The Girls

by Chloe Higgins

  In the new house, their rooms are set up as they would have been if they had come with us. Pink walls for Lisa, blue for Carlie. A double bed in each, a chest of drawers, a Sharks football jersey hanging in Carlie’s cupboard. On the bedside table, my mother props family photos, in case they roll over in the middle of the night and want to know who loves them.

  Sometimes, I wonder: when family friends or cousins spend the night in one of their rooms, how does it feel?

  Mum will spend the next two years gradually moving items out of the girls’ bedrooms and into cardboard storage boxes. She stacks them in the barn out back, because Dad refuses to let her throw them out. I suspect she intends to get rid of them eventually, one box at a time, after he has forgotten they are there.

  One day, I come home to find empty boxes strewn through the house. I ask Mum what is going on and she begins crying.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘I came home and Dad had unpacked all of the boxes and put everything back in the girls’ rooms.’

  We are sitting out front again and I remind Am that Harry has a school performance that night. I ask if she’s going.

  ‘I have to work,’ she says.

  ‘At night?’

  ‘It’s a dinner function. Will you go?’

  ‘To the play?’ I light a cigarette.

  ‘Yes. Harry would love to have you there. He loves you so much.’ Am inhales, closes her eyes and exhales smoke through the side of her mouth.

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘You’re a life saver,’ she says. ‘Do you remember the night you moved in?’

  ‘You said I could come.’ I laugh, feeling insecure about whether her invite had been genuine.

  ‘Yes, but I didn’t think you would. But we love having you. I love having you here. You know that.’ Am inhales her cigarette. ‘You have been such a big help.’

  ‘Do you remember the night we met?’

  ‘You were so young.’ Am takes another drag. ‘And expensive.’

  ‘But I was worth it, right?’ I look up at her.

  ‘Of course, darling. We settle for nothing but the best. I’m going to get us a glass of wine before I have to leave. Will you wait here?’

  Later that night, we lay a blanket on the grass in the garden and begin removing our clothes. It is late—maybe eleven or twelve. The air is crisp, but our bodies are warmed by adrenaline and arousal.

  ‘Dad,’ a voice calls. It is Harry. His eyes are heavy with sleep, and we are shrouded in darkness. But still: he is standing in the centre of the living room, looking straight out into the backyard where the three of us are splayed.

  ‘Stay there, honey,’ Seth calls out. ‘I’m coming in.’

  He grabs his pants and pulls them on, before heading inside to put Harry back to bed. I think Seth’s head was between my legs when Harry appeared.

  ‘Don’t worry, honey, he was half asleep, he didn’t see a thing,’ Am says, trying to calm my horror.

  Sometimes, in the evenings, I go out without Am and Seth and make a bit of spending money. I am seeing a regular who built his own company from scratch. He converted a warehouse in the inner city, with a downstairs office where he and his staff work, and an upstairs apartment where he lives.

  I have never seen a house like this before.

  The front wall is made of glass, overlooking the crowded streets and cafes, a silhouette of Sydney’s skyline visible in the distance. A thick wooden table takes up half the front area, and sometimes we eat Thai or lie naked across it. Behind that, there’s a couch on Turkish rugs and the biggest television I’ve ever seen, mounted to the wall. And behind that, a huge circular bed.

  I arrive and he pays the cab fare then takes me out for dinner and tells me stories of how he built his business from the ground up. He orders for us and I sip wine and taste food I’ve never heard of before. Afterwards, we walk back along the empty streets to his house to have sex. He leaves some money in my handbag, and then I pick it up and head back to the Eastern Suburbs. I like to see Am before she goes to bed.

  I hunger for the time each night when it is just me and her, sitting on that veranda.

  Am and I are sitting in opposite ends of the bath, the warm water reaching our nipples. Seth’s gone out for dinner and taken Harry with him. An hour ago, he found out Am had had an affair while on a recent overseas work trip. He borrowed her phone and saw the text messages. He was not impressed. I ask her about it, steam hanging between us in the air.

