Chapter 35
RUSSELL
As I stepped down into the houseboat kitchen, Bridie froze in the doorway to the bedroom, the light behind her haloing around her shoulders and making wings of the sleeves of her white pyjama T-shirt. She’d heard me getting dropped off, and took in the image of me with her mouth open wide.
‘Daaaaad!’
‘I’m okay!’ I put my hands up. ‘But I really need a shower before I do anything else.’
I went in and stripped my clothes off, showered, came out of the tiny bathroom not sure if I preferred being covered in thousands of tiny, open, dirty scratches or thousands of tiny, clean, rapidly closing ones.
Every inch of me itched. My palms were ripped raw and trailing white, dead skin.
I looked like I’d gone toe-to-toe with a hundred and fifty cats in a pit full of scalpels.
Bridie was sitting on the end of one of the single beds at the back of the vessel, her legs crossed, watching me come in with the towel around my waist, her eyes still bugging and her mouth still open. ‘What happened?’
‘Blackberry bushes,’ I said. I pointed to the sheets, the freshly made beds. ‘What happened here?’
Bridie looked. ‘Oh, a local lady brought them over. They’re lovely.’ She patted the coverlet beside her. ‘I literally think they’re washed in lavender laundry liquid. You can smell it. And she made us cupcakes. They’re on the kitchen counter.’
‘Oh no.’ I went into my bag, pulled out my boxers and tugged them on under the towel. ‘Old woman.’
‘How did you know she was old?’
‘The cupcakes. The sheets. The whole gesture. I’m a detective, but it wouldn’t have taken one. I don’t like old women, Bridie. So if she comes back, you keep her away from me.’
‘What are you talking about? Who doesn’t like old women?’
‘Me.’
‘Why?’
‘They have incredible gaydars.’
‘What?’
‘Old women have the best gaydars. I can’t explain it. It’s true. You just have to accept it.’
‘I can’t accept it. That is not a thing.’
‘Yes it is.’ I eased myself onto the bed with a chorus of groans.
‘They can smell it on you. She’ll come back here and she’ll figure out I’m a queen in five minutes flat, and then she’ll insist on organising an unexpected but adorable encounter between me and the local gay and I’ll never recover from the awfulness of it, Bridie, I’ll never recover. ’
Bridie shook her head. ‘You’re insane, Dad.’
‘I’m right.’
‘No, but you actually need, like, professional help.’ She leant back against her pillows and flipped her long legs up. ‘And if she does come back around here, you can’t yell at her. I’m not going to sit by and watch you make someone’s nana cry. You can’t act the way you do around people anymore.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because you’re going to end up an angry, lonely old man, that’s why not.’
‘I won’t be lonely. I’ll have you.’
‘No you won’t, unless you clean your act up.’
I felt a chill enter my chest. She was quiet, clearly examining the gravity of her own words, trying to decide whether to withdraw them or not.
Silence fell around us. A full minute. Two.
I was simultaneously proud of her for not backing down and in a rage at myself, at who I’d become.
How right she was about everything. Somebody had to say something, so I said, ‘You’d better go back to sleep.
The sparrows haven’t even got up to do their morning wee yet. ’
‘No way. I want to know why you decided to roll around in a million blackberry bushes.’
I told her. Didn’t leave anything out. She’s the kid of two cops.
‘Holy crap,’ she said when I was done.
‘Yeah.’
‘So the case is over?’
‘No.’
‘But you’re off it, at least.’
‘Also no.’
‘I mean, officially, though?’
‘Yeah, but that doesn’t mean anything.’
‘Are you going to sleep?’
‘No.’ I took my phone from beside me and set an alarm. ‘I’m going to have a little lie-down. Forty minutes. Then I’ve got shit to do.’
Bridie got up, pottered around for a bit, then came back, flicked the lights off and sat against her pillows again, playing with her phone. I didn’t realise I was asleep until I woke myself up snoring. She gave a snicker from across the room.
My mind drifted for a while. Then I said, ‘Hey.’
‘Yeah?’
‘I have a question for you.’
‘Go for it.’
‘Do you …’ I started. Paused to get my words in order. Heard a sharp sigh from over there. ‘What?’
‘Do you have a boyfriend?’ she said. Her voice was tight. ‘That’s the question, isn’t it?’
‘No.’ I laughed. ‘Why would it be?’
‘I don’t know.’ She gave another sigh, like a train trying to get up a hill. ‘It just seems like every time I meet a new adult the only two questions I ever get are How’s school? and Do you have a boyfriend?’
I put my head back, shifted position. My knees were giving me hell from all the running. ‘I’m not trying to find out about some teenage dirtbag boyfriend, Bridie, I’m trying to find out about you.’
‘Oh. Okay,’ she said. I could hear her smiling.
‘Do you have, like, a …’ I still couldn’t find the right words. ‘Like, a … vision … about what you want to do? And how you want to live? In the next … I don’t know, decade? Or whatever?’
‘You mean, like, what do I want to do for a job?’
‘I mean everything.’ I rubbed my head. ‘I’m just trying to say …
when you imagine yourself in ten years. Twenty years.
Are you … are you … what? A healthcare worker in Nigeria?
