The Slap (20 page)

 

‘Will you marry me?’

‘What the fuck?’

Richie stopped dead and dropped her arm. She giggled at the look on his face and she punched his shoulder.

‘Why not?’

His tongue was doing that weird thing he did whenever he was thinking to himself, jutting out and licking his top lip. It sometimes made him look a little slow. His face brightened. ‘Sure.’

‘Cool.’

‘When?’

‘We’ve got to have lots of affairs first and travel the world.’

‘Done.’

She filled the cat bowl with biscuits when she got home, and Lisa purred around her ankles. It was still daylight and Bart wouldn’t stop prowling the neighbours’ yards until dark. She switched on the computer and connected to Messenger. She did the maths and worked out that it was just after eight in the morning in England. Maybe Zara was online. But only Jenna’s and Tina Coccoccelli’s avatars were visible. She quickly typed a message to Zara and sent it off into digital space. She chatted with the girls for a few minutes but signed off when she heard her aunt enter the front door. She went into the kitchen where Tasha was standing, her backpack still on, rubbing her hands together.

‘It’s getting cold. Winter is definitely on its way.’

‘Guess so.’

‘How was school?’

‘Okay.’

‘Have you got much homework tonight?’

‘A little. Why?’

‘I thought we could go out and see a movie and have something to eat. I can’t be bothered cooking.’

‘Sure.’ She looked at her aunt. Tasha was due a haircut, and there were dark rings under her eyes. Connie kissed her on the cheek. ‘I can cook dinner.’

‘No, I want to take you out.’ Tasha chucked her backpack on the kitchen table and started sorting through the mail.

‘A movie would be great, Tash. Thanks.’ She hesitated, then blurted out: ‘It would have been Dad’s birthday today.’

Her aunt did not look up from the bill she was examining. ‘I know. He would have turned fifty.’ She put the bills to one side and started filling the kettle. ‘You want a tea?’

‘I’m fine.’

‘You know how terrible I am with dates. But I never forget your father’s birthday. Everyone else’s I forget, just as I forget faces and phone numbers. But since I could talk I always remembered Luke’s birthday.’

‘How about Uncle Pete?’

‘The fifteenth of August,’ Tasha laughed.

‘I reckon it’s a sibling thing. I think siblings must always remember each other’s birthdays.’

Tasha sat down then looked up at her niece. ‘You’re perceptive, aren’t you, Connie?’

That was a nice word. Perceptive, it sounded like a good thing to be. At school last week Mr Dennis had a go at her for not putting enough effort into a history assignment. He was right. She had left it to the last minute and had completed it while watching an episode of
The OC
. You’re so much smarter than the others, he said to her, just apply yourself a little bit harder. Smart, she’d wanted to yell back. Smarter? What the fuck does that mean? You think the rest of them are morons and bogans, so what’s so great about being smarter than them? She had been surly and made a half-arsed apology. But her aunt never made a compliment that did not have some insight behind it. Inheritance.

‘Maybe it runs in the family.’

Her aunt looked confused, was about to say something, then her face softened, and she sank back in the chair. ‘I thoroughly hate work.’ She straightened up and smiled. ‘Do your homework fast and then we’ll catch the movie. I’ll tell you what I want to see:
The Squid and the Whale
, that French film
Hidden
and the new Jennifer Anis-ton movie. You can pick from those three. Look up session times after you’ve done your work.’

Connie had nothing urgent to do except some Maths reading. The English report she could do the next night. She clicked on Messenger again but there was nothing from Zara so they probably wouldn’t talk until the weekend. There were more kids from school online but she clicked off without bothering to join in. She did her Maths, and then searched for information about the movies.
The Squid and the Whale
sounded interesting, a little arty-farty, all about smart, educated people and divorce, and it was playing in Carlton, which she knew Tasha would enjoy. The food would be good.
Hidden
was French and had amazing reviews. But it sounded complex and like it needed a lot of thought. And it required reading, it would be subtitled. She knew that her aunt had picked it because she thought it was good for Connie to be exposed to challenging films. She was probably right, but after a day at school the last thing she felt like was more education. The new Jennifer Anniston was called
The Break-Up
and half the girls at school had already seen it. People seemed to like it. It also starred Vince Vaughn. She looked at the actor’s face. He looked like Hector, just not as handsome, but he had the same big, slightly boofy face. She really wanted to see the movie and it was playing in the city, so they could eat in Chinatown.

