Sister Moon

by Kirsten Miller

  She places the bowl on the ground. The dog approaches, submerges her head below the rim and drinks deep and long with a thick pink lapping tongue. She drinks as though this beach is a desert and we fade into mirages of what could be. I step back from her and look at the sea, shading my eyes against the sun.

  Twelve

  Outside the window of Devin’s room in Marshall’s house a grown tree stretched forever across the sky. ‘I wish we could climb that one,’ Devin said, but the trunk was solid and round with smooth bark and no branches parallel to the ground to stand on or hold. They grew upwards like thin and fragile needles in the winter months and if they tried hard enough, they might pierce the sky and even cause some rain. She was always a woman and a girl at once. I watch the female polit­icians on television at night, trying to find in them traces of the girls they might once have been, wondering if instead they were born ready formed and complete as women of power, able to fly.

  My mother became angular in those suburban days, her body awkward and out of place in all the new-found space. The effort of wanting was too much to bear, and to bear silently as she got on with making the lives of those around her function. She was a woman of average size, but the woman in my memory recedes as though I am examining my past through binoculars held the wrong way round. Sometimes I struggle to see her face; it is now so far away. The days turn to dust and the nights come alive then with memory.

  My life is the kind of existence that calls on higher forces to keep reminding me that I should be grateful. In the few hours between supper preparation and bedtime, I switch on the television set and glance absently at the freak shows that are talk television. How to live longer, look younger, dress better, what you could look like if you took plastic surgery too far. I watch incredulous at the common yearnings of humanity, and yet I know that here is not where my life lies. Not in things or possessions or what can be bought, owned, or held in the hand. I always want to be somewhere else. I exist here, and yet I am really buried somewhere between the wash of the waves, on a windswept beach beneath the moon’s pull on a predawn tide. I don’t wish to be what I am not; my yearning is not for any kind of future I might create. I only want to sit and watch the ocean take the shore in a mighty thunderous sound, I want to watch the mountain rising above me, bigger than us all, and I want to understand the person I was back then, the child who watched silently, and waited for things to fall.

  The sun was warm and brought colour to the garden. We’d been in the house almost a year, and as summer approached, I had never known so many shades of green.

  ‘Devin,’ I called into our shared bathroom, but she wasn’t there. I stood and rubbed my eyes, still sticky with sleep, eliminating the night’s impression upon them. Now we were living with Marshall, there was no beach nearby. No startling sea to pound and sparkle, dependent on its mood. There were no gulls’ cries, no heady days filled with sand and sun on our skin. In the year I turned ten, my childhood passed me by and left me with a sense of incompletion. Now there was a sky set apart from us by green blankets of leaves and the air was thick with the scent of cut grass instead of salt, and when my feet were bare, they no longer felt the sand. The birds in this new place were innocuous, tiny creatures chirruping their way through each day, reminding us that we were not what we once were. There was no resounding echo of a gull’s call in competition with the lonely sea. This was suburban blissfulness, and it continued in the same way and repeated daily like a straight road that never came to an end. Our foundations had crumbled, and I didn’t know how to respond to any of it.

  I descended the stairs and there were voices in the kitchen before I saw the faces. Something was different. My sister and uncle were both at the table and each had something to distract them, or to hold their attention. For Devin it was a bowl of cereal and my uncle held a cup of coffee in both his hands. They both looked at me, surprised, as though they each had just remembered that I was there, part of that same family, or part of them. Then Devin got up from the table and left the room, her uneaten bowl of cereal behind her.

  ‘Hello,’ Marshall said.

  I walked across the floor and wished he’d put his eyes somewhere else. The top that I slept in was too small and the stretch of the fabric hugged my chest too tightly. I went to Devin’s empty place at the table. Her soggy cereal drowned in a dam of white milk, and I shovelled a spoonful of the muck into my mouth. It was easier than scratching in this man’s cupboards; I still felt like a stranger in his kitchen.

  ‘Where’s my mom and dad?’

  ‘They went in to town,’ said Marshall.

