The House of Memories

by Monica McInerney

  ‘I’m the root cause of my weight problem, Meredith. I eat too much. It’s that simple.’

  She couldn’t even try the ‘but you’ll be so much happier if you’re thinner’ approach with him. Because Charlie was the happiest person any of us knew. Happy and popular, even with the girls. He didn’t care that he was fat, so why should anyone else?

  Walter still worked too hard. Mum worked part-time too, as an Avon lady, for the fun and free samples rather than the money. The rest of her time was spent looking after Jess. With five of us on the move, our home life needed to be organised. Fortunately, it was. Walter was German, after all. We had rosters and timetables. Walter could easily have afforded a cleaner but he and Mum thought it more character-building if Charlie and I took on the task, in return for our pocket money.

  Jess was considered too young for chores, but during our high school years, Charlie and I were given plenty to do around the house. I had to load and unload the dishwasher, make the beds and do the vacuuming every Saturday. Charlie swept the verandah, mowed the lawn and cleaned the bathroom. When we complained one month, Walter swapped the rosters so that I did the verandah and Charlie did the vacuuming.

  ‘That should help keep it fun,’ Walter said as he proudly pinned up the new roster.

  ‘It’s really working,’ Charlie said to me the next Saturday. ‘I’m having so much fun with this vacuum cleaner I want to faint with excitement.’

  ‘Me too,’ I said, in a mock-excited voice. ‘Look at this dirt I’ve swept up. I am fascinated.’

  For the next week, we amused ourselves and drove our parents mad by finding everything either fascinating, wonderful or incredibly interesting.

  ‘Stop it, you two,’ Mum said one night.

  ‘We’re just being enthusiastic about life,’ I said.

  ‘No, you’re not. You’re being annoying.’

  But it was different for Jess. They didn’t tell her to stop saying particular words, or tell her she was being annoying, or expect her to do anything but be cute. I’ve talked about this a lot with Charlie over the years. It was like Jess somehow bewitched our parents from the second she arrived. It was as though she was in charge of them, not the other way around. And the two of us? We were her servants.

  We were told from morning till bedtime to do things around the house: tidy up, wash the car, empty the dishwasher, eat our dinner. There was no choice in the matter. From the moment Jess had any say in it, however, her answer was no.

  ‘Jess, tidy your room.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Jess, pick up your toys.’

  ‘No.’

  We would be told off if we dared to defy our parents like that. But they just smiled at Jess.

  ‘You are such a vascal, my Jessie,’ Walter would say.

  Charlie and I would roll our eyes at each other. ‘You are such a vapscallion, my Jessie,’ Charlie would whisper to me when we were out of Walter’s earshot. ‘Such a vogue. Such a vatbag.’

  My mum was as bad. Jess could do no wrong in her eyes. A temper tantrum was a show of high spirits. A flood of tears was evidence of her emotional maturity. ‘She’s such a character!’ I’d hear her say to her friends on the phone. ‘Honestly, she’s the light of our lives.’

  It helped, of course, that Jess was – is – beautiful. Physically beautiful, I mean. She was – still is – like a little doll, with a round face, rosy cheeks, big eyes and a head of golden curls. And she had a lot of curls as a child because she refused to let anyone cut her hair until the day she turned seven. It’s true. Mum took her to the hairdressers when she was about three and brought her back, unchanged, an hour later, both of them red-faced, Mum tearful, Jess defiant.

  ‘She screamed bloody murder as soon as she saw the scissors,’ I heard Mum tell Walter. ‘Next time, you take her.’

  Walter tried. Same result. The next month, Mum tried again and came home in tears. Her, not Jess. Walter tried one more time. They eventually gave up.

  One night while we were tidying up the kitchen, Charlie and I idly discussed the matter of Jess’s hair. It was getting worse every week, a long tangled mass of golden knots and snarls.

  ‘I know,’ Charlie jokingly suggested. ‘Let’s cut her hair ourselves one night while she’s asleep.’

  Jess overheard, told on us, and we both got into trouble for being mean to her.

  ‘It was just an idea,’ Charlie said to Jess later, once we’d told her off for being a squealer.

  ‘A very good idea,’ I said. ‘You are looking a bit wild, Jess, if you don’t mind me saying.’

