About a month after Jess’s first birthday, I was able to repay Charlie for his kindness. He and I had recently been watching lots of American TV shows during the few hours of TV a week our parents allowed us. Copying one of them, we thought it would be funny to set up a lemonade stall down the street from our Richmond house one Saturday afternoon. We convinced ourselves we’d make a fortune. Hundreds of people walked past our gate on their way to the football at the MCG. They’d be dying of thirst, desperate for fresh lemonade.
As we set up the stall, Charlie made me laugh by giving the lemons lemony voices and getting them to talk to one another. “You give me the pip,” he had one say. “Yeah?” another replied. “Well, your problem is you’re too thin-skinned.” “You’re just a yellow-bellied coward!” “Don’t think I’m going to come to your aid, lemon. Or should I say, come to your lemon-ade.” It suddenly seemed urgent to let him know that, alongside Lucas, he was my favorite person in the world.
“Charlie?”
“Mmm?”
“I love you.”
He swooned, clutching his chest. “Be still, my beating heart. But, Arabella, it will never work out between us. I’m sorry to break it to you, but I’m your brother.”
“Stepbrother, actually,” I said. “But that’s what I meant. I love you in a brotherly way.”
“How marvelous.” Apart from using as many big words as possible, he’d also taken to occasionally speaking in an upper-class English accent. “And I, dearest Arabella, love you in return. In a sisterly way, of course.”
“Good,” I said.
He reverted to his very Australian accent. “Can we get back to our lemonade now?”
“Sure,” I said.
Two hours later, we were packing up after a frankly disappointing afternoon. We’d made only two dollars and twenty cents and had drunk most of the lemonade ourselves. I heard a noise from down the street—shouting, and a bottle being kicked along the footpath. It was a gang of boys from one of the other schools in the area. I’d seen them now and again going past our house, and ignored them. There was an unspoken war between the two schools. They thought we were all posh brats. We thought they were all criminals.
Charlie was still very fat at this stage. It wasn’t until he reached his twenties that he started to lose any weight. I could hear the gang of boys begin to taunt him as they approached. “Hey, Fatso.” “Who ate all the pies?” “Someone call the RSPCA. There’s a beached whale on the street.”
“Come on, Charlie,” I said, quickly pushing the unused cups and lemons into the packing crate we’d used as our stand. I wasn’t quick enough. I was just taking down our handwritten sign when the gang stopped in front of us.
“Fatso’s got a girlfriend,” one of them said. The other one said something cruder in reply. I ignored them. Beside me, Charlie kept packing up too. I shot him a glance. He didn’t look back.
“Give us a drink, Fatso’s girlfriend.”
“We’re closed,” I said, looking down at the footpath.
“Fatso drank it all,” one said. They all laughed.
Before I could stop him, the tallest boy reached into the packing crate, grabbed one of the lemons and pelted it across the road. It narrowly missed a passing car. The driver honked his horn. Two of the boys gave him the finger.
“Ignore them,” Charlie hissed at me.
I tried, but they did it again. More horns honked. The third time, they threw the lemon at Charlie, not the cars. It missed him by inches. The next one hit him on the shoulder.
“Don’t do that,” he said, his face turning red.
“Who’s gonna stop us, Fatso? You and your girlfriend?”
The tall boy reached across and, in what seemed like slow motion to me, shoved Charlie. I watched, horrified, as Charlie stumbled back against the crate. It tilted. He lost his balance and fell heavily. Paper cups and lemons scattered onto the footpath around him.
The gang of boys laughed. I had to do something, and quickly. No one shoved my Charlie and got away with it. No one laughed at him or called him names either.
As well as the American TV shows, we’d been watching American films. One of them was
The Karate Kid
. I’d never been to a single karate class, but the boys weren’t to know that. To their shock, and mine, I went into action. I leaped in between them and Charlie and made a strange high-pitched noise, a kind of “Ah-yah!” as I held up both hands at an angle.
“Watch out,” I shouted as loudly as I could. It was pretty loud. “I’m a black belt.”
They started laughing. One of them threw another lemon at Charlie, who was still lying on the footpath. It hit him on the head.
I shouted at them again.
“No!”
