So Wild

by Eve Dangerfield

  “Nice,” Gil said, looking over her shoulder. “Moving on from greyscale and classical and entering your self-portrait phase, are you?”

  “What? She doesn’t look like me.”

  Her colleague grinned from ear to ear. “Show Noah and your old man, let them decide.”

  “I will!” Sam stood, feeling glassy-eyed but exhilarated, the way she always did after a good sketch. She’d been in a flow state, as her dad called it, the only time she truly escaped her head. If only she could get her shit together and make it happen on a regular basis…

  Tomorrow. Tomorrow.

  “Where’s Noah and dad?”

  “Noah’s in room one, finishing off the tat on the kid from Seoul,” Gil said. “No idea where your old man is. He wasn’t here when I got in. I had to help Noah open.”

  Sam ignored his ‘woe is me’ tone. Gil had been working at Silver Daughters for a year and while he was a decent artist, he was a world class whiner. “What do you mean, dad wasn’t here?”

  “Pretty self-explanatory.”

  “We live upstairs,” she reminded Gil. “He’s not in the house, he’s not here, so where the hell is he?”

  “Maybe he finally bought a phone, downloaded Tinder and got himself laid.”

  If the mental image wasn’t so gross, Sam would have laughed. Her dad hadn’t so much as been on a date in twenty years. He was an attractive man—a not-cunt Johnny Depp was everyone’s general assessment. He got hit on by female clients almost as much as Noah, but he’d never accepted propositions. He never said it out loud, but Sam knew he was waiting for their mum to come back. It had been two decades without so much as a phone call, but still he postponed romance; pouring his attention into his business, his garden and his daughters. Acknowledging that always made Sam feel woefully inadequate, but today it was even worse. There weren’t many twenty-seven-year-olds that still lived with their dads, but she wouldn’t have it any other way. Her father was funny, a great cook and gave her (and her fly-by-night dates) plenty of space. She owed him everything. Ever since Tabby moved out, he felt like all the family she had.

  “I’m gonna go look for him,” she told Gil. “Sit tight.”

  She headed for the back of the studio.

  “We still on for drunk trivia, tonight?” Gil called after her.

  Shit. She’d forgotten about that. Every month, the Silver Daughters Ink staff went out for some not-so-friendly competition with a few other studios. In theory, they were playing bar trivia. In reality, they were seeing who could drink the most and she, Noah and Gil were solidly committed to winning. Sam bit her lip. The smart thing would be to stay in, hang out with her dad, work on her designs…

  “I’ll be there. But I’m not going to get too drunk.”

  Gil grinned. “We’ll see.”

  As Sam headed for her dad’s office, it occurred to her Gil had just earned forty bucks in wages without doing a thing. As the general manager, it was her responsibility to tell him to wipe the counters, call clients, sketch, or at least look busy. She hesitated, half-turned and decided she was too hungover to play effective boss. She’d bring it up after she found her dad.

  Edgar DaSilva’s office was as chaotic as always, paper over every surface, ancient filing cabinets crammed full of shit without any organizational rhyme or reason. Sam scanned the space, as though her dad might be hiding behind his cracked brown swivel chair. He wasn’t. Obviously.

  Sam sat down and sighed. She felt like a world class bag of shit. If her dad wasn’t in, she could finally sort through the paperwork, maybe follow Nicole’s advice and scan—

  She froze. The framed photo of her and her sisters was gone, a dust-free patch where it used to sit. Sam’s heart hurled itself into her throat. No one would have broken in to steal a dorky picture, and their dad wouldn’t have moved it, unless…

  “Where are you going?” Gil yelled as she sprinted past him.

  Sam didn’t reply. She was too busy chanting a steady mantra of ‘fuck, fuck, fuck.’

  She made it to the house side of the building in record time, unlocking the door and hurtling herself up the stairs. Nothing looked different, but the panic in Sam’s chest told her something was very, very different. She ran to her dad’s room and flung open the door. The majority of his things were still there—the books, the penguin statues, the yoga mat, but his coat was missing and when she opened his wardrobe, she saw his overnight bag was gone. She turned, fear pulsing in her blood like poison and she saw the folded note he’d sticky-taped to his mirror. She snatched it off, tearing the paper in her haste to read her father’s words.

