‘I really hadn’t noticed,’ I said. Parents are just there, like part of the furniture, whether they talk to each other or not.
Mum’s voice began to wobble slightly. ‘You hadn’t noticed that he’s never home? That he’s either working on a brief or off running a marathon? You hadn’t noticed that he hardly says more than six words a day to either of us? Or that it’s months since the three of us went out together as a family?’
‘Dad’s always been like that,’ I said.
‘That’s the whole point!’ Mum cried. ‘He’s always been like that. Totally self-contained. Shut off. No room for anyone else in his life.’ Her shoulders slumped. ‘I should have seen years ago that I couldn’t live with a person like that. It’s not anyone’s fault. We’re just too different.’
‘So you shouldn’t have got married,’ I said. ‘And you shouldn’t have had me. I’m just a stupid mistake, aren’t I? A reminder of something that’s turned to worms.’
Mum’s eyes filled with tears. ‘Oh, Bel, don’t say that!’ she groaned. ‘You’re the best thing to come out of our marriage. You’re the only reason I managed to stay with Andrew for so long.’
I couldn’t stop. I wanted to see her hurting as much as I was. ‘But then Reuben comes along and suddenly Bel doesn’t matter any more?’
The tears spilled over and ran down her cheeks. Ridiculously, she tried to blow her nose on the torn strips of tissue. I handed her my box of Kleenex. ‘Bel, please try to understand,’ she choked. ‘I’m not young any more. I need some warmth and fun and love in my life. It’s like I come alive when I’m with Reuben, after all those years of feeling like a zombie inside. I just can’t wait any longer.’ She sniffed and blew her nose loudly. ‘I’m really sorry your life is going to be upset. Truly. But I know you’ll get over it. You might even find that your life is happier in the long run when we all settle down again.’
I almost began to believe her. But then she made a silly mistake. She looked at me with swimming eyes and said hopefully, ‘Would you like to come to dinner tonight with Reuben and me? He’s dying to meet you.’
A nightmarish scene flashed before my eyes — this aging hippie bloke in a Greenpeace shirt sitting across the table in a trendy vegetarian cafe, smiling and patting my hand and asking me about my favourite subjects at school. ‘No,’ I snarled, ‘I don’t want to go to dinner with you and Reuben. And I certainly don’t want to live in the same house as him. Quite frankly, I’d be happy if I never ever laid eyes on him. Shit, why couldn’t you just shag him in a motel room like most people do?’
She leaned across and slapped me on the cheek. We both sat frozen for a second, staring at each other. She’d never hit me in my life before. It was totally against her principles. ‘Oh, Christ,’ she groaned. Then she jumped up and ran out of the room.
I lay on the bed, my arms folded, and stared stonily at the wall. My cheek was stinging. Round Two was definitely mine. Funny how I felt worse instead of better.
Dad had a go at me a few nights later. Or I had a go at him. I’m not sure how it worked out in the end. Except I still felt just as rotten.
Mum had put two dinners out on the bench ready for heating in the microwave and had taken off in her car. I was lolling in front of the lounge television, having developed an inability to do anything constructive like homework or swotting for exams. They couldn’t have chosen a worse time to drop their load on me. I had my final exams in a few weeks. But whenever I sat down to read a textbook the words turned into indecipherable black squiggles.
I heard the front door close. Dad appeared in the lounge doorway. ‘Evening, Bel,’ he said.
‘You’re home early,’ I said. ‘Are you going for a run or something?’ Sometimes in the evening he came home early, changed into running gear, and disappeared for hours. I think he likes running because it’s something he can do all by himself. The better he runs the more he leaves other people behind. My secret name for him is the Gingerbread Man.
‘No,’ he said, loosening his tie a fraction and lowering himself into a chair. ‘I’m not running tonight. I came home early to talk to you. Your mother told me you said some pretty cruel things to her the other day.’
‘Do you want some dinner?’ I said, jumping up and turning off the television. ‘Mum left the usual junk to heat up in the microwave.’
The creases down the sides of his mouth deepened. ‘Sit down, Bel. I don’t want dinner at the moment. I want to talk to you.’
‘But you never talk to me,’ I blurted.
