About a Girl

by Joanne Horniman

  I crept around the house and did a few things while she went on sleeping. The grey cat accompanied me, purring when it saw me opening a tin of food, winding round my legs and collapsing at my feet at every opportunity. I didn’t feel that it was mine, in any way, and yet here it was.

  When Flynn woke, I sponged her clean, changed the damp sheets, and put her into one of my own clean nighties, one that my mother had bought for me. Perversely, it gave me pleasure tending to her small wants, anticipating her needs. Flynn was so weak, so helpless, so dependent.

  Mid-morning, while I was offering her tea and toast, her mobile rang. I handed it to her. She looked at the screen and did not answer it.

  ‘My mother,’ she said, quietly. ‘I don’t have the energy to talk to her. If I answer she’ll work out I’m ill. She’ll want to come and look after me. She’ll want to come and take me home. Next time she rings, can you answer and tell her a little white lie? She likes you; she’ll believe anything you say.’

  She sank back onto the pillows and fell asleep.

  So her mother liked me! I felt obscurely pleased.

  I took the phone outside where it wouldn’t disturb her, and sat in the shade against the side of the house and painted my toenails green. When it rang again, the screen said, Mum.

  I answered it, saying, ‘Hello, this is Flynn’s phone. Anna speaking.’

  ‘Anna? Hello … is Flynn there?’

  ‘No, um …’

  ‘Is anything the matter with her?’ There was an edge of panic in her voice.

  ‘No! She’s fine … she’s just …’

  Flynn hadn’t said what the little white lie should be, but I told her mother that Flynn was out helping Caleb with something that would take all day – that she’d accidentally left her phone with me and I wasn’t sure when I could get it back to her. I promised to tell her that her mother had rung – no reason, just to see how she was.

  Soon after I’d hung up, the phone beeped. Message. Automatically I looked to see who it was from. It was from Rocco.

  My pulse quickened. I heard the children next door calling to their father. A bird piped shrilly from a branch of the pawpaw tree. The morning was bright and ordinary but my belly felt heavy with dread and anxiety.

  And then, idly, guiltily, I looked to see what the message was.

  Hey, Flynn, what’s this people keep telling me about a grrl?

  By Monday morning, she was still sleeping most of the time. I called the café to say she was sick.

  Coming home at lunchtime (I’d driven to work so I could do this), I found her still asleep, but her temperature felt normal. I made myself a coffee and a slice of bread and cheese, fed the cat, kissed Flynn on the cheek, and departed, leaving a glass of lemonade and a stack of Sao biscuits next to the bed. When I got home that evening she was in the shower.

  I remembered to tell her the story I’d told her mother. I didn’t report how anxious her mother had sounded about her. I remembered her mother’s sorrowful face, and it all fell into place.

  After her shower, Flynn put on the clean clothes I’d brought up from her place, and started eating ravenously.

  I couldn’t forget that she'd not told me her brother had died. But I could see why she didn’t like to think or talk about it; it was too painful. Singing a song about him was different – it was a way of making sense of her feelings.

  I didn’t even ask who this Rocco was, or about the text message that seemed to be referring to me: What’s this people keep telling me about a grrl?

  I pretended everything was fine. I did not want anything to come between us.

  When I remarked that I needed a haircut, she offered to do it, bringing from her own place a pair of haircutting scissors that belonged to Hannah. We sat on the wall in late afternoon sunlight, and as she clipped my hair I remembered Morgan, the day we had cut each other’s hair, the thrill of being close to her, and later, the shame I had felt at my helpless desire.

  Chapter Ten

  AND THEN I spoiled everything.

  I keep remembering her in her kitchen, with her hands full of apples.

  I blurted out, ‘Who’s Rocco?’

  I couldn’t help myself. It just came out and, once there, hanging in the air, couldn’t be retrieved.

  She tipped the fruit into a bowl. They might have been pomegranates, they were so round and red and unreal-looking. They might have been plucked from the underworld, the place where the dead go.

  An apple tumbled onto the table. She picked it up and put it with the others. Flynn, the keeper of apples and pomegranates.

  It was after work, almost dark, and the tai chi women in the room across the way were moving their arms in arcs, bending and twisting like old trees in the wind. I watched them. I wished, for a moment, that I was old, and all the difficult parts of my life, like falling in love – all the agonies and uncertainties – were over, and I could stand in a room and spread my wings like the white dove.

  Who’s Rocco?

  ‘A friend,’ she said. ‘Just a friend of mine. Anyway, how do you know about Rocco?’

  ‘Your mother asked about him, that day in the café.’

  She laughed, without humour. ‘You certainly have a good memory, Anna.’

  Her sarcasm made me reckless, and I rushed on.

  ‘Is he the boy in the photo?’ I demanded.

  ‘What photo?’

  ‘The one in your drawer,’ I said reluctantly.

  Flynn’s face looked incredulous, and then angry.

  ‘You looked through my things?’ She stood with one hand on her hip, furious, and I felt my heart contract with dismay.

