The Other Side of Summer (4 page)

As I was going up to bed that night, I heard Dad in the cellar. We’d already cleared it so I went down to see what he was doing.

At the bottom of the steps I froze. Dad was standing with his back to me, his hands clasped behind his neck. He was facing Floyd’s old skateboard ramp. The only thing left. I remembered the day Floyd had made it in the back garden. Dad had shouted at him for using a piece of skirting board that he’d been meaning to nail back into place ‘one of these days’.

My foot made the stair creak and Dad turned around. The despair on his face vanished and he smiled, as if he could change channels just like that.

‘Nearly done here!’ he said, cheerily.

‘That’s good, Dad.’

I felt so bad for him. It was Dad’s job to decide what to do with that ramp.

The new kids might like it.

Wouldn’t you mind?

It was the best quarter pipe I ever made. Deserves to be used.

‘Dad?’ I said. ‘We should leave it for the next family that lives here.’

This time his smile looked real. ‘That’s a great idea, sweetheart.’

I turned back around, then. At the top of the cellar stairs I noticed a scar on the wall that I’d never seen before. I put my fingertip to one end and let it glide through the deep groove to the other. All the marks in this house had a story but this was one story I hadn’t heard before. Now I never would.

Dad had promised Wren and I separate bedrooms in Melbourne. He was smart, despite what Wren thought of him. If we’d stayed here, I don’t think even Wren would ever have been able to move into Floyd’s room, despite how much she was always saying that she hated sharing with me. (Dad had packed up Floyd’s room on
his own. It hadn’t been discussed. I hadn’t even asked what he’d done with Floyd’s other guitar in case I didn’t like what I heard.)

Two years ago Wren had rigged up some tie-dyed sheets on a piece of string to divide our bedroom in half. That still wasn’t enough. She’d sigh when my
shadow
got on her nerves. Our bedroom was a battleground. As usual, I had the Ibanez Artwood with me for backup, propped in the corner on my side of the room.

We both had single mattresses on the floor now. Dad had sold the beds on eBay along with almost every other piece of furniture we owned.

Wren’s side of the room used to look like the Chamber of Horrors. She’d say that my side looked like unicorn vomit. Both sides looked the same now: bare walls with shiny circles where the Blu-Tack had taken the paint away.

‘What are you doing with that guitar all the time?’ Wren’s voice shot through the small gap between the sheets.

‘Looking after it.’

She scoffed, and I knew there’d be more.

‘Could you
not
spray that disgusting stuff everywhere?’

‘It’s deodorant, Wren. Leave me alone.’

‘You’re getting into bed. Why do you need to smell like a meadow?’

Don’t rise to it. You know she can’t help it.

How come
she
gets to be the angry one?

Through the gap, I spied Wren curled up with Charlotte, the cat she named after a spider. Charlotte was small and black with surprising patches of orange fur in three spots, like when you tear off a piece of wallpaper and find the old wallpaper underneath. Wren and Charlotte were in a huge nest made of all the clothes she’d wrenched out of Dad’s hands earlier when he’d tried to pack them into one of the forty-three boxes. There were dozens of black tights, long skirts and lace-up ankle boots. For someone who had so many clothes and accessories that we couldn’t take them in a suitcase, it was impressive that she looked the same every day.

That’s more like it. You can give as good as you get, you know.

Yes, but only inside.

‘Stop looking at me through the gap, you little freak.’

‘Fine! God, what’s
up
with you?’

‘You! Why’d you have to be so helpful to Dad? How can you even bear to be on his side? I’m not going to Australia, you know.’

‘Good! Whatever! Don’t then!’

Um, Summer? You need to work on your comebacks.

‘I know, Wren, why don’t you try running away again? That seemed to go really well for you.’

‘Shut up, you moronic midget.’

Ouch. One of Mum’s old sayings came to me: don’t dish it out if you can’t take it. I couldn’t. I slid under the covers and stewed. I didn’t want to go to Australia any more than she did. I
could
be just as angry as she was, but Wren owned being a human volcano.

‘I will literally die there,’ she said. ‘I’ll die. DIE! Of the heat, the beaches, the cheeriness, the idiot kangaroos bouncing all over the stupid place.’

I wanted to laugh but didn’t dare. Sometimes she was so angry it actually came out funny.

She’s scared. You know that, right?

Fine. You win, Floyd, I’ll be nice.

‘Kangaroos can’t kill you, Wren. It’s just a normal country full of normal things.’ I hoped.

‘What’s that supposed to mean? Shut up. I hate you, Summer. It’s going to be like
Home and Away.
’

This was obviously not the time to mention that I quite liked
Home and Away
. She was impossible.

‘We’re going to be so far away. From everything.’ Wren’s voice had softened, as if the real her had slipped out of the room.

‘I know.’

‘Then why the
hell
aren’t you angry about it?’ she yelled.

My eyes and nose prickled. I
was
angry! I had so
many feelings but hers suffocated mine. I could only scream and yell silently. Both of us had drawn a chalk circle on the ground around our feet – she was angry Wren, I was timid Summer – and who knew what would happen if we stepped outside?

