Islands

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Islands Page 24

by Peggy Frew


  Dev seems unbalanced by this. He blinks for a few moments, then says to June, ‘I think perhaps this is your mother worrying about you. I think you look very well. A little tired, but very well.’ Then, to Helen, he raises his eyebrows and shakes his head, then shrugs, lifts a hand, palm down, and rocks it to make a so-so gesture.

  June almost laughs. It’s like a game, in which answers must be reduced to blunt objects: yes, no, maybe.

  They all lapse for a while into sipping and crunching.

  Then Dev says, ‘So, June. We don’t see much of you.’

  A pinprick of discomfort penetrates the wine haze. ‘Um,’ says June. ‘Well, no.’

  ‘I find this quite strange,’ says Dev. ‘Helen, she doesn’t have any other family. You are the only one. And yet …’

  With her brave and uncomprehending smile, Helen looks back and forth between the two of them.

  ‘I think,’ says Dev, ‘that she is very sad about this. That she doesn’t have a relationship with you.’

  A fragment of crispbread has caught at the back of June’s throat. She coughs, and drinks more wine. Helen goes on watching, smile in place.

  ‘What,’ says June eventually, ‘makes you think that?’

  ‘What makes me think she’s sad?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She tells me.’

  This is not pleasant, this conversation with Dev, but with its subject right there, grinning jovially and understanding nothing, and with the help of the wine, it has rapidly come to seem bizarre, unreal.

  There is a sense of something coalescing. Because of Helen’s handicapped presence, because of these statements being made by Dev, because of Paul, back at home, things have aligned, and June doesn’t know if they will again. It’s another opening, and it’s one she can enter—she thinks so, anyway—and, inexpertly and without caution, she goes in.

  ‘Well,’ she says, brushing crumbs from her shirt, ‘she certainly hasn’t told me that.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ says Dev, ‘she is afraid to.’

  ‘Afraid? Of what?’

  ‘I think, of rejection.’

  ‘Rejection!’ June finds she has finished her glass of wine. She seizes the bottle and pours herself more, her mind a furious Rolodex of grievances. What to say? Where to begin? What the hell—anywhere.

  ‘Listen, Dev.’ She takes a swig, sets the glass down, jabs a finger. ‘She rejected me. She—she smashed up a whole family, because she got bored, because she couldn’t be bothered with it, because she just couldn’t help putting herself first.’

  It’s coming easily. She can feel her lips flying, the eruptions of words. ‘And then—you’ve seen what she’s like, with this brave-face stuff. Nothing can be bad, everything must be wonderful all the time. So then we get, Everything’s fine, it’s for the best. You kids are fine—you’re fine, you’re fine, you’d better be fine. Be fine, and if you’re not fine then I don’t want to know about it.’

  Helen’s face at the edge of her vision is puzzled. June leans forward. She feels inflated, huge with rage. She keeps going: ‘And then—once things were over with the first boyfriend, when she must’ve got a glimpse of what she’d thrown away—then we’d have to watch her blubbering, crying about how sad everything was. Then we were supposed to comfort her.’

  Helen is no longer smiling. Her expression is one of alarm. ‘What are you talking about?’ she says in her blundering voice.

  ‘June,’ says Dev. He is sitting very still, hands on knees. ‘All I was—’

  ‘Hold on.’ June gestures with her glass, spilling a bit. ‘There’s a lot you probably don’t know, Dev. There’s all the stuff about Anna. Anna was cutting herself. Anna was fucked up. Anna had serious problems, and she just let it go on—and I bet she’d tell you it was because she thought Anna just needed love, and freedom, and that really Anna was going to be fine—fine, fine, fine, because we were all going to be fine, in fact we would be better than fine, we would all be happy, deliriously happy, we would all dance around with her while she took all her clothes off and had sex with whatever disgusting man—’ She swallows. Her mouth is full of saliva. She feels like a boxer, as if she should be popping out her mouthguard for a swill of water. She almost spits, right there on the floor.

  ‘Are you talking,’ honks Helen fearfully, ‘about Anna?’

  ‘Yes!’ June nods extravagantly. ‘Well done, Mum.’

  ‘June,’ says Dev.

