The Good Little Girl by Annette Stephens

Author:Annette Stephens
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Big Sky Publishing

Strangely shocked, I watched Nina and her boyfriend on the couch smooching in a world as small as their touching bodies. I tried to explain to Nina and Stefan how we needed to lighten our energies. That there is only one place that understands this, that understands our humans need to play sometimes. They responded neither positively nor joyously. In fact they barely responded to anything I said about Kenja.

Mum’s phone calls disappeared from mind the minute I hung up. She was a determined ringer of people. ‘I ring them every week,’ she’d mutter. ‘They never ring me,’ and I was not an exception.

My family understood that I had dramatically changed, but believed I had made a choice. That something sinister might have happened to me was inconceivable, and I had a reputation along the lines of: she’s always been a worry to her poor mother. My joining Kenja had hurt them. We never got beyond that, and I was still, mentally, a Kenjan.

I did visit a cousin. After two hours of stiff enthusiasm and polite enquiries as to the health of increasingly far-removed family and friends, the visit ended and was not repeated.

My two long-term neighbours visited and struggled to recognise this new Annette. I was fearful of ending up a little old lady on the pension, no longer able to afford this rambling, altering dwelling. However, a new neighbour seemed friendly. I couldn’t connect but was grateful for the attention. She had misplaced her purpose in life, left it in New Zealand and wanted to return. My opaque self had nowhere to go.

At Melbourne’s National Gallery I stood with my hands in the water that runs down its glass walls. In my late teens I had discovered the original gallery in a columned building on the city fringe and often stood before one painting, transfixed by its gentle indistinctness. My painting, David Davies, 1894, ‘Moonrise’, was not on display in the new building and I was strangely disappointed; it encapsulates my dreaminess.

Nearly three years had passed since I left Sydney. What had I achieved? While I was at the gallery, my thoughts tottered, veering inexorably back to my old life and my visits with old friends.

While I was in Kenja Sydney I had visited my school friend, Laura. (To this day, I cannot recall how we met up again while I was Kenjan.) She had a new kitchen in her beautiful house, with a pool, and two luxury cars in the driveway. I couldn’t relate. I tried to connect, dredge up our mislaid past but something was wrong. Without commitment to a purpose like mine, what value could a life have? Laura had refused my pleas to attend a lecture. I didn’t push it; better she didn’t ask questions about Kenja or, worse, my feebly touted success.

In Melbourne, I met up with my other school friend, Lynne. Ashamed of my old car parked outside, sitting on her white couch in a fine old Edwardian house in a beautiful treed street in Hawthorn, I stared at everything I had wished, and had sessions, for.

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