especially two seas
Hetty and I met in Grade Two. It was the start of the year, and she had moved from another school in another suburb to be in my class, with Mrs Harris as our teacher. Mrs Harris was a strange woman—I could understand that even as a seven-year-old. She had tight brown curled hair that sat stiff around her head, a tanned face with slack pillow cheeks and nostrils that flared unpredictably, like a horse’s. She didn’t change her manner according to who she was talking to—she spoke to her pupils in the same blunt, flat way she spoke to my parents when they came to see the classroom, and the principal when he popped in to see how we all were. The principal was a man called Terry Hooven. He told all of us to call him Terry, and seemed to like us—the children—as well as the adults. He was thin, light on his feet, excitable. Mrs Harris stagnated beside him.
I hadn’t really noticed Hetty until one day early in the year when it was raining terribly—the kind of rain that would almost scare you, when you would wonder if sheer water could take the earth away—and I was sitting at the window at recess, looking out. I was thinking about my four little guinea pigs, already with their vulnerable, delicate hearts, sitting in our backyard in their cage in the storm, shaking and making tiny, terrified peeping noises. I was on the verge of crying when I heard Hetty beside me say, ‘Are you all right?’
Looking back, it seems unusual for one seven-year-old to ask after the wellbeing of another, but that was Hetty. She had five brothers and sisters and was born near the middle, and this had given her the strong sense at a young age that she was just one human among many.
Hetty had only ever told me a little about what it was really like in her house when she was growing up. She never said anything bad about her dad, but it became clear that he was sick with alcohol most of the time, and depressed the rest, and that he favoured some of his kids over the others. Hetty was a favourite, though I don’t think she realised it. She never thought she was special, but she was. Even Mrs Harris sensed it, and gave her extra, unique tasks throughout the year, believing in her more than she did the rest of us, with our snotty noses and claggy paws. The only time I saw Mrs Harris move her heavy mouth up into a smile was when she was talking to Hetty.
That rainy day was ours. I told Hetty I was worried for my four little guinea friends, and she confided in me that she was worried for her two rabbits, also outside in her backyard in a flimsy hutch—all those tiny animals at one with the thunder and lightning and sheets of water. We sat together and talked about how we hoped they were safe, convincing each other that our animals were stronger than they were. We grabbed for each other’s hands when the thunder got louder, and when recess ended we sat together for the rest of the day. I didn’t have siblings—just a worn-out mother and a silent father—and I was lonely. I sometimes wonder if Hetty had sensed from that first day how much I needed her.
From then on we were firm friends, and I began to understand the ways Hetty could help me, with her gentle laugh and imagination and sweeping care for everything. Through primary school and high school she stayed close by me, even when she became much more popular, much more admired than me, and when she was confirmed to be very beautiful. Loyalty suited her: I saw how the other kids started to see me as cool simply because she behaved as if I mattered. I let their eyes dally on me and was thankful.
Hetty and I had made a sort of pact when we were sixteen that we would travel together to the other side of the world one day and live there for as long as we could brave it, in order to become better, more alive versions of ourselves. We knew that Melbourne was so far from the parts of the world that seemed to really matter, and that the drear of suburban Ringwood, where we had spent our days circling, trying to find something, was even farther. We didn’t leave when we had planned to, because Hetty fell in love with a guy called Sean just after we finished high school, and he ruined her life for a while, or at least stopped her from considering university or reaching out beyond herself to find out who she could be.
Sean was obsessed with Hetty, and became more and more frightened that she would leave him. I was clearly a threat, and he was snarling at me rather than talking by the time it ended, telling Hetty I was a bitch when I was in the next room of their two-bedroom flat in Reservoir, calling their pet kelpie after me to make sure I knew he thought I was a dog. Hetty was so sorry for everything Sean did—from the beginning he placed her in anxious debt to everyone around them—but he knew how to make her feel for him, and how to pull her in with the tentacles he grew over those four long years.
When Hetty was finally able to leave him, I wanted us to fly to Toronto straight away, to move beyond the pain she was feeling and the risk of her closing in on herself for good, but it took another whole year of Hetty and Sean bumping up against each other before she was able to truly pull herself free. He killed himself two days after she told him she couldn’t talk to him anymore, leaving a note that said she was heartless and had left him unable to live.
Hetty broke into pieces then, and moved into my place, where she didn’t go to work or eat or cry or smile, spending her time lying in bed facing the wall or trudging off on long, aimless walks that she came back from gaunt and blank. I didn’t really know how to talk to her about what had happened—I hated Sean so much I couldn’t hear her speak of him with grace and love, and my anger meant she backed off from my pleas to let the guilt go. We kept smiling at each other, but her smiles were small and polite, and I felt our friendship dying.
It was only after a long summer that Hetty spent by herself near water—the Yarra River, Red Bluff beach, the dam on her uncle’s property in Kangaroo Ground—and months of me leaving her alone even when I wanted to ask her everything, that she came back, and we booked our flights to Canada.