‘Stop it,’ I say, sounding like Taylor. Except my behaviour is much more acceptable because I’m much more in tune with my inner emotional world than Taylor is. ‘Stop trying to make this okay. We all hate it here.’
He keeps staring at the fairy carving, but his voice carries in the still air. ‘Don’t you think I know that?’
‘But why can’t you help yourself? And why can’t you just gamble with things that aren’t money? Why can’t you gamble about who does the dishes or giving someone massages for a week? Why does it have to be money and things?’
‘Stell. It’s complicated.’
‘It’s not, though. I gave up gluten! Remember when I gave up gluten? If I can do that, you can do this.’
‘What?’
‘Nothing. I just . . . I don’t get how you can still do it. It’s destroying everything that’s meant to be important to you. And you don’t even care.’
‘Of course I care, Stell!’ He sounds so tired. ‘I don’t want to gamble. I don’t want to do any of it. I want to stop.’
‘So? Stop, then.’ My voice is pleading and I hate it. ‘Just stop.’
‘If I could, I would!’
I gaze at the fairy carving. We’re both gazing at it instead of each other. ‘So, that’s it? If you could, you would?’
‘Stella . . .’
‘You’re just giving up because it’s too hard?’ I shake my head. ‘You know – Mum deserves more from you. We all do. We deserve you giving it a go. We deserve you trying to sort all this out.’
***
Later still, my period starts and there’s nothing worse than having your period when you’re sharing a bed with your sister and living in a shell-encrusted cabin with your family. I lie down on the bed next to Taylor, one arm wrapped over my middle, and stare up at the shells on the ceiling above the bed.
I’d tried to get school to run a workshop on accepting our changing bodies during puberty, but the teachers had just stared at me and nothing had been done about it. So I’d tried to run a workshop myself at lunchtime, but only Zin, Lara and Clem turned up and every time I tried to talk about stretch marks or hormones, Lara told me to stop talking and fed me a pretzel. Clem said she was training me.
Taylor is on her stomach, staring at a picture that she keeps tucked under her pillow. At first, I wonder if she’s sleepwalking, but she sighs and I know that she’s awake. She sounds different when she’s sleeping.
I roll onto my side. ‘What’s that?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Taylor! Just show me.’
She hands it over. ‘You told me once why you’re so obsessed with helping everyone and giving people therapy without asking first.’
‘Did I?’ I turn the photo over in my hands, waiting for my eyes to adjust in the gloom.
‘You said you wanted to make sure you left the world better than you found it. It was a weird thing for a kid to say. You’ve always been so weird. Reckon it might be about you being adopted, maybe.’ She shifts. ‘Like, you need to be on your best behaviour or something. You don’t, you know. Nobody cares if you stop trying to fix everything. Nobody will care if you just act like a normal teenager.’
I don’t reply. She’s wrong about all of it. I can see the photo now. It’s of Mum and Dad in summery clothes, posing on the edge of a river. It must’ve been taken in the years before I was adopted and Taylor was born. I can tell, because there’s a glow about them that’s not there anymore. I wonder if I somehow extinguished it when I came into their lives. Nappies and broken sleep and all the other stuff that comes with looking after a baby.
Judy and Charlie, is written on the back. There’s no date. Judy and Charlie. They look like they’re having fun. They look like the sort of couple you see holding hands and laughing and not needing anyone else. Judy and Charlie.
‘I found it stuffed in the medicine cabinet back home,’ Taylor says. ‘It’s weird, right? They looked so normal back then.’
‘They’re still normal.’
Taylor snorts and fiddles with her earphones, but doesn’t turn the music on.
‘You know, I think this is the Sutherbend River,’ I say.
Taylor frowns. ‘No way. It’s not. Look, there are people swimming in it.’
‘So? Maybe people could swim in it back then. Maybe it wasn’t so rotten and polluted.’
Taylor takes the photo back and peers at it closely. ‘Yeah. I think you’re right. I can see the butcher and the bakery in the background. God, how weird.’
‘The river?’
‘Yeah. And how strange they look. I don’t think I’ve ever seen them smile like that.’
I think of the day at the track, running errands. How Dad had smiled so hard at the end of some of the races that he’d looked like he was going to cry. ‘Me either,’ I say.
‘Mum grounded me, you know,’ Taylor says.
‘What?’
‘I’m grounded. I shouldn’t be grounded. Dad should be grounded.’
‘Yeah, well,’ I say.
‘She’s been unfair, right?’
‘Yeah, but what did you expect? She’s always so worried about what people are thinking. Of course you’re going to end up grounded.’
Taylor makes a huffing noise.
‘And she’s protective of Dad. You know that, Taylor.’
‘Whatever. She’s at work too much to stop me going out.’ She glances at me. ‘It’s a long walk to the closest pokies. Other than the River Pub. I was thinking about that today, after Mum finished yelling at me. How it must take him a long time to walk there.’
Dad doesn’t have a car. He’d had an automatic one, but that was one of the first things to disappear. And when it did disappear, Mum immediately traded her auto in for a manual, which Dad couldn’t drive. Maybe things had been going downhill for longer than we realised.
‘Do you hate him?’ Taylor asks me so quietly that I wonder if she’s worried about being overheard. Except that’s not the sort of thing Taylor would worry about. Not normally.
‘I should,’ I say. I think about the incredibly complex understanding I have of my internal emotional world and feel a bit bad for Taylor. ‘I know I should.’
‘But you don’t?’
I roll onto my stomach. ‘Sometimes I think I do, but I’m mostly just mad at him. He’s hard to hate.’
Taylor considers this for a moment. ‘Being mad at him and hating him is pretty much just splitting hairs.’
‘No,’ I say. ‘I don’t think so. Hating him is a coldness, I think. It’s just switching off and not caring and being like a stone. Being mad at him is all pulsing and ragey and emotional. They’re different.’
‘Maybe I don’t hate him either, then,’ Taylor mutters.
‘Like I said, he’s hard to hate.’
‘I guess.’
‘I mean, he hand-makes us cards for our birthdays, and if we’ve had a bad day he always knows and makes us a cuppa. He loves us. I know that.’
‘He hasn’t made anyone else a cuppa in months and we’ve had some pretty bad days.’