Sydney, October 21, 1973
VAL DIDN’T TELL TONY SHE WAS PLANNING TO VISIT her father because she knew he would forbid her. He liked the fact that he and Nicole were her only “proper” family. His parents lived in Perth and they visited once a year, but Tony was always grumpy after they left, his ears ringing with their criticisms. Why hadn’t he been promoted at work? Why didn’t they have a bigger house? Why did it take Val twelve years to get pregnant with Nicole then nothing since? Why couldn’t she produce more grandchildren, as his brothers’ wives had done?
Val had no answer to that; it was just the way it was. Until she was thirty years old she’d thought she must be infertile, but then her baby daughter popped out with a beaming smile and a happy nature, like an amazing gift from the universe. Gazing at Nicole’s peachy skin, the long eyelashes, the teeny fingernails, she knew that everything had changed in the most fundamental way possible. From now on, for the rest of her life, this little person would come first.
Tony changed too. He cooed over his new daughter and took endless photos to post to his mother. He bought a set of Lego bricks, and Val didn’t dare tell him they were dangerous for a newborn, so she just kept a close eye to make sure Nicole didn’t stick one in her mouth. They grew closer as they admired their daughter’s wobbly first steps and giggled at her made-up toddler words. When Tony swung her in the air or let her clamber over him, his eyes all soft and affectionate, Val could almost love him again the way she used to before they were married. He’d kept his part of the marital bargain, getting a decent if dull job in finance, and buying them a house with a garden and a car apiece. If only it weren’t for his temper, and his desire to control her every move, perhaps she could have been content.
Nicole chatted on the way to preschool that morning, asking food questions: “What do you like better? Chips or yogurt?”
“Yogurt,” Val said.
“Vegemite or ham sandwiches?”
“Definitely ham. Poo-ee to Vegemite.”
Nicole laughed. This was their little joke. Tony liked Vegemite but Val had to hold her nose while spreading it for him because she loathed the smell.
“Apples or ’nanas?” Nicole persisted.
She took the answers very seriously, cataloging them in her brain, and Val knew she would remember months later: “You said you like apples best, Mommy.”
It seemed a miracle that Nicole had been born with a talent for happiness when neither of her parents was happy, but so it was. At preschool, she was greeted by a throng of little girls and trotted in after giving Val a quick hug, utterly confident in her own skin.
Val turned the car toward Bondi Junction, and almost immediately hit a traffic snarl-up. It was a stifling day and gas fumes wafted through the open window along with the noise of some idiot leaning on their horn. Only now did she allow herself to think about the prospect of seeing her father after seventeen years, and it made her shudder. Even with dementia, she was sure time would not have mellowed him. Did he still drink as much? Did he cry crocodile tears for Mother Russia when he was drunk?
She could barely remember what he looked like, apart from the perpetual scowl. He had dark bushy brows, and eyes too close together, but she couldn’t picture his mouth and chin or put the pieces together to make a whole face. She could remember his voice, though: thickly accented, harsh, tyrannical. She would never forget his unpredictable temper and the belt he used to hit her across her bare legs. She remembered him yelling at her school friends, accusing them of being sluts, scaring them so they would never come to her house and avoided inviting her to theirs. He used to embarrass her by using derogatory terms for anyone of a different skin color, especially Aborigines, whom he called “scroungers” and layabouts. It seemed personal, since her mother was Chinese and Val had her thick black hair, buttermilk skin, and almond-shaped eyes. Were they scroungers too? Did his Russian birth and pale skin make him superior?
She remembered the tension of mealtimes after her mother was gone, when her father used to quiz her on general knowledge. What was the capital of Mongolia? How many feet in a mile? She’d done her best to answer, but seventeen years on, as she pulled into the nursing home parking lot, she felt her stomach clench with dread, the way it always used to do as a teenager.
Why was she visiting him? Would he still be able to terrorize her? She was a married woman with a daughter; she must stand up for herself. People could only bully you if you let them.
She walked down the spartan air-conditioned corridor, following a nurse in white uniform. The nurse knocked on a door and pushed it open, and there he was, in a chair by the window, recognizably him, although the bushy brows were silver and the posture was hunched.
“It’s your daughter to see you,” the nurse said in a too-bright voice, and Val approached, stopping when she was six feet away.
“Hi, Dad.” There was another chair, and she positioned it so she was out of arm’s reach before sitting down.
“I’ll leave you to it,” the nurse said, glancing from one to the other, perhaps surprised that Val hadn’t attempted to hug or kiss him.
“How are you keeping?” Val began. Her dad’s eyes were vacant, a paler shade of brown than she remembered, with spidery red veins. Hairs sprouted from his nostrils and ears, and the hair on his head was combed flat across a shiny skull. “What’s it like here?” she persevered.
“You look tired,” he said, his voice croaky. “You’ve got shadows under your eyes.”
