The House of Memories

by Monica McInerney

  ‘She’s definitely allergic to you, Ella,’ Charlie said. ‘Alternatively, she hates you.’

  He was joking, but it didn’t matter. I felt a surge of something wild inside me – hurt, anger, jealousy, all mixed in together. To my own astonishment as much as Charlie’s and Mum’s, I swept the jigsaw off the table and started shouting.

  ‘I’m allergic to her! I hate her! I hate all of you!’ I ran out of the room and slammed the door. I heard Jess start crying again.

  Right then, I really didn’t care. I didn’t care about any of them, or anything. Why should I? They didn’t care about me. I ignored Mum calling to me to come back right now and apologise. I ran down the hall into my tiny room, threw myself onto the floor and wiggled under my bed as far as I could, until I was pressed right up against the wall, the carpet rough against my bare legs and my face. I started to cry, the tears hot on my cheeks. I heard the door open and the light being switched on. I could see Mum’s feet. I shut my eyes and stayed still until I heard the door shut again. My tears kept falling but I made no sound. A few minutes later, the door opened again. I held my breath. ‘Ella?’ It was Mum again. ‘Ella? I know you’re there somewhere. Come back out here and apologise.’ I stayed where I was.

  I ignored Charlie too when he came into my room soon after. I ignored Mum when she came in a third time. She had Jess in her arms, I could tell. I could hear her little hiccuppy breaths. ‘Ella, I know you’re hiding under the bed. This childish behaviour has to stop, do you hear me?’

  I lay there, as still as I could, until they went out again. I waited a few moments and then I really started crying, tears and loud sobs at once. I couldn’t seem to stop. I cried for every sad thing I could think of, going back as far as I could remember, finding new and old hurts. I cried about my dad, about him leaving, about the divorce. I cried about Lucas’s sad little baby fox. About a bad result in a recent school test. The loss of my bedroom. But, mostly, I cried about the now obvious truth. Mum loved Jess more than she loved me.

  I don’t know how much time passed, how long I was under the bed – an hour, maybe more. I could hear voices outside, Walter arriving home, the sounds of dinner being prepared, the TV. I stayed where I was, on the floor, in my dark room, my face pressed against the carpet. Eventually, I got up. I didn’t go to the bathroom, brush my teeth, any of it. I just put myself to bed, in my clothes. I was hungry, but there was nothing I could do about it. I wanted to keep crying but there didn’t seem to be any tears left. I waited for Mum or for Walter, or even Charlie to come in and check on me. No one did. I fell asleep and slept the whole night through.

  I woke up at six a.m., before anyone else was up. I dressed, made my own breakfast of cereal and toast, then quietly let myself out of the house. I was waiting at the school gate when the first teacher arrived. It wasn’t until the next day that I found out Charlie had been right behind me on my walk to school, and that he had also gone back home to report to Mum and Walter that I was okay. He’d heard me get up and followed me. He didn’t want them worrying about me, he told me. He’d thought I might be running away.

  ‘And I’d miss you,’ he said. ‘Like, I don’t know, a dog would miss its fleas.’

  That night, after Jess was fed, bathed and put to bed and while Walter was helping Charlie with his homework, Mum called me in to her and Walter’s bedroom. I knew what was coming. A telling-off. I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear it. She took a seat on the bed and patted the cover beside her. I came in and sat down.

  ‘Darling, we need to have a little chat.’

  I got in first. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. I knew I’d misbehaved the night before. And I was sorry. I didn’t like feeling this way either.

  ‘I’m glad to hear that. Ella, you really do have to stop being so jealous.’

  ‘I’m not jealous. I’m really not. I’m just very tired.’

  She gave a laugh. It wasn’t a nice laugh. ‘I think if anyone deserves to be tired around here, it’s me. You just have to try harder, Ella. She’s your little sister. You should love her.’

  My apology was forgotten. I felt that surge of crossness again, but I tried pushing it down this time. ‘She should be the one getting used to me. I was here first.’

