There was a slight pause and then he said, ‘Were you best friends?’
‘Spoken like a true only child. We were sisters.’
‘Aren’t sisters supposed to be best friends?’
Winner of The Letter Review Prize for Books
We Were Having Such a Good Time
It was probably about a month after we met that Ben found the photo. He had been looking for paracetamol and opened my bedside table drawer, pulling it half out of the book I kept it in. The photo was taken during one of the summers we spent hanging out in an old, abandoned weatherboard house near the beach. We lived a bit past the line where the Central Coast became a place where Sydney’s wealthy purchased weekenders and insisted the hamburger shop sell flat whites and banana bread. There were still a few rundown old houses people hadn’t bought and done up. We used to spend hours in one of them. Sometimes we’d bring food, other times we’d just sit there and read, escaping the midday heat of those seemingly endless days in the middle of summer holidays, or waiting for the rain to end. That day, we’d brought mum’s camera to the house, and we’d asked someone to take our photo. I can’t remember who it was or why they were there. Perhaps it was just someone passing by.
‘Is this you?’ Ben was grinning broadly, as he approached me, holding the photo out. I felt a strange flutter of panic when I saw him holding it and snatched it from his hand. He looked taken aback. ‘Clare?’
I pressed the photo, face down, against my sternum. ‘Why have you got this?’
‘I was looking for paracetamol. It was in your bedside table drawer – I thought it was cute.’ He was looking at me in a way I found almost unbearable. ‘Was I not supposed to touch it? I’m sorry -’
‘It’s fine.’
He didn’t say anything for a moment, just watched me. Then, ‘Okay. Who is it with you in the photo?’
‘My sister.’
‘Oh,’ relief coursed through that single word. How bad could a photo of two smiling sisters be? ‘I didn’t know you had a sister, you never said.’
‘She disappeared. Seventeen years ago.’
‘Disappeared?’
‘She went swimming one afternoon and she never came back. She drowned. Sorry, I don’t know why I said ‘disappeared’. Habit.’
In the aftermath, the dreadful months of furious sadness, we never really said it for what it was. There was this idea – desperate, ridiculous, but desperation is – that she would come back. Missing, disappeared, they were bigger, more expansive, less finite words than dead.
Ben reached for my hands, and I could see him trying to think of the right expression. He landed on the classic. ‘Clare, I am so sorry.’
I smiled at this. I know there are a lot of people who bristle at ‘sorry’, find it too small a word or too inadequate in meaning. But sorry is an expression of sorrow and sorrow is the right thing to have for someone’s loss, so I am fine with it. And Ben’s hands were warm on my own and he was visibly sad, visibly unsure of the ground he was on. The whole thing felt soft and, anyway, I was relieved it was out there.
He pulled me to him by holding my wrists. I still had the photo clamped to my abdomen, I don’t know why, I don’t know what I was protecting it from.
‘Can I see her again?’
‘Oh. Um, I suppose so.’ I gave him the photo, and he held it with both hands, inspecting it.
Heather was in the undeniable full throes of her teenage dream when she died, long surfer hair dipped in the bleach of saltwater and sun, a big white smile, Dad’s button nose. She looked nothing like me. I was fair, my hair was dark red, the sun didn’t like me like it did Heather. I was smaller, too, less imposing. Finer.
‘You’re so different.’
‘I know.’
Telling people about Heather is like letting them into a room full of beautiful things they can’t touch, the queen’s bedroom in an exquisitely restored palace. I’m the tour guide and I move from object to object, picture to picture, agreeing with the gasps of awe and melancholy. Yes, yes, so sad, so young, so pretty, so much fun.
‘She didn’t have your lovely hair, then.’ He reached out and touched my hair, ran a finger down its length until he reached my collarbone. ‘Or these,’ and he touched the bridge of my nose.
I smiled and felt a strange swell of relief. He still thought I was beautiful, although of course, why wouldn’t he. It was a stupid, adolescent surge of jealousy I had always had, watching Heather move through the world in a way I was always too awkward to do. ‘No, we weren’t anything alike. I got Mum’s skin, not the right skin for this country she always said. English skin and all that.’
Ben’s hand had moved from my collarbone, to my arm, his thumb rubbing my forearm.
‘Is it hard, without her?’ He shook his head. ‘Sorry, that was a stupid question, of course it’s hard.’ He was cross at himself for the wrong word.
‘I don’t really know what it is anymore. It was hard at the beginning, but she’s been gone for longer than she was alive now.’ I hated that particular platitude that I had started saying once it had ticked over into seventeen years without her, but people seemed to like it, it made them feel better.
