‘Devin, stop it. Are you playing a game?’
She walked ahead of me and the sky could have swallowed us with the intensity of blue. My legs were shorter and I ran in spurts, bursting forward to catch up. ‘Okay. Who are you then? What are you talking about?’
Devin had just completed her final year of school. We’d been living in Marshall’s house for six years, and still there was no sign that we’d ever go back to the beach. My mother wanted Devin to study maths; she was certainly smart enough, but my sister didn’t know what she wanted, and the applications for the following year had all closed.
‘I’m a witch. I’m magic. I can come back from the dead. I nearly died once, Cat. Do you know that? I was going to die, but I’m alive now! I’m a witch-queen with magic powers.’
‘Why, Devin? I don’t understand it. Why did you do it? Why did you want to die?’
Now she stopped, turned, towered above me and her hair was strong and furious as a waterfall gushing down her back, and I was afraid. Her eyes were dark with the shade of a thousand new moons and I would never be bright enough to extinguish that kind of nothingness.
‘The days are long,’ she said. ‘They stretch on and I don’t know where to place my feet.’
‘Don’t talk in riddles.’
‘It’s plain as day to me. What you don’t understand is your own problem.’ She bent to the ground and picked up a stick. Long, with bumpy nodules on it that made it look like an old man’s arm. ‘Bend down!’ she commanded.
‘Devin—’
‘Come on, onto one knee. Down!’ She tapped the outside of my leg with just enough strength to let me know that she could hurt me.
‘What are you doing?’
She raised the stick above her head and it came down onto my back, not too hard, but menacing enough that I had no other option but to do what she said. I kneeled on the ground in front of her.
‘No, one leg, stupid. You have to be on one knee to be knighted.’
I raised my right knee beneath my chin and placed all my weight on my left. The rough grass and a stone dug into the skin that covered the bone and I bowed my head. The tip of the stick touched my shoulder.
‘I now pronounce you the Darkest Knight,’ she said. The stick-sword pushed down harder. She lifted it and tapped three times with the end. ‘You, Catherine Landsberg, the Darkest Knight, are condemned forever to live with what you know.’ Her voice was soft and controlled as she said it.
‘What do you mean, Dev? What do I know?’
She held her face close to mine, looking right into my eyes. ‘I’m pregnant,’ she whispered.
Then she shrieked and threw that stick high into the air, and it came down and brushed my face, a random thorn cutting me clean across the cheek. I held my hand to my face in horror, gazed at the blood that stained my fingers. ‘And there will be blood,’ she said. ‘There is always blood where there are secrets.’
‘Devin, you cut me!’
She took her bag off the ground and ran ahead of me, shouting back with glee and mirth about knights and blood and who is bound. I understood not a word of it and I walked on behind her under the leopard-shade that the suburban trees provided, under the new awareness of the sharp end of her stick.
I wanted to tell my mother, but Devin threatened, not to kill me, but finally to kill herself. ‘I’ll make sure no one finds me,’ she said. ‘I know how to hide.’
‘What will you do?’
She looked at me, eyeing out my trustworthiness. ‘It’s why I can’t study next year,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what’s going to happen.’
‘Who’s the father?’
‘Mind your own business.’
I was incredulous. My sister seldom went out.
‘How can I help you, Devin?’
‘You can’t help me. You’re only fifteen.’
It was holidays, and the sun beckoned while my sister stayed indoors. Two mornings later, after both my parents had left for work, I watched from the window as Marshall’s car returned. It was eight-thirty. My sister emerged from the house in a skirt and a long jersey and her head was bent as she hurried to the car and climbed in. It pulled out of the driveway and without any warning, I was left alone.
She returned in the mid-afternoon, white as a sheet and doubled over. I made her tea and put her to bed, but the drink was left untouched on the side table as she slept. That night my parents noticed nothing; they had grown so accustomed to Devin’s frequent absences at dinner time.
In the morning Devin woke and she was somehow different. It was as though the world could have no impact on her now. She bathed and dressed and ate her breakfast. She read through the day and made supper for my parents before they were home.
