Ngrimmirra
My sister comes home the summer I turn eleven. Her name is Nya, but they don't call her that in
the city. She likes to be called Nicole. She thinks it’s a pretty name but my mother doesn't look at
her the same when she says that. Mama likes Nya because it was chosen for her grandmother, not
the name our father wanted for her but the name Mama chose all the same.
Nya has her hair done, straight and dark into a ponytail that sits with the help of a load of hairspray,
and her feet are in a pair of delicate pink shoes, that prop her heels off the floor. She’s wearing a
white sundress, and a broad hat.
When we come to pick her up at the train station, Mama makes a sound deep in the back of her
throat and almost scoffs. She would never, too practical, waste her time on foolish things like
scorn. She has spent too long living on someone else’s time to do that, but the thought remains,
and it sits in the space between us.
I have to sit in the back seat of the car, a late eighties model that is a little rusty, but drives well at
least after Uncle Rob fixed it last summer, and made it drive smooth and easy along any type of
road, and it stays well above it - which is one of the most important things out here. The low-down,
city cars aren’t at all useful when there isn’t a nice, hard, bitumen road and you have to drive on a
dirt track. Nya sits in the front, her suitcase beside me, her legs folded prim and proper, the white
skirt playing at her knees. They’re clean for once, with not even a mark on them, and the only sign
that remains of the girl she once was is the slightly puckered skin, a little paler, on her left knee,
just above the kneecap, from where she got into a fight with one of the girls in school (Mandy, who
had yanked a pink ribbon out of her hair and thought she deserved it because she was lighter, and
therefore, brighter) and pushed the girl to the floor, only to end up on top of her and driving her own
knee into a piece of broken glass on the floor. She still won the fight.
I ask Nya about school in the city. She says it’s different there, but doesn’t seem to think anything
else about it, or at least nothing she wants to say to me.
“You’re not getting into any trouble there, are ya?” Mama asks, turning her head from where her
hands are heavy on the wheel. “There’s a lot more boys in the city. And pubs.”
“I don’t go to any pubs,” Nya says, wrinkle her nose delicately, her words scornful. “The girls and I
go to the clubs sometimes, but mostly we go out to dinner. Besides, I work at the store most of the
time, and between that and studying, I’ve barely got the time to think, let alone go out and find
boys. It’s too much of a hassle.”
Mama doesn’t say anything.
After awhile, Nya pushes a CD into the player - a new one, that’s barely got any dust on it, let
alone a scratch, and plays Lauryn Hill, even while Mama makes faces the whole way about this
type of new music that she’s far from a fan of. City music, she calls it, and she likes country and
rock only, the kind that plays on the two radio stations out here, thirty songs over and over and
over.
By the time we pull up the road on the way towards our house, it’s late and billowing and there’s
dirt and sand being tossed everywhere.
When Nya gets out, her dress is splattered in it almost immediately, and Mama lets out a small
smile, vindictive in her reassurance that she knows better as always, an I told you so she doesn’t
voice. Her whole dress is stained red now, her hat nearly coming off her head. Despite that, she
looks more than just elegant, slim and slender, her wrists slight on the squeaky wooden gate,
clumsily painted blue, and places her fingers on the mango tree’s leaves, just for a second. They’re
starting to bear fruit, thick and heavy and yellow, round like the moon, perfect for twisting off with
gentle hands. Nya’s hands look like they’re itching with the desire to, but despite the months she’s
spent with inferior fruit: bananas and apricots and strawberries, she doesn’t reach for one. Instead
she twists the door handle halfway right, and then all the way left, and pushes the yellow door
open.
She steps softly into the house, the place flooded bright and gold, almost red, with the sunshine,
highlighting every cobweb and piece of dust that might dare to be present in the room, all even
after hours of cleaning. I wonder if she likes it, or if this place is another shameful memory she tries
to get rid of, with its dull walls of off-white whitewash and its silent memories of the men and the
dreams and the ghosts.
She never fully enters the house, her body between the door, eyes caught on something I can’t
see.
Moments later, she walks out, leaving Mama and I to stand in the room, almost chilly, as the sun
goes down and the wind comes in. She moves all the way to the end of the road, and faces the
sea, only a kilometre away, watching it come in and out and in and out, and the leaves of the trees
sway with the weight of the fruit that hangs heavily. She doesn’t look real, looks like a statue,
staring out to sea, something from the past that no longer belongs, is now crumbling into the sea.