She switched off the computer, zipped up her jacket and pulled on her boots. She knelt before the mirror and carefully started applying lipstick. It was her father, not her mother, who had taught her how to apply make-up. Marina never wore it. Her dad had done his own face. The secret, he’d said to her, powdering his cheeks, his chin, his nose, is foundation. You can hide any blotches, he added, pointing to a sarcoma underneath his chin, and you don’t get any shiny patches anywhere. She puckered her lips. Her dad would have wanted her to choose
Hidden
, he always went for the obscure, the difficult, the arty, what the Australians called wanky. Wasn’t that why he had left Australia? What would have her mother chosen? A thick-set, tall Pakistani man in a suit. He looked a little like Vince Vaughn as well. She carefully drew on the eyeliner.

Tasha had combed her hair and changed into pants and an op-shop fifties lavender faux-fur jacket with wool lining around the collar. Connie loved that jacket. It made her aunt look so cute.

‘What’s the choice?’

‘
The Squid and the Whale.
It sounds cool.’

Tasha rubbed her hands together eagerly. ‘Perfect. We can have pasta after the movie.’

She’d go and see
The Break-Up
with Richie. Or Jenna if she hadn’t seen it yet. Or maybe she would go on her own. And pretend. Shut up, don’t think about him. She clutched tightly onto her aunt’s arm as they strolled to the station.

 

When they got home there was a message from Rosie on the machine, asking if Connie could do some babysitting on Thursday evening. She glanced at the clock. It was not yet eleven, so she picked up the phone.

‘Are you going to say yes?’ Tasha had poured a red wine and turned on the television.

‘Yeah, I think so.’

‘Do you have time?’

She wished her aunt would lay off a little. She could make her own decisions. ‘I can do school work at their place. It’s no big deal.’

She could see that her aunt wanted to say more. She held her breath. But Tasha had turned away. Connie quickly dialled. Their answering machine clicked in and she began to leave a message. There was a loud squeal, an electronic cacophony, and then she heard Gary’s voice on the other end.

‘Connie, that you?’

‘Yeah. I can look after Hugo on Thursday. What time do you want me to come around?’

‘You’re good, aren’t you? You’re a good person, Connie.’ Gary was slurring his words. She figured he was pissed. ‘Come around seven.’

‘Sure.’

‘Bloody Rosie has booked us into some Mickey-Mouse parenting workshop. I fucking hate those things. I always feel like the bad boy at the back of the class.’

She bit her lip. She didn’t have anything to say in response. She couldn’t imagine Gary as a student. She wasn’t thinking of the learning part, he would enjoy that part of school; he read all the time. She thought he probably regretted having dropped out so young, Form Four he’d told her, which was now their Year Ten, but she didn’t have the guts to ask him why he had. She figured a person like Gary couldn’t stand the discipline, obeying rules and following a timetable. He could never sit still. She was always slightly anxious whenever she was alone with him.

‘Okay,’ she finally blurted out, realising there had been a long pause in the conversation. ‘See you Thursday.’ Maybe he was stoned.

‘Yeah, yeah, thanks Connie, you’re an angel.’

Her aunt was channel-surfing, going from Iraq to
Big Brother
to some American crime show. She took the remote off Tasha and flicked back to the news. A black, charcoal shell of a car was smouldering in a stretch of desert highway. Scarfed women were howling.

‘Please turn it off, Con, I can’t stand watching this.’

She pressed a button. Two women were in a sauna, discussing anal sex.

