by Emily Paull
She didn’t reply.
Thomas reached for one of the towels hanging over the pool fence. He rubbed his hair and dragged the towel down his face, lengthening his jaw until he looked like the character in The Scream.
Still, Marnie hadn’t moved.
He opened the pool gate, but paused before passing through it, not knowing whether to leave her there or not.
She was fourteen—not a child—but also not his child. What if something happened to her?
‘I’m going inside now,’ he said, meaning it only if it would get a response.
‘Whatever. You’re not my father,’ Marnie said.
Thomas flinched. ‘Your mother will be home soon,’ he said, letting the pool gate bang shut behind him as he walked over to the patio where he’d left his shoes.
She looked at him over her shoulder, her head moving slowly. With her hair wet and slicked back, her eyes seemed to take up most of her face. And she was thin, so thin that Thomas imagined her standing there without her skin on— just her skeleton showing through.
He blinked a few times to get the image out of his head.
‘Come on, Marnie. I have to cook dinner.’
She raised herself onto her toes, held herself there for a moment and launched into the water. Her body grazed the bottom of the shallow end of the pool and glided along for a moment, an image broken only by the dappled light reflecting through the waves. When she rolled over, her eyes were wide open and a thin stream of bubbles blasted out of her nose and from between her parted lips.
Thomas dropped his towel on a chair and leaned over the pool gate, his lips poised to speak. She broke the surface, and he realised he didn’t know what he should say.
‘Marnie. Please. Get out of the pool,’ he begged.
‘What are you doing, Thomas?’ she asked, sculling her hands in front of her.
‘I’m supposed to be starting tea.’
‘I don’t mean now.’
He thought he saw her shiver. He took her beach towel from the fence next to him and held it out to her.
‘I don’t know then, Marnie. Tell me what you think I’m doing.’
She shook her head.
He pulled the towel back over the fence and walked around to the gate. Approaching her slowly, as though she were a horse that might bolt, he held the towel out in front of him once more, and this time she took it, sighing. Her eyelashes had stuck together in the water, and the chlorine had turned the corners of her eyes red.
‘Pretending,’ she said. ‘You’re pretending we’re a happy family.’
He turned away as she climbed the steps out of the pool and didn’t look back until she’d hidden herself in the cocoon of her towel. Thomas expected her to walk right past him to head to her room to listen to loud music and read magazines, but she stayed. He felt a sudden pressure to perform, like a bad comic in a low-grade comedy show.
Eventually, she looked away and stared at her toes, rocking back and forth on her feet as the ground beneath them heated up. Her toenails were crimson—he recognised the shade as one her mother favoured, and wondered if she’d asked Jasmine’s permission to put it on.
‘Thomas,’ she said. ‘You can’t really honestly tell me that you’re happy with my mum. Can you?’
‘Of course I am,’ Thomas said, pulling his shirt on over his towel. ‘Why would you say that?’
Marnie shook her head. ‘Forget it.’
He hesitated.
She looked up at him through a curtain of wet hair. ‘It probably won’t come as a surprise to you that I don’t have any friends,’ she said.
Thomas stared past her at the creeping bougainvillea which encroached on their property from the house behind theirs. He knew that she was waiting for a response. He also knew that his silence was assent.
‘You have friends,’ he said.
‘Have you ever met any of my friends?’ she said, wiping her nose on her towel. ‘Name some.’
‘I don’t know their names. The red-headed girl, talks too much?’
Marnie fashioned her towel into a tube dress and sat low on one of the lawn chairs. ‘If you weren’t married to my mother,’ said Marnie, ‘would you want to know me?’
She looked straight at him, straight through him.
‘Marnie,’ he said, ‘it’s not okay for forty-one year old men to hang around with teenagers.’
Marnie pushed herself up using the armrests. ‘I know.
You’re right. That’s stupid. And you’re not my father, so you don’t have to lie to me like Mum does.’
