  At first, she considered taking some photos, just for the memories, before thinking better of the idea. Why would she ever need to look at pictures of this night, when what it represented – her sister’s leaving – made her feel like she’d just been dumped by a dark, churning wave that left her bruised and spitting out sand while it carried on towards the beach?

  Besides, John had his Nikon out. He stood to one side, laughing like a familiar uncle, snapping away and guffawing as Sam would lope up to the edge of the water then bound away when water was splashed in his face.

  ‘Raven looks happy,’ Tina said, late in the evening, well after midnight. Andi and Viera had gone, and now the remaining two Musketeers sat to one side in banana lounges, wrapped in blankets, watching Raven and her friends downing bright green cocktails under the shifting glow of bamboo torches.

  ‘Yeah, she does look happy. She’s excited. And I guess I’m excited for her, too. Off on her big adventure...’

  ‘Tuesday, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Your dad didn’t come tonight.’

  ‘I didn’t expect him to.’

  ‘Will Raven get to see him before she goes?’

  Anonymity shrugged. ‘I’m not sure. Probably.’

  ‘How is your dad?’

  ‘Sad, I think. I used to take him flowers, and he didn’t even put them in water.’

  ‘Maybe he doesn’t know that’s what you’re meant to do with flowers.’

  ‘He doesn’t set his alarm clock.’

  ‘So he probably uses the alarm on his phone.’

  ‘He’s really messy.’

  ‘He’s a man, isn’t he?’

  ‘John’s not messy,’ Anonymity said, glancing towards the house. ‘The thing is, Dad just seems sad all the time.’

  Tina didn’t reply for a moment. ‘Yeah, that is something of a giveaway.’

  ‘I think he’s depressed. I’m not going to give him flowers anymore.’

  ‘Because he’s depressed? Um...’

  Anonymity smiled. ‘I guess that doesn’t make much sense.’

  ‘He’ll be OK.’

  ‘I just wish I could do something, you know?’

  Tina sighed, and Anonymity couldn’t determine whether it was frustration at the futility of the situation or frustration that she was about to repeat herself.

  ‘You can’t have everything the way you want it.’

  ‘I know. I’m not trying to. God! You make me sound so spoiled.’

  Tina shook her head. ‘I’m not. I’m just saying, your dad’s left, and he’s making the most of the situation, even though it looks to you like a miserable existence. But he’s a big boy. He’ll sort it out.’

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘Then there’s your mum. She threw your dad out because she felt hurt and didn’t think she could trust him anymore, but now she’s making the most of it. Good for her, I say. And Raven’s going to Europe, because she’s got a year with nothing else planned, so–’

  ‘So she’s making the most of it. I get it, OK? But tell me, how am I supposed to make the most of all this? What do I get? What’s in it for me, while all this shit’s going on? And don’t say that whatever doesn’t kill me will make me stronger.’

  Tina snorted. ‘As if I’d say that. It’s Tina you’re talking to, not Andi.’

  On the day Raven left, John drove them to the airport in the Impala. The flight was delayed, and Anonymity didn’t mind. Raven seemed a little fidgety, keen to get going, but Anonymity wanted to wish the clocks to a standstill. While the others went to find a decent coffee, Anonymity and Raven sat side by side opposite the security doors leading to Customs, saying nothing, their fingers braided together.

  ‘Did you get to see Dad?’

  ‘Yesterday.’

  ‘How was he?’

  Raven shrugged. ‘Usual. A bit sad, I think. He gave me this.’ Reaching into her shirt, she pulled out a silver, fish-shaped pendant on a fine chain. ‘Pisces.’

  ‘It’s nice,’ Anonymity said.

  ‘It is.’ Raven tucked the pendant away. ‘Hey, do you think Sam will miss me?’

  ‘He’ll probably pine, but he’ll be OK.’

  ‘Look after him, won’t you, sis? And Dad.’

  ‘Of course.’

