‘But Cat, there’s an important principle here. Stella should know where you are at any given time.’
‘I’m not a minor.’
‘No, but you should be letting her know what you’re doing. I don’t like the thought of you going out and about without someone knowing where you are, what you’re doing.’
‘But you know I’m perfectly responsible, thoroughly reliable …’
‘Yes, yes, but that’s not the point.’
‘Well, I’ve told you, so now you know.’
‘But Cat,’ he said, ‘I’m not around.’
‘Shame,’ I said, suddenly feeling glum.
‘And Stella’s your mother, she’s got a right to know about this. Hell, she’d be pleased.’
‘Say no more,’ I said.
There was a long silence. We sat there, not eating, toying with our forks.
‘What’s going on here?’ he said finally. ‘Are you punishing her in some way?’
‘Of course I’m not punishing her,’ I said hotly. ‘Why would I want to do that? I just feel like keeping Jem to myself for a while, that’s all.’
‘Why have you told me?’
‘Because you understand,’ I said, without thinking.
‘And Stella won’t?’
I shrugged. The conversation had gone rather awry. I hated Freddy being cross with me.
‘I’ll tell her soon,’ I said.
‘I worry about this, Cat, this not talking about things. I think it’s very important that you talk to Stella about Jem and about everything else too — about the past, about her and me, about—’
‘Yes, yes,’ I said. ‘I know I should. I will someday, I will, I will, I promise.’
‘Have you told Jem about Ti—’
‘No,’ I said. ‘No I haven’t. Don’t ask me why, I just haven’t. I just don’t want to. Honestly, Freddy.’ I looked straight at him. ‘I just don’t want to.’
I hated that troubled look on his face.
‘Look, I’ll tell Stella about Jem, I promise. I’ll tell her, okay? Please cheer up.’ I lifted my glass at him in a hopeful toast. ‘Please don’t worry about me, I’m great. Honestly, I’m fantastic. You’ll have to meet Jem. I know you’ll really like him. I’ll arrange it, okay?’
I burbled on until he smiled and we clinked glasses to romance. I promised him I’d tell Stella about Jem as soon as the moment was right.
But the right moment never came.
April was the month for celebration dinners. For a start it was Stella’s birthday, her thirty-fourth.
‘Not something Arieans like much, either,’ she said, gloomily. ‘They don’t like ageing, at all. They think of themselves as permanently twenty-six — dynamic, upwardly mobile, infinitely desirable.’
‘Freddy’s an Aries, too,’ I said, meanly. ‘He doesn’t fight the facts.’
‘Freddy was born mature,’ said Stella.
‘You said it, Stella.’
We had dinner at Nan’s, and after dinner — and a lot of wine — Stella and Toni sang songs from the shows, with William on the piano. It was wonderful, just like all the old Christmases when my grandfather was alive and Freddy and Stella were married, Freddy hamming it up with the others, singing Rodgers and Hammerstein tunelessly at the top of his voice.
‘What do you reckon, Dad?’ Stella would say, breathless with laughter. ‘Nature or nurture? Freddy may not be Cat’s biological father, but they sure have a tin ear in common.’
‘It’s Stella’s idea of hell,’ said Freddy, his arm around Stella’s neck. ‘Trapped in the car with me and Cat and Tiggie all singing rounds.’
I watched Stella now, singing ‘I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair,’ enjoying her performance for once, not feeling the ghastly longing for the old times. When she and Toni sang ‘People Will Say We’re in Love’ I just smiled at them and thought of Jem, hugging him to myself.
Then it was Freddy’s birthday and I had dinner at his parents’ with his big family — six brothers and sisters, sixteen grandchildren. I sat watching the swarm of kids, finding myself, as usual, looking for Tiggie’s curly head, listening for her high, shrieking laugh. I couldn’t bear that feeling. I couldn’t bear the horror that swept over me when I realised all over again that she wasn’t there.
I made myself think of Jem instead.
‘Happy Birthday, Daddy-O,’ I said to Freddy, giving him his present and a big hug. Then I wished I hadn’t because he had to take off his glasses and wipe them a bit later when he thought no one was watching. That was the trouble with Freddy’s family. Tears were lurking, ready to snare any of us in a moment. I found it frightening.
