My Sister Has Returned

After a yearlong absence while she studied music and German, my youngest sister has returned to the house my in which my father and occasionally coincide. We both live here, but it seems we don’t overlap quite as much as should, an unfortunate consequence of both our evening habits and professions.

I spent the evening with Katie, the father absent for his public speaking class/group. I’ll be honest, I’m well aware he doesn’t much enjoy the company, so I naturally lean towards the assumption that it’s a class, but I’m also given to the understanding that he needs relatively little further education in public speaking, which only confuses the whole affair. Regardless, I chattered idly with Katie while she engaged in the same activity she always manages to indulge during her returns to the house.

Katie is really quite impressive when it comes to cleaning and organisation at speed. I’m not sure how it’s happened, but she is very certainly the only member of the family to have developed an innate sense not only of when things are out of place but also if they are in some intangible manner disarrayed. Moreover, this sense has been incredibly tightly honed to the point where she can sense, in an apparently entirely organised space, that certain items require reclassification.

I helped for most of the evening (if spectatorship still qualifies as ‘help’) as Katie reclassified a significant amount of the “food”* in our presses as “refuse” and then made sure to reassign it from “press” to “bin”. I’ll be honest, her criteria confuse me – there are a number of items ** that were kept despite their being well past their Use Bys. I have no idea how one judges the toxicity once the date is passed, but somehow she can.

She then proceeded to explain, at great length and in interminable detail, why I shouldn’t be using air freshener as fly spray. I left the room to attend an imminent call of nature and returned to the smell of a kitchen doused in air freshener, but given the sheer quantity of the foods* we had moved around would account for any number of airborne irritants (that amount of mustard and red wine vinegar could draw bloodied tears). We then walked the dog until she looked like she wasn’t up for walking any more and returned to the house around half past nine, to make some tea.

Katie had some urgent phone related business to manage (I’ll be honest, I wasn’t really paying attention) so I busied my writer’s hands with the tea – a task with which I’m pretty intimately familiar from so many years of delicately arranged looking-like-I’m-working-harder-than-I-really-am. On opening the press, I saw what our gleeful ‘organisation’ had wrought.

There is a press in my house now, big enough that I might fit myself inside it comfortably, that contains only a black box, perhaps a litre in volume. Inside this box are perhaps fifty teabags. Surrounding the box, improbably black against the white-and-spilled-spices backdrop of the press itself, were three or four houseflies – dead – gassed most likely, a can of Glade practically smoking a foot to my left. There was something else too, that looked like the slightest twist of a dried tea-leaf.

It turned out to be a moth, twisted by whatever cocktail it had ingested. Insects don’t have lungs, and so it had absorbed, directly through spiracles to every meaningful cell it had, the lavender-fresh smell of an unnaturally strong outdoors and it had been twisted beyond all meaningful recognition.

I dug out two teabags, swung door of the press shut and wondered if this was what the whole second generation German guilt over the concentration camps feels like.

I’m like a household Caliban. She has taught me how to clean, and my only profit on it has been to see the mess that I have made.


* Largely, the “foods” present in my house are, in fact, condiments, but let’s not get into the technicalities any more tonight.
** Including but not limited to: Black Olives, “Hot Chick” Curry dishes and some kippers in sunflower oil we feared the father might notice missing.