Chapter 39
Nugget, who had the audacity to jump onto my bed during the night, rouses and starts yapping with such furor her little legs lift off the ground.
“Will you shut up for once in your life?” I say, putting a hand on her head. It has the desired effect and she stops. “Shh. Good girl.”
I swing my legs out of bed and am looking around for my dressing gown when Daphne, impatient, lets herself in with her key.
“There you are,” she exclaims, appearing in my doorway. “Thought you might have died.”
“No such luck.”
She lifts her glasses—which are cobalt blue today, to match her mohair roll-neck jumper—from around her neck and balances them on her nose. “You look dreadful. Why are you still in bed?” she says. “Are you ill?”
“Pop the kettle on,” I tell her. “Have I got a story for you.”
It’s rather novel and exciting to have a story to tell Daphne—one that doesn’t include her. So much of our lives have been intertwined that it’s rare there is something that she doesn’t know about. She seems just as delighted as me.
“Goodness gracious!” she exclaims. “Just when we think we’re ready to shrivel up and die, life gets exciting again. Whatever next?”
“Who knows?” I say, and then my washing machine plays its little song, making it clear that next, I have to hang out my laundry.
We had just hauled the washing basket out to the clothesline when there is another knock at the door.
Daphne grips her chest. “The Italian Stallion?” she whispers, her eyes bulging. “Better get a baseball bat.”
“For pity’s sake,” I say. “It’s not the Italian Stallion. Besides, I don’t have a baseball bat.”
I grab the broom.
But it’s Roxanne at the door.
“Do you have a minute?” she asks.
“We’re elderly ladies,” Daphne cries. “We have all day.”
We invite her in and offer her a cup of tea. She declines the tea and instead joins us in the courtyard. I am surprised and a little charmed when she starts helping to hang the clothes.
“Did you contact the police?” I ask.
She nods, shaking out a pair of slacks and pegging them by the hems.
“And? What did they say?”
“They said I could go down to the station and give a statement.”
“All right.” I search the basket for my smalls. As nice as she is, I’m sure that Roxanne could do without hanging out my undergarments. “When are you going to do that?”
“I’m not.”
I gasp.
“Why the dickens not?” Daphne asks.
“There’s no point. I already have an AVO against Shane.”
“An AV what?” I peg a bra at the back of the line, out of the way.
“An apprehended violence order. A restraining order, essentially. But it isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. Every time he breaches it, I go to the police and make a report and nothing happens. Every time we move, Shane always finds us.”
Roxanne digs into the basket and stands up holding a pair of giant beige underpants. Must have missed those. She hangs them dutifully, using three pegs. Daphne snickers.
“And Shane is …?”
“Persephone’s father.”
“Ah,” I say. “And … I take it he was violent?”
She nods.
“Scumbag,” I say.
“Motherfucker,” Daphne cries.
“Yes,” Roxanne agrees. She reaches for the last item in the basket, my cream blouse, shakes it out and hangs it.
“So what now?” I ask. “Will you have to move?”
She laughs, without humor. “This is my sixth move since I left him. He still found me. Where do I go now? The moon?”
I collect the basket and we go inside. In the back room, she sits on my sofa and pulls a cushion into her lap. I offer her tea again and she declines, so I bring her a glass of water and put it on a coaster on the coffee table.
I sit in the armchair. “How did you meet him?” I’m prying, which is probably rude, but what the hell? I’m curious.
“Shane and I met when he was injured in a car accident. I was twenty-three and he was thirty-three. I was working as a nurse at the local hospital in a small town outside of Sydney. I’d just lost my mother.
Ovarian cancer. My father had never been in the picture.
I had a few cousins, but none lived nearby.
My community was mostly the nurses at work.
Anyway, Shane was in a bad way—broken ribs, black eyes, bruises all over him.
I fixed him up and he asked me out to dinner.
Shane was the charming sort, believe it or not. ”
She picks up the glass of water from the coffee table and takes a sip. Then she puts it back down. “He came on very strong, with romantic gestures, like surprise weekends away, flowers, gifts. And the sex, my God. He was a man, if you know what I mean.”
“I do indeed,” I say.
Daphne chuckles.
Roxanne blinks. “Anyway … I was renting an apartment in town when we met. A few months after we’d started dating, I went to Sydney for the weekend for a friend’s birthday and returned to find he’d packed up my things and moved them into his house.”
“Uh-oh.”
She nods. “Red flag, I know. But part of me liked it. I had no family and in a way it made me feel safe, to have someone. What an idiot.”
“Hindsight,” I remind her, “is twenty-twenty.”
“I guess. But there were other signs along the way that I should have paid attention to. Like … he didn’t give me a key to his house. The one he’d called my house. He said I could just come and go with him, or, if I went out without him, wait for him to get home to let me back in.”
“Sounds very odd,” Daphne says.
“That was just the beginning. Next thing I knew he’d got rid of my car!
I went into the garage one day and it was gone.
He said it wasn’t safe, and in fairness to him, he was probably right.
It was an old bomb—the only thing I could afford.
He told me he got his uncle to tow it to the junkyard and that he’d ordered me another one.
A Mercedes! I was so excited about the Mercedes that I didn’t complain about his dumping my car.
But the Mercedes never arrived. It was hard to object since he drove me to work and back every day. ”
“The controlling type,” Daphne says. “Probably terrified you’d catch the eye of another fellow.”
