Pop cried when he saw me in the dress the night of Homecoming. I felt bad, but I wasn’t doing it to spite him. He took some pictures of me standing at the foot of the stair, and took some more when Ray arrived. Ray bought me a real nice corsage, tiny white and pink flowers. I think even Pop was impressed. He told Ray to bring me home by midnight, but it almost sounded like a joke. Some reason, those two get along well. I always think it’s funny Pop trusts Ray but gets suspicious round Delaney’s mom.
I phoned Luther before we left. He wasn’t there, but that was okay. We hadn’t arranged it.
I’d got Ray to buy liquor for me, which meant he’d got his brother to buy it. It was a plastic bottle of bourbon. When we got to school I slid it under the passenger seat in case his buddies came looking for some later. My hand touched something metallic. All I could think was, What kind of dumbass bring a pistol to a Homecoming dance. I didn’t say it, though, since I didn’t want to start something.
Delaney’s guy was stoned. She was in a mood. Ray went straight to his buddies and they all stood there cracking jokes from the sides of their mouths. I knew he’d probably said something about my dress, since all the other girls were wearing strapless things, and he’d already told me I was weird in the car. The gym was decorated in blue and silver. It was all making me feel bitchy. I drank some punch. I listened to Delaney talk about Carter. I stood in the bathrooms and reapplied my lipstick. Karen Bridger was sobbing about something Donna Weitzman had said. I caught up with Ray right when a slow song came on. He acted like he was a real gentleman by asking me to dance.
I didn’t want to move that way, that bored shuffle, the restrained bumping of hips. I could hold Ray’s hands anytime. I wanted to dance the way Delaney and I did in her room. Legs set wide, the music throbbing all the way through to our heels, which would twitch and stamp, our wrists flicking like the belly-dancers we’d seen in movies. Sometimes we’d press our stomachs together like one of us was a guy, and I’d feel our hipbones knock. We made our hands soft and hard, flexed our wrists. Delaney’s mom had been a dancer. She used to watch us and smoke and say, Airy armpits, girls. You gotta have air under your armpits. That’s what makes it look graceful. Once she showed us what she meant. I never forgot it. She was drunk and the colour was high in her cheeks. Her body looked like a dancer’s. She tossed her head. Her ribcage swelled and jerked. The way her hips moved made it look like she was fucking the air. Delaney and me weren’t even embarrassed, since she didn’t look like anyone’s mom anymore.
I wanted to dance like that.
I was feeling good, like I could still drive. I had this idea I wanted to go up to Angel Peak. You can’t see jack-shit at night, only points of light down where the town is spread, but I wanted to get out of that gym. By the time I came back, things would be winding down and we could either head to the canyon to drink, or else go to Camila Reed’s party.
It wasn’t hard to escape. Ray was holding my hand so lightly that I hardly think he noticed when I slipped away. My purse was under the bleachers with his keys stuffed inside. I had to pee real bad, but there was a line of girls waiting for the restroom. In the parking lot I squatted between two cars and hitched my dress up to my hips. I thought about when boys pee and you see steam. I was so cold. My jaw and shoulders and ass were clenched with it.
I was trying to remember where Ray had parked his truck. I looked at my face in the window of someone else’s car. My hair was mussed from the wind. All the curls had come out. It looked like Silly String.
Then my head hit the glass, hard, and there was a hand on my arm. The shock made me stay quiet. My first thought was Ray. I wondered why he was so pissed he wanted to hurt me. But the voice was different. That’s when I knew I was in trouble. My vision swarmed. My arms were pinned behind my back, like I was under arrest. I said, Get off of me. He clapped his hand over my mouth. I spat into his palm, but he didn’t notice.
‘Relax,’ he said. ‘I’m not gonna hurt you.’
He marched me between the cars. I tried the limp noodle. It only made things easier for him. When I kicked his shin, he stopped and showed me a knife, like one you’d use to gut a fish. I knew I had to do what he wanted.
