Chapter 5: All The Things We Don't Discuss
crossing the boundary between childhood and adulthood
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It was one of those bright afternoons that seem to happen so often in youth but grow scarcer as one ages. The sun was a tiger in the sky, obliterating all doubt and misgiving before its glare. This was just as good for me, having spent the night in the warrens of distressed sleep, jolting awake to my own rank existence in the pre-dawn, exhausted.
Now in the mid-afternoon I drowsed in the garden with the bees. It wasn't a tamed place like Auburn's garden with its sections and avenues and misty vistas of grass. This was a savage city paradise, wildflowers struggling to tangle over each other, fighting for space and light to grow. The garden was reclaiming the debris of urban life, the broken glass and desiccated cigarette butts and discarded soft drink bottles.
It luxuriated over trespassers.
My mind wandered, of course, to what it could do to me if I lay there long enough, or if Ranulph's still body had been lying there. I pushed the thought away from my imagination, knowing from past experience where it could take me. As always the action filled me with peace and warm wellbeing. I lay down in the whispering grasses.
Dreams about Ranulph were nipping away at my insides like cancer. Under the broad square of sky I found my way back to the path of my thoughts and I remembered where I was. I hadn't felt so whole in weeks.
The sounds of the metropolis curled in around me. There were many I hadn't heard before.[1] Underneath it all there was the rumble of the lorries on the quays and the steady fall and echo of the footsteps of passersby. They came together, murmuring endlessly like the rivers that wound deep in the earth beneath the city. I wanted to see those secret streams someday. Their names struck me like words from another civilisation.
Small birds fluttered back and forth from a holly tree to a slope of roof that jutted from the building. I followed them with my eyes for a few minutes before I realised that they were practicing their flying. I was glad to know that even wild creatures took such particular care of their young.
The tiny whelps tumbled from the nest and back up again. It must have been terrifying to learn to fly like that under the baleful stares of their siblings. Children are wicked creatures. Ranulph had spurned my adoration, subjecting it to ridicule whenever he could and wherever he chose.
There had been a garden party in a grand house that was very far off and exotic when we were children. I had been excited about the excursion for weeks, as had my twin sister Sarah.
We had practiced our manners in the schoolroom after lessons had ended. Sometimes our governess joined in, pouring imaginary tea and acting the lower servant. In retrospect she must have been as bored in that house as we were ourselves. Sarah rejoiced in makebelieve, just as she still does. Like a shadow, she takes on the character of others.
While the governess stood aside with her hands folded, we prattled our please and thank yous to each other, enquiring as to the weather and the state of the government (our parents' favourite topics at the time).
Another thing I remember was the governess adjusting Sarah's posture, pulling her chin up and shoulders back with her anaemic freckled hands. She let me alone but in deference to Sarah I copied them.
We sat ramrod straight all afternoon and knew that that we were grownups. This would be a feeling repeated over and over as we approached our teenage years -
Is this the line
to cross
to adulthood?
Or is it this? Is it my first taste
of alcohol? Is it
the first time
I ignore
my alarm clock?
Is it in
the first lie
I tell? Or is this it,
writing our story now, for strangers?
At last the day came. We donned or new clothes with merriment unmatched since Christmas. Our parents piled us into the larger car and I danced my legs against the wide seat, gaping past my mother as she sat opposite, distracted by the driver's gleaming bald head. That day had been very much like this one in temperament, the sun all-knowing.
The sun peeped from the severe part in Ranulph's hair, maybe emanating from the bone-white scalp skin that lay naked. Even my parents glittered that day. They seemed to like each other more than before or since.
Sarah and I were installed at a children's table with other well-dressed offspring of wealthy or titled couples.[2] To our disgust, Ranulph was seated beside our mother at the big grown up's table. We vowed to have our revenge and swore to never speak to him again.
Being left to our own devices was heaven itself I must admit. No fussy governess or lingering servants or even the distant voices of our parents disturbed us. I say distant because in those years they were. They might have been stars in outer space for all we had to do with them. At the time they were devoting all of their attentions to Ranulph.
