Brothers & Sisters - Charlotte Wood [82]
Klara and her husband were waiting at the other end of the room for me to reappear with a gin and tonic and amnesia. My cousin was burning to ash and bone in the crematorium. As the noise around me pulsed in shouts and raucous laughter I sucked in fast desperate breaths, giddy with the unreality of it all. The only reality was Klara, sitting at a table in that room. Klara wearing peach silk. Klara all grown up. I didn’t want her to be Klara, but she was.
On my way back from the bar with a gin and tonic and another whisky, the muscles in my neck tingled and released. The third shot was fanning through my bloodstream.
‘We thought you’d run off,’ Klara said, glancing at her husband.
I raised my fourth shot to my lips and swallowed. ‘Not this time. How is everyone, anyway?’ My voice rode the hubbub, a punchy voice filled with green light and dust.
‘We’ve left Rhiannon with a babysitter. We hate parents who take their children to every inappropriate event, don’t we, Squidge?’
Squidge—who had been introduced as Lawrence—nodded. He was nursing the same glass of wine he had first brought to the table. Klara nestled up to him again. He smiled as she turned back to me and lifted her glass. The straw bobbed up and down in the fizzy tonic and she followed it with her pursed lips like a baby seeking a nipple. At last she caught the straw between her lips and I saw the old Klara for a moment, focused intently on her drink, frowning. I would have recognised her anywhere, but I was surprised she had recognised me—it was as if she left little Klara behind on that dusty property.
‘I meant the people I knew. Your family.’
Her face rippled, almost imperceptibly. It was the second sign of the Klara who had been my best friend so many years ago. I used to see that deep quiver when Dieter walked by, or when we heard his voice from another room.
‘Oh, Mum and Dad have moved to Queensland. Dieter’s married. Has his own salon now. Helen’s still nursing.’ Her eyes blinked, empty, while her hand travelled around her husband’s lap like an animal searching for somewhere to hide. ‘What about your family? I can’t remember—did you have any brothers or sisters?’
‘Salon?’ I said. Did Klara remember our pretend salon? How I lay on the bed while she smeared my face with yoghurt and stained my lips purple with the juice of a cherry.
‘He’s a barber. He likes to call his shop a salon.’
A laugh hacked out of my chest. ‘They let him near people with a razor? Does he still throw knives? I hope he got better at it if he does.’
Klara and Squidge stared at me. Then Klara dropped her gaze. She picked up her purse and began sorting through its contents.
‘Sorry?’ Squidge said, speaking directly to me for the first time.
‘Dieter loved to throw things at people. Sharp things. Didn’t he, Klara?’
She pressed her lips together and shook her head slowly, looking down at the table. Her blonde hair flared in the light. Both her hands had disappeared inside her purse now.
‘Did he? He was a terrible teenager, I suppose. I told you I had a shocking memory.’ She looked up at Squidge. ‘Didn’t I?’
‘Dreadful,’ he answered. ‘Completely vague.’
I had to close my eyes because I couldn’t stop staring at Klara’s features, trying to find the child I had loved so deeply. We used to lie beside each other on the spongy surface of the playground and count each other’s freckles. I would watch as Klara’s bottom lip pressed briefly under her top teeth before she spoke. I thought it made her look like a mouse, a sweet, hesitant mouse. Sometimes I stood in front of the mirror trying it myself, but it never worked for me. I looked like a dumb rabbit. It was the shape of Klara’s face and her mouth that had made her so loveable and vulnerable.
I rubbed my eyes till they stung, trying to superimpose one Klara on the other.
‘I should get you home,’ Squidge said to Klara.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, please.’
When I opened my left eye she was looking back at me. The blue of her eyes was like the sky shuddering