The Grass Sister, page 3
I looked through the thick glass of the windows for any sign of my sister. No movement, so I sped, suddenly apprehensive, through the door of the old house and out into the rain, in time to the bell’s insistent rhythm.
Our mother used to hit this bell as if she could bring out a fiercer sound than its narrow tinging range, or call up children other than her own from out of the valleys. If we were very far away, instead of hearing our actual names, we heard only the sound of her English voice between the noises of the bell and spoon. Then we felt sure she was calling for the six children she used to dream of when she was an unhappy child in an orphanage after the war. Or for the baby boy she’d miscarried in Africa following a bumpy tractor ride.
The bell had been looted by Tin, our father’s grandfather, from a farmhouse one afternoon during the Boer War. Whenever our father picked it up, he would wonder aloud, with a degree of guilt in his voice, about the farm woman in Africa who must have once rung it. Did Trevor Irwin Nevitt take the woman prisoner? he’d ask into the air. Or was the farmhouse already emptied except for the bell, sitting to one side of a half-finished lunch?
Whenever we had South African visitors of Dutch extraction staying, the bell and all other suspicious brass objects would be put away. Our father said this was in case they might’ve belonged to the grandparents of our visitor.
‘Oh you are corny,’ Alana would say, oblivious to the bell’s history. ‘Please couldn’t you just fix it, so it rings again?’
‘Of course I will, darling,’ our father always replied, only for it never to be mended.
‘I’m afraid to say that little brass bell used to be used in our house to tell the cookboy that he could bring the next course.’ Our father will still tell a total stranger, or Lavinia for about the fifth time, defensively, with embarrassment. ‘Well, what can I say, that’s the way it was. Ooh, I’m feeling awful, aren’t I?’
Inside the New House I could tell immediately my sister wasn’t home. On this particular night, my parents were happy. It might’ve been the cosy feelings rain can evoke, or that they were well into a bottle of wine. I could hear them laughing in the kitchen, making suppositions as to our whereabouts.
I squinted outside, using my bedroom window’s factory-batch numbers, which I was meant to have washed off six years before, as small frames to the farm. It seemed to me that through the triangle of a number four, I saw my sister hunching off the side verandah of the Abandoned House, in the direction of the Stinging Tree Forest. The stinging trees were all that was left of original rainforest on the two-hundred-acre farm our father bought following the death of his mother, Betty.
I was named not only after this grandmother but my other one as well. Until Patricia went paragliding in Spain, there were never any photographs of the grandmothers about the house, only stories, which hung in the air around us as warnings. I could never understand why I’d been given the names of women so disliked. My father says it was because of guilt. By the time of my birth, not only had he completely abandoned his mother, but Alana had all but washed her hands of her own. Thus my name was, if I liked to understand it in a logical light, an awkward show of conscience. It would’ve been better to be born a boy, I used to think bitterly. To have been called after the grandfathers, Budge and Barney, whose photographs were obviously precious, sitting on our father and mother’s desks respectively, would’ve been a fine thing and no cause for shame.
Alana displayed the paragliding photo for about a month. In this photo you can’t see Grandma’s face. It’s turned away and her legs are in bandages from an operation designed to alleviate her intermittent claudication. She is about fifty feet above blue Marjorcan waters but nevertheless wears a jaunty kind of air.
It used to seem strange to Ann-Clare and me that although our grandmothers both enjoyed travelling, neither of them made the journey from England to Africa for our parents’ wedding. Also, not only were they not friends, but they had never met. This point was first brought home to me when as a six year old, I tried to write to them for Christmas on the same card.
At the time of my birth, Elizabeth Mabel, our father’s mother, but always known as Betty, was living in hotels around Europe. She was one of the Bones from Kent, our father said. If her funny maiden name was meant to help describe the nature of her illness, it did not. Her madness was always hinted at but never properly explained and we knew it hadn’t stopped her from travelling alone in a quite bold and flamboyant style. We also knew that eventually she was dishing out such large tips and gifts as she made her way around Europe, that solicitors in Plymouth advised our father to restrict her access to the estate.
