Apples Never Fall Page 14

  Called out her name

  In two syllables

  As if she had the right

  My mother’s name is Joy

  And when she answered

  The Strange Girl

  Her voice was full of

  Joy

  Amy languidly drew thick rectangles over various words in her poem as if she were a wartime censor, tore out the page, crumpled it up, and ate it.

  She didn’t specifically remember eating paper before but she must have, because the taste and texture was familiar. She chewed carefully, swallowed. If she was rating it at work, she would have said it was “pasty, bland, difficult to swallow, with a chemical aftertaste.”

  Apparently Steffi, her parents’ dog, had developed a fetish for paper. There was a name for it. Her mother had told her all about it.

  Ever since she’d retired, Amy’s mother brimmed with facts. She listened to podcasts, clicked on BuzzFeed articles, and googled. Then she called up her children and passed on all the new facts that she’d learned. It was interesting to observe her mother’s personality changing after retirement. She’d always been the busiest person Amy knew, impatient and distracted, and now she’d become so uncharacteristically reflective, willing to engage in very long, meandering conversations about topics she would have once deemed frivolous.

  “Mum needs to do some kind of course to occupy her mind,” Brooke had said, sniffily.

  “She’s doing a course. She’s learning how to write a memoir,” Amy told her. “Except she says she’s never going to write one.”

  “Thank God,” said Brooke.

  “I’d read it,” Amy had said.

  Amy had always been interested in who her parents were before they became her parents: Joy Becker before she became Mum, Stan Delaney before he became Dad. Both Amy’s parents were only children with beautiful, complicated mothers: mothers who should never have become mothers. Her father’s mother had a scar that trailed down her wrinkled right cheek from where she’d been thrown across the room by Amy’s grandfather. Supposedly that was the first and only time Amy’s grandfather had hurt his wife, and Amy’s grandmother “immediately chucked him out” and “that was that,” but Amy thought there had to be more to the story. She’d given her father a book about a man who finally speaks about his troubled childhood to his oldest daughter in the hope that her dad might speak about his troubled childhood to his oldest daughter (her), but so far he “couldn’t make head or tail of it.”

  “I don’t know why you thought Dad would suddenly start reading novels,” Brooke had said, pleased that Amy’s plan hadn’t worked, because she believed that Dad belonged to her. “Did you think he’d join a book club when he retired?”

  Then they had both got the giggles imagining their huge taciturn father in a book club, chatting about character development over Chardonnay.

  “He watches TV now,” Amy had pointed out. “He never used to watch TV.”

  “I know,” said Brooke. “He told me this long, complicated story the other day about a family where the youngest son had died in a car accident. It turned out he was telling me the entire plot of a movie. I thought it was real.”

  That was a few months ago now. Brooke was too busy to talk much these days, because she was starting her own physiotherapy practice, which was a big step, and knowing Brooke, it would turn out to be a proper, grown-up success, and Amy was proud of her little sister, although also mystified. Like, why do that to yourself? Had Brooke never noticed how the Delaney family business had controlled their lives? The paperwork, the stress, the requirement for all four children to “help out.”

  Once, when Amy was a teenager and in the middle of studying for a history exam, an exam she was destined to fail because this was the first time she’d even cracked open the textbook, a kid had come into the house and imperiously demanded Amy make her a sandwich as if Amy were her servant, and Amy had very nearly got up and made the sandwich before she came to her senses and told the kid to get lost.

  They could never escape it. When they were growing up there was a family they knew who had packed up their three kids and gone traveling around Australia for a year in a caravan. Amy had been temporarily obsessed with that family. She thought it sounded like a dream. “He’ll never catch up,” her father had said. He was speaking about the middle kid in that family, the only one who was any good at tennis and therefore the only one who existed. But her dad was wrong, the kid came back, he kept playing, he didn’t do that badly, ranked in the top two hundred at one point. “We should go traveling around Australia,” Amy had said to her mother, and her mother had burst out laughing as if she’d made a clever joke.

