The House of Memories

by Monica McInerney

  My first thought when I saw Charlie wasn’t complimentary. There’s no way around this. Charlie was a really fat kid. I now know there are other words – plump or overweight or kilo-challenged, but back then all I saw was a fat boy with short, dark hair. I was a skinny kid with long, dark hair. Somehow, straightaway, his size made him easier to talk to. I was reading a lot of Enid Blyton at the time, courtesy of Lucas’s book parcels, the Five Find-Outers books especially. Charlie immediately reminded me of Fatty, the boy detective who is also a master of disguise, managing to dress as a policeman, among other things, and somehow hoodwink the adults in his life. It was all I could do not to address Charlie as Fatty when my mother and his father seated us together at the table and then pretended they weren’t watching to see how we got on.

  ‘Hi, Ella,’ Charlie said.

  ‘Hello, Charlie,’ I said. Hello, Fatty, I thought.

  ‘How are you?’ he asked.

  ‘Fine, thank you.’ Then I remembered my manners. ‘How are you?’

  ‘Very well, thank you.’

  Our parents beamed at us as though they were the world’s happiest matchmakers.

  Unfortunately that brief exchange temporarily used up our conversational skills. We sat there, silently, while my mother talked to the waitress, giggling a bit too much. She was also holding Walter’s hand under the table. I wondered whether she was trying to hide it from me or from Charlie. Either way, she wasn’t doing a very good job.

  It was an Italian restaurant. The waitress listed the specials, in a perfect Italian accent. I turned to Charlie, trying very hard to be polite and to ignore a strange, sick, sad feeling in my stomach.

  ‘Do you like Italian food?’

  ‘Si,’ he said.

  ‘See what?’ I said, puzzled.

  ‘I was being clever,’ he said. ‘Si is Italian for yes. Yes, I do like Italian food.’

  You like food from everywhere, by the looks of things, I thought. ‘Can you speak Italian?’

  ‘Si,’ he said again. ‘I also speak German, English, obviously, and also a bit of French and Spanish.’

  Woop-de-doo, I nearly said out loud, before remembering my mother telling me off for saying it. I’d heard it on a cartoon and mistakenly thought it was a way of saying ‘Great, well done!’

  ‘What’s this?’ I pointed to a glass, expecting the Italian, French, German or Spanish word for it.

  ‘It’s a glass,’ he said.

  For some reason, that cracked us both up.

  ‘And that?’ I said, pointing to a fork.

  ‘A fork.’

  ‘And this?’ I said, pointing to the bread in the basket, giggling uncontrollably now.

  ‘Bread.’

  It took two tellings-off from our parents before we stopped laughing that night.

  The next time we met was at dinner in Charlie and Walter’s big house in Richmond, a fortnight later.

  ‘Hi, Ella.’

  ‘Hi, Charlie,’ I said. He was still fat but at least I was expecting it this time.

  ‘Want to see my games room?’

  ‘Sure.’

  Again, conscious of our parents watching us, obviously hoping our first successful meeting hadn’t been a once-off, we went down the hall to his games room. It really was a games room. There was a table-tennis table in the middle, and shelves all around, with jigsaw puzzles neatly arranged on one shelf, board games on another, a basket of different balls – a baseball, a basketball, a football. It was like a combination sports and toy shop. It was also very tidy. That impressed me more than the games themselves. I wasn’t a tidy person back then.

  ‘Do you have a cleaner?’ I asked.

  He shook his head. ‘I do it all myself. I’m meticulous.’

  ‘Is that a kind of disease?’ I wasn’t even being smart.

  He gave a big laugh. ‘You’re funny,’ he said.

  ‘I am?’

  ‘Hilarious,’ he said.

  There’s something wonderful about being in the company of someone who laughs at you, when it’s for all the right reasons. You feel good around them. They make you want to try harder and be funnier. Especially when the person laughs like Charlie, from his head to his toes. He literally used to shake with laughter. He still does, even though he’s half as fat as he used to be. But back then, it was like watching a circus act, a boy squeezing his eyes shut and laughing with all his body at something I hadn’t even realised was funny.

