Kisses for Lula (18 page)

I shut Pen’s door quietly behind me and headed for the kitchen.

Dear God.

Mum had done chicken-liver stew. My stomach turned and I nearly ran from the room, but I knew what Must Be Done.

‘Mum,’ I gushed, ‘this smells wonderful.’

Pen shot me a baleful look and lifted her fork in a rude gesture.

‘Careful with the cutlery, Pen,’ I suggested mildly. ‘Don’t want to take your own eye out.’

Her nostrils flared and Dad coughed as if he were about to say something. But it seemed the cough turned into some sort of heave, because he bolted from the table and headed for the bathroom across the hall.

Pen rolled her eyes. ‘Dad’s illness is, like, so old,’ she complained, fiddling with the trim at the sleeves. I watched
her work a bead loose and tried to calm my breathing.

It was no good.

‘Leave the frikking beads,’ I snapped. ‘They take at least a minute apiece to sew on.’

Pen ignored me. ‘Has Dad got Aids?’ she asked Mum curiously.

My jaw dropped. If it wasn’t for my excellent hinge joints, the bottom of my face would have landed on the floor.

‘I think the correct term is HIV, Pen,’ said Mum. ‘And, no, it’s just a fluey thing.’

‘Oh,’ said Pen, clearly disappointed.

‘Your daughter?’ I said to Mum, waving the salt cellar at Pen with meaning. ‘She needs help. Clinical help.’

Pen yawned ostentatiously. ‘Fu-unny,’ she drawled.

‘Conniving to get Fat Angus in the sack is the first symptom of which we should all take note.’

‘
Tallulah!
’ cried Mum. ‘That’s enough! Just ignore her, Pen,’ she continued, finally sitting down.

‘Okay, Mum,’ said Pen meekly, pretending to eat the stew while slipping forkloads to Boodle under the table.

‘Where is Great-aunt Phoebe? Is Blue in bed?’ I asked.

‘Blue’s asleep,’ confirmed Mum. ‘Phoebe rushed off when she remembered a dinner drink she’d scheduled ages ago.’

Pen caught my eye. Yeah,
right
. Mum’s stew had sent Great-aunt Phoebe running for sure.

We sat in silence for a while, listening to Dad vomit.

‘He puts a lot of volume into each retch,’ I noted at last. I gripped my fork so hard the handle hurt my palm.

‘Tallulah!’ exclaimed Mum again. ‘What is with you tonight? I’m glad I’m not on the receiving end of your bad mood.’ She stood up from the table and turned to the sink to start rinsing and putting stuff in the dishwasher. Pen sprang into action, and Boodle obliged as her plate appeared under the table. Scoff, scoff, scoff.

My foul food was congealing. I stared at it numbly.

‘Personnel had nothing much to say about Sophie,’ said Mum, clattering dishes into the washer. ‘We’re going to get answers soon, though.’

‘Riiight,’ I said doubtfully.

Mum bent her head over the stew pot, blackened at the edges, and began to scrub like a woman possessed.

I looked at her closely. Uh-oh.

‘Mum, what have you done?’ Pen asked sternly.

My mother looked distinctly shifty and ripped off the rubber gloves before shoving the crusty pot on the bottom rack of the groaning dishwasher. She swiped a wisp of hair from her forehead leaving Fairy foam upon her brow. ‘I told everyone that the disks from the CCTV footage were in my office for safekeeping.’

Pen’s eyes widened. ‘Yes?’ she urged.

I pushed my food into a grave-like mound, and nudged
a potato into headstone position. The sound of retching was still coming from the bathroom.

Mum pulled a container of ice cream from the freezer and thumped it on to the table. ‘I asked that my office door remain locked till I got a chance to look them over.’

‘Oh,’ Pen said, disappointed. ‘But, Mum, you told me earlier there are no tapes. And you won’t know if anyone does rummage in your office, because you don’t really have a working camera in there.’

‘Two words,’ said Mum, holding up three fingers.

Pen raised her eyebrows.

‘Maybe three,’ she added. ‘Mr Kadinski’s clock!’

‘Clock?’ I muttered.

‘Yes, alarm clock with hidden spy camera and twenty gig digital video recorder combi package!’ she trilled.

‘I’m not hearing this.’ Pen shook her head in disbelief.

‘But wait!’ said Mum. ‘That’s not all! This is the ultimate video surveillance system at an affordable price, providing up to sixty hours of constant video recording by a high resolution camera integrated in the alarm clock.’

