by Davina Bell
I let go, stood up, did a handstand, flicked up my feet and rested them on the trunk of a tree. This isn’t a dream, I said to myself.
‘Letters made colours in her mind—little pops of coloured lights, like fireworks.’
‘That’s crazy,’ said Edward. ‘The sounds? Or when she saw them written down?’
‘Both. So everyone’s name made a different rainbow inside her head. Isn’t that pretty?’ My arms burned, but the muscles down my back felt firm, felt strong. I could stay here forever, I thought, with him. ‘And that’s how she remembered things—the order of the colours that they painted in her mind.’
‘What would my name look like?’
‘Well, let’s see. Vowels are white and yellow—pale. “R” is purple—’
‘Urgh, I hate purple.’
‘—and I think “d” was blue. But a really light blue, like, softer than the sky.’
‘Oh, great,’ said Edward, ‘like the colour scheme of a nursery school. That’s just dandy. I bet my surname’s mauve and peach. And yours?’
‘Well, “w” is navy blue, and then the vowels are pale, and “n” is grey and “f ” is black and then “r” and “d” are purple and light blue, like I just said.’
‘Whoa, whoa, whoa—what do you mean, “f ” and “d”? Where’s the “t” in all this, Winter?’
I swallowed. ‘It’s not.’
Summer
I shrugged Winter’s arm off gently, pretended like I didn’t care that basically my entire life seemed to have been a lie, and she sat straight down, curled herself into a little ball, so small that I might have mistaken her for a teensy boulder. I threw down my backpack and went walking around the top of that mountain, feeling how thin the air was up there, how my head ached right between the eyes from the altitude, like I’d just shovelled in some serious amounts of ice cream. The snowdrifts were so big that walking was basically just lifting your feet high and sinking them down again till you were almost halfway up your thighs in powder. But I hoped that would make it easier to dig up whatever it was that was marked with the X on old Pops’s map. You see? I still believed in him. Sometimes it’s crazy, how blindly we love.
It was so peaceful there, on top of Our Mountain. You could hear a tear drop. It was beautiful.
I turned my back on the settlement. In the other direction, the rubble of Bartleby was no bigger than a chocolate chip. I sat down in the slush so I could look properly and, though it was wet, the cool of the ground felt lovely. I lay back. Swiped my arms around. ‘Look, Winter—snow angels! Remember the Christmas we were in Belarus? Remember how Pops said—ow!’
My left arm struck something hard and I banged my funny bone, which has never and just will never be a source of comedy. I felt like I was going to up-chuck with that weird, tingly pain, and I also felt disproportionately angry. I would dig up that stone and throw it over the side of the mountain, out into oblivion, and it would spin so many times that it would probably leave the Earth’s orbit, and wouldn’t that serve it right. And, sure, maybe I was angry at other things too. How our father had deceived us, even though we’d trusted him—trusted him all around the world. How my sister had turned herself into a skeleton. There was nothing, now, that was still pure.
I dug around that stone, ripped the snow up in chunks, smashed it into snowballs, threw them at the sky, and when the tips of my fingers went numb, I thought, What do I care? I kept on anyway, and pretty soon I figured out that the stone I was uncovering wasn’t a stone. Well, that’s not entirely right. It was the top of a stone and I’m not just talking any stone, I’m talking a gravestone, that unmistakable slab that says Death and Not Forgetting.
‘Someone died up here,’ I called over to Winter.
But she just sat with her head drooped down, breathing.
‘Are you okay there, kid?’ I said, but I was sort of distracted. I’d cleared off enough snow to see the top of the inscription, chiselled out all chunky and tender and perfect.
And that’s when I started flinging the snow out behind me like a desperate dog, because I knew those letters. Though I hadn’t said it for three years, I knew that name.
And though her name was here, she wasn’t.
That someone hadn’t died up here.
She died on a desert dune. The sand looked hot. I had wondered if it burned her knees through the jumpsuit, though I guess it was the least of her worries at that point.
