Solo (6 page)
I could crawl into Dad’s lap.
Dad tried too hard with Scott. He had a basketball ring installed above the garage and shot hoops. In the afternoons they went fishing together on the beach. Itsy would stand on the verandah and drink Blue Lagoons.
Through a jigsaw of partial conversations I had overheard I got the impression that Itsy was the reason that Dad wasn’t with Scott’s mother any more, but I was six, and while I knew on some level that my parents had existed before I was born, I also assumed that nothing important had happened until me.
Scott only stayed a few months and then Dad gave him a job at the chemist’s shop and bought him a flat nearby. It was on the second floor. Scott had guitars on stands in the corner and there was always a pile of dirty dishes on the floor next to the lounge.
Our ages were too different for us to play together. Besides, he was a boy.
It wasn’t that I didn’t like him, he just wasn’t anything to me. He was like a fellow commuter on a train. You both look out the window. You make sure that no part of you touches any part of them. You make polite conversation if you have to, and then you get on with your life.
I always dreamed of having an older sister. She would have a sensible name like Sandra or Cathy, and she’d walk quickly, as though she had lots of things to do and not much time. She would always have mints in her handbag. She’d boss me around about how I was going at school, and the clothes I was wearing, but in a nice way – as if she cared about my future. She’d insist that I cleanse, tone, moisturise, and wear sunscreen.
My older sister would buy me something for Christmas that I’d forgotten I wanted, and when I opened it she would give me a secret half-smile of satisfaction that would be as good as the present itself.
I’d go around to her place for dinner a few nights a week and on weekends, and we’d sew hems on curtains, try out new low-fat recipes, or plant basil and rosemary in squat terracotta pots on her large back patio.
She would have a pool, and in summer I would go around to her place after school and swim laps or practise somersaults until she got home from her sensible middle-income job. My older sister would be a pathologist, a town planner, or a bank teller.
When my sister came home from work she and I would lie around on inflatable floats listening to the drone of the pool vacuum as it twitched along the blue floor below us, and we’d bitch about Itsy.
We could talk about Dad, or not, and she would know when to do which.
She would tell me it’s not my fault, even though she knows the truth. The whole truth – not the re-remembered version.
I don’t think I’d like a younger sister – besides, I asked Itsy about it and she told me that she’d had her tubes tied after me. Apparently I made her sick all the time and she put on fifteen kilos. She got acne and her legs swelled for the whole nine months.
Itsy said she actually started smoking when she was pregnant because she heard it reduced the size of the baby’s head. ‘The baby’s head’ – that’s the way she said it. She was talking about
my
head.
This is why a big sister would be better.
If I had an imaginary friend it would be a big sister called Sandra or Cathy, but I’m worried about starting an imaginary friend, especially at my age, because I might develop multiple personality disorder.
Besides, knowing my luck I’ll start an imaginary enemy instead.
The downsizing happened quickly. I didn’t notice at first because our standard of living didn’t change so much. I still had new toys, new clothes and plenty of food in my belly. Then one day it was all gone and I didn’t have any of those things.
Not long after Dad left, Itsy sold his car and put the beach house on the market. I went back there much later hoping that our beach house would still be somebody’s weekender, so that I might squat for a few nights, but it’s a belt of villas now.
Itsy traded her Saab for a second-hand Barina. She put most of our furniture in storage. We moved into a cottage in a neighbourhood with a much greater ethnic mix than I had ever seen before.
Itsy sold our house next. She didn’t discuss it with me, because back then I was a child and she was an adult and she made the decisions.
I’ve only recently thought about how much all of these assets would be worth.
On one of those cold winter days when the light slants across the afternoon sideways and the air is crisp and sharp like citrus, Itsy was chopping wood on the driveway at the side of the cottage. I watched my breath, cramming my hands in the pockets of a pale yellow parka with fake fur around the cuffs. I loved it but it was getting too small. There was a box of kumara on the front step – a gift from our Samoan neighbours, who had a substantial vegetable garden.
