‘Your room belongs in a museum,’ commented Emmy. She pointed at a box on a shelf. ‘Why did you have so many Walkmans?’
‘Don’t you remember?’ Noelle wandered over to Rae’s cabinet full of cassettes and CDs. ‘She used to listen to music all the time. I had to schedule in time to make my big sister play with me, because she was always plugged in, warbling to some band.’
‘I thought I was going to grow up to be in No Doubt,’ confirmed Rae. ‘I wanted to be in a grungy rock band so much. I thought – if I can just get out of Maplewood and meet some like-minded people, we’ll be on CD:UK in no time. Where did it all go wrong? How did I find myself singing opera at the crappy Royal Albert Hall?’ She laughed.
‘All right, mosh-pit-head, back to business.’ Noelle turned back to her legal pad. ‘These walls are going to need several coats, and the skirting boards will need a proper sanding down. But I wondered if this room, as it’s so big, could be marketed as a potential kids’ room? We could get twin beds, make it quite bright and fun – anyway, I don’t know, I’m getting ahead of myself. New windows are needed in here, though; those ones are permanently damaged with shoe marks from when you climbed in and out.’
Rae inspected the window frame, proud of all those momentous escapes that were preserved in time with scuff marks and stiletto-heel holes. ‘Excuse me, where we all climbed in and out.’
‘Yes, but you were escaping to go drinking with that gaggle of other Goth kids, I was only ever escaping to go and sit in the garden.’ Emmy joined her sister by the window and they looked out across the roof of the conservatory, towards the little den in between the trees. ‘I really might as well have used the front door.’
Noelle appeared behind them and stage-whispered in Emmy’s ear, ‘But sometimes, you’d be escaping to go and sit in the garden with Jared.’
Emmy moved away from the window, a trickle of nostalgia warming her face. Whatever happened to Jared?
Chapter 8
The sisters bored fairly quickly with repeating that the rest of the house needed carpets and paint and the odd new window. The main structural changes seemed to be confined to building a window seat in the living room; changing out the glass in some of the other windows in the house; doing something with the heating and something with the doors but nobody could decide what yet; some landscaping around the front of the house and the driveway; redoing the decking on the porch; putting in some spotlights; and getting quotes for the bathroom to be redone.
Following a lunch of toast and cheese and some cheese on toast (they really needed to do a proper shop), they found themselves back on the landing staring up at the loft hatch.
‘How do we get up there?’ asked Emmy.
They stared a bit more.
‘You’re an astronautical engineer, isn’t figuring out ways to go upwards your thing?’ Rae asked.
‘Mm, not quite. Does it have one of those ladders that flop down when you pull the rope?’ Emmy pondered. But there was no rope.
‘I think I remember Dad using a stepladder when he went up there.’ Noelle looked around her. ‘So if we could just find that stepladder.’
‘The garage?’ Emmy suggested, and stared at Noelle. She did not want to go in the garage.
Noelle reached into her bedroom to grab her trainers. ‘I’ll go. Though how you managed to spend days and sometimes nights out in that den considering how scared you are of spiders getting inside the house never fails to amaze me.’
‘It’s because I’m… a complex woman.’
‘It’s because you’re a massive knob,’ Rae joked.
Finally, Noelle staggered back up the stairs with a paint-splattered chrome stepladder. ‘You guys, the garage is a gold mine. There’s paint and furniture and tools. We are going to be so amazing at this whole house renovation thing.’ She plonked down the stepladder. ‘Wish me luck.’
Up Noelle climbed, pushing the hatch out of the way and fumbling about the dusty beams and fuzzy loft insulation to find a light switch. She found one, and a very seventies amber light bulb ignited. ‘Oh wow,’ she breathed, looking around her.
‘What’s up there?’ Emmy called up at Noelle’s headless body. ‘Can you see Dream Phone?’
‘Come up and see. What’s up here is… us… preserved in time.’
‘Do you see spiders?’
‘Nope.’ Noelle gripped the sides of the hatch and pulled herself up and into the attic, closely followed by Rae, and not so closely followed by Emmy.
