Baygirl

by Heather Smith

  She looked hesitant. “I don’t know, Kit.”

  “This is our house too,” I said. “Go on. He’s totally out of it.”

  But as soon she got up to get the remote, his eyes popped open and he lunged at her. “What are you doing, you stupid woman?”

  I screamed for Iggy, but it was too late. My father had struck my mother hard across the face, sending her backward into the couch. Iggy rushed down the stairs, grabbed my father by the shoulders and pushed him against the wall. He put his hand around my dad’s throat.

  My mother, through her tears and her pain, begged Iggy to let my father go. “He didn’t mean it, Iggy,” she said. “It was my fault. I should have asked first.”

  “Call the police, Kit!” said Iggy.

  “Don’t you dare, Kitty,” said my father through gritted teeth.

  I reached for the phone with a shaking hand, but my mother grabbed it first.

  “No one is calling the police!” she said. “He made a mistake. He’s sorry. You’re sorry, right, Phonse?”

  He didn’t answer.

  I stared at my mother. “You’re pathetic.”

  She looked wounded, cut by the honesty of my words. She lowered her head.

  Iggy let go of my dad and gave him a shove. “I want you out of my house.”

  “If he goes, I go,” said Mom.

  Iggy shook his head. “Then so be it.”

  Mom looked at me, embarrassed but defiant. “And if I go, she goes.”

  “No she doesn’t!” I yelled. “I’m not going anywhere!”

  I ran to my room. Iggy followed.

  “I can stay, right?” I said. “If you kick them out, I can stay?”

  He sat down on my bed. “Of course.”

  “Will you kick them out? For real?”

  He sighed. “I don’t know, Kit. I want him out, but I don’t want your mother to go with him.”

  “If she’s stupid enough to go, let her. Who cares?”

  “I care. And so do you. At least if they’re here, I can keep an eye on things. She’s my sister. I have to protect her.”

  My head was spinning. “Why did he hit her? He’s never hit her before. All these years…why now?”

  “Who knows?” said Iggy. “Stress? Depression? He’s lost his livelihood. He’s living with his brother-in-law. He’s not the king of his castle anymore, Kit. He’s a sad, depressed drunk.”

  “So what do we do?” I said. “Just live with it?”

  “For now. I don’t know what else to do.”

  “Me neither.”

  “I’m sorry, Kit.”

  “You have nothing to be sorry for.”

  Iggy kissed the top of my head. “It’s late. Go to bed. Try to get some sleep.”

  But I didn’t go to bed. I went downstairs to the den instead and, holding nothing back, wrote an in-your-face kind of a speech. And even though my stupid sling made it difficult, I made a poster to go with it—a visual aid, big and bold, to help drive the point home. Soon everyone would know just what a waste of space my father really was.

  A blush of purple pushed through the foundation that Mom had slathered on her cheek. “What will you say if someone mentions it?” I asked. But she didn’t want to talk about it. She mumbled something about a door and that was that. She didn’t speak to Dad for days. Iggy had it out with him though. Big time. Laid on a major guilt trip. Dad even apologized. But the next night he was right back in his recliner, a glass in his hand and a bottle by his side.

  Mr. Adams was the only person I told. He didn’t say much. He just listened. And when I was done, he reached into his pocket. “How about a quarter?” he said, as if I was a five-year-old who’d be cheered up by a bit of loose change. I took it from his hand and went home, feeling better, oddly enough.

  A few days later, Iggy was waiting for me on the front step when I got home from school. He told me he’d found the poster I made. My heart sank.

  “I wasn’t snooping,” he said. “I was just looking for some tax stuff in the den and saw it on the desk.”

  “That’s okay,” I said. “It’s not like it’s a secret or anything. It is a public-speaking contest, after all.”

  “So you won’t mind reading me the speech that goes with it?” he asked.

  “Not at all,” I said, shrugging as if it was no big deal. “Whatever.”

