Perfections (23 page)

‘Maybe you don’t remember making Jacqueline, either.’

‘No!’ She shakes her head, vehement. ‘She’s my sister, she’s
always
been my sister. Jacqueline, you have a
birth certificate
, for godsake.’

Jacqueline glares at her. ‘Because those can never be faked.’

‘And baby photos, photos of you and Mum and Dad from before I was even born. Remember those tiny plaster casts Mum made of your hands and feet? Stuff like that can be faked too, I suppose?’

‘I don’t . . .’ Her stomach rolls. Pain forms a vice around her temples. She tries once again to recall something she has kept from her childhood. A memento, a favourite toy or book. Some useless, forgotten bauble. ‘I don’t have anything from that long ago,’ she says at last. ‘I remember things, yes, but perhaps that’s all it is. A collection of unlived memories.’

Ant snorts. ‘You don’t have anything, because you constantly throw stuff out, you always have.
I’m too old for this now
;
this isn’t who I am anymore;
et-bloody-cetera. You don’t even keep birthday cards.’

‘You don’t understand how it feels,’ Jacqueline whispers. Because there are no words to explain it. Only the gaps between the words, beyond articulation. Those formless, indifferent spaces where, until Loki, she has always dwelt alone.

‘We’re not saying you did it deliberately,’ he tells her sister.

‘I didn’t do it at all!’

‘I don’t feel real.’ Her own voice fights her now. Loki frowns. He hates that word, she knows that, but it’s all she has. ‘I’ve never felt real.’

Ant isn’t listening. Instead she’s talking about their mother. Who would need to be in on the whole thing, right? Lying to them and everyone she knew for however many years Jacqueline decides it has been, pretending she has two troublesome daughters instead of just one, forging paperwork and god knows what else. Does that sound remotely like the Sally Paige they know and love?

‘Maybe,’ Loki says. ‘If she did it for you. If you were so lonely, if you wanted a sister so badly that you went and made one, then maybe she did it for you.’

Ant looks as though she could rip his throat out. ‘You’re not helping,’ she says through gritted teeth. Then she turns to Jacqueline. ‘What about Charlie? Am I supposed to have made our brother as well?’

‘I don’t . . .’ Deep inside, that familiar, twin-shaped pang.

‘Because Charlie isn’t just a memory, Jacqueline. He lived, and he died – for real. His grave’s down in Springvale, you know that.’ Her sister points towards the front door. ‘Should we go and visit, take some flowers? Will that be proof enough for you?’

Jacqueline presses fingers to her temples. ‘You could have made him . . . the both of us at the same time . . .’ She feels like vomiting again. Loki touches her shoulder. She shrugs him off.

‘Well, why isn’t he here?’ Ant is asking. ‘If I made him, why isn’t he here with us right now? Why would I just let him–’

‘I don’t know!’ Her voice pitches so high it cracks. ‘What happened to the fendlies when you got bored of playing with them, or when you just wandered off, forgot they were even there?’

Her sister looks stricken.

‘Is that what happened to Charles?’ Jacqueline wipes at her eyes, surprised to find them wet. ‘Is that what’s happening to me? Now that you have Loki, perhaps you don’t need a sister anymore. Is that it?’

‘Lina,’ Loki warns, but she’s finished. She’s done. Each terror and nightmare-fed doubt sliced open. Pegged out for inspection. But still the tears won’t stop. She dries her face with a kimono sleeve. Breathes.

‘I think . . .’ She can’t even look at her sister. It’s easier to turn away. To walk away, to force one foot in front of the other until she reaches the kitchen. Open the cupboard. Find a glass. Fill it from the tap. Drink. Drink some more. Behind her, feet stomp down the hall, keys jangle in someone’s hand. Jacqueline stays by the sink and closes her eyes.

‘Fuck this,’ Ant mutters.

‘Where are you going?’ Loki asks.

‘To get some bloody proof, if that’s what she needs.’

‘Wait, let me . . .’

The front door slams shut. Jacqueline can hear the faint echoes of their footsteps going down the stairs. She finishes the water. Tucks her hair behind her ears. Then she bends neatly over the sink and allows her rebellious stomach to do its worst.

