Where Have You Been? (4 page)

When she reads over what she's written, Susan is disturbed by the brevity, the starkness of the information. She could have been writing about anyone. A stranger, not a sister. She prints out the page and slips it into an envelope. She has the photograph ready – a school portrait, taken the year of Karen's disappearance. She seems so very young; an ordinary teenage girl – gleaming hair, bright eyes, a wide untroubled smile – waiting for life to begin. She slides it in, seals the envelope.

Later, she goes back to the computer, reopens the file. Scrolls to the bottom of the page, adds another category, another subheading: ‘What I remember about my sister'. She types slowly, a single sentence:

She realises that it's not all that unusual, has spoken to others who've admitted that similarly, they have very few memories of their young lives, of actually being themselves before they were four, five, six, whatever. But Susan's amnesia seems to be more substantial. Sometimes it feels as if she slept until she was eight. That she didn't really come to
consciousness until Karen's disappearance and that her very existence is only a bizarre consequence of her sister's absence: her first conscious memory, her first real memory, she's certain, is of waving her sister goodbye on that particular night, of watching Karen's elegant figure receding in the distance, and then disappearing altogether as she turned the corner at the end of the street. After that night, after Karen left, Susan's memories are sharp, clear, focused; they come thick and fast and more or less chronologically. But before that it's almost a blank. Oh, there are a few random recollections – brief and unrelated, almost like snapshots, or dreams. And she can never be sure that they truly are memories, that they aren't constructions, reconstructions based on stories told to her by her parents, or made up collage-like from family photographs.

And it isn't just her sister. No matter how hard she tries, Susan can't really recall the woman who was her mother
before
Karen's disappearance. Her only enduring memory of her mother is of the woman she became – a woman to be feared and then, as her anger and grief became madness, to be guiltily avoided. Oh, the texture of certain fabrics, a whiff of hairspray, lipstick, a particular tune on the radio, all these can pull her back – but it's to a feeling, an indefinable sense of her mother as she was once – loving, humorous, interested – rather than a concrete memory or even an image. And with it comes always an associated sensation of loss and grief, of her mother,
that
mother, being lost.

Susan's memory of her father before that time is hazy, too. It's difficult to connect the smiling youthful man who, according to the photographs anyway, was physically demonstrative (in so many snaps he stands close, arm slung round shoulders; he hugs – unconsciously, easily) with the irritable and emotionally contained man she knew. In photographs there's an unselfconscious, irrepressible energy
about him. He looks like he might be good fun. And that's the sense she has of him from that time: recalls, she's certain, being thrown up in the air; or tickled, tortured in that affectionate fatherly way. But after Karen's disappearance – though he was only in his late thirties – he became someone else. Someone unbearably burdened, not someone fun.

And Karen – the big sister who, they assured her, she worshipped – Karen has for years existed only in two dimensions, six by four, framed, and under glass. Karen she barely remembers at all. She has a handful of memories in which her sister features, but these are incoherent, without context. All meaningless. If not for the photographs, the few stories provided by her father, family friends, it would be easy to assume that she'd never even known her.

She wonders endlessly about those final months before her sister's disappearance. Did something happen, something she's repressed or denied or perhaps dissociated from? (Oh, she knows the jargon – she's read the books, done her homework, spoken to experts. Ed would be impressed.) Or is there something – some moment, some event that she just can't remember because she was too young?

It eats away at her, this blank. She scours her memory, but there's nothing there: no gleaming moment of truth just waiting to be to discovered beneath the burnt-on layers of the past. There's nothing – an absence.

Ed has cut the notice carefully from all of the papers. The nine copies are pinned neatly to the cork board in the office, waiting to be filed. Susan prises out the drawing pin and takes the top clipping.

She thinks about their names. Susan. Karen. Their lack of meaning, of connection. If their names held some particular association for her parents, Susan was never told – as far as she knows they were named for no one, for no particular reason. Their names have no history, no past. They are names typical of their era: Karen was fashionable and so was Michelle. At school Susan was always Susan C. to differentiate her from the three other Susans in her class. Susan's middle name is Louise – the bridesmaid of names, a perfect middle name, containing the required number of syllables, nothing more than a convenient filler. At home she was usually Sukey. Or Susy, Suse, Sue. She was only ever Susan when she was in some trouble or other.
If you don't stop doing that right this minute, Susan Louise Carter
... It was impossible to shorten Karen's name. She was always just Karen.

Waiting, she is in a state not unlike those first days of pregnancy, when it seems that everywhere you look there are women lumbering with their eight-month bellies, or pushing new babies in prams. Everywhere Susan looks she see sisters. At the school gate a tiny kindergarten kid – her dress too long, shoes extra shiny – grips her sixth grade sister's hand tightly; another shouts something, gives her younger sister a sneaky shove with her bag before running off with friends. A pair of elderly women – their identical bright blue eyes the giveaway – walk slowly along the beach, trousers rolled up to
their knees, shoes swinging loosely in their hands. Queuing at the supermarket Susan eavesdrops unabashedly as the young women ahead of her talk heatedly and unselfconsciously about their mother: ‘I can't believe sometimes, that she's actually our mother. She's so irresponsible,' says one. ‘She's just lonely,' her more generous sibling replies. ‘She needs the attention.' Even stopping at traffic lights she imagines sisterly similarities in the faces of drivers and passengers, between female pedestrians crossing together at the lights.

