How to Grow a Family Tree

by Eliza Henry Jones

  ‘Running errands,’ I said, thinking of the horses. Mum sighed and went back out into the living room, and I peered at my lips in the bathroom mirror, still stained a bit orange from the icy pole.

  I suppose it had already started then. I suppose Mum knew instantly how much money such a huge arrangement would have cost and knew where the money had come from. I suppose it wasn’t his first time to the track. But I still like to pretend it was. That there was something magical about that day; that somehow, Dad remembers it as something more than the amount of money that he won.

  ***

  Later that night, I sit hunched in the hallway with my knees up under my chin and my arms full of books.

  ‘We just can’t fit them,’ Mum says to me, and her voice is so gentle that it immediately makes me panic. It’s the sort of voice people use when there’s been a death or a terrible accident. Mum hasn’t used it in a long time. Not even telling us about losing the house and moving to a caravan was enough to warrant her gentle voice.

  ‘No,’ I say and I sound so like Taylor that I think I surprise us both.

  ‘Stell, we all have to give things up.’

  ‘No. I don’t care what else goes – I’m keeping my books.’ I look up at the ceiling. It’s much less interesting here than it is in the kitchen. No stains or cracks. No traces of our lives here.

  Mum looks at me pleadingly. ‘You don’t even read half of them.’

  ‘Of course I do! I read them all the time, Mum! You just don’t notice because you’re never here.’

  Taylor looks up from where she’s tipping drawers of things into boxes in her bedroom. She nods her head in agreement.

  Mum looks at me in that searching way that suddenly makes me feel sick. I cling harder, feeling the edges of the paperbacks press into my skin. ‘I’m keeping my books.’

  ‘There’s no room. The place is tiny.’

  ‘I thought you said it was a deluxe cabin!’ Taylor calls from her room.

  ‘Deluxe at Fairyland Caravan Park?’ Mum closes her eyes. ‘Stell, c’mon. You know how small it’s going to be.’

  ‘Oh, so you lied to us.’

  ‘I didn’t lie to you.’

  ‘You lied! And you just took them out of my room! You should’ve at least asked.’ I frown. ‘It’s poor communication, Mum.’

  ‘Stella – don’t start with the self-help stuff, please. I don’t have the energy for any of this. I know they’re special to you, but they’re just not going to fit. I thought it’d just be easier if I packed them.’

  ‘They have to fit or I’m not going.’

  She sighs. ‘Fair enough. Where are you going to go, then?’

  I blink. I remember Taylor and I losing our tempers as very little kids and packing our kindy backpacks. We’d tell Mum we were running away and she’d ask the exact same thing. Where are you going to go, then? ‘I’ll live at my friend’s house!’ I tell her, the cover of How to Help People Stay Motivated digging into my ribs.

  ‘Good for you.’ She stands up. ‘More room for us in the deluxe cabin. You and Tay can put dinner on. I’ve got to sort through the linen cupboard.’

  ‘You can do dinner,’ Taylor says to me. While I’ve been carefully packing things with bubble wrap and labels and keeping track of everything with a master list, Taylor is just tipping everything into the boxes and taping them up. I guess she feels like her stuff will be safe from Dad in unmarked boxes. It makes me think that maybe she’s only as organised as she is by necessity. I’d be organised like this no matter what.

  I watch as Taylor tips another drawer into a box. A kaleidoscope of everything familiar that we’re about to lose.

  ***

  Ever since I was little, I’ve been obsessed with self-help books. The type that give you strategies for dealing with everything, from poor sleep through to creating positive workplace relationships. Taylor always goes on about how weird it is, being into that sort of stuff, but I like the feeling those books give me. A sense that I’ll be able to handle what gets thrown at me. It calms me down, although trying to explain that to Taylor is pointless.

  Everyone’s a bit mystified about where my reading’s come from. Or they would be, I guess, if I hadn’t been adopted. Dad and Taylor would rather eat their own hair than read anything more than a magazine. Mum says she’s a reader, but her reading consists of re-reading Little Women each Christmas. I don’t think Mum loves reading for the sake of it – for the adventure, the strangeness. She reads for the warmth of it; the nostalgia. She reads the same book at Christmas because it’s what she’s always done.