  Coldly, without looking at me, she reached for the bowl she’d been softening butter in and tipped in some sugar, added eggs, mashed some bananas with a fork. She automatically stuck a finger into the mixture and tasted it, then added some flour, not even bothering to sift it. Timothy put his paw into the bowl and hooked some out, but she did not push him away. She stood with her hands clutching the bowl as if it was supporting her, looking ahead, her eyes fixed somewhere on the wall.

  ‘If you must know,’ she said, ‘The boy in the picture is my brother Simon. I keep the picture in a drawer because I can’t face looking at it all the time, just yet.’

  The women next door had finished being white doves and were collecting their bags and hugging each other and laughing, preparing to leave. One day I would be an old woman, and all the painful parts of my life would be over. I would be a flying white dove.

  ‘I’m sorry, because I should have told you about him, but I just can’t, yet. That’s why I wrote the song. It was a way of saying how I feel.’

  She picked up the spoon and began mixing the cake batter.

  There was a shabby kitchen at twilight, there was a table, and two girls, and a cat, and apples came into it somewhere. They looked like pomegranates in a certain light, if you squinted your eyes and used your imagination. They could remind you of death if you wanted them to, those apples, or pomegranates. They reminded you of folly.

  There were bananas and flour and a cat licking cake mix from the bowl. There was a girl who knew about death and wouldn’t say, and another girl who knew nothing. This girl could have gone to the other and said, I am so, so sorry. I was completely in the wrong.

  But she didn’t. She was like a car without a handbrake. She was on a hill and about to roll down, about to gather speed and crash. She was an accident waiting to happen.

  ‘That message Rocco sent you … What’s this people keep telling me about a girl? Or something. Why should they think he needs to know?’

  She put down the wooden spoon and shook her head, as if she couldn’t believe it. ‘You read a text sent to me!’

  But I pressed on.

  ‘You said a “fri
end”. You mean, like a boyfriend.’

  ‘Yes, if you must know. A boyfriend.’

  The cat jumped down from the table.

  The lights went out in the room across the way.

  I looked at Flynn but she wouldn’t meet my eye.

  ‘But where is he, if he hasn’t come back yet? And is he coming back to you? I mean, are you still on with him or anything?’

  ‘If you must know, we’re still friends.’ Flynn spoke as if she was pounding rocks to smithereens. ‘And because he was going overseas for a year we decided we’d leave each other free for that time. I mean, long-distance relationships are difficult, aren’t they? And yes, when he comes back I’ll see him. And I don’t know what will happen! Does that satisfy your curiosity? Or do you want to control my whole life?’

  She slammed the cake into the oven.

  ‘Anyway, I bet there are things about yourself you haven’t told me,’ she went on.

  I went to the window and looked out into the dark, narrow space between the buildings. It was so empty, so devoid of light.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. Though what I was sorry for I didn’t know.

  That day I told her about my first year at university – about my madness, as I called it. I told her about my anger, my illogical fury at receiving a high distinction for my essay. I told her about Molly’s accident and how it had been all my fault. I told her about my father’s defection from the family, but not about falling in love with Morgan.

  And then I told her about ‘The Tablets’ that had worked such wonders, and made me not care about anything at all.

  She looked at me rather dubiously. I’d suspected that she would, which was why I’d not said anything before.

  She said, ’Don’t people get addicted to those things?’

  ‘Well, I didn’t,’ I said, defensively. ‘I think they helped me a lot. They helped me to think clearly and rationally again. They got rid of all the static in my head.’

  I teetered on the edge of hostility.

  We looked at each other. Neither of us could think what to say. It was like some sort of standoff. I wondered if we could ever make each other happy again.

  Chapter Eleven

  WHAT ARE THE words of that song? Everywhere you go, always take the weather with you. It has an upbeat tempo, but it seems to me to be coloured with sadness.

  Flynn always had the weather with her. Or at least, I always noticed the weather when she was with me. She heightened my senses, caused me to notice things. She made me feel more alive.

  Our argument in the kitchen made the weather irrelevant to me, because we avoided each other. I went to work and then home again, burrowed into books, and lived on comforting invalid food like tea and Vegemite toast. I was licking my wounds. I felt that I might never see her again.

  I took out the mother-of-pearl button she’d given me. A token, given to me on the day when I had abused her trust. (But I was right, wasn’t I, said a little voice in my head. There is a boy. I was right about that, for the wrong reasons.)

  I thought of the childhood trinkets Flynn kept in the little tin. The guitar pick, that she’d not told me the history of. Simon had taught her to play. He had helped her shop for Louise. That one, he’d said, is a little beauty. It must be one of his guitar picks.

  And the day her mother had turned up, it was just after the anniversary of Simon’s death. So that was the grief in her. I imagined my own mother if one of us had died. She’d be inconsolable, for years and years, perhaps always. That sort of thing must never go away. Flynn’s mother said she’d called in the week before, but Flynn was at the beach with me, observing the anniversary with me, even though I didn’t know it at the time. That must show how much she cared about me – mustn’t it?

  And then the voice in my head said, And what about when Rocco gets back?

  She arrived unexpectedly on Sunday afternoon, with a bag full of groceries.

  ‘Let’s not quarrel,’ she said, and went straight to the kitchen to make us a Japanese feast, little seaweed rolls with slivers of pink salmon and cucumber, and bowls of soupy rice.