When her third series of knocks go unanswered, Antoinette sorts through her keys for familiar, tarnished brass – the oldest one on her ring, the key she’s had since she was twelve years old and could be trusted not to lose it – and lets herself into her mother’s house. ‘Mum? You home?’

No answer, even though the Commodore is in the driveway. She checks the kitchen window, in case her mother has got it into her head to do some gardening out back, to weed the dandelions or prune the oleander shrubs that grow half wild along the perimeter. But no, the yard is empty and overgrown, littered with mutant, misshapen lemons from the tree by the porch – and it’s these that really get to her. Normally the fruit would be collected long before it fell, squeezed into juice or boiled for chutney, or simply left in a bowl handy for cooking, and it hurts to see so much of it left to just rot in the grass. Hurts to know how ill her mother must be to let them lie.

Antoinette taps on the bedroom door, waits a beat before opening it. ‘It’s only me,’ she calls softly, but the room is empty, the bed made. There’s a small army of pill bottles lined up on the side table, most of them the shop-bought vitamins her mother has been swallowing her entire life, although there are a couple with more ominous labels. Prescription labels, plain and white with black type far too small to read from this distance, but she isn’t about to take another step unbidden and instead retreats, closing the door behind her.

Sally Paige’s bedroom has always been sacrosanct.

Back in the kitchen, she puts the kettle on. The only coffee in the house is instant and most likely stale, the half-empty jar kept solely for the benefit of guests, but it’ll still deliver a much-needed dose of caffeine. The house is so quiet. So still. Her mother must be visiting a neighbour, Mrs Jeminson from down the road maybe, if they’re still on speaking terms after the incident with, what was it, geranium cuttings? Antoinette has lost track of how many people have made it onto the Sally Paige blacklist, let alone for what obscure slights and misdemeanours.

The coffee is vile, bitter stuff. She stirs in extra sugar and tops up the milk, then takes it with her into the living room. The mahogany cabinet in the corner is where her mother stows Family Business, its two bottom drawers filled with photographs and greeting cards, old letters and other various keepsakes. It’s the photographs she’s after. Those of Jacqueline and Charlie as babies, as toddlers, taken before she was born or not long after, some concrete evidence to wave in her sister’s face –
look, you were here first
– to make her see the ludicrous depths of her paranoia.

To make Loki see it as well.

How can she even think it
, she yelled at him as he followed her down to the car.
And you, encouraging her like that.

Why won’t you admit the possibility that we’re right?

Because you’re not.
Stabbing two fingers into his chest, right into the middle of his sternum.
I would feel her, the same as I feel you.

After all this time? Maybe you’re just used to her.

Antoinette chewed on her anger all the way to the Dandenongs, seething and singing along with early Nine Inch Nails jacked up as loud as she could stand it. Anger as black and bitter as her mother’s coffee, but better that than face up to the hurt that lurked beneath it, the raw bloom of betrayal.

But now, as she pulls a thick, mustard-coloured album from the drawer and begins to turn its pages, the anger dissolves and drips away. Past the photographs of her parents looking far too young to be believed, past the candid wedding day shots where her mother’s smile shone wider and happier than it possibly ever has since, she comes at last to the baby snaps. Not all that many – Sally Paige now uncomfortable around cameras, it seems – but enough.

Here, the sequence she remembers. Half a dozen shots of the twins in a bubble bath, their mother crouching beside the tub with her belly still clearly full of Antoinette, a taut, unwilling grimace on her face as her husband presumably exhorts her to
say cheese
. Jacqueline and Charlie themselves all grins and giggles and shiny pink baby skin, Charlie brandishing a handful of bubbles in one photo, dumping them on his sister’s head in the next, while Jacqueline stares at the camera with huge, astonished eyes.
J & C – 15 months
, penned in careful Sally Paige script.