And then it was dinner at Jem’s.
‘Better meet the folks,’ he said. ‘Get it out of the way.’
‘But you like them,’ I said.
As far as I could tell his parents were nothing short of perfect — Christian, reliable, but broad-minded, tolerant. Jem, his dope-smoking brother and the twins seemed to live in loving harmony 365 days a year. It wasn’t as simple as that, he said.
‘Not like me and Stella,’ I said, certain it was as simple as that.
‘What’s it like with you and Stella, then?’
I tried to think exactly what it was like. ‘We’re like two pieces of sandpaper rubbing at each other. And we’re the wrong way around, most of the time. I’m like the mother and she’s like the child. She was seventeen when I was born and she’s been having her adolescence ever since — except when she was married to Freddy. Then she was good. She was really together, she was a proper mother.’ I laughed. ‘She cooked, and ate it too. She bottled fruit. Then she stuffed it up by having an affair. And it was all downhill after that.’
‘How come? If they were happy, I mean. Were they happy?’
‘I thought they were,’ I said, feeling the old bitterness.
‘So why are you getting all dolled up?’ Stella asked me on the last Friday in April. We were both standing in the bathroom brushing our hair. Stella had already smacked a dozen potions on her face but I couldn’t decide whether to wear make-up or not.
‘Going out for dinner,’ I said truthfully, feeling rather pleased with the way my hair looked in the mirror. It was redder and curlier than ever but I felt differently towards it now, knowing that Jem liked it, loved it, even. He played with it, curling it in his fingers, exclaiming over its redness.
‘Titian-coloured,’ I told him. (I was doing art history at school.) ‘He was a painter.’
‘I know that,’ he said. ‘I may only be a zoo keeper, but I’m not a philistine.’
Tonight I had on a black velvet hairband, black jeans and a white shirt. I was saving my zoo money to buy a jacket. It was cold now in the evenings, a fact Stella never stopped grizzling about.
‘Pretty soon it will start raining,’ she said now, leaning against the basin, filing her nails, ‘and it won’t stop until November. The sky will be thick and grey and about three inches above our heads. Why don’t we move to Australia? Brisbane? It’s summer there all year round.’
‘You say that every autumn,’ I said, watching her in the mirror. She was wearing one of her singing outfits, a long silk skirt and a low-cut black leather bodice, laced up the front. Very medieval, very glam.
‘Do you think we could pass for sisters?’ she asked hopefully, moving up behind me, putting her chin on my shoulder. It was an annoying fact of our relationship that I was now five centimetres taller and much heavier than Stella. This discrepancy only served to emphasise our back-to-front roles; it bugged me something wicked.
‘You wish,’ I said, moving out from under her chin towards the bathroom door.
‘Do you know what?’ she said, leaning into the mirror. ‘I’ve got an awful feeling I’m developing a moustache. There are newer, darker hairs above my lip. Oh, God,’ she sighed. ‘Roll on menopause. I’ll be able to relax then, it’ll be all over.’
I toyed with a picture of Stella, old and raddled, with middle-age
spread.
‘You’ll die of lung cancer before you get to menopause,’ I said.
‘Yeah, yeah.’
‘Can I borrow your leather jacket?’ Stella liked lending me clothes. It made her feel young and sisterly.
‘Only if you tell me who you’re going to dinner with and where.’
‘Penny and some of her friends, some Chinese place,’ I said, shutting out the picture of Freddy hovering on the periphery of my mind. I’ll tell her about Jem tomorrow, I thought. Definitely.
‘Come to the Studio afterwards,’ said Stella, catching me out. ‘I’m doing “West Wind”. And you might meet Paul.’
‘Thanks but no thanks,’ I said. I didn’t want to meet the new man. I started down the hall to my bedroom.
‘Are you determined to be shitty about this?’ Stella shouted after me.
‘Not at all,’ I called back haughtily. ‘But why should I expend any energy on someone who will probably disappear in a couple of months?’
‘You are such a bitch sometimes, Cat,’ said Stella, coming after me. She stood in the entrance to my bedroom, spitting tacks. ‘You haven’t even met him and you’ve written him off!’
‘Painful experience, Stella.’
‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?’
