Before you forget, p.17
Before You Forget, page 17
‘Dad’s the one who’s supposed to do the housework,’ I say. ‘Mum’s too busy working most of the time. And the support workers only vacuum and mop.’
‘Yes, well, nobody’s been dusting lately, have they?’
I can’t help bristling. I feel like it’s a criticism of Mum. And I can’t understand why you would care about a bit of dust. It seems about as relevant to life as Gemma making herself sick. Come to think of it, maybe there’s a connection between Gem’s tidiness and her getting sick. My room is a total tip. I’ve always been messy, but now I don’t own a single piece of clothing that’s not on the floor or in the washing basket or shoved under the bed. If I let Hecta in, he finds a pile and goes to sleep on it. My homework is all over the place too: my desk is usually reserved for art, and the rest of it I do sitting on my bed with my laptop on my knees. No wonder I’m struggling to get Cs. Except for in Art.
Dad used to hate people going into his room. Somehow Fiona has bullied her way in there and thrown out all the piles of newspapers and magazines under his bed, cleaned his shelves of hose parts, elastic bands, packets of sandwich bags, bin ties and jars full of screws, bolts and nuts. She found bags and bags of burley on top of the cupboard full of crawling larvae, which turn into brown moths, which lay eggs near the ceiling and in the corners of the room. Fiona’s gotten rid of the bags, but she won’t squash the eggs.
‘They’re living things,’ she says.
‘They’re insects,’ I say. ‘Do they even have a brain?’
‘That’s not the point,’ she says. ‘They are sentient.’
‘They’re what?’
I know what she means. I’m just trying to needle her. But she gives me a look and waves me away.
She’s also unearthed plastic boxes of photographs – black and white ones of Dad as a child, plus hundreds and hundreds of shots of me when I was a baby. I don’t know why he took so many photos, or why you would bother printing them out, but he did. There’s me sitting, standing, sleeping, eating, running around naked, running around clothed. Normal things that kids do. I suppose some of them are cute.
Fiona brings them out onto the kitchen table. ‘Oh, Simon,’ she coos, ‘look at Amelia here. Wasn’t she gorgeous?’
I note the past tense.
‘Our girl,’ Dad says, coming over and squeezing me with one arm.
Fiona pulls out a photo of me sitting on the bonnet of our old car. Dad’s making sure I don’t fall off. Behind us are the cliffs at Kalbarri, chunky stripes of red and orange and tan.
‘Oh, Kalbarri!’ I say, showing Dad. ‘Remember that?’
Dad used to make up songs about me when I was a kid, all with my name in them. ‘Amelia Ophelia Piddly Pop, Doop Doop Flip Flop’ was the beginning of one. He used to change the rest of the lyric every time he sang it. Another one was about all the people coming to our house, and why they liked coming over. But Dad wrote my favourite song on that trip to Kalbarri. I was four, and I was obsessed with a model propeller plane outside the tourist bureau. Apparently (I don’t remember) a man took it away one day to repair it, and I was inconsolable, until Dad started singing:
Amelia sighed and Amelia cried
When she saw the man take the propeller inside
A little flame of hope within her died
When she saw the man take the propeller inside
Amelia gave a laugh and Amelia gave a shout
When she saw the man take the propeller back out
A little flame of hope within her flared
When she saw the man bring it out repaired.
I start singing, ‘Amelia sighed and Amelia cried . . .’
I wait for Dad to join in. He smiles. ‘You were a baby there,’ he says, pointing.
‘Do you remember the propeller song, Dad?’ I sing the next line.
‘That’s a nice song,’ he says.
‘You wrote it,’ I say. ‘Don’t you remember?’
‘I like that song.’
‘Daddy?’ I say. ‘Do you remember the sunsets?’
‘Don’t hassle him,’ Fiona says, as if he’s not there.
‘I’m just asking.’
‘Don’t,’ Fiona says. ‘It’s not his fault.’
‘I want to know if he remembers,’ I say.
She brings out another photo of Dad and Mum before I was born.
‘Look at this,’ Fiona says. ‘Isn’t this a lovely photo?’