  Sometimes I wonder if she’d read more if she was less stressed and busy, but I don’t know. She’d probably just read more magazines with Taylor.

  My books are still in neat piles in the hallway, where I’d sprung Mum trying to pack them. I can’t bring myself to move them – either back onto their shelves or into the boxes.

  I wonder if my biological parents are readers and my stomach flops, like it always does. Maybe they’re writers. Maybe they’ve written self-help books – the good ones; the ones that make you feel as though you’re being guided by a kindly aunt or uncle. The ones that make you feel cleverer than you were when you started. I press my hand to my heart and feel the edges of the letter poking up from my bra.

  When I grow up next year – because apparently, you’re all grown up when you hit eighteen – I’m going to do something that helps people. A therapist, maybe. Or a life coach. Maybe I’ll write a self-help book one day, the sort that helps people like a kindly aunt would. Maybe I’ll write a book that helps people who’ve been adopted.

  Or maybe I’ll write one for people who have to move to a caravan park and have a gambling dad and a sister who burned down a library.

  ‘Pack those books!’ Mum calls from the other room, and I close my eyes and pretend not to hear her.

  ***

  The next day, I wake up and stare at my bedroom ceiling. It’s plastered with very old glow-in-the-dark stickers and watermarked from where it leaked the year we had so much rain that most of Sutherbend flooded. I’ve never really loved my room, but I feel a sudden rush of fierce affection. If I were Zin, I’d probably start crying. I feel a sudden fondness for the beige walls and the window that doesn’t quite close. I want to hug the broken wardrobe and the faded carpet and the desk that’s just been sold to the neighbours across the road.

  I listen to the sounds of the street. They’re really the only sounds I know. The distant chug of the train and the neighbour’s bad music and the occasional car going too fast just outside my window.

  How could anywhere else possibly ever feel like home without these sounds? I pull my blankets up over my head, block my ears and practise being somewhere else. Somewhere that’s not home.

  ***

  A little later on, I slip out the back before Mum can give me a job to do. Dad’s outside, staring at his garden shed and holding a mug of coffee that I’m certain has gone cold. He smiles when he sees me.

  ‘You look like you’re off somewhere.’

  ‘Friends,’ I say. I have my backpack slung over my shoulder. I keep my treasures in there, preferring the risk of being mugged to leaving them home alone with Dad. Zin had her phone and wallet stolen last year. Lara chased the guy down and knocked him out.

  Normally, Dad would ask me which friends, where we’d go, what we’d do. It drives Taylor crazy, how nosy he is about all that stuff. But he just nods, like he has no right to ask anything of me anymore.

  ‘Mum’s really busy in there,’ I say.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Packing up the shed.’

  ‘Well, bags or boxes might help with that. You’re just staring at it.’

  ‘I’m working out what I’m going to keep, Stell,’ he says very quietly.

  I shift my backpack. The books are heavier than I thought they’d be. ‘What are you going to keep?’

  He shrugs and turns away. All
of the half-finished projects and the tools and the weird things he’s picked up second-hand. Things he’d kept from when he was little. All of his precious, curious things are packed tightly into the garden shed.

  ‘Nothing,’ he says, not looking at me.

  I watch him watching the shed, both hands cupped around his mug of cold coffee. My stomach tightens and for a moment I’m sure I’m going to vomit. I wipe my hand across my mouth, take a deep breath and turn away.

  ***

  Our last night in the house. My missing books feel like an open wound; like an illness. I’d kept about ten of my favourites, but the ghosts of the others trail after me around my room. I make notes of the things in them – the bits of advice I’ll no longer be able to re-read that I don’t want to forget.

  Dad’s thrown out everything in his shed and I get the feeling he’s trying to punish himself. Mum had got mad at him, said we could’ve sold a bunch of it online. Dad had just shrugged in that maddening way of his and now they are at separate ends of the house.

  Taylor’s locked herself in her room and is playing her terrible punk music so loudly that the whole house is thrumming. Mum keeps yelling things at me – Have I finished emptying the cupboard under the sink? Have I emptied my drawers? – just trying to be heard, but she doesn’t ask Taylor to turn it down.

