A couple of hours before they were due to collect Nic, Will googled hoarding disorder, cringing because he hadn’t thought to do it before. Why do I have to be the one to think of everything? Mercy said all the time, and he used to not know what she was on about until he did, and then that, too, became a thing she’d had to think of first.
He’d only thought of it at all because his tooth had seared him awake while it was still dark and he had taken the last of the ibuprofen and was back on the sofa under the quilt, trying to distract himself from the barely diminished pain. He read the ‘Hoarding Disorder’ Wikipedia page and then one from a social services mob, tried to see Aunty Nic in any of it. But how would he? He hardly knew her anymore. Was she indecisive and anxious? Socially isolated? Did she have OCD? But here was something: a traumatic event. She’d had a couple of those, he knew. But who hadn’t? Still, could be a thing to consider.
The toilet flushed, water ran on and off, a pool of yellow light cast out into the hallway.
‘Hey, Leen,’ he called. ‘When did Uncle Steve die?’
‘What are you on about?’ She was in the doorway, scowling, hand on hip like a cartoon of an angry mother.
‘Just wondering what might have triggered all this.’
‘Steve died when I was a baby.’
It annoyed him, her dropping of the Uncle, the Aunty. Like she thought she was on par with them, grown. ‘Do you reckon that might—’
‘Obviously not. We practically lived here as kids, long after he died. She was fine.’
‘Yeah. But it’s weird Mum and Aunty Nic never spoke about him. Maybe there’s something—’ But she had stomped away already.
It wasn’t that Uncle Steve was a secret. Will had always known his mum had a half-brother who was much older and who had died young. But the tidbits of info mum dropped about him when pushed made things less rather than more clear. What was he like? Will asked once, and Mum said, He always brought me and your aunty a bag of mixed lollies from the corner shop and a box of Roses for our mum. When he asked what Steve did for a job, Mum said he worked in a tool shop, but another time she said he worked in a factory and another time that he was a cleaner, and when Will wanted to know why he had so many jobs she said, Not everyone works in the same place their whole life, which didn’t answer the question but did seem like a dig at Aunty Nic, who had worked at the same place since she was a teenager.
It wasn’t until the morning after fourteen-year-old Will came home from a mate’s place with a vicious case of the giggles and bloodshot eyes that Mum sat him and Lena down and told them their uncle had died from a drug overdose. She didn’t say which drug, or that his death came after a decade of addiction, including short stints in jail and rehab—these details were filled in later. At the time, she made it sound as though Steve, like Will, had smoked weed one night with a mate and that was the end of him.
Later, after Will’s arrest, Aunty Nic had asked him if he was an addict, if that was why he’d been dealing. He told her truthfully that he didn’t even use, and she’d sucked in all her breath and let it out again and started talking about something else altogether. Some dumbarse reality TV show. Even at the time he’d known that was fucking weird. Her nephew facing serious drug charges and she’s rabbiting on about some bloody cooking comp. When he mentioned the weirdness to Mum she’d said, My sister is not good at handling hard things, and then hugged him for the thousandth time that night.
Mum wasn’t that great at hard things either. Never talked about her brother, never talked about her dad, but at least when Will and Lena’s dad died she let them ask as many questions as they needed, always did her best to answer, even though it was obvious how hard it was for her to speak without crying. But, then, his death was innocent. His life, too, as far as Will knew. Too short to have done much damage.
Aunty Nic had scripts to be filled so Will ducked into the hospital pharmacy while Lena helped her out to the street to wait for the Uber. He asked the pharmacist if she could fill the repeats as well but she barely bothered to say no, just repeated the doctor’s instructions for Nic’s medication regime. He thanked her, bought some more piss-weak painkillers for himself (all on Aunty Nic’s Mastercard, which Lena had handed over like it was her own), took a double dose right there in the useless fucking emporium of public health.
When he got to the car, Lena was in the front seat next to the driver, leaving Will to sit beside Aunty Nic in the back.
‘You all right there?’ he asked, because she sat like she was balancing her tailbone on a tightrope.
