My Not So Functional Family Read online

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Winston was like every other home town in our collective history in that it was incredibly dull but had the power to both enchant and provoke regression in its former inhabitants. It was the beginning of spring so it was a particularly dangerous time to return – the bitumen was warm enough to give off the smell of your childhood when the rain hit and every flower seemed to be in technicolour.

  If that was not enough to give a 28-year-old woman whiplash from the nostalgia, Claudia Carter had returned that September to get married. Despite being the perfectly average age to do such a perfectly average thing, Claudia was feeling radical. The idea of marriage still seemed so foreign to her that it was almost subversive.

  This was just one of the many ridiculous things that crossed her mind as she sat on a kitchen island in her mother’s house, listening to her mother cataloguing her younger sister’s flaws.

  ‘And you know, out of all of you, Poppy was the one I breastfed the longest,’ Rachel told Claudia, ‘so it’s bullshit that it fosters a bond.’ Rachel stabbed viciously at the sausages browning in the pan in front of her as she spoke. Rachel sub-scribed to the idea that cooking dinner was some form of martyrdom.

  Rachel’s list of grievances was familiar. Her youngest daughter Poppy did not phone her ‘Mother’. Poppy never said sorry. Poppy expected everyone to do the things she wanted to do, go to the places she wanted to go for dinner. Poppy always said exactly what she thought. (‘That skirt is ugly. Why don’t you cut your hair? Your best friend is a monster.’)

  The truth being that Poppy was – in fact – just like her mother.

  At the core of Rachel’s gripes, although she would be insulted if it was ever actually suggested to her, was that Poppy did not ask permission to do anything, and even though they were all adults, her children were all expected to ask permission. Claudia did a good job of pretending to ask permission. Poppy, on the other hand, never bothered pretending anything.

  ‘How long did you breastfeed her for?’ Claudia asked abruptly.

  Her mother looked at her blankly. ‘What? Oh, eighteen months.’

  Claudia snorted. ‘So she could say words and you were still putting your tit in her mouth?’ She knew it was somehow wrong to be grossed out, probably something to do with the patriarchy, but it was too juicy. So she filed it away for further mocking at a later date with a more receptive audience.

  Poppy was due to arrive tomorrow; their brother was already here, upstairs, avoiding all women, and Claudia’s best friend Nora would arrive in just a few days. Claudia worried that this would be the spark to quickly engulf the bone-dry kindling of the family dynamics. Everything a woman feels for her sister – protectiveness, envy, passion, competition – is magnified twenty-fold when her best friend is around.

  And the longer they all hung around Winston the more they would all regress. There would be screaming at each other. Last time they’d met up, Claudia had screamed at Poppy, telling her that (at twenty-five) she had fucked her life up and destroyed Mum and Dad. So Poppy had thrown a wine glass that had shattered all over Claudia’s chest. The next morning Poppy had got up and left and they had not spoken since.

  And now Claudia was getting married in a week.

  Last to arrive would be lovely Dylan, a crucial element for the marriage. His presence would help diffuse any tension between the siblings. That was the kind of man he was: soothing, reassuringly sane.

  Claudia was perched at a solid oak island, so close to the gas stove she could reach out and grab her mother if she wanted. The island was too big for the space, of course – it always had been – but Rachel had fallen in love with it, and when she fell in love with something, her steely determination to make it work could only be worn down over painful decades. The kitchen was old but all the utensils were brand new, bought on a glossy-magazine-abetted rampage. She had not bothered to replace the stove, although it was entirely possible it was older than her. But her knives, toaster and kettle all matched and all gleamed.

  Claudia had spent her late teenage years living in the house, an inheritance from Rachel’s mother, but today she was not comfortable here. Why wasn’t she comfortable here? When had this town stopped being her home?

  ‘I thought you would be more excited.’ Rachel glanced across the kitchen island and eyed Claudia, who kept her head down. She was fiddling with her ring.

  ‘I am!’ Claudia responded brightly.

  ‘Your dress is beautiful. You’re going to look beautiful, don’t worry about that,’ her mother said. ‘And you look very slim, you’ve always been so slim,’ Rachel continued, admiringly.

  ‘Yes, well,’ Claudia said, picking at her ring again, before looking up and smiling sweetly back at her mum. ‘I’ve always had such motivation.’

  Her mother let the comment blow past her: a piece of interloping dust, never to be thought of again. Rachel had endured a lifetime of commentary from her own mother about her weight, who had endured a lifetime of commentary from her mother. You might as well feel guilty about the sky being blue if you were going to feel guilty about teaching a girl her size mattered.