  It was the truth, but I was also trying to be funny. I wanted to make Mum laugh. I wanted lots of things. I wanted Mum to stop telling me off and to give me a big hug, to tell me she still loved me, to tell me she was sorry that Jess, and Walter, seemed to take up so much of her time these days. I wanted her to ruffle my hair and say, of course you’re tired, you poor kid, come on, an early night for you. I wanted her to tuck me into bed, and read me a story. I wanted her to thank me for being such a good girl lately, for getting on so well with Walter, and with Charlie. I wanted her to say that of course Jess wouldn’t take up all her time forever, that of course she would soon be able to come into school again to listen to my reading and do tuckshop duty and all the things she used to do, and not make me take in another apologetic note to my teacher, explaining that she just didn’t have the time any more, not with a new baby in the house. I wanted her to give me another big hug, and tell me that she loved me just as much as she always had, before Walter had come along and before Jess had come along, and that, yes, she did now have another daughter, but I was absolutely right, I had been there first, so I would always be her special, first daughter, no matter what happened.

  She didn’t. She stood up, put her hands on her hips and gave me a cross look. ‘“I was here first”? Ella Baum, you should be ashamed of yourself. Jess is your baby sister. You should be welcoming her into our family, not being so mean to her.’

  I stood up too, just as crossly. I’d heard that word ‘should’ from Mum too many times recently. He’s your new father, you should love him. This is your great new house, you should love it. I felt the fury inside me again. This time I let it out. ‘I don’t care! You can’t make me love her!’

  ‘Go to your room, Ella. Right now. I’m very, very disappointed in you. And Walter will be too.’

  My fury was running free now. ‘I don’t care about that either! I don’t care about you or Walter or Jess. And I’ll never love her, no matter how much you try and make me!’

  Once I’d slammed my way into my bedroom, the fury turned into tears again. I was nearly twelve, old enough to know that Mum was right. I was jealous. I should love my baby sister. But at that moment, I couldn’t. It was too hard. For the second night in a row, I found myself under my bed. I cried myself to sleep.

  Charlie woke me up two hours later, using my hockey stick to poke me awake. ‘I come bearing food,’ he hissed. He’d smuggled in some biscuits and chocolate (he always had a secret stash). He pushed them under the bed, reciting what was on offer as if he was a waiter, chatting to me in his usual conversational way, as if it wasn’t a bit strange that I was lying in my dark bedroom, under my bed, cramming biscuits into my mouth.

  He waited until I’d eaten three biscuits and two chocolates before he spoke. ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘No,’ I said, my voice muffled by the food.

  ‘You’re in the right, you know.’

  I swallowed. ‘About what?’

  ‘Jess,’ he said. His voice was clear and firm in the darkness. ‘She is a complete nightmare. She has brought nothing but pain and suffering to this house. Not to mention a great deal of washing. She is nothing but a big, stupid, red-faced, bald cry-baby. A midget, stupid, red-faced, bald crybaby.’

  I suddenly heard myself laugh.

  He continued. ‘She can’t feed herself, either. She dribbles. She’s also incontinent. You know what that word means, don’t you? Disgusting. She wears nappies, all day, every day. She can’t string two words together. She hasn’t got any teeth. Did I mention she was bald? Hairless and toothless. No wonder you hate her. She’s absolutely hateful. Hideous. A blight on society. She should be banished, not just from this house, but this city, this country, thrown to the wolves, eaten alive, torn from limb to limb �
��’

  He was going too far now. ‘She’s not that bad. And it’s not her fault she cries so much.’

  ‘It is,’ he said, matter-of-factly. ‘She is evil and she must be destroyed.’

  ‘She’s not evil,’ I said. ‘She’s just a little baby.’

  ‘Come out here and say that, if you’re so brave,’ he said.

  I edged out, and sat up, pushing my hair out of my eyes, feeling the imprint of the carpet on my face.

  He handed me another biscuit.

  ‘Thanks, Charlie,’ I said. I wasn’t just thanking him for the biscuit.

  ‘No need for thanks,’ he said. ‘Anyway, maybe your mum is right. Maybe you’ll learn to love her. Like you’d learn, I don’t know, to live with a wart. Or a boil. Metaphorically speaking.’

  He gave me one more chocolate, told me it was my turn to load the dishwasher and left the room.

