The Spill

by Imbi Neeme

  ‘I’m delighted to hear that you and Celine are taking your relationship to the next level. Are you officially going steady now?’ Samantha’s voice sounded strange, like she was trying very hard to keep her words completely separate from each other.

  ‘We’ve been talking quite a bit,’ I admitted. Celine had been ringing me every day since she had been discharged from the hospital and I was starting to worry how much she was depending on me. At some point, I knew I would disappoint her, just like I seemed to have disappointed everyone else. ‘So will you come out for lunch on Saturday? I thought we could, you know, finish that unfinished business of ours.’

  ‘Yes. Asking him prying questions will definitely cheer him up.’

  ‘Don’t be like that, Sam. Just say you’ll come. Please?’

  ‘Yes, I will. But only because you used your nice asking voice.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Your nice asking voice. It’s very nice that nice asking voice of yours.’

  ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘I am okay but I must go now,’ she replied. ‘Goodbye.’

  I was left feeling unsettled. She’d sounded like a complete stranger just pretending to be Samantha.

  I arrived at Mount Lawley just before noon the following Saturday. Celine greeted me at the door in her dressing gown but with a full face of make-up on.

  ‘What do you think?’ she said, fluttering her fake eyelashes. ‘F’nelle brought me a new eyeshadow palette while I was in hospital and I’ve been having a play.’

  ‘Um, the colours make your eyes really pop,’ I said, pleased that I still remembered F’nelle’s turn of phrase from the wedding day.

  Celine beamed and opened the door wide. ‘Come on through. Craig is just getting his jacket.’

  We set off down the hall, but Celine paused outside the doorway of the room Samantha and I had once shared as children before Mum and Dad had broken up.

  ‘We’d started to redo this room,’ Celine said, and then lowered her voice. ‘For the baby.’

  She pushed the door open, like it was a reveal moment on one of those home makeover shows, except she was only revealing a shell of a room. The carpets had been ripped out, the walls had been stripped back to the bare plaster board and the ceiling fixtures had been removed.

  ‘The ceiling rose . . .’ I said, my own voice now almost a whisper. My childhood room had been destroyed. It hit me harder than anything Aunt Meg had said at the Blue Duck.

  But then I saw Celine’s face and I realised how selfish I was being. Her sadness was for a childhood that might never even touch this room. I put my hand on her arm and she gave me a small smile, before closing the door and leading me back down the corridor.

  ‘Oh,’ I exclaimed, as I stepped into the open living space out the back. It had been ages since I had last visited the house. Whereas it had once been filled with 1950s furniture in Tina’s day, and fifty shades of beige during Donna-Louise’s term in office, it was now awash with colour. The throw cushions were popping all over the place.

  ‘I really like what you’ve done,’ I told Celine, hoping to pull her away from her sadness. The compliment worked because her face lit up again, now brighter than all the throw cushions combined.

  ‘Oh, thanks. I’ve changed the room’s colourway. I think it’s working, but Craig complains that it’s too busy. He says it gives him a headache.’

  ‘And so I’ve taken to wearing sunglasses indoors,’ Dad said, as he walked into the room behind us. His hair was still wet from the shower and it made him look old and shrunken.

  ‘Hello, darling,’ he said, giving me a quick hug. ‘Where are you girls taking me?’

  ‘Jethro got us a reservation at Coco’s. Sammy will meet us there.’

  ‘Coco’s? La-di-da!’ Celine said, evidently impressed, and then she started to fuss over Dad. ‘Maybe you should wear a tie?’

  ‘It’s not fancy.’ I stepped in. ‘What he’s wearing is fine.’

  I was now feeling a little anxious about the time. Samantha had never ever been late in her life and I knew if we didn’t get there soon, she might burst a blood vessel.

  ‘I thought we said one,’ was the first thing Samantha said when we met her outside the restaurant. It was only five minutes past. ‘And however did you manage to get a reservation here?’

  She spoke in hushed tones, like she was about to enter a church and I found myself getting annoyed.

  ‘I rang and made a booking,’ I said with a shrug. ‘I don’t understand all this fuss about Coco’s. I’ve eaten in far fancier places, even in Perth.’