It breathes all around her, comes alive at the sight of her skin glowing slightly in the sunshine and
her hair hanging long and thick and dark in a braid down her back, the hairs lighting up gold and
moving slightly in the breeze, and when Nya sighs, her whole body moves with it.
———
Nya stays away all of the next year, and returns only in the summer the following year.
She’s paler now, after months of city sun, but comes back with a promotion at her job as well as
top of her class awards.
She takes me to the beach for once, and sits there, only watching. She wears blue, is solemn and
nineteen to my twelve, a pretty dress with sleeves for once. She sits with her feet in the water,
watching it lap at her ankles until they’re wet. She stands in the sand until they sink in, covering her
feet in the tiny pieces of shells, the sand thick and heavy, licking between her toes, until pieces are
resting along the top of her toenails and in the hollows beneath her ankle bone.
I lie in the water in my underwear and watch the sun slip between the thin ribbons of the white
cloud, glide back and forth. The sun glimmers in the water, sliding over the chipped pink nail polish
of my left hand.
After awhile, the water tires me, even just floating weightless along its top, and I drag my self to lie
mostly naked beside her on the sand.
Nya is wearing a sunhat with a broad brim. She looks like one of those women from the
magazines, they sell in town, that wear white blouses, wide pants, red lipstick with heels and
pearls, that walk through grey streets in busy, anonymous cities. They look classy in the way that
Mama likes, or at least has never in the world mocked. In Mama’s case, that’s almost as good as
outright approval. She likes the lack of fuss they have - without ribbons and bows and frilly skirts,
but also acknowledges that there’s no point in dressing like that here, and means that she frowns
at Nya’s clothes.
Sometimes, when we walk down the street, for all our skin being the exact same shade, no one
recognises us in one another. With her pretty long hair, mostly straight in brown, eyes that
glimmered bright gold, and features that were delicate, with a pretty slim and upturned nose, and
cheekbones that were clearly defined, even a slight blush on her cheeks, she sticks out around
here. She has something that makes everyone watch the swish in her walk, the way she stands on
the sand, or when she reaches up to pull a mango off a tree, or pull in the nets which have been
used to gather hundreds of fish - the tiny and large and medium sized, flapping dully between thin
black cords, their fins golden in the sun and blue against the white.
In contrast, I’m too wide set across the face to ever be called exotic and too dark to ever be called
pretty.
Everything about Nya glitters, and I want it so bad in this moment as I look up at her, this pretty city
girl with the world in her hands. The only thing dragging her down is this small town, this tiny dot in
the middle of nowhere, filled with the scent of the salt and the mangoes and stunning with the
weight of hundreds that call her cousin and don’t look a goddamn thing like her.
“Do you miss it?” I ask suddenly, raking at the sand beside us with my right hand until the pieces
collect in the crevice between skin and nail, the sun heavy and oppressive.
“Miss what?” Nya turns her head to look down at me, her eyes shaded by the hat.
“Home,” I say, push my hand against the skin of my leg, up towards my knee until the sand falls
out. “Here.”
“Sure,” she says, and looks out towards the sea, further than the horizon.
When I was a child, at five or six or seven, what I always believed was that if I could see five
kilometres ahead, Nya could see ten. I wonder if she can see far enough out to the islands that rest
beyond the horizon, mysterious for the fact that I’ve never had any interaction with them: never
been there, or seen them, or even a person from there. Even though there are books and
newspaper articles all about them, They are not yet know to me, because I’ve never known even a
single piece of them intimately. Foreign until my interaction with them is personal. As mythical as
Atlantis. For a moment I wonder if someone could swim out to them, all the way out, the kilometres
and kilometres, if there’s a strong enough swimmer in the whole world, if they rest in this tiny
village. I decide that if there was a strong enough swimmer, they would be from this land, because
we were all born from blood and water and heat. Raised in the water, we say. Some women even
giving birth in the sea. I was placed in the water before I turned one.
“I miss you mostly baby,” she says, and pats my hand, turning her head back towards the water.
———
Next year’s summer is spent in tears.
Mama’s sister passes slowly, and then quickly, like a leaky house that starts to drip and then one
day the whole roof collapses, and ruins all that is in the space and leaves everyone left around
picking up the pieces, finding the salvageable furniture, throwing the rest in a huge pile that will
need to be burnt off. Leaves the ones left watching their home become nothing more than a
crumble of bricks and chipped wood, lying on the road, the tree they planted in the front yard
broken halfway down.
