Simply Heaven (40 page)

‘Need you to look after the little girl,’ says the man.

She approaches. Doesn’t look at my dad. Crouches down in front of me. She’s wearing stockings, red garters. She smells salty, like the premises, and has smeared red lipstick on. Reaches out a hand that looks a lot younger than her tired, lined face and traces my cheek with a chipped nail. ‘Hello, darling,’ she says. ‘My name’s Lindy. What’s yours?’

‘Melody,’ I tell her.

My dad walks away.

‘That’s a pretty name,’ she says. ‘I’ve got a little girl about your age.’

‘I’m five.’

‘That’s nice. My little girl’s six. She lives with her nan.’

‘It’s my birthday,’ I tell her.

She raises eyebrows that have been drawn roughly with black crayon on to shaven skin. She looks about a million years old to me at my age, but looking back, I think she was probably not a lot more than thirty. The red mouth forms an ‘O’ of feigned astonishment. ‘Your
birthday
! Happy birthday, darling. Have you had your presents yet?’

‘At home,’ I say. ‘Though some people gave me some things.’

‘I’ll bet they did,’ says Lindy. ‘What did you get?’

I tell her, counting the list off on my fingers.

‘That’s lovely, darling!’ says Lindy.

The sound of raised voices drifting down the corridor. Lindy glances briefly over her shoulder, turns back to me and raises her voice. ‘So your daddy brought you out for the day?’

I nod.

To my surprise, Lindy shakes her head. ‘Well, that’s just wrong,’ she says, more to herself than to me.

From the cubicle emerges a man so fat he can barely squeeze through the entrance. Hairy hands, rolls of fat on the back of his neck, one, two, three, a waistband that has vanished beneath a rippling waterfall of a stomach. He totters on legs that look like strings of faggots. He’s tying his tie and carrying his jacket over his forearm so I can see the great patches of sweat under his arms, which leach down all the way to the first fold of his hips. He waddles down the corridor towards us, and I see that he is, of all things, pouting.

‘I’ll be with you in a minute, love,’ Lindy says.

‘Don’t bother,’ he replies.

‘Sorry,’ she says, not reacting. He gets level with us, and I reel at the smell of unwashed underpants that comes off him.

‘You’re too old for it, anyway,’ he says.

‘Yeah,’ says Lindy, ‘well, it’s been a pleasure for me too.’

We have to squeeze to one side to let him pass. Her face is a mask of non-reaction. Once he’s gone, she turns back to me.

‘If everyone else is giving you presents,’ she says, smiling, though even in this light I can see that there are tears in her eyes, ‘I’d better give you something too.’

Something in me, even though I’m only five, makes me say: ‘No. No, really.’

‘Oh, bless her,’ she says. ‘It’s not your fault. It’s not.’

My dad’s still shouting. He never shouts at home. I shuffle, strain to look round Lindy and catch a glimpse of him. Behind another curtain, someone moans repeatedly. It sounds like they’re in pain, or dying.

‘Don’t worry, darling,’ Lindy puts a hand on my face and guides me back to looking at her. ‘You’re so pretty. Daddy’ll be back in a second. He won’t be long.’

But I’m only five. I start to blub.

‘No, look …’ Lindy reaches behind her neck and unhooks the necklace she’s wearing: a cheap filigree crucifix, hanging from a slender chain. Later, on Gozo, I’ll realise that it’s a Maltese cross. ‘Look. See this? Isn’t it pretty? You want to wear it?’

I sniff. Look as the metal catches the light from the red bulb above our heads. It glitters wondrously, makes me open my mouth in awe.

Lindy stretches her hands round the back of my neck, clips it on. ‘There,’ she says. ‘There. You look ever so pretty, darling. Beautiful. Now, you wear that for ever, and it’ll keep you safe, I swear. And every time you touch it, you can think of your friend Lindy.’

‘Thank you,’ I say.

Another touch to the face. ‘Take care of it, darling.’

Dad reappears, marches up the corridor. Sees the tears drying on my face and snaps: ‘What have you done?’

‘Nothing,’ says Lindy, looking up. ‘She got nervous, waiting. You shouldn’t have—’

‘You look a mess,’ he says. ‘Clean your face up. Shit.’

And he grabs me by the hand and pulls me towards the exit. As we get out into the sunlight, I look at the hand holding mine and notice that there’s a graze on his knuckles.