  Dear Sam, Nix and Tabby,

  I’m sorry to leave like this, but if I’d told you what I was planning, you would have wanted to know when I was coming home and the truth is, I don’t know when I’m coming home. I’ve been talking about going on retreat for years and now’s the time to push off and do it.

  “Fine,” Sam muttered. “A bit random, but fine. Now, where are you, old man?”

  I can’t tell you where I’m going. I know if I do—if I even say the country—my clever girls will track me down and that’s not what I want. I’m almost certain that’s not what you want, either.

  “Dad,” Sam whispered. “You’re not serious?”

  A month ago, I reread Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet. This time the words felt like they were opening up new spaces inside me. Raising you girls has been the center of my life, but you’re women now and I don’t think I’m helping by keeping us in the same dynamic we’ve had since your mum left.

  Anger stabbed at the well-worn place behind Sam’s navel. Her mum? What did her mum have to do with anything? She was gone. She’d been gone for years and they were fine.

  You girls need change. Radical change. I am your dad, I taught you how to ride bikes and drive cars. I gave you your first tattoos and showed you how to move through the world. Unfortunately, when you became adults, I got self-satisfied. I thought I was done leading by example, but I was wrong. We all need to continue to grow, both you girls and I.

  Tabby, I love your confidence and wit. I love how you can make anyone your friend and every new place your home, but I can’t send you money every time Splendor in the Grass has a good line-up.

  Nicole, I’m so proud of all you’ve accomplished. Your dedication to self-improvement is truly impressive, but you shouldn’t try to boss me or anyone else around, even if you think it’s good for us.

  Sam snorted, wondering how Nicole was going to react to this critique of her character. By compiling a ten-point list on why their dad was wrong, probably. But the roasting wasn’t over, yet.

  Sammy, my eldest, my beautiful talented girl—you’re getting complacent, not in your work, but in life. You need to strive for something or you’ll never be happy.

  “What the fuck? I’m happy! I’m very happy!”

  The room was silent. Condemningly silent. Feeling raw and unnerved, Sam returned to the note.

  I am yesterday, my beautiful girls, you’re tomorrow. I want your lives to be as good as the world can make them, but I can’t do it for you. You’ll need to do it for yourselves.

  Sam—I’ve put everything in your name. The business, the deed to the house and all the rest of it. You’ll find the paperwork in the brown cabinet in the shed. The box is labelled erotic nudes, but that was just to stop you from looking. Please don’t be mad at me for this decision, Nicole. Sam is the eldest and she still lives and works here. That means from this point onward, she’s the head of House DaSilva. All decisions regarding its assets rest on her capable shoulders.

  Believe me when I say I trust you, Sam. I also want you to know you can go down any path you choose. If I come back and you’re still tattooing in my old chair, wonderful. If you sell up, then that’s wonderful, too. All I ask is you go forward with your eyes and hearts open. You might be surprised at what you find.

  Dad.

  PS. try to water the plants.

  He’d drawn a picture
beneath his signature, a symbol she knew as well as the McDonald’s logo—four daisies on an unbroken chain. It was the tattoo each DaSilva daughter had inked into their wrists on their eighteenth birthday, the one their dad had given himself at their age.

  “We’re blood,” their dad said as the needle kissed their skin for the first time. “It binds us and it cannot be broken.”

  “Fuck,” Sam said as the backs of her eyes prickled. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

  She sat down on her father’s bed and stared at the letter for a long time, as though hoping to change the words around, make them something they weren’t. Her dad might be in an Indian ashram, or a Balinese temple or a commune in Queensland, but she had no way of knowing. It was ridiculous, she knew, to feel so sad. She was twenty-seven, the same age her dad had been when she was born. She was hardly an orphan and as far as running the house and business went, how hard could it be?

  Hard enough dad had to leave to get me to do it.

