Pretty Girls

by Pretty Girls (retail) (epub)

  He was on his last legs, but there was fight in the old boy still ... and violence, she could see it shifting red and black just below the membranes of that petrified skin.

  “This your daughter then?” He pointed a finger towards Tilley. “Matilda, isn’t it?”

  Tilley stood uncertainly at the foot of the bed.

  “Tilley,” Evie corrected him.

  “Tilley, then. Nice that I get to see her before I cark it.”

  The room smelt of piss and morphine, mixed in with a heavy disinfectant. It was awful, an assault to the senses. It smelt like death.

  “She looks like you, Evelyn. Pretty, like when you were young.”

  Evie didn’t respond. Everything he said had an undercurrent, he was intentionally provocative. Even in his compliments there was a backhanded slap. She wasn’t pretty anymore – that’s what he was saying. She was aged and her looks had deserted her. Only young things were pretty.

  “So how come it took you so long to come and see your old man? I’ve been here for months now.”

  “I’ve been living in Melbourne, Dad. I had to move everything back to Sydney – it wasn’t easy.”

  He sniffed dismissively as though he didn’t quite believe her. She had no intent in coming back. Every bone in her body told her to stay away – but then something had induced her to come back. Coerced her almost. She wasn’t sure what it was. It was something in her blood and something she could feel on her skin.

  “Where you living?”

  She could feel her fingers quivering. That familiar voice. Rough. Disconcerting. It brought back her childhood, even the parts she had buried deep.

  “Redfern.”

  “That awful place. Why the hell would you go back there?”

  “It’s close to work and to Tilley’s school.” She knew that wasn’t the reason.

  “Thought you’d have more money. Aren’t you getting child support from that bloke that knocked you up?”

  Again, she said nothing.

  “What happened to ‘im?”

  She swallowed. “It didn’t work out.”

  “It never does, does it Evelyn?” He laughed, a few awful guffaws. His chest heaving.

  “What do you want, Dad?” she said. The words slopped out of her mouth before she had a chance to mull them over.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You wanted me to come and see you. Well I’m here. What do you want?” she demanded. She shifted her weight from one side to the other. Maybe she had come here for something after all. Maybe she had expected to find him a changed man but he wasn’t different at all. Just sick. Just dying.

  “You need a reason to come and see your dying father?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s nice of you, Evie,” he barked.

  “Well you weren’t very nice. Ever. Not at all.”

  He scoffed. “Of course, that’s what she said. Your bloody mum. Always sick. Never worked a day in her life. But somehow I was the bad man.”

  “You made her sick.”

  “She was sick in the head Evie. Come on, you know that.”

  Maybe she had been. It was more than a maybe. She had been sick in the head. Mostly because of him.

  “And your brother was sick in the head too.”

  Her brother. Ben. She felt the blood rush to her head. A sudden swooshing sound which made her sick. Literally gag. Like she might vomit. She didn’t want him talking about Benny. Not now. Never. Not at all. Her dad didn’t deserve to utter his name.

  “He was fucking crazy.”

  “Don’t talk about him.” The words tripped over themselves, exiting in a jumble. It was almost like they didn’t belong together, nor apart. They didn’t belong in that room at all.

  “Why? He was my kid.”

  “He wasn’t,” she shook her head violently.

  “He was my kid, and he was fucking useless. A drop kick. A druggie. He was never going to make it through ....”

  “Stop talking about him.” She covered her mouth, like she could stop his words through the action.

  “You were always such a bleeding heart, Evelyn. You always wanted to protect the two of them.”

  “Protect them against you,” she said. For a moment she was reminded of Tilley. Beautiful, timid, Tilley - still standing at the edge of the bed clutching her iPad. Her face was downcast. She wasn’t used to this type of thing. They didn’t talk like this at home. She’d never experienced violence. Evie felt the guilt rise up in her throat. There was no getting away from it.

  “That’s right. Here we go again. I’m dying and I’ve got to listen to this bloody story about how bad I was.”