It was dark and he was mostly dragging me, but once we passed under a floodlight and I saw his face in a flash. He wasn’t anyone I’d ever seen before. His skin was pink, almost translucent, and he had eyes that reminded me of John Lennon’s, with heavy lids. His face was covered in sores, like Ray’s brother’s when he was addicted to crystal meth. The next day they sat me down with a lady cop and she tried to help me make a picture of his face with a computer, but my memory didn’t work the way I thought it would. The face in the drawing looked like every bad man.
I saw the tall sloping letters that said FOLEY FIELD ATHLETIC STADIUM. We’d come as far as the bleachers by the football field. He shoved me against the concrete. I felt the weight of him at my back, his hands prising my legs apart. I felt so sorry for Pop, since this was the last thing any daddy’d ever want to happen to his little girl, and since he’d been telling me to keep myself safe since I was old enough to understand the words.
He was hurting me. He kept telling me to shut up, but I was sure it was him making the noise. I waited for him to finish. There was a pain like gunfire in my body, but my mind went someplace else. I was at the canyon smoking weed with Delaney. I was crossing the field by the school. I was floating on Morgan Lake. There was no pollution.
There’s this dream I have where I’m older and I’m living someplace new. I have a job. I wear cloppy heels and a silk shirt. Maybe my job is something to do with helping people, like the lawyers on TV who represent the public. I drive home to visit Pop and no one recognises me. I drive by my high school and the gas station and the Sonic Drive-In, and Ray and Mr Murphy and Mrs Vasquez all look up to see who’s driving that car down West Broadway. I’m so old and I’ve gathered so much power that it’s like a disguise. No one can touch me through it. No one even recognises me but Pop and Luther. They’re waiting for me on the front lawn.
We sit down to eat dinner together. They’ll tell me they’re glad to see me. They’ll say they’re happy I made something of myself.
PEAKS
Gideon came to pick me up from the train station in Sheffield. He was standing by the kiosk holding his phone. I had the upper hand of the person who sees first. He hadn’t changed. Same curly dark head, greying at the temples since I’d known him; same unfashionable wire-rimmed glasses. Same posture: he had the faux-casual stance of the lanky man who was bullied as a child. I had the uncharitable thought that he could do with some sunlight. He waved when he saw me.
‘I didn’t know if I’d recognise you!’ he said. I almost said, Why, what did you expect, but there was no sense starting a fight this early on. He held me at arm’s length to appraise me, the way everyone seemed to do at that time in my life. He took my suitcase.
‘You travel light,’ he said. ‘Maybe you can teach Yoni.’
‘She has to take all the kids’ stuff,’ I said. ‘It must be hard, travelling with them.’ He glanced at me sideways as he shut the boot of the Fiat Punto.
Gideon is the only person who makes me defensive of my sister.
The children met us at the door. I heard their feet on the carpet, their whispers. When Gideon bent to flip open the letter slot, a pair of brown eyes blinked back, startled.
‘They’ve been waiting all day,’ he said.
‘They need to lower their expectations,’ I said, but it was too late: the door swung wide and the two girls stood there with identical expressions, part guilt, part ecstasy. They both yelled, Daddy! and hurled themselves at him, staring at me the whole time. He picked up the youngest. She fit herself against his shoulder, looking at me from beneath a choppy fringe.
‘Aren’t you going to say hello to your auntie?’
I knelt and the oldest obediently presented her cheek for a kiss.
‘It’s okay,’ I said, ‘we haven’t seen
each other for a long time. Do you remember when you came to Australia?’
She stared.
‘I remember,’ Gideon said. ‘Travelling to the antipodes with a six-month-old and an almost-three-year-old. I remember far too well.’
‘Mum said she was sick,’ Mila said.
‘Excuse me,’ said Gideon. ‘She is the cat’s mother.’
‘It’s okay,’ I said again. ‘I was sick, but I’m better now. And, anyway, it’s one you can’t catch. I promise.’
‘It was the same sick as Nan,’ Mila said. ‘Mum told me.’
