Steal My Sunshine (4 page)

 

Nobody spoke. Mum clasped both hands over her mouth and turned towards Sam.

‘What's going on?' My voice bounced down the hallway, which seemed longer than usual. My family were little dots at one end. I got a feeling like car-sickness and stared hard at them the way you make yourself look at the horizon.

‘It's all right, Han,' Dad said, and Mum's hands flew off her mouth, releasing everything she'd been trapping in there.

‘All right? It's not all right. It's anything but all right,
Hannah
.' At first she said my name so viciously I thought she'd packed my bags over the Essie thing, but then I saw it was Dad she was furious with.

‘Don't start again, Sara. Let's keep this civil for the kids.'

‘Keep what civil?' I said. ‘Tell me.' As Dad walked towards me I backed away, because I already knew the answer and all I wanted was to go out the way I came and slam the door on it. Mum put her hands back over her mouth. Sam was half-seated on the edge of our dining table and he had his arm around her. I felt like I'd been away for more than just a few hours.

‘Is this a joke?' I said. I don't know why.

‘A joke?' Sam's voice was loaded with scorn. ‘Are you that much of an idiot?'

‘Calm down, everyone,' Dad said. He stretched his arm out to me but I ducked away and slid across the wall, deeper into the house.

‘I don't believe this.'

‘It's just got too difficult,' said Dad. ‘We can't talk about it now with everyone feeling so raw but we will, okay, guys? I'm sorry.'

I'd never seen Dad look so decisive. I shrugged at him, my whole face quivering with the strain of not crying. I refused to blink, my tears clinging to my lashes.

We'd been hanging by a thread. Christmas had been the big test, and I'd been the little kid still hoping for a bit of magic.

Dad left us standing there and went into their bedroom. I didn't move. Time had to stop for a moment, someone had to press pause so Dad wouldn't walk out the front door. It crossed my mind to tell a lie. I could say I was ill or in trouble, something that would get their attention. Girls in my class had been to therapy for eating disorders or anxiety and they didn't seem so different to me. Sometimes they looked happier than I felt – how were you supposed to tell if your level of sadness and worry was more or less than someone else's anyway? Maybe I was really screwed up. Maybe if I told Dad I needed him, he'd stay.

I was only half-aware of Mum and Sam leaving to go into the back room. Mum's voice was in a new register, one I could hardly make out, saying desperate things to Sam as he sighed deeply in between.

‘He would have left without telling us if we hadn't come back early,' she said.

‘He's a moron. It'll be okay, Mum.'

A delicate thread seemed to stretch between waking up this morning, arriving at Essie's, walking to the beach and coming home to this. It was spider silk, invisible and strong. It could have been the beginnings of a web or the finished shape, but I didn't know which bit I was caught up in.

Scribble, our cat, slunk along one side of the hallway towards them. The air con wasn't on, as if none of us could begin to change a single thing about what was happening.

I heard drawers opening and shutting, a click, a zip and then Dad's footsteps. He stood near me, holding the worn leather case containing all his drawing equipment that he took to work every day.

‘Are you taking your maps too?' I said in a small voice. They were in mismatched wooden frames hung all down the hallway. Old maps that Dad had been collecting since he was my age.

‘Not today,' he said.

‘What about the little globe?'

He nodded guiltily. It wasn't just clothes he was leaving with, it was the whole Dad that was going. We'd found that globe on holiday years ago. It was tiny with a wooden base that had a compass set in it. He was only leaving his giant atlases because he couldn't carry them in one trip. They were everything to him. But what was I, what were we? How could something that I'd worried about since forever be taking my breath away now that it was finally happening?

Nothing had ever felt as real as this moment. As he came forward to hold me, I noticed his ageing trainers and the grey jeans that Sam and I were always ribbing him about. But was he more unshaven than usual and did he smell the same? Were there more lines on his face? What else had I missed? He hadn't even gone yet but already I felt my grip on him was changing.

I pulled away and sensed Mum and Sam behind me.

‘Did you know?' said Mum. It took Dad's warning look to tell me that the question was meant for me.

‘Did I know what?' I said.

‘That he was leaving? Well, go on, did you?'

‘Sara, just stop this. Look at her, for god's sake. Of course she didn't know I was going.'

‘Don't speak to Mum like that!' yelled Sam.

Dad ignored him and tried again to put his arm around me. ‘Han, your mum and I –'

‘Don't you dare blame this on me,' Mum said. ‘
You're
leaving.' She looked at me and pointed at Dad with force. ‘He's the one walking out, you remember that.'

I just nodded. I'd have done anything to change the look in her eyes. I didn't dare ask Dad where he was going; nothing I said was going to make a difference. I pressed my back into the wall and looked down.

