‘Sea,’ Devin said. Her voice was sullen.
‘What?’
‘Not spider monkey. Sea monkey.’ She didn’t move, as though her correction excused her from the forced obedience of childhood.
Marshall patted his thighs with the palms of his hands. ‘Come here, Devin,’ he said. ‘Come and sit with your Uncle Marshall.’
Devin looked at me and then back at him. I thought for a moment she might refuse or leave the room or stay right where she was. But she moved, slowly, from her own chair and across the room. She folded her dress beneath her and sat down straight as a beanpole on my uncle’s knees.
His pelvis shifted in the chair as though he was adjusting the weight of her upon him, his great arms encircled her and he pulled her backwards against himself as my father had done with me. She resisted with her eyes but her whole body obeyed him and he brushed the hair at the side of her face with his hand and I saw her downcast gaze. His other hand rested on her left thigh. ‘Such a beautiful girl,’ he murmured, but not at me. ‘How did my brother manage to make such a beautiful girl?’
I saw them there. I looked at them and I saw the way his arms were around her. It was dark in that room. Dark and cold though a fire was lit and the room had been too warm before and the flames danced against the walls like they knew some secret. I wanted the sun on my back and a day on the beach. I wanted sunlight and I wanted the sea to envelop me. I sat and looked at my father’s brother with a half-grown woman-child on his lap. The flames moved behind them and the walls of the room flickered and floated and fell in on themselves as she sat there and she didn’t move. Samuel’s voice came in through the door and I wanted to go to him in the kitchen, but I couldn’t. I sat as though it was the only thing left in the world that I knew how to do.
My mother lit three candles and placed them in the centre of the table as we seated ourselves and waited on polished wooden chairs for the food.
‘What’s with all this firelight?’ Samuel said. ‘Anyone know how to switch on the lights?’
‘It looks pretty.’ My mother moved to the sideboard and began to dish the food. ‘Candles are romantic.’
‘You didn’t say that at our house when he forgot to pay the electricity,’ Devin said. ‘You cursed the candles then.’
‘Devin, shush now. Don’t get complicated.’
‘I like the candles,’ Marshall said. ‘I don’t think this house has seen candlelight since before I lived in it.’ He spoke without looking up. He spoke with his eyes on the chicken as it arrived on the plates carried in my mother’s hands, and when he ate his lips moved greedily, shining with grease in the candlelight.
That night I dreamed that I was in a caravan on a hill in a place where there were no other houses or structures of any kind. Everywhere was green and dark and cast in shadow, and there was no moon. A lighted candle rested on the table next to the window inside the caravan, and the flame played in its own reflection against the glass. The rain came down. In that dream it fell soundlessly and created no racket against the roof. I looked out at the surrounding landscape and all around on the ground was water where the earth had flooded, a soft and liquid surface that crept closer and closer to the island that remained, that place where the caravan stood.
Sixteen
My father lies in his bed, his head resting on two feather pillows. The midday sun streams in through the window and catches dust particles that fall onto the empty chair beside a table stacked high with magazines.
‘Come on, Samuel, it’s a beautiful day. Let’s go out. Let’s go for a walk on the beachfront.’
‘I’m sick,’ he says. He keeps his eyes closed.
‘You’re not sick. Jeanette took your temperature this morning. There’s nothing wrong with you.’ I bend towards him, place my palm against his forehead and find that it is soft and cool.
‘It’s a bloody conspiracy. Can’t an old man just lie in bed if he feels like it? Everyone’s always telling me what to do. Get up, time to bath, time for meals, time for this, time for that. They get you up and get you dressed, and then what? I spend the whole day sitting around, waiting for nothing. Waiting for supper and bedtime again. Pah! I might as well just stay in it.’
I perch at the edge of the bed and he pulls the covers up right under his chin. The skin of his hands has a blue tinge now, it is so thin. His eyes are open wide, too alert.
‘That’s why I thought we might go out today. Go for a walk,’ I say.
‘I walked the whole of my bloody life. Why the hell must I walk now?’
‘You had a car for most of your life, you drove. We were never that poor.’
