The Girls

by Chloe Higgins

  Rhonda and I went to bed when we got home and we talked for a fair while. Rhonda told me that no matter what happened it was just a terrible accident and she didn’t blame me for the death of the girls as she knew how much I adored them and that I would never do anything to harm them. She also said that she and Chloe had discussed it and Chloe couldn’t understand how I would think that she would blame me for the accident. This made me feel really good even though we were both crying.

  We talked about whether or not we believe in heaven. Rhonda believes that . . . Lisa is pleased she doesn’t have to do homework and the girls are up there looking after us and Carlie probably has some other kids she is looking after as well as Lisa. I’m not sure about heaven—if there is a heaven why did the accident happen and why did the girls die?

  Rhonda got her period for the first time since the accident today.

  Chloe seems to think that you can’t laugh because of what happened and this worries me.

  I sat down and watched television and then had breakfast. Before long I was thinking about the girls again and thinking that if there was a God, the girls would still be alive. This religion is all crap.

  I checked the web for Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and she has written a lot of books on death and grieving. I might get two of them: On Children and Death and On Death and Dying.

  I then went around to Mum and Dad’s place to cut up some logs. When I came home I realised that I didn’t have Carlie and Lisa with me because they always went to Mum and Dad’s with me when I had some work to do. Carlie would help and Lisa would go inside and annoy Nan and eat and drink heaps. It was a strange feeling and I just started crying and wishing they were here.

  We went to bed about 10.15 and we just lay there and Rhonda told me she loved me and we cuddled and talked about how lonely it is without the girls.

  On the way back I started thinking about the girls and whether they were screaming out for me when the accident happened or whether they were unconscious. I started crying. Why did this happen? I don’t know if I can live with this.

  I spoke to the accident investigation person, and he made some enquiries for me and it turns out that there are a number of witnesses that say I was swerving over the road prior to the accident and that some cars travelling in the opposite direction had to take evasive action. Apparently I wasn’t right over the other side but just swerving. I don’t understand. This means I killed my own girls but what happened? I tried to tell Rhonda but I could hardly speak but I eventually got it out. I don’t believe this happened.

  If I was swerving, Carlie being Carlie, she would have been screaming out at me and wouldn’t that have woken me up if I was sleeping? She was always telling Rhonda and me how to drive. Carlie always said that she was going to be such a good driver that they would give her a full licence and not worry about P plates. Were the girls awake? I can’t imagine them being asleep because they had started watching a DVD when we left Jindabyne and Lisa wouldn’t sleep during the day. Were the girls conscious? Was I conscious? Why did my car burst into flames on impact—was something wrong? Is this just all my fault? Why can’t I remember? I don’t know if I want to remember, maybe I do, I don’t know.

  I kept thinking about the girls and the crash. How far before the crash was I swerving? Surely they would have been screaming at me. Were they asleep? Were they conscious? Was I conscious? I could have killed the other family as well. Is the girls dying my punishment for swerving over the road? Why didn’t I die? Were the girls screaming out to the fellow that rescued me and he couldn’t save them? No one could save them. What happened?

  Should I be driving a car?

  Chloe had a bad night’s sleep and Rhonda stayed with her for a few hours.

  I called into the cemetery to see the girls. We talked about the football on the weekend and I kept asking them if they knew what happened in the crash. I want to believe that they are up there somewhere looking down on us all but I am having great difficulty accepting it.

  Why couldn’t I see anything until the next morning after the accident?

  Today I searched the web for any articles on the accident and on Pajeros generally.

  He said let’s get over this stage first and if there was enough evidence and I was charged that we would deal with that if and when that happens. He also guaranteed me that no matter what happened in the interview I would be going home and I wouldn’t be arrested. I hadn’t even thought about being arrested.

  It is my birthday today but I don’t really feel like celebrating. Carlie and Lisa would have made me a birthday card and would have been up early to wake me and give it to me. They would have woken Chloe up and then Rhonda as they came stomping up the hallway like a herd of elephants. I really miss them.

  I cooked some food on the barbeque and I couldn’t stop crying, thinking about the fact that Carlie would have been helping and Lisa would have been getting us drinks or something to nibble on. I miss them so much. It is two and a half months since I had a cuddle from them, since I kissed them good night.

  I tried to get Chloe to call the psychologist, but she refused point blank as he will want to talk to her and she won’t talk to anyone under any circumstances. I don’t know what to do.

  We left and Lance made the observation that without the fire, five people would have walked out of the accident with only minor injuries.

  Why did they bother pulling me out?

  I went to Fairfield Council and on the way home I saw a man taking his two boys to school and I started crying thinking about Lisa and never being able to walk her to school again.

  My little girls are dead and I was driving. Why can’t I remember anything? Why are people treating me as though I wasn’t even there?