  Now Brooke was doing exactly the same as their parents: filling her pockets with rocks before she waded out into life. Brooke was meant to avoid stress because of her migraines, not chase it, but she’d always been a martyr. Amy remembered Brooke as a little girl, high pigtails and reflective sunglasses.

  “She’s got a headache,” Amy would say to her mother, watching her.

  “What? No she doesn’t, she hasn’t said a word.”

  But Amy could tell. There was something about the way Brooke walked when she had a headache, as if her head was in danger of rolling off and she had to keep it balanced on her neck, and Amy wanted to cry for the poor little kid walking out there with the weight of everyone’s expectations on her shoulders, as if she already knew she would end up as the last hopeless hope for the Delaneys. Amy’s parents could read their children’s games with perfect accuracy, they could predict their every shot, exploit their every weakness, but in other ways they were clueless, blinded by their love of the greatest sport ever invented.

  Maybe it was the migraines that made Brooke so serious.

  Amy wished she could take them away from her. She remembered Brooke when she was a baby, dark curly hair in a topknot, only two chipmunk teeth. She never crawled, she bum-shuffled. It was hilarious to watch. Now look at her: so serious, so married, her shoes so sensible, her bra strap so beige, you’d think she was fifty, not twenty-nine. Had Brooke ever danced all night? Had a one-night stand? Brooke would say these were not examples of a life well lived, and maybe she was right, but Amy blamed those cruel migraines for aging her sister beyond her years.

  Amy threw her journal on the floor and lay back down in the cold flood of air from her open window. Her three flatmates were all out. She’d moved here six months ago, and she’d thought that with three flatmates she’d rarely have the place to herself, but, in fact, she often seemed to be the only one at home. It was cheap rent because the neon light from the sign lit up her room like a disco.

  For the last year she’d been keeping herself afloat with a cobbled-together series of part-time jobs. She’d finally accepted that regular full-time work was not for her. It wasn’t a matter of finally settling on the right career path. The right job didn’t exist. Full-time work caused a kind of claustrophobic terror to build and build within her chest until one day there was a humiliating emotional spillage that resulted in her termination or resignation and her parents looking distressed when she said the new job hadn’t turned out to be so wonderful after all.

  Now her most regular work was three three-hour shifts a week as a taste tester, or a “sensory evaluator” if she ever wanted to sound more impressive, which she never did. She joined a group of university students, young mothers, and retirees to taste and discuss food with immense seriousness. She wore no lipstick or perfume or hairspray. She drank no coffee nor chewed gum beforehand. She sat at a laptop, logged in, spun around on her chair, and waited for the kitchen staff, dressed in black, to bring out trays of labeled food. There was no right or wrong, there was no winning or losing. It was very important but also of no consequence whatsoever. No one got upset, except for the occasional roll of the eyes if someone went on and on making their impassioned point about lemongrass to the panel leader. There was also that one time an executive stormed out because none of the taste testers liked the Bolo
gnese sauce he’d spent a year developing, but that had been exciting.

  In between taste-testing shifts she did market research and product-testing work. Today, for example, she’d spent an hour as part of a focus group discussing toilet paper. It was cash in hand, the sandwiches were excellent: that was lunch sorted. Everyone was extremely nice and polite when you did focus group work. She didn’t care that it was fake; it was soothing. She got to walk into a lovely plush office in the city like she was part of corporate Sydney and then walk right out again and go to the beach.

  This afternoon she’d filled in a long questionnaire about her thoughts on deodorant and in return she’d received a department store voucher that she’d used to buy two bras on special.

  It felt like she was getting away with something, like she was living by her wits picking pockets in Dickensian England.

  She also had a theory that this sort of work was good for her mental health because it forced her to make multiple choices (Do you prefer spray or roll-on, with or without perfume?) and when she was sick she found choices impossible. She could stand in a grocery store staring at a shelf, paralyzed with indecision. She hadn’t yet found a therapist who fully endorsed this theory.

