Meeting my brother reminds me of what it feels like to play for the winning team. It comes with a sense of accomplishment and also honour. When he sits down opposite me, it feels as though the years of knockdowns, wipe-outs, and defeats have finally led to victory. It has all been worth it, I think. Although I have never thought of it in that way, the second I meet him I know he, in fact, is first prize.
After our initial meeting, Alex and I begin to see each other fairly regularly. Getting together for dinners and coffee, to which I am usually late. It always takes longer than I’m expecting to make sure I am wearing the best version of myself, the version I think will make him the most comfortable and least likely to reject me. It’s bad enough we had to meet while I was still in rehab, but once out, back in the real world, and doing my best to live life on life’s terms, I am determined that he won’t see a trace of the crazy.
I am soon introduced to other members of Alex’s family, some of his friends, and his seemingly angelic fiancé, Carina. With each new introduction I am fit to burst with the novelty of this apparent acceptance, or whatever it is I’m feeling that isn’t rejection.
I discover that shortly after his divorce from Kris, when Alex was around two, Ken had remarried a woman named Debra and they had gone on to have two children together. A son, Brett, and daughter, Georgia. Alex’s other half-siblings, five and eight years younger than him. By the time I meet Alex, Ken and Debra are in the middle of an acrimonious divorce.
I fall in love with Brett and Georgia instantly and when they call me their stepsister (which, in fact, I am not) I feel like the cat that got the cream. Debra and I also start to spend time together, although I am not always sure of her motives for wanting me so close. After all, it had been Ken’s forced revelations to her about baby Karoline that had provided the final nail in the coffin of what she tells me had already become an unhappy marriage and led to her demand for a divorce. Debra’s anger is ill concealed. Anger, not only about having been lied to, but Ken’s apparent embellishments around the story of my death. How he’d been forced to bury baby Karoline on his own after Kris had refused to attend the ‘funeral’. Sometimes I find being around Debra difficult. We are both angry, for different reasons and at first I find myself almost paralyzed by a misbelief that I must shoulder the weight of Debra’s pain AND feel responsible for the divorce. It takes a lot of time and even more therapy to disentangle myself from feelings of guilt by association.
Generally, though, and for a while, life is fantastic. After nearly a year, I have finally left rehab and am determined that all will be only good from here on out. I am clean and sober, eating three meals a day and committed to staying well. I’m renting a room in a wonderful part of town and have a close group of friends whom I’ve met through the support meetings I attend every day. I am floating on a pink cloud of recovery and am slowly morphing into someone I could grow to like.
I’m also enjoying being a sister. Brett is funny and rebellious and takes me for my first Nando’s meal and introduces me to Facebook. When he gets a tattoo over his heart that reads ‘Family first’, he tells me, ‘That includes you too, sis.’ I adore Georgia, who shares my love of books and wry observations on life, and whose social circle is encouragingly less pale than that of the brothers. We bond instantly and there is no one who can tell me she is not my sister. I delight in the gentle ribbing between my new siblings and find every opportunity to introduce them as such. But for a long time, I struggle to be my authentic self with Alex. I become exhausted trying to show him only the good, passable version of myself. I am terrified he will see whatever it is inside me that makes people leave. For a time it works, for a time it is tolerable. But the fallacy of it all makes it feel like we are in a movie, cast in roles for which neither of us know our lines. The script says we are brother and sister, but we haven’t had a dress rehearsal. Nevertheless, I do my best to put on an Oscar-winning performance.
One day, several months after our initial meeting, Alex tells me that Ken has invited us to dinner. It will not be the first time Ken and I have met, but this time it will just be the three of us. Our very first meeting took place some weeks before at Brett’s birthday party at a nightclub in town. It had been brief and consisted of no more than a polite ‘Hello’ and ‘How are you?’. I had thought I would feel more than I did, but went home after the party thinking the meeting had been rather anticlimactic.
Over the years, my feelings about Ken and his role in Karoline’s death had remained steadfast. That he was as culpable in the whole situation as Kris. Because he was accomplice to the lie and the perpetuation of the dreadful secret, I never saw him simply as the cuckolded boyfriend. He too was accountable for so much.
