The Good Daughter (7 page)

Aden straightens. ‘Does no-one ask where he was or what he was doing?’

‘Shh, Aden …’

‘What?’

His mother whispers, ‘Zach’s right there.’

Aden looks over, and his face does register some regret.

When it seems like he might approach, Zach gets to his feet and leaves the room. Rebecca is not far behind.

‘I’m so sorry, Zach,’ she says as she walks towards him. ‘I can’t believe it. I really can’t. I don’t know what to say.’

‘Can I see you out by your car?’

A look of confusion passes over her face. She nods.

As they leave she scans the room, looking – Zach can tell – for Aden Claas, as though he should come with them, as though he is, in a matter of hours, important to her.

They go down the steps and out through the gate. When they get to the car, Zach steps in close. ‘My mum’s not missing, Rebecca. You shouldn’t have called the cops.’

She looks blankly at him. ‘What do you mean?’

‘You shouldn’t have called the police.’

‘Where is she?’

‘You should have rung us.’

Rebecca is against the car, her face pale above the black of the jumper. ‘We did ring you. We couldn’t get on to you.’

‘You didn’t try too hard. All you had to do was ring Dad and he would have dealt with it.’

‘Dealt with what?’

‘Her being missing.’

She shakes her head. ‘I don’t understand. Is she missing or not?’

There are sounds of footsteps, the crunch of gravel, and an easing of tension in Rebecca. Zach turns to see Aden coming up beside the police car.

‘Fuck off,’ Zach says.

Aden holds his hands up in surrender. ‘Whoa … Just coming out to see if everything’s all right.’

‘Everything’s all right – fuck off.’

‘Well, I won’t actually.’ Aden starts forward again.

‘We’re talking.’

‘I don’t think Rebecca is comfortable talking to you right now.’

‘What would you know?’

‘Listen, mate —’

‘Don’t call me mate.’

‘I tell you what.’ Aden’s voice flattens out and loses its tolerant ring. ‘Rebecca’s going to go inside, we’re all going to go inside, and you can talk to her in there.’

‘Why is he here?’ Zach asks Rebecca. ‘Why the fuck is he following you around?’

Aden says, ‘Go inside, Rebecca.’

And she does.

No hesitation, just like that –
Go inside, Rebecca
, and it is like she’ll do whatever he tells her to.

Zach finds himself saying as a result, yelling on a night that he shouldn’t, with a clarity that shouldn’t be there, in a voice he recognises, but one he doesn’t own, ‘So it’s true then! You do fuck anyone! I’m disappointed though, Toyer – you didn’t howl like a dog for me. You didn’t bark for
me
, Beccy!’

More might have been said – it’s a stream issuing from him, out of his control, but Aden shoves him in the chest and Zach stumbles against the car’s side mirror.

Aden apologises roughly. ‘Sorry.’

‘Fuck off!’

‘I didn’t mean to —’

‘Fuck off!’

Aden steps back. ‘Fine. Whatever, mate.’

‘Don’t call me mate! Don’t touch me! Don’t think you’re my brother, or half-brother, or anything. Don’t come near me. Go back to your slut mother and tell her she’s not getting another cent from us!’

11

As a consequence of the day, the night, Zach’s behaviour, the relief at having left at last, what seems to Rebecca to have steadily built is building still as Aden takes her home in her car. It’s there as he parks beside the truck shed and while she counts the dogs and puts them in the enclosure, there as he explains Nigel is coming out to pick him up, but he’ll probably be about half an hour, and there as he stands on the porch and waits to be invited in. It’s built to this.

Looking back, she’ll say she felt it the moment he stepped out of the clubhouse, as he walked down the dirt track around the oval, across the bridge towards her. She’ll ask him when he felt it, and he’ll say before that – while on the cricket field, out there at long off, noticing the car, squatting and picking grass to pass the time, looking over his shoulder and seeing her down by the river.

Rebecca would go as far as to say everything in her life led to Aden Claas.

He kisses her beside the light switch in the kitchen. He puts his hands on her waist and says he knows he shouldn’t be doing this, and then kisses her again. It’s soft and makes her swoon – tiredness, she knows, plays a part, a mentally exhausting last few hours, feelings of guilt and culpability seesawing inside of her, but it’s also the first time she’s been kissed this way.

‘Are you all right?’ he asks. ‘Because tell me if this is not all right.’

