Forget Me Knot

1 – Find Your Own Way

‘So, whatcha gonna do about it?’

I’d already tuned out of the phone conversation, but heard myself plagiarising this familiar line.

Rather than focusing on the conversation with my mum, I was happily distracted by my aged mare, Beauty, who was gazing in through the kitchen window to see what was happening in the house. I felt like I was in a fishbowl or bird cage. I’d put Beauty in the backyard so she could eat down the lush lawn, rather than sacrifice it to a lawn mower.

‘She’s grounded. She doesn’t get to just hang out for the holidays.’

My mum, Bonnie, was having one of her rants.

‘All you have to do is come up with a few jobs for her to do and make sure she doesn’t get hurt doing them.’

My twelve-year-old niece, Charlize, had just copied an assignment off the internet rather than writing her own. The school had been in touch and had been contemplating failing her in English until the promise of a freshly written assignment was made.

The assignment had been resubmitted and the grade had been changed from fail to pass. Now it was summer holidays and Mum was trying to make sure Charlize didn’t forget that she was in trouble.

‘Send her out on the weekend and I’ll get her to help out with a few things.’

I heard myself say these words, but I was still distracted by Beauty’s large, dark, soulful eyes.

When Charlize was dropped off on Saturday morning, I told her that she had a choice between cleaning the embedded chook poop off the bottom of the portable chook pen or picking up the horse poop in the round yard. Either way, she had to shovel shit and she wasn’t impressed.

Surprisingly, she opted for the horse poop.

I handed her the pooper scooper, pointed to the wheelbarrow, and left her to it.

With just two horses to clean up after, I figured it would take her fifteen minutes to finish the job. However, a half-hour later, I wandered over to the round yard to find Charlize backed up against the rails and defensively holding the pooper scooper across the front of her chest. One of my two disinterested mares faced her about four metres away, slowly chewing on hay.

‘What, you scared that she’s going to attack you?’

‘I don’t trust her. She could squash me if she wanted to.’

Charlize was being melodramatic.

‘Your mother would be embarrassed to have a daughter that’s scared of horses.’

I hadn’t thought this through before I said it.

‘I don’t care. It’s not as if I even knew her!’

The punch back was hard to take.

I was lost for words as a firm knot tightened in my stomach. I had to take a moment to contemplate my next step. As much as it pained me that Charlize felt no connection whatsoever to her mum, I decided that this was the reality of the situation.

It was at about this moment I realised I’d been trying to make Charlize fit into the mould left behind by her mum. This realisation was just as hard to take as Charlize’s words. I had been trying to do to her exactly what I had felt my parents – collectively known as ‘the Wrinklies’ – and everyone else in my life, had been trying to do to me when I was about her age.

Memories of Nanna never being able to say my name, Trina, or my sister’s name, Talicia, without hesitation because she couldn’t tell us apart, either by name or appearance, came flooding back. Other relatives and schoolteachers were much the same. Mum’s insistence on dressing us the same when we were too young to competently decide what to wear for ourselves and even having matching horses to ride, who happened to be sisters too.

It was all landing in my mind at the same time. The realisation that … I’d turned into my mum!

It wasn’t fair on Charlize to try to shove her into the mould. While she was a much shorter and younger version of her mum in appearance, she was absolutely nothing like her in personality.

I quickly backpedalled.

‘You don’t have to like the horses. You don’t even have to trust them, but you do have to do a few jobs around here so I can report back that you’ve paid your penalty.’

Either oblivious to the fact I was watching her as she stepped away from the rails to resume poop-scooping, or not caring that I could see her, Charlize started pulling faces and mocking what I’d just said.

‘Come on girl, put your head up.’

I was trying to coax Beauty into letting me put a winter rug on her, without having to go back to the shed for a halter. However, Beauty was too intent on scoffing down the feed that had just been offered as a blatant bribe before Kat happened by. Eventually Beauty grew weary of my persistent nagging and lifted her head, allowing the rug to be quickly fastened around her neck before lowering her head again.

Last winter I had noticed a power shift from Beauty being the ‘Paddock Queen’ to Kat assuming the throne. This had been hard to watch, given that since the day she had been taken off the float at my childhood home in Burra, Beauty had been the queen of whichever paddock she had been placed in. However, she now needed a protective detail as she ate her feed each night. Without me guarding Beauty, Kat would be doubling up on dinner feeds as she snaked her neck between the two feed bins, stopping Beauty from eating while Kat doubled her own consumption.

The winter passed with me standing in the cold darkness to protect Beauty from a greedy Kat and a few opportunistic trips to Victoria so Dusty, my significant other, could see his excessively large family of six—yes six—brothers, and his Australian rules football team lose . . . again.