His mouth pulled down even more. He began opening and shutting the clasp on his watch strap. ‘Maybe that’s something I’ll have to change,’ he said slowly. Click. Click. ‘Bel, this isn’t easy for me either. It’s not easy for any of us. But you’re not going to make things better by abusing your mother. This is a time when we all have to behave in a civilised manner. It’s the only way to get through it.’
His lawyer’s voice is so reasonable, it always makes me want to scream. ‘Just tell me one thing,’ I snapped. ‘Are you quite happy with the idea of me going off to live with Mum and that man? Did you agree to let me go without an argument? Because it was the civilised thing to do?’
He rubbed his hands over his face, a rare sign of emotion for him. ‘Of course I thought about your future. A lot. But going with your mother is the only sensible solution. She’s more able to look after a teenage girl than I am. Remember, we’ll still be able to see each other. You can come and stay with me for weekends and holidays.’
‘Big deal,’ I said. A few girls in my class had parents who were divorced and they were always moaning about how draggy it is having to visit their fathers when they’d rather be hanging out at the mall with their friends.
‘There’s something else,’ he went on, still not looking directly at me. ‘I mentioned it before but I don’t think you took it in properly.’
I didn’t say anything. Surely nothing he could come out with now could make things any worse.
‘I’ll be going overseas for six months or more as soon as the house is sold,’ he said. ‘I’m going to travel. I plan to run in some marathons in Europe and the States.’
‘Oh,’ I said stupidly.
‘When I get back I’ll find an apartment in town and you can come and stay with me at weekends.’
I laughed. I couldn’t stop laughing. He frowned at me. I kept on laughing. He got to his feet and leaned over me. ‘Stop it, Bel,’ he snapped.
I looked up at him through tears of hysteria. ‘The Gingerbread Man,’ I choked out. ‘Always running away.’
‘Stop it!’
‘Run, run, as fast as you can…’
‘Annabel!’ His voice was a roar. ‘Pull yourself together!’
It was his use of my full name that stopped me. I hate my name. It sounds like the fairy on top of the Christmas tree. ‘Why?’ I spat at him. ‘Why should I behave in a civilised fashion? Don’t you realise what’s going to happen to me?’
‘I do realise what’s going to happen to you,’ he said, slipping back into his calm voice. ‘But your mother and I are hoping you’re old enough to cope with it.’
‘Well, I’m not,’ I retorted.
‘I can see that,’ he said grimly. ‘Bel, your mother and I aren’t prepared to put up with your tirades. I think it would be better for you to go away somewhere as soon as school finishes. If you’re finding things difficult now, how are you going to cope when we sell the house and you have to pack up and move?’ He stared at me. I wished for the millionth time that I knew what he was really feeling underneath the icy layers of control.
‘I don’t want to go away anywhere,’ I muttered.
He sat down again, looking very tired. ‘We’ll see,’ he said. My heart sank. When my father said, ‘We’ll see,’ it usually meant he was going to do whatever he wanted to do.
The next few weeks were an extended nightmare. I went round in a daze, wondering how I could feel so awful for so long. School was the pits.
I resigned from the choir, giving the chance to sing at the school prize-giving to the second-best soprano. It was going to be my first solo performance. But I couldn’t utter a note. Every time I opened my mouth a croak came out. Luckily I hadn’t told Mum or Dad about my performance. I’d been saving the news for the perfect moment. Yeah, right.
I spent almost all my time at Rae’s place. Rae decided she was single-handedly going to prevent me from having a nervous breakdown and also get me through the exams with a halfway decent mark. She worked with me for hours on end, testing and reminding and nagging. When I told her I’d scream if I had to memorise another French verb she’d give me a 30 minute break and read to me from The Lord of the Rings. Then we’d spend another 30 minutes checking out the latest stuff on the movie website. In the end I did okay in the exams. All thanks to Rae, none to my parents.
I couldn’t spend more than ten minutes at home with Mum and Dad without ending up choking with rage or bursting into tears. I could hardly bear to be in the same room as them, watching them doing ordinary things like reading and eating. How dare they do normal things when everything’s so stuffed up?
