Chapter 51
He stepped away from the girls. They looked up at him, confused. I braced myself.
This can’t tell me anything I don’t already know, I thought. It can’t tell me things I don’t know.
But somehow that didn’t bring me any comfort. There were so many things I already suspected, feared. What was left to invent?
My father walked over to me, then looked back over at the two girls.
“Look at them.” He gestured. “Aren’t they perfect?
They’re tidy and neat. They’re well-mannered and sweet.
They play princess and tea parties. They’re gentle and kind.
They don’t swear. They don’t fight. Despite everything they’ve gone through, they never lash out at anyone.
Proper little girls”—he turned back to me—“like your mother and I had always hoped for.”
And there was the twist in my gut.
My father shrugged.
“We understood you don’t get to choose,” he said.
“You get the kid you’re dealt and you do your best with what you’re given.
But can you really blame someone, after all those years of dreaming and hoping, those nine months of wondering, not to feel a little disappointed when what they get is plain, sulky, lazy, careless?
When they don’t get what they hoped they would? ”
I tried to turn the tight, hot feeling in my chest into rage, but it refused. It sat like concrete, weighing down on my stomach, choking the air from my chest.
“But it wasn’t just that.” My father waved a hand reassuringly. “Believe me, if it was just that I’m sure we could have pretended better. Got on with it, without you becoming aware of how we really felt. But there was that… you know, that other thing.”
I frowned. My father looked surprised.
“Wait, you don’t know?” He raised his eyebrows and put his hands on his hips. “You must have known. Didn’t you see it, even back then? That there was something not quite right with you.”
He shook his head with surprise. Then a thought seemed to come to him. He walked over to the girls with that stuttering quickstep he always had when he was thinking. He took their hands.
“Come here, princesses.” He led them further up the cliff, then looked over his shoulder to me. “I’ll show you what I mean.”
I followed them up to the cliff edge, numb and hollow. He placed the two girls, standing side by side, backs to the wind at the edge of the cliff.
“Pose just there, girls,” he said to them. “We’re going to make a picture so Tammy can understand something.”
He turned back to me. His hair shimmered and shook around his head, battered by the growing wind. My eyes kept flicking from him to the girls. They were a little too close to the verge for comfort.
“You know, I could read it on your face that day. So could your mother, that’s why she kept you so far away from us.
We’d both known there was something wrong with you, but that day we realised we’d underestimated how bad it was.
We could both see it in your eyes—before the graduation gifts and the giving up your room and everything else you accused me of, so you can’t blame it on all that.
Right from the very first time we stepped up to take care of these poor innocent girls, you had the overwhelming desire to do this. ”
With a quick, sharp shove, he pushed Lucy off the cliff.
I thought I’d be desensitised by now, after the stapler and the hammer, but nothing quite prepares you for hearing a little body crack on rocks far below you.
Vomit flooded my mouth instantly. I fell to my knees and heaved.
“I know,” my father said. “It’s sickening. I was sickened that day when I saw the desire in your face. I thought, I knew there was something wrong with her, but I never thought she was… well…” He gestured toward me, as I emptied my stomach onto the grass.
“It’s not real,” I muttered, chanting to myself, trying to make some sound over the horrible crack that kept echoing in my mind. “This isn’t real this isn’t real this isn’t real.”
“It feels very real, though, doesn’t it?” said my father.
Then he shoved Laura-Ann off the cliff.
I heaved again. My body convulsed with sickness—stomach and soul.
“No,” I sobbed between mouthfuls of bile. “What the fuck?!”
“Why are you saying that?” My father tilted his head. “This is what you wanted. This is what you’ve always wanted.”
The worst part was that he was right.
It took me years to find the words for it, but I’d spent a lifetime measuring myself against those perfect girls, and then every perfect girl who’d come after.
The glossy-haired, sporty teens at school.
The preppy student who’d confidently chat with the lecturers at university.
The chatty women at my office always surrounded by friends.
The confident, coifed director at my last position.
It had all started here. And I had twisted myself into knots hating them, all the perfect girls, for decades.
“I didn’t mean it. I was a kid!”
“Child or not, you had despicable desires in your heart.” My father leaned close to me.
