IMBI NEEME The Spill: extract
This week we’re delighted to bring you an extract from Imbi Neeme’s debut The Spill, winner of the 2019 Penguin Literary Prize and published just last month. It’s an absorbing novel about two sisters, and how differently each remembers the past.
When Nicole was 11 and her sister Samantha was nine, their mother took a corner too fast on the road outside Bruce Rock in Western Australia and the car flipped over. No one was seriously injured, but the events of that day reverberate through the girls’ lives. It’s only as adults years later, after their mother’s death, that the sisters come to fully understand the events leading up to the accident.
Tina, Nicole and Samantha’s mother, is lively, loving – and addicted to alcohol. Craig, their father, is now married to his third wife. Samantha is determined to stay in control of everything and not become like her mother. Nicole, on the other hand, seems to drift through life, and has captured the heart of wealthy and devoted Jethro.
In this extract, it is the day after Tina’s funeral. The wake had been held at Nicole and Jethro’s expansive house, and earlier that morning Jethro had been puzzled to find a bunch of lilies in the garbage bin stinking of alcohol. At the wake Tina’s sister Aunt Meg – known as the Ghost Aunt because the sisters saw her so rarely – was insistent she talk to them both before she goes back to Melbourne. Nicole is wary, but Samantha is keen, and next morning she is on Nicole’s doorstep.
Extract courtesy of Penguin Random House
Nicole
I found my sister standing there, with a full face of make-up, wearing heels and holding her phone.
‘I just got your text,’ she said, one eyebrow raised.
‘I thought we were meeting at the cafe,’ I replied.
‘We were, but I knew you’d try to get out of this,’ she said, before adding, ‘You look well.’
I looked at my feet. ‘I’m just not ready to talk about Mum. Not with Meg.’ Or with you, I added silently. Always silently. Even if the words had managed to bubble almost all the way to the surface, I’d have found a way to submerge them again.
‘Well, you’ll have to tell Meg herself that you’re not coming. She’s in the car.’
Sure enough, there was Meg, waving at me from the front seat of Sam’s car. I waved back half-heartedly and started to walk sheepishly over to her.
‘You don’t want to disappoint a little old lady,’ Samantha called out after me, but I ignored her.
‘Hi, Aunt Meg,’ I said, as she wound down the window. ‘I’m . . . well, I’ve got a bit of a headache.’ Even as I spoke, I knew I wasn’t convincing anyone.
Luckily, Aunt Meg didn’t embarrass us both and call me out on the lie. She just folded her hands on her lap and said, ‘I wouldn’t have asked to meet with you girls if I didn’t think it was important.’
She then looked up at me with her blue eyes, so much like Mum’s, and I felt any resolve I might have had slip away, like booze into a wheelie bin.
‘It won’t take long. My flight’s at three, anyway,’ she said. ‘We could even stop for coffee here if you’re not feeling well.’
I thought of how Jethro would feel about Samantha being in our house two days in a row.
‘No, it’s okay,’ I said, with an inward sigh. ‘The sea air will do my head good. I’ll just get out of my pyjamas.’
‘Oh, they’re your pyjamas, are they? I find it so hard to tell with the fashions these days,’ Meg said with a little laugh. This time, I sighed out loud as I headed back to the house. As if a grown woman would ever wear a T-shirt with ‘I ♥ sleep’ emblazoned across it as daywear.
Samantha was still standing on the doorstep.
‘Are you coming now?’ she said, not bothering to hide her smile.
‘You’re pretty happy with yourself,’ I mumbled, as I passed her.
‘What can I say? I’m very persuasive,’ she called down the hall after me.
*
‘Well?’ Jethro had stayed upstairs in the bedroom. He’d obviously worked out that it was Sam at the door.
‘The situation’s hopeless,’ I told him. ‘She’s got Meg in the car. And now they’re both out there waiting for me.’
‘I told you she wouldn’t let you not do the thing she wanted you to do.’
I stepped into my walk-in wardrobe and started throwing some clothes on. ‘Look, I’ll just go for as long as I can stand it, and then I’ll come back and we can get on with our day. She can’t take the whole day away from us.’
‘I bet she’ll try. Remember how she turned your fortieth into a shitstorm? There’s still a mark on my grandmother’s sideboard from where she threw that fork.’ The look on his face was so sad.
‘Oh Jethro,’ I said. ‘I’m not saying my fortieth was the best night of my life. But really, I should have told her I was inviting Mum. She must have felt under siege.’
‘Why do you defend her when she upsets you all the time? You’re always telling me about things she says and things she does that hurt you. And yet you do everything she tells you. I just don’t get it.’
Of course he didn’t. Jethro was an only child who had never experienced the eternal push–pull dance of siblings.
‘She’s my sister. And we just lost our mum, remember?’ I said. Aware that I’d just played the grief card, I quickly added, ‘But listen, I’ll be back as soon as I can. I’ll pick up some takeaway from that Thai place you like. We can eat out of the containers and watch crap TV.’
Jethro smiled again and sunlight re-entered the room. ‘Sounds like a plan.’
*
Imbi Neeme
Photo: Miles Standish
Samantha was still standing on the doorstep, while Aunt Meg waited patiently in the car.
‘I’m going to take my car because I’ve got to run some errands on the way home,’ I told Samantha, wresting back as much control of the situation as I dared.
Samantha just shrugged. ‘Suit yourself.’
I passed the bin house on the way to my car and remembered the flowers.
‘Hey, Sam,’ I said, turning back, using the last of the bravery that the previous night’s vodka had given me. ‘Jethro said he found a whole vase of flowers in the bin this morning.’ There wasn’t enough bravery in the tank to mention the stink of booze, however. ‘They weren’t the ones you took with you, were they?’
Samantha stared at me, unblinkingly. ‘No,’ she said, after a beat. ‘I took those flowers home with me.’
‘Oh, okay.’
‘What, you don’t believe me?’
‘I didn’t say I didn’t believe you.’
Samantha shifted her weight from one foot to the other.
‘That’s the problem with you, Nic. You never say what you believe or don’t believe. You never say anything.’
She spun on her high heel and strode off to her car in a huff, leaving me behind. I stood for a moment in the brightness of the day to consider what had just happened. Something told me I’d caught Samantha in a lie much bigger than a vase of flowers in a bin, and it sat heavily in my empty stomach.
Imbi Neeme The Spill Penguin Viking 2020 PB 336pp $32.99
Like to keep reading? You can buy The Spill from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW here or you can buy it from Booktopia here.
To see if it is available from Newtown Library, click here.