  I wasn’t feeling that funny, as it happened. I blurted out something that had been on my mind all week. ‘I think they’re going to get married.’

  That sobered him up. ‘Your mum? My dad?’

  ‘No, Charlie, me and your dad.’ I’d recently learned how to be sarcastic. That time he didn’t laugh. I felt bad. ‘Yes, your dad and my mum. I think it’s getting serious between them.’

  ‘I think so too,’ he said.

  We both stood in silence for a moment, taking that in.

  ‘Where’s your mum?’ I eventually asked.

  ‘In Germany. Dad got custody of me.’

  ‘Do you mind?’

  He shrugged. ‘Where’s your dad?’

  ‘In Canada. Mum got me.’

  We were both quiet again for a bit, then Charlie spoke.

  ‘Would you live here with us if they got married?’

  I shrugged too. ‘I guess so. Our house would be too small for four people.’

  ‘Especially me,’ he said, patting his stomach.

  ‘Charlie!’ It was all right for me to think of him as Fatty, but not him.

  He seemed proud of it, patting his belly again. ‘So, do you want to see what I think would be your room?’

  ‘Sure.’

  We walked down the hall into a small, bright room at the back of the house. It had in-built bookshelves and a big window.

  ‘All yours,’ Charlie said. ‘Unless your mother would want it?’

  ‘No. She’d be sleeping in the same room as your father, wouldn’t she?’

  We both pulled a face at each other. Charlie grinned again. I wanted to say something really funny, to make him do that shaking laugh, but I couldn’t think of anything quickly enough.

  We stood in the middle of the room and looked around instead. It was being used as a kind of storage room, with boxes everywhere. There was a tree outside the window. I thought it would make a very nice bedroom, but I didn’t say that out loud.

  ‘Would you go to the same school as me?’ Charlie asked.

  I shrugged. I liked the way shrugging felt and also I didn’t have an answer for him.

  ‘It’s a good school,’ he said. ‘I think you’d like it. It’s just down the road. I walk there sometimes. Mostly Dad drives me.’

  ‘Is that where you learn all your foreign languages?’

  His smile broadened. ‘Oui,’ he said.

  ‘What’s that?’ I said, pointing to the tree outside the window.

  ‘A tree,’ he said.

  ‘And that?’

  ‘A window.’

  We were nearly hysterical with laughter by the time my mother and his father came to find us.

  Years later, Charlie told me that he’d thought I was really sad when he first met me. I said that I thought he was really fat.

  ‘I was fat,’ he said.

  ‘I was sad,’ I said.

  We did move in with him and his father. Our parents did get married. I did have that room as my bedroom. I did go to the same school as Charlie. For the next year – it’s funny to say it so confidently and firmly, but it’s true – I was also very happy. I had Charlie to thank. Because as well as being fat, and lots of fun, Charlie was also very kind. He still is one of the kindest people I’ve ever met. Relaxed and kind – a good combination in any human being, let alone a newly acquired stepbrother.

  Mum and Walter were glad we got on well, I think, but once we all settled into the new house and the new arrangement, they let us get on with it ourselves. Perhaps they would have paid more attentio
n if we hadn’t hit it off, but in the first year especially, they were too busy being in love with each other to take much notice of us. I’d hear my mother on the phone to her friends.

  ‘I never realised it could be like this. What was I doing wasting my time with Richard? I must have been crazy!’

  I had loved my Dad. I’d have liked to talk to him more than I did, which was once a month, sometimes less, depending on how much travelling he was doing around Canada. Walter tried to be a kind of father to me, I think, but the truth was I didn’t really need him. Mum was always happy to tell me what to do, and she was the person I’d go to for pocket money or advice or if I was upset about something at school. If I wanted to talk to someone apart from her, I had Charlie. So Walter was just, well, there in the house, really. A nice enough man with a beard and an accent who idolised my mother, who idolised him in turn. He spent a lot of time at work – he had an office on Collins Street as well as his home office. On the weekends he would devote himself to either my mother or the garden. He liked growing roses and rhubarb.