  Despite being in her sixties, Rachel remained a very attractive woman. She was the only mother at the high school gates who had not conceded her femininity by cutting her hair short; she wore her silver-streaked hair carefully styled with three blow-dries a week. Sometimes, just looking at her mother’s figure made Claudia want to sit down, contemplating the sheer amount of effort that went into maintaining it. The daily cycling, the aqua-aerobics classes, the pacing around the house with weights strapped to her ankles, the measuring out of portions. Rachel was the kind of thin that required an immense amount of time and effort; daily self-denials that ensured she remained under sixty kilograms when over sixty years of age. On top of all of that Rachel was just pretty – radiant, even. This hadn’t quite been passed on to any of her daughters, who had been polluted by their father’s genes, their eyes slightly too far apart and mouths too narrow. Even with youth on their side they did not feel they had a patch on their mother, something they had each made an uneasy peace with towards the end of their teenage years.

  Rachel shifted from one bare and pedicured foot to the other. ‘I’m still not sure about the bridesmaid dresses you know,’ she said.

  Claudia exhaled; she had not wanted a bridal party but her mother had called her sobbing about the prospect of her sisters being left out of the wedding. ‘It will look so odd if you are standing at the front of the church with nobody around you,’ she had wailed down the phone, so Claudia had acquiesced, just as she had by agreeing to a church venue –
she had wanted a garden wedding – and to holding it in Winston. She and Dylan had originally wanted to marry in a coastal village halfway between the towns in which they’d grown up.

  ‘If I’m going to have bridesmaids, I definitely do not want to go the full matchy-matchy,’ Claudia told her mother firmly.

  ‘Well, just in case you change your mind, I popped down to the dress shop and put a dress like Poppy’s on hold in Zoe’s size as well. I think when you see them standing next to each other at the dress shop you will see how funny it looks if they are in different dresses to each other.’

  ‘You really shouldn’t have done that.’ Claudia emphasised the ‘shouldn’t’. ‘I’m not worried about how their dresses are going to look.’

  ‘Well, what are you worried about then?’ her mother asked her.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘If you’re not worried about how the dresses are going to look, why are you so agitated?’

  ‘I’m not agitated. I’m just sitting here.’

  ‘Well, since you’re not agitated and you’re not doing anything useful, can you finish these sausages?’

  Claudia took the tongs from her mother and watched her walk to the bathroom for what she knew would be the precise length of time it took for dinner to be finished. Rachel might have seen the martyrdom potential in cooking dinner, but that did not mitigate the tediousness of the task.

  Claudia started turning the sausages with her left hand so she could see her glinting engagement ring, picked out and paid for by her at an antique fair, almost on a whim, when she was feeling particularly dreary about her job and prospects. It had been so long since she had felt excitement in her life, but the most drastic thing she could think of was getting engaged. She didn’t even bother to hint to Dylan about what she wanted, she just gave the box to him and told him to produce it at a nice time in the next month. Dylan, who was always happy as long as Claudia was happy, obliged a few weeks later.

  She did not know why she wore an engagement ring.

  She tried to turn over how she felt about the marriage in her mind, as she had done so many times before in her own kitchen, her friends’ kitchens (even on one occasion her boss’s kitchen), in the shower almost every morning and anytime she was in a supermarket, a task so mundane it regularly sent her into a meditative state. When she had bought the engagement ring she had not really thought much past what time of the day she would announce it on Instagram for maximum likes. Claudia might have thought she and Dylan would just be engaged forever, or even that it was a bit of a joke, or that she would just feel more excited. But it had turned out that she didn’t really think she would get married, and she had felt like a spectator through the past year. She loved Dylan, but when she wore the ring she felt like a traitor. Then she felt indulgent for feeling like a traitor. She had never actively wanted to get married. When she was a teenager she’d revelled in brazenly describing it as an ‘empty constitution’ after once mishearing a teacher who had been asked about its place as a traditional institution.

  Claudia had always been the one for whom events just happened: always in the right place at the right time – a geospatial and temporal nook that never required more than a minimum expenditure of effort. She had fallen into a well-paid job for a boutique bank when she was nineteen, she had earned her degree in Economics while hardly showing up for class, and had been promoted almost as soon as the Dean-signed document was in her hands. She had met Dylan and had a blissed-out few years and now she was getting married, having barely made a decision along the way.

  And now here she was in her mother’s simultaneously posh and decrepit kitchen, dreading the arrival of her sisters and wondering if the next decade of her life was going to look exactly like it did now.

  ‘Hi sweetie, hi doll-face, hi SNOOKUMS.’

  Her brother Phinn was doing a pitch-perfect impersonation of their aunt Mary. The aunt who always hugged the girls a little too long and liked to look them up and down while telling them they were looking healthy. Phinn leaned over and bear-hugged Claudia, lifting her off her feet, as if to underline the point.

  Once back on earth, she handed the tongs to him. ‘Finish these.’

  He took them good-naturedly.

  ‘Settling in well? Ready for all your dumb girl craic?’ he said cheerfully.

  ‘What exactly do you think is so painfully girlish about this week? Both of us are getting married you know.’

  ‘Yeah yeah, I’m sure the focus on Dylan in all of this has been entirely equal; nobody has made more of a big deal about it for you, I’m sure,’ he said, mildly sarcastic.

