My father called me The Creeping Jesus. After seeing him with Leonie on the bed above me, I scraped through a space between fallen boards in the corner of the hut. He didn’t see me leave.
I ran back through the scrub to the house, crawled in the sewing room window, but the lining of my mother’s hatbox was empty, her money for “when we are going” was gone. My father had been there, I could tell by the way the lid was left open and the silk of the lining was torn. His house dog watched me from the door.
My legs were being spotted with the bites of mosquitoes and sand fleas. To cover them I took the dust-coloured nankeen trousers thrown on the compost heap by the Chinese cook my father had fired. I washed them in the cement sink in the outside laundry, with a pumice and purple soap, scrubbed them of the colours of cooking. I rinsed and fed them through the wringer, forcing the turn of the handle from a bucket I stood on, like nights I helped her with the dress. The legs flattened into wrinkled tongues.
I put them on to dry, folded down their tops. I wrapped a stirrup leather twice around my middle, rolled up the trousers five times at the bottoms and stowed my stone in a slot in the pocket that was meant for a penny. I liked the way it felt against my thigh.
I heard my father coming home, cantering up the drive in the half-light. I crept into the cover of the powder-lit garden gone wild since my mother’s confinement, closed the ivy-cloaked meat safe door behind me. Mould and sweating leather reminded me of the smell of curing sides of beef that hung from the ceiling hooks; my father used to slaughter there, but not anymore. I was hidden.
My father had put my mother’s clothes in a tea chest in the corner of the meat safe when he stopped letting her outside. Her Christmas socks with red-hatted rabbits holding hands around their tops became plumper as I pulled them tight over my calves. I tugged on her jodhpur boots, tied the too-long laces in a double knot around their backs. I never wore socks, hardly ever shoes. But I couldn’t stop the freezing in my feet.
A wrought-iron bath was stored unplumbed against the wall. Narrow and deep with rusted, lion-clawed feet. I lay down in it, her dress wound up as a pillow, her musty smell, and waited until morning.
I woke to a shadow behind me. I sensed it was my father, but as I turned, the door whined closed. He locked it and was gone. I got up warily, folded the dress in an Arnott’s biscuit tin with my other special things, hid them under the old milk separator. He’d locked the door but not the window; it hadn’t rusted shut. I twisted my head and slid on my back, threaded through the inches piece by piece, scraped the side of my face on the sill. I could get places a boy shouldn’t fit. My father once said I had snake hips; it was all a matter of angles.
I walked stiff-legged past the stables, hushing the cattle dogs. The pony in the paddock was startled by my movement in the half-light, snorting steam and trotting, his tail up over his back. I cornered him near the shed, kept the dogs from chasing.
The front-room lamp beside my father’s leather sleeping chair was the only light the distance carried. I looked over my shoulder, watched the light shrinking as I got further away.
If she slept on her side, she said she had nightmares. Then he kept her in the room, wheeled in the special bed and trussed her into it each night on the wend of her spine, her head facing up. He said he didn’t want doctors or hospitals, he thought he could treat her himself. She hardly seemed to sleep after that; she woke against the restraints when she did. The palette gagged her silent but for the sucking sounds. I watched her through the nailed-up window.
My mother had polio as a child; it curved her spine just slightly. She walked with one hip higher. They said she shouldn’t have children. She only had me. My name is Day.