Nya misses the train home. She doesn’t make it to the funeral.
It doesn’t matter, because by the time it is over Mama can’t see a thing. She wails, heavy and deep
and weeping, the way our women always do.
At funerals, the thing that you have to remember that they’re for the living. That’s what Nya said at
my father’s funeral. That he’s in a better place, and it doesn’t matter, because it’s all done for the
ones left behind. The whole time, I was perfectly fine. I didn’t let out a single tear for the whole
funeral, until the second that the wailing started. That’s what gets you. It’s what makes you know
that you’re going to have a lonely, desperate month, scrambling for hope and comfort, because it’s
just such a terrible sound, awful and tragic and terrifying, something otherworldly. The kind of noise
that shakes you to your bones and makes you want to weep hopelessly into the night, claw at your
skin and your hair until you are crawling out of your body. That’s what I remember about the
funeral, a hundred or so women crying for her, loving her more in death than they had ever in life.
It’s always easier to give to the dead, who do not demand anything than to give to the living, who
want and need constantly.
Mama sits outside, her hand clutched to her chest, breathing softly, shallowly enough that she
faints three times over the course of summer. I find her sitting on the wooden seat she and her
sister had made when they were kids, of heavy pieces driftwood they lifted from the mangroves
and the sea, and their father’s nails, and the rope their mother had kept in the shed that they
weren’t meant to touch.
I bring her tea and biscuits, tell her when to go to bed.
Nya barely knows what to do with herself. My beautiful, sophisticated sister seems barely there,
watching the water, waiting for it to come in. Half there, her dresses around her ankles and
dragging on the road and the dirt and half a degree clinging to her hands with blue ink that draws
half letters onto them.
Mama watches her watching the world, but doesn’t say a word to her.
This summer they don’t speak to each other except in silences. I’m caught between them in a
silent argument I can’t begin to understand.
The aunties all gossip about her. They says she’s got a boy back in the city, someone with nice
hair, or a car, or a job. They say she’s sad because she misses him, and I shake my head and
insists that there is no one, because if there is, Nya would tell me. Nya and I tell each other
everything, I insist to all my cousins and their mothers. Jimmy makes a joke about how she might
not be telling me because there are certain things you don’t tell your kid sister. His mouthing off
forces me to get up from where I’m sitting in the sand and kick him for her sake, which end up with
the pair of us play wrestling and him trying to throw me off, until one of the aunty’s pulls me off, and
his girlfriend pulls him away.
When I get home, Mama doesn’t say a word about me or my face or the way it’s blooming into a
bruise, unfurling into a purple flower, like the tattoo on Margaret-in-town’s back, curling up onto her
spine and neck.
Nya winces when she sees my face, and brings a pack of ice, scrapes extra from the side of the
fridge and places it against the hot skin, and tells me to sit down on the couch, even though I’m still
wet from the beach, putting a ratty towel down before I sit there.
She brings me a glass of lemonade, from the bottle she brought with her last time she was in town,
sickly sweet and with cubes of mango in it, and watches me as I swing my legs back and forth
along the edge of the couch.
“Train wreck girl,” Nya says, and her voice has the edge that means she’s scolding me in the way
eldest daughters learn how to do before they know anything else, but her face is soft and
hopelessly fond. “What am I going to do with you, huh?”
She puts a hand over her face then, and leans back against the chair, shakes her head in her
hand. I drink the lemonade, until it’s weak from the ice cubes and watch her.
Nya lets out a shriek of laughter that’s shrill and has an unfamiliar edge to it, dangerous, before
she smiles softly at me, glimmering eyes taking me in.
“The girls at school asked me if I was getting an arranged marriage,” she says then, confiding in a
way I so rarely hear nowadays, with her so far away.
“Didn’t you tell them that nothing in this family is arranged?” I ask.
She laughs at me, soft and slow.
“I don’t think they know what it means,” she says. “When I say this is where I’m from and this is
where I am. They don’t understand what it means to be not like them.”
