I remember Lisa at Little A’s every Friday, stopping to high-five me during every race. She didn’t care how fast she got to the end, she just cared how many people were watching. She always cracked me up!
And then a teacher from her school:
I will never forget the love shown when we lost her. The children covered her desk with flowers, cards and messages. Also the anger I felt when a parent asked me why the teachers weren’t on duty the morning after. They were, but they were school counsellors . . . then my humility when that same parent, after being told why things were different, arrived at school later that day with an arrangement of flowers for the staff.
For the first time in more than a decade, I am beginning to see them as three-dimensional humans. I see their bodies moving, hear the sound of their voices, rather than experiencing them only as the flat, two-dimensional faces of their funeral memorial card. The mentions of Lisa’s excitable energy and dribbly kisses come as no surprise. This is exactly how I picture her: arms always wrapped around someone. But the mentions of Carlie and her relationship to conversation come as a shock. I think of her as restrained, solitary and quiet in a corner, observing the action rather than participating. But this is not what the comments convey.
My primary school best friend writes, She loved to just be listened to.
Tarni, who rode with me in the car between the funeral service and the cemetery: I remember Carlie keen to chat when we were supposed to be studying.
Our cousin:
I often think of Carlie and Lisa and what they would be doing if they were still with us, what they would be like, what would their interests be . . . I think Carlie would have gone on overseas adventures with you and she would have loved exploring with you xx
And then, after another twenty or so comments, my mother posts again: Too well loved to ever be forgotten.
Carlie’s teacher:
I have been teaching for twenty-one years now and I have never developed the same bond I did with Carlie. I remember when I first met Carlie she was such a quiet, anxious, eager-to-please girl. Over that year, I watched Carlie grow so much. She was no longer quiet around me and realised that she could give anything a go and I would be proud. She became confident in class and I developed a friendship outside of school, with both Carlie and your family. The following year, Carlie would help me after school every Monday. We would sit and chat about life or anything she was worried about and cut out kindergarten resources. Then we would have afternoon tea and get a Slurpee before I dropped her home. They are my favourite memories. Carlie was so excited when she found out I was getting married. She and your mum came to see me at the church and I was so happy to get a hug from Carlie before walking down the aisle. I remember your parents asked me over for dinner and Lisa was so excited that she told nearly the whole school that Miss Weeks was coming for dinner.
Beneath this, my mother posts a photo of the teacher and her husband outside the church on their wedding day. Carlie is standing beside them. All three are staring into the camera, the sides of their bodies pushing up against one another in the sun. Carlie is dressed in a pink singlet, another thing which shocks me. She was a tomboy, as I remember her, her room covered in decorations from her favourite football team, the Sharks. I have never, in the decade and a half since her death, pictured her in pink.
My favourite image is a close-up of her face that accompanies a post by our cousin Lucy:
I remember being in Kylie’s wedding with Carlie as flower girl. I was trying to corrupt her but she was a good girl and just laughed at me. I love the photos of her from that day. We had the same freckle/beauty spot under our eye (halfway point from the nose), my mum had the same spot when she was younger.
And, most heartbreakingly, also from Lucy:
I remember each morning I woke (after the accident), I kept hoping it was a terrible nightmare that felt real but wasn’t (sometimes when I wake from a nightmare it can take a few hours for me to realise it).
I remember that feeling so well.
My mother again, via text: Good morning, writer girl. Not sure if you remember but I always used to say to Lisa, ‘You know what?’ and she would say back to me, ‘Yes, Mum, I know, I’m beautiful, I’m special and you love me.’ It was the cutest thing ever. I used to say it to her almost every single day because I wanted her to know how special she really was.
Again and again, over the next few days, two images return to mind: Lisa laughing at her uneven knees; Carlie, in that pink singlet, with a freckle under one eye.
