The next morning, I woke to the sound of smashing pavers. Hollie was gone. She must have slipped out of the window without waking me. Sitting up in bed, I looked outside to the courtyard and there was Randy, pigeon-chested, in bright red stubbies, wielding a sledge-hammer.
‘What are you doing?’ I yelled above the din but he didn’t hear me, so I chucked on an old T-shirt and I went outside. Mum sauntered across the courtyard, wearing a new lemon-silk dressing gown. She pashed Randy and handed him a mug of tea.
‘What’s going on?’ I said to her. Randy continued his demolition frenzy, shattered bits of paver flying into the air and landing with a splash in the fishpond.
‘Andy’s building me an outdoor power shower.’ She beamed across at him.
‘What the hell for?’ I stood, hands on hips.
‘So he can scrub off all the bacteria germs before coming into the house,’ she said as if it were the most logical thing on earth. ‘It’s my Christmas present.’ She swung her hips around to Randy. ‘Isn’t it, possum?’
Randy stopped and turned around. ‘What’s that?’
‘My Christmas present.’
‘That’s right.’ He grinned back at Mum, wiping the sweat from his bald patch with a crumpled hankie.
‘Where’re you putting it?’ I fired at Randy, eyeing the chalk boundary which had been marked up in a lopsided square beneath my bedroom window.
He flashed Mum a quick, nervy look. ‘Well, Rosie,’ he started but Mum cut him off.
‘Andy’s checked the pipes and there’s really only one place for it. That is, without having to install a whole new plumbing system.’
‘This way we can run the shower off the existing connection,’ Randy added, ‘and, so long as we don’t use more than one shower at one time, there should be enough water pressure to activate the turbo-jets.’
‘Great. Just fucking great.’ I went inside, grabbed my car keys and pulled on my sneakers. I tore through the house and out the front door. Mum came flapping across the lawn, but I was already reversing down the drive. She tugged at the passenger door. It flung open and she managed to get her arse inside the car while it was still moving.
‘Stop,’ she said. ‘There’s something I want to tell you.’
I braked and gazed out the window, the engine idling, the sun crashing in through the windscreen, waiting for the inevitable lecture. But when I looked over at Mum, she was smiling like a loon.
‘What?’ I said.
She took a deep breath. ‘Randy, I mean, Andy is moving in.’
I clenched the steering wheel. ‘When?’
‘Before Christmas.’
I stared straight ahead as Mum leaned across and hugged me, yelling in my ear, ‘I’m so happy!’ She pecked me on the cheek and leapt out of the car.
I swung backwards out onto the road and burnt rubber down the street, waking as many lazy burbanites as possible.
Lunchtime, I was meeting up with Dad. The thought of it filled me with dread. It only happened once a year at Christmas. We’d go the same coffee shop at the top end of the Queen Street Mall where he’d buy me a cappuccino (but not lunch) and give me a Christmas card with a crisp five-dollar note inside, enough to cover half the cost of parking in town. As I drove into town along the river, I planned my usual list of pleasant conversation starters: ‘So, Dad, how’re things in the life insurance business?’ and ‘Been playing any tennis lately?’ and ‘They reckon it’ll be the hottest Christmas on record.’ Work, sport and the weather; all safe territory outside of which it was best not to stray. But he always had to bring up Mum. And then came the tears – bleary, weeping tears; three-parts booze, one-part tear.
Dad was sitting at our usual outside table, overlooking the mall but close to the bar.
‘Hi, Dad.’ I was twenty minutes late.
He stood up as if I were royalty or something and I waved at him to sit down. We didn’t hug or kiss. I sat opposite him and ordered a cappuccino from the waiter. Dad looked at me blankly for a long time as if trying to figure out how he knew the daggily-dressed redhead sitting across from him.
‘Hello, daughter,’ he said, smiling with relief as if he’d just remembered.
‘Sorry I’m late.’
‘That’s alright.’ He gulped at his beer, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, blinked. ‘You made it in the end.’
‘Yeah. Traffic wasn’t too bad considering it’s Christmas.’
‘Yes. That’s right. Christmas.’ He grimaced and drank more beer as if to wash away the thought of it. I never bothered to ask how he spent Christmas. I imagined he spent it alone in front of the telly drinking tinnies and watching his old cricket videos until he passed out blotto in the chair. He probably didn’t even eat.
