Lessons in Letting Go (7 page)

The rest of the box mostly contained stuff from the early eighties. I spent the evening poring over my primary school-era handwriting, trying to pick out the words in drafts of letters to relatives that I must have written when I was eight years old. The handwriting was almost illegible and disturbingly identical to my handwriting now.

I deciphered each note as best I could, then smoothed it out and put it in the ‘keeping’ pile. The pile for throwing out contained some rusty bobby pins. When I was done, I repacked the box. I guess it was at that point that I accidentally dropped the Bastard Man’s book in there as well. I taped the carton shut without realising and put it back in the wardrobe.

Looking back, I can’t believe I didn’t miss that book. I didn’t miss it then and I didn’t miss it when I moved out. It just disappeared and never crossed my mind again.

Until it was too late.

Part 2
Where It Became Unsteady

Chapter Six

Two days later I was back in Corryong sifting through my childhood. I’d left Melbourne that morning after an early breakfast with Adam and a warning from him not to bring too much back with me.

‘Here. This is to stop you from acting like an idiot.’

He dropped a Saint Christopher’s medallion onto my plate of eggs and bacon. I picked it out and squinted at him suspiciously.

‘Adam, what’s this got to do with anything? For a start, you’re not Catholic, and for another thing, Saint Christopher is the patron saint of travellers. Besides, I’m pretty sure he was de-sainted, or whatever you call it, quite a while ago.’

Adam rolled his eyes.

‘Jesus, all right Perry Mason, calm down. I was trying to find you a patron saint for possessions but there isn’t one. So then I thought I’d get you one of the Archangel Michael, but I couldn’t find one of those either, so—’ ‘What’s he got to do with anything?’

‘He’s the patron saint of the possessed.’

‘Oh, you’re hilarious. You’re truly, truly hilarious.’

Adam flicked his wrist.

‘I know. So in the end I got you a Saint Christopher. He can look after your car and stop you filling it with crap.’

‘Except that he doesn’t exist.’

‘Well they shouldn’t keep selling his medallion then, should they? Stupid Catholic church. Well, actually, I got it in one of those two-dollar shops.’

I slipped the little medallion into my purse.

‘You do realise you’ve completely blown your argument by
giving
me crap instead of telling me to get rid of what I’ve already got, don’t you?’

‘Haven’t you left yet?’

I hugged him goodbye, left him to pay the bill as punishment for being a smartarse, and started the journey back home.

Six hours later I was on my hands and knees on my bedroom floor in Corryong, contemplating a little ball of crumpled paper that, when unfolded, seemed to be a two-page essay titled ‘The first thing I am going to talk about is little sisters. Bad points and good’. It was dated to when I was ten years old.

My sister Wendy is two years younger than me and whenever anyone asks (which isn’t all that often), I’ve always likened our childhood to that of Laura and Mary Ingalls in
Little House on the Prairie
. They lived in the country, so did we. They were sisters, so were we. They were partial to pinafores, so were we. We were exactly like them except for the fact that we had running water and an indoor toilet and virtually no trouble from wolves. And neither of us was blind. Like all siblings, we had our disagreements and there was one particularly heated exchange where I lost a chunk of hair, leaving a bald spot on my head about the size of a twenty-cent piece, but on the whole, we were very close. Or so I’d thought.

The weird syntax of the essay—of putting ‘bad’ before ‘good’—gave me an indication that the list was going to be perhaps less than flattering to my sister. Another indication was that the ‘bad points’ list filled an entire page and the ‘good points’ list was blank. I started to read it with trepidation.

BAD POINTS

Mess up bedroom

Hang around you

Hang around your friends

Take your things without asking

Then break the things

Say embarrassing things about you

Never get into trouble

Get what they want all the time

Don’t feed the cat

Annoy you on purpose

Take all the good posters out of
TV Week
.

In my defence, I hadn’t made a single spelling mistake.

Instead of ringing Adam (who no doubt would have told me to throw it out), I rang Thomas. He laughed when I read the list out to him.

‘The good posters out of
TV Week
? I’ve seen your childhood bedroom, remember; neither of you had any good posters.’

‘I think she took the one of Bros that I wanted.’

He laughed again. ‘Where’d you find it?’

‘The list? In a drawer. It just fell out of an old diary.’

