One Whole and Perfect Day (7 page)
If it was, Lonnie didn’t seem to be aware of it. ‘I can hardly remember him,’ he’d always say when Lily asked about their dad.
‘What did he look like?’ she’d ask, and then Lonnie would close his eyes, a pained expression gathering on his face, one hand up to his forehead. Like a medium in a séance, Lily thought.
‘He had a beard. And –’ (here Lonnie’s fingers would twitch against his brow) ‘And a long sort of face. Long cheeks.’
‘Is that
all
? You must remember more than that! You were nearly six! I can remember heaps of things from when I was six! What about your first day at school?’
‘My first day at school?’
‘Yes! Did he take you? Bring you back?’
‘Mum did. At least, I think it was her.’
Lily would give up at this point. It was hopeless asking him anything.
‘I can remember him,’ she’d confided once.
‘But you weren’t even born!’
‘Unborn babies can hear, can’t they? Inside their mother’s tummies? They can hear music, so why not voices? I can remember his voice.’
‘That’s from the telephone,’ Lonnie had told her. ‘When he rings up at Christmas and stuff. That’s what you’re remembering.’
Lily was sure it wasn’t. The voice in her memory was younger.
Now she went into her mother’s room and took the old shoe box from the top shelf of the wardrobe. A shoe box! Proper families kept their photographs in albums, labelled with names and dates and places.
Lily sorted through them; there weren’t many, no more than a handful, really. A small Lonnie in a party hat at someone else’s party. Lily as a baby in her mother’s arms. And then in Nan’s arms. Two-year-old Lily holding hands with Lonnie. Pop and Nan. School photos. No wedding photos. What kind of family had no wedding photos? Right at the bottom, she found the single photograph their mum had kept of their father.
Oliver DeZoto was standing at the end of a jetty, leaning against a sign that read ‘DANGER!’ And ‘NO FISHING ALLOWED’. He was barefoot and bare-chested, wearing tiny ragged shorts. Lonnie had been right about the long cheeks. And the beard. Apart from that, the rest of their father was – scrawny. He had no hair on his chest. Harmless, you’d think, looking at him. Inoffensive.
Pop hadn’t thought so. ‘I knew he was no good the minute I set eyes on him!’ Pop still loved to say.
‘The
only
time you saw him,’ Mum would retort.
‘And that was enough. Eyes too close together, I spotted it at once. Shifty.’
Was that true? wondered Lily. Were people with their eyes set close together shifty, never to be trusted? She put the photo back in the box and returned it to the wardrobe. Then she went into her own room, opened the drawer in her bedside table and took out her copy of last year’s school magazine. The pages fell open of their own accord, to page 53, where there was a photograph of the Drama Society, with Daniel Steadman in the middle of the back row.
Lily lay down on her bed and gazed into Daniel’s face. These last two days, since that moment in the kitchen when she’d said to herself ‘I should fall in love’, she’d found herself haunted by the image of Daniel Steadman. It was the stupidest thing, it was – weird. Lily bent her head over the magazine, studying Daniel’s face, trying to make out if his eyes were set too close together. It was hard to be sure, as there were so many kids in the photograph, and his face was so very tiny – all the same, she was almost certain the position of his eyes was normal. And they were such beautiful eyes. Even in such a poor photograph, you could see –
‘Oh!’ she burst out, suddenly angry with herself. How on earth had she got like this? She hadn’t been serious, she hadn’t actually meant to fall in love.
And yet it had happened, despite her, as if a spell had been cast, some spirit conjured. Lily shivered, remembering that tiny corpse-like shape in the corner of the room, the shape she’d imagined looked like Seely, or his ghost.
She threw the magazine aside and crept out to the kitchen. It was strange how the empty house always made her creep, as if she was an intruder in someone else’s home. Once again the Seely-coloured dishcloth wasn’t where it should be, hanging on its hook; this time it lay bundled in the soap dish on the edge of the sink, curled like a tiny creature fast asleep. Lily prodded at it cautiously, but she felt only cold wet cloth, and the dark red splotch on its side that looked like fresh blood was only a stain of tandoori sauce from the chicken they’d had last night. She took a fresh dishcloth from the drawer, thrust the old one into a plastic bag and took it outside to the bin.
It was a clear still night. How long had she spent going through those photos, searching for her father, and then goggling at Daniel Steadman’s face in the school magazine? Above their small back garden the stars blazed down, the same stars Daniel would see if he paused to look out of the window in the middle of his homework, or wandered out into the garden for a breath of air. The very same stars! The simple thought of it made her feel close to him, as if she could reach out her hand and touch his. ‘Oh,
stop
it!’ fumed Lily, stamping her foot on the grass. ‘Stop thinking about him!’
