Sliver Moon Bay: The Looking (3 page)

We’re looking in on her. She’s
in bed, curled up under the blanket and spooning Chris’s pillow.
She has her wig and make-up on but her dress and her platforms are
at the foot of the bed. Starling grabs the shoes and starts
dragging them out the door.

‘Mummy shoes,’ she says,
pulling hard. The heavy shoes make a racket on the wooden floor. I
see what she’s doing. She means to line them up behind my boots
which she insists we keep in her room. She loves to play with them.
But it’s not going to happen. We’re not lining up shoes today.

I pick her up and she drops
them.

‘No, Salah! No!’ She struggles
with me but I carry her out, close the door behind us. Starling’s
squealing like a stuck pig but it makes no difference to Lilian.
She’s unconscious, possibly, and will sleep the day through.

So what shall we do with the
rest of the morning? —We go down to the beach.

The surf is up and it’s still
windy but the sky is blue. Starling likes the blue. She runs down
the dune, shouting blue blue blue, scattering the birds and making
them angry. They fly off, complaining. But it’s only seagulls and
they come back after making a loop in the blue. It’s a very blue
day in Sliver Moon Bay. You look out over the ocean and you don’t
see the horizon. ‘Blue! Blue! Blue!’ shouts Startling, scooping up
sand and throwing a handful at the circling birds.

She spies her sandcastle. It’s
almost intact despite the rising tide which only now and then licks
the moat.

‘My castle!’ she squeals. She
drops to her knees right there.

I hand her the little bucket
and spade.

‘Go get some seashells,
sweetie. We’ll make a garden, okay?’

Starling scampers off, looks
for shells. She’s singing to herself, totally absorbed, happy, for
once, to be alone. So I leave her be. I’m lying down, looking at
the blue sky. I spy the Moon, up there, somewhere, holding court in
the vast big blue. He’s looking down at me, challenging me to a
game of I Spy… I spy with my little eye… Fairy… on a ladder… I spy
with my little eye a sparkly ball hanging from a tree… I spy with
my little eye a chubby little hand reaching up…

‘Sarah!’

Crash! The sparkly ball falls
from the tree. The tinsel shakes.
Now, look what you’ve done,
Emily!
Fairy frowns at the millions, billions, trillions of
little sparkly bits scattered shattered on the floor. Emily’s in
trouble.

‘Sarah!’

Oh, Lord, not him. I don’t want
to dream about him. He doesn’t belong here.

‘Sarah! Wake up!’

Now he’s got my attention. We
belong here, on the beach, together as always. Of course. He’s wide
awake. He’s been watching while I fell asleep.

In two strides the old man was
upon me. He has Starling in his arms, scared stiff. Her pants are
wet, all the way up to her crotch.

‘She was up to her thighs in
the surf, Sarah!’

He deposits Starling on my
lap.

‘Hi, Mr Drake. How are
you?’

He’s looming over me; his
gnarly old hands hanging by his sides like tree roots. I see his
inked snake poking out from under his shirt cuff. It looks mean,
like him. Like Chris. But Chris’s hands look like hammers.

‘You ought to be more careful.
She could have drowned.’

He’s staring at me through his
bulging hairy nostrils, it looks like. They’re so big I could crawl
up them and see what’s inside his head. You can feel the old dude
is angry cause these here massive flared nostrils are pumping air
like fans in a tunnel. It’s funny, it really is and I desperately
want to laugh but of course, I don’t. It would be too rude. So I
don’t laugh and he continues to stare. Soon I’m feeling a little
impatient with this charade. Am I supposed to be scared now? What’s
he gonna do? Tell Chris? I know he’s not going to do that; he’s
caught me napping a few times now and he’s never said a thing to
Chris or Lilian about it.

‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘It won’t
happen again.’

He nods, turns around. His big
brown boots make an audible squeaky sound as he walks them away
from us. Sand flies from underneath his footfall. Soon he’s
crawling up the dune like a tall skinny spider and finally he
disappears from view.

7

On the way home, Starling spies
another birdie. Another baby starling lying on twigs in the same
spot.

‘Birdie sleeping,’ says
Starling. ‘Take birdie home.’

She grabs a handful of leaves.
But this birdie is dead. It should be, anyway. It’s so tiny, with
massive staring eyes and scrappy little feet. It has no feathers.
It can’t have dropped down from the sky. It couldn’t have flown.
How weird to find a second bird in the same place.