  He didn’t take his eyes from my face. His mouth held a kind of fixed leer, a pretence of friendliness. I picked up the cereal box off the table and turned it over, studied the cartoon character that grinned back from the cardboard. Marshall wasn’t used to children, Samuel said. It would take him a while to get to know us.

  ‘When are they coming back?’

  ‘Lunch time.’

  ‘What are we supposed to do?’

  ‘Whatever you like.’

  I put more cereal into my mouth, but it had disintegrated in the milk before it even left the bowl and I pushed the bowl and the spoon aside.

  ‘Do you want some coffee?’ Marshall asked.

  Was he joking? I looked at him with my head tilted, but he kept that lopsided grin attached to his face and his eyes didn’t move from mine.

  ‘Kids can’t drink coffee,’ I said. ‘Coffee makes us hyped. It’s bad for kids.’

  He rose from the table and went to the counter at the side of the kitchen. He poured himself a fresh cup from the percolator.

  ‘You’d know that if you had any kids yourself,’ I said. Something in that morning made me unafraid. Something pushed me to test him, and let him know that I was no fool. ‘Why don’t you have children?’

  He looked at me and then looked away and something passed briefly over his eyes. A sun setting, or a star rising, or a long shadow falling. He raised the coffee cup to his mouth and drank, his eyes narrowed. His hand flinched when he burned his lip.

  ‘Children aren’t everything,’ he said. His voice was soft.

  ‘I’m a child.’

  ‘You’re a child now, but one day you’ll grow up and it will end and you’ll realise that the world isn’t suitable for children. You’ll realise that you’re an adult, but there’s a part of you that still clings to the hope that one day you’ll know what it is that you’re supposed to do. What you’re supposed to be.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  He smiled at me. He looked gentler now. ‘Just be a kid while you still can.’

  ‘But why don’t you want children?’

  ‘I’m a busy man. I wouldn’t have any time.’

  ‘My dad’s busy too. He’s still got the time.’

  He went to the sink and ran the water from the tap in a long thin column of silver, and rinsed out his coffee cup beneath it. He shook the droplets from the cup and turned it upside down on the drying rack, took a cloth and wiped his hands clean. ‘What are children?’ he said, way over my head. ‘When I was a child I never felt like a child, I was only ever aware that I would be on this earth for a long time, and so I would have to make it work. If I had my own child, I’d feel nothing but pity, that it would have to live and grow up and find a way to survive no matter what kind of parents it had or what happened or what was done to it, that it would have to stay for so many years on this earth and be essentially and always completely alone.’

  ‘It? How can you call a kid an “it”?’

  ‘You know what I mean.’ He looked out the window, bored. He drew his sleeve up and glanced at his watch and I didn’t know if he thought it was early or late or if he really wanted an excuse to go somewhere else.

  ‘You’re not alone if you’ve got family. My dad says.’

  He wiped his hand across his mouth and looked at me with faraway eyes as though I was someone he’d never seen befor
e, an arbitrary mouse crept into the kitchen to catch and to carry away his thoughts. ‘You’re always alone,’ he said. ‘Samuel’s always been naive.’

  I thought, from the way he looked, that he wasn’t speaking to me.

  Later I sat on the floor of Devin’s room and read a book. She lay on her bed with her long legs bent, her feet flailing around in the air, her hands creating a drawing of the waters we had left behind.

  ‘Now I’m drawing a shark,’ she said. ‘A great white. Its teeth are sharper than a razor.’

  ‘Don’t draw any penguins,’ I said. ‘They’ll get eaten.’

  ‘I’ve drawn them already, swimming around your head.’

  ‘Devin!’ I sat up. Her pencil poised above the paper, there was a grin on her face. ‘Don’t do that.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Draw me with the shark. I don’t want to get eaten.’

  He appeared as a shadow across the room and his voice came rough and dangerous from the door. ‘You’ll be fine,’ he said. ‘The shark will go for the penguins first.’