  Sam knew she should call her sisters and break the news or even go downstairs and tell Noah and Gil, but she couldn’t handle the idea. She sat on her dad’s bed, remembering the last time she’d gotten a note full of bad news. A note left in a tree by a pretty, stuttering boy who liked King Arthur. Considering Scott Sanderson had grown up to be her worst enemy, it was strange to finally get a note that topped that one on the ‘sucking so hard it was a black hole’ scale of sucking. Then again, she and Scott had only been friends for a week before he left the letter saying her mother was a slut. She’d known her dad her whole life and she still hadn’t seen this coming at all.

  “Fucking hell.”

  Sam stood up and wandered around the four-bedroom apartment she’d once shared with her whole family, calling up memories for each and every corner. The exposed beam where their dad had marked their ever-increasing heights, the lounge room where they’d played monopoly and trivial pursuit with mugs of tea at their elbows. The corner where Tabby had once accidentally smashed their grandmother’s urn and cried as they vacuumed up the ashes. It was the only home Sam had ever known and it had always been here, full of art and recollections and, most importantly, her dad. He was the one constant in the house and now only the bare bones were left. Left to her.

  God, Nicole was going to kill her. Sam was surprised she hadn’t called already, her DaSilva senses tingling with the knowledge something had gone wrong, something which she could be called on to correct. It was widely acknowledged she was the good twin, the fixer, the sensible one. Yet their dad had left her everything.

  “He must want this whole place destroyed,” Sam whispered. Her head was swimming and her knees felt loose. She walked to the liquor cabinet and poured herself a shot of vodka. She knocked it back like medicine then ventured downstairs, to the street and then the tattoo studio, her brain sagging with what she knew.

  She found Noah handing the kid from Seoul a small bottle of the recovery oil their dad invented. That was another job she’d have to take on; mixing up the post tattoo potions. As if she had any idea how to do it. She didn’t even know where her dad kept the recipes. She’d never asked.

  She watched Noah swipe the kid’s bank card through the machine without saying a word. He was a better artist than Gil, but his PR skills were lacking in every conceivable way. Two years ago, she’d come home from a tattooing expo in Vegas to find Noah hulking up tattoo room three. When she asked her dad who he was, he said ‘your new brother’ without the slightest trace of irony. Noah had been at SDI ever since, tattooing his ass off and speaking a total of nine words a day. Sam still had no idea what his deal was, but she’d grown to like him. More importantly, she trusted him. She waited for the kid to leave and caught his eye. “Got a minute?”

  “What’s wrong?”

  Sam wasn’t surprised by the question. Quiet as he was, Noah had a knack for sensing discord. One day she’d introduce him to Nicole and see who could most accurately predict disaster. “It’s pretty big.”

  “I got time.”

  “Are you sure? You might need to overspend on your daily word quota?”

  Noah tilted his head to the side, wordlessly telling her to shut up and get on with it.

  “Dad’s gone away.” Sam felt the truth of it weigh down on her like a lead vest, filling her eyes with more tears. She screwed up her eyes, willing them away.

  “Where’s he gone?” Noah said.

  “I have no idea. To a retreat, maybe? He says he’s not coming back and I think he means it. He’s put Silver Daughters Ink in my name, turned the whole thing over to me.”

  Noah’s brow folded like a manly accordion—his version of throwing his head back and screaming ‘why Lord why?’

  He and her dad were close. They’d shared a lot of silent beers on the back patio over the years and Sam was sure her dad had Noah’s phone number, something no one else at Silver Daughters had the privilege of owning. Still, this proved it. He hadn’t known her dad was leaving any more than she had.

  Noah swallowed, his thick neck flexing. “Okay. What are we going to do?”

  Sam’s eyes prickled and she bit down on her tongue knowing crying would only make it worse. “I have no fucking idea.”

  Noah watched her for a second then coughed loudly. “Want a beer?”

  “My father abandoned me. I don’t want a beer.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “I want all the beers.”

  “Ah.” Noah dug around in his pockets. “I’ll get a slab?”

  She pulled out her wallet and handed him a fifty dollar note. “Get two.”