  I was pretty sure I saw Samantha roll her eyes as she popped a peppermint into her mouth.

  Inside, we were led by the maître d’ to a table by the window.

  ‘Nice spot,’ Dad said, looking around.

  Samantha was already scouring the menu. ‘Bit pricey,’ she remarked.

  ‘I’ve got this covered. It’s on me,’ I said, thinking back to the number of times Samantha had bought me lunch when I was living by myself in Inglewood. It felt good to return the favour.

  ‘You mean, it’s on Jethro,’ Samantha said, with a small laugh that grated my very soul.

  ‘Well, whoever’s paying,’ I replied as breezily as I could, ‘it’s neither of you.’

  ‘Thank you, darling.’ Dad placed his hand on my arm and I smiled. At least he seemed grateful.

  The waiter came over to take our orders. I ordered a pasta dish while Samantha and Dad continued to pore over the menu.

  ‘I’ll have the Atlantic salmon,’ Samantha eventually said. Any issue she had with Jethro’s money obviously didn’t stop her from ordering the most expensive thing on the menu.

  ‘I’ll have the sirloin with mushroom sauce,’ Dad said, before turning to me with a wink to add, ‘Celine doesn’t need to know about the cream.’

  ‘And would you care to order some wine?’ the waiter asked.

  Before Dad and I had a chance to respond, Samantha jumped in. ‘No, we’ll just have some sparkling mineral water for the table.’

  ‘Very good,’ the waiter replied as he took the wine menu away.

  Dad and I both stared at Samantha.

  ‘What?’ she said. ‘It’s daylight. You’re not winos.’

  And you’re not the boss of me, I thought, somewhat sulkily.

  A few tables over, a couple were sipping wine while their young child watched Dora the Explorer on an iPad, the volume turned up extra loud.

  ‘Restaurants are no place for personal TVs,’ Dad muttered.

  ‘It’s not a TV, Dad,’ Samantha corrected him. ‘It’s an iPad.’

  ‘Whatever it is, the kid shouldn’t be on it.’

  ‘Maybe it’s the only way they can enjoy an uninterrupted meal.’

  ‘If they have enough money to eat here, then they have enough money to hire a babysitter,’ Dad observed.

  ‘Maybe they want to enjoy the meal with their child,’ Samantha argued. ‘Give them a break. Some parents just have a hard time managing.’

  Samantha’s defensiveness didn’t surprise me, considering how inseparable Rosemary had been from her various devices. I had always put it down to Samantha and Trent’s inability to say no to their child rather than them not managing.

  Dad excused himself from the table and went off to the bathroom.

  Samantha leaned forward. ‘When are you going to ask him?’

  ‘I thought you were going to ask him. I did it last time.’

  ‘You’re the one who organised this lunch. You’re the one who’s Team Meg. Why should I do it?’

  I gave a small groan. She was right, of course, but this didn’t make things any easier. This post-Tina version of Samantha that made me do everything was really starting to get me down. As the waiter came and poured out our sparkling mineral water, I wished I’d been allowed to order wine.

  ‘This is a pretty nice spot to take a slash,’ Dad said when he returned to the table. I had forgotten he used to call urin
ating ‘taking a slash’. Donna-Louise absolutely hated it.

  I went to open my mouth, ready to cut straight to the chase, but Dad reached out and put his hand on mine.

  ‘Nicky, I’ve been thinking a lot about the conversation we started to have at the Queens and the question you asked me.’

  I felt a brief moment of sweet relief at not having to repeat the question, but then I realised his reply was coming and I tensed up again.

  ‘I’m sorry I didn’t answer. Obviously, it was partly because of that phone call from Celine. But it was also partly because I’ve dreaded someone asking me that very same question for over three decades.’

  I shot Samantha a glance but she was staring at Dad.

  ‘You wanted to ask if it was true, if Meg and I had an affair,’ he started and then paused to take a sip of his water. ‘It’s a funny word, “affair”. When you apply it to politics or the news, it has a certain gravitas. Foreign affair. Current affair. A state affair. But when applied to the heart, it’s all so sordid.’

  As he took another sip of his water and gazed out at the view of the river and the city, I wondered if we were about to go to an ad break or something. He was drawing this out more than the finale of any reality TV show I had ever watched. And I’d watched plenty.