It’s hard to fathom. The kids at school are all pretty much my cousins, and we know each other’s
mothers. We know where each one of us begins and ends and where we overlap. I can’t imagine
the world away, can barely comprehend the lives of the people on the telly, living in surfing towns
or in the big American cities where everything seems to be a never ending stream of big buildings
and bigger streets. I’ve only gone outside this little village into Darwin once in my whole life, when
my father took me before I was five, and all I remember is eating ice cream and buying red shoes.
“You’re not different,” I say. “You’re just like everyone here.”
Her face breaks then, just for a moment. Looks at me, pleading for my understanding for
something I cannot begin to comprehend. I hold still.
Nya laughs then, again, as if the idea that she is like us is ridiculous.Her strange mood, fills the
whole house, bubbles out of it and froths onto the streets, brushes the bottom of Mama’s feet until
she wakes up and comes back inside, and looks at us both, and chases me off her couch, still wet
from the seawater and in a shrill voice, tells the both of us off. Behind her, Nya makes a face that
sets me off giggling, and her running from Mama as she threatens to take her shoe to both of our
legs.
———
Nya comes halfway through the summer, the next year.
I have to pick her up and call her every time I want to talk to her. She won’t talk to Mama, but won’t
tell me why, not after how she left. When she picked up a faded photography from twenty or so
years ago, and held it out to Mama, and I got sent down the street to my aunty’s. Not when the
shouts and screams and sobs exploded through the whole street, and I went home the next
morning and only found a letter left for me. She says she’s not coming home, until I plead and beg
with her to come home, to bring all her stories of the city and the wealth that swallows it with her.
She finally does, on a Sunday, and Mama refuses to pick her up from the train station.
She says it’s because she has to go to church, but normally we go to the early service at seven
thirty. Instead, that Sunday, she sleeps in and goes to the nine o’clock service. Nya hitches a ride
back from the station with our cousin Jimmy who likes to spend all his money filling up his new car
(from a cousin who runs a dealership in the city) with fuel and driving around, showing off for all the
girls who might see him, forgetting that we all knew him as kids, and know what he looks like when
his Mama scolds him after church for everyone to hear.
She stays with Aunt Eileen, who’s always been good to the two of us, even though she’s not a big
fan of Mama.
Mama tries to keep me in the house with her, doing chores, but eventually I slip out the back of the
house and two streets down to Aunt Eileen’s, where Nya is sitting out the back, a pair of
sunglasses glinting in stained plastic and gold on the bridge of her nose, looking the picture of
glamour in a village that doesn’t even know what the word means.
I run towards her, and she picks me up into a hug and twirls me around and around, even though
I’m nearly her exact height, and probably weigh more than her.
Aunty Eileen stands at the back door, and watches us both, drying off some dishes with one hand,
and waves to me. Nya and I sit on the back porch and watch the way everything seems to drift in
this place, the leaves that flutter back and forth, and then settles in the exact same place as they
begun. It’s the kind of heat that’s wet, means you should be almost, if not completely, naked, stand
in the sun and let the water come to your knees, or lie on your back and let your hair spread
around your face in tiny little curls.
In the background, Aunty Eileen chops through fish heads with a huge knife that’s slightly blunt
which means she pushes her whole weight into it. The quiet we share isn’t quiet, nothing here ever
is out of the water. It’s only when you sink your head below the water line, and your ears plug with
it that you can finally understand soundless, with only your pulse for company. It’s punctuated by
the sound of kids riding down the side of the road, laughing hysterically and loudly, by the scream
of cars being driven at rapid acceleration, wheels scraping against faded, pale , cracked, bitumen
roads, by the bugs that skitter in the thick crawl of shrubbery and ground plants that lie on the floor
and sneak in at night to bite at soft skin.
“Are you going to come back?” I ask eventually, when the sun sets on us and turns the world the
red that you dream about all wet season long. “Come home?”
Nya makes a sound in the back of her throat. “Maybe. It’s complicated though, baby.”
“What’s complicated?” I ask. “It’s home and you’re part of our family. You belong there.”
“Yeah,” Nya says. “But it’s more than that.”
“What more is there?” I ask, and my words are angry and bitter, tired of my older sister not being
there even when she was right in front of me and I narrow my eyes. “You just don’t want to come
home!”
I stomp off towards home, ignore her calls after me, and when it sounds like Nya is about to follow,
run through the streets until I’ve come near the mangroves, which skitters and creaks under the
weight of the night and watch the moon rise slowly, the sky perfectly clear, and bright on the water
and my skin.
