Normally, Dad would ask me which friends, where we’d go, what we’d do. It drives Taylor crazy, how nosy he is about all that stuff. But he just nods, like he has no right to ask anything of me anymore.
‘Mum’s really busy in there,’ I say.
‘Yeah.’
‘What are you doing?’
‘Packing up the shed.’
‘Well, bags or boxes might help with that. You’re just staring at it.’
‘I’m working out what I’m going to keep, Stell,’ he says very quietly.
I shift my backpack. The books are heavier than I thought they’d be. ‘What are you going to keep?’
He shrugs and turns away. All of the half-finished projects and the tools and the weird things he’s picked up second-hand. Things he’d kept from when he was little. All of his precious, curious things are packed tightly into the garden shed.
‘Nothing,’ he says, not looking at me.
I watch him watching the shed, both hands cupped around his mug of cold coffee. My stomach tightens and for a moment I’m sure I’m going to vomit. I wipe my hand across my mouth, take a deep breath and turn away.
***
Our last night in the house. My missing books feel like an open wound; like an illness. I’d kept about ten of my favourites, but the ghosts of the others trail after me around my room. I make notes of the things in them – the bits of advice I’ll no longer be able to re-read that I don’t want to forget.
Dad’s thrown out everything in his shed and I get the feeling he’s trying to punish himself. Mum had got mad at him, said we could’ve sold a bunch of it online. Dad had just shrugged in that maddening way of his and now they are at separate ends of the house.
Taylor’s locked herself in her room and is playing her terrible punk music so loudly that the whole house is thrumming. Mum keeps yelling things at me – Have I finished emptying the cupboard under the sink? Have I emptied my drawers? – just trying to be heard, but she doesn’t ask Taylor to turn it down.
Taylor gets away with all sorts of things that I don’t.
She’s been less mad about the whole thing since she worked out that Fairyland Caravan Park is actually much closer to her boyfriend’s place than where we are now.
Adam goes to Ascott because his dad teaches art there. It seems pretty miraculous that out of all the boys at Ascott, Taylor ended up with Adam – who is about three inches shorter than her, endlessly calm, a lover of art and totally and utterly besotted with her. Adam had no patience for Taylor’s acting out and, unbelievably, she’d settled down over the last year. I mean, it was almost worth all the times I’d accidentally walked in on them in the middle of heavy make-out sessions on the living-room floor.
Taylor had also been dropped down a grade when she transferred, given how much school she’d missed in Year Nine when she was totally focused on being difficult. Which is weird, because she didn’t really have a reason to be difficult. Sure, Dad had been going to the track and the pokies a bit more than usual after work to blow off steam, but none of us were worried. At least, Taylor and I weren’t. Sometimes people do those sorts of chaotic things for no real reason, and it’s taken me ages to understand that.
Taylor’s CD shudders to a halt and I hear her swear. More quietly, I hear Mum packing. I hear her humming a song that she’d learned from her mother. I’ve never met my grandparents. They’d all died by the time Taylor and I came along. Dad doesn’t seem to like talking about his parents and I guess from the stuff Mum’s said that he had a pretty rough childhood. He’s also really weird about violence in movies and on television shows. Once he walked out of a Disney movie because the battle scene was upsetting him too much. And I suppose it’s all connected, although it would take someone who’d read many more self-help books than I have to piece it all together.
Mum’s different. She loves talking about her family. Her dad was a plumber and her mum was a seamstress. There’s something so wholesome about imagining my granddad coming home and stepping out of his coveralls, and my nanna at the table, all dusted in fabric threads.
But with the letter tucked down my bra, it’s never been more obvious to me that I don’t belong to them. I’m a stranger who they really have nothing in common with. We’d never even met.
I guess that my biological mother has always felt like a story. Something that might or might not be true. Something that has no weight in the real world, and so doesn’t really matter.
But she’s real, now. Her letter rustles every time I breathe.
Who am I if I’m not my parents’ daughter? Or Taylor’s sister? Who am I if I’m not the grandchild of a plumber and a seamstress?
I listen to my mother snoring. And when she finally falls quiet, I murmur to myself. Lines from my favourite book on sleeping – no caffeine after three; visualise something calm.
It’s a long time before I fall asleep.
***
Taylor sleepwalks because of course Taylor sleepwalks. I’m woken up by her tugging one of my pyjama tops from a packing box. ‘I need to cook it!’ she tells me, frantic and furious.
‘Alright,’ I say. Sometimes I try to get her back to bed with gentle coaxing, but it’s nearly three in the morning and I don’t have the energy. ‘You cook it.’
‘I’ll cook it,’ she says, sounding pleased. I listen to her rustling around on the other side of the room for a little while. ‘There’re flowers in here,’ she says. ‘We can’t cook the flowers!’ And then she curls up in a ball on the floor and falls asleep.
CHAPTER THREE
The next night, Mum, Taylor and I sit in the orange-and-brown annex of our new not-a-caravan-just-in-a-caravan-park home. I should point out that the place has multiple rooms, just like Mum promised. The multiple rooms just don’t include a kitchen. Instead, we make do with a folding table in the annex attached to the front of the cabin, where we’ve set up two folding camp tables, an electric frypan and oven, and a tiny little bar fridge we’d picked up second-hand. Mum and I insisted on scrubbing the place and all the existing furniture down with disinfectant before we moved anything in.
The cabin doesn’t have the best ventilation, so we’re all a bit light-headed by the time everything’s drying and the boxes are all inside. The annex’s fly mesh has a big hole in it, which I try to sew up – the mosquitoes would be bad at this time of year, so close to the slow-moving river. Taylor had been responsible for packing the medicine cabinet, which means we’ll be lucky to find the insect repellent before Christmas.
Now, we sit dazedly in the annex while Dad fries up some sausages in the electric frypan, and in between turning them I see him glancing at Mum’s hand, the one where she wears her wedding and engagement rings.
Mum tucks her hand under the table and I see Dad notice and it kills him. And then I see Mum notice Dad’s expression and her face flickers.
I take a big swig of lemonade and wipe my mouth on the back of my hand. It tastes like chemicals and too much sugar.
‘I’m going to get it all back, you know,’ Dad says, his voice wavering. ‘Everything I’ve lost. I’ll get us out of this mess. I promise.’