At the table that evening, and with Marshall present, she put down her fork and looked around the table, smiling softly.
‘Devin, you look like you’re the cat that got the cream,’ my mother said.
‘Out with it,’ Samuel said.
Devin cleared her throat and pulled all her hair across so that it fell over only one shoulder. Her eyes grazed over Marshall and then moved to me, but her main purpose was pointed at my parents. ‘I’ve decided to study art,’ she said.
Twenty-Six
Devin’s art dream lasted less than a year, and by then I was only a year behind her in my own education. She spent the following year waitressing her way through paying for a one-roomed apartment, but by the end of it returned home, which was how we’d all come to see Marshall’s house as time drew us further away from the only other place we’d known.
It was also an end point for my parents. As I began tertiary education, they bought a small two-bedroom house in the side-suburbs of the city. I moved out and began my full-time film studies and found both a bursary and a room in digs with four other girls my own age. My life moved on. I visited my parents once a week on a Sunday, and my mother prepared a roast for lunch with potatoes and vegetables, and my father joked around and still called me Sea Monkey, though somehow I’d grown into my looks. Sometimes Devin attended those lunches, and sometimes she didn’t.
Devin moved through her life as though it was a dream, as though she’d wake one day and renew the chance to begin again for real. I lived mine as though I only had one chance, this chance, and I defined it for myself with pointed aims and exact direction in my choices. I moved in three short years from a general introduction, history and analysis of film to creating and directing my own short films that were both peer-reviewed and good enough to graduate. Quentin Tarantino’s career was on the rise, and I admired the greats such as Kubrick, Scorsese and Coppola because everybody did; they’d created bodies of memorable work. My real hero, though, was David Lynch; his surrealism and unsettling use of dream imagery spoke to something about how my fractured childhood had created my waking dreams and the kind of woman that I was. He inspired me; his was the kind of work I thought I might one day like to do.
I moved in art circles with my fellow film students. We lived our craft, and found it in everyday life. On Sundays I broke the dream and paid homage to my parents. For the rest, I immersed myself in the construction of different ways to see the world and the deconstruction of postmodernism and film theory, all the while discovering how I could gain autonomy over and control my own vision through the camera’s lens. Life became not something to be lived, but something that was built, analysed, composed, through whatever world-view I wished to use. Postmodernism was a perfect room in which to come of age and learn my craft – nothing need have meaning, unless I told it to.
I saw less and less of my sister in those student days. Somehow I was able to blot her out of my periphery as I sharpened my focus and honed my skills, deciding all the time how I wanted to construct my own life. As I graduated, Devin suddenly seemed to look up again from her own frittering trance-life. She took a student loan, moved into my new flat in a city building, paid a portion of the rent and registered to begin her studies in maths and science.
/> It took discipline and focus for me to become what I am, but perhaps for Devin the way was too easy, meant too little to her. She passed her first term of tests with distinctions in every subject, and for the first time I saw Samuel’s attention begin to shift to his older daughter. She began to attend Sunday lunches more regularly, and there were even times in our family when we could all laugh together.
But after the nights that Devin didn’t come home, I never asked her where it was she went. Sometimes she slunk in quietly and remained silent all morning. Other times she entered the flat singing, and I would notice a new cardigan on her, fresh perfume, or a new pair of jeans. She never seemed to need to study too hard; she breezed through the first year and a half of her degree, but she kept to herself most of the time, and found few friends.
It must have been a Wednesday evening, because Devin and I were in the lounge eating takeout, when there was a banging at the door. In a building crammed with students and young graduates, there was nothing unusual about the interruption except perhaps the strength of it – people were always popping in for cups of tea or to borrow sugar. I opened the door with wooden chopsticks still in my hand. My father stood there in his old blue jersey and there was something frantic and new in his eyes.
Behind me I heard Devin rush to the window to flick out her cigarette when she heard his voice.
‘What’s wrong?’ I asked. Only then did I remember to invite him in.
‘I need to talk to you girls.’
