So make sure you love like you’ve never been hurt
And when you dance, dance like there’s no one watching you
-Alexisonfire, ‘Get Fighted’
Pictures in the mirror
Pictures she never knew
Pictures in the mirror
Always regretting you
-The Living End, ‘Pictures in the Mirror’
I laugh at something funny on the TV. Dad does too, but then he looks at me and his eyes glaze over before he turns away. I don’t bother to ask what he is thinking. My resemblance to Mum has been pointed out so many times that Dad’s words have lost all meaning. He used to occasionally remark about something I said or did, or an unconscious mannerism I appeared to have picked up from her. In a way it’s funny, because how could I possibly have acquired those traits at such a young age, and retained them for over a decade, long after the influence was gone?
As Dad’s observations continued and repeated themselves, they grew so tiresome that I began ignoring them, until eventually he stopped himself whenever the fancy to comment came along. I don’t really want to know if I laugh like she did, or if, when I turn my head back over my shoulder, I give a class A greasy just like she did. I am my own person, not just a reflective shadow of my mother, and I don’t need to be constantly reminded that she’s gone. I think sometimes Dad forgets that.
* * *
Maybe music isn’t dead
Maybe we all just forgot what it fucking sounded like
-Alexisonfire, ‘Get Fighted’
I turn the music up louder. It’s Alexisonfire, my favourite band. Pip doesn’t understand why I enjoy them so much. All she can hear is the lead singer’s screaming; admittedly a prevailing aspect of their music, but you learn to get past that. Maybe it’s just an acquired taste? Who knows.
Even I didn’t really like Alexis when I first ‘discovered’ them. A sort of generic name; an angry mob with a gravel-throated lead singer, just like so many other bands out there. But after about twenty minutes, the music began to make sense. I found that first impressions aren’t always right. ‘Never judge a book by its cover’ or whatever they say. The irregular charges of the guitar, the diapason created by the backing vocalist, the thunder of the drums, the underlying pound of the bass – all these things seemed to take away my anxieties, cares, fears, tendencies towards masochism – perhaps even from reality itself. I can never pinpoint what it is exactly that stirs me, perhaps merely the fact that amidst a chaotic range of sounds they discovered harmony - eurhythmy. It’s like a drug, and I became addicted. The music brings everything back into perspective, removing the debris which suffocates me.
Pip still doesn’t like them, though. She’ll listen for my sake, but not for her own, and I think maybe that’s why. It’s hard to appreciate things when you’re too busy just putting up with them.
* * *
Have you seen your mother girl?
Has she gone away?
…Gone
When you wake in the morning, gone
-Stone Temple
The night that Santa comes is always the longest. Sleep comes slow and unwillingly; then one year you learn that the quicker you allow weariness to take you, the quicker the next day comes, all the sooner to get what’s coming to you.
This year, though, something’s changed. I’m big and know that Santa comes quicker if you go to sleep quicker, but I can’t. The air smells different. Like there is some shadowmonster holed up in the dark, smoking and waiting for me to sleep so it can come out. I shake my head. There are no such things as monsters. There is nothing hiding in my closet, nothing underneath my bed, nothing in the shadow behind the door. But still…
The night never seems to end. I don’t feel safe, and locate my teddy snow leopard in an attempt to stave off panic. I can hear the ocean through my open window, and ferns rustle outside with the wind. The sensor light switches on, and I sit up with a start. But it’s just Dad, trying to pull a jumper over his pyjamas and getting in the car. Why’s he going to work on Christmas?…
At about five, I get a shocking feeling, like I’ve been discovered by the shadowmonster, no longer in its hiding place, where it should be, where I want it to be. It wavers overhead, breathes fire into my face and laughs, an awful chainsaw laugh that cuts through the sheets I’ve pulled over my face to save me. Liana the leopard is there with me, and she trembles as I shake.
But it was a dream. A nightmare. How silly. Dad’s come into my room to wake me up for Christmas…
A faint dawn bared itself vaguely through the lace curtains, its ultramarine sky blended with orange and black.
* * *
I believe the grass is no more greener on the other side
-Savage Garden
Ducking quickly, I manage to miss the branch as it whines past the top of my helmet. Shadow doesn’t even slow down, not one notch; she keeps going, it wasn’t her head that nearly got smacked, after all. Stupid horse. The path begins to clear up a little as we reach the end. It opens up into a clearing, deserted but for a few tussocks of dry grass, clustered closely together so that they can get a decent drink in the depressions where dew gathers overnight. A single straggling tree, which didn’t make it to the edges of the clearing like the others, stands crookedly near the exit of the trail, and I tie Shadow to it so she doesn’t go off searching for some non-existent free-range feed. I give her an apple, and she snorts at the unoriginality of the meal, but eats it anyway.
Standing at the base of the crooked tree, watching a bunch of galahs taunt a lone black cockatoo, I lose myself in the desolate beauty of the place. This drought has been shocking, but the lack of rain doesn’t mean there is lack of life. The bush is tough like that, a real fighter, like the cockatoo struggling its way through a flurry of pink wings in the treetops above. The trees ignore the birds’ idiotic behaviour, busy in their own affairs. Shadow gets hit by a falling branch and isn’t impressed; I shake my head at her indignant expression and rub her neck as she moves closer to me for sympathy.
