The Convent

by Maureen McCarthy

  For some reason I can’t move. I lie here as rigid as a dead sailor, hammered to the deck by the weird kind of inertia that disappointment creates. That last plan took us both the best part of a day to work out. All those solutions, strategies and promises written down so meticulously and pinned to the back of her bedroom door. The DOs on the left-hand side and the DON’Ts on the right. They’d looked so damned convincing spread across two large white pages. Mum and Dad were going to be so proud of her, of us, when they got back. It’s only two days later and she’s cut loose again, hurtling along that infamous paved pathway, stepping on all the good intentions in the world!

  I sit up and stare out the open window at a dark clear night full of stars, feeling the frustration begin its slow miserable journey down from my brain into my throat and chest. Maybe I should go down there and yank her up by the hair. Smack her around a bit. She deserves it. Fifteen key points. She crossed-her-heart-and-hoped-to-die on every single one of them. Number one on the right was No secret eating in the middle of the night.

  An electric guitar riff strides into my ears as if it has a perfect right, followed by drums, then some screeching angst about purple sunsets. Is this sneering Johnny Rotten telling everyone what a hero he is, or The Clash vomiting over the crowd in some forgotten English club?

  Stella’s musical tastes are fixed strictly in the seventies. She also loves Neil Diamond, the mature Elvis in his white-studded jump suit, grim-faced Patti Smith, Joni Mitchell with her jutting teeth and early Sting.

  ‘He lost it after The Police,’ she told me recently.

  ‘Really?’ The sarcasm went straight over her head.

  ‘Yeah,’ she sighed, like it cut her up to have to say it. ‘There was only one good album after that.’

  I lean across to the bedside table, grab the glass, gulp some water then flop back down. I turn over and look at the fronds of the top of the Jacaranda tree playing along the bottom edge of the window sill and try hard to think about something else.

  But it’s not working.

  This can’t go on. It has got to stop … now.

  I feel along the bed for the cotton nightie I threw off earlier. Thick tendrils of hair have escaped from the knot at the top of my head and lie in damp curls around my ears and neck. Sweat runs between my breasts and under my arms.

  After I’ve dealt with my sister, I’ll go have another cold shower.

  I creep downstairs, past my mother’s photo collection and out into the wide front hallway, stopping for a moment at the bottom of the stairs. Moonlight is shining straight through the stained glass panels set into the front door, making flecks of gold, deep-blue squares and patches of ruby red float along the polished wood floor.

  I make a mental note to tell Det about this when I see her next. She’ll laugh at me, but she’ll like it. She is an artist and light is her thing: moonlight, fluorescent light, candlelight, sunlight, old gaslights, and inner light too.

  Sure enough, Stella is in the family room at the back of the house. Wrapped in a sheet, propped against one of the heavy chairs in front of the telly – and yep, it’s some old bootleg video of the Sex Pistols. She’s spooning ice-cream from the tub into her mouth as though someone has switched on the automatic button. I stand in the doorway a moment because I don’t want to frighten her.

  ‘Stella,’ I say.

  She doesn’t turn around, but she stops spooning the ice-cream so I know she has heard me. I take a few steps towards her. ‘Stella, it’s after three a.m.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Bedtime.’

  ‘No need to crack the shits,’ she grumbles sourly, still not looking at me. ‘It’s not exactly against the law!’

  ‘I’m not cracking the shits.’ I walk over to her and hold my hand out for the ice-cream.

  She heaves a deep sigh and gives it up.

  I look down at the extraordinary mass of coal-black hair she inherited from Dad. It is springing out in tight curls from her head at virtual right angles, almost blocking a view of her shoulders, and I wish I could play some role other than big-sister-who-knows-best. She used to set me straight about a whole lot of stuff not so long ago.

  I put the tub of ice-cream down on the coffee table and take the thick pink hairband from around her wrist. Using both my hands I drag as much of her hair as I can up into a rough ponytail.

  ‘Much cooler like this,’ I murmur.

  ‘I know,’ she sighs.

  ‘So why didn’t you have it up?’