I opened the door a little wider. Devin was back in her place. The room smelled of sweet fried batter, soya sauce and cigarettes. Samuel moved into it and sat down on the edge of the settee. He was ashen and afraid.
‘Oh boy,’ Devin said. ‘This must be big.’
He looked at her sharply, as though she’d just blasphemed. ‘Your mother got her test results back yesterday,’ he said.
‘What test results?’ Devin and I uttered in unison.
‘She’s been feeling tired, having a bit of trouble breathing.’
‘You didn’t tell us this,’ Devin said.
‘We thought it was nothing. We thought it was because of the move, and work, and all that’s gone on in these last years. But it’s not that.’ He looked at his hands, and then at the sky as it darkened outside. ‘Your mother’s ill. She has cancer. The doctors think she might not have very long.’
That night, unable to sleep, I went to my sister’s room and climbed into her bed beside her. She lay on her back with her hands behind her head, staring at the half-moon that illuminated the space within the window frame.
‘You know what’s sad,’ she said, ‘is that, secretly, I think Mom doesn’t believe her life has begun yet.’
‘She’s already fifty. She’s had a life.’
‘No, she hasn’t. She’s been a daughter and wife and a mother. What else has she done? She’s lived for other people and that’s all.’
‘What’s wrong with that? That’s a life, isn’t it? It’s what she chose.’
She turned towards me, her cheek on the pillow, her hair caught by the moon. In the dark I couldn’t really see what was in her eyes. ‘You won’t understand,’ she said. ‘Your life belongs to you. Your life is all yours, because other people have sacrificed theirs. You and Samuel are just the same.’
‘Why should I feel guilty about my life?’
‘No.’ She pulled the duvet closer around herself. ‘It’s just the way things have turned out. Life isn’t always what you make it, Cat. For some people, it’s what life does to you that makes you who you are.’
Twenty-Seven
When I arrive after lunch, he’s not in his room. I’m halfway up the ramp that stands in for a staircase with Hayley tailing me in her school uniform when Jeanette’s head appears through a doorway on the landing. ‘I thought I heard your voice,’ she tells me. ‘Your father had a good night. He’s in the lounge on the ground floor.’
‘Thanks, Jeanette.’
She smiles and says hello to Hayley, but Hayley looks at her from her feet to her head and doesn’t answer. My daughter can be rude but today, for once, I don’t tell her so. Jeanette goes back to making beds or changing bins or whatever else is required in heaven’s waiting room.
Hayley and I turn around and go down the slope again and Hayley sidles up to me, takes my arm. ‘Mom, this place smells funny,’ she says.
‘Shhh,’ I tell her. We get to the lounge on the ground floor and there’s a tea table waiting in the centre of the room covered with cups and steaming metal pots. A plate of biscuits sits untouched. Three old people occupy chairs in different parts of the room and nobody is talking, or doing anything much at all. A man with a bald head and dark liverish spots peppering his skin is resting his chin in one hand and staring into a gap in the air. The overweight woman in the blue dress doesn’t look old enough to be here, but then to me Samuel has never looked old enough to be here either. The excess weight stretches her skin and smooths the wrinkles from beneath. Her eyes flicker to us as we enter and just as easily they let us go. Another woman is at the far end of the room in a wheelchair and she’s staring at the ground with her mouth half-open. None of them are drinking the tea or eating the biscuits that are on the table. Samuel doesn’t belong in this place of abandoned strangers, but he’s not in the room.
‘Mom, what’s wrong with her?’
‘Shht, Hayley. We need to find your grandfather.’
‘He’s not here.’
‘I can see that.’
‘Who are you looking for, dear?’ The woman in the blue dress looks up at us again. Thick hairs sprout from her chin, like gold wires.
‘Samuel Landsberg,’ I say. ‘My father.’
‘He’s on the balcony,’ she says and she nods in the direction of the windows and the sun. There is a small door beside the last window and then I see just the top of my father’s head through the bottom of the second last window. It is dark and it’s still and it’s alone.
