‘You’ll just have to figure out what to do with your hair. That’s above my pay grade.’
With a smile, she leaves, though her energy lingers. My hair has dried with an abundance of frizz – that is always the trade-off for avoiding the heat and noise of a hairdryer. I run my straightener through the layered ends to try and give them the right kind of shape. What felt edgy and fun in Melbourne feels unkempt and embarrassing here, particularly in contrast to the overall sleekness of my sister. Cleo had talked me into it; this grown-out wolf cut now all that remains of our friendship. I leave my hair loose, much like the floral sundress Olivia has laid out on the bed. It looks fitting for a neighbourhood get-together, and I trust she knows better than I do how to dress appropriately for an event. I will not fill it out in the same way she does, and I am sure I will look uncomfortable, so there is no need for reflected confirmation. I am comfortable with the version of my image I hold in my head.
Light makeup, a floral dress, I am keeping things simple and comfortable. Gorgeous, too, of course, but I have no need to be the one who notices that. I recall the last time I dressed up, and the wedding guest who said I looked like that actress from the horror movie. He went on and on about it, actually. No doubt it was a compliment, the actress being quite pretty, and nothing to do with her intensity or developing insanity. That was the film plot; he only said we looked alike. Anyway, these last few weeks at home have been healing; I am healed. I am grounded – still quiet, still awkward, still interesting, but no longer in that frenetic, scary kind of way. I am the safe kind of interesting now, and the endearing kind of awkward. I have enough self-awareness to be sheepish about seeing Fran for the first time since moving back, but enough confidence to carry myself with care. We meet as equals, and I am emotionally adept and agile enough to be able to apologise without making him feel uncomfortable or upset. He will be moved, genuinely, and surprised by that. A lot has changed, we will agree. Time has worked its magic.
‘Nora, time to go,’ Dad calls through my window.
I am sucking on my vape like it is filled with life-giving oxygen rather than quite literally the opposite. We convene on the front lawn, and Mum does not make a comment about my appearance. She has offered a silent treaty; the absence of a negative remark a positive, and my desire to offer pithy commentary on the more-is-more pirate-booty haul of gold jewellery she is wearing likewise disappears.
We walk together to the Kingstons’, Maeve in her stroller pointing out birds and bats soaring overhead, and the cicadas serenading us as we go by. They have chilled out a little, or perhaps this is a different sub-species. The air is warm and soft, the sky an ever-changing painting, and I can breathe for a minute, as long as I don’t think too hard about anything. Mr Kingston is waiting at the top of the drive, pouring arrival drinks and making jokes in front of his unfortunately colourless but nonetheless beautiful home. He pretends to offer Maeve a glass of champagne, and she is confused for a minute, because of course she would like to get her small hands on the crystal and the bubbles, and she does not laugh with the rest of the group when he pulls it away. I do not laugh either. Olivia pulls out Maeve’s sippy cup and we all do a cheers with her to make up for it. People do not include children enough. As though they won’t one day grow into adults. As though they are another thing entirely. I pick Maeve a pink hibiscus from the bush by the letterbox, and she smells it, breathing in deep with her eyes closed. She already knows it all. So much of growing up is forgetting, I think.
‘Everyone’s around the back,’ Mr Kingston says, directing us down the garden path like a flight attendant, his arm out straight.
Each nerve is alight knowing how close he is. My family walks ahead, giving me a few more seconds to steady myself. Through an archway of climbing jasmine, sickly sweet, we step into the celebration. There are dozens of people spread across the back lawn, dressed in sensible, church-appropriate clothes, clumped together in small groups making small talk and sipping from small glasses and cups. It has the kind of energy I would imagine at a Guy Sebastian concert; Elsie’s celebrity crush. I sense him before I see him – Fran, not Guy – attuned as always to his energy and presence. He is standing under a vast mango tree hung with fairy lights, talking to another neighbour, Jamie, in the glow of the warm light. He looks different and exactly the same, older but more himself than ever, his hair longer – uncharacteristically pulled back – his smile unchanged. Aware that I am staring, I try to cover my tracks, popping open and closed the clip in my hair and looking around at my family. They are all scanning the party too, peeling off one by one to approach familiar faces in different corners of the yard. It is too late to tag along, I have missed my moment, and I feel outside of myself standing alone, so I start towards Fran before I have the chance to think about how I want to do this, or if I want to do this at all. He looks my way.
‘Hey,’ he says, his feigned nonchalance a little overcooked.
‘Hi.’
It is a strange sensation, this moment – zoomed out, zoomed in, deja vu if she had amnesia, drunk on a boat, high in an elevator – and I must remind myself where I am, who I am. My inner self starts to detach and I have to grab her by her ankle to keep her here, a helium balloon trying to escape the clutches of a party-worn child.
‘Great to see you, Nora,’ says Jamie, leaning in for a hug.