‘That’s not what I—’
‘Look, Thomas, I was just trying to say that I understand what it must be like for you with her. I was thinking that you don’t have to think of me as your daughter or anything, but if you wanted, I could be your friend sometimes. I know Mum can be hard to handle. I’m sorry I brought it up.’
She paused, waiting for him to say something in reply, but Thomas was stunned.
Exasperated, Marnie rolled her eyes.
As she ran inside, her bare feet slapped against the tiles. He heard her door slam, the door-muted doof doof of a radio turned up enough to drown out an air raid.
* * *
At their wedding reception, Thomas and Jasmine had danced to ‘Drops of Jupiter’ by Train. As they spun like the frosted figurines in a music box, Thomas couldn’t help but wonder how many other thousands of couples had danced to that same song. It was her favourite, she’d said, and with a spot-light singling them out, it with like they were the only ones who could possibly have done it.
He smiled at Jasmine; his at last. Her eyes were wide as she took in the crowd and her lips parted in a half-smile. There was so much lace on her dress that she hardly felt real. Thomas pulled her closer to him.
‘Are you happy?’ he asked her.
She leaned her head on his shoulder. ‘Mmm,’ she said.
Her hair tickled his neck.
Thomas pressed his lips to the hairspray-hardened curls on the top of her head. He breathed in her citrus scent and it made him thirsty.
When the song ended, Thomas closed his eyes and tried to hold on to the last few notes. The voice of their DJ grounded him.
‘All right, ladies and gents, it’s time for a father–daughter dance.’
Jasmine pulled her head off his shoulder and looked around for her father. Mr Hawthorne limped out to them from the top table, his face shining with pride and alcohol. Thomas shook the old man’s papery hand and then passed Jasmine over to him. He was suddenly obsolete, and he drifted off the dance floor as other pairings joined in.
Back at the head table, he sat next to Marnie, who was picking at her chicken with a fork.
‘Some party,’ she said to her plate.
‘Yeah,’ he agreed. Sitting down, his legs felt heavy.
‘You could have picked a better song for your first dance, you know.’
‘It’s a good song!’ He paused. ‘It was your mother’s choice.’
‘It’s a nonsense song. I would have picked ‘Make the World Safe’ by The Whitlams. That’s love.’
He looked at her, impressed by her insight. Her lips had set into a thin un-made-up line. She leaned her elbows on the table in a picture of listlessness.
He nodded and took a sip of champagne. ‘That’s a good song. Keep it for your own wedding.’
Marnie looked at him sideways, one eyebrow raised.
‘Yeah,’ she scoffed. ‘Right.’
Thomas tried to imagine her older, in a wedding dress. He wondered if he’d be the one to dance with her on her wedding day, when they called for her father. His heart felt heavy or drunk, or both.
Looking at Jasmine, spinning under her father’s raised arm, he opened his mouth to ask Marnie to dance with him, and then stopped himself.
He had reacted badly when he discovered that Jasmine had a daughter. Not just a daughter, but a teenager. Marnie had been five when her father left, and she hadn’t seen him since. But Jasmine
had been very clear—she hadn’t married him just so Marnie could have a new dad. Marnie didn’t want a new dad, and Jasmine didn’t want any help raising her daughter.
‘She’s practically raised,’ she liked to joke, whenever the subject came up. ‘If any parenting questions come up, you just leave all those to me.’ Thomas had been grateful for this. What did he know about children? He’d been one, sure, but he’d never been a teenage girl. Teenage girls made him uncomfortable, the way they seemed to look at a person and know right away what their deepest insecurities were. Before he’d met Marnie properly, he’d imagined that she would be some sort of vicious, mean, hostile Lolita. That she’d drive a wedge between him and Jasmine, because right away she’d see that he was weak.
He had been surprised by how wrong he was.
Marnie was shy and insightful, and had all sorts of insecurities of her own. Plus, he suspected that she was being bullied. He worked from home a lot—he had his own architectural business and had set up a home office with a light box in the upstairs study—and so it was he, not Jasmine, who witnessed the dark look that clouded her brows when she came home from school. Marnie was prone to dropping her heavy schoolbag in the front entry and stomping straight to her room. He’d learned to identify the haunting, thumping music that she put on when she was upset as Evanescence or Placebo.