  ‘R things,’ Charlie said one afternoon, when we were in the games room playing Scrabble. Even though Charlie was very clever, I had a bigger vocabulary, so usually won. Charlie had announced he was trying a different approach, and was doing his words in French, while I stayed in English. It was working surprisingly well, considering I didn’t have a clue what words he was putting down. ‘Trust me, Ella,’ he’d said. ‘It wouldn’t be in anyone’s interest for me to cheat.’

  ‘What?’ I said now, looking up from a rack of difficult letters. ‘Are things what?’

  ‘Not the word “are”. The letter R. Dad only grows things starting with the letter R. Have you noticed that?’

  I looked out the window. Roses. Rhubarb. Rocket.

  ‘We’ll have to get him a rabbit for Christmas,’ I said.

  ‘A vabbit. A vabbit called Vudolph.’ Charlie found it very funny to mock his father’s way of speaking, especially the way Walter sometimes pronounced the letter ‘r’ as ‘v’. Walter would even laugh, if he did it in front of him. ‘Oh, Charlie, you are my comedian!’ I still never dared to do it myself. But on our own …

  ‘Not a vabbit,’ I said. ‘A veindeer. Vudolph the Vednosed Veindeer.’

  ‘And a vobin —’

  ‘A ved-ved-vobin —’

  We sang together. ‘The ved, ved vobin comes bob, bob, bobbin’ along!’

  We were a textbook blended family, I suppose. A child apiece, a happy second marriage, a nice house, plenty of money, holidays twice a year, both children doing well in school, Charlie in particular. He didn’t just have a flair for languages, he was also a mathematical whizz-kid. I was bad at maths, but good at English. I’d finally learned to spell, mastered grammar, and when I wasn’t writing my own little books, I was reading other people’s, still arriving regularly from Lucas. My favourite pastime was to clamber up the tree outside my window, hook a leg around the largest branch and read for hours. It was extra good if the weather was cool enough for Charlie to come outside and sit at the base of the tree doing his homework. He’d only come outside in cool weather. The sun gave him hives. But in general, we were both very content.

  And then Jess arrived.

  We had plenty of warning. Eight months of it, in fact. Mum and Walter brought Charlie and me together. ‘We won’t be telling anyone outside this house yet, but we have some incredible news,’ she said. ‘Can you guess what it is?’

  Charlie and I had been playing Monopoly and weren’t happy about the interruption.

  ‘We’re moving?’ he said, yawning.

  ‘You’re getting a divorce?’ That was me trying out my new sarcasm again.

  Mum reached for Walter’s hand. ‘We’re having a baby!’

  We both said ‘Wow!’ and ‘Great!’ at the time, but as soon as they went out, Charlie turned to me and said ‘Yuk.’

  ‘Yuk,’ I agreed. Yuk about the baby, about the fact that the baby meant they must have done you-know-what, and also a kind of yuk as in what-does-that-mean-for-us?

  ‘We were here first,’ Charlie said, confidently. ‘It won’t change anything. Don’t worry.’

  He was wrong. Everything changed from the moment Jess arrived. Even before she arrived. Six weeks before Mum’s due date, I was moved into the spare room, the smallest room in the house, because Mum needed my bedroom as a nursery for Jess.

  ‘But I’ll be eleven soon. The baby will be much smaller than me,’ I said. ‘Shouldn’t it have the smallest room?’

  ‘Even a small baby needs a lot of voom, Ella,’ Walter said.

  ‘Voom voom,’ Charlie said later. ‘Are we getting a new baby or a new car?’

  I couldn’t laugh about it yet. I loved my bedroom.

  Mum turned thirty-five three days before Jess was born. Walter was forty-two. They were older parents, with older-parent energy, and they needed every bit they could summon. From the second Jess was born, she needed a lot of attention. ‘What changed?’ as Charlie said later. She was three weeks premature, and had to spend her first two weeks of life in an incubator.

  We were taken into the hospital to meet her. Charlie was more interested in the technology on display than his new baby half-sister. He put both hands up to the glass and peered in at the row of incubators. Mum, standing beside the one on the far left in her dressing gown and slippers, waved at us. We couldn’t see our new baby sister, but we waved back, encouraged by Walter.

