Brothers and Sisters (14 page)

She was sitting in the shade on the little stool with her eyes closed, with Lucy’s cool, moist fingers feathering over her face, when another young woman arrived. She had a blonde ponytail and a pierced nostril, and stood uncertainly, holding a bucket and a broom. The cleaner.

‘Oh, I forgot!’ said Ruth. But they waved the girl inside, and she disappeared up the stairs. Soon they heard a vacuum cleaner’s thrum.

An hour later, when everyone but Ruth had gone, Wendy saw herself in her bathroom mirror.

The bathroom smelled fresh and her bedroom was orderly, the bed made with fresh pale green sheets and her things stacked and folded tidily on the chair and the bedside table.

Wendy leaned into the mirror, trying to focus on her earrings as she slipped them through the holes in her lobes, but she could not help sneaking glances at her face. Eventually she straightened, and stared.

She didn’t look like a man.

She didn’t appear to be wearing make-up at all. Her eyes were clear and blue, and the planes of her nose and her cheekbones had strength and dignity. She seemed taller. What had Lucy done? Apart from the gloss at her lips Wendy found the make-up impossible to see. Perhaps it was her eyesight. But her face, in the mirror, seemed to radiate some force of life, some charge of beauty that came from being alive, that she had not ever seen in herself before. It was
this
all the young women had; this blaze of life. And now Wendy had it too. She stared and stared.

Ruth was calling from the bottom of the stairs, and Wendy trotted about her room, calm and regal, gathering things into the beaded handbag. And then her heart seized.

The little tub, the ashes of Jim, had gone.

The bedside table was clean. But the plastic bag with the magazines and brochures was gone.

The bins were empty. The one in the bedroom, and the bathroom one with its carefully folded wads of toilet paper, all empty and clean. She remembered now the girl leaving, hauling behind her one of the large heavy-duty orange plastic garbage bags Wendy had seen in the streets.

She sat on the bed, her breath coming fast and cold. She put her hands out flat on the cool bed sheets on either side.

Ruth shouted up the stairs now, ‘Wendy, they’re waiting.’

A shivering began to fill her chest. She breathed. She knew the ashes had gone, but still she began to bolt around the room, tearing at things and lifting scarves and bags and hats.

‘Wendy! For heaven’s sake!’

At last she made her way down the stairs and pushed past Ruth, out across the terrace and into the lane.

‘Wait for me!’ Ruth called, as she locked the heavy door.

Wendy climbed into the back seat of the car, sunglasses jammed on her face. She clutched her handbag and the straw hat and a tissue, staring out of the window, trying to swallow the lump of pain in her throat, forcing back her rising tears.

Next to her, Ruth was plump and garrulous. Their arms pressed together, and Wendy could feel her sister’s warm, happy skin against her own.

She had done something terrible, something she had believed she could never, ever do. She had separated herself from Jim. Distracted by trivial, selfish pleasure, she had
forsaken
him.

She wanted to be sick.

As the car moved Ruth said, ‘What a marvellous day!’ and through the window Wendy saw a pile of the orange garbage bags slumped against a wall in the heat. Three hungry cats licked at a torn corner of a bag, where filth and decay spilled onto the old stone stair.

At the wedding reception it was Ruth who looked as if she had lived in Greece for half her life, and Wendy was the tight-smiling outsider, sitting at the end of the table with some old people, friends of the groom’s parents who had travelled from England.

A man next to Wendy was from Oxford. He leaned across and said, ‘I hate Greek food. I don’t know why they can’t serve it hot, do you?’ And then sneered, showing his yellow teeth.

Sitting across from Wendy was Derek.

She watched her sister down the table. Ruth wore a white silk blouse and chocolate satin trousers, and her brown hair was swept up glamorously. Wendy had never seen Ruth with her hair up. She looked twenty years younger. And she wore Wendy’s earrings, citrine and peridot drops, which glinted and shimmered as Ruth turned her head, chatting merrily with a young man in a beautiful green shirt. A woman on the other side of Ruth put her fingers up behind the earring, remarking on it, and Wendy watched Ruth absently finger it and say,
Citrine, from Greece actually
. She didn’t even look up the table to Wendy when she said it.

The man from Oxford saw Wendy watching Ruth and the man with the beautiful shirt, and he said in his loud English voice, ‘I didn’t know so many of Jeremy’s friends were homos, did you?’

Across the table Derek sniggered into his glass. He was wearing the suit again, but without the woollen tie. He drank a lot.

A little boy dashed between the tables, dumping plates of food in the centre.
Mit mit!
cried the boy, when he set down the meatballs, and
Feesh feesh!
when the plate of little fried fish came.

The man from Oxford had turned away to talk to someone friendlier. Derek looked at Wendy, and asked, ‘What are you doing up this end?’

He was tugging at his left nostril with his thumb and forefinger. It was quite disgusting, but she liked him.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she said gallantly. ‘They have to put people somewhere, don’t they? I suppose they think old people have things in common. Why are you here?’

He snorted unattractively. ‘Ah. They put all the misfits up here.’

She didn’t like him so much now. She watched him drain his glass of the pale red wine they were serving. He reached across his neighbour for the jug and filled his glass to the brim.

Wendy drew the jug towards her then, and filled her own.

She understood, as she sat back in her chair, that it wasn’t just Derek’s drinking that had seen him relegated to this end of the table; everybody was drinking a lot.

It was that sad people were not really wanted at weddings. That was why she had been put up here with Derek.

The man from Oxford turned to her again. She smelled his sour breath.

