the orange.

Saraid Taylor


I am inside six memories.

The first one is the memory of everything. I am no days old or twenty-three years and my family are the colour of apricot. They are the nubs of fruit my grandmother puts in her annual summer pudding and the dusty sunset that bleeds over the bush as the cousins play cricket barefoot out on the road. I flick through it all. The aunties hiding chocolate eggs in the garden each autumn. The uncles wrestling one another in the kitchen. My grandfather querying from his chair whether I have been driving carefully. Nan with the buttery, cheese-crusted potato bake she brings to all the birthdays, insisting I have a larger plate.

The grandchildren, as products of teachers and nurses who are products of factory labourers and cleaners and railroad workers and immigrants, are now hapless beneficiaries of opportunity with degrees in medicine and law, environmental sustainability and psychology. We have been raised on a diet of tame liberalism: our parents read progressive newspapers, value female sport, support a treaty, freely express that they love one another. This is the discordant rhythm of my existence.

 

The second memory is my oldest uncle. He is vibrant tangerine: warm and antagonistic. I am seventeen, balanced next to his foot with a bowl of plum pudding. The rest of the family sprawl around me, along the couch and over the floor in pillows and beanbags. ‘Surely you’re not voting them in again,’ my uncle is saying to my grandmother.

‘I am,’ Nan says, crammed between my mother and father, ‘and you leave me alone.’

‘You’re going to vote in the people destroying the environment and locking humans in offshore detention?’ He is incredulous.

My grandmother looks at him stubbornly. ‘The others are just as bad,’ she says.

He tells her to vote for the colour as his wife tosses a pillow at him. ‘The movie is starting,’ she complains. The montage at the beginning of a film begins to flicker over the screen. A joyful little boy dances in a chicken suit.

‘There’s your message,’ my uncle jokes, ‘don’t let your kids dress up in chicken suits or else they’ll turn gay.’ He leans over to jab his son, who is holding the hand of his girlfriend. ‘We let this bloke dress up as a teapot and look what happened to him.’ There is a rumble of groans and he grins. ‘You all know I’m joking. Because there’s nothing wrong,’ he explains, ‘with being gay.’

‘Sounds like a pretty homophobic joke,’ my sister says from a beanbag.

‘Eh, I’m not homophobic. I voted yes.’ He lobs the pillow at her, then playfully considers Nan. ‘What’re your thoughts on the whole gayness thing, Mum? The secret epidemic?’

My grandmother thinks about this for a while. ‘I guess there is nothing wrong with it,’ she says eventually. ‘We should just let them be happy.’ This is accepted as a good answer and the couch falls quiet. Somebody restarts the movie as my littlest cousin giggles to himself.

‘No chicken suits, no chicken suits,’ he says.

There is sickness in my chest as the room collapses into laughter. I look pointedly at my youngest uncle, but he is laughing with everybody else.

 

The third memory is of him. My youngest uncle resembles his brother: smart and irreverent and kind like marmalade. He is in the backyard, cooking my soy sausages on the barbeque. I am leaning against the outdoor table, keeping him company. ‘I just don’t see why it has to be in our faces,’ he says, nodding up at the television flashing inside.

I laugh aloud at the cliché. ‘How is it in our faces?’

‘I don’t care if they have to wear dresses, but why do we have to see it?’

‘I do not think ‘they’ have to. I think we all make choices to define ourselves.’

He flips a sausage. ‘Exactly, and that is their choice. But why does it have to be in our face all the time?’

‘You could argue that about a woman kissing a man on every other advertisement,’ I tell him.

‘That’s a bit different.’

‘How?’

‘Well, a bloke kissing a bloke isn’t really normal, is it? It’s not the majority.’

I ask whether it has to be the majority to be valid.

‘I’m just saying I’d rather not see it. That’s all.’

‘But don’t you think conflating difference with abnormality is dangerous? It implies there is something inherently wrong with it.’ I point to his ten-year-old son. ‘What are you saying to him if there is a little boy in his class who wants to express himself that way?’

‘No, no. We’ve had that conversation.’ He pauses, mid-flip of the fourth sausage, and looks at my baby cousin. ‘What do you do if someone is getting picked on?’

‘I’m the first person to support him,’ my cousin says. ‘I stick up for him.’

I offer him a high-five, but clasp his hand instead and drag him, complaining, in for a hug. I squeeze his small body, feeling a strange mix of emotion. Somewhere in it, I feel like crying.

 

The fourth memory is of a teammate. She is sweet as cantaloupe: a mentor and friend. It is my first national league season. I am newly eighteen, in a nightclub filled with athletes. She presses her lips against mine, to my horror, in the middle of the dance floor, because a traitorous fellow rookie pulls her away from the Melbourne United boys to tell her I have never kissed a girl before.

‘We’ve all kissed girls,’ she snorts. ‘It doesn’t mean you’re … gay or anything.’ She points to a player from another WNBL team – a celebrity guard with long legs and blue eyes. ‘See her? Every time we’re drunk, she’s all over me. But we’re both straight. I’m not interested in females and neither is she. It’s just something to do.’