  She would be forty next April.

  She wasn’t sure how that had happened. She could remember when her mother turned forty, and it had seemed ancient. Amy had assumed there would be flying cars by the time she turned forty.

  Forty was too old to be eating bad poetry for dinner, to be living in a share house with twenty-somethings, to have no savings or furniture or boyfriend. She and Brooke should swap lives, except that if Amy was married to a man as deeply enamored of his own supposed intellect and supposed wit as Grant Willis, she would have to answer yes to that ubiquitous question: “Have you been experiencing suicidal thoughts?”

  She reminded herself to get herself a new boyfriend soon, so she wouldn’t wake up alone on her fortieth birthday.

  Would this strange girl, this Savannah, still be living in Amy’s old bedroom by her fortieth birthday?

  She listened to the panicked scuttle of a possum’s paws as it ran across the roof tiles above her head. Her heart raced within the cavity of her chest, and her thoughts scuttled as fast and as foolish as a hundred panicked possums.

  It’s your fight-or-flight response, explained each new therapist, kindly and patronizingly, as if this were a brand-new concept for her. Often they spent precious expensive minutes of the session explaining how cavemen needed the fight-or-flight response, because of the saber-toothed tiger, but now there was no saber-toothed tiger, but still we responded as if there was one (they were always so excited by the tiger!), and Amy would drift off, thinking about how there could be occasions in the modern world where you could actually face a tiger, like if you were on safari, for example, or if one escaped from a zoo, or how a rapist could represent the tiger, and you needed to race off down the alley, and how she was fast, she was a fast runner, faster than most, she would get away from any rapist or tiger, but she could never get the fuck away from her thoughts, her crazy, stupid thoughts, and next thing, time was up, and that will be three squillion and fifty-six dollars, thank you, and our next available appointment is in three years’ time, shall we book you in?

  She did the four–seven–eight breathing technique.

  Breathe in for four. Hold for seven. Out for eight.

  In for four. Hold for seven. Out for eight.

  Her heart rate slowed from full-blown panic to an acceptable level of high alert, as if she were no longer running from the tiger but she’d climbed a tree and was watching it circle and snarl below. She hadn’t climbed a tree in a while but she used to be good at it.

  She yawned hugely. Don’t fall asleep in the tree, Amy!

  Tomorrow was Father’s Day. She needed to sleep. She had to be up early to make chocolate brownies. Her dad loved her chocolate brownies. If she stayed awake all night, which was a real possibility, she’d have dark circles under her eyes and her mother would notice and worry, or perhaps she wouldn’t because she would be so busy noticing and worrying about Savannah, who had proper problems, like homelessness and abusive boyfriends.

  She considered her options to make herself sleep:

  Sleeping pill.

  Hot bath.

  Hot milk.

  Guided meditation.

  Orgasm.

  Really boring book.

  One of her flatmates read giant, hardback biographies of important men, and they were so boring they made Amy want to weep.

  Her dad said he played imaginary tennis in his head when he couldn’t get to sleep. Amy said, “Doesn’t that wake you up?” Her mother suggested doing the ironing.

  Amy couldn’t think of anything less restful than playing imaginary tennis and she never ironed. “That’s evident,” her mother said.

  Amy rolled onto her side, adjusted her pillow.

  She might love this girl who was trying to steal her parents. This Savannah from the savanna where the saber-toothed tiger roamed.

  When she asked Troy about Savannah he said she was “fine,” which was the word he used when a waiter asked, “How was your meal?” and Troy thought it wasn’t that great, but it wasn’t bad enough to get all Gordon Ramsay about it.

  Logan said he had no opinion on Savannah. She could hear his shrug.

  Brooke would be meeting Savannah for the first time tomorrow too, but when Amy last spoke to her, she said that she’d spoken to Mum and she wasn’t worried and Amy shouldn’t worry either, and that their parents were doing something nice for a domestic-violence victim and they should all feel proud.

