Chapter Forty-One Netta
Chapter Forty-One
NETTA
‘Do you want more pudding?’ Netta offered the container to Mo over the table strewn with takeaway dishes.
The smell of gravy and roasted vegetables mingled with the brandied scent of the dessert and the woodsmoke from the fire.
The record player was playing Etta James softly from the lounge.
This was as close to heaven as Netta had ever felt.
‘I couldn’t,’ he said, waving his hand. ‘I feel like I’ve eaten an overweight horse. Maybe two.’
Netta put the container down and rubbed her belly. ‘Me too. I really should’ve stopped at the third helping. Things got out of hand.’
Mo reached for the half-full wine bottle on the table. ‘Got room for another glass?’
Netta smiled and held out her glass as he raised the bottle and poured her a generous helping of pinot. ‘Let’s clean this up later,’ she said. ‘I think I need to lie down fireside and focus on digesting for a while.’
Mo stood and followed her. He sat on the floor in front of the fireplace and motioned wordlessly for her to rest her head in his lap. They stayed like that for a few moments, Mo stroking Netta’s hair, their easy, drawn-out silence perforated only by the crackle of the fire.
‘Netta?’ said Mo, eventually.
‘Yeah?’
‘I want to tell you about the diary.’ His voice faltered as he spoke, as though he wasn’t really sure he wanted to at all.
‘You don’t have to.’
‘I know. But I … I feel like I need to.’
She sat up and turned to him. ‘Okay.’
His face was ashen, despite the fire’s glow.
He squeezed the tips of his left fingers between his right thumb and forefinger, systematically, over and over again, his brow knitted together into twin valleys between his eyes.
He’d crossed his legs and it struck Netta how vulnerable he seemed.
Like a little boy preparing to confess something he knew he’d be in trouble for.
‘I used to live in Pete’s house, when I was a kid,’ he began. ‘With my mum and Mav.’
This information still felt impossible to Netta—that the road to this moment had been paved decades before. ‘What was she like, your mum?’
Mo’s expression was unreadable. ‘She was … everything. She was wonderful and terrible and talented and wasted. She was an incredible painter. An artist.’ He lifted his eyes to meet hers.
‘She was also an addict. I didn’t realise it at the time, but now …
’ He tucked his chin into his chest, his mouth reduced to a thin line.
‘Was it … bad? For you and Mav, with her addiction?’
He nodded. ‘Sometimes it was, but sometimes she was amazing. When she was good, she was, like, radiant. She had this gravitational pull that just drew people in. People wanted to be in her orbit. She was smart and funny and really beautiful. She dyed her hair mad colours and had a piercing here.’ He pointed to his septum.
‘And she had tattoos all over her arms—flowers and leaves, a butterfly. She used to let me colour them in with texta.’
Netta’s heart bloomed at the visual of little Mo, earnestly colouring his mum’s arms. ‘Is that why you have so many?’
‘Maybe, yeah. My first one was for her.’ He lifted his jumper and pointed to the tight cluster of flowers in the middle of his chest. ‘Jasmine. That was her name, but everyone called her Jazz.’
Netta brushed the tattoo with her fingers. ‘Right on your heart.’
‘Yeah.’ He let the jumper drop.
‘What was it like when things were bad?’
‘She’d just, I don’t know, vanish. She’d still be there, but she was gone. She’d stay in her room for days on end and sleep a lot. I had to look after Mav when she was like that. He was still so little.’
‘How did that make you feel?’
‘Scared. Angry.’
‘Wasn’t there someone who could’ve helped? Another adult?’
Mo shook his head. ‘Mav and I don’t know who our dads are. Our birth certificates only list Mum’s name. And Mum was an only child and her parents were gone by the time things got really bad.’
‘You could’ve told a teacher.’
Mo moved his gaze from the wall to Netta. ‘No, I couldn’t. I knew what would happen. They would’ve reported it and Mav and I would’ve been taken away from Mum, so I just stepped up as best I could.’
‘So, the diary?’
‘It’s proof.’
‘Of what?’
‘Of what she was really like. I wrote in it when she was in her bad spells, and I was eleven, so I didn’t exactly hold back. I can’t let Mav see it. Ever. I’ve never told him the truth about her. I don’t want him to know what she was really like when he’s grown up thinking she was perfect.’
Mo swallowed hard. ‘It’s also proof that it was my fault Mum died.’ He dropped his face into his hands and took three long breaths. ‘She read something—something awful—that I wrote about her, and then she killed herself.’
The weight of his admission swung between them like a pendulum.
‘Oh, Mo.’ Netta wanted to wrap her arms around him, to comfort him. ‘You were just a little boy. It’s not your fault.’
He shook his head violently. ‘It was, Netta. I was so angry with her because she hadn’t turned up to watch me perform at school. She’d promised me she’d come. I was so nervous and I just wanted her there, you know?’
Netta nodded.
‘When I got home, she was smoking weed in the lounge room with some loser guy. She didn’t even ask me how it’d gone. I went into my room and wrote something terrible about her in my journal. The next day when I got home from school, it was open on that page on my bed, so I knew she’d read it.’