  I remember lying down on the carpet again for a few minutes to think his words over. Could I learn to love Jess? Like I’d learned to ride a bike, cook an omelette, climb a tree? With practice and repetition? Maybe I could at least try. I left my room, said sorry to Mum, to Walter, to Jess and to Charlie. And for the next few months, it was almost peaceful at home. If you ignored Jess’s constant crying. Which I tried to do.

  Life settled for all of us. I received the news about my dad’s death. I was sad at first, but I also found it confusing. I’d rarely heard from him and I realised I didn’t really remember him. He’d become a distant figure in my life. Mum had also made it clear she didn’t like him, that he had been an error of judgement in her life. And there was always so much going on at home to distract me from any thoughts of him. Jess was starting to crawl and talk a lot. No words, just babble, a nonstop stream of nonsense words, which even I had to admit were pretty funny. I began to feel happier most of the time. Mum had started noticing me again. I had friends at school and Charlie’s great company at home. Having Lucas helped, too. I was still sending plenty of faxes to him, and getting plenty in return. He was my confidante and advisor and he made me feel special, something I needed whenever the jealous-of-Jess feelings started to rise. Jess might have been the apple of everyone’s eye here in Melbourne, but she didn’t have an uncle in London who sent her faxes and foxes and books, did she?

  About a month after Jess’s first birthday, I was able to repay Charlie for his kindness. He and I had recently been watching lots of American TV shows during the few hours of TV a week our parents allowed us. Copying one of them, we thought it would be funny to set up a lemonade stall down the street from our Richmond house one Saturday afternoon. We convinced ourselves we’d make a fortune. Hundreds of people walked past our gate on their way to the football at the MCG. They’d be dying of thirst, desperate for fresh lemonade.

  As we set up the stall, Charlie made me laugh by giving the lemons lemony voices and getting them to talk to each other. ‘You give me the pip,’ he had one say. ‘Yeah?’ another replied. ‘Well, your problem is you’re too thin-skinned.’ ‘You’re just a yellow-bellied coward!’ ‘Don’t think I’m going to come to your aid, lemon. Or should I say, come to your lemon-ade.’ It suddenly seemed urgent to let him know that, alongside Lucas, he was my favourite person in the world.

  ‘Charlie?’

  ‘Mmm?’

  ‘I love you.’

  He swooned, clutching his chest. ‘Be still, my beating heart. But, Arabella, it will never work out between us. I’m sorry to break it to you, but I’m your brother.’

  ‘Stepbrother, actually,’ I said. ‘But that’s what I meant. I love you in a brotherly way.’

  ‘How marvellous.’ Apart from using as many big words as possible, he’d also taken to occasionally speaking in an upper-class English accent. ‘And I, dearest Arabella, love you in return. In a sisterly way, of course.’

  ‘Good,’ I said.

  He reverted to his very Australian accent. ‘Can we get back to our lemonade now?’

  ‘Sure,’ I said.

  Two hours later, we were packing up after a frankly disappointing afternoon. We’d only made two dollars and twenty cents and had drunk most of the lemonade ourselves. I heard a noise from down the street – shouting, and a bottle being kicked along the footpath. It was a gang of boys from one of the other schools in the area. I’d seen them now and again going past our house, and ignored them. There was an unspoken war between the two schools. They thought we were all posh brats. We thought they were all criminals.

  Charlie was still very fat at this stage. It wasn’t until he reached his twenties that he started to lose any weight. I could hear the gang of boys begin to taunt him as they approached. ‘Hey, Fatso.’ ‘Who ate all the pies?’ ‘Someone call the RSPCA. There’s a beached whale on the street.’

  ‘Come on, Charlie,’ I said, quickly pushing the unused cups and lemons into the packing crate we’d used as our stand. I wasn’t quick enough. I was just taking down our handwritten sign when the gang stopped in front of us.

  ‘Fatso’s got a girlfriend,’ one of them said. The other one said something cruder in reply. I ignored them. Beside me, Charlie kept packing up too. I shot him a glance. He didn’t look back.

  ‘Give us a drink, Fatso’s girlfriend.’

  ‘We’re closed,’ I said, looking down at the footpath.

  ‘Fatso drank it all,’ one said. They all laughed.

  Before I could stop him, the tallest boy reached into the packing crate, grabbed one of the lemons and pelted it across the road. It narrowly missed a passing car. The driver honked his horn. Two of the boys gave him the finger.

