Notes of an Ingrate

I

It’s a relief to be alone again. To walk down the promenade, look up at the palm trees, the sky, and know that an hour-long bus ride awaits me, that there’s nobody beside me filling the silence with his condescension and self-importance.

My brother, he performs all his ideas. He talks into the darkness, his voice echoes, and he bows to a resounding silence – mine. He says he wants to get to know me better, but he’d replace me with a soundboard in a heartbeat.

A street performer’s microphone screeches. A crowd in the distance.

I don’t feel resentment but regret – an aching relief at externalising these feelings, of coughing them up like phlegm. This is my brother we’re talking about. My brother whose brown eyes resemble my own. Sometimes, I even catch a glimpse of the little boy I grew up with, the one in photographs, but despite the familiarity etched into his features, and etched into my heart, I don’t know the man who wears my brother’s face.

Bus station bustling. My ticket, scanned. I climb onto a coach headed home. Row after row of faces as I make my way to the back.

My family are all I have, and in their absence, the illusion remains intact. In their presence, it shatters. I am alone. I have nobody. I don’t even have my family – except maybe my dad.

The engine rumbles. Silent scenes play behind the glass.

II

1.

No family is perfect, but it sounds awfully black and white. Is there not a spectrum of imperfection, and if so, which shade are we? Where do I even begin with so much resistance? I’ve left this box untouched, abandoned in the garage of my childhood home. To unpack what was my upbringing is something I shy away from. I usually write my way out of the pain, but I’m afraid I might write myself into it. I could shut my eyes for the journey home, but instead I open my Notes app. I write.

Nora waits outside Arrivals watching suitcase after suitcase glide through the doors. Owners still in neck pillows, a Penguin classic, a woman with a Duty-Free bag in hand. Behind her, a man. Nora recognises her brother as soon as she sees him – a shorter, stubbier version of the brother she last met in a loose cream singlet which sticks to his belly. It’s automatic, really, when you haven’t seen someone for a while, to notice their weight, new wrinkles and drooping cheeks. You’ve aged, says the mind. How was your flight? says the tongue.

A few bystanders smile at the reunion. And as they make their way outside, there is a feeling of hope, of promise, that this time it’ll be different.

2.

We wish against all odds and against our better judgement. If we gave up hope and accepted others as they are, we wouldn’t break our own hearts. We’re children inserting coin after coin into a rigged claw machine, but the love we crave, the validation and understanding, they remain there warm and fuzzy behind the glass. Behind the glass, arid land speeds past. Click of a seatbelt. A snore. An obnoxious phone call.

William enters the dimly lit café, while Nora minds the table. She watches him in queue, looking up at the chalk menu. Glass domes of dessert on the counter. He looks over and offers a smile, and she smiles back. She feels a deep tenderness for him: he is, after all, her big brother.

But it was only a snapshot, a still image in which his familiar features spoke louder than words. Then the words flow forth, as they always do, and if he weren’t distracted by his own reflection in the bus-stop billboard behind her, he’d notice Nora drowning.

3.

Nora folds her napkin and milks her oily fingers.

“And why do you think he would do that?” says William, biting into a croissant.

“Because he’s insecure,” says Nora.

William shakes his head, chewing rigorously, swallowing with strain. “Think about it,” he urges. He leans back and folds his arms, a finger on his pursed bottom lip.

Nora doesn’t reply.

“Think about it,” he repeats. Slight eyelid flutter, nod of the chin. More lip pursing.

“To grow an audience?”

“And she’s got it,” he says, snapping his fingers, “By making people thi—”

The spiel unreels and she’s tangled up in it again. She stares into her napkin, brown and creased. It was baffling to voice someone’s opinion and have it be validated as though it were a game of trivia, as though the answer were written on a card.

4.

They sit across from one another on a terrace, in the rose aftermath of a thorned first day, sand in their hair, on their pink skin.

“You don’t listen to me,” William says. “But I understand that you have your own prejudices, too.”

“I just feel like you don’t listen or want to hear what I think,” says Nora.

“Don’t you dare,” he says. “That’s not true.”

Nora freezes.

“But I’m proud of you. I tell everyone about my little sister. That she’s so smart and speaks a million languages.”

Don’t you dare. He says it a lot. Don’t you dare put me on a pedestal, he’d said when she expected him to speak respectfully of women. He’d grown up alongside girls, after all. They’d bruised their knees together, grazed their elbows, fallen off skateboards and bikes. But that was another time.

5.

“Well, do you love me?” William asks, and it sounds like a throwaway question, as though he expects her to say of course!

“I don’t know,” she says instead, and it’s the truth. She doesn’t.

His eyelids flutter, his head shakes, as though he’s trying to blink away a bad dream.

Nora tries to explain it away, explain that she lacks object constancy, that people are less real when they aren’t around, but it’s not about object constancy – not this. It is in his absence that she likes him most, when she has a brother to miss, one who listens.

III

1.

Outside the window, the driver takes a final toke of his cigarette, stubs it out with his shoe. Passengers hurry back from the restroom, heavy footfall as they board.

