Brothers & Sisters - Charlotte Wood [77]
I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry.
I bite the red cushion. I feel his ribs on my ribs. My body an anvil and he’s beating something upon it, shaping it into a truer shape, seeking to prove it, the strength, the ductility, the temper of his love.
ONE GOOD
THING
Paddy O’Reilly
‘If you were my sister,’ I asked Klara Fuchs, ‘do you think we’d still be best friends?’
‘Oh, Natalie, of course we would,’ she said, and I believed her.
We were in love, the way that primary school girls fall in love with each other. When I look back now I realise that Klara was thin and brittle like a bunch of sticks held together with cloth. But at that time I thought she was perfect. She wore bright striped dresses that her mother had made, and matching single-colour cardigans. She wore long white socks every day. She smelled different to everyone else, sour and spicy like an exotic fruit. The first night I had tea at her house and they served me sauerkraut I recognised the smell. Sometimes, in school, we held hands under the desk. I remember the sensation of her hot sticky fingers entwined in mine.
I was an only child. Klara had a sister and a brother. Her sister was nine years older than us, almost an adult. She only ever spoke to us to point out how annoying we were. Klara’s brother, Dieter, was thirteen. As much as I wished Klara was my sister and could live with me at my house, I wished Dieter was not her brother and that I had never met him.
If Dieter found a drawing we had done, he ripped it up. If he caught us playing in the mud, he smeared the mud over our faces. At the swimming pool, he tried to hold us under. He might always be around a corner, so we had to speak softly. He might find the spell we had written to ward him off, so we ate the paper.
When I sat opposite him at the dinner table, smiling politely as I tried to chew my serve of sour cabbage and meaty sausage, Dieter watched me. He stared until my throat tightened and I couldn’t swallow. He seemed to hate me for no other reason than the fact I was sitting opposite him at the dining table and had caught his eye. Klara sat next to me, hardly letting anything pass her lips, as if Dieter was controlling her food intake. She carried herself in a hunch, and she shivered easily. The temperature only had to be slightly cool and Klara would start shivering. Or if her brother was nearby. Then she shivered too.
The times Dieter was around were the only times I wondered if I could keep on being Klara’s best friend.
One Sunday Klara’s mother and father took us on a trip to the Caribbean Gardens in a suburb a long drive away. Klara, me, Dieter and his friend from school. Fibreglass statues of animals rose out of dry garden beds like we were in a museum, and the sun beat down over acres of brown dirt and colourless rides and stalls selling hot jam doughnuts and sausages in batter. The parents set up at a picnic table with a tablecloth. They brought baskets out of the car boot filled with bottles of beer for them and cordial for us, parcels of meat in pastry and thick, heavy cake smelling of honey. At the table Klara’s father shook out a newspaper and held it in front of his face. Her mother stripped down to a pair of bathers, laid her towel on the dirt and settled down with a book and a sunhat.
‘Why don’t you go for a swim?’ she said to us, nodding in the direction of the Caribbean lake, a large body of muddy water a few hundred yards away. A paddle-steamer ploughed through the water on the far side. Klara and I wandered around the statues of elephants and giraffes and crocodiles. Further along the shore a replica submarine rose out of the dust like a grey dinosaur. Dieter was on the deck trying to climb the periscope. Klara saw what I was looking at and she took hold of my hand and tugged me in the opposite direction.
‘Let’s play over there,’ she said, pointing