  ‘Ignore them,’ Charlie hissed at me.

  I tried, but they did it again. More horns honked. The third time, they threw the lemon at Charlie, not the cars. It missed him by inches. The next one hit him on the shoulder.

  ‘Don’t do that,’ he said, his face turning red.

  ‘Who’s gonna stop us, Fatso? You and your girlfriend?’

  The tall boy reached across, and in what seemed like slow motion to me, shoved Charlie. I watched, horrified, as Charlie stumbled back against the crate. It tilted. He lost his balance and fell heavily. Paper cups and lemons scattered onto the footpath around him.

  The gang of boys laughed. I had to do something, and quickly. No one shoved my Charlie and got away with it. No one laughed at him or called him names, either.

  As well as the American TV shows, we’d been watching American films. One of them was The Karate Kid. I’d never been to a single karate class, but the boys weren’t to know that. To their shock, and mine, I went into action. I leapt in between them and Charlie and made a strange high-pitched noise, a kind of ‘Ah-yah!’, as I held up both hands at an angle.

  ‘Watch out,’ I shouted as loudly as I could. It was pretty loud. ‘I’m a black belt.’

  They started laughing. One of them threw another lemon at Charlie, who was still lying on the footpath. It hit him on the head.

  I shouted at them again. ‘No!’

  There’s something glorious about letting fury rise inside you. It’s like a gas flame, a whoosh of pure emotion. I turned mine up to high and went for it. I was twelve, tall for my age, thin and fast. I seriously didn’t have a clue about karate but I knew from the films that it involved a lot of quick kicks and hand slices. As luck would have it, my first kick landed right where it would hurt, on the tallest of the four boys. He doubled up. Another kick landed behind the knee of a second boy. He crumpled. That was it in terms of my armoury, but they weren’t to know. I kept shouting, making so much noise that a neighbour came out to see what was happening.

  ‘What the hell’s going on here?’ he said. He was more than six foot tall and very broad.

  The sight of an adult was what made the boys run, not me, I know that, but I still took pleasure in seeing them run down the street, the tallest one bent over, groaning.

  ‘Are you two okay?’ the neighbour asked.

  I was panting, but I nodded. Charlie nodded too.
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  We packed up swiftly. I looked over at Charlie. His face was red, but he was smiling.

  It wasn’t until we started walking that he spoke. ‘Wow, Ella,’ he said.

  I smiled all the way home too. Neither of us told Mum or Walter what had happened. It was our own excellent secret.

  I turned thirteen, fourteen, fifteen. I went through puberty, with some alarm at first. Charlie got taller, a bit fatter and even cleverer. He topped his class each year, became a skilled debater, applied to be a Rotary exchange student and was immediately accepted. After he passed his final-year exams he’d be spending a year in the US. I think I was prouder of him than Walter was.

  Meanwhile, Jess was growing older too. Older and bolder, as the saying goes. The house still seemed to revolve around her. When I was with her, I was often conscious of difficult, spiky feelings, not the warm, amused feeling I had when I was with Charlie. It bothered me, especially the older I got. Was it because she was only half my sister? Or was it just that I didn’t actually like her very much? I couldn’t work out which one.

  The age difference – eleven years in my case, thirteen years in Charlie’s – meant that we didn’t have huge amounts to do with each other, particularly once Charlie and I went to high school. Our after-school lives became as busy as at-school. I played hockey, sang in the school choir, volunteered in the local library. Charlie studied, and studied some more. In between studying, he wrote to his dozens of penpals. The mailbox was always full, every day, with letters for him from all over the world, part of his involvement with the Rotary clubs. He’d applied for penpals as part of his mission to be chosen as an exchange student, and then got hooked. He didn’t just write one letter which did for them all, either. He would compose letters to each, carefully and considerately.

  He also sent them regular photos of himself. I took the photos. He wasn’t in the least bit self-conscious about his weight. He would beam at the camera, his pudgy cheeks red, his stomach round. Mum had tried sending him to dieticians and even psychologists in an attempt to find the root cause of his weight problem. Charlie sat her down one afternoon and gently asked her to leave him alone and stop worrying.