It’s hot up here. The air has teeth, stinging your nostrils like a biting thing. The heat follow you around like a nagging child – just as you think you’ve been afforded some relief in a corner of the house with the curtains drawn, it tugs at you for attention again.
Mouths stick open, hands splayed to catch the first stirrings of a breeze. Winter is a familiar smiling face you can’t quite place. Everything is tinged with gold, as if it blew in on a wind. It’s so still that it feels like the world has agreed to a game of hide and seek and left only time unawares. It is, after all, the only thing that’s moving.
My body feels like it’s in a slow collapse that might last the full two weeks that we’re here. It’s like a constant state of existing in the moment just before a faint, when your surroundings start to sparkle with death and break away into stars and your ears sing as if to woo back the blood to your head. The drawl of the radio on the kitchen bench is the only evidence anyone else exists in the rubbery silence.
Our old family friends came to visit yesterday. We see them once a year, at the same time, when all the kids are back at home for Christmas. Seeing someone once a year is a strange experiment. You get to see the effects that the year has had on them, without understanding any of the causes. Julie has grown bloated with sadness. A rotten son and the responsibility of looking after his constantly screaming decisions (1, 3 and 5) will do that to you. Alice has started dying her eyebrows. She snuck two pieces of Christmas cake from the pale plate her mother brought it on. Her spit pooled in her cheeks as she juggled mouthfuls of fat fruit and talk of cutting her teeth in the military. Her actual teeth wrapped themselves like jagged shoreline rocks around a broad accent. Every time she talked, we all leant in on our elbows to hear it – so much so that everyone had little pink roses on their arms when they got up from the table.
Alice has inherited Julie’s talent for sitting around a table for longer than is ergonomically safe. And that’s not all. Side by side, observing me like a strange creature from a distant zoo, they looked like the before and afters of themselves. I stared at Alice staring back at me, giving a vague reply to the pointed questions I had asked her about military life. We both half-listened, more invested in the wordless discussion being had in the space between us.
“I bought a house, you know. Did your acting degree do that for you too?”
“Why don’t you tell the table your thoughts on Donald Trump. How did you vote in the last election?”
“Ask me what it’s like to have money and a stable job that lets me use the words ‘fibre optics’ in casual conversation. Don’t look at me like I’m lonely. I’m not.”
When their tea was drunk, they sat back from their cups like they had just realised they were full of poison. The clock barked 4pm like an order and, right on cue, Julie launched into the first of three holiday stories that are repeated every year – same time, same table – but that we all receive as if it’s the first time we’ve ever heard them in our lives. The first, my favourite, is a rollicking tale about the time my mother and Julie tried to kill a lobster for dinner by drowning it. Whether they discussed their thoughts on trying to drown a literal sea creature beforehand, we’ll never know.
The second is a long-winded story that sees Julie lose grip of a raw chicken halfway through spatchcocking it and watching on hopelessly as it flew through the air, drumsticks to heaven, and landed square in the middle of the neighbour’s freshly baked pumpkin pie. Needless to say, she quickly rescued the chook, grabbed a butter knife and smoothed over the hole in the pie, politely refusing dessert that evening while the rest of us hoed into grand helpings of pumpkin pie.
I sat in the familiar mould of my upbringing as story after story rolled on. Most pointed to Alice’s incredible courage as a child and my shivering cowardice – the time Alice and I had been chased by a dingo down a dirt track and she, a star school athlete at the time, had outran the dog, while I had climbed a tree, howling bloody murder until help arrived. When Alice had punched a shark in the nose abalone diving off a cliff, while I watched on from the safety of the shore, having been too scared to go in. For her, childhood was heroic. I quickly learned to love dark, cool spaces, quiet reading spots and how to duck at lighting speed so, when Alice came calling at the door or peering through our windows, it would appear that I wasn’t in.
I wasn’t in for most of my 20s after that. Hiding became a great skill of mine – in impossible tasks and equally unachievable romances. I didn’t want to be known, not even by myself, in case it meant being dragged out to dive for abalone in shark-infested waters. I still jolt at the knock of a door. I’ll come out when I’m ready, I want to scream back at the jeering face of the world.
Julie’s nostrils flared with the force of her cackling as she told story after story of Alice’s incredible feats that I would have always left uncompleted or unattempted, having turned around halfway through to return to a warm embrace and an afternoon interred in a book.
“You’ve always had soft hands, haven’t you” Alice chuckled, holding up our hands to compare her ropy calloused fingers with mine.
I met her gaze just in time to see the fissure of pain that ran through her expression, gnawing at her. Alice would always go. And in there somewhere, she had inherited a beast that I would never hear. Not like she was now.
I smiled, and I meant it this time, knowing I was the one running head, looking back just as the dingo sunk its teeth into her heels.
TN