But he’d followed his wife’s instructions, and not interfered.
* * *
Thomas had started preparing dinner but now sat in front of the television, listening to the sounds of Marnie’s music coming through the walls. He could feel the vibrations from the bassline in his toes. The sausages lay half-thawed in the sink, forgotten; Thomas had lost his appetite. He didn’t think Marnie would be coming out of her room. He wondered if his own parents had ever sat like this, thankful for a closed door to hide their helplessness behind.
He leaned his head in his hands and counted wrinkles with his fingers. When had he grown so old? When had he forgotten how desperately he wanted to be liked and accepted? He reached for a vinyl record from the rack next to the couch, wondering if he would feel any better if he drowned out all thought.
A key scratched at the lock in the entry, and the front door clattered open.
‘Hello-o! I’m home,’ called Jasmine. He heard the crinkle of shopping bags as she stacked them on the counter and hung up her bag. ‘Marnie? Tom?’
‘In here,’ Thomas said.
He counted Jasmine’s steps as she came towards him.
‘I think I must be the only person in Perth who actually had to do their job today,’ she said, sweeping her hair back behind her ears. Dropping her voice to a whisper, she added, ‘What’s with the Marnie melt down?’
Thomas wanted to burst into tears. He wanted to bury his head in the softness of her and have her hold him. ‘I screwed up with the Dad Talk.’
Jasmine frowned, the creases in her pink lipstick showing as her face stiffened. ‘Tom, we talked about this. I said I’d handle the Marnie stuff.’
‘What was I supposed to do? She asked me a question.’
Jasmine said nothing. She checked her phone and locked it, tucking it back into her pocket.
Thomas waited for her to say something, to yell at him, to get upset.
‘I’m sorry, Jaz. I panicked,’ he said.
‘I don’t get it, Tom. I thought you liked not having the responsibility.’
Thomas shrugged off her remark. ‘What happened to Marnie’s father?’ he asked, his voice softening.
She turned her face away from his and stared out the open patio door. Wet footprints decorated the tiles. ‘We don’t talk about that.’
‘Why not? Don’t I have a right to know?’
‘Because I don’t want to talk about it.’
‘Well, I do!’ His voice echoed between them.
Jasmine took a deep breath. Her voice stuck in her throat, and the lines around her eyes tensed and drew together for support.
‘He left, Tom. He said he couldn’t handle it. He couldn’t handle us. He didn’t love us enough, I guess.’
‘There’s got to be more to it than that.’
‘I never asked. He didn’t want to be there, so I didn’t want him there.’
‘And he’s never once reached out? You’ve never tried to contact him, to tell him that his daughter needs a father in her life?’
‘The only person Marnie needs is me!’
Thomas felt his lips edging apart and the words forming at the back of his throat. He tried to keep them there, knowing they wouldn’t do any good. Somewhere, in the back of his mind, he registered that the music in Marnie’s room had stopped, and there was only silence around them.
‘I wouldn’t do that to you,’ he said, a weak offering, like a child trying to share a toy. ‘I wouldn’t do that to Marnie.’
‘It doesn’t matter. Nobody thinks this marriage is going to last.’
He winced. ‘Nobody, Jaz?’
The way she said nothing held a note of judgement—of finality. He almost heard the gavel bang down. It was when Marnie appeared in the living room entrance that he realised it had been the sound of her shutting her bedroom door.
‘I knew it,’ she said, glaring at Jasmine as she pushed between the two of them and ran out the back.
He found her there an hour later. Jasmine had locked herself in the bedroom, and Thomas found himself aching for company. He remembered Marnie’s earlier offer.
‘Hey, kiddo,’ he said.
She was leaning against the pool fence and staring up at the stars. Her fair head turned, and her lips twitched in a sad smile.
The two of them moved onto lawn chairs. The air was thick and scented with frangipani.