My cappuccino arrived. I ate the chocolate off the top and pushed it aside to cool. Dad ordered himself another beer. On my way up the mall, I’d bought him a pair of Homer Simpson socks, which I thrust, still in the sock-shop bag, across the table.
‘Happy Christmas,’ I said.
Dad whipped the ever-predictable envelope out of his breast pocket. ‘Merry Christmas, to my one and only daughter.’ On occasions like these he spoke as he might write in a greeting card, stilted and formal. As I tore open the envelope, pretending that I didn’t already know what was inside, he pulled the Homer socks out of the bag.
‘Socks,’ he said. ‘I need socks.’
‘Do you know who he is?’ I said, pointing at Homer’s giant, yellow face.
‘Yeah,’ he said, shaking his head.
‘You don’t, do you? He’s a cartoon character that likes to drink a lot of beer.’
‘Oh. Right. I get it.’ He put the socks back in the bag. I should have got him sports ones instead.
I pulled out my card, which was from the same twenty-pack of identical Christmas cards Dad had been giving me for the past twelve years – an obese surfboarding Santa being towed along the crest of a wave by a fleet of flying reindeers with pink-zinced noses, their antlers poking through red and gold life-saver caps. I opened it and, miracle of miracles, a twenty-dollar note fluttered out. For Dad, twenty was a decent session at the pub.
‘I wanted to get your mother a little something this year but I didn’t know what to get her. So, I thought you could pick her out something nice from the twenty and keep the rest for yourself.’ He was gripping his beer so hard I thought the glass would shatter in his hand, and his eyes had misted over. I knew what was coming next.
‘Dad,’ I said, under my breath, ‘do you have to do this, again? The past is the past – you can’t make up for it, it’s too late.’ He sculled his beer in one go and signalled to the waiter for another. I sipped at my coffee and tried to change the subject.
‘Scott’s back,’ I said. After what Scott’d done to me the day before, I couldn’t believe I was bringing him up, but then, it wasn’t easy making light conversation with Dad.
‘Who?
‘Scott Greenwood. He’s back from overseas.’
‘Oh. That’s good.’ On the few occasions Scott had met Dad, the two of them had got on well, bonding over cricket or the footy, depending on the season.
‘What about uni?’ he asked, staring gloomily into the distance.
‘Dad, I quit, remember?’ I paused. ‘Anyway, I’m thinking about going travelling.’
He grunted. ‘What a load of bunkum.’
For a few long minutes we said nothing as Dad drifted back into his pickled past and drank his beer. I stared down at the bobbing heads of the shoppers, jostling up and down the mall; saggy-titted women, tired and flustered, overloaded with carry bags, who’d rather drop dead of exhaustion than return home without that final all-important item crossed off their Christmas list.
‘You can’t leave your mother alone.’ It was like that with Dad. He’d stew on something for ages before short-circuiting back to an earlier conversation, like a fuse box with water damage. ‘Forget this travelling palaver. Your mother needs you.’ It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him about Randy but I held back, wary of his reaction. ‘Listen to me, daughter.’ Suddenly forceful, his words were lucid and direct, a man emerging from the haze. ‘I know your mother better than anyone else.’
‘But, Dad, I can’t stay in Brisbane my whole life. It’s not my fault she married an alcoholic.’
‘She still blames me?’ Tears were forming in tiny weirs at the bottom of his eyeballs.
‘She doesn’t really talk about it,’ I lied. There wasn’t a day she didn’t curse Dad for ruining the best years of her life.
‘Do you think if I quit the grog she might have me back?’ It was the same question every year and I was sick to death of it. I decided to spill the beans.
‘Unlikely. She’s got a new boyfriend. He’s working on a cure for cancer and he’s building her an outdoor power shower and he’s got a great sense of humour and he treats Mum like gold… ’ On and on I went, pumping Randy up to be some kind of superhero, while Dad’s face contorted in a painful wince. I left out the bit about him being a bald, artificially enhanced geek who drives a rust-bucket, and finished with the clincher.
‘… and he’s moving in.’
Dad couldn’t speak. His face was screwed up tight as a walnut. ‘But she’s mine,’ he finally managed through clenched teeth. ‘She’s my woman.’
‘She’s not your woman. She divorced you, remember?’
