Girl Next Door (10 page)

Then I told Dad about the sheriff. I skipped the part about our siege. I also skipped the part about the hotel, and went straight to the part where the whisperer was clinging onto the side of the caravan like a monkey. I told him what they said. I used the swear words. I told him how Willem was the squeaky wheel.

My dad didn't speak, but I could tell he was there because he had a whistle in his nose that came through the phone. That made me all choked up in the neck, because when I was small and my dad had a whistle in his nose, I used to ask him to play me a tune. He always did, and it was always 'Good King Wenceslas'.

With my choked-up voice I told him about the passport and how I had pictured him creeping out past his children and pregnant wife.

'What do you have to say about that?' I said. 'What are you going to do about it? Are you just going to pretend we don't exist?'

There was a space where his nose whistled for a while.

'And besides, yelling at the woman from the electricity company is not being proactive. A squeaky wheel is not proactive. It's the opposite, because if it had been taken care of properly, then it wouldn't be squeaky, would it? You know what would have been proactive? If you'd bought a generator, or windmill, or something.'

'Jenna-Belle, you need to understand something important,' Dad said. 'After you were born I had a vasectomy.'

'A what?' I said, but I knew what that word meant. 'No . . .'

So now Dad's lying around on the lounge crying while Mum gave me the little-brother-or-sister speech made a bit more sense.

'They can come undone, you know,' I add.

'It didn't come undone.'

'Oh.' I hang up the phone and sit for a while cross-legged on the floor not saying anything at all, until the suspense sends Declan insane.

'What did he say?'

'Dad had the snip.'

Declan stares at me. 'Then who . . .?'

'Yes, that's what I want to know,' I interrupt.

After that Declan and I did something that I'm not ready to talk about yet.

'It's got to be Bryce Cole,' Will says in a low voice.

We're sitting on the edge of the pool splashing our feet in the water. I've just told Willem about Dad's little procedure. The light reflecting off the water makes crazy patterns on Will's squinting face. There are a few women with mini-bogan children down at the other end. Our swimmers are in Declan's garage, otherwise we'd be in the pool.

Mum has taken her points back to Centrelink on her own.

All the way on the bus back to the caravan park I'd been thinking and I decided that Bryce Cole was not the father of Mum's baby. Where would Bryce Cole have met my mother? They don't have a single thing in common. Well, they do now. They're both povvos.

'But why bother pretending? Surely not for our sake?' I say. 'And besides, they're just not lovey with each other. They're more like siblings.'

I know lovey. Declan gave me his mobile when I left and he's written lovey text messages for the last three hours from Messenger on his computer. He started out all about how he was a slave to his silent love for me, but now he is free. Then he realised he could use medical metaphors. I think he thinks it's poetry. He's still fixated on Hansen's disease, and some of the imagery is pretty ripe.

I cud liv w/out my legs
Bt I need my hands
2 rip out my
& give it 2 U

It was freaking me right out, so I turned the phone off and stashed it at the bottom of my bag, under Dad's t-shirt and the pinch pot.

'If it's not Bryce Cole, then who?' Will asks.

'I don't know. Maybe it was someone from work.'

Will keeps a wary eye out for those other boys, but we haven't seen them yet. They're probably off playing hacky-sack with kittens.

Bryce Cole left a message for us at reception. He's coming over later. He said he'd take us somewhere for dinner. I'm hoping he had another good day at the track and will take us somewhere nice.

'If it is him we could confront them and maybe he'll stay over.'

'Better still, we can go and stay wherever he's staying,' Will says. 'Where do you think he stays?'

I had wondered about that myself. I bet he sleeps in the car.

'But if we do confront Mum then I'll have to admit that I rang Dad, and then explain that I actually rang Heather.' I think about it. 'It might be worth it. I don't want to stay here another night.'

Will grunts.

I'm so used to thinking of Dad as the bad guy, but now I don't know who cheated on who first. I think it was Mum. She's the bad guy and we're with her. If Dad's the good guy, then he's supposed to save us. We should be with him, shouldn't we? Bryce Cole seems to be doing all the saving, such as it is, but I know
he's
not the good guy. Maybe there aren't any good guys? It's a depressing thought.

I tip forward, land in the water with a splash and let myself sink to the bottom. When I pop out of the water Will is shaking his head. 'You're an idiot.'

I reach out my hand for him to haul me out, but when he takes it I jerk with all my strength and Will falls into the pool next to me. It's the oldest trick in the book. I can't believe he didn't see it coming.

Neither of us gets out though. It's nice and cool. I hope our clothes will dry before it's time to go out for dinner.