It wasn’t much of a surprise when Mum told me they’d arranged for me to go down to Taupahi Island to stay with Uncle Steve and Aunt Lorna as soon as school finished. ‘Time out. It’ll be easier for everyone,’ she said, pressing her fingers into her forehead as if to knead out a headache. She wasn’t wearing her wedding ring any more. ‘When you come back in the new year the house will be sold and your things will be moved to the new place and your father will be overseas. You can make a fresh start.’
So a few days after school finished I cried goodbye on Rae’s shoulder and was driven out to the airport to catch a flight to Wellington. Everyone was tactfully calling it a holiday. Both parents came to see me off. I’m sure Dad only came so he could say goodbye to me in a public space with a minimum of emotion. Mum snivelled the whole time and used up half a box of tissues. I got the feeling she was saying goodbye to more than just her daughter. In a weird way I was relieved to walk through those doors saying Passengers Only and leave my parents behind.
CHAPTER 6
After my first trip to Dawson’s Beach, Lorna finally gets round to commenting on my dinnertime eating habits. I’ve been expecting it. ‘Bel, do have some peas,’ she says offhandedly, waving a dish in my direction. ‘Only picked yesterday. Couldn’t be sweeter or fresher.’
‘I don’t eat vegetables.’
Tracey draws in a big breath. Lorna looks puzzled. ‘But everybody eats vegetables.’
‘Not the way my mother cooks them.’
Lorna’s eyes widen. The dish of peas hangs from her hand. ‘Oh, yes. I’d forgotten. Kate’s cooking. When we stayed with you I could barely swallow the mushy cabbage and lumpy potatoes.’
‘And the leather steak,’ Steve contributes, giving me a slow smile.
‘And the soggy sponge cake!’ Tracey shouts.
‘We only got a decent meal when I volunteered to do the cooking,’ says Lorna.
‘That’s why Bel is so skinny and pale,’ Tracey says smugly.
I glare at her. Stupid little cow. Can’t she understand that I want to look the way I do? Lorna reaches out to take my hand but changes her mind. ‘Bel, I simply can’t sit at the table with you for three weeks and watch you refuse all the lovely fresh food I grow in my garden. Thinking of all those vitamins and minerals you’re missing. It’d break my heart. Truly. Can we come to an agreement?’
‘What?’
‘Could you eat just a tablespoon of the vegetables with each meal? Six peas and four sticks of carrot? Please, please?’ She clasps her hands together on the table as if she’s praying.
I look at her suspiciously. Her eyes twinkle back at me. Oh, why not? If that’s all it takes to keep her off my back. ‘No worries,’ I say, shrugging. ‘Chuck over the peas.’
‘That’s my girl,’ Steve rumbles. Ridiculously, I feel a rush of happiness. I can’t recall my father ever saying that to me.
But a minute later my good mood is shot to pieces by Lorna’s announcement that we’re all going into Picton for church tomorrow morning. ‘Boring,’ Tracey groans.
For a few seconds I can’t speak. No way am I going into Picton. I have to go back to Dawson’s Beach to see if Lizzie was real or a dream. ‘I don’t go to church,’ I announce. ‘God doesn’t exist.’
There’s a dead silence. Tracey stares at me wide-eyed, obviously waiting for lightning to strike me dead. ‘How do you know God doesn’t exist?’ she asks.
‘God is a figment of man’s imagination, invented to help people cope with the idea of death,’ I tell her.
It’s too much for Tracey. ‘Death?’ she repeats in a squeaky voice.
‘But how do you know God doesn’t exist?’ Glynn asks suddenly. ‘You can’t prove that he doesn’t.’ He leans back and folds his arms and grins at me.
I stare at him. It’s exactly the answer Rae would have come back with. While I’m trying to think of a suitable reply, his mother speaks up. ‘Figment or not, we’re all going to church. That’s definite,’ she states.
‘I’m not going,’ I say.
Lorna and Steve exchange a glance. I hate it when adults do that. My parents used to do it too until they stopped looking at each other altogether. ‘Bel,’ Lorna says carefully, ‘we don’t go to church every Sunday but when we do, all of us go. We make a day of it. We have lunch afterwards at a café and do some shopping and maybe see a few friends. I don’t want you here on your own all day. Certainly not this early in your stay.’
