About a Girl (13 page)

Chapter Eleven

W
HAT ARE THE
words of that song?
Everywhere you go, always take the weather with you
. It has an upbeat tempo, but it seems to me to be coloured with sadness.

Flynn always had the weather with her. Or at least, I always noticed the weather when she was with me. She heightened my senses, caused me to notice things. She made me feel more alive.

Our argument in the kitchen made the weather irrelevant to me, because we avoided each other. I went to work and then home again, burrowed into books, and lived on comforting invalid food like tea and Vegemite toast. I was licking my wounds. I felt that I might never see her again.

I took out the mother-of-pearl button she'd given me. A token, given to me on the day when I had abused her trust. (
But I was right, wasn't I
, said a little voice in my head.
There is a boy.
I was right about that, for the wrong reasons.)

I thought of the childhood trinkets Flynn kept in the little tin. The guitar pick, that she'd not told me the history of. Simon had taught her to play. He had helped her shop for Louise.
That one
, he'd said,
is a little beauty.
It must be one of his guitar picks.

And the day her mother had turned up, it was just after the anniversary of Simon's death. So that was the grief in her. I imagined my own mother if one of us had died. She'd be inconsolable, for years and years, perhaps always. That sort of thing must never go away. Flynn's mother said she'd called in the week before, but Flynn was at the beach with
me
, observing the anniversary with
me
, even though I didn't know it at the time. That must show how much she cared about me – mustn't it?

And then the voice in my head said,
And what about when Rocco gets back
?

She arrived unexpectedly on Sunday afternoon, with a bag full of groceries.

‘Let's not quarrel,' she said, and went straight to the kitchen to make us a Japanese feast, little seaweed rolls with slivers of pink salmon and cucumber, and bowls of soupy rice.

We ate sitting on cushions at the coffee table, not saying much. We passed food across the table, spooned soup into our mouths, and nibbled fastidiously on the little rice parcels. I'd made a pot of green tea (I had bought a teapot, finally, in an op shop, a small Japanese-style pot with a side handle), and I poured it into small glasses with thick bottoms and ridged sides. I spooned pale green wasabi onto my plate and dabbed a roll into it, savouring the fiery bite. I sat for a while without eating, and took in my surroundings. I took in the colours – the pink salmon in the white rice rolls, the translucent cucumber with its thread of dark green skin, the black seaweed wrapper, and Flynn's glossy dark hair.

The sky outside was a pure blue. Not a breath of wind stirred the trees.

The only sound was the clapping and chanting of my neighbour's children as they played handball against the side of the house.

At last, we had eaten enough. Flynn lay back against the sofa and said, ‘I'd like to tell you about Simon.'

She went on without waiting for me to say anything.

‘He was just the best brother. You know how siblings are not meant to get on? Well, we did. He was only three years older than me, and we were best mates. He was the one who called me Flynn – he said Rose was a sissy name. We used to go down to the creek in the paddock behind the house and make rafts out of drums and bamboo – they always sank. And he'd hoist me up trees with him and we'd sit looking at the view with the branches swaying underneath us. I broke
bones
playing with him. I have
scars
. But he was such fun to be with.

‘He made his first guitar out of a biscuit tin, with a wooden neck and ordinary string. It sounded okay – or so we thought.

‘So anyway, when he got a real guitar for Christmas, he let me use it, and then the following Christmas our parents gave me one – just an acoustic. And then we could be a duo!

‘Okay – he wasn't perfect. He was really wild when he was a teenager – a risk-taker. He rode a friend's motorbike when he was under age – not just once, but all the time – at speed, on public roads. Don't know why he was never caught. Smoked dope. Drank spirits. Maybe it all went with his rock-musician image of himself. Got an electric guitar, then urged me to save for my own. That's Louise – you see why I like her so much?

‘I called her Louise because he said Louise was an okay girl's name. He said he always fell for girls named Louise – they were smart and sassy. It was sort of fatal for him to meet a girl with that name. I can only ever remember one – it didn't work out. He wrote a song about her, of course.'

She sat for a long time without speaking.

‘How did he die?' I prodded.

‘He drowned,' she said. ‘Went out on a friend's boat late one night. No life jacket. When he … the
body
was found, the autopsy found he'd been drinking.' She punched the cushion she'd been clasping to her chest. ‘Oh, he was so
stupid
! I
hate
him!'