Itsy split the wood and then I collected the pieces and put them in the basket to take inside.
She told me I had a bank account and that Daddy had put money into it. She asked me if it was all right for her to use some of the money. Itsy looked me in the eye when she asked me, but her face was pinched and faded. She said she would only use it on things for us – on ‘living expenses’.
I smiled and said that was fine.
Of course, Mummy.
(I didn’t start calling her Itsy until after she had spent all my trust.) I don’t know how much money was in that bank account. I suspect it was some kind of mechanism for hiding money, and if that was the case then it might have been quite a lot. My guess is over a hundred thousand.
It never occurred to me to say no, but even if I had refused, I’m sure she would have stolen it from me.
Of all the things Itsy has done to me, it’s the memory of this day that makes me rumble full of hate for her with a thickness and force like boiling oil. She can make my present life a misery, but there is something particularly spiteful and uncaring about stealing my future as well.
We stayed in the cottage for a while, perhaps three years, and then when I was about nine we moved into a unit.
My cousin Drew came to stay. He was older – he must have been fifteen. He talked to me about music. I didn’t know the bands he mentioned but I pretended that I did.
We slept in the lounge room in sleeping bags. I had a yellow one with cartoon characters on the inside and Drew slept inside the green one – the one I brought with me to wilderness therapy.
Drew zipped it to the top, and then, with the hood over his head he stood up inside it and tucked his fingers in the corners. We were listening to Korn. He sang along to ‘Falling Away from Me’ inside this sleeping bag, wiggling his fingers and bobbing up and down at the knees, face all serious as he sang the words. He looked like a giant, bright-green caterpillar. It made me laugh so much that I wet my pants a little bit, and I wore the sleeping bag at least up to my waist for the rest of that night because I was embarrassed that there might be a pee stain.
We made peanut-butter foldies for dinner. That’s pretty much all we ate while he stayed. Peanut-butter foldies, and when we ran out of bread, Iceberg lettuce with a dob of mayonnaise inside, which is just a foldie of a different kind.
When I had run out of fresh clothes Drew tried to do a load of washing, but he must have put the hose in the wrong spot because it flooded the laundry. Water went out across the carpet and over our verandah, then dripped down onto the verandah of the flat underneath ours and the one underneath that.
We grabbed towels and tried to soak it up. We were giggling even though I knew we would get into trouble. I rubbed the laundry floor, and at first I thought I’d rubbed the pattern off, but then I could see that the tiles were white underneath. I’d always thought they were cream and brown.
The neighbour knocked on the door and we pretended we weren’t home. Leaning against the wall in the hallway, we covered our mouths with our hands, trying to keep from laughing.
About half an hour after that the real-estate agent came, and when I could hear her jingling the keys outside, it stopped being funny and I started getting scared.
She stood in the doorway with her eyes wide and hand over her mouth. We showed her how we had turned off the machine and cleaned the laundry. She picked her way across the floor in her high-heeled shoes as though she was hopping rock-to-rock over a river full of snapping crocodiles.
Then Itsy came out. The real-estate agent shook her head. Itsy’s face was puffy and screwed up. She said she was supposed to have notice of an inspection. They stood in the lounge room and shouted at each other. The estate agent wanted Itsy to buy new carpet.
Drew took me to the verandah and covered my ears. He pulled silly faces to stop me from crying. I could still hear them, though, and see them through the door. He treated me as though I was a little kid and I liked that.
I wish Drew had been around to cover my ears more often. He got a job in Alaska as a helicopter mechanic, which is about as far away as you can get.
Itsy yelled that she’d been on night shift, but it was a lie because she hadn’t left her room for nearly ten days. At least, not when I was awake.
Then the downstairs neighbour stepped inside the doorway. He and the real-estate agent exchanged a glance, and that’s when Itsy went nuts. She gave the real-estate woman a big shove – two hands flat on her chest just below her shoulders. The woman fell off her shoes into the neighbour and he lost his balance too. They scrambled out the door and Itsy slammed it behind them, still screaming and swearing.