Jump forward seven years. I’m twelve and we’ve been up north a while and things have started to go bad at school. It’s not that – you know, I’m not such a pariah that I’ve got no friends, but I’m gawky and goofy-toothed, and what with the foreign dad and the gaudy mum, I’m not high on people’s invitation list. And then Reggie Harper steps in and things get a whole lot worse. Because Reggie doesn’t like me and, though I do my best to persuade myself that she’s only turned out like she has because Regina is no name to be carrying through the Australian state school system, it doesn’t make it any less painful when she hits me.

She does it daily. Just for the hell of it, really. Reggie and her friends Babs, Dinah and Linda Ho have a little click: lumpen, high-coloured girls with habitually challenging expressions, they swagger round the playground looking for people to pick on. And those people are mostly me.

It starts off small: a bit of pushing, some tripping up. But then I make the mistake of trying to fight back one day, and things escalate, because Daddy’s brought me up to be his princess, not a brawling Greek like he is, and I have no more idea what to do with my fists than I would what to do with a Black and Decker Workmate. The four of them, a year or so older and several inches taller, simply hold me by my hair as I flail at their faces, then throw me to the ground like a piece of flotsam. And now they’ve had their reaction off me, it just keeps on coming. Every day, every dinnertime, same thing: hello
Millerdy
. Doof. Oops.
Sor
-ree. Aww. Is she
cry
-ing? Aaah. There there.

It goes on for months. Every day, same thing: doof and down I go: great wedges of skin off my thighs and knees, school blouse hiding atlases of bruises on arms and shoulders, never the face because then the staff might have had to notice. Anyone who’s been bullied will tell you the same thing: the teachers never want to know, never want to shift themselves to champion the awkward ones, the fat ones, the ugly ones, the lispers, the odd-ones-out who always come in for the worst of it. And the teachers’ idleness depends on that great rule of schoolyards the world over: you don’t dob your mates in. You don’t dob anyone in, not even your enemies, because then your mates will cut you out, too.

And then one day Dinah’s foot slips, or I curl up too early into the foetal position I’ve got used to adopting and, instead of kicking me in the ribs like she’d intended, she catches me one full in the face. Draws blood from my nose, imprints a livid toecap mark on my cheekbone. And I go home and refuse, resolutely, to dob through the interrogation that ensues, do the old walked-into-a-lamppost routine, but none the less, three days later, when I come back to school, I find that it’s all over. My persecutors have left the school. Not sacked, or suspended. They’ve simply left, all four of them, and they aren’t coming back. Dinah’s father’s taken a job up in Darwin. Babs has gone to family over in Canberra. Linda’s been taken to another school, twenty Ks away in central Brissie, and Reggie – well, the Harper family are just
gone
. The neighbours saw them packing up a rental truck in the middle of the night and reckon they must’ve left some bad debts behind.

Whatever; they’re gone.

Except that somehow the other kids seem to be treating me with a little less familiarity. They’ve not turned rude or anything: just jump back like a woman in danger of touching a Buddhist monk when I go down the corridors, pull back their hands so as not to overhit when they tag me in playground games. I never have trouble of any sort at school after that. I don’t have many mates, either, mind.

Jump back four years. Our unit in Manly. We’ve already moved up in the world, got a sea view, hot tub on the deck. I’m seven, and I’ve woken up with a powerful thirst. There’s a murmur of voices from downstairs.

We live on the third and fourth floors of a sixties block that’s filled from floors to ceilings with the sort of luxury goods normal people still only really see on television. We are a white-leather-sofa, giant-screen-TV, cut-glass-cocktail-bar, marble-bathroom sort of family. We’ve got fluffy rugs and chandeliers and a twelve-setting dinner service rimmed in fourteen-carat gold. My mother wears chunky chains and earrings to do the weekly food shop, my dad has a watch that would sink the
Titanic
. I’ve got toys, toys, toys, and a wardrobe of tiny replicas of my mother’s designer gear. Costa has a Chopper bike, a TV and video recorder of his very own. It doesn’t occur to me that it’s unusual, because everyone my parents know lives the same way.

I lie in bed for a minute or two, listening to the action downstairs. What sounded like conversation now sounds like it’s been replaced by the sounds of the television.
The Sweeney
, maybe, or
The Professionals
. They like their English TV. Certainly, it’s something that involves an amount of hardman discourse and the occasional pause for violence. My mouth is as dry as a pommy’s towel. I’m not going to be able to get back to sleep unless I have a drink. And needing a drink gives me all the excuse I need to get a look at Bodie and Doyle, like all small girls want to.