Bryce Cole has a friend who owns a Chinese restaurant in Parramatta, so we go there for dinner. The restaurant is closed, but there are some Asian men sitting at a table at the back. Bryce Cole knocks and they let us in. A waiter sets the three of us a table. She gives us forks and spoons instead of chopsticks as if we're ignorant chumps, and brings us a plate of piping hot spring rolls. She also brings us hot chips and pours soy sauce over them. The whole time she's watching a television. I say thank you, and she flicks me a look. There is no religious flourish or bowing.

After a quick greeting, Bryce Cole joins the others at the back table. There's a clatter as one of the men tips out a box of small tiles. They shift them around on the table, mixing them up, and then start building a tiny wall.

'What are they doing?' I ask.

'I think it's called mahjong,' Mum answers. 'It's kind of like cards.'

'Let me guess,' I say. 'It's a gambling game.' Now I understand why he took so long to get our food that night.

When we finish eating I turn Declan's phone back on. There are twenty-five text messages. They start out lovey and then get more urgent. Thankfully he has reintroduced vowels into his repertoire. The most recent one reads:
ur obviously dead. I'm calling the police.

I text back:
Not dead. Eating.

Declan answers almost immediately.
OMIGOD I have been so worried! u haven't said anything 2 me since u left. Is everything okay? I mean about this afternoon.

I really, really don't want to talk about this afternoon. I'm racking my brain trying to think about something else – anything else – to talk about, and this is the crux of the problem, because the beauty of my relationship with Declan was that I didn't have to think when we talked.
Hey wot did u get in that pol pot assignment anyway?
I text back.

After a minute or so I receive a new message from Declan.
Something that random was def a code 4 something. Have u been kidnapped? If u want me 2 call the police DON'T answer this msg.

I put the phone on the table and cross my arms. Bryce Cole yells out, 'Mahjong!', which I presume means that he won. One of his opponents pushes his wall of tiles over and mutters what I imagine to be a curse in Cantonese.

No code,
I text.
I'm switching off now. Nighty!

Instead I watch the telly with the turned-off phone in my pocket. I feel so mean, because it's not all Declan's fault, but I don't want to talk about it or even think about it, and the more I don't want to, the more he does, and I just wish he'd back off.

I turn the phone on again and browse through the numbers in his phone book.

A new message comes in.
OK. I just want U 2 no that U R the most beautiful girl in the whole world & I hope U hav sweet dreams. Even if they R not about me.

I write back.
Hey wot was that number that U recognised from our phone bill?

After a minute he sends it through. I browse through the numbers in his mobile – it's there. I quickly punch in his number. When he picks up I say, 'That's your dad's work number.'

'Why would your dad be ringing my dad?' he mutters.

'Maybe they were having an affair,' I joke.

'Hang on.' Declan is rifling through pages. While I wait I look across the table. Mum is staring at me, her face drawn, gaunt. She looks trapped.

'This bill isn't for your home phone,' he tells me. 'It's your mum's mobile.'

Will's learning how to play mahjong. I hope he's not getting himself in debt to the Triad. Mum's gone outside to have a cigarette. I'm so glad that she did that, because she knows I know about her and Declan's dad, and if she stayed we would have to talk, or not talk, and even the not talking is communicating – like when . . .

Before I get into that it's important to understand that I was very young, and I thought I was in the house alone. Unsupervised childhood is a time of experimentation. There's nothing weird about that.

I'd been watching that show
Scrubs,
and the Carla character told the Elliot character that if she wanted to have an orgasm she should use the washing machine. She didn't elaborate. Anyway, an ad came on and I just happened to notice that at that exact moment our washing machine was starting the spin cycle. I was curious, and so I went into the laundry and hopped up onto the washing machine lid.

I didn't get a thrill. I tried various postures. Still nothing. And because I thought I was in the house by myself I got quite inventive. Then my mum comes around the corner with the hamper from the upstairs bathroom and I'm engaged in a lewd act with her whitegoods.

What do you say?

It would have been best for me if Mum had laughed. Believe me, I have re-run various alternative scenarios in my head. If she had laughed, then I could have laughed, and it could be a kind of silent in-joke – an awkward moment that we shared. Later she could have even teased me about it, because in a way that's almost like saying it's okay.

It would even have been better if she'd said,
Silly duffer, that's not how you do it.
Actually, no. That would have been worse. To this day I have no idea how you get off on the washing machine – not that I dared try again, but in the months afterwards I hypothesised.

Instead Mum looked shocked and disgusted. Then she turned away, murmuring, 'Excuse me,' the way you do when you inadvertently open the door when someone is on the loo. She could at least have had the courtesy to forget about it, but even now, years later, she never says the words 'washing' or 'laundry' to me.

I know rationally that what I did was in the normal range of behaviour, but her black-banning any words that might in any way bring up associations kind of makes me feel as though she'd caught me boiling puppies.

