Almost Sincerely by Zoë Norton Lodge

Author:Zoë Norton Lodge
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Giramondo Publishing
Published: 2015-05-28T00:00:00+00:00

An Open Letter of Apology to Little Georgia: Volume One

To my darling Little Georgia,

As you know I am now an adult.

Now that I am twenty-one and you are fifteen, I feel it is time for me to take a moment’s respite from my important life to reflect upon our scars.

You are very pretty. Petite. Fine legs. Pert bosom. Big red smile. Probably should have had braces, but what matter that, unless you open your mouth? An action hardly necessary for the PDHPE lessons you so adore. And then of course, there’s your scar.

I was six years old when you arrived from somewhere like an angry, wrinkly red currant. Sometimes I used to dress you in my doll’s clothes. When you got too big I would dress the cat in my doll’s clothes. You may remember that you hated it equally.

Whilst I have long since put away childish things, on this day of reflection, I am reminded of our little spats over Polly Pockets. You would look at me with that glint in your big baby eyes and unleash your birth-order ambivalence. Stage One: you start hitting yourself and slapping your own face and scratching your arms with your tiny perfect nails until you are vermilion. Stage Two: eyes locked with mine you restage the Charge of the Light Brigade in our playroom, strewing it with my My Little Ponies (that I had won through the meritocracy of the Sunday Telegraph colouring-in competition). And screaming like you were dying. And smiling.

In Mamma would run. ‘Aaahh! She’s JUST a BABY!’ ‘No, please listen, you don’t understand Mamma!

Please!’ My protests were as fruitless as poor Goody Proctor’s. Mamma would scoop you up, and from the parapet of her shoulder you would stare at me, with the devil Abigail in your eyes and flip me the bird. And I knew you’d won. You always won.

Except one time I urinated in the bed when I was nine and told Mamma and Dad it was you.

I became embittered, utterly defenceless in the face of this assault on my integrity by you, baby Joseph McCarthy, with whom I shared my bedroom and my genes. My poor parents – may they rest in Annandale – bewitched by your dribbly chin and your unimaginably golden ringlets, your wobbly fat legs and your dimply bottom, were deaf to my pleas, to my logic and reason. No evidence, no graphs or deductive reasoning would drag my parents out of the lie-hole you had dug and buried them in.

So I did something. Something un-sisterly. It was, in a way, an experiment. A minor contribution to scientific enquiry. I had to know. Could you fly?

Cut to Yia Yia and Papou’s house in Drummoyne, 1993. You are three and I am nine, but with the reading level of a twelve year old. Yia Yia and mother are downstairs in the kitchen, chain-smoking, eating kourabiethes and bitching about Papou. Upstairs, you and I are playing in Papou’s room. It is not very stimulating.

‘Look, a paperweight. This watch has a stretchy band.

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