‘I’m good, but listen, there’s something I’ve been worried about. Lena doesn’t know this, but …’
Lena’s head whipped around. ‘What don’t I know?’ Like a meerkat she was, eyes bulging, hyper alert. Meerkat or ice addict.
Aunty Nic half raised her right arm. She might have meant to reach out and touch Lena’s shoulder or to wave off the question, but the actual gesture she managed was a pointless flapping. Title of my autobiography, Will thought.
‘You know a lot about animals, right?’
She must have been high still. What he wouldn’t do right now to get dosed with whatever they’d given her.
‘Um, not really.’
‘You’ve been living in the country! All the farms and that. You must know something about animals.’
‘Yeah, nah, I was in town. Not really any animals. Unless you count pets, I s’pose.’
‘What are you worrying about animals for?’ Lena asked, but Aunty Nic didn’t take any notice. She kept her glassy-eyed focus on Will.
‘It’s just I have these cats and—’
‘Nic! You don’t have any cats! What are you—’
‘Let me talk to my nephew, please, Lena. Will, listen, I have these cats. They visit me every morning for their breakfast. I don’t know where they get their other meals from, but breakfast is always at my place.’
‘Nic!’ Lena made eye contact with Will, pulled a drunk face like they used to behind Mum’s back when she had more than one glass of wine.
‘Now, I’m not worried they’ve starved. They’re scrappy little street fighters, you know. They’ll have survived all right without me, I know that. But—I know this is silly—but … have they forgotten me, do you think? When I take out their food tomorrow morning, will they even come for it? Do they forget so quickly, cats?’
Lena was laughing silently, as was the driver. Both of their faces turning red under the pressure.
‘Nah, cats have great memories,’ Will said. ‘Like elephants.’
‘Really? That good?’
‘Almost as good, yeah. Plus, they’re great communicators, cats. One of ’em will pass by tomorrow morning and see you out there with the brekky and before you know it the whole lot of them will have heard and be over with their bibs on.’
‘Ah, good, good.’ She smiled at the air in front of her face. ‘I knew you’d know.’
Will helped Aunty Nic out of the car while Lena got her bag and crutches from the boot. The pharmacy bag nestled his thigh through his shorts. Tease.
The three of them made slow progress to the front door. A man called out from across the street and they waited, Aunty Nic leaning hard on her crutches, Will and Lena hovering either side, while he bounded across to them. Kissed Aunty Nic on both cheeks. Told her how good it was to have her home. He greeted Lena like an old friend, shook Will’s hand warmly when introduced.
‘How are my little chickens doing?’ Aunty Nic asked the man.
Will was ready to whisper that she was experiencing medicated delusions of animal visitations but the man’s answer made it clear that the chickens were children belonging to him. Real children that Aunty Nic cared for sometimes. Children who missed her and couldn’t wait until she was well enough to come play again, apparently.
When the neighbour left, Lena transformed back into the meerkat. Ready to run, or stick her head in a hole. Or scratch and bite. She pushed the door open, skittered into the hallway, let Aunty Nic swing herself over the threshold, Will right behind.
For a moment it was good. Will closed the door. His aunty said, ‘Home!’ like it was New York City. Her head fell back and he leapt forward but she was just looking up at the ceiling. ‘You fixed the light,’ she said. Then she was looking everywhere at once. Almost coming off her crutches as she smacked a hand against the wall.
‘What have you …’ she said. ‘What did you do?’
Her words came fast and violent, then. Lena’s, too. Like lightning striking each of them in turn, taking off flesh and splintering bone in the process. Within seconds, both women were sobbing. Within five minutes, Lena had fled outside and his aunty was crumpled on her bedroom floor, her face shiny with tears and snot.
‘Do you understand what’s happened here?’ Her eyes enormous and wounded, her whole body shaking and shaking. ‘She’s … She said she wouldn’t … Oh, it’s … I can’t even tell you what this feels like. I can’t even say it.’