  ‘It makes me look ridiculous.’

  I have to smile. I twist her shoulders around so I can see her from the front and we grin at each other. It does look ridiculous. The ponytail, I mean. It looks like some weird black plant sticking straight up out of her head.

  ‘And there are so many people here to see you, Stella, and all of them with cameras. You and your freaky hairdo with be all over the internet before you know it.’

  She giggles and gives me one of her gorgeous bright-dark smiles, her enormous eyes twinkling in the low light from the flickering television. I have to wonder (for the millionth time), if her burgeoning weight means she is in the middle of some deep inner crisis, then how come she seems so cheerful most of the time?

  ‘You never know who might be watching,’ she says, mimicking Nana, who tried to teach us about being groomed at all times. When you least expect it, girls, the man of your dreams will be coming around the corner of the street!

  ‘Yeah. Even at three a.m., someone might call,’ I say, then take both her hands and pull her up. ‘Come on, switch that off.’

  She allows herself to be led until we reach the foot of the stairs, then she stops and pulls her hand away. I turn to see that she is frowning.

  ‘Come on,’ I say sharply, about to turn off the light.

  ‘So how come?’ she whispers, lifting her eyes to my face. ‘How come you don’t have them anymore?’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ I snap, pretending I don’t know what she means, but of course I do. She knows I do, too, which makes it all the more crazy to be standing here denying it at three a.m. on this hot, airless night. But I know this much about myself, that if I let her embark on one of her big rambling monologues about my dreams now, I’ll start screaming.

  ‘Those dreams were so … you, Peach.’

  ‘Bed,’ I say again, sharply.

  ‘But I won’t sleep,’ she whines. ‘I won’t.’

  ‘You just tell yourself that.’

  ‘No, I honestly won’t sleep,’ she sighs miserably.

  ‘You will.’

  ‘Can I sleep with you?’ she whines. ‘Please, Peach?’

  ‘It’s too hot.’

  ‘I swear I won’t touch you.’

  ‘Promise?’ I sigh, too hot to fight her.

  She nods happily and hurries up the stairs like a little kid. ‘I’ll bring the big fan in,’ she calls over her shoulder. ‘Okay?’

  ‘Okay,’ I say sourly.

  I walk up the stairs behind my sister watching her bum bounce up and down. There are rolls of fat around her neck. She pauses on the stairs and tries to sound offhand.

  ‘When are Mum and Dad coming back?’

  ‘Six weeks on Saturday.’

  ‘Oh, I can’t wait,’ she sighs. ‘It will be soooo great to see them again, won’t it?’

  ‘Yeah. I guess.’ Our parents have only been gone two weeks, but Stella is already missing them. She’ll be like a bloody caged cat by the time they get back. She goes straight for the shower, comes out stark naked and goes to her room for the big fan.

  ‘Wear a nightie,’ I yell after her.

  ‘It’s too hot!’ she calls back.

  ‘Stay in your own room then!’

  ‘Such a prude.’

  ‘Yeah, well … cop it.’

  When she comes back in with the fan she is wearing a cotton nightdress like mine, except hers only just fits her.

  I head for the bathroom and stand under the lovely cold water, gasping a
s the cold enters my bones. I know I won’t get much sleep now. It is a double bed, but once she’s asleep my sister’s legs and arms often fling out in odd directions. She’ll grunt and sigh and snore a little. She is actually liable to push me out. But she’ll be happy. And I’ll be doing the job that I agreed to do and … that’s important.

  ‘Tell me stuff,’ Stella murmurs sleepily.

  ‘Too late.’

  ‘Just tell me anything.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I like listening to your voice.’

  ‘Well, I don’t want to talk.’

  ‘Hate it when you go all quiet on me, Peach.’

  ‘Please shut up, Stella. I have to get up early in the morning.’

  ‘It’s just a stupid old boring cafe job.’

  ‘But it’s a five-minute bike ride and I need money for the trip.’

  ‘Have you guys bought your tickets yet?’

  ‘No, we haven’t and please … shut up.’

  ‘Okay.’