When September happened around the rugs were taken off to reveal a plump Kat and a lean Beauty. Despite my best efforts, Beauty had not managed to maintain her weight during the short but sharp Canberra winter.

At work that day I was confronted with a hysterical colleague named Bernadine. Bernadine’s uncle had cancer and was going downhill fast. As the only other person around at the time of the distress call, I dutifully comforted Bernadine and assisted in making last minute travel arrangements to Adelaide in an attempt by Bernadine to see her uncle before it was too late.

As the morning wore on, I realised that Bernadine was inconsolable.

Imagine if it were an immediate family member that was dying, I thought to myself, she doesn’t understand what it’s like to lose someone as close as an immediate family member.

Bernadine dashed to Adelaide that day and wasn’t seen in the workplace again for a fortnight.

A few months later, with the festive season looming and an indefinite standstill on horse movements due to the equine influenza outbreak, the decision was made for Dusty and I to sojourn to Hamilton Victoria to spend New Year’s with his family.

An offer of cash was presented to Charlize to make her way out to our property at Carwoola each day to feed the dogs, horses, and chooks as a means of teaching the immature teenager the value of money. With Charlize keen to earn some extra cash, Dusty and I left our two Golden Retrievers, Soda and Trev, in the backyard and my two pinto ponies in the front paddock, with ample foodstuffs for both and instructions as to how they should be dispersed.

After a much needed relaxing couple of weeks catching up with Dusty’s brothers and parents, traveling randomly through Victoria, we made our way back up our driveway on the outskirts of Canberra.

As we turned into the driveway in the late afternoon, we were surprised to see that the front gate was closed. As we made our way up the drive I watched as Beauty casually sauntered across the driveway from the formerly big, round bale of hay under the car port in front of the shed.

Despite this not being the scene that we had expected to come home to, both Dusty and I knew exactly what had happened.

With no great need to employ powers of deduction, investigation, or consultation, we both knew that the Wrinklies had grown weary of trying to harass Charlize into meeting her end of the bargain. Eventually resulting in them conceding defeat and just turning the horses loose to graze the hay and lawn and drink from the unfenced dam as they pleased, loading the chook pen with enough pellets to get them through a week at a time, and taking the dogs in to their house to be cared for.

That evening, as we walked through the Wrinklie’s backdoor unannounced to pick up Soda, Trev and the chooks, Charlize was the one to awkwardly greet us, as the Wrinklies were not yet home from work.

‘Hey guys. I wasn’t expecting to see you ‘til tomorrow,’ Charlize offered in a nervous tone, her sandy blonde locks almost shaking with nervous tension as she spoke.

‘Yeah, well, we got home a day early and now we want our dogs back.’

I knew I was being short with Charlize, but felt it was warranted.

‘So why did you bring Soda and Trev in here?’

I asked knowing the answer but wanting to hear what excuse Charlize came up with.

‘Dad bought them here. He thought it would be more comfortable for them and then there would be no need for him and Mum to drive me out to look after the horses and chooks each day. You’re still going to pay me, aren’t you?’—yes, my niece refers to my parents, her grandparents, as Mum and Dad.

‘Don’t feed me a line of bullshit Charlize. I think it’s pretty obvious that Dad was getting sick of having to do your job for you.’

As I uttered this statement, I could see both an awkward sideways look from Charlize, in an attempt to avoid eye contact, and behind Charlize, through the large windows at the front of the house, the headlights of the Wrinklies’ LandCruiser making its way up the driveway.

A frustrated argument ensued once the Wrinklies were in the house, in which Charlize insisted that it was their decision to turn the horses out and bring the dogs in to their house, and a frustrated Dad let out a tired rant; ‘Charlize, you didn’t go out once and I’m not gonna have you claiming that you did what you were asked, or that we’re the reason why you couldn’t live up to your end of the bargain.’

Having seen enough, and not being too inclined to pay Charlize, Dustin and I made a quiet exit with Soda, Trev, and the chooks.

‘Oh, she’s being a little teenage turd!’ I blurted once we were in the car heading down the driveway, with Trev diligently popping his head up between us from the back of the car.

‘Yep. She’s got a lot of growing up to do yet. Really, we should have seen it coming. She is only twelve.’

Dusty, always the voice of reason for me on these matters – yet completely irrational on matters such as football and alcohol consumption – offered.

‘Sad thing is, Beauty is actually looking better for having been turned out for a while.’

‘She doesn’t bite does she Trina?’ Charlize asked before mounting the small pony.