  Then came the silence between them, while all around was nothing like silence. A final boarding call for a flight to yet another place Anonymity had never been. A security warning about leaving bags unattended. The shuffling of feet and the sound of clacking footsteps, and the thin rumble of suitcase wheels. Music played in one of the duty-free stores, blasting out of a cheap pair of iPod speakers. A few metres away a bored man wearing headphones polished the floor with a rotary polisher, which whined with a thrumming cadence. To Anonymity, all this sound, and the deep silence between her and her sister, was like a great plunger pressing down on that cavernous room of glass and aluminium and shiny grey floors, compressing the air and making her chest hurt.

  ‘Don’t go.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You heard me.’

  ‘I’ll miss you too.’

  ‘No, it’s more than that. I need you. There’s shit about to go down.’

  ‘What kind of shit?’

  Anonymity shrugged. ‘I don’t know yet. But shit will go down. Serious shit.’

  ‘I have to go, sis.’

  ‘Now?’ Anonymity glanced up at the departures board.

  ‘No, I mean I have to go to Europe. I’m meeting people.’

  ‘Then let me come with you.’

  Raven smiled, and pushed Anonymity’s hair back from the side of her face. ‘You’re so crazy it makes me happy.’

  And you’re so happy it makes me crazy, Anonymity thought.

  ‘I’m not joking. Take me with you.’

  Raven’s smile faded. ‘You know I can’t do that. Seriously.’

  ‘Let me meet you there in a couple of weeks. Where will you be then? Amsterdam? Still in London?’ She sat forward, ideas crackling through her mind like static. ‘I’ve got a bit saved – you know, for my new camera – and you must have some extra, don’t you? Or I’ll ask Dad. He feels guilty as hell anyway.’

  ‘Sis.’

  ‘Don’t patronise me.’

  ‘Then don’t say crazy stuff!’

  Eighteen minutes later an announcement came and the tearful goodbyes began. Raven cried because she was probably a little frightened, Corinne cried because mothers seem to always cry when their children fly to the other side of the world, and Anonymity cried because the plunger was pressing in on the room so hard that the tears were squeezed from her. And Sam stood by, perhaps confused by all the fuss.

  John didn’t cry. He waited a short distance away, his attention briefly captured by a glass display case of duty-free liquor and cigars, before he went back to snapping photos of the tearful farewell.

  Then Raven extracted herself, stepped up into the queue, smiled at the security officer who was checking boarding passes and passports, and with a tight, hurried smile and a quick wave she was gone.

  They drove home. John tried to say comforting things to Corinne, who finally told him that she just wished to sit quietly, saying nothing, and Anonymity slipped her arm around Sam. From the vast back seat of the Impala they watched the city go by, saw planes taking off from the airport, roaring overhead and banking away. She noticed more taxis than she remembered ever seeing before. Taxis and buses and cars.

  And she saw people walking. Along footpaths, through parks and plazas, across roads and streets, holding hands and pushing prams and carrying bags. Going somewhere, doing it with purpose, while she was being driven home in a silent car. Then, to break the silence, it became a car with American rock’n’roll on the stereo. What a friggin’ cliché.

  At home, she sat on the back step and wept. Sam had gone down to the tree at the bottom of the garden, where he’d started a new hole, but when he saw her sitting there he stopped digging and bounded back up to the house
to take his usual place beside her.

  ‘She’d still be over Australia,’ Anonymity said, as if he could understand. ‘If the plane had to make an emergency landing, she’d still be here. You know what I mean?’

  Sam slumped against her, and closed his eyes as she stroked his head. He didn’t know what she meant, and it didn’t matter.

  Over the following days, she allowed a recurring daydream to grow. It featured a meeting with her sister on the platform of some grand station in Europe while trains departed for other grand stations in Europe. She allowed the fantasy to expand and fill those wispy moments before she fell asleep, but she never dreamed properly of it. And with the repeated fantasy came the seduction, that perhaps with some determination and a measure of luck she could make it come true.