The attic probably looked like every other attic in every other home, but at the same time was so intrinsically linked to them. A rocking horse wearing a green foil wig and a cape stood by the hatch – a toy that had been Rae’s, then Emmy’s, then Noelle’s, and had been loved dearly by each one of them. There were boxes marked ‘Emmy’s Sylvanians’ and ‘Crap of Rae’s’ and ‘Dressing Up Clothes’. There were trunks that looked like props from movies about finding mysterious trunks in the attic. There was a set of six dining chairs crammed on top of each other, several lamps, a huge box TV, plastic crates full of more recently stored items that looked modern next to the musty cardboard. Boxes of school work, university prospectuses, a doll’s house of Rae’s labelled the ‘Haunted Badger Mansion’, a chest of drawers covered in stickers (Emmy’s – as evidenced throughout her bedroom, stickers played a prominent part in her childhood interior design) and mountains of books that belonged to Noelle, on top of which was a box labelled ‘Noelle’s Furby + Furby home and garden, please don’t touch and don’t talk too loudly’.
‘Where do we start?’ asked Emmy.
‘We start, of course,’ Rae said, making herself comfortable on the floor and crossing her legs, ‘with the mystery trunk.’
She lifted the lid of the trunk, after a little fiddling with the rusty clasp, and heaved it wide open. It was lined with paper-thin material and filled to the brim with stuff. ‘What’s this?’ she pulled out a wad of material and unravelled it. ‘Oh. It’s just a coat or cloak of some kind. Something from the sixties, I expect.’ She dug her hands into the trunk, pushing around papers and trinkets. ‘So this must be a load of Mum and Dad’s stuff.’
‘Hey, Mum did say she didn’t want us snooping,’ said Emmy, feeling like a saddo even as she said it.
‘We’re not snooping, we’re helping her have a clear-out.’
‘I don’t know, Rae…’
‘Come onnnnnnn, aren’t you curious what they were like before we came along? What even brought them to Maplewood anyway, I never asked. They didn’t grow up here.’
Emmy looked at Noelle.
‘Don’t look at me, I want to know all the secrets.’ Noelle settled in front of the trunk next to Rae, and a moment later, Emmy crossed her legs and sank down next to them.
The three sisters were rifling through the trunk some time later, singing loudly to the Sugababes on Emmy’s boombox that they’d plugged in in the hallway beneath them, when Rae pulled out a yellowed newspaper page. ‘Oh my god.’
So far, the trunk had taught them that their dad was a very ugly baby but had some awesome memorabilia from the flower power era, and that their mum, Willow, had passports stamped from all over the world in the sixties and seventies.
But this was something else. Rae unfolded the newspaper page fully and reread the article headline. ‘Oh my god.’
‘What?’ Noelle put down the photo album she was flicking through of her mum as a teenager – all floppy hats and big shades and stick-thin legs.
‘Did you know Mum and Dad were, like, Wiccans?’
‘You mean they did witchcraft?’ Noelle’s eyes lit up.
Rae kept reading. ‘I don’t know, but Maplewood certainly thought they did. When’s this from?’ Rae turned the paper over. ‘1979, five years before I was born. It says, well, a whole bunch of bullshit about Wiccans which sounds pretty sensationalised to me, and how the town was peaceful until “the arrival of the mysterious Mr and Mrs Lake”.’
Noelle looked thoughtful. �
��What did Mum and Dad do to make the newspaper write this stuff?’
Emmy reached over, taking the paper from Rae. ‘Let me see that. “Although there was nothing out of the ordinary to report on that particular night, Willow Lake, 26, has twice been cautioned for public indecency in the woods, which was suspected to be part of neo-pagan worship.” In the woods? So Mum was naked in her own garden and some weirdo reported it to the police, or the newspaper.’
Noelle cut in. ‘Wait, go back to the beginning, what night? What’s the story about?’
Taking the paper back off Emmy, Rae started the article again, from the top this time, rather than skipping around. ‘Okay, it says that last night – so May the eighteenth in 1979 – a bunch of people came here, to this house, in the middle of the night to try and prove our parents were practising Satanism.’ Rae put down the paper. ‘This bloody place Salem Witch Trialled Mum and Dad!’ She thought back to Tom and Kelvin calling them witches on their first day back in town and felt herself begin to fume. She stood up, bumped her head on an eave and sat back down. ‘This town! They’ve always had it in for us – before we were born it was our parents.’