‘You don’t even know the half of it. I was owned by my brother for most of my life. He paid for that car. You don’t even know what went down, Monkey.’
I am quiet. I don’t want to hear this again. Since his dementia diagnosis, he speaks to me in a different way. He’s more cynical and he generalises and puts less thought into what he has to say about others, but if it’s because of the condition or because of how he feels about it, I can no longer tell. Sometimes he speaks without looking at me, with his eyes fixed on the wall or the door or on a picture in his mind, and it is possible that he believes he is talking to my mother or other people from another life. I miss the kindness, the softness he once had for me. I miss the man who was in full control of all his faculties. Now the smell of pee hangs in the room like old washing. Now I get impatient, and I always want to believe that he is play-acting.
‘And your mother,’ he says. ‘Bloody martyr. Sanctimonious about all my faults. My mistakes. Where is she now anyway? Never around when you need her.’
‘Mom died. You know that. I’ve told you about a thousand times. You just won’t FUCKING REMEMBER!’ My weariness turns to anger and I want to hit him. I want to drag him from the bed and beat him back into the man I once adored, and all the time I’m ashamed of raising my voice and I want these walls to crumble and free us from ourselves.
The door opens and a nurse’s head appears. ‘Everything all right in here?’
‘I’m just trying to get him up.’ Guilt invades the clarity of my hopes for the morning. My good intentions turn sour in the light of who I have become so suddenly, in my response to him.
‘Good luck. We’ve been trying all morning.’ She winks at me and I choose not to join the conspiracy. I look at my father and he’s feigning sleep again, his head’s turned to the wall and his eyes are closed.
I smile at the nurse and shake my head. Don’t worry, I say without words, I’ll take care of him, but I don’t know that I really can. She gives me a nod and closes the door.
Then I see the puddle beside the wastepaper bin. Innocent and slightly raised from the floor, contained by the surface tension, it’s impossible to tell how long it has been there. I sigh and stand up, pick up a magazine from the pile, a National Geographic with a feature on whales, and I sit in my father’s chair in the sun.
I read about the Southern Right whales, the gentle rolling giants that come to our shores to breed in August, to this cosy bay with its misty blue mountains all the way across that serve as a backdrop. The whales know where their home is, no matter how the tide turns. There are pictures on the glossy pages. The paper shines from the neon tube above my head, close-ups in crystal green water. A tiny eye penetrates the page, brings home the majestic mammal’s deep sadness at the swallowing whole of the earth by humans.
Once I saw a pure white calf in the bay. We watched it play for hours, Samuel and I. Rolling and spouting and splashing, the sun like glitter on the sheen of its back. ‘It’s an albino,’ Samuel said, as surprised, as excited by the little one as I was. It appalled me then, that here was a misfit calf. Too pale in the same way that I was, as though the blood had all been sucked out of it, both of us left with no real sap. But Samuel had been wrong about that calf. It was no albino. All these years and I never knew it. We lived with those whales each year in the bay, each year they arrived on our fluid oceanic
doorstep. He was wrong. I see it now, on the thick and shiny pages of this magazine that is printed all the way across the seas. There are photographs of our bay in there, famous as it is for attracting the whales, but Samuel didn’t know then what the magazine tells me now. ‘Around 4% of the calves are entirely white, a genetic characteristic that is sex-linked. In time, the calves will darken to the usual black colour of the mature adults.’ I read on, but my mind doesn’t take anything in. I was no baby whale. I was a sea monkey, cast forever in the role of my father’s own cartoon. I look at him, and he is turned away from me. His back rises, covered by the blanket, and I can barely see the top of his unwashed head.
Seventeen
‘Are we rich now?’
Samuel laughed into the night that came predictably and took away the whole world.
‘We’re always rich,’ he said. ‘Rich in spirit, that’s all that’s important.’
My mother kept her mouth closed and her eyes averted from us. I could hear a fruit bat’s radar bouncing off familiar black trees. Marshall was away. I believed then that I could hear the trees breathing. I would never go into the garden; it had sunk into blackness, but I could feel it all around like a rich soup that bubbled with things alive and apart from who I was.
‘No, I mean really rich. Rich with money.’