During this period of remembering, at night, the lymph nodes in my neck swell with anxiety, propelling me to consume. Sometimes I have pizza delivered to my door, sometimes I walk one hundred metres from my apartment to buy a family-sized tub of ice-cream that I eat within days. Other evenings, I find myself chain-smoking as I phone friends or stand in the dark on the nearby viewing platform overlooking the ocean. During the day, the sun is out and I am content in my own company and my mind is busy—writing in the morning, reading and swimming in the afternoon—but, come early evening, I retire to my bedroom to watch multiple episodes of the Norwegian drama Young and Promising, or New Zealand’s Married at First Sight, or America’s You’re the Worst. All of these people trying to navigate relationships. And then my mother calls and I let it go to voicemail because my anxiety is high and now it’s higher. And on top of that, there’s the guilt.
I think about this book and the terror in my body and I don’t know how I’m going to last the months between now and publication. And even that is just the beginning. What’s going to happen when everyone finds out I worked as a hooker? And how hard will my mother’s heart break when people report back the things I have said about her? She is still unable to bring herself to read the book.
The author Geneen Roth writes: ‘We eat the way we eat because we are afraid to feel the way we feel.’
Yesterday, Aunty Jill sent me some photos. My mother, staring into the camera, her clear skin, her nineties glasses covering one third of her face. She is very beautiful. Another in which she is holding Carlie in one of those baby bathtubs, set up on our old dining table. Carlie must be only a few months old and I am propped up on a chair beside them, looking eager to be involved.
I send a screenshot of the first one to my mother and she replies quickly. She is excited and wants to know where I got it. I remember that was a jumpsuit, she texts. And I don’t think thirty years later I look that different. Afterwards, she shares it on social media and lots of people click the ‘love’ emoticon.
My favourite is a photograph Aunty Jill has captioned ‘Lisa copying the naughty girl’. This brings such a huge smile to my face that I momentarily forget how difficult I have found the past few weeks.
And then the tears come.
A stuffed doll, the same height as Lisa’s seven-year-old self, has her arms pressed against the wall, lifted to head height. Her face is leaning against her arms, so that the back of her hat, brown curls and polka-dot dress are visible, as if she is a small child facing the wall after being told off. To the left, Lisa is mimicking the doll, herself dressed in baggy blue overalls, her hair cut into a bob. You cannot see her face in the photograph, but I can picture it, the slight upturn of her mouth in that ever-present smile, the tip of one tooth poking through her lips. Those thick eyebrows several shades darker than the luminescent blonde of her hair. The way she would have been swaying while trying to stand still, always slightly wobbly on her feet. There were probably several of us watching—she was always making other people laugh.
In the next photo, Carlie and I are sitting on the back steps of our house in Mount Pritchard. Our dog, Jessie, is scrunched between us. This photo must have been taken several years before the accident—we are both in primary-school colours. Carlie must be around eight years old; I’m about eleven. We are both squinting against the sun, our bodies leaning into one another. This
makes me happy, to know I hadn’t always pushed her away. Carlie’s hair is cut into the same style bob as Lisa’s in the previous photo, only Carlie’s blonde is a couple of shades darker, her eyebrows thinner, her energy stiller. I remember that quiet girl.
In the next couple of photos, Carlie’s huge blue eyes are the centre focus.
I open another photo and laugh. It is the three of us: Carlie, Lisa and me. Lisa is in a long white dress, a baby, sleeping as I hold her on my nine-year-old lap. Beside me, Carlie is tiny—perhaps six years old—dressed in a navy dress covered with white flowers. Again, our bodies are pushed up against one another, our arms meeting in the centre, and it brings me joy to see it. It hurts a lot to think about how I treated Carlie in the last couple of years of her life. But perhaps it wasn’t always this way.
I have a sudden thought that I should send this photo to Carlie. It will make her laugh, I think. But then I remember.
I go to a family function and a friend tells me she has a bunch of home-video footage of my sisters. Her daughter has filmed clips of them with her phone, and I am to contact her when I am at home, with proper internet data, and she will text them to me.
