A Thin, Brilliant Line – by Lal Perera
ISLAND | ONLINE ONLY
According to Mandy, the things we imagine are as important as the things that are real. I imagine if our house had no roof back then, a bird could look down and see the three of us in front of the TV: Dad lying along the length of the grey couch, me on the brown one, and then, once Mandy had done stretching herself out on the floor, the bird would see us making the shape of an arrow, and the arrow would point to the door.
Once, when we were arranged this way, Dad said: ‘I’m proud of the two of you.’ He was smiling that way only adults do – where there’s nothing fake about the smile, but you can tell it’s not exactly happiness behind it.
‘Thanks,’ I said, smiling.
Mandy stood up and started collecting the glasses and bowls to take back to the kitchen. Dad stretched out his arm, offering her his empty can. She stopped in front of him and said: ‘Why?’
‘Why?’ Dad said. ‘Are you asking why I’m proud of you?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Well … because of the way you carry yourselves as you move through this world. Because each of you has a good head on your shoulders and a kind heart beating in your chest.’ His eyes were very soft as he said it. I liked it.
Mandy walked away from him, leaving his arm stuck out there with the can in his hand. He didn’t move it as she walked to the kitchen and said: ‘What do those things even mean, though? Good head and kind heart – you could say that about anyone and no one would be able to argue.’
‘No one is looking to argue, though, are they?’ he said.
Mandy sighed.
‘Tell us something measurable,’ she said.
‘Measurable?’ Dad said.
‘Yeah. Measurable. Provable.’
‘It can’t be proved except through observation, Mandy. I see you and I see those things in you. In both of you.’
‘But is there anything you’re proud of about me that doesn’t just exist in your head?’
‘It doesn’t just exist in my head, Mandy. It’s real. I see it every day.’
Mandy walked back into the front room and stood in front of him again. ‘Prove that I have this good heart you’re so proud of,’ she said.
‘You might not see it yourself, darling, but I can see it.’
She raised her voice: ‘So show it to me! Point out the evidence for this good heart and good head, or I’m going to have to believe that you’re just saying that because you think it’ll make us like you more.’
‘Like me more?’ Dad sat up.
‘Why else would you say something based on no evidence? It must be to make us feel good about you.’
‘I don’t know what to say to you, Manjula,’ Dad said.
Mandy looked at her phone. ‘I’ve got to go to the shops. Can I take the car?’
Dad frowned for a second, then stopped. ‘Why don’t you both go? Walk there together?’
I looked from Dad to Mandy. Mandy shrugged her shoulders and said: ‘Why don’t we both go and I take the car?’
Dad sighed as I jumped up and started out the door.
‘Hey!’ he called out from the couch. ‘Can one of you please take this can and put it in the yellow bin?’
‘I’ll do it!’ Mandy yelled as we got in the car. She grinned and reversed really fast – I hadn’t even finished putting on my seatbelt. As we pulled away I turned to see Dad shaking his head as he walked with his empty beer can towards the bin.
Mandy says if you treat life like a series of battles to win, all your victories will be pyrrhic. I still haven’t searched up what that means, but I will.
I chose the playlist and Mandy drove. Really, really fast.
Look, I know this is weird, but: If you get the chance, try to meet Mandy while you’re both moving at high speed. Going fast suits her. It’s not that she’s fidgety or twitchy, but when she’s sitting still, you feel like she’s only doing it to build up the energy to rocket away any second. If I was going to post a video called ‘The Essence of Mandy’, it would be her during the last drop on the roller-coaster at the Royal Show, the biggest smile you’ve ever seen growing bigger as we get faster, and I’d shoot all of it at a thousand frames a second, so you have the chance to take it all in.
I didn’t recognise the road we were on. ‘We’re … not going to the shops, are we?’ I asked.
‘Nah. Highgate. I’ve got a pickup,’ Mandy said.
‘Where’s Highgate?’
‘Remember Aunty Sissy and Uncle Rama? We’d walk up concrete stairs to get to their flat. We’d make paper planes and throw them off the balcony. That was Highgate.’
‘Oh, yeah. With all their cats.’
‘Yeah. So many cats.’ She screwed up her face as a new song started. ‘What is this?’
‘I made a new playlist, I told you.’
‘Yeah, but what’s this song?’
