Closed for Winter

by Georgia Blain

  So, I like it here. Here where it is safe in the pools. When I lower myself in, the water comes just to my waist. No further. And it is cool. I do not like the heat and the sand, I do not like the flies, and this place is my own. Just mine.

  On the jetty, an old woman eats fish and chips. Wrapped in newspaper. She breaks off fragments of the batter with her fingernails and tosses them across the wooden boards to the gulls gathered at her feet. They squawk furiously, pecking each other in the race for scraps. And then, standing at the railing, she throws the remains over the edge. The gulls dive and swoop in an angry whirl of grey, and the noise is, for one instant, deafening.

  I look up, startled by the cry of the birds. Out on the edge of the jetty, I see the boys gathering in a small group, tight black jeans and no shirts. They egg each other on, push each other, jostle each other, until one will eventually take the plunge. The first jump of the day. A dive-bomb that will rupture the smooth surface of the ocean, and down he will plummet, and then up again, glittering in the dazzle of sunlight as he pulls himself back up the ladder, wet jeans clinging to long thin legs.

  Under the jetty, families spread out towels in the cool. Eskies, cricket bats, li-los, books that are dog-eared at the corners; they are setting themselves up for the day. I watch. A dog snaps at the ankle of a girl who walks too close, a baby starts crying, a father slaps his son. A brother and sister fight and one of them runs off to tell, You’ll be sorry, while the other stays behind, hiding behind the pylons, and I drift in and drift out, sometimes aware, sometimes sensing no more than a general blur in the background.

  But did you see anything? Anything at all that was even a little bit unusual?

  I cannot think. I cannot pinpoint that moment they are looking for.

  I look up from my pool and try to find my sister. Just occasionally. To know where she is. To the left of the jetty are the dunes. Not really dunes, just gentle mounds of sand. She is normally there for most of the morning. Out of sight. Any clear vision is blocked by the pylons and then the sand itself. I scan along the shoreline but I know it is unlikely Frances will be in the water.

  I do not panic. It is just a routine check. And I slide back into the cool blue, deep down, bubbling a lungful of air back up to the surface and then out again, my hair a long wet snake down my back.

  The sun climbs higher, until it is a flat white disc burning a hole in the sky. Lunches are bought from the kiosk, or unpacked from baskets. Sandwiches, hot chips, chicken, pies; I can smell it all and I am hungry. I want to go home, and I stand, no longer a mermaid, but unsteady on my legs, to look for Frances. To look across to the dunes, to the water, to the end of the jetty and behind me, to the path leading up to the road. And then again, fingers crossed, hopeful that this time I will see her.

  But there is nothing.

  Only families and children and the boys on the jetty and the sand and the ocean, and no Frances.

  So I sit in the pool again. And wait. I do not want to move, because I had promised I would be here. If I move we might miss each other. Frances may come back and walk home without me. And I would be left alone on the beach. Waiting and waiting for something that had already gone.

  The storm has stopped and everything is still.

  The only sound is the hum of the refrigerator in the corner and the ticking of the kitchen clock. These streets are quiet. Suburban backstreets. Everyone sleeps at night and everyone works during the day.

  I pull the cutlery drawer out to put my photograph away, and the knives and forks rattle. I wait nervously for Martin to call out to me. Nothing.

  He, too, is asleep. Snoring in his flannel pyjamas. Content without me and oblivious to the fact that I am angry with him.

  I pull back the quilt on my side of the bed and Martin does not wake.

  My side of the bed. I lie narrow and straight so that I will not touch him. My eyes are closed but I am not asleep. I am willing him to wake and open his arms to me. I want him to open his arms to me.

  He does not move.

  If he did, I would only pull away. This is what happens between us.

  Over and over again.

  So, I lie there, with him and alone, and far away, underneath the jetty, the water slaps against the pylons, bleached and coated with barnacles.

  5

  This cannot go on.

  These are Martin’s last words to me as he leaves in the morning. He is referring to my silence. I can see that he is confused, that he does not understand. I can also see that he is fed up.

  I do not want to speak to him until he apologises. But how can I explain that when I am not talking to him? And I do not even know what apology it is that I want. I fear it is so large it amounts to no less than apologising for his very existence.

  I do not want him. But I do not want him to leave me. And I am terrified that I am driving him away.

  Martin and I both work at the State Theatre. He is the financial controller and I am the box office manager. This was how we met, seven years ago.

  When I started at the theatre, I did not want anyone to know who I was.

  Throughout my school years, I lived with the knowledge that they knew, all of them, what had happened. I was her sister. That was my identity and I could not escape it. I was as quiet as I could possibly be, unobtrusive and unnoticeable in the hope that they would soon forget I existed, and that it had happened.

  But it did not work.

  Head down, eyes to the ground, I would walk past the boys behind the bike shed, older boys who had known her, and I would feel their gaze, the sting of their curiosity. My cheeks would burn.

  Outside the tuckshop, the girls would look me up and down, their whispers scratching the air around me. Like nettles. Her friends or her enemies? I did not know. I drew circles around them all. Zones of danger. Areas to avoid.