  ‘It’s my hair,’ Jess said, stamping her foot, like a child in a comic book. ‘I’ll wear it the way I want.’ She’d have made me laugh if she didn’t infuriate me so much.

  One summer, the year she turned five, she refused to wear any clothes. Just point-blank refused. Fortunately for her, there was a heatwave in Melbourne at the time. Also fortunately for her, she was only in kindergarten and spent most of the time at home with Mum. After two months of nudity and wild tantrums if anyone tried to dress her or make her leave the house, she consented to wear her swimsuit, but that was it. We have a Christmas family photo from that time, the three of us kids standing in front of our tree. There’s Charlie in all his gorgeous fatness, wearing his new Christmas clothes of white shirt and shorts. Skinny me beside him, giggling at something he must have just said, wearing a red shift dress and a pair of blue sandals I recall being very proud of. And there between us, like a feral Shirley Temple, is a beaming wild-haired child in a grubby swimsuit. She wore it everywhere – to restaurants, to our end-of-year school concerts, to the shops. Mum and Walter just seemed to let her do whatever she wanted.

  The year she turned seven, she announced she wanted a pet for her birthday. We’d been asking for years, Charlie and I. The answer was always the same.

  ‘Not yet,’ our parents would say.

  ‘When is yet?’ Charlie asked once.

  ‘We’ll know when the time is right,’ was the answer.

  ‘Yet’ was obviously the moment Jess asked. She wanted a kitten, she told them. Really, really, really wanted a kitten. A birthday kitten.

  Charlie and I were nearby, washing up or darning socks or sweeping the chimney or whatever task we’d been allocated that day in our roles as slaves in the Kingdom of Jess. At last, I remember thinking, she finally won’t get her own way.

  Mum smiled at Walter, then at Jess. ‘Do you know, a kitten around the house would be cute, wouldn’t it?’

  I stepped in. ‘But, Mum —’

  ‘You’ll all get to share it, Ella. It won’t just belong to Jess.’

  Of course, we didn’t get anywhere near it. Jess chose the kitten from the pet shop and she ruled over it like a warlord. If either Charlie or I tried to pick it up, she would roar at us. ‘That’s my kitty!’ If we put out milk for it, she’d tip the milk out of the dish and refill it. ‘I feed my kitty, not you!’

  The kitten soon realised who was in charge. It let Jess do whatever she wanted with it. Jess carried it in a sling for the first few weeks. Not a mew of protest. For the next month, she carried it everywhere in a plastic shopping bag. Not a squeak of complaint. Mum and Walter thought it was hilarious. They took dozens of photos. Wild Jess, with her wild hair, half-naked, carrying her cat around in a plastic bag.

  ‘That child!’ they’d say. ‘What will she do next!’

  ‘Run away to the jungle?’ Charlie said to me. ‘She already looks like Mowgli.’

  Jungle Girl, we called her from then on. Until she told Mum and Walter, who told us off. ‘She’s your little sister. Be kind to her.’

  ‘She’s only half my sister,’ I remember saying.

  ‘I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that, Ella. You’ve got very jealous again and it’s not nice to see.’

  Charlie and I spent hours discussing the situation. We’d run away, we decided. They didn’t want us, their two half-kids, not now they had a full-kid in the house. That’s how we
thought of ourselves, full and half, as though we were cartons of milk.

  Lucas tried to give me good advice via his faxes during all of this. Try to be kind. Make your own life.

  Easier said than done. I’d asked once if I could do violin classes. ‘I don’t think so,’ Mum had said. ‘Concentrate on your studies for now.’

  Jess had after-school piano, theatre and dance classes.

  Charlie asked if he could go on a school trip to the skifields. ‘Money’s a bit tight at the moment,’ his dad said.

  Jess got a new bike that birthday.

  I know how this sounds. Jealous older siblings. Poor little Jess. But the truth is, she would drive a saint mad. Whether it was her personality or the fact she’d spent her whole short life being indulged and gazed on with endless pride, she was difficult company. It was all ‘me-me-me’. ‘Look at me!’ If either of us ever dared to tell her off, she’d turn into a fury in a second. ‘Stop ganging up on me, you two, or I’ll tell!’