Antoinette closes the album and gulps down a mouthful of coffee. Wills her hands to stop shaking. She doesn’t like thinking about Charlie. Dreads the greasy, suffocating darkness that slides over her whenever she does, the anxious clawing at her guts and the voice in her head that’s more vibration than speech.

runstopbadrunstopbad

It’s why she always rolls her eyes whenever Jai or any of his death fetish circle-jerkers start up their necrophilic spiels: death as friend, mother, lover; death as guardian or guide; death come with gentle arms to kiss your brow and usher you into the sweet unknown. Rolls her eyes or just walks away, depending on what mood she’s in, because fuck that Sandman shit; death is not your valentine.

runstopbadrunstopbad

Death is what comes for your four-year-old brother in the bath and holds his face under the water until his tiny lungs fill and choke and burst.

runstopbadrunstopbad

The back door slams.

Antoinette jumps, coffee splashing from her mug. ‘Mum?’ She rubs the spill into the carpet with her foot. ‘Is that you?’

No answer, still, but she follows the sound of running water and finds her mother standing at the kitchen sink, lathering her hands with eucalyptus-scented soap. She tilts her head a little as Antoinette comes into the room but doesn’t look around. ‘I didn’t expect another visit so soon.’

‘Where were you? I couldn’t find you.’

‘Out back.’ Her mother has blue socks on her feet. She must have taken off her shoes before coming into the house. Not something she usually does, not unless the shoes are particularly filthy.

‘How far out back?’

‘I went for a walk in the bush.’ Her mother rinses her hands, turns and grabs a tea towel from the dishrack to dry them. ‘It relaxes me.’

Antoinette hates the reserve. The shadows that move between the trees, the constant rustle and crack of the underbrush, the chance of being bitten or stung by some small, unseen and possibly deadly creature – it’s incomprehensible how anyone could find strolling through such an environment
relaxing
.

‘I’m feeling fine, by the way,’ her mother says.

‘Sorry, I just . . . that’s good, that’s really good.’ Although
fine
is far from how she looks. Thin and hollow-eyed, her once-tanned skin fading to grey, Sally Paige is a woman being worn away from the inside out.

‘Your sister with you?’ her mother asks.

‘Uh, no, she had some things to catch up on. For work.’

‘On a Sunday?’

‘Yeah, tell me about it. Her boss is an arsehole.’

Her mother nods at the photo album tucked beneath Antoinette’s arm. ‘What are you doing with that old thing?’

‘Can I borrow it? I . . . um . . . I want to show Loki some of the photos from when we were kids. Thought he’d get a kick out of them.’

‘Loki. That’s Paul’s new nickname?’

Antoinette winces. ‘Yeah, a bit silly, I know.’

Her mother stares at her, doubtful. ‘Here,’ she says at last. ‘Give me that rubbish.’ Antoinette shifts the album beneath her arm, but it’s the coffee mug her mother wants. She plucks it from her hand like it might be diseased, takes one small and suspicious sniff before tossing the contents down the drain and setting it aside. ‘I’ll make us some proper tea,’ she says, filling the kettle. ‘Then we can talk.’

‘I can’t stay very long.’ Not with Jacqueline most likely climbing the walls back home, paranoia goading her to ever greater heights.

‘You can stay as long as we need.’

‘No, Mum, really I–’

‘Stop it!’ Sally Paige now at full steam and close to boiling, stabbing the air with a forefinger so thin it might be nothing but wrinkles and knobbly bone. ‘Do you think I’m such a moron, I can’t see what’s sitting at my own dinner table?’

Antoinette is stunned. ‘I don’t . . .’

‘Stupid, thoughtless fool of a girl. I know exactly what you’ve done. I know exactly where that
boy
of yours came from.’

—
17 —

Her mother starts to cough, a brutal hacking and hitching of shoulders, shaking her head as Antoinette takes a step forward. ‘I’ll be all right,’ she insists, slapping at her chest. But the coughing has deflated her, diminished her; she sags panting against the kitchen counter like a runner at the end of her race. Beside her, the kettle shrieks and steams. ‘When?’ she asks. ‘When did you perfect him?’

Antoinette frowns. ‘
Perfect?
’

‘Create him, bring him into being, however you want to say it.’ Her mother dismisses the words with a wave of her hand. ‘When did you do it? How long has he been in the world?’

‘I didn’t–’

‘Enough.’ She grabs Antoinette’s chin, fixes her with a merciless Sally Paige stare. ‘Don’t try to tell me that he’s Paul, or Paul’s long lost brother, or even some tall-dark-and-handsome who just so happens to bear a striking resemblance. I’m your mother, Antoinette, and
I know
. Now, stop playing games and tell me the truth.’