And this is the part where I need to tell you that I lied.
Not one time: lots of times. Over and over I told the same stories—a serial liar. A weak little fraud.
Because our mother didn’t die with Winter curled inside her.
She died when we were eleven.
They took her out to the desert and ripped open her prison jumpsuit and wrote something on her bare breasts. It said, SPEAK NO MORE. They left it hanging open.
They made her read something, and her voice was still so warm and clear and pretty, just like it was on the radio, even though I could tell she didn’t believe what she was saying.
Then they made her say her name and she did, so proudly, such a strong, regal name. And then she turned and vomited onto the sand, because she knew what was coming next. Everyone knew what was coming next.
Everyone in the world saw it, and that’s not just me exaggerating in my Summer-speak. It was the first killing they spliced into the news, into movie theatres, on every screen across the world. It flashed into computer labs full of strung-out uni students high on No-Doz, and classrooms full of kinder kids with iPads playing treasure island alphabet games, and nursing home rec rooms, the old-timers propped up in their chairs, not really knowing if what they were seeing was real or dementia haze, and onto the TVs in gyms with those buff corporate guys pounding squeaky treadmills on their lunchbreaks. In Times Square and department stores. On every mobile phone.
Nobody could work out how to stop it—not for days. By then people could see her face, her head, every time they closed their eyes.
Over and over, every hour, my mother came back. Her name. The vomit. Her chest.
Her head.
We were in Tokyo when we saw it. My father had taken us back to Japan while he organised the seaplane to bring us here, got all the supplies together. Our mother had been gone for months by then but somehow we still had hope. She would be back some day soon, red glasses dangling round her neck. We were supposed to be in hiding in our apartment while we packed up her books and he packed up his lab.
But they found him. Through a chain of threats and whispers, they gave him twenty-four hours.
His secrets for her life.
‘Let’s celebrate! Should we go and get peach bubble tea?’ Winter had said that day when we’d sealed the last box—the one with To Kill a Mockingbird stacked on the top, waiting to greet us wherever we’d be when we opened it next. We went back to the skyscraper climbing gym and, boy, was Eric happy to see us. His bumbag was blue—blue like a peacock’s chest. We did karaoke and drank our favourite bubble tea, just like old times. Except it wasn’t.
Suddenly there she was, our mother, on the screen of that karaoke booth. And on every screen, wherever we ran, wherever we turned. Boy oh boy, there are a lot of screens in Tokyo—on the sides of buildings, in lifts, in trains. We couldn’t escape. It was burned into the backs of our eyes, and I want to say retinas but I’m pretty sure that’s only half right.
Her death was a message to the Resistance. To everyone around the world who had been trying to fight back—who had listened to her words about freedom, beauty, hope. Were they all for nothing? And now there it was, her name, on that smooth piece of stone on top of this very tall mountain, and the date she was alive and the date that she’d died, which wasn’t the day we were born, and I’d run from that date for so long that, as I knelt to clear the last of the snow from the bottom of her gravestone and trace my finger around the letters of her name, I felt relieved that I could stop running now.
Winter stood up a
nd came over and looked at those words for a long time. Then she sat down and leaned her head against the stone and closed her eyes. She whispered, like she had a million times across our lives, ‘Read it. Out loud. Read it, Summer. Read it to me.’
I couldn’t. I swallowed and tried again. I couldn’t. I swallowed and tried again.
‘You made me live without her,’ Winter said sleepily. ‘You tried to make me forget until all I did was remember. I just wanted to love her with you, so it wouldn’t feel so lonely.’
I started to cry, then, and I know I’ve said that before but I mean really cry.
On and on in ripples and waves, until I felt I could have filled the moat at dear old Bartleby, if it still existed anywhere but our hearts. There were so many things I was crying for and I’m not going to itemise them here like a shopping list but I bet if I gave you a pen and paper, you’d be able to have a good crack at that yourself. Everything you’ve ever heard about my mother—and people talked about her a lot—it was all true. She was brave and bubbly, clever and noble, wise and funny and good. If anyone deserved not to…Well, you get the drift.
