Slights (3 page)

  "Daddy's coming in now. You children better go and play." But all there was was Lisa Sargeant's brother, who was much older and very handsome with that perfectly flawing scar on his chin, but still only a kid. As we left, he stared after us, and I think I've been on the inside of a look like that. I wanna go with you. Don't leave me here alone. We left him there to be the Daddy.

  I tried never to arrive dirty at Eve's place, because I didn't want a bath, but the time they drained the creek nearby was the chance of a lifetime.

  Every kid who had any control over parents was there. Kids said there was gold at the bottom of the creek, bodies, dead kids, treasures for all.

  There was a car, a push bike, three headless dolls and a bunch of wallets. We scrabbled on the creek bed, searching for clues, until the people chased us off. Then I went to Eve's and had a bath, but it was worth it.

  We always had to leave when Eve's real husband Harry came home. We had to be out that damn door and gone before his car hit the driveway. Once I pretended to leave but hid in the alcove near the front door, behind the plants. It was very, very dark there. When you first walked in from sunlight, you were blind. It was that dark. You had to stand a moment, only just inside, and wait for sight to return. She'd say to you, "Come on, don't dilly dally letting the flies fly in," and made you feel like you were scared.

  I hid there and didn't move, wanting to know what happened to the house when I wasn't there. Was she a robot who stopped moving? I also wanted to see what the husband was like. I wanted to know whose brother he was.
Bang bang
front door,
clunk
of something.

  Noises.

  It was hard to identify what was going on.

  I'm told my great-grandfather was wonderful at picking sounds. He had perfect hearing. It was his party trick; people would try stranger and stranger sounds and he always got them.

  I'm good with faces. Not as good with sounds. So it took me a while, crouched there behind the shiny ferns, smelling dirt and old furniture polish, to realise the thumping and the shouting meant he was beating her up.

  I wished Peter was there to hear it. I wished I could run upstairs and watch it. I crawled out to hear better.

  "You mad bitch. I told you to stop bringing kids here. I'll have you locked up, you mad woman. You've gotta stop it."

  Did he know about all those teenagers carefully mowing the front lawn?

  "I'll call the kids' parents if you do it again. I mean it. Leave the poor little mites alone."

  She cried, but she liked to cry. She cried when she made me suckle at her breast.

  After that, I wasn't scared of Harry.

  Eve never tired of my daily visits. She loved to listen to me natter, so I thought up stories on the walk to her place. If I couldn't think of a good story, I told her about a TV show I'd watched, playing all the parts, being descriptive.

  "Who needs a TV with you around?" she said, but she must have been very bored.

"Yes. I remember her," I said. Peter nodded, as if it was a happy memory we shared. It's hard to connect to that powerlessness. When you're a child, you do as the adults say, unless you're willing to be punished.

  "I didn't talk to her," Peter said. I knew that small rebellion won him a lot. "You're lucky you missed it," he said.

  Lucky I missed my mother's funeral. If that's my luck, I'm in trouble.

  Somehow I knew her card meant the opposite of what it said. We once had a discussion in class, about what a dead body might smell like, because we were reading a series of hard-nosed detective novels, all full of bodies and gore, and wondering about the imagery. She thought dead bodies smelt of frangipani and jasmine.

  The card said, "Call me."

  The police spoke to a lot of people after Mum died, and I had to prove a hundred times that it really was an accident, and one not caused by my imaginary deep-seated hatred of my mother.

  "I didn't hate my mother, I loved my mother."

  "And you didn't deliberately become intoxicated in order to lose your judgement, thus causing the accident?"

  "I wasn't intoxicated. I wasn't even a bit pissy. I only had a couple of drinks."

  "The head waiter at the restaurant where you had your lunch claims you were loud and over-excited."

  "And you find that at odds with my natural character?" I said. Even sitting up in a hospital bed I wasn't scared of them. The cop smiled. I thought he liked me and hoped he'd offer me a lift home when I was well. On the way I'd tell him about Dad and his career, remind him who I was.