And so she does. Her confession albeit stilted, nudged through every pause and reluctant hesitation by a dogged Sally Paige who appears to have already guessed the broader strokes anyway. Paul dumping her. Antoinette devastated and alone. Loki spun from grief and disillusioned desire. That only a week has passed comes as a surprise, and even Antoinette needs to count back on her fingers. Really, only one week? There are raised eyebrows over the notebook as well, and the vanished words.
Clever
, her mother acknowledges.
Clever to do it like that
.

‘I didn’t mean to do it,’ Antoinette says. ‘I didn’t even know it was something I could do.’

‘No, you never
mean
to do it. That’s your problem.’

‘What are you talking about?’

Her mother just stares for a moment, the expression on her face at once thoughtful and strange. Like she’s scared, or sad, or both. ‘Do you remember, when you were a child? Those things . . .’

‘The fendlies? Not really, no. Little bits and pieces if I think about it hard enough. Jacqueline remembers more than I do.’

‘Your sister remembers the fendlies?’

‘Not well. Until Loki, she figured she imagined them.’

Her mother nods. ‘But now she knows the truth. Because of him.’

‘She, ah . . .’ Antoinette is unsure how much she can reveal before landing herself on the wrong side of the Sisters Against Sally Paige alliance. But so many chips on the table already, her bank running close to dry, and besides – the realisation tinged by no small amount of wonder – her mother might actually be able to help for once. ‘That’s why I need the photos, to show Jacqueline. She thinks, um, she thinks that I somehow made her as well.’

‘Ridiculous,’ her mother says. ‘She’s older than you by almost two years.’

‘She reckons I made her with a head full of fake memories. I thought if I showed her the photos, you know, physical evidence that she
was
alive before I was born . . .’

‘Good idea, you do that.’

‘Maybe you could come with me? Since you know about it all anyway? If the two of us sit down and talk to her, make her see how impossible . . .’

Her mother is already shaking her head. ‘I can’t. I’m sorry.’

‘I know you hate going into the city, but Mum, this is important. Jacqueline’s seriously freaking out about this. She’s afraid she’s not even real.’

‘Convince her she’s wrong.’

‘I’ve tried, she won’t listen to me. If you could just–’

‘No, it won’t work.’

‘She’s your daughter, she needs you. Why won’t you even try?’

‘Because she’ll know I’m lying.’ Her mother rubs at her forehead in the same distracted manner that Jacqueline does, those hard sandpaper strokes Antoinette catches herself making when she’s stressed or frustrated or just too tired to think. Her stomach dips; she feels the urge to hang onto something solid.

‘Lying about what?’ she whispers.

Her mother coughs again, thumps herself once on the chest. ‘Jacqueline isn’t
your
perfection, Antoinette.
You
didn’t make her. That, I managed all on my own, her and Charlie both.’

Loki was right. The grease has helped. Jacqueline still feels quite seedy but at least her stomach has decided to tackle the bacon and eggs and hashbrowns rather than reject them. She puts her sunglasses back on as they leave the café. It’s too bright outside. The sky too blue.

Jacqueline takes Loki’s hand as they walk. ‘Thank you.’

‘For what?’

‘Throwing me in the shower. Forcing me out here.’

‘I wasn’t going to let you hole up in that apartment all day.’

She squeezes his fingers. ‘I feel odd.’

‘It’s called a hangover.’

‘No,’ she says. ‘Not that. More than that. What was that word you used? Flux, yes. That’s how I feel.’

‘You feel like you’re in flux?’

‘Like I
am
flux.’ She sighs. ‘I don’t know who I’m supposed to be.’

‘Why do you have to be anyone? Why can’t you just be you?’

Jacqueline stops. Drags on Loki’s arm so that he has to stop as well. It’s a clear, sunny morning and Port Melbourne is packed. Brunchers and joggers. Couples pushing oversized prams or dangling toddlers from their wrists. So many people, so many lives. How do
they
know who they are? How do they not spend every moment wondering how they should act or speak or carry themselves? How they should dress or style their hair? How they should
breathe
?

