The Spill

by Imbi Neeme

  Luckily, this time Jethro did it for me.

  ‘Hey, here’s something weird for you,’ he said, as he picked up a pillow from the floor and fluffed it up. ‘When I went outside to get the paper this morning, I noticed someone had pulled the bin out of its housing and dumped a whole vase of flowers in it.’

  I immediately thought of the vase of flowers that Samantha had left with the previous night. ‘White lilies?’

  ‘Got it in one. Hang about . . . is this your handiwork?’

  I shook my head. ‘Sam took some lilies with her, but she wouldn’t have put them in the bin. She was taking them home for Trent or something.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Jethro said, putting the fluffed pillow behind my back. ‘The thing is, the whole mess stank of booze.’

  ‘That really is weird.’ I reached for my coffee.

  Had Samantha put the flowers in the bin? She seemed so determined to take them home, and she wasn’t the type to change her mind between the front door and her car. It didn’t make sense, particularly if there was also alcohol involved.

  Another memory flashed into my head, like an image thrown briefly onto a screen. Samantha in the kitchen of that small Shenton Park flat on the eve of the millennium. The bottle of tequila beside her, its red hat bottle-top to the side. The shot glass at her lips. Rosemary crying in the room down the hall.

  I pushed the thought aside and finished the last of my coffee. Some memories were like dark, empty rooms I didn’t like to go into, especially when I was feeling fragile.

  ‘So what do you want to do today?’ Jethro asked.

  ‘Nothing. Just be with you.’

  ‘Well, that’s worked out well, because I just want to be with you.’

  We smiled at each other and I felt that satisfying click that I always felt when I was with Jethro, like two pieces of jigsaw that connect to each other. In that moment, all my guilt and grief disappeared. That was Jethro’s special kind of magic.

  ‘Let’s go out for lunch. Somewhere fancy near some water,’ Jethro suggested. ‘How about the place that does the roast vegetable salad that you love?’

  ‘Sounds great. I’ll make us a booking,’ I said, reaching for my phone. But then I remembered Samantha’s text and my stomach clenched. ‘First, though, I’ve just got to tell Sam I can’t do the thing she wants me to do.’

  Jethro raised an eyebrow. ‘As if Samantha would ever let you not do the thing she wants you to do.’

  ‘This time, she’s going to have to.’

  I texted: Soz Sam. Woke up with a terrible headache. Please give Meg my apologies.

  The second I pressed ‘Send’, the doorbell rang.

  ‘Must be the caterers,’ I said.

  ‘You stay in bed, I’ll go,’ Jethro offered, but I had already jumped out of bed and was putting on my slippers.

  ‘No, I’ll deal with it. I need to apologise for Sam’s scariness last night.’

  But when I opened the front door, instead of the caterers, I found my sister standing there, with a full face of make-up, wearing heels and holding her phone.

  ‘I just got your text,’ she said, one eyebrow raised.

  ‘I thought we were meeting at the cafe,’ I replied.

  ‘We were, but I knew you’d try to get out of this,’ she said, before adding, ‘You look well.’

  I looked at my feet. ‘I’m just not ready to talk about Mum. Not with Meg.’ Or with you, I added silently. Always silently. Even if the words had managed to bubble almost all the way to the surface, I’d have found a way to submerge them again.

  ‘Well, you’ll have to tell Meg herself that you’re not coming. She’s in the car.’

  Sure enough, there was Meg, waving at me from the front seat of Sam’s car. I waved back half-heartedly and started to walk sheepishly over to her.

  ‘You don’t want to disappoint a little old lady,’ Samantha called out after me, but I ignored her.

  ‘Hi, Aunt Meg,’ I said, as she wound down the window. ‘I’m . . . well, I’ve got a bit of a headache.’ Even as I spoke, I knew I wasn’t convincing anyone.

  Luckily, Aunt Meg didn’t embarrass us both and call me out on the lie. She just folded her hands on her lap and said, ‘I wouldn’t have asked to meet with you girls if I didn’t think it was important.’

  She then looked up at me with her blue eyes, so much like Mum’s, and I felt any resolve I might have had slip away, like booze into a wheelie bin.