  We both looked up. The wood of the open doorway framed him. Devin moved to a sitting position and shifted her legs to cross them, one over the other like a lightly browned pretzel. ‘Exactly,’ she said. ‘I drew Cat swimming. Sharks only attack people if they’re on a surfboard because they think it’s a turtle. I didn’t draw you on a surfboard, Cat. You’re in the water.’

  ‘Lucky Catherine,’ Marshall said and entered the room. ‘Saved by the penguins.’ He stood like a tall tree in the ocean, inappropriate and misplaced. I moved so he wouldn’t stand on my book and he leaned over to peer at my sister’s picture. ‘And where are you in all of this, Devin?’

  She pointed onto the paper with the back of the pencil. ‘That’s me.’

  ‘A penguin?’

  ‘The biggest one. The shark will go for the little one and I’ll whack him on the nose with my flipper.’

  ‘Do you think a penguin and a shark could be friends?’

  She looked at him, considering his question. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’d peck his eyes out first.’

  ‘A blind shark?’

  ‘So he won’t see where the other penguins are.’

  I got up from the floor and kneeled beside Marshall’s legs at the side of the bed and looked at my sister’s picture. My own human figure in a purple swimming costume was monstrous, taking up most of the page, short spiky hair, freckles and eyes too small for the face. I held a sharp spear in one hand. ‘I’m so big,’ I said. ‘The shark’s mouth isn’t even big enough to get around my feet.’ The penguins were much smaller, except for the one that was about the size of my head with its flipper just touching the tips of the fingers of my free hand.

  ‘Exactly,’ Devin said. She threw the pencil down. ‘So you’ll be safe at least.’

  Thirteen

  The leaves outside the windows drooped in softness like a Chinese pen-and-ink sketch fading green into light. The traffic coughed and rumbled like an old smoker with persistent phlegm and I waited. Devin was somewhere in that house, somewhere that I couldn’t see.

  I found her eventually at the side of the pool with her bare feet dangling, disappearing into the warm water. ‘What are you doing, Dev?’

  She looked up. There was no surprise to see me, or any pleasure either.

  ‘Nothing.’

  A bug flailed in the water on its back, its hard black shell a temporary boat, its legs in the air and floundering wings stuck to the surface, waterlogged.

  ‘Where have you been?’

  ‘Nowhere.’

  His car was parked in the driveway across the lawn. I could just see the glint of dark paint through the trees. The sun shone and the bug struggled and Devin stared at the water.

  I sat beside her on the crazy paving that edged the pool. The water glinted, kept immaculate by a daily ritual of automated pipes and machines making it all clean. I liked to close my eyes as I dived, to open them again to the soft brown of the bottom sand and the thick haze of misty salt. This water was crystal and it stung my eyes, nothing like the water I knew. ‘Do you want to do some drawings?’ I asked.

  ‘No.’ She didn’t raise her eyes.

  The stillness of the morning surrounded us as I waited for Devin to see me. ‘I don’t want to do anything. Just leave me alone, Cat.’ Her full lips closed softly together.

  ‘I could get my costume on. We could swim if we wanted to.’

  She moved her head sideways and looked at me properly.

  ‘Do you want to go back home?’ she said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘To our own house. We could pack our things and take a bus. If we went home maybe Dad and Mom would follow us. We’re half of this family. They can’t force us to live here.’

  ‘We can’t go back, even if we want to. Other people will be living there now. Samuel said.’

  ‘Stop calling him Samuel. You’re not a grown-up. You’re not even his friend. He’s your bloody father.’ The words were sudden and low, thrown at me. Coupled with them might easily have been the names that Devin had for me, names she hardly ever apologised for afterwards. Everybody had a father, a dad. It was a word far too common for my mouth. Not everybody had him. Samuel meant the creases on his face, the strong hands that held me up, the fine carpet of gold hair on his arms. I didn’t need anyone ordinary when I had him. I was his monkey and he was my Samuel. This was our life-long game and these were the parts we played in it. Samuel was my ally, my strength, and I wasn’t going to give him up so that he could become Dad. Samuel’s name separated me from my sister and from the rest of the world.

