Simply Heaven (39 page)

I dread to think what Rufus must be thinking. Because though Dad’s got the subtlety of a discarded condom in an alleyway, this sum of money is the answer to his prayers. It’s enough to put the roof back on. Seriously. Not to mend the foundations, but at least to stop the rot from above. And here’s his father turning it down and his grandmother hurling invective at the givers.

‘Ah, come on,’ says Dad. ‘Let’s face it. It’s not like it’s not obvious you could do with it.’

I actually hear a groan escape my lips.

‘What I want to know,’ says Beatrice, ‘is where this money came from in the first place.’

‘Granny, how
dare
you?’ says Tilly.

‘Oh, right then,’ says Mum. ‘If
that
’s the way you’re going to play it, then we might as well forget about it.’

Great wafts of despair drift over from Rufus.

‘Look,’ I say, ‘maybe we can talk about it later? Dad, I think you’re amazing. I can’t even begin … but why don’t we leave all this till later?’

‘
What
a good idea, Melody,’ says Mary, voice oozing sincerity. ‘What a
good
girl you are.’

Mum glances at me speculatively as she hears the tone, but I just smile. No way. No way am I getting into this now.

I turn to my mother-in-law as plates of turkey with all the trimmings land in front of us. ‘So what’s the deal with Boxing Day, Mary?’ I ask. ‘Are you all going out with the hunt?’

‘Every able-bodied person in the entire county will be out,’ she assures me, with the absolute certainty of the totally sheltered.

‘What, all two million of them?’ asks Mum. I attempt to kick her under the table, but my leg doesn’t reach.

‘Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha!’ tinkles Mary. ‘Ah-hah-haaa!’

Conversation sort of dries at that point. Everyone concentrates on the plate in front of them. I cut into a Brussels sprout. It gives off the sulphurous scent of the overcooked brassica and takes several chews to get it down.

Beatrice still looks murderous. Peers round the table like a malevolent little gargoyle. Never been one to let things lie, that woman.

‘It’s her fault,’ she announces. ‘That woman. Twisting his mind. Turning him against us. It was all fine before
she
came along.’

I stretch my eyes. Rufus takes his serviette off his lap and slaps it down on the table. Stalks out of the room.

‘Oh
God
, Granny,’ hisses Tilly.

Yaya lifts her glass. Says, loudly and ironically: ‘Well! Happy Christmas, everybody!’

I storm off after Rufus. He’s not in our room, not in the lounge, not out in the grounds in any obvious sort of way. My family doesn’t last a lot longer at the table: Mum, letting loose a couple of choice adjectives, storms off after me, Dad storms off to have a smoko and Yaya, suddenly deprived of people she can make asides to in Greek, just storms off, in a hobbling sort of a way. Tilly, who knows perfectly well that once we’ve all gone she’s going to be in for it despite the fact that she’s not actually done anything, waddles off to her room holding her stomach. When I pass the dining room five minutes after I first left it, there’s nothing left but a pile of wrapping paper, a couple of dozen delighted fellow-guests and the Wattestone party, all eating their roast turkey with their elbows tucked in and gazing, blankly, into the middle distance.

Serve them bloody well right.

I can’t seem to find Rufus anywhere. He must be really distressed if he doesn’t even want
me
to find him. I decide to give our room another go. Maybe he’s curled up in a cupboard somewhere, doing the old rocking routine. As I mount the stairs, I find Mum coming in the opposite direction.

‘There you are!’ she says. ‘I’ve been looking for you everywhere!’

‘I’ve got to find Rufus,’ I say.

I get a hand on the arm. ‘Not yet, you don’t, young lady. Not until you’ve had a serious word with me.’

‘I don’t have time, Mum. Give me a break, huh?’

‘No, I won’t. I want to know what’s going on and I want to know now.’

‘It’s nothing I can’t handle.’

‘Well that’s not the way it looks from here. What
is
going on here, Melody? Have you gone out of your mind? What are you doing, letting people talk to you that way?’

‘Please, Mum. Just leave it, OK?’

‘Leave it? I didn’t bring you up to let yourself get walked all over by snobs like that. I’m not bloody putting up with it. I’ll tell you something: we’re not staying around here to get talked to like that. We’re out of here and if it was up to me we’d be taking you with us. You’ve got to stand up for yourself, girl. Haven’t I told you a million times? I can’t be here to do it for you all the time.’

