Lullaby (10 page)

‘If we're going to be accurate about it,' I said, ‘they both fucked me. That's what
really happened.'

‘Why would they do that?'

‘The two of them on stage together. The school had seen nothing like it. Probably
it never will again. By the end of the fortnight we were turning people away at the
door. The last curtain call, we were all in tears. And it was straight from there
to a party. I lost track of them, there was a lot happening. They were both high,
on canisters and adulation.

‘I think of it like this. You never want a show
to end. You cling to it, and sometimes
that means you cling to each other.'

‘That's a very generous assessment.'

‘Now. At the time I would have been happy to see them both dead.'

The sourness came back into my mouth. Maybe it had never completely gone away.

‘But they weren't thinking of me, they weren't thinking of how it would hurt me.
They knew, of course, but there's more to decisions than the things we know, right?'

‘What did you do?'

‘I wallowed in hatred. First Harriet and now Emily, that's how it seemed. If I'd
been a better person, I might have found another way of looking at it. I might even
have been pleased for him, noticed that the person I loved more than anybody in the
world was happy again, maybe for the first time since our parents died. I might have
worked out that the only way forward was to forgive him.'

‘That's an awful lot to expect of a fifteen year old.'

‘Sixteen, by then. It was our last year.'

‘Still a lot,' Maggie said.

‘Either you forgive them, or you end up
having to forgive yourself. That's the way
it goes isn't it?'

‘Yeah, it probably is,' Maggie said.

What about you, I wanted to ask her. Who haven't you forgiven? There'd be someone.
There's always someone.

‘Angry's a tight-fitting, ugly little place to make your home. It infects everything,
even travels backwards through time. He's pushed you around your whole life, it told
me. You've got to stand up for yourself. You've got to make it stop. So when the
year ended and he applied for drama school, and Emily applied too, I did the same.
Just to piss him off. Just to show him he couldn't have it all. Which was stupid.
He didn't have it all, not by a long shot. Drama school was his only fucking option.'

‘Were they together?' Maggie asked.

‘No, it was a one-time thing. They both apologised to me. They wanted to make it
all right. I wouldn't let them.

‘The drama school's an elite establishment. They only take twenty students each year,
that's from the whole country. Even though Emily and Theo were head and shoulders
the most impres
sive performers in our school, it would have been remarkable if they'd
both got through. And I was never a chance. I was just being an arsehole.

‘Other people understood my application was a petty act of emotional vandalism. It
was the only time I remember Mrs Struthers getting properly angry. I walked into
the kitchen while she was making pastry. She shook when she spoke. I thought she
might hit me with the rolling pin.

‘Just imagine how Theo will feel, if you get selected and he doesn't.

‘But I was angry too.

‘So, because I have a brother who's a fuck up, I don't get to do the things I love?
I replied.

‘If I thought for one moment you loved acting, Mrs Struthers said, I would never
have mentioned it.

‘I still don't love it. And every time some eating disorder with a goatee tells me
to feel the energy flowing into my body, it becomes a little less likely I ever will.
But there you go, it's done now.'

‘Is it?' Maggie asked.

‘Well, if you know how to turn back time, I'd be very fucking grateful if you'd share
that. I'd
take today back, to start with. Can I take it back for Theo too, is that
how it works?'

‘You've still got your life ahead of you. There are still choices,' she said.

‘You don't know anything about my life,' I told her.

‘I'm trying to find out,' Maggie replied.

I was angry, close to collapsing. Push me hard enough and I don't push back. I crumple
and cry.

‘So, what about school, what did your teachers say when you applied?'

‘They told me I was throwing my life away. You could be anything you want to be,
they liked to say. They meant Doctor or Physicist or Engineer, any job with money
and a title worthy of a capital letter. I don't know if that would be me either,
to be honest. Does it make you happy, being a psychologist? Or do you wish you'd
run away to the circus?'

‘I'm scared of clowns,' Maggie answered.

There were moments, when it was as almost as if we were talking to each other. All
part of her method, I imagine.

‘But you applied anyway,' she said.

‘I didn't think I'd get in. I just knew that my
applying annoyed him, and that was
enough. I didn't cheat. I didn't try to mess with him, or give his name instead of
mine at the audition. I did the only thing I knew how to do. I worked hard. I researched,
spoke to people who made it through in the years before, rehearsed the two pieces
I'd chosen until they felt part of me.

‘Emily struggles when people think badly of her. So when I suggested we prepare for
the audition together, she agreed. That got inside Theo's head. I knew it would.
He came out of his audition fuming, said he'd blown it, but I didn't believe him.
I thought he was just being hard on himself. Later I talked to somebody who was in
Theo's audition group, and apparently he blew up at one of the examiners, just went
nuts at him. My audition was better, obviously. I'd ground the roles into myself,
and when they started directing, and asking me to do it different ways, it felt strangely
natural. I'm good at exams, at being tested. That's my environment. So I managed
to convince them I was someone I'm not: an actor.'

‘Doesn't that make you an actor?' Maggie asked.

‘It was a fluke, a one-off. That's the risk of
auditions. Emily got accepted too.'

I looked down. My ears burned with shame.

‘And now you feel guilty,' Maggie said.

‘Yeah.'

‘Some people would look at what you did and they wouldn't see anything wrong with
it.'

‘Some people are good at seeing what they want to see.'

‘What if that's what you're doing?' she asked. ‘What if you need to feel responsible
for your brother? What if you've always needed that?'

‘I am responsible for him,' I said. ‘It's how it is.'

‘Why?'

I wanted to swear at her. I wanted to stamp and throw things and tell her that had
nothing to do with it, but I couldn't. Because then she'd know how much I needed
her to sign me off as competent, and from there she was easily smart enough to guess
why. And once she knew that, she couldn't sign me off. It was an impossible game.