Even on the smaller income, Betty continued to move around England for another six years. Reaching the Cornish tip of England where our father had left her years before, she booked into the Blue Cap Hotel. Two weeks later she hung herself from an oak tree in its garden. Such was her will to die, she lifted her knees towards her face, the branch she’d chosen being too low for her considerable height. As is common with advanced schizophrenia, her handwriting had deteriorated so enormously, the letter she left for our father was never properly deciphered.
In order for Betty’s belongings to be sold or shipped, and on the strength of our father’s inheritance, we immediately went as a family to England. We were then able to meet our living grandma, Patricia Avis, an alcoholic Londoner of flirtatious disposition. After this reconciliation between Alana and her mother, Patricia came to Australia every few years. With each visit came a silver charm for our bracelets, a bottle of beer shampoo and frightening fights. If this was meant to be our normal grandmother, we used to ponder, what hope had we? My sister, taller even than our father, must’ve inherited her height from Betty, whereas I have Grandma’s much smaller build. Therefore although my sister was two years younger than me, during our childhood people would always assume the opposite.
For years I was shy about giving the exact sequence of grandmother names that my mother had strung together. Who knows, I used to brood, my name may even have contributed to Betty cutting up the first baby photographs my father sent of me, before returning them to him bit by bit, inside English aerograms. As no extra postage was ever added for the enclosures, my parents had to keep on paying out fiddly amounts of money to Lindley’s postmistress to make up the shortfall. Alana said it was as if Betty had murdered her first grand-daughter and was sending pieces of my dismembered body back in the mail.
This used to pang me. Also, that apart from being called Rent-a-Car at high school, no one ever found a nickname to save me from my real name. My sister had three nicknames—Nipsy Beetle, Gnat, Splinter. The last two arose from her thinness, the first from her affection for a local and drab-coloured insect with a double-jointed body. Sometimes, in my envy, I thought of one for myself and compelled Ann-Clare to use the nickname. But although she was very obliging, these names never settled or remained. My sister would use the nickname of the moment when discussing me, and Alana would say, ‘Who on earth are you talking about darling?’ The inability of my mother to ever call me by the nicknames, her insistence on my real one, seemed to make them fail faster.
As if to remedy the disaster of my Christian and middle names, my mother picked two short and easy ones for her next daughter and joined them with a hyphen. Not even an e on the end of the Ann. It had a lovely ring to it which I seemed set to envy forever.
As I stood at the window of my bedroom watching the dark shape of the forest, my mother came to stand by my side. ‘Ann-Clare’s gone out into the rain,’ I said. I could smell wine on my mother’s breath. The air was full of fine-winged cockroaches that made my mother moan. She thought the cockroaches were flying directly from the old farmhouse about two hundred feet away, into her narrow architect-designed house. I was hoping Ann-Clare hadn’t put her hand into my raincoat pocket which I knew held at least five wishbones I’d excavated from dead wild birds and forgotten to put out for the ants to clean. I was interested in how dead things looked, whereas Ann-Clare was by far the best listener to the stories told about dead people.
‘What did you do to her this time?’ I thought Alana was going to hit me but she only took my wrist in her hand and held it hard. She made me look at her eyes which were as sharp grey as steel. We were never hit, only at most tapped lightly over the palm with a wooden spoon we were more often in the habit of licking.
Taking my torch, my mother slammed open the sliding screen door and went outside. I ate a pretzel sitting on a plate on my bedside table. I could hear my mother calling my sister, Ann-Clare, Ann-Clare, with the stress falling on the last, beautifully simple name. Long after the torch beam disappeared, I felt their progress was in a southeasterly direction, with my sister moving faster and always ahead of the weakening torch beam. I knew it would soon fail altogether, for earlier that day I’d been wasting its batteries, sitting in my mother’s wardrobe in order to look at the glider aeroplanes I’d unwrapped before Christmas. As Ann-Clare’s birthday fell on Boxing Day, her Christmas presents were always superior to mine and this year was no exception. It was not the glider my sister had hoped for but nonetheless, I felt Alana or Jack had chosen Ann-Clare an above-average plane, a much more beautiful balsa-wood plane than mine, the construction of which would require my considerable assistance.