  Maria was a bit tiddly and tried to help me cope with everything. Why do people do this? She has no understanding of what I am going through and no one understands that I was driving the car and the girls died while I was driving and nothing will ever change that, irrespective of what they say.

  I iced the cake for Chloe and I really missed Lisa’s help. She would stand on a little chair next to me and cause more of a hindrance than a help but she would be there and today she wasn’t.

  Chloe has become very possessive of me.

  We talked about the fact that I was guilty because I was rescued and the girls weren’t. We discussed suicide, but I don’t think I am suicidal. But I don’t think I should be here since the girls aren’t. They should have let me die in the accident with my girls. But then I think about Rhonda and Chloe and the fact that I should be here for them.

  Pete from AAMI called and advised that I could have the car for nothing but that they were still moving it from Fowles’ holding yard. I don’t know what to do about the car.

  After golf I had dinner with Noah and Liz at Hog’s Breath and I felt really strange as the girls always loved going to Hog’s Breath and this was the first time since the accident that I had been.

  I went to the cemetery as I hadn’t seen the girls for a few days, and I watered the girls’ grave.

  We went grocery shopping to get some parmesan cheese. Rhonda went to get the small one and I said to get the big one but Rhonda said we didn’t need it and it really came home that the girls weren’t there for meals anymore and I started crying.

  Chloe screamed out at about one o’clock and woke us up.

  We went to the cemetery to see the girls and tell them about the land but I couldn’t stop crying. It doesn’t seem to be getting any easier and I keep thinking about the girls in the car being on fire and whether they suffered.

  I seem to be a bit depressed tonight and I don’t know why.

  We bought this new block of land because of Lisa—it was nice and flat and she would have had fun and no difficulty getting about. It isn’t right, how can people say there is a God when this happens, what did Carlie and Lisa ever do to anyone?
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  Is it because I did something wrong?

  I saw Les at golf and he said, ‘I hear you had some bad luck.’ What an arsehole of a comment that was, I just couldn’t believe that someone would or could say something like that.

  After we arrived Shane turned up, he is Garry’s friend who was in the car with him. Shane went running along the stopped cars trying to get a fire extinguisher but couldn’t. He seems to be having trouble accepting the fact that he now thinks he should have done more and not worried about trying to get a fire extinguisher but I can’t blame him for doing what he thought was right at the time.

  Rhonda was crying and said that she couldn’t be brave anymore. It was like a bad dream and she was waiting for the girls to come home. This was the first time she’d said anything like this and I think that she might start grieving as she doesn’t seem to have been doing so, I don’t know.

  Maybe I can go into a coma until after Xmas. I don’t want to do anything or get anything for Xmas, I don’t deserve it. I couldn’t even bring Carlie and Lisa home safely to see their mother and sister. I was driving and they died while I was supposed to be looking after them. I couldn’t even look after my two girls.

  Rhonda slept with Chloe as she didn’t want to be alone.

  I seem to be fretting about the girls and I don’t know why.

  After that, the diary stops.

  14

  I land at Kolkata Airport as India’s monsoon season is finishing. It is mid-afternoon in late October 2008. The rain is pouring down.

  I am twenty years old, female, white and alone. In India, these things are not a good combination. The plane lands, and the country pushes itself into my body. There is a thickness to the air, an inescapable physicality that pulls everything out of your mind and into your body. The volume of the world is turned up by the number of bodies crammed into it here. Back home, in Australia, I move through life one or two senses at a time: the smell of someone baking bread in the kitchen; later, the sound of traffic as I jog along a main road in Sydney’s inner west; the feel of sand underfoot on a quiet beach down south. Each sense gets a singular turn. In India, all five senses are simultaneously pushed into one: the rainbow of saris, the smell of spiced foods, the heat pushing into your nostrils and throat, the twenty-two official languages and more than seven hundred dialects spoken by 1.3 billion people.

  I collect my luggage and head outside for a cigarette.

  I am swamped by local men trying to convince me to take a taxi and it takes several minutes for them to give up. I move into a corner, away from them, and light up.

  (Landing almost anywhere in Asia, still to this day, is for me one of the most exhilarating feelings I know. It is like having been deprived of cigarettes for a week and then lighting up again. Later I will travel through Europe and it won’t come close.)

  A middle-aged woman is standing beside me. She, like many of the other women around, is dressed in a sari: a hip-to-ankle length of silk-like fabric wrapped around her lower body with a three-metre piece of fabric looped around her shoulders, upper arms and torso; a choli top covering her breasts, leaving only her arms and stomach exposed.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ she asks, a kind smile on her face.

  I think: I’m trying to make up for all the bad shit I’ve done and said.

  I say: ‘I’m going to help teach some disadvantaged kids English,’ and take another inhale of my cigarette.

