Chapter Eleven

WHAT ARE THE words of that song? Everywhere you go, always take the weather with you. It has an upbeat tempo, but it seems to me to be coloured with sadness.

Flynn always had the weather with her. Or at least, I always noticed the weather when she was with me. She heightened my senses, caused me to notice things. She made me feel more alive.

Our argument in the kitchen made the weather irrelevant to me, because we avoided each other. I went to work and then home again, burrowed into books, and lived on comforting invalid food like tea and Vegemite toast. I was licking my wounds. I felt that I might never see her again.

I took out the mother-of-pearl button she’d given me. A token, given to me on the day when I had abused her trust. (But I was right, wasn’t I, said a little voice in my head. There is a boy. I was right about that, for the wrong reasons.)

I thought of the childhood trinkets Flynn kept in the little tin. The guitar pick, that she’d not told me the history of. Simon had taught her to play. He had helped her shop for Louise. That one, he’d said, is a little beauty. It must be one of his guitar picks.

And the day her mother had turned up, it was just after the anniversary of Simon’s death. So that was the grief in her. I imagined my own mother if one of us had died. She’d be inconsolable, for years and years, perhaps always. That sort of thing must never go away. Flynn’s mother said she’d called in the week before, but Flynn was at the beach with me, observing the anniversary with me, even though I didn’t know it at the time. That must show how much she cared about me – mustn’t it?

And then the voice in my head said, And what about when Rocco gets back?

She arrived unexpectedly on Sunday afternoon, with a bag full of groceries.

‘Let’s not quarrel,’ she said, and went straight to the kitchen to make us a Japanese feast, little seaweed rolls with slivers of pink salmon and cucumber, and bowls of soupy rice.

We ate sitting on cushions at the coffee table, not saying much. We passed food across the table, spooned soup into our mouths, and nibbled fastidiously on the little rice parcels. I’d made a pot of green tea (I had bought a teapot, finally, in an op shop, a small Japanese-style pot with a side handle), and I poured it into small glasses with thick bottoms and ridged sides. I spooned pale green wasabi onto my plate and dabbed a roll into it, savouring the fiery bite. I sat for a while without eating, and took in my surroundings. I took in the colours – the pink salmon in the white rice rolls, the translucent cucumber with its thread of dark green skin, the black seaweed wrapper, and Flynn’s glossy dark hair.

The sky outside was a pure blue. Not a breath of wind stirred the trees.

The only sound was the clapping and chanting of my neighbour’s children as they played handball against the side of the house.

At last, we had eaten enough. Flynn lay back against the sofa and said, ‘I’d like to tell you about Simon.’

She went on without waiting for me to say anything.

‘He was just the best brother. You know how siblings are not meant to get on? Well, we did. He was only three years older than me, and we were best mates. He was the one who called me Flynn – he said Rose was a sissy name. We used to go down to the creek in the paddock behind the house and make rafts out of drums and bamboo – they always sank. And he’d hoist me up trees with him and we’d sit looking at the view with the branches swaying underneath us. I broke bones playing with him. I have scars. But he was such fun to be with.

‘He made his first guitar out of a biscuit tin, with a wooden neck and ordinary string. It sounded okay – or so we thought.

‘So anyway, when he got a real guitar for Christmas, he let me use it, and then the following Christmas our parents gave me one – just an acoustic. And then we could be a duo!

‘Okay – he wasn’t perfect. He was really wild when he was a teenager – a risk-taker. He rode a friend’s motorbike when he was under age – not just once, but all the time – at speed, on public roads. Don’t know why he was never caught. Smoked dope. Drank spirits. Maybe it all went with his rock-musician image of himself. Got an electric guitar, then urged me to save for my own. That’s Louise – you see why I like her so much?

‘I called her Louise because he said Louise was an okay girl’s name. He said he always fell for girls named Louise – they were smart and sassy. It was sort of fatal for him to meet a girl with that name. I can only ever remember one – it didn’t work out. He wrote a song about her, of course.’

She sat for a long time without speaking.

‘How did he die?’ I prodded.

‘He drowned,’ she said. ‘Went out on a friend’s boat late one night. No life jacket. When he … the body was found, the autopsy found he’d been drinking.’ She punched the cushion she’d been clasping to her chest. ‘Oh, he was so stupid! I hate him!’

She turned to me, her face smeared with tears, her lips curled with grief. ‘For ages afterwards, I kept saying to him in my head, It’s just like you to leave me on my own! So how am I meant to go on?’

She shook her head as though getting rid of images. ‘But he didn’t mean to die.’