  June raises a palm to him. ‘I was talking about Anna,’ she says. ‘What was I saying again? Oh yeah—and she’d say Anna just needed to be allowed to be herself or whatever, to find herself, but really it was because she was too busy with her own conquests to pay attention.’

  She pauses again, for breath. Dev appears to have given up trying to get a word in, and Helen to comprehend; they both sit, watching, waiting. This changes things—June rapidly begins to lose her bluster. She battles on, but the boxer’s sweat is evaporating, and she begins to notice a horrible, childish tone in her own voice, a plaintiveness. She is slipping, and she’s not sure into what.

  ‘And I was worried it would happen to me, too. Anna’s stuff, the cutting. The drugs—the need to, I don’t know, scrub yourself out. I just had to hold myself together, just hold on, and she never once asked me if I was all right. If I missed Anna. She’d just crap on about her work—and there’d always be some man, you know, who she’d talk about with this look on her face. She was just this, this, sexual monster—in, well, in my mind, anyway.’ She is faltering. ‘I know this isn’t the actual truth,’ she says in a flat tone, eyeing Dev. ‘This is just how it was for me.’

  Dev nods slightly, but doesn’t say anything.

  ‘And then …’ June sighs. She feels, very suddenly, wrung out. She is face down on the floor of the boxing ring, wishing for someone to undo her gloves. ‘Then there was Dad going off the rails. He went crazy, and I had to deal with that. Completely by myself. I was eighteen, and there I was trying to drag him off the streets and make him, you know, eat and sleep—and I didn’t know if he would get better, or worse.’

  The room is very quiet.

  ‘I think I’m finished,’ she says.

  ‘What on earth,’ booms Helen, ‘was all that about?’

  Dev ignores her. He addresses June. ‘All I am saying, all I am telling you, is what I know, now. Which is that Helen is sad that she does not have a relationship with you.’

  ‘I can’t stand it!’ cries Helen. ‘I have no idea what anyone is talking about!’

  ‘Well,’ says June to Dev, ‘I’m sad about that too.’ There is a wobble in her voice that she hadn’t seen coming. She heaves a trembling sigh. It’s not the longed-for crying from her dream, the deep and glorious relief, but her eyes have gone blurry, and there is a fizzing feeling in her nose.

  ‘June. Junie.’ Her mother has the pad and the pencil, and is thrusting them at her. ‘Please. I need to know what you’re so upset about.’

  The pad is small and her writing comes out big and shaky, so she can only manage a few words to each line.

  Anna was

  lost and

  I blamed

  you

  and

  all I know is

  how to be angry

  I’m sorry

  I love you

  and I’m

  sad we

  don’t

  She doesn’t know how to finish. She gives up and hands it over before she loses her nerve.

  Helen reads, then sits, head lowered. Her breathing is audible. She fiddles her veiny hands together. When she looks up at June, her eyes are swimming.

  Here we go, thinks June. Here comes The Weeping.

  Helen opens her mouth.

  ‘Mum. No.’

  Helen’s mouth closes. She tilts her head like a begging dog.

  ‘No,’ says June again, the word falling in a clod. ‘I am sad.’ She taps herself on the chest. ‘Me.’

  She stays a week. She sticks it out. Atmospheres sl
ide over them and settle, for moments, minutes, hours—breezy and humorous; oppressive, pressurised; gently sad—and are enjoyed, or undertaken, or ridden out.

  They sit at the inside table; they sit on the couches. They sit in the courtyard, by the stone Buddha, beneath the chinking of birds. They go for short walks to the end of the street and back, to where the bushland starts, Helen taking dubious steps, sometimes slanting off sideways, horror-show smile always in place.

  They drink tea. They drink wine. They eat tidy meals, mostly prepared by Dev.

  ‘I’m still a terrible cook,’ says Helen.

  Helen talks, in her new, runaway voice, and June writes things on the notepad. Sometime June talks, out of forgetfulness, desperation, vindictiveness.

  ‘I can’t believe this,’ she mutters. Or, ‘You would think that.’

  Once she stands behind Helen’s chair and whispers, ‘You don’t know how much love small children have. How much of mine was wasted on you.’

  Things, writes June to Paul in a text message, are being said.

  ‘I miss the birds,’ says Helen in the courtyard. ‘Are they singing, Junie? Can you hear them?’