‘Where’s Lisa?’ Dad frowns, looking around. It’s the first time he’s asked.
‘Good question,’ I say darkly.
‘She’s on holiday,’ Fiona says. ‘But she’ll be back soon.’
‘I want Lisa,’ Dad says. ‘She’s never here!’ He stands up suddenly. Hecta leaps out of his basket and runs to his side.
‘It’s all right, Simon,’ Fiona says soothingly. ‘Sit down.’
Dad doesn’t sit down. He walks out the front door, leaving a bewildered Hecta behind.
‘See what you’ve done?’ Fiona says.
‘I didn’t do anything,’ I snap. ‘I asked a question.’
I get up too, before I say anything else, and go to my room.
‘That’s right,’ I hear Fiona call. ‘Leave me to clean up!’
I go to my painting. I examine the half-squeezed tubes of paint. Then I get a bowl and a paintbrush.
I know what I have to add to the painting. I just hope it works.
I don’t remember much about when I was little. It’s weird seeing photos that I don’t remember being taken, wearing clothes I don’t remember having.
Dad is forgetting his whole life. What happens when you forget everything? How do you know who you are? How do you know you’re a person who likes peanut butter but hates Vegemite? What happens to everything you’ve ever done?
Is it like dying? Like those people who went to work at the Twin Towers one day and never came home. Their lives are gone, but people are now dedicating their lives so that we remember them. So we don’t forget what an awful thing it was that happened. The way I’ll want to make sure even if Dad forgets his life, forgets who we are, we won’t forget him.
When I told Poppy about watching the clips, she said, ‘But heaps of people have died since then. It’s not like they’re special.’
I guess she’s right. But it matters to me. I don’t know why. It just does.
I spend as much time as I can at Poppy’s with Fiona at ours. We both actually study, seeing as our mock exams are three weeks away. I want to work on my painting but I don’t want Poppy to see how much time I’m spending on it. I haven’t, before this year, cared one way or another about my art pieces, not the ones I do for school. I like starting them, but finishing them properly seems too much work. What I’ve always loved is drawing in my visual diaries, drawings that nobody except Gemma and Dad would ever see. Now I have these weird fantasies about what Ms M is going to say about my self-portrait. The other pieces don’t matter, only this one. The fantasy conversations go something like this:
Amelia, you’ve really outshone everyone with this. Even Poppy.
Thanks, Ms M. (I sound suitably humble)
No, I mean it. I couldn’t have imagined that you’d produce work like this. I can see how important it is to you.
Can you?
Yes, I can. I can see this is all about your father.
At this point I choke up. Ms M hugs me like a mother. I cry and cry, and by the time I’ve finished crying, it’s all right. Ms M offers to adopt me, and I move in with her and her kids.
The end.
I know perfectly well that nothing like that is going to happen. Ms M does seem to hate me slightly less than she did before, but that is about it. And she has commented favourably on my self-portrait. But there’s a long way between that and becoming an adopted daughter.
‘You are in turmoil,’ Eleanor says to me one night over honey-roasted carrots, rosemary potatoes and a tofu loaf with meat-free gravy that is actually delicious. ‘You need to trust.’
‘Trust who?’
‘Just trust,’ she says.
‘Mum . . .’ Poppy rolls her eyes.
‘She needs to hear this,’ Eleanor says.
I think of my painting. How I keep stressing over it, and the more I’m stressing, the more messed up it’s getting. In an instant, I see what I have been struggling for so long to work out.
‘Do you mind if I leave the table?’ I say. ‘I just – really need to do something.’
‘Of course,’ Eleanor says. ‘Take your dinner with you.’
My painting is propped on one of Poppy’s easels. I stand and look at it. Then I scrape at the paint until the canvass is showing. I imagine what I want to see there.
And I begin again.
After school I get home and unlock the screen door, then find the front door is locked. I don’t have a key for that door for the very good reason that it’s never locked. Until now.
I knock on the door – once, twice, three times. No answer.
I go and peer in the front window. Dad is out the back, Hecta by his side, watering the vegie beds that have no vegies in them, only weeds. Inside, I can hear Neil Diamond playing full bore.