  She confessed all one lunchtime, under the small tree near the hockey goals. The other Musketeers were practical, if a little abrupt. ‘Of course you can’t go,’ Tina said, closing her eyes and putting her head in Anonymity’s lap. ‘Don’t be stupid. You’re in the middle of a school year.’

  ‘That’s right. And it’s expensive,’ Andi added. ‘Plus there’s the carbon footprint to consider.’

  ‘Thanks, guys – as if I don’t know all that. But when I saw Raven so excited, I really wanted to go. And since then I’ve just been wondering if I could, that’s all.’

  Tina half-opened her eyes. ‘Besides, we’re planning to do that as a group in a couple of years, remember?’

  ‘Exactly,’ Andi agreed. ‘The Four Musketeers, invading Europe.’

  ‘For me, re-invading Europe,’ Viera said. ‘I want to show you Prague, and where I went to school.’

  Anonymity frowned at her. ‘I thought you hated it there. You’re always talking about how it’s all cold and grey and horrible.’

  ‘Maybe this is true, but it is where I come from. And I would like you to see it when I show you, not when you have one of those guidebooks, all ... like this...’ She tilted her head back and peered around at the tree and the nearby buildings, like a tourist taking in the sights through bifocals.

  ‘So that’s it, then, all settled,’ Andi said. ‘We’re doing it together in a couple of years. There’s nothing more to discuss.’

  ‘At least, that’s the current plan,’ Tina added.

  ‘See? That’s exactly what I’ve been talking about,’ Anonymity explained. ‘It’s never more than the “current plan”. Which means it could just as easily turn into “the old plan”.’

  ‘But that’s the beauty of life,’ Andi said, and the others groaned. ‘No, I’m serious. It’s unpredictable. You should know that better than anyone,’ she said to Anonymity.

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘Because you’re a Gemini. Unpredictable, impetuous, impulsive. You should love change.’

  Anonymity chuckled. ‘Which is exactly why I think all that stuff is complete bullshit, Andi.’

  ‘You don’t have to believe it if you don’t want to,’ Andi said with a shrug. ‘But I’m telling you–’

  ‘So, your mum’s in love or something,’ Tina interrupted. ‘That’s good, right?’

  ‘It would be, if it was with anyone else. There’s something about this guy that gives me the spooks.’

  ‘His music?’

  ‘Worse. Although just let me say this: if I have to listen to Hot August Night one more friggin’ time I’m going to stick my head in the microwave. Neil Diamond,’ she explained.

  ‘Ah,’ the other three said, together.

  ‘See what it’s doing to me? I’m turning into a middle-aged woman. It sucks!’

  But the spooks surrounding John remained nonspecific, and the matter of the peanut allergy that wasn’t eventually blew over as an uneasy truce developed between Anonymity and her mother’s new boyfriend. It was unclear whether Corinne had ever enlightened John about the sham. Certainly Anonymity had never raised it, and one evening she watched as he took a jar of pesto from the shopping bag, read the label and cursed before putting it away in the pantry. Later, when he’d left the room, she checked the label for herself, and smiled. Peanuts, twenty-two percent.

  And then, almost by accident, they were all living like family in the same house, except John wasn’t family. Yet he seemed oblivious to this fact. He cooked, he flopped onto the couch and turned on the TV, he put his feet on the edge of the coffee table and changed the channel without checking what anyone else wanted to watch, and his Sunday newspapers were now delivered to that address. He set up a bench in the back of the garage, with tools and waxes and polishes and chrome cleaners stacked neatly on the shelf beneath. He mowed the lawns and trimmed the edges and blew the clippings into the street with his noisy leaf-blower. And of course he slept in Corinne’s bed, and Anonymity moved into Raven’s old room, which was further along the hallway.

  Anonymity’s mother did all she could to make them feel like a proper family. A late-summer Sunday afternoon drive in a convertible to a picnic by the river sounded good in theory, and Corinne’s enthusiasm was almost infectious. But Anonymity didn’t like the proposed cast of characters, so instead she feigned period pain that day and stayed home, while Sam went willingly, and didn’t even seem to notice that she was waving goodbye at the front door.