Later, late that night, while we lay in bed in the dark, I told her about falling in love with Morgan.

‘I fell in love with my father’s girlfriend,’ I said. ‘My stepmother, sort of.’ Because it seemed important that she know.

‘Was she the first one?’ she asked.

‘I had a crush, that’s all. It didn’t even last for very long.’ All those days turning up breathless at their house, hoping that my father wouldn’t be there. ‘But no, she wasn’t the first girl I had a crush on. One of a long line.’

‘When did you realise that you liked girls?’

‘Oh …’ I pretended to think. ‘When I was about six.’

‘Six!’ She laughed, incredulous.

So perhaps she didn’t know the feeling of always being alien in a world where what you saw and what you felt never added up.

I remembered my black period, when I read Dostoyevsky, imagining myself as a disaffected, subversive raskol’niki in a stinking, ragged black coat, stamping my feet in the snow, the steam of my hot breath, harnesses jingling in the frosty air. Telling myself, Courage!

I imagined my eyes red with anger and fury, scowling through the windows of a lighted ballroom at women with scented white shoulders, little feet in satin slippers. I was outcast and alone, because I had fallen from grace. And there were no street signs to show me the way.

I felt Flynn’s hand take mine.

‘Of course,’ I found myself repeating, ‘I knew when I was six. How about you?’

‘How about me what?’

‘When did you first know that you “liked girls”?’

I heard her sigh. ‘You know, I don’t think I do especially. Apart from you. You were the first. I’m usually attracted to men.’ She squeezed my hand.

‘Then why me?’

She was silent for a moment, but I waited. I really wanted to know.

‘I think it was the way you looked at me – that day on the roof. My heart went out to you, and I saw the possibility. Of something with you. And I thought – why not?’

I remembered her reaching over a fence to pick someone’s flower for herself. I must have this. Was I just something that she must have?

‘And you know, Anna, sometimes I wish I hadn’t allowed myself to think that. Because you can choose to fall in love. But the choice goes only so far, because once you’re in, it’s like quicksand. It seems irrevocable.’

At the words fall in love, my heart quickened.

I remembered the night – I must have been about fifteen – when I lay in my bed in the dark, curled up into a tiny ball. I am this way, for ever and ever, I thought. And falling in love, finding a life partner, was something I longed to do. But at the same time it filled me with fear and terror, because the world was not this way, and I was not the way of the world.

I had never felt so small and frightened and alone.

‘It doesn’t have to be quicksand. I’ll let you go whenever you want,’ I said, feeling such a wrench that I couldn’t imagine being alive if she accepted.

‘I didn’t mean that,’ she said. ‘It’s not you stopping me from leaving. It’s in me, the not being able to get out.’

But even though we appeared to have found a new openness and honesty with each other, there was a sadness there, and Flynn stayed away from me again for almost a whole week, and I from her. I wanted her to make the first move. I wanted to know that she chose to be with me.

Then one night she let herself in with the key I had given her. I woke from sleep; in the illumination from the hall light I saw her dark shape next to my bed. She put a finger to my lips, and I nuzzled her hand. She undressed, and slid in next to me, running her hands up under my singlet. I felt her fingers play across the corrugations of my ribs; I imagined them white and bleached, like ghostly piano keys. And then the weight of her on top of me, the pressure of her lips on my mouth, so familiar and welcome.

I remembered how she had used the word love, about us. You can choose to fall in love, she said, and she’d fallen in love with me. I couldn’t forget that. I nursed it and nursed it.

The next night, she came round again, and as we cooked a meal together, I said, as casually as I could, ‘Hey, I’ve just had an idea. Why don’t you come and live here? I mean, you say that Caleb and Hannah are never there anyway … you could have your own room, and one for Louise as well.’

For a long time she said nothing, and the atmosphere in the room was thick, like molasses. ‘What do you think, Flynn?’ I said. ‘Wouldn’t it be fun? And you’re here an awful lot anyway. It’d be easier, in a way.’

I waited to see what she would reply, and finally she said huskily, ‘I’ll think about it.’

That night I woke and found her gone. Going out to the living-room, I peered through the window at the grey light, and saw her sitting on the wall with the cat beside her. When I went outside, she turned her face to me, and there was no answer in it.

And I saw then that what I’d done was to invite her out into the snow with me, and why would she want to stand outside the ballroom window with tattered boots and icy breath and no street signs? Because that was the way it’d be – of course she’d want to be in there, drinking wine and dancing with bare shoulders far into the scented night.