The Life You Choose and That Chose You

by Figment Publishing

  ‘Ow ware! Too nice! He's a good boy. Is he still seeing Janice? She's a nice girl.’

  ‘Ya, they together still. But you know, it's like I always tell him: just because a girl is pretty don't mean you have to be on a leash. She doesn't even have a job, you know, a grown girl like that! I don't think it will last.’

  Sometimes I wish Aunty Didi would just shut up. She always talks like this, like Davie is so perfect. So what if he is? Nobody cares! I don't care about her or him or any of them. I want to go to the room where my cousins are sleeping, but I stiffen when I hear Charlie's voice close by.

  I creep to the side of the island and spy out to the lounge. He plants wet, slightly open-mouthed kisses on the lips of every stepdaughter he sees. They smile tight smiles and push him away with polite, but firm hands. He is roving around the house getting involved in every conversation. He talks loudly about the price of bread. He shows a cousin the ruby ring on his pinkie finger and retells the story of how he won it in a fight in 1969. At last he sits at the dining-room table and pours himself another drink. He pats his shirt pocket and pulls out a silver necklace with a small heart pendant dangling at the bottom. He smiles at it as Grandma Brenda pulls a chair up next to him. He puts the necklace in Brenda's hand so that he can pour her another drink.

  ‘Do you think she'll like it, Brenda?’

  ‘Yes, I think she will.’

  I pull my head in and rest my back against the island.

  I'm outside in the dark. I walk along the side of the house, my hand brushing the brick to keep me steady. The light from the kitchen illuminates a little of the backyard, but I stay away from the lit patch. I know the voices inside are still booming but the walls muffle the sound. The music is muted too. I feel like I'm inside a bubble. I feel giddy. It's naughty to be outside, but I like it.

  The backyard is small, with tall mango trees at the back. There's a big aviary behind those trees. Uncle Mervin keeps speckled pigeons, parakeets, doves, chickens and a parrot all caged up. I hop along the path to the darkness of the trees. My hands lead me, as I step one, two, left and one, two, right towards the birds. The smell of bird poo gets strong. There is another smell too. Charlie's cigar smoke.

  ‘What kind, Liatie?’

  ‘Davie!’ His silhouette leans against a mango tree, facing the birds. ‘How'd you know it was me? Did you steal one of Charlie's cigars?’

  ‘You think I've got no money to buy my own?’

  I frown at this Davie-Big-Man. ‘How'd you know it was me?’

  ‘Want a puff?’

  ‘You smell like Charlie.’

  He sucks on the horrible fat cigar, stubs it out on the tree behind him and pockets it.

  ‘What you doing here, Liatie?’

  ‘Don't call me that, I'm not a liatie.’

  ‘What are you then? A stekki? A sexy lady?’ He laughs at me and beckons me over to him. I go.

  ‘Where's Janice?’

  ‘She's sick.’

  ‘What's wrong?’

  ‘She's having a baby.’

  I blush. They did it.

  ‘I like Janice. She's nice and she has nice hair.' I talk about hair because he's touching my hair and breathing bitter breath down on my face. I want to say something but he is very quiet. His hand is on my shoulder, his fingers stroke my neck. I can hear the birds cooing lullabies behind me. I want to close my eyes, but I close my hands into fists instead.

  ‘Sophie! Sophie!’ Mummy calls from the back door, her voice high and anxious. Davie quickly moves his hand from my shoulder. I turn away from him and run back up the path. She hears me first, but then sees me coming from the dark. She falls to her knees, lets me run into her arms. I breathe hard on her shoulder, my snot dribbles onto her curry-stained dress. I've been naughty and she's worried, but she just holds me and softly strokes my back.

  ‘Everything okay?’

  ‘I'm sleepy, Mummy.'

  She didn't dance. Not something you'd confess in company—somehow it was tantamount to admitting celibacy. However, four hours into the reception and it was the only thing left to do (apart from jumping into the pool, which was at least an hour—or maybe one collective drink—away). Ella adjusted her dress, rearranged her feet, and watched the great time being had on the lawn below. She tried to look delightfully and wholly occupied, as if her supervision were integral to the proceedings. She had to hope that no-one would approach her doing that infuriating mime—arm extended, beckoning, dancing backwards in exaggerated entreaty.