  ‘It won’t take long. My flight’s at three, anyway,’ she said. ‘We could even stop for coffee here if you’re not feeling well.’

  I thought of how Jethro would feel about Samantha being in our house two days in a row.

  ‘No, it’s okay,’ I said, with an inward sigh. ‘The sea air will do my head good. I’ll just get out of my pyjamas.’

  ‘Oh, they’re your pyjamas, are they? I find it so hard to tell with the fashions these days,’ Meg said with a little laugh. This time, I sighed out loud as I headed back to the house. As if a grown woman would ever wear a T-shirt with ‘I ♥ sleep’ emblazoned across it as daywear.

  Samantha was still standing on the doorstep.

  ‘Are you coming now?’ she said, not bothering to hide her smile.

  ‘You’re pretty happy with yourself,’ I mumbled, as I passed her.

  ‘What can I say? I’m very persuasive,’ she called down the hall after me.

  ‘Well?’ Jethro had stayed upstairs in the bedroom. He’d obviously worked out that it was Sam at the door.

  ‘The situation’s hopeless,’ I told him. ‘She’s got Meg in the car. And now they’re both out there waiting for me.’

  ‘I told you she wouldn’t let you not do the thing she wanted you to do.’

  I stepped into my walk-in wardrobe and started throwing some clothes on. ‘Look, I’ll just go for as long as I can stand it, and then I’ll come back and we can get on with our day. She can’t take the whole day away from us.’

  ‘I bet she’ll try. Remember how she turned your fortieth into a shitstorm? There’s still a mark on my grandmother’s sideboard from where she threw that fork.’ The look on his face was so sad.

  ‘Oh Jethro,’ I said. ‘I’m not saying my fortieth was the best night of my life. But really, I should have told her I was inviting Mum. She must have felt under siege.’

  ‘Why do you defend her when she upsets you all the time? You’re always telling me about things she says and things she does that hurt you. And yet you do everything she tells you. I just don’t get it.’

  Of course he didn’t. Jethro was an only child who had never experienced the eternal push–pull dance of siblings.

  ‘She’s my sister. And we just lost our mum, remember?’ I said. Aware that I’d just played the grief card, I quickly added, ‘But listen, I’ll be back as soon as I can. I’ll pick up some takeaway from that Thai place you like. We can eat out of the containers and watch crap TV.’

  Jethro smiled again and sunlight re-entered the room. ‘Sounds like a plan.’

  Samantha was still standing on the doorstep, while Aunt Meg waited patiently in the car.

  ‘I’m going to take my car because I’ve got to run some errands on the way home,’ I told Samantha, wresting back as much control of the situation as I dared.

  Samantha just shrugged. ‘Suit yourself.’

  I passed the bin house on the way to my car and remembered the flowers.

  ‘Hey, Sam,’ I said, turning back, using the last of the bravery that the previous night’s vodka had given me. ‘Jethro said he found a whole vase of flowers in the bin this morning.’ There wasn’t enough bravery in the tank to mention the stink of booze, however. ‘They weren’t the ones you took with you, were they?’

  Samantha stared at me, unblinkingly. ‘No,’ she said, after a beat. ‘I took those flowers home with me.’

  ‘Oh, okay.’

  ‘What, you don’t believe me?’

  ‘I didn’t say I didn’t believe you.’

  Samantha
shifted her weight from one foot to the other. ‘That’s the problem with you, Nic. You never say what you believe or don’t believe. You never say anything.’

  She spun on her high heel and strode off to her car in a huff, leaving me behind. I stood for a moment in the brightness of the day to consider what had just happened. Something told me I’d caught Samantha in a lie much bigger than a vase of flowers in a bin, and it sat heavily in my empty stomach.

  Piece #5: 2010

  The pavlova had failed in all the ways a pavlova could possibly fail. Samantha had over-beaten the egg whites and set the oven temperature too high. And now she was left with a frisbee made of meringue that had still managed to sink in the middle.

  ‘That’s Nicole’s birthday ruined,’ Trent joked, when he saw the mess.

  ‘Maybe it’s a sign that we shouldn’t go,’ Samantha grumbled.

