True Stories by Helen Garner Page A

does the pins backwards.’
    We are drawn to stand in each other’s bedrooms. Perhaps it’s simply for the scent of the place where a sister’s body has slept. Even a husband’s smell can’t mask the deep familiarity of the first person you shared a room with. I love to put my head on my sisters’ pillows, and breathe in. I like the smell of clean skin, something sweet and cottony. Maybe that smell is not just sisterly, but motherly.
    â€˜When I got my first period,’ says Two, ‘I told One. She laughed. But then she was nice, and took me out to the toilet and showed me how to put the pad on. I didn’t tell Mum. Do you remember the toilet, at that house at Ocean Grove? It was like a brown coffin.’
    â€˜Do you mean the room, or the toilet itself?’
    â€˜The room,’ says Two patiently. ‘It was painted brown, and sort of curved.’
    â€˜I don’t remember that,’ says One. ‘I thought it was white.’
    Two visits One and they discuss the problem of curtains for the big back windows of One’s kitchen. ‘It faces south,’ says One, ‘so it doesn’t get direct sun.’
    â€˜South west ,’ says Two, firmly. ‘That’s south west , so it must get direct sun, late on a summer afternoon.’
    â€˜Oh…yes, I suppose it does,’ says One, ‘in summer.’
    Two is very happy about this. She sits down at the kitchen table and says, with a big smiling sigh, ‘I’m much more of a sun and moon person than you, aren’t I!’
    Sisters have no truck with one another’s finer feelings. Once I visited a friend and helped her in the kitchen where she was preparing a meal. I remarked, as I laid out the cutlery, ‘This table is too low. Whenever I sit at it I knock my knees. You ought to get a higher one.’
    She turned round from the bench and stared at me; her face was blank with shock.
    â€˜What’s the matter?’
    â€˜That table,’ she said, ‘has been in my family for generations. I love that table.’
    â€˜Oh—sorry!’
    We went on with our work. A week or so later she brought it up again.
    â€˜I think I was so shocked,’ she said, ‘because I’ve got no sisters. I’m not used to that bluntness. Thwack— you just hit me with it. But I realised later that you hadn’t meant to offend me.’
    There are no beloved historic objects in our family. There is no family home. Every time our mother gets settled somewhere, our father gets itchy feet and they sell up and move on. They have moved so often that some of their children have not even visited every house they’ve lived in.
    Going in to Bat
    â€˜I remember,’ says Four, ‘when some hoon friends of Five’s flatmate terrorised her one time, when she was home alone. After they’d gone she rang me up. Her voice was so faint that I thought she’d been raped. So One and Five and I found out the name of the main hoon, and we put on our best black jackets and drove out to his parents’ house where he lived, to sort him out. Remember? It was a horrible cream brick veneer house, with a shaven lawn and no trees, and we presented ourselves at the front door, after dinner one evening, and asked for him. And when his mother said he wasn’t home, One said, in a polite and icy voice, ‘Perhaps we could have a word with you , Mrs So-and-so.’ She sat us down in her lounge room on some fancy chairs, and we dobbed her son, in detail. She was struggling to look as if she didn’t believe us; but I bet he was home. I bet he was hiding in his bedroom, letting his mother take the rap.’
    â€˜I was so nervous,’ says Five, ‘that I kept letting off huge odourless farts into the upholstery.’
    â€˜It didn’t do much good, I guess,’ says Four, ‘but we shrieked and yelled all the way home down the freeway. And probably went out