The Girls

by Chloe Higgins

  I live in a constant state of fight or flight.

  Kris and I have an argument, so I go out without him. A local restaurant-bar on Liverpool’s main street plays electronic music with flashing strobe lights, to simulate an inner-city club. Each weekend, they push the tables to the side to make way for dancing.

  My friends and I order drinks and take a seat at a booth. Someone walks towards us and as he gets closer I realise it’s Teo, the guy who held my hair back when I spewed at the party. I am surprised I remember his face so easily. He isn’t particularly attractive but there is something about him that intrigues me. He doesn’t talk much but when he does it is with confidence. I can’t help but believe everything he says. He acknowledges me with a nod and sits down with my group. As the night rolls on, the music gets faster and the empty glasses on our table stack up. Teo pays for everything. At midnight the staff begin asking people to leave. We all decide to continue the party elsewhere: my friend’s boyfriend has more beer and weed at his place.

  When we climb into the car I conveniently forget I hate drink-driving. And when we get to the house I conveniently forget I have a boyfriend. I think technically Kris and I broke up during our fight—although if you ask him he might say otherwise.

  We don’t kiss that night, but when Teo asks if I have a boyfriend I say no. And when he asks if he can have my phone number, I say yes.

  For the next month, I forget Kris exists.

  T and I hang out most days.

  All around people are becoming who they were meant to be, while I have become someone else.

  I have university two days a week but am otherwise free. T always has a stash of cocaine on him, and lives his life between a bike and the bedroom he keeps at his parents’ place. At first, we hang out with mutual friends. Like old times, except now Kris has been replaced.

  I stop seeing Kris. When he calls, I ignore my mobile or go into a different room and say I’m busy. At home, my mother is not happy, and although there’s a passive-aggressive tone in her voice as she gives me advice, she does not stop me. I suspect she is not willing to push me away.

  Kris is the only boy I have slept with. Until I met Teo and discovered cocaine, I really believed I would never sleep with anyone else.

  I’ve not seen anyone draw out lines of coke before, let alone snort it. T clears the space on his bedside table and pours the powder onto the glass. He takes out his key card because his licence has been confiscated and uses the edge to break up the coke the way you use a knife to cut garlic finely. Pushing one corner of the card into the glass, he lifts the other corner up and down quickly, the balls of coke separating into a fine dust. He uses the card to push the powder into two thin, long lines. He rolls a fifty-dollar note into a tight cylinder.

  ‘One end in your nostril, one end traces the line,’ he says, before showing me how it’s done. He blocks the empty nostril with his fingers, and inhales through the rolled-up cash, moving it along the coke as he goes.

  The coke doesn’t do much for me. But it is a new experience and I am having a good time, living in a world separate from the one the girls have been taken from.

  After a while, T and I begin spending less time with our mutual friends, preferring to hang out alone at his house. His parents are at work all day so we have the place to ourselves. We smoke cigarettes, make out and snort coke.

  Despite his worn-out Adidas sneakers, musty-looking skin, and waif-thin thighs that barely fill his nylon trackpants, people are drawn to him. I find him attractive, and this strikes me as odd. He is not particularly nice, or intelligent, or good-looking. But he is mostly quiet, even when we are alone, and I find this calming. I am hungry for a glimpse into his world, and a reprieve from my own.

  Since the accident, I live in fear. Some nights, I call out to Mum and she walks the few metres down the hall to accompany me to the toilet. Other times, I sleep with a potty beside my bed so I don’t have to wake her. The bathroom is three steps outside my door.

  Twice a week, I spend three hours driving to and from Sydney University from our home out west. The days are long and lonely. I make only one friend, a girl I accidentally ask twice, on separate days, for directions around campus.

  ‘I have a fashion business,’ she tells me when I ask what she’s into. ‘My collection just had its first runway debut.’ She lives in North Sydney with two parents, one dog and one sister.

  I have a clown business and two dead sisters, I want to say, but don’t.