  She had been feeling cross with Nicole for insisting on hosting them for lunch when she couldn’t even cook. Samantha had offered to host a number of times but Nicole had refused. At least, Samantha told herself, they didn’t have to go out to some fancy restaurant they couldn’t afford and suffer the humiliation of Jethro paying for it all like they were children.

  Trent stuck a small bit of broken meringue into his mouth. ‘Hey, this actually tastes great. I bet it will be the best thing at the lunch.’

  ‘Well, that’s not hard,’ Samantha said, thinking of the last time Nicole had hosted a special lunch. ‘Remember that Christmas she served us frozen ham and potato gems?’

  ‘I wasn’t there, remember,’ Trent said pointedly. Their eyes met briefly and then Samantha looked away. She didn’t know why she’d brought up that Christmas. She knew neither of them wanted to think of the fight they’d had and how she’d gone to Nicole’s without him. It was all water under a very distant bridge now.

  ‘This is the worst pavlova I’ve ever made,’ she announced, returning her attention to the meringue frisbee. ‘I’m going to have to turn it into Eton Mess.’

  ‘Careful now. Jethro probably went to Eton,’ Trent joked and Samantha laughed, grateful that the conversation had moved on. If it weren’t for Trent’s Teflon-like relationship with the past, they would have broken up years ago. Samantha, in stark contrast, always let the past crust over her like an extra skin.

  ‘Is Rose ready?’ she asked him.

  ‘Yeah. She must have taken her headphones off long enough to get her clothes over her head because she’s fully dressed.’

  Samantha sighed. Either the iPod or the Nintendo DSi always seemed to be in between Rosemary and the rest of the world. Someone at work had sent Samantha an article about kids and screen addiction and Samantha had been thinking they should try to reduce Rose’s screen time. But then, screens kept her happy. And if Rosemary was happy, then Samantha was happy. And if Samantha was happy, she was less likely to reach for the bottle.

  Put that way, it was best that the screens won.

  As she stepped through the front door of Nicole and Jethro’s house, Samantha realised that her pavlova and Rosemary’s screen time were the last things she needed to worry about.

  First, she heard Tina’s voice ahead of her somewhere in the house.

  And then, she heard her father’s voice behind her as he and Celine made their way up the path.

  Samantha’s world was collapsing in on itself, just like her failed pavlova. She turned to look at Trent, whose face mirrored her alarm.

  ‘Oh shit,’ he said.

  Samantha immediately leapt into action. She turned around and, as her father approached the front door, she grabbed the bottles of wine he was carrying.

  ‘I don’t think we should be having these.’

  ‘Why not?’ Craig looked confused.

  ‘Nicole can tell you why,’ she replied, quickly stashing the wine behind a pot plant.

  ‘Surprise!’ Tina said, appearing in the hallway.

  ‘Well, this really is a surprise,’ said Craig, although the look on his face suggested it was much more of a shock.

  Trent, brave to the very last, jumped straight into facilitating the small talk between Craig, Jethro and Tina, while Celine offered to take Rosemary outside to see the fishpond at the bottom of the garden.

  Samantha felt a small knot tighten inside her chest as she watched Rosemary willingly shed herself of her iPod’s earphones for the first time in days and take Celine’s hand.

  ‘You look so pretty today, Aunty Celine,’ Rosemary said, as the two of them headed into the garden through the French doors.

  Samantha quickly excused herself, saying she was going to help Nicole in the kitchen. There, she found Nicole carefully arranging a mound of king prawns on a giant platter.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me Mum was coming?’ Samantha hissed, as she sat on one of the leather stools at the end of the huge island bench.

  ‘Would you have come if you’d known?’

  ‘I don’t know. But I would have liked the choice.’

  ‘Tina rang me yesterday. She told me she was sober and, actually, I believed her. She sounded the most sober she’d been forever.’

  ‘I’m surprised you could remember what that even sounded like.’

  ‘Be nice,’ Nicole pleaded, looking up from the prawns. ‘It’s my birthday.’