The prospect of meeting him properly reignites a scene I’ve been playing in my head since it became clear how adverse he and Kris had been to my getting in touch Alex. I had replayed it over and over in my head and it left me unsettled, uncertain, with a sense of the unresolved.
I imagine a scenario in which, by some awful fortune, Alex is diagnosed with a terrible illness. There is hope, say the doctors, but only if a blood or bone match can be found. Kris and Ken are asked if they can think of anyone who may be a match. Anyone. They look at each other, then back to the doctor and, in unison, they say, ‘No.’ They sacrifice their own son to protect themselves. I still struggle to reconcile the idea that they would never have told the truth, not even if Alex’s life depended on it.
Alex and I make the journey to Ken’s home together. For the entire drive I am fidgety and nervous. Anxious. When we arrive at his swish pad in the city centre Ken is roasting a chicken. I am given a tour and while I make all the right noises of appreciation and interest, I am aware of a compulsion to pick up the chef’s cleaver lying seductively on the kitchen counter and plunge it straight through his solar plexus. We sit down to eat. I can see he is uncomfortable; he knows I’m not here for small talk. ‘You look like her,’ he tells me, slicing me a slither of perfectly cooked chicken. I can feel the anger rising up from my gut and even though I have no appetite, I stab a piece with my fork anyway and shove it in my mouth in order to gag myself. I chew for what feels like an eternity and then swallow.
‘So, who’s idea was it to say I’d died?’ I ask diving straight in. There is no time for beating around the bush. Debra has already – frequently – told me that Ken is a scoundrel and that I shouldn’t believe a word he says, but I need to at least ask. I’m disappointed, but not surprised when he tells me he can’t really remember. He thinks it had already been conjured up by the time Kris came to tell him the truth about Karoline. I’m dubious, but nod anyway.
For the next hour, we talk. Me asking questions, Ken clearly wishing he were anywhere but here, doing this. There are fleeting moments when I feel sorry for him, when I consider that really this isn’t his fuck-up to have to explain, but the pity is short-lived when I look across the table at Alex and remember that so much of his pain could have been prevented too. It’s also because Alex is here, witness to all of this, that I end up censoring myself, avoiding some of the questions to which I need answers. Answers about Kris. And so I hold back because, whatever I think of her, I tell myself, she’s still his mother.
Later, as we say our goodbyes, with me no more enlightened to the past as I had been when I walked in, Alex gently lays a reassuring hand on my shoulder. I nearly sob at the tenderness of it.
Several months later I am temporarily back in the UK when Alex calls me to tell me he is getting married. I already know he is engaged and I have been excitedly waiting for confirmation of the details of the wedding. The phone call is it. He is getting married in two days’ time. He doesn’t say it outright but, with the wedding taking place in just forty-eight hours, it is clear I am not invited. Kris, of course, will be there, flying in from the US where she now lives; Ken too. From eight thousand miles away, I can tell this is not a call Alex has been looking forward to and I do my best to reassure him that I understand the difficult position he is in. Kris will not tolerate my being there. After an uncomfortable five minutes, he signs off with his usual ‘Ciao Ciao’ and the line goes dead. I pull the duvet over my head and fall apart. I am a sister … but with conditions.
Once back in South Africa, the wedding is never mentioned but I am already anxious about the future. Although it is some time before my nephew and later my niece are born, I begin to wonder who I will be to any children Alex has. How will I be explained? Which branch will I be allowed to occupy on the family tree? I think about Kris and whether she will be able to put aside her own feelings for the sake of Alex, his children, and for all of us caught up in this mess, or whether her inability to make peace with the past will hold us all hostage. Most of all, I worry that I will be forced to become a secret again.
For the longest time I am, perhaps naïvely, convinced that the colour of my skin doesn’t matter to Alex. I have been in South Africa long enough to see that there is still a long way to go in achieving anything close to the promised Rainbow Nation, but I am his sister. However, while it doesn’t take long for me to see how vastly different Alex’s politics and views are to my own, despite being initially shocked by some of his beliefs (he tells me one day at lunch that he believes things were better under apartheid) and by his lack of black or ‘coloured’ friends, I still never imagine it will make me think less of him.