‘He's responsible for me, too.'

‘Is that how he's behaved?'

‘He went looking for me in the bush. He might have died.'

‘He was a child then.'

‘What are you saying?' I was sitting on my hands, digging my fingernails into my
legs.

‘You're only responsible for your own actions, Rene. No one can blame you for things
Theo chose to do. You can't blame yourself for them.'

‘Is this a condition of you finding me competent?' I asked. ‘Do I have to stop caring
about him?'

‘No.'

Just the one word. It could have meant anything. Mostly it meant, I'm not going to
push this. I think it also meant, I shouldn't have pushed this. Twice now, she'd
seen my anger, and the tank still felt brim full.

‘Your story isn't finished,' Maggie said.

‘It feels finished to me.'

‘Tell me about Emily. Tell me how it was that Theo and Emily came to be together
today.'

‘Do I have to?'

‘No.'

10

I waited. I counted the eyelets in my boots. I looked at her feet. I pushed my knees
up and down, felt my thighs hang loose above the chair, then fall and splay. I stared
at the floor, and didn't look up again until I was halfway through the explanation.

‘I was angry with Emily, but I hadn't fallen out of love with her. It started on
the last night of induction camp, after my performance with the crazy naked woman.
There was a party, and Emily and I contrived to stand apart from the preening crowd.
We watched, passed comment, moved closer to one another.

Your piece was great, she said. You looked so genuinely lost, at the end, I wanted
to give you a hug.

I was lost. I didn't know she was going to take
her clothes off. She didn't tell
me. I didn't know where to look.

Smart move, from her then, Emily said.

Not too late for that hug, if you still want.

‘I held my breath.

‘There aren't that many moments where you genuinely feel your future splitting in
two. Either she would hug me, and I would cling to her, and there would be no pretending,
or she wouldn't. Those two paths would never meet.

‘I couldn't look at her face. She moved first, and when we clung to one another,
it was like we were already lovers.

I'm so sorry, she whispered.

Me too.'

Maggie was frowning. It seemed an odd moment to let the mask slip. I'd told her worse.

‘Theo wasn't interested in her,' I repeated, thinking that might have been the trouble.
‘I wasn't moving in on—'

‘No, it's nothing to do with that.' She dismissed me with her hand, as if brushing
away a fly. But there was a pale patch on her bottom lip, where she'd bitten at it.
‘And you had sex?'

‘Not then.'

‘But later on?'

‘Sure.'

Maggie didn't ask for details, and I wasn't about to offer them. Some stories work
best untold. Emily's intensity took my breath away. I don't know what I'd expected
from her, not reluctance, but perhaps caution. I carry a fear that if I let my true
feelings come to the surface, they will frighten people away. And yet the way she
looked at me, the joy in her eyes, the vulnerability, it was startling. She taught
me how to let go. What more could you ask for?

Emily lived in a self-contained unit beneath her parents' house. For the next three
months, so did I. It was like discovering another world, magically suspended between
adulthood and childish delight, taking the best from each. Taking whatever we wanted.
She'd walk around the house naked, and I would sit up in bed and watch her, and think,
this isn't true. This can't be true. I have a memory of her walking away from me,
into the kitchen, reaching up for a box of cereal. A poem. And it's mine forever.
It can't be taken away from me.

We'd set the alarm for an hour earlier than we
needed to get up, so we could fuck
before breakfast. One of us always woke first, and turned it off. There's that place,
just between sleep and waking…

There was a park at the valley at the bottom of her street that spread out over the
opposite hill. We'd walk together in the afternoon sun, oblivious to the world, but
also secretly hoping it was watching us, feeling envious. First love, first sex,
first glimpse of the possibility that I might be lovable. First time not being one-half
of me-and-Theo. Walking in shoes of my own. Drunk.

‘And how did it feel,' Maggie asked, ‘knowing she'd already had sex with Theo?'

‘What sort of question is that?'

How easy it is to reduce us.

‘A necessary one.'

‘It didn't matter so much.'

‘So much?'

‘I thought about it, sometimes. I didn't want to, but I did. Then other things took
over.'

One more step. I wondered if Maggie already knew how it went, the last sordid twist
of our doubled double helix.

‘What things?'

‘Mrs Struthers called up and asked me to
come back home. She was worried about Theo.
He hadn't enrolled in any of the courses he'd promised to look at. He was out all
night and slept through the day. Women came and went. He'd moved on from the canisters;
it was hit and miss whether you could even get him to talk to you. When he was lucid,
he told us not to worry.

I'm waiting for the end of the year, he said. Then I'm going to join the army.

‘In our family, if you want to reject everything you are, and everything everybody
who loves you believes in, you join the army. The threat was enough to get me out
of Emily's bed.'

‘Is that why he did it?'

‘I don't know. No. No, he wasn't thinking that straight.'

‘Emily was great about it. She understood. She told me I had to move back home, just
for a while, or I'd never forgive myself. She…'

All I had left was the end of that sentence. I wasn't going to give it to her.

Maggie let it hang. Emily, the unspeakable. Fuck.

‘What did you do when you got home?'

‘Spent time with him. Got alongside him,
tried to be his brother again.'

‘How did that go?'

‘It was slow,' I said. ‘For a while it seemed impossible. I was at drama school,
I was in love, I was happy and I couldn't pretend I wasn't. He was lost and miserable.
I'd stolen his life. He didn't have to say it. Mostly he pretended he didn't care.
But we both knew.'

‘So what did you do?'

‘Pretended it didn't matter, made sure he never caught me crying. It ripped me to
pieces, the way I could see all his choices setting hard around him.'