1966, Sydney
It’s not easy to sleep on your first night in an old house in a new country on the wrong side of the world on the back of the death of your brother.
When your living brother, snoring softly up the hallway, knows you’re a murderer.
When your parents, still whispering and snuffling on the pining wooden chairs in the kitchen, wouldn’t use the actual word murder but you’re sure they’re sure you had something to do with it.
When the cicadas outside are thrumming your brother’s name.
When the large spider on the naked white wall is scuttling out his initials P.O.W.
When the night scent of the garden flowers is bristling the bitter sweet of funeral laurels through the fly screen.
When there should have been five in the new old house and now there are four.
When one small brown leather suitcase remains conspicuously unopened and unpacked just outside your door.
When some bird has cocked up the dawn chorus and has ramped up a solo so euphoric, so ecstatic, that it could bring a whole congregation to its knees.
When it’s your first night on dry land in six weeks and your bed, with its pre-slumped mattress, pitches and shakes and fouls your stomach until you’re retching into your pillow.
When you ache for the night to keep on going but the moon is already sweeping into its dying arc and cold white light is readying itself to turn warm golden rose.
When the sweat is weeping down your back and across your buttocks and you’re so so thirsty but you don’t know if the water out of the tap is safe to drink.
When you plot escape plan after escape plan, each more outlandish than the last, until you remember you have no money.
When you want the water out of the tap to be mephitic and pestilential, and you see yourself standing in the dark in a long white nightdress, gulping down glassful after glassful.
When you draft the first family breakfast scene in your head and you try every which way to change the chronicle but there’s no way that you can stop your father throwing you out into the street before you’ve even had your toast.
When the mantel clock, brought by your mother on a whim in her hand luggage, is so upset by the epic nature of its journey, that it chimes four then three then two then one.
When every creak is the footstep of a passing ghoul.
When your sheets, too white and starched stiff, crab and scuttle with every toss and turn.
When the whine and buzz of a mosquito becomes a sharp angry welt on the side of your neck. And then again between your breasts. And then again on your cheek.
The night was long, and when Janet finally came to in the dim grim of the morning, Philip was still dead and nothing had changed. Nothing had changed at all.
To be continued.
SANDERLINGS 