When I had wiped away enough tears to be able to see and dealt with the strings of snot and the sore-throat hiccups, I looked across at Winter. She was lying in the snow with her back to me, curled around our mother’s gravestone as if it were the last true thing left in the world. And through her singlet, the outline of her spine was a foot-long string of pearls.
‘Winter,’ I said. But she didn’t move and I couldn’t see her face to know if her eyes were open or closed.
‘Winter, I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t as strong as you. I never have been.’
That was the truth—all of it, bundled up so neatly. And at that second, as it came out of my mouth, I realised I had always known it and that Winter had, too.
But she didn’t say anything.
‘Winter,’ I said, louder now. ‘I admit it—I lied. And I made you live that lie, and I get that. I just didn’t want you to have to remember what you did—at the market. I’m sorry. I couldn’t be more sorry. Please forgive me. Say you forgive me?’
I went and lay down and curled myself around her tiny back and tucked my knees in the crook of her knees and put my chin on her shoulder, and it was lucky I was so close, right up in her grill, because even then I could hardly hear as she breathed out, ‘Yes. I forgive you.’
And then, high on relief, I put my arm around her chest and squeezed her to me, and you actually, literally cannot imagine how she screamed—the shrillness of; the brutal pitch. How her body arched, all writhing animal, flipping fish. She sprang up, her hands on her back, moaning.
‘What did I do? What is it?’ I asked, trying to grab hold of her, but she was thrashing against me and her eyes were rolling around, all whites, and in the half-darkness, boy, was that spooky. I said, ‘Stop it—you’re scaring me. Calm down and just tell me what’s wrong.’
But she didn’t say anything.
When she had slowed to a shiver, I looked at her wasted little body, and that’s when it suddenly dawned on me, and maybe you’ve guessed this all along, but clearly I didn’t, and oh, oh, oh, it would have been so obvious in the daylight from the colour of her skin. Minami’s eyes flashed through my mind, so brown and gentle, like a bright young deer’s.
‘Winter,’ I said slowly, calmly, as I stepped towards her, though inside me was so very Not Calm. ‘Turn around and pull up your singlet. Winter, show me your back.’
Winter
Winifred
If I hadn’t turned my head that day in the market, in Egypt, they wouldn’t have taken my mother.
In my dreams I have unturned it a thousand times. A hundred thousand.
I have whispered to the sky, Come back. Take me instead. I will be so well behaved in heaven. I was always good—it was just this one time.
But then I think about Edward, and my father, and I wonder, What is good? What is bad?
Summer
It’s ironic, how beautiful that web of bruises was, blooming across Winter’s back. So delicate—I’m talking spider-web fine—and dark against her skin, like a chocolate pattern marbled in white icing. I wished Winter could see it up close and we could study it forever.
And as I pulled Winter’s shirt back down, I thought about how the things that make us vulnerable also make us beautiful, and how the parts of ourselves that we hide away are the ones that we should probably hold up to the sun.
I felt it as a stillness in me, Winter’s Greying. And for once I didn’t say anything, just folded her into my arms as if she were a paper girl.
Winter
On the night before Edward betrayed me, we stood side by side on the banks of the river in the moonbeams. The light flowed like liquid silver. He ran his fingers so softly over the back of my wrist.
I said, ‘There is nothing more beautiful than this here now.’
He turned and he flipped my hand over to look at my palm.
He looked up, right into my eyes, and he said to me, ‘Your mother, your father—that wasn’t your fault. None of it. Do you hear me, Winifred? They would have found them soon enough anyway. They knew she was there. They knew he was here. They know everything about you. You didn’t stand a chance.’
‘You can just call me Winnie,’ I said. ‘Then it’s Winter and Winifred together, you see? Not one or the other.’
