Moving Among Strangers Read Free

argued, mostly silently or by proxy, and occasionally not so silently: first over where our mother should die, and then over how.
    Every morning of those last three weeks my mother insisted on walking from her bedroom along the hallway and down the three steps to the lounge room so she could sit up and feel she was still taking part in life. She wasn’t going to spend her entire day dying. As she approached the steps she clutched at the walls, just in the place the handles were supposed to have been installed, her fingers grabbing at the flat surface for stability. In these moments I loathed my sister. Too late now to ask the handyman to come and drill into the walls, too late to make sense of my sister’s decision. It was all I could do to keep our mother safely tucked in under her pile of Irish blankets.
    Only much later did I realise that when the handyman came to prepare my mother’s house for dying, my sister was also terminally ill. If she had allowed the modifications, it would have been like watching a rehearsal for her own decline, and her own decline, which she kept largely a secret, was much closer than any of us could have guessed.

2
    S isters are known for their intense and often discordant relationships, and in my family nothing was in moderation. We always went to extremes, whether it was politics, love, hate, rage or sibling rivalry. Of the two of us, my sister was the more virtuous. She worked harder and longer hours, leafleted for the Greens, knitted cardigans for newborns, hand-fed baby magpies and lived a life of celibacy. I, on the other hand, was inherently lazy, neglected my chooks and had deceived my last husband to have an affair with a younger man from my yoga class. Cathy was a wonderful cook; she followed the recipe to the letter. I didn’t own a recipe book; I made things up as I went along. Cathy was a meticulous researcher for a current affairs program; her desk was in order, her information in neat alphabetical files. She was always talking about the stories she was working on – torture of the Basque people in Spain, the psychiatric ailments of staff in Australian detention centres. She wanted to do stories, she said, that would change things – improve the world, make a difference . I, on the other hand, just wanted to tell stories for the sake of the story. She believed this was very indulgent, and she was probably right. And yet, we were also uncannily alike, as only sisters can be. In the end, as our mother lay dying, we could barely look at each other; partly, I suspect, because one cannot bear too much reflection of the self.
    *
    Growing up I had adored and worshipped my beautiful big sister with long blond hair; if only I could be like her! I wore her clothes, listened to her music, followed her wherever she went and copied everything she did. I especially wanted to be a rebel just like her.
    My older sister was notoriously rebellious – six years older than me – I always looked up to her. Expelled from school, she was sent to boarding school, then became a runaway and took acid. She even had her own little business making tie-died T-shirts, which she sold at the flea markets – a pretty, blond hippy drop-out with a boyfriend who also had hair down to his waist, sang the blues and screen-printed radical posters at Sydney University’s swarming centre of insurrection: the Tin Sheds. Man, was my sister cool. I had a lot to live up to by the time I got to high school.
    During my first year at Gymea High I soon realised that I would never achieve my sister’s legendary standing. She was a way better rebel than me – more effective, more articulate. I couldn’t get expelled even when I tried; I had to walk out in a huff at lunchtime one day. And even then, no one noticed.
    Now I realise that we were both trying to be like our father. Our father was the best rebel of all. As a child, I sometimes went to the university during the school