  Did you know about the cutting? June writes. Anna? Self-harming.

  ‘No,’ says Helen, the word dolorous, heavy. ‘Oh God,’ she says, and puts her fingers, with their thickened knuckles, to her eyes.

  Did you ever even worry? writes June. About me? Once Anna was gone.

  ‘Yes!’ cries Helen. ‘Of course I worried about you. I was consumed with worry—about you, and about John. But, oh God, Junie, you were hard to love. Don’t you remember? I’d ring you up and you’d give me the brush-off, and I’d try to take you out, for lunch, or dinner, or to a movie, and half the time you wouldn’t even show up, and then when you did you’d treat me like, well, like I was your enemy.’

  Hard to love?! scribbles June, and then, I don’t remember any of this.

  ‘Well, to show love to. I came along to all your art openings and you barely spoke to me. I always felt like you and your friends were sniggering behind my back. I’d have to work myself up to seeing you, I’d have to steel myself.’

  That’s not how I remember it. I thought you’d just moved on, from everything. Anna. Dad. Me.

  Helen stares at her with an expression of exaggerated disbelief. ‘Anyone would think,’ she blares, ‘that these are not the same events we are both talking about.’

  ‘Everyone’s fighting here,’ reports Maggie over the phone. ‘Essie’s being mean, and Cal is just a total poo.’

  ‘That sounds—hard.’

  ‘I hate them both.’

  ‘I can still remember,’ says June, ‘how good it felt to bite my sister, when we were fighting. When things had really reached a crescendo. I knew I was going too far, I knew I’d get into trouble, but it just felt so good to sink my teeth into her.’

  ‘Mum!’

  ‘Well, you just said you hated both of your siblings, and called Cal a poo.’

  ‘Yes, but that’s not nearly as bad as biting your sister who disappeared,’ says Maggie. Then adds, with inspiration: ‘And then showing off about it.’

  ‘Well, I didn’t know when I bit her that she was going to disappear.’

  June thinks of nineties Helen, her harshly cropped hair, her work suits, mid-length skirts and big-shouldered jackets, the red nail polish. Her skin had been paler then, her make-up bolder—stark eyeliner, ovals of blush, lips to match the nails. All the effort showing in the hard edges, the drawn-on lines. Helen’s high heels on the kitchen floor in the mornings, her diet breakfasts, black coffee, half a grapefruit.

  ‘At boarding school,’ says Helen, ‘there was a girl with orange hair. Bright orange. Like, well, like an orange. And she peroxided it and it went green.’

  Fresh fish. Fresh ginger. Coriander. Lime. A sunset behind the bamboo. The Buddha leering over his up-light.

  That Bhudda, writes June. Spelling? Buddha? Looks like he’s ready to tell a ghost story.

  ‘It came free with the outside table,’ honks Helen.

  Helen says, ‘When you said moved on, did you mean given up? Because of course I had to move on. We all did. Even John, in the end. But giving up, that’s something different. Giving up hope, I mean. You can’t, even if you want to. I’ve wanted to! It causes so much pain. It’s not a rational thing.’

  They watch television—cooking shows.

  ‘What’s she saying? Quick!’ Helen elbows June. ‘Where’s the notepad?’

  Texture excellent, June writes. Too sweet tho.

  ‘Oh, but he’s my favourite!’ cries Helen. ‘He’s the one I want to win!’

  ‘I had no idea she was into this stuff,’ says June to Dev, but he doesn’t answer—he is also enthralled, hands on knees, face thrust slightly forward, eyes on the screen.

  ‘Hey, Dev, you know the sweat lodge,’ says June to Dev, and giggles. ‘Do you have to take it apart again? Each time?’

  The handle falls off the inside of the bathroom door while June is in there. She can’t fix it, and she can’t get the door to open. Dev is out. June hammers with her fist for a while and calls, uselessly, like a child, ‘Mu-um! Mu-um!’ Then she sits on the edge of the bath and waits.

  After a long time she gets up again and looks through the cupboards and drawers for something to write with but finds nothing. She begins to tear toilet paper into the shapes of letters. H. E. L. She is just starting the P when a shadow appears under the door and there is a dampened knocking, as if made with the heel of a hand.

  ‘June,’ comes the clumsy voice. ‘June? You in there?’

