Isolde Byrne: Like?
Taylor Hellemann: Like I said: the meh point. The day where you’re not thinking of him at all. Because you’ve got other stuff to think about.
Isolde Byrne: And that’s going to happen when?
Taylor Hellemann: When you’re ready for it to happen. When you’ve gone through all the normal emotions a human being goes through after lost love. It’s not overnight. Jeez, Goldie, give yourself a break.
Isolde Byrne: Fine.
Taylor Hellemann: And don’t get too hung up on that scarf. Believe me, one day you’ll pull the thing out and it won’t smell anything LIKE what you remember, and you won’t have any trouble giving it away. I promise.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Sent: Monday 17 December, 9:16am
Subject: Date night no. 2 :)
Watch a movie with me? And yes, it’s Christmas-themed. Die Hard.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Sent: Tuesday 18 December, 11:33am
Subject: Now THAT’S a Christmas classic
Can you do tonight? Vi flies in tomorrow night, and then we leave for the South Coast on Thursday morning. Mum’s actually taking the 20th and 21st off work. Dad says it’s a Christmas miracle.
I think I told you, but we’re away until the 7th of January. ‘Quality family time’ and all, before the stores open again in the new year and Mum and Vi start Mission: Find Wedding Dress.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Sent: Tuesday 18 December, 2:05pm
Subject: All good
I got the South Coast deets weeks ago so that I could mail your birthday gift to Patrick. He’s the only one I trust when it comes to hiding presents properly.
Yeah. I remember how you like to snoop in cupboards during the festive season.
And yup, tonight’s a go.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Sent: Wednesday 19 December, 5:00pm
Subject: Re the presents: I’m still being good
I only looked through two shelves in Dad’s cupboard this afternoon, and then I gave up because we’re leaving for the airport now.
Thinking about seeing my sister again gives me the same feeling I used to get on Christmas morning.
Maybe even better.
Isolde’s Mobile
Violetta
Friday 21 December, 1:37pm
They’re driving me insane. Why did we let them eat sugar? It’s made them worse.
Because it’s a crime not to stop at the famous Berry Doughnut Van, because fresh doughnuts. Just be thankful – 2.5 hours down, so we’ve only got another hour of being car hostages.
Obviously, the novelty of having her firstborn finally home AFTER NEARLY A YEAR has worn off Mum already. That ‘Shut up, Vi’ was super mean-spirited.
It’s not you. She’s just fuming at Dad for snapping off the top of the Christmas tree when he was trying to get the thing into the boot. That level of angry trickles into everything else.
How come you didn’t tell me they’d got this bad?
I guess I didn’t notice. You know them, they’ve always fought.
Not like this. This is like fingernails on the blackboard x 10,000. We need some music. Don’t you have a new playlist from Taylor?
How do you know about that?
Mum told me. Maia told her Taylor spends hours putting them together for you. And they’re all themed and stuff. It’s too adorable.
Shut up.
Jeez, twice in ten minutes. Nothing like coming home. Come on, Is, PLEASE?
I can’t – I forgot to download the playlist before we left. Mum hit the roof at my data costs last month.
Tay-related data costs? :)
Your point?
Nothing . . . Anyway, there’s wi-fi at the holiday house. So we’ll be playing them there, along with anything else that drowns out those two.
I think my reception’s dying.
Mine’s struggling too. Great. Now we really ARE car hostages.
Isolde
Thursday 27 December
I lie to Vi about two things.
The first is the playlists. I always download each one as soon as Taylor sends them to me so the songs are at my fingertips anytime I want, no wi-fi needed.
I lie about this to Vi because I don’t want to hear Mum and Dad’s angry words laid down over Taylor’s Ultimate Summer Road Trip playlist. I feel like they’ll poison the songs – that are meant to be happy and carefree – and I’ll never be able to listen to any of them in the future without that memory weaving in amongst the lyrics.
The other lie I tell Vi is that I didn’t notice what had happened to Mum and Dad since she left last January. The truth is, I didn’t want to tell her. Not only because she’s all the way over in Cambridge and can’t do anything about it, but also because I don’t want her to feel the way I do in that house with them.
I knew Vi would be back for Christmas, of course, but I kind of thought Mum and Dad would go back to how they’d been before she left for England.
Performing.
I never asked Vi if she could see it. Maybe I was hoping that I was the only one who could – that I only recognised it in Mum and Dad’s body language because of spending every day in the ballet studio.
I read an article once that said ballet might be the only sport where the athletes have to pretend that they’re not in pain. That every single muscle in their body isn’t throbbing in agony all the time.
Ballet is meant to be graceful and beautiful and, above all, look easy to the audience. Not so easy that they think they could do it, of course, but easy enough that anyone watching could relax during the show, confident the dancers would deliver what they should deliver, especially for the price of the tickets.
No-one wants to feel anxious at the ballet, Ms Morris would remind us if she spotted a stressed or tired expression during class.
As a dancer, you spend hours and hours staring at the studio mirrors, keeping your body and expressions in check. So that over time, you become a master in hiding what you’re feeling or thinking, and you can convincingly dance the way your character would be feeling or thinking instead.
