Don’t Play With Your Hair at the Table, Dear, It Isn’t Nice
by Debi Hamilton
The year my sister was packed off to boarding school, Nathan and I learned
to keep our heads down. We were talking about it only last night.
We hadn’t met up since Dad’s funeral and the first thing I noticed about
him was the knife-sharpness of the creases he had ironed into his jeans. I
briefly tried to remember when and where I’d last seen my iron, but gave up
as I stood to subject myself to one of Nathan’s hugs, which was all tight
clasping at chest level and a farcical retraction at hip level.
“Shit the traffic’s bad out there,” he said. Maybe turning forty had got to
him, loosened a lock or two.
“You’re looking well,” I said.
Something about him had softened.
Maybe he’d put on a little weight, and his hair was definitely longer.
“What’re you having?” He took out his wallet, as if offering to pay for
our drinks was an adequate acknowledgement of the compliment I’d paid him.
“Have you heard from Sharon?” he asked when he returned from the
bar.
“Not for months. And you?”
“You’ve got to be kidding!” He ran his hand through his hair.
Nathan has a cowlick, and I sat watching it while he sucked the froth
from his beer. I don’t know where the cowlick came from—no-one else in the
family has one, not even our cheerless progenitors whose black and white
scowls we used, as children, to examine in the heavy clothbound albums that
were kept in the cupboard under the stairs.
The hair springing from the
cowlick was now peppered with grey, but this didn’t detract from his
boyishness, much.
“How’s Robyn?” I asked, more out of politeness than interest—
Nathan’s wife was a featureless kind of woman who had, in the absence of
children, devoted her spare time to a laborious investigation of her family tree.
I’d seen her study last time I’d visited them.
She’d made a frieze that
extended around all four walls, attesting to the extraordinary success of
sexual reproduction. Of course there was the little dead end where her name
was joined by a black line to Nathan’s. I never asked how they felt about that
dead end—whether it was voluntarily chosen—and they never offered.
“She’s at a workshop at the State Library,” he said.
“Oh?” I’d asked how, not where, she was.
He drank more of his beer, then ran his hand through his hair again. I
hadn’t seen this gesture since, decades ago, Dad used to give us a
dinnertime grilling over what we were reading for school. As if, without his
constant monitoring, we were incapable of comprehending and appreciating
the offerings of our education. See Me In My Office nights, I used to call
them. I adapted and rehearsed, extemporising where necessary.
Nathan
never learned to. He’d be caught out afresh, every Monday and Wednesday
evening, trying to give an account of Thomas Hardy, or the precipitating
events of the Rum Rebellion.
“Just make stuff up!” I’d furiously will him in my head, but he never did
anything other than stammer and run his fingers through his hair. Perhaps
that’s where his cowlick comes from.
“Don’t play with your hair at the table, dear,” Mum would say. “It isn’t
nice.”
“It’s a gabfest about their online history resources,” he said.
Gabfest? Ouch. Was all not well in Marriage Land?
“Are you having an affair?” I said.
I’d drunk my gin and tonic too
quickly.
“Why on earth would you ask me that?” he said. Fair call, I thought.
But he looked surprised, not annoyed.
“Oh, no particular reason. Sorry. It just slipped out. You’re looking
more—”
“—relaxed?”
Unruly was the word I think I wanted, in spite of the fierce ironing, but
relaxed would do.
“Robyn’s been a bit … unavailable lately.”
“That’s cryptic.”
“Another drink?” he said.
“My turn,” I said, fishing around for my purse.
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I came back with the next round and he blathered for a while about
Robyn’s increasing involvement in the family tree stuff. I could hardly interrupt
to ask my brother whether this was all code for the death of sex in his
marriage, so I did my best to stay focused on the ins and outs of long nights at
the computer, unexpected emails, and the odd appearance of unknown
cousins. I began to suspect that he was about as interested in all of Robyn’s
Friends and Relations as I was. The sun was setting over the furniture shop
across the road, and I was hungry.
“Do you fancy eating here?” I said.
We adjourned to the dining room.
A bottle of Shiraz appeared.