The frustration builds in me and I grasp at sticks, throw them into the water and watch them sink. In
a fit of anger, I jab one into the trunk of the tree and watch the sap dribble down the tiny hole
slowly, a red that’s almost gold, and sink into the dirt below, staining it like a crime scene. I’m filled
with shame almost immediately, and it burns at my ears and the back of my neck, and I flee the
hollow between the two trees, leave the stick in the trunk, the sap spurting out periodically, and try
to ignore the voice that sounds like Nya that tells me the old stories, tells me I should be ashamed,
should beg for forgiveness for my actions, should announce my sins to the whole town.
Back home, Mama is making fish stew for dinner.
The scent slides into the living room, and she piles it onto my plate, giving me the fish eye. It’s
what Nya and I normally fight over, and she’ll claim half the time because she ’s always been taller
than me and can shove me back harder. Half the time I end up with it though, which she says is
because I was shorter and slight and could slip in and around her to get in. Really though, it is
mostly because she ends up giving it to me, out of a misguided sense of duty, or even because
she misses me in the city.
I push the fish eye guiltily to the side. After yelling at Nya and my tantrum I hardly deserve it, and
even swallowing the stew, it sits heavy and awkward in my stomach, like the shells that wash up,
prickly and rough and unwanted. The eye lies there, looking at me until I feel so sick that I can no
longer force anything else down my throat. Mama looks at me in confusion, wondering how after a
year of eating as much as I can get my hands on and growing all over I can barely swallow three
mouthfuls.
Nya is only going to stay for three weeks. After two days of sulking around the house in the heat to
avoid her, I go over to the beach and find her sitting by herself.
The other cousins leave her alone for the most part, not sure what to do with the girl they once
used to fight with. That means she’s sitting on the beach, reading. She looks like she could be on
the telly and the thought almost makes me laugh, and I sit next to her.
“Hi.”
“Hi,” she says back, and waits.
There’s an boy practicing the yidaki nearby, his hands moving over the worn wood slowly. He
sounds careful, not the way the uncles who’ve been doing it their whole life do, but like it’s difficult,
a struggle that he has to constantly rise to. It makes it more beautiful than normal to listen to, to
hear when fragile notes give way to the strong and thick notes that ring out through the open
space, carry across the water. The way it grows with time, falls back down and is picked up again.
We sit for awhile. I don’t want to say sorry, and she doesn’t want to explain herself, but we sit in
silence, watch and wait. So much of our time together is marked by not speaking. That’s the
difference between when she’s away and here. When she’s away our time together is littered by
conversation about anything and everything; school and work and mutual friends and people that
we don’t know but still want to share with each other. When we sit next to one another it’s like
Nya’s almost never left, like she’s been in the bed next to mine the whole time, and we still go to
church every Sunday and watch the priest speak to dozens of women in pastel sweating beneath
their broad hats, the ones that are carefully hung up or put away in boxes as soon as they get
home. Or like we still make it out to the mangroves after school on Thursday, or watch the cousins
head out into the sea to hunt for the stingrays that drift through the turquoise, two pin straight lines,
spears grasped in their hands and at either side, waiting and watching, constantly alert.
It’s a cool feeling, like how the ledge of the window feels when I sneak in, unexpected but tinged
with the familiar, a new version of something I’ve known my whole life.
I lie down next to Nya, let my hair fill with sand and let myself grow drowsy from the heat, and know
that’s how I will always think of her, lying on the sand with the sun drowning us in warmth, the wind
arriving once in a blue moon and sweeping the cool of the water over us.
———
When I am fifteen, there is a wedding.
My cousin Jimmy is marrying the girl who he has loved forever.
She is pregnant, a slight curve, but she doesn’t look desolate or broken the way so many girls do
when they come back from towns or cities they’ve been sent to with rounded stomachs. She is
happy, so very happy, that it sets her whole face aglow, and lights up her features.
She is golden skinned, bright blue eyes and dark hair, and everyone knows her to be pretty in a
way that means she gets attention from all sorts of people, even the men that sometimes come
through after working in the mines, and look for a drink, or fuel, or somewhere to spend the night.
The kind of pretty that holds up even outside of this village. She wears a white wedding dress that
was her mother’s. It is lacy, and they adapt it so that she can fit her belly inside it. In her hair she
wears desert roses that her brother drove kilometres for, and she is barefoot. She was going to
wear these pretty, delicate heels but her feet swelled and grew too big and she has no choice but
to wear none at all, sink her feet into the land that is her own.
