Brothers & Sisters - Charlotte Wood [1]
The writers in this collection are as obstinately different from one another as your brothers and sisters are from you. They have written in surprising ways about the deep bonds—bad, beautiful or broken—between brothers and sisters, and, in one piece, about our abiding suspicion of that happy, foreign creature, the only child. Twelve stories speaking of love and fear, separation and tenderness, confusion and—sometimes—reunion.
When Patrick White’s sister Suzanne died, he wrote that he and she had nothing in common ‘beyond blood and a childhood’. But for so many, of course, blood and childhood is what haunts us, and always will. This book is for you.
Charlotte Wood
ABOUT THE
OTHERS
Virginia Peters
I like the kitchen best because it’s the smallest and darkest room in the house. The little windows are overshadowed by a large pohutukawa tree, its knotted branches peering in through the window, tapping as the wind blows. Inside there is the soft orange glow of the oven light, the hum of the element as the meat cooks.
I’m sitting on the bench, watching my mother. I can see her hands—large brown hands, the skin slightly loose like a glove, the nails strong and oval, the polish, fading, in a shade called ginger jam.
She cups a potato and, sliding the knife beneath her palm, she chops four ways then takes another. Once the basin is full of quarters, she starts on the carrots. I watch the rings wheel across the board. She talks to me while she works—or rather I talk to her, coaxing responses from her. She gets into a rhythm with the knife, the soft flow of her voice punctuated by the chop-chop-chop as her arm cranks. Every so often she stops what she is doing, and with a sigh lifts a crystal glass to her lips. I watch the lump in her throat draw back like a syringe and the dark liquid disappearing. I can smell sweet fumes atomising in the warm air as she exhales: dry sherry and Oil of Ulan.
‘Tell me more,’ I say.
‘Well,’ she begins, ‘your father’s mother was a lady. Very elegant, despite the fact she’d given birth to eleven children.’
I’m impatient. ‘Just get to the swimming bit,’ I tell her.
‘Well,’ she says, luxuriating in the vowel as she thinks. ‘Your grandma went to Point Chevalier one day. And once there, she took her clothes off, folded them neatly and placed them on a rock near the water’s edge.’
I lean forward on the bench. ‘Was it winter?’ I ask, though I already know the answer.
‘Yes, it was winter. A cool day, quite blustery on the point. That’s why they knew she was not just cooling off, as you might in the middle of summer.’
‘And?
’ ‘Well, once in the water she swam as far as she could, all the way over the low mudflats until the water deepened; and she kept going, and going, and going until the sea dragged over her like a silver blanket.’ She puts her knife down and looks at me. ‘And from that day onwards, Grandma was never seen again.’
‘Why do you think she did it?’
‘Probably because she’d had enough,’ she says, placing the potatoes around the meat.
It’s always the same unsatisfying response, but it doesn’t stop me from pressing her, as though one day something new might be added, something she’d not thought of before, that will make things so much clearer.
By the time she is spooning the juices around the pan I’ve moved her on to the story of my father