  Charlie in particular always tried to be patient. ‘We’re not ganging up on you, Jess. We’re trying to play a complicated card game and you are too young to play it.’

  ‘Can’t you play a game Jess can join in on?’ Mum said. ‘Fish or Snap?’

  ‘No!’ Jess said. ‘Let’s play musicals. I’ll be the singer and you be the audience!’

  And so the game of cards would be abandoned, and we’d find ourselves sitting beside Mum and Walter on kitchen chairs watching Jess dance, prance, jump and do somersaults, over and over again.

  ‘It’s like being on Broadway, isn’t it?’ Charlie said to me once in a stage whisper.

  I got the giggles and was sent to my room.

  Of course, the especially infuriating thing was Jess really could sing and dance. It would have been easier if she’d had two left feet, was tone deaf and looked like a troll. But to paraphrase her favourite song of that time, ‘Close to You’, it seemed the angels had gathered the day she was born and made a dream come true.

  I still can’t listen to that song. I can’t think about Jess any more. Thinking about Jess means thinking about —

  Stop.

  It was too late. She was in my head now. What she’d done was in my head now.

  Chapter Six

  My son Felix died at 2.10 p.m. on Friday, 18 June 2010.

  He was twenty months old. He had black hair, like his dad, like a raven’s wing, so black and shiny it sometimes looked blue. He had blue-green eyes, also like his father. He was tall for his age. When he was born, he was all curves and softness. Within months, he’d grown long and skinny, the skinniness from me, the height from his dad. He got his first tooth at six months. He started to crawl aged nine months.

  He started speaking the day he turned one. His first words were ta and bye. His favourite toy was a blue knitted rabbit. He liked pumpkin, apples, carrots and oranges. He hated chicken, tomatoes and banana.

  His bedroom was multicoloured: his cot was painted blue, his quilt was bright orange and his favourite pyjamas were a rainbow-patterned flannelette pair, with a matching pair of slippers that he never wore.

  He called me Mama. Aidan was Daddy. To our astonishment, and his own delight, one of the first phrases he learned was his own name. It was part toddler-babble, but we were convinced he knew what he was saying: ‘I’m Felix O’Hanlon!’ He’d announce it out of the blue, shout it out – in a supermarket queue, at the doctor’s surgery, all sorts of places. It always made me laugh, made him laugh, and mostly, made the people around us laugh.

  He liked jigsaw puzzles. Blocks. Trucks. The Wiggles. Play School. He didn’t like going to bed and he didn’t seem to need much sleep. Some nights he’d go down for eight or nine hours, but more often he’d sleep in bursts of two or three hours. Each time he’d wake up and yell, literally yell, until Aidan or I came in. He’d always be in a good mood when we appeared, smiling or waving – ready for action, as Aidan put it. It was as if he’d got lonely in his room or was bored sleeping and wanted company. That was Felix. It was as if he knew – as if he had so much to do in his life he didn’t want to waste time sleeping. So we would try to soothe him, talk to him, read to him. Sometimes we were successful and he’d be coaxed back to sleep, but more often he would yell again until we took him into our bed with us. If we were still up working, he’d sit on my lap as I edited or on Aidan’s lap as he did some translating. He especially loved to bang our pens or pencils on the desk, laughing at the noise. It used to drive me crazy if Aidan so much as ate an apple while I was editing. Felix’s pencil-banging never bothered me at all.

  It was wintertime, mid-June. He’d been through a stage of being particularly energetic, even for him – waking up five or more times a night. It lasted for eight nights in a row. Aidan was very busy at work. There was an international trade conference taking place in Canberra and he was working sixteen-hour days and collapsing into bed as soon as he got home. So I got up for Felix each night. I didn’t mind. The conference was a big deal for Aidan, I knew. It was a quiet time for me work-wise, so I was able to cope with the lack of sleep. I caught up on an hour here or there, while Felix had his afternoon nap.

  Aidan’s conference was due to finish on the Thursday. The delegates would be in Canberra for one more day, but Aidan’s official role in their visit was over. The timing was perfect. It was Walter’s birthday, and to celebrate, he, Mum and Jess were coming up to Canberra for what Mum called a cultural weekend. They weren’t staying with us – our flat was too small – but in a hotel in town. They were going to have the Friday to themselves to go to the museum and galleries, and we’d all go out together that night for dinner.