Loki pulls her from the path of two girls giggling over a phone. One of them knocks Jacqueline’s elbow. Keeps walking. Keeps giggling. Jacqueline wants to grab her oblivious blonde head and smash it into the footpath.

‘What is it?’ Loki asks. ‘What’s wrong?’

Jacqueline blinks at him. Adrenaline seeps from her system as the urge to violence flickers. Fades. She has no idea where it came from. Loki brushes her cheek with the backs of his fingers.

‘You’re crying.’ He shows her his hand, damp with tears.

Jacqueline blinks again. ‘I never cry,’ she tells him.

Perfections
. Sally Paige’s name for them, and her mother’s, and her grandmother’s – but not her
great
-grandmother’s apparently, because sometimes it skips a generation; skips it or finds a heart stubborn enough, stony enough to offer resistance – a lineage of women passing along this gift, this
curse
as Sally Paige sees it, spitting the word from her mouth like something rancid and foul. Never the men of the family, never their dull and mundane sons – those lines stop dead; cauterisation by Y chromosome – and so it’s been whittled down over the centuries, cornered and corralled into the blood of fewer and fewer daughters.

The ability to take what should only be imagined and
perfect
it, to craft dreams and desires into flesh and bone, into life and breath. To force a small chink in the world and fill it with what doesn’t belong.

‘Grandma could do this as well?’ Antoinette struggles to hold it all in her mind. The knowledge is big enough to swallow her without even chewing. ‘Who else?’

Her mother sips at her tea. There’s no one she knows, not in this country anyway. There’s a woman over in America – Georgia or Louisiana, she can’t remember – the descendant of some great-great-aunt or other, and a handful back in Europe as well. No names, no more details than that, so Antoinette might as well close her mouth and forget the questions.

‘But–’

‘No. This is nearly at an end with us, and good riddance to it. You ever get pregnant, my girl, you best take one of those tests they have now, tells you the sex before it’s more than a tadpole wriggling inside you. If it’s a boy, you have my blessing. Otherwise, you make the right decision. Do what you need to.’

Antoinette stares into her empty tea cup, at the few leaves that sit limp and wet on the bottom. She doesn’t want to consider the decision Sally Paige might have made with such a test at her disposal.

‘You think I’m an evil old woman.’

‘I . . . I don’t know what to think.’

‘Your new boy. Loki. What did you give for him, you figured that out yet?’

‘What do you mean,
give for him
?’

‘That’s how it works, even if we try to convince ourselves otherwise.’

It’s the difference between a perfection and a whimsy, she explains. Those
fendlies
Antoinette used to make, they were whimsies – thoughtless, tattery scraps of imagination that little girls fashion as playthings, barely aware of what they’re doing. It’s often the first sign a child carries the curse. Of course, grown women have been known to make their own whimsies to play with, albeit of a less
innocent
nature.

And here Sally Paige offers a sneer, thin and fleeting; Antoinette can’t tell whether her mother is revolted or amused.

A girl makes a whimsy, she continues, it doesn’t take much from her. A bit of energy maybe, for the fancier ones. A bit of breath, like she’s been walking up hill for too long. Then a few minutes or hours later, maybe even as much as a day if her concentration holds that long, they just disappear. Those ones, the whimsies, they’re not alive. They’re no more real than what a child might construct with Lego blocks. Strange and colourful creations to be briefly fussed over, then pulled apart and thrown back into the mix.

But a perfection is different. Permanent, fixed, part of the world.

A woman doesn’t get to make something like that for free.

‘So,’ her mother says. ‘Why
exactly
did you create Loki?’

Antoinette shifts in her seat. ‘I told you, I was drunk. I don’t really remember much of the specifics and all my notes–’

‘Stop making excuses. You know why you did it.’

Shaking her head, because she doesn’t want to talk about it, not with Sally Paige of all people; cold, pragmatic Sally Paige who wouldn’t have the first clue what it was like to fall in love. Except . . . she remembers the wedding photos, and the young woman in the white flouncy dress with a smile so radiant and broad, her face must have ached for days afterwards. That young woman, now this old woman who winces whenever she sits down, or stands up, who hides behind a battered, hand-me-down, Sally Paige face. Antoinette doesn’t know
this
woman at all.