  The full blast of the fan is good on my freshly showered skin. I watch the way it makes the curtains flutter in the dark and I am lightly and fleetingly happy.

  It is too hot for even a sheet and we are both spreadeagled on our backs as far away from each other as we can get. My right arm is above my head and my left dangles over the edge of the bed. Just as well I’m thin or there wouldn’t be room for us both. Within a minute I hear my sister’s deep, even breathing. I turn over on my side and close my eyes.

  Stella and I are so different physically that it is funny. People who don’t know the situation just about fall over when I introduce her as my sister.

  ‘What?’ Their mouths open in disbelief. ‘But you don’t look anything like each other!’

  Then come the wisecracks about Mum having had a fling around the time Stella was conceived, because oddly enough Mum and I look pretty similar, which is funny, really, because it’s me who isn’t the blood relation.

  I was adopted as a baby when my parents thought they couldn’t have any children of their own. They had their names down for another child when Mum became pregnant ‘out of the blue’, as she likes to say. Stella came out looking just like Dad, a bit stocky, olive skin, with dark eyes and thick curly black hair.

  Sometimes we don’t bother to tell people the truth. We just smile at each other and let them rave on. Of course, all our friends know. Most of them were initially intrigued about what it felt like not to be ‘real’ sisters. I stopped getting annoyed about what that question implied a long time ago. Stella too. We figure we were so damned lucky to get each other that all that crap isn’t important. Everyone has family issues, why should we be immune? When our friends met our parents and saw that we live in a normal family – that me being adopted is not an issue – they soon lost interest.

  My hair is naturally blonde and wavy, and although Mum and I have quite differently shaped faces, and her skin is fairer than mine, I pass as her birth daughter without comment, because I’m fine-boned too, and we both have blue eyes. I’m tall for a girl: 172 centimetres when I last measured myself.

  Stella was pretty too, but in a completely different way. She still is, of course, only it’s getting hard to see it. Her coal-black hair, bright-dark eyes and husky voice make you think of Spain (even though none of us has been there!). People pick up on her warm, gutsy vibe as soon as they meet her, and they either love it or avoid her like the plague. Stella wears her heart on her sleeve. It’s just the way she is. She is fantastic and ridiculous in equal measure. We’re so close that she tells me I am her other side, the ethereal, cerebral guardian angel who lives in her head. If that is true, then she has to be my other side; the tempestuous, brave, wild side that I’m too uptight to let out most of the time.

  People have all these strange ideas about what being adopted must be like. For the record, let me just say that I don’t sit around yearning to meet my real parents, nor have I even wondered much about them. I don’t spend time thinking about how my life might have been different. Maybe I simply lack imagination, but it has never been something I’ve considered important. Oddly enough, it’s Stella who is more intrigued by it all than me. One of her favourite pastimes is weaving complicated stories about my origins. Your birth mother was a priestess in a faraway land … She couldn’t keep you because she was doomed to die when she turned sixteen. My lack of interest in these bizarre scenarios never fails to infuriate her.

  ‘I wish it was me who was adopted,’ she often moans to Mum and Dad. ‘The romance of it is wasted on boring old Peach!’

  ‘Will you look after her for us, sweetheart?’ Mum and Dad sat side by side on the deep-pink velvet two-seater couch under the window; it had belonged to Nana who’d lived with us until she died the year before. ‘We don’t have to go if it’s going to be too much for you or if you feel that you won’t be able to cope.’

  It pissed me off a bit that they thought they had to ask. As though I wouldn’t look after my sister while they were gone!

  ‘Of course,’ I said, not bothering to sound enthusiastic. ‘I’ll have her sorted out by the time you get back.’

  ‘We realise it might get difficult,’ Dad was looking down at his fingers, ‘but you can ring us any time. We’ll come home early if needs be.’

  ‘Don’t sweat.’ I shrugged. ‘It will be okay.’

  ‘Thanks, love.’ He gave me a tired smile. ‘But understand, you are not responsible for everything she does. And it’s only a couple of months.’

  ‘I know that.’

  ‘You think you’ll be okay at Christmas?’