  And it was not just those who had known her. Even those who hadn’t had heard. That’s her. Poor little thing. The mothers who waited at the gate would watch me when I came out at home time. The teachers would monitor me with concern. The children in my year avoided me as if I were contaminated.

  They all knew.

  I was marked and I had no escape. Not in that school and not in the next.

  The first day of Marketing at the Institute of Technology, I stood up shyly and tried to do what I had been asked. To market myself. To introduce myself to the class. I am shy now, but then it was even worse. It had no limits. I had been waiting for my turn, faint with dread. I had been unable to bear the thought of having to explain who I was. I had been trying to prepare something to say, but when my moment came, all that I had prepared slipped like water through my fingers.

  And I lied.

  Apart from my name, there was not a word of truth in all I said.

  I headed back to my place, giddy and light with what I had done.

  But then I heard it.

  Oh yeah? someone hissed as I sat down. I looked around and saw him. Eyes staring straight at me. It was one of them. One of the boys from school. And I felt a fool for having imagined there was a possibility of escape.

  But at the State Theatre Company, no one knew me. I applied for the position by filling out a form. Just the bare details. In the interview I gave nothing away. It was not difficult, I was experienced by then. And as I answered their questions, I knew I had finally succeeded in hiding it all; locked it up, put it away, out of reach from everyone.

  I had become what I had tried to be. Unobtrusive. Unnoticeable.

  I look at my reflection in the mirror as I get ready for work and it seems there is no definition to my face. There are no lines to mark where I end and the air begins. But this is a bad day, I tell myself. This is not all there is. It cannot be. I lean forward anxiously until my forehead hits the glass, and I pull back, a dull throb in my head. I feel like a fool.

  Martin is the only one who knows the story. He is the only one who knows who I am.

  I didn’t know you had a sister, he had said, referr
ing to the photograph he had seen in our living room. I had forgotten about it in my relief that we had finally left Dorothy in the kitchen. The first visit was over. He had seen. I would not have to show him again.

  But there was that photograph.

  We were driving south, inching our way through the miles of outer suburbs that eventually lead to the periphery of this city. It was hot, the dry heat of a desert town, and the wind blew gritty, its mounting fury swinging the awnings on used-car yards and petrol stations. It would catch at your throat and make your eyes sting. I could see it and I could imagine it. But I could not feel it.

  Martin turned the airconditioning up another notch.

  There were goosebumps on my arms.

  Is she older than you?

  He put his foot down on the accelerator in an attempt to overtake the car in front. There was a truck coming towards us. I closed my eyes. He swore loudly as he was forced to pull back into the lane we had just left.

  He was taking me away for the weekend, to stay with friends of his whom I had never met.

  She’s a painter and he’s a writer, he had said, proud of his links to the artistic world.

  He had described them and I had imagined them. They had made me nervous before I had even met them, and I had tried to make excuses, reasons why I had to stay at home, but it had been futile.

  Please, I had eventually said, I am no good with strangers. You will have a better time on your own.

  He had looked at me with disbelief. If it came to going on his own, he would rather stay at home. The reason why I am with you is so that I have someone to do things with. So that I do not have to be on my own, he had said.

  And when I had protested again, he had told me that I was adorable and that he would look after me. He had circled me in his arms, so tight that I could not breathe, and I had given in, terrified at the prospect of what I was about to encounter, terrified that I would spend the entire weekend silent.

  He pulled up at a petrol station and opened his door, letting in a blast of hot air. Okay, I told myself, when he gets back in, I will tell him everything. I prepared myself, the whole story ready to be laid out in front of him, and as he turned the key in the ignition, I was about to begin. But he spoke first.

  You’ll love this place, he said, and Marissa’s paintings. Not my kind of thing, but they’ll be worth a lot one day. Mark my words, and as he pulled out of the service station, he told me he had always been interested in the art market. He had a theory, he said, about how you could make money.

  Simple really, and he began to explain it to me. In detail.

  The moment was gone.

  I had not told my story. I had not said what I wanted to say. And so I was left, waiting for him to bring up my sister again and knowing that when he did, I still had to speak. All weekend I dreaded the moment when he would ask. The few words that I managed came out heavy and solid; I could only just squeeze them past the bulk of all that was still unsaid.

  On our last night, I heard Marissa whisper to Robert as I tiptoed past their bedroom to our own. He never shuts up, and she never says a word.

  Shhh, he answered, they’ll hear.

  I had spent the afternoon with her, picking figs and apricots in a garden that tumbled down the hill to the sea, brilliant in the distance. I had wanted to tell her that I had always longed for a garden like this, I had wanted to compare it with the place from where I had come, but when I began, Martin interrupted.

  Poor Elise grew up with a pebbled back yard, he laughed. I don’t think she’d seen a flower until she moved in with me.

  I said nothing.

  Later, when I asked her how she knew Martin, she told me that she didn’t. Not really. She had known his wife.