‘But I still love her.’ He drained his beer. ‘I’ve always loved her.’
‘C’mon, Dad. Don’t torture yourself.’
He pulled out a hundred-dollar bill from his wallet. ‘Here. Get her something special. Jewellery. Gold jewellery.’ I stared at the note lying on the table, slated that he’d rummaged a hundred for Mum when all I ever got were scummy fivers.
‘She won’t want it, Dad,’ I said, huffily. ‘Not from you.’
‘Well, tell her it’s from you.’ He got up and shambled towards the toilets on thick, stocky legs. Each year his shoulders got a bit more stooped, his shorts a bit saggier in the bum.
‘Hey, I gotta go,’ I called out to him.
He waved backwards, not turning around. I slipped the hundred in the card, next to the twenty, and headed down to the mall, relieved that it was over for another year.
Blondie’s on the radio. I’m in my biggest, puffiest skirt and Dad’s spinning me around and around. The lounge room’s all blurry and I can’t tell which way’s up or down. The baked beans we had for dinner are all tumbly-jumbly in my tummy like I might vomit. I hope I don’t vomit. Not on my nice pink skirt. Sooner or later, he’ll let go. I’ll fly through the air and crash land into Mum’s new apricot leather lounge suite. She’d be so angry if she knew.
He lets go.
I’m flying through the air but the couch is out of range. I land with a thud on the floor but it doesn’t hurt that much; just a bit of carpet burn on my knees. Dad rushes over to see if I’m alright.
‘Must have lost my grip,’ he says.
His face is huge and red and spinning. I struggle to sit up.
‘Old noggin OK?’ He rubs my head with his big, rough hand. I would have cried when I was younger but I’m five now. Besides, I don’t want to stop the game. I pick myself up and hold my hands out for more.
‘Give it a rest for a while, hey? I’m all out of puff.’ He lies down on Mum’s couch with his shoes up on the armrests, which he’s not meant to do, and cracks open another bottle of beer. Watching Dad drink is boring so I start spinning around on my own. My skirt billows out, making a lovely cool breeze between my legs. Over and over, I keep spinning and crashing, spinning and crashing, until the baked beans come up in an orange puddle on the carpet. Dad’s fiddling with the radio so he doesn’t even notice when I hide the vomit under one of Mum’s satiny cushions and sit on top.
‘That’s more like it,’ he says, looking over at me all prim on the cushion. ‘Since you’re being such a good girl, let’s go out for an ice-cream when I’ve finished this stubbie.’
Driving in the car, Dad lets me sit in the front as a special treat so long as I promise not to tell Mum. He turns the radio up really loud and we sing along to our favourite song about talking Japanese. I make my eyes go all slanty and Dad bursts out laughing. When the song finishes, he says, ‘Bloody funny-looking bastards, those nips,’ and we laugh at that, too.
We go to the drive-through bottle shop where Dad buys a carton of beer and a can of lemonade for me. Halfway home, I remind him about the ice-cream and we turn around and drive back to the corner shop where they sell Jelly-Tips. Dad gives me the money and I go inside. When I come out he is drinking a beer from the carton, even though the man at the bottle shop said they weren’t cold. We sit in the car while I eat my Jelly-Tip; picking the chocolate shell off first, then sucking the jelly, then making the vanilla ice-cream last for as long as possible. Dad drinks another beer and tosses the empty can out the window.
‘We’d better get back before Mum gets home,’ he says.
‘OK,’ I say, wishing I could have another Jelly-Tip.
Dad pulls out from the kerb.
There’s a screech-bang-crunch like in a Roadrunner cartoon.
I go flying through the air.
I hear the crack of my head against the windscreen.
Dad’s screaming out my name. And then, everything goes black.
When I wake up, I’m in hospital and Mum’s sitting beside me. She tells me how I nearly went to heaven. Every day she brings me presents: books and hair-clips and Freddo Frogs and felt-pens and puzzles and, one day, a pair of pink hippopotamus slippers. But Dad never comes. Maybe he’s in a hospital for grown-ups. I ask Mum where he is but her mouth goes all twisted like a caterpillar and she says a bad word – bastard – under her breath. When I get home, Dad’s not there either. His plastic Buddha’s missing off the telly and his cricket movies from the bottom shelf of the bookcase have all gone, too.