Family Fun By Moonlight

I remember one time when my sister, Kelly, started talking about what life would be like when she was all grown up. Kelly had it all worked out: The kind of man she would marry, the house they would live in, the names of their two kids, even the name of their pet dog. She even tried to get me in on the conversation, but I thought I was way too mature for that kind of nonsense, and even though I couldn’t be bothered with her imaginary world, she used to bring it up now and again over the next couple of years, until I guess she just grew out of it.

Kelly is four years younger than me, which of course means nothing in adult life, but it probably made a big difference to the way we saw the world when we were kids. Of course, real life doesn’t always work out like our childhood fantasies.

When Kelly was nineteen years old and barely out of high school, she met a guy called Brock. He worked in construction and he came from Perth, but he was working in Sydney on a new high-rise apartment complex, and coming up on the weekends to party with his workmates in the coastal city where we lived. Kelly met him when he was in party mode and before long they were an item.

My father was not impressed with Brock, and he said he was an, “opportunist,” whatever that meant, but there was not much he could do about it because Kelly was a nineteen year old adult and could make her own decisions about life. In time, the high-rise project in Sydney was completed and Brock came up to our city, where he got a job on the construction of a big shopping mall in a new suburb on the edges of town. Before long, he and Kelly moved into a small apartment together, and our father was not happy with that either.

I remember Dad saying, “What’s he going to do when he goes back to Perth? Is he going to take her with him? I don’t think so.” In spite of that, when work on the shopping mall finished, Brock decided to go back to Perth, because here was a mini construction boom going on over on that side of the country, and Kelly went with him. Our father was disgusted with that, as well.

He was even less impressed a couple of months later, when Kelly rang back to say she was pregnant with Brock’s child. Her due date was early in the Australian autumn of the following year, which was shortly after she was due to turn twenty. Then, we all got another surprise when her first prenatal scan showed she was carrying twins- an instant family! Six weeks later, her second scan showed the twin were non identical, because one was a boy and one was a girl.

However, Kelly was not the only one with a happy event on the horizon. I had married Sandra when we were both only twenty-two years old, because in spite of all our friends and their advice to wait a while, we had both found The One, and we didn’t want to wait any longer. We weren’t really planning to start a family so early, but we were over the moon when we found out Sandra was also pregnant, and her due date turned out to be less than a month after Kelly’s.

Both Sandra and Kelly went through their pregnancies with barely a hiccup, and in time Kelly gave birth to her twins over there in Perth. She and Brock named the boy Aiden, and the girl was named Alexandra, after Brock’s grandmother, but from the time she could answer to it, she was always known as Lexi. Then, three weeks to the day after Kelly gave birth to her twins, over on this side of the country Sandra and I welcomed our daughter, Greta, into the world.

Kelly and Brock waited until the twins were born before they got married, and at the reception she told me she had done that because she didn’t want to be walking down the aisle with a big, swollen belly, but in the end, her marriage only lasted eight years. She found out early in the piece that Brock could be a mean, sarcastic drunk, but she put up with him for years. Then, when he started smacking her round after a few beers, she decided it was time to pull the plug on their marriage, and she divorced him. They went through the whole divorce, property settlement and custody orders routine, and Kelly got the kids, with access rights granted to Brock. She decided to move back to New South Wales with them, and she once told me that when she told Brock about her plans, and suggested he go through the courts to make some sort of access arrangements, he said, “Just take the little cunts with you and fuck off back where you come from. I don’t give a fuck.”

So, that’s what she did. Kelly moved back to our home town, now a young, divorced single mother, with two little kids. She used her share of the property settlement to put a deposit on a big, old style house on six acres, twenty miles from town, which was close enough to drive to work each day to her pharmacy job, but far enough to feel like you were really getting away from it all when you went home.

Kelly’s new place was amazing. It was bounded on two sides by a state forest, and the nearest neighbour was nearly a mile away, so you couldn’t even see their house. Believe it or not, it was a little like the house she had talked about living in as a kid, and Sandra and Greta and I spent a lot of time out there, getting away from it all. Even though it was only a half hour drive from my place, you felt like you were a thousand miles away, and the kids could run wild in the state forest, having all the fun in the world. We just loved it.

My own marriage lasted a little longer than Kelly’s, but after a little over ten years, Sandra told me we had gotten married too early and we had grown apart. This was kind of news to me, but she was adamant about it and she left me for a new guy, called Vic. He was a real party boy, even though he was in his late thirties, and Sandra and I also went through the whole drama and conflict of a divorce. Same old story, divorce proceedings, property settlement, child custody orders and so on, but we ended up with joint custody of Greta. We each had her for alternate fortnights, which worked out okay with me in the circumstances, but within months of the dust finally settling on our court proceedings, Vic got a skinful of booze at a party one Saturday night, and on the way home he ran into the back of a semi-trailer that was stopped at a red light on the way back into town. Both he and Sandra died in the accident, and although I had my differences with Sandra, I certainly did not wish that on her. I was only thankful that it was my fortnight to have Greta with me, or she might have been in the car that night, but now I had sole custody of my little girl.

As a divorced single father, I saw a few women over the years. I had a few flings, the occasional one night stand, even a couple of relationships, but I never settled down with any of them. I came close one time with a lady called Mandy, but she got a job transfer to Kuala Lumpur and that was the end of that. I know Kelly saw a couple of guys early in the piece, but she tended to keep her love life to herself, even though we were close. There was one guy called Andy who used to come and go. He worked in some government job that involved travel and overseas postings, and he would be around for a while and then he’d be off the scene, sometimes for a year or more. Then, he would be back, and they’d pick up again until he moved off on one of his postings. There may have been others, but like I said, Kelly kept that sort of thing close to her chest.

So, that was how life went for both of us for years as our kids grew up together. After my divorce, Greta and I spent a lot of time out at Kelly’s place, sometimes spending whole vacation periods out there, with the kids running around having fun, riding horses or trail bikes, exploring the forest, and basically growing up together. In time, when Greta was old enough to get her driving licence, she could even drive out there herself if I had work or personal commitments, or even the occasional romantic engagement.

The years seemed to go by surprisingly fast, and almost suddenly, the kids were due to turn nineteen. They had all finished high school, and they were now all gainfully employed. Aiden had started an apprenticeship as a carpenter, Lexi was studying pharmacology part-time while she was working in the same place as her mother, and my daughter, Greta, had found a job as a receptionist in a lawyer’s office, while she decided what to do with her life. The twins were still living at home with Kelly, and Greta was living with me, and I kind of thought we had both done okay bringing them up, given the circumstances.

With their nineteenth birthdays coming up, Kelly and I asked them what they wanted to do for their celebration, because over the years, they had nearly always had a joint party, seeing Greta’s birthday was only three weeks after the twins. The previous year, we had put on a big coming of age eighteenth birthday party for the three of them in a function centre in town, but this year they said they would be happy with a family barbeque with a few friends at Kelly’s place, out there in the forest.

So, that’s what we organised, on the Saturday night of a four-day long weekend in early autumn. It was a great night, with Kelly and me, her twins Aiden and Lexi, my daughter Greta, along with six of their friends, and the parents of one of Lexi’s friends, because her mother was also Kelly’s friend.