Free True Stories by Helen Garner

and politics and justice system of the country are different, according to who’s talking. Now I’m in possession of the tapes and I don’t know what to do with them. I thought of adding them to some as yet non-existent family archive—our father has burnt the slide collection—but they are too…blunt. I don’t mean bitchy, though at certain points on each tape there are moments of intense silence followed by sharp laughter. I encouraged bluntness. But I was surprised. The ones I expected to hold back did not, while the usually talkative ones were discreet.
    And because I, the eldest, was the one with the tape machine and the pen, this account lacks a blunt view of me. I got off lightly, this time. I tried hard to be irresponsible, to vanish, to be swallowed up by the texture of the writing. Because the one who records will never be forgiven. Endured, yes; tolerated, put up with, borne, and still loved; but not forgiven.
    Already, a few weeks after we taped the interviews, regretful postcards, letters and phone calls are flying. ‘What with my big mouth,’ writes one, ‘and your big ears…’
    In the bunfight of a big family, each member develops a role. Everyone gets behind a persona and tries to stay there. Selective amnesia is required in order to maintain that persona. So the conversations on which this essay are based have stirred things up. And now I can’t find a shape for the material I’ve got. The best I can do is a sort of scrapbook, or album. I certainly can’t analyse my sisters. They keep taking over, bursting out of the feeble categories I devise to order the material: they keep heightening themselves, performing themselves with gusto. All I’ve done, really, is to tone them down. I feel panicky. We are five sisters and it doesn’t even seem right to name us. The others wouldn’t like it. ‘The others’, four women for whom I have feelings so dark and strong that the word love is hopelessly inadequate. I’ve used a chronological numbering system. We have one brother, by the way. He comes between sisters Four and Five. He’s a chef. He makes the best lemon tarts in Australia. He has two sons. We love him, and we’re proud of him. But he belongs to the male strand of the family: to a different species.
    Work
    I note that I have immediately defined our brother by mentioning his job. It would never occur to me to do this about my sisters. Work is what interests us least about each other. Work is our separateness, what we do when we’re apart.
    We know that good manners dictate an interest in other people’s jobs, so we ask each other perfunctory questions; but often the questioner has tuned out before the answer is complete. (Four is the exception to this.) In childhood she seized the role of family clown, and every tale she tells is cleverly fashioned for maximum grip: ‘He was wearing a rather bad pork-pie hat. Get the picture? A real “bohemian”. So I say to him, “Can I get you something? Like the bill ?” ’
    Otherwise, each sister’s working life is a mystery to the others. Two of us were nurses, but I have never seen either of them in uniform. Four is in a band, which is more public, so she is often cranky because her sisters rarely come to hear her play. The three of us who write and publish live in a cloud of unknowing: has anyone in the family ever read our stuff? We are brilliant withholders. We behave as if we subscribed to Ernest Hemingway’s dictum from Paris in the 1920s: ‘Praise to the face is open disgrace.’ Praise from each other and from our parents is what we really crave; but we will not gratify each other. Our pride in one another is secret and oblique. One winter Four’s funk band collapsed and she had to take a job selling donuts from a van outside the Exhibition Buildings. Far from complaining, she kept me entranced with stories about her workmates