Chapter 71

chapter seventy-one

‘If you hear the cabin crew say, “Evacuate, evacuate, evacuate,”’ said the flight attendant, ‘first check that the area outside the aircraft is safe.’

She said ‘evacuate, evacuate, evacuate’ in such a bored, bureaucratic monotone, it was funny. You couldn’t find the horror in the words.

The girl in 12F stopped listening to her exit row responsibilities. No plane would crash during a pandemic. That would be too many disasters for the nightly news. Anyway, in the unlikely event of an emergency the muscly guy seated next to her would shove her aside and fling the exit door free.

She tugged at her mask. It itched.

Everyone fiddled incessantly with their masks, trying to adjust to this strange new world, only their frazzled eyes visible. Glasses fogged up. Some people kept pulling their masks down under their noses for refreshing sniffs of germ-scented air. Two women across the aisle scrubbed at their tray tables and armrests with disinfectant wipes as if they were cleaning up a crime scene.

The girl looked like a member of a nineties girl grunge band. Her hair was dyed inky black and shaved on one side. She wore ripped black jeans, chunky buckled motorcycle boots and a lot of clanking jewellery that had set off the metal detectors at the airport: a bangle coiled with snakes, a skull necklace.

The girl was flying to Adelaide to visit her mother.

Her flight had been delayed multiple times so as to ensure bad moods for all. By the time she picked up her car rental and drove out to her childhood home, it would be past nine. She assumed her mother would be tucked up in bed, warm and cosy, don’t let those bed bugs bite, just as she’d left her in the gold-tinged light of dawn many months before.

‘Bye, Mum!’ she’d called. ‘Love you!’ There had been no answer.

The night before that morning, she’d cooked dinner for her mother, as she always did when she visited. A tiny exquisite calorie-controlled meal on a big white plate. Two herb-encrusted lamb cutlets (all fat excised with surgical precision). Eight green beans. One small, perfectly shaped scoop of mashed potato. Her mother still watched what she ate. You must never stop watching! Insidious calories can creep onto your plate and onto your body. Sometimes calories can find you in your dreams.

Her mother, dressed as though for church, although she’d never been to church, polished off everything on that big white plate. Afterwards, she picked at the pieces of meat between her teeth with a toothpick while proclaiming the meal to be ‘quite good’.

Then her mother showered for a long time, cleaned her teeth and changed into her nightie and dressing-gown, after which she sat on the couch to watch television with a small glass of vodka (the lowest calorie alcohol, no carbs, fat or sugar) and two yellow sleeping tablets. The doctor had said she should take only one tablet thirty minutes before bed, but what did he know? The girl’s mother said, ‘You should make your own decisions when it comes to your health.’ She took two tablets every night and slept like the dead.

The girl stood in the kitchen for a long time staring at her mother’s plate before she scraped the gnawed bones into the bin.

Then she went out to the living room and spoke to the back of her mother’s head. ‘Didn’t you teach me to never eat everything on my plate?’

Her mother said, ‘You’ve got that topsy-turvy! You teach your children to eat everything on their plates.’

The girl said, ‘Your rule was the opposite. Never ever finish everything on your plate.’

She looked at the shelves where all her ribbons and medals and trophies were displayed. She picked up a trophy. It was one of her least prestigious – just second place in a ‘tiny dancer’ regional competition – but it was one of the largest and most impressive-looking. A gold-plated pirouetting ballerina on a chunky white marble base.

The girl remembered dancing for that trophy because she remembered everything. She remembered her mother’s tiny smile for her tiny ballerina. The tiny smile was the girl’s tiny reward for the blistered toes and bruised toenails, the shin pain, the ankle pain, the back pain, but above all, the pain of unrelenting hunger.

She said to her mother, ‘Don’t you remember? If I forgot to leave something on my plate you locked me in my room. Good dancers must learn to control their calories.’

Her mother continued to watch the flickering television. ‘I don’t know why we’re talking about this now.’

The girl didn’t know why she was talking about it now either. It had not been her plan. She was here to say goodbye. She was moving interstate with her new boyfriend. He was Irish, a painter. He thought she was normal. He thought it was sweet that she’d been a ballerina. His sister had been a ballerina too. The girl knew his sister’s ballet experience had been entirely different from her own.

The girl said, ‘Sometimes you locked me in my room with only water. I had to ration the water. That was a terrible thing to do to a little girl. I thought I would be there forever. I thought I would die. I think I might have come close to dying. A few times.’

Nothing.

‘I have an eating disorder,’ said the girl. ‘I’ve got issues with my thyroid, my iron levels, my teeth, my digestion, my brain, my personality. I’m not . . . right.’ She paused. ‘You wrecked me.’