  She had cried. During the ceremony and again during the speeches. She hardly knew anyone at the wedding (apart from Natalie—the bride—and a few other people from work), but the familiar tune of the proceedings had exerted its tidal pull and she'd wept with the chorus. It was to be a modest, two-day event, just far enough out of town to warrant a sleepover with a bunch of virtual strangers. How she'd made it onto the guest list was a mystery. It appeared that she was the sole representative of a unique subspecies—halfway between friends and parents.

  Ella clutched the drink that was keeping her afloat and surveyed the crowd. Everyone was dancing now. Some people jiggled aimlessly, content to be in the throng. Others were effortlessly good and, despite her hard-wired resolve, Ella felt the strings of envy tugging gently. Above them all hung a constellation of bobbing paper lanterns. The shadow of a streamer stretched across one of the glowing spheres, the twisting, horizontal line dancing in time to the eighties hits. The lantern looked, for all the world, like a face; a big white smiley face with a crazy shadow mouth singing along to the music. Ella sat entranced by the antics of her bouncing new friend. She wished there was someone she could tell, someone else to bear witness to the phenomenon. Look, it's singing! The DJ seemed pleased with himself. He obviously thought there was some ironic value to his playlist, but it sounded pretty much like the top ten of Ella's youth. Even the lampshade knew all the words.

  Ella's face was sad. Not because she was sad—in fact, she was beginning to feel much better—but because her face was acquiring a gentle downward droop, the gift of gravity she'd begun to notice on all her peers. It seemed to arrive just in time—this semblance of melancholy—just as adults became orphans and things went awry. Tonight, however, most of the guests were at least ten years away from looking sad; the bearded young men uncharacteristically elegant in the suits that the dress code demanded, the women with their long hair and colourful shoes.

  Surely it was safe to leave now? Before the inevitable swimming in underwear? Before the suits came off? Ella took a discreet look at her watch and scanned the garden for one of the others. The wedding was in a beach suburb an hour north of the city and she and a group of her colleagues were staying in a rental house up and over the hill. There was only one key. Ella took a deep breath. Announcing her departure was probably unnecessary, she just had to find the holder of the key and walk up the steep hill away from the bay and down to the house on the ocean side of the peninsula. She was sleeping on the bottom bunk in the kids' room.

  Use it, her friends counselled. Use it or lose it.

  Ella's footsteps sang the mantra as she made her way along the side of the road, high heels in hand. Ella considered the startling proposition. It would be pretty terrible if it really did get lost. Imagine waking up one morning to find a body part missing. Could she be that careless—or could she care less? Maybe a bell, so she could always find it. Not a dinner's-ready kind of bell, but a small bell—one that a cat might wear on its collar to alert wildlife of its approach.

  But she hadn't lost it yet. There it was, thrumming in the darkness as she climbed the hill. It had been a guest at the wedding; speaking when not spoken to, listening in on private conversations, quietly reminiscing.

  The high beam of a car traced the corner and stopped behind her, turning her wedding finery into a transparent violet gauze that was suddenly inadequate as a dress.

  ‘Do you need a lift?’

  Ella peered into the light at the silhouetted figu
re. It was a young woman from the wedding. One of the bridesmaids.

  The car was like a giant handbag on wheels. Hairbrushes, old apples, receipts and tampons rolled around under Ella's feet as they took yet another corner. The bridesmaid talked a lot. Such an amazing party. Natalie looked fucking incredible. She was staying in the house next door to Ella's and was going back to get changed out of her pool-drenched dress. She smoked the same cigarettes as Ella's ex and she deftly juggled the steering wheel as she lit up. It was mesmerising—the smoke hovered around her mouth tentatively, stray tendrils wafting before curling back into her nostrils with alarming velocity. The bridesmaid wound down the window, the smoke vanished, and suddenly the show was over. Ella snapped her gaping mouth shut, shifted her bra strap so that it didn't show, and smoothed down the fabric that had risen up her legs getting into the car. Ash fell here and there and Ella felt a prickling sense of recognition. Maybe she had once been this girl, just like this, talking and smoking and picking up strangers. The girl's hairdo was unravelling and the smell of chlorine wafted from her wet clothing, a swollen presence in the car. Ella remembered that men also smelled like that of their own accord. Not always and not everywhere—sometimes it came out of the place where neck met shoulder, sometimes it was an invisible cloud that followed two steps behind, sometimes it was present in the tender skin between leg and torso. And now here she was in a strange girl's car thinking about testicles. How they're never still; the charming independence of their slow motion recalibrations.

