Free The House of Memories by Monica McInerney Page A

Having Lucas helped too. I was still sending plenty of faxes to him, and getting plenty in return. He was my confidant and adviser and he made me feel special, something I needed whenever the jealous-of-Jess feelings started to rise. Jess might have been the apple of everyone’s eye here in Melbourne, but she didn’t have an uncle in London who sent her faxes and foxes and books, did she?
    About a month after Jess’s first birthday, I was able to repay Charlie for his kindness. He and I had recently been watching lots of American TV shows during the few hours of TV a week our parents allowed us. Copying one of them, we thought it would be funny to set up a lemonade stall down the street from our Richmond house one Saturday afternoon. We convinced ourselves we’d make a fortune. Hundreds of people walked past our gate on their way to the football at the MCG. They’d be dying of thirst, desperate for fresh lemonade.
    As we set up the stall, Charlie made me laugh by giving the lemons lemony voices and getting them to talk to one another. “You give me the pip,” he had one say. “Yeah?” another replied. “Well, your problem is you’re too thin-skinned.” “You’re just a yellow-bellied coward!” “Don’t think I’m going to come to your aid, lemon. Or should I say, come to your lemon-ade.” It suddenly seemed urgent to let him know that, alongside Lucas, he was my favorite person in the world.
    “Charlie?”
    “Mmm?”
    “I love you.”
    He swooned, clutching his chest. “Be still, my beating heart. But, Arabella, it will never work out between us. I’m sorry to break it to you, but I’m your brother.”
    “Stepbrother, actually,” I said. “But that’s what I meant. I love you in a brotherly way.”
    “How marvelous.” Apart from using as many big words as possible, he’d also taken to occasionally speaking in an upper-class English accent. “And I, dearest Arabella, love you in return. In a sisterly way, of course.”
    “Good,” I said.
    He reverted to his very Australian accent. “Can we get back to our lemonade now?”
    “Sure,” I said.
    Two hours later, we were packing up after a frankly disappointing afternoon. We’d made only two dollars and twenty cents and had drunk most of the lemonade ourselves. I heard a noise from down the street—shouting, and a bottle being kicked along the footpath. It was a gang of boys from one of the other schools in the area. I’d seen them now and again going past our house, and ignored them. There was an unspoken war between the two schools. They thought we were all posh brats. We thought they were all criminals.
    Charlie was still very fat at this stage. It wasn’t until he reached his twenties that he started to lose any weight. I could hear the gang of boys begin to taunt him as they approached. “Hey, Fatso.” “Who ate all the pies?” “Someone call the RSPCA. There’s a beached whale on the street.”
    “Come on, Charlie,” I said, quickly pushing the unused cups and lemons into the packing crate we’d used as our stand. I wasn’t quick enough. I was just taking down our handwritten sign when the gang stopped in front of us.
    “Fatso’s got a girlfriend,” one of them said. The other one said something cruder in reply. I ignored them. Beside me, Charlie kept packing up too. I shot him a glance. He didn’t look back.
    “Give us a drink, Fatso’s girlfriend.”
    “We’re closed,” I said, looking down at the footpath.
    “Fatso drank it all,” one said. They all laughed.
    Before I could stop him, the tallest boy reached into the packing crate, grabbed one of the lemons and pelted it across the road. It narrowly missed a passing car. The driver honked his horn. Two of the boys gave him the finger.
    “Ignore them,” Charlie hissed at me.
    I tried, but they did it again. More horns honked. The third time, they threw the lemon at Charlie, not the cars. It missed him by inches. The next one hit him on the shoulder.
    “Don’t