  ‘We’ve been over this a million times!’ I said irritably. ‘I am nineteen years old!’

  Christmas has never been that big in our house, mainly because we don’t have any close relatives apart from Mum’s sister, Claire. It was all arranged for us to go to go over to Claire’s place for Christmas Day. But I knew it wasn’t really Christmas that was worrying them. It was Stella.

  My sister’s slide into a strange malaise over the last year had us all stumped. There was Nana’s dying, I suppose – they were so close because of the music thing – and then the teacher stuff, but it still didn’t make any sense to the rest of us.

  ‘Your sister is almost seventeen. You must continue to go about your normal life.’

  My normal life! I felt like laughing, and then I wanted to cry, because I was suddenly thinking about Fluke. The way he’d smiled at me through the smoke and bouncing lights and loud music, straight across the heads of the other girls, some of them my friends who were dancing so fast and mean and sexy that I couldn’t keep up.

  ‘Go see your friends and have fun, okay?’ Mum was nodding seriously. ‘All we’re asking is that you keep an eye out for her.’

  ‘Just as long as I can still bring home hot guys to party all night?’

  Dad grinned. ‘Just make sure Stella doesn’t get hold of them first!’

  The same week that Nana died, Stella got a new music teacher. I’d already left school by then, but I heard about her. Spiky and vivacious Ms Beatrice Baums, she of the striped red socks and sharp tongue, had decided that she was going to make Stella a star. What sixteen-year-old can resist that? To say Stella developed a crush on her teacher would be the understatement of the year. Stella didn’t just want to be like Ms Baums, she wanted to be her.

  Mum stood and propped her bum on my desk. She put one hand on my shoulder and ran her other fingers through my hair.

  ‘I might have to come back early,’ she said, resting her chin on the top of my head and holding me around the neck. ‘Wild men in the middle of the night sounds too good to miss.’

  ‘Hang on!’ Dad laughed.

  My parents are both doctors, specialists in different fields. Mum is in women’s health and Dad is a surgeon, with a speciality in oncology. Although he’s short for a man, Dad has a lovely, warm open face, dark skin and a long straight nose. He is one of those guys who shaves twice a day. He’s got patches of hair on his
back and shoulders and his legs and arms are thick with it. When Stella and I were really little, we’d sit on the mat of curly black hair covering his chest and belly and he’d tell us that he’d grown it especially for us to and we believed him.

  Stella used to say quite seriously that she’d never go out with a guy who wasn’t covered in hair like Dad, because she’d be afraid he wasn’t the real deal. I secretly agreed of course. Dad is the best.

  Mum is two inches taller than Dad, quieter, gentler, with beautiful fair skin. She is the most honest person I know, and the kindest. It’s not just me who thinks so. Everyone who meets my parents loves them.

  They were both looking at me, waiting for me to say something or ask something, but all I was thinking about was the lines of tiredness and stress I saw around their eyes and the fact that whatever happened I wasn’t going to call them back early. They really needed a break.

  Of course, we’d all been away together heaps of times, but this would be their first proper holiday together, just the two of them, since I came along. First they were off to Paris, where Mum had gone to university and still had friends, and then over to England to see Dad’s very old mother. It was all arranged that as soon as school finished Stella was going to do an intensive music summer school and I was going to get a cafe job and save for an overseas trip with my mates.

  Then two weeks before they left, Stella declared that she wasn’t going to do the summer school because she wanted to spend more time ‘with friends’. We all knew that was bullshit because she didn’t have friends any more.

  They’d fallen by the wayside like most other things in her life. She was just piking out on the thing that she was best at, and it didn’t make sense. But none of us knew what to do about it.

  ‘Just make sure you come home safely,’ I said stiffly. I couldn’t seem to swallow the lump that had formed in my throat. What if something happens to you? Just looking at them was freaking me out. I’d never thought of them as old before. Maybe it was just because they’d spent such long hours at work recently. I wished Mum hadn’t cut her hair so short and let it go grey. I wished she cared about her clothes; I wished she would laugh more, too, the way she used to.