‘I’m good.’
There will be no reopening of the wound today; the scab is already coming along quite nicely. I don’t stay for the looks, but I know exactly how they will go. Olivia will raise her eyebrows in reaction to my blunt tone. Mum will stretch her mouth in an exaggerated downwards motion she hopes I will see, and Dad will continue focusing on his plate, pretending not to have witnessed a thing. If I ask what the looks are about, Mum will deny, and Olivia will placate. She may not be an instigator, but her perception of and adherence to hierarchy means deferring to Mum. I understand that, now. And Dad will be there to adjudicate, his apparent objectivity a peacekeeping power that unites the troops. Funny how we all have our roles, though I am not particularly happy with mine. Better to skip all the painful trying and go straight to the part where I am comfortable and silent and alone. There is much to consider.
If asked, Olivia might insist we were close when we were young, but I would say I’m not so sure. I have attempted to analyse the data, to form my own opinion from this new vantage point. My findings vary depending on my emotional state, which has always been the problem. Here is what I know: we were four years apart, shared many interests, and even looked a little alike. And this, perhaps, is where the additional colour added by the lingering emotions from that disastrous lunch comes in – I was a funhouse mirror version of her. If Olivia was the perfect portrait of what you ordered, I was the hilariously wrong item that actually arrived in the kind of online shopping fail the internet seems to lap up. Mum had tried to replicate the professional cake she had received in Olivia and ended up with the kind of terrifying home-baked Mickey Mouse creation that would fuel a child’s nightmares.
When looking for memories to prove my theory, my quick draw is unmatched. On the afternoon of her school formal, when Olivia was back from the beautician’s house in town, and dressed in her pastel pink dress with the ruching and the diamanté belt buckle at her waist, her hair curled in that big, bouncy way, we took family photos on the deck. Dad arrived home just in time from work, dressed in his good shirt and grey pants, Mum in her two-piece navy ensemble that made her look a decade older than she was, and Luke in jeans and a baggy T-shirt. I was wearing my favourite hand-me-down dress from Olivia, one-shouldered, black, and flowing in a way that did not make my skin crawl, which was a rare thing. Comfort and style did not usually reside in the same neighbourhood as one another, let alone the same garment.
‘Everyone smile and be ready, it’s only a five-second timer,’ Dad said, balancing his fancy digital camera on the railing.
We huddled around Olivia, bared our teeth, and said ‘cheese’. Olivia rushed forward to inspect the images, and sighed with frustration when she saw the result.
‘Nora’s doing her weird fake smile again,’ she said, turning the camera to show the evidence.
Mum might even have told me to smile more like Olivia, or my mind might have created that scenario as a representation of a more general feeling I have – put your energy into replicating this beloved earlier model, even if you can only manage to be a lesser version. I do not remember whether we took another. But I took several shots of Mum and Dad with Olivia, and one of those sits on the mantle over the fireplace now, flawless.
Another memory: when I called her last year from Melbourne, in the middle of the night, but early afternoon where she was. This memory is harder to recall, but I remember at least a part of how it went.
‘Olivia, are you there?’
‘Yeah, hun. I’m here. Maeve is losing her mind because we don’t have the flavour of yoghurt in a pouch that she likes best. Can you hear me over all the wailing?’
‘I don’t feel okay, Liv.’
‘You what?’
‘I feel . . . unwell.’
‘You’re sick? Have you seen a doctor? I don’t know what it’s like there, but it feels like every illness known to mankind is active in London right now.’
‘I haven’t seen a doctor. I don’t really know how to do that here, I don’t even have a Medicare card.’
‘You’re still on Mum’s card?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, you should sort that out. You’re an adult now, Nora. You need your own Medicare card, at the very least.’
‘Okay.’
‘I can send you the link to the form you need to fill out, if you like? I had to do it when I first moved out – it’s not too hard, you can probably do the whole thing online.’
‘Sure.’
‘I’ve got to go – Maeve is hungry and we’ve got a park date in an hour. Are you good?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Great, let’s talk soon. You’ve got this.’
And she hung up without saying goodbye. So, I could go on, but there is no point. Case closed. Olivia might, if pushed, counter with opposing pieces of evidence. She could remind me of the secret language we developed when we were small, built from backwards words and made-up phrases purely to make one another laugh. Or she could point to all of the toys and books and clothes she passed down to me, the notes she left in the margins of her classic hardbacks to make my first reading of them a shared experience. She might even mention the dozens of letters she has sent me since moving to the UK, spilling her heart out about her struggles in her ending relationship, her stalling marketing career, or her adjustment to new motherhood that was not easy or well understood by others in her life. And, in contrast, the single letter I posted in response. I had wanted to write more, but there was not a post office near my place in Melbourne and I did not have it in me to recount my experiences of that time, painful as they had been to live through in the first place.
I can understand, I suppose, that our views may differ, that my own views may differ depending on how I am handling or not handling any one particular moment in time. I can even see how Mum might have shaped Olivia’s attitudes towards me at certain times, Elsie’s frustrations becoming my sister’s, where otherwise they might not have formed. My problem, right now, always, is that knowledge, words, have no sway when emotional clouds have already settled over my perception of how things are. The signal becomes lost, the well poisoned. And it is easier to envision the darkest version of events than it is to recall those splintered by any fragments of light. Good and bad are comfortable labels, and as I can never imagine things as one hundred per cent good, that leaves only bad. An example of this with Olivia, perhaps, is when I think about how frustrated she would get with me as a small child, begging her to read one of her books to me at night. Why was her frustration the thing that stuck with me, the annoyance in her tone, and not the part where she lay and read to me nearly every single night?
Even with all the recent therapy, I have not yet come to understand exactly why I view events, and other people, this way. Focusing on the bad instead of the good. It is obviously linked to the way I view myself – the worst, unbearably lacking. That was something I learned early, based on how people reacted to me most of the time. Why else would I continue to mess everything up? I tie badness to good things until I no longer want them, because I do not feel as though I deserve them in the first place. It is a comfortable pattern, even though I now know I want to be kinder to myself; I also owe it to others not to judge them in this same way. How can I expect people to think the best of me, while I am committed to finding new ways to think the worst of them? And just like that, I am so lost in it all that I have forgotten what even brought me here to begin with, knowing only how little I know. I am, at least, tired enough to let myself rest, my toddler brain worn out from all its thrashing and ready to nap amidst my toys.
5
Meeting Maeve is the highlight of my life to date – a memory not even the worst day could darken. She is fair-skinned, chubby-cheeked, curly auburn perfection and I immediately burst into tears when five of her tiny fingers wrap around a single one of mine.