For the first time ever Susan is envious. Is filled with a real sense – an adult sense – of what she's missed out on. Of what she's lost. She has female friends, good female friends – her best friend Anna, her sister-in-law, girls she went through college with, colleagues at work – but with none of them does she have that uncomplicated ease, that familiarity that she sees between these women. She notices the casual way they touch one another – the brisk removal of lint from shoulders, of lipstick from teeth, the hair brushed away from faces, sunscreen smoothed onto skin. She envies them their easy impatience, too, the scornful shrug of the shoulders, roll of the eyes, the knowledge of each other's shortcomings, fears, failures. She envies most of all their shared history, their shared past.

The week before she is due to start her college nursing course, Susan visits her mother. She visits only every month or so now – and then for just a few hours at a time. She goes for lunch usually, or sometimes brings Chinese takeaway for an early dinner. It has been years since she has stayed overnight – and anyway there is no longer anywhere for her to stay. Her mother has closed off most of the house, and lives entirely in the kitchen and lounge room, where she
has set up her bed on the couch. She gave up working years ago, and Susan guesses that her father supports her, or at least supplements her government entitlements, though he never mentions it. She knows he or Gillian calls in every week to bring groceries and to check that she's okay, that she's bathing, eating regularly, but they never mention this either. Nobody ever suggests that Susan should do more – she is young and busy – and the time that she spends with her mother is painful enough.

Today her mother has set the table for a formal afternoon tea; the good silver teapot – a wedding present from an English aunt – has been brought out of storage, and the dainty china cups have matching saucers and tiny silver teaspoons. She has covered the table with a lacy cloth that doesn't quite hide the smeared and crummy surface beneath. Neat stacks of Scotch Finger biscuits grace a scalloped Wedgwood cake plate.

‘Karen won't be long,' her mother says as she fills the cups. ‘She called me from London last night and said she'd be here in time for afternoon tea. She said we should start without her, not to let it all get cold, not to let it spoil, waiting.'

The tea is stone cold, and the surface looks slightly greasy. Susan pretends to take a sip. ‘Mmm,' she murmurs. ‘Delicious. Just what I need. Thanks Mum.'

Her mother blows on the surface of her tea. She breaks a biscuit in two, dunks one half, and pops it into her mouth. Swallows the finger in a single noisy gulp. She's no longer the thin, haggard, underfed woman of Susan's childhood, but is unhealthily plump – a result of years of inactivity, overeating and medication.

‘Did I tell you I start college next week, Mum?' Susan says brightly. ‘Nursing's a three year course at college now, it's not taught in the hospitals anymore. Not like when you did it.' Susan keeps going, though her mother isn't even looking
her way, is humming tunelessly to herself through another mouthful of soggy biscuit. ‘I'll get a diploma in applied science at the end of it. And then I start work as a sister.'

Her mother nods and mutters. ‘A sister. A sister.' Susan has her attention now. ‘Your sister Karen is a very fine doctor,' she announces with a proud smile. ‘All her patients tell me she's a fine doctor. One of the best.' She slurps her tea, lifts a corner of the tablecloth and delicately wipes her mouth. ‘You should be proud, too. It's no small thing, having a doctor in the family. Your sister; you should be proud.'

She presents Susan with a cardboard carton as she leaves. ‘I'm having a bit of a spring clean, dear,' she says, ‘and I thought I'd give you a few of your old things, things you might not want me to throw out.' As far as Susan can recall, she's left nothing here, but she takes the carton anyway. ‘I thought I might take a short holiday when I've finished here,' her mother says as Susan kisses her goodbye. ‘I thought I might take a train down to Melbourne to stay with Karen for a few days. It'll be lovely to see Karen and the kids,' she adds, a little teary now. ‘I'm lucky to have such lovely grandkids,' she tells Susan earnestly. ‘So many things to be grateful for.'

Susan opens the box when she gets home. They're not her things after all, but Karen's. A couple of netball trophies – best and fairest, 1973; most consistent player, 1975 – and a random selection of her books:
Carrie, Jaws, Go Ask Alice,
some hard-backed Agatha Christies and a few old Nancy Drews. There's a battered address book and several dressing table trinkets: a Victorian pincushion and a pair of china kissing angels; a maroon-and-white Manly football beanie; a
Certificate of Merit
in Biology for the year 1974. Susan is surprised that her mother's kept anything belonging to Karen. Soon after the separation, all her sister's belongings were consigned to the incinerator, and everything that couldn't be burnt was sent to
the tip. Nothing was donated, it was as if her mother wanted all evidence of Karen's existence destroyed. She must have hidden this collection of things away from herself. But this is a strange assortment, there's nothing here that's characteristic, nothing telling – they're meaningless bits and pieces.

At the bottom of the carton are several slim manila folders – all with
Karen
scrawled darkly across the top. Inside is a copy of some official document – a police report. In the second folder are newspaper clippings detailing Karen's disappearance and the subsequent search. They range from front-page articles in the
Manly Daily
with six by six blowups of Karen's last school photograph; to a single paragraph in the
Sun. Police give up hunt for missing teenager. Girl feared dead.

Susan dumps everything back into the carton, tapes it up and shoves it as far back in the wardrobe as she can. She is starting college in a week. She has her own life to get on with.

She has chosen nursing because she has enough marks and because, as her father has pointed out, nursing is a sensible job for a girl. ‘It's not as if you've got any burning ambition, Sukey,' he says, ‘or any particular talent. Nursing's respectable and flexible and the pay's reasonable, though I can't understand why you have to go to college. Waste of time if you ask me. I don't understand all this bullshit about careers for girls, anyway,' he adds somewhat irritably. ‘You'll all just end up getting married and having kids like your mothers.' Susan's father has become unashamedly reactionary as he's aged, and she is often appalled by his curmudgeonly declarations, can't imagine what Gillian sees in him, but has never braved asking, perhaps fearing that underneath the flamboyant clothes and eccentric opinions Gillian would secretly like to shave her legs and don flesh-coloured pantyhose.