Eventually, I watch the first video. The words ‘Oh my God’ come out of my lips, and I wait for an overwhelm of emotion. I half expect to run to the toilet to vomit, or start crying, but I do neither. I sit and watch her in shock. She is so stunningly beautiful.
(This is what I felt that first night on Kris’s kitchen floor and for several years afterwards, I finally realise: shock. For so long, I was confused. I was expecting intense sadness but instead the shock froze all emotion. Perhaps it makes sense, those years I spent trying to induce emotions in myself: the sex, the drugs, the sad films and art galleries. They were attempts to shift the shock.)
It is New Year’s Eve, and all of our family friends are on the balcony in The Entrance, where we gathered every year to welcome in midnight. Lisa is in the centre of the video, her hair the short blonde bob, her torso in a pink t-shirt, just as I remember her. She has a sparkler in her hand, waving it in circles as she sways on two legs of slightly different lengths. She looks so goddamn cute and I really want to hug her. Carlie walks past, in the corner of the video. And then Lisa lets out a sad drawl, ‘Ohhhhhhhhh,’ dropping her head and pointing to the ground, where her sparkler now lies, spent. Our mother steps into the frame, ready with another already lit. Lisa beams again as she takes the new sparkler. Over and over, my mother’s high-pitched voice: ‘Write your name. Spin it around and write your name.’
In the fifth video, the same group of family friends are sitting around the Budgewoi caravan park we visited every year and the camera follows Lisa as she runs around. It is adorable, and very familiar: her teasing the camera man and then running away in that super, super slow way of hers. And then, also in her usual way, she returns to the camera, comes straight in close so that the screen is filled with her face.
In the next, it’s Lisa and our family friend Glen, with their usual banter and joking manner. Glen, who was always with Lisa, carrying her around, taking care of her on family trips away. Glen, who got his body tattooed with their initials when they died.
Then, it is a couple of years earlier. Carlie is hovering in the background. She is so skinny, so different from the body of her final years—bloated by epilepsy medication—but still so gentle in her movements. Her hair is longer over her shoulders, kept back with a blue headband to match her shorts. The camera is focused on a family friend, opening birthday presents. Lisa barges onto her lap, wanting to be part of the action, but then just as quickly pushes back down and runs away.
The next video is more opening of birthday presents. It occurs to me that we are all going to die. There are at least two people in these videos, besides my sisters, who already have.
Since starting this chapter, I find myself wanting to shower more than usual. There is something in my body that, after going through these emotions, longs to wash it all away once I’m done. I go from washing my hair every third day to washing it most mornings once I finish writing. Today is no different.
In the next video, we are all away at Una Voce, the place we visited with ten or fifteen families every year while growing up. A group of us are playing volleyball with a football, and Carlie comes into view. She loved team sport. It must be a few years later now, as she is larger here. Her stomach hangs over her shorts a little, small breasts beginning to fill out. Still she is dressed in blue, still she is gentle in her movements. In the background, some of the mothers sit against the ice-cream shed. Behind them, the river.
The second-last video jumps back in time. Carlie is skinny again, Lisa is still wobbly. Lisa is dragging Carlie along to somewhere out of sight, Carlie following her lead.
In the final video, neither of the girls appear.
A couple of weeks later, I dream about my sisters. We are in the same room, all three of us. Carlie is sitting off to one side, doing something with her hands. She is quiet, as was usual. I am lying across a couch, Lisa standing over me, pushing her long limbs against my side and telling me a story—something she’s done, or something she wants to do—and I remember I’d meant to call her that morning but had forgotten.
‘Are you pregnant?’ I ask.
‘No,’ she says, and I believe her.
Carlie still sits in the background, silent. Lisa is still tall and thin, her body firm, as if she is a gym junkie. Her hair is long and pale, a white-glow around her face and shoulders and torso.