  (When I was twelve, I started my own business. I was at a family friend’s birthday party, and there was a woman there, dressed as a fairy, doing face painting and playing games with the kids.

  ‘You could do that,’ my father said to me. So I did.)

  That afternoon, I drive home later than usual. The traffic is thicker, and the ads on the radio feel a little louder. I’m driving down the Hume Highway, three lanes of traffic in each direction. I feel suffocated, unable to sit quietly enough in myself to turn the radio off, but stifled by all the noise and traffic and people and cars. I don’t think about anything—I’ve stopped thinking about anything except my study notes, and even those are sifted through my mind. I am driving in the lane closest to the median strip.

  I feel an urge to steer my car over the dividing concrete into oncoming traffic.

  A couple of cars honk their horns, and I will myself to do it. Just steer to the right, I think. Go towards those cars coming head-on. What would happen if I did? Would it be instant? Would it hurt?

  But I lack courage, or have too much, and I cannot do it.

  I imagine my parents having to bury another child.

  I write in my diary:

  Sometimes, I have a desire to shoot my parents and myself.

  But I’m a coward. I wish I had the guts to do it.

  BANG.

  BANG.

  BANG.

  It feels like my friends from school are starting to leave.

  We used to spend most weekends together. But then I stop making an effort to see them, instead retreating into different, wilder worlds. In hindsight, it was I who left them, not the other way around.

  Again, a diary entry:

  Mum says I am depressed, but everything feels too complicated to be depression. I feel like I have all these little people running around in my head, smashing into each other. Everything is all extremes and opposites.

  A portrait: it is raining. T and I are sitting in the doorway leading to his backyard, blowing our smoke outside. He’s kissing me in between taking puffs. He stands to throw the extinguished butts over the fence, then comes back to where I am sitting and kneels in front of me. He kisses me. Slides his hand along my thigh. His fingertips touch the edge of my undies beneath my floral dress and he pauses. He pulls his mouth away from mine and looks at me, his hand still on my inner thigh. When I smile, he kisses me again. Pushes his fingers beneath my undies and inside me. A moment later, without saying a word, he removes his mouth and fingers, reaches across to grab the cigarette packet. He lights one, takes a puff, hands it to me and pushes my body onto the mat behind.

  I feel a compulsion to physically hurt people.

  At home, we fall into a routine. I use a razor to scrape a few lines across the inside of my wrist, keeping the cuts superficial so they won’t touch a vein or artery. I do not enjoy the pain, or feel the release self-harmers write about. But I don’t know how else to say please, I need help.

  Another afternoon, I am sitting on T’s front porch with his niece, who lives in the same street. He is inside, talking on the phone. She is seven or eight years old and mentions another girl, who she refers to as ‘Teo’s girlfriend’.

  I am not aware of any other girl, and I don’t particularly care.

  There is a widespread assumption that the grieving process is somehow innate to us all. It seems to me that this is not the case. Just as
we learn to ride a bicycle, speak a language or paint a picture, we learn how to grieve, falling over and fumbling as we go.

  My parents ask if I am smoking cigarettes so I give up trying to hide it and begin smoking at home, although it is rare that I’m there much these days. Usually, I sleep until midday, eat a leisurely breakfast, shower, slip on a loose dress and walk out the door. I return long after dark. It’s easier this way. I avoid my parents’ worried looks and questions and if I stay out late I can exhaust myself enough to fall asleep as soon as I get into bed.

  Another Christmas rolls around; I think it is our second without the girls. My cousins, aunts and uncles come down from Mudgee to stay with us. We’re having a big family Christmas. Except that half our family is dead, and I am too busy snorting cocaine and fucking T to stop by. Years later when Mum refers to it, she calls it ‘the Teo Christmas’. I’ve never had a high sex drive. I just like being held. But even now, looking back, I do not understand why I couldn’t sate this need with people who loved me.

