‘Bring It All Back’ – by Freya Daly Sadgrove

“Choose a CD,” Elise says. It’s Christmas Day – I wanna say 2012 – and she’s driving us from Mum’s house in town to Dad’s house on the coast. It’s a 45-minute drive when there’s no traffic, but there’s traffic. My sister has inherited a sort of stylish, contained version of Dad’s road rage; she expresses her desire for the driver in front of us to get fucked while I rifle through the stacks of burned CDs in the glovebox. On any other day of the year, she’d check which one I’ve chosen before I insert it, but on the 25th of December, I am fundamentally incapable of making decisions that will annoy her. It is the one day of the year on which we align perfectly, like a pair of planets, or like two friendly bus drivers waving at each other. It has always been this way. I push the CD in and the iconic opening notes of S Club 7’s 1999 hit album S Club burst from the speakers. It’s Bring It All Back, and even the might of our combined mental illnesses is not strong enough to withstand so much pep today. It lands in our bodies like big knives of kindness. Elise grins and wiggles in her seat.

When I am six and Elise is nine, Mum and Dad sit us down on the white couch by the botched job of a bay window and tell us they aren’t gonna live together anymore. I know it’s a serious talk because they don’t tell me off for picking at the upholstery on the couch arms, and also because they are crying. Elise is also crying, so I cry a bit too to fit in.

I have a very early memory where Elise is taller than me, holding my hand in the hallway, peeking around a door, not letting me see what our parents look like screaming at each other. I already know what they look like, but it still makes me feel better.

I have a much more recent memory where we are the same height and she has been driving us around Waikanae for the past twenty minutes. She persuaded me to leave the house by promising we can go look at some LEGO. She’s googled “buy lego in Waikanae” and we’re trying to find a place called “Toys 4 U”. Eventually, we spot a small corflute sign gaffa-taped to a high fence. It reads “Toys 4 U WINTER IS HERE KINDLING $10” and then it says “DOWN DRIVE” and there’s an arrow pointing to a drive. We decide not to go down the drive.

Call it something like New Years 2013. I’ve been at a party with Sam and Michael. Sam holds me under the arms and Michael grabs a foot in each hand and they carry me down the steps and then fifty metres up Pirie Street to my sister’s flat, where they sheepishly hand me over at the door. Elise laughs, puts me on a chair in the shower and washes the vomit out of my hair.

It’s less than a year ago and I’m sitting on the blue couch at Elise’s house, breathing harder than normal, which is to say, really really hard. Elise is asking “and what else?” and I am saying, “email Libby,” and Elise is writing down “email Libby: approx 15 mins”. We finish the list, and then she writes a timetable for the next two days and shows me that I can finish it all in time, plus take breaks and sleep. I revert to my regular heavy breathing.

I bought tickets to the Vengaboys concert when I was manic in March 2016, but now it’s November 2016 and I’m profoundly broke and depressed. Elise helps me sell the tickets on Facebook and then takes me to Staglands to cheer me up. She takes a picture of me ugly- crying when I see the ducklings.

On an undisclosed date, I’m sitting in Elise’s car outside my flat, anxious to go in. I’m scared ofmy flatmate. Elise says, “would you like me to come in and punch her in the face?” I laugh and go in by myself.

Callum and Hera are drifting into a party somewhere in Aro Valley while they wait for me to get weed, but I’m lying on the footpath on Marama Crescent, screaming into the concrete. I think it’s 2016 again, classic 2016. Jamie finds me and I say I want my sister. Moments later Elise and
Jake pull up in the van and I say I want to go to the hospital, so they take me to the hospital.

In the year 2000, she gets S Club for her birthday. She’s in a good mood and I’m allowed in her enormous goddamn room. She’s on the phone to Rosa and I’m dancing to Everybody Wants Ya. She cracks up when I sing “I’m no foooool, ’cause I got cheow.” I think I’m doing an impressive job of the accent. She goes, “listen to how Freya says ‘you’,” and holds out the phone. I play it up: “’cause I got cheooowwwwww!” She laughs and laughs, and I can tell Rosa is laughing too. I go “what? What!” But I am happy. I know it is the good kind of getting laughed at.

It’s Christmas day 2080. Elise chucks her walker in the boot with exuberance largely unprecedented in 90-year-olds. I’m in the driver’s seat; I finally learnt to drive ten years ago when Elise got caught at a police checkpoint where they were doing random eye tests. Mum and Dad have kept up their end of the deal they made when they decided to bring us into the world, which was to never ever under any circumstances ever die. We’ve just said bye to Dad for the eighth time, after he hobbled out to the car holding up two bottles of excess orange juice (he outdid himself this year, Elise reckons she saw seventy orange rinds in the compost). We’re headed to Mum’s, where I am hoping I will get to put the pomegranate on the top of the trifle for once in my life. The car is exceptionally old, just like us, and still has a CD slot. Elise holds up a disk with faded vivid on it: “S Club 1999 (+ Reach)” in her unmistakable handwriting. She knows it’s the right one, but she doesn’t trust her eyes since her licence got confiscated. “Yup,” I say, and she pushes it into the player. Bring It All Back makes its traditional Christmas Day entrance through the speakers as I pull out of the driveway, and we’re on our way. Just me and my big sister, old as shit in the Wellington summer, driving along, being a muthafuckin team. Just two children of a broken home cruising with the windows down, baby.