Chapter Fifteen
Each time Lucy visits the charity shop, she comes away with an idea. Sometimes it’s for a dress. Sometimes for an embellishment on a dress she saw in the shop – one she can’t afford, but that doesn’t stop her dreaming about what she could do if she were able to buy the dress and alter it.
Her mother has a sewing machine at home for working on alterations from the shop, and Lucy’s been using it the past couple of weekends because her mother only uses it on weeknights. She’s still doing some hand-sewing at the shop when it’s quiet, but she likes having the machine at home too.
‘You’re becoming obsessed!’ her mother said one day, but she was smiling so Lucy didn’t think it was a criticism.
Not that her mum criticises her often. Not like Poppy’s mother, who’s always telling Poppy to stand up straight, make her hair neater, pull her stomach in and smile more.
‘It’s only because she cares,’ Poppy said once when Angelica said she thought it was mean.
Angelica and Lucy had looked at each other in disbelief. If that’s how a mother shows she cares, Lucy doesn’t want it.
It’s sort of like how Russell is with her, though, she supposes.
He’s always criticising her, telling her she’s ugly and stupid, and their dad always says he’s only saying it because he cares about her and wants her to be the best she can be.
Except when she told Angelica about it, her friend said it didn’t sound like criticism so much as cruelty, and Lucy didn’t really know what to say about that.
If that sort of behaviour is all you’ve ever known, you get used to it, and you don’t want to think of it as someone being cruel, because what does that mean for your life?
‘It means your brother’s an arsehole,’ Angelica said, and Lucy had to admit this was probably true.
She first told Angelica and Poppy what her home life is like one day when she was feeling really down about it all, to the point where a teacher pulled her aside after class to ask if she needed to go to the sick bay.
The teacher, Mrs Bradley, is always really kind and notices little things about her students.
Lucy didn’t want to tell her anything, though, because it would get back to her parents, who’d get cross that their family matters were known to the school – her father, in particular, is big on privacy. And they’d do nothing about it anyway.
‘Russell’s such an idiot,’ Angelica said. ‘Can’t you just ignore him? I would.’
Lucy can’t, though – they share a house, they work together, and she doesn’t even have relatives she could go to.
Her father’s family are in New Zealand, and her mother’s parents aren’t around much.
They’re good to Lucy when she sees them but that’s only a few times a year.
She doesn’t feel close to them, not close enough to ask if they could help her.
So she has to find her own ways to manage Russell.
Or, rather, to not antagonise him. Except that seems to be failing, because he really doesn’t like her sewing at home.
He’s been grumbling about the noise of the machine ‘wrecking things’, even though she’s upstairs in a tiny space that her mum calls the attic but which is really a weird kind of half room that has no purpose.
Now it’s Lucy’s sewing room, and she doesn’t make that much noise in it, not even now she’s trying to make a dress according to the pattern.
Today, though, in the interests of trying to keep everyone happy, she’s closed the door to the stairway that leads up to the attic and put a draught stopper against it – one she made herself – to cut out as much noise as possible.
There’s enough room in the attic for her to spread out a little and lay the calico pieces she’s sewed on the floor. Her mother gave her that tip – to make a pattern in calico first if you’re not sure what you’re doing. And Lucy really isn’t sure.
She bends over the machine to start on the next piece, frowning as she looks closely at her stitches. Are they straight? They need to be. The fabric for the dress was expensive and she can’t afford to make a mistake, so she needs to get this calico version right.
She bought the material from a big fabric shop in the city – white cotton with holly leaves and berries printed on it – and another fabric that’s the same red as the berries, which she plans to use for the sash.
The cotton is rolled up and sitting on a chair Lucy brought up from her bedroom, and the red is folded over the back of the chair.
As she presses the pedal on the machine to make it move, she hears a loud bang and starts, which makes the stitch go awry. Great – now she’ll have to unpick it.
Another bang.
She goes to the stairs and opens the door.
‘Tell her to shut up!’ It’s Russell, yelling.
‘I will not.’ That’s their father, and Lucy feels surprised – usually he lets Russell have his rants, regardless of what they’re about.
‘She’s ruining my bloody weekend!’
So Russell is back on this again. She can’t imagine what she’s ruining for him – all he does is sit around and watch television.
‘Let your sister have her hobby,’ her father replies.
‘Half-sister.’ Even all the way upstairs, Lucy can hear Russell’s contempt.
That’s what he’s always called her: his half-sister.
Back when he was still at school and had friends, he’d bring them over to the house and introduce Lucy as his half-sister.