Emmy was in shock, and said sadly, ‘They came to the house in the night – imagine how Mum and Dad must have felt?’
‘They never mentioned it to any of us, maybe that means they weren’t that bothered?’ Noelle suggested.
‘Wait a minute, wait a minute, I can tell you how they felt,’ said Rae, her mood lifting a little as she pulled a photo out of the trunk that had been tucked under the newspaper cutting, the same date scribbled on the back. She held it up. In the photo was their mum and dad in their twenties, their mum looking so like Noelle, and their dad with big floppy hair like Mick Jagger at a hippy convention. Both absolutely stark naked. Both clutching a handful of daisies and holding their middle fingers up to the camera. Willow had a pointed, garish witch’s hat on her head and looked like she was mid-laughter.
Noelle took the photo, screamed, and threw it at Emmy. ‘NO!’ cried Emmy, throwing the photo in turn back at Rae, who had started laughing. ‘Naked parents!’
‘This makes me so happy,’ said Rae. How could she have thought for a second that a bunch of bastards would have got her mother down? ‘Knowing Mum, she probably posted a copy of this photo to everyone in town.’
‘They were Wiccans though, you know,’ said Noelle, reaching into the box and pulling out a book. ‘Look at all this stuff. It makes sense now you’ve said it.’
‘What about this makes sense?’ asked Emmy.
‘I saw them once, naked, doing a dance out in the meadow. It was really, really early in the morning before any of us were usually up. I just assumed they’d… you know… and were celebrating. But, actually, I think they might have been communing with nature as part of their spirituality.’
‘Ew, you saw them naked?’ Rae gagged.
‘They’ve seen me naked, it’s not that unfair,’ smiled Noelle. ‘Plus, they were far away. It was quite beautiful, actually; I remember they looked so happy and free. Have either of you ever thought about being a nudist?’
‘I like being naked in the bath, or with the lights out, but that’s it,’ said Emmy. She picked up the photo of her parents (but covered their rude parts). She smiled at their laughing faces. ‘It must just not have bothered them at all. Do you think?’
‘I never saw anything bother Mum,’ Noelle stated, happier again despite the burn of injustice she felt in her heart for her family.
Rae didn’t answer. Instead she went back to the trunk to see what other treasures could be found. Perhaps it was because she was older. Perhaps it was because her veins oozed with the same protective blood Willow had for the two younger girls. But while a bully would never get their mum down, Rae knew that other things could. Herself, for one thing.
‘Did I ever tell you that Mum and I fell out for several years?’ Rae asked without looking up.
‘When?’ asked Noelle.
‘When I was a teenager. Late teenager. I mean, it was on and off, but I was really, really angry with her for a lot of reasons. It’s partly why I kept going off on my time outs.’
‘She was pretty angry at you for a lot of reasons too, from what I remember, but I didn’t realise you’d properly fallen out,’ Emmy added.
‘The fact that she was angry at me was one of the reasons I was angry at her – it was like a never-ending cycle.’
Noelle had never liked anyone saying bad things about her mum, so asked her next question carefully. ‘But why were you so angry?’
‘Mainly because I felt like I had to raise my two little sisters. Sorry, but that’s just how I felt at the time.’
‘You didn’t have to raise us,’ said Emmy. ‘Mum and Dad did that, they were always around.’
‘They were around, but Mum always wanted us to figure out how to solve our problems on our own. She was a lioness around her cubs when she needed to be, but I felt like all too often she was hands-off, and when you two – no, when we all – were being bullied it was me who had to keep stepping in. Like, Emmy, after you fell off the roof and everyone thought you’d tried to commit suicide.’
‘I remember.’
‘Mum thought the other kids might be more sympathetic if they believed that you had tried, and she also thought nobody had the right to question another person’s mental health. So she let it lie. I didn’t want those arseholes at school to think they’d had that much of an effect on you, and anyway you were stronger than all of them put together, so I stood up for you. As always. I felt like I had this tough bitch reputation because I had to.’