‘It’s all right,’ she tells him.

‘Rebecca, I’m twenty-two, you’re sixteen, you’ve had a terrible day …’

It doesn’t stop him.

The smell of Aden Claas? Impossible to say, but strong, because he’s unwashed: oily hair and salty skin, faint trace of aftershave. And in that place behind his ear, where his hairline meets his neck, he has his initials tattooed –
A
.
C
. – in slanting text, as though he knew that’s where she’d go looking for him. She presses her nose and lips against it, blinks away the prick of tears. It’s silly, she knows – she’s emotional, the day, the night, thoughts of her mother – but it’s like he says: it feels right. Why else would they be doing this?

He undresses her in the bedroom, kneels with his clothes on and kisses her stomach, moves his mouth down to between her legs. It’s not the first time someone’s done it, but it’s the first time it’s felt good. She forgets to be self-conscious, holds his shoulders for support. It’s so good it culminates into something near to an orgasm, not the intensity of those she has alone, but it’s more than she’s ever had with a boy, or ever hoped to have.

He tells her to lie on the bed. He has sure hands and avoids all the most obvious spots. He says warm words against her skin, tells her she’s got a beautiful body, turns her over and runs his hands over her back, down over her bottom.

He says with his lips against her shoulder, body pressed in behind her, ‘I haven’t brought anything with me. Are you on the pill?’

She shakes her head.

‘Have you got any condoms?’

‘No.’

He puts his hand between her legs and rubs her as he talks.

‘You’re wet,’ he says, as though this should automatically lead to her having some sort of protection in the house.

‘Sorry.’

He smiles against her shoulder. ‘Don’t be.’

What she understands then is that he’s not there to muck around. Unlike the boys she’s been with, who would fondle for hours if you let them, who seem to have no goal or direction, he unzips his jeans and takes them off, asks if she’s done it from behind before. Rebecca shakes her head.

‘I’ll be gentle. I won’t come inside you.’

Virginity lost on the night Joanne Kincaid went missing. Face down on the bed, doggy-style. The gradual easing in, and the muttered words
You’re tight
. Sex then, unmistakably. One hand holding her hip and the other hand on her shoulder, like in the movies, and not the sort of movies you see at a regular cinema. It hurts and it’s her fault, all she has to do is tell him to stop, but she doesn’t want him to stop. It’s good to get it done.

Although the dogs are barking and there’s the sound of a car idling out in the driveway, Aden changes position, takes off his shirt and has her lie on her back in the middle on the bed. He makes sure she’s comfortable, and then kneels and guides himself inside her again, glancing at her face. ‘Does that hurt?’

She shakes her head.

‘Does it feel good?’

She wets her lips and answers yes, and, strangely, having said that, it does feel good for a second.

He says
Fuck
between his teeth, puts his bare chest against hers, slides his arms around her and holds her from underneath, tucks his face into her neck and her hair.

Missionary position.

She discovers he likes it best when she moves, that he has a rhythm, and that he increases the speed and penetration when she grips his back and arches against him. He groans and mutters things, tells her it’s good, tells her she feels good, touches her breasts, kisses her neck and jaw.

Keen to learn, taking mental notes, Rebecca watches him come on her belly, his chin to one side, face screwed up, strange final strokes she wouldn’t have thought would make a man come, not the big
wank, wank
, they go on about but something more efficient and precise, interesting, leaving her feeling as though she’s witnessed something special.

He opens his eyes and looks at her, blinks and smiles lazily, makes a low growl in the back of his throat.

As aggressive as he sometimes seemed during the height of it, he is gentle and grateful after it. He curls in behind her and hugs her, says again that she’s beautiful, that she’s got the best body,
Great tits
, he whispers in her ear.

When they go out, Nigel is in the yellow hatchback, motor running, radio on, the seat back and his feet up on the dash. He winds down the window and eyes them.

He says, ‘That’s disgraceful, Aden! You ought to be ashamed of yourself!’

Aden turns to Rebecca. ‘I’ll come and get you in the morning. If they find her during the night, do you want me to ring you?’

‘Yes.’

‘God, that’s filthy,’ Nigel goes on. ‘Really lowbrow stuff. I’m insanely jealous. How’s it going anyway, Rebecca? Lost any more local identities tonight? I got a couple in mind you could make go missing for me.’