  Peter said I was lucky to be Dad's daughter; I got off without a charge. He said if my father hadn't been a cop who died on the job, it would have been manslaughter. He reckoned I was lucky just to lose my licence.

  I think it was because the cop who interviewed me liked me.

  And Mum was a cop's wife, wasn't she? Why didn't they swear to avenge her, if that's why I got off?

  The cops felt sorry for me; they tracked down so many people who said they didn't know me well enough to talk of my feelings for Mum. The cop running it, grey hair, wrinkles, held my hands and stroked me with his thumbs, said, "Isn't there someone who knows you?"

  "Peter," I said. "My brother has to know."

  "We've asked him. He gave us pages about how he felt, nothing about you. What about someone who looks up to you, who might see you as a role model?"

  The only person who'd ever looked up to me was Tim, little Tim who was allowed to be bad when I babysat. And his brother Lee pretended not to care but he did. I'd say he worshipped the air I exhaled.

  "There's a couple of kids I used to babysit. The Walshes."

  Laurie, the young cop, gave me his card and said I should call him if anything came up. I tried to imagine he wanted to see me, that we could drive to a beach cabin which had been in his family for years and listen to the surf. I didn't call him though. Peter put me off, saying how all the cops would know what we did because cops told each other everything.

  My nurse let me walk around looking at the sick people. She didn't know what I was doing and didn't much care. It was the dying I wanted to see. Those in their rooms waiting for one more breath before the last.

It seemed astonishing that I had been so close to death. All I could see were the faces of the people in that cold room. Two weeks I spent in hospital, then I sat up in bed and said, "I want to go home."

  Didn't the papers love that, too?

  As I was recovering, the cut on my head scabbed and was so itchy I couldn't resist picking and scratching it. It made the scar worse, but it was good to be marked with something. People were sympathetic; they asked me how close I'd come to death. It was like pregnancy; everyone thought my body belonged to them. When the scar was no longer bright red, people stopped asking. They didn't like to. People won't let me tell the story; they think it will upset me. But it's like when you see a cripple, or an amputee, or a sufferer of elephantiasis. It's far better to have a good stare and smile at them than to look away as if there was nothing to see. Everyone knows there is a story to tell, but they won't ask me the questions. Where were you going? Why was your mother with you? Why did you drive so fast? Was she in pain? Were you in pain? Does it still hurt? Do you feel guilty? What was it like to almost die?

  There's an answer to every one of those questions.

I put on a pair of wellies which had sat by the back door since Dad died. We never cleared them away.

  I planned to dig up the yard; plant a sea of night blooming jasmine, surround myself again with that saviour scent. I had no idea what I was looking at, weed, vegetable, treasure. Some parts were green, some brown, and there were sprays of bright colour: purple, yellow, red.

  Somewhere out there was a shed which no one had been near in nine years.

  I headed in that direction. The whole area smelt composty and things rustled and slithered at my feet. I was amongst nature and it felt unnatural. I stamped fronds and flowers underfoot, bent to pick up interesting items.

  I found a sock lost long ago from the Hills Hoist near the back door and a plastic, long-hated doll.

  The shed had become a rusty mess. The door had never had a lock. Even though Dad was a cop, he wasn't bothered about security in our home. It was like he thought that his occupation was enough of a deterrent; that somehow thieves would KNOW who lived there and leave us alone.

  The grass had grown up through the hinges and between the door and its frame. I used my bare hands to tug away the weeds from the door and pull it free. Inside smelt of petrol and metal. In the bright sunlight I saw the lawn mower, and Dad's rusty old tools.

  I scythed away the grass first, then mowed it, not with Dad's old mower, which wouldn't start, but with one borrowed from the man next door, who watched me over the fence and waited in his front yard for it when I had finished.

