‘No thank you. I just thought you would have offered to get a coffee for your mother; that’s something people might think is a nice thing to do.’
‘You said yesterday that five-dollar coffees were a waste of money, were why no young people could afford to move out of home anymore, so I assumed you wouldn’t want me buying two.’
‘That’s not what I said.’
She does not provide me with another version of yesterday’s comments, to show how I came to misunderstand them, and I know better than to ask.
‘Iced latte for Nora,’ the barista quietly shouts.
We turn and head for home. My knees ache only a little. I alternate sips from my coffee and my strawberry vape. Elsie has turned a blind eye to this particular habit, for which I am glad. I am almost able to relax. Substances paired with silent motion seems to be the winning ticket during daytime hours. Nicotine, caffeine, nicotine, caffeine. My brain is no longer on fire, no longer being boiled alive in its own juices. Elsie is talking at length about which gifts she has purchased for everyone, and how much she has spent on each. She buys expensive things with little to no meaning for the people they are intended for, other than to signify that she has spent a lot of money on them, and they should be grateful. Elsie is perhaps keeping the luxury candle and cashmere throw industries afloat in this cost-of-living crisis, though I cannot complain as she is also keeping me afloat, financially speaking. Despite our assertions to the contrary, this has been a comparably lovely walk. I will need a little recovery time before I am able to be with others again, but it is possible today as I have no plans other than lunch and dinner. My lack of plans since arriving home has felt crushing, vacuous and unending, but now as I approach a week of time so fully accounted for, my insides twist in apprehension. It has been an age since I have been able to enact acceptable personhood full-time, especially with those who know me well. I cannot remember the last time we were all under one roof.
My parents and I have only thus far really congregated at meals, each one its own somewhat fractious event. Planning, preparing, cooking, serving, and cleaning up from meals is where Elsie expends most of her time and energy, and she is, of course, incredible at it. Food causes me nothing but stress – another attribute I now have a new understanding about. Avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder, the proper name for my embarrassing tendency towards fussy, picky eating that does not seem to dissuade anyone of the idea that I am simply choosing to be difficult.
I survived my time in Melbourne on packet noodles, ice blocks, and Granny Smith apples, with occasional bank-breaking food deliveries for the times I could not put together a sentence, let alone a meal. The substances helped; I forgot how to feel hungry after a while and that saved me effort I did not have to give. Despite what people were saying, behind my back and eventually to my face, it was never about how I looked. I lost interest in that long before I lost recognition. Again, capacity and expectations – the diminishing of the former leaving me near-obliterated by the latter. Neither should be set in stone, and both have to be self-determined, that is what would be fair. This thought rages inside me like a protest, but what good is internal rebellion if I am not able to convert it to words, or actions?
Elsie has long bestowed the fruits of her kitchen labour like honour, so my pickiness has always been personal for her. Like so many elements of how I am. I want to retcon her conceptualisation of me, or at least fill it with caveats and footnotes, but right now all I seem to be able to manage is avoidance or confrontation. It runs too deep, both ways.
Giving my mother an emotional wide berth has been my first choice of coping mechanism since I was small. Olivia would appease, Luke would gather evidence and present it like he was the closing speaker of a winning debate team, and I would avoid, avoid, avoid. All of these methods had their merit, though I have not until now considered the internal ramifications of my siblings’ differing approaches. I only know their public selves, perhaps. Between her and I, Elsie seems to recover a lot quicker, the rise and fall a more comfortable part of her routine. I have, until recently, still been working as hard as I can against all emotional extremes, a natural counterpoint to the times I have found myself on the ugly apex of a fury or devastation so extreme it has seemingly never before been reached. I questioned, at various times, if I was a sociopath, or an empath, feeling always too little or too much. Perhaps it would be smarter to embrace these feelings, to honour them and let them pass. I type ‘emotional extremes’ into my notes app so I remember to talk to Dr Montague about it on our next Zoom call. There are now thousands of words written in the ‘my weird brain’ note, as fragments of thoughts, theories and memories float down into my consciousness like falling leaves.