He has interrupted my train of delirium. The Kingstons’ son is much older than us, and he is the only one who makes a big deal of this, or mentions it at all. ‘Just wait until you’re my age’ is his favourite quip, about everything from late nights to exercise, but that is the thing about time: we will not align in years lived until he is dead. As he puts his hand on my hip, I suddenly remember him cornering me in a dark room, teaching me to French kiss when I was a small child and he was already nearly an adult. His unwanted touch pulls me back there, and I may be sick. Time can truly come for him as swiftly as she likes.
‘Is that Olivia? I thought she was in London?’
‘She’s just back for Christmas with the family,’ I reply, as if scripted by AI.
Jamie makes a beeline for a dream that will never come true, leaving us alone sooner than I expected, and for a moment I am glad to see him go. But then I think of Maeve. If he so much as looks at her, it will be another story. An exceedingly violent one. I would actually kill him, I think, without emotion, my programming amplified – I would go M3GAN on his ass, swiftly righting moral order rather than waiting on a tardy Madame Time. The silence crescendos and I remember where I am, who is in front of me. In a panic, I continue scripting, as is often expected in moments like this.
‘It’s good to see you,’ I say to Fran, avoiding his gaze and instead focusing on preloading some questions about his family, his work, his summer.
‘Yeah,’ he responds, and by the time I build up the courage to look at him, he is surveying the party, no doubt planning his escape.
I have a few seconds to observe him. He still dresses like a boy-child of the nineties, but he has grown into it – it now seems an interesting aesthetic choice rather than an accidental outcome. He is holding himself differently, shoulders high instead of folded in on themselves, a once misguided effort to disguise his height. He must draw more attention now than he did growing up; he certainly has mine. I am absorbed, watching, drinking, seeing, until his returned eye contact startles me out of stillness.
My script has been destroyed, tossed into the fire like Jo March’s manuscript. I should have put more effort into thinking about how this might go – into planning for his comfort, rather than my own. I wish I was a stranger, and he did not have any prior knowledge or experience with me at all. I think we would get along quite well if we did not know one another as we do. Or, what I really mean is, if he did not know me as I have been. Fran sighs and rubs his eyes. Tired. This means he is tired.
‘Don’t let me hold you up,’ I say, delivering another relic of conversations gone by.
‘Right, well, see you in a bit.’
And without a moment of hesitation, he leaves. Quelle surprise! Like the shoulders, this is new. Replaying the scene in my head, I am sure I made it clear I was saying ‘Don’t let me hold you up’ in the small talk kind of way, just to be polite, to fill the silence, without meaning it, but apparently not. Perhaps I used the wrong tone, or my face looked angry in the way it does when I am not thinking about how it looks. Or perhaps Fran’s desire not to speak to me trumps adherence to usual social conventions. This is the worst possible turn of events, short of me projectile vomiting directly into his face. I will not get another chance at our first interaction post a major friendship-ruining series of events, and I flubbed it. Of course I did.Of course I did.I cannot go to the grocery store without a meltdown or two days in bed – why did I think I could pull off some kind of highwire emotional-resolution triple somersault with two feet landing on the mat? Landing on my arse was the only conceivable outcome. It is possible I ruined his life, or at least his adolescence. I should have waited until middle age, like a second-chance romance novel. He probably never wants to see me again.
The rumination cycle cannot take hold in public; that act of self-harm is only survivable in private. I release the ankle and let the inner self detach, like a ghost or a soul departing, floating until I disappear. And even as I feel all of these storm-of-the-century waves crashing against me, I am also admonishing myself for being so ridiculous. Kim, there’s people that are dying. Get a grip, girl. And get another drink.
Collecting myself, I make my way over to Olivia and she offers the reprieve I need, as well as a top-up of my glass. I keep myself busy on Maeve duty, taking her far from Jamie for walks around the garden, then rock her to sleep in her pram. Time to focus my energy on a quest to locate the best tree in the garden. There is a clear winner. This one is just far enough from the party to see everything without falling into the trap of being a convenient stopping point for people who want to talk about nothing. I am not sure what kind of tree it is, maybe a fig, but it is old and twisted and beautiful. I park the pram under it, tuck Maeve in with her light blanket and pull the hood down to hide her from nosy and increasingly drunken eyes. People seem to love children a lot more when they are intoxicated, or the idea of them at least. I sit in the dirt next to her, and I do not see Fran again until the sky has turned wholly dark, stars out. Living on a mountain always made me feel physically closer to them; they are so much brighter here, though I now understand this is more to do with light pollution, the difference in distance negligible.
‘There you are,’ Fran says, walking towards me with a sway in his step and a glass of wine in each hand.
‘Here I am,’ I reply, trying to grasp at the escaped balloon, trying to bring her back, as he joins me under my tree.
‘This party is weird,’ he says.
‘Seems like you’ve been having fun.’
‘I’ve been getting drunk and doing my best to avoid you.’
