16

Papa looked worse the next day. A yellower shade of ash. Sometimes his eyelids fluttered as though he was going to wake up.

Brigitte yawned and rubbed her face. After a restless sleep in Kerry’s lumpy spare bed, she’d been at the hospital all day, listening to Joan prattling about celebrity gossip in magazines she’d bought from the newsagency, when she wasn’t at the café next door buying skinny lattes and gourmet muffins.

Brigitte felt in her bag for something to read. Her hand found a book at the bottom: Dead in the Water. How the fuck could she have forgotten it in there? Local murder, spousal rejection, sibling attempted suicide, imminent death of grandfather — such a careless oversight was understandable.

She glanced at her mother; Joan was engrossed in a publication with the headline Exclusive: Teen Mom Jemma Reveals If She’s Still Feuding With Tyler And If She’s Met His Baby With Khloe! Brigitte traced her fingers over Dead in the Water’s glossy cover, thumbed the pages, held her breath, and peeked inside. Brigitte, letting you go was the biggest mistake of my life. Matt x. And a mobile number. She snapped the book shut and shoved it back into her bag.

‘Why don’t you go see Ryan?’ she said.

Joan looked up. ‘I’m not quite ready,’ she gulped a deep breath and clutched the costume pearls around her neck, ‘to see my boy like that.’

Brigitte looked away, rolling her eyes. She needed to move. She stood up and stretched her arms above her head, lengthening her spine.

‘Brigitte! I think he’s stopped breathing!’

She spun around, walked over, held a finger under Papa’s nose, and nodded.

Joan screamed and knocked over her chair as she scurried for the buzzer beside the bed. New Idea, and half a low-fat raspberry muffin and its wrapper, fell to the floor.

A nurse came without urgency. He listened to Papa’s chest with a stethoscope, and then rang a doctor. Joan rushed out in hysterics.

The doctor called the death, wrote out a certificate, and asked if Brigitte would like to spend some quiet time with Papa. She nodded, and the doctor left them alone.

Brigitte pulled up a chair and folded her hands in her lap.

After a long silence, she said, ‘Remember that time Ryan and I went fishing with you when we were little, and I stood on the fish hook?’ It goes in the fishy, but it can’t come out. Clever, isn’t it? Papa had said as he’d tried to calm her. They were on the first jetty — the same place she’d sat with Matt that night. But your foot’s not a fishy, Papa said as he cut the line. The hook can’t go back, it has to go forwards. He pushed the hook out through the soft flesh. ‘You carried me screaming to the house, and Nana fixed it with Mercurochrome and a Band-Aid. Back then, I thought everything could be fixed that way.’ She couldn’t remember the pain of it going in, only coming out.

‘I don’t think Aidan wants me anymore, Papa.’ She sighed. ‘What am I going to do?’

She looked at Papa’s face — relaxed now — for the last time, and an unusual calmness enveloped her. How strange it was that, from inside the building, she could hear birds twittering, and so close to the city.

Outside the window, it was raining but sunny. The sunlight seemed to coat the rain and it looked like snow. A social worker came in, offering counselling. Brigitte held up her hand. She wanted to watch the rain a while longer.

***

Ryan had been moved to a ward. He was sitting up in bed, his face almost as white as the pillowcase, his eyes distant. Next to a water jug and box of tissues on the bedside table sat a gift-box arrangement of purple and cream flowers: Love from Mum was written on the card.

The calmness Brigitte had felt in Papa’s room was replaced by anger — irrational, and directed mainly inward for not feeling more empathy towards her brother. He’d been there for her when the roles had been reversed after her ‘breakdown’. Still, she wanted to slap him, yell that he was forty years old — too fucking old for this kind of selfish shit. And he should have been by her side with Papa. She unclenched her fists, smoothed her shirt, sat beside his bed, and asked how he was feeling.

His voice was croaky as he apologised.

She poured him a cup of water. The need for sleep was in the stiffness of her shoulders and in the twitch of an eyelid.

‘Rosie left. Took Georgia,’ Ryan said.

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘Said I was a bad father.’

And did he think this was going to help! ‘You know that’s not true.’

‘It is true.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘She won’t let me see her.’

A nurse came in, took Ryan’s pulse and blood pressure, and wrote something on the chart at the end of his bed.

‘Told them I was unfit, an alcoholic.’ He started crying, and spilt water on the sheets.

Brigitte took the cup from him. ‘Told whom?’

‘She’s applied for an intervention order, Brigi.’

She passed him the box of tissues. ‘This was an accident, right?’

He shrugged. ‘I was pretty pissed.’

‘Oh my God, Ryan!’ Joan stood in the doorway, mascara smudged under her eyes. ‘How could you do this to me?’

Thank God she had a train to catch in an hour.

Brigitte left the hospital once Ryan had fallen asleep. Down on the street, with a ball of pain lodged between her chest and throat, she rang Aidan and told him Papa had died. It was peak hour and city-drivers jammed the parade. She covered an ear so she could hear him as an old W-class tram trundled past on its way to Docklands. He said he’d come down, but she convinced him she was OK.

She started walking towards the old neighbourhood.