Chameleon by Rebekah Jennings - © Copyright (e manga reader txt) 📕

I wear glasses, we all do and they’re not always rose coloured. Mine can’t be seen through, by others that is, although they’ll try... and perhaps they’ll find a similar pair. I don’t have an eye sight problem. My glasses are incorporeal, abstract, they cover my eyes, colour them and sometimes they are broken.

My mum always said my brother saw things in black and white. When she spoke those words they were clear to me. I knew what she meant at that time yet I know what she means now and both of my knowings are different from each other.

My glasses have evolved, developed over time and it’s wrong to say I only have one pair. I have many, like clothing I wear them, see through them and then I can change them, redress to fit the occasion. Opaque one moment, wide in periphery or sometimes narrow. They can be reflective or they can be all consuming, like a black hole.

Chameleon-like my glasses can change in colour so that I may see things according to the way my peers see things, so that we have a shared view and I am accepted as one of the group. The versatility assisting me to shift roles appropriately, mother, daughter, friend, boss or student. My specs can be dark, murky, and unclear, they can be sterile, emotion free. They can be moulded and formed like clay and they can be wrought with emotion, tangled, strangled.

I thought there was something wrong with my brother, that he could not see the grey area that Mum had spoken of.

I see through adult glasses now, most of the time anyway, and I know now there was nothing wrong with my brother’s glasses then, because all children see things in concrete form and don’t understand the flexibility with which the world can be viewed.

“I should have brought my picnic mat,” I said to Louise, my sister, as I scanned a message on my phone. “It’s Mum. She says she’s leaving Cliff.” We swapped glances, eyes wide in surprise. I saw Louise’s smile as I felt my own. Her phone had beeped shortly after mine with the same message.

“That’s excellent,” she said.

Louise was wearing her purple comfort jacket today, warm polar fleece with ribbed cuffs. It was her home jacket, she’d put it on after work to lounge around as though it allowed her to put work away, she wore it making dinner or when watching a movie.

“What?” Louise eyed me with interest her, brow furrowed.

“You never wear this out.” I removed my hand from her arm where I’d fingered the ribbing of her sleeve.

“Yes I do... When we go camping I wear it.”

I nodded, “Yes, only then.” I studied her, “Things will get better.”

“I know.”

Louise’s favourite colour is purple and when I’d given her a canvas I’d painted of her Blackness meowing, majestically poised against a purple and red backdrop we remarked over the beauty of those colours together.

My sister is an intuitive person; she takes a selection of vitamins for her health; and believes in the healing qualities of herbs, gems and meditation.

When she talks about people it is done in a very careful way, clothed in kindness, understanding and recognition of the individual. She is a nurturing person and I decided that her natural specs for the world are shaded in those qualities. I imagine them as the purple view.

“What have you got in your sandwiches today?” she asked.

“Salami and cheese, they’re so yum.” My eyes closed for a moment. My cheeks rounded with food. “What did you bring?”

“I still don’t have an appetite.” A scowl marked her face like war paint.

“Hmm...”

“What?”

I shook my head.

“I have been eating,” Louise nudged me away with her stare.

I took the hint, “I think this is the best thing Mum’s done in a long time, leaving Cliff I mean.” I felt my body relax back into its previous slouch as Louise’s eyes withdrew their talons and dropped to the grass.

Four years ago Mum got married again. Cliff was not the man she’d dreamed of marrying. He was not like any man she would have chosen. Or anybody else would have chosen for that matter, though he had been married before. That wife had died some time ago. I imagine there was an overwhelming sense of relief for her passing through that white light.

“I’m lonely and I know I’ll never have a good looking man, I’m not pretty enough. You know what I mean,” Mum’s voice had been loud, her inflection rising, insistent. She’d lost her patience. That wasn’t hard for Mum. Merely looking in her direction could cause a loss of patience.

Anyway, I didn’t know what she meant. To me she’d always been pretty. As a child I’d thought of her as the most beautiful person in the world. I tried to look through her glasses as we talked but hers were foggy. They were always foggy.

“I wonder if Mum will be lonely again when Cliff moves out,” I mused. “You’re not there anymore.” My sandwich finished now I searched around my bag for a napkin and a piece of fruit. I offered Louise one of each, refusal given in the wave of her hand.

“I’m glad I’m on my own now. It was hard moving at the time but it’s worth it now.”