‘Do you want your jumper?’ Rebecca asks Aden.

‘Looks better on you, you keep it.’

He is in two minds on the step, caught between leaving or leaning in to kiss her. He looks over at the car.

‘Shit, Rebecca,’ he says, and she can’t help but smile.

Shit, Rebecca
seems to be her lot in life. Boys will forever be saying that to her, with that regretful expression on their face: wishing she was someone else, a few years older, anything but exactly what she is. It’s understandable. It hurts.

‘Why,’ he says as though reading her mind, ‘can’t you be older?’

‘I’m old enough.’

‘Nigel’s right, you know – I am a bastard.’

‘What’s that mean?’

‘I’ve never had a girlfriend longer than two weeks. I probably should have told you that. I’ve got a really bad track record.’

‘I’ve got a really bad reputation – is that the same thing?’

‘Sort of.’

She shrugs. He grins. He pulls her into a kiss. ‘So we make a good pair,’ he says.

Nigel heckles them from the car.

After he’s gone, Rebecca thinks how Joanne Kincaid might find it
inspirational
, or a coming together of
good energy
. At the very least she wouldn’t think of it as boring.

12

Zach is up before dawn, not having really slept. Unlike his aunt Belinda, who he suspects sleeps soundly in her old bed, who was quick to turn up on the doorstep last night, who probably revels in the absence of his mother. He catches her in his father’s room laying out his clothes – her grey hair and sloping shoulders, backside sliding away into her legs. She asks, ‘How are you today, Zach?’

His father is in the shower and Zach is able to answer, ‘How the fuck do you reckon I am?’

Zach waits until his father leaves and then he starts out across the paddocks. The sky is bleached out in the corners. He walks through the tussocks and up over the rocky outcrops, cuts through a stand of bush.

Birds sing and the air seems electric, things click and rustle in the grass. It hurts to breathe. He arches his shoulders, tries to get his breath, keeps touching his hand to his chest like people with asthma do.

Standing by Rebecca’s side gate is a quieter, more subdued replay of the day before – the grey house, the blue sky above it, low rays warming the jagged edges of scrap metal in the front yard, the dogs scratching and whining in their cage. It’s not as intense as yesterday. The heat’s been taken out. He half expects Rebecca to come out of the front door in a longer, more modest T-shirt, one covering her underwear; he waits, sure that it will happen. He looks at the drawn curtains in her bedroom window, runs his hand over the corroded metal gate and down to the latch.

The dogs break the lull. They explode with noise in their enclosure; they jump against the wire and run back and repeat it like animals half-mad with captivity. Zach opens his mouth to speak, but finds he has no voice. He swallows and tries again.

‘Hey guys,’ he says.

The barking becomes less furious. They stick their noses through the wire and snort for his scent.

There are sounds of a person, seemingly twice as heavy as Rebecca, walking around inside the house. Zach turns to double-check that the truck isn’t in the shed. He checks down towards the road for other cars. When he feels sure she is alone he goes up and knocks on the door.

She is in a dressing-gown, tied tightly at the waist, her hair in a rushed ponytail, and her face glossy from being washed.

He starts by saying, ‘I got you out of bed again.’

She looks past him out into the yard. ‘Is your dad here? Is your mum back?’

‘No, on both counts.’

That same blank look from the night before returns to her face, as though she’s uncertain who he is – not the Zach she knows from school, not the boy she touched on the bus. ‘I wanted to apologise,’ he says, ‘about last night, about what I said. Can I come inside?’

Her eyebrows draw together.

‘Rebecca, I’m sorry. I’m sorry for what I said. I’m sorry I acted like I did. I was trying to work out if we …’ he motions back and forth between them, ‘if we’re together.’

‘I don’t think we’re together, Zach.’

‘Can I talk to you?’

‘Yes.’

But she doesn’t invite him in. After a moment of them both standing there, looking off in their own separate directions, Zach says, ‘I got the impression last night there was something between you and Aden.’

‘Don’t you see how all this is really strange to me? Last night all you do is insult me and tell me your mum isn’t missing, and now you turn up here saying she is missing and you think we’re going out. I still don’t know if she is missing or not. You accuse me of doing the wrong thing – well, what was I meant to do? She was acting strange. She was upset. She didn’t even go inside the restaurant. I thought it was pretty serious.’