Long after the speeches Wendy sat, not listening to the man from Oxford’s voice drilling into her about his shares, the plummeting price of something or other.

The sun had set, and in the dusk the awning of the little taverna swung with coloured lights.

Down the long table, Ruth was surrounded by Leonie’s friends, attentive and sweet, their heads bent towards her and eyebrows raised, smiling expectantly if she began to speak. Now and then Wendy could tell from the friends’ expressions that Ruth had said something ignorant, or mean, but Leonie’s friends did not remark on it; they quickly regained their smiles and changed the subject. Everybody knew their roles here, at a wedding. And the bride’s friends knew Ruth was the bride’s mother, must be cared for and cosseted. So they reached for glasses for her, poured her wine, beckoned a dish back from the other end of the table if she liked it.

A great tide of savage, bitter envy swept through Wendy.

She got up from the table and wandered away from the balloon of light, leaving the man from Oxford to turn his droning voice to Derek, who sat stone-faced and drunk in his chair.

She picked her way across the gravel and the pebbles in her bare feet, and then she reached the water’s edge, her feet sinking to the ankles in the clean grey grit. She stepped back and sat down on the pebbles.

She did not want to be this maudlin old woman, tearful in the dark at weddings. This afternoon she had seen another woman, very briefly, in the mirror. But that was the terrible thing she had done. She had wanted to
be
that other woman. Renewed. And because of that she had let poor, beloved Jim—for it was actually
him
she had disregarded—be left behind.
Thrown away
.

She burrowed her two hands up to the wrists into the sand beside her, put her head to her knees, and cried.

Then someone was staggering up from the far end of the beach, calling, ‘Wendy! What are ya doing?!’

She didn’t answer.

‘Are you being sick?’ called Ruth, who was drunk.

Wendy stood up. ‘Of course not!’

But she did feel a little drunk now, having rushed to stand upright, and the sea slurping back and forth.

‘Oh,’ said Ruth. ‘I did.’ She giggled sheepishly, and wiped her mouth. ‘Think I drank too much of that wine.’ She burped. ‘Sorry,’ she said solemnly. They stood looking at the sea.

Then Ruth, her voice full of emotion, cried, ‘I miss Alan!’

The swell of bitterness inside Wendy crested, and crashed down. She turned on Ruth. ‘
Alan!
He could have come but he couldn’t be bothered. You’ll see him next week! You have your
children
. What could you possibly have to
miss
!’

Ruth said nothing, but looked out at the dark water. She sniffed.

In a little while she said, in a simple, peaceable voice, ‘I’m allowed.’

She sat down, dumpily, in the sand.

Wendy stayed where she was. The sea heaved and moved. Jim was dead and gone, and she had no children. She had made her life; now she was lying in it.

This is all that’s left
, she thought.
And it’s Ruth.

She stood over her sister and they both looked at the water. Music from the wedding came in drifts from behind them.

One day soon, watching the water on the swimming pool in Ruth and Alan’s backyard, thinking back to the wedding in Greece, Wendy would be suddenly tired of being secretive and complicated and alone. She would be tired of her disdain for Ruth. She would be tired to the bone of Jim being dead, but even more tired of missing him, of the watchfulness and diligence it demanded, the effort and duty of it. She would go home and tip the last of the ashes from the cricket palace into a small dip in the garden bed, and press the earth down with her fingers.

But now, here on the beach with Ruth, she simply stood.

Eventually Ruth got up from where she sat, letting out one of her long, old-people groans as she rose, and Wendy put out her arm to help her sister steady herself while she brushed the damp sand from the back of her trousers, and they turned and walked back towards the party lights.

FAMILY RADIO

Roger McDonald

A dust storm blew until it reached the riverbank, where it stalled in the sky, a cliff, purple-bruised, highlighting one side of the Louth road as red, the other as green. A steam pump made from an old boat’s boiler drew water from the clay-smelling river, irrigating lucerne in leaky sweeps and flooding lanes of an orchard, where oranges hung in the trees.

At the Watsons’ ‘Blindale’ on the river road, Tony Watson lay around on the shady verandah boards like a bog-eye lizard waiting for a fly, turning the pages of a Marvel Family comic and feeling sick with a malaise without name. Happiness was a sensation so rare that it was unrecognisable when it came. Now he had a name for it: Blindale.

After a shower under the tank stand Tony wiped a sweaty mirror, stared into his grey eyes between the cracked splats of silvering, and made his voice into Churchill’s, fighting ’em on the beaches, the British Bulldog’s vowels and growls rolling from the voice box of a pale-skinned chicken-chested boy; shifting then to a nasal Nazi interrogator promising, ‘We haff ways off making you talk.’

Tony came into the house and heard the cat snoring. Everything gave him pleasure: the cat snoring, the blanket the cat slept under, design and nap thereof, the ring of damp soil at the tank stand where zebra finches came for water, the sight of the yellow sponge cake with passionfruit icing under the mauve gauze fly cover on the kitchen table. It was a cake to celebrate his hitting his teens. He hummed along to the sound of the wind under the roofing iron. This was home and it wasn’t a dream: knitted tea cosy, butter board, carved emu egg on the living room shelf, Gundabooka Mountain waddy-donger tied to the hallway wall with fuse wire, and Pop’s Velocette motorbike propped at the garden gate when Pop came in for a cuppa. Tony thought himself into the photos the family had, of the son who died (diphtheria, buried in a sky-blue coffin). They’d taken on Tony to fill the gap.