Family Baggage by Monica McInerney

Author:Monica McInerney
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781742283951
Publisher: Penguin Group Australia
Published: 2009-06-19T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

By the time Harriet and Lara turned twelve, in some ways it was as if she had always lived with them. Three children had become four, which made games easier to play, although Harriet secretly wished she didn’t have to end up partnering James all the time. Austin was always more fun.

Her parents were careful to make sure that what one of the girls got, the other did too. Two kittens. Two birds. Two goldfish. Their birthdays were both in May, yet there were always two separate parties.

Lara puzzled Harriet, though. She wasn’t how she’d imagined a sister would be. She’d thought a sister would be another girl she would play with and laugh with, and be kind to and teach how to do things. It wasn’t like that. Lara already seemed to know how to do most things – ride a bike, swim, do her homework. If she wanted to find things out, she asked Austin, or James, or her mum and dad, even Gloria, as often as she asked Harriet.

Sometimes it felt as though Lara was the one who had always been there, and Harriet was the one feeling her way. Lara seemed to be more confident. Harriet felt nervous about things, and often had to check with her parents or with Gloria if she had done something the right way or if she had said the right thing. Lara didn’t seem to need that reassurance.

Harriet tried to put herself in Lara’s shoes, the way her mother had asked her to do. To understand how hard it must have been for Lara, her own parents being killed, having to come and live with a whole new family. Harriet gave it a lot of thought. She would have felt scared, she decided. And she would have done her best to make everyone like her, and been really well-behaved and done lots of housework and not sworn and tried to be kind. In her mind, it started getting a bit confused with the Cinderella story, that she would become the unpaid slave, but it was the truth. She would have felt uncertain, that she had to behave really well so that she didn’t stand out and so her new family didn’t ask her to leave.

Lara didn’t behave anything like that, though. She had grown-up conversations with Harriet’s mother and father, talking to them in a serious way that Harriet herself had never done. Lara got on well with James too, watching cricket with him and saying quite sensible things when Harriet couldn’t make head or tail of the game and found it too slow, anyway. Lara and Austin got on especially well. They did a lot of laughing.

Harriet and Lara were still sharing a bedroom. That caused more problems. Lara was extremely tidy. Harriet was the opposite. She would come back from school and throw her belongings around, while Lara would fold hers neatly. It wasn’t Lara who complained, but Harriet’s mother.

‘It’s not fair on Lara,’ she said one afternoon.

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