Paper Alice (25 page)

Anyway, her eyes have taken on a new shine, and she laughs a lot more and gives Dad and me – and Wilda! – plenty of hugs. Even her piano playing seems more lively and fun, not the grim and desperate therapy it used to be. She sleeps in some mornings rather than going to the gym, eats the odd piece of chocolate, and has even gained a couple of kilos, which really suits her. And she's started thinking up fun suggestions to jazz up our lives. Next weekend the five of us – her, Dad, Andy, me and Wilda – are going camping up the coast, which should be a laugh. Certainly a first for the McBeans, anyway!

And things are so much more relaxed between Mum and me. Of course like all mothers and daughters we still have our rows, but I no longer get the feeling that I'm constantly being marked on her invisible score sheet. And we talk a lot more – about all kinds of things. Sometimes I find myself forgetting she's my mum – she seems more like a wise and funny best friend.

Speaking of which, Milly is still my oldest and (at times maddening) dearest mate. She and Chet, by the
way, see quite a bit of one another – even now the revue's well and truly over. Strictly platonic so far, but I've got a feeling that may change. And she hasn't had a single one-night stand since Paul.

Wilda, on the other hand, has become like the sister I never had. Plainer-speaking and more down-to-earth than me perhaps, but a sister in ways that go much deeper than just physical similarities. Even if I don't see or speak to her for several days, we still seem to somehow sense how one another is feeling; what we're up to. As Mum remarked the other day, it's almost as though she and Eva have been reunited, in the form of their daughters.

And on the subject of sisters, thanks to Students as Siblings I now have another one – a very, shall we say,
lively
ten-year-old called Brittany. But that's a whole separate story and one that is still very much unfolding.

I sometimes wonder how things would have turned out if I'd never seen that piece in the paper. Would Wilda and I have ever met? Would Mum still be trapped, as they say in the soapies, in her past? Or Andy, for that matter – would he and I have got together? I can't bear to think of us not. Surely we would've, somehow . . .

And I wonder whether I would have become exposed to all that . . . darker, more difficult stuff, lurking there beneath the surface. Such a lot happened in those weird, disorientating, painful weeks; it's hard to get a handle on it all now. Almost like a period of insanity, or how mothers describe childbirth – you forget the worst of it once it's over.

And Wilda – I know she's a living, breathing girl who, for example, now I've got to know her, loves old
Jimmy Barnes songs, swimming and Maltesers, and hates reality TV, sultanas and bigotry.

Yet somehow in my mind there are still the two Wildas. There's the flesh-and-blood Wilda of here and now–

And then there's that other girl.

The ghostly double, who shook up my world. Almost a separate being, in her own right.