  And so my weekend went. After my hands were scratched and raw, I finally thought to go and buy some gloves. I bought books on gardening, too; about how to turn the soil, that sort of thing, if your soil is good, how to grow your turf. I didn't intend to grow any food. Easier to buy it. I just wanted to see the lawn neat, green. I wanted to be able to sit on it. People wouldn't think I was a weirdo if my garden was neat. I wanted jasmine to scent the house.

  I read in one of the gardening books that manure was very good for soil, so I had a shitload delivered. I'd hardly made a dent in the backyard, but I wanted this stuff to spur me on. It sat there, slowly spreading over the nature strip, the footpath, and spilling onto the road. I quite liked it as a piece of modern sculpture, an ever-changing study symbolising the unknown world. Then I went out and spent an age in the hardware shop. There was even a cafe, so I stopped and had coffee and "a piece of our own spicy, healthy carrot cake". As I walked around the corner to my street, the smell hit me. It really did stink; I had been used to it, but the trip away had cleared my nostrils. No wonder the street people, Rat Traps, I call them, kept meeting in clusters outside their houses. I never did bring that manure in; every now and then I'd have another load dumped on top. When I got back from shopping one Saturday, someone had shovelled all the shit from my nature strip to my front door, a huge mound.

  I just used the back door.

  In the dirt I found a coin holder, a plastic bracelet, a cat collar and a chipped crystal, with the remains of a piece of string.

The counsellor they made me see told me I needed goals. "Things to work towards, to avoid that sense of purposelessness."

  I hadn't had a sense of purposelessness before that.

  "I want to dig up my backyard and plant jasmine," I told her. "That's my goal."

  She had this habit of nodding her head but at the same time pressing her lips together. "That's a good physical goal," she said, "but how about we come up with something a little more spiritual."

  Honestly, the woman was an idiot. Though she did tell me to sort through Mum's things, and I found out a lot of stuff I had forgotten. Piles of papers I'd never been allowed to look at. Mum would have burnt them, if she'd had warning of her death.

  One paper had yellowed a little, making it harder to read. I realised what I had, though. Dad's last words, scribbled down by Dougie Page, his partner. I stared at the scribble for minutes, knowing it should mean something because it gave me a feeling in the pit of my stomach. It was the feeling I got when I thought about Dad and no other time; thinking about Mum didn't produce it.

"Tell her to promise
[pause]
never to move

away from the house. Tell her to make the

kids promise. I love her. Tell Pete to look after

his Mum and sister. Tell Stevie she'll make a

great detective."

  I remembered the pride I felt, hearing those words.

  When I was six, Dad took us into the station for a visit. Peter got all the attention as Dad showed us around. They called him young man and asked him when he'd get his badge. He was allowed to hold the guns and look at some horrible photos which made him sick. They wouldn't have made me sick. I would have loved a look.

  The policemen gave me lollies and said how cute I was. Finally one asked what I wanted to be when I grew up.

  "A mother?" they guessed, "or a movie star?"

  "A detective," I said. They all laughed.

  "You'll have to be a cop first," one man said, thinking even that was impossible. They all laughed, especially Peter. He sat up on someone's desk, with someone's cop hat and someone's cop badge on.

  It didn't matter to me what they said. My Dad said, "Steve can be anything she sets her heart on. Because I say so." That was all I needed.

  Wanting to be a detective – that was because I wanted to be like Dad, not through any inherited instinct. I wasn't born wanting it. I would have been good, though. You need a criminal mind to be a good cop.

Every time Peter rang up I was digging in the garden. He wanted me to stop; he said Dad would have wanted me to stop. He said I was obsessed and should have a break.

  "You need to get out of the house," he said, as if the house was a disease. He begged me to come stay for a week. The time was specified. There was no chance I was to stay for longer than that. I couldn't anyway; no one would collect my mail.

  And I didn't want to go. Here I felt in control, in command. I sprinkled some grass seeds on the manure out the front to see if they'd sprout. My garden was all I needed.