The Wrong Door by Bunty Avieson Read Free Book Online Page A

mother and had stepped between them. So Marla had hit her instead. Mr Sanjay had laughed. Not unkindly. But still it had shocked Clare. It had taken a great deal of trust and courage for her to confide something of what went on inside their home. It seemed so ugly and shameful and she had expected him at the very least to be sympathetic.
    The memory made her smile. She had been so serious, so full of her own importance, speaking in a hushed, meaningful tone. In her mind she was sharing something profoundly raw and personal. She expected Mr Sanjay to give her an equally reverent response. At first Clare had been dumbfounded when Mr Sanjay, after listening attentively and nodding, had started to chuckle. Then she felt hurt. Then annoyed. How dare he not be suitably awed by such a revelation, she had thought. Her feelings must have shown on her face because Mr Sanjay started to laugh even more. It hadn’t been the jolly, belly-deep kind of laugh he gave himself over to when he found something very funny, which was quite often. It was more of a gentle chiding and Clare had been at a complete loss as to how to respond.
    The comment he finally made was so unexpected, so bizarre, that she thought about it fordays, turning it over in her mind, trying to get to the core of what he meant.
    ‘You say your life is imperfect,’ he said. ‘You don’t like the way your sister behaves. She yells at your mother and treats you unfairly. You speak as if life is something that is happening to you. Well, if that is your life then choose it, all of it. Choose your sister. Choose your mother. Choose your school and the girls there who say nasty things to you. Everything in your life that you think is the cause of your unhappiness, instead of shying away from it and complaining about it, choose it.
    ‘The solution is not to blame the life that arises for you. The solution is to accept it all as if you had chosen it to be exactly that way.’
    Then he had changed the subject, talking about his garden as if the conversation he and Clare had been having held no greater importance than his precious hollyhocks. Clare was completely flummoxed and spent the following days sitting in her bedroom trying to make sense of what he had said.
    She tried to imagine choosing life with Marla. Sometimes her sister was fun, she decided – like those occasions when she got into bed with her on weekend mornings and told her stories about the cute things Clare used to do when she was little. She also liked Marla when she let her try on all her clothes and makeup, pretending she was a glamorous movie star. On those occasions Marla let her wear her very expensive Hermes scarf and showed her eight different ways to tie it. Then she was a great big sister, the best in the world. Even her bestfriend, Susan Lee, with her perfect parents and perfect house, would have wanted a big sister like that. It was the other Marla that Clare couldn’t choose. The one that screamed abuse at Peg and locked Clare out of her room when she was suffering from one of her migraines and didn’t turn up to collect her from school when she was supposed to.
    So there was some of Marla she would choose and other bits that no-one in their right mind would want. But Mr Sanjay had said choose all of Marla. That meant the bad bits too. Clare looked at her sister as a whole package. She wasn’t sure that the good outweighed the bad. In fact if she divided it up she decided she liked Marla one-third of the time.
    After a few days of thinking about Marla this way, Clare realised she was behaving differently around her sister. No longer was she on tenterhooks waiting for the next explosion. Nor was she annoyed with her before she even walked in the door after school. What mysterious alchemy was this? Somehow, somewhere, something in Clare had shifted, without her consciously knowing it was happening. She was a lot closer to accepting her life as it was. She didn’t understand how it had occurred,