  ‘If you mock me I will cut myself,’ said Claudia, reverting to a joke born years before in the disinfected halls of the local hospital, when she’d been having a particularly tough time. Their oldest sister Zoe had swept into town whispering to Phinn that she’d had great difficulty choosing a wardrobe that said ‘concerned but effortlessly elegant sister’. That night she had refused to give Claudia the remote control and, without missing a beat, Claudia delivered the po-faced threat about cutting herself. After a moment of leaden silence, the trio collapsed into laughter. Since then it had become a running joke.

  Phinn chose not to react this time and looked over the top of Claudia’s head. ‘Have you heard the latest?’ he said, all the while looking at the doorway for interlopers.

  ‘You finally got laid this year?’

  ‘No. Well, not that, none of your business.’

  ‘You know what you want to do with your life?’

  ‘Unfortunately for you, no.’

  ‘God has called you. You weren’t in.’

  ‘No . . . Seriously . . . Old mate is back at it again.’

  Phinn did not need to explain any further. The recent reconciliation between their father and his girlfriend, Lisa, had always been fragile to say the least.

  ‘This is none of our business,’ Claudia finally said.

  Phinn gave a grunt of assent. ‘But you know who is making it their business.’

  Claudia groaned. ‘Rachel.’

  ‘Yep, none other than our esteemed mother, and who else?’

  Claudia stared at the ceiling, stretching out her arms so she could do a full body groan. ‘Poppy.’ She hadn’t needed to guess; she’d known straight away which of her sisters it would be.

  ‘Award yourself a PhD in Juvenile Behaviour and Failure to Thrive as an Adult and call yourself Doctor Carter because you just scored 100 per cent in the “could our family behave more idiotically?” exam!’

  Phinn turned the stove off and moved the pan of slightly too-crisp sausages to the side.

  ‘What are the briefing notes?’ Claudia asked.

  ‘Apparently shit-for-brain’s car has been seen outside some local footy player’s house – and may I put in an aside here, does this woman have any imagination? And Mum thought it wise to let Poppy know, so now Poppy’s apparently preparing for the warpath upon arrival.’

  ‘Hmmmm, that’s odd. They’re meant to be on the same team. Mum was gleefully going through Poppy’s shortcomings earlier. She was even referring to me as the “good one”.’

  Phinn scowled. ‘There’s more.’

  Claudia braced herself with a tight smile.

  ‘Poppy is already here,’ Phinn told her.

  Claudia propped herself up on her elbows. ‘What do you mean? Where?’

  ‘She arrived this afternoon and has set up camp at Dad’s house so they can have their crucial favourite parent–favourite child time while we pay our dues here.’

  ‘I knew this was going to be a disaster. Why did I agree to this whole shitfight?’

  ‘Hardly a shitfight, dear,’ he responded, grinning. ‘I would say this whole situation is utterly fucking predictable.’

  *

  Phinn leaned against the doorframe, allowing his shoulders to fill the space in the way of someone who is sizeable enough to have thrown down a few people in his time but not so big that he invariably
becomes the target of every dickhead with eight schooners under their belt at any given time. You never want to be the first, the best or the biggest. It’s too much pressure.

  He was comfortable in his skin. This was partly because of his medium size, which precluded him from having to prove too much in the schoolyard, and partly because of his three sisters. When your youth is spent playing the fourth Spice Girl, you shed anything resembling self-consciousness fairly quickly.

  He thought about the week stretching in front of him and immediately felt weary. Not that it would ever show. He kept the same measured disposition whatever the turn of events. He could be relied upon never to lose his temper, but what swam beneath the surface, what was really going on under his dark eyes was never quite understood by the women around him. And there were a lot of women around him.

  He gave his mother a kiss as she squeezed past him, and he lazily picked up the knives and forks before he was told. He was already exhausted but at least tonight was just his sister and his mother. Claudia would not fight with Rachel and Rachel knew better than to pick on her. Her excitement at having two children at home at the same time would be enough to make a pleasant evening. It would be another day or even two before Rachel would be driven mad by towels left in the wrong place and yoghurt tubs with missing lids in the fridge.

  Phinn had laid down the third plate on the table next to the kitchen when his mother crossly peeked over his shoulder. ‘Where’s Mary’s plate?’ Phinn did not sigh. He rarely revealed his exasperation to his mother.

  Claudia was not so circumspect. ‘I thought it was just us.’

  ‘Your aunt wants to see you – she might be coming around.’ Rachel’s tone stopped any complaining from Claudia. The ingredients for a successful evening were in place but it still turned on Rachel’s whims.

  ‘Well, these sausages are going cold and I have the salad so let’s eat.’

  The three sat down in the formation that had existed for almost thirty years. Rachel at the head of the table, Claudia at her left, with her brother sitting across from her. If the other two had been there they would have sat in the next seats down, the oldest, Zoe, next to Phinn, and Poppy next to Claudia. Phinn reflected on an article he had seen on how the Queen fed her waiting corgis by seniority, but, as always, thought better of mentioning it.