Free Preservation by Fiona Kidman Page A

or without reading her textbooks. While everyone else was deep in study, Jan would sit as if in a trance. It was only later she revealed what they should have noticed, that she had a photographic memory. All the same, it seemed Jan was part of all that they did, only, looking back, Sabrina sees this wasn’t so. Rather, she was the person who gave them permission to get up to their pranks, the one who listened to them plan their misdemeanours, dared them when their courage faltered and, later, covered their tracks. Sabrina smiles at herself when she uses the phrase ‘gave them permission’, as if she is some latter-day counsellor, a jargon freak like Jan’s mother, Leonie. She was weird, not like other mothers. She and Elsa never said this to Jan, but they knew she thought so, too, noticing how she liked to stay over at her friends’ houses but never asked them back to her place.
    They did meet Leonie once a year while they were in high school. When it was Jan’s birthday, they were summoned togather at a Chinese restaurant, the same one in Courtenay Place every year. ‘My mother wants you to come,’ Jan would say, her face rigid with embarrassment. They said yes, of course, and thanks, that would be fine. When Jan wasn’t there, they would say ‘Le-Oh-nie, oh my God’ and raise their eyebrows. It was the only time they were unkind to Jan, and she would never know, and, after all, they did turn up. How could they not, because if they didn’t Jan would have to do it on her own.
    Leonie was one of those women who liked to party hard, wore platform shoes and maxis, and talked about women’s liberation. She worked as a reporter, a media-hen she called it, and cackled at herself, her toughness, her fearlessness in tackling the big stories. Each year she would have a different man with her, although the uniform didn’t change much — flared trousers, sideburns. They had names like Eddie and Norm and Ted, and they all worked for one or other of the unions. They smoked over dinner, because you could do that then, and drank red wine, and complained that they couldn’t order spirits.
    The year Jan turned fifteen, Leonie brought along a photograph of Jan as a baby. Jan was blonde and dimpled, and the dimple in one cheek had stayed with her. In the photograph, Leonie had straight hair dangling to her waist, and wore a poncho over a long flowery dress. How we change, she had said, passing the picture around for everyone to admire. That was the sixties, you know. Jan would hunch down in her chair and look as if she wished her mother would die. Jan was dux of the school in her year, the first of them to graduate, the first to get a real job, as a flight attendant it turned out.
    ‘My daughter, a trolley dolly,’ Leonie said to Sabrina when she chanced upon her in the street one day. Her hair was permed in a very big Afro and she wore round spectacles.
    ‘I’m surprised,’ Sabrina said, although she thought anyone as pretty as Jan, and as clever, could do much as she liked.
    ‘She says she doesn’t have to use her brains. It figures — she was always lazy.’
    ‘I’m sure she does,’ Sabrina said, thinking that, after all her talk about women’s liberation, Leonie was being sexist. She, herself, had an appreciation of feminism, now that she went to university and suffered jokes about her name. Her parents had named her after a British pin-up star with enormous breasts. They had done it as a kind of a joke, they told her, shamefaced. Sabrina, the pin-up one, had visited the town where her mother grew up, and she’d thought it great that someone got so much attention. They were sorry. They would understand if she changed it; they were only young themselves when they had her. As acts of contrition, they gave her brothers plain staid names. But Sabrina has hung onto her name as if it’s a lucky charm.
    ‘I talked to her about it as a political concept,’ said Leonie of Jan’s job. ‘But she says she hasn’t got