‘Birdie gone to Heaven,
darling,’ I say to Starling.

But Starling is not listening.
She’s busy making a nest in the basket.

I don’t want her touching this
thing. I’ll have to distract her from it.

‘Look, sweetie. Up there.
See?’

In the fork of the tree branch
a little way above my head is a hole. I see some straw and little
twigs sticking out so I’m guessing the cavity has a nest in it. I
step on the tree trunk where a big knot allows me a good foothold
and I jump up and grab the nearest branch to help me pull myself
up. I see the hole. It does have a nest. A big fat baby cuckoo
fills it, encased in it like a sausage bursting out of its skin.
It’s a big bird with dark beady eyes and a downward curling beak.
It looks as if it likes to quarrel. Well, it would quarrel if it
had siblings. But this is a cuckoo. It doesn’t tolerate brothers
and sisters. So it just sits there like a judge on a lunch break
waiting to be served.

‘Mummy bird!’ cries Starling.
I’ve lifted her up to see it better. She’s very excited, eye to eye
with this fluffy ball of a murderer. He looks calm, eyeing her off
like a choice morsel. Not gonna happen, bird. I’ll keep my baby
Starling away from you.

Starling soon tires of the
cuckoo. She wants to go home to tell Mummy.

At home we find Lilian drinking
tea. She’s nursing a headache and can’t do without chamomile. But
she looks fresh; she’s had a shower and the sleep-in did her good.
She finishes her tea and goes to cuddle Starling on the couch. They
watch Starling’s favourite fairy movie while I cook porridge for
Starling. Lilian will eat nothing; she has no appetite. The phone
rings. It’s school, asking the usual. Lilian lies, as usual. I’ve
not been well over the weekend. She’s let me stay home, just as a
precaution. She forgot to ring in the morning. Yes, I’ll be fine
for school tomorrow.

Lilian hangs up. ‘Don’t tell
Dad,’ she smiles, shrugs her shoulders and scrunches up her nose.
Fleetingly, she looks like Starling. They are one and the same. So
what does that make me? My mother’s keeper? I’d rather not. I have
my hands full with Starling.

Starling falls asleep watching
the fairies. She’s slumped over Lilian and Lilian won’t stir. She
sits there, watching the logs crackling in the fireplace, with
Starling in her lap, with her arms around her. I love her so much
when she’s like that. And of course, I won’t tell Chris. It’s just
another school day.

Lilian wants me to feed the
cat. That reminds me; I have to check on Starling’s birdie. It will
be dead by now. So I go into Starling’s room. White Sox sits on the
table, with his head in the cotton balls. I’m too late. Birdie gone
and buried inside the cat.

8

Chris comes home the next day.
After school, he’s the one picking me up in the truck. Starling’s
with him. She’s licking a huge rainbow-colored lollipop wheel,
looking at it at the same time cross-eyed. Chris hands me another
one, same as Starling’s, and then we drive home. Along the way we
have a mundane conversation about school and how I’m doing in
general; I give him what he wants to hear—it’s all good. In the
silence that follows I know he’s thinking about the best way of
tripping me up when he asks about Lilian. But he won’t get me. He
never does cause I’m onto him. Presently, he starts.

‘So what did you guys do while
I was gone?’

‘Not much. Same as usual.’

‘Aha. Did you play at the
beach?’

‘Yep.’

‘We find birdie, Daddy!’ That’s
Starling chirping in.

‘You did? What kind of
birdie?’

Starling thinks about it, licks
her lollipop. ‘Birdie,’ she replies and looks out the window.

‘Did she go out?’ That’s Chris,
trying to trip me.

The man’s a fool. Does he
seriously expect me to rat her out? We coped just fine without you,
is what I want to say but of course, I don’t. I tell him what he
wants to hear, politely.

‘Shopping,’ I reply, lick my
lollipop, look out the window.

We get home and I get to spend
time alone in my room, for once. Chris and Starling play in the
back yard and Lilian cooks. It’s a good afternoon all around.

In the evening we sit down to
dinner, family style. Lilian has cooked Chris’s favourite,
Spaghetti Bolognese. Starling won’t eat the sauce but she loves the
pasta and the grated cheese. She’s being very creative with it.
Chris can’t take his eyes off of her. It gives Lilian time to
breathe.

Into all this good feeling
comes a knock on the door. You’d think it was a gun shot, the way
Chris snapped to attention.