  Definitely not lost.

  The car hit something solid. Under one wheel and then the next. A gum tree, brightly illuminated, hurtled towards Ella. The air punched out of her lungs and her head became huge with the sour music of crying metal and chattering glass.

  Finally (how much later?), all was quiet. Lost in a field of voluminous white, Ella struggled to get her bearings, to remember what she was, where she was, which one she was. The two women turned to each other with looks of complicit surprise. Before words, and across the billowing breasts of the inflated airbags, they considered each other as time jiggled itself back into linearity.

  Getting out of the car wasn't easy, the bonnet was wrapped around a tree trunk in a masochistic embrace. They fought with safety features, belts and bags, until they emerged, tottering and undone. The women looked back to the wallaby that was spread across the road. Not the dried up roadkill that dotted Australian highways like in a musical score, but a pungent wet Rorschach, violently colourful, and steaming in the brake lights.

  ‘Shit.’

  Ella looked towards her companion and saw a dark black bloom expand from the centre of the girl's skirt.

  They both watched as it grew with astonishing speed. All colour drained from the bridesmaid's face.

  ‘I don't feel so good,’ the girl said softly.

  She danced awkwardly sideways and fell suddenly to the asphalt. Her head landed with a smack, eyes wide open and face-to-gentle-face with the bloody remains of the wallaby.

  It was shocking how final it was. From a few steps away, then closer, then when Ella's lips clumsily attempted vaguely remembered resuscitation techniques. The girl was dead all the while.

  Ella wiped her sticky red hand across her own mouth and then down the side of her purple dress. Music from the party below floated up to her in small shards, catching and compressing in the night air, up the hill, through the trees, along with screeches and splashes.

  ‘Am I disabled?’

  The laughter isn't completely unexpected, and she joins in so that she is being laughed with. It rings a little too long and she adjusts her step so they are in unison, marching side by side. She finds this amusing though she should be old enough not to find pleasure in such actions.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well…’ Her shoelace is coming undone. ‘I had to sign in with Disability Services when I started uni.’ Should she stop and tie it? ‘And I keep getting emails for things like “Opportunities for Disabled Kids” and “Workplace Discrimination and Rights for Disabled People” and stuff like that.’ No, she'll get it later.

  ‘They just lump you all in together.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  She swings a plastic shopping bag (wool and DVDs) experimentally in her right hand and briefly wishes her other hand was so occupied. In pocket, out, in, out, dangling hesitantly by her side. Not fiddling with her jacket.

  ‘But I'm not, am I?’

  Silence. There's a Woolworths up ahead. Perhaps she should get things for a pavlova.

  ‘I've never thought of you as disabled. I don't like labels—they put people in boxes.’

  She likes labels. Without them, she never knows when it's time to throw things out.

  ‘I suppose you could play up that angle, but I don't think you need it.’

  She wonders whether to voice her disagreement, but then her sister is jogging back toward them, asking please can they stop by JB cause she needs new earphones. Mum nods and they turn toward the bright-yellow store.

  Later, as she compares the use-by dates on bottles of thickened cream, it occurs to her that she hadn't actually received a straight answer. She places a bottle back on the shelf.

  She hadn't really expected one.

  On normal nights there be me, Ma and Pa. Tonight there be the ol’ g-ma too. A stocky little bulldozer, G-ma be busy: bang, bang, banging away, opening drawers, closing drawers, all ‘where oh where are those…’ for a good quartz hour now. First out comes the placemats. Then out comes the plates. Then it be the glasses. And now? Now it be all ‘…well, well, well, here we are. I don't know. I mean…’ and here she pause to look at me like a right ol’ villain, ‘…all this dust.’ She finds them knives and forks and sticks. ‘No wonder your ma's sick…all this dust.’