‘I think if we get you up on to the bed you’ll be—’
‘Rape! It feels like I’ve been raped. The violation of it, Will! She’s just stripped away everything, violated me. There’s nothing left.’
Don’t be hysterical. You weren’t meant to say that to women, Mercy had taught him. There was a whole history which they all apparently knew and were scarred by even if you, the one using the word, had no fucking idea. Anyway, you weren’t meant to label people’s emotions. Just respond to the material facts of the situation.
‘There’s lots left,’ he pointed out. ‘Heaps. Look at—’
‘You don’t know what you’re talking about!’
‘Aunty Nic, I wish you’d—’
‘I should call the police on her, the little thief. Bet she’s made a fortune selling off my stuff. Is it drugs? You’ve seen how skinny she’s gotten, how puffy around the eyes. Taking advantage of an injured woman and sold off all my things for her meth or whatever.’ She pounded the floor with her fists. ‘How can I live?’
‘I think once you calm down—’
‘Stop! I don’t need to be patronised and and and—just stop, Will. Go away. Go.’
He backed from the room slowly, unsure of whether it was okay to leave her alone in such a terrible state. Her sobs followed him right down the hallway.
He found Lena on the front step, scrolling through her phone, the whites of her eyes streaked the same colour as the eerie red sun.
‘I keep thinking about that skip,’ she said. ‘How quickly we filled it.’
He’d been thinking of that, too. The relief of having it taken away, problem solved—as long as you didn’t picture where it was going, which was to landfill. How when it got there it would contribute to the increasing toxification of the earth as the mercury and cadmium, the solvents and acids and lead, the PVC and arsenic locked away in all those electronics and bits of plastic crap leaked into the soil. And when it rained, water would turn the chemicals into leachate, which did what it sounded like, leached right into the ground, poisoning the soil and water.
Taylah had taught him all that. Or he’d taught himself after he’d stayed up half the night reading in-depth after helping Taylah with her Earth Day project. Imagine if she could see what he’d done here, see his hypocrisy and blatant disregard for the planet. The shame of it made him want to crawl into the skip himself.
‘I just … How can someone accumulate so much stuff?’ Lena went on. ‘In such a short time, too. It’s like she was trying to bury herself. And now she’s angry we’ve dug her out.’
‘Maybe it’s that—’ Will stopped. The need in Lena’s face made him want to flee. He thought of Dad, took a breath, tasted ash. ‘I get stressed a lot about the environment and that, you know? Like really freaked and … I was talking to Mercy about it, about how fucked up it is that the planet is dying and nobody seems to know what to do to fix it, and—’
‘Will, understand I do not want a lecture about fucking climate change right now.’
‘I’m not talking about climate change, just this thing Mercy said. That the scariest thing isn’t that the planet is dying and we don’t know how to fix it. We do know, actually. How to slow it down, or make it less terrible anyway. The scariest thing is that so many people don’t give a fuck that it’s dying because giving a fuck means they might have to give some shit up, and being less comfortable in the short term is a worse prospect to them than a dead planet in the long term. Or middle term, even.’
Lena had been thumbing her phone while he was talking but she was obviously listening because she said. ‘The planet’s going to be fine, though.’
‘You serious?’
‘Yep. We’re not killing the planet. Just making it uninhabitable for ourselves.’
‘Fucking hell, Lena. Always looking on the bright side, you are.’
She smiled a little at that. Properly. So fast it could have been a tic, but he was pretty sure it was a smile. That he caused in his sister. As wins went it wasn’t huge, but he’d take it.
‘Point is, maybe Aunty Nic hasn’t been, like, deliberately burying herself. It’s just the unfortunate consequence of making herself comfortable.’
‘You’ve seen the pictures when I first got in here. You can’t think that was comfortable.’
‘To her, maybe. Or she’d become so used to it she couldn’t see it anymore. Hey, give us your phone a sec.’
‘Use your own.’
‘I wanna show her the photos you took.’
‘She hates me enough as it is.’
‘What if she’s got some warped idea about how it was? If she sees the, like, objective reality, she might understand what a good thing you’ve done.’
