She smiles a shy smile and points to Gary, who is lying face down on the couch. It is not the first time I have felt kinship with or a desire to be a soft toy.
‘Morning, Gary,’ I call.
Olivia laughs. The unease I expect is nowhere to be felt. We are convening, we are doing the thing. I pour my own glass of water, riding that high, and manage to spill half the contents down the front of my T-shirt. I needed to be humbled, lest I become too inflated by my own social success.
‘Where are Mum and Dad?’ I ask.
‘Dad has been sent to pull the dead leaves out of the agapanthus and Mum is changing the bedspread in Luke’s room. Again.’
Olivia contemplates the contents of the fridge and settles on strawberries for her breakfast. She chops them into small pieces in a small bowl, ready to fuel her small stomach. Though she has issues with food portion sizes, a gift from our mother, she does not seem to struggle with variety or regularity as I do. I wonder how many different types of food she can eat, and I try not to feel jealous. There are always more reasons to envy Olivia, and I am bored of all of them. I want to connect with the person in front of me, rather than continuing to build on the version in my head shaped purely around my own feelings of inadequacy.
‘Did you speak to him much when you were in London?’ I ask.
It is odd to envision the inter-personal relationships of my family members away from myself. We are not the best at being together, but I know there are more harmonious groupings within this unit, like Mum and Olivia, or Dad and Luke. Those pairings seem to work quite well. Perhaps Maeve and I might one day be added to that list.
‘Not that much – I called him on birthdays and sent him photos of British stuff like the palace and London Bridge. Sometimes I’d text if I was thinking of him, but he’s become all about his job. Like Dad, I guess. I spoke to Laura more – well, for a while there.’
‘Not anymore?’
‘Not anymore. I’m surprised she’s coming, that’s all I’ll say.’
There it is, another implication – this one entry-level, very nearly totally spelled out as an explicit statement for the benefit of an amateur like me. There is trouble in Luke’s marriage to Laura. Easy, understood. I lean against the sink and bite into a green apple, contemplating what else I can eat before my appetite is killed by the humidity, and the fact that Luke and I do not communicate at all. Not photos of Melbourne stuff, or Sydney stuff; no birthday phone calls or ‘just thinking of you’ messages. In my mind, our relationship existed in childhood but neither of us put in the effort to transition it to our current, adult lives. We have never been a potential pairing. I may remember parts of his past and how he acted at certain moments as a child, but I don’t know him, and he doesn’t know me, and there does not seem to be anyone at fault, but I still feel a little angry about it anyway. He is older; isn’t that a bit more his job?
Luke met Laura at uni and they have been together ever since, but this will be the first time Laura has been to the family home. The yearly cycle of viruses, floods (here) and fires (there) gave them probable cause for a registry wedding in Sydney (only two close friends there to witness), and Luke’s work in finance seems to surge any time there has been mention of them visiting, a pattern I cannot be the only one who notices. Nobody is saying anything direct about that; nobody ever says anything direct. I settle next on toast.
I eat slowly as Olivia fills me in on her most recent communications with Luke, and the fact that he has booked a car from the airport to bring him here this morning. Not a taxi, not an Uber, but a private personal driver. I cannot imagine this version of him – work-obsessed, married, a job in finance, a real adult arriving home in a nondescript luxury car driven by – probably – a man in a suit and a hat and little white gloves. My imagination runs away with the visuals, comedic exaggeration a little respite. There is a red carpet, and then a French horn.
It must all be for Laura, and I wonder what her family home is like. None of us have been there, but the way Mum talks about the way Luke talks about his Sydney life, the fragment filtered through her perception, our middle-class comfort may as well be feudal peasantry compared to his work colleagues’ upbringings, laden with trust funds, family estates, and surnames that match those on street signs and university buildings and monuments. Hence the agapanthus, because they line the front fence and the driveway, and Laura might just ask that man in the top hat, monocle, and tails to turn right around if she sees even a hint of brown foliage.
‘Do you think he got fake teeth?’
I am now scrolling Luke’s page, trying to get an understanding of the adult version of the child who was my brother. I zoom in on a photo of him and Laura, seemingly taken on a boat in Sydney Harbour. His teeth seem substantially larger than they used to be, even when accounting for the child to adult tooth-size trajectory.
‘They’re not fake teeth, they’re veneers,’ Olivia replies, rolling her eyes as though I am the one who is being ludicrous in this situation.
Something has shifted in her energy. I get a sense of my morning walks with Elsie.
‘What’s the difference?’
‘They’re a totally different thing.’
She does not seem to care to elaborate, but is instead massaging her temples, her eyes closed. I have offended the very idea of veneers by calling them fake teeth, despite the fact that, from what I can tell, that is exactly what they are.
‘Well, they look weird.’
‘Don’t say that to Luke, he’s sensitive about his looks.’
‘Is he?’
‘Of course he is. The tiny teeth and weird chin – he’s got a total complex about them.’
I am conscious of her tone, now mocking and dismissive, and wonder whether it was a conversation with this version of Olivia that brought about the not-fake teeth, and if there has been some kind of alteration made to the chin as well. It does not look weird to me, at least not in this photo. Maybe there is a filter. I make a mental note to assess the real thing. Maybe chins are something we should all be more worried about.
‘Are you okay?’ I ask, cautious.
‘Yeah, I’m fine. I got about two hours’ sleep, between the jet lag and Maeve. I’m not ready to face a whole new day just yet,’ she replies, more settled again.
‘Yikes, that’s rough. I can get Maeve changed if you like? Give you a bit of alone time. You could shower or whatever.’
