Brothers & Sisters - Charlotte Wood [2]
‘How could you cut your own throat?’ I ask, fingering the corrugations in my oesophagus.
‘I suppose it would require some effort,’ she says.
‘But why would you do it?’
She makes a line with her lips as she looks at me. ‘Depression. It runs in the family.’
‘And what about Aunty Shona?’ I ask. ‘What does pulverised mean again?’
And when she tells me, I ask her, ‘What about her bones? Would they be pulverised?’
‘I’m not sure about the bones,’ she says, and for a moment I picture Aunty Shona’s bones, snapped like branches on the train tracks.
We hear the door open, my father clearing his throat. So often we forget he’s here. Most of the time he’s not; he’s up-country, travelling between doctors’ waiting rooms with his bag of promotional pills.
‘Hello, Mummy,’ he says as he steps into the kitchen. His voice is grave, and has been since he lost his job in management. I would never know the man she married, my mother tells me, for he is certainly not the one she has now.
‘Hello, Daddy.’ Her voice is brisk as she dries the chopping board, completely disguising the macabre conversation we’ve just had.
Turning to me, my father nods. ‘Girl,’ he says in a frowning voice, and I turn my head, showing him the edge of my jaw.
‘What’s going on in here, then?’ His voice is a tremolo of suspicion.
‘Nothing much, Daddy.’ My mother turns to smile at me. ‘Just chatting with Bubba,’ she says. Her voice is bright, and although I’m just a little girl, I know well enough that it’s a game. I’m inside the circle with her, and my father is on the outside. He’s not got the slightest idea what she’s thinking right now, but I know. I know everything about her.
My mother has no friends. She says she doesn’t have time for ‘that sort of thing’, as though friendship is a modern fad that won’t last. I am her friend. The best companion any mother could have. A little girl who loves her.
It seems her other children, years older than me, have amalgamated into one, joined together by their proximity in age and their ordinariness. Boy, boy, girl, boy. I arrived six years later, followed by the announcement there would be no family holiday until Bubba was old enough to travel. My mother tells me they’d not been on a family holiday before, and rightfully suspect that now they never will.
Rather than dote on me like any decent older siblings might, mine ignore me. When they do speak to me, it’s only to torment. In the early evening, when they arrive home from high school, they barge into the tiny kitchen where I sit quietly with my mother, talking or playing teacher with her as I run through the lessons I learned that day at school.
I watch as, with her back still turned to the bench, she throws her voice over her shoulder.
‘How was your day, boys?’
‘That’s good. Tell me all about it,’ she says when they grunt back, but I can tell by the thoroughness of her tone that she is only pretending to be interested in what they have to say.
I wait as they bang cupboards looking for food, noticing the way the corners of their eyes seem to snag each time they pass me. Sometimes they can’t resist it and they have to say something—the words don’t matter, it’s the gruff jeering voices I can’t bear. When I put my hands over my ears and sing, sure enough they raise their fists and pretend to jab me. I have to scream and scream until my mother is treading on the spot. I can’t stand it, I can’t stand it. I’ll end up in a mental home, she cries.
‘Why don’t they like me?’ I ask her when she is calm.
The answer is always the same: they are jealous of me.
‘You’re a very special little girl,’ she explains. ‘Quite different to the others. I can sit and talk to you about anything.’
The more she tells me this, the more I embody her words, and the more unremarkable my siblings appear to me.
Although they are bigger and taller, I cannot look up to them. They don’t excel in any area of study at school, not even sport. Neither do they appear to be unique in any way at all, except for the simple fact one is a girl.
I can’t complain about her. When my