  It was not until that night, our last night, that I finally told Martin. Unable to bear it any longer, I told him the whole story, all that I could remember, while outside, the branches of the olive trees swayed dark against the window.

  But it was not the story I had prepared for him in the car. It was a story I had not spoken out loud, and with my first attempt to voice it, it came out tangled and twisted, falling in a heap between us.

  I do not know what reaction I had expected.

  He sat up in bed. It was, he said, extraordinary. Impossible. There must be a way we could work out what had happened to her. If we went over every detail, wrote a list. Still drunk from dinner, he became excited. He put forward possibility after possibility, certain each time that he had found the answer, the answer that no one had managed to find before him.

  No, I said, wanting to retract it all. That is not the point.

  How could I explain? I hadn’t told him because I wanted him to solve it. I had told him because I wanted him to understand. I wanted him to know.

  And I wanted him to care.

  But he did not listen. He just kept on talking until eventually he saw my face and he realised he had gone wrong.

  Please, I said. Don’t tell.

  And he promised. Did not question me as he normally would, but solemnly swore he would stay quiet. My secret was safe.

  As far as I know, he is still the only one who knows.

  To the others I am just Elise Silverton.

  Unobtrusive and unnoticeable.

  6

  Newspapers, like photographs, deteriorate with age. The paper yellows and becomes brittle, fragile to the touch. The print remains, stamped black on the page, but the page eventually crumbles in the fingers, like ash.

  The first article, the one that announced our story to the world, is pasted at the front of Dorothy’s first scrapbook. It is brief and matter-of-fact: the date, the time and our names. At the top there is a copy of the photograph that is in our living room. Frances, aged eleven. Frances in her school uniform smiling at the camera. It does not look like her, but it was the only photograph my mother had.

  The article is dated Monday 10 January 1974. It appeared in a newspaper that no longer exists. The paper was once the colour of the page on which it is pasted. There is now a contrast. It has aged more rapidly than her book.

  My photograph has also deteriorated. The corners are bent and creased and there are fingermarks across the print from where I have held it. There is a stain on the back, coffee-coloured, and the colours of the image are no longer true.

  Dorothy keeps photocopies of that first newspaper article, a pile of them in a folder on the kitchen table. She puts a copy in each letter that she writes. I know. I have seen her.

  She writes her letters in the morning. Long letters to people she does not know. She reads their stories in the paper and then clips the article for her ‘Similar Stories’ book. She has their names and then she finds their addresses, sometimes just from the phone book, sometimes she has to be more resourceful.

  Dear Jeanne (may I call you Jeanne?),

  My name is Dorothy and I too have been through a similar experience to what you are now experiencing. I am writing to you because I thought it might help to hear from someone who knows how you feel. And believe me, none of them (the police, your friends, even the rest of your family) really know . . .

  She does not write these letters quickly. Sometimes they take her days. She will sit at the table, staring out past the sink to the window, her eyes narrowed in concentration. She is taking the few scraps of information she has from the newspaper article and trying to become that person. She wants to see what they see and to feel what they feel. Only then will she start writing again.

  I know. I have watched her. It is like watching someone disappear.

  When she finishes, she signs her letters with her full name, Dorothy Elise Silverton. I have read them late at night while she sleeps and I have wondered who this person is. I have tried to soak up the words on the page, pretending that she was speaking them out loud to me and not just writing them to a stranger.

  I have never told her that I know this other side to her.

  I have never told Martin that she is not just what she ap
pears to be. Dotty Dot, whose life has become confined to this house he feels she should leave. Mad Dorothy babbling forth a stream of stories, the layers of truth and imaginings tangled in and out of each other, or abruptly lapsing into a silence that may last for hours. It is always one or the other, never the in between, never the conversation of a person who listens and responds.

  Except in those letters.

  She finishes writing at midday. There is a knock on the door and she stops. Puts her pen away, gathers up her papers and lets him in. John Mills, standing on the cracked cement steps, one hand clutching a white paper bag and the other resting on the rusted handle of the flyscreen door.

  He brings ham and tomato sandwiches. Always. One for each of them, and when I was at home, sick from school or studying, one for me too.

  They eat in the kitchen. She makes coffee, strong and black, The way your father liked it, and she smokes a cigarette while they drink it. He frowns with disapproval.

  When I was young, I was the only girl who could blow smoke rings, and she blows three, expertly. I was also the only girl who could drink with the boys and not be sick. I could run faster than any of them, stay out later and dance until dawn. I have a constitution to envy. Besides, and she smiles at him, I only ever have one a day now. No one will buy them for me when they do the shopping.

  I have sat in the corridor and listened to them talk. He does not laugh at her wild and impossible stories. He does not try to silence her.

  He was once her doctor but he is now retired. Strictly speaking, his visits are no longer professional. They have not been for a long time. But despite the fact that his surgery is now closed, he still likes to do his rounds. Just a few of his old patients. People whom he visits regularly; my mother the most regularly of all.

  Loneliness is the worst illness of all, he once said.

  And I did not know whether he was referring to his patients or to himself.