Brothers & Sisters - Charlotte Wood [19]
‘They’re not to play with,’ our mother said. ‘Put them somewhere they won’t get ruined. Imagine how Dad would feel if he came home and they were broken.’
She made sure that we didn’t overwind them or touch the fragile ballerina on her tiny spring, and after a while the shining red and black music boxes did indeed seem too special to play with, and we put them solemnly on either side of the dressing table in our bedroom, which our mother had decorated with a frilled pink tulle valance. Inside, next to the ballerina, was the little hinged lacquer drawer.
‘For all your precious things,’ our mother said.
I’m sorry to say that, at first, even our precious things were pretty much identical. First to go in were the rosary beads Nanna had given us when we visited her in Adelaide, before Dad went away. She’d let us play with her glow-in-the-dark statue of the Virgin Mary and given us each a set of old silver rosaries. She’d told us why they were so special but I hadn’t been listening; it was my turn after she’d gone to hide under the quilt again with the glowing lady, and in any case my rosaries were soon, inexplicably, broken.
Also in the drawer were our round discontinued fifty-cent coins, which we believed were very valuable.
Then I put in, secretly, some tiny pink shells Dad had sent me from a beach in Vietnam which he’d included in one of his weekly letters. Mum had told me he’d had to walk a very long way for these special shells, right to the end of a huge beach. It had been a hot day, she’d said, and yet that’s what he’d done; that was the evidence that he was always thinking of us. The shells were no bigger than my little brother’s delicate pink fingernails.
I imagined that beach; a long shining curve of it hazily disappearing into the distance. At the near end the shells were large and ordinary, scattered in their millions, but as you walked further and further towards the horizon, your feet crunching on nothing but shells, they began to shrink in size. It wasn’t until you came to the very end of the sliver of beach, a place a little like heaven, that the tiny, truly precious shells lay, a reward for true devotion. They were the ones that I had, now.
Years later, when I came across my lacquered music box in a storage carton somewhere, I lifted the lid and checked inside the drawer. I was taken aback to see in there, alongside the shells and the tarnished rosary beads, some small pearly objects I recognised with a start as my own milk teeth. What perverse childlike conviction had possessed me to save my own teeth that year as they fell out? I’d believed them to be something uniquely valuable, something worth saving, to show Dad. They looked a little creepy now, jumbled there with their sharp red edge of root exposed, but I saw my seven-year-old reasoning: the teeth and the shells resembled each other; lustrous with nacre and enamel. They seemed to belong together, like something you could thread side by side onto a necklace, something to wear next to your skin that nobody else had.
Summer came and we wore our Chinese shortie pyjamas in pastel pink and blue, decorated with dragon embroidery. They were narrow-cut and uncomfortable, chafing our sunburnt skin, but we loved them because they’d come all the way from Vietnam. We pulled them over tight, sunburnt shoulders on Sunday nights to watch Disneyland as heat radiated from our scarlet legs, slick with Johnson’s Vaseline Intensive Care Lotion, watching as Tinkerbell touched her wand to the Disney buildings and our favourite show started with animated fireworks. Adventureland! Fantasyland! Frontierland! We gazed, transfixed by all of them. Whichever land it was, we wanted it.
We waited our turn to pick up the pen and make the cross. We tried to entertain and look after our