  Should she have felt pity for him? She wasn’t sure. He was sick, yeah, he was goddamn sick. He was as sick as a dog. His skin had turned an unnatural colour, wrinkled and devoured by the disease, the cigarettes, the alcohol, the drugs. He could barely breathe anymore. They were feeding him oxygen through his nostrils. His stomach (she knew) was full of fluid. That’s what happened when you had lung cancer. Your stomach filled up with fluid. She remembered the swollen belly from right before her mum had passed. He had laughed then, said that she was getting what was coming to her.

  How could she feel pity for him now?

  Sure, he was her flesh and blood - but she hated herself for it.

  “You were bad. Admit it. Admit it before you fucking go.” She hissed it at him. She wanted to reach across and shake him. Force him to make the admission. Force him to atone.

  That’s why she had come here. For atonement. She had expected to find a changed man. Maybe he had found God, or a soul .. or something. Somehow in the depths of her mind she had thought that he might have explained it all to her. Why he’d been a violent son of a bitch. Why he had never loved them. Why he had treated them like shit. She’d thought ....

  It was a fantasy. She knew that much. Men like him never changed.

  “I’ll do no such thing Evelyn. Not even close. I looked after you all. None of you worked. Your mum was sick every single bloody day we were together. Never earned a dollar, just spent it up. Just lived off my pay .... You were all like that .... Bloodsuckers.”

  His face formed an awful grimace.

  She stared at him for a moment. Frozen. There he was. Her dad. A man who should have looked after her. Protected her. Loved her.

  Such a fucking fantasy.

  “Come on Tilley, let’s go,” she said, turning on her heel. She grabbed Tilley’s hand and pulled her into the corridor. Their footsteps clipped against the cool tiles of the hospice.

  His voice followed them. Screaming, like a lunatic.

  “Run away then, Evelyn. That’s what you always bloody do!”

  She shivered. It wasn’t cold at all.

  The thing is – you could never run far enough.

  8

  The beach

  (1997, Coogee)

  It was late afternoon and a storm was coming. The clouds were gathering across the horizon and the ocean was taking on a gloomy darkness. Evie pulled a loose jumper over her swimsuit. The cool air stung her skin. She ran a hand over her legs, goose-bumps were blossoming, creating tiny mountains and ridges across her usually smooth skin.

  In the background the surf crashed against Coogee beach. Hard and unrelenting.

  It was time to go home. The day had got away from them. Filled with sunshine and promise, it had been devoured by time, and now all that was left was the memory of it.

  The majority of sun-seekers that had lined the beach hours ago were gone. The families with their sun protection tents and packed lunches, the British tourists with their pallid skin and cigarettes even the surfers were gone. There were only a few stragglers left.

  They were the stragglers. Ben and Evie were always stragglers. Because they had nowhere else to go. They didn’t want to go home. Out was the only option. They were always the last ones to leave a party (if they got invited), the last ones at school hanging at the playground well after the final bell
had sounded and ... yeah, even the last ones on the beach. Even if a storm was brewing.

  She wrapped her arms around her legs, her blonde hair whipping her face in the breeze — she scanned the beach to find her brother.

  There he was, feet stuck in the water, hands firmly in pockets, mind lost.

  “Benny!” she called. “Benny!”

  He was lost in a reverie.

  “Benny!” One final time.

  He turned. His awkward thin figure was framed by that dark ocean. The perfect portrait of a lost boy.

  “Benny, it’s time to go!” Her voice was lost in the wind.

  She sighed, got to her feet, and started packing their things up. They didn’t have much. Not like the other families who turned up with multiple towels, spades, rackets, balls, drinks . and all the rest. They didn’t have any of those trinkets. Because they didn’t have any money. All of their gear was broken, dirty, used . like everything else in their lives.

  “Benny!” she yelled again.

  Straightening up she noticed he had plucked a large piece of dark seaweed from the ocean. It was bloated with sea water and he was dragging it towards her with intent.

  “Don’t even think about it,” she said to him in a warning tone.