‘Stop changing the subject,’ he said. ‘I want you to say: This was not my fault. None of it—past or present or future. Whatever happens, promise me you’ll remember that you haven’t done anything wrong. You’re the sweetest thing that ever lived. Say it: This was not my fault.’
The future was him. I see that now, the things he took: my mind, my heart, the truth.
The past was my mother being captured, and my father hanging himself, mad with grief and the ghouls of his own mistakes.
And the present was my love for Edward.
I say it again and it means something different.
The present was my love for him.
I am standing on top of a mountain.
I shout out to the world, ‘THIS WAS NOT MY FAULT.’
Summer
As I set off through the snow, I was thinking of that sore and helpless feeling that comes from being stuck in the middle of who you are and who you wish you could be. How life is a daisy chain of moments where you have the chance to be better, but you fail at being selfless or honest or brave.
Like when someone comes to school and you know they no longer have a brother and you’ve spent the whole weekend obsessively imagining the empty place at their dinner table, not that you’ve ever even bothered to think much about that table since you went there for dinner about seven years ago on the way to a bowling party. And they turn up to class, that someone, and you’ve all just been told to Act Normal, and you just sort of whisper ‘hi’ into the ground when every bit of you wants to do and say and be more, to be everything, but you just can’t bring yourself to look up and into their eyes.
Or when there’s a guy on the edge of the road to your dad’s office in the city, his knees pushing out his jeans and a bright-yellow sore on his knuckles, like a really bad new-shoe blister, his hair all greasy like he’s been washing hot dishes all day except he hasn’t because he doesn’t have a job and he doesn’t have a home and what he does have is a putrid smell like a baked cat-pee pie, and in spite of that, or maybe because, all you want to do is put money in his grimy, faded football cap but should you and can you because maybe he’ll use it for something No Good, and don’t you need the cash for the movies, and does that make you a terrible person, and what is the weight of that guy’s life when you hold it in the palm of your hand? So you walk on by and you try to say ‘Sorry’ but it gets caught in your throat like a squeak.
It was Winter who pushed past the desks and chairs in the classroom and, with the gentlest, truest hug, said, not even in a mumble, ‘I’m so very, very sorry about your brother.’
It
was Winter who was scared of that bright-yellow knuckle sore but shook that guy’s hand anyway, and introduced herself like he was the boss of her work-experience placement, and gave him the Italian bread sticks and blackcurrant wine gums our dad’s secretary had given us for movie snacks.
It had always been Winter. And I guess I’ve gone off topic just slightly here, but you get what I’m saying, and it isn’t really about wine gums. Not even a bit.
Winter
The snow on the summit reminds me of Belarus at Christmas. We were there when I was seven, all wearing pompom hats. I had striped mittens. We were walking along, arms linked, in a line.
The streetlights made the snowdrifts glow golden. A sleigh went past with a powdery swish.
We had been singing rounds of Christmas carols. My mother sang the harmonies. Pops knew half the words in Latin.
‘See those icicles hanging down from the tips of the trees?’ my mother asked. ‘There’s a name for those. Clinkerbells. Isn’t that pretty?’ She closed her eyes and said it again.
‘What colour is it, Mum?’ I asked. ‘Right now—right this second—what colour do you see?’
She paused, then she whispered with tears in her throat, ‘What I see…What I see are the colours for Love.’
My father lay down, right in the snow. He stretched out his arms into glorious wings. He looked up at us. Stars shone out of his eyes.
‘This is love,’ he said. ‘This right here. This is love. We are love.’
Summer
Taking Winter down the other side of the mountain, well, it shouldn’t have been too tricky at all. She was so light by then, and so brutally tiny, that a whole flock of backlit angels could have flown down to pick her up, and it only would have taken one, medium-sized, to carry her home, wherever that was. But racing down a slope is so very much harder than climbing up, and if you’re not Careful (capital C), you will tip on your ankles and jar your knees, and the stones will slip under you so that you get a fright like ice-water rushing to your feet, and there’s so much clammy sweat it’s like you’re covered in glue.