‘Waterfall. The Stone Roses.’
‘Dad’s music?’ She looked disgusted.
‘I like it.’
She sighed. ‘He’s got a girlfriend, you know,’ she said.
‘What? Dad? Who is she? How do you know?’
‘You don’t ever wonder why he’s suddenly had so many away-trips for work on the weekend? I don’t care who she is. And I know because he told me. He told me not to tell you. Which is exactly why I’m telling you.’
‘You literally won’t do anything he asks you to do, hey?’
‘It’s not that, Sam. I mean, yeah, that’s true. Well, I try my best to make it true. Rules to live by, you know. But it’s not that.’ We pulled into a dirty carpark next to a soccer ground. You could hear the bass thudding out from a gym behind us. Mandy yanked the handbrake and looked at me. ‘Listen to me, Sammy. If an adult ever tells you to keep something secret, don’t do it. Ever. Find the first person you can and spill the beans. Straight away. Every bean there is. Spill it.’
‘Any adult?’
‘Any adult. If they’re over eighteen they’ve got no reason to keep secrets with a kid.’
‘So … even Dad?’
‘Jesus, yes! Especially …’ She stopped herself. ‘Yeah. Even Dad. Tell someone straight away, okay?’
‘Why, though?’
‘Adults, man. I can’t even begin to tell you. There’s no excuse for the way they behave.’ She had one hand on the steering wheel, one still on the handbrake.
I looked at her for a bit, then said: ‘What about next month?’
‘What about next month?’
‘Next month you’ll be eighteen. An adult. What happens then?’
Mandy puffed out her cheeks as she pushed herself back into the seat. She tilted her head back and looked up, then dropped it forward so her forehead rested on the bottom of the wheel. She stayed like that and said:
‘Shit shit shit. Okay. Good point. Okay.’ She leant back again and turned to look straight at me. ‘Even with me, stick to that rule, okay? The second you see me blow eighteen candles out on a cake, it means we won’t have secrets together anymore. That’s how it’s gonna be, right?’
I didn’t say anything. I nodded.
I wanted us to start driving again – fast – but Mandy undid her seatbelt and opened the door and walked out to a too-full skip, as two filthy bin-chickens squawked awkwardly off to scratch about in a puddle. She moved behind the skip and squatted down, then came back carrying a white shopping bag. She sat in the driver’s seat and pulled two bottles of vodka from the bag.
‘Who left it there for you?’ I asked.
‘Not important,’ Mandy said as she looked at whatever else was in the bag. ‘It’s all here. And in three hours it’ll well and truly be Saturday night!’ She grinned and swung the bag onto the back seat. We drove home fast enough that before I really knew what was happening, neither of us could stop smiling.
Mandy reckons you should never trust a man who has a first name for a surname; that how you feel about your shoes affects how you feel about your day; and that every animal’s perfect because every animal’s innocent. She says sometimes you get things right even though you don’t know what the fuck is going on.
Dad had an away-trip for work that night and Mandy’s friends were out on the patio when I fell asleep. The bass sounded a bit like a heartbeat, and their vapes smelled like strawberry lollies. I was dreaming I was flying when a weight on my bed woke me up: Mandy, cross-legged next to my feet.
‘Mandy?’ I said.
‘Sorry to wake you up, Sammy. This can’t wait.’ She leaned over to switch on my lamp. Her eyes were wider than I’d ever seen them. Even her pupils were big. Her eyelashes were like those little lines of brightness preschoolers make when they draw the sun. I could hear her friends and the music outside. ‘Come on, sit up, sit up. You have to be proper awake. I don’t want you thinking this is a dream.’
I got cross-legged too and pulled the doona over my lap.
‘I was thinking about what you said about my birthday coming up,’ she said, ‘and I have to tell you this now or it’ll be too late. It’s a secret. A big secret.’ She took a deep breath, then looked straight into my eyes and said: ‘Not everyone has to die.’
‘What?’
‘Okay, you know how we’re told that from the time we’re born, there’s only two ways to be: either dead or on your way to being dead? Well, for some people it’s not like that. For some people, there are more than two ways. They don’t have to die.’
This was weird. ‘What?’
‘I know. It’s big, right?’
‘I don’t …’ I didn’t even have an end in mind when I started that sentence.