Mum sobbed. ‘See, you'll never take them from me.'

Dad sighed. ‘I'd never try.'

I kept staring at my feet. There was still sand between my toes from St Kilda beach, a million miles away. A fat teardrop hit the floorboards.

It wasn't like Mum to show weakness. She'd been the together, older mum at the school gates, the one who stood apart because she didn't have time for gossip or drama. I looked at her, splitting out of her own skin, changing shape somehow – hot and tired, desperate, angry.

‘Just go, Dad,' said Sam. Mum collapsed into him and wept in short bursts, wringing the front of his t-shirt. I wanted to be close to her too. I couldn't even look at Dad but I heard him pick up his things and open the front door.

When it slammed shut Mum cried out as if her fingers had been crushed in it. She staggered against Sam to the back room and I drifted after them, a ghost. Then it was like slow motion as Sam strode to the Christmas tree, picked it up and hurled the entire thing against the glass sliding doors. Much too late, I ran over to grab his arm but he shrugged me off easily.

‘Why did you have to do that?' I raged.

He marched over and kicked the fridge, making everything rattle inside. Then he grabbed the remote control for the air con and angrily pressed the button. He wasn't going to answer me. I watched him open the fridge and take out one of Dad's beers.

There couldn't be a single Christmas ornament that wasn't shattered or squashed: the frosted pears, the two silver sequined birds with white feathers, the red wooden hearts and the little brown paper boxes tied with ribbon. I picked up a piece of broken glass with a frosted snowflake on it and went to my room.

It was dim and still inside, a shrine to my old life before Essie and Dad tipped it upside down. Door closed, ceiling fan on, I lay on my bed. When I licked my lips I could taste the sea. I sat up and reached into my bag for my phone to call Chloe but halfway through dialling I felt like I was just going through the motions – did I really want to speak to her now? I couldn't risk hearing her say I still had it easier than everyone else on the planet. I needed to sit with this. It was mine, for now.

I tucked the phone under my pillow and flipped onto my front. Mum was still crying out there. The smiling faces in the photos stuck on the wall just above my headboard made me feel like a joke. Sam and I in our paddling pool, aged five and three. That was in our old house, just around the corner from Essie's. In the photo we're smiling, but if you looked at our hands you'd see we were fighting over a plastic watering can.

There was one of Chloe and me outside her Dad's bar last year. She'd just finished a shift. I was meant to be staying at her place but she'd had to work at the last minute and I'd spent the whole night sitting outside, trying to blend into the background and letting my thoughts ride out on the inky waves.

Then Mum and Dad at my eighth birthday party, which was fancy dress: Mum as a Viking with thick blonde plaits, and Mercator – Dad's version of a superhero. Mercator was the guy who invented a way to project the globe onto a flat piece of paper. Dad had tried to explain it to me hundreds of times but it had never sunk in. All I could see was the fact that Greenland looked twice the size of Australia when it's actually three times smaller. Dad said some things on a map had to be distorted to make the whole thing work out, whatever that meant.

I sunk my face into the pillow and sobbed until I was breathless.

An hour had passed. One single hour. Was this how life was going to feel from now on? I wanted to get out of my room but something told me not to. Not something: Sam. He was out there, making his presence felt in a way that made it hard to breathe. Dad never stood a chance when Mum and Sam were teamed up. I didn't know when Sam and I had become enemies. Maybe we always had been. My memories of us getting along were mostly made out of my parents' shared memories at Sunday lunches.

Sam had been in my room only the week before, foraging for his massive DJ headphones even though I kept telling him I hadn't seen them. It was after dinner and we'd left Mum and Dad arguing at the table – one of those arguments that start out about something harmless, like an empty carton in the fridge, but germinate into ‘his tone' or ‘her look' or whatever stupid things made them kick off.

‘He needs to watch it,' Sam had said.

‘What for?'

‘I just reckon Mum's had it.'

‘Has she said something?'

‘No. Nothing you need to know about anyway.'

I remembered I'd planned to talk to Dad about it, to try to get him to do something nice for Mum. Maybe I'd have brought it up at the movies.

I realised Dad hadn't even mentioned that when he left. He'd left home on our movie night. That alone seemed to distort my whole world.

I pulled down the photo of Mum and Dad and the one of Sam and me. The only other one was of Essie when she was much younger than Mum – her hair in the same style as it is now but jet black, no creases in her face, full cheeks and lips. She was posing with one arm behind her head and the other on her hip, her legs long and lean in a miniskirt. I had no idea who'd taken the photo – Mum's dad hadn't been on the scene since before I was born and no one ever talked about him. Essie had written on the back:
Me in 1971. Happy days.
The Essie from the photo looked like she was really living.

