Ebony tiptoed up the hall to her sisters’
room, avoiding the floor boards she knew would creak on the way. It was
midnight and her parents were asleep. She quickly pushed open the door,
ensuring that if it was going to make a sound, it would not last long. The
bedside lamp was on and dimly lit the room. She closed the door behind her and
looked around.
Alice had always wanted a room that was
more of a shrine, something that people could walk into and know her, just from
looking at the walls. Ebony glanced around and realized that she had achieved
exactly that. There was a world map that took up one of the smaller walls, with
blue tacks in the places she’d been; France, Italy, England so far. There were
purple tacks too, those were for the places she would go next; Denmark, Sweden,
Norway, Finland and Iceland. She wanted to explore Scandinavia; go on a
reindeer sled ride and sleep in an igloo. Under the map were four pictures in an
impossibly straight line, stretching the length of the map with perfectly even
spaces in between. Each was a photo of Alice with one other family member; their
mum, dad, elder sister Aubrey and one with Ebony. Alice ran a finger over the
picture of her and her sister, setting it to memory.
There was a pin up girl picture from Paris that
she had not yet framed, and an oil painting of the Eifel Tower she got from a
vendor on the streets of the Montmartre. She had a wall specifically for
artistic and almost abstract photos she’d taken when in Rome, each lined with a
thin matted black frame. There was a laminated picture of a pirate ship she
took at Disneyland Paris blutacked to the mirror on her cupboard. On the wall
above her study desk was a framed photo she said was for motivation. It was enlarged
almost to the point of distortion and was of the Notting Hill tube sign in
London, taken from the far side of the tracks. She had been experimenting with
the camera at the time and managed; with very little know how, to make the
photo shades of grey, with just the circle around the station name in red. She wanted
so badly to be back in London. Under the photo that she spent a little too much
of her study time daydreaming at were the textbooks; the whole top shelf of the
desk were lined with names like Contracts, Principles and Practice of
Australian Law, Commercial Law, Crime in Australia, and many, many more.
There was a tray next to the printer
specifically for paper; she went through reams each semester. Sitting on top as
a paper weight was the porcelain duck she had bought from the markets when she
was 4. Her great grandma had given her $2 and she had fallen in love with the
$1 ducky, as she affectionately called him. Neither Ebony nor Alice knew where
the last dollar had ended up, and it didn’t matter.
Ebony picked up a snow dome her sister had received
from an auntie for a birthday so long ago she couldn’t recall which. She gently
turned it up side down and then back again, the little pink flowers slowly
making their way to the bottom, passing a reading rabbit, a duck holding a
flower with a lady beetle on top and a blue bird on their way. The Snowdome had
a lilac base with the words “I Love You” painted in white. Ebony smiled and
placed it back on exactly the angle she found it.
She wandered over to the wall next to her
sister’s bed and ran her left hand along the light blue curtains covering two
windows that took up the whole wall. In front of her was the wall Alice loved
most. Ebony sat on the end of the bed, facing the wall and looking up at the
memories her sister liked to relive over and over. The wall was brown, a comforting
feature in the otherwise bland cream room. It was covered with photos from her
travels, of pictures from her favourite designer and Polaroid’s of friends. The
photos were placed artistically and seemingly purposefully, although Ebony
never quite understood it. Each photo was on an exact parallel to the floor and
ceiling; of the 40 or so photos, not one was on the wrong angle. From afar the
wall was striking, with reds and pinks of beautiful designer clothing standing
out amongst clusters of a brown Paris and blue skied Liverpool in the summer. Up
close was a journey, from where she had been, and where she was yet to go. It
was of hope and happiness. It defined her, just as she had hoped.
Her sister wouldn’t be coming home any time
soon, so she got up and started opening draws, looking for hidden secrets. The
desk, as suspected, contained nothing but a bottom draw of thousands of pages
of law school readings, filed under subject and year. The top draw was orderly
stationary. She opened the cupboard and found nothing but clothing hung up
according to colour, perfectly lined shoes and some paperwork on the far left
shelves. She made her way over to the bedside draws and opened the first one.
There were CD’s and novels, photos that didn’t make the cut for display, old
birthday cards and hair ties. Lots of hair ties. She shut the draw,
disappointed. She was certain there would have been some sort of insight, some
sneaky something that she could have dug up. There was nothing. Deflated, she
lay down on the bed and stared at the ceiling. After a little while she decided
to go back to her own room, not wanting to fall asleep where she was. She
shifted the pillow slightly in order to make the covers as neat as they were
before, and caught sight of a corner of a stack of paper. She pulled it out
from under the pillow and examined the outside. There was nothing written on
the cover; a blank page. The paper was bound together by shreds of leather that
were frayed at the ends.
Deciding she didn’t actually care whether
she was found in her sister’s room in the morning, Ebony climbed back under the
covers and started reading.
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