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake.’ Her aunt tore the remote from her hand. The screen flicked over to the crime story.

Connie yawned, leaned over and kissed her aunt on the cheek.

‘It’s all rubbish, isn’t it? Maybe we should get cable?’

Jenna had cable but all they ever did at her place was channel-surf as well. Connie shook her head. ‘There’s only rubbish on that too. Goodnight.’

‘Goodnight, angel.’

 

She lay in bed and listened to the muted sound of the television. She kept the light on and looked at all the pictures on her wall. Last summer she had stripped the room bare of all her posters, all the images of movies stars, celebrities and pop stars; she chucked out Robbie Williams and Gwen Stafani, Missy Elliot and Johnny Depp. The only picture she couldn’t bring herself to part with, was one she had ripped out of a
TV Week
, a small black and white photo of Benjamin McKenzie from
The OC
. It reminded her of Richie and she kept it Blu-Tacked at one edge of her bedroom mirror. Across from her bed the wall was dominated by a large print of nineteenth-century London that her aunt had bought and framed for Connie’s sixteenth birthday. Her desk sat underneath it. There were only two posters on the walls now. One was of a clear blue desert sky shot through with razor wire, protesting the inhumane detention of refugees in Australia. She had snaffled it at an anti-racism rally the year before. The other poster was a stark image of an Arab child with a petrol pump murderously aimed at his head. In Arabic and in English the stark red lettering read NO TO BUSH’S WAR FOR OIL. Zara had sent it to her for her sixteenth birthday. The walls were now full of photographs of real people, people she knew: Tasha in a blue raincoat holding an over-sized black umbrella; Richie grinning maniacally at the camera, wearing his daggy Thank Drunk I’m a God T-shirt; she and Jenna and Tina dressed up for a party; Zara in a long-sleeved white hoodie with an image of Kurt Cobain stenciled across the front; her own Year Ten school photo, the one in which her legs didn’t look fat. Then there was the photograph of her mum and dad, looking like she had never known them. Her father was pencil thin, his hair cut short except for a greased quiff at the front and dyed a peroxide salt-white, her mother in garish eyeliner and lipstick, her hair in a mohawk. They looked like gangsters, not like in rap videos and ads for Coca-Cola, but like romantic outlaws from deep in the last century. Her mother wore white lace stockings and had a brooch of the Japanese imperial flag pinned to a cup of her exposed bra. Her dad was smoking a cigarette, had a white shirt on, the top button done up and a thin black tie; he was leering comically into the camera as her mother gave him a look of open adoration. Just above the photograph of her parents she had stuck a photo of last year’s work Christmas party, everyone a little drunk, smiling stiffly into the camera. They all formed a semi-circle around the table, Aisha in the centre, with her and Hector at either end. He wore a suit, elegant as always, and he looked so good. He looked so good it hurt. Her eyes drifted from her father to Hector, and then back to her mother and then to herself. In the photograph she was looking at Hector with the exact same expression as on her mother’s face. How was it that she had never noticed it before? She blushed, and quickly turned off the light.

Lisa, who was asleep on her pillow, miaowed in indignation at being disturbed. Sorry, girl, she whispered, and tickled the cat underneath her chin. There was a scratching at the door. She waited. Bart pushed opened the door and she heard him scampering across the carpet. He jumped on her bed and she lifted the covers, making a space for him to nestle into. Lisa jumped off the pillow and onto the dresser. She could hear the cat lapping at the water in the glass. Bart curled into a ball and began purring.

She tried to think of schoolwork, she tried to think about the movie she had seen—the actor reminded her of her father and she wondered if that was how her dad would have looked now if he hadn’t died, if he had lived to fifty, gotten fat, maybe grown a beard—but she couldn’t stop thinking of Hector. Bart edged further under the sheet and blanket; she could feel his purring, the rise and fall from his breathing, the warmth of him next to her stomach. The sound of the television was just audible from the lounge room. She closed her eyes and fantasised.