  ‘And?’ I eventually asked, now impatient.

  ‘And, well, with this particular matter, the sordid undertones are completely appropriate.’

  ‘Appropriate?’ I was confused. His answer was wrapped up in too many words.

  Dad looked down at his hands. ‘Yes, I was unfaithful to Tina with Meg. And not just with Meg. I slept with other women, maybe eight,’ he said quietly, his reality TV demeanour now gone. ‘I’m not proud of what I did. And it’s been hard not to feel like God has been punishing me for those things by taking away our baby.’

  ‘God?’ The only time I’d ever heard my father mention the word was when he was being led through the vows at his wedding to Celine.

  ‘I’ve been going to church with Cee-Cee.’

  ‘Christ,’ I said, despite myself.

  ‘I’m not proud of my behaviour,’ Dad continued. ‘Not at all. Tina was wonderful, but she was wild and unpredictable. I convinced her to marry me, hoping that it would contain her. But it didn’t. So I ended up having little affairs on the side with women I thought I could control.’

  ‘But Mum’s sister?’ I asked. Even though I had believed Meg, it was still hard to hear the truth.

  ‘The two of them were so alike, they were almost like twins back then. But Meg was a little more biddable than Tina. She had a track history of terrible boyfriends and was what you might consider “low-hanging fruit”.’ He sipped his mineral water. ‘Of course, that’s not what I thought at the time. I was just acting on instinct. The faith counsellor I’ve been seeing through the church has been helping me understand things better.’

  I looked over again at Samantha in time to see her eyebrows shoot up at the mention of the ‘faith counsellor’.

  ‘And when I told him about the question you’d asked me, we prayed about it together and I realised that it was time to be honest. My biggest regret was that I was never honest with Tina and never really took full responsibility for my part in our separation. I told myself I only did those bad things because Tina was bad for me. And she was bad for me, in a way.’

  ‘But how?’ I asked.

  ‘When I was a kid, I would get really upset when I accidentally coloured outside the lines. You were the same, weren’t you, Sammy?’ Samantha nodded. ‘I convinced myself that Tina was the colour outside the lines – that she wasn’t good for me because I really needed order. In fact, that’s why you came to live with us, with DL and me. You needed order, too.’

  ‘And me?’ I wanted to know. ‘What about me, Dad? Why was it okay to leave me behind?’

  I realised, as the words fell out of my mouth, that I’d never expressed it that way, as being ‘left behind’. I had only ever described it as Samantha leaving Mum and me.

  ‘You always understood her,’ Dad answered. ‘She was good around you. Or rather, she was better having you with her than she would have been without you. Without you, she might have drunk herself to death much earlier.’

  ‘And you never minded when you coloured outside the lines,’ Samantha interjected, as if the whole fucking point of the conversation was about colouring in.

  ‘Tina wasn’t a colouring-in page or a Texta or anything else like that, she was a human and she was your wife,’ I said. ‘You slept with her sister, Dad.’

  ‘I know, I know. Please forgive me,’ he said, his head bowed as if in prayer.

  ‘What about Donna-Louise?’ Samantha asked. Her face was pale now. ‘Did you cheat on Donna-Louise too?’

  Craig picked up his napkin and started unfolding and refolding it. ‘DL was the opposite of Tina. After years of feeling like I was careening out of control with Tina, DL was so . . . stabilising. But then I made a mistake. DL found out and she left me.’

  ‘So that’s why you broke up? Because you slept with someone else?’ Samantha asked.

  ‘It’s complicated,’ Dad said, eyes cast down. ‘There was this one time—’

  ‘I can’t believe you did that to Donna-Louise, after all she did for you, after all she did for us.’ Samantha’s voice was rising and with it, I felt my own anger growing.

  ‘What about Mum?’ I asked. By this point, we were both being much louder than Dora the Explorer. ‘You heard what Dad said: he slept with eight other women while he was with Mum, not just one. And one of them was her sister.’

  ‘As if Tina would ever have noticed. In fact, if she hadn’t been so drunk all the time, she might have paid more attention and he wouldn’t have needed to sleep around.’

