As psychologist Alison Gopnik reminds us, in a child’s universe, parents are like stars – fixed and stable. But siblings are more like comets that sweep into our lives, lighting us up but sometimes scalding us.
Rilla’s notes
On Thursday, three days later, still desperate to get a sense of normality back into my life, I try going to university again. And this time, it isn’t as bad, maybe people do have short memories when it comes to scandal. I hold my normal office hours, I attend a seminar, and I even type up some notes. I am still getting missed calls from Simon every day, but I have switched off the notifications and so I only have to look at his name on my phone log briefly before I go to bed. Slowly, slowly, I can start to get my life back on track.
Late on Thursday afternoon, on the train back from university, I am hanging on for dear life. It is rush hour and the train is packed. People are standing in sweat-smelling distance, and I am trying to hold my breath. The people in my immediate vicinity must be acrobats because they all seem to perform complicated tasks while trying to stay upright on a moving train. A woman with a Chihuahua in her straw handbag is fanning herself with a receipt with one hand and feeding the miniature dog chicken wings with the other. A man with soft long curls and a borg-collar bomber jacket is reading Issue 97 of The Walking Dead. An attractive young man with red hair is teaching the woman next to him how to YOK2, which is apparently knitting jargon and not something to do with missiles. And an Indian man is having a phone conversation while also writing notes on his hand.
‘I said give me your CV,’ he says, ‘and she was like, I already told them my qualifications. I said to her what have you done in your life? How can I recommend you? I can’t put my name to this. And she started crying, man. I was like, what are you, a bloody nautanki?’
And just as quick as that, I can’t breathe. I grope blindly, I clutch at people. ‘I want to stop the train,’ I gasp. ‘I have to stop the train.’
People around me are staring. They look like they are going to arm-wrestle me to the floor if I say this again. They will do anything not to have to stop the train. Someone creates a bit of room, drags me down to a sitting position, puts my head in between my legs – I have no idea if this is so I can get breath back in my body or to make sure I can’t reach the emergency lever. I fight them, flailing, punching, kicking, but nothing works because I am surrounded by a savannah of legs. Jean-clad ones, nude pantyhose, varicose veins, and then there is a face. It’s a little girl.
‘More,’ she says in her baby voice, and hands me a wad of gummy tissue with mushy banana in it. At the next stop, someone practically throws me off the train. I run all the way down the platform, all the way up the stairs, and I stand outside in Lewisham next to a florist. I bend over double and gasp for breath.
My father disappeared into his study to write a book on Indian street theatre or nautanki when I was eight years old, soon after Rose disappeared. Before then, as far as I know, he had no ambitions of writing a book. When I was little, he taught drama in a college and he used to tell me – Rose and me – all about nautanki.
Rose and me. Yes, I suppose it’s time to talk about that now. To talk about Rose and me. Though it is also the hardest thing I can think to do right now.
That’s how it was for the first seven years of my life. It was always Rose and me. Rose and me did this or that, Rose and me are going out, Rose and me got into a fight. Rose and me are hungry, thirsty, tired, back from school, too awake to go to bed.
It was difficult, maybe impossible, to talk about myself without also talking about Rose. And Rose – she hardly knew what it was to exist without me either.
Our night-time stories were not the same as other children’s. We knew about Pippi Longstocking, the Wishing-Chair and The Bobbsey Twins from school. But my father didn’t read these stories to us. He read us the notes he made about Indian street theatre, gathered from books written in the Sanskrit script that would take him weeks and months to decipher. We would sit on rugs, the two of us in our pyjamas, the kind that had a matching top and bottom, and the top had a collar. I can see us now, all I have to do is close my eyes.
Me in my purple pyjamas, with the moon and stars dotted all over them. Rose in her lemon yellow top and bottom, printed with a dancing Popeye.
We would sit holding one blanket around us, skinny beans crouching together for warmth, and we would share a cup of hot chocolate. Or at least, our mother told us it was hot chocolate, but looking back it was mostly milk with the tiniest pinch, a smidge of brown in it, hardly there.
‘That looks like me,’ Rose would say, staring into the steaming milk. ‘Make it like Rilla, Mummy, please, please, Mummy!’ And our mother would. She would add another pinch to the cup and the brown would swirl and aria till it mixed with the milk. We would sit under our blanket, drink our hot chocolate, and listen to Dad tell us about nautanki.
‘Melodrama – you have to have melodrama in a nautanki. Without it, there is nothing. When you cry, you cry like you will die of sadness. You cry so loud, aliens on another planet can hear you and their hearts melt. When you are angry, you are full of rage. So much rage that if you tried to, you could swallow the sky whole. There’s no point feeling unless you feel big, see? And the nagara – the kettledrum – heightens the drama. Only when it reaches fever pitch is there an explosion. Get it? Try it. Show me.’
I would laugh, a shrill, high-pitched, over-the-top, machine-gun kind of laugh. But Rose would cry. And when she cried, she didn’t scream or sniffle. Her face turned inwards, her eyes swam and silent tears poured down her face in two long streams.
There was something about Rose’s eyes. They searched, they were always alert. She was always looking for things to go wrong, always on the lookout for trouble, something that could hurt her, and maybe me too. Yes, that’s true. She was always alert for anything that could hurt her or me. When she cried it was as if the world was coming to an end. It wasn’t the kind of melodrama that Dad was telling us about, but there was something about Rose’s tears. They broke your heart. Even our puppy was reduced to a pitiful moaning.
Gus-Gus. Yes, it is time to talk about Gus-Gus too.
When I turned seven, the same day that my sister Rose turned nine, Auntie Promilla’s Irish wolfhound Gus-Gus came to live with us and he was enormous. All he had to do was come and stand next to you – not lean on you or jump on you – but just stand next to you for you to fall over. Rose and I were in hysterics. He was easily, hands down, the best thing that had ever happened to us. I loved Gus-Gus. There was only one problem. He loved Rose more than he loved me. I was always giving him treats and throwing things for him to fetch. Smiling at him, singing, She’ll be wearing pink pyjamas when she comes (his favourite song), generally grovelling at his feet. But if Rose came into the room, quietly with hardly a whisper, as was her way, he would instantly drop what he was doing and go to her. Given the choice of going out for a run (his other favourite thing) with me or sitting under Rose’s feet, he would always choose the latter. In fact, I was sure that when we were playing he kept one ear pricked for the sound of Rose. If Rose was out and she was on her way back, even before she had come anywhere near our house, the other ear would prick up and his hair would coil tighter. He would start doing laps – front door, living room, dining room, kitchen, pantry, through the bathroom, back to the front door, living room, dining room, kitchen, pantry, and so on, until she entered the house. Rose often had that effect on people.
‘Rose hasn’t washed her hands,’ I would complain. ‘And she’s putting her hand in the liquorice allsorts.’
‘Wash your hands, Rose,’ my mother would say. But with that indulgent voice she saved for her first daughter.
‘She’s giving the dog a sweetie!’ I would cry.
My mother would walk up to Rose and take the allsorts from her hand. Then she would turn to me.
‘Have you seen how dirty your frock is? Go and change, right now! Stop bothering Rose. If you don’t have any manners, you can stop going to school and stay