Netta touched his knee. ‘What did you write?’
Mo closed his eyes and took a deep breath, every muscle in his face fighting tears.
‘I said that I wished she was dead because me and Mav would be better off without her. It wasn’t true, but I was so angry, Netta.
There’d just been so many times when she’d let me down, and that performance was so important to me.
I’d been practising for ages. God, it all seems so stupid now. I was such a little idiot.’
‘No, you weren’t,’ said Netta. ‘You were a little boy who needed his mum.’
‘I was a little boy who killed his mum.’
Netta shook her head sadly. ‘No, Mo, you couldn’t have. Tell me what happened.’
Mo took a deep breath. ‘When I saw that she’d read the diary, I panicked and hid it in my secret hiding place under the loose floorboard, where you found it.
She’d been asleep when I got home from school that day and she was still sleeping when it was starting to get dark, so I made me and Mav some dinner and we both went to bed.
The next morning she wasn’t up when I was getting ready, but I’d cooled off a bit and I wanted to say sorry to her for what I wrote.
I went into her room and tried to wake her up, but I couldn’t. ’
Netta’s eyes filled with tears, and she pressed her lips together to contain the sob waiting to escape. ‘Was she—’
Mo nodded. ‘She was so cold. I called an ambulance straight away but it was way too late.’
‘Do you know how she died?’
‘There were pills and stuff next to the bed. I heard the paramedics saying “suspected accidental overdose” and things like that. But I knew—I knew—it wasn’t an accident. I knew she’d done it on purpose.’
‘Because of what you wrote?’
‘Yeah.’
An ache carved through Netta’s chest at the crack in Mo’s voice.
‘And then, straight after,’ he said, pulling himself together, ‘the cops took me and Mav to the police station and we spent the next seven years being bounced around different foster homes.’
‘Was it awful?’
‘You don’t want to know.’ Mo’s expression was grave.
‘As soon as I turned eighteen, I took guardianship over Mav and we got out on our own. I worked and saved until we could come over here. I just had to get as far away from it all as I could. And Mav needed a fresh start. His childhood was so shitty.’
‘So you’ve been looking after him his whole life, pretty much?’
‘It’s the least I could do,’ said Mo. ‘If it wasn’t for me, none of it would’ve happened.’
‘Mo, it wasn’t your fault.’
‘It was,’ he said, his certainty cemented into his jaw. ‘She was sensitive. She really felt things, more than most people do. She’d see sad things on the news and be in floods of tears. She would’ve read those words and spiralled. I know it.’
‘But, Mo, you were just a kid,’ Netta said. ‘Kids get angry with their parents all the time. She would’ve known you still loved her. You wouldn’t have been angry with her in the first place if you didn’t.’
Mo was silent, staring at the floor, his hands clasped tightly in his lap.
‘Mo, look at me.’ Netta dipped her head to make eye contact with him. ‘Mo.’
Finally, his shadowed eyes met hers.
‘It wasn’t your fault,’ she said.
‘But—’
‘It wasn’t your fault,’ she repeated gently.
‘Don’t.’ His voice held a spike of warning.
‘Did you ever find out what her actual cause of death was?’
‘No.’
‘Maybe you should try, Mo. It might take a while to get it, but wouldn’t it be worth it to get some closure? The pills might’ve had nothing to do with it.’
‘What difference would it make, Netta?’ His voice was beginning to harden.
‘She’s gone either way. And whether it was an overdose or not, the fact remains that the last thing she knew of me was that I wanted her dead.
It’s just too much of a coincidence for it to have been anything other than suicide.
’ His voice cracked as he locked his gaze with Netta’s, defiance and sadness competing in his eyes.
‘So that’s it. My big secret. Who I really am. ’
‘Mo—’
‘Don’t,’ he said, again. ‘There’s nothing you can say. I just needed you to know the truth about me. I don’t expect you to make it better. I just didn’t want you to think that I was something I’m not.’
‘I think you’re incredible,’ Netta said. ‘Even more now that I know what you’ve overcome.’
‘Don’t do that. I don’t need pity. I know who I am and I know what I did.’
Netta could sense the distance he was putting between them, and the drag on her heart was unbearable. ‘We’ve both got our shit, remember? Everyone does. We’ve lived lives by our age. It’s impossible not to have a bit of luggage, right?’
‘But, Netta, yours was never your fault,’ Mo said. ‘This is all my fault. It ruined Mav’s entire childhood. Who knows what he could’ve become if it wasn’t for me.’
‘It sounds to me like he’s very lucky he’s got you,’ said Netta.
Mo drooped, looking a million miles from the rock star the world knew. ‘I think I need to go for a walk. Clear my head a bit.’
Netta watched as he let himself out the door into the freezing, empty streets of Christmas Day.
Her heart stretched and contracted in her chest. He’d opened up to her.
He’d trusted her with something he’d never told anyone.
She felt more of a connection to him than she had with anyone in her life, so why did it feel as though he was already slipping away?