  Chapter 2

  There were worse things than a twenty-three hour flight from London to Melbourne, but Scott couldn’t think of any of them. He stumbled into the main coffee-shops-and-shitty-stuffed-koalas part of Tullamarine airport, his body stiff and aching. He’d pictured himself arriving in a blaze of glory. A new man shedding the shackles of his old self. Two minutes into the wait at baggage claim and he knew that was bullshit. For one thing, Melbourne wasn’t a new city. He’d lived here for ten years as a scrawny kid and then a gangly teenage virgin. He hadn’t uprooted his life to go back to being a gangly teenage virgin. He’d had good reasons for coming back to Australia, but in the airport hubbub they seemed vague and convoluted. Unfinished business? Being close to the place where his mother was buried? Sating his endless craving for fresh lamingtons?

  He massaged his temples. “Should have picked Sydney. Why didn’t I choose Sydney?”

  A stranger slammed into his shoulder. “Watch where you’re going, mate.”

  “S-s-sorry.”

  Scott clapped a hand to his mouth. He’d just stuttered. He hadn’t stuttered in years. He felt as though he’d said the c-bomb in front of a bunch of kids.

  The stranger took no note of his faulty apology but Scott stared after him, desperately wanting to tell the man he didn’t stutter, that he’d spent a decade not stuttering.

  “Christ,” he muttered to himself.

  As if he needed more signs that his return to Melbourne was doomed. He stared up at the departures screen above his head. There was a flight to London in two hours. He could buy a return ticket right here and now, go back to the clean streets and corporate camaraderie he’d come from. Only…his apartment had been sold and his job transferred. He’d taken his nice girlfriend, Amy out for dinner and told her he was sorry but their relationship needed to end. She merely smiled and said ‘It’s probably for the best. We’re hardly Harry and Meghan, are we?’

  No, they weren’t. Nothing about his life in London had that kind of passionate energy, which was why he’d moved back to this hot, unruly country where everyone made fun of his accent and called football ‘soccer’ and rugby ‘football’, and AFL ‘football’ as well.

  He exhaled, trying to relieve as much pent-up stress as possible before heading to baggage claim.

  Twenty minutes later he was in a taxi, speeding toward his new address.

  “New in town?” the cabbie asked.<
br />
  “In a way.”

  “Which means…?”

  Scott stared at the driver in the rear-vision mirror. He had a thick black moustache and smelled of cigarettes. He looked like an actor you’d hire to play a cabbie in a soap opera. “I used to live in Melbourne when I was a child. Now I’ve come back.”

  “Just visiting? Or is it permanent?”

  A very good question. “We’ll see. I’m fond of London.”

  The cabbie smirked and Scott knew it was either his accent or his use of the word ‘fond’ that had the guy grinning. When he was eighteen, his British enunciations had been present only in words like ‘dancing’ and ‘castle’ but within a week at Cambridge, he’d been speaking with his mother’s accent—as though the past decade in Australia had been no more than a summer holiday.

  “Do you have family around here?”

  “No,” Scott said automatically, because it felt true. His father was here—from here, but he hadn’t seen him in years. Three times since his mother’s death, to be precise. Whatever his reasons for coming back to Melbourne, it hadn’t been to reconnect with Greg Sanderson who’d so foolishly dragged him and his mother here when Scott was eight. Depositing them both in that big empty house next to the DaSilvas’.

  His father hadn’t done his research. If he had, he’d have moved them anywhere else on earth. He hated the DaSilva family from day one. Hated that their patriarch had long hair and was covered in tattoos, hated that their matriarch fled a mere week after they arrived. He hated that the three daughters were loud and happy and swore so regularly, his mother took to wearing headphones whenever she went in the backyard.

  But if he’d known the truth—that the eldest DaSilva girl was going to utterly reshape his son so no woman would ever provoke such a reaction in him ever again—Scott imagined his father would have gone ahead and burned the DaSilvas’ house down, the way he threatened when Scott was a kid.

  Samantha DaSilva, he thought, rolling the hills and rivers of the name around his head. I did not come home to see Samantha DaSilva.