‘Dad!’ I yell. ‘Open up!’
I bang on the windowpane. Hecta comes rushing from the back, skids across the tiles, and stands looking at me, wagging his tail.
‘Hecta!’ I yell. ‘Get Dad!’
Hecta trots to the door. I can hear him scratching on it. Dad, however, doesn’t notice Hecta’s absence or the fact that I’m banging so hard on the windowpane the whole window is rattling.
‘Come on! Dad!’
I’m busting to go for a wee. I phone Dad’s phone. I can hear it ringing in the bedroom. I call the landline. It rings out. I contemplate whether I should jump over the fence and through the gaping hole Dad made in the shade cloth, but I figure I’m too short.
I go back to banging on the door. If I bang on the window any harder, my fist is going to go through it. I bang and swear. Bang and swear. I text Fiona.
Where are you?
No reply.
I go back to pummelling the door.
By the time Fiona pulls up, my hands are throbbing, and Dad is still out the back. He’s not watering now. God knows what he’s doing.
‘What’s going on?’ Fiona says. ‘I was just at the shops.’
‘Dad’s locked me out,’ I say. ‘My key doesn’t work and I’m busting!’
‘Okay, okay,’ she says. ‘You don’t have to be so hostile.’
‘I’ve been here for ages!’ I say, as Fiona trawls through Mum’s key collection to find the right one.
‘You only texted me five minutes ago,’ she says. ‘You can’t have been here that long.’
Fiona opens the door and I stamp through it. I snap Neil Diamond off, go to the toilet, then go out the back to find Dad.
‘I’ve been knocking on the door for ages!’ I yell. ‘Didn’t you hear me?’
‘Hello, sweetheart,’ Dad says. He’s standing with a beer in his hand, looking at the pond. ‘It’s peaceful out here.’
‘It’s not peaceful out the front when you’re locked out,’ I say. ‘Maybe if you didn’t drink so much your memory would be better!’
‘There’s nothing wrong with my memory,’ Dad says. ‘I’m a bit vague, that’s all.’
‘You’re not fucking vague,’ I scream. ‘You’ve got Alzheimer’s!’
‘Everyone keeps talking about this Alzheimer’s,’ Dad says with a hurt look. ‘But I don’t know what they’re talking about.’
‘Amelia!’ Fiona says, rushing out the back door. ‘Don’t speak to your father like that!’
‘Why not?’ I say. ‘He won’t remember if I do, will he?’
‘Oh my goodness!’ Fiona gasps. ‘What an awful thing to say!’
‘Not as awful as –’ I make a sweeping gesture that covers the backyard, Dad and Fiona herself – ‘this!’
I run inside. I’m hysterical by the time I get to my bedroom. I want to get away, but there’s nowhere to go. Gemma’s still in hospital, and I can’t bear the idea of seeing anyone else. When I finally stumble through my bedroom door, I have a strange moment of not recognising my surroundings.
All my clothes are gone; my books are stacked up on the bookshelf; the mess of papers are now in pink folders along the back of my desk. Even my paints have been collected and stacked in a box. My bed is neat, covered in sheets and a quilt I’ve never seen before.
I stand there, staring, panting, incredulous.
I open my drawers. I take out the folded clothes and throw them in the middle of the floor. I shove the books off of the shelf, tip over the folders, and scrunch up the quilt and throw it on top of everything.
The only things I leave are the paints in the box.
Then I throw myself on the messed-up bed. I lie there until the sky turns completely black and my room is cold. The mattress isn’t soft enough. Everything feels hard and sharp. I can’t think. My mind just keeps repeating two words. Like a mantra.
I wish. I wish. I wish.
But I can’t finish the sentence. Because I can’t think of anything to wish for.
It’s all too late for that.
I have to admit it: our artwork, displayed properly in the Exhibition Hall, looks good. All year you get used to canvases being stacked up against the wall, or objects being crammed on trolleys, or garments hanging on movable racks in a blur of colour. But to see them all hung professionally and owning their own space. Well. It feels, somehow, special.
