The Dark Part of Me (19 page)

‘Hello, daughter,’ he said, smiling with relief as if he’d just remembered.

‘Sorry I’m late.’

‘That’s alright.’ He gulped at his beer, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, blinked. ‘You made it in the end.’

‘Yeah. Traffic wasn’t too bad considering it’s Christmas.’

‘Yes. That’s right. Christmas.’ He grimaced and drank more beer as if to wash away the thought of it. I never bothered to ask how he spent Christmas. I imagined he spent it
alone in front of the telly drinking tinnies and watching his old cricket videos until he passed out blotto in the chair. He probably didn’t even eat.

My cappuccino arrived. I ate the chocolate off the top and pushed it aside to cool. Dad ordered himself another beer. On my way up the mall, I’d bought him a pair of Homer Simpson socks,
which I thrust, still in the sock-shop bag, across the table.

‘Happy Christmas,’ I said.

Dad whipped the ever-predictable envelope out of his breast pocket. ‘Merry Christmas, to my one and only daughter.’ On occasions like these he spoke as he might write in a greeting
card, stilted and formal. As I tore open the envelope, pretending that I didn’t already know what was inside, he pulled the Homer socks out of the bag.

‘Socks,’ he said. ‘I need socks.’

‘Do you know who he is?’ I said, pointing at Homer’s giant, yellow face.

‘Yeah,’ he said, shaking his head.

‘You don’t, do you? He’s a cartoon character that likes to drink a lot of beer.’

‘Oh. Right. I get it.’ He put the socks back in the bag. I should have got him sports ones instead.

I pulled out my card, which was from the same twenty-pack of identical Christmas cards Dad had been giving me for the past twelve years – an obese surfboarding Santa being towed along the
crest of a wave by a fleet of flying reindeers with pink-zinced noses, their antlers poking through red and gold life-saver caps. I opened it and, miracle of miracles, a twenty-dollar note
fluttered out. For Dad, twenty was a decent session at the pub.

‘I wanted to get your mother a little something this year but I didn’t know what to get her. So, I thought you could pick her out something nice from the twenty and keep the rest for
yourself.’ He was gripping his beer so hard I thought the glass would shatter in his hand, and his eyes had misted over. I knew what was coming next.

‘Dad,’ I said, under my breath, ‘do you have to do this, again? The past is the past – you can’t make up for it, it’s too late.’ He sculled his beer in
one go and signalled to the waiter for another. I sipped at my coffee and tried to change the subject.

‘Scott’s back,’ I said. After what Scott’d done to me the day before, I couldn’t believe I was bringing him up, but then, it wasn’t easy making light
conversation with Dad.

‘Who?

‘Scott Greenwood. He’s back from overseas.’

‘Oh. That’s good.’ On the few occasions Scott had met Dad, the two of them had got on well, bonding over cricket or the footy, depending on the season.

‘What about uni?’ he asked, staring gloomily into the distance.

‘Dad, I quit, remember?’ I paused. ‘Anyway, I’m thinking about going travelling.’

He grunted. ‘What a load of bunkum.’

For a few long minutes we said nothing as Dad drifted back into his pickled past and drank his beer. I stared down at the bobbing heads of the shoppers, jostling up and down the mall;
saggy-titted women, tired and flustered, overloaded with carry bags, who’d rather drop dead of exhaustion than return home without that final all-important item crossed off their Christmas
list.

‘You can’t leave your mother alone.’ It was like that with Dad. He’d stew on something for ages before short-circuiting back to an earlier conversation, like a fuse box
with water damage. ‘Forget this travelling palaver. Your mother needs you.’ It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him about Randy but I held back, wary of his reaction. ‘Listen
to me, daughter.’ Suddenly forceful, his words were lucid and direct, a man emerging from the haze. ‘I know your mother better than anyone else.’

‘But, Dad, I can’t stay in Brisbane my whole life. It’s not my fault she married an alcoholic.’

‘She still blames me?’ Tears were forming in tiny weirs at the bottom of his eyeballs.

‘She doesn’t really talk about it,’ I lied. There wasn’t a day she didn’t curse Dad for ruining the best years of her life.