  Besides, she had a little snooping to do.

  A couple of days earlier, Anonymity had received a Netbook friend request from John. Curious, she went to his personal page. Nothing unusual showed up. He said he was in a relationship, gave a birth-date but no year, and had a shot of his beloved car as his profile picture. His list of favourite music was made up mostly of artists she’d never heard of, plus a couple she’d heard a little too much of, and one or two she recognised from her mother’s collection. He had twenty-eight friends.

  She’d clicked on the photo button and, as expected, saw that there were several albums dedicated to his precious 1960 Chevrolet Impala; some driving tours he’d taken with his car club; a few photos with his friends, triumphantly holding up their beers or giving the thumbs-up over the bonnets of their cars. All the usual.

  Then the last album: Raven’s Europe trip.

  It contained seven shots. Raven in the back seat on the way to the airport, looking ill with nervous excitement. Raven and Anonymity getting the luggage out of the boot. Raven holding up her passport and boarding pass. Raven pretending to bite her nails. The duty-free shop near the Customs gate, with Raven killing time by looking at handbags. Raven and Anonymity hugging goodbye. Raven leaving through the gates into Customs. Seven shots. And their mother didn’t appear in any of them.

  That had been a couple of days earlier. Now, alone at home, while her mother and John and Sam picnicked, she went into the room which had once been her father’s study. These days it was the spare room, and it contained a desk and an ageing computer, a bookcase two-thirds empty, a couple of cardboard boxes half-filled with various items Richard was yet to pick up, a treadmill, an office chair and a Swiss ball. And John’s Nikon, on a pile of loosely stacked bills.

  She flicked the camera’s power on and selected the view button. Onto the screen flashed an image she recognised from the website – Raven disappearing through the security door waving. She began to scroll back through the photos. They were all from the day at the airport and, alarmingly, the trend she’d identified continued: Corinne was barely represented in any of them. They were mostly of Raven, with a few that included, or even featured, Anonymity herself. And many of the images that had failed to make the cut for the website seemed to have little connection with an eighteen-year-old catching a flight to the other side of the world on a great adventure, or the family of that eighteen-year-old seeing her off. Raven window-shopping in a duty-free shop. Raven and Anonymity standing at the sandwich bar, waiting to be served. Raven listening to music with her eyes shut. Raven and Anonymity, sitting and saying nothing, their fingers braided together. Shot after shot, photo after photo, one after the next after the one before.

  Anonymity put her finger to the
power button of John’s camera and held it down until she saw the screen go dark. There were greasy fingerprints all over it.

  The next day, first thing, as they waited for assembly to start, she told her friends what she’d found.

  ‘Ick,’ said Andi, shuddering.

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Tina. ‘ Very ick.’

  ‘So perhaps it’s not so bad, that you and your sister look nice,’ Viera said, shrugging. ‘Did you think that maybe he’s paying you some compliment?’

  Anonymity frowned at her. ‘I’m happy to look nice, Viera, but not to him. I mean, he’s not exactly the right age, is he?’

  ‘Yeah, I think it’s creepy,’ Tina said. ‘Although, it just goes to show that you’ve still got it,’ she added.

  ‘Still got it? Jesus, Tina, I’m sixteen – I only just “got it” a couple of years ago! And these,’ Anonymity said, cupping her breasts. ‘And I doubt that John ever had it.’

  ‘Oh, grow up, you pathetic microbes,’ Tina said to the group of boys further along the row, who’d seen what Anonymity had done and were now sniggering and elbowing one another. She rolled her eyes at the other girls. ‘It’s like they’ve ever even heard of oestradiol. Well anyway, it certainly looks like you’re living with a real charmer. You got a ladder at your place?’

  ‘I think so. Why?’

  ‘You’d better check the ceiling in the bathroom.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘Spy cameras.’

  ‘Wouldn’t I be able to see one of those?’

  ‘Not really. That’s why they’re called spy cameras. They go inside the ceiling or even the wall, and all they need is a tiny hole. They’re almost invisible.’