Charming, she thought. “My daughter wakes me early and my husband keeps me up late. What can I do?” She tried for a lightness of tone, wondering if he would pick up on the fact that he had a granddaughter. He didn’t.
“The food’s shocking. Just shocking.” He pronounced the sh like ch. Chocking.
“Dad, have you heard from Mom at all? Ha Suran, your wife? Where is she?”
He looked blank. “I don’t have a wife.”
“You did have a wife. I’m her daughter. Where did she go?”
He shook his head, and a tear trickled out of the corner of his eye. Val wondered if he was crying, but decided it was just his eye watering, because he didn’t seem emotional. There was a blanket on his lap and he rubbed the satin binding, back and forth. Val watched his hand with its funny raised scar like a red slug nestled between thumb and forefinger.
“The nurse told me you keep saying ‘I didn’t want to kill her.’ Who did you not want to kill?”
He turned to gaze out the window and mumbled the words. “I had no choice.”
“Was it Mom? Is she dead?” She wanted to shake him, force him to tell her what had happened when she was thirteen.
He shook his head. “There was so much blood. So much.”
“Whose blood, Dad?”
“I didn’t kill her.”
“Where is she then?”
“There was so much blood.”
“Did you stab her?”
“I had no choice.” He shook his head sadly. “I didn’t want to kill her.”
For a while they went around in circles, but he just repeated the same phrases over and over, without seeming to have any understanding of their meaning. Whatever memories had been in his brain had faded, like a blackboard wiped almost clean, leaving just a few traces of words but no sense of their context. They could have come from a movie he’d seen.
“Do you know who I am?” she tried.
“Of course. You’re . . .” He scratched his wrist. “You’re a visitor.”
“I’m your daughter, Val.”
“I don’t have a daughter,” he said. “You’ve got the wrong person.”
“Do you remember Ha Suran? She had shiny black hair, so long she could sit on it, that she wore piled up on her head.” Val demonstrated with her own hair.
There was no sign of comprehension, not a twitch. Anything he knew about her mother’s disappearance was long gone. He was a senile old man, and Val became aware that he smelled of urine. Had he wet himself as they sat there? It hadn’t been obvious when she first entered the room.
She tried to find a vestige of affection for the man who had raised her, but felt nothing but distaste. She wasn’t going to get any information out of him and suddenly couldn’t bear to stay a moment longer. She rose, hesitated. Should she kiss him goodbye? The thought made her feel sick.
“See you, Dad,” she said, secretly hoping she wouldn’t.
He didn’t reply, just gazed out the window, where a dog was crouched, bowlegged, scent-marking a spot on the lawn.
* * *
“I don’t think he’s a killer,” Val assured the nurse. “He was an obnoxious old goat when he was younger, but it wouldn’t have been in his character to commit murder. I think he’s just repeating something he heard.”
“If you’re sure . . .” The nurse was relieved. They didn’t want the hassle of a police investigation. “Will you visit again?”
Val made a face. “It’s difficult. We live quite far away—Croydon Park—and I’ve got a nipper at school. But you’ve got my number . . .”
She had goose bumps on her arms and couldn’t wait to get back into the heat of the day. The stink of urine lingered in her nostrils as she drove across town to collect Nicole, feeling shaken by the encounter.
It was difficult to accept that the helpless, pathetic creature sitting in a chair by a window was the same man who had menaced her during her teenage years. The monster had faded but the harm he had done remained, and she couldn’t forgive him. She had read enough psychology books, borrowed from the library, to understand why she had walked straight from a violent bully of a father into the arms of a violent husband. Human beings were attracted to what was familiar. The way Tony treated her must have triggered a feeling instilled in childhood that it was all she deserved. Sometimes she still felt that.
During the years of infertility, Tony had called her a failure as a wife, a useless waste of space, and it was hard not to take the criticism on board. What was the point of her life? He wouldn’t dream of letting her get a job because it would make him look as though he couldn’t afford to support her, so she spent her days cooking and cleaning like a domestic robot. Her friend Peggy repeatedly urged her to leave him, but where would she go? What would she use for money? How would she pay for a roof over her head when she had no qualifications, having left school at Tony’s urging without taking her final exams?
Her marriage was unhappy, but wasn’t everyone’s behind closed doors? Even Peggy moaned about her husband’s untidiness. Once Val had Nicole, everything else became bearable. Her daughter gave her all the love she needed.
She pulled up at the preschool just as the staff began releasing the little ones onto the playground, braids flying. Nicole ran to her waving a painting in garish reds and blues, daubed so thickly the paint was still wet and lumpy. Val swept her up and hugged her tight, feeling her daughter’s ribs through the cotton T-shirt, smelling the sweet scent of her hair, not caring that she got paint on her blouse. The primal love she felt for this little person was so overwhelming that it made her want to cry out with joy.