Nya and I stand watching when they marry, and she grasps my hand herself, and a tear rolls down
her face.
Afterwards, there is a party.
It’s furious the way that they are when the wet season is being swept away. We dance, and Mama
drinks for her sister, and her dead husband, and all she has loved. I dance by myself for a long
time, until my feet ache, and then let myself be swept up by cousins and the girls I go to school
with, and even Jimmy, whose face is elated and press kisses to his cheek at his joy, who for all I
fight with is one of the only men in my life. Even his beautiful wife dances, swinging and swinging
and swinging around until all the roses from her hair are flung to the ground, pink against white.
I lay stomach down on the jetty, hanging my arms over the edge of it, and slit the skin of the mango
with my teeth, and devour one, then two and then three, drop the stones all on the floor of the
ocean, watch it them sink slowly down into the sand, down and down, until they are covered by the
grains, only a small lump indicating their presence to the world.
Nya makes her way out to sit next to me.
The rain comes down eventually, washes down heavily and sticks my dress to my skin, the blue
turning just a shade darker, and the paint that Mama had applied to my face washing off my skin,
the water opaque white and staining the dress.
Nya’s dress is red, and long and swishes around her ankles, but when the rain comes down, it
sticks to her calves and her thighs and her breasts.
We sit there, and watch and wait, and then walk back together into the streets, and slip through the
doorway.
Nya goes back to the city early.
She comes by to see Mama and I, before she catches her train back.
She hugs me goodbye, and presses a kiss to my head. I roll my eyes and bustle out of her arms
quickly.
Mama’s face looks wicked with anger, with pain and frustration, and somewhere beneath that all,
hurt.
“I gotta go Mama.”
“I suppose you’ve got a boy then?” Mama asks, frown etched onto her thick lips. “Someone back in
the city. Can’t see why else you’d be leaving so early.”
“I ain’t got a boy,” Nya recoils and steps back, her face contorting into shock and horror and finally
anger. “Just cause I’m leaving early don’t mean the only reason is a boy.”
“You’re a pretty girl,” Mama says. “If ya didn’t snap at everyone you could have your pick. Hell, you
coulda gotten any boy if you just smiled once in a while. Even now, there are always some hanging
around, would be happy to take you out.”
“I don’t go with any boy that looks at me twice,” Nya hisses back, grabbing her suitcase, bending
down slightly, suddenly on eye level with Mama. I’m shocked to realise not only is Nya taller than
her, so am I. It seems so strange that our mother, who angers so quickly and carried enough fury
for four grown men in her body, is smaller than us, smaller than most of our cousins. “I’m not like
you.”
Mama’s face hits painful momentarily, and the world stills, and I feel it collapse, the fact that she
can in fact be hurt by us hitting the space. It recovers itself, and then shutters off into her blank
face stare, that she perfected somewhere after having her a secound daughter and her husband
leaving her.
Nya’s breathing hard, her face still angry, but she looks slightly apologetic, just for a moment. I
realise that I’m making up this image of her as gentle, as a caregiver. Our women aren’t gentle don’t have the time, the luxury of wealth and hope. They have to be strong to survive, and for all
her city airs, Nya’s still one of us. She was born and raised here, drew blood in the playground like
us, fought with her hands and fists as a passage into adulthood. Nonetheless, she doesn’t say
anything, just stares at Mama, her own face going blank. The perfect image of each other. Even if
Nya did want to say sorry, no way in hell would she now, not with Mama looking like that. Not when
the two of them look so alike.
“Get out,” Mama says, her voice as flat as the desert when the wind has been chased away, and
turns around.
Nya grasps her hat and places it firmly on her head, and lifts her suitcase out the door and onto the
back porch. Jimmy’s rusty wagon pulls up with a splutter and her face tightens. “Well, I’ll be going,”
she says to me, and flicks her eyes towards the door where Mama has disappeared behind, and is
no doubt still listening. “Study hard, alright?”
She marches down towards Jimmy’s car, and when he makes to get out and say hello to Mama
and me, she shakes her head.
Jimmy waves at me then, and I wave back slightly, my hand moving a moment too slow, and I
wonder if they saw it. What will Nya remember when she leaves, I don’t want it to be the image of
me staring dully out towards her.