About a week after Dusty and I had made our quiet exit from the Wrinklies without paying her, Charlize – either recognising that she’d let us down, thinking she could make a pitch for the cash I’d promised her, or having been pressured into it by the Wrinklies – got my kid brother, Brad, to drop her off one afternoon so we could go for a horse ride together.

While Charlize didn’t appear to have been bitten by the horse-crazy bug that her mum and I had been, I was more than happy to indulge any interest she showed in spending time with me.

Returning from our ride – me on Kat and Charlize on the neighbour’s borrowed pony mare – Charlize made me think about the inevitable. Something I’d seen slowly coming my way but hadn’t yet been brave enough to acknowledge.

‘Trina, how old is Beauty?’ then, almost as if it was an afterthought, ‘How long have you owned her?’

Beauty was slowly walking over to the fence to welcome us back as we rode by. Her aged, but beautifully refined features, athleticism and her wildly irregular and unique white markings stretching right across her body bringing a smile to my face.

‘Beauty and I have been together almost twice as long as you’ve been alive. A lot longer than Dusty and I have been together too. I can barely remember a time without Beauty in my life, or a person other than family that has been in my life longer.’

Charlize didn’t appear to have heard my words. Rather, while I had paused to admire my beloved old friend, Charlize was persisting up the driveway, intent on cooling the pony off quickly, probably so she could make it inside before some television show started.

‘You know, I was your age when I bought Beauty. She wasn’t a cheap horse either. I had to work my bum off to afford her, but she was worth every cent.’

No response was offered as Charlize and the pony made their way up the driveway.

‘What are you interested in, Charlize? What makes you happy? What would you like to do with your life?’

The only acknowledgement I received was a shoulder shrug as I started to follow her up the driveway.

‘That’s okay. You don’t have to know what you want to do with your life. Just be glad you’ve got it and find your own way through it. You don’t have to fit in the pigeonholes that people will try to stuff you into,’ I said.

I wasn’t aware of my niece doing anything productive with her spare time, but also didn’t really know one way or the other. My niece, who referred to me as a Saunty—kinda an aunty, but also kinda a sister—was a bit of a mystery to me. I hadn’t exactly been around much for her twelve short years.

‘You know, your mum and I used to have great dreams and plans with the horses. We were almost inseparable at your age. People could barely tell us apart.’ Was my next attempt at a conversation as we unsaddled and cooled our horses.

It was pointless trying to talk to Charlize about her mum or my relationship with her. It simply wasn’t an issue for her.

‘Can I go inside now?’

Charlize was ignoring what I’d been saying to ensure she didn’t become engaged in a distracting conversation.

‘Whatever blows your hair back.’

And with that she disappeared into the house.

I sat there reminiscing again for a bit. Reminiscing about how, up until I was about Charlize’s age, I was commonly mistaken for my big sister. Despite us being almost two years apart in age and one year apart at school, people commonly mistook us for each other. Reminiscing about how this situation was not helped by our mum coming up with two very uncommon names for us that still managed to sound the same to the uninitiated.

That reminds me, I should catch up with Nanna this week.

Personally, I didn’t have a problem with being mistaken for my sister. But I was about Charlize’s age when I started to step out of her shadow a bit, but never too far out of it. Charlize, on the other hand, didn’t have the luxury of a big sister to look up to for guidance if needed. She didn’t even have a parent to help her through life.

I eventually made my way up to the house where Charlize was helping herself to some junk food left over from our last social gathering with our mates. I watched her emerge from the pantry with an already open packet of potato chips and noticed the messy state of her hair after having worn a helmet during our ride.

‘Come over here and I’ll clean your hair up before you head back to civilisation.’

She pulled a face, but still manoeuvred in front of me as I pulled a brush from my handbag.

‘Your hair is so soft, just like your mum’s. It gets all knotted just from sitting back against a chair, doesn’t it?’

She didn’t respond to me.

‘The knots are inevitable, you just have to deal with them as best you can.’

‘I do.’

Finally, I had a verbal response.

2 – Girls and their dreams

‘Trina, why do you always sit on the left side of the bus on the way to town and the right side on the way home?’ Talicia asked as we boarded the school bus for the long ride through the Burra valley to school in Canberra.

‘I know you like to sit near me on the bus, but you will only sit next to me if I sit on the left in the morning and the right in the afternoon.’

I could feel my eleven-year-old face turning red as I turned around to face my big sister while taking up a seat on the left of the bus. I hadn’t realised that Talicia had noticed and wasn’t sure if I wanted her to know. Surely Talicia, a veteran of almost an entire year at high school, would think my preference for the left side of the bus was something little kids did.