“Well, if you ask me she was always hard to live with anyway,” I said. I wasn’t sure if the same were true for Louise but then I think Mum saw us both differently. I was the frosty and independent one.

Louise lived with Mum for quite some time so when mum had remarried the three lived together. I don’t like being around Mum very much. She was and still is upset and angry most of the time. Cliff held the target now. Her and my relationship improved. It was Cliff’s turn to witness the daily crying and fits of temper.

He was a man in constant pain with a penchant for spending and an inability to wear any other glasses but his own. He did not feel other’s pain. I had no real empathy for Cliff when Mum yelled at him and treated him like shit, I might have for someone else but Cliff lived by a set of rules most others baulked at so it felt as though he deserved her anger and emotionality.

It was impossible going in the car with Mum and Cliff. It didn’t matter what specs Cliff wore from day to day. They were all the colour of road rage and Mum couldn’t get him to take them off or throw them away. So he would yell at other drivers, she would yell at him and I would cover my ears. My glasses took on a murky, narrow view, illusory even with a strong sense of tunnelled vision. And when I looked at Cliff from my position in the back seat I imagined little daggers hurtling toward the back of his head.

I packed my lunch wrappers neatly into my cooler bag. I rubbed my left hand up and down, watching the blonde hairs stand up and flick back. “I think it is a mile stone for Mum to have gained some control over her life.”

“Me too,” Louise said, “I wonder when he’ll be moving out.”

“I wonder if it really is even over. Last time she sent a message like this they stayed together.”

Louise didn’t like Cliff either, “He’s a control freak!” she’d said to me shortly after he’d moved in.

“Really?”

“Now that he lives with us he phones me when I’m out to tell me I’ve left the wire screen door unlocked. That’s true I said to him because there are so many window and door locks and they’re all keyed differently,” her hands extended out toward me, palms up, exposed as though she were providing to me her honesty on a plate. “It‘s become too hard to remember which key does what and what door I did or didn’t lock. But, I said to him, did you realise you left the stove on, Cliff? You could have burned the house down. Did I? He said. What an idiot.”She finished.

“So what did you want to tell me?” I knew she’d be off shortly.

She handed me a folded A4, “What’s this?”

“I didn’t know how to tell you so instead I’ve written this letter.”

I eyed the paper then pushed it back in her direction. “What’s it say?”

“Read it.”

“I don’t want to,” I jabbed the air in front of her with the paper. She didn’t take it.

“You’ve lost your job?” I hazarded a guess.

“No,” her rebuff barely perceptible, earrings rocking ever so gently back and forth. My eyes exploring her eyes, their shape and aperture, creases, muscle texture, tightness.

She recognised my confusion. “It about a man.”

My head rotated enough so that I watched Louise from my right eye, offering her my ear as though I hadn’t heard correctly. She sat still now, her eyes reading, deciphering, searching me.

“Adam?” I offered, thinking of a guy she’d met recently. They’d dated briefly before he disappeared no explanation offered. He seemed nice and she’d mourned him for twice the period she’d known him. Amusement became warmth filling my chest, curling my lips.

“Shane,” she said carefully.

“What about him?” I studied her. She watched me. “You didn’t get back with him?”

“At first it was just a sex thing so I didn’t bother to tell you.”

My hand shot out, forming a partition between Louise and I. Disbelief a side to side movement of my head. My chest then seemed to take on weight, a mass bearing down that formed into a sharp rough stone taking the place of my stomach. My throat constricted slightly, a noiseless slow heave took over elongating my neck as though the rock, my stomach, were climbing my throat. I swallowed slowly, managing a deep breath as though I’d just surfaced from deep water.

“Don’t. I don’t want to know.”

Shane was a man Louise had loved once. It lasted many years. On one occasion she and Shane had had an argument. They’d had many arguments but she’d told me about this one early on, when she was still allowed to discuss their relationship with me. It was on the way home from a night club about half way she’d said. His views were definite. He wore red glasses, she wore purple. There had been yelling and name calling. He stopped the car and instructed her to exit. She did as she was told and his friends watched on from the back seat, quietly through their own blurred goggles.

She’d walked home in the dark, heels in hand, pride on her shoulder, alcohol in her veins. That might have been one of the times; perhaps the first time he’d told her to collect her things from his house and leave. Her items still fit in a box then, when she wasn’t officially living there.

They say your life rushes before your eyes at your moment of death. I wasn’t dying but the pictures came, the memories, flashing before my eyes. I remembered clearly the times she’d talked to me about those arguments.