I’m in a wave of shock, blistering all over me, an hour or so later when Mama tells me to go over to
Aunty Jemima’s and help her with the new babies, because she’s got three to look after and she’s
working at the laundry place back in town a half hour away. I stare outside the window for so long
that I let the water bubble over, and have to rush to fix it, as the flame is extinguished by the
excess, the scum from the water clinging to the sides of the pot.
———
Nya doesn’t return the next summer.
Sometimes she calls, and says that she’s working extra hard and if I want I’ll be able to come into
the city and live with her in the little flat she’s planning on buying. There’s a market that sells
mangoes from just nearby home there, and she even found somewhere that will give her fish
heads for next to nothing, just two dollars for a couple of kilos, because no one uses them in the
city for anything at all - wasteful in the way that they seem to be.
I sit outside on the seat outside and hum and nod and don’t say anything much, watching the kids
running down the street, naked and joyful.
Since Nya left, Mama has taken to staring out the window and flicking through books of photos,
crinkled and weak from the years that has been spent sitting in the sun, or in her own mother’s
photo albums, that sat on the rickety bookshelf that had collapsed on them in a flood one year. In
the photos, here mother is beautiful in a wedding dress, and her and her brothers and sister’s
gather around, shy in front of the camera in the front of the house. In others, Mama herself stands,
young and beautiful next to my father and holds me proudly, for the few years before he died. In
others, Mama is in the background of photos with her siblings, with a man who is a stranger, who
looks different from anyone I have ever known, something foreign in the set of his face. They
whisper in the back of pictures, and she smiles, the one that I see in my own face in mirrors, that
means I have a secret and it’s a good one. She makes all her favourite dishes as if wishing on it
will make Nya return. She even sings the old songs I vaguely remember from my childhood, all
filled with affectionate terms and promises for fantastical things.
Nya won’t return, I know, and it makes me feel bitter and angry, boils under my skin until I’m
clenching my teeth in anger and spend my time throwing things around, and I raid her side of the
room we used to share, find her old, bright lipsticks, cracked from the years in the drawer, garish,
movie star beautiful shades, and paint my lips with them. When I smile, the thickness cracks on my
lips, and blood bursts from the skin, and bleeds through.
I sneak out more than I ever have before, and spend my nights under the stars or in packed
bedrooms or on the back of cars. The girls from school who drive me down to the beach, where we
lie on the sand at night, or go skinny dipping into the shallows, and shriek and laugh with and share
sips of wine that was stolen from parents stashes or the fridge. Boys, who drive slightly out to
abandoned properties and national parks and start bonfires, and watch them smoke around them,
the butts lit up cherry red against the black sky and their bright white teeth, and sometimes bring
spirits from the nearby town, and mix it with juice and sip it long and slow all night. I think about
how Nya would disapprove with her city girl ways and inflections and think screw you as hard as
possible, as if she can hear me from all the way over the country, as if they were physically burnt
into her skin, as if disregarding everything she has ever taught me will bring her rushing back.
I dance all night, the kind of dancing that takes a dangerous edge when people have been drinking
and there’s a fire that’s around us and makes us slightly crazy, giggling and hysterical and I
collapse with my friends on the floor, each of us falling over one another, our cheeks plump and
spread wide with the white of our teeth flashing.
When I sneak back into my bed at night and smell of salt and smoke, I think of Nya, kilometres and
kilometres away and her life that I barely understand. I hate her for choosing it over us, for running
away from us. For giving up on us. I promise myself to never be like her. To never be that weak,
that pitiful.
———
Nya comes back again.
She seems weary, and she brings with her a degree and a job offer at a fancy company that will
pay her real, good money to do good, honest work.
We didn’t watch her graduate, but one of her friends took a video of her getting her degree, and on
her second night back we all pile in front of the telly in Mama’s house and watch the fuzzy, grainy
video, everyone from the neighbourhood squished in the small space, and I slip into a space
between two of my aunties with my back against the foot of the couch.
Nya looks happy when she gets it, pleased to the point that she almost flushes, bright in the way
that Jimmy’s wife had looked the day that had gotten married.
Everyone cheers when they watch her get her degree, and Jimmy kisses her cheek loudly, and
picks her up and twirls her in the air, which makes everyone laugh loudly, and then his baby girl
demands to be picked up as well.
