Chapter Fifty
Blaise eyes me across the table of the super-cool restaurant on the top floor of the Standard hotel where I’ve brought her for dinner.
Her eyes have been on stalks all night soaking up the beautiful young male waiters, and she loves the food.
I chose well. She has told me about her life, about the university course she’s starting when she gets back to Sydney next week, about her Bondi lifestyle of evenings on the beach, surfing on Sundays, and, God, I envy her life.
I try not to show it as she speaks. To be nineteen again, I think, to be this beautiful, this young, this free. My God, I’d give a kidney.
But I’ve just done the thing I told myself I wouldn’t do. I’ve shared the car crash of my life with my daughter.
“Stay with me,” she says now, her eyes wide with horror. “Seriously, there’s, like, a sofa-bed thing in my hotel room. Please. Don’t go back there.”
“I have to,” I say. “The dog needs feeding. Daisy needs me. They all just need me.”
“Please,” she says. “I hate this for you. They’ll live without you. Just for one night.”
But every time I start to give the idea genuine thought, bam, there, like a dropped cinder block in my consciousness, is Daisy.
I picture her in the kitchen tomorrow morning, running late because nobody woke her, leaving without the packed lunch that she never eats, entombed in the terrible rage of her mother, who will not have me to take it out on, and therefore will take it out on her, and I shake my head and say, “You are so sweet, but no.” And then I say, “I promise you, by the next time I see you, I will be out of that mess. I swear. I just need to get Daisy out of that house. Make sure she’s safe. ”
Blaise looks at me then, half-affectionately, half-skeptical. “OK, dude,” she says. “If you say so.”
We leave at 9 p.m.; I catch a taxi to get me home quicker. My earlier resolve has diluted, and my head keeps filling up with pictures of Daisy dealing with her drunk, insane mother. The taxi drops me off into the tawny darkness that exists almost uniquely at the bottom end of the Vale of Health.
“Don’t think I’ve ever dropped anyone down this end before,” the driver says, looking around him. “Didn’t even know the road went this far.”
I pay and get out and I eye the house in front of me: the aged jeep, still not fixed, still a work in progress, the lights on in three windows, the air all around of encroaching rage.
I hear Hugo barking and then go quiet again when I call out, “It’s me, mate,” into the darkness.
I take out my keys, unlock the front door, and pull it open, and then the darkness that has been chasing me all day fully descends with the weight and agony of something heavy against my skull that makes my brain feel as if it is loose in my head for a moment, and then, a second later, I am gone.