  ‘Leave him alone,’ I said.

  ‘Leave me alone.’ The pool’s surface glinted in her eyes.

  ‘Why hasn’t Marshall gone to work?’

  ‘How should I know?’ She squinted into the water. She bent her back and leaned down, suddenly smacked her foot hard onto the surface of the water and drowned the desperate bug. It struggled violently, briefly, in the water’s churn and then it stopped moving. Instead of saving it, she drowned it.

  Devin stood, her long hair falling earthwards. ‘I don’t feel like talking any more,’ she said. ‘I’m going inside.’

  Later, when I went into the house, I caught her at the bottom of the stairs. She stood with her hands on her hips, those thin fingers curling upwards into her palm and her thumbs sticking out at angles. ‘What?’ she said to me, a tendril of hair hanging down into her face. It moved with her breath as she spoke the soft word with whispered force.

  ‘You were in there.’ I could feel my eyes wide, the cool air on the whitest parts of them. ‘I saw you. You were in his room!’

  She looked at me and her eyes narrowed and she set her chin. I didn’t know what to say, nor did I have the words to explain what was happening on her face. My sister looked more alone than I’d ever seen her. Her mouth opened and knew that she wanted words, but they wouldn’t come. She sat on the step at the bottom of the long flight and put her chin on her two palms, resting her elbows on her knees.

  ‘What you been doing?’ she asked in another tone, as though my accusation had never occurred.

  ‘Nothing. Waiting for you.’

  ‘Don’t tell anyone.’ She paused. ‘That I was in there.’

  ‘So you were.’

  ‘Just forget it.’

  ‘Why?’

  Her face screwed up at the eyes, the corners of her mouth moved in a twist of irritation. Like a wild cat backed into a corner, she snapped. Her fists clenched and for a moment I thought she was going to hit me. ‘Oh for god’s sake, Cat, why can’t you just fuck off and leave me alone? I don’t want a baby hanging around me, see? I don’t want your snotty nose and your whining voice bugging me all day long. You’re driving me crazy. It’s none of your business, so why don’t you just … fuck right off.’

  I sat, soft terror creeping between me and my sister. I didn’t know her like this and I was the cause of the ugliness that cam
e from her now. My shock immobilised me. My sibling, who’d shared a beach, a tree and her poetry with me. I loved her and I didn’t know her. I looked at her and saw the way her hair fell about her shoulders and touched her elbows with the tips. Her smooth skin and flawless face. She wasn’t what I thought. The distance she put between us made my breath draw in, but no words came. This was not our house, and we couldn’t raise our voices in it.

  I walked away down the passage towards the kitchen, and when I reached it I opened the fridge and took out the juice bottle. Tilting it to my lips, I drank as though all the swallowing in the world would never be enough. I closed the bottle, replaced it. The kitchen was clean, shining surfaces waiting for someone to return and prepare the next meal. There was no one about but us. My sister and me. She was all I had. I turned and retraced my steps, went back down the long passage, passing doorways between, but when I reached the steps where she’d been sitting, she had gone. I moved past the steps to the door that led outside and then, as though my foot had hit some invisible trigger, the door beneath the stairs opened.

  It was him with his hair rumpled and his shirt undone at the collar and he was coming out of that dark room that was nobody’s business and it looked as though he had not slept a whole night. He saw me a second after I saw him. His face was only briefly startled, then cleverly composed.

  ‘Catherine,’ he said. He closed the door behind him with one hand. I felt small as a mouse and imagined that he was a monster, about to swallow me whole. ‘Is your dad here?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And your mother?’

  ‘No.’

  He nodded. His eyes were skittish, trying not to meet my own for too long as though he was guilty of being in his own house.

  ‘Devin’s here,’ I said.

  He nodded slowly, as if agreeing with something he already knew. He looked sleepy, like he’d just woken up. He raised his eyebrows and shook his head slightly. ‘What are you girls doing today?’