I’ve trained myself to keep my energy ‘up’, and on the performance above all, because if you don’t do that, you might just cry from sheer pain. Some of the girls do after they finish their part in a show and are behind the curtain.
I have too, once or twice.
After years of focusing on the act and the processes behind the illusion, I guess I’ve become a master in recognising it in others, like Mum and Dad.
All year, I’ve seen them stumbling and bleeding on the stage. It’s on their faces and in their bodies: all they want to do is stop the show because they don’t want to be up there any more.
Vi can see it now. I know that’s why she’s been so quiet the last few days.
If we’d had mobile reception, she would have been on the phone to Jack telling him about it, but where the holiday house is, miles from the next town, its white-washed structure tucked into the cliff, the ocean right in front of us, rolling in with a steady low growl, there’s nothing. Secluded is the description on the website, which is why Dad chose the place. He liked the idea of ‘getting away from it all’.
I love the house. It has high ceilings and couches you sink right into and a pool out front that stretches into the horizon.
Mum doesn’t love it. That’s because something’s wrong with the wi-fi and, because it’s Christmas, the real estate hasn’t been able to get the phone company to look at it. So the tension is higher than ever because Mum can’t access her work emails. I think she’s losing her grip on reality, because this afternoon she accused Dad of ‘sabotaging the internet’.
‘Louise, come on!’
‘You threatened to cut it off l
ast year. You said if I ever did what I did that trip, which was to answer a few emails—’
‘Not leave the computer for one second, you mean,’ Dad mutters.
‘You’d ask the real estate looking after the next place to cut the wi-fi. To “force me” to relax. I can’t believe you, Patrick. You take nothing seriously. This is holding our lives together.’ Mum holds up her laptop. ‘This job. Because you still don’t have one!’
I look at Vi’s face and Dad’s eyes, and I crack.
‘Just shut up, Mum! Of course Dad hasn’t sabotaged the internet. You’re being so horrible!’
I walk out of the house, down the road to the beach.
‘Best family holiday ever, right?’ Vi says as she wanders over to where I’m sitting, down by the water’s edge. She sits down in the sand with me.
‘Totally.’
We both sit there, tracing patterns in the sand and looking out at the ocean until 5pm rolls around, which is when Mum and Dad’s friends, Tina and Joseph, are meant to arrive. They’re sharing the holiday house with us over New Year’s Eve and they’ve given Ana a lift down from Illawarra airport.
As Vi and I reach the top of the path that leads back to the house, there’s a slam of a car door, and Ana runs over and throws her arms around me. This holiday has to get a bit better now she’s here.
Taylor’s Mobile
Goldie
Saturday 29 December, 11:31am
Missed call
11:45am
Missed call
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Sent: Saturday 29 December, 12:30pm
Subject: Call me if you’re around :)
I’ve been cut off from all civilisation since last Thursday – no phone reception + no internet. The only reason I’m able to email right now is because we’re at a café an hour from the holiday house, having brunch for my birthday, and there’s reception here in town.
That’s why I missed your calls :( I tried to call you back just now, but it keeps ringing out. I wanted to say thank you for my birthday present, which is amazing. Seriously. I made Dad pull down one of the photographs in the room Ana and I are sleeping in and put yours up in its place. I didn’t want to wait till I got home to have it on the wall.
Anyway, we’re in town for another half an hour or so while we pick up groceries and sparklers for New Year’s Eve. Call me if you’re around, okay? I want to wish you an early Happy New Year because it’s obvious I won’t have even a quarter bar of reception then.
We’re only four hours from Sydney, and it’s like the end of the earth.
Xx Issy
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Sent: Saturday 29 December, 3:30pm
Subject: ARGGGGHHHHHHGGHHHHHGGGGGRRRRRRRR
That’s the sound I made when I saw I’d missed your calls. I made the same sound when I tried to ring you back and the calls all went straight to your voicemail.
ARGGGGHHHHHHGGHHHHHGGGGGRRRRRRRR.
My long, mournful brontosaurus-like cry just freaked out a couple of customers.
Yeah, I’m at work. Or I was at work. I just finished a shift. My boss, Rob, makes us keep our phones in the storeroom because it’s a bad look to text in front of customers.
Now neither of us is going to get the chance to wish the other a Happy New Year in real time. I have to settle for you opening this email whenever you have reception again. That could be days from now, when the new year is no longer shiny, and everything I want to say – that I’d planned to say at midnight – falls flat.
But I’ll try. Here goes:
I know you’ve had a bad year in a lot of ways. What with Vi leaving, and Ana not being around, and Mr Imbecile . . . well, being a total Imbecile. You had your heart broken, which we both know throws a year right out of the running to be Miss Best Year Yet. I know you told me you felt like you were failing all the time, or maybe it was just dance that was making you feel that way.
My year? Before we started messaging, the year wasn’t bad (believe me, I know what a bad year is), it was just . . . a bit predictable. TBH, I was spending quite a bit of time on my own, thinking too much.