  ‘Jesus Christ, Samantha! Nineteen fifty-two is calling and it wants its gender inequality back.’

  ‘Girls, girls,’ Dad said, touching both our arms in an attempt to calm us down.

  ‘Don’t touch me,’ Samantha said, shaking off his hand and standing up. ‘I’ll never forgive you for doing that to Donna-Louise.’

  ‘And not our mother?’ I was seeing red now. After all these years, and Mum just buried, Samantha was still siding with Donna-Louise.

  ‘She was only ever your mother,’ she spat out.

  As I watched her go, I wondered if I would ever be able to sit through a whole meal with my sister without her storming off. I turned to Dad, but he was standing now, too. Without even a glance in my direction, he grabbed his jacket and ran after Samantha.

  ‘Sammy,’ he was calling. ‘Let me explain.’

  I sat alone at our table and tried desperately to pretend half the restaurant wasn’t staring at me as the waiter delivered our food.

  ‘Can you please box up my companions’ meals?’ I asked him. ‘And can I please see the wine menu?’

  ‘Certainly, madam,’ the waiter replied, and without missing a beat, he carried the steak and salmon away.

  Over at the Dora the Explorer table, the iPad had been put away and the little girl was sleeping in her father’s arms while he ate his meal with one hand. I found myself wishing Dad would come back, wishing Dad hadn’t left me alone in the first place, hadn’t chosen Samantha over me.

  Again.

  I took a forkful of my pasta and, chewing very slowly, I looked out at Perth and its river, both sparkling in the sunshine in spite of me.

  Piece #15: 1999

  The ‘Big Red Car’ video was playing for the fifth time that day and Dorothy the Dinosaur’s voice was feeling like a chainsaw against Samantha’s brain.

  The feeling had been building for weeks. Weeks that were filled with seemingly endless days of the same: wake, breakfast, Wiggles, walk, Wiggles, lunch, Wiggles, nap, Wiggles, dinner, Wiggles, bath, bed. Then repeat.

  But today had felt worse than ever. Rosemary had woken before six – on Trent’s sleep-in day, no less – and had only had a forty-five-minute nap in the twelve hours that had p
assed since then. Samantha had spent most of those forty-five minutes putting away the lunch things and hanging out the washing and had only just put her head on her own pillow to try to get some sleep when she’d heard Rosemary shout for her. Samantha had shouted then, too, but into her pillow.

  Now, Samantha looked at her daughter, this tiny ball of determination, who never did what Samantha wanted her to do, and never slept when Samantha wanted her to sleep, and never ate the things Samantha wanted her to eat. She wouldn’t even wear the clothes Samantha chose for her, always choosing the same red velveteen leggings, pink ballet skirt and pirate top.

  ‘She’s headstrong, like her mother,’ Trent would say to people, as if it were something to be admired. But Samantha was worried that Rosemary was headstrong like her grandmother. Like Tina.

  As the hands on the wall clock approached six, Samantha finally started to relax. Trent would be walking through the door soon, just as the theme music for Neighbours came on, and he would whisk Rosemary away to the bath, leaving Samantha to watch the show as her reward for another long day alone with Rosemary. It wasn’t much, but it was hers.

  But then the phone rang.

  The phone ringing at this time of day never brought good news. Still, she answered it, vaguely hoping it was Trent ringing from the shops, wondering what flavour ice cream he should buy.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Hi, Sammy,’ Trent said. He sounded tired.

  ‘You haven’t left yet,’ she said. Not as a question but as a note of extreme disappointment.

  ‘No, I haven’t. I have to wait until they’ve pushed the new fixes live,’ Trent explained. ‘I’m so sorry, Sammy.’

  If he really was sorry, he wasn’t anywhere near as sorry as Samantha was.

  ‘Daddy is going to be late,’ Samantha told Rosemary after she’d hung up. ‘Let’s watch Mummy’s show together!’

  Rosemary crossed her arms and pouted. ‘No!’ she said. ‘Wiggles!’

  ‘It’s Mummy’s turn now.’

  ‘Wiggles!’

  When Samantha switched over to TV mode, Rosemary put her hands over her ears and screeched loudly, harpy-style. ‘Wiiiiiiiiiigglessssssss!’