I’ve managed to get a couple of steps above her by now. Stop and turn to face her. ‘I’m not asking you to.’

‘Well, you don’t seem to be doing a very good job of it for yourself.’

I take a deep breath, try to find the right words.

She ploughs on. ‘It’s pathetic, Melody.’

And this is the problem. My parents are so afraid of anyone getting one over on me that they’ve never let me sort things out for myself. I love them. I love them to bits, but I’ve had to cross several oceans to get to make my own mistakes. It’s about themselves, of course. But it’s not really about me. If they see someone dominate me, insult me, overlook me, ignore me, they feel it as a reflection on themselves. And they can’t bear that.

I lean against the wall, arms folded like a sulky adolescent. ‘Mum, it’s my problem, OK? I’ll handle it my way.’

‘Your way isn’t
working
. I’d say
that
was pretty obvious. Don’t be such a bloody
doormat
.’

The trouble is, she has something of a point. I
am
being wet, I know that. But I’m like someone trying to put in central heating without a monkey wrench. And if there’s one thing I
do
know, it’s that if you ain’t got the tools, you’re bound to make a few cock-ups along the way. I tried doing it the Katsouris way, with Andy, and all it did was drive him off. There has to be another route, and I haven’t worked out what it is yet. But one thing I do know is that nagging isn’t going to help.

She goes on, ‘And another thing. How come Rufus lets people talk to you like that? What sort of a guy lets his wife—’

‘No,’ I say, ‘leave Rufus out of this. You’ve only been here five minutes. You don’t have the first idea—’

She does a sort of
hah
-type laugh. ‘I’ve got a good enough one. You’re living in an armpit of a house with a load of people who think they’re too good for you, right down to the –’ she pauses to emphasise the word – ‘
employees
, and your husband – well. Presumably he thinks
he’s
too good for you and all. I’ll tell you, Melody, if you don’t do something about it, then I will.’

I unfold my arms and take a step forward. ‘If you do anything of the sort,’ I say, ‘you can go back on the next plane. I’ve got enough on my plate without you putting your oar in. I’m an adult, Mum, and I’ll deal with my own problems, OK?’

‘But you won’t,’ says Mum. ‘You never do!’

‘You never give me the chance!’

‘Well, what do you expect? We’re your parents! We’ve always looked after you! How can you expect this to be any different? I can’t just stand back and let this disaster fall in on your head, Melody! I’ve stepped in before and I will again!’

And I step back as she says this, look her in the eye and say: ‘
Please
. If I don’t get a chance to make my own way in the world I’ll never survive it. Please. This time. Let it be me, even if I do screw it up.’

She looks at me. ‘But these people … You can’t be serious. You can’t want to be like them.’

I take two steps up the stairs. Look her straight back in the eye.

‘No, I don’t. And I don’t want to be like us, either.’

I love them. Love them to pieces. They’re my people and they’re where I come from, but they’re not good people. They’re my people, and they started from the bottom of the heap and made it close to the top, and I’m the indulged, spoiled little Daddy’s girl who doesn’t know how to get away. Because my folks are rich, yes: far, far richer than the Wattestones give them credit for. Far, for that matter, richer than the Wattestones themselves, probably. And you know what they say: behind every great fortune there’s a great crime. Dad’s no honest son of the soil. He didn’t toil his way to riches by scrimping and saving till he got the deposit for his first car. He got there because that genial exterior is the packaging for one nasty bastard. He got there by being the sort of man who can watch someone beg and remain unmoved. You don’t get rich by owning a cab company and fast food service. Not
rich
rich. People like my dad own companies like that because a business that deals almost entirely in cash is the most effective way of laundering the spoils of their other businesses.

Yes, I’m a little rich girl, and yes, just like Mary thinks, I’ve got no class. But I’m rich because my people would beat you up and throw you in a ship canal as soon as look at you.