But what did she do, the very minute she got back to her room? Picked up the magazine, of course, still open at page 53, picked it up and kissed the photograph.
Actually kissed it, before she could stop herself.
She could hardly believe she’d
done
that. ‘I’ve got a crush on Daniel Steadman,’ she whispered miserably, because it was so embarrassing; a
crush
, like some little girl in Year 7. Ugh. The sort of thing that made your toes curl up inside your shoes. She’d wanted to stop feeling middle-aged, and she’d succeeded. She felt young now, only it was the wrong sort of young – like a very little kid who couldn’t talk properly and kept falling off her bicycle.
‘Daniel Steadman doesn’t even know I exist,’ she said out loud. Bracingly.
Of course he didn’t. And yet it seemed to Lily now that when they passed each other in the corridors and playgrounds there was a tension between them. She couldn’t tell whether the tension was desire or disgust. Or was she imagining the whole thing? Of course she was.
The phone shrilled out in the hall and Lily tossed the magazine down on the bedside table and ran to answer. Oh, it was embarrassing, it was shameful – how when the phone rang she always thought it might be him. How could it be?
She picked up the receiver. ‘Hello,’ she said, and listened tensely.
It was only Nan.
‘Lily?’
‘Nan?’
‘Yes, it’s me, lovie. Lily, guess what?’
Lily was silent. How could you ever guess? Nan could ring to tell you her snowdrops were out in the bottom of the garden. Or her family of blue wrens had returned, or that her friend Mrs Petrie (a real friend, Mrs Petrie, not an imaginary one) had bought a pair of ducks. ‘Muscovy, dear.’
‘What’s happened?’ Lily asked her.
‘You’ll never believe what your pop’s gone and done!’
Lily felt a tumbling sensation deep down in her stomach. She’d believe almost anything of Pop. Got himself arrested? she thought, though she didn’t say it aloud to Nan. Perhaps there was some poor old lady up there in the hills, living in a shabby old house on valuable property that Pop had thoughtfully burned down so she could live in a brand new unit with all mod cons.
‘What’s he done?’
‘He’s gone and found his mum’s wedding dress!’
‘Pop had a
mum
?’ It was something Lily could imagine only with the greatest difficulty, because it meant thinking of Pop as a little boy, and that was really hard to do. All she could manage was a shorter Pop, still red-faced and piggy-eyed, the kind of kid who threw stones at girls and other humans who weren’t exactly like him: quiet boys with good manners, for instance, or little old ladies, or people who weren’t Australian . . .
‘Of course he had a mum!’ Nan said indignantly. Then her voice softened. ‘Lily, that dress – it’s so beautiful!’
‘Oh,’ breathed Lily. Back in primary school she and her best friend Annabel had been obsessed with wedding dresses, and weddings, and brides. They’d waited outside churches on Saturday afternoons, spent whole Sundays cutting out brides and bridesmaids from old magazines Annabel’s mum brought home from her job in the doctor’s surgery. They’d designed their own wedding veils and dresses, chosen bridesmaids and flowers for their bridal bouquets. All that was missing was the groom. ‘Oh, I can’t
wait
, can you?’ they’d whispered to each other.
But those strange sweet weekends were now very long ago. Annabel and her family had moved away, and Lily was in Year 10 and she could see through all that kind of stuff: commercialism, that’s all it was.
And yet, as Nan went on describing Pop’s wedding dress, Lily couldn’t stop a tiny sigh escaping from her lips. That was because of her stupid crush on Daniel Steadman, of course; it was turning her soft as butter. Melted butter. Lily shook her black curls briskly to rid her head of all this soppy stuff. Stuff that made you feel as if you weren’t real unless some boy noticed you. Fell in love with you. Happy ever after . . .
‘Lily?’ The little voice crackled in her ear. ‘Lily, are you still there?’
‘Yeah, Nan, I’m here.’
‘So I’m having a party, a little celebration.’
‘A – a
wedding
party?’ Even as she said this, even before Nan’s airy chuckle floated down the line, Lily knew she’d got it wrong.
‘Not unless one of you is planning to get married.’
‘’Course we’re not,’ scoffed Lily, though she felt her cheeks grow hot. Stupid.
‘It’s for your pop’s birthday,’ Nan explained. ‘He’ll be eighty in September, you know.’