There’s something glorious about letting fury rise inside you. It’s like a gas flame, a whoosh of pure emotion. I turned mine up to high and went for it. I was twelve, tall for my age, thin and fast. I seriously didn’t have a clue about karate, but I knew from the films that it involved a lot of quick kicks and hand slices. As luck would have it, my first kick landed right where it would hurt, on the tallest of the four boys. He doubled up. Another kick landed behind the knee of a second boy. He crumpled. That was it in terms of my armory, but they weren’t to know. I kept shouting, making so much noise that a neighbor came out to see what was happening.
“What the hell’s going on here?” he said. He was more than six foot tall and very broad.
The sight of an adult was what made the boys run, not me—I know that—but I still took pleasure in seeing them run down the street, the tallest one bent over, groaning.
“Are you two okay?” the neighbor asked.
I was panting, but I nodded. Charlie nodded too.
We packed up swiftly. I looked over at Charlie. His face was red, but he was smiling.
It wasn’t until we started walking that he spoke. “Wow, Ella,” he said.
I smiled all the way home too. Neither of us told Mum or Walter what had happened. It was our own excellent secret.
I turned thirteen, fourteen, fifteen. I went through puberty, with some alarm at first. Charlie got taller, a bit fatter and even cleverer. He topped his class each year, became a skilled debater, applied to be a Rotary exchange student and was immediately accepted. After he passed his final-year exams, he’d be spending a year in the US. I think I was prouder of him than Walter was.
Meanwhile, Jess was growing older too. Older and bolder, as the saying goes. The house still seemed to revolve around her. When I was with her, I was often conscious of difficult, spiky feelings, not the warm, amused feeling I had when I was with Charlie. It bothered me, especially the older I got. Was it because she was only half my sister? Or was it just that I didn’t actually like her very much? I couldn’t work out which one.
The age difference—eleven years in my case, thirteen years in Charlie’s—meant that we didn’t have huge amounts to do with each other, particularly once Charlie and I went to high school. Our after-school lives became as busy as at school. I played hockey, sang in the school choir, volunteered in the local library. Charlie studied, and studied some more. In between studying, he wrote to his dozens of pen pals. The mailbox was always full, every day, with letters for him from all over the world, part of his involvement with the Rotary clubs. He’d applied for pen pals as part of his mission to be chosen as an exchange student, and then got hooked. He didn’t just write one letter that did for them all, either. He would compose letters to each, carefully and considerately.
He also sent them regular photos of himself. I took the photos. He wasn’t in the least bit self-conscious about his weight. He would beam at the camera, his pudgy cheeks red, his stomach round. Mum had tried sending him to dieticians and even psychologists in an attempt to find the root cause of his weight problem. Charlie sat her down one afternoon and gently asked her to leave him alone and stop worrying.
“I’m the root cause of my weight problem, Meredith. I eat too much. It’s that simple.”
She couldn’t even try the “but you’ll be so much happier if you’re thinner” approach with him. Because Charlie was the happiest person any of us knew. Happy and popular, even with the girls. He didn’t care that he was fat, so why should anyone else?
Walter still worked too hard. Mum worked part-time too, as an Avon lady, for the fun and the free samples rather than the money. The rest of her time was spent looking after Jess. With five of us on the move, our home life needed to be organized. Fortunately, it was. Walter was German, after all. We had rosters and timetables. Walter could easily have afforded a cleaner but he and Mum thought it more character-building if Charlie and I took on the task, in return for our pocket money.
Jess was considered too young for chores, but during our high school years, Charlie and I were given plenty to do around the house. I had to load and unload the dishwasher, make the beds and do the vacuuming every Saturday. Charlie swept the veranda, mowed the lawn and cleaned the bathroom. When we complained one month, Walter swapped the rosters so that I did the veranda and Charlie did the vacuuming.
“That should help keep it fun,” Walter said as he proudly pinned up the new roster.
“It’s really working,” Charlie said to me the next Saturday. “I’m having so much fun with this vacuum cleaner I want to faint with excitement.”
“Me too,” I said, in a mock-excited voice. “Look at this dirt I’ve swept up. I am fascinated.”
For the next week, we amused ourselves and drove our parents mad by finding everything either fascinating, wonderful or incredibly interesting.