Lena looked at him. ‘You think it was a good thing?’
‘Leen, you probably saved her life and then you made it possible for her to move back home. There’s no question it was a good thing. But it’s a good thing in the way that taking away an addict’s supply is a good thing. In the long run she’ll thank you, but first she’s got to come to terms with how bad things were. The photos will help, I think.’
Lena swiped at her eyes although Will couldn’t see any tears. She fiddled with her phone, started to hand it over before folding it back into her palm. ‘My screen’s all cracked. I’ll forward you the rest of the photos.’
‘It’s cracked? Bad?’
Lena nodded, kept thumbing the screen. He felt the vibrations in his pocket as the photos arrived.
Back in Aunty Nic’s bedroom Will held his screen in front of her face, swiped through the photos. Lena was in the doorway, like a roo stock-still in a field, ready to bound off the second you make a move towards it.
‘No. No. I didn’t leave it that way. Not at all.’ Nic waved the phone away. ‘Don’t you see? She trashed the place and now she’s trying to put the blame on me. God. What did I do to deserve this? Lena! You were my—’ She let out a wrenching moan. ‘She’s been my best friend,’ she choked out at last, talking directly to him. ‘I thought she was, anyway. I can’t believe she’d do this to me.’
‘Aunty Nic, I think if you maybe have a bit of a rest and then—’
‘Get out of my sight.’ She said it calmly.
He stood there, trying to think of the right thing to do. From the corner of his eye he saw Lena disappear.
‘Are you deaf? I told you to go.’
In the hallway Will tried not to cry like a fucking child. There was this story about Aunty Nic that he and Lena loved as little kids. They’d first heard it from their mum as a warning against getting into fights. Your aunty was the youngest kid in the history of our high school to ever be suspended—for getting into a fight. When they went to Nic for confirmation she laughed, said, How the hell would she know if I was the youngest or not? And they, wetting themselves with excitement at this seeming confirmation that the story was true, begged for details.
Maybe I was the youngest ever, but I doubt it. It was a rough school back then; it’s better now. Be better still by the time you two get there. I can tell you for sure that I was the first in my year group to get suspended, since we were only a couple of weeks into our first term when it happened.
So I was sitting on the toilet one lunchtime (cue hysterical laughter from little Will and Lena) and just as I was finishing my business I heard this loud voice going, ‘Watch what you’re doing you turd (more giggles), you just sprayed water all over me.’ And then I hear this other voice saying sorry and then giving this little yelp. I get out of the cubicle and see this giant girl—a year nine, it turned out, but I didn’t know that at the time—holding this smaller girl, a girl from my year, up against the wall. The big one’s palm was flat against the little one’s chest and she was just eyeballing her, you know?
So, the little one’s friends, two girls I recognised from maths but whose names I didn’t know, start begging the big one to let their friend go, saying how she’s sorry for splashing water and all that. The big girl kept totally focused on her victim, who was going all red in the face, obviously trying super hard not to bawl. A minute went past. Must have been only that long because I’d rushed to go to the loo with only six minutes before the bell rang and it still hadn’t gone by this stage. And then the little girl squeaks out, ‘It was an accident, okay? Please.’ And the big girl repeated it back at her in this nasty, high-pitched voice. The little one starts crying. One of her friends says she’s going to get a teacher and that’s when the big one drops her hand. ‘Don’t,’ she says. She stands back as if to let the girl go, then BAM, slams her against the wall again, this time by punching her stomach. Imagine it, right? The height difference would be like if I punched you in the stomach, Leen! (‘No!’ Lena would laugh-gasp, wrapping her arms around her tummy protectively.) I’d have to actually bend my knees a little and do an awkward low swing to get you right there (and Nic would land the world’s gentlest punch on Lena’s covered belly and sometimes do the same to Will and it would take minutes to stop the gentle fighting and laughing and get back to the story).
