Brothers & Sisters - Charlotte Wood [51]
Do Australians gaze openly around them? I am trying to imagine myself doing this. I can see myself exchanging smiles with people on the bus, but maybe this is not true.
Every few weeks Emma got a letter from Peter, who was finishing his commerce degree in Sydney. I got letters almost every post, having channelled my lost voice into aerogrammes. My friends drew pictures and sent me bits of their lives—some hair, a leaf folded into the blue paper. Emma showed me one of her letters before putting it in the bin. Peter said that he hated his degree, and hated the other students. I always wanted to be a pilot, he wrote, but my mother wouldn’t let me. I shall never forgive her for that.
‘Why doesn’t he do it now?’ I said, handing the letter back to her. ‘He’s twenty-two. He doesn’t have to do what his mother says anymore.’
Emma just looked at me, then did what she always did, ripped the letter, once, twice, and stamped on the bin pedal to flip the lid up. I didn’t know if she was writing back to him.
In my aerogrammes I told my friends how wonderful, how amazing London was, and with Emma, Karen and Ruth I dutifully went to see bands, new movies, exhibitions. I was so often bored when I went to see bands, but found it hard to admit this to myself. This was London. I had read about these bands in the NME. If I could get drunk enough I would not be bored, but often my capacity for the large, plastic cups of brown, watery beer fell short of drunkenness. I got sleepy standing there next to Emma, holding my cup, watching the other two dancing, yawning till my ears ached.
I made a friend at work, out of necessity. Her name was Sarah, and we were united in our hatred of Rory. Poor Rory. His face seemed always to be sweating—pearls of it on his upper lip and forehead— while I was still cold and getting colder, clutching my coat around me as I stood in the lift going up to our floor. Sometimes I wore my coat all morning. Rory was not bad-looking; he had a classic English look: dark hair and plenty of it, regular features. But the sweat, and the froglike skin, and the whining drawl he spoke in. I nicknamed him Rory the Reptile and taught Sarah to play How much would you charge? We always ended up at the same place—How much would you charge to sleep with Rory? Sarah was one of those conscientious players who tried to put a realistic price on things. Fifty pounds? One hundred pounds? I was always unreachable—a million pounds. A billion pounds.
I hadn’t, of course, slept with anybody, but Sarah had. She had a boyfriend called Michael, who often used to stay at her house. Her parents wouldn’t let him sleep in her bedroom, though, so they had to sneak into each other’s rooms at night. She told me everything they did. All day she talked about Michael and I suppose I encouraged her, for we were the only people who worked in our dwindling section, and I had no other friends. It was her or Rory.
‘We couldn’t make love this morning because Dad was up early. But we had a shower together after he left.’
I would be on my knees in the storeroom, slitting open a box of books with a Stanley knife. Sarah would be sitting at the desk with the invoice. It was my job to unpack and count the books while she marked them off.
‘Michael told me he wants me to buy some sexy underwear. So he can tear it off!’
‘Can you two hurry it up! I want to get those on the shelves before lunchtime!’
We glanced at each other and rolled our eyes as Rory walked away. Rory was not fat, but he had a broad bottom like a woman’s. I despised him for this, the way I despised myself. Sarah thought he was gay, but that was too obvious. He wasn’t anything. I knew people like that at home. Perhaps others thought that was what I was