Brothers & Sisters - Charlotte Wood [3]
Sometimes when she is sleeping she opens her lids to find me looking at her from my pillow on the other side of the room.
‘Whaddayu want, face-ache?’ she growls.
I screw up my nose. ‘You’re a real mole,’ I say, and she curls her lip in a way that makes me laugh.
‘Shurrup,’ she says, not shut up, like me. My sister has poor elocution. I speak like my mother, who won first prize when she was a little girl for her recital of ‘Daffodils’ by William Wordsworth.
‘She’s a funny little thing,’ my mother says, as though it is my sister who is smaller than me. ‘She really has no conversation. I never know what to say to her. Does she talk to you?’
‘Sometimes she barks at me,’ I say to amuse her.
‘Oh, you’ve got a sharp wit, Bubba,’ she says, ruffling my hair. ‘You’ll go far.’
Every so often my mother surprises me with the declaration that there will be no school today. Instead, we are going on an excursion. We sit on the train, our shoulders touching as we rock from side to side, looking out the window at the milky bays and inlets, and the oat.coloured sheep on the hills. Once in the city we disappear among the old government buildings, passing ministries, police headquarters, legal chambers, until we arrive at the criminal courts. My mother examines the list with her fingernail for the best case. She has a preference for sexual assaults.
‘Nothing like that will ever happen to you, Bubba,’ she reassures me later.
And I tell her I already know that, for I will hardly have anything to do with such rough types as the Mongrel Mob or Black Power.
Other times we drop in to see the Prime Minister in the Houses of Parliament, as though he is a personal friend, or we take a tour of a radio studio or newspaper printing press. I am guided around by a staff member like a visiting dignitary, while my mother stands back, her two hands shyly clasping the handle of her bag.
I have the impression with all these visits she is grooming me for a bigger life than the one she has—one in the outside world of politics, communications and justice.
‘You can be anything you want,’ she shouts in my hair as the train roars through the tunnel towards home.
‘What about the others? Can they be anything they want?’ I yell back, fisting popcorn into my mouth. I’m testing her theory, for surely if she believes those hopeless lumps can be anything, she is not a reliable source of information.
I wait as she thinks for a moment, and by the time we have exited the dingy light of the tunnel for the outer world of sky and space, she says, ‘I’m not so sure about the others.’ The disappointment in her voice is reassuring.
‘Why?’ I ask, encouraging her.
‘Well, they don’t have the same interest in the world as you and me. We’re different. And I suppose I didn’t have the time to give them as I do to you. There were four of them under five. What was I to do? Take them all with me? I couldn’t possibly.’
She’s off track. I don’t want to hear about her or we, I want to hear about me, how different I am from them, from her too, for surely she does not think I will ever be like her, cooking, washing and ironing.
‘A mother can only do her best,’ she is saying. ‘No one is ever satisfied. Never.’
‘But I’m satisfied, Mumma.’
Her eyes cast down her shoulder at me, sadly.
‘You’re the best mumma in the world,’ I say, looking up at her.
As we face forward again, I see our heads tilting together in the glass at the end of the carriage.
‘One day you’ll grow up and leave me,’ I hear her say. It’s spoken lightly, but my response is firm.
‘No I won’t. Never. I will always need you to look after me.’
I like to go into my brothers’ bedrooms when they are out, to check their pockets for coins. I also like to go through their drawers