  On the days when I’m not with T, I lie on a mattress on the floor at home, watching movies. I stay in my pyjamas, and don’t bother showering, getting changed, putting on make-up. My energy is drained. I no longer have the drive to exercise or study or socialise. Unless I take drugs first.

  Mum says we should have a talk. I’ve been trying to sleep, but can’t stop crying. Out on the back step, I can’t hold it in and let out a scream. It feels good to release the energy. Dad raises his voice. I stop, in shock. He never raises his voice.

  He yells back at me, ‘What do you want us to do, Chloe? What are we supposed to do?’

  All I can say in response is: ‘I want Kris.’

  Within twenty minutes I have what I want. Kris leads me by the hand and we go to my room.

  ‘I just want it to stop, Kris. Please, I want it all to go away. I can’t do this. I want the girls back. Please, I just want to hug them. Make it stop.’

  ‘Shhh, bub, I know. I know. Come here.’

  He tries to calm me but the tears keep coming. My hands are shaking. I feel sick in the stomach, like I need to vomit but it won’t come out. Kris keeps hugging and rocking me, wiping the tears off my face. He tells me it’s okay. The crying and shaking continue for another hour before I exhaust myself enough to sleep. I like that about the crying: it is so physically tiring. It stops the scenes from childhood playing in my head. There are good scenes, but they are the worst ones. They are the ones that make me miss the girls the most. And the bad scenes make me feel guilty for not being a better sister.

  Now, eleven years after the accident, I don’t even remember what those scenes were.

  My mother is pissed off: someone told her I am taking drugs.

  ‘Bullshit,’ I say.

  While Mum cries and I sit on the lounge, denying the accusations, Dad is quiet in the corner. She cries and I try to comfort her. Then I start crying and Mum tries to comfort me.

  ‘Chloe, we just want to help you.’

  ‘Get away from me.’

  ‘Chloe, please calm down. We aren’t angry. Just talk to us and let us help you.’

  I am crying, Mum is crying. Then I am screaming, and Mum is sobbing. She tries to hug me.

  ‘Get away from me, leave me alone,’ I scream.

  I stand to go out the back for a cigarette. Dad stays in the same seat in the same position with the same blank expression. Mum is dialling numbers hurriedly on the phone.

  When I am on my third cigarette, Kris steps outside. He has tears in his eyes. He says nothing, but sits down and pulls me onto his lap.

  A diary entry from that time:

  Cut your parents a break and let them be with Carlie and Lisa.

  Things get better for a while. I stop seeing T and again start calling Kris in the early hours of the morning to come over, but the calls aren’t coming from a place of hysteria anymore, just loneliness. The scary voice in my head stays away until an afternoon when I am browsing PostSecret, a website where people anonymously submit their secrets and accompanying artwork. Some secrets are small or inconsequential: ‘I enjoy picking my nose in bed’. But others are larger, and can trigger intense emotions: ‘Sometimes I pretend to limp in public. Children have asked me “What’s wrong?” I tell them “Motorcycle accident.” I hope it will scare them enough so no one else has to lose their best friend.’ As I am reading the week’s secrets one day, the voice returns.

  Dad’s in the shed working or playing solitaire and Mum’s putting the potatoes in the water boiling on the stove. I wander around the house, bored, restless and pissed off. I walk between rooms, trying to find something that will quieten my thoughts.

  Mum is talking on the telephone while she cooks. She is laughing. I peer around the wall into the kitchen, keeping out of her line of sight. She is cutting up pumpkin and carrots for dinner. She’s holding a knife in one hand, the phone resting between her ear and shoulder on the other side. The blade gleams in the last light of day coming through the window as I take a step towards it.

  I grab the knife.

  Mum starts screaming. She yells out my father’s name, but gets no response. My wrist is held high in the air, fingers wrapped around the knife’s handle.

  ‘Please, Mum, just say it’s okay.’

  She continues screaming.

  ‘It will be easier this way.’

  Now she’s sobbing.

  ‘Please. We can all be with Carlie and Lisa again.’

  Our faces are centimetres apart.