I continue to sip and inhale between steps, keeping my eyes peeled for birds. Three willie wagtails observe us from the lowest fence-wire of the cattle paddock, having a gossip session of their own. I wonder if anyone they know has painted their nest white, or removed any pretty plants and depreciated the value of their treetop homes, or if the empty nesters have been unpleasantly surprised by the return of their grown offspring. Black cockatoos squawk overhead, and I remember that this means rain is on the way. It is something, at least. The last twelve months of my life are accessible only through dreaming, and even then, the most I recall are partial details – smells and sounds most potent. I can’t remember stories, or certain words, or if the things I think happened to me really happened at all. I can’t remember communicating with my brother or sister. I can’t remember why Cleo is no longer talking to me or how long I stayed in that apartment before Mum and Dad organised my flight home. But little titbits will return to me like gifts, and I try to treasure those in place of the pieces of my life they have seemingly replaced. For now. My hope is that if I concentrate hard enough, for long enough, and relax my eyes, eventually the full picture will show itself. Memory as a Magic Eye autostereogram – that is a curious thought. Into ‘my weird brain’ it goes.
‘Thanks for the walk,’ I say, as Elsie heads upstairs and I go down.
‘Any time,’ she replies, and I can see her ticking ‘quality time with psychologically vulnerable daughter’ off her mental to-do list.
I return to my bed, to my loungewear, to my thoughts. I email Dr Montague to ask for an extra Zoom session, to touch base this week, because it is actually the hardest week – an idea I originally discarded the moment she suggested this might be the case. And I try to remember the last time my room felt like a magical world of its own. Revisiting my past so often is perhaps a side effect of coming back, or an inevitability of my particular circumstances regardless of location, but at least in quiet moments I can focus my thoughts on the scenes I wish to examine. Elsie said he was home – it has to mean something, us both being here.
We were explorers before we were truly friends. On warm afternoons at the end of spring holidays, when our parents were gardening or exercising or drinking wine on their respective decks, Fran would ask me to imagine us an adventure. He had the momentum; I had the ideas. We were palaeontologists, magical twin orphans, wildlife videographers, celebrities with a burning secret, world-weary mountaineers, lost children on another planet. The farm behind our houses was so expansive I did not even realise there was a farmhouse there until long after our last voyage. There was only a canvas of grass, with a jacaranda tree on the hill in the middle that glowed gold in the afternoons to give us something to paint around. Fran never wore shoes; I could never take mine off. He brought walkie-talkies, and paper planes, and snacks in a plastic shopping bag. I brought as many soft toys as I could hold, somehow knowing he would not make a comment about whether I should still own them at my age. I had been mourning the transition that other children seemed to be making easily away from imagination and play, and relished the chance to keep it alive with someone so skilled in the art. When we got tired, we ate seedy mandarins in the bare limbs of the tree, and told each other snippets of stories too big to fully unfold.
‘My mum doesn’t really like your mum,’ I remember him saying. ‘She says she looks down her nose at people too much, or something like that.’
‘Yeah, she does. My mum doesn’t really like anyone,’ I replied.
‘Not even you?’
‘Especially not me.’
‘My mum likes me,’ he said, wrapping his arms around his knees.
‘I can tell,’ I replied.
Another time, he told me about a boy in his class who would splash piss on him every time they were side by side at the urinals, never saying a word. I asked what he did when that happened.
‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘I don’t know how to fight, and he does. He’s always getting in fights behind the bike shed, and he always wins.’
‘I’ll fight him for you. I’m older and probably stronger,’ I said, believing it though it was not likely to be true.
‘I don’t know, I’ll think about it. Thank you.’
‘He sounds like a little prick,’ I said, throwing my peels into the long grass below.
‘He is. He’s a little prick,’ he replied.
‘Little prick!’ I yelled like a coo-ee.
‘LITTLE PRICK!’ Fran screamed like a foghorn.
He later armoured himself with a class clown persona that protected him in a way that would not have worked for me, even if I did possess the wit to quip and jest on the spot, and I very much did not. People only seemed to laugh when I was being earnest, and my jokes landed like barbs enough times for me to stop trying to make them. I was quiet, according to me; I was strange, sullen, too serious, according to others. I did not see it at the time, but looking back, Fran’s comic disguise did not seem to fit him any more comfortably than my mask fitted me.