  June leaps up and hammers again, squats to stuff the toilet-paper letters under the door, rises to resume hammering.

  The door swings open. Helen’s face is lit up. ‘Junie!’ she says. ‘I felt you banging, with my hands! Through the door!’

  Out in the courtyard Helen examines the toilet-paper letters, laying them on the table. ‘Helen,’ she says proudly.

  June collapses with laughter, snatches up the pad.

  Not Helen! HELP!

  A mild breeze dances the letters.

  Helen connects a laptop to the enormous television and dims the lights. She and June sit side by side on the couch.

  ‘John did this,’ says Helen. ‘Got all the old photos scanned and sent them to me. Once he’d met Kathy and stopped being angry.’

  She says it almost with humour, as if John’s anger had been a whim, arbitrary and undeserved, and June has to contain a gush of irritation.

  But then the photos. Suspended within the TV’s wide black mouth, their colours rich and filmic, even the ones that are over- or underexposed, flash-blasted, unflattering. Baby Anna on her back on a rug, sun-dapples on her face, thumb plugging her mouth. A slender John with June and Anna on the beach at Red Rocks, June aged perhaps four, in underpants, face blurred as she bends to a plastic bucket; Anna nude, her toddler body caught between John’s knees, stubby fingers, fat grin under a hat. All of Anna’s primary school photos, tracking her increasing frogginess, her hair in various shades of ginger and sometimes chlorinated green, her mouthfuls of evolving teeth.

  The smiles, the eagerness—June is sure she can’t bear it, but Helen goes on wielding the mouse, unfurling Anna after Anna against the black. She speaks, also, a one-sided commentary, answering her own questions.

  ‘Grade two? Three. Those teeth! Mrs Murchison, God she was drip … Now where was that? It was somebody’s party, wasn’t it, a picnic at the Botanic Gardens … You girls got those roller skates for Christmas, remember? And Anna’s were too big, we had to stuff the toes …’

  She halts, finally, at one of Anna and June sitting at Nan’s kitchen bench. It must be around the time of the break-up—Anna frowns into a Choose Your Own Adventure book; June’s book lies flat, hiding the cover; her pubescent nipples disrupt the front of her t-shirt. Faux-timber laminate. Glasses of milk. Slices of fruitcake.

  ‘Shall we stop here?’ says Helen.


  June draws in breath. She is one giant, live, nerve ending. She nods.

  ‘Or do you want to keep going?’

  Not, writes June, if we want to stick to happy memories.

  Helen laughs like something deflating. She closes the laptop and switches off the TV. Then she puts her hand over June’s on the couch between them.

  June’s lips are numb. She bends forward, dropping tears into her lap.

  On June’s last morning they go, early, to a beach. June drives, obeying Helen’s stentorious directions. She parks and they walk. They pass houses like Helen’s, white and modern, black SUVs in their driveways, plush lawns. They pass rickety fibro shacks that make June think of the island—houses with cobwebs and perished canvas window awnings. They descend a hill covered in tall trees, and turn onto a narrow path—no more buildings now, only trees—and wind up and around and along until they come to stairs down to the water.

  The beach is a small, clean semicircle between cliffs, its narrow sweep of pale sand bookended with dark rocks. Tranquil, luminous, blue-green waves. It’s like an ad for a beach. At the far end a grey-bearded man is exiting the water, naked. Helen nudges June. The man claps one hand to his mouth and the other to his groin and does a comical little jiggle to his towel and clothes. Helen waves; June hisses at her to stop.

  The sea is hardly colder than the air. June dives under. She swims out, away, but when she pauses she finds she can still stand, the water just up to her chin. She turns around. The bearded man is a miniature figure, dressed now, ascending the steps. Helen, about halfway between June and the shore, breaststrokes, blank face, closed eyes.

  June feels the wave behind her, and has barely time to snatch a look at it before she launches herself, head down, right arm windmilling. She feels the lift, the slip of the water being sucked back below her. She joins her hands over her head, and kicks, and kicks.

  Not far from the train station there is a path. You don’t have to walk up it for very long before you feel alone in the bush. Completely. Everything else very far away.

  Ferns have curling shoots with insides no person has ever seen. The ground is damp in a permanent way. Dark brown marks on the tree trunks, from rain dripping, running down.

 

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