‘Why did you marry my mum?’ Marnie asked. ‘Really.’
‘Because I love her,’ he said simply, running his bare feet through the grass.
She nodded. ‘But that’s not enough, is it?’
Thomas looked at her sideways. She was so young; he didn’t quite know how he could make her understand, but she was so willing to listen.
‘It’s like you with your music, I suppose. You find a song, one you really love, and you listen to it as much as you can. You listen to it loud. You use it to drown out everyone else, as if it can fill you up and make you whole. But songs end. And when they do, you realise that it’s just a recording. It’s an illusion. Like when you said we were all pretending to be happy.’
‘Things which end aren’t any less beautiful.’
‘Mmm,’ agreed Thomas, leaning his head back. He listened to the sounds of the suburb—the river, cars on the freeway, and cicadas and crickets in the bougainvillea bush creeping over the fence.
Marnie scratched at a mozzie bite on her leg. ‘I didn’t mean to start all of this. I know it’s my fault.’
Thomas lifted his head. ‘It’s not your fault.’
Her little mouth twitched as her mind chewed over her thoughts.
He laid his head back and closed his eyes, wondering what Jasmine was thinking, locked in their bedroom upstairs.
‘Thomas,’ said Marnie.
He opened his eyes to see her standing behind his chair, her body inverted against a panoply of stars right above his head. For a moment, she was like an angel.
‘Yeah,’ he said, quietly, so as not to scare her off.
‘If it would fix things, I would give you all of my favourite songs, and the way they make me feel.’
‘Thanks, Marnie.’
‘I want you and Mum to get through this.’
Her words hung in the air for a moment, alongside those she hadn’t said: Please don’t leave.
And Thomas, acutely aware of his place in the world for a moment, thought of the way his identity now came from all the things he was not—not a real husband, not a real father. He knew that he did not want to leave. Not really.
It was the pretending to be happy that allowed him to exist.
THE SETTLEMENT
Iwas thirty-
two when we met, and he was thirty-nine. We didn’t have a lot in common. I was a desk clerk at the local library; he was the assistant regional manager of a bank, the kind of man who reads maybe one book a year, and usually only on holiday. Dan Brown was his favourite author, followed closely by Jack Higgins, which should have told me all I needed to know. But Peter was the kind of charming man who people wanted to be friends with. He was friendly, outgoing, confident. And while I was married to him, I felt as if I’d had a bright light shone on me.
Sitting in the window seat at my favourite café, I thought about Peter as I thumbed through the weekend newspaper magazine, bringing my hot chocolate to my lips.
Before our marriage, I’d been the kind of person who didn’t care that much about how I looked, but under his guidance, I’d learned what colours I should and should not dye my hair; the cut and style that suited me best; what parts of my body I should wax, shave and sculpt; and who to dress up for. I hadn’t realised until I moved away from it all—until I’d had to start again with nothing—how unimportant those things were. Now, living a few hours out of the city, I dressed for comfort rather than style, wore my hair however took my fancy, and most importantly had hours to myself to do the one thing that never failed to make me happy—read.
They say that fate has a twisted sense of humour. As I put down the mug and reached for the second marshmallow, ready to pop it into my mouth, the door to the café opened, bringing a person inside in a flurry of wind and autumn leaves. A man. He was tall and dressed in jeans and a wool jumper, his head and ears obscured by a beanie. It was the way he walked that was most familiar to me.
As the newcomer strode over to the counter, I gathered my book and my bag, and taking a last mouthful of my drink, I hurried out onto the street, heading in the direction of work.
Though it was a Saturday, the library was busy—mostly with children and their parents, though there were older students working at the desks in the independent study room at the back of the building.
Sonia Driscoll, the librarian on duty, was down in Large Print, encumbered by a trolley full of weighty hardback romances, her black-rimmed glasses sliding halfway down her nose. Though she was younger than me by about ten years, she was the first friend I had made in the town, and the only person who knew the whole sorry story about the collapse of my marriage.