‘Noooo,’ moaned Pen.

‘You’ve planted a hidden camera. In your office.’ I was incredulous.

Mum beamed triumphantly. ‘Someone will try to get those disks. And I’ll see exactly who it is.’

‘Four bags of Maltesers says it’s Sophie Wenger,’ I said.
‘It will be so good when you have evidence to prove it – I just want this planning dispute over with.’

‘Please.’ Pen shot me a scornful look and said in her most pompous voice, ‘Secret tapes are inadmissible. You know nothing of the law. Don’t go there.’

‘Stop with the pseudo-solicitor speak, Pen. I’ve seen enough telly to know what’s admissible,’ I said darkly. ‘I can see I’m going to have to take this matter into my own hands.’

Dad staggered out of the bathroom.

‘Other matters too,’ I added, through a lump in my throat.

‘Whatever,’ said Pen disrespectfully.

I bit my tongue and clutched her mobile for comfort. It helped. Revenge would be sweet. I was going to think up something terrible. Like ringing Angus and saying –

But Pen was not done being forty: ‘It looks like you should be doing extra school work to get your marks up!’ she said, waving her index finger in my face. ‘Or getting that heap of junk in the cellar to start! Or actually not damaging the next guy who comes along so that you at least get a kiss before you turn sixteen!’ Pen was now the most worked up I’d seen her in a long time. I blinked. ‘Any minute now your weird-ass jinxy reputation is going to start affecting
me
! If it gets any worse, guys will wonder if
I’m
in the same boat as
you
!’

‘Mind your own business,’ I said, my voice tight and strained.

‘I
am
!’ yelled Pen. ‘Don’t you get it?’

‘Take it easy, Pen,’ said Dad from the doorway. We all turned to look at him.

‘Yes,’ said Mum. ‘Lula’s got a date tomorrow, anyway. Nothing wrong with being a late starter.’ She beamed at me kindly and I felt like screaming. ‘With Bill? Ben?’ she asked.

‘Ben,’ I said, nodding wearily.

Mum took the rubbish to the dustbin outside, and Pen escaped with Boodle for a walk.

‘A date?’ said my father mildly.

‘Hn,’ I replied.

‘Me too.’ Dad laughed. ‘Though I shouldn’t.’ He sloshed himself a glass of water at the sink and staggered across the hall again, leaving me gaping after him in disbelief.

What?
Was he
drunk
?

The frikker had just told his own daughter he was going on an illicit date.
How? The? Hell?

Clearly, only one path was open to me. Vengeance. Bodily harm. More vengeance, more harm.

Okay. Make that several paths.

I shoved my plate into the dishwasher so hard it smashed.

All at once everything seemed just too, too much. I wanted to scream and shout and cry all at the same time,
to forget everything – have everything back the way it was before Grandma died.

‘Lula?’ came Mum’s querulous voice from outside. ‘You all right? What broke?’

‘Your heart, in case you hadn’t noticed,’ I muttered, too low for her to hear. And left the smashed plate in the washer, eyes too full of tears to manage a clear up.

‘I’m going to catch up with Pen and Boodle for a stroll. Back in a bit,’ called Mum, but I barely heard her. Dad’s voice was on repeat in my head:
A date? Me too
.

And I hadn’t said
anything
to him. All this . . .
hatred
at Dad and
NOTHING – not
. . .
one
. . .
word
– would come out of my gaping, useless, gobby mouth.

So, then, with my head in no place at all, my senseless body took over. I pushed away from the dishwasher and went after my father. He was just closing the bathroom door behind himself as I got into the hall, and suddenly it felt like I’d been hit with a jab of adrenalin because the next second I was pounding on the door, just as the latch clicked to lock on the other side.

‘You fff–! You rr–! You shh–!’ I shouted stupidly. And I pounded, and hit, and thrashed, and punched till my fist felt soft and pulpy.

‘T?’ came Dad’s voice, and then, ‘Wait, I –’ and more retching.

‘You PIG!’ I screeched. I took a step back and kicked the
door as hard as I could. All I could think was that I wanted to get in there, shout at him and see what he had to say for himself. I wanted to see him squirm. I wanted to see him understand that messing up our weirdy family was not going to happen. He needed to sort everything out – there’d be no understanding
I knows
from this quarter. No sirree.