‘What makes you ask that?’
‘We live in this big house. You and Mom are working now.’
‘Working for someone else never made anybody rich.’
‘Samuel,’ my mother said. There was caution in her soft tone.
He leaned forward in his chair and rested his elbows on his knees with his glass cupped in his hands. ‘This house is Marshall’s house. Not ours. You know that, Monkey.’
I wanted to sit on his lap as I had all my small life, but I was getting too big for that now. I peered up at him from the steps. His dark eyes poured down upon me, drinking me in.
‘Does Marshall have a lot of money?’ I asked.
‘Uncle Marshall to you,’ my mother administered.
‘Marshall has more money than you can imagine,’ Samuel said. ‘Marshall could have a whole other house just like this one built and furnished and give it to us to live in forever and he’d never come close to feeling the pinch.’
‘I married the wrong brother, obviously,’ my mother said. She caught a look from Samuel that I had not seen before, even at the worst of it. His eyes narrowed and there was no warmth there. They lived another life apart from us, my parents. Their real communication happened above our heads and in a space that did not include our understanding.
‘Just as soon as I make enough money, we can go back to the sea house. You’ll see. I’ll do my darndest. I’ll do it for you.’
‘Samuel, don’t lie to her.’ My mother again.
‘It’s true. Give me two years. I’ll get that house back.’
‘Give it up now. What’s done is done and we won’t go back there ever, and you know it.’ Then her voice changed and I knew from the altered tone of it that she was speaking to me, as though my understanding was somehow different from my father’s. ‘Anywhere’s hard at first. You’ll get used to it.’ She looked at her watch, pushed the sleeve of her cardigan up and I saw the freckles deepening with the age of her skin. I never liked the dry smell of her; she was too much like me. ‘Life is just a whole array of decisions and sometimes these count against you, though you’d never guess it when they were made. Where’s your sister? It’s almost time to eat.’
I went upstairs to find Devin, but her room was dark. I pushed the door ajar and there was no sound. ‘Devin?’ I called down the passage and I thought I heard somebody sigh. I went back to her room. The curtains were closed and the light was off. My eyes grew accustomed to the dark and the shapes of the furniture emerged at first as apparitions and then I could see just enough to place where things were. I saw the shape of a mound upon her bed and I went slowly forward, touched it. The fabric was soft, but the mound did not move.
‘Dev? It’s supper time. Are you sick?’
‘I’m not hungry.’ The voice came muffled, hidden and far away beneath the blankets.
‘You have to come downstairs. Mom won’t start without you. You know it.’
‘My stomach’s sore. I can’t eat today.’
Devin wanted to be held, but I was too small to hold her then and she was much too big for me. I stood back and watched, and I only ever held her when it was too late. I was there, in her bedroom, and I never stepped forward at all. I backed out. She hadn’t surfaced to look at me. Not even once. She could always find me in the dark if she wanted to. I went back downstairs.
Samuel and my mother were seated at the table. We occupied only one end of that table at mealtimes, it was so long. It was made of a light creamy wood, polished smooth, with knots and grains that ran up and down and darkened the surface in surprising places. My father was always at the head, Devin and I adjacent on one side and my mother on the other, opposite us. I went to my chair and sat down. ‘Devin won’t come down,’ I said.
My father lifted the white serviette off his lap and threw it onto the table and I saw his eyes. My mother cautioned him with her hand, she touched his arm before he rose.
‘Something wrong with her?’ she asked me.
‘She’s just lying on her bed with the light off.’
‘There was nothing wrong with her earlier,’ Samuel said.
‘Leave her,’ my mother said and folded her hands in her lap. ‘She’ll be down when she gets hungry enough. Now we say grace.’
‘Grace,’ Samuel said and winked at me. My mother’s eyes closed and she uttered the words of thanks that we heard every night at mealtimes. When she was done, she wiped her palms across her serviette and reached for the bowl of peas.
‘Why do you keep on with that when none of us are Christians?’ Samuel said.
My mother spooned out portions of everything for the three of us and handed us our plates. ‘Speak for yourself,’ she said. ‘One of us has to pray for the souls of this family.’