  Taylor gets away with all sorts of things that I don’t.

  She’s been less mad about the whole thing since she worked out that Fairyland Caravan Park is actually much closer to her boyfriend’s place than where we are now.

  Adam goes to Ascott because his dad teaches art there. It seems pretty miraculous that out of all the boys at Ascott, Taylor ended up with Adam – who is about three inches shorter than her, endlessly calm, a lover of art and totally and utterly besotted with her. Adam had no patience for Taylor’s acting out and, unbelievably, she’d settled down over the last year. I mean, it was almost worth all the times I’d accidentally walked in on them in the middle of heavy make-out sessions on the living-room floor.

  Taylor had also been dropped down a grade when she transferred, given how much school she’d missed in Year Nine when she was totally focused on being difficult. Which is weird, because she didn’t really have a reason to be difficult. Sure, Dad had been going to the track and the pokies a bit more than usual after work to blow off steam, but none of us were worried. At least, Taylor and I weren’t. Sometimes people do those sorts of chaotic things for no real reason, and it’s taken me ages to understand that.

  Taylor’s CD shudders to a halt and I hear her swear. More quietly, I hear Mum packing. I hear her humming a song that she’d learned from her mother. I’ve never met my grandparents. They’d all died by the time Taylor and I came along. Dad doesn’t seem to like talking about his parents and I guess from the stuff Mum’s said that he had a pretty rough childhood. He’s also really weird about violence in movies and on television shows. Once he walked out of a Disney movie because the battle scene was upsetting him too much. And I suppose it’s all connected, although it would take someone who’d read many more self-help books than I have to piece it all together.

  Mum’s different. She loves talking about her family. Her dad was a plumber and her mum was a seamstress. There’s something so wholesome about imagining my granddad coming home and stepping out of his coveralls, and my nanna at the table, all dusted in fabric threads.

  But with the letter tucked down my bra, it’s never been more obvious to me that I don’t belong to them. I’m a stranger who they really have nothing in common with. We’d never even met.

  I guess that my biological mother has always felt like a story. Something that might or might not be true. Something that has no weight in the real world, and so doesn’t really matter.

  But she’s real, now. Her letter rustles every time I breathe.

  Who am I if I’m not my parents’ daughter? Or Taylor’s sister? Who am I if I’m not the grandchild of a plumber and a seamstress?

  I listen to my mother snoring. And when she finally falls quiet, I murmur to myself. Lines from my favourite book on sleeping – no caffeine after three; visualise something calm.

  It’s a long time before I fall asleep.

  ***

  Taylor sleepwalks because of course Taylor sleepwalks. I’m woken up by her tugging one of my pyjama tops from a packing box. ‘I need to cook it!’ she tells me, frantic and furious.

  ‘Alright,’ I say. Sometimes I try to get her back to bed with gentle coaxing, but it’s nearly three in the morning and I don’t have the energy. ‘You cook it.’

  ‘I’ll cook it,’ she says, sounding pleased. I listen to her rustling around on the other side of the room for a little while. ‘There’re flowers in here,’ she says. ‘We can’t cook the flowers!’ And then she curls up in a ball on the floor and falls asleep.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The next night, Mum, Taylor and I sit in the orange-and-brown annex of our new not-a-caravan-just-in-a-caravan-park home. I should point out that the place has multiple rooms, just like Mum promised. The multiple rooms just don’t include a kitchen. Instead, we make do with a folding table in the annex attached to the front of the cabin, where we’ve set up two folding camp tables, an electric frypan and oven, and a tiny little bar fridge we’d picked up second-hand. Mum and I insisted on scrubbing the place and all the existing furniture down with disinfectant before we moved anything in.

  The cabin doesn’t have the best ventilation, so we’re all a bit light-headed by the time everything’s drying and the boxes are all inside. The annex’s fly mesh has a big hole in it, which I try to sew up – the mosquitoes would be bad at this time of year, so close to the slow-moving river. Taylor had been responsible for packing the medicine cabinet, which means we’ll be lucky to find the insect repellent before Christmas.