Are you an airline pilot in Japan? Are you a vet in Sydney?
Are you homeless and living under a bridge?
What’s the plan? Do you think you’ll have kids? Do you want to get married?’
‘That’s a shitload of questions, Dad.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Did you just decide you were going to ask me every question you’ve been thinking about for the past five years all at once?’
I laughed. There was so much laughing lately. She was so fun to talk to. ‘I didn’t realise they were all tied together until I started pulling them out.’
‘Well, I think I want to stay nearby, long term,’ she said. ‘I like Sydney. I don’t know if I’ll have kids but if I did I would want to be near you and Mum.’
‘Okay,’ I said gently, careful not to punch the air with joy.
‘And something with animals suits me,’ she mused.
‘Of course.’
‘But I don’t know about going full-on down the veterinary science route. There’s a lot of hard work there. Crazy hours. And so much death. I mean, so much death!’
‘Right. Okay.’
Her voice became light, almost feathery, floating with possibility.
‘There are, um, people who manage wild brumbies? In the outback? They trap them, study them, figure out which ones can be domesticated. I’ve talked to Mum about maybe going and doing that for a while, after the HSC.
Managing the brumbies. Maybe I could build up some equine skills and knowledge, before coming back to Sydney and settling down and doing something with horses at home. ’
I put my hand on my chest, trying to smother the growing sparkle of terror at the idea of my beautiful teenage daughter surrounded by lonely horse trappers twice her age and huge, feral horses, in a landscape so sparse and desolate it might as well have been outer space. ‘That sounds awesome!’ I flat-out lied.
‘You think so?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Hmm.’
The silence fell. I was walking the razor blade between sleep and the desire to close the gaping wounds of wonderment in my heart.
To know my daughter again. This almost-woman who had once been a tiny girl attached to my side like a limpet on a rock, trembling in the big bed between Georgia and me, having crawled in there during a thunderstorm.
‘So I haven’t turned you off marriage, then? ’
‘What?’ She laughed. ‘Oh, nah.’
‘Because what happened between your mum and me, that’s not normal. That was my fault.’
‘It was and it wasn’t,’ Bridie said. I gripped onto those words tightly, holding them to my heart, afraid to open my palm and look too closely at them. ‘I mean, sure, it was an awful mess,’ she went on. ‘But I think she’s going to be okay. Mum.’
‘You do?’
‘Yeah,’ Bridie said. ‘She’s dating. She’s going to things. She laughs.’
I smiled. ‘Good.’
The silence lingered for a while. ‘Do you …’ she began.
‘Do I have a boyfriend?’ I scoffed. ‘Bridie, how dare you ask me that?’
The laughter rose and fell and rose again. ‘I sometimes go to DejaVu and get a bit worried I’ll see you there,’ she said.
‘Oh, Jesus.’ I rubbed my head. ‘You wouldn’t catch me dead in that place. I can’t dance and I can’t afford the cover charge.’
‘Do you see people, though? Men?’
‘Yes, Bridie, I see men.’
‘How?’
‘I date online,’ I said. ‘Sporadically. And very privately. I’m not a stand-around-in-a-bar guy.
Or a clubber. I tried that, in the beginning.
Thought I should go to a gay bar and just present myself as a prospective member of The Gays.
Fill in the application form. After a few soul-destroying nights of being avoided like a leper, a helpful little twink came up and told me that the way I was dressed and the way I stood and the way I was looking at people was screaming “cop” so loudly nobody could think straight. ’
‘Oh my god,’ Bridie snickered. ‘What did you do?’
‘I said, “Honey, this is a gay bar, nobody in here was thinking straight anyway.”’
‘What! Did you really say that?’
‘No.’ I sighed. ‘I thought of it three weeks later.’
‘Oh, man.’
‘But I’ll have it pre-loaded for next time.’
‘Do gays not like cops?’
‘Sometimes, but definitely not in that circumstance. In that situation I was so cagey they figured I was undercover wanting to bust people for drugs.’
‘Poor you.’
‘You live and learn.’
‘So, now you date online,’ Bridie said.
‘Yep.’
‘Are you with someone?’
‘Oh, no.’
‘Why?’
‘Urgh. How much time have you got?’
‘Plenty.’
‘I’m emotionally unavailable.’ I started listing on my fingers. ‘I don’t text. I don’t take selfies. I don’t hold hands. I’m a socially anxious workaholic with a huge chip on my shoulder, and I could really use a pedicure.’
She laughed. ‘Well, at least you’re self-aware.’
‘I’m not going to end up an angry, lonely old man, though, Birds.’ I glanced over. ‘So you don’t have to worry.’
‘Oh?’ she said. ‘You’re not?’
‘No. I just decided. When you said those words. I’m not going to be that. I’m going to get you back, and I’m not going to lose you again.’
‘So what are you going to do, then?’ she asked. She sounded unconvinced. And that hurt so badly I could hardly breathe for a minute.
‘I’m going to learn,’ I said. ‘And I’m going to change.’
She made a little sound. I was too tired and scared to try to figure out if it was an interested, disbelieving or relieved sound. My mind drifted away, led by the call of the creatures out there and the whispering of the nearby river.