Chapter 49
Lucy said we should move, and that ‘it wasn’t fair to put all the pressure on Dad’.
I was incensed. I ran the Jack Brady Academy and rarely had time to take the stage roles I was offered before the pandemic.
Now we were forced to temporarily close the school and while the government stepped in to subsidize our earnings, they weren’t paying our mortgage.
A distance was growing between Lucy and me.
I encouraged her towards acting. It was the family business after all, and she had done all the child acting courses the Academy had to offer, but she claimed now she hadn’t enjoyed them and refused to do any more.
Jack quietly said to me that a film or TV set was no place for a child, and I knew he was thinking of his own childhood and his sister, Barbra.
‘We shouldn’t push her, she’s not interested,’ he said, but I couldn’t accept that. Her parents were actors.
One evening when Lucy and I were on our own, I said, ‘You know you could be a big star, like your dad, if you just tried a bit harder?’
‘Or I could be a scientist or a zookeeper or a billionaire like my real dad? I guess we’ll never know, because you slept around so much.’
I was shocked by her words. ‘Lucy!’
‘Well, it’s true, isn’t it? Dad was an addict too. He didn’t have a random child, did he?’
‘You are not a random child. I could have had an abortion. I wanted you.’
‘Why?’ Her question reminded me of the time long before Jack and I were together, when he said that getting sober was a shitty reason to have a baby. ‘I had screwed up my own life. I had an opportunity to make a great one for you.’
‘How many men did you sleep with?’
‘Stop this, Lucy. I am not answering that question. It’s unworthy of you.’
‘What does that even mean, Mum? Didn’t it ever occur to you that I might want to know?’
‘I think your dad would be upset by this.’
Lucy snapped back. ‘No, he wouldn’t. He says he never discussed it with you and that if I wanted to know, I should ask you, and now I’m asking you and you’re not giving me any answers.’
‘That’s because I never knew,’ I shouted at her. She glared at me. I could see her judgement. ‘It’s easy to be promiscuous when you’re drunk all the time.’ I teared up, but instead of giving me an apology, I heard her walk away, stomp up the stairs and slam her bedroom door.
It hurt me that she and Jack had talked about this without me.
Jack knew my situation when she was born, and when he married me.
I did not like this growing alliance between them, with Jack telling her she shouldn’t be an actress and encouraging her to ask for details of her birth father, details he knew I didn’t have.
When I confronted him, he said I shouldn’t be so defensive, and that Lucy was displaying normal teenager behaviour.
It continued as she got older. In the most minor of arguments, she would take Jack’s side against mine.
I reckoned her birth father must have been a very bright guy because she was smarter than Jack and me both.
She used her ‘mystery father’ as a weapon against me many times in years to come.
She was doing riding lessons and wanted a pony, and when Jack and I both said no, she said it was a shame she didn’t know who her birth father was because she was sure he would have said yes.