Chapter Six: La Belle Dame Sans Merci
After our concert date I didn't see Anjali again for almost two months. She was preparing for a conference in Italy, and I had a birthday party to organise.
I've never really thought of John as my stepfather. To me, he was "Mum's boyfriend", and then later "Mum's husband" and "Cassie's dad", never
my
anything. That wasn't his fault. He's a good bloke, very normal in all the ways that I'm not, and when I look back I can see he was doing his best to be a good stepfather to me. But the timing wasn't on his side.
Nobody had asked me whether Mum and Dad should get a divorce, nobody had asked me whether we should move for Mum's new job, nobody had asked me whether I wanted to change schools and leave my old friends behind. John came into the picture as one more change foisted on me without asking.
Another teenager might have acted out: tantrums, shoplifting, or perhaps taking up smoking. Me, I was the sort of goody-goody who could barely bring herself to whisper "shit" when I stubbed a toe, never mind more drastic measures. What I did was more civilised, and in its way crueller.
I was impeccably courteous to John. I said hello and goodbye, please and thank-you, I did all my chores. I gave him no cause at all for complain. But whenever he tried to do something fatherly, offering me help with my homework or a lift to Physics Club, I would, very politely, turn him down.
Memory is unreliable, but I don't
think
I was trying to be hurtful. I was dealing with bullies at school and trying to figure out whether Cassie's inexplicable friendliness was some sort of trap, while struggling through the complications of queer puberty. My relationship with Mum was changing as I tried to come to terms with the idea that I wasn't the only priority in her world, and I was missing Dad, who was somewhere in Idaho with his new girlfriend. I'm not good at multi-tasking, and as best I can interpret it now, I just didn't have room for John in my emotional world.
It didn't help that we had so little by way of shared interests. When John wasn't running his hardware shop, he liked to spend his time at the football or trekking in the great outdoors. Me, I was a bookworm who believed our ancestors had invented roofs and electricity and the internet for a reason.
It can't have been easy for him banging his head against my wall, and eventually he must have got the message. He backed off on the overtures and we settled into a cautious, distant sort of interaction, more like housemates than family. Things improved a little after Cassie and I became friends, but by that stage John and I had set the pattern for our relationship. Once the rut is worn, it's hard to break out of it.
Then the unthinkable happened, and suddenly John and I
had all too much in common. Losing Cassie tore a huge hole in my heart. I can't imagine what it must have been like for him to bury his daughter only a few years after her mother.
After that, I made a conscious effort to be kind to him. I didn't have the conversational tools to talk to him about Cassie, much less my own grief, but I made a rule of saying yes to family stuff whenever I could. I'd sit and watch the footy with him, helping him cheer on the Swans, trying to work out the rules of the game. I'd go on family outings with him and Mum even when it meant getting wet and mosquito-bitten. These are the sacrifices we make.
I always feel Cassie's absence on holidays and anniversaries, so I assume John does too, and I make an extra effort to be there for those. That's why I put my hand up to help Mum organise his sixtieth celebration. I called around venues, I arranged a group outing with his friends to watch the Swans squeeze in a narrow win against the Bulldogs, and I booked a karaoke dinner afterwards, because John loves karaoke.
He was duly grateful, and I was glad to have helped him enjoy himself. But in hindsight, it should have been obvious that I was setting myself up for a small meltdown. Phoning strangers, trying to guess what other people might like, going to a footy game surrounded by noisy fans, and boisterous drunk people singing: any one of those is guaranteed to drain my batteries. Packing them all into a single event was asking for trouble, even before the inevitable "wish Cassie was here" thoughts.
I'm used to being surrounded by neurotypical people, and normally I can deal with it. But when my defences are low, sometimes it catches me unawares and I feel myself lost and lonely and far from home. When the party had wrapped up and everybody was gone, I was still wide awake and fretful at three in the morning.
In hindsight, I can see how it happened. But the more stressed I am, the worse I am at figuring out
why
it happened. As I tried to work out the cause of my malaise, my brain attempted to help by dredging up a long list of Stressful Things To Fret About, playing on endless loop inside my head. Of all the things I could have picked, the most obvious one was something from two months ago that I hadn't quite let go of, the thing Anjali had said after the concert.
"A job on the side" was how she'd described our arrangement. Was that really all I was to her?
The advice I would've given anybody else was "sleep on it and see how you feel in the morning," and it's good advice, but I was in no place to take it. I was unhappy, and I ascribed my unhappiness to that issue, and through sheer force of will I managed to turn a molehill into a mountain. I spent the wee hours of the morning drafting an email of a few paragraphs, unsure whether my words were communicating my anxieties, unsure whether I was being unreasonable.
It was almost five AM, and I still wasn't happy with the wording, when I noticed Anjali's IM light come on—of course, she was in Florence, it would be evening for her. Messaging her might not have been a good idea, not in my state of mind, but I was lonely and needy and couldn't help myself.
PrincessOfParallelograms: heya, how goes the conference?
NeutroniumGirl: Hey Sarah! It's going very well, I think they really liked my talk. How are you?
PrincessOfParallelograms: um... not great.
NeutroniumGirl: Oh no, what's wrong? Trouble with the party?
PrincessOfParallelograms: No, the party went fine. Just fretting about other stuff.
NeutroniumGirl: Do you want to talk about it?
PrincessOfParallelograms: You remember when we were talking to Thomas and Heather after the Sisters concert, and you said you had a job on the side. Did you mean us?
NeutroniumGirl: Yes?
PrincessOfParallelograms: Is that how you think about me?
There was a long silence. I could see she was typing, pausing, typing, but no text came through for almost fifteen minutes. Then at last:
NeutroniumGirl: Sarah, this is hard to answer right now. I need to think about this and right now I'm really busy with this conference. Is it all right if we talk about it after I get back?
PrincessOfParallelograms: sure.
Of course, it wasn't all right. Even as I said it, I knew I was going to spend the next week trying to guess what Anjali was going to say, and fretting over things that hadn't even happened. But I couldn't very well say
no, I demand to talk about it right now.
I just had to stifle my impatience and pretend to be an adult until time did its thing and we finally had a chance to discuss matters in my lounge room, over the wreckage of a gourmet pizza.
"So," I said, feeling the anxiety gnawing in my belly, "...that stuff we were talking about..."