‘Some people, they just kind of reach a point where they stop getting older. They can die if you kill them or if they fall under a train or whatever, but they don’t get older and die the way everyone says everyone has to. They just don’t.’
I blinked really, really slowly. Mandy leaned in closer.
‘You know what a missing person is right? Well, heaps of them – not all of them, but lots – they’re these people. They realise they’ll never die of old age so they have to make their way to another place, then another, then another, so no one can see that they stay the same age. There are people around us, Sam, and they’ve been alive for, like, hundreds of years!’
‘Did you …’ I wasn’t exactly sure how to ask. ‘Did you … um … Did you take drugs tonight, Mandy?’
‘Sammy, this has nothing to do with drugs. This is just an amazing thing that almost no one knows about. But I want you to know. I really do.’
‘You believe this?’
‘It’s the truth. Remember that guy from St Judes, Anthony de Souza? How he never came back from that big bushwalk thing their school put on? He’s the one that told me about it, ages ago, when I was in year nine. He told me he was one of them. It sounded totally insane at the time but look what happened last year. Boom. Without a trace.’
‘How did he know he was one of those people?’
‘He said it’s like … a feeling. At first. You know, you feel like there’s something about you that doesn’t quite fit. That deep down you’re not what everyone says you are. Then, when he found out about this, he realised who he was. No one had ever told him before that he could even be that way, and he suddenly just kind of realised.’
‘Who told him? Another one of these people?’
‘I dunno. But …’ she waved her hands in front of her face like she was trying to catch hold of something there. ‘But he said something like he knew for the first time that he wasn’t the only one.’
‘I don’t know, Mandy,’ I said.
‘It’s okay. It’s okay. It’s a lot. I know it is. But I had to tell you. Can you get back to sleep? I’ll turn the music down.’
‘No, the music’s okay,’ I said.
‘Can you fall back asleep?’
‘I think so. I always fall asleep pretty easy. I’ll fall asleep easy,’ I said. And I did. I fell straight back into the dream where I was flying.
Mandy didn’t answer when I knocked on her door the next morning. I went to make myself some toast and saw, asleep on the blue couch, a girl I’d never seen before. She’d pulled a denim jacket over herself like it was a blanket. She was wearing camos exactly the same as Mandy’s and still had her Superstars on. The light through the curtains had turned the whole place a kind of buttery yellow but the gap near the edge of the window let a thin, brilliant line of white light fall across the girl’s hair and curve onto her cheek. When I realised that if I’d got there a few minutes earlier I’d have seen that line touch the edges of her eyelashes, I decided to stay and watch for longer. I wanted to see the line grow wider and its edges blur as it oozed further into the room.
It happened very, very slowly and it didn’t happen in stages at all; I didn’t notice when the line started to grow wider and I wasn’t sure how I knew when I’d watched it for long enough, but I didn’t stop watching.
When I remember to, I go back to that spot at the right time and I watch that line of light change as the sun climbs higher. Every time I do it, it feels slightly different from the time before but also, somehow, exactly the same.
Mandy says adults love resilient kids because a resilient kid is one who’s been let down by adults so many times they’re numb to the pain. She reckons adults will tell you they’ll never hurt you, but they do – and then say you’ll understand when you’re older. Then they do it again. And again. They’re the only ones who can stop it from happening but no matter how many times you ask them to stop, they keep on doing it, until finally you don’t ask them to stop anymore, because what’s the point? Then, once they’ve let you down for the five-hundredth time and you’re not crying or begging but you’re just sitting there all toughened up, they watch as you get on with school or softball or doing the dishes and they say to their friends on the phone: ‘Wow! I’m so proud! I’m so grateful! I’m so blessed to have such a marvellously resilient kid!’
I never met Dad’s girlfriend who Mandy told me about, but his girlfriend now is Sophie. He calls her his partner. Sophie stays over a lot. She gave me a lift after school once and everyone watched her black Lexus as it glided up to the kerb. She and Dad met because Sophie was his grief coach. He got a grief coach called Sophie and I got a grief counsellor called Elaine.
