Other Lilia
Kate Twomey’s Other Lilia was the first runner-up in the secondary schools section of the Sunday Star-Times short story competition. Judges described it as ‘‘a delightfully dark and quirky story about a girl who has to share her name with the seemingly perfect ‘other Lilia’. The language is original and evokes the senses well, with phrases that beg to be read aloud so that they may be truly savoured, such as ‘by spring the road was softening at midday like undercooked cake, black cement oozing from between the cracks’.’’
The shadow of the mountain gave our lives structure. Its dark silhouette became sight’s shorthand for home, so that no matter where in the world I was, any distant hill or mountain which rose in that same sudden, distinct way had a strange flash of familiarity, like glimpsing a childhood friend.
My name is Lilia. I like to mention this because it was my name first. I was born in winter, while other Lilia arrived the subsequent summer. She was the year above me in school, and from the first established herself as one of those rare, annoying children who are good at everything. Strangers would excitedly announce they’d heard of me on learning my name, before quickly realising I was the wrong one, a shadow paled by other Lilia’s brilliance.
I could handle that she was better than me at everything she did; that even trying was pointless when matched with a girl who was a tennis champion before she could write, who could render a face with two colours of paint and was chosen for a national academic team after winning an essay contest aged eight. But the salt in the wound was that she had no right to be Lilia, while I, rightful owner of the name, was Lilia W. I grew up in the shadow of someone who didn’t know who I was.
I had my own friends, and our school years were largely defined by not being there. We learned physics from shaking bottles of coke until they exploded, and English from obnoxiously correcting the grammar of the graffiti under the bridge. I found new things to succeed in (best at faking an ID, first person to successfully shoplift four packets of chips while in school uniform). In the evenings as we leaned on lampposts and kicked pebbles down storm drains, other Lilia would sometimes pass us on her way back from tennis. She was never alone – an arm was always looped over the shoulder of one friend or other as they both laughed at an unheard joke, clutching each other in the purple dusk.
In many ways they were the happiest years of my life. Everything mattered so much more, in such inconsequential ways. Summers have reduced themselves to a few fleeting, lovely memories; the sound of tennis games at dusk, eating strawberries in dusty side alleys, the smell of vinyl seats and the way the sun caught the dregs in wine glasses on napkin-scattered cafe tables. Mum said I was setting a bad example for my sister by skipping school, and I guess I was, but finding a place where I fitted was too rare and precious to lose. In retrospect, though, I don’t think the person I became was the one I wanted to be. There was only ever room for one Lilia, and if I hadn’t been edged to the fringes of our world by other Lilia’s presence, I wonder who I would have become.
Trips to the mountain were usually winter ones, but as spring approached we were all piled into a beaten-up alpine bus and taken on a mandatory school trip. The long drive was borne with good humour by my friends and I, who leaned out the half-open windows trying to lasso one of the roadside sheep with a piece of string. As punishment, we weren’t allowed up the mountain to sketch volcanic rocks and ancient lahar flows, but had to stay in the car park sweeping shingle and grumbling. Once the teachers were gone, we climbed under the stairs of an empty ski chalet and carved our names into the underside of the stairs. I had a small knife worn like a necklace pendant, normally used for carving my name into things to prove I’d been there first.
By the time we emerged from our hiding place, the sun was pricked on the tip of the mountain and kids were piling back into the bus. We were given another scolding for our disappearance and were made to sit separately with reputable seat buddies. I sat opposite other Lilia, who didn’t say a word to me the whole ride home. She had her head leant on the window, and seemed strange and sad in a way I can’t quite put into words, except to say there was an almost martyr-like brokenness behind her eyes. For the first time in my life I pitied her, though I didn’t quite know why.
Other Lilia died on her sixteenth birthday. She was lying with her damp curls spread over the pillow, and didn’t open her eyes when her mother brought in a tray of birthday breakfast. The doctor said her heart must have given out in the night. She died like a little baby, with no other explanation except that it’s just how life works sometimes.
We all cried at her funeral, mostly out of selfpity, knowing that she’d never know nor had likely ever wondered how much we’d miss her. The sporting friends made a great fuss over her tennis racket, while an English teacher stiffly read a poem about the decline of the American west, which seemed inappropriate for the occasion but was probably very profound. In the midst of it all Lilia lay like porcelain, her stillness spilling over the lip of the coffin and lying dormant under every conversation. There seemed something faintly indecent in having an open casket, and I averted my eyes while everyone else crowded around and stared. It seemed just like Lilia to die in such a lovely, romantic way. I wondered if people would have been quite so sad if she’d been crushed by a pig falling off a balcony like that man in the story – then had to press my fingers over my mouth and convulsed with silent laughter while a school friend stroked my shoulder and murmured that it was okay to cry.
It drizzled as she was cremated. The whole town seemed to have shown up – the dairy owner, the primary school teacher, the guy who slept on a bench outside the post office – all standing awkwardly and sadly with their eyes on the ground. A stab of light shone through the clouds, and the minister told us it was her soul joining the angels. I had to cover my mouth with my hands again as I pictured the angels getting increasingly pissed off as Lilia beat them at everything.
Lilia’s death brought a sense of relief. The shadow I had spent my life living under was gone, and for the first time I felt I had beaten her in something. After all, there was only enough room in this world for one Lilia.
The following winter, on my seventeenth birthday, the crater lake began to warm. Scientists tested it and shook their heads and warned us we’d have to move. It was hard to believe that our mountain had the capability and the will to kill us. I stood for a long time in the grey twilight, trailing the crags with my eyes and feeling a strange sense of impermanence, paired with a hopeless certainty that I and no-one else mattered.
The world was unseasonably warm; by spring the road was softening at midday like undercooked cake, black cement oozing from between the cracks. Family cars weaved down side streets as we learned to drive, house keys rattled with loose change in our pocket linings, and adult life seemed on the verge of beginning. School ground to a halt, and we shook our school bags over rubbish bins and spray painted the teacher’s cars. Then at last we were let loose – we were adults. Childhood dreams came true for two golden weeks as we drove our parents’ cars, stealing off in the middle of the night to hold bonfires by the lake and wake on a bed of ashes and broken bottles.
Then the tremors began, little ones which sent the lips of glasses tinkling against each other. Black smoke unfolded itself from the crater lake, and we understood that life as we knew it had come to an end.
We were the first to move. Mum and her asthmatic lungs needed cleaner air, and I followed her around the house in the shadow of removal vans, boxing away my childhood. No-one knew what to do with themselves any more – finding work in a world of such an uncertain future, and clinging to friendships as one by one families packed up and moved away seemed hopelessly naive. My little sister wept over our childhood garden while I stood at the gate watching smoke shift in the sky, feeling that everything good and right and simple had ended with Lilia’s death.
I suppose it’s true that humans live through curiosity. I never cried as our car drove away and my friends waved to me from the pavement. There is always something to come next.
Lilia’s death was the last pure sadness of my childhood, and the moment in my life I could pinpoint and turn to in proof that should I have died on my sixteenth birthday, the tragedy of a young life cut short would have outweighed all other shortcomings of my life.
But in the end, I know Lilia’s death never meant anything. The universe only aligns itself with schoolkid jealousies by coincidence. She was always the luckiest of the two of us.
That’s all.
A stab of light shone through the clouds, and the minister told us it was her soul joining the angels. I had to cover my mouth with my hands again as I pictured the angels getting increasingly pissed off as Lilia beat them at everything.