She turned to me, her face smeared with tears, her lips curled with grief. ‘For ages afterwards, I kept saying to him in my head,
It's
just like you
to leave me on my own! So how am I meant to go on?'

She shook her head as though getting rid of images. ‘But he didn't mean to die.'

Later, late that night, while we lay in bed in the dark, I told her about falling in love with Morgan.

‘I fell in love with my father's girlfriend,' I said. ‘My stepmother, sort of.' Because it seemed important that she
know
.

‘Was she the first one?' she asked.

‘I had a crush, that's all. It didn't even last for very long.' All those days turning up breathless at their house, hoping that my father wouldn't be there. ‘But no, she wasn't the first girl I had a crush on. One of a long line.'

‘When did you realise that you liked girls?'

‘Oh …' I pretended to think. ‘When I was about six.'

‘Six!' She laughed, incredulous.

So perhaps she didn't know the feeling of always being alien in a world where what you saw and what you felt never added up.

I remembered my
black
period, when I read Dostoyevsky, imagining myself as a disaffected, subversive
raskol'niki
in a stinking, ragged black coat, stamping my feet in the snow, the steam of my hot breath, harnesses jingling in the frosty air. Telling myself,
Courage!

I imagined my eyes red with anger and fury, scowling through the windows of a lighted ballroom at women with scented white shoulders, little feet in satin slippers. I was outcast and alone, because I had fallen from grace. And there were no street signs to show me the way.

I felt Flynn's hand take mine.

‘Of course,' I found myself repeating, ‘I knew when I was six. How about you?'

‘How about me what?'

‘When did
you
first know that you “liked girls”?'

I heard her sigh. ‘You know, I don't think I do especially. Apart from you. You were the first. I'm usually attracted to men.' She squeezed my hand.

‘Then why me?'

She was silent for a moment, but I waited. I really wanted to know.

‘I think it was the way you looked at me – that day on the roof. My heart went out to you, and I saw the possibility. Of something with you. And I thought –
why not?'

I remembered her reaching over a fence to pick someone's flower for herself.
I must have this.
Was I just something that she
must have
?

‘And you know, Anna, sometimes I wish I hadn't allowed myself to think that. Because you can
choose
to fall in love. But the choice goes only so far, because once you're in, it's like quicksand. It seems irrevocable.'

At the words
fall in love
, my heart quickened.

I remembered the night – I must have been about fifteen – when I lay in my bed in the dark, curled up into a tiny ball.
I am this way, for ever and ever
, I thought. And falling in love, finding a life partner, was something I longed to do. But at the same time it filled me with fear and terror, because the world was not this way, and I was not the way of the world.

I had never felt so small and frightened and alone.

‘It doesn't have to be quicksand. I'll let you go whenever you want,' I said, feeling such a wrench that I couldn't imagine being alive if she accepted.

‘I didn't mean that,' she said. ‘It's not you stopping me from leaving. It's in
me
, the not being able to get out.'

But even though we appeared to have found a new openness and honesty with each other, there was a sadness there, and Flynn stayed away from me again for almost a whole week, and I from her. I wanted her to make the first move. I wanted to know that she chose to be with me.

Then one night she let herself in with the key I had given her. I woke from sleep; in the illumination from the hall light I saw her dark shape next to my bed. She put a finger to my lips, and I nuzzled her hand. She undressed, and slid in next to me, running her hands up under my singlet. I felt her fingers play across the corrugations of my ribs; I imagined them white and bleached, like ghostly piano keys. And then the weight of her on top of me, the pressure of her lips on my mouth, so familiar and welcome.

I remembered how she had used the word
love
, about us.
You can choose to fall in love
, she said, and she'd fallen in love with me. I couldn't forget that. I nursed it and nursed it.

The next night, she came round again, and as we cooked a meal together, I said, as casually as I could, ‘Hey, I've just had an idea. Why don't you come and live
here
? I mean, you say that Caleb and Hannah are never there anyway … you could have your own room, and one for Louise as well.'

For a long time she said nothing, and the atmosphere in the room was thick, like molasses. ‘What do you think, Flynn?' I said. ‘Wouldn't it be fun? And you're here an awful lot anyway. It'd be easier, in a way.'

I waited to see what she would reply, and finally she said huskily, ‘I'll think about it.'