  There had been some recent tension between Jess and me. She had an on-again off-again relationship with a fellow drama student, Canberra-born and now Melbourne-based, and had been up to stay with his family several times. She’d visited them – and us – most recently a month earlier. She’d arrived at the door, called out, ‘Hi, it’s Jess!’ as usual, swept in, kissed us all on both cheeks, Felix included, told us how cute he was – ‘He’s going to break so many hearts when he’s older!’ – then spent the rest of her hour-long visit telling us about the dance award she’d won recently, the roles she’d auditioned for or planned to audition for, how much she was enjoying doing guest appearances on Mum’s TV show and how great it was being stopped in the street and being asked for autographs.

  I was extremely tired. Felix had barely slept the previous night. While she was talking, he started to nod off in my arms. I quietly excused myself and carried him into his room. I lay him down, stroked his cheek, relieved to see him start the slow, deep breathing that promised a few hours of sleep. Then, outside, Jess sprang up out of her chair and started showing Aidan a new tap routine she was learning. In her winter boots. On our wooden floor. The noise shocked me as much as it shocked Felix. He sat up in the cot, wailing. I went into the living room and shouted – really shouted – at Jess. I called her selfish. Self-obsessed. Self-absorbed. She burst into tears and started shouting back. Felix started crying even more loudly. Aidan tried to intervene. I shouted at him then too, telling him to keep out of my family business. ‘You’re just jealous of me,’ Jess had said, as she tearfully, dramatically, gathered her bag and coat and ran for the door. ‘You always have been.’ Walter’s birthday dinner would be the first time I’d seen her since that day.

  On the Thursday night, Aidan put down his first post-conference celebratory beer, took one look at the bags under my eyes and said, ‘Arabella Fox Baum O’Hanlon, you are beautiful but you are exhausted. I hereby pronounce myself in charge of the world. Through the powers I’ve just invested in myself, I grant you a full day to yourself, starting tomorrow at eight a.m.’

  I remember laughing. ‘Sure, Aidan. I’ll ask Felix to look after himself, will I?’

  ‘Of course not. I, his loving, biological, capable father, will take care of him.’ He held up a hand as I started to protest. ‘Ella, I want to. I need him as much as you n
eed a break from him. He won’t ask me about trade tariffs, the French phrase for exclusion areas or the German word for extrapolation, will he?’

  ‘He might. He’s very advanced.’

  Aidan grinned. ‘Say yes, Ella. Leave Felix and me in peace for the day. We’ve got swings to swing on. Playgrounds to play in. A box set of The Godfather to watch.’

  ‘But your work —’

  ‘It’s finished. Fertig. Fini.’

  ‘You always say that and they always call you in.’

  ‘They won’t this time. They promised. But if they do, I’ll bring Felix. He can take the minutes. Make the coffee. He loves making coffee. I told him that every time he pushes the plunger down, there’s a huge explosion somewhere.’

  ‘Aidan, I’d love it, a whole day, but you can’t. This conference, I know how important —’ I was so tired I could barely make sense.

  ‘Was that pidgin English, Ella? I’m not familiar with that dialect.’ He pointed to an area above his head. ‘Can you see that lightbulb? I’ve just had a brilliant idea.’ He took out his phone and dialled. ‘Meredith? It’s your favourite Irish son-in-law. All set for your travels? Wonderful. I wonder if I could ask a big favour? Can I please have you on standby tomorrow, as Felix’s beloved and loving grandmother, in case of any urgent babysitting?’ He listened, laughed, said goodbye and hung up. ‘She said yes. How could she say no to a silver-tongued devil like myself? But I won’t need her, of course. That ruse was just to appease you. Did it work? Are you appeased?’

  I was completely appeased. I spent the rest of that evening making plans. A whole day to myself! I could go shopping, get my legs waxed, go and see three films, whatever I wanted. Aidan was amused at how often my ideas changed.

  ‘You could make it up as you go along,’ he suggested. To both of our surprise, I agreed.

  On Friday morning, the pair of them waved me off. Felix was on Aidan’s hip, smiling and blowing kisses. He’d just learned how to do that.