The pretzels were stale. All their salt had fallen off. My father came into the bedroom. ‘What’s going on?’ He wanted to know and pulled down the temporary bamboo blind which had become permanent. I gave an account that explained nothing. He said that if Ann-Clare and Alana didn’t turn up soon, he’d also go outside. ‘We’ll just give them a few more minutes,’ he said, as if we were playing some kind of hide and seek. Black margins of night lay at either edge of the blind. As I heard noises of my mother and sister coming towards us, I concentrated on the resemblance the blind had to pretzels. I didn’t appreciate that at this moment Rosemary Kincaid, the girl visiting from Africa, came out from my sister’s bedroom to smirk at me through the door.
‘Oh, Rose,’ said my father, ‘you haven’t happened to see Ann-Clare around have you?’ As if Rosemary was likely to give a totally sane and rational reply.
Then Alana was bursting back through my bedroom door.
Suddenly I thought I could feel worms dying in my belly. I thought, My mother has overwormed me and I’m dying too! The rain must’ve been heavy for she was very wet.
‘Shut up for a moment,’ said Alana, though I hadn’t said a word. Or maybe she was talking to our father, who was making murmuring noises of general comfort and dismay. My sister had appeared. Even under the rain cap she’d improvised, the haircut was visible. It was an undercut, the style Ann-Clare had begged from me. She’d said she wanted it cut like the Baldwin boys’ hair. I had followed her instructions and the shape of a haircut of a magazine child Ann-Clare periodically held up to the mirror. Nevertheless Alana moved towards Ann-Clare as if towards a small tragedy. I couldn’t explain that it wasn’t my fault Ann-Clare had inherited Alana’s elephant ears or that the haircut was nothing to do with Ann-Clare’s tears and flight out into the rain.
‘Sheet, shame,’ said Rosemary. Because she had been in and out of a number of mental institutions in South Africa, no one said a word, whatever four letter word she chose. ‘Shame,’ she said it again. She sucked and chewed at her stringy orange hair in a way that made me long to take the scissors to her also. Shame was a word all our white African visitors overused. Depending on the degree of upward inflection, it usually denoted a certain affectionate humour. Rosemary also used it as a withering, half-disgusted way of responding to something, without articulating it any further than that.
I went over to my sister, requiring her with a glare of my own to say that she’d asked me for a haircut, but she was still crying so hard she couldn’t speak. The tears were coming not only from her eyes but from her neck as well, for when she was born, the gills that are meant to have closed over in human babies hadn’t quite shut. And even to this day, I imagine, if something or some person is making Ann-Clare cry, the tears will be forcing themselves through the normally invisible holes.
Closer up I saw that what I’d thought were raindrops on her plastic rain triangle were actually little glistening insects, the size of lady beetles but without any patterns. I touched her wrist and she snatched it away. I wished she was younger. Then our father could piggyback her outside as he used to, to show her the stars, or the spiders in their webs at work for their supper.
I couldn’t say, ‘It’s Rose’s fault! Nothing to do with hair!’ pointing to our visitor, without in some way implicating us all. I bent down instead to unlace the boots from the paws of the dog who had to wear them ever since he’d developed an allergy to the stinging leaves as a puppy. ‘There you go Jasper,’ I said, hugging him despite the smell of wet dog.
I don’t remember any specific punishment but that in the ensuing fight (my mother accusing me, my father defending, my sister crying and crying in the bath until Alana said we’d have to take her to hospital if she didn’t stop) no one remembered to bring the guinea pigs in out of the rain.