I don’t want to keep writing about my weekend with William. Not the nuances, not the feelings, not for now. Forgive me as I put everything back into its box. I can still tell you what it contains, after all, without getting my hands dirty. Tell, not show – not the mouldy teddy bears, not the moth-eaten clothes.

But if you were to unpack it, you would find photos of my brother and I. These, at least, are the images that have remained with me.

Strangled against a door, neck pressed against the knob, until I half lost consciousness. Then he lowered me to the ground, cradled me on the carpet where we used to play video games.

Sitting on our big brown couch in my high school uniform. Strangled me when we disagreed over grammar. I showed him an English worksheet. See. He lunged, and I recall the fleeting instant of confusion before his hand found my neck.

Sitting in the hallway beside all our shoes. During the comfort part of it. The aftermath. I just don’t like you as a person, I said.

2.

Greasy stain of somebody else’s head on the window. A familiar roundabout – we’re almost home. A whiff of McDonald’s and the crunch of a paper bag. All passing thoughts, just a backdrop.

When I was a teenager, my mum had me take vitamin supplements for emotional stability. She later said my brother and father had noticed improvements in my behaviour. I wonder if they had that conversation or if she made it up. Did Dad really say that?

But it was me, not my brother, who spent their adolescence sprinting into their bedroom, throwing their feet against the built-in wardrobe, back against the door – a climber’s chimney technique. It was so routine that I remember it. Remember my knees locked, of turning my body into a dynamic brace to absorb the seismic banging. And then the resignation outside, the silence, my racing pulse. Was I safe? Was my brother gone? But I guess if he’d really wanted to hurt me, he’d have taken the door off its hinges.

I once threw a mirror on the floor between us to buy time. Outside Aldi in my socks. Ran into a schoolteacher who asked where my shoes were.

The hole in the computer room door – that was me, too. He’d cornered me in the narrow room, but who had access to the exit? Not me. I threw a chair as he approached. Mum said I could have hurt him.

I pulled the butcher’s knife from the kitchen drawer once, too, and it stopped him in his tracks. He begrudgingly entered his bedroom.

3.

Passengers alight the bus. Suitcases, duffel bags unloaded. I’ve got only a backpack and my thoughts. Zebra crossing. Car horn.

Dad called me once. Urgently. Repeatedly. Told me to delete all my family photos off social media because my mother said so.

Mother-daughter relationships are difficult, I’m told, but it’s an ambiguous word – another colour spectrum, I suppose. With my mother, you can never say the right thing. I’ll make the most banal comment, and she’ll look at me as though I’ve metamorphosed into a stinkbug. I’ve even resorted to talking about the weather but still her nose scrunches up.

She calls me vain. I don’t think she knows I hate myself – that it’s hard not to when you’ve been humbled all your life. I feel like my father is proudest of me when I’m pretty; and when I’m pretty, my mother detests me.

She makes an effort, though. She took me whale watching in the van with Dad’s binoculars. And I don’t know. Maybe that’s enough.

4.

Pedestrian lights. Green walking man.

I once went home after four years abroad but was afraid my father would love me less for having aged.

I pushed him once in high school – we pushed each other, really, but he fell against the pantry, and I can’t forget the image of him below me, looking up, startled. I can’t shake the guilt of having emasculated my father. I’m tangled in the cobwebs of it all, haunted by its voice.

I do feel some relief these days because the last time we said goodbye, I cried as he went through customs, and boy, did he smile. Maybe he’d needed confirmation that I love him. Maybe he doesn’t know how much I miss him. The sound of his engine entering our cul-de-sac, him pulling onto the lawn in his ute after a long day at work.

He doesn’t pay me much attention, though. Plays chess. Stares at his phone. Turns on a series while I’m speaking to him. I think he’s grey rocking because that’s how he’s survived my mother. But when I see the real him, he’s playful and bubbly and silly and smart. He dances with me in the kitchen, he hides his playing cards, he bursts into laughter and his eyes light up when he explains things like special relativity.

He used to fold me newspaper hats when I was little, and make small, animated illustrations: a strip of paper rolled around a pencil, things like mice eating cheese.

5.

Key in the door. I’m home. I’m home.

How does one tell their family they are heartbroken because of them? You show them your bleeding heart and they pretend not to have seen, they look away. I don’t know what to do with all my emotions; nobody wants them, and they resent me for having them. If I suppress them, however, I resent everyone else. Will I ever be able to bring my feelings to someone and have them examine them with me, like a child showing you their scabs and bruises?

My heart, it’s a winged insect clasped in my hands, and others cringe as I reveal to them its writhing body, its smothered fluttering. If I were to place my heart on the floor, they’d crush it with a shoe, smack it with a swatter, spray it with poison. I’m looking for someone, I suppose, who’ll carry it in a jar somewhere safe, and despite their own trembling hands, let it loose with a page. And maybe that’s me, maybe that’s why I must write.

Backpack on my bedroom floor, and I fall into bed. Relief.

There’s no place like home.

There’s no place like me.