‘You expecting anybody?’ he
asks Lilian, in an undertone dripping with displeasure. He does not
like surprises.

Lilian looks frightened, scared
and she shakes her head like a guilty child, like she’s been caught
out doing something terrible. She looks so foolish I want to slap
her.

A succession of rapid knocks
batters the door. Abrupt, angry knocks. Chris puts down his
cutlery. He wipes his mouth with his thumb and forefinger, pulling
the corners down. The veins in his hand are pulsating. He’s angry.
His tattoo is too. The snake moves.

Chris gets up and his chair
makes a horrible scraping noise. Even Starling looks up from her
pile of noodles strewn over the tray of her baby chair.

‘Daddy, don’t!’ she shouts,
pushing out her bottom lip. She’s going to cry. ‘Daddy?’

But Chris is long gone,
slithered across the room. He opens the front door. We crane our
heads, the three of us collectively, to see who’s standing
there.

‘What do you want?’

It’s old Drake. He’s not
wasting any time sizing this situation. It’s gonna go the way it
always has. Badly.

‘Can I come in?’

Chris steps aside. Old Drake
comes in, Chris closes the door. The two of them stand facing each
other. The Tree Root versus The Hammerhead, breathing, fuming,
about to—

Lilian rushes forward.

‘Drake, how are you?’

Drake nods at her.

‘I need to speak with you.’

He looks at Chris, at
Lilian.

‘Both of you.’

‘Then speak,’ Chris replies. A
question hovers behind his reply and I’m getting an extra bad
feeling about this. Old Drake has not looked at me at all. I think
he wants to talk about me.

‘Can we speak privately?’ he’s
looking at Chris, just Chris.

Chris looks at me. Lilian looks
at me. I know what that means. I pick up Starling and we go into
her room, to play behind closed doors.

But there’s no escaping the
conversation. It gets pretty heated, straight up, when Chris blurts
out: if it’s about the dope, you’re wrong. I didn’t do it. I
didn’t. Do it. I don’t take your stupid dope, I’ve told you that.
And now get out. Then old Drake blurts out about me sleeping on the
beach and Starling playing in the surf. Chris is fuming, Lilian’s
confused. What do you mean she’s been sleeping on the beach? She’s
very good with her… Are you sure?… Sarah’s very responsible. Chris,
don’t. Please. She’s such a good girl, whines Lilian, like a scared
little puppy. She’s probably peed herself, by now.

But Chris has grasped it. I
feel his anger. It comes poring at me, from under the door,
grabbing at my feet. It wants to drown me, seep into my bones, like
cancer. I imagine.

I imagine he’ll be at the door
any second. But I’m not scared. He won’t do a thing. Can’t risk it
cause we both know what we know.

Old Drake out there’s thinking
along the same lines.

‘You can’t blame the kid,’ says
old Drake. ‘She’s only young.’

‘Get out of my way, dad,’ says
Chris. ‘You can leave now.’

‘Listen, son. Starling is your
responsibility. Yours and hers.’

At this point I imagine he’s
looking at Lilian, pointing even, his crooked gnarly finger at her,
accusing her. Lilian, I know, is crying. And I don’t even hear her.
I just know.

‘Stay out of this, old man, I’m
warning you,’ Chris has lowered his voice, in volume, tone and
pitch. But I can hear him clear as day so he must be closer to
Starling’s room and closer to the old man. They’re breathing into
each other faces by now, I imagine.

‘No, son. I’m warning you. And
you, girlie. You are both on notice. Either you do a better job
around here or I’ll report you. Do you understand me?’

One elephant, two
elephant—Chris is just about to disappear into the old man’s
nostrils. He’s going to explode.—Three elephant, four—

‘Chris! Don’t!’ Lilian’s
screaming and this whole thing suddenly gets real, like a proper
nightmare. Even Starling freezes.

Next door, they’re fighting.
Old Drake and Chris are dragging their bodies around, locked in
together, lurching about, busting up things. Lilian’s screaming. It
doesn’t help. It goes on for a bit, like a skit in a silent movie.
Only the piano’s missing. Then finally the door slams and we have
silence.

Later, when Lilian and Chris
have stopped arguing, Chris comes in to let us out of the room.
Starling’s in bed, snoring. I’ve cuddled up with her, and now I’m
pretending to be asleep. I don’t want to deal with him. He stands
there, looking at us. Somewhere in the house, Lilian’s sobbing.
Still. So she won’t hear a thing cause she’s too busy hearing
herself.