Dickie’s cooking eggs at eleven p.m., scrambled with mint from the tank. He pours in Tabasco and a nip of his drink. The kitchen smells vaguely of liquor. Callie’s asleep on the couch. I can see her through the door to the sitting room. The linen slip has ridden up high on her legs. I catch Dickie watching her; he’s too drunk to be subtle.
I play patience on the kitchen table with a furry deck of cards. The pack is so old it’s hard to shuffle. I’m afraid to go to bed. They won’t be alone if I’m around.
He serves himself a plate of salmon-coloured mush from the pan. Scrambled eggs must be what drunk people eat at midnight. He sits himself down at the end of the table, puts a forkful to his mouth. He doesn’t offer me any. He swings another glance at Callie. He can’t help himself.
“I wonder what I’d be like if I’d grown up with you,” I say. I lay out cards, pretend I’m interested in what comes up.
“Maybe you’d enjoy things more,” he says. He pours himself a tumbler of Darwin’s stout. He’s less fussy about his drinks as the night wears on. Callie doesn’t move in her sleep. “You might have learnt how to make her happy,” he says, motioning at Callie.
The way he says it makes my skin feel different, like prickly heat. I grab the table, shove it at him, my fingers tight as teeth around the edge. It slides quick and definite, hits him midchest, flips him from his chair, scrambled eggs and broken glass beside him on the brown linoleum floor.
He gets up, rubs his elbow, tucks in his white silk shirt. He doesn’t seem surprised. He brushes past Callie who’s awake and up in the doorway. The touch of his forearm against her is so slight I can’t tell if it’s real. He doesn’t look back as he walks up the hall.
I bend down and pick up bits of my mother’s plate. Callie gets a sponge from the sink, she doesn’t ask what happened.
“Did you tell Dickie we don’t make love?” I ask her. She soaks up his drink from the floor but misses most of it.
“I said we did once,” she says. “In Mexico. He said most men don’t know how.” She gets up and wrings out the sponge in the basin. I pick up the playing cards. Some of them tear from being wet.
“If he leaves will you go with him?” I ask.
“Did you ask him to go?”
I hate it when she answers with a question. “Not yet,” I say. I look down at the floor, crouched on all fours. Callie looks out the window, but there’s nothing to see. She’s different when she’s drunk, maudlin, like she doesn’t care at all. We’re usually the two who haven’t been drinking, amused at the ones who have. She takes a glass of water into the sitting room and lies back down on the couch. She holds her arms around a cushion and pretends to sleep, her knees and feet drawn up into the slip.
I walk up the hall to Dickie’s room. His long dark shape is in the bed, an open bottle of gin on the table beside him. His clothes are on wire hangers, on a string rigged up along the curtain rod. He’s discarded his pillow, a lump on the floor by my feet. I pick it up, a sewn-up linen square with sand in it. It was my pillow when I was a child. My mother made it. I’ve never seen one like it since. I hug the coarse material against my face. You have to punch a dent for your head before you lie down.
“Callie?” says Dickie with his eyes still closed. I go to the bed, climb quietly over him, sit on his ribs. He doesn’t seem to mind my knees on his arms.
“It’s Day,” I say.
He opens his eyes, his eyebrows are close to his hairline. He doesn’t struggle, he’s too drunk to fight. He doesn’t make sounds, as if he’s half expecting me, as though I’m in a dream he’s had before. I place the pillow over his face, spread the edges so I can’t see his hair.
There’s a familiar dullness to the sound, a boy punching a sack of barley that hangs by a rope from the feedshed rafters, safe in the air from mice. But this bag doesn’t swing, it’s up against his face. The blunt thud of my fist making and remaking its shape. Grains of sand trickle as the stitches spread, down his shoulders and onto the bed, not freely like hourglass sand, but in little cakes and clusters, some in the sweat on my knuckles. A dull pain goes up my arm. It doesn’t feel like he’s my father.
I look up and see my shadow painted on the wall, the bend of my arm distorted, the length of my head, my shoulders as wide as half the room. I can’t see my expression, just the pillow all over his face, the numbness in my forearm, the burn in my bent-up fingers. His clothes on their hangers stand in the window like long, dark relatives. The air has gone from all around us.
“Day,” says Callie from behind me. I try to breathe slowly but my chest is racking. Dickie is still. He looks at me oddly as I uncover him, as if he isn’t hurting. His cheeks are scraped and burn-bruised, a split on his lip, smudges of blood from his nose. But his face has kept its shape, he doesn’t seem daunted by consequences.
Callie’s wrapped in a blanket; she’s brought him a glass of cordial. She puts it on the bedside table. He half laughs then stops. “I’m bleeding,” he says, “I can taste it.” He touches his face, dabs his lip with an index finger. There are patches of sand on his skin.
I pick up his towel from the end of the bed. “Can you dampen it?” he says to Callie. I spit on a corner and hand it to him. My arm is shaking slightly. His face is raked and already swelling, like he’s been dragged on gravel.
“I haven’t been with her,” he says groggily. The word “yet” at the end of the sentence hangs in the silence between us like it’s all we have in common.
I reach for the pillow. There are bloodstains on the stitching. I clutch it, like a child might clutch the remains of a toy, and stand at the foot of the bed. Dickie blots his lip with the towel.
“Callie was raped by her father,” I say. She squints at me dimly. It wasn’t mine to say, but I hold her look as if I’m entitled. She sits down beside the glass on the bedside table, flushed and confused. I wonder if drinking magnifies the worst in her or if it’s closer to who she is.
Dickie turns his head to see her; he seems neither sad nor surprised, only drunk. He doesn’t say he’s sorry. She leans to him as if about to whisper but looks at the cut on his cheek. He closes his eyes, he’s going to sleep.
“Do you want to stay with him?” I ask her.
She shakes her head but it doesn’t mean no. She slumps back into the chair.
I walk down the hall to the kitchen, glad to be out of the room. I follow the runner of carpet like I’d otherwise lose my way. I cup my hands and drink from the tap. Water pours from the faucet and into a spoon in the sink, it splashes onto my clothes. I’m the only one who’s sober.