On Your 21st Birthday

Abstract

Any time there is a surface there is a surface and ever y time there is a suggestion there is a suggestion and every time there is silence there is silence . . .-Gertrude SteinIremember it waS a Sunday-a louSy, oVercaSt aFternoon with that diStinctly Melbourne light: the refraction of steel, a planed metallic glint to the sky, which cast it almost white. Almost. It would not rain; it would merely threaten to rain. Such were late spring afternoons in this southeastern corner of Australia: thin and hard and heavy on the skin. Today, it is also Sunday. Ten years later and the sky is the same, a shroud pulled taut over the city, and I walk beside the Yarra against the stream of runners, bikers and vagabonds. The river is slow and wide today, and I move off the path to contemplate the strange fact that the current f lows away from the sea, reaching back for the mountains. A slender boat skims past, muscular young arms moving in sharp arcs, forced on by a girl with a megaphone. Happy Birthday! she spruiks-see how I translate her muffled bark. But even with a mega- phone you couldn't hear her.You would be 31 years old. The river is tangled with willow branches and crushed soda bottles, and the rowers disappear around a bend.On that faraway Sunday, in our Richmond home, the streaked wide windows opened onto wind chimes, cobwebs and the courtyard garden bristling with mela- leuca and salmon-pink geraniums. Inside, the dining table was set with an Indian cotton cloth upon which three golden candles burned with small, steady flames: one for each daughter. On the table lay dishes of roast vegetables, home-baked bread, olives and hummus-a plate, too, of just-out-of-the-oven salmon, our moth- er's most prized offering.You were late, and I remember that I expected that. So did the rest of the fam- ily; so did our mother, although she had shoved that expectation way down deep, that place where the whale lives whose belly trapped Jonah for three days and three nights. (We all have an ocean inside ourselves, and sometimes we float and some- times we drown and sometimes a great fish swallows us whole and won't let us go, and won't let us go.)There were three of us: me, you, and Rebecca-she was the sister with the face a plaster mold of determined cheerfulness that released anger through tiny invisible slits at the side; when you sat next to her your skin caught the sudden arctic blasts. Rebecca hated you with a long, fluid ribbon of hate like she always did these things, with style and silence. I was not able to hate you; I still lack her strength.Rebecca wore lipstick, a thick magenta line-warmth without blood. Not like the red you used on weeknights, when you disappeared into the city and in the morning when it was still dark the taxi man would dump you on the doorstep (or maybe he placed you carefully, glad you were not his daughter) and ring the door- bell: once for waking, once more for urgency. He would mutter as Dad paid him, then fall into his taxi and disappear into Victoria Street. I tried to never be there. I was asleep, or at a friend's house, perhaps out running the 5-a.m. streets, all the while counting 1,2 in, 1, 2, 3, out as Jimmy Barnes and Michael Hutchence sang Mary into my headset: We're gonna have a good time tonight. Just the right speed for running like I needed to, that song. Back where I tried to never be, Dad chanted vegemite legs, vegemite legs as he lifted you up and your legs dragged on the carpet and he wept you up the stairs and shut the door.No he didn't. I just made that up. He spoke that only one time, in a whisper, when he thought he was alone in the kitchen, me quietly at his back, tying the laces on my running shoes and eyes on the back door. Those words of his, they whistled across the kitchen tiles then smashed into the sink; broke all the dishes stacked there because nobody had been home for three days, and I hadn't got to cleaning them yet. Didn't need to clean them, after you made him scream so quiet like that, vegemite legs, I just threw those plates away. …