  Samantha sighed and, twisting on her stool, looked around Nicole’s beautiful kitchen. It was roughly three times the size of Samantha’s, even though Nicole did about a third of the cooking that Samantha did. Among its many fancy features was a double oven (‘One for savoury, one for sweets,’ Nicole had once explained to her, as if she would ever attempt both at once), a coffeemaker the size of an industrial washing machine, and a whole wall of fridges and freezers, including a dedicated wine fridge with a clear glass door, and one with an ice and soda water dispenser. According to Nicole, one of the drawer-like freezers was filled entirely with different flavours of ice cream.

  Samantha found herself standing by the wine fridge, wishing she could open one of the bottles. She didn’t even like wine.

  In the middle of the island bench, lit up by a giant chandelier, was a large pile of discarded packaging.

  Nicole saw her looking at the pile. ‘I outsourced the catering,’ she explained, gesturing to the large foil containers heating up in one of the ovens (the savoury one, Samantha presumed). ‘Simply heat and serve.’

  ‘Like the frozen ham of 2001?’

  ‘Why are you still going on about that?’

  ‘Why do you still have that hideous jar?’ Samantha retorted. She had caught sight of the Cookie Monster jar on the bench behind Nicole.

  ‘It’s not hideous,’ Nicole said. Her face was now a closed shop and she continued her work in silence, while Samantha looked on, wondering how the hell that jar could still mean so much to her sister.

  Tina had been sober for five months. At least, that was what she said as they started to eat their lunch. Everyone sipped their mineral water and smiled politely, except for Rosemary, who had her iPod back on and was oblivious. Under normal circumstances, Samantha would have insisted (or at least tried to insist) that Rosemary take the earphones off. But these weren’t normal circumstances. It was better for Rosemary if she stayed inside her music bubble.

  ‘I’ve even got a job,’ Tina said. ‘Working at the Bassendean Coles as a night filler. I go in overnight when the supermarket is closed and I restock the shelves. And then I sleep all day.’

  No difference there, thought Samantha.

  ‘That’s great, Mum,’ Nicole said.

  ‘And I’m thinking of going back to study. I just picked up some forms to enrol at TAFE. Maybe interior design.’

  ‘Really great,’ Nicole echoed. But Tina was looking at Craig, who, in turn, was looking at his hands.

  ‘What do you think, Craig?’ she asked him.

  ‘I think it’s, um, great, too.’

  ‘Really? Because I seem to remember you telling me I was going to die drunk, penniless and alone in a ditc
h.’

  ‘I never said that,’ Craig spluttered.

  ‘Yes, you did. You know you did.’

  ‘Well, if I did, I regret it,’ Craig said, lifting his chin a little. ‘You’ve done things you’ve regretted, haven’t you?’

  ‘More than you’ll ever know,’ Tina replied, every word like a punch. Craig bowed his head again and Samantha considered stabbing her own hand with her fork.

  ‘This beef is lovely, Nicole,’ said Celine.

  Tina turned to look at her as if she had just realised she was there. ‘And what are you doing these days, Celeste? Are you still modelling?’

  ‘No, those days are behind me,’ Celine laughed. As far as Samantha knew, Celine had only ever had one modelling gig that she did as a favour for a friend and yet Tina always liked to claim that Craig had married ‘a model half his age’. Technically, she wasn’t actually half his age. But at thirty-five, she was two years younger than Samantha.

  ‘These days, I’m an MUA for a start-up cosmetics company.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘An MUA. A make-up artist.’

  ‘We like to pronounce it “mwah!”, like a kiss,’ Craig said, almost relaxing into the conversation for a second. But then he remembered where he was and who he was talking to and he put his head back down.

  ‘Mwah! Like a kiss!’ Tina exclaimed, clapping her hands together like a small child. ‘How adorable!’

  Celine, her eyes wide, pressed her napkin to her mouth while Craig continued to look at his hands.

  ‘She’s very good,’ Jethro piped up. ‘I’ve recommended her to many people. You’ve even done some TV work, haven’t you, Celine?’

  ‘Yes, I worked on last year’s Channel 7 Telethon. I did hair and make-up for Sally Stanton and Jack Yabsley. You know, from Saturday Disney?’

  ‘I have no idea what language you are speaking right now,’ Tina said. ‘But I’m sure it’s all very impressive.’