chalk and food crumbs.
The television, a brand new fifty-two-inch, was blaring at full volume. Lisa was lured to it like a zombie. She stopped less than a foot from the screen, mouth agape, as if the cartoon characters on the screen were whispering all the secrets of the universe.
In the middle of the living-room floor was an Ikea box, roughly torn down the middle to expose a mad tangle of cheap wood and plastic brackets.
If I spent just one day in Amy’s shoes my mind would melt with sensory overload, but she seemed to thrive in the chaos.
‘It’s a goddamn toy chest for Lisa’s room,’ she said, picking up an L-shaped bracket and turning it over in her hands, as if it were some mysterious archaeological artefact. ‘Or at least it will be a toy chest … one day. In the far off, distant future.’
‘Need some help putting it together?’
‘Nah, I’ll leave it for Wayne to finish. And I don’t even care what that says about me as a woman. Coffee?’
‘Sure.’
As she prepared coffee in the adjoining kitchen, she talked about the toy chest for a full five minutes. Shouting over the sound of the percolator, she told me how much the toy chest cost, which section of Ikea she found it in, what it should look like after its construction and the complex series of decisions that led to its purchase. She told me all of this without a break as I waited in the living room. I could have left, gone to the bathroom and come back, and she wouldn’t have noticed. Instead I used the time to scan her bookshelves, searching for her photo albums.
In particular I was looking for a fat pink folder with EARLIEST MEMORIES spelled out in purple block letters on the cover. The album had belonged to our mother, and should really have been kept at Dean’s place, but Amy went a little nutty with photos after Mum died.
The photos were the whole reason I was here. Last night I’d half-convinced myself that I could have been the kid in James Finn’s photograph, and I was eager to knock that speculation on the head.
The bookshelf was packed with DVDs, magazines, a framed cast of two tiny feet marked Lisa, age 6 months, but there were no albums.
‘What are you looking for?’ Amy had snuck up behind me. She handed me a cup of black coffee. ‘We’re outta milk.’
‘That’s fine. And nothing. I was just looking.’
‘You’re lying.’
Damn it, I thought. Ever since we were kids Amy could always tell when I was trying to hide something. She had a knack for it that bordered on psychic. The morning after I’d lost my virginity to Rowan Kipling I told my parents that I had stayed over at my friend Charlotte’s place. Amy, at all of eleven years old, looked at me over her breakfast cereal and said, ‘She’s lying.’
Assuming Amy knew something they didn’t, Mum and Dean started picking at my lie until the whole damn story came unravelled. It wasn’t that I was a bad liar; Amy was just an exceptional lie detector.
Sighing, I came clean. ‘I’m looking for the photo album with the baby pictures.’
Amy clicked her tongue, a thinking technique she’d used since she was a kid. The wet click-click sound briefly transported me back in time to my bedroom at number fourteen Greenlaw Street. The memory was hazy and fragmented, lacking context like a fading dream. But I could see Amy clearly, at four or five years old, in pink-and-green striped pyjamas. She was climbing into my single bed and I was pulling back the covers to let her in.
As the memory drifted away a heavy sadness remained.
‘All the photos are probably in the garage someplace,’ Amy said. ‘We still haven’t totally unpacked the garage, if you’d believe it. Six months later. It’s Wayne’s job but every time I bring it up he does this big sigh. You know that sigh he does that sounds like a deflating tyre? Like you just asked him for a kidney.’
‘So you have it?’
‘Why do you want it?’
‘This’ll sound strange, but it’s a secret.’
Amy sipped her coffee, searching my face for whatever hidden tell or psychic signal she usually used to catch me out. Then her eyes lit up. ‘Does this have something to do with my birthday? Did Wayne tell you about the photo collages we saw at the shopping centre? Forget it. Don’t tell me. I want it to be a surprise. Follow me.’
The garage smelled of old paint and methylated spirits. Amy found a pull-string in the darkness and a fluorescent light flickered on overhead, revealing a cramped concrete room with a low ceiling.
Several rows of packing boxes occupied the space between the far wall and Amy’s little red Honda Jazz. We spent the next forty minutes carrying out each box, setting it down on the small patch of unused concrete floor and poring through its contents.
Most boxes contained miscellaneous stuff: year-old energy bills, a roll of expired coupons, a tattered apron, a chipped ceramic ashtray with a single English penny sliding around inside, a grocery bag full of magnets that Amy snatched gleefully from my hands saying, ‘I’ve been looking for these.’
One of the boxes was full of my old photography projects, many embarrassingly similar to the ones my students had presented the night before. I found a first-year uni photo-series called Scars: Physical and Emotional. Amy had organised the collection into a binder. I flicked through it, cringing; it was more like a high school project than a university folio.
One photo showed the small nick I got on my pinkie toe while climbing out of a friend’s pool one summer; another showed the grizzly slice running across Amy’s thigh from when she fell off her ten-speed. Here was a nasty burn on my mother’s hand, and the fading ghost of an old housemate’s cleft palate. Next came several photos showing subjects who looked sad or rejected or angry. It was a pretentious, highly unoriginal project designed to force the audience to consider the scars people carry on the inside as well as on the outside.
‘Oh, hey, how’s it going with Frank?’ Amy asked, leafing through an old school report.
‘Eh.’
‘What’s that mean?’
‘We stopped seeing each other.’
‘Why?’ Amy said in a high-pitched, whining voice.
‘No one thing. Just, you know. It wasn’t a love connection.’
‘You’re too fussy, Kim. You know that. And you’re running out of time to make babies.’
Amy was aggressively maternal. Reproducing was her sole purpose in life. She and her fiancé Wayne pumped out Lisa as fast as they could and were planning for a second. I, on the other hand, had never once felt the urge to procreate.
We eventually found the family albums in the ninth or tenth box and sat cross-legged on the floor to look through them. Each album was titled with big block letters, written in colours that somehow matched the theme of the photos within. PERTH HOLIDAY ’93 was black and yellow to match the emblem on the state flag. NEW HOME, which chronicled Mum and Dean’s move from their old place on Osborne Avenue to their smaller but much newer pad on Benjamin Street, was written