‘But… you did love all that grungy stuff and your bands and drinking. It’s not that Mum made you that way,’ Noelle said. At four years Rae’s junior, she felt like she’d been sheltered from this feud, somehow. ‘I remember you going away sometimes, but Mum and Dad never seemed worried, so I didn’t know I had to be.’
‘You didn’t have to be,’ said Rae. ‘I was okay. I only did it when I was over sixteen, and I never went very far, really. Emmy, you always had some idea of where I was going, and it helped me to clear my head and have a couple of days out.’
Emmy nodded. ‘I hated it when you disappeared. I always thought you were going to get raped or murdered. But in my heart, I knew that you talked a big talk but you wouldn’t put yourself in danger.’
‘So where did you go?’ asked Noelle.
Rae thought about it. ‘Anywhere. We didn’t really have mobiles back then, not to any large extent, so I’d just go to places where I wasn’t very reachable. Often, I went to youth hostels, and pretended I was a couple of years older. I liked to hang with gorgeous Aussie backpackers and feel really grown-up. I always came back, so Mum and Dad really didn’t have any need to worry.’ She wished they had worried though, just a little bit more. ‘The drinking and the rock music was my everyday release though, and I liked it, so it made me so mad when Mum would tell me off and try and contain me. I was like, “Mum, I just need to cut loose.” I was being a bratty cow, looking back, but that’s just how I felt at the time.’
Emmy and Noelle glanced at each other, unsure what to say. Eventually, Emmy spoke up. ‘I had no idea you felt like that.’
‘Yeah, well. I was mad about a lot of things really, and taking it out on and blaming parents is just a rite of passage, I suppose.’
‘What else were you mad about?’ Noelle asked.
‘I was very, very mad that nobody would be in a band with me. And I was also fuming that my soprano singing voice was more suited to opera, which I fashionably hated but also secretly loved. All of that combined was Mum’s fault, in my eyes, at the time. Stupid witch.’ Rae shrugged, the moment passed. One of the best things about being a grown-up was the ability to let it go.
‘Look at this photo of Mum and Dad on their wedding day,’ Noelle said, changing the subject to happier things. ‘Don’t worry, they aren’t naked.’
She held the album out for her sisters to see, and
they smiled.
‘They were such hippies, even then,’ Emmy said, noting her mum’s flower garland in lieu of a veil.
‘I wonder if they were Wiccans before they met?’ said Rae.
‘I don’t know,’ Noelle answered. ‘It seems like the kind of thing you get into as a couple. Like ballroom dancing.’
Rae nodded. ‘Ballroom naked dancing.’
Noelle snapped the photo album shut. ‘Okay, I’m going to bring this downstairs with me to look through when we’ve all got the image of Mum and Dad in the buff a little further out of our minds.’
Emmy hauled a box towards the hatch, marked ‘photo albums’. ‘Let’s take these down too. I hope the one of Rae dressed as a bumblebee in primary school is in here.’
‘I hope the one of you crying on your potty is in there,’ she retorted.
I hope there are a lot of happy memories in there, thought Noelle.
Emmy was pretty happy. She wasn’t going to commit to that fully, but being holed up here with her sisters was kind of nice, she was willing to admit that much.
It was later that night and she sat alone in the soon-to-be kids’ room, Rae’s bedroom, while her sisters were downstairs watching TV. She was cutting out really cool – and accurate – stencils she’d made of planets and spacecraft to go on the ceiling. Noelle had limited her to the ceiling because she said space wasn’t very ‘Devon’ so the walls needed to be reserved for stencils of squirrels and sheep.
What Rae had said earlier was playing on her mind. As much as she felt some of her burden came as a result of who Rae had been, she also saw that Rae too carried a weight she had never asked for – and that was Emmy’s safety, and later Noelle’s. Emmy had never asked too many questions when Rae went walkabout – even between sisters everyone still needed something that was just theirs – but it helped to be more in the know all these years later.
My Sisters And Me Page 8