The slight sulk around his mouth disappeared and he leant forward again, his hands back on mine. ‘I’m sorry I took the photo.’
‘No, it’s fine, I was just surprised. I should have told you about her earlier. It’s just a complicated thing to weave into conversation. And we were having such a good time.’
There was a slight pause and then he said, ‘Were you best friends?’
‘Spoken like a true only child. We were sisters.’
‘Aren’t sisters supposed to be best friends?’
Heather had frozen in a time of our becoming, almost fully formed but not quite. I don’t know what she would have become, I don’t know what we would have been like together, as adults. We never got to finish our complicated teen years together, in which we fought like cats, said we hated each other daily, because one of us had ruined something or borrowed it or stolen it or done whatever else teenage girls do to each other as they blow through life, furious, uncertain, potent. So much time had now come between Heather as I knew her and me as I was now, all the time Heather had not been able to use to whittle and sand herself down to whoever it was she really would have become. All the time I had had to make myself into … what. I shook my head and chased that thought away.
‘Sisters are sisters.’
What I didn’t say, because I didn’t want to talk about Heather anymore – there was nothing Ben could say that I hadn’t heard and there was no help he could ever be because the wound was long, long sutured – was that when Heather drowned, I felt betrayed. She had left me. How dare she.
‘Anyway, there’s one more thing I should tell you, while we’re at it.’ I stepped away from him and made for the kitchen, to flip the kettle on. I needed to break our stance in the hallway, spread the weight of what had come and what was coming next. ‘My Dad died, too.’
Ben had followed me into the kitchen. ‘Your Dad, too? I thought you said your parents were on the coast.’
‘Mum is. Dad died five years after Heather.
‘Did he …?’
‘He had a massive heart attack.’
It had lain in wait for him since he was born, like a patient lioness. Two weeks after his forty-fifth birthday, it took him down silently, savagely quickly. I heard the term ‘widow-maker’ more often than I heard my own name in the wake of Dad’s death.
Ben exhaled, and his hair moved a little. ‘So when you said your parents lived up the coast …’
‘I was buying myself time until we had to have this conversation. Sorry.’
He didn’t say anything for a moment, then, ‘I have never come close to tragedy.’ He was staring at me with something naked, almost like arousal. ‘The only funeral I’ve ever been to was my Opa’s and he was old and not particularly nice anyway, no one was sad when he died. I have lived a life of nothing but … I’m boring.’ He said it more to himself.
‘You’re not boring. Look at you, all the way out here, casually bilingual. You’re far more interesting than I am.’
‘Multi,’ he winked, ‘my Spanish is pretty good.’
I rolled my eyes at him, ‘Show off. Anyway, that’s me. No more revelations, I promise.’
‘No secret kids, dead bodies in the back garden?’
‘Absolutely no kids,’ I said, automatically, and my tone seemed to surprise him.
‘You don’t like kids?’ He laughed as he said it, leant back against the kitchen bench.
‘Oh, I like them. I just haven’t ever really …’ I trailed off. He was looking at me with such expectancy, I knew I had to lie a little. ‘I haven’t ever really thought about it.’
Coming from a thirty-four-year-old woman, the lie was almost egregious. Of course I had thought about it and children didn’t interest me in the slightest. They were a possibility, of course, but more than that I had never felt. But I had already thrown a dead sister and a dead father at him tonight, we had traversed enough; we didn’t need to dig any further.
Ben swooped in, ‘I suppose I haven’t either, but I do want them. Just not now.’ He winked at me.
‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘I’d like to see a bit more of the world, I think, which is your fault. You’ve ruined everything. I have decided I quite like the idea of selling everything I own and getting on a plane. Brushing up on my high school German, learning Spanish. You can teach me.’ I pushed further away from the serious stuff, away from Heather and Dad and not having children. ‘Let’s have our tea and discuss buying a campervan and driving through Spain. Or we could buy one of those rundown houses in Tuscany, do it up, turn it into a B&B.’
Ben grinned, but then he leant forward, reached out and stroked my hand. ‘It’s funny,’ he said, ‘I feel like I have found a city I don’t ever want to leave. Let’s get the campervan, but we can drive around the Outback on our holidays.’
‘Oh dear,’ I passed him a cup of tea. ‘We have reached an impasse.’
Liv Hambrett is an Australian writer and English language lecturer. Hailing originally from Sydney, she resides in Germany’s beautiful Schleswig-Holstein, with her husband, two children, and the family dog.