  ‘Please, Mum. Just say it’s okay.’

  She snatches the knife from my hand and runs out the back towards Dad’s office, slamming the door behind her. It is like the calm after an earthquake. Moments before, the house seemed flooded in red and black, but it all disappears, leaving just me and the white light. I let out all the rage and despair and confusion in one long guttural noise. For a moment I feel what it must have been like to be on my father’s side of the howl that day in the hospital. And then, once more, everything is silent.

  I know how it sounds, but I don’t believe I ever had any intention of harming my mother. I couldn’t verbalise my pain—I couldn’t even tell my parents I loved them—and I was running out of ways to physically express my feelings. Now, at thirty, I am learning the value of communication. It pains me to look back at that girl and see how difficult such a seemingly simple thing can be.

  When my parents come in the back I am crouched on the ground, ready for a fight. Mum picks up her phone and walks, hands shaking, straight past and out the front door. Dad assumes his usual position, frozen face staring blankly into the distance. We sit like this for some time. Me crouched, sobbing, on the floor. Him frozen, half-dead, sitting with his back up straight against the couch.

  The family friend who lives down the road arrives and sits next to Mum on the chair on the front veranda. I can see them through the front window.

  Dad stands and walks past me without looking in my direction. ‘Netball,’ he says. Each week, he plays indoor netball with a group of friends. He walks past the two women, cuddled together. Gets in his replacement car and pulls out of the driveway.

  I lay my head down on the cool kitchen tiles and close my eyes. I try to block out the sobs coming from the veranda. I feel a hand touch my body and I jump.

  ‘Bub, it’s me.’

  Everything inside disappears once Kris’s arms are around me. He stands, takes my hand and pulls me to my feet.

  ‘C’mon, bub, I’m taking you to my house.’

  And that is it. The knife and the howls are all forgotten in our half-family.

  Until a week later, when I am again alternating between screaming at Mum and smoking cigarettes on the back step. She walks down the back step, past the eighteen-year-old who thinks she is the only one hurting, and into Dad’s office. I can’t see them but I hear her say, ‘Mauri
ce, come and talk to your daughter.’

  (Sometimes I wonder if my father notices he still has one daughter left. I don’t want to portray him as a distant man, because that’s far from the truth. If I ask, he is always there. But when I can’t ask, he doesn’t know what to do with me. Dad and I have always been close but in a different way from Mum and me. My mother and I spend a lot of time discussing who said what and how so-and-so dresses; Dad and I don’t make small talk. But when we do talk, we really talk. It is easy to lie to my mother. She was—and is—the glue that keeps the three of us together, but she bears the brunt of my anger and lies and hatred while Dad gets something else.)

  When Dad and I talk, I tell him the truth. Now he comes to me, looks me in the eyes.

  ‘What do you want us to do, Chloe?’

  It is the first time I’ve been able to say this out loud:

  ‘I need help. I want to go to hospital.’

  5

  It is june 2018. I am thirty years old. I am living in Wollongong, a coastal city about seventy kilometres south of Sydney.

  There is something about Wollongong that helps me. Each year that passes gives me another reason to fall in love with this city. At first, it is the university, and my studies. Then the landscape: mountains on one side, ocean on the other, within a ten-minute drive of each other. Later, the people: I am introduced to the arts world, which is full of feminism, queer and progressive politics—it’s a community I’ve never experienced before.

  Some days are better than others, and I work hard to do the things that help. I live a hundred metres off the beach, a five-minute walk from town, and out here I can afford to live alone in a one-bedroom apartment on a part-time wage. Sydney is only ninety minutes by car.

  Part of learning how to grieve has been learning how to answer unexpected questions. A random lady in a supermarket queue who starts talking about siblings. A student asking why I began writing. A new friend at a dinner party enquiring about my childhood. You’d think I’d get better at being put on the spot, but it always feels like a shock through my body, my brain foggy as I struggle to find something to say. How much do I want to give away on this particular day?