She’s been to the doctor and is waiting for results. There is some issue, but not a pregnancy, she assures me.
When I wake from the dream and get out of bed, a friend from high school is asleep in my living room. I tell her about the dream.
‘But you must dream about the girls a lot, right?’
‘No, never. This is the first time,’ I tell her.
My mother brings me a selection of photo albums when she comes to visit in Wollongong. They sit in my cupboard, untouched, for three months. When I finally look at the first album, I am surprised at my reaction: I laugh. These photos are glorious.
In the first: the three of us girls, my father, and my uncle’s dog Pepsi (or Coke, or Pepsi Max: there were so many of these Jack Russells, so many soft drink–based names) are sitting on a four-wheeler. We spent many summers riding those things around my uncle’s property in Port Macquarie. Once, Carlie drove us straight into a paddock fence. I found it funny. My father did not. Dad would take us girls with him, and we’d bike around the paddock where they threw all the animal carcasses, slowing down as we passed through the racehorse stables; we’d swim in the pool outside the main house or lounge around inside on the plush, velvet-feeling carpet beneath the taxidermied, upright bear, its head almost touching the roof. In the photo, we are all looking at the camera except Lisa, whose eyes are closed. Lisa, always slightly off kilter.
In the second photograph: Lisa and Mum in that red tub, bubble bath spilling onto the floor. Lisa’s chin and lower left cheek messy with foam.
Then, Lisa and Dad fishing on the bank of a river, an almost empty Pop Top to one side. She loved those drinks.
Lisa asleep. She is lying on her back, mouth open, hair messy, her arms open wide as if taking a morning stretch. Who sleeps like that? She’s hilarious.
Also hilarious: Carlie and me, in our old living room. I must be around ten, she around seven. I am in grandma-style slippers and a white jumper with a yellow kangaroo on the front. She is wrapped from head to toe in white bandages, her body mummified, only her eyes and lower lip visible. In her hand, a pink lollipop. It is comforting to see my hand wrapped around her arm so casually, as if it is nothing.
In the next: Carlie, aged six or seven, dressed in knickers and my mother’s huge bra.
There are a series of images of us girls: at the lake, getting ready to go out in a family friend’s small boat; r
iding the sea biscuit; taking surf lessons in Queensland; Lisa and Carlie in the bath; Carlie and me with our fingers in our noses and mouths pulling them into contorted facial expressions for the camera.
In the final image, Carlie is wearing her flower-girl dress. Her body is turned away, but she looks back over one shoulder, straight into the camera. It is evening, she is outdoors, and the background is barely visible. In the centre of the frame, her small smile, and those blue, blue eyes.
The next morning, I rise easily and early. Finally, I am back to hungering for my desk each day. It strikes me as odd, that I’d put so much effort into avoiding these photos for so long.
In the next album, there is a photo of the three of us dressed in denim overalls with handkerchiefs tied around our necks. We are sitting on a picnic blanket, the grass green and yellow and very, very long, the tufts behind us reaching over the Akubras on our heads. In the background, a farm shed. I remember Mum dressing us for that shoot. What surprises me in this photo—and indeed, in many of the photos—is how easily our bodies melt together. Lisa is in my lap, my arms wrapped tight around her two-year-old waist. Carlie has one arm around my shoulders. I have a vague memory of being uncomfortable touching Carlie but, for some reason, I interacted with Lisa in a way that I could with no one else. We had a special kiss. I would turn my head and she would kiss my face in order: first the left cheek, then the right, then my chin, my forehead and finally my lips. I could say those words—I love you—to her when I could not say them to anyone else. She was the only person whose skin pressing against my own didn’t make me squirm.
I realise: this strange longing for and repulsion to touch started well before my sisters died. This is not a red herring; there is no pre-accident trauma that contributed to this. But I have always struggled to express my emotions. ‘Trauma accentuates existing traits,’ my therapist tells me.
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