  “Great. Can’t wait to hear it.” He opened the front door and gestured for me to go through. “After you.”

  I didn’t move. “What? Right now?”

  He nodded. “Yep. Right now.”

  I walked through the house as if the den were death row and Iggy a prison guard marching me to the electric chair. Iggy wouldn’t like my speech. No one in my family would. But I didn’t write it for them. I wrote it for me.

  I sat at the desk and shuffled through the stack of loose-leaf paper, pretending to look for the speech. After a few awkward moments I realized there was no point dragging it out. I could tell by the way Iggy was looking at me that he’d waited long enough. I opened up the desk drawer and pulled out the speech.

  Iggy picked up the poster. “Here,” he said. “I’ll be your easel.”

  “Thanks.”

  He held up the bright-yellow bristol board showing the giant liquor bottle I had drawn. I felt myself blush.

  “Go ahead,” he said. “Read the speech.”

  I fumbled with the paper, and when I scanned the first page I started to think that maybe my speech wasn’t such a good idea.

  “Go ahead,” he said again. “Read it.”

  I cleared my throat.

  “Mr. Byrne, fellow students and Iggy. The topic of my speech today is…”

  I looked up. Iggy raised his eyebrows. “Go on,” he said.

  “Um, the title of my speech today is, uh, ‘Living with a Drunk: My Personal Experience.’”

  I looked up again to see Iggy’s reaction, but he just looked back at me, straight-faced.

  “This is the Drunk-O-Meter.” I pointed awkwardly at the bristol board. “As you can see, I have divided this bottle into five sections, each one representing one of my alcoholic father’s states of drunkenness. I have ordered them from not so bad, seen here at the bottom, to really, really bad, seen up here at the very top. I’d like to start with the bottom fifth of the bottle, The Happy Drunk. When my father is in the Happy Drunk stage, he can be found at the local pub using a piece of battered cod as a microphone and singing ‘Phonse was every inch a sailor.’”

  I paused. Iggy’s poker face revealed nothing.

  “Alternately,” I continued, “he can be found at home standing on a chair giving a speech, because, when in the Happy Drunk state of drunkenness, my father sees our family life as one of sunshine and roses. He can talk for hours about how he has the greatest family in the world and how I am the most wonderful girl in the universe. I wish I could believe him. But when I look in his bloodshot eyes it’s plain to see. It’s the booze talking, not his heart.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I glimpsed sadness on Iggy’s face, a chink in his armor.

  “Keep going,” he said quietly.

  “Next up, The Legless Drunk. This state is characterized by the inability to stand up without stumbling, coupled with the inability to string a sentence together. Picture this: my father staggers through the door after a night at the pub. He falls into his chair and says—”

  I paused again. “This is dumb. I don’t know why I even wrote it.”

  “Keep going,” said Iggy. “He falls into his chair and says…”

  I let out a deep sigh. “He falls into his chair and says, ‘Itty-Bitty-Kitty, my marverloush daughter, pash me a shigarette, I need a shigarette, gashping for a shigarette, need a shmoke, wheresh yer mudder, wheresh my shigarette, w
heresh my shupper?’”

  I looked up. “See? It’s dumb.”

  Iggy pointed at the speech. “Keep going.”

  “But there’s one positive of aspect of The Legless Drunk,” I continued. “It always ends with the inevitable Pass-Out. So before I know it, my annoying lush of a father is out cold and I can relax, for a little while at least, knowing that he can cause no trouble.”

  I pointed to the middle section of the liquor bottle. “Now for The Depressed Drunk. We won’t spend a lot of time here. There’s not much to say, really.”

  I scanned the next few lines I had written, and when I spoke, my voice started to shake a bit and I was startled by stinging in my eyes.

  “Hearing my father say things like, ‘What’s the use? What’s the bloody use? I might as well shoot myself in the head’ upsets me more than anything else. Not because I’m afraid that he’ll do it, but because sometimes I wish that he would.”

  A tear rolled down my cheek.