So, anyway, she’s punched the little one and then she just keeps going, pummelling this little girl, right? By now word has spread, or else there was just a rush of girls coming to the toilet before the bell, because the place is full and as they’ve come in I’ve sort of been nudged closer and closer to the action, and so I cannot only see this poor kid’s face, all wet and red and with a big bit of snot dripping onto her lips (‘Eeewwww!’), but I can hear this noise. Underneath the yelling of the little girl’s friends and the excited commentary of the crowd, I’m actually close enough to hear the sound of the bully’s fist smacking into the little girl. (Here, Nic would slam a closed fist into her own open palm. After the first time, Will and Lena knew to be silent at this point in the story. The thwack wasn’t loud but it thrilled them every time.)
The bell rings. A couple of girls run out, more worried about being late to class than missing the end of the fight. But most of us stay because it’s like the big girl hasn’t heard a thing. She’s punching and punching and the little one is trying hard to get away, ducking and weaving and covering herself, but the big one just changes her target, going for the arms or chest or shoulders. Never the head, but everywhere else she can land a blow she does and the little one doesn’t hit back, just keeps moving her arms around to protect herself best she can and sliding back and forth against the wall trying to escape.
And I didn’t know I was going to do it until I was doing it, but I step up real close and say, ‘Enough,’ and I can smell the foul breath of this enormous girl as she turns on me. The little one takes the opportunity and bolts but she’s the only one. The whole room is watching as the bully swings out. First punch connects—POW—with my cheekbone and I can’t even think. I’m in it, you know? I’m bigger than the other year seven but still much smaller than this beast, but I give as good as I’m getting. More, I reckon. I go hard, and before I know it we’re both on the disgusting toilet floor, each trying to get on top of the other, punching and clawing. People are screaming and cheering. Everything hurts. Everything! All I want is for her to stop but I’m not going to lie still and wait, so I keep going at her and then WHOOSH, she’s gone, pulled off me. I lie there, stunned, like the second you first wake up from a really weird dream. And then I’m being dragged up by Mrs Braddon and I see the bully ahead of me being dragged by Miss Carter and that’s that.
By now Lena would be almost crying and Will would be air fighting, showing how he would’ve taken the bully down. Aunty Nic would wrap it up quickly, telling them how she and the bully were both suspended and how the original victim left the school soon after.
They nagged Aunty Nic to retell it almost every time they slept over. It got so they knew it word for word, would jump on her if she got a detail wrong or skipped over anything. But every single time, Lena got all riled up at the end. I can’t believe you got in trouble when you were the hero! I can’t believe the little girl didn’t say thank you! The older she got the angrier it made her. It’s so unfair, Aunty Nic! she would say and, later, I can’t stand the injustice. Heroism should be rewarded, not punished.
Will knew it was pointless to argue with Lena when she was in a snit, so he never bothered to point out the obvious: knowing you’d acted heroically was the reward. You could hold your head high even if you were doubled over in pain. Your brain would rest easy at night even if your broken skin kept trying to sting you awake. You would always know what you did, and that would get you through a whole lot of feeling you were useless and scared of everything. That was more than most people had.
It was more than Lena had. She wore everything on the outside. Needed you to know when she was hurt and when she was sad and when she was angry, when she’d done well on a test and when the nurse complimented her on helping her aunty. It was like that goddamn scar; she wore it like it was something she’d done on purpose, like it meant something. Like gang colours or a prison tatt. She never considered that keeping things to yourself was not about shame and hiding; it was about not thrusting all your shit in someone else’s face because everybody’s got shit to deal with. Have some dignity, he wanted to tell her. Have some pride.
That’s what he’d tried to do when he got sentenced. Maybe he’d done it too well, though. Made Aunty Nic think he didn’t need her. Maybe that was why she didn’t come.
But actually, given the hysterical—it was—howling coming from the bedroom right now, maybe Mum had been right all along. Nic couldn’t handle hard stuff. Wasn’t tough like the rest of the family. Wasn’t good of heart or strong of spirit, either. Maybe she had shown her true colours when he’d been locked up. He should’ve told Lena about that. Saved her from wasting her week and breaking her heart over the mad, selfish cow.