He wouldn’t even use her name. So his friends all called her the half-sister.
‘Hi, half-sister’; ‘Hey, Russ, does your half-sister want a drink?’; ‘Don’t let the half-sister in. ’
It’s designed to hurt her, she knows. Her mum once told her that she was the real target, because Russell has never forgiven her for being with his dad. Or something. But it’s not her mum whose name has been erased. Russell always introduced her to his friends as Connie.
Lucy understood what her mother was telling her, though: Russell needs their understanding.
Lucy’s to do her best to accommodate Russell and accept that he isn’t going to accommodate her.
That’s what she gets for being second born.
And it’s still going on, even though he doesn’t have friends coming around any more.
‘Russell, Lucy’s allowed to have her interests,’ her father says.
‘What – even if they’re stupid?’
She can’t hear what her father replies as they seem to be moving into a different room.
Lucy returns to the machine, but doesn’t feel she can go on. If she starts up again, will Russell get worse? She decides to leave it for today and try again next weekend.
On Monday, though, she thinks she’ll try to sew the pieces by hand – it’ll be good practice and at least she can make some progress that way.
She tells Poppy and Angelica about what happened on the weekend and they both tell her to not let Russell win.
‘Who does he think he is?’ Poppy says. ‘Imagine carrying on like that about a sewing machine?’
It does seem ridiculous when she puts it that way. But Lucy doesn’t want to make things worse, so after she arrives home from the shop, she eats her dinner quickly and goes upstairs.
When she turns on the dim overhead light she sees that the Christmas fabric has unspooled and is now covering part of the attic floor. Which is odd – she propped it on the chair in such a way that it couldn’t have unrolled by itself.
Then she peers closer and sees there are shoe prints on it. Dirty, big shoe prints.
She can’t quite figure out what’s happened. A biology teacher once told them how the human eye doesn’t actually see things – it gathers information for the brain to then work out what it’s looking at. So that must be why she can almost feel her brain trying to make sense of this.
How did shoe prints get on her fabric? Why are they there? Who would have …
The answer clicks into place and she stands up, her fists clenched. She feels … angry. Is that what this is? She’s never felt like this before: hot and rigid. Like she could hurt someone.
Stomping back down the stairs to the ground floor, she finds her mother in the kitchen.
‘Mum!’ she almost shouts.
‘Sweetie?’ Her mother turns with a frown, which deepens when she sees Lucy’s clenched fists.
‘He –’ Lucy gulps in a breath, her throat feeling like it’s closing over.
‘Lucy?’ Her mother clutches onto Lucy’s arm, looking really worried now.
‘He RUINED IT!’ she shrieks, and stomps a foot, hoping the beat of her fury can be heard all through the house.
Now her mother takes both of her arms but Lucy’s hands don’t relax. ‘You’re not making sense,’ Connie says, as if she’s talking to a toddler, and that makes Lucy even angrier.
‘Russell has ruined my fabric!’
There’s a noise from the living room and Lucy’s father appears. She has no idea if Russell is still in the house, or what she’ll do to him if he is.
‘What’s going on?’ her father says.
‘I’m not sure,’ her mother replies – but how can she not be sure? Lucy just told her!
‘I had fabric,’ Lucy says, almost hiccupping with rage. ‘I was making a dress. It’s on the floor!’
‘It must have fallen,’ her mother says quickly.
‘It has shoe prints on it!’ Lucy stomps her foot again. She knows it’s childish, but what she really wants to do is hit something and she wouldn’t be allowed to do that.
‘Shoe prints?’ her father says, puzzled.
‘Where’s Russell?’ Lucy says.
‘Somewhere,’ her father says vaguely.
‘He did this!’
‘Darling, I don’t –’
‘Sweetie, that’s a big –’
Lucy doesn’t hear the ends of her parents’ sentences because the weight of reality – her reality – suddenly feels like it’s crushing her chest.
They will always defend him.
No matter what he does to her, they will defend him because they feel guilty.
Guilty that Lucy exists.
She’s the living proof of their relationship, which Russell hates. So he hates her too. And her parents know it, but they keep defending him. Which means they will never be on her side. Not when it counts. Like now.
The Christmas fabric may not matter to them but it means the world to her. Because it is her world. Her means of creating something. Of being something. Of being herself.
She feels something rising in her oesophagus. Food, dismay, sadness – it could be anything.
Without another word she pushes past her mother and goes into the back garden, where she retches over the garden bed that is furthest from the house.
But nothing comes out. Nothing except a swirling sense of betrayal and a pulse of change that she is determined to make.