  ‘You think that’s real love?’ she says. ‘This is real love, showing up, coming home day after day.’ She pushes herself up on her haunches, lifts an arm to push the bathroom window open. She grabs the joint and lighter off the windowsill as she sinks back into the water. Wind funnels in, causing the candles on the toilet seat to flicker but not extinguish.

  It feels good, this new air in the room, a contrast to the hot water reddening our bodies.

  She lights up and takes a slow drag. ‘Seth drew me into his life because he lacked chaos,’ she says, and passes me the joint.

  We continue this to and fro, each taking an inhale, while the other contributes a thought to the conversation about love, fidelity and long-term marriage. I should be recording this, I think. I already know I’ll write about her one day.

  We finish the joint and I lean over the bath to reach the plate of prosciutto sandwiches we’ve brought with us. I offer the plate to her, and she takes two halves, one for each hand.

  ‘There’s a difference between self-absorption and self-love,’ she says, holding up a sandwich for me to take a bite.

  I say nothing, and she settles back, eyes skyward, head resting on one corner of the bathtub. She lets out a sigh and closes her eyes.

  I bring Am and Seth to a play I am performing in. The story takes place at a wedding, and the audience is seated around circular tables and eats courses of food in between acts, mimicking the structure of a reception.

  I have no experience in theatre. Signing up to be in a play is just another experiment. I never do it again. It is hell—the unromantic evening rehearsals in cold community halls, the self-consciousness, the bore of rote-learning lines, the terror of being on stage.

  It does not cross my mind that perhaps my parents and the couple I am sleeping with should not be seated at the same table. So Am and Seth share a table with my parents and Am ducks outside for a cigarette every fifteen minutes. A couple of days after the show, my mother and I have another fight.

  ‘Are you sleeping with Seth?’ she asks in anger.

  ‘What? No. Why would you think that?’ I reply, a faux-shocked expression on my face. But I know she knows, I just don’t know how. It shakes my nerves.

  Years later, while writing this book, I ask my mother if she read my diaries back then.

  Yes, she texts back. But not all of them.

  Am arrives home, and I am sitting on the couch trying to read Henry Miller. I never get past the opening few pages. There are cuts happening at the firm she consults for, and they’ll no longer need her services. This morning was her last day, a team goodbye breakfast. She doesn’t know what she’s going to do about a job long-term, but another firm has expressed interest in her consulting for them. The contract is worth a lot of money, she tells me, but it would mean indirectly supporting principles she’s always opposed. The conversation quickly becomes focused on the reasons why she has to take the contract. This is the first time I’ve seen this side of adulthood, of trying to balance maintaining your principles while feeding your family. It comes as a shock.

  ‘Let’s have a picnic,’ she says, a bag of food in her hand, leftovers from her work spread. She is wearing a fur coat. Its fabric is deep brown, rims of fur lining the neck and wrists. The coat reaches her mid-calf and looks like it should be worn with heels rather than for a backyard picnic. She’s barefoot, having kicked her shoes off on the way
in.

  ‘What are you going to do about the job?’ I ask.

  ‘There are two types of people in the world. Those who take control, and those who are controlled. You have to decide which group you belong to,’ she says.

  I watch as she stands in the lounge room, facing the mirror that covers half the wall. Gold-rimmed photo frames display awards she’s won over the years for her work. There are no niceties between the two of us anymore. I like that about her. She says it how it is.

  ‘Will you pass me my lipstick?’ She winks at me.

  I nod and pass her the lipstick. I take a seat on the couch, swinging my legs up to get comfortable, to watch her.

  ‘Do you like my new haircut? Isn’t it incredible? My hairdresser did it last night.’

  ‘The fringe suits you.’

  When she’s ready, we carry the bags of croissants and frittatas and fruit out into the back garden. Lay a blanket across the grass, and settle into the winter sun and silence of an empty house. It is unusual for us to be home alone together in daylight, and I feel lucky to have her all to myself.