And then I emailed you, and you emailed me, and we kept going. A lot of what was in my brain started flowing out into those emails and our Skype calls. And, over the last few months, my brain started to feel a lot less . . . junked up with stuff.
For some reason, that’s given me more energy to do things. Energy to want to get out more. I know this would have happened eventually, but your emails gave it a good kickstart.
Maybe this is embarrassing for me to admit, but you kind of made my year.
So, when the fireworks go off tonight, my new year’s wish is for next year to be a good one for YOU, Goldie.
I know you have some good times coming. The day you arrive here in Queenstown. The day the snowflakes start falling in town and you’re right with me to see it (it’s gonna happen this winter, I’m telling you). Vi’s wedding.
What I’m trying to say, Issy, is that I hope this year’s a special one for you.
Maybe this time next year we’ll be celebrating NYE together. After all, anything can happen in a year.
Xxx Tay
JANUARY
Taylor
Tuesday 1 January
New Year’s Eve always makes me edgy.
I guess it’s because I don’t trust the thing. You know, because it’s meant to be a gateway into the next year. The one that everyone makes out is ‘full of possibilities!’ so they welcome it in with open arms.
What if that new year is just full of . . . bad stuff instead?
I didn’t always feel this way. Once upon a time, New Year’s Eve made me feel excited. I’d count down the last ten seconds, imagining all the cool things that the next twelve months might bring. Snowboard-comp wins. Trips to Australia to see Goldie’s family. Maybe, finally, that puppy I kept bugging Mum and Dad for.
Good stuff. Not the kind of stuff that’s so awful you can’t imagine it. Cancer. Nearly losing our house. Losing a leg.
After the years started delivering that kind of messed-up bounty, I didn’t want to welcome them in. It was enough to just survive them.
So, every NYE now, I get this feeling like I want to run as far as I can from the fireworks to a field way out in the middle of nowhere and build a bunker. I don’t admit that to anyone else, of course. Not even Mum or Dad, because if I do, Mum will start worrying that the depression is coming back, and Dad will start a long discussion of how calendars are a human conception and the 31st of December is just a day WE choose to make significant. He’d talk and talk, distracting us from the fact that he still feels guilty about the cancer. Even though it’s not his fault.
So yeah, I didn’t let on to them about the edginess. I forced the feeling aside and went into town with everyone tonight for the celebrations. Mum and I stood on the Queenstown shoreline with Finn and his family, watching Dad perform. Dad’s band had been chosen for the 11:30pm–12:30am entertainment slot, which was major. Dad and the band were having the best time on stage, getting the crowd to sing and clap their hands, and then just after midnight, the fireworks went off with booms and whirs and fizzes and cracks.
I danced of course, and hugged everyone, even Lee, who is as far from touchy-feely as you can get. But even though I was having a good time, the edgy feeling didn’t go away. It followed me home, and now it’s sitting here, sharing my pillow, at 2am.
What’s this year going to bring, Taylor? it says.
I don’t want to think about what’s coming, but my mind’s not letting me think of anything else but the new year.
So I think about that one with her instead.
Because NYE always reminds me that when I say, ‘I’ve never had feelings for Isolde,’ I’m lying.
The feelings started when I was fourteen and a half. The year I decided kissing wasn’t gross any more. Up
until then, kissing had been saliva and germs and just MUSH. Kissing was the part of the movie where the characters went on and ON, saying all this gooey stuff to each other, and when they couldn’t come up with any gooier stuff, they pressed their mouths together for what seemed like forever.
BOR-ING.
Even when I was ten, I’d put my hands over my eyes during those bits, and Goldie would try to pull them off. She said I was like that little boy from The Princess Bride who kept asking his grandad, ‘Is this a KISSING book?’ and I’d miss out on all the good stories if I kept acting this way.
She loves romantic movies, the mushier the better.
‘I’m not missing out on the good stuff,’ I said. ‘I keep my eyes open for the swordfights and the bit where they stretch Wesley out on the rack. So what if I don’t watch the kissing? Why does it matter if I miss that?’
‘Maybe you’ll want to kiss someone one day.’ Goldie shrugged. ‘And you won’t have picked up any tips.’
‘I’m NEVER going to want to kiss anyone.’ I made a face.
‘I bet you a hundred dollars you will,’ Goldie challenged me.
‘I won’t.’
‘Shake on the bet, then.’ Goldie stuck out her hand. Her face said, I know you, Taylor. Better than you know yourself.
She’s wrong, I thought. So I shook her hand, making the bet official.
She was right, of course. Four years later, I couldn’t stop thinking about kissing.
Or to be really honest – I couldn’t stop thinking about what it would feel like to kiss her.
Goldie.
It had come out of nowhere MONTHS before, back in August, when the Byrnes had visited us and we’d gone skiing. Mum had driven us up to the Cardrona ski field because even though Dad was between chemo rounds, he didn’t have the energy to ski with us like he normally would. Goldie and I had been on the chairlift together. I could feel my lips were getting dry from the wind on the mountain, so I started feeling around in the pockets of my jacket for my lip balm.
The Long Distance Playlist Page 12