Read Online Lessons in Letting Go by Corinne Grant - Free Book Online

They lived in the country, so did we. They were sisters, so were we. They were partial to pinafores, so were we. We were exactly like them except for the fact that we had running water and an indoor toilet and virtually no trouble from wolves. And neither of us was blind. Like all siblings, we had our disagreements and there was one particularly heated exchange where I lost a chunk of hair, leaving a bald spot on my head about the size of a twenty-cent piece, but on the whole, we were very close. Or so I’d thought.
    The weird syntax of the essay—of putting ‘bad’ before ‘good’—gave me an indication that the list was going to be perhaps less than flattering to my sister. Another indication was that the ‘bad points’ list filled an entire page and the ‘good points’ list was blank. I started to read it with trepidation.
    BAD POINTS
    Mess up bedroom
    Hang around you
    Hang around your friends
    Take your things without asking
    Then break the things
    Say embarrassing things about you
    Never get into trouble
    Get what they want all the time
    Don’t feed the cat
    Annoy you on purpose
    Take all the good posters out of TV Week .
    In my defence, I hadn’t made a single spelling mistake.
    Instead of ringing Adam (who no doubt would have told me to throw it out), I rang Thomas. He laughed when I read the list out to him.
    ‘The good posters out of TV Week ? I’ve seen your childhood bedroom, remember; neither of you had any good posters.’
    ‘I think she took the one of Bros that I wanted.’
    He laughed again. ‘Where’d you find it?’
    ‘The list? In a drawer. It just fell out of an old diary.’
    I was lying. I had found it beneath a pile of training bras, old copies of Dolly and what appeared to be disintegrating hair bobbles, all of which I had carefully put in my ‘keeping’ pile.
    ‘Hey, guess what? I forgot to tell you, Mum and Dad are selling the house. I’m up in Corryong right now.’
    ‘Really? Wow. Cleaning out that bedroom is going to be a nightmare.’
    The first time I had taken Thomas home to meet my family had not gone well. I was nervous about taking him to the country, I was nervous about him meeting my parents for the first time and I was nervous about him seeing my childhood bedroom. To mitigate things I had taken Adam along too, as well as another friend named Jamie. Jamie and I were doing a show together and I was using the trip as an excuse for us to film some footage to use in a sketch. Jamie was a country boy himself, so I thought he could help smooth the way.
    The boys were all staying at the local caravan park, but on our first night in town, my fancy new city boyfriend was coming to meet my family on his own. Mum had whipped up a roast and her famous pavlova. We were even using the dining room, the good cutlery and the good tablecloth, all of which were normally reserved for Christmas Day. At the age of twenty-four, this was the first time I had brought a boy home and no one really knew how to react. I am sure that as we were waiting for him to arrive, a small part of my parents wondered whether he might turn out to be imaginary.
    Thomas pulled into our driveway exactly on time and the introductions went well. Then Dad and Thomas went out into the backyard for a chat. My sister, my mother and I set the table, smoothed our skirts and generally tried to ignore the fact that I had grown up and was very clearly having sex with someone.
    No matter how nervous Thomas had told me he was feeling before he turned up, I knew I was feeling worse. He would eventually want a tour of our house and my childhood bedroom. It still looked the same as the day I had left, complete with the beds made in case we ever needed them. Even our childhood cot was ready to be slept in, presumably in case either of us shrunk. All our toys were still in the toy box and all the ornaments covering our dressing table sat there gathering dust. Piles of my old schoolwork covered the tops of the drawers, posters