FATHER—
He had not expected his daughter to come back from the university one afternoon with a handful of brochures, telling him that she wanted to move out of home. She didn’t say it in so many words. She told him that she had been offered a job at a residential college. He hadn’t even known that she had gone for an interview. He thought she was applying for law jobs because she had finished her degree. His children were like that: they would do things and then tell him the results without letting him know the in-between steps, as though their lives were mathematical equations done so quickly in their heads that they had no need to scrawl down the workings-out. But the truth was that their plans were laboriously plotted and closely concealed, and it was only the results that took him by surprise.
Just like the time his daughter decided to go to Sydney for a debating tournament when she was eighteen. She made the excursion sound like such an official university event, but when she returned with her album filled with photographs, he could see that there were no lecturers or tutors present. What had he expected? That eighteen-year-olds in Australia would be chaperoned? Well, why yes, he had. That was what he had expected. And uniforms or gowns of some sort, even, to show that they were a team. But no, in her photographs it was a hotchpotch of jeans and dresses in different colours and lengths, river cruises, a boy standing on a dustbin doing an impersonation of the prime minister, a red-headed girl kissing another boy with a head of hair like spiral pasta, and his daughter, standing there in the middle of it all, smiling her head off like she was part of this amateur thespian production, a cameo role caught in the spotlight. Surrounded by those Australians, she looked like she was twelve.
‘Why do you have to live at the college?’ he asked. ‘Can’t you just teach there and then come home in the evenings?’
‘Because it’s part of the job description. They won’t hire me if I don’t live there. It’s only a twenty-minute drive from home.’
His wife was against it, of course. How could he even consider allowing their eldest daughter to move out? People would think she was a runaway, that there was immeasurable misery or wantonness in the family that had caused an unwed daughter to leave home. Those Australians, his wife told him, think that childrearing ends when the kids reach eighteen. Then they tell them to get out of home and make their way into the world without so much as helping them buy a car with airbags! Perhaps that’s why so many of them didn’t finish university. They had to fend for themselves: eighteen-year-olds with rented houses preparing their cheap meals of macaroni mixed with melted squares of Kraft cheese!
He could not understand his daughter’s strange need for space, and to be alone. After all, hadn’t the family stuck together during the years of the Black Bandits? He had lived with his mother all of his life, and his sister, and later his wife. He had never been separated from the women in his life and he hated the thought that his loved ones would be far away from him.
‘Just have a look at the brochures, Dad,’ she had pleaded with him, and left them on the table. He glanced down and saw the picture on the cover of one of them – a stately red building that looked like the fairytale castles in the books he had read when he was young.
The college was at the back of the university where he had dropped his daughter off so many times, watching her disappear through one of its gates, which weren’t actually gates but wide pavements surrounded by trees. He liked the look of this place – he thought it looked exactly the way a university should look. University: such a strangely perfect word. It had the word ‘universe’ in it. Somehow, it seemed appropriate; each time one of his children entered this place they were like little planets flung into far distant galaxies. He was reminded of one year not too long ago, on Christmas Eve, when his daughter had herded them all to the science museum. She woke up early, looked in the street directory, and then the whole family drove out to Spotswood. He realised, in a bewildering yet not unpleasant way, that lately the kids had been taking the parents on little excursions.
Kien had fallen asleep in the planetarium because it was dark. There were stars in the domed sky, but it seemed too close, the ceiling was too close and it pressed down, reminding him of all those nights they had been running away from the Black Bandits, and how they had slept beneath the sky – he and Kien and his mother and his sister. The skies were clear then too, and the stars winked like unforgiving blades.
*
In the end, he decided to let his daughter go.
‘You start with this one now,’ said his wife, ‘and they will all want to leave.’
‘She’ll be home on the weekends, she said.’
‘She won’t! She’ll soon decide she wants to go out to parties all the time with the Australians.’
No, his daughter had never been any good at maths. Even when she wrote down the calculations carefully, she would make one silly mistake and mess up the whole equation. She would arrive at an answer, and it would not match the one in the textbook and she would ponder why and run through their steps again, overlooking the same mistake in the middle, even though it was obvious what she had left out. But she would plod along, believing that the sum would work out in the end. And when it didn’t, she would just start working on a new question. This new world was an infinity of possibilities.
He finally decided that it was safe enough for one of his flock to fly. He didn’t understand the magnitude of what he had done until the second week, the third week. For the first few days it felt as though she were on extended school camp. But then she was no longer around.