I am proved wrong one day when after I have been back living in South Africa for a couple of years, something happens that smacks me, sharp and violent. It is a couple of weeks before Christmas and the evening before I am due to fly to England to spend the holidays with Mum. I have been invited to a braai at Brett’s place. As always, I am on my best, most acceptable behaviour. I have left Sara-Jayne at home.
Alex and his wife Carina are also there, along with some other people I have met before and some new faces I have yet to meet. Alex is doing the introductions when he turns to a friend sitting next to me at the table.
‘Have you met Sara before?’ he asks, his eyes rolling a little from his fifth Stella.
‘Yes. We met at the house after the christening,’ answers the friend.
‘You probably thought she was the maid!’ quips Alex.
I listen, keep listening. Hear it again.
‘You probably thought she was the maid!’ The maid?
After a second of crowded silence I laugh. To save him. To save him, I betray myself, my skin, my father.
I smile for a little longer and then, finally, push back my chair and stand. I must leave, I say. To finish packing for my trip. Alex walks me to my car, I hand over the Christmas presents I have bought for his kids and, as I click my seatbelt into its holster, watch him walk away. After the car door closes and his footsteps drift into the past, I feel the sorrow come. I start the engine and drive, taking a left at the end of the road where I should take a right. Wipers instead of indicators. I blink to get rid of the tears, but more come and I can feel them heavy on my eyelashes. I can only let them fall. I’ve taken another wrong turn.
At home I sit in my car in the driveway, the engine still running. Tonight my own brother has debased and disgraced me with a sudden and shocking brutality I have until now pretended did not and could not exist. For the first time, the thought strikes me that perhaps at the root of his discomfort, his inability to fully accept me, his refusal to discuss the past, is the idea of Kris, his mother, having lain with my father? Is he secretly disgusted by the thought she could have done such a thing? Allowed herself to be taken by ‘one of them’? I have been kidding myself, thinking it didn’t matter.
A few months later, we are at Brett’s wedding, an event scrawled on my calendar that I have been dreading for months. My anxiety around whether I would even be invited has now been usurped by who I am supposed to be when I get there. I do my best to be no one. When the ceremony is over, I purposefully disappear, to chainsmoke and avoid any potential awkwardness when the time comes for the family photos. I am too unsure of my place and do not want to watch as ‘the family’ assembles for a tableau of feigned solidarity. Most of all, I do not want anyone to feel uncomfortable.
I’m dragging on my fourth cigarette in as many minutes when I hear my name being called.
‘Where have you been? We’re waiting for you for the photos.’ My sort-of cousin is running towards me, flustered. She’s been tasked with corralling the guests for the wedding pictures.
‘Come now!’ she says breathlessly, and seconds later I’m standing next to Ken and the rest of ‘the family’ being told to say ‘Cheese!’ Click, click, click and I’m digitally immortalised into something that feels like belonging. Later, when during his groom’s speech Brett thanks ‘my siblings, Alex, Georgia and Sara-Jayne’, I am unable to hold back my tears.
Later that night we are on the dance floor, Alex and I. We have forced ourselves to get to this point. Where I have always felt we are not close enough, now we are too close. Every time he takes my hand I want to shake it free and clench my fist or fold my arms into myself. Discomfort has led to my shoes having been abandoned and in my bare feet my eyes are just about level with the collar of his pale dress shirt. When we come together in an awkward pantomime waltz, all I see is white.
Today, what I felt after first meeting Alex, that sense of the precarious, of teetering dangerously close to the edge of rejection has begun to fade. Where once there was the overwhelming sense of having something to lose simply by being myself, I have come to the point of knowing that the only way I can save myself is to be authentic. I admit, it scares me.
I must accept that perhaps I tried too hard in the beginning. That I had been so desperate to connect with my brother, this stranger, I had failed to see that the very thing I thought connected us was actually that which drove a Kris-shaped wedge between us. It has taken me a long time to understand that he, too, had perhaps felt, feared, the same things I did. Rejection, loss and abandonment.
Although I still carry with me an ever-so-faint trace of hope that one day we will be able to talk about all that has happened, I see that, for him, the past must remain in the past and for now all I can do is force my hopes to the place of the unspoken.