  Now, we sit dazedly in the annex while Dad fries up some sausages in the electric frypan, and in between turning them I see him glancing at Mum’s hand, the one where she wears her wedding and engagement rings.

  Mum tucks her hand under the table and I see Dad notice and it kills him. And then I see Mum notice Dad’s expression and her face flickers.

  I take a big swig of lemonade and wipe my mouth on the back of my hand. It tastes like chemicals and too much sugar.

  ‘I’m going to get it all back, you know,’ Dad says, his voice wavering. ‘Everything I’ve lost. I’ll get us out of this mess. I promise.’

  ‘No, you’re not,’ Mum says sharply. And I guess that Dad saying he’s getting all our stuff back really means that he’s going to keep gambling and lose more of it.

  ‘You two should try marriage counselling,’ I say.

  ‘What?’ Mum snaps.

  ‘Marriage counselling. To help sort out all this weird communication.’ I twirl my empty plastic glass on the table, thinking of the book I’d read on salvaging marriages and reigniting the flame. I hadn’t quite finished it when Mum noticed, said it wasn’t appropriate for someone my age and confiscated it. It had mostly been pretty waffly and useless, but some of the stuff had made sense. ‘You could both do with communicating more openly with each other and using lots of “I” statements.’

  ‘I statements?’ echoes Taylor blankly.

  ‘Like, I feel angry when you look at my engagement ring.’

  ‘Who said anything about being angry?’ Mum asks, her voice rising. ‘Who said anything about my engagement ring?’

  ‘Don’t yell at me,’ I say. ‘I haven’t done anything wrong!’

  ‘I thought you said you’d taken that book on marriages off her,’ Dad says, turning off the frypan and sitting down with his plate of food.

  ‘She’d already read through most of it,’ Mum says.

  ‘It was very helpful,’ I say. ‘You two should have read it, but I bet you just tossed it out. Typical.’

  Mum blinks at me, like she’s not sure whether to tell me off or not.

  ‘Do you just sell it?’ Taylor asks Dad.

&
nbsp; We all look at her.

  ‘Our stuff that you take,’ she says. ‘Do you just sell it?’

  Dad’s mouth hardens into a line and he takes his plate of sausages and sauce and bread and goes out of the annex, zipping it up carefully behind him, right to the bottom, so the mosquitoes can’t get in and bite us.

  ‘Don’t,’ Mum warns.

  ‘What?’ Taylor is aggressive.

  ‘I know you’re mad about all this, but just don’t.’

  ‘Taylor’s just trying to talk. We need to talk more, Mum.’

  ‘That goes for you, too, Stella. Both of you. Just don’t.’

  I push my sausages away. Taylor refills my drink, which she never does, and then we all sit in silence.

  ***

  After dinner, Taylor and I sit on the creaking camp chairs and Mum hands us each a corkscrew. Taylor stares down at hers, running her finger along the tip.

  ‘What the hell, Mum?’

  ‘Just carry them around with you.’

  ‘Why?’ I ask.

  ‘For protection.’

  ‘What? We’re going to corkscrew all the bad, scary Fairyland people?’ Taylor snorts. ‘I don’t know why everyone panics about the people who live here. I mean, it’s a dump and I’d rather die than tell anyone we’ve moved here, but the people are fine.’

  ‘They’re not fine,’ I say. ‘They’re from Fairyland!’

  ‘Well, we’re from Fairyland now, too,’ snaps Taylor. ‘Stuff happens. I’m not carrying a bloody corkscrew around.’

  ‘Just keep it in your pocket,’ Mum says.

  ‘I’m not going around with a corkscrew in my pocket!’

  ‘Mum? What are we supposed to do with the corkscrews?’ Mum frowns. ‘What?’

  ‘What are they for, exactly?’

  ‘Self-defence, Stella.’

  ‘But, like, how?’

  ‘Go outside with your dad.’

  ‘No,’ says Taylor.

  ‘Taylor.’

  ‘No!’

  I put the corkscrew in my pocket and cross my arms. ‘There’re mozzies out there.’