“Stop it, you two,” Mum said one night.
“We’re just being enthusiastic about life,” I said.
“No, you’re not. You’re being annoying.”
But it was different for Jess. They didn’t tell her to stop saying particular words, or tell her she was being annoying, or expect her to do anything but be cute. I’ve talked about this a lot with Charlie over the years. It was like Jess somehow bewitched our parents from the second she arrived. It was as though she was in charge of them, not the other way around. And the two of us? We were her servants.
We were told from morning till bedtime to do things around the house: tidy up, wash the car, empty the dishwasher, eat our dinner. There was no choice in the matter. From the moment Jess had any say in it, however, her answer was no.
“Jess, tidy your room.”
“No.”
“Jess, pick up your toys.”
“No.”
We would be told off if we dared to defy our parents like that. But they just smiled at Jess.
“You are such a vascal, my Jessie,” Walter would say.
Charlie and I would roll our eyes at each other. “You are such a vapscallion, my Jessie,” Charlie would whisper to me when we were out of Walter’s earshot. “Such a vogue. Such a vatbag.”
My mum was as bad. Jess could do no wrong in her eyes. A temper tantrum was a show of high spirits. A flood of tears was evidence of her emotional maturity. “She’s such a character!” I’d hear her say to her friends on the phone. “Honestly, she’s the light of our lives.”
It helped, of course, that Jess was—is—beautiful. Physically beautiful, I mean. She was—still is—like a little doll, with a round face, rosy cheeks, big eyes and a head of golden curls. And she had a
lot
of curls as a child because she refused to let anyone cut her hair until the day she turned seven. It’s true. Mum took her to the hairdresser’s when she was about three and brought her back, unchanged, an hour later, both of them red-faced, Mum tearful, Jess defiant.
“She screamed bloody murder as soon as she saw the scissors,” I heard Mum tell Walter. “Next time, you take her.”
Walter tried. Same result. The next month, Mum tried again and came home in tears. Her, not Jess. Walter tried one more time. They eventually gave up.
One night while we were tidying up the kitchen, Charlie and I idly discussed the matter of Jess’s hair. It was getting worse every week, a long, tangled mass of golden knots and snarls.
“I know,” Charlie jokingly suggested. “Let’s cut her hair ourselves one night while she’s asleep.”
Jess overheard, told on us, and we both got into trouble for being mean to her.
“It was just an idea,” Charlie said to Jess later, once we’d told
her
off for being a squealer.
“A very good idea,” I said. “You are looking a bit wild, Jess, if you don’t mind me saying.”
“It’s
my
hair,” Jess said, stamping her foot, like a child in a comic book. “I’ll wear it the way I want.” She’d have made me laugh if she didn’t infuriate me so much.
One summer, the year she turned four, she refused to wear any clothes. Just point-blank refused. Fortunately for her, there was a heat wave in Melbourne at the time. Also fortunately for her, she was only in kindergarten and spent most of the time at home with Mum. After two months of nudity and wild tantrums if anyone tried to dress her or make her leave the house, she consented to wear her swimsuit, but that was it. We have a Christmas family photo from that time, the three of us kids standing in front of our tree. There’s Charlie in all his gorgeous fatness, wearing his new Christmas clothes of white shirt and shorts. Skinny me beside him, giggling at something he must have just said, wearing a red shift dress and a pair of blue sandals I recall being very proud of. And there between us, like a feral Shirley Temple, is a beaming wild-haired child in a grubby swimsuit. She wore it everywhere—to restaurants, to our end-of-year school concerts, to the shops. Mum and Walter just seemed to let her do whatever she wanted.
The year she turned five, she announced she wanted a pet for her birthday. We’d been asking for years, Charlie and I. The answer was always the same.
“Not yet,” our parents would say.
“When is yet?” Charlie asked once.
“We’ll know when the time is right,” was the answer.
“Yet” was obviously the moment Jess asked. She wanted a kitten, she told them. Really, really, really wanted a kitten. A birthday kitten.
Charlie and I were nearby, washing up or darning socks or sweeping the chimney or whatever task we’d been allocated that day in our roles as slaves in the Kingdom of Jess. At last, I remember thinking, she finally won’t get her own way.