  We ate sitting on cushions at the coffee table, not saying much. We passed food across the table, spooned soup into our mouths, and nibbled fastidiously on the little rice parcels. I’d made a pot of green tea (I had bought a teapot, finally, in an op shop, a small Japanese-style pot with a side handle), and I poured it into small glasses with thick bottoms and ridged sides. I spooned pale green wasabi onto my plate and dabbed a roll into it, savouring the fiery bite. I sat for a while without eating, and took in my surroundings. I took in the colours – the pink salmon in the white rice rolls, the translucent cucumber with its thread of dark green skin, the black seaweed wrapper, and Flynn’s glossy dark hair.

  The sky outside was a pure blue. Not a breath of wind stirred the trees.

  The only sound was the clapping and chanting of my neighbour’s children as they played handball against the side of the house.

  At last, we had eaten enough. Flynn lay back against the sofa and said, ‘I’d like to tell you about Simon.’

  She went on without waiting for me to say anything.

  ‘He was just the best brother. You know how siblings are not meant to get on? Well, we did. He was only three years older than me, and we were best mates. He was the one who called me Flynn – he said Rose was a sissy name. We used to go down to the creek in the paddock behind the house and make rafts out of drums and bamboo – they always sank. And he’d hoist me up trees with him and we’d sit looking at the view with the branches swaying underneath us. I broke bones playing with him. I have scars. But he was such fun to be with.

  ‘He made his first guitar out of a biscuit tin, with a wooden neck and ordinary string. It sounded okay – or so we thought.

  ‘So anyway, when he got a real guitar for Christmas, he let me use it, and then the following Christmas our parents gave me one – just an acoustic. And then we could be a duo!

  ‘Okay – he wasn’t perfect. He was really wild when he was a teenager – a risk-taker. He rode a friend’s motorbike when he was under age – not just once, but all the time – at speed, on public roads. Don’t know why he was never caught. Smoked dope. Drank spirits. Maybe it all went with his rock-musician image of himself. Got an electric guitar, then urged me to save for my own. That’s Louise – you see why I like her so much?

  ‘I called her Louise because he said Louise was an okay girl’s name. He said he always fell for girls named Louise – they were smart and sassy. It was sort of fatal for him to meet a girl with that name. I can only ever remember one – it didn’t work out. He wrote a song about her, of course.’

  She sat for a long time without speaking.

  ‘How did he die?’ I prodded.

  ‘He drowned,’ she said. ‘Went out on a friend’s boat late one night. No life jacket. When he … the body was found, the autopsy found he’d been drinking.’ She punched the cushion she’d been clasping to her chest. ‘Oh, he was so stupid! I hate him!’

  She turned to me, her face smeared with tears, her lips curled with grief. ‘For ages afterwards, I kept saying to him in my head, It’s just like you to leave me on my own! So how am I meant to go on?’

  She shook her head as though getting rid of images. ‘But he didn’t mean to die.’

  Later, late that night, while we lay in bed in the dark, I told her about falling in love with Morgan.

  ‘I fell in love with my father’s girlfriend,’ I said. ‘My stepmother, sort of.’ Because it seemed important that she know.

  ‘Was she the first one?’ she asked.

  ‘I had a crush, that’s all. It didn’t even last for very long.’ All those days turning up breathless at their house, hoping that my father wouldn’t be there. ‘But no, she wasn’t the first girl I had a cr
ush on. One of a long line.’

  ‘When did you realise that you liked girls?’

  ‘Oh …’ I pretended to think. ‘When I was about six.’

  ‘Six!’ She laughed, incredulous.

  So perhaps she didn’t know the feeling of always being alien in a world where what you saw and what you felt never added up.

  I remembered my black period, when I read Dostoyevsky, imagining myself as a disaffected, subversive raskol’niki in a stinking, ragged black coat, stamping my feet in the snow, the steam of my hot breath, harnesses jingling in the frosty air. Telling myself, Courage!

  I imagined my eyes red with anger and fury, scowling through the windows of a lighted ballroom at women with scented white shoulders, little feet in satin slippers. I was outcast and alone, because I had fallen from grace. And there were no street signs to show me the way.

  I felt Flynn’s hand take mine.

  ‘Of course,’ I found myself repeating, ‘I knew when I was six. How about you?’

  ‘How about me what?’

  ‘When did you first know that you “liked girls”?’

  I heard her sigh. ‘You know, I don’t think I do especially. Apart from you. You were the first. I’m usually attracted to men.’ She squeezed my hand.

  ‘Then why me?’

  She was silent for a moment, but I waited. I really wanted to know.

  ‘I think it was the way you looked at me – that day on the roof. My heart went out to you, and I saw the possibility. Of something with you. And I thought – why not?’

  I remembered her reaching over a fence to pick someone’s flower for herself. I must have this. Was I just something that she must have?

  ‘And you know, Anna, sometimes I wish I hadn’t allowed myself to think that. Because you can choose to fall in love. But the choice goes only so far, because once you’re in, it’s like quicksand. It seems irrevocable.’

  At the words fall in love, my heart quickened.