I
couldn’t tell you which of us ordered it.
“You’ll have to get a cab home,” I said.
“If I go home.”
“Where else might you go?”
He shrugged, examining the menu closely.
After we’d ordered we talked harmlessly for a while about our jobs, the
latest political news and how his new car was going. I’d never owned a new
car, and I wondered what it would be like––whether the shininess of it would
get me past the horror of burning bundles of hundred dollar notes as I drove it
out of the dealer’s.
“I saw Sharon in a BMW last time I was here,” he said suddenly.
“You didn’t tell me!” I said.
“No.”
“So how do you know it was hers? She could have been taking a
friend’s car somewhere for some reason.” I couldn’t see Sharon in a BMW.
How did that go with her arty, hippy poverty?
“It had personalized plates—Shaz.”
Perhaps this is a good time to let you in on a bit of back story. Our older
sister Sharon was trouble. She seemed to have arrived from another planet.
Mum and Dad were so straight they could have been produced in a
ruler factory. Sharon set about putting bumps in everything. She wouldn’t
keep her things tidy, she was always ripping her clothes or losing her shoes—
climbing trees, tearing down to the beach on her bike—and she challenge
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everything. I mean, everything. If we were asked to wash our hands before
dinner, she’d ask “Why?” You need to understand that none of this was done
in a spirit of challenge or resentment. It was just that Sharon was intense
about the meaning of everything. She would only do things that made sense
to her––she wouldn’t wash her hands before dinner if it was just a thing nice
people did, but she scrubbed herself thoroughly once she was told about
germs.
She brought home stray dogs, both real and metaphorical, and she
would only do school homework that had a clear purpose.
“How many grownups have you seen colouring in?” she’d ask, throwing
the teacher’s worksheet in the bin. But get her to draw a plan of her ideal
classroom, or use mathematical principles to calculate how long it would take
to get somewhere, and you couldn’t stop her. By the age of eleven, I cottoned
on to the fact that Dad’s See Me In My Office questions were always carefully
tailored for Sharon. I might be asked to recite the colours of the rainbow in
order, but Sharon would get “If one cake takes forty minutes to cook, how long
would it take to cook three cakes?” I resented this special treatment.
Anyway, it all was kind of manageable until Sharon hit puberty, which
she did almost overnight not long after her thirteenth birthday. One day it was
all careful rationales for domestic rules and minor struggles about leaving toys
lying about; the next, it was full-on storm clouds. I had no idea what was
happening, other than that something was keeping Sharon in the bathroom for
inconveniently long periods, and that there was a lot of door slamming and
furious whispered conversations.
Sharon stopped riding her bike, singing around the house, and talking
to us. It was only when I hit puberty myself and Dad prohibited me from bike
riding that I realised what had started it all. I coped; Sharon couldn’t bear it.
Our house became a difficult place to live. Mum went on anaemically
declaiming from the book of etiquette and Dad went on being a bully in
paterfamilias clothing, but with Sharon holed up in her bedroom it became
clear how much her joyful chaos had kept us balanced.
One night the doorbell woke us all up. My bedside clock told me it was
2.04 am.
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“Mr McColl?” Two young police officers were standing on the front
porch with Sharon propped between them. She looked shocking.
“Yes?” Dad straightened his shoulders.
“Is this young woman your daughter?”
She clearly was, but I think all of us had trouble acknowledging the
idea. For one thing, she looked vacant and unsteady, and for another, until
that minute we had all—or so I believed at the time—thought she was tucked
up in bed asleep.
Nathan and I did our best to eavesdrop at the kitchen door, but didn’t
hear much beyond the second police officer saying, “How about putting the
kettle on, Mrs McColl?” before Dad came storming out.
“Go on, you two. If I catch you out here again there’ll be trouble. This
is none of your business.”
Sharon was in bed for days, except for Mum getting her up briefly to
take her to some appointment. Later that week, another police officer, this
time in plain clothes, came and holed up with Mum, Dad and Sharon in Dad’s
study for an hour.
Sharon stayed out of school for the next few weeks, and at the
beginning of second term she went off to boarding school in Melbourne.