Canned laughter rose and fell from the television.

Finally her mother spoke. She sounded a little impatient, a little amused. ‘You always were such a liar, Savannah. You had a television in your room. Like a little princess in a castle! Just look at all those trophies! Don’t you think I had better things to do than drive you around to ballet recitals across the country? I had a life of my own, you know!’

So that’s how she lived with it. She did it the way so many people lived with their regrets and mistakes. They simply rewrote their stories. Her mother had recreated herself as a devoted mother: as if ballet had been her daughter’s favourite extracurricular activity, not her own obsession.

‘You were only moderately talented,’ said her mother after a long pause. Her words were beginning to slacken as the two sleeping tablets did their job. ‘You weren’t a protégé like your brother. I knew that from the beginning.’

Your father got the protégé.

The girl folded herself up. Neatly. Geometrically. Like origami.

She went back into the kitchen and cleaned with swift hard tiny graceful movements. She scrubbed at a congealed spot of grease on the stove with a dishcloth, pulled tight over her thumb, until it was gone. She swept the floor. She cleaned the sink until it shone.

She went back out to her loving mother and found her sound asleep on the couch, head tipped back, her mouth open in a perfect oval shape, like one of those fairground attractions.

Her mother had said earlier that day that sometimes the sleeping tablets worked too fast and she fell asleep on the couch and woke with an aching lower back. She said this as if it were somehow the girl’s fault.

So the girl took charge. She picked up the remote and turned off the television. ‘Let’s get you to bed, sleepy-head! No sore back for you!’

She had to drag her under her armpits, but her mother was as light as air, as light as a tiny ballerina. She dragged her to the closest bedroom, which happened to be the one that had once belonged to the girl, the one with the old-fashioned lock on the door.

These days it was illegal to have bedroom doors that could be locked from the outside. A safety issue.

There seemed to be no safety issues when the girl was growing up.

The girl heaved her mother onto her old bed. She pulled the sheets up tight and smooth over her chest and under her mother’s chin.

Once she was done she found she was breathing fast yet with a controlled kind of exhilaration, as if she had performed something extraordinary yet ordinary, remarkable yet required, like thirty-two fouetté turns en pointe.

‘Sleep tight, don’t let the bed bugs bite.’ She kissed her mother on her forehead. She felt her breath warm on her cheek. At the doorway she said, ‘Now, you know I do need to lock this door. That’s the rule. You gnawed on those bones like a disgusting little pig!’

The girl found the key to the bedroom door where her mother had always kept it, in the little trinket dish an ex-husband had given her as a gift. It had a cartoon of a man and a woman hugging on it. Hearts floated above their heads. It said: Love is . . . being loved back.

He’d been one of the nicer husbands, he’d taught the girl to cook, and then he was gone, taking his surname along with his cooking utensils. If he’d stayed, he would not have let what happened to her happen.

There were many people who would have stopped it, if only they’d known, if only they’d looked a little harder or bothered to ask a question or listen.

There were teachers and other ballet parents and doctors who could have noticed. Like the plastic surgeon who had seen her when she was a child. Dr Henry Edgeworth. Her mother took her for an appointment to see how much it would cost to pin back her ‘unfortunate ears’. (It cost too much.) ‘I’m hungry,’ the girl whispered to the doctor as he studied her unfortunate earlobes, and he chuckled as if it were funny that he was examining a malnourished child.

He’d recently paid an expensive price for that kindly chuckle, although he thought he’d paid a bargain price for an affair with a trashy young girl he met at a nightclub. Either way was fair.

While her mother slumbered that night, the girl went to the supermarket. She bought six boxes of Optimum Nutrition Protein Crunch Bars. They looked delicious! She bought a shrink-wrapped pallet of bottles of water. She carried the supplies into the bedroom and left them on the floor near the bed. Her mother breathed peacefully through her mouth.

She wrote her mother a friendly note. This looks like a lot but you will need to ration carefully. Remember: self-discipline!

She relocked the door.

The girl left that night for Sydney. It was back when there were no border closures, when you could move across the country with your new Irish boyfriend and not think about it.

She hadn’t expected to be gone as long as she was. She got busy! Life! Her relationship didn’t work out but she met new people and visited old friends and acquaintances. She tied up some loose ends. She had a few cash windfalls. She even did some charity work. She ‘reached out’, as the Americans said, to her famously successful brother, and he was kind, and they agreed they would get together once this crazy world returned to normal. He said he never wanted to see either of their psychotic, fucked-up parents again, and she understood. Neither did she, really, but she was a devoted daughter just like her mother had been a devoted mother.

She kept the key on a chain around her neck. It seemed important, essential even, to keep it close. It demonstrated her love.