‘It was in a different part,’ I said.
Then my sister appeared, wiping her hands on a tea towel. She was smiling as if she hadn’t expected me at all, with her mouth wide open and an ah-h-h-h sound coming from her throat. She’d tossed the towel over one shoulder. When she hugged me, my face was pressed to the linen and I breathed in strong things—dirty dishwater and onion and fennel and a sour smell I couldn’t name—and I was momentarily repulsed. I turned my nose to her neck like a lover instead. She began to stroke my hair. When we separated, I saw the girls and Gideon watching. All three of them had the same polite, unsteady smile. At last Yoni touched Gideon’s arm.
‘Could you do their bath? Dinner’s still half an hour away.’
My sister seemed to have forgotten I’d never been in this house before. When Gideon thumped upstairs to bathe the girls, we left my suitcase in the hall by the door. It looked like I was ready for a midnight escape. I followed Yoni to the kitchen. I sat at the table and she took up grating a hunk of cheese.
‘Can I do anything?’
‘No. Just sit there. The girls have already eaten. It won’t be far away.’
‘Is that a Gideon thing?’
‘What?’
‘Feeding the girls first.’
She glanced at me over her shoulder. ‘No. I don’t know. We’ve always done it. Gives us time to talk at the end of the day. It’s good to be able to eat at leisure.’ She set a chopping board in front of me, then the grater and the cheese. ‘Can you finish this? I need to do the salad.’
When we were children, living at the edges of Melbourne, it was Yoni, me, Mum and Dad around the dinner table every night, and there was no reason to eat anywhere else. I remember Yoni trying to convince Mum to let her eat tea in her room once, when she was studying for her HSC and couldn’t afford the time to socialise or ask anyone else about their day. Mum went through the roof. Dad worked nights at the casino and slept through most of the day. Dinners were when we found out about each other.
I began to grate the cheese.
‘How was London?’ she asked.
‘It was all right. I think I expected it to be the same as when I was backpacking.’
‘What, when you were twenty-three?’ Yoni turned to the sink to wash the spinach. I started to explain it, how I’d suddenly felt unsure of what to do or how to fill my days, how I’d gone to bed in my tiny hotel room at nine-thirty every night, lonely and full of dread, but I couldn’t tell whether she was listening.
‘Anyway,’ I finished, ‘it’s good to finally be here with you.’
‘We don’t like London much,’ Gideon said from the doorway. He poured three glasses of wine. I stood to match the two of them. The three of us were very close. It felt like a suicide pact.
‘Cheers,’ Yoni said, raising her glass. She held it between her fingers at the bottom of the stem. Mostly likely someone had told her to do it at a wine tasting once.
‘What do the French say? To your health,’ Gideon said. ‘À votre santé.’
The spare room was on the third floor, up a steep flight of stairs.
‘Be careful if you come down to the loo in the night,’ Gideon said.
‘Have you ever tripped?’ I asked.
‘I did,’ Yoni said, ‘when we first moved in. I wasn’t even drinking. I just slipped, went straight down. Bruised my coccyx.’
The three of us stood in the doorway saying a long goodnight. Gideon and Yoni pointed out everything I might possibly need, from the towel folded at the end of the bed to the internet access code to the wall heater to the windows set into the sloping roof, which could be opened by standing on a chair. When they’d said goodnight for the last time, I lay on the quilt in my clothes. I looked at the small dark squares of sky above me, one at either end of the room. There was a streetlamp right outside the house. I couldn’t see it from the bed, but it flooded the room. When I turned back the bed, the sheets were streaked with sordid yellow shadows.
The room filled with pale light by five in the morning. It was useless trying to sleep. I drank a cup of coffee in bed. I went back to my book, the one I hadn’t been able to concentrate on the day before, sitting on the train. I was still reading when Mila, the oldest of the girls, appeared in the doorway. She was wearing a floor-length nightie speckled with tiny pink flowers. It made her look oddly elderly.
‘What are you doing?’ she asked.
‘Reading my book.’