Ann-Clare’s crying was really quite impressive, quite melodic, for all its softness, the new bathroom’s acoustics holding the echo. I felt amazed at my power over her and watched for a while at the crack in the door.
I thought the tears were coming from Ann-Clare’s sadness stream. Our mother said this stream runs through the body of girls and women, running alongside the various blood-carrying vessels. Sometimes it pushes itself up through your body, a small spring coming out of a hillside, which must leave not as fresh cool water but in hot tears. I feel Alana stole the metaphor from a novel without acknowledgement. But although in the years following her death I’ve read most of my mother’s books shelved at the far end of the corridor, I’ve never yet found the reference.
‘Here,’ I said to Ann-Clare, standing next to the bath in her fourth hour of crying. ‘Here. Have all my wishbones,’ rattling them at her, a huge boxful, collected mainly from hundreds of roast chickens but interspersed with smaller or rarer types as well. ‘Well at least wish on one?’
She didn’t speak but I saw her poking around under her bud breasts in search of her own, which she said lay in humans just above the heart.
‘That won’t work,’ I said. ‘You have to break a piece of bone. There has to be a snap.’ I upended my collection into the bath. They floated, and Ann-Clare was suddenly bathing in small fragile bones.
After she’d finally cried herself to sleep, wrapped around a large river rock Alana had warmed for her in the oven, I went to gather up my sodden trinkets. As far as I could gauge none of my wishbones were broken except that of a budgerigar I decided to pull and wish on myself.
That night I dreamt that my family’s time at the farm was over. Although the property next door was bright with winter ryes, in the dream, the grass around ours had turned pale and white like a winter lawn. Where had we gone? There was no way of knowing. The New House looked as derelict as the Abandoned one, which in the dream had fallen over. Somewhere just out of sight was the sound of horses eating the long stringy native grasses that grow in between the graves. The sky was becalmed, as if whatever action had taken us from home happened a long time ago under long past bad weather.
Though Rosemary Kincaid clearly felt Ann-Clare was being too lenient, my sister and I became friends again in the morning when we found the guinea pigs drowned in a dip in the lawn. I cried, at the same time as feeling relieved, knowing that Alana’s clean sheets wouldn’t get into the guinea pig pellet poo under the washing line any more. Nor would their bright pink legs, keeled over in the heat of summer, anger her. Ann-Clare and I buried them in our separate cemeteries. My sister didn’t cry. She was quite emotionless when it came to animals, though observant. A few weeks later she was able to point out the two bright circles of grass which began to grow over them. ‘Wouldn’t that have pleased the pigs?’ she said. ‘If only they were here to eat it.’ She said I should try not to brood about my name any more. Suppose you’d been called Dorcas, she suggested.
‘At least that means gazelle,’ I said, looking it up in Important People.
But Ann-Clare said that dwelling on something impossible to change just made me horrible to be around. Instead, I must think of Betty as the reason for our visit to England, the purchase of the farm and the building of the New House which had made Alana happy—even if we ourselves were not very keen on its appearance and all its accompanying chores.
The day our father bought the farm was at first without wind. Smoke hung in invisible seams of the morning’s mist and slighter traces lay amongst the heart-shaped stinging leaves of the rainforest remnant behind the original house. The paddocks were full of cockatoos that Alana said looked like a bright white crop or bodies at prayer in an Asian field near rice.
The estate agent made an apologetic gesture towards the cemeteries and tried to get our parents to focus instead on the way the hills fell away from the garden’s edge, the prettiness of surrounding farms and state forests, and the dark patch of original wilderness which had been a national park for nearly a century. Yet instead of the presence of gravestones making my family feel morbid, it was exhilarating. When the wind came up and began to cause small, soil-coloured waves in a trough, my mother was reminded of another time altogether: walking through an old square in Yorkshire, pushing Barney in a wheelchair, the wind spraying the water from a stone fountain at them in great gusts. Her father laughed though by then both his legs had been amputated.