  Amy had never had a boyfriend hit her, although she’d had a couple who fucked her when she was too out of it to consent, but that was before consent got fashionable. Those kinds of incidents used to be considered “funny.” Even “hilarious.” The worse you felt, the louder you laughed. The laughter was necessary because it put you back in charge. You didn’t remember, so you created a memory you hoped was the truth. Sometimes she kept dating a boy, temporarily convinced herself she loved him, just to keep the correct narrative on track. Well. No need to go all the way back there. Her mind was filled with catacombs it was important to keep sealed shut, like the sealed-up fireplace in her parents’ living room. The brick hearth where her grandmother had smashed her face was long gone.

  She thought of her grandfather, her father’s father, who nobody talked about because of what he’d done. She would have liked to have at least seen a photo of him. “Why would you want to see his photo?” her younger siblings said, disgusted with her because their grandmother made extraordinary apple crumble and palmed five-dollar notes into their sticky little hands, as if she were tipping them.

  He just interested her. Did he regret what he’d done? Did he ever do it to another woman? She assumed her interest in her dead abusive grandfather indicated a pathological attraction to bad men.

  Sleep, Amy, sleep.

  She heard a door slam downstairs, so that meant one of her flatmates had come home, which was good, no need to imagine robbers in black balaclavas wandering through the place and getting frustrated when they couldn’t find anything to steal except forty-dollar biographies.

  Breathe in for four.

  Hold for seven.

  Out for eight.

  Supposedly people in the military used the four–seven–eight breathing technique and got to sleep in under a minute.

  “Let’s start with sleep,” her latest therapist had said. His name was Roger, and she wasn’t too sure about his qualifications. He probably read about the breathing technique on the internet. She liked the fact that there was something a bit dodgy about him. She felt more comfortable in his slightly dingy office than she did in the softly lit, plush-carpeted offices of the expensive psychiatrists and psychologists, who she felt were judging her hair and clothes.

  She didn’t actually expect Roger to “cure” her. It was just so that when people said to her, as the
y inevitably did, “I think you need to get help, Amy, professional help,” she could answer, “Sure. I’m getting help.”

  She moved through therapists like she moved through boyfriends. She dumped both boyfriends and therapists when they offended her, enraged her, bored her.

  The boyfriends said she was a head case, a nut case, a drama queen, a psycho. The therapists said she had ADHD or OCD, depression or anxiety or most likely both, a nervous disorder, a mood disorder, a personality disorder, maybe even a bipolar affective disorder. The word disorder was a popular one.

  There was one guy who announced there was nothing at all wrong with her, she just needed stress relief, and then he texted her the following week and asked her out for a drink, which he said would be fine now he was no longer treating her. The fact that she said yes to the unethical sleazebag probably demonstrated that there actually was something very wrong with her.

  “Medical diagnosis isn’t in my scope of practice,” the new guy, Roger, said anxiously when Amy asked, mildly interested, which particular diagnosis took his fancy. “I’m a counselor. I work alongside the medical profession, and I work alongside you.” Then he smiled and leaned toward her, confidentially, as if he were sharing a secret, no longer anxious, “You know, sometimes labels are a distraction. You’re not a label. You’re Amy.”

  Hokey but sweet. It actually did feel like he was sitting shoulder to shoulder with her, on the same team, rather than simply observing her with the cool, professional eyes of some of his colleagues.

  She liked him. For now, at least.

  She only sometimes took the tablets the good psychiatrists prescribed, and she only sometimes took the pills the bad boyfriends offered.

  Every now and then she pulled out the hopeful, obligatory “mental health plan” she and her GP had worked on together, and she did her best to keep up “strategies” and “techniques” that made her appear semi-normal to the world: Poetry. Journaling. Exercise. Mindfulness. Nature. Meditation. Breathing. Berries. Vitamins. Superfoods. Probiotics. Gratitude. Baths. Conversation. Sleep.