“Shaz,” I repeated. I gulped at my wine, as if it would help me digest this
apparent change in our sister’s fortunes.
“You’re jealous, aren’t you?” Nathan said.
“No, I don’t think so.”
“You never liked her, did you? Always being Miss Clever and keeping
your nose clean.”
“I loved her!” How could he think otherwise? “Where’s this coming
from, Nat?”
“You were so good at keeping under Dad’s radar, deflecting his shit
onto us.”
“But Dad used to let Sharon off the hook on See Me In My Office
nights!”
“On what nights?”
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“You remember. How he used to quiz us over dinner every Monday
and Wednesday.”
“No!”
“You must! I still can’t sit down to dinner with other people on Monday
and Wednesday nights without coming over all hot and anxious.”
“Or Thursdays, it would seem.”
“You’re being weird. I can’t believe you don’t remember.”
“What I remember is Sharon taking bullets for me. You didn’t know
that, did you?”
“What?”
“When I was really little I sometimes used to wet the bed. I’d go in and
tell Sharon and she’d swap me her dry sheets and stuff and cover up for me.”
“Why?”
“You don’t remember how keen Dad was to make a man of me? I was
his last hope in having the masculine McColl line go on.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Well he was. If I was caught wetting the bed he’d go berko, call me
Little Sissy. But if Sharon came out with wet sheets and some story he’d let it
go.
He might shout, but he never belted her.
Just let Mum fire up the
washing machine and keep the house nice.”
“He belted you?”
“Yeah. Like you didn’t know.”
“Is that why you wouldn’t give a speech at his funeral?”
“And the rest.”
“The rest of what?”
“You really don’t know, do you?”
“So tell me.”
“Remember the night the police brought Sharon home?”
“I’ll never forget it.”
“How do you think she got out without being noticed? Dad could hear
the sound of footsteps in the hallway even in a thunderstorm.”
This was true. I’d tip-toed past their bedroom late one night to get a
schoolbook from the lounge room, and on my way back, there was Dad,
asking what I thought I was doing sneaking around the house in the dark.
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Nathan poured us both some more wine.
“I used to come into her room and put the flyscreen back on for her
after she’d climbed out. When she came home again, she’d scratch at my
window and I’d go to her room and let her in again.”
“You mean this was a regular thing?”
“She told me she just needed some fresh air, some space. She said
Dad was crushing her. That’s the word she used. Crushing.”
“Nat, what’s wrong?”
“She could’ve died that night. And I was the one who let her out.”
I dug around in my bag and handed him a tissue. “You’d better fill me
in,” I said.
“Sharon came in and talked to me the night before she went off to that
horrible boarding school. She told me she’d met some boys and they seemed
OK. They sat in the park—you know, the one behind the primary school in
Rose Avenue—and they gave her a drink.”
Now he was frankly crying. “She said they also gave her some pills,
and while she was out of it, they did stuff.”
“Please don’t tell me what.” I felt sick.
“Well, she came to and heard one of them suggesting she be given a
few more pills, make everything look like an accident. But one of the boys
was upset, and made them sit her up on a park bench and call the police to
come and find her.”
“But why wasn’t anyone charged?
And why would they send her
away?”
“Huh.
I thought you’d have got that already. They didn’t want the
shame. The idea that someone might stand up in a public court and reveal
that the McColls weren’t … nice.”
“But Dad loved us, for all his authoritarian shit!”
“I’m not sure he knew how.”
“What do you mean?”
“A few months ago, Robyn was babbling on about her family tree stuff
and I said something about how my own family tree didn’t really interest me.
No it wouldn’t, she’d said. And I asked what she meant and she said, Well
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Sharon has brown eyes and your parents both had blue eyes and I said So
what, and she told me, as if I were really dumb for not knowing.”
“You’ll have to explain that to me,” I said. He did.
“Did Dad know?”
“Well, he taught Biology, if you remember.”
We sat in silence for a really long time. So much water under so many
stupid bridges. So much rewriting in my head.
Then we both spoke at the same time.
“That means Mum—”.
“I am having an affair—” he said.
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