Elaine and I meet in the front room of a house in Mt Lawley that’s always full of light, even in the winter. I think she lives there; there are folding screens which stop you from seeing down the corridor, but sometimes the place smells like cooking and you can hear normal house-sounds sneaking out from behind the screens. I guess Elaine’s good at her job because over the last couple of years I’ve told her things that I didn’t think I’d tell anyone. Like one time I was sitting on her bench-sized windowsill, flipping that ugly hourglass of hers up and down in both hands while she was in her usual chair, and I ended up telling her about the time an express train roared past the platform at Daglish and, as it whipped by, I saw someone in the window who looked exactly like Mandy.
The other thing that makes me think Elaine might be good at what she does is that she makes a real effort. Ages ago – in the first six months – she brought in all these printouts from the days of the search: how many boats went out, how long they were out before they came back, who was on each one. There was one for the helicopter too. On the second day it came back an hour late. I imagined the pilot radioing in to base saying ‘I’m not giving up on her yet! We’ve got time for one more sweep,’ and then they’d ignore all the protesting as they swung the chopper round into the sun and then curve it back again, and everyone on board would squint across the ocean and sometimes lift binoculars to their eyes and they’d fly on, against orders, searching and hoping.
They didn’t use the helicopter on the third day. There wasn’t a fourth day. They stopped looking.
Elaine explained how, even though it was a really big search, it wasn’t on TV or any of the news sites because there are rules (she called them ‘guidelines’) about how they do reports on suicides and ‘likely suicides’. I told her I thought that made sense. Then, sitting in her usual chair, she leant over to the little coffee table, turned her hourglass onto its side and said:
‘Sometimes people feel as though they have no other choice.’
‘I know,’ I said, because she was right. She got it right, even though she didn’t know what the fuck was going on.
Every now and then Dad asks if I want to keep seeing Elaine and I just say I don’t mind. It’ll end one day, I know, like most things do, and a couple of times I’ve heard her tell Dad that I’m ‘remarkably resilient’ so, you know … yeah.
One Tuesday after Easter, Dad gave us his credit card and asked Mandy and me to go to Coles to buy discounted chocolate. We flew through the aisles like the best idea you ever had which you can never quite remember again. We swept cat food into the trolley for all the cats we hoped we’d one day meet, we bought one box of every cereal with a cartoon animal mascot, and we loaded up on the most expensive ice cream they had. By the time we were a yawping, speeding blur headed for the stationery section, that one good Katy Perry song started playing overhead as Mandy skidded the trolley to a stop. She grabbed a notebook with a brown-paper cover, tossed it in and said:
‘I know that you know why I’m getting a new one of these.’ I tried to look like I didn’t know what she meant, but she said, ‘Sammy, it’s fine. I only write that stuff because I know you’ll read it.’
I tried even harder to look confused, but even I could tell I wasn’t pulling it off.
‘What do you mean?’ I asked.
‘I’m not stupid, man,’ she said. ‘You think I’d write a bunch of life advice for myself? And even if I did, you think I think it’d be safely hidden there? Sammy, I know you, dude. You’re sneaky. You’re a sneaky little bastard in your own doe-eyed way. So what better way to let you get some actual knowledge than by leaving some notes for you?’
‘You knew I’d be reading it? Like, it’s not private?’
‘Like I said, Sam, I’m not stupid. And I’m a good big sister. The best there is. These are things I want you to know and not forget, so I’m writing them down. For you. The notebook you’ve been reading is full, yeah? So we’re buying another one – on Dad’s card – and I’ll start filling that one too. You can thank me later.’
Here’s the thing:
Ages and ages ago I started going into Mandy’s room and looking around; different times, day or night, as long as she wasn’t home. Late afternoons, I’d look under the bed as the light slid lower and lower into the room. Saturday nights when she was out, I’d shuffle quietly through her old shoeboxes in the almost-dark. Even after doing it for quite a while and never finding anything interesting, I didn’t stop.
One day I found a notebook behind her bedside table. On its brown-paper cover she’d written in fat black marker ‘Rules to Live By’ and it was full of Mandy’s ideas about how to get better at things, how to not let things get to you, how to spot bad people in good situations and good people in bad situations; stuff like that. The things I’ve told you here – about resilience and imagination and animals and pyrrhic victories – they’re all from what she’s written for me. They’re amazing books, both of them. The first one’s next to me now. I can just see it in the corner of my eye as I watch a thin line of sunshine widen across the floor, blurring and fading as it goes. ▼
Image: Andrey Konstantinov
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