Weeks later, after another night out, I stay at her apartment. In the morning, we spread out blearily on her couch watching television. ‘Being a bisexual is such a trend now,’ she comments suddenly, apparently prompted by an advertisement for tomato soup. ‘Don’t you think?’

She waits for me to answer, so I nod uncertainly.

She nods, too, in distaste. ‘Some of them aren’t even bisexual. They just fucking want to look cool.’

I am unequipped to point out the contradiction. My bystander blood flushes orange. I smile at her and call my parents to pick me up.

 

The fourth memory is my mother. It contains my brother and my father and my sister, but it is of my mother. She is peach: my favourite. I have just turned nineteen – and descended unexpectedly into love with an older teammate.

‘But you’ve got to understand where I’m coming from,’ Mum says, from where she cuts carrot at the sink. ‘It’s just … confusing.’

‘It is confusing,’ I agree once again, ‘for me, too. Yes, I have never been attracted to girls and, yes, I did not think I was gay and, no, I still would not call myself gay and, no, bisexual does not seem accurate either and yes, again, it is all unexpected but if we could just roll with it like I have to, that would be great.’

From the washing basket, my father hears the tension in my voice and says to leave me alone. Mum scoffs loudly. ‘I’m only saying the things you have been saying to me.’

Her words flinch against my body. I turn to look at him as he falls silent. ‘So, what, Dad is being just as homophobic, only discreetly?’

‘More homophobic,’ Mum says playfully. She catches my expression and becomes serious. ‘We just don’t want you to get hurt.’

‘Have you seen me? Good luck to everyone else.’

‘Be serious,’ she sighs.

‘Fine. Like I have said, I have never felt this way about a person before. It transcends physical boundaries.’

There is a thoughtful pause. Strands of spaghetti bubble in the pot on the stove. My younger brother looks up from his phone. ‘Just say you’re a lesbian.’

Mum coughs a laugh into her hand.

‘Just say you’re ignorant,’ my sister snips back.

My brother invites her to shut up.

I quell them with calm recital. ‘I have explained I do not feel like I am a lesbian.’

‘So, you’re a bisexual,’ my brother says.

My jaw tenses. ‘That is also not how I would define myself, as you know, but if you need boxes to make sense of the world, then go ahead. I feel like we are moving around in circles.’

‘Nah, you’re pretty much saying,’ he tries, ‘that you’re still straight but you like one girl.’

‘What I am saying,’ I say, ‘is I have not experienced this level of emotional and mental connection with anybody. That is why those labels, that seem to have just become synonymous with sexual attraction to the same gender, do not feel accurate.’

My brother pauses for comedic effect. ‘So, moral of the story … you’re a lesbian.’

Over by the pasta, Mum surrenders helplessly to laughter. ‘That’s enough,’ she says to him, then appeals to me. ‘But, you know, it is confusing. You’ve got to understand where we are all coming from.’

I am burning amber: a peculiar tint of shame and defiance. ‘Is it actually? I love her mind.’

‘You love her?’

‘See,’ my brother says. ‘You’re a lesbian.’

I ignore him. I am watching my mother as disgust diffuses across her face. ‘You are uncomfortable with me saying that,’ I muse aloud. ‘You are being homophobic, Mum.’

Mum snorts that she is not homophobic.

There is an empty, ticking sadness moving through me. ‘It must be so … hard. If you can react like this, it is terrifying to imagine the response of parents who do not claim to be progressive.’

 

The fifth memory is again my oldest uncle. I am halfway through twenty. He sits across the table from me as my cousin is interrogated about her new boyfriend. He grins suddenly and interrupts to query whether I could provide any insight into the disproportionate rates of lesbianism in female sport. ‘Maybe you have some girls on the scene?’

He says this like he has made a particularly good joke, and he has, because I am attractive and feminine so obviously not gay and the table feels safe to chuckle. My brother and sister smile into their lemonades as Dad shifts in his seat. Mum is watching me.

‘Not that there’s anything wrong if you were gay.’ My uncle shows his palms in surrender, on a mission to extract more chuckles. The chuckles are extracted. I look around the table at my family. I should ask whether my uncle can actually explain why gayness is a punchline. I should ask whether the rest of my relatives can even explain why they are laughing. Instead, I play along as if I already understand and roll my eyes and laugh a bit and punch him on the arm and tell him to get lost as my bystander blood wallows inside me.

 

This is the sixth memory. It is of myself. I am thirteen, compassionate and vague – and I spout the rhythmic rhetoric about the spectrum of sexuality, even though it is not something I truly consider applicable to myself. I am fifteen. I believe love is love, for everyone. Yet I still compartmentalise the world into the provided categories. There are us straights. And then there are the homosexuals, which is fine. Along with those bisexuals, also fine.

I am sixteen and eighteen and I am twenty or twenty-three. I am a hypocrite and an advocate and a reluctant cliché. I am flawed in those complexities: tinged with shades of orange. The culture has poisoned me, even as I thought I was resisting it. I am that division. I am a chasm and a bridge. I am the two worlds. I seek growth through recognising the myriad of hues in everyone.

end.