Lily hadn’t known. Eighty! The sheer weight of it pressed in on her: half a century, with another thirty years tacked on – almost five times as long as Lily had lived on earth. Perhaps that explained why Pop was such an old bigot; so backward in his opinions.
‘I want you all to come,’ urged Nan. ‘Lonnie especially.’
‘
Lonnie
?’ Sometimes Lily wondered if Nan was actually a citizen of planet Earth. ‘Nan, you know Pop’s not speaking to Lonnie. You know he’s written him off. He said so. He said – ’ Lily deepened her voice so it sounded a little like Pop’s. ‘He’s no grandson of mine!’
‘He didn’t mean it, dear.’
‘Yes, he did! What about that axe?’
There was a small pained silence on the line before Nan spoke again. ‘Pure bluff, dear.’
‘Bluff?’
‘You know your pop’s all talk.’
‘Talk? ls that what it is?’
Nan sighed. ‘I’ll get rid of that axe, if it bothers you.’
‘It bothers me if Pop’s got hold of it.’
Nan’s voice went stern again. ‘Your grandpa’s not a maniac, Lily.’
Now Lily was silent, picturing her grandfather: his short square body, his red face and little piggy black eyes. The way he could be really, really nice, and then, quite suddenly, go troppo. She thought it quite possible he was some kind of maniac.
‘Lily?’
‘Yes?’
‘Could you do something for me? Could you go round to that place where Lonnie lives and tell him about the party? So I can be sure he gets the message? I can never seem to catch him on the telephone. And we really want him to come to the celebration.’
Celebration! More like a massacre if Pop and Lonnie got together. And who was ‘we’? Not Nan and Pop, for sure. More like Nan and Sef. Sef. How come Nan had chosen such a weird name for her imaginary companion?
‘Could you?’ Nan persisted.
‘Oh, all right,’ said Lily.
‘Oh Lily, thank you! You’re a treasure, dear.’
For some reason this compliment made Lily feel uncomfortable. Every bad thought she’d had about her family in the last few months surfaced like wicked sharks’ fins in a tranquil sea. ‘No, I’m not,’ she said guiltily. ‘I’m not a treasure.’
‘Don’t be silly, dear, of course you are. Now is Marigold at home?’
‘She’s still at work.’
‘At work?’ Nan’s voice became incredulous. ‘But it’s
dark
outside!’
Lily pictured her grandmother standing by the phone in her kitchen, turning her small face to look out the window at the garden and the thick black winter night, and the image made her voice go tender. ‘It’s winter now, Nan. Gets dark early, and Mum doesn’t finish till six, or later.’
‘That’s shocking, dear.’
What could you say to that? Nan came from a different world. ‘Mum likes her work, Nan. Really.’
‘You think I’m a silly old softie, don’t you?’ said Nan.
‘No, no, of course I don’t,’ said Lily, startled, as she always was, when Nan said something sharp and even cluey.
‘Bit of a loony, eh?’
‘No!’
‘Oh, you
do.
But I don’t mind. Now tell me, what are the two of you having for dinner?’
‘Dunno.’ Lily ran a hand through her hair. ‘I haven’t really thought about it yet.’
‘That’s the worst part, isn’t it? Thinking of what to cook? Now here’s an idea for you, Lily.’
‘What?’
That airy, clued-up chuckle came again. Then Nan said, ‘Why don’t you get Meals on Wheels?’
Lily and her mum were watching a film on television. Or rather, they appeared to be watching: sitting side by side on the sofa, their eyes fixed on the screen. But if anyone had asked them who that woman in the big hat was, or what the man riffling through the desk drawers was searching for, they wouldn’t have been able to reply.
Their minds were elsewhere. Lily was thinking dreamily of Daniel Steadman, and then angrily realising how humiliating it was to be dreaming of him. It was a week now since that strange morning in the kitchen, only a week, and yet Lily felt she was becoming a whole different person, and one she really didn’t want to be. Yesterday at school she’d walked past the senior common room five whole times in the hope that she’d catch a glimpse of him. Four times the door had been closed. On the fifth it was open, but Daniel had been standing at the window with his back to her; she hadn’t been able to see his face, and he hadn’t even known she was there.
Lily squirmed on the sofa. She was furious with herself. Fancy spending a whole lunchtime walking past the senior common room! It was pathetic! She’d have been better off in the library doing her homework or writing out her grocery list, or sneaking out to the hardware store to buy that washer for the leaky kitchen tap.