  We eat, and I tell her I’m going to stop working. I can’t go on keeping it secret from my family, it’s making me sick.

  When we finish eating, she stands, says she’s going to the toilet. I light a cigarette and lie back on the blanket. The grass is soft beneath me, and besides the occasional bird chirping or the tiny crackle of my cigarette as I inhale, I am encased in stillness and silence. It is restorative, like being wrapped in a warm hug. I pick up my book and read while I wait.

  When I finish my cigarette, I go inside to use the bathroom. Am’s been gone a while, and I think she must be doing something else in the house.

  I push open the bathroom door. Am is on her knees, face over the toilet bowl. She turns back to look at me, her eyes widening as she wipes her mouth and pushes the door shut.

  I am confused, unsure what just happened. I think I know what I’ve seen, but it is so unexpected that I don’t trust myself to be sure.

  Back outside, still needing to use the bathroom, I count the leaves on the ground. The magic of the garden has disappeared.

  Am comes out and sits next to me.

  ‘Don’t tell Seth,’ she says, and my heart breaks for her.

  I am still sleeping on the thin single mattress on the floor of Am’s study. I have spent the last couple of years breaking my parents’ hearts and I want to do something that will make me feel like less of a bad person than I think I am.

  I find a company online that runs trips where you can volunteer to help kids living in poverty overseas. I’ve always wanted to go to New York, but it doesn’t occur to me that it might be possible or that there would be disadvantaged communities living there. As I am looking online, a couple of tours come up. One involves travelling to Guatemala to work with rescued animals. The other, teaching disadvantaged kids in Kolkata, India. I know nothing about India and don’t particularly like kids but India feels like the right choice. I book the trip, pay for a flight and tell Am and Seth I’ll be leaving in a few weeks’ time.

  At home, I tell my mother I’m going to India and she asks how I’ll afford it.

  ‘I’ll get a job overseas.’

  ‘What kind of job? I hope not like some of the jobs you’ve had here,’ she says.

  I feel a surge of anger.

  Two weeks later, Am is getting ready to start her new job. I have moved back to my parents’ place. I’ll spend a month or so here while I pack for my upcoming trip. Am calls, tells me she wishes I was there with her. She’s starting on Monday and is scared. She is worried she’s not up to the role and hopes she can come through with what she promised to deliver, but is unsure.

  I try to encourage her, ask if she can tell them how she feels.

  She sighs into the phone and I think of all those evenings we spent smoking joints on the balcony, rain drizzling over the garden; eating prosciutto sandwiches in the bath; red wine–fuelled conversations on her front veranda; roaming the city high on ecstasy. ‘It has to come through. It must work. It always has in the past.’

  I need to stop by to pick up my pillow and books.

  I am going to miss her.

  Back home at my parents’ place, I don’t yet know how to cope in healthy ways, so I incorporate a newly acquired drinking habit.

  (Even now, I am still learning to sit in emotions I find confronting.)

  I’ve gone from being a sheltered seventeen-year-old who has never had coffee to a wine-soaked twenty-year-old recluse. In the evenings, I stay home, drink white wine, cry and write about the accident. We have three lounge rooms in the new house, and my parents and I take one each.

  They do not say anything about my new habit, and I try to hide how much I am drinking by filling my glass quietly, replacing bottles while they are out.

  (Years later, when I take a short course in kinesiology—an early attempt to get myself back together—I am dismayed to find out that actually no, the inner work doesn’t count if you were not sober while you did it.)

  In the afternoons, I borrow DVDs from the video store. The films are about death and loss and grief. Sometimes my mother watches them with me, but I prefer to watch them alone because it’s the only time I can cry without needing a substance to help me. In the mornings, I sleep late. It feels easier when there is less of the day left.

  One of the ways I measure how I’m feeling is the time I get out of bed. When it’s a bad day, I get up in time for lunch. If I’m awake early enough to eat breakfast, it’s a good day.