  “It’s okay, Kit, keep going,” Iggy whispered, so I did, even though the page was shaking and the words were all blurry.

  “Next up, The Moody Drunk. The fear of the unknown. At any moment, The Moody Drunk can snap. The Moody Drunk is unpredictable. The Moody Drunk is unreasonable. The Moody Drunk makes me wish that a magic fairy would come and sweep up the eggshells I always seem to be walking on and take them away forever.”

  Iggy gave me a sympathetic smile and spoke softly. “You’re almost done, Kit.”

  I swallowed hard.

  “Last but not least, The Mad Drunk. Broken dishes and broken hearts. Blushes on faces and bruises on cheeks. Fists that shake and eyes that threaten. Words that swirl in the air like gusts of snow riding on the breeze, never to be caught.”

  I took a tissue from the box on the desk and wiped my eyes. “That’s it,” I said. “I didn’t really know how to wrap it up.”

  Iggy put the poster down.

  “You know you can’t read that at school, right, Kit?”

  I nodded.

  “I mean, social services would be all over this place.”

  “It seemed like a good idea at the time,” I said. “But now that I’ve read it…I mean, I could never have read that in front of my whole class. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

  Iggy took me by the arm and sat me on the couch. “You were mad. At your dad. So you wrote about him. And very well, too, I might add.”

  I blew my nose. “Really?”

  “Yep. Really. And I bet it felt good to get it all on paper too, huh?”

  “Yeah, it did, actually. It felt really good.”

  “You should write more often then,” he said. “I’ll get you a journal, if you like.”

  “You will?”

  “Sure.”

  Iggy got up and took my speech off the desk. “What should we do with this? We wouldn’t want it to fall into the wrong hands.”

  “Rip it up,” I said.

  He passed it to me. “No. You rip it up.”

  So I did. Into a million little pieces.

  I was in Mr. Adams’s kitchen, leaning against the mop handle and staring into the bucket of murky water, when he burst in and accused me of being the worst housecleaner in the history of the world.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I was thinking.”

  “I don’t pay you to think, lass. I pay you to keep things spick-and-span.”

  I took the mop out of the bucket and slopped it onto the floor.

  “Sorry,” I said again. “I have a lot on my mind.”

  Mr. Adams grabbed the mop out of my hand. “Obviously,” he grumbled. “Look at the ginormous puddle you just threw on the floor. It looks like the bloody Atlantic ocean in here.”

  I held up my sling. “Mopping’s a bit awkward.”

  “Excuses, excuses.” He wrung out the mop, dipped it in the puddle and let it soak up the water, then wrung it out again.

  “Bloody hell, this is hard work,” he said, wiping his brow. “Why didn’t you tell me it was this hard?”

  “Well, I—”

  “Come on,” he said. “Break time. ’Ave a seat. I’ll make the tea.”

  I sat at the kitchen table and, while Mr. Adams filled the teapot with hot water, put my head down on my arms, closed my eyes and tried to think of a new topic for my speech.

  “Wake up, lass!” Mr. Adams boomed. “Don’t you know it’s the height of rudeness to fall asleep at the table?”

  “I’m thinking,” I said, sitting up straight.

  “So you keep saying,” he said. He placed two cups and the teapot on the table.

  “Any bickies?” I asked.

  “Listen here, madam,” Mr. Adams huffed. “You shouldn’t ask for bickies. You should wait to be offered. Coming out and asking like that is the height of rudeness. The height of rudeness, I say!”

  “What isn’t the height of rudeness?” I grumbled.

  “Kit Whatever-your-name is! You are in a foul mood today!”

  “It’s Ryan. And like I said, I have a lot on my mind.”

  Mr. Adams got up, grabbed some biscuits out of the cupboard and presented them to me.

  “Will these do, Your Royal Pain in the Arse?” he asked.

  “Yes.” I laughed. “They’ll do. And I’m sorry. You’re right. I have been the height of rudeness. The width of rudeness too.”

