1988

The kitchen is long, narrow and repressively hot under a tin roof. Light is coming through the brown shutters, the child watches as dust particles become visible and disappear. The child’s Mother is frying the meat in the pan in her disapproving way. A fly is buzzing around, and the Mother keeps taking breaks from frying to swat at it with her tea towel with short, sharp violence. The sudden thwacks make everybody in the small room jump. On cheap plates, dinners are being piled. Lettuce, tomato, buns and fat, to be eaten with our hands. The child’s sister serves herself.

Tugging at my curls, standing in the corner, I’m watching her in her world that I wanted to be part of. She takes mayonnaise and tomato sauce, mixing it together in an orange paste like the colour she has dyed her hair. (Thwack, Mum’s towel flicks the bench) Mum says her hair now doesn’t look like the rest of ours. I will always remember that shade of orange made by her strange tastebuds, not like the colours of the lino covered floor or the lampshade. I think they were orange too, but they could have been blue, maybe green. That orange is so vivid in my memory.

She has a silver earring hanging from one ear, it was a bat, and as the pedestal fan tried to circulate air around the room, it softly flapped against her neck. (thwack). Her feet were bare, I remember because her toes seemed pointed as I looked down at them. I also like to think that her toes were painted red. I think she was humming, but I don’t really remember. I do remember that I once crept into her room when I couldn’t sleep. I laid my blanket on the floor of her cold room. In sleep, her face was so child like it could have been a mirror. I whispered her name. Wake up, I said, getting anxious. But she slept on.

In the kitchen, as she is getting her dinner, I am now clumsily following her. I spread orange paste on my bun too, even though I don’t enjoy the taste. (thwack) Mum makes me have the stuff on my burger that my sister calls rabbit food. I want to sneer at the food like she does, but everyone is shocked if I am rude. She sits on the vinyl chairs in the room, I remember them being brown and sticky. I am hot and my skirt is sticking to my knees. In my memory, she pays no attention to me as I stare at her, the curly haired child following the girl with dyed red hair. (thwack) Now I wonder, was she listening to something I said? Was the window in that room so big, and dark? Did the light overhead really swing like that, in the artificial breeze? (It’s a blackout. There’s nothing to cry about. Mum is with your little sister. She’s too little to be brave like us. We’re just going to light a candle, we don’t mind a bit of dark, do we? No need to cry)

As I chew my burger, trying to take bites as big as hers, she is apart from me. Her image is fuzzy. The little girl watches her, intent on the fast way in which she speaks, uses her hands, throws away words, and crams them into sentences where they probably don’t belong. If I remember correctly, nobody listened to her many words except me. My sister gets up to leave. Were there words spoken that were not her own, that made her leave at that moment? There were so many angry words spoken in our house, I can remember none specifically any more. What I remember now is only my own silence. On the way out, my sister draws a large heart on my child size black board.

For weeks afterwards, the curly haired child no longer let the neighbour’s children use the black board for games of teacher or hangman, alienating some of them forever. There was no way she would let that prefect white chalk heart be smudged away for a silly game.

As soon as the point of the heart is finished, she is gone. I remember waking up from a dream where a red haired girl danced away from me, and for the first time the outside light was switched off, casting my little room into unfamiliar darkness. For the first time, I knew if there was a blackout, I was on my own.