  One morning, at home, I get in bed with my mother. Before I pull back, so our bodies aren’t touching, I notice how her skin feels the same as Am’s. We start talking about how I need to get a pap smear.

  ‘Do you want a female GP, or do you want the actual gynaecologist I went to in Liverpool?’ she asks.

  ‘I want a female.’

  ‘What does it matter? You’ve slept with lots of men.’ Her conversational pivots always make me squirm.

  My mood darkens and my defences come up. She senses the shift and changes topics, rambles on about scrambled eggs and other people’s lives, and we go back to pretending everything is fine.

  I read a book once that said that for people who have experienced severe trauma, other people become a utility. They live in survival mode, always fearing something. When I’m almost thirty, I share a cigarette with a 69-year-old woman with purple hair and an American accent who, after telling me about the brother she lost at seventeen, says, ‘Since then, I’ve always felt like I was teetering on the edge.’ And afterwards: ‘I was always afraid of something.’

  The life that Amelia had built—one of a confident woman with her shit together—was awe-inspiring. Her writing was published regularly; she had a career that mattered, doing something she loved; a husband who adored her; a beautiful house and frequent travel. In my eyes, she had everything. But walking in on her that afternoon in the bathroom, I finally saw her pain.

  (Now, while seeking permission from the people I’ve written about in this book, I ask Amelia what was going on back then.

  She says: ‘It was always about control. I was freefalling, somersaulting into no job . . . or a job I hated . . . I don’t know, that was the problem. Nothing was certain.’)

  13

  Yesterday, i finished reading the diary my father kept after the accident. It is December 2018. I am thirty years old. He stopped writing these entries two days before the first Christmas we had without the girls. Mostly, it goes like this:

  Why can’t I remember anything?

  Rhonda and I don’t talk about the accident, and nor does Chloe. I can’t ask them about it because I’m worried that they blame me for Carlie and Lisa dying and I don’t know what I would do if they did blame me. I blame me because they were with me. I don’t know who caused the accident and I still can’t
remember anything but I want the other fellow dead. Why should my girls die alone? Why didn’t I die too? Why didn’t I even get singed from the flame but the fellow who dragged me out of the car got burnt?

  Today, it sank in that I won’t be helping Lisa get dressed for school and I won’t be telling Carlie ten times to get out of bed.

  Chloe seems to be regressing. Maybe it has sunk home. I don’t know, but she won’t talk and I can’t ask her about it.

  I was watching Sunrise on the television with all the Father’s Day adverts, and I realised that Carlie and Lisa won’t be here for it this year. They loved making cards and Lisa always bought me something from the Father’s Day stall at school.

  Ned nearly ran a red light. I told him to stop and he made fun of it but it scared the absolute crap out of me.

  On the way back we went to Carasel Trailers to get my tow bar and a partial refund. I explained that the receipt was destroyed when my car was burnt. I tried not to go into too much detail. The older fellow point blank refused to give me a refund and then I lost it with them. This was the first time I have lost it and I feel like shit because of it. It wasn’t the younger fellow’s fault but I just snapped. I rang up and apologised.

  I need to know something; it is killing me not knowing anything.

  It is difficult because Carlie and Lisa would always bring in a nice breakfast of cold toast and a cold cup of tea and today they didn’t.

  I transferred Carlie’s and Lisa’s frequent flyer points to Chloe. I couldn’t stop crying while I was doing it.

  My lawyer Andrew advised that the police would be interviewing me under caution as they suspect that I may have committed an offence: they have an eyewitness that says I was on the wrong side of the road. I was absolutely dumbfounded and started crying as I couldn’t believe it and I got Andrew to explain it to me again and again as I couldn’t comprehend it. This meant that I had killed my girls, it was bullshit, I couldn’t remember anything and now they were saying it was all my fault. I started crying again. I started to panic about the fact of what Rhonda and Chloe would say and do when I told them that the police were saying it was my fault. I started to get chest pains. With everything that was said and done previously, this just didn’t make any sense.