I went to school the next Wednesday morning, and in the afternoon went home to a different flat. I don’t think Itsy paid for the carpet. I’m pretty sure she left that place in a big mess.
She was always wrecking other people’s things. I remember once she ran into someone’s car in a carpark. She drove out of there as fast as she could. I told her that she was supposed to leave her number on their windscreen.
‘Who are you, my mother?’ she asked. ‘They’ve got insurance.’
Itsy looked glamorous, but something underneath was decayed and you knew if you pressed too hard it would all crumble away to dust.
Now I think of Itsy like a penguin in an oil-slick – clogged, miserable and without any hope of saving herself.
Itsy said, ‘This is not working out for me,’ as though I was optional.
She said she needed some time to herself to work things out. Space. It wasn’t me, it was her. I wanted to punch her in the face, but I didn’t. My hate bulged inside my guts and along my limbs and made all my muscles sore.
She wouldn’t look me in the eye. I remembered that she had been strange for a few weeks now and I wondered if I had failed some test she had set for me – a worthiness test.
I thought about all the things she had asked me to do. Set the table. Clean up your room. Run down to the shops. I hadn’t done all of them, but I would have if I’d known it was a test – if she had said, ‘Hang out the washing, Mackenzie, or I will leave you and never come back.’
This wasn’t a test. She wanted a fresh start. A new day with no mistakes in it like Anne of Green Gables, and I was a hangover from the old mistakey day.
She didn’t want me and I could have punched her, but I also could have fallen on the floor and grabbed her around the ankles and begged her to take me with her. I didn’t do either, I just stayed lying on my bed at a funny angle, skewiff, with my knees facing the wall and looking at her over my shoulder.
She was standing in the doorway with one hand on the handle. She was biting her cuticles. It’s disgusting the way she eats at herself.
I remembered the time when I was seven I went to Gregory Oldberger’s birthday party. It started at two in the afternoon and everyone else had gone by five. Itsy didn’t pick me up until eleven o’clock the next day.
She said she thought it was a sleepover. Such a liar.
She made me stay with the Oldbergers, who I hadn’t even met until that day. They said grace before they ate and I didn’t know what that was.
In the morning Mrs Oldberger told me to have a shower and when she locked me in the bathroom, I was terrified. My family showered in the nude, but maybe people who said grace before they ate kept their clothes on? Their shower tap only had one lever. It was too hot, but I stood under it and cried, and hoped none of the Oldbergers would come in and see me naked.
My mother said that she didn’t think our relationship was working out. I lay twisted and didn’t move, or say anything, even though I could feel a pain in my lower back and my mouth was twitching. I couldn’t stop it from doing that.
I said ‘OK, see ya,’ and turned around as though she had said she was going out for milk rather than that she was breaking up with me.
The bay smelled of salt, fresh pippy shells and dried-out seagrass. From the top of the hill I could see the buoys above the crab pots, bobbing and dipping on the water’s surface. Moored yachts rolled lazily from side to side in the chop, pulleys clanking against booms. The afternoon sunshine flickered across the water so brilliantly that I had to shade my eyes with my hand – a salute to old territory.
As I trudged down the long driveway past the garage my schoolbag bumped against my back. There was a blister on my heel and with each step I pushed hard into the toe of my shoe, trying to lessen the rubbing.
The door to my old room was open. The bunk beds were unmade and two small boys in board shorts were lying on the floor on their stomachs playing Snakes and Ladders. Their legs were deep caramel, and encrusted with sand. They peeked up at me, startled, with huge black eyes. They looked Indian, or maybe Sri Lankan. The older one offered me a brief, wary smile.
I turned the corner past the old vinyl swinging chair. The screen door creaked as it opened and clattered closed behind me, just as it had all those years ago.
‘Nan!’ I called out.
She appeared around the doorframe holding a spatula. ‘Mackenzie!’
I laughed. ‘Hello, Nan!’