‘Do you think if I quit the grog she might have me back?’ It was the same question every year and I was sick to death of it. I decided to spill the beans.

‘Unlikely. She’s got a new boyfriend. He’s working on a cure for cancer and he’s building her an outdoor power shower and he’s got a great sense of humour and he
treats Mum like gold… ’ On and on I went, pumping Randy up to be some kind of superhero, while Dad’s face contorted in a painful wince. I left out the bit about him being a bald,
artificially enhanced geek who drives a rust-bucket, and finished with the clincher.

‘… and he’s moving in.’

Dad couldn’t speak. His face was screwed up tight as a walnut. ‘But she’s mine,’ he finally managed through clenched teeth. ‘She’s my woman.’

‘She’s not your woman. She divorced you, remember?’

‘But I still love her.’ He drained his beer. ‘I’ve always loved her.’

‘C’mon, Dad. Don’t torture yourself.’

He pulled out a hundred-dollar bill from his wallet. ‘Here. Get her something special. Jewellery. Gold jewellery.’ I stared at the note lying on the table, slated that he’d
rummaged a hundred for Mum when all I ever got were scummy fivers.

‘She won’t want it, Dad,’ I said, huffily. ‘Not from you.’

‘Well, tell her it’s from you.’ He got up and shambled towards the toilets on thick, stocky legs. Each year his shoulders got a bit more stooped, his shorts a bit saggier in
the bum.

‘Hey, I gotta go,’ I called out to him.

He waved backwards, not turning around. I slipped the hundred in the card, next to the twenty, and headed down to the mall, relieved that it was over for another year.

Blondie’s on the radio. I’m in my biggest, puffiest skirt and Dad’s spinning me around and around. The lounge room’s all blurry and I can’t tell
which way’s up or down. The baked beans we had for dinner are all tumbly-jumbly in my tummy like I might vomit. I hope I don’t vomit. Not on my nice pink skirt. Sooner or later,
he’ll let go. I’ll fly through the air and crash land into Mum’s new apricot leather lounge suite. She’d be so angry if she knew.

He lets go.

I’m flying through the air but the couch is out of range. I land with a thud on the floor but it doesn’t hurt that much; just a bit of carpet burn on my knees. Dad rushes over to see
if I’m alright.

‘Must have lost my grip,’ he says.

His face is huge and red and spinning. I struggle to sit up.

‘Old noggin OK?’ He rubs my head with his big, rough hand. I would have cried when I was younger but I’m five now. Besides, I don’t want to stop the game. I pick myself
up and hold my hands out for more.

‘Give it a rest for a while, hey? I’m all out of puff.’ He lies down on Mum’s couch with his shoes up on the armrests, which he’s not meant to do, and cracks open
another bottle of beer. Watching Dad drink is boring so I start spinning around on my own. My skirt billows out, making a lovely cool breeze between my legs. Over and over, I keep spinning and
crashing, spinning and crashing, until the baked beans come up in an orange puddle on the carpet. Dad’s fiddling with the radio so he doesn’t even notice when I hide the vomit under one
of Mum’s satiny cushions and sit on top.

‘That’s more like it,’ he says, looking over at me all prim on the cushion. ‘Since you’re being such a good girl, let’s go out for an ice-cream when
I’ve finished this stubbie.’

Driving in the car, Dad lets me sit in the front as a special treat so long as I promise not to tell Mum. He turns the radio up really loud and we sing along to our favourite song about talking
Japanese. I make my eyes go all slanty and Dad bursts out laughing. When the song finishes, he says, ‘Bloody funny-looking bastards, those nips,’ and we laugh at that, too.

We go to the drive-through bottle shop where Dad buys a carton of beer and a can of lemonade for me. Halfway home, I remind him about the ice-cream and we turn around and drive back to the
corner shop where they sell Jelly-Tips. Dad gives me the money and I go inside. When I come out he is drinking a beer from the carton, even though the man at the bottle shop said they weren’t
cold. We sit in the car while I eat my Jelly-Tip; picking the chocolate shell off first, then sucking the jelly, then making the vanilla ice-cream last for as long as possible. Dad drinks another
beer and tosses the empty can out the window.

‘We’d better get back before Mum gets home,’ he says.

