Brothers & Sisters by Charlotte Wood Page B

through a mouthful of ham, ‘He nearly killed us!’
    Leonie groaned again, leaning forward to lay her head melodramatically on her outstretched forearms on the table, then sat up. ‘He’s Jeremy’s old friend from uni. He’s lived here for years. He’s a pain in the arse—sorry, Wendy—but he’s sort of useful.’ She sipped her beer.
    She gazed thoughtfully out across the water, with her chin in her hand, and then said, ‘Derek’s alright. He’s just sort of . . . depressing.’
    Wendy felt a surprised stab of pity, and solidarity, for Derek.

    The day before the wedding, while they slept after lunch, there was a knock at the door. Wendy groped her way down the dark stairs and padded across the flagstones. When she opened the door, Leonie strode in with another woman, and called up the stairs to her mother as she went to the fridge and pulled out a jug of iced water.
    The other woman’s name was Lucy. She had thick bushy hair and a loud sharp voice, and wore bangles that clacked up and down her arms when she moved. Lucy was her make-up artist friend from London, Leonie told Wendy, and she had offered to do them all for the wedding.
    Ruth, clambering down the stairs, was already calling, ‘Oooh, lovely.’
    Wendy had never really worn make-up, except the occasional smudge of lipstick and some rouge, as they used to call it. When she was younger she scorned make-up; it was a thing suburban women like her sister were interested in. But also, more secretly, Wendy had found that any make-up other than lipstick—the other things: foundation, and mascara, and eye shadow—made her look strangely like a dressed-up man. So now while the other women discussed make-up Wendy laughed lightly and waved her hand no thank you, as she refilled the water jug and returned it to the fridge.
    The woman Lucy met her eye across the room, and shrugged and said, ‘Well, if you change your mind.’
    Then Ruth’s son Paul came striding in, carrying a heavy-looking cardboard box. Wendy had not seen him for eighteen months, and he looked even taller, and now tanned and more masculine. He was forty-three now, and married with two children, but Wendy still thought of him as a wastrel university student, full of potential and wit and unbloomed talent.
    She hurried around the table towards him, calling his name. He grinned and said, ‘G’day, Wendy,’ and leaned his head down sideways for a kiss, before kneeling at the fridge to put the box down. When he set it down, he didn’t then get up to greet Wendy properly, but began tearing open the cardboard box and stacking bottles into their fridge, carrying on a conversation with his sister and mother that seemed to have been started without Wendy.
    It had been decided that tomorrow Wendy and Ruth’s house would be ‘the girls’ house’; that there would be a champagne breakfast, with Lucy and her cosmetics set up on the terrace, where any of the women guests could come and have their make-up done in the hours before the wedding.
    The house was to be overrun. Nobody had asked Wendy’s opinion about this, although her money was paying half of the rent. As she stood in the room and listened to them all talking, it galled her to think that since Jim died she was no longer a person to be consulted.
    She didn’t say anything. She knew it would be ridiculous to complain. It was a wedding. Ruth’s daughter’s wedding. She was lucky to be here at all.
    She left Leonie and Paul and the friend and Ruth, and went out walking.
    The steep streets of the town were populated by hundreds of slender, pretty cats. They crept along balconies and strolled the shadeless stone stairs. They swarmed around the orange plastic bags of garbage that appeared on odd days at selected laneway corners.
    Wendy had been told by one of Leonie’s friends that a man with a donkey came clopping down the stairs to collect the rubbish, but in three days she had not seen or heard any donkey, though the rubbish disappeared