I like looking at the work of the younger students as well. Every year we do the same tasks, so it’s an exercise in nostalgia, seeing what they have done this year. The leaf paintings. The drawings of hands. The sandstone sculptures of deformed and distorted figures.
Usually Gemma and I walk around, commenting on everyone else’s work. This may include the occasional bitchy comment about people we don’t like, and speculation about what obscene things abstract objects may represent. We also like to imitate the principal, who is the first person who gets to see the exhibition once it’s hung. She gushes in inverse proportion to the amount Ms M criticises.
‘This is remarkable work,’ she’ll say, stopping before the paintings of buildings, or the display of lino cuts, or the clay pieces. ‘Such talented students.’
Gemma pretends to be the principal, and I pretend to be Ms M.
‘That is a remarkable representation of a porcupine,’ Gemma would intone.
‘It’s a pincushion, and it looks like crap,’ I’d snap back. ‘Have you got your glasses on backwards, Henrietta?’
‘What about this, Felicia?’ Gemma would say. ‘Look at the subtle use of shade and tone in this piece.’
‘No, he’s vomited on the canvas and called it a painting,’ I’ll say. ‘How much ecstasy did you take in the eighties, Henrietta?’
‘You’re looking particularly attractive today, Felicia,’ Gemma would say. ‘I’m going to ravish you in the supply cupboard afterward using this object as a dildo, if you don’t mind.’
‘Don’t take that tone with me, Henrietta,’ I’d reply. ‘You’ll be bent over backwards on my desk the way you are every year.’
By this time we are usually leaning against a wall and howling, much to Ms M’s disgust. This year, I try to talk to Poppy about the work, but she doesn’t offer much of an opinion, so I go walking around by myself.
I see the principal, flanked by a deputy on one side and Ms M on the other, examining the artwork. She starts at the year seven area and moves up. She pauses here and there, muttering and nodding. I’m not close enough to hear what she’s saying, but I don’t need to. Her repertoire of art commentary is about as imaginative as her wardrobe. She dresses like she’s a partner in a law firm who is a personal trainer on the weekends, not a teacher surrounded by the great unwashed, aka teenagers. Except that she hardly ever is surrounded: the only time we see her is at assemblies and graduations. And exhibition openings.
The principal pauses when she gets to the self-portraits. Hopefully she’s not staring at the gap where my painting is going to go, once I’ve finished it this weekend. She asks Ms M something. Ms M frowns and replies. One of the deputies also offers something up. This particular deputy is a fat woman whose main role, as far as I can work out, is to give girls detentions for wearing skirts that are too short. They move on.
‘I only got this job because I wanted to be closer to the principal,’ I imagine the deputy saying to Ms M.
‘I don’t think you’re her type,’ I imagine Ms M replying.
‘Are you saying –’
‘Yes,’ Ms M smiles.
The deputy lunges at Ms M and they have a cat fight.
The End.
I sigh. I miss Gemma.
‘Want to come down for bubble tea?’ Poppy asks, making me jump.
‘I have to finish my painting,’ I say.
‘It’s fine the way it is.’
‘It’s not,’ I say.
Not good enough for Ms M, anyway. But I’m not about to say that aloud.
All weekend I paint. I block everything else out: Dad’s muttering, Hecta scratching at my door, and Mum, newly returned from her holiday more stressed than ever, drinking her wine and typing furiously on Facebook. I ignore all of them.
It’s like the reverie I go into when I’m drawing.
It’s just me and what I’m painting.
It’s the submerged chess pieces.
It’s the sea water pouring out of my eyes like tears.
It’s the pelican at the corner of the painting.
It’s the joker outlined in the sand.
It’s my face, half in, half out of the water. My face – half mine, half Dad’s.
The blue of the water and the sky is ominously calm.
I pause for Milo and crackers. Mum goes all out and makes chicken curry, which I barely taste. My head is aching from concentrating and my neck is stiff, but I keep going. I keep going until I’m dreaming the painting and painting my dreams. I don’t know anything except my hand, the brush, the smoothness of paint over canvas. And I finally know: the painting is not only the best thing I’ve ever done – it’s good.