I was lying. I had found it beneath a pile of training bras, old copies of
Dolly
and what appeared to be disintegrating hair bobbles, all of which I had carefully put in my ‘keeping’ pile.

‘Hey, guess what? I forgot to tell you, Mum and Dad are selling the house. I’m up in Corryong right now.’

‘Really? Wow. Cleaning out that bedroom is going to be a nightmare.’

The first time I had taken Thomas home to meet my family had not gone well. I was nervous about taking him to the country, I was nervous about him meeting my parents for the first time and I was nervous about him seeing my childhood bedroom. To mitigate things I had taken Adam along too, as well as another friend named Jamie. Jamie and I were doing a show together and I was using the trip as an excuse for us to film some footage to use in a sketch. Jamie was a country boy himself, so I thought he could help smooth the way.

The boys were all staying at the local caravan park, but on our first night in town, my fancy new city boyfriend was coming to meet my family on his own. Mum had whipped up a roast and her famous pavlova. We were even using the dining room, the good cutlery and the good tablecloth, all of which were normally reserved for Christmas Day. At the age of twenty-four, this was the first time I had brought a boy home and no one really knew how to react. I am sure that as we were waiting for him to arrive, a small part of my parents wondered whether he might turn out to be imaginary.

Thomas pulled into our driveway exactly on time and the introductions went well. Then Dad and Thomas went out into the backyard for a chat. My sister, my mother and I set the table, smoothed our skirts and generally tried to ignore the fact that I had grown up and was very clearly having sex with someone.

No matter how nervous Thomas had told me he was feeling before he turned up, I knew I was feeling worse. He would eventually want a tour of our house and my childhood bedroom. It still looked the same as the day I had left, complete with the beds made in case we ever needed them. Even our childhood cot was ready to be slept in, presumably in case either of us shrunk. All our toys were still in the toy box and all the ornaments covering our dressing table sat there gathering dust. Piles of my old schoolwork covered the tops of the drawers, posters spilled out of containers and an Itty Bitty Bin full of erasers sat at the foot of my bed. If Dickens’ Miss Havisham had grown up a teenager in the eighties and shared a bedroom with her sister, this is what it would have looked like. When Thomas opened the door, I lied and told him that most of the stuff belonged to Wendy.

We sat down to dinner and Dad carved the roast. My father is a very traditional man with some very strong, albeit unusual, rules: shoes should always be shined, men do not swear in front of women, and under no circumstances should fruit ever be put in a savoury dish. Thomas had good shoes and had never shown a penchant for apricot chicken but he came from the city and had a lot of Scottish friends; swearing was like breathing to him. Sure enough, somewhere between the lamb being served and the gravy being poured, Thomas took a call on his mobile at the dinner table and said ‘Fuck.’ Loudly. Then he said it again. My sister, my mother and I all stared at our plates, hoping that if we did not look up, then the world would conveniently stand still and my father would somehow suffer a very specific form of amnesia, wiping the last ten seconds from his memory. When I eventually did look at my father it was obvious that was not the case. He was still passing around the gravy but he looked like he was passing a stone. Thomas continued his phone call, oblivious to the silent, slow-motion mayhem unfolding around him. I can only imagine that my father decided not to haul Thomas outside and run him down with the rotary hoe because he didn’t want his dinner to go cold.

When I told Thomas later what he had done he went weak and had to sit down. So much for first impressions. It would be another year before Thomas finally felt that he had earned my father’s forgiveness and that was only because my father accidentally ran into his car and tore off the back end. It was the first and only time I have ever seen someone relieved to be in a car accident.

The next morning my sister Wendy and I drove out to the caravan park to pick up the others. She was still laughing.

‘He said “fuck” at the dinner table, Corinne! Maybe we can get him to say grace tonight. “Hey, God, thanks for the fucking chicken.” ’ More laughter.

Adam came running out of the caravan as we parked. ‘Jamie knows the bull spoof guy!’

What a wonderful trip this was turning into.

‘The bull spoof guy! J went to school with him!’ Adam was waving excitedly as if he had just found out that Jamie was related to Mariah Carey.

‘We saw him on the telly! He’s selling bull spoof!’ Adam was laughing maniacally. I could not figure out if Thomas looked amused or sick.

