Blain - Closed for Winter

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Georgia Blain has written a number of novels for adults including the bestselling Closed for Winter, which was made into a feature film. Her memoir Births Deaths Marriages: True Tales was shortlisted for the 2009 Kibble Literary Award for Women Writers.

In 1998 she was named one of the Sydney Morning Heralds Best Young Novelists and has been shortlisted for the NSW Premiers Literary Awards, the SA Premiers Awards and the Barbara Jefferis Award. She lives in Sydney with her partner and daughter.

HOUSE of BOOKS

This edition published by Allen & Unwin House of Books in 2012
First published by Penguin Books Australia Ltd in 1998

Copyright Georgia Blain 1998

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ISBN 978 1 74331 337 4 (pbk)
ISBN 978 1 74343 050 7 (ebook)

I would like to thank the Australian Society of Authors for the opportunity to take part in their mentorship scheme and Rosie Scott for being such a wonderful mentor.

I would also like to thank Louise, Tony, Catherine and Laura for advising me when I needed it.

Thank you also to Fiona Inglis and to Ali Watts and Julie Gibbs at Penguin for all their work in getting this book to its final stage.

And, finally, thank you to Anne and Andrew for their unwavering support and love.

Behind us the ocean is pale blue.

I hold the photograph up to the light and look closely. The colour has faded but I can remember it as it was. Silver-blue, but pink with the warmth of the last of the day.

We are silhouetted. Two young girls. Long limbed and gawky. Awkward, thin and misplaced. Me more so than Frances. At twelve, she stood poised on the edge of change and hating it. Furious with it and with everyone around her. But she had a certain grace, a certain strength in her defiance. You can see it, even in that picture.

At eight, I was still safely cocooned in childhood. Still on the right side of the fence. But I wanted to be like her. In the photo, I am trying to stand in the way that she stands. I am trying to look the way that she looks. But I am a child and she is not.

Our features? Eyes? Nose? Mouth? I hold the photograph closer but nothing is discernible. We are figures against a pale-blue backdrop. I cannot see the details, the parts that made up who we were. But if I close my eyes, if I concentrate, I can remember.

And it is the heat that I feel first.

Standing with my eyes closed in the house where I live with Martin, my photograph on the table in front of me.

Feeling the warmth of the sun on my shoulders as I lie in the rock pool again. Knowing that this is where I am because this is where I was every day of that summer.

And I am concentrating. I am taking myself back.

The row of shells on the rock ledge next to me, but they are not shells. They are my jewels. The seaweed on my back, but it is not seaweed. It is my hair. My legs stretched out in front of me, but they are not legs. They are my tail.

I remember.

I am a mermaid. Sliding down into the pool and holding my breath. Swimming down to my palace, deep down in the dark-blue sea.

This is the way I was.

And far off, the boys dive-bomb from the jetty. They run, full pelt, along the wooden planks and then leap, high in the air, legs tucked tight against the chest, shouting wildcat calls as they crash, like bullets, into the depths.

While outside this house, the house where I am now, the wind comes up from the gully, shaking the winter-wet branches of the trees, cold and bracing.

But I am not really here.

I am there.

In my pool, with my back to the jetty. Lost in my world; my sister, Frances, somewhere in hers. Up there on the jetty, leaning lazily against the railing, with the boys, a cigarette in one hand, her free arm draped around the waist of the toughest boy, the best-looking boy, a boy who also smokes a cigarette, pinched between his thumb and forefinger, down to the butt and then flicks it expertly into the ocean, where it floats bobbing on the surface.

This is what it was like. Day after day.

This is the place to which I try to return.

But it is not just this general picture that I am trying to remember. It is not just the summer as a whole. I am always trying to narrow it down. I am always trying to take myself back to the one day, to pick out the details that made that particular day what it was.

I turn the photograph over in my hands. On the reverse there is nothing, just the word Kodak in pale-grey print. I have not written our names or the date on which the photo was taken. It was one of those days, but I do not know exactly which one.

No one knows I have this picture. Not even Dorothy, my mother. I have always kept it hidden and I change the hiding spot regularly. Or else I carry it around with me, tucked into the back of my diary. I bring it out when I am alone, when Martin is out and I am in the house by myself, when there is no one behind the box office desk with me, or on the bus after work.

I have had this photograph for years.

I have had it since that day.

And for months afterwards, I would keep it hidden under my pillow and each night I would take it out and stare at it, trying to take myself back, going through every detail to see if there was something I had missed, while at the other end of the house, my mother would be sitting in front of the television, chain-smoking in front of an endless blur of pictures, until, at last, she fell asleep.

I would hear her.

And then it would be quiet.

Silent.

I would turn off my light, close my eyes and tell myself, Okay, one more time, from the beginning, in order, and I would start again, picking through that day, piece by piece, from beginning to end.

And this is what I still do.

This is what I am trying to do now.

With my photograph under the light, I am taking myself back to that day.