Mama gets out champagne even, that’s measured out carefully into glasses - not champagne
flutes like on the telly, but wine glasses and even just ordinary cups, enough for everyone, and I
steal a sip off from Nya when she and Mama are both not watching.
It’s almost like she’s just graduated, like this is her real graduation, and we make her go take out all
the pictures from her graduating and pin them up on the wall, and everyone coos at her.
After awhile, people start heading home to put their kids to bed, and Mama sits on the back porch
with a few of the aunty’s.
Nya and I sit next to one another, and go through all of the photos of her life at university. The
friends she made, from all over the world, every race and religion. She explains the different things
that each of them do. She shows me pictures of girls in salwar kameez and diracs and abayas and
kaftans and hanboks, dressed up for different events. Tells me what it means for to wear blue there
and why her belt is knotted this way and that. About different holidays, and all the times she went
to festivals for those. Even pictures of food, laid out on the table, that make my mouth water.
Gozlemes that are oozing, and thick with chicken and look so good I can almost taste them.
Biriyani with its brightly coloured rice, almost the colour of mangoes. Dim sum, where the foods
served on tiny plates in large amounts, and shared between people.
It seems like I can see the whole life she has led in the city, even if I don’t quite know what the city
itself is like, or who her friends are with their strange names that sit oddly on my tongue.
Afterwards, we go to bed.
Nya takes the first shower, and I take the secound. When I come out, she’s sitting on her old bed,
looking around her, running one hand through the covers of her bed, and the other touching the
whitewashed walls. The photos she has on there, and the scraps of paper that say odd things like
a stream of numbers (912-223-1110-32) or a quote that she read in a book or a list of things to do
(Pack: toothbrush, books, underwear, warmest clothes, sunglasses) that all mean something to her
specifically, or at least to the girl she was when she left them up there. I wonder if she remembers
what they all mean still, or if she has forgotten them.
I climb into bed, and wonder how I can barely know her.
“I haven’t been sleeping well lately,” Nya says suddenly, still under her sheet.
I don’t say anything.
After a while deep breaths sound throughout the room. After years of sharing a room with her, I
know those signal that Nya’s asleep. But I’m stuck up all night, wondering how she can leave a
place that she always treats so gently, with so much love. That she loves herself. How more than
that, she can fill her lives with all of her friends food and clothes and past times and leave her own,
the one that she spent her whole life with, here, kilometres and kilometres away, and bringing
nothing to show for it.
———
For a little while, it’s almost like things are normal. But Nya goes back to the city quickly, and
returns for a short time, and then goes away, and only comes back in time to see me graduate
from high school.
She has a car that she’s brought just for home, a white station wagon that she brought secound
hand from an uncle that was moving south after his girlfriend had left him and run away to another
country, somewhere far away, where this tiny village means nothing and these people are
unknown.
We ride out to the middle of nowhere, and she parks it underneath the tree, and we lie in the back
of it, next to the smell of rotting fish. It’s awful, but familiar, and I don’t mind it much. Barely mind it
at all.
“What are you going to do now?” Nya asks. “Are you going to go away to university? Come down
south with me?”
I laugh.
“What?” She asks, a frown on her face and bends her neck up to look at me. Even my beautiful
sister gets a double chin from doing that.
“Why would I move there with you?”
Nya frowns. “There’s more opportunities than you can ever dream of there.”
“Opportunities in the city, or in another city, or halfway across the world,” I trace tiny waves onto my
skin with my nail, raised into white, dry skin. “My whole life is here. Everything. Everyone I know.
Mama. What would she do if I ran away? What would I be without this place?”
Nya says nothing for awhile, sitting next to me. After a moment she moves slightly.
“Yeah. Sometimes I don’t know what to do without it.”
“How do you live like that?” I ask, turning my face to look into hers. “How do you live without this?
This is everything we are, right here, this space around us, between us. We exist here, we end
here. What are we without it?”
“I don’t know,” Nya says, and it sits in her throat until it comes out shaky and rough, early in tears.
“I don’t know. But I can’t stay here with everyone that knows that we don’t share a father, and who
think I’m strange, or stuck up, or something odd. I can’t stay here and go through that again and
again and again. I can’t end up like Mama, sitting in that sad old house waiting for ghosts. All I
have from this place is my history. And you, yapa.”
I grasp her hand tightly.
We stay still against each other’s side, breathing in sync, and fall asleep, legs and arms pressed
together, and don’t think about the train that will take her away again.