The ring was still tight. I put my little finger in my mouth and used my teeth until it started to give way. It came off and I just held it on my tongue for a while.

Maybe, I thought, I could block out the rest of the world and let two little things seem bigger than they really were: what Evan had said to me today, and Essie's secret.

 

 

 

Someone was knocking on the door and there was a buzzing in my head. The light in the room was different. I'd fallen asleep and my phone was vibrating under the pillow.

‘What?' I said, heavy and disoriented. Dry throat, bitter tongue. I hoped it was Dad but Sam coiled his way in and closed the door with his back. He was holding the cat. I pulled myself up to sit against the headboard and reached under my pillow. Along with my phone I pulled out something else – Dad's old compass. What was that doing there? I hid it again quickly.

There was a missed call from Essie and one from a new number. I felt my heart decide that it was Evan's.

Sam sat down on my bed, rubbing Scribble under the chin. I fidgeted. Me and cats didn't get along. I couldn't stand Scribble. That was a big deal for some people – a few of the girls at school would actually cry if I ever told them but all I had to go on was a cat that saw me as nothing more than a human scratching post. We kept out of each other's way. Of course, he loved my brother.

‘You okay?' said Sam. He sounded sombre and patronising, but I didn't want a fight. I remembered him wrecking our Christmas tree.

‘Not really.'

The weight of him on my bed made me bristle. Why did he have to fill every space he was in? He'd made Dad feel small these last two years, and had loved it.

‘So, you really didn't know,' he said.

‘That Dad was leaving? I had no idea, you idiot. Why would you even think that? And where's he gone?'

‘I don't know and I don't care. Nor should you. We've got to look after Mum. She's taken it really bad, Han.'

My phone chimed a voicemail message, which made me tense up even more. ‘I can see that, thanks.'

‘Don't be immature.'

‘Me? You're the one who ran off today instead of helping me with Essie.' That was the wrong thing to mention.

‘Help you what? You took one look at the old bat and started organising her bloody funeral.'

‘Shut up. She did look dead. Really dead – you didn't see her.'

‘No, no one but you did.' He smirked. I wanted to thump him so badly. ‘Anyway I didn't run off – I went to get Mum, which was the right thing to do.'

He could smell my weakness. I wished I could have faith in the things I'd said and done.

Sam let go of the cat and I watched as Scribble curled up on the end of my bed. Well,
that
was new.

‘And about that,' he said, ‘you've got to start seeing Essie for what she really is. She's evil, Hannah. You can't trust her. She's messed up.'

‘She is not! She told me everything – there was an explanation for what happened this morning, if you'd bothered to stick around.'

‘That's bull. She's always having us on about something. What about when she said the cleaning woman was stealing things?'

‘Maybe she was!'

‘Hannah, seriously. Do you even remember the time she made Mum lose her job?'

I didn't, and I didn't think Sam did either. We were little kids then. We only knew about it because Mum and Dad always talked about things Essie had done as if they'd happened yesterday.

But he had the upper hand. I couldn't risk telling him what Essie had told me this morning while my head felt so patchy.

‘You're wrong about her,' I said. ‘She's Mum's mum and she's an old lady. She just gets carried away sometimes.'

‘Old women aren't a breed any more than teenagers are, otherwise you'd be the same as someone like Chloe.' He got up. I knew what he meant by that without drawing any more out of him. He was always calling Chloe a scrag to wind me up. ‘I'm going to check on Mum.'

It was getting dark. My ceiling fan was just moving hot air around and around. You couldn't fight heat like this and the only consolation was the knowledge that it couldn't last. There'd be a storm, the heat would dissipate and everyone would be able to breathe again soon.

I tried to imagine the same thing happening with Dad. Walking back through the front door, putting his bags down, saying it had been a mistake. I pictured myself screaming at him – I could feel the pain of it in the back of my throat – letting him know how brutal it had felt, hugging him and crying and begging him never to do it again.

The longer I stayed in my room, the more difficult it felt to go and join Mum and Sam. Dad was my back-up, my friendly face. I put my head out of the window and looked up the narrow strip that opened out into the broad night sky. It was charcoal with a threat of orange – the promise of a storm. But as I twisted round towards the back of our house, I could see a single star. Was it north or south? Dad would know. He'd be able to tell me which direction the storm was coming from too.

My voicemail alert went off again, muffled under my pillow, and I suddenly remembered hearing it earlier. The top of my head scraped against the window frame as I hurried to check who it was. I dialled and could only hear the blood pumping in my ears. Evan. And even though I listened hard to every word he said, they barely made sense; some were lost, others I had to string together again when the message had ended.

 

When I smiled I could feel where the tears had dried up on my face. But what now? What if I called him and Chloe was there? What if I'd got the message wrong or had misunderstood some vital part of it? I listened to it again. And again. What if I sounded like an idiot on the phone? What if I went on a date with him and it was everything I'd imagined hundreds of times?