‘Nothing wrong with our souls.’ Samuel pushed a forkful of meat mixed with mashed potato into his mouth. ‘And I know it’s money you’re really praying for. Nothing to do with our salvation.’
‘Well, if it’s money that I want, I know damn well it’s not going to come from you.’ That space again, where I wasn’t supposed to be.
He put his fork down and looked at her. He was chewing. Even after he swallowed, his jaw still moved and pulsed. ‘We have a chance to start again.’
‘Charity. It’s charity,’ my mother said. ‘Marshall feels sorry for us. That’s all. Pity never did anybody any good in the long run. It just makes people dependent.’
‘Marshall feels nothing for anyone; we get no pity from him. I’m a workhorse, that’s all. A chance for a bit of power over his big brother. He’s always wanted that. Fair exchange. I give rocks. And we get a nice house to live in. It works both ways.’
‘I hate it when he’s here,’ I said. ‘I feel like he’s always watching us.’
‘Shht, love. Don’t speak like that. Uncle Marshall has been kind, let’s not speak about him in his own house.’ My mother’s voice changed again as she spoke to me.
‘Where else can we speak about him then? Do we have to walk to the corner shop or something?’
‘Don’t be cheeky, Monkey.’ Samuel leaned forward, abandoned his knife and went about shovelling his food into his mouth, the silver teeth of the fork turned upwards, clinking against his own. ‘Your mother’s right. A bit of respect.’ He lowered his voice, and there was a hardness in his eyes as they narrowed. It was one of the few times I can remember thinking that my father could have a side to him completely foreign and unfamiliar to me. ‘Let’s make the best of a good situation. We’re lucky and that’s all there is to it.’ He leaned forward, sticking the fork towards my face. ‘This is our only chance, Catherine. If we mess this up, we’ve got nowhere to go. Marshall has saved us. E
ither of you girls puts one foot wrong, makes one complaint or carries on whinging, and I’ll sort you out with my hand if I have to. You be polite to Marshall and smile when he speaks to you, understand?’
‘And Devin?’
‘It’s the only way we’ll stay here, if you girls toe the line. And you can tell your sister that too.’
My mother put more potato on her plate. ‘If one of us hadn’t put us in this situation in the first place—’
Samuel’s fist slammed down hard on the table. ‘Dawn, we spoke about this. Not in front of the children!’ I looked at the pattern on the wall, a soft green embossed paper that tried to be something natural, like a forest or a river that flowed. But it was not real.
My mother changed her mind about the mashed potato. She said nothing in return to Samuel’s anger, but she pushed her plate away.
Later when the dishes were cleared, Devin came downstairs to the kitchen. I wiped the remains of onion and skin into a bucket and scraped a pot of leftover potato. Everything about my sister seemed to drag, like gravity had taken hold of her. My mother’s hands were warmed by sudded soap. She scrubbed at the dishes, scraping away whatever was left of the meal.
‘Are you feeling any better?’ she asked Devin. ‘Do you want to eat now? I saved your supper in the warming drawer.’ She shook her hands and foam went flying. She reached out, tried to touch my sister’s head, but Devin ducked out from under her hand.
‘No. Thanks.’ Devin put her glass on the sink and did not rinse it in the grey waiting water, but my mother said nothing. ‘I’m going to bed.’
Eighteen
By the summer of my sister’s thirteenth birthday we’d been in the house for over a year. The trees filtered light through gentle leaves and the air rang with the smell of fresh cut grass, cool mornings and fragrant days pronounced by the kind of light that permeated the suburbs. We’d settled into Marshall’s house and grown comfortable. The pool gave relief on days that were warm. After school Devin and I made shakes in the kitchen from bananas and milk. We’d take our tall glasses out to the poolside and lie on the warm paving stones. When the perspiration dripped from above our ears down our necks, we pushed ourselves upright and slipped into the cool water. But Devin wouldn’t swim if Marshall was in town. When the sleek blackbird car was in the driveway, she preferred to be alone; she made a cave of her room and hung out in the dark. Even on weekdays when he was away at the paper factory in the afternoon with my father, she was cautious, not trusting the air around us.