Love You Two Read online

  About the Book

  Something shifted. I don’t know when what used to make me content began to make me cringe; when my adoration of her turned to irritation. Was it adolescence? Was it a mother–daughter thing?

  ‘Love you t(w)oo.’ That’s what Pina’s mum has always written to her and her brother Leo: just a funny little saying to help them feel equally loved. Pina’s friends think she’s lucky. How many families get a long the way hers does – how many parents are as free-spirited and happy as hers? But sometimes Pina wonders who the grown-up is–her or her mother.

  Then a chance glimpse at an email unravels what Pina thought she knew about life and love. Running away to stay with her uncle throws her into another, unexpected, world. Can her family survive what she’s discovered? And what does it mean for her own life?

  Two siblings, two boys, two cities, three generations, four friends. How m any versions of the truth?

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  1. ‘Love you t(w)oo’

  2. Introducing my suburban wog family

  3. Introducing my wog girlfriends and skip boyfriend

  4. On love and life, according to Dad

  5. How to explore your house, and find you have no home

  6. Going inside my mother and finding Gianna

  7. Sinking back to the surface

  8. Border-travelling

  9. How hook turns lead to Narnia

  10. Of closets and clotheslines, Narnia and nowhere

  11. From bandaids to ECPs

  12. Of pasts and panopticons

  13. Of bats, boxes and boyfriends

  14. Christmas in Narnia

  15. Other worlds around the corner

  16. Someone else’s nonno

  17. ‘I have a name!’

  18. Silver Volvo dating

  19. Not a goodbye to Narnia

  20. Christmas Eve on the borders

  21. Christmas at Nonna’s

  22. The family plays ‘twenty questions’

  23. ‘Dirty washing should stay in the family’

  24. At home on the borders

  25. Closets with swinging doors

  26. A New Year and old school baggage

  Italian glossary

  Tapestry

  Author’s note

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  To all young people whose families

  love ‘differently’,

  whose families are on the borders,

  misunderstood, misrepresented,

  and erased:

  I hope you find yourself in this novel,

  know that families like yours exist,

  and know that what matters is

  that they know how to love,

  not who they love.

  1

  ‘Love you t(w)oo’

  THERE IT WAS ON THE computer screen: ‘Love You T(w)oo’. I’d sat down to log into MySpace and my email when I saw that Mum had left her email program open again. I’ve told her she should log out when she’s done. It’s a pain logging out for her and then waiting for the program to log me in.

  The window was open at the last message sent, from three o’clock this morning. What was she doing up at that time? No wonder her eyes were bloodshot and watery tonight. Maybe her shiftwork at the nursing home gives her weird sleeping patterns. Or maybe she’s a witch after all. She’s always going on about strega magic – witches’ magic.

  Would you believe my mum thinks witches were ‘strong independent women ahead of their time’ who got burned or drowned because they knew too much; more than the doctors, more than the judges, priests and politicians, and more than women were supposed to know back then?

  Before I tell you what I read, I think I should tell you a little more about this person I knew as my mother. She has no hesitation in letting you know she loves you. She’s a bit of an old hippy, I think, with all her off-the-planet stuff about ‘love, peace and harmony’, ‘unity in diversity’ and ‘love isn’t finite’. Leo, my little brother, just soaks it up and yeah, there was a time when I used to gush around her too.

  But then something shifted. I don’t really know when what used to make me content began to make me cringe; when my adoration of her turned into irritation. Was it adolescence? Was it a mother–daughter thingy? Most girls I know have this love–hate thing with their mothers. Or maybe we think we should have it, so we can cover not knowing who we want to be by feeling that at least we’re not like them? Well, except for Laura and her mum. Laura doesn’t play those games. That’s probably one of the reasons many other girls don’t like her. Laura still adores her mum. Even my almost perfect, but still-cool cousin Stella has her moments with my aunty, Zi Elena. Elena’s my mum’s identical twin sister, but she’s nicely normal.

  Anyway, as I grew older, it seemed more and more embarrassing and annoying to have my mother flashing me a starry-eyed child-like grin as she constantly told me, and everyone else who could hear her, that she loved me.

  Her parents and I banded together, a rarity that’s for sure, over our embarrassment and irritation with her. I remember bringing home this tie-dyed t-shirt we were forced to make in Design and Technology, and wanting to just chuck it in the bucket of cleaning rags in the laundry. My mum went into orgasms over its ‘groovy rainbow swirls’. She actually wore it, midriff bare and all. To which her mum, my nonna, threw up her hands (again) and tried to find the right saint in the ceiling with her usual wail, ‘Ma Gesù Cristo, Gianna’. Her dad, my nonno, grimly shook his head and silently contemplated Hell lurking just under the kitchen lino. But there’s my dad saying it shows off her youthful curves while his fingers crawl their way around her post-two-babies-who-are-now-teenagers stretch-marked waist. Of course, my nonna thought such displays were disgusting; how dare they hint at a sex life that went beyond ‘matrimonial duty’!