Roxanne picks up her water glass again but doesn’t drink.
“He always managed to make everything sound romantic and as though it was for me. He said he would always take care of me, and I liked the sound of that. But I became quite isolated. And before I could address it, I was pregnant with Persephone. You can see the trajectory I was on. Trapped, reliant on a man. Powerless.”
I shake my head. “Exactly how he wanted it.”
She nods. “The first time he hit me was when I got a taxi to a prenatal appointment. He was meant to drive me but he couldn’t so he told me to reschedule.
But there was no reason I couldn’t go. So I called a taxi.
I was getting sick of him telling me what to do.
When I got home after the appointment he was there.
I remember being really annoyed. He’d said he couldn’t make the appointment, so why was he home?
I started to ask him about this and he slapped me across the face, hard. ”
I look at Daphne. Her eyes are full of tears. Her right hand rests against her right cheek.
“It was a hard slap. It hurt a lot. I ran out of the room, but then I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t leave.”
“Let me guess,” I say, “he apologized in the morning and said it would never happen again?”
“Actually, no. He never apologized. He didn’t bring it up at all. And I didn’t either. I was too afraid. But that was when I started planning to leave. We finally got away when Persephone was six months old. But he keeps coming back.”
“What does he want?” I ask.
She shrugs. “Control? To punish me for having the audacity to leave him? To feel powerful?”
“Persephone?” I ask. “Does he want her?”
She contemplates this. “As far as I can tell, his interest in her is only insofar as it hurts me. He’s never attempted to get custody of her or anything. That’s one thing to be grateful for, I suppose.”
“Buttnugget,” Daphne mutters. “Dickweed!”
I give her a look and she stops.
“So what now?” I ask Roxanne.
She looks exhausted. “Find a new place and hope to hell he doesn’t find us. Save some money because moving isn’t cheap. I can’t do night cleaning anymore obviously.”
“Can you clean during the day?” I ask.
“I can,” she says, “and I do. But the night cleaning pays the best.”
We drift into silence. I try to avoid Daphne’s gaze but I feel her raising her eyebrows and nodding at me. I sigh.
“What if Persephone stayed here on the nights you worked?” I say, under duress.
Daphne beams. “What a great idea!”
“I have a spare room,” I continue. “You could drop her here after she’s had her dinner and she could scuttle home in the morning when she wakes up.”
Roxanne stares at me. “No. No, I couldn’t ask that of you.”
“Corsets you could!” Daphne cries. “She insists!”
I roll my eyes. “I insist,” I drone.
“But … you think she’s an irritating little despot!”
I open my mouth to disagree, but her statement is factually accurate.
And yet, I’ve always prided myself on the fact that I don’t do things I don’t want to.
It makes me infinitely less likeable in the moment, but as I’m not known for my likability, I figure I don’t have a lot to lose there.
For this reason, I know I must mean it when I say:
“If you’re happy to have Mad Mabel as a babysitter, looking after an irritating little despot is the least I can do.”
I stand in the hallway outside the spare bedroom, a cardboard box in one hand. The door is closed as usual. Even Nugget has learned not to scratch at it. I only go in there occasionally, privately—when no one’s around to see.
I was glad Roxanne agreed to let me watch Persephone. Not because I’m itching to care for a child—God forbid—but because it’s a practical solution to a messy problem. And I am, above all things, a pragmatic woman who likes solutions.
Still, a pulse of unease beats beneath my ribs. If Persephone is going to be staying in that room, there’s some work that needs to be done.
I rest my hand on the doorknob. The house is quiet. I inhale deeply, then push the door open and walk in.
It’s a proper mess. Unlike the rest of my house—tidy, spare, scrubbed within an inch of its life—this room is cluttered and full to bursting. It smells faintly of dust and furniture polish. The wallpaper is faded. The air in the room is stale and unmoving.
And he is everywhere. His face looks out from every surface.
Dozens of photographs—some framed, others stuck up with curling blue tack—cover the walls and line the dresser, the desk, even the top of an old Singer sewing machine I never use.
There he is in the front garden, holding a hose.
Carrying a ladder. Wearing his ridiculous fishing hat, bought on special, of course. Laughing. Always laughing.
It’s a shrine, no two ways about it. A shrine to Peter.
It occurs to me that I owe Persephone my thanks.
If she’d told anyone what she saw in here, I’d probably have been hauled off to jail, or a home for the insane.
But I’m not insane. Despite popular opinion, I never have been.
I’m simply … alone. Peter has been a bright spot in my little world for quite some time.
A fixed point. Someone to care about, from a distance.
Someone who, it seems, cares about me … even a little.
I have no intention of pursuing a relationship with him—heaven forbid.
I’d never invite such an opportunity for rejection.
But here, in this room of my house, it feels safe to indulge such a fantasy.
A fantasy of loving, and of being loved back.
I pop the cardboard box on the floor and sink into the worn chair by the window.
I reach for the nearest frame, one of the more recent photos—Peter on his front porch, mug in hand, squinting into the sun—and gently lay it in the box.
The next picture follows, and the one after that.
My hands are slow, careful, like I’m packing up a person. In a way, I am.
Nugget wanders in and lets out a small sigh before curling up beside the box. I glance down at her. “Don’t look at me like that. It’s for the best.”
She closes her eyes. I turn back to the wall and keep going, one picture at a time.
“It’s time,” I say quietly. To myself. To Peter. “Time to put you away.”