I get up. I’m in Barbie pyjamas. I pick up my monkey for company. I slip my feet into my rabbit slippers and make my way down the stairs, past the collection of resort goods my mum insists on collecting on our thrice-annual trips to the islands. It’s dark on the stairs and in the hall; all I can see by is the sliver of light that peeps out from under the lounge door. Whatever’s on the TV is dead realistic. I hear someone hit someone else, a sort of wet thud, and a soggy groan in response. I push the door open, walk inside.

I’m in the middle of one of those nineteenth-century drama paintings:
When Did You Last See Your Father?
, something like that, only bloodier. And the clothes are a lot less stylish. Someone’s spread plastic sheeting on the white carpet and the white suite, and in the middle of the floor sits a man on one of our kitchen chairs. Only, he’s not just sitting there: he’s handcuffed, and my dad is standing over him with a band of steel wrapped around his knuckles. Uncle Phil and Uncle Ern – my dad’s business associates – sit on the settee, wearing bomber jackets emblazoned with the logos of American sports teams from cities they probably wouldn’t be able to point out on a map. My mum’s in the kitchen, on the other side of the lounge; I can hear her, rattling pots. Uncle Ern’s wearing dark glasses. The man in the chair is covered in blood: his head has swollen up like a football.

But the thing that’s most striking is the fact that they have all frozen as I entered, which is how I get the image of them as figures in an oil painting. I stand, one hand on the door handle, and stick a thumb in my mouth.

It’s the man on the chair who speaks first. Tipping his head back, he spits out a tooth and gives me a wide, gory grin that reveals that he’s lost at least two more.

‘Why, hello, darlin’,’ he says, and his accent is the broadest Strine. ‘What’re you doing up at this time of night?’

‘Good evening, Melody,’ says Uncle Ern. ‘Did we wake you up?’

‘I need a glass of water,’ I say, staring all the while at the gash on the captive’s left cheek. It looks like it’s turned inside-out. Red stuff and clear stuff runs down his face as he grins again and winks a black and swollen eye. ‘Sure you do,’ he says. ‘That’s a lovely monkey you’ve got there. Has he got a name?’

‘Ringo,’ I say.

‘Now, that’s a good name for a monkey,’ he says. ‘Isn’t it a good name?’ He appeals to the uncles for affirmation.

‘An excellent name,’ says Uncle Phil.

‘Where’d you get that name from, sweetheart?’ asks Uncle Ern.

Wide-eyed, I suck harder on my thumb.

‘I’ll get you your water,’ says my dad. ‘Stay there, darling. Don’t come any further in. We don’t want you messing up your lovely slippers.’

Uncle Ern leans forward as he leaves the room, looks at my slippers over his glasses. ‘What’re they?’ he asks. ‘Gonks?’

‘Rabbits.’

‘Well, b— I never,’ says the bleeding man, like a man correcting himself at a vicarage tea-party. ‘The things they think of. Ginger rabbits. Where’d you get those, darling?’

‘Market.’

‘Well, I must get our Siobhan a pair of those,’ he says. ‘She’d love a pair of those.’ Then he shuts up, manages a watery smile. The uncles shift on the sofa.

‘How you getting on at school, Melody?’ asks Uncle Ern.

‘OK.’

‘You’re in what … year two?’

‘Three.’

‘Three already? Aren’t you the clever one?’

The man in the chair does an enormous cough, sprays blood over his front. ‘Best days of your life,’ he tells me. ‘You listen to your teachers and work hard, and you’ll not regret it.’

Phil nods, sagely. ‘Nothing more valuable than your education,’ he concurs. ‘Get your exams under your belt, you can be anything you want.’

Dad comes back, followed by Mum. ‘I thought you said you’d locked that door,’ she says. ‘Here you are, sweetheart. Drink that down and we’ll get you back to bed.’

‘No harm done,’ says the man in the chair. Gives me another flash of his toothlessness.

I drink my water.

‘Right,’ says my mum, ‘let’s get you off.’

‘Say good night,’ says Dad.

‘Good night,’ I say.

‘C’m ’ere and give your Uncle Ern a kiss,’ says Uncle Ern.

I tiptoe over the plastic sheeting, stretch up and buss the cheek he offers me. He rubs my hair. ‘Sleep tight, little one,’ he says. ‘You take care of yourself, now, you hear me?’

‘Night night, Uncle Ern.’

Mum takes me by the hand and leads me towards the door.

‘Night night, little one,’ calls the man tied to the chair. ‘You make sure you do your homework.’