The door bounced in its frame and I stood back and levelled another kick. The panel I connected with cracked through, taking my foot with it. I hopped uselessly, my leg stuck and my heaving sobs sounding loud, with Dad’s retching coming clearly through the shattered panel. Falling on my right hip, I kicked with my left foot, splinters both giving and pulling at my ankle, tearing my sock. As the wood panel fell out and away I could see my dad squashed in against the wall next to the toilet. He was hanging over the toilet bowl and his whole body shook and convulsed with the retching from his chest. His head was down, his hands holding the seat tightly.

My foot came free then, and I pulled it out of the door, but I didn’t move. The adrenalin shot had gone and I was frozen by that small square picture of my father reduced to something I couldn’t hate. At all.

And then he looked up. His eyes met mine through the shattered square and he wasn’t shocked at the smashed door. Not angry. Not outraged.

Broken.

Broken so completely it caught at my throat.

There was nothing I could do. As my father turned away to heave again, I rolled to my knees and pushed myself up from the ground, wincing at the pain in my fist and ankle. My entire body was shaking like a leaf, and I somehow made it to the back door. I didn’t know what I was doing till I found myself outside the cellar again in a daze. I went in slowly, quietly shutting the door behind me, leaving the light off while I felt my way round the workbench to Oscar’s side. Opening the driver’s door, I slumped on to the seat behind the wheel, but this time I couldn’t cry.

In the last hour everything had got so unbelievably jumbled that the tears were squashed down low. Deep down it hurt. And my chest hurt too. And my head.

And my fist.

And especially my foot.

Heaving a shaky breath, I moved my ankle carefully and sagged into the seat, listening numbly to the muffled sounds around me.

After a while, Mum was back. Then, minutes later, Boodle’s panting breath came snuffling round the cellar door and Pen said, ‘C’mon, Boodlington-love-bunny-snuggly-hugs.’

Boodle followed her up the back steps to the kitchen door.

It wasn’t long before I heard a call from inside the
house: ‘Je-hee-pers! Mum! What happened here?’

I winced. Pen had found the bathroom door.

It sounded like Mum followed her straight to the scene of my crime. She rattled the doorknob. ‘Spenser?’

Shuffle, shuffle
.

Pen’s voice, lower down: ‘Dad, it’s not like we can’t see you in there.’

I hunkered down in the car seat and pushed the heels of my hands against my eyelids. Could I live down here? Like Anne Frank? For, like, ever?

In the house above me, Dad came out of the bathroom.

‘Dad?’

‘Spenser?’

‘Don’t ask me,’ he rasped. ‘I’m going to bed.’ I listened as his footsteps receded above, Mum and Pen obviously standing very, very still.

Then they spoke together, the sound loud in the quiet: ‘Tallulah.’

‘I told you she had problems,’ said Pen.

‘That child . . .’ said Mum, in her special
I’m going to eat my offspring
voice.

Hoo boy.

This was not going to be a happy time.

It must have been at least an hour of solitary I confined myself to. Sitting in the dark, listening to the plumbing roaring
and banging, the bathwater gurgling from the downstairs bathroom, Pen dirging tunelessly (she knows better than to sing in public), Boodle whining at the back door for a last wee in the Great Outdoors. I wondered whether Mum was worried about where I was. Maybe I should face the music now. Get the pain over with. Confront both parents about what was going on.

I shifted in the deep leather seat to get out, but my ankle protested with a jolt of agony so extreme I went eeeemph, and fell back. It was a sign, I thought. I should stay where I was. But I was interested to see if there was blood from the door incident. I wiggled my toes and slid out of the car. While I fumbled for the light switch I heard the back gate squeal and I stopped in my tracks. Who was coming in? Or going out?

My family were all inside, I was pretty sure of it.

Unbidden, Pen’s words before supper flitted at me:
Angus came back from the city this morning
. So it hadn’t been him that Jack had seen hanging around our house last night, after all.
Who, then?

Footsteps sounded ever so quietly outside, moving slowly to the back steps, then stopped about a metre from the workshop door. The crisp night air carried a faint whisper: ‘Subject is not in her room, not in the cellar workshop.’

I was too frightened to think how totally nutso this was.
Subject?
I mean, wha–?

Who was this?

I inched back into Oscar and hunched down behind the steering wheel.

Then I
really
thought I was going to lose bowel control because whoever was outside moved carefully over to the cellar door . . .

Frikfrikfrik!

. . . and opened it.

Fffffff!

I was frozen inside the car, shaking like a leaf and staring at a dark silhouette in the doorway. Tall. Male. No handbag. No satin robes. A stranger.