The Gap
by Alexandra Jones
I’m on the phone to my sister. She’s crying.
I’m not sure what to say, what to do. She’s my big sister, she’s the one who’d dried my tears. I had no idea what to do with hers.
She tells me she’s pregnant.
She’s seventeen.
I suddenly feel like I’ve been wrenched up out of my world, out of the bubble I’ve been living in since I got here, and been dragged back down to what life was before, back to our unfortunate reality.
I start crying too.
We just sit crying together, my sister and me, on the phone, a world apart.
* * * * *
I got the scholarship two years ago. The indigenous scholarship to a school in Sydney, a posh, rich, all-girl private school nobody had heard of. Regardless, everyone was ecstatic. All my friends and family threw a ridiculous celebration in our backyard and everyone brought food and beer and Cottee’s cordial and both child and adult sat laughing and drinking and chewing on steak for an entire day.
It was great.
I kept thinking that it was; great, that was until I pulled up to the place I’d be living at for the next three years. It was mammoth; the driveway was longer than the total cross-section of my old school, the trees taller than the highest building back home and… there was a church in the middle of the grounds? My mind was a train wreck at that point. Great had snapped itself in half. I could feel a gap wedging itself between past and present, my world and this world. Confusion? Yeah, I was confused.
The first night I thought of my sister, Lin, remembering her telling me to ring everyday, as her departing words of wisdom she’d said “Let the rich bastards pay for the phone bill, and ring me, everyday, because frankly I want to hear all about life on the other side.” Then with a grin and slap to the back of my head I was out of Darwin in off to a new world. This world. My new world.
I remember the first day. It was… enlightening. Teachers looked at me funny, smiling with a sort of manic stupidity, like they were trying to be nice but didn’t really have a talent for it. Teachers at home just had the job of keeping us all in one piece, making sure we kept sober, clean, un-impregnated, and most of the time alive, though it didn’t make the headlines if the headcount decreased during lunchtime. The girls here were insane. They talked in an unbelievably absurd way; like drinking and drugs were cool, like sex was the most exciting thing that could ever happen, like being a rebel was the only way to be. I could feel that gap between us. Everything felt like it was happening too fast, like everyone shuffled through people and words and places and feelings at super speed, fastforward. I remember thinking that people laughed and cried at the same time. It was bizarre. Like the fact that at six that morning I’d looked out the window of the boarding house and seen girls in sport uniforms off to train for soccer or netball or swimming. This didn’t happen back home, the incentive just wasn’t there. I was seen as a bit of an oaf for trekking here and there for my tennis matches. I wonder if anyone noticed it was that effort that got me here. No. I think people back home were too busy slapping me on the back and telling me not to become a blue-blood to really look into it.
Two years is a long time.
It’s been about a year since the confusion faded, since I started wearing makeup and growing my hair out and wearing my skirt shorter, since I became part of this world, since I’d closed that particular gap. It’s been nine months since I won my last tennis match. It’s been six months since Lin’s phone call, the one that brought me down from the cloud I was living in.
For six months I’ve been replaying our memories. I remember as kids weÙd dream, imagining ourselves going places, meeting people we hadn’t known our whole lives. I’m living it, the dream and she’s living our nightmare, following the pattern dictated by decades of unreasoned tradition. I’ve been thinking of our phone calls, telling her about the city, the rich girls, the school, the crazy fact that all of them pay thousands of dollars just to attend when back home it took a ton of effort for a majority of the school the even show up. I remember hearing the wonder in her gasps when I told her about the sports uniforms, and the gym and the six am trainings.
* * * * *
Two months later I was home, reminded of just how big the gap between my two worlds was.
I saw her, my sister, stomach protruding absurdly, blowing on a whistle, pointing a finger around all over the place, surrounded by a group of children in white t-shirts bouncing balls up and down a makeshift court in the middle of the road. Training. Uniforms. Six in the morning.
I’d caught Lin’s eye and we started laughing and crying at the same time.
* * * * *
Back to school. The image of those kids still implanted in my brain. I felt like my worlds had fused together, if only by that tiny strand. Lin had told me I was her inspiration, that my stories of my new life had made her want to change everyone else’s. I told her she was a genius.
This morning I told the assembly that I was organizing a pen-pal program for girls here to inspire people back home and in other indigenous communities, just like I’d inspired my sister. Turns out the respect I had gained from my peers proved beneficial, they’re all leaping at my proposal.
I can feel the gap closing already.