  We chat for a while, and she tells me about the house she lives in, each generation of her family occupying one of its three storeys. She and her husband live on the middle floor. On the top level, one of her daughters, her son-in-law and their two kids. On the bottom level, her parents, now too old to climb the stairs. Her other daughter, she explains, lives a few kilometres away in another part of the city close to the community health organisation she manages. In turn, I tell her about my parents, and when she asks if I have siblings, I stutter as I try to find something to say. I am always shocked when this question comes; always unsure how to answer. Sometimes I say yes, two, and then change the subject. Other times I shake my head no, and then also change the subject in case this leads to a discussion of the pros and cons of being an only child.

  ‘No, no siblings,’ I say. This is the first of many lies I will tell during my time here.

  (My editor: Lies are interesting, aren’t they? I have been thinking about them recently too. About how we always tell kids not to lie, but then confuse them by telling them to keep certain things to themselves, or by trying to explain that some lies are good. It sort of boils down to everyone being entitled to a degree of privacy.)

  A man calls out to the woman and she leans in towards me. ‘You should not smoke here,’ she whispers.

  ‘Why?’ I ask her.

  ‘Only men and prostitutes smoke in public,’ she replies, before walking to the waiting car.

  When I have been in India for seventy-two hours, I call my father, crying.

  I had no preconceptions about this trip. In truth, I knew very little about the country and was being my usual self, signing up for things just to see what happened.

  But India is a country that doesn’t let you in gently. The days at school are hot, noisy and long. After stepping out of the shower and drying the water off with a towel, a layer of sweat immediately forms in its place. Heading into town, towards the school, the air thickens with smoke, pollution and car horns. Only rarely do you stumble into a street that isn’t filled with people and cows and overwhelmingly loud noises. In the classroom, there is no air conditioning, and no quiet time. Classes are filled to the brim, under-resourced, and it is a struggle to will each hour away. I am moody during the day, teary at night, missing home. But most jarring is the segregation of genders. I go out to eat one night and walk past restaurant after restaurant filled only with men.

  ‘The women here are used for two things: fucking and giving birth,’ I sob into the phone, unaware of how small a segment of Indian life I have seen, how many men and women are working towards gender justice across the country.

  My father hates swearing. When I was in high school, my friend Jodie stayed over. In the morning, we sat at the breakfast counter while Dad made his famous pancakes. Jodie was telling a story, my father and I listening and laughing along, until she said the word bum.

  My father, frypan at the ready to flip a pancake, interrupted her: ‘Excuse me, young lady, we don’t use that word in this household. We say bottom.’

  My father has always been the more self-contained parent, the one who feels safer playing by the rules. My mother is the one who likes to push boundaries in small, private ways: teaching her daughter to throw brown eyes, squatting by the side of a busy road, peeing with the door open while friends are visiting, not worrying when a large boob momentarily escapes as she pulls her swimmers on in a semi-public place.

  Listening to me speak over the phone from India, my father says nothing about my language. A few days later I call again, once the mental fog has cleared. For the first time since landing in India, I feel lighthearted, able to smile, to appreciate what I am experiencing.

  ‘Culture shock,’ my father explains. He asked someone at work about it.

  In the evenings, I venture out with the two girls I am living with—both also volunteer English teachers—to decompress, explore, chat. They are both in their early twenties, Tara also Australian, Cia from Sweden.

  Tara is trying to figure out who she is away from a co-dependent relationship and a stable post-science-degree job back home. She’s drawn to helping people, she tells me, and wants to apply for further study in social work or behavioural sciences.

  Cia set off after the death of her uncle—a role model and long-time solo traveller. She is unsure whether to study social work or teaching and thinks an internship might help her make a decision.

  We are all as naive as one another.

>   Cia arrived a couple of weeks before Tara and me. On her first day in the country, she tells us, she’d changed into some clothes she’d bought and headed into town. ‘Men in the street started cracking up and pointing at me,’ she says. A local later told her she had been dressed like a poor Indian man.

  One night, when Tara, Cia and I are out at a club, I go outside for a cigarette. It doesn’t occur to me to heed the airport lady’s advice.

  I start chatting with a boy. He is tall, and thick-armed in that way of boys who are well-built despite not working out. He has a shaved head, with an air of quiet and calm curiosity.

  ‘An American,’ he tells me. ‘Here because I don’t know where else I should be.’ He speaks slowly, his body leaning back against the brick wall. Takes a long time to exhale the smoke from his cigarette.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I ask. It is good to be outside. Inside, the electronic music, smoke machines and laser lights are a cliché that hurt my ears, nose and eyes. Loud noise is always suffocating.

  ‘I just finished a degree in theology and the history of religion. My father expected me to have some answers about what I want to do with my life. I told him I still had no idea, and he got frustrated. I said I wanted to travel, so he got me a job here in Kolkata.’

  ‘You work here?’

  ‘Yeah. Dad works for an IT company back home and they have a branch here so he got me an entry-level job. Mainly I restart computers when they stop working. What about you? What do you do?’