It wasn’t easy. It was like trying to talk with a stone in my mouth.
My mother wanted to know what we should do on Christmas Day. My brother had phoned to say he wasn’t coming home because it was too complicated getting there and back at this time of the year. Eddie said he was trying to get some time off around mid-February but he couldn’t promise anything.
‘He’s punishing me,’ said my mother. ‘For leaving your father.’
‘You’d be dead you if you hadn’t,’ said Rowena, laughing in her throat. She didn’t like my father any more than I did.
Nobody suggested going to church because only my mother had any background in religion. After we grew out of Sunday school she gave up trying to persuade us any of it was true, and anyway even she didn’t think it was by then. But she missed the singing so in the days before Christmas she played hymns and carols on the stereo for Amy so that at least she would know what they sounded like.
In the end my mother asked me to ring the Bookers and see what they were doing on Christmas Day. Mrs Booker said they would love to come over.
‘Do you need any help stuffing the turkey?’ Mr Booker called down the phone.
‘I think we can manage,’ I said.
My mother asked my father too but he said he’d been invited somewhere else for Christmas.
‘I do have other friends you know,’ he said. ‘No doubt you find that hard to believe.’
A week before Christmas my father dropped in to say hello to Rowena and see the baby. He was dressed in one of his antique safari suits with wide lapels and lots of pockets. Rowena sat in her chair while my father perched the baby on his knee and stared at her while she reached for his shiny buttons.
‘No doubting who the father is,’ he said.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ said Rowena.
‘She looks like Donald made her all by himself.’
‘His name’s Holden.’
‘What kind of a name is Holden?’
‘
Catcher in the Rye
,’ said my mother.
She handed us each a plate and put a tray of sandwiches down on the coffee table in front of my father.
‘Thanks, teach,’ said my father, handing the baby back to my mother because he’d grown bored with looking at it and wanted to eat. He had only met Rowena’s husband once, before Rowena had married him, and after that my father had written Rowena a letter to say that if she went ahead with her plans to marry she was a bigger fool than he’d taken her for because anyone could tell her oriental Lothario was on the make. Rowena had given the letter to me to read. In it he had called Holden a charming lout.
It’s money he’s after.
Trust me. I don’t know why you can’t see through these people, but then you
never were very bright.
He refused to go to the wedding because he said he had no desire to watch a girl with Rowena’s potential throw her life away on a common conman. I said I thought my father was jealous. And that’s when Rowena told me my father had tried to kiss her once, which didn’t surprise me at all.
My father fingered the sandwiches to see what was in them.
‘No doubt the literary reference is entirely lost on our Chinaman,’ he said, helping himself to all the ham and tuna. He ate them one after the other while Rowena went to put the baby to sleep.
‘So who are your friends?’ asked my mother. She had poured them each some wine. She sat watching my father over the rim of her glass.
‘I am looking after a farm for a chum while she and her husband take their children to the coast. They’re leaving Boxing Day and they’ve kindly suggested I join them on Christmas Day if I have no other commitments, so that they can show me the ropes.’
‘A farm?’ said my mother.
‘A hobby farm,’ said my father. ‘They keep horses and a few donkeys, ducks, geese, a couple of dogs.’
‘I’m glad,’ said my mother. ‘I don’t like to think of you in that room by yourself.’
‘Save it,’ said my father. ‘It actually suits me down to the ground. I should have moved out years ago.’
He stopped eating and wiped his mouth, then raised his glass in my mother’s direction. When he was in this kind of sour mood his eyes glinted like glass marbles.
‘Things are looking up,’ he said.
‘Glad to hear it,’ said my mother.
And then he brought up the subject of money because he couldn’t help it.
‘I hope you’re not bankrolling Rowena and that creep she’s married to,’ he said. ‘No doubt she’s down here to ask for another handout.’
Rowena had borrowed some money once from my mother to pay the bond on the flat she was renting. She’d repaid the loan in full as soon as she had the money, but it was the kind of thing my father kept account of, because he didn’t like the thought of anyone apart from him getting hold of my mother’s money.
‘You can talk,’ I said.
He glared at me for a moment and told me this was a private conversation between him and my mother and I should mind my own business. Then he turned back to my mother.
‘Well?’ he said.
‘I don’t know where you think I get all this money from that I’m supposed to squander on my friends. I’m a schoolteacher. You think I front up every Monday to teach Year 10 Geography for the fun of it?’
My father emptied his wine glass and poured himself another.
‘I take it you have no intention of responding to my last letter,’ he said.
‘I would,’ said my mother. ‘If I had any idea what to say.’
‘And as for you,’ he said, turning on me. ‘My spies tell me you’re consorting with a man twice your age.’
‘Your
spies
?’ I said, trying to keep my voice level.
‘I had high hopes for you,’ said my father. ‘But it turns out you’re no better than the rest of them.’
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I said. ‘The rest of who?’
‘Don’t play the ingénue with me,’ he said.
I didn’t say anything. I just sat there and wished my mother would make up her mind to stop seeing my father. I wanted to tell her how sad it was watching her waver all the time between wanting a clean break from Victor and wanting him to be her friend. That was never going to happen. Mainly it was never going to happen because my mother and father, as far as I could tell, had never been friends in the first place.
After she had watched my father eat the last of the sandwiches my mother made it seem as if she had to go out shopping so that he would leave.
‘Do you need a lift anywhere?’ she said.
‘No thanks,’ he said. ‘I’ve discovered public transport. It does one good to rub shoulders with the general citizenry once in a while.’
