The kettle whistled and Aida jumped up to snatch it from the heat. Even over the roar of the neighbour’s lawn mower, she found herself cringing at the kettle’s shrill volume.
As she poured hot water into the teapot, she blinked away a sting of tears. This is what she had come to: hiding, stealthy and alone. Afraid to make a sound.
At first she had pleaded, What am I supposed to do? before she had grown angry, disbelieving: It’s my life and You can’t decide for me and Maybe I’ll tell people the truth. But the fury had subsided soon enough, and been replaced by a realisation of necessity and a galloping, terrifying sense of the inevitable.
There was no better alternative.
Aida hadn’t been the one to break the news to her father. Her mother had gallantly taken that bullet, only hours after she herself had found out. Bent with shame, Aida had been unable to bear the prospect of taking a sledgehammer to the loving pedestal her father had always put her on. So, from behind her parents’ closed bedroom door, the news had been delivered through a quiet, tearful murmuring by her mother to her father.
Aida set the lid on the teapot and waited for it to steep. Outside, the lawn mower fell silent. Now she could hear the birds singing. The beat of her own heart felt obscenely loud.
Her father’s reaction she could not have predicted. While she had expected distress, disgrace and even rage, she had instead received forty-eight hours of stunned silence. For two whole days, her father had looked at her and simply shaken his head. ‘I need some space, kid,’ he said to her eventually. ‘Give me some space to think.’
On the third night, her father had knocked on her door. A hesitant knock, like he wasn’t sure she was in the room. As though he thought she had already left. In one hand he held a suitcase, in the other, a sheaf of papers. Her mother’s face, steely, at his shoulder.
‘This is the best idea,’ they said.
‘But what am I supposed to do?’
‘Maybe you should have thought of that before you got yourself into this situation.’
It was explanation enough.
Oh, she was a lucky girl, Aida knew that. Plenty of others weren’t. To think of the rumoured fates of other girls in a state sent her into a shudder of dread. Downfall, disappearance – botched and bloodied fix-ups. The hastily purchased mortgage deed her father had placed on her dresser was compassion. The weekly supply visits from her mother and the meagre allowance from her father were both practical and kind. The thirty-mile drive from home was a bearable eternity.
And the plans for afterwards would be her mother’s millstone.
‘Everything will be back to normal. Once all this is over,’ her mother had attempted to console her as she’d driven her all the way out of the city, to the far edge of another town. To the simple, unassuming new house that squatted at the fringe of suburbia.
Aida poured her tea and took milk from the refrigerator. As promised the refrigerator had been delivered, last Sunday, the day after she’d snuck into this place. She carried the cup down the hall and peered through the glass in the back door.
The young couple had moved in two days ago. Aida had heard the woman’s excited squeals and peals of laughter, the thud and thump and scrape of furniture being arranged and rearranged. The man had hurried into the backyard, sweeping his arms out like a farmer appraising a crop of wheat. Glints of wedding bands on their fingers, the sparks of love and hope in their ruddy cheeks and tender touches.
Through the lace, Aida could see them carrying folding chairs across the yard. They set them beneath the gum tree. Their figures were distorted and hazy through the curtain, but Aida could see how happy they looked. The woman laughed with a hand over her mouth and the man kept touching her: her arm, her waist, her cheek. After a while, the man set his glass on the ground, stood up and walked out of sight.
Aida moved closer to the window. With one finger, she inched the curtain aside, opening a strip of bare glass. Where had the man gone?
She looked back at the woman.
Who was looking straight at her.
Aida flinched and dropped the curtain, jerking away. Tea slopped onto the floor. She turned and pressed her face against the wall, and she tried to breathe.