All that self-esteem stuff she talks about is such total crap, because instead of offering me a way out when it really mattered, she left me with my shame and mortification. That's what she does. Mum opens her mouth, and in all the places where she can confide something real, she says I look good in pastels, or she admires my spatial awareness, and when she doesn't open her mouth at all she's reminding me that she remembers every single stupid and humiliating thing I have ever done.

Mum comes back inside and sits at the table next to me. We're in a closed Chinese restaurant in Parramatta with some guy we just met, who is totally ignoring us anyway. Tonight we'll go back to the caravan and possibly be beaten up.

I take a deep breath. Although she knows I know, I'm still having trouble putting the words together, mostly because I can't picture her being intimate and messy, and intimately messy with someone, and especially not with Declan's dad. My mum wears rubber gloves to take the rubbish out. When they talk to each other, which I have hardly ever seen them do, they talk about council rates, concrete stencilling and options for solar pool heating.

But I need to say something. I think about when the boys brought the cot in to the garage, and how Declan's dad freaked out. And then I go further back and remember when Declan's dad brought her home from the hospital, and how she clung to him. I remember Dad telling me that it was complicated. What did he say? He felt 'intensely conflicted'. No shit!

I want her to tell me, or at least not
not
talk, in that pineapple-on-your-head way.

She's sitting at the table opposite, smoothing the tablecloth with one hand and pretending to watch television.

I say to my mother, 'Hey, do you remember that day with the washing machine?'

She blanches. 'I don't know what you're talking about.'

In the car on the way back to the caravan park I have this brainwave. If Declan's dad and my mum got together we could just go and live in Declan's house, which is almost exactly the same as our house – same colour, same shape, same room configuration almost – just different fittings, and a few metres to the left.

Declan's dad earns a packet. I could go back to school.
A
school. You couldn't drag me back to Finsbury. In essence our lives would be the way they were.

Almost the way they were.

It seems hard on Declan's mum to be shunted out of the picture, but once she knows that her husband is a cheating bastard, surely she would want to leave? Mum already knows that he's a cheating bastard, and besides, it turns out she's a cheating ho, so they'll suit each other.

Alternatively, Declan's dad could leave and we could move into wherever he goes. I think a terrace in North Sydney or a unit in Kirribilli would be nice, and also close to work for him. Mum too, assuming that she'd go back full-time. She needs to build up a nest egg for when Declan's dad cheats on her and his new girlfriend moves in with her kids.

It would solve two problems. Declan would be my stepbrother, and so he could never hit on me again. It would be icky. We could pretend that the thing that happened didn't happen, but not in a taboo laundry way. Once every ten years we could say, 'Remember that day? Ha, ha, ha. Wasn't that a silly one-off mistake? And now here we are related.'

And that would be the end of it.

See, what happened was, I was at Declan's after the whole ringing Dad business, and we were talking about other things, the way you do. Declan said that he had been looking at vaginas on the internet, but he needed to see a real one, just for scientific research. I said I thought the photos were probably pretty accurate and the real ones were most likely much the same, but he said they weren't in three dimensions. Anyway this back-and-forth went on for a while, and we laughed a lot. Eventually I agreed to flash him for half a second in the name of science. Except it didn't end up being for half a second.

When I went over to Declan's house he was listening to my story, and he was saying all the predictable things. He was genuinely interested in everything that I said. He'd missed me, because he loves me. He made me laugh.

When I saw him again after being apart I'd missed him too. It's as if when we first met we were two separate shapes but over time our personalities have rubbed together so much that now they're moulded into two complementary shapes – like a jigaw. Yin and yang.

This morning it was so nice to fit into the mould again, and be in a safe happy place with someone I trust, and to be able to laugh at the things that happened, to be able to cry, and have Declan be genuinely, sincerely, earnestly . . . and all that.

So that's
why
it happened.

And also it felt good at a time when everything else felt bad.

The big question is, what do we do about it? Almost the second we stopped I realised it was a really, really dumb thing to do. Especially when he said the thing he said afterwards, which was meant to be a joke, but wasn't.

Who knew this was how events were going to unfold? Even twenty minutes before, if someone had suggested it I would have said
pfft!
If I'd known beforehand I would have worn nicer undies, for starters.

Now the mould is broken because our whole relationship had been based on him making dirty suggestions and me turning him down, and neither of us believing that it could ever occur. Those are the shapes we are.

Were.

Now I'm sad, angry with myself, and scared too, because the one thing I could rely on in my whole life was the shape of Declan.

But here is the magic solution! We just tell Declan's mum about the affair, like tipping over the first domino.

This is what I'm thinking as we pull into the caravan park – dominoes. The car stops. Bryce Cole, Mum and Will are all staring at our caravan, which has these weird black and grey blotches around the windows like smudged mascara. While we were away having Chinese, someone has set the caravan alight and then hosed it down.