  He kept marching towards her like a zombie-supermodel, those bony knees and skinny legs, made him all hard angles and deranged swagger.

  She put her hands on her hips and resisted.

  “Put that bloody thing in the ocean where you found it,” she maintained her ground, but he approached rapidly.

  She could feel the panic rising in her and at the same time a smile spread across her lips. He was about to fling that disgusting thing at her. As much as it turned her stomach, it also awakened a childish playful glee in her.

  He was metres away from her now and he launched that thing at her with all his weakling might - she sprang away from it quickly. It missed her entirely and landed with a disgusting squelching sound on the sand, a few of its strange leafy tentacles swiping her toes.

  She screamed despite herself, her heart pounding.

  “Bloody hell, Ben. Stop it!” she found her voice and roared at him over the sound of the pounding ocean.

  He grabbed the seaweed again, it was octopus like in shape, with a large body-mass in the middle and tendrils spiralling around it. Medusa-like.

  “What? It’s just a friendly piece of seaweed. What did it ever do to you?”

  His eyes had a scant quality to them, like he was a little spare in the head. There was too much space between them. His nose protruded from the recess, hook-like in quality, and his bulbous lips did little to improve the situation. They looked alike, similar features, and yet one had been drawn harmoniously and the other idiosyncratically. It was like they were the same muse but drawn by different artists, an abstractor and a realist.

  “Stop it,” she repeated. She always found herself acting like the adult around him. There was something tirelessly childlike about Benny, which made him the class clown. It was fun until it wasn’t.

  “We have to go back,” she told him. “It’s after 4pm. We should go back before it rains.”

  He stared at her with those great big green eyes, unregistering.

  “Did you hear me Benny? We have to go back,” she repeated, pulling the calico bag over her shoulder.

  “Where?” he said.

  “Home Benny,” she told him.

  “Where?” he asked again. He was being purposefully obtuse. He got into these moods sometimes. Often, recently. He never wanted to go home. He refused to acknowledge that home existed. She didn’t blame him - and she did at the same time. Maybe if he could be slightly better, less of a delinquent, things would be different. She wasn’t sure if that was the case.

  “Come on Benny – if we’re late he’ll get into a mood.”

  “He’s always in a mood,” Ben responded darkly.

  “Not always,” she lied.

  “Always,” he remarked childishly, his face downcast.

  “We’ve got to catch the bus – it takes at least half an hour to get back. If we’re not there by dinner he’ll have a fit,” she continued rationalising.

  Ben rolled his eyes.

  “Don’t provoke him Ben,” she warned, starting to walk up the beach without him.

  Someone had to be firm.

  She walked, plunging her feet into the moist sand, her hair whirling around her, disturbed by the wind. Halfway up the beach she turned to see if he was following her. He wasn’t. He was still standing there staring at the sand.

  She wouldn’t call his name again. She’d been calling him for the better part of half an hour. She was always calling him. He was truly the quintessential lost boy. It had to stop. Some how he registered her thoughts. He snapped to attention, and started moving towards her. He shoved his hands into his pockets, and his head bobbed, as though independent of his wraith-like figure.

  Finally, he reached her. He looked up at her.

  “It’s going to be either him or me soon.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Him or me. Someone’s got to go.”

  He muttered the words and then kept on marching. His words lingered in the air. Floated about her like tiny, evil balloons, knocking softly against her skin.

  9

  Running

  (2017, Redfern)

  Mirela lived in her family terrace a few streets down from Evie’s new place. That day it was raining softly outside and Mirela’s next-door neighbour, a slim Burmese man, wearing a beanie and overalls was watering the plants on his balcony. He waved cheerfully at Evie as she approached the old place on Riley Street and rung the doorbell. She drew her expression into a half smile but she found it hard to break through her torpor. Something about this old place made her irredeemably sad.

  Mirela threw the door open, her pock-scarred face luminous.

