Rose lives a block back from High Street, which is crammed with shops selling coffee and clothes and records. The north of the city always felt like the second-hand side of town to Cal and me, and we liked it. Over the river, in the south, there are wide streets and new clothes, but if I have to live in the city, I prefer it here. The cinema shows old and new films, walls are covered in graffiti, crooked powerlines cross the sky.
Rose’s last flat, over the road from the hospital, only had one bedroom. When Cal and I stayed there she put a mattress on the lounge room floor for us. Her new place is an orange-brick warehouse with CAR REPAIRS written in faded letters across the outside. There’s a wooden door on the left, and double wooden doors on the right, which must be where they drove the cars in.
Rose is my favourite aunt – she was Cal’s, too – but she has always been the most elusive. She appears and disappears. When she appeared in Sea Ridge she was always mowing the lawn or cleaning out the garage or smoking in the dunes. When she disappeared, it was always to somewhere exotic – travelling through Africa, working in London, volunteering in Chile.
Once I asked her why she didn’t have kids.
‘I never wanted them,’ she said. ‘I’m too busy. Plus, I swear too fucking much.’
But I know she didn’t mind Cal and me being around. I’m told that after I was born, I cried all the time; Rose would stop by after her shift at the hospital and hold me, so Mum and Dad could get some sleep. Mum would wake in the night and hear Rose reciting the periodic table. ‘It’s the only story I know,’ she’d said.
Before I get out of the car I send Mum and Gran a quick text to say I’ve arrived, then I put my phone on silent and take my suitcases out of the boot. I leave Cal’s box where it is, locked inside.
‘I heard she gave you the car,’ Rose says when she opens the door. ‘How’d it feel to drive here?’
‘Pretty good.’
‘You were scared the whole way, right?’
‘Half the way,’ I tell her, looking around. It’s messy because she’s renovating, but that’s not the problem. ‘There are no walls,’ I say, and she taps on the outside one.
‘There are no indoor walls.’
It’s one huge room with polished concrete floors, the front all windows. There’s a kitchen in the back right corner and two spaces at the front set up as bedrooms.
I can see straight into Rose’s life now. Her bed is unmade, a blue mess with a chest of drawers next to it and a shelf full of her medical books. Her clothes, mostly jeans and t-shirts, are lying on the floor or half out of drawers. There’s a clothes rack with some little black dresses, some long boots underneath.
My corner of the warehouse is near the front windows. There’s a bed with a pile of sheets on it, a chest of drawers and an empty clothes rack.
‘Obviously the long-term plan is to have walls, but until then we’ll just have to respect each other’s space. The bathroom has walls.’ Rose points to a metal door near the kitchen.
I look at where she’s pointing and try to be comforted by that fact.
‘You don’t like it?’ she asks.
‘I do. It’s just not what I expected.’
But what I’m really thinking is, there’s nowhere to hide.
I don’t have much to unpack, and there’s no food in the house, so Rose and I leave for the supermarket. I’m thinking about the warehouse on the way and wondering what I’ve let myself into. I’ve gotten used to being alone and doing my own thing – walking to the beach, skipping school to sleep, crying if I want to, in my room where no one sees.
‘I’m talking to you,’ Rose says.
‘And?’
She points through the windshield. ‘We’re here. You get the trolley. I’ll meet you inside.’
Rose isn’t much of a cook so we buy things that I can make or things we can heat. It feels good to shop in the city, and not in Sea Ridge, where everyone knows everyone, and everyone still gives us looks. This supermarket is new. Cal and I never stood in the chocolate aisle deliberating between peanut or plain M&M’s. Rose doesn’t deliberate at all as it turns out. She puts both bags in the trolley.
‘Your gran says you’re not eating enough,’ she says, and we keep moving. ‘She also says you’ve turned into a zombie who hides in her room, sleeps all day and spends her nights at the beach with her mother, who has always turned into a zombie.’
Rose throws cans of tuna in the trolley while I’m trying to get a look at myself in the cake tins to see if I do actually look like the undead. The news isn’t entirely good.
‘She has no idea what a zombie actually is,’ Rose says. ‘So I wouldn’t worry.’
‘Cal introduced her to zombies. Shaun of the Dead is her top movie of all time.’
‘Jesus,’ Rose says. ‘We didn’t even get to watch TV when we were growing up. Now she’s watching Simon Pegg films and telling me my niece needs to have sex. But don’t worry,’ she says, looking at my horrified face. ‘I set her straight about that. I told her to leave you alone.’
‘Good.’
‘I told her zombies don’t have sex.’
I put down the cake tin and we keep walking. Rose moves along the aisle complaining about the volume of Gran calls she’s had lately and how every one of them has been about me. ‘Late at night, early in the morning,’ she says, throwing crackers into the trolley.
Gran and Rose have fought for the sake of fighting all the way back to when Rose was three, or so the family history goes. According to Gran, Rose swears too much, works too much, and doesn’t come home nearly enough.
‘If she’s sent you to me, you’re in trouble.’
‘I tried to pass Year 12,’ I say, in an effort to defend myself.
‘If you were trying, you’d have passed. You could pass Year 12 with your eyes closed.’
I think of myself lying out the back of school when I should have been in class – the sun on my face and the warm grass on my back. ‘My eyes were closed most of the time.’
‘Life starts again,’ Rose says, as if that’s something she can order.
When we get back to the car I notice a flyer tucked under the windshield wipers advertising a band called The Hollows. I know immediately that it’s Lola’s band. It’s the name she and Hiroko chose back in Year 9, when it existed only in their imaginations. It was written all over the covers of their exercise books, their folders, their school bags. Lola designed t-shirts and had them printed before the band officially existed.
I study the flyer while Rose packs the last of the shopping bags into the car. There’s a picture on it of the two of them at a bus stop, waiting with Lola’s bass and all of Hiroko’s percussion instruments. ‘Old friends,’ I explain to Rose.
‘Old friends write,’ a voice says, and I look up to see Lola standing there.
It’s not all that surprising since she lives close by, and she’s obviously here putting band flyers under windshield wipers. It feels like a small miracle, though, as if she’s slipped through the air from the past: short and curvy, long brown hair and olive skin. I want to hug her, but if I do that I might spill everything and cry right here in the parking lot.
‘It’s been too long,’ I say to fill the silence.
‘Way too long,’ she says, twisting an earring that looks, in the dimness of the car park, like a small nail. ‘I thought you might be dead.’
‘I’d have told you,’ I say. ‘If I were dead.’
She doesn’t smile, but she stops twisting the nail. If I told her about Cal, she’d forgive me immediately, but she’d feel guilty when there’s nothing to feel guilty about. Plus, it doesn’t feel right to blurt it across a grubby car park while Rose is packing toilet paper into the car.
‘Year 12 sort of took over everything,’ I tell her and she steps forward a little and touches my hair as if she’s just noticed that it’s short and bleached now.
Her eyes roam all over me, over my black t-shirt and jeans, over my skinny frame. She’s in a short silver dress and I try not to look as faded as I feel. ‘You don’t like it?’ I ask, running my hand over my hair.
‘I like it,’ she says.
‘Are you forgiving me?’