  Anyway, what was weird this sweaty December night wasn’t my mum writing this email with ‘Love You T(w)oo’ as the subject, but that the email wasn’t to me and my brother. Now that phrase, ‘Love you t(w)oo’, may look alien to most but it isn’t to me. Mum’s written that way to Leo and me for as long as I can remember. It’s scrawled on a thousand cards, notes and messages to us. Tonight those words were typed so neatly, glowing at me from the computer screen as if lit in nuclear-neon to make some major global war announcement. Even though I stir her about how it’s such a loserish thing to write, I guess I felt curious and, okay, kind of jealous, and wanted to see who else was special enough to have it said to them.

  Confession coming up here: I read her email.

  Okay, okay, privacy and all that. And yeah, I’d kill her if she ever did that to me. But my parents know about individual passwords and they hadn’t bothered about them. My mum isn’t so cluey with email systems, blogs, MSN and all that ‘virtual reality spider web’ stuff, as she calls it. I used to laugh when she’d have her tantrums with the computer. She’d accidentally delete a letter or forget to save a file or it’d give her instructions she couldn’t understand. Which is most of the time. She’d grumble about ‘Bloody files. Work files, email files, X-Files as far as I’m concerned.’

  So she wouldn’t have a clue about trashing, probably thinking ‘off the screen, disappeared forever’. Point is, I’m over trying to justify what I did, and what I read is more than enough justification for never trusting her again! Once I started reading, I wished for that phrase to delete itself right in front of my bulging eyes. Or maybe rewind to the moment where I didn’t even know it existed.

  But that’s movie-script sci-fi stuff. This is reality, where things just go on even as your heart plummets into your stomach
and explodes, your throat goes into drought mode, and the world around you drowns in drops of salty water. Except they’re called tears. And they’re yours.

  When I somehow got to the last line of that email on the glaring computer screen, I felt so numb and still, like a corpse on a slab. Then this zombie me started trying to revive, its eyes and brain trudging through each word over and over again. I finally managed to get my shaking fingers to position my mouse and press ‘print’ so I could see if it was still there – black-inked on paper so I could take it with me and check every few minutes during the night to see if the words had maybe, just maybe, please, ceased to exist.

  My mum gushes, my mum rambles, my mum thinks she could’ve been a writer and that she’s being insensitive and uncommunicative (two things she says she worries I might be becoming) if she doesn’t go on and on about her feelings. By the time I’d finished reading this email, I kept wishing she would just shut up.

  To: [email protected]

  From: [email protected]

  Subject: Love You T(w)oo

  cc: [email protected]

  Dear Nathan,

  Here we go again, hurting over the rules. It’s that time of year – Xmas looming and how do I love you both through this season of supposedly happy families when the obligations I have to my parents, the rellies and paesani map the itinerary out for me.

  I’m so sorry we argued like that last night. The drive home was devastating. I understand what you’re saying, Nathan. It’s so terribly humiliating. To be edited out of my life when it comes to this wog culture that celebrates la famiglia and togetherness at the expense of what individually suits us. And you being an Aussie – long gone from that kind of obedience/dependence circuit with family – I know that even after twelve years of knowing me, you don’t understand why I revert to being this kid!

  You know I get very frustrated and sad about it all. I fought so much with my parents over so much crap about ‘how shameful’ my choices were – ‘Che figura!’. From the length of my shorts, to why going to uni wasn’t a shameful thing for a good Italian girl, and that there was a lot more to being a nurse than perving at men’s penises! UGGGHHHHHHH!

  But this one’s beyond me. As Elena says, it’s beyond most people, not just the wogs. So I guess I’m not brave enough yet.

  It’s not just that I’m a daughter of these old peasants who thought going out with your boyfriend without a chaperone was advertising your sluttiness. It’s also that I’m a parent myself of two teenagers going through their own stuff now. Pina, with this boy Scott who I think she really fancies … but he worries me. I’m not sure if I should tell her that – she’s so stubborn. She thinks everything’s so black and white. And Leo, so quiet and sensitive, who says he’s all right, but I don’t know if I believe that.

  I love them so much, my beautiful kids. I want so much for them and I want to be a good mother but I think they’d hate me if they knew. Maybe not Leo, maybe he’d understand. But Pina? I’m afraid of her. This daughter of mine who can be so sharp and so cold and so clinical. I’m afraid to shatter that crisp neat world of hers and yet I know that one day it’ll happen. She’ll learn that life and love melt and thaw, flow and burn. But she’s like my mother, who even today has little ice-packs of truths in her frozen heart.

  So, I’m stuck in between, a middle-aged fruitcake who loves her family so much and is terrified to do anything that could break their love for her and make their lives unbearable.

  Ren, I’m sending you a copy of this even though you want me to have my private space. My Ren, who loves me no matter what, who got me away from a prison of daughterly ‘shoulds’ and didn’t lock me away in another one of wifely ‘shoulds’; who encouraged me to follow my dream and study nursing after we married. Remember how my parents relinquished responsibility of me to you, warning you that if you gave me too much freedom, I’d turn bad?