I couldn't help giggling. There was no way I could call him in this state. But knowing the message was there filled up the hollow space in my heart. I put the phone back under my pillow and stared at the photo of Essie. Somehow I knew what she'd have done if she were me. She wouldn't hesitate. She wouldn't have a single doubt. I wanted to know young Essie – someone that complex and strong had to have really lived. I needed to know her secrets, to find out how to be fearless like she was.

When I closed my eyes I saw Dad's map of the route from our house to the bay. I breathed deeply, slowly, and traced my way back.

 

The next thing I knew, there was a thin strip of sunlight across my feet and a breeze skimming my legs. Warmth, breeze, pillow, head: I came slowly out of sleep, collecting my surroundings one by one. Then the front door slammed and I was instantly awake, stumbling across my room to see if it was Dad. Sam marched past without a glance my way, carrying a plastic bag crammed with food.

‘You're awake then.' Mum's voice startled me. She was standing in the doorway of her room. She pulled her dressing-gown cord tight around her waist.

‘Yeah.' I rubbed the sleep from my face. Mum's eyes looked small and she had bunched-up tissues in her hand.

‘Sam, is that you?' she called out.

‘Just making tea.'

I looked into Sam's room. His bed was made and the clock on his DVD player read 8.25 am. I'd usually have left for school by now. Dad would have still been nagging Sam to get up as I walked out.

Sam came striding down the hallway, pulled his door shut and went back to the kitchen. ‘I'm doing sausages.'

I waited for Mum to react. We hadn't had sausages for a year, not since her stupid friend Margot had made her watch a DVD about how they were made. But Mum sort of smiled as if sausages were the perfect thing.

‘I can't believe he's up,' I said.

‘I don't think he slept.' She sighed. ‘Maybe he will after breakfast.'

I felt myself shrink at the concern in her voice. Sam would be loving this. He'd always clashed with Dad and now he had Mum to himself. All I could think was how much I wanted to hurt her.

‘Wonder how Dad's doing,' I said. I swallowed as soon as the words were out.

‘I think he's probably just fine, Hannah.'

‘Sorry, Mum, I didn't mean . . . I just don't know what's happening.'

Her shoulders deflated. ‘I know. Look, I'm going to need some time and a bit of support. Do you think you can do that for me?' She sounded pretty unconvinced that I was even half capable of it.

‘Fine,' I said, almost a whisper. I could smell the sausages now and my mouth was watering. There was no way I was going to touch them.

Instead, I showered and got dressed. Every sound from the back room registered somewhere inside me – their knives and forks, the kettle boiling again, someone stacking the dishwasher, the TV. Normal things were driving me crazy. I had to get away.

There was panic in my chest as I put on my uniform. Mum wouldn't expect me to go and maybe that's why I was. Or maybe I wanted other people to know what was happening to me, even if it was only the girls in my class. The dynamics between us had shifted since I became friends with Chloe but I'd known most of them since junior school. Girls like Seren and Naomi had even been to my movie night with my dad once or twice in the old days. And even if we hardly spoke now, telling them might mean something.

Then there was Chloe – I had to tell her, even though I could have written down right then and there what she would say. And school was near Essie. She had the key to the person I could turn into. My heart was still racing as I put my phone in my schoolbag and promised myself I'd call Evan, later and not here. I couldn't do anything here.

My legs couldn't keep up with how fast I needed to get away. I didn't care how dumb I looked with my bag whacking against me, my shoes slapping the footpath. I hadn't said goodbye and I half-expected Mum's furious voice to come hurtling down after me. So when my tram slid into view, I started to run.

Making that tram was like a sign. For the first time in ages I didn't bow my head and try to go unnoticed in my uniform that was different to all the other ones this side of the city. I just held on and caught my breath, rehearsing what I'd say when I walked into class. I'd be late so there'd be questions. Girls who usually never spoke to me would look up and see me properly. Old friends like Seren, Naomi, maybe Jess and Grace, would ask if I was okay. It was always that way when something big happened to someone in the class.

When Naomi's parents split up we were still in junior school. We'd huddled around her every lunchtime. She'd cried a lot and we'd given her little presents and made sure she was never left out when it was time to pick partners. I couldn't remember now how long that had lasted. But it'd been the same when Grace's grandfather died. And when Seren told us she was going to a clinic for eating disorders.

It felt twisted to look forward to some attention but what else was I supposed to do? Naomi was fine now, so were Grace and Seren – this was just my turn. Maybe it would even be a way to get Chloe and me back into the group. Maybe a few girls would tell me I could stay with them if things got too bad at home.

I couldn't get there fast enough.