  When Mum came out into the corridor, Charlie fired questions at her. About the incubator, not the baby. I mostly remember being amazed that Mum was a normal size again, and just as amazed that the huge bump she’d had was now out of her stomach and lying fast asleep in that glass box. The incubator kept the baby warm, Mum explained to Charlie. Walter went into a more complicated technological explanation about the importance of keeping the baby germ-free while her lungs were still so fragile. Charlie listened and nodded.

  ‘Got it,’ he said. ‘It’s a combination of warmth and sterile conditions.’

  On the way in we’d noticed a big sign about some fundraising the hospital was doing.

  ‘I’ve got a great idea,’ he said to me as we peered in through the glass at our new half-sister. Mum and Walter were still deciding whether to call her Jessica or Molly. ‘They should put eggs in there to hatch at the same time. Raise money on the side as chicken farmers. It would kill two birds with one stone. Metaphorically speaking.’

  I got the giggles, at the mental image of hundreds of newly hatched chickens roaming the hospital as much as the ‘metaphorically speaking’. He’d recently taken to saying it as often as possible. ‘Yes, thanks, Dad. I’m full, metaphorically speaking.’ ‘Yes, I’m ready for school, metaphorically speaking.’

  Standing beside us, Mum wasn’t amused. She told us both off for being so silly.

  Walter told us off again when we got home. ‘Your little sister is very fragile. It’s veally no laughing matter.’

  She – Jessica, they finally decided, who quickly became Jess – might have been fragile when she was first born, but by the time she came home, it was as if she’d been in the super-strength incubator. I’d never heard a noise like her crying. The walls seemed to shake. I also don’t think she slept for more than two hours at a time in her first year. Which meant we didn’t either. She needed to be held all the time, and she had her favourites. I wasn’t one of them.

  One Saturday afternoon, when Jess was about four months old, Charlie and I were working on a jigsaw puzzle together. Walter was at his office in town. He often worked six days a week. Mum was folding the washing while talking on the phone. Jess started to cry in her room. Mum called over to me, ‘Ella, darling, go in and check on her for me, would you?’

  I reluctantly put down my jigsaw piece. I was just getting to the interesting corner bit. I winced at the noise as I went into Jess’s room, which I secretly still thought of as my room. As I lifted her out of her crib, she started to cry more loudly. The more
I jiggled her, the louder she got. I brought her into the living room. Her cry turned into a shriek. Charlie put his hands over his ears.

  ‘I think something’s wrong,’ I said, as loudly as I could. ‘Is she sick?’

  Mum said something into the phone and then hung up. She was barely visible behind the piles of baby clothes. It amazed me how much laundry Jess generated. ‘Of course she’s not sick. You’re just holding her wrong. Ella, really, how many times do I have to show you?’

  ‘I’m not holding her wrong. I’m doing it just like you told me to.’

  ‘You’re not, Ella. Your hands are in the wrong place. You know she needs to have her head supported.’ Mum took Jess from me and Jess instantly stopped crying. Then, to my dismay, Mum handed her back. ‘I’m going to need lots of help from you over the next few years, Ella, so you need to learn how to do this properly.’

  The next few years? She instructed me again exactly how to hold Jess: a hand here, another arm there, like a cradle. I tried it. Jess was quiet for a second, another second, even a third. We all started to relax. And then she looked up at me. Her whole face seemed to scrunch in on itself. Her skin reddened. Her mouth opened. The bellowing began again, louder than before.

  ‘Oh, Ella,’ Mum said, crossly this time. I started my Jess-jiggling again, to no avail.

  ‘She’s obviously allergic to you,’ Charlie said over the sound of the cries. He took in my furious expression. ‘Don’t blame me. Don’t shoot the messenger.’

  ‘Give her to me please, Ella,’ Mum said. I did. Jess stopped crying immediately. Mum started cooing to her, smiling and stroking her face, speaking in the sing-song voice she’d started using only since Jess had arrived.

  ‘There we are, my Jessie. Are we all better now? Of course we are. You’re with Mummy, darling, aren’t you? That’s my dear little baby, yes! Who’s a good girl, my little Jessie? Who? You, that’s right. Good girl, Jessie.’

  Jess started to gurgle, a sweet, musical sound. At that moment, I hated it even more than I hated her crying.