The Accident (12 page)

‘I don’t know. It’s just kinda weird, me calling you.’

‘If it makes you feel less awkward, you can think of yourself as the high-maintenance little sister I never had.’

I’ll wear that. ‘Okay.’

‘So what’s up, kid?’

‘It’s stupid.’ Not what I’m thinking about, or even the fact that I want to tell someone, but that he’s the one I want to tell.

‘I’ve done stupid. Not much in the realms of stupid that can surprise me.’

‘I’m worried about my parents.’

‘Worried like it’s-going-to-end-in-divorce?’

‘Maybe. They used to fight sometimes, but now it’s basically every night. Mum’s being awful and Alan just takes it.’

‘What are they fighting about?’

‘I don’t even know. Stupid stuff, from the sounds of it. No matter what he does it’s the wrong thing. It just feels like things are starting to disintegrate and it’s unfair. We already lost Robbie…’

‘A few fights doesn’t mean the end of things. Stuff like this takes a while to get over.’

‘Yeah, but…’ I trail off as the waitress approaches, not quite sure what I was going to say, anyway. I keep thinking back to the last thing Mum said in the argument, about Alan not knowing. Not knowing what?

I deliberately keep the conversation on lighter topics. He tells me about his work, about travelling. I’ve heard some of it before. I remember him talking to me that night in the pouring rain, trying to distract me by telling me stuff, stories about people and places. He’s just spent two months volunteering in Africa, in the Congo. He’s planning on going back for a longer stint, a couple of years, maybe.

‘You’re not worried about being away for so long?’

‘I don’t know,’ he says with a shrug. He braces himself against the table again in that characteristic way. He’s the same person as before, but different, too. Last time there was something about him, some sadness that went beyond the situation we were in. Whatever had caused it, it seems to be gone now. ‘I look at myself and wonder if I’m running away. But maybe that’s exactly where I’m meant to be.’

‘You’re still thinking about them, aren’t you?’ he asks as we stand to leave.

‘How can I not? If you think about it, it’s all my fault.’

‘Are you serious?’

‘If I hadn’t crashed and Robbie hadn’t died, Mum would have nothing to get angry about. It’d all be fine, like it was before.’ I’m not saying it to make him feel sorry for me, I’m just stating the facts.

He grabs my arm, but then releases it almost immediately, as if he’s conscious of overstepping some boundary. ‘Can you hear yourself? Are you seriously trying to tell me you think you’re to blame for what happened? I was there, I saw it happen. None of this is your fault. Least of all your mum’s issues. You were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.’

All that stuff is true, but he’s still wrong. Yeah, the other driver made mistakes too, but that doesn’t let me off. I’m still the reason we were sitting at that exact intersection at that exact moment. Wrong place and wrong time, exactly.

Alan’s out when I get home. Tuesday nights he plays indoor cricket. Mum’s sitting at the kitchen bench with dirty dishes piled up around her and a stack of design magazines in front, flipping through and flagging pages. Tear sheets, they’re called. She’s got folders and pinboards full of the things at work and in her office here.

I’ve never been into domestic stuff but I’m probably better at it than Mum. She doesn’t even know how to use the dishwasher. I start rinsing the dirty dishes and loading them in.

‘Why are you so mad at Alan?’

‘
Dio!
’ She throws up her hands. ‘Can’t I just have a moment’s peace?’

‘I just asked you a simple question.’

She glares at me, then starts flipping pages again with renewed violence. ‘I’m not discussing this with you.’

‘You said he doesn’t know. What is it that he doesn’t know? Is this about Robbie?’ Surely it must be—what else would it be? But what about Robbie?

‘He wants us to move on. Go on holidays. Act that it’s all normal.’

‘What’s so wrong with that? What else are we supposed to do?’ I want to move on. I need the wound to close up and stop hurting so much.

‘It’s been less than a year since we put your brother in the ground. Fifteen years of life and we can’t take twelve months to remember him? But your stepfather, no, he doesn’t want to
waste
the time…’

‘Mum!’

‘How can he know? How can he know a mother’s pain? To lose Robbie, to almost lose you…’ She’s unstoppable once she gets momentum. ‘Your stepfather wants this to be like one of his cases, that he can tie up all the loose ends and pack it away in a box and move on. If he really knew the pain—’

‘Mum, shut up!’ It’s the only thing I can say. ‘Stop talking like you’re the only one who got hurt.’ Even as the words come out of my mouth I realise: that’s how she actually feels. She thinks that Alan, because he’s not our biological father, doesn’t feel the grief as strongly as she does. It’s stupid. And typical of Mum, egocentric, emotional Mum, to think that way. Yeah, it changed her life. But it changed my life and Alan’s too. And Daniel’s. Any one of those other people who were there helping or watching could have been affected too and we’ll never know. Has she ever stopped to think about that? Probably not.

Once her business took off she started working longer hours. It was Alan who took me and Robbie to soccer training and our games on weekends, who took us swimming and helped us with our homework. I don’t remember a time before he came on the scene. One of my earliest memories is being in the backyard of our old house with him, and he was spinning me around till we both got dizzy. I was only four or five, Robbie two years younger. That was when they were dating, and soon after that they got married and every morning he’d put on a full spread for breakfast; not just cereal but porridge and fruit and pancakes. We thought it was the best thing ever. He still makes the best breakfasts.

‘I always thought of him as my dad,’ I say finally. ‘So did Robbie. Don’t take that away from us.’