And how did our brother dearest rebuff us that day, you might be asking; what cruel and usual torments did he inflict upon his twin siblings? Dear reader, it was his silence. He never once so much as spared us a glance all that long afternoon; and that was the keenest betrayal of all.
It had been very much the three of us in our own world until that sweltering afternoon. Adults seldom wandered into our safe haven of silly pranks and make-believe games. That afternoon marks the first disappearance of our brother. He had stepped across the threshold into adulthood and went ways that we could not follow.
He was obscured to us ever after this; I never saw the person I recognised as Ranulph again. This was years, of course, before his frequent absences, the alabandical parties, the shouts in the night, his harsh-voiced friends. This was years before his most majestic illusion, his famed everlasting vanishing act.
The bark of the doorbell wrenched me from the grass, wondering who on earth it could be, noticing all kinds of infinitesimal details now in the brickwork around the front door, a woodlouse, a cobweb out of reach, a name scrawled in chalk. I should have suspected -
Ryan stood in the street with his hands in his pockets, craning his neck back to gaze up the three stories of my home to its flat roof.
"Oh hey man," he exclaimed when I opened the door, as though I'd surprised him, "how's it goin'? Wos de story, horse?"
Not understanding his jabberwocky I stood back to allow him in, locking the door shut behind him, kicking us both into comparative darkness.
"Love what you've done with the place man," Ryan said, strolling right on in, making himself immediately at home, heading for the kitchen area and opening drawers, testing the taps.
"Yes," I agreed, "and yes; everything does work."
"Yeah I can see that a'right man, that's deadly altogether like, I'd been a bit a-scared they'd-a ripped y' off like but it's sound anyways. Deadly."
Not worried enough for my coffers to come here to supervise the renovations, I thought to myself in ignominy as he pulled a wrinkled paper bag from his pocket saying, "Gotcha bit of a house warmin' pressie. It's on'y small like."
"Oh thank you so much," I fumbled as I opened the little package, "I really wasn't - "
It was a sachet of looseleaf tea and a tea-strainer, bound together in an approximation of a bow with what I can only describe as perhaps a ribbon from a chocolate manufacturer. My cheeks glowed warm and vision disjoined itself from my body.
"So kind of you," I stammered, "very - " I was interrupted by the size of my words as they drifted away from my body, glimmering and floating higher in a lazy way that had me rapt.
"Ah now - "
"No," I said, smearing some stray water from my tear ducts which was making them clog up, "Thank you." I cleared my throat, inspecting my fingers. "Apologies. Dust." We smiled at each other. I looked down at the tea and back up again with what I hope was a vivacious expression and asked if he'd care to partake with me. He assented with enthusiasm and then, for reasons I cannot imagine, seemed a little underwhelmed when I clicked the kettle on.
"Yeah go on then," he said, "I drink tae all the time meself. Mornin', noon n' night."
We sat out in a sunny room to drink our tea, eyeing the bees in silence. How I wished it was a comfortable silence, but it wasn't; we were no longer certain where to go now that the small talk formalities were dispensed with.
So you might understand how I was taken aback the following day to open the front door and discover Ryan there again, with his car, asking me 'out into town'. I had thought I already lived in town but clearly I didn't know anything. My mind spun through a thousand different items I should perhaps bring with me[3] but I ended up climbing into Ryan's car with nothing but my wallet and house keys. It felt delicious to be so light.
The seraphic sky wasn't judging us, for no bad dreams could follow anybody out into that all-pervasive blue. After so many days and nights of low clouds the sun embraced us.
I closed my eyes and raised my face up to it, as were many foot passengers on the streets.
Perhaps the winter was finally ending.
[1] The distant giggle of an ice-cream truck; the incomprehensible shouts of the children from the flats all around; a passing horse; far-off sirens.
[2] We hid our disappointment at them behind our hands. Our manners meant nothing to them.
[3] What if it rained? what if I was too warm? what if I was thirsty? what if I didn't come home tonight?