My mother and I saw him to the front door and watched him walk off up the driveway. His khaki shorts, long socks and wide-brimmed hat made him look vaguely military.
‘All he needs is a baton to beat the blacks with,’ said my mother.
Rowena came out from the front room asking if the coast was clear and my mother said she needed another drink while she planned the menu for Christmas Day.
It was going to be hot, she said, so salads and cold meat might be best.
‘How did you live with that man for twenty years?’ Rowena said, watching my mother leaf through her cookbooks.
‘You can get used to anything,’ said my mother.
Rowena went quiet after that. I don’t know what she was thinking but when I asked her if she was all right she said she remembered now how she always thought my mother was wasted on my father.
‘You should be married to someone kind and thoughtful,’ she said. ‘Victor’s a danger to society.’
When I told her Victor had a gun she looked truly afraid.
‘Some families have fathers who dress up as Santa and hand out presents from a big sack on Christmas morning,’ I said. I told her about the previous year at Alice’s place, when Alice’s father had worn his Santa suit all morning until it got so hot he had to strip down to his Christmas boxer shorts. ‘Why can’t I have that kind of father?’
‘Just lucky I guess,’ said Rowena.
Rowena was angrier than my mother, which is why I liked her. She didn’t have my mother’s indecisiveness. She was angry with everybody and everything. She had never been any different as far as I could remember. She hadn’t been the kind of playmate who humoured me and patiently waited for me to catch on. She was in too much of a hurry for that, as if there were dark things trailing behind her, breathing hotly on her neck. They made her reckless, given to running away from home, even if it was only to some secret spot in the backyard where she couldn’t be found. Even before her mother’s disappearance my great-uncle was always on the phone to my mother asking if Rowena was at our place.
Amy had calmed her down, but not entirely. Everything that wasn’t Amy irritated her, especially now that she was back in the town where she claimed she’d spent the worst year of her life.
We took the baby on a drive around the neighbourhood, past the boarding school Rowena’s father had sent her to for a year so she could get away from the bad influences in Sydney. In the beginning she went to my old school but she was expelled after two months for spending the whole of athletics day in the back of Stefano Musso’s panel van.
‘They didn’t expel
him
,’ she said. ‘Hypocritical bastards.’
She hadn’t been any happier at her new school, because she’d had trouble fitting in.
‘They thought I was a freak,’ she said, ‘so I turned into one, just to please everyone.’
She said she thought that had always been her trouble, that whatever people told her she was or wasn’t she believed them. So when her father called her a whore and a slut, she did her best to fit the description. That was why she started going to school dressed in a uniform she’d shortened especially to show off the tops of her thighs.
‘School uniforms are so ugly,’ she said. ‘What is that about?’
Her father had told her she deserved to be raped going to school dressed like a streetwalker. So she had called him a pervert and he had slapped her on the face and split her lip. She claimed the scar on her cheek was from her father too, but my mother said it was from the car accident she had when she was going out with Richard Everett—he drove straight through a stop sign and nobody in the car was wearing a seatbelt.
‘My dad was sorry I wasn’t killed,’ she said. ‘He didn’t say so but it’s what he was thinking.’
I told her I didn’t believe that. I told her that I’d seen her father sobbing at the hospital when he saw her wrapped in bandages. I remembered it because I’d never seen a grown man cry before that.
I asked her if she liked living in Sydney and she said it was hard because of the rent and the traffic and because her stepsisters lived there and she couldn’t stand either of them.
‘Why not?’ I said, although I had some idea. Rowena’s father had remarried. His new wife started a chain of gourmet supermarkets and they lived in her big house in Mosman and whenever we visited them it was like the wife was afraid we were going to break something, so we had to be careful. Also she never stopped talking and it was mostly about her two children and even my mother got tired of listening.
‘They’re so pleased with themselves,’ said Rowena. ‘It’s like they never doubted themselves for a minute. I hate that. Sydney’s full of it. Self-satisfaction and pretentiousness.’
‘It’s better than here,’ I said.
I stopped listening then because Rowena was starting to sound shrill and it was giving me a headache and because we had to stop at the supermarket to pick up some things for Christmas lunch.
‘Who are these people?’ asked Rowena.
‘They’re Mum’s friends,’ I said. ‘You’ll like them.’
‘If they’re anything like her other friends I won’t,’ she said.
I asked her what she meant and she said that most of my mother’s friends were losers with nowhere else to go.
‘What’s happened to that awful woman with the retard son?’
‘Hilary,’ I said.
‘Still drinking vodka for breakfast?’
‘Mum feels sorry for her,’ I said.
‘That’s my whole point,’ said Rowena.
‘Anywhere’s better than here,’ she said. ‘You need to get away. If you stay here you’ll wind up with some boring nobody called Shane or Wally who wants six kids and a brick veneer in the ’burbs. And one day you’ll wake up and decide to stick your head in the oven because it’s better than facing another conversation about football or whether little Wally is a faggot because he likes reading books.’
it’s lovely down in the woods today
Mr and Mrs Booker showed up an hour early on Christmas Day with a bottle of champagne and a basket full of presents. Lorraine had already left to drive to Sydney with Geoff so there was only me, my mother and Rowena at home.
‘It was too quiet at our place,’ said Mrs Booker. ‘So we thought we’d just come over.’
We were all still in our pyjamas but we opened the champagne anyway and started drinking, then Mr Booker said I should get dressed so he could drive me down to the pine forest to get a tree because there was nowhere to put the presents if we didn’t have a tree.
‘You don’t have an axe,’ said Mrs Booker.