“You are so full of spite. You put on a good face, professional, calm, but anyone with any sense can see it. It bubbles away just under the surface. Your finger rests on the trigger of it, ready at a moment’s notice.
That’s why we kept you at arm’s length. The strain of it all took its toll, of course, on your mother, on our marriage.
It wasn’t just that we preferred those girls.
It was you and all that sickness you carry around with you. ”
He laid his hand on the grass next to me. Next to the blade of my axe.
“Look. You came to your neighbour’s house and what did you choose to bring?”
With his other hand, he raised the axe head up. He hovered the blade over his knuckles. I still held the handle, but not with any fight. My wrist twisted, limp, yielding, with the turn. My father leaned in close to me and whispered.
“There’s only one monster in this house, Tammy. And it’s you.”
This house.
The thought wriggled clear over everything he was saying, no matter how true it sounded and felt.
He dropped the axe blade.
We’re still inside the house.
I caught the axe by the handle just before it hit him. His eyes flicked to me.
I moved the axe out of his reach and set it down beside me.
“I’m not spiteful, I’m angry,” I said between sniffs.
“I’m so angry. All the time. The moment I see anyone do better than me, I’m the crab pulling them back down into the bucket.
I’m angry and I’m envious and I’m bitter.
I thought for a long while my constant anger would keep me safe, give me power, help me fight back against the horrible bullshit I think about myself.
” I wiped the vomit off my mouth. “But all I am is tired. So, yeah.” I sat back and let the wind pull through my hair.
“I guess I am kind of fucked up. But if there’s anything I’ve been learning recently”—I looked at him—“it’s not all about me. ”
My father-not-father leaned back as well, mirroring my seated posture, sun setting behind him with that world-ending light.
“I used to look at those girls as if they were the archetypal little girl, the perfect child I was not. But they weren’t.
Lucy bit the music teacher at school once.
And Laura-Ann made an art out of lying. Impressive really.
But I don’t think that mattered. They could have been boys.
They could have been rescue dogs. It would have ended up the same.
Because I think that perfect little girl line is bullshit. ”
I sat in my father-not-father’s attention. There was something nice about it. How his gaze never left me. For once that open-eyed stare wasn’t too bad. I continued.
“For a long time, I thought if I was just successful enough, I’d somehow prove my worth to you, then maybe you’d pay as much attention to me as you did to them.
But the more successful I got, the bigger clients I took on, the higher profile stuff I got to work on, the less you cared.
I didn’t understand. I thought I was becoming what you wanted me to be.
But I’d gotten it wrong. Because I wasn’t competing with them on some ideal.
It wasn’t anything to do with that. It was about you.
” I nodded at the rightness of it, letting the realisation wash the past in a new kind of pain, but one that put out the fires of anger, one that brought a cool-headed understanding.
“All the compliments down the years, all the people telling you how kind, how good you were. It was never about them being sweet or cute, it was about them being in need. They make you feel needed, like some kind of hero. And I don’t. ”
The waves crashed below us, a low rhythm in time with my breath. Seagulls glided in the air above, alongside the kite that still hovered there somehow, its red line bright against the grey sky. I picked up my own spool from where I’d dropped it in the grass.
“That’s why you always rushed in to help.
That’s why you keep rushing to them with every new disaster.
You want to feel like the hero. You still do.
” I looped the thread around my fingers.
“You crave it above everything else. I can see it now. You always choose the people and things that are falling apart, that would fall apart without you. Those girls make you feel needed. They continue to make you feel needed. I don’t know if you ever consciously thought about this, or whether you just assume I’m tough, I’m fine, I don’t need you. But the effect was the same.”
I looked at this approximation of my father, now in silhouette against the sunset, wishing for a moment he was really here, really listening to what I was saying.
“I’m sorry it took me so long to figure it out.”
I sighed. Time to get it over with. I looped the thread around my fingers.
“It was never about me. Even if I sort of wish it was.”
I pulled the knot tight.
My father’s silhouette sat frozen, the dusk seeping into the sky behind him, the sound of the sea and the wind all around. It was almost a nice day out. Almost.
“Bye, Dad,” I said.
He dropped away. As did the cliffs and the seagulls and the sea and the beach and the wind and the sunset and the light at the end of everything and the past and the yellow kite. It all dropped away into nothingness, until it was just me and the darkness and the basement.