‘I’ll be all right,’ I say. ‘I’m used to being on my own.’ What do they think I’m going to do — top myself?
Uncle Steve puts down his knife and fork. ‘Bel, we do expect you to come with us,’ he says evenly.
I open my mouth then shut it again. It could be my father talking, but somehow I’m not angry. My eyes drop under his steady gaze. ‘I suppose,’ I mutter, despising myself for caving in again. Twice in five minutes. What a pea-brain. I can’t bear to look at Tracey or Glynn and see the expressions of scorn on their faces.
‘Right,’ says Lorna briskly. ‘We leave at eight a.m. on the dot.’ Then she reaches out and gives my hand a quick squeeze. ‘Bel, you’ll enjoy it when you get there. You can’t spend three weeks cooped up on the island. You’d go mad.’
‘Yeah.’ I reach for the gravy to drown my peas.
As I chew the yucky green things, I glance surreptitiously at Uncle Steve. How can he be so different to my father? I don’t mean in looks, but in temperament. Steve laughs a dozen times a day, while Dad doles out smiles as if he’s being charged for them. They’re brothers with barely a couple of years between them, but they could be total strangers. Maybe it’s because Dad was sent away to boarding school in Wellington when he was 13, but Steve flatly refused to go. He wouldn’t leave his beloved island.
Uncle Steve catches me watching him, and winks broadly. I look away, feeling my cheeks turning pink. Somehow it seems disloyal to wish your uncle was your father. But I can dream, can’t I?
To be honest, going to Picton the next day isn’t all totally bad news. I choose some really funky clothes to wear — a pink and gold sari skirt with a handkerchief hemline, a black shoestring top, and a short denim vest. The whole effect is finished off with black fishnet stockings and boots, and at the last minute I shove a beaded beret on my head. When Aunt Lorna sees my outfit, she gulps and mutters something about taking a spare parka for the boat.
I actually enjoy the boat trip up the Sound. The water is like a sheet of silver. The hills have a long, thin layer of cloud resting on their peaks, just as if someone very large has carefully wrapped them in cotton wool.
As we come round the point into Queen Charlotte Sound, the fast ferry is heading towards us. What an ugly thing it is, a great white crab crawling across the sea on crooked legs. It drones past and a minute later the swells in its wake make us rock violently. Lorna pulls a disguste
d face. ‘Thank heavens it’s only allowed to do eighteen knots in the Sounds,’ she says in my ear. ‘It can do forty knots, you know. When they did that sort of speed the damage from the wake was absolutely devastating.’ We both look at the long foamy trail of the wash spreading out behind the ship like a scar on the skin of the water.
I think how nice it would be to listen to silence rather than to the chug of Queenie’s engine. Maybe Glynn’s kayak isn’t such a bad idea after all. If I can survive his attempts to teach me how to paddle I could go by sea to Dawson’s Beach.
The church at Picton is little and old and dark but it has really neat stained glass windows. And it’s good to get a chance to sing again. Okay, it’s just the boring old hymns that we sing at school assembly, but I love singing in a group regardless of what kind of group it is. Steve stands next to me, rumbling away in a rich baritone. I wonder if my father sounds like that when he sings. I’ve never heard him sing. ‘You’ve got a lovely voice,’ Lorna says to me as we file out of the church. ‘Are you in a choir?’
‘I was. At my old school. I was going to sing my first solo at prize-giving. Then I had to resign.’
That certainly shuts her up.
After we eat a very unhealthy lunch of sausage rolls and lamingtons and Coke in a café on the waterfront, Lorna informs us that she and Steve are going shopping. ‘You kids can do what you like but make sure you’re back at the boat by three o’clock.’
For a few seconds the three of us stand outside the café, not looking at each other. Then Glynn mumbles something about fishing rods and slouches away. Tracey looks across at me with a hopeful smile. ‘Want to check out the shops with me? Some of them will be open.’ She doesn’t sound quite so sure of my answer as she would have been a day ago, so maybe I’m finally getting that sisters idea out of her head.
I shrug. ‘Why not? I don’t mind, as long as you don’t mind being seen with me.’
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