I shut the car door and kissed my boyfriend hello. ‘They sell bull semen to farmers for breeding. It’s not some kind of weird sex thing. At least not until J and Adam found out about it.’

Jamie grinned. The part of a country kid that delights in grossing out city people never disappears. When I was in high school I made a video for my city penpal that showed me sticking my arm into a cow’s mouth to prove they didn’t bite. (The cow did bite—a lot—but we managed to edit that out.) Now Jamie, like a true country kid, was standing in the doorway of the caravan, arms folded and laughing as Adam breathlessly told my unimpressed sister everything he had just discovered about artificial animal insemination.

I watched as Jamie climbed into the back of my sister’s car. Although we were both from country Victoria, a childhood desire to disturb city people was where the similarities between us ended. He had done a far better job of assimilating into city life than I had. He was groovy. He had groovy wavy blond hair, long, but not too long, just groovy. He wore T-shirts bearing the names of indie bands. He had an earring. Admittedly, he also drove a Barina with cow-print seat covers, so the transformation wasn’t complete, but he was a long way ahead of me. I had turned up that morning in a flannel shirt, track pants and Blundstones. I looked like I should be heading out to a paddock to collect bull spoof myself.

Jamie was the only one in our party that I was not worried about. Adam was a constant source of concern for too many reasons to list and Thomas had already proven himself a disaster. Jamie was supposed to be the one who was in control. So it took us all by surprise when he proved to be the most unfit for country living out of all of us.

That morning, we were going to visit the local trout farm. Thomas had never seen a trout farm before and Adam thought it would be funny. Wendy and Jamie came along, acting as nonchalant as possible. Trout were nothing special; only city folk got excited about fish. So we went and we looked at ponds and we saw some fish flapping about. Adam and Wendy went off to hire some rods and Thomas took a call and went off to say ‘fuck’ a lot in private.

I was quite proud of the trout farm. It was one the town’s biggest tourist attractions and it sold a trout pâté to which I am yet to find an equal. It even had an underwater viewing platform where you could watch the trout swimming about undisturbed. Jamie and I went down for a look. The viewing area was not perhaps as spectacular as I had remembered it. It was smaller and murkier. It was pretty much a thirty-centimetre-square piece of thick glass looking into some cloudy water. Jamie complained that he couldn’t see anything and pressed his face right up to it to get a better look.

Essentially, a fish is nothing more than a shiny, smelly muscle with a flipper on each side. Muscles move quickly. Jamie should not have been at all surprised when one of them shot into view right in front of his face. Even so, he screamed so loudly that the fish, stunned into unconsciousness, instantly turned upside down and floated to the surface. After a moment of standing completely still and open-mouthed, we both ran up the stairs to see if we could find it. Adam came running towards us.

‘What happened? Corinne, are you all right? Why were you screaming?’

‘It wasn’t me, it was Jamie. He screamed at a trout and we think he killed it.’

‘What do you mean, “Jamie screamed at a trout”? Who’s scared of trout? Jamie? Did you scream at a trout?’

‘It came out of nowhere!’

‘You’re at a trout farm, it didn’t come out of nowhere, it came out of a trout pond. Why did you scream at a trout?’

And then we saw it floating on the surface. Jamie put his head in his hands. Then, just as quickly as it had stopped moving, it started again. It was like someone had pushed a reset button and it swam away as if nothing had happened.

Everyone was quiet. Then my sister, standing behind us and holding all the fishing gear, called out, ‘Hey, J, how about we forget about these rods and bait and we just let you wade out into the middle of the pond to scream until all the trout float to the surface? You’ll be like an aquatic version of Shelley Duvall in
The Shining
.’ Adam clapped his hands in delight.

Later that day I took us for a drive somewhere dry, where the fish couldn’t hurt us. We drove out the other side of town, my sister and I pointing out the sights along the way. Here’s the cemetery that everyone’s forgotten about, here’s the place that was nearly the capital of Australia, here’s the place that was used in a movie once. As we were driving, I saw something in the middle of the road, and as we got closer, I realised it was a turtle. The middle of the road is not a good place for a turtle to be hanging out. Cars are fast, turtles are slow. I pulled over to the side of the road with the plan of picking it up and putting it back onto the grass, safe from oncoming traffic. I will also admit, I had never touched a turtle and I could not envisage a time in the near future when I might get to touch one again. It was an opportunity too good to pass up.