On that note, I leave her. My bedroom is dark and I flip on the light and gaze around. My eyes fall on the pile of canvases, and before I can second-guess myself I pick up the top one and take it over to my workbench, ripping off the plastic wrapping. I choose my tin of red paint and crack it open. It’s started to separate, too long since it was last used, and I have to grab a brush and stir and stir until it thickens again.

I paint a line, a delicate curve. The edge of a leaf, the curve of a woman’s buttock, I don’t know. I reach for blue and repeat the move on the inside of the curve, a thinner line, then I grab a half-empty glass of water from beside my bed and dump the contents into my painting mug, wash the brush until the water is brilliant blue. I bring the blue back to the canvas and water down the second line, then with the wash I round out the shape. An orchid petal? I dab off the excess water so only a thin shadow is left, then swap brushes again and open the white, laying on a thick coat, then scratching back. Orchid petal. Tame. Somewhere to start.

I paint another petal, then do the quick outline of the lip and the three narrower petals at the back, then I fill the background with a rusty orange wash. Average. It needs something. I look around my room; something to inspire me, even something to collage with. My photo wall. People, places, random textures and colours. Tanned feet in bright pink Havaianas. Sunburnt grass. Monkey bars. Fingernails painted with the Australian flag. Lime green stick insects with bulging black eyes. I used to be a scavenger with the camera, not interested so much in faces but in little details. A childlike collection of postcards from the world around me. And that’s the problem with it. I’m not a child anymore.

I leave the canvas behind and move closer to the wall, stretch hesitantly up. I can’t even reach the highest row of photos. Instead of pulling down the lower ones I stop and get a chair. But again, I can’t bring myself to tear them down. These photos came with me, in their embryonic form, from our old house six years ago. Every night I’ve gone to bed staring at them and woken up the same way, reminded of Robbie every time. Pulling them down is a big deal.

The digital camcorder is still in its original box in my wardrobe. We got it right before the crash. I think Mum and Alan just forgot about it.

I flip it to playback to check I’m not going to record over anything, but the tape’s blank. I grab my tripod and set up the camcorder so my whole room is in frame—wall, workbench, unmade bed—and I hit record.

It’s going to be like pulling off a bandaid, I know. I climb up onto my chair so I can reach the top corner and I pull. The photos are stuck to the wall, not each other, and only the photo in my hand comes off. Not good enough. Not fast enough. I’ll lose courage at this rate.

I grab off another picture, then another, and start clawing at them, shoving my hands underneath trying to prise them free. They start to fall to the ground around me, but still not good enough. I start to tear the photos, throwing them over my shoulder. Grabbing them with both hands and crushing the prints in my hands. Trashing my wall, wanting to feel some sort of breakthrough or release, wanting to want to bawl my eyes out. But it just all feels mechanical, that brief sense of flight that came with painting is gone. I pull the last photo off and survey the mess on the floor, and then the blobs of Blu-Tack all over the wall, and I just feel empty.

It takes twice as long to pull off all the Blu-Tack as it did to get the photos off, and it leaves greasy marks on the paint. Too bad. Mum can just redo this room like she’s been itching to for years.

I gather up all the trashed photos, trying not to look at them, and shove them in a shopping bag to put out in the garbage later. And I stare at the wall. Empty. I flip off the bedroom light, but the moonlight coming through the window hits the bare wall, emphasising its barrenness.

The camcorder is still recording a failed experiment. I take it off the tripod, flip it to playback mode and hit rewind, listening to it zoom back to the start of the tape as I carry it back to my bed to watch.

Robbie. The voice, tinny because of the tiny camcorder but still unmistakeably his, fills my ears, the room. April last year, the digital readout tells me.

‘Hey, I got it working. It’s recording me, genius tech guy.’ He swings the camera around, panning over the same photo montage I just pulled down. He’s in my bedroom. We must have unpacked it in here. He lands the camera on me. I’m on my bed in my pyjamas, cross-legged with my art diary in my lap, scribbling madly away. Same sheets, doona; even the same pyjamas. How can that be?

‘Sarah, say hi.’

On the tiny screen, Old-me holds up a hand, ignoring him. ‘Go away.’

‘Stop being such a wuss. Say hi.’

Old-me looks at the camera. A sardonic smile. ‘Hi. Happy now?’

‘Is that the way you talk to guys? No wonder you can’t get a date.’ He swings the camera back on himself, giving himself a smug thumbs-up for the crack. He was going through the hair product stage, and his hair is cut short and carefully spiked up. His face goes serious, newsreader style.

‘Robert Starke reporting, National Nine News.’

And that’s it. It cuts to me, my bedroom, and the wall that is no more. I hit the stop button and lean back on my pillows, holding the camcorder against my chest as if it can somehow ease the fresh pain there. I thought tearing down the wall would end something; move me on. But seeing his face and hearing his voice has brought him back in such an intense way. I can barely breathe. Not what I wanted. Not fair.

Part of me wants to erase the tape or just destroy the whole thing, but I know I could never bring myself to do it. I can’t put it down, either. Without moving it from my chest I nudge the power to Off with my thumb, and I lie there silently in the dark holding it, trying not to cry.

before
after
later

Lauren finds me sitting on the front sandstone step reading Chaucer, or at least trying to. My mind is swimming with too much else to concentrate properly. Anthony spent last period trying to talk me into his new plan for schoolies, a week on the Gold Coast with a bunch of guys from our grade. I tuned him out as soon as he started talking about hot girls in bikinis. I know for a fact the closest he’s ever got to a girl in a bikini is when he had to be fished out of a rip last summer by a female lifeguard.