She didn’t specifically remember eating paper before but she must have because the taste and texture was familiar. She chewed carefully, swallowed. If she was rating it at work, she would have said it was ‘pasty, bland, difficult to swallow, with a chemical aftertaste’。
Apparently Steffi, her parents’ dog, had developed a fetish for paper. There was a name for it. Her mother had told her all about it.
Ever since she’d retired, Amy’s mother brimmed with facts. She listened to podcasts, clicked on BuzzFeed articles and Googled. Then she called up her children and passed on all the new facts that she’d learned. It was interesting to observe her mother’s personality changing after retirement. She’d always been the busiest person Amy knew, impatient and distracted, and now she’d become so uncharacteristically reflective, willing to engage in very long meandering conversations about topics she would have once deemed frivolous.
‘Mum needs to do some kind of course to occupy her mind,’ Brooke had said, sniffily.
‘She’s doing a course. She’s learning how to write a memoir,’ Amy told her. ‘Except she says she’s never going to write one.’
‘Thank God,’ said Brooke.
‘I’d read it,’ Amy had said.
Amy had always been interested in who her parents were before they became her parents: Joy Becker before she became Mum, Stan Delaney before he became Dad. Both Amy’s parents were only children with beautiful, complicated mothers: mothers who should never have become mothers. Her father’s mother had a scar that trailed down her wrinkled right cheek from where she’d been thrown across the room by Amy’s grandfather. Supposedly that was the first and only time Amy’s grandfather had hurt his wife, and Amy’s grandmother ‘immediately chucked him out’ and ‘that was that’ but Amy thought there had to be more to the story. She’d given her father a book about a man who finally speaks about his troubled childhood to his oldest daughter in the hope that her dad might speak about his troubled childhood to his oldest daughter （her）， but so far he ‘couldn’t make head or tail of it’。
‘I don’t know why you thought Dad would suddenly start reading novels,’ Brooke had said, pleased that Amy’s plan hadn’t worked, because she believed that Dad belonged to her. ‘Did you think he’d join a book club when he retired?’
Then they had both got the giggles imagining their huge taciturn father in a book club, chatting about character development over chardonnay.
‘He watches TV now,’ Amy had pointed out. ‘He never used to watch TV.’
‘I know,’ said Brooke. ‘He told me this long, complicated story the other day about a family where the youngest son had died in a car accident. It turned out he was telling me the entire plot of a movie. I thought it was real.’
That was a few months ago now. Brooke was too busy to talk much these days because she was starting her own physiotherapy practice, which was a big step, and knowing Brooke it would turn out to be a proper, grown-up success and Amy was proud of her little sister, although also mystified. Like, why do that to yourself? Had Brooke never noticed how the Delaney family business had controlled their lives? The paperwork, the stress, the requirement for all four children to ‘help out’。
Once, when Amy was a teenager and in the middle of studying for a history exam, an exam she was destined to fail because this was the first time she’d even cracked open the textbook, a kid had come into the house and imperiously demanded Amy make her a sandwich as if Amy were her servant, and Amy had very nearly got up and made the sandwich before she came to her senses and told the kid to get lost.
They could never escape it. When they were growing up there was a family they knew who had packed up their three kids and gone travelling around Australia for a year in a caravan. Amy had been temporarily obsessed with that family. She thought it sounded like a dream. ‘He’ll never catch up,’ her father had said. He was speaking about the middle kid in that family, the only one who was any good at tennis and therefore the only one who existed. But her dad was wrong, the kid came back, he kept playing, he didn’t do that badly, ranked in the top two hundred at one point. ‘We should go travelling around Australia,’ Amy had said to her mother, and her mother had burst out laughing as if she’d made a clever joke.
Now Brooke was doing exactly the same as their parents: filling her pockets with rocks before she waded out into life. Brooke was meant to avoid stress because of her migraines, not chase it, but she’d always been a martyr. Amy remembered Brooke as a little girl, high pigtails and reflective sunglasses.