‘You hate everything in the whole world,’ I said, the cracks starting to show in my voice. ‘Why do you care which bit of it we live in?’

‘Oh, don’t start crying, you idiot. I don’t hate
everything
. Just Dad.’

I held my breath.

‘And you.’

‘Great. Thanks a lot.’ I cried as quietly as I could.

Listen to me. She doesn’t mean it, Sum.

You don’t know that. And you don’t even know how it feels – she loved you. Everyone loved you.

I wiped my snotty nose on the edge of the duvet. ‘Dad thinks Mum might get better in Australia,’ I said.

‘Mum’s never getting better. She’s been sucked into a black hole and it’s one-way only. I wish I could get sucked in there with her. You can stay in Happy Land with Dad.’

I knew that Wren liked to think that she had Mum and I had Dad, but the truth was that no one had Mum anymore.

We were quiet, then, and my cheeks were tight
where the tears had dried. I looked through the gap. Wren had her big headphones on and the ceiling was getting a dirty look.

My eyes were just closing when I heard knuckles rapping on the door.

‘Girls?’ Dad popped his head in. He looked nervously at my sister. ‘I need that music system, Wren.’

She didn’t move a muscle.

Dad took a breath. ‘Wren! TURN IT OFF.’

‘WHAT?’ Half a smile, pretending she couldn’t hear.

‘TAKE THE HEADPHONES OFF.’

‘WHAT?’

‘I’VE ASKED YOU ALL DAY, WREN!’

‘WHAT?’

‘FOR GOD’S SAKE!’ Dad reached down to the socket and yanked out the plug. ‘Listen to me. It has to go on the ship with everything else. I’m running out of time! Doesn’t anyone understand?’

Poor Dad, standing there yelling at us with the end of the long wire clenched in his fist and the plug flopping over as if it were the head of a snake blacked out from his squeezing. He went on yelling about how it was all on him –
all on him
– and I didn’t like being put in the same basket as Wren and Mum. I
had
been helping. I
was
trying. He was sweating and getting redder, and veins bulged from his neck.

Through the gap I saw Wren stagger to her feet. As she scooped up her stereo, the cat shot out the door in between Dad’s legs. Time seemed to slow down. Wren’s face glowed with rage. She steadied herself on the mattress, twisted her body round and then hurled the stereo towards Dad with a scream that sounded like her throat was ripping apart.

Dad cried out as it flew in his direction and landed against him. I felt it, too, how hard it would have dug into the soft flesh on the inside of his arms. There was a flicker of despair in his face, but I think the shock had silenced him and he hugged the stereo, breathing heavily.

Wren flopped down on her bed and curled away from me to face the wall. The room thrummed with her anger. But Dad had calmed down and was trying to look like someone who’d got exactly what they came for.

‘Nearly there,’ he said, maybe only to himself. ‘’Night, girls.’

‘’Night, Dad.’

Half of me still hated Dad and his plan, but the other half understood why he thought we had to do this. I missed the way I used to love him: simple and endless, like a cloudless sky. Maybe I could be bigger than I felt I was. I stretched out of my bed to put my face near the gap.

‘I’m sorry, Wren.’ I didn’t really know what I was sorry for but it was worth a shot. ‘Merry Christmas.’

There was no reply.

In the dark, I felt alone. Apparently there were seven stages of grief but that was a neat way of putting it. Grief was messy and didn’t colour inside the lines. I could switch from one to the other. I could feel all seven in a day. This felt like number four: despair.

Then I thought of the Ibanez Artwood. I got out of bed and sat with it on the floor in a ribbon of moonlight that ran across the carpet. The guitar was cold against my bare legs and the strings were silvery.

An object like this isn’t just for looking at, Summer.

I can’t play it, Floyd. It’s yours. It’s you.

One chord at a time. Just trust me, okay? I’m still your big brother.

He was right. This guitar had to be more than an ornament to have survived the way it had. I took a deep breath and held it in. Middle finger high E, second fret. Index finger on the G, second fret. Ring finger on the B, third fret. My thumb grazed the strings to play the softest D.

That night I found myself standing in the space where Floyd’s bed had been. My legs were ice-cold and stiff.
I must have been sleepwalking again. I stayed still and tried to remember the dream that had brought me here. It was this:

I hear chords from a song Floyd had been working on for weeks. It’s the one that he told me he couldn’t finish. This song had never sounded right to him but he couldn’t explain why and he couldn’t let it go.

I tiptoe silently towards the sound, dream-thinking that he’s come back to us. I’m scared to be wrong but can’t stop the hope rapidly expanding in my heart like a time-lapse flower.

I open the door and see him on his bed with his back to me, holding his guitar. He’s going over and over the same part, humming where there are no words. His fringe bobs to one side as he strums. I see the angle of his jawline and the bristles that have started to grow there. He’s so real, and so close.

Suddenly I know what the missing line should be. I try to sing it to him but no sound comes out. So I walk over and tap my brother on the shoulder.

And when he turns around, he has a completely different face.