  Did I turn bad, Ren? Is that what happened? Am I bad to love this way? To love you so much still while so many of our friends simply do time in their marriage-prisons? Being married to you has never been a prison for me, my darling Renato, it’s been a sanctuary.

  Ren, Nat, my love and respect for you t(w)oo is so overwhelming, I’m sometimes afraid my heart will burst with the joy and the sadness of such hidden bliss and burden. So somehow I keep it tied together in my heart, as if with a multicoloured silk ribbon, reflecting the rainbow of colours you’ve brought me in your love, the rainbow of possibilities of ways to love that you both allowed me to discover. You’ve been amazing partners, and nothing can take away how I’ve grown through you, and the beautiful memories I have, which haunt me in sad ways every day.

  Nat, I understand why you want to end this. You’re right. As Xmas approaches again, another year’s over and we’re all getting too old for this painful hiding of the way things really are, of who my family includes.

  Love you t(w)oo, always will,

  Gianna

  It was like I had gone into another world that had coexisted all this time, a parallel universe I hadn’t known. There but invisible, since I was four years old.

  Sure, what I read could be described as a beautiful love letter: romantic, soppy, agony and ecstasy stuff. Perhaps my mother missed her calling as a Mills and Boon writer. But this has a hideous twist that they’d never publish. This isn’t a love letter to her husband. This isn’t even a love letter to her secret lover, who she will abandon after realising the error of her adulterous ways. This is a love letter to both, at the same time. My mother’s been having an affair for twelve years. Can an affair last that long? And my dad’s known all along! So is it still technically an affair?

  I feel like I’m having a panic attack, like I’m perched precariously on some cliff edge. That piece of rock I’m clinging to breaks off and I plummet down again when I think about how her email says I’m cold and sharp and clinical. My mother says she’s afraid of me, as if I could tear her life apart. Why does knowing all this chill me, make me feel such a poisonous mix of sadness and despair and fury? I am not like my control freak nonna. My mother’s blaming me for her wimpiness. I do love her, but all I’ve ever wanted is for her to be a normal mother. I always tried to tell her that. Maybe something inside me knew there was much more to her than just harmless eccentric habits.

  I wipe my sweaty forehead with a trembling hand and lean back on the chair, seeing black email-print on the ceiling. I don’t want to keep looking at that letter, but I can hear the incessant whir of the computer. I can see the screen’s glow on the ceiling, telling me it’s all real. Even if I hit ‘delete’, the reality cannot be deleted. It’s in hard copy in my clammy hand.

  What’s with my family? I always told them they were abnormal, freaks, losers, and I was the only sane one among them. But it was abnormal because they were the only mum–dad couple not getting a divorce, nor considering a divorce, nor looking and acting like they should get a divorce, nor staying together because of the kids, nor having kids begging them to get divorced.

  They’re aliens. Not your average abnormal parents but totally off this planet! So is that why Mum’s been quieter lately, and Dad’s been fetching her more herbal teas than usual? And why she’s been snapping at the nonni more and not wanting to see them? Hell, do they know? I don’t think so. Nonna would’ve died years ago, gone into one of those hysterical fits she conjures up when something upsets her – talk about victim power! But then again, could you blame her, having a potential bigamist on her hands? What did Nonna do to deserve you as a daughter? What did I do to deserve you as a mother?

  So my Zia knows and has never said a word to me. Does that mean her husband Zi Rocco knows? And Stella? But they always treat my parents with such genuine affection. Maybe they’re doing it too. But they seem to love each other so much …

  I thought Mum and Dad loved each other so much too. Well, okay, this email says they do. She’s even telling her boyfriend she loves her husband, and then CC-ing it to her husband so he
knows she loves her boyfriend! That’s so disgusting. I don’t think she loves either of them. Has she hatched a perfect way to keep them both looking after her, hedging her bets both ways? If she really loved them, she’d stop this selfishness. She’d choose. And she says I’m insensitive and cold. How cold and calculating is she behind that Doris Day daisies-in-her-hair grin?

  2

  Introducing my suburban wog family

  ‘PINA, DINNER’S READY, BELLA.’ Her sing-song voice breaks through the shock burning in my head.

  What do you think is the most cringe-creating name for an Italian girl, one that leaves them wide open for stereotypes and stirs? Yes, in one of their few misguided attempts at being conservative and traditional Italians, my parents named me Giuseppina, after my grandmother on my father’s side. That’s me: Giuza, Giuzy. Apparently, it’s now the trendy name for girls in Italy. But not here among both the skip-kids and migrant-kids at school, where it denotes the woggiest, daggiest, try-hardest kinda Italian chick. Luckily, I worked hard on making everyone call me Pina. Even ‘Josie’ could slide dangerously towards ‘Giuzy’ among the kids at school and with my rellies at home. In my days of childhood innocence I hadn’t counted on ‘Pina the Penis’ being a hit at school. Fortunately most kids gradually grew out of that one.

  By the way, there’s a pattern. Leo’s really meant to be Leonardo, after my father’s father. Thank God it’s edited to Leo or my brother would get a less edited version of the bullying he now gets at school.