‘Going back home?’ asked her muscle-bound seatmate as the plane began to taxi towards the runway. It was a time when people everywhere were going back home. The man had gentle dog-like eyes over the top of his mask.

The flight attendant demonstrated what to do if an oxygen mask fell from the ceiling. First remove your mask. The virus will no longer be your main concern!

‘I’m visiting my mother,’ said the girl.

There were many ways a resourceful senior citizen could have, should have, may have, probably had freed herself from a locked bedroom. Kicked down a door. Banged on the window. Called out to a neighbour. Shouted to a neighbour – the bedroom was on the second floor and faced a brick wall, but still, it was possible. A child could study a window made of thick glass effectively locked by layers of ancient impenetrable paint between the sash and the frame and find no way to break or open it, but a grown-up could find a clever solution. If I was a grown-up I could get myself out of here:that’s what the little girl had once thought. She had longed to be a grown-up, with money and food and agency, but she was a kid, just a kid who dreamed of a beanstalk she could climb to get out of that room and into the sky. She didn’t want the giant’s gold. She wanted the giant’s dinner.

She still felt helpless and trapped, no matter what actions she took in her increasingly desperate attempts to make the pain stop. She knew her memories did not fade like other people’s seemed to fade and she accepted that, but she didn’t get why the pain intensified the older she got and the further away she got from those times.

‘Me too,’ said the guy next to her. ‘Is your mother on her own?’

‘Yes,’ said the girl. She knew what he meant, but she thought, We’re all on our own. Even when you’re surrounded by people or sharing a bed with a loving lover, you’re alone.

A friendly neighbour might have called in to check on her mother after a week or two or three had passed, although if you required the concern of friendly neighbours, it helped to be a friendly neighbour yourself.

So maybe not.

Or perhaps her mother was in bed right now, peacefully unwrapping her last delicious nutritious protein bar, sipping from her last bottle of water, floating away on a choppy endless sea of television, just as her spoiled daughter once did when she slipped free of the cruel hunger pains and into other realities and other lives.

Perhaps her mother had created a sitcom version of herself.

The girl imagined a plump, smiling version of her mother bustling to greet her, wiping her hands on her apron, pulling her close. ‘I woke up that morning and had a good old laugh! You locked me in, you little minx!’

Perhaps the house would smell of sugar and butter and love.

Perhaps it would not.

‘My mother and I are going to isolate together,’ said the guy. ‘She has autoimmune issues, so she has to be careful. It’s scary.’

‘Yes,’ said the girl. ‘So scary.’ She touched the key around her neck. ‘We have to keep our parents locked up right now.’

A demented laugh rose in her chest and caught in the air between her mouth and her mask. She breathed fabric in and out and thought of a plastic bag pulled tight around her head. Her seatmate didn’t notice. He didn’t know the truth about the girl seated next to him, sharing his exit row responsibilities. Masks were so great. So useful and protective. Nobody knew what went on behind them. She could be any type of person she chose to be, any type of person he needed her to be.

The pilot’s voice crackled over the intercom. ‘Cabin crew, please prepare for take-off.’

She pulled her seatbelt tighter, the way a nervous flyer does, and she felt him notice and she felt him care, the way nice, well-brought-up boys care about fragile, frightened girls. He needed fragility. She could give him fragility. She wasn’t dressed right – girl next door would have been better – but it was all in your delivery.

The engines roared. That moment before take-off always seemed impossible. Against the laws of nature. But things happened all the time that were seemingly against the laws of nature.

The plane lifted into the sky.

The girl looked down at the patchwork quilt of suburbia below: miniature houses with tiny backyards and swimming pools, matchbox cars travelling along winding streets past sportsgrounds and tennis courts.

From here above the clouds, life looked so peaceful and manageable: Jump in your matchbox car and drive to that cute little city to earn your living! Go to those dear little shops and buy your dinner! Love and feed your children! Follow your dreams and pay your taxes! Why was it so impossibly hard for some people to do those things, yet so easy for others?

Her seatmate was describing his mother. ‘She’s a homebody. Not exactly active.’

‘My mother is the opposite,’ said the girl.

She saw a woman who looked just like her, running her a bath, checking the temperature with her hand, sloshing the water back and forth to get it just right. She saw her standing at her bedroom door late at night with an extra blanket because it had ‘suddenly got so chilly’. She saw her pulling a dress off a rack that was ‘just her colour’ and then clapping her hands with delight when she walked out of the change room. She saw a woman furiously scolding her for her behaviour, but then moving on, as if it was possible for even the most terrible of actions to be forgiven.

The girl said, ‘My mother plays tennis.’