  The g-ma is superior to the ma in most ways. If G-ma be the bulldozer, Ma be the newborn foal in the forest getting bulldozed. All frail, pale and the like. Floating, as if they forgets to give her feet when she be made. She sees me but she don't see me. While G-ma. Ol’ G-ma keeps check on me. Tags me from room to room. ‘Do not crumb the carpet,’ she tells me. But it be my carpet to crumb so I tells her, ‘Do not buy crumbly bread.’ ‘Brush your hair,’ she tells me. But it be my hair to brush so I shaves it off instead.

  Right now we be in the kitchen. Next door be Pa in his ol’ happy chair flicking past this and that on the ol’ data block. He bought that chair to sit in til he departs. So now that be just what he do: he sit there, waiting to depart. Next door again, Ma lies in bed. Counting tiles on the roof. I know this be what she does all day cause one day I went right up in there and asked the ol’ fool. In just a few ticks the big happy chair and the cripple-bed will empty and the ma and the pa will be here, sitting at the table. We don't normal like eat at the table. We don't normal like eat. But good ol’ G-ma be here. And things be far from normal.

  When they comes in, Ma goes straight for the top drawer and gets out the ol’ Chinese chopping sticks. Pa goes for the bread bin and retrieves his special juice. They both sits at the table and now, I've been waiting for this bit, they notice the plates, the glasses, the tablemats and the silverware.

  ‘…in honour of Serge's big day tomorrow…’ G-ma rab-rabbits away while the ol’ ma and pa contemplate them plates. ‘I thought I'd cook up a big old-fashioned treat. So I've got us a chicken, I have. And potatoes. Real potatoes. Real chicken…’

  I gets the feel the ma and the pa haven't heard the ol’ g-ma. A feel which is confirmed when good ol’ predictable Ma produces the ol’ pill box from that robe of hers and places it right down in the middle of her plate like that. On top of this box she be carefully balancing them Chinese chopping sticks. Pa, on cue, moves that glass he been contemplating and puts his juice down right where that glass once been.

  ‘Yes, yes, G-ma. Real chicken. That's right.’ Here I be nodding like a woody woodpecker, slicing up that chicken quick-like. Some for her, some for me. While the ma, the ma open up that box, and be using them Chin
ese chopping sticks to extract out a blue pill. And Pa, he be taking a swig of juice. In goes the pill. Up bobs that Adam's apple. A severe moment's silence passes us. ‘Keep calm and carry on, eh, ol’ lady,’ I jokes with the ol g-ma. But G-ma is not very jokey. She be all sniff face, ‘…you know my mother's great-great-grandmother, had a step-sister whose great-grandfather was killed in that war.’

  Now. Normal-like I would take the g-ma down for such a folly comment. But G-ma ain't real mad at little ol’ me so I lets it slide.

  ‘Oh you and those pills of yours.’ The g-ma be giving the ma a right ol’ eye of it. ‘Honestly. I mean I can understand if you might maybe need to take a vitamin here or there, not everyone can afford fresh fruit and veg, I'll give them that. But Emotamin? Now that just be silly. In my day feelings were free. In fact they still are. Won't catch me paying for it, no sir.’ And with that she takes a ladylike ol’ delicate bite of that chicken I still be putting on her plate.

  ‘Now. Will you be going on your own tomorrow, Serge?’ asks the g-ma.

  ‘No,’ Pa answers, ‘he will not.’

  G-ma stabs a piece of chicken with her fork.

  ‘So then,’ asks the g-ma, ‘will you both be going, to the school then?’

  ‘Yes. Yes we will,’ replies the pa.

  ‘Oh good, good,’ replies the g-ma, but I tells you, she not be genuinely relieved on this front.

  G-ma takes another bite of chicken. Ma pops an orange pill in the ol’ open wide mouth of hers. Pa swigs the juice. All this while I tells you, I be clearing my plate like the Amazon. Soon I will be done. G-ma looks at me all approving like. And soon I am finishing and making to leave the table, but no, oh no, down goes the head and now, nows I be getting the view of the g-ma's three chins as she glares across the table. But she not be glaring at me. No sir. She be glaring at the ma as good ol’ Ma pops another pill in that mouth of hers.

  ‘What you having there, deary?’ G-ma leans in towards the ma and talks real loud and stupid like the ma be quiet of hearing. But good ol’ Ma be busy examining the wall. G-ma puts down the knife and fork real scary like. ‘Aren't you going to have some chicken?’ the g-ma asks. But the ma? The ma just keep on staring at that wall like before.