‘What book?’
‘It’s lots of short stories,’ I said, ‘mostly about sad men.’
‘Why are you reading about sad men?’
‘I don’t know why. I think I might stop.’
It was one of those fashionable recommended books I’d bought to take away with me. I like reading, but I get most of my books from other people or from the recently returned shelf at the library. When I have to choose my own, I feel overwhelmed. Suddenly I don’t trust my own taste and I buy something with a metallic sticker on the front. This is also how I choose wine when I need to spend more than ten dollars.
‘Can I get in with you?’ Mila asked.
I turned back the duvet. ‘Of course you can.’
She climbed in beside me. I almost held out an arm for her, the way I’d seen my sister do, but it would have felt strange. The last time I’d seen Mila, she’d been in nappies. She was six now. We were strangers. She burrowed in deep, clutching the blanket to her face. I felt one chilly foot brush against my leg. Her eyes flashed at me in apology.
‘Did you have any dreams?’ I asked.
‘One about a fire,’ she said, ‘but I knew it wasn’t real because Daddy wasn’t upset. If it was a real fire he’d yell, Quick, quick, get out of the house.’ She still had the duvet over her nose and mouth. Her voice was muffled. Her accent had a weird lilt to it, nothing that matched either Gideon or Yoni.
‘Do you have school today?’ I asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Do you walk?’
‘Yes. Or sometimes Mum drives me if it’s raining.’ She pulled the sheet back from her face, breathed in. ‘You have a different smell to Mum.’
‘All bodies smell a bit different,’ I said.
‘Why?’
‘Oh—different chemicals and things, I suppose.’ I thought of how surprised Yoni would be if she came in and saw the two of us. I thought of how our mother would have loved the girls.
After that Mila came to my room every day. I was usually awake when her face appeared at the top of the stairs, except for once, when she climbed in beside me without speaking. I couldn’t tug myself out of sleep. I’m not sure how long she was there for, but when I woke up properly she was waiting with the sheet over her head. I saw the star shapes of her hands through the cotton.
Their kitchen was chaotic in the mornings. I preferred to stay out of the way, either in the yard if it were sunny, or upstairs reading while Gideon tore around the place and Yoni hurried the girls to get ready. She worked a few days a week, a receptionist job at a walk-in clinic, but she’d taken time off while I visited. I couldn’t imagine the mornings when she was working, too. The noise was maddening; the constant scraping of chairs on the slate tiles in the kitchen, Yoni counting down the time to departure, shouting Ten minutes then Five up the stairs.
After she’d taken Mila to school, Yoni and I went for a walk in the valley. We had to drive down there, she explained, because Poppy would never make the
hike back up the hilly streets. She zipped Poppy into a windbreaker, sat her on the carpeted stair to put on her socks and boots.
‘It’s not even that cold,’ I said. ‘She’ll roast once we get moving.’
‘The weather changes like that,’ Yoni said, snapping her fingers. ‘Like Melbourne. Anyway, nobody moves fast enough to get warm with a three-year-old.’
The sign at the entrance said EASY-GOING TRAIL. Before we’d properly started we passed a playground with a severe-looking metal slide set into a grassy slope. Poppy tugged on her mother’s hand and asked if she could play.
‘One slide,’ Yoni said, ‘then you can have a proper play on the way back.’ We watched her toddler legs cross the playground.
‘She can have a go now, can’t she?’ I asked. ‘We’re not in a hurry.’
‘She’ll be too knackered to walk if I let her play now,’ Yoni said. ‘Oh. I haven’t said knackered in ages. It must be hearing you say it.’
‘It looks painful,’ I said. ‘That slide—that bit at the end. Looks like it’d give you a jolt.’
We watched her watching the other children, fingers in her mouth, until it was her turn. From the top of the slide she glanced up to check we were looking. We waved. The angle at the base was so sharp I was sure she’d cry out. I waited for disaster, but she landed on two feet, rhapsodic. My sister knelt with her arms outstretched. Poppy came running.
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