Sometimes I come here just to be alone for a little while. I’ll take up my usual position on a charred log where a long time ago a lightning bolt split open a tree, and put Alexis on full bore on my Discman. Normally I listen until the battery dies – I’ve usually sorted out whatever is bothering me by then – but today I turn it off after only a few bars of the second song. There’s something else here. Shadow lets the remains of her apple fall to the ground and begins to nod her head up and down in time. She can hear it too.
With a burst of feathers, the black cockatoo takes flight, leaving the triumphant galahs their patch of dirt and dry leaves. It is another fifteen minutes before I get up to leave. Shadow gets frightened by the dark, and nights come on quickly in June.
* * *
Can’t you see that you’re dying alone?
Dying alone?
-Sunk Loto, ‘5 Years of Silence’
I never, ever want any member of my family to read these things. It’s not that they would hate me – I wouldn’t care even if that were the case, and I’m not at all sure that it isn’t. But there are just some things that you don’t want certain people to know. Maybe it’s fear of being too well-understood that I’m afraid of. I like having secrets.
My only real fear, I guess, is that I could die alone. I can’t think of anything more sickening. As remote as death may seem at this point in my life, the thought of ‘going solo’ – feeling entirely naked and vulnerable at my final moment – is truly frightening. Every creature feels vulnerable when they lack the comfort and shelter of loved ones.
What point would there be to it all, if there were nobody who even cared enough to be there, to say “I love you, and I’m going to miss you”?
My mum died alone. No one was there. No friends and no family to wish her farewell, to tell her that she mattered.
* * *
I’ve got the sun in my eyes
I didn’t see you passing me by
-The Butterfly Effect, ‘Gone’
I resent how young I was during those times.
The pink corner couch – it had always been my favourite. I felt safe there, cuddled in the warm fabric made friendly through wear and tear. Perched in front of the telly, I would gather my legs underneath me, or hug them to my chest, and often enough fell asleep there, small head nodding on the magnificent headrest, delighting in the diverse bouquets wafting from its seldom-washed softness. Like a baby animal that identifies its mother by smell, I will always be able to recognise that chair.
I used to call it ‘Mum’s Chair’. Sometimes I would come home from school to find her huddled there, her head drooped comfortably onto her shoulder, gently snoring – a comforting sound which I was rather fond of. It was different from Dad’s snore. It wasn’t annoying, and didn’t keep you up late at night with a rolling echo that resonated through the house. Mum used to make jokes about his snoring that made Dad blush. I didn’t always understand them, but I’d laugh anyway.
Youth, innocence, ignorance – they’re all one and the same. The times taken for granted are the ones most sorely missed. I wish I hadn’t spent so much time with the chair and telly. I wish I’d known.
* * *
I believe you don’t know what you’ve got until you say goodbye
-Savage Garden
I still can’t believe she’s really gone. Never-coming-back-gone. Parents shouldn’t just leave their kids like that. It’s not right. Every eight-year-old girl needs her mother.
The impact of not having a mother isn’t one that just hits and then goes away once you’ve dealt with it. It’s a recurring thing, like the seasons. A time comes when you think you have everything sorted out, think it’s no longer a problem, that it’s something you’re over and won’t ever come up again, at least not in a negative way. Wrongo. Sure, there are times when you feel fine and as though it’s not such a big issue. You even forget about your motherlessness for days, weeks. But then something will happen – a friend complains about her mum, Mother’s Day cards start appearing in the newsagencies, her birthday comes around, stuff like that – and bang! She’s gone. There it is again. From summer you are plunged back into the depths of winter – cold, hard reality. You don’t have a mum, you haven’t had one for years, you will never have one again.
* * *
Difficult not to feel a little bit
Disappointed and passed over
When I’ve looked right through
To see you naked and oblivious
And you don’t see me
-A Perfect Circle, ‘3 Libras’
The glazy window seems to shift and bend as I stare at the washing line below. Dad feeds laundry to it, then turns and beckons someone to him, with exaggerated gesticulations. Mum moves over to him, stooped, looking scared, looking like she’s retarded with her posture hunched in that way. She reaches Dad, who grips her by the hand as he points up to the window where I look down on them. Mum can’t see me, and Dad begins to yell…
I turn and rush through the shaking house. My exit through the front door is almost blocked by Dad, yelling at me to see Mum. “She’s just out the back, she wants to see you!”
“No!”
I fly past him, and make for the beach through an old path running behind the house across the street. I used to use it before Mum died, but it’s gotten overgrown in the years since. Fern branches and palms reach out and knot in my hair, catch on my clothes – tearing them away coloured with patches of blood – but I don’t slow down. Dad walks to the entrance of the path, but can go no further. Some invisible force stops him where he stands. Arms held out, pleading, he shifts and bends and melts into the ground.
It’s high tide. Two or three surfers ride the waves that rise high as the surges hit the elevated sand bar. I enter the openness of the beach, only then realising how perilously massive the waves are. One crashes down, bringing the tide line much closer. I cover my face, slip, try to get away, but my naked, bloody skin seems to meld with the particles of sand and shell. The surfers motion frantically for me to leave, to get to safety, but I cannot get up. I catch a figure in the corner of my eye – it’s her. Mum’s there, her nakedness barely covered by the tresses of seaweed cascading down her body like a veil. She stands beneath a second wave. Slowly her head turns towards me, like a Jan Vermeer portrait, and she looks at me, looks through me. I plead for a flicker of recognition, fail to notice the wave as it finally crashes down after a suspended eternity.
A loud roar, then black.
I wake up in a thick, salty sweat with the sound of fire resonating off windows along the whole street.
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