‘It means that this is your fourth boyfriend in twelve months!’
‘So what?’
‘So, you’d better have an AIDS test!’ I shouted, shutting the door on her.
She went out shortly after that, banging the front door behind her, stamping down the path to the car.
Well, I’m not sorry, I thought. It’s the truth and I’m not sorry to speak it. It’d be all right in the morning. Stella’s rages never lasted long. She was all spit and bark.
I shut the front door quietly and sat on the verandah in the sharp night air, watching the willows over the road by the river swaying slightly, an eerie yellow-green in the light of the street lamps.
‘I love your family,’ I said to Jem, later that night.
We lay on his bed in the semi-dark, listening to an old Go-Betweens record. I could just see Jem’s face, lit by the porch lamp.
‘It’s just the novelty,’ he said. ‘The ugly phenomenon of siblings is unfamiliar to you.’
It was the perfect moment to tell him about Tiggie. I took a deep breath and opened my mouth to talk about her, but — as they say in books — the words stuck in my throat. They really did. Nothing came out. I wanted to say it. There was a cesspool of strong memories, simmering, buried. I just couldn’t call them up, turn them into words.
‘You’ll have to reframe everything when you meet Sim, anyway,’ Jem was saying. ‘He’s the cuckoo in the nest. The proverbial square peg.’
I squeezed my eyes hard to stop thinking of Tiggie. I buried my face in Jem’s neck, licking his salty skin, little tickling slurps. He rolled slowly on top of me and started kissing me, long and fierce.
‘I love you,’ I said for the first time. It was true and I needed to tell him precisely because I couldn’t tell him other important things.
‘Me too,’ he said, smiling down at me.
He put his hands in my hair and continued kissing me. I wanted to cry with pleasure.
‘Do you …?’ His breath warmed my ear.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But not here.’ We groaned and clasped each other and went on kissing and kissing, pressing into each other as if we were trying to merge.
And then there was a loud bang, a burst of light and a shout. Someone stood in the open doorway.
‘Ah hah! Thought so! Coitus interruptus! Sorry folks, show’s over. Uncle Simeon’s home to meet the flaming redhead!’
‘Bloody hell!’ said Jem, sitting up, blinking. ‘Shut the door, you mad bastard.’
I sat up slowly, pulling the sides of my shirt together, embarrassed, staring at the boy in the doorway.
‘Are you sure he’s your brother?’ I asked Jem later.
‘Pretty sure,’ he said. ‘I think he’s a throw-back — to a Germanic past or something. You know, Goths and Visigoths, sort of flaxen and barbaric.’
He was Jem’s opposite in almost every way — as fair as Jem was dark, a head of straw-coloured hair sticking out in odd directions, thick, pale eyebrows. He was shorter and broader than Jem, with small, rough-skinned hands, blunt fingers. (Gardening hands, I thought.) He wore moleskin trousers and hand-tooled, embroidered cowboy boots. He was grinning crazily at us and swaying slightly on his heels.
‘Shut the damn door,’ said Jem again, getting up off the bed. ‘Are you pissed?’
‘How’s my Byronic brother?’ said Simeon, putting his arm around Jem’s shoulders, leaning on him.
‘You are pissed,’ said Jem, pushing him off, sitting down on the bed with a thump. He rolled his eyes at me.
‘I am not pissed,’ said Simeon with careful dignity. ‘I’m merely knocked sideways by the sexual miasma in this room.’ He grinned at me and waggled his eyebrows and I had a strong desire to giggle.
‘Oh for Christ’s sake!’
‘Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain, old son. Shall I turn the record over?’ he asked, helpfully.
‘I’d prefer it if you just buggered off, actually,’ said Jem, smiling faintly.
‘I’ll just turn the record over and then I’ll bugger off and have a widdle.’ Simeon bent carefully over the stereo and turned the record with great delicacy.
I started to laugh and so did Jem.
‘God, you’re an impossible bastard. Where have you been anyway?’
‘Round at Fitz’s listening to the Dead. Now there’s a band.’ He inclined his head towards me and nearly toppled over. He was drunk. ‘Not like these love-sick pansies,’ he said, gesturing to the turntable. He walked carefully over to the bed and sat down beside us. ‘Aren’t you going to introduce me, Jemmy?’