  “Come in, love,” she said, flinging the flyscreen open and gathering Evie up in her arms in an oppressive bear hug. She smelled of stale cigarette smoke again, mixed in with pasta sauce. Two odours Evie immediately linked to this ancient place.

  Evie tumbled out of her arms and into the corridor. The timber floor boards were more warped than she remembered but the image of the black Madonna was still framed on the wall, with a blue crucifix slung over it. Evie couldn’t remember if the crucifix was new or different.

  “Mum’s waiting for you in the kitchen, she’s made biscotti,” Mirela added.

  The house smelled of sauce, mould and dough – the three of them wrapped together in a familiar way. It all took her back to a time when she was wearing a grey uniform, and listening to grunge CDs in Mirela’s bedroom – every afternoon after school. It wasn’t just Benny who hadn’t wanted to go home.

  The kitchen was the same as she remembered it. Another seventies fixture, cream linoleum, with a knife magnet stapled to the back wall proudly displaying a series of sharpened blades. It was a dull and mediocre space, but there was something unmistakably homely about it. It was hard to identify what made it so exactly – if it was the plate hung on the wall with bright yellow lemons painted on it, or the recently used tea towels. It felt familiar, like home should be.

  ‘'“Ciao bellissima,” Mirela’s mother, Mrs Manganelo, a tiny Italian woman with steel grey hair and tanned wiry skin, pulled her into another overbearing embrace. It was hard to believe the woman had so much strength in her still – she was decrepit now. She had always seemed old to Evie, even when they were kids. She’d had Mirela in her mid-forties. Mirela didn’t have any younger brothers or sisters. She referred to herself as the immaculate conception. Evie hadn’t been sure what that was exactly and when she’d figured it out she didn’t want to burst Mirela’s bubble and tell her that her mother was likely lying about her origins.

  “I never thought I would see you back here,” Mirela’s mother said, her dark eyes heavy now, probing. Despite her appearance she had a strong Australian accent, her vowels wide and elongat
ed.

  “My dad’s sick,” she responded. The words stuck in her throat and then skipped out irregularly.

  “I always thought you would be off in Hollywood making movies,” Mrs Manganelo continued. She cupped a hand around Evie’s face now and Evie tried hard to remain still. She found this type of intimacy hard, virtually impossible. She counted slowly in her mind while the hand remained clasped to her chin like a vice.

  One, two, three, four, five she tried hard not to flinch.

  When Mirela’s mum removed the hand, she inhaled sharply, as though she had been holding her breath.

  “You always were so beautiful. Even now Evie,” she said.

  “Mum, leave her alone already,” Mirela said in the background. “Otherwise she’ll never come back. You’re so bossy sometimes.”

  Mirela had always had that relationship with her mother. Like she could say anything to her, and the old woman would never take offence. It was so natural. Like the pair of them were conjoined, one and the same person.

  “You’ll have a coffee won’t you?” Mirela asked her – she hovered over the espresso machine in her bearish way. So substantial, she took up every space. She made Evie suddenly feel the opposite -ephemeral, transient . hardly there.

  “Of course,” she responded.

  “Here, come and sit with me at the table while Mirela makes the coffee. I made biscotti,” Mrs Manganelo continued. That’s how they referred to her as kids. The other parents usually asked to be referred to by their first name.

  “Call me Sara,” they’d say.

  Not Mrs Managanelo — she was Mrs Manganelo always — at school, at home — Evie could only assume that the name followed her everywhere. That she never appeared in her Christian name format like the rest of them. Maybe this change had occurred when she had become the recipient of the immaculate conception. Someone that worthy couldn’t simply be known by their first name, they had to be heralded by something more important.

  Evie took a seat at the Swedish round-table, a new addition, clearly. It seemed an anomaly in the otherwise old and tired house, like it had been cut and pasted there.

  “Take a biscuit,” Mrs Manganelo said shoving the tray full of biscotti in her direction. They were the tiny, hard ones with the almonds at the centre. Evie had never liked them, but always felt obliged to eat them. They were baked so hard, they were virtually a liability.