Some things I remember. I don’t remember all that much. And besides, they wanted me, at least, to have the chances they’d never had, to grow up with all the advantages of Daddy’s money and none of his criminality. Costa was a different story, of course. He’s the legitimiser, the investor in the straight and narrow, but he’s Daddy’s son and heir. When I was eight we moved out of Sydney into our neoclassical spread with the six-pillared, broken pedimented porch and the swimming pool with the retractable roof and the mega-gas-fired barbecue pit and the collection of shotguns under the beds because Dad’s firm was expanding up north and they needed someone to head it up. And at that point I largely got separated off from how Daddy made his money: I got the self-congratulatory suburban upbringing my mum had always yearned for, and apart from the wads of cash in the shoeboxes and the occasional cortege of Mercedes rolling up the drive and the odd door closing suddenly as I passed it, my life was pretty much normal. Only with more money.

Though they had their own sweet way of sorting out my problems. You’ll see.

I don’t know if I remember very little because I’m suppressing the memories, like a dodgy shrink would probably say, or if it’s that they just didn’t let us see much of what was going on in Dad’s working life, but I suspect it’s the latter. But here are the things I do remember.

King’s Cross, 1978. It’s my fifth birthday. My daddy takes me out with him, all dressed up in my party dress, while Mum organises a surprise shindig. My daddy’s got his business suit on, and he looks
sharp
: giant collars, one on top of the other, and a tie covered in pictures of ladies in bikinis with their hands linked behind their heads. My daddy’s got one of those haircuts where the front is bouffant and the back hangs down below the collar in lank locks. He has magnificent sideburns, bushy and black, that run all the way from his ears to the point of his jaw.

We go down one of those streets you find in most cities that’s full of a mixture of ethnic shops and bordellos – a street of a thousand yayas, where every third woman is an old one in black and a lot of the rest are wearing clothes constructed of nylon and spangles. Dad says he has to do some business, that he’s got to just drop in and see a few people, and in each shop, the people behind the counter stop what they’re doing the moment we come in, greet me with an enthusiasm that I now realise was probably not as wholehearted as it felt at the time.

I’m hoisted up on to counters, congratulated for being such a pretty girl, and in every shop I go into, an assistant is left to pick me out a birthday present while Dad disappears into the back with the owner. And people are going: ‘I didn’t know your dad
had
any children. How old are you? And look how pretty you are. Look at your
hair
! If I had hair like that, I’d be a model!’

I get some chocolate in the coffee shop. A gateau is wrapped to go in the baker’s. In the newsagents, the assistant, a lovely-looking girl with black eyes, a green mohican and six earrings dangling from a single ear, digs me out a colouring book and a multi-pack of felt-tip pens. I emerge from one Italian restaurant with a box of little tiny macaroons wrapped in tissue paper, and from the one next door with yet another cake, this time in a tin. The chemist showers brightly coloured hair bobbles on me, and the hippie shop gives me a small plaster cat.

It’s a great birthday. This street, barely touched by the backpacker’s paradise around it, is a seedy, glamorous, cosy mix of sex and family, and no-one can do too much for the pretty little daughter of their local loan shark and protectionist.

And then Daddy ducks down some steps into a basement, and I find myself in a witch’s cave. It’s dark down here, red and black on the walls, a series of black curtains, and it smells sort of damp, sort of salty, with a faint whiff of cheese.

‘O!’ shouts my dad.

A head appears from behind a curtain: a man who seems, in this light, to be red and sweating, a grimace that I don’t understand written across his face. ‘Uh,’ he says, and his head disappears.

At the end of a corridor, another curtain moves back and a man with a moustache appears. Looks us up and down and says: ‘You’re a day early. You’re not due till tomorrow.’

‘It’s my little girl’s birthday,’ says my daddy. ‘Getting her out of the house.’

The man stares at me. Says: ‘Happy Birthday, sweetheart. You shouldn’t have brought her here,’ he says to Dad. ‘It’s not a place for a kiddy.’

‘Well,’ says my dad, ‘hurry up, then, and we can get out of here.’

‘Like I said,’ he replies, ‘you’re early. You can’t just—’

My dad takes a step forward. I can’t see his face, but the man can. A muscle moves on his jaw. Raising his voice, he bellows: ‘Lindy! Get out here!’

‘Customer!’ a voice bellows back.

‘Now.’

‘Oh for fuck sake …’

‘Language!’ shouts my dad. ‘There’s kiddies here!’

A curtain moves and an irritated-looking woman pokes her head into the gloom. Sees us standing there and says: ‘
Oh
.’ Vanishes again for a moment and re-emerges, wrapping a slightly greasy satin robe around her.