‘This is Cat,’ said Jem, leaning away from Simeon. The smell of alcohol was very strong. ‘Cat, Simeon, in case you hadn’t guessed.’
Simeon held his hand out to me over the top of Jem. ‘Simeon Eli Baynton Hook,’ he said, giving me a sleepy grin.
I laughed and shook his hand and he promptly fell backwards into a deep drunken sleep.
‘Oh, great!’ said Jem. ‘He passes out on my bed — and not for the first time either.’ He leaned over with his head in his hands and groaned and laughed and sighed all at once. ‘God preserve me from my family.’ Simeon had begun to snore gently. Jem threw the duvet on him.
‘He’s funny,’ I said, looking at the little hill of duvet. Only Simeon’s face showed, cherubic and endearing in sleep.
‘Sort of,’ said Jem. ‘Sort of. But chiefly, he’s a royal pain and I’m running out of patience.’
We walked out to his bike and put on our helmets. Simeon’s van was parked on the road and I saw that it had been painted in the same fluorescent colours as the JESUS LIVES!! banner. The words love, peace and Deadhead leapt out of the surrounding decoration of flowers, snakes and androgynous bodies.
As we wound through the well-lit streets of Parklands it started to rain gently. When we came to the long black stretch of Travis Road I hugged Jem, rested my head on his back. The air rushing past made me breathless.
I imagined describing Simeon to Penny. Almost ugly, really, I would say. Yeah, sort of ugly and exasperating and hilarious and rude and out of control and somehow, I don’t know, somehow, weirdly, there was a look in his eye, there was a—
‘Cute, eh?’ Penny would say.
Very cute, I thought, lifting my head momentarily, catching a sharp wallop of air. I burrowed into Jem’s back, tightened my arms hard around his middle.
Chapter Six
‘Aren’t you going to say anything to all that?’ I asked Miriam Wilkie. I didn’t like it when she was silent.
‘I was thinking,’ she said. ‘I was thinking that it seemed a bit like the calm before the storm.’
Yeah.
‘And I was thinking, too,’
she went on, ‘that you were good at boxing off bits of your life.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well …’ she said slowly, taking care with her words, ‘all the compartments of your life are just that — compartments — school, the zoo, home. All the people are carefully kept separate — Stella, Freddy, Jem, Penny, et cetera—’
‘So?’
‘And nobody knows everything. Stella doesn’t know about Jem, Freddy doesn’t know that you haven’t told Stella, your classmates don’t know anything, Jem and Penny don’t know about—’
‘Yeah, yeah, I get the picture. So what?’ She irked me when she went on like this, pushing some point, on and on, relentless as a tank.
‘Do you think that’s interesting?’
‘Not particularly.
‘But you obviously do,’ I said, testily, when she didn’t reply.
‘Do you know why?’ she asked, sitting forward, toying with her rings. ‘I think,’ she said, not waiting for an answer, ‘I think that it takes enormous energy to keep bits of your life caged off like that. I think it’s a demanding balancing act. Very tiring.’
I thought back to the middle of last year, how sleeplessness had crept up on me, how I woke, suddenly, at 4 a.m. sometimes and lay there watching my breath, clouding briefly in the chilly room.
‘I was tired,’ I allowed, ‘but that was the insomnia.’
‘What do you make of the insomnia?’ asked Miriam.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I thought it was excitement, happiness, new beginnings, you know — I thought a lot about Jem and the Salters and the animals and Jem’s family.’
‘About Stella?’
‘No, I hardly thought about Stella at all.’ I suddenly felt very tired now.
There was a long silence:
‘When did it blow?’ said Miriam.
‘What do you mean, blow?’ I said.
‘I was thinking of engines,’ she said, smiling slightly, ‘overheated engines.’
An awful prickly heat crept down my neck and back. ‘Mechanics was never my line,’ I said, trying to breathe slowly, trying to ignore the panic in my stomach and throat. I thought of the steam pouring out from under the bonnet of Simeon’s van, the white vapour hissing noisily. I thought of Simeon yelping with pain as he tried to get at the radiator cap and me collapsed against the side of the cab, wobbly with laughter.
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