We cross the blue felt carpet that institutions like this love to install to cut costs. I allow Hayley through first and then I follow and close the door behind me. The balcony is enclosed to make a kind of a sunroom. The arched windows are wide and the room is long. Samuel faces the windows that sit between him and the grass and the mountains and the sky. There’s a table beside him that supports a bird’s cage; inside a blue budgie hops from perch to water bowl and back again, chirruping and ringing a tiny silver bell at the top of the cage in between.
‘Look Mom, a bird!’ Hayley says and runs to the cage. The bird clings to the bars beside her face and they talk to each other in some kind of soft and whistling bird language, as though the bird has been waiting a long time for her attention.
I expect Samuel’s face to light up when he sees that I have brought Hayley with me, but I swallow hard when he looks at her as she crosses the room and then looks away. I sit down in the chair beside him and touch his arm. ‘Hi, Samuel.’
He drops his head to look at me. ‘Hello, Monkey.’
‘How are things?’
‘Better than expected.’
‘Oh good. That’s good. Look who I brought with me today.’
He looks at Hayley. She moves away from the cage, although the bird remains in position and repeatedly calls her back.
‘Where’ve you been?’ Samuel says.
Hayley quickly leans in and puts her arms on his shoulders. She puts her mouth against his cheek, but when there’s no response from him she steps away. ‘At school,’ she says, her eyes dart in my direction. ‘Mom just picked me up.’
‘Where is your mother anyway?’
Hayley’s eyes are on me, looking for an explanation, but I’m not giving her one in front of him. I’m not giving anything away, not now; we can speak later, in the car on the way home. ‘Mom’s right next to you, Grandpa!’
His head swivels sharply and he looks at me as though I am something unexpected he hasn’t noticed before, but then no, his gaze softens and pours ove
r me like love. ‘That’s Catherine,’ he says.
‘Yeah.’ Hayley nods. ‘That’s my mom.’
Samuel’s eyes change. They hood themselves, look down and away. It’s a moment of realisation, naked, and it’s caught him by surprise.
‘This is a nice room,’ I say.
He leans back, stretches his legs out and Hayley goes back to the bird. ‘Yes, good to get a bit of sun.’
‘Did you eat lunch today?’
‘Yes, yes. Ate my lunch.’
‘What did you have?’
He breathes in, about to answer and then his mouth closes again. His eyes wander away and out the window. Has he forgotten what he ate just a couple of hours ago, or has he forgotten the question so testily aimed at him? His hand comes up and touches his neck, fiddles with a flat mole on the side of it.
Hayley flashes a look back at us. ‘Grandpa, what did you have for lunch?’
His hand drops down and into his lap. ‘I don’t feel very well today. I don’t think I had lunch.’ Then he turns to me and smiles and I see the light in those eyes that I know so well. He looks at me with that deep connection that I never knew from any other adult when I was young. ‘And how are you, Monkey? What have you been doing?’
‘Not much. Hayley’s doing really well at school.’
He drifts again, stares out the window and a swallow flicks past and disappears beneath the roof of the building. He nods slowly, but his mind is somewhere else. ‘You must bring her to see me,’ he says. ‘I don’t know when … I just don’t know.’
‘Mom—’
‘Quiet Hayley.’ But when I have silenced my daughter, there is nothing more to say.
The sun shines through the window, warm on my skin. Hayley becomes bored with the bird and starts practising gymnastics across the wide carpet. She becomes oblivious to us, her lips moving softly with the dialogue of her own fantasy world and the commentary that goes along with it. She points her toes and flicks her hair and does a summersault with an extraordinarily straight back, landing on her feet again with just a small push from her hands. I hear Samuel breathing beside me. I feel the sun. Beyond the window, over the roofs of the houses and to the right of the jutting mountain edge, I see a small corner of the sea. Suddenly my father shifts in his chair, clears his throat and pushes his elbows against the arm of the chair. ‘Please, Monkey. Tell your sister to stop that nonsense. What is she trying to do? She’s making my head spin.’