That night I woke and found her gone. Going out to the living-room, I peered through the window at the grey light, and saw her sitting on the wall with the cat beside her. When I went outside, she turned her face to me, and there was no answer in it.

And I saw then that what I'd done was to invite her out into the snow with me, and why would she want to stand outside the ballroom window with tattered boots and icy breath and no street signs? Because that was the way it'd be – of course she'd want to be in there, drinking wine and dancing with bare shoulders far into the scented night.

Chapter Twelve

‘T
HE RAIN IT
raineth every day.' Was it the Fool, in
King Lear
, who said that?

I trudged to work beneath an inadequate umbrella. There was something about being out in the unrelenting rain that suited my mood.

I hadn't seen Flynn for five days, since I suggested she come to live with me. Her silence had become a kind of reply. There'd been no quarrel, just her withdrawal from me. I'd noticed the absence in her that morning when she sat out with the cat, and later on when we both left for work. I felt rubbed raw inside. I couldn't eat. We hadn't explicitly parted, but we didn't seem to be together, either.

Customers told me that all this rain was typical Lismore weather. They stood damply about in the bookshop, leaving puddles from their umbrellas. The place was uglier in the wet; the lights seemed brighter, the covers on the books more garish. I felt unutterably dreary. In an attempt to cheer myself up I'd bought a pair of red gumboots, and I saw them sitting in the stockroom, near the back door. If I put them on and clicked their heels, would they take me home? Wherever that was?

She came to see me late one night, saying nothing, and we slept curved together like spoons as the rain pounded on the roof.

Or at least Flynn slept. I couldn't. I kept thinking that I was surely and steadily losing her, drop by drop by drop. I knew I'd been too hasty in suggesting she live with me. We woke up face to face. I put my hand up onto her cheek and kissed her, looking into her eyes. Drawing away, I said softly, ‘What is it that you're afraid of, Flynn? Committing yourself to me? Or embarking on a lifetime of loving women?'

She averted her eyes from my face and did not answer, and I saw just how unreachable, how clouded she was.

‘I hate the way you come and go as you feel like it, as though you can't decide.'

I still spoke softly. I simply wanted to assert myself. But she shot me such an ambiguous, defiant look as she swung herself to a sitting position at the edge of the bed that I couldn't think what more to say. I only knew that I loved her and, perversely, probably wouldn't have her any other way. Perhaps deep down I liked her capricious and unattainable. I didn't want someone predictable whose every thought and action was known to me.

‘You know how I feel about you, Anna,' she said, and with a baleful glance went off to the bathroom.

We parted that morning in the rain, and did not plan when next we would meet. And that was the last I saw of her for what seemed like a very long time, though it was really only a little over a week.

Without acknowledging that anything was amiss between us, Flynn turned up one afternoon, and we drove to the coast. The sky was a dazzling blue. It was as if rain had never existed. But we said very little to each other, almost as though it would be too dangerous to speak.

The sea had flung up great piles of kelp torn from the ocean floor; the roots still hung onto the rocks which had come away with it. The sand dunes had been chomped away as though by earthmovers, and thick yellow strands of the grass that once held the dunes together hung across the scars.

As we had on that long-ago earlier occasion, Flynn and I balanced our way along the trunks of trees that had been washed up on the beach, but there was no longer any joy in it. We were like oversized children who had lost the ability to play. I felt I was losing her, but in a strange way I had never felt closer.

‘This is the beach where Simon was washed up,' she said, staring out to sea, her whole body utterly still. ‘Some early-morning walkers found him.' It was as though she was talking to herself.

I wanted to go to her, put my arms round her, but I could see that nothing I could do or say could make her feel better in the face of all that grief.

As we kept walking slowly up the beach, I found ropes of seaweed beaded like a necklace, and looped them round her neck, but she only tugged herself free of them. Not wanting to see the expression on her face, I ran ahead, and then, unable to bear being separated from her, I waited for her to catch up.

Someone had taken long branches that had washed up with the tide and buried them in the ground like posts, and then threaded ropey lines of dune grass between them, making a kind of sculpture, or a primitive washing line. Working silently, as though by instinct, Flynn began to pick up the long strands of ragged kelp and hung them over the lines. Without her inviting me, I joined in, and we went silently back and forth with the seaweed, like creatures instinctively performing some atavistic ritual. And as I walked up and down the beach, my arms full of seaweed, I knew with dread that everything was hopeless.