‘OK,’ I say, wishing I could have another Jelly-Tip.

Dad pulls out from the kerb.

There’s a screech-bang-crunch like in a Roadrunner cartoon.

I go flying through the air.

I hear the crack of my head against the windscreen.

Dad’s screaming out my name. And then, everything goes black.

When I wake up, I’m in hospital and Mum’s sitting beside me. She tells me how I nearly went to heaven. Every day she brings me presents: books and hair-clips and Freddo Frogs and
felt-pens and puzzles and, one day, a pair of pink hippopotamus slippers. But Dad never comes. Maybe he’s in a hospital for grown-ups. I ask Mum where he is but her mouth goes all twisted
like a caterpillar and she says a bad word –
bastard
– under her breath. When I get home, Dad’s not there either. His plastic Buddha’s missing off the telly and his
cricket movies from the bottom shelf of the bookcase have all gone, too.

It was just after eight when I arrived at Hollie’s dead mum’s party, wearing a black evening dress with diamanté straps. For Hollie’s sake, I’d
decided not to go to the rave. Besides, I’d convinced myself that, after his abysmal post-root behaviour, I was through with Scott for good. As I ran up the drive and down the side of the
house to the back, my heels sinking into the pebbly path, I felt good and virtuous for the first time in ages. I prayed that Danny had turned up; if he hadn’t, Hollie would be in a terrible
state. Last I’d spoken to her, around five that afternoon, he was stil missing.

The backyard had been transformed into a Japanese-style garden complete with a meandering creek spanned in the middle by a red-lacquer bridge. In broad daylight, it would’ve looked a bit
Disney but at night the effect was enchanting. Centre-stage, golden water tumbled from a jade sculpture, pooling in a circular pond glinting with black and orange koi-carp.
Madame
Butterfly
blared from speakers set up on the deck. Manicured bonsai, especially imported for the occasion, stood as attentive as the kimono-clad waiters carrying silver trays of luminescent
cocktails and black fish-spawn on ice. Red and yellow lanterns were strung up from the gum trees beyond which the bush loomed, a wall of solid black. From the dark, the crickets throbbed a backbeat
to the hum of party chatter, opera and the chinking of crystal. Each year, I was always surprised by the odd and varied assortment Hollie cobbled together – distant relatives, university
acquaintances and the odd scruffy English professor, most of whom only came for the French plonk and gourmet tucker. Whatever their thoughts about the Danny scandal, it didn’t stop random
neighbours flocking, too, all eager for a free piss-up in the name of dead Mrs Bailey. As I headed past the crowd of first arrivals, fidgeting in makeshift black-tie, guzzling pink champagne and
spoofing over the scenery, I couldn’t see Hollie or Danny anywhere. Mr Bailey didn’t seem to be around either; some years he showed up, some years he was conspiculously absent, not that
Hollie seemed to care.

I made it to the spiral staircase, decked out in fairy lights, and climbed up to the house. Helping myself to a glass of champagne, I roamed from the kitchen to the lounge room, the dining room,
the piano room, the parlour, even peeking behind the oak-panelled door to Mr Bailey’s study, but there was no one around. I tramped upstairs and, as I proceeded down the thickly carpeted
hall, nipping into each bedroom, the noise of the party became muffled and distant. I called out to Hollie but there was no reply. It wasn’t like her to neglect her guests. At parties gone
by, she’d flit around, topping up drinks, bringing around tray after tray of delicacies, laughing theatrically. She’d even stand up on the deck and say a few words, just like Mrs Bailey
used to do. The number of times I heard someone remark, ‘She’s the spitting image of Lesley, isn’t she?’

I came to Mrs Bailey’s bedroom door. After a few deep breaths for my jangles, I turned the cut-crystal doorknob and pushed inside. The room was cloaked in dark shadows, the air chilly. No
Hollie here either. Walking up to the mirrored wardrobes, I took the opportunity to check myself out. I dropped my hands, letting them wander, slipping smooth down the slinky front of my top, over
my breasts, my stomach, my hips. I lifted the hem of my dress up to admire my pins; the way my thighs sliced without touching, the way my butt sat firm and pert with one nice crease underneath.