  Mr. Adams poured tea into my cup. “A problem shared is a problem halved, you know.”

  I sighed. “I have to write a speech. For school. I mean, I already wrote one. About my dad. But it was a bit too honest, if you know what I mean, and now I have to start all over again, and I can’t think of a new topic.”

  Mr. Adams thought for a moment. “Then don’t change it.”

  “Huh? What do you mean?”

  He shrugged. “Don’t change the topic. Try to turn a negative into a positive. Write about your dad again but in a good way, and see what happens.”

  I looked at him like he was nuts. “If I write a speech about my dad and try to make it positive, it’ll be a speech full of big fat lies, because there is nothing, and I mean nothing, positive about that man.”

  “There’s good in everybody, flower,” he said, waving his biscuit in the air. “You just ’ave to look a wee bit closer with some folk.”

  “A wee bit closer?” I snorted. “I’d need X-ray vision to find good in my dad.”

  Mr. Adams chuckled. “It’ll be a challenge, that’s for sure. But give it some thought, lass. You never know what you might come up with.”

  I finished my tea and went home. All through supper and all through homework, I racked my brain, only to come up empty. Lying in bed, I searched every file in my head for something positive about my dad. The only result was a pounding headache.

  But when I woke up in the morning, a memory came to me right out of the blue, like a big whack across the face.

  I went to school and spent my lunch hour in the cloakroom, writing. The words flowed out like a glass of spilled milk, flooding every inch of the page, soaking into every corner, and when the last drops had dribbled out, I mopped up the messy bits, tidying here and there, until I was left with a clean piece of writing I was proud of.

  I had done it. I had found good in my father.

  And I didn’t even need X-ray vision.

  It was agony having a last name beginning with R when teachers insisted on doing things in alphabetical order. By the time Allison Johnston was reading her speech, “The Life and Times of Madonna,” I was ready to jump out of my seat. And when Mr. Byrne finally called my name, that’s exactly what I did. I jumped to my feet and practically ran to the podium.

  I was surprised at how quickly my speech went. I mean, one minute I was standing in front of the class, reading, and
the next I was back at my desk, with my heartbeat slowing to its regular pace.

  I was also surprised when I won. Mr. Byrne said he really liked my “artistic approach to an informative speech.” I was pretty pleased with myself, but then he went and ruined it by telling me I would have to read it again at a public-speaking night, where I would be competing with all the winners from other classes.

  “Don’t forget to tell your parents, Kit,” he said. “Friday night, seven PM, in the auditorium.”

  I didn’t want to tell Mom and Dad. First of all, Dad would probably show up drunk, second of all, Mom would probably be hurt that my speech wasn’t about her, and, third of all, I didn’t really want Dad to hear me say niceish things about him.

  But I knew they’d get wind of it sooner or later, so I told them about it casually, trying to pass it off as no big deal.

  “There’s a public-speaking thingie at school on Friday night,” I said. “Parents are invited, but it’s not like you have to go or anything.”

  “What kind of thingie?” asked Mom.

  “A contest or something.”

  “Are you in it?” she asked.

  “Yeah, I kinda won a speech contest for my class.”

  “Marvelous!” she exclaimed.

  “What’s the topic?” asked Dad.

  “It’s sorta about Parsons Bay…and stuff.”

  “Sounds wonderful,” said Mom. “We’ll be there, won’t we, Phonse?”

  “You betcha!” said Dad.

  Iggy knew what I’d been trying to do but didn’t know why.

  “Don’t you want us to come?” he asked me later, when Mom and Dad were out of earshot.

  “Um, yeah. Of course,” I said. “It’s kinda complicated, that’s all.”

  “I won’t let him show up drunk,” he said, “if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  “That’s the least of my worries,” I said.

  Iggy looked confused. “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t want him to hear the speech,” I said.

  “Who? Your dad?”

  I nodded. “Yeah. ’Cause it’s about him. And it’s positive.”