Ballad for a Mad Girl Page 14

  ‘Is that what we’re doing?’ I say, thinking of the way we used to be as a family, and the way we are now. He’s wrong. It would change everything. It’s not for me that I won’t believe it; it’s for him. If I knew for sure that my mother had killed herself, I would have lost both parents—I could never forgive him.

  ‘We need to focus on you now,’ he says. ‘You’re here and she isn’t. I see you struggling but you won’t admit it. I hear you wandering around the house in the middle of the night. You’re hardly eating. We need to tackle this now, together.’

  ‘It’s not like before, Dad. I’m not like her…’

  He cuts me off. ‘It’s more than that. Pills and therapy couldn’t fix what she had. She couldn’t outrun the demons in her head. What’s going on with you is different, trust me on this.’

  I go back over what he just said. ‘What if I have demons, too?’

  ‘No. Not like hers.’

  ‘You know more than you’re telling me,’ I say, turning in my seat. ‘I bet you tell Cody everything.’

  He sighs. ‘I can help you, Grace.’ He lets go of the gearshift and reaches out to touch my cheek. ‘I couldn’t help her.’

  I start crying.

  When we pull up at the Morgan farm, Dad wipes my tears with his shirtsleeve and encourages me to get out and stretch my legs. ‘Sit by the lake, get some sun on your face. Take a walk, pet the animals,’ he says.

  I don’t do any of those things. Instead, I wait in the shade by the truck. This place reminds me too much of the farm, even though it’s very different. Dad’s talking to Kel Morgan up by the house, a massive, modern ranch-style building with a wide verandah and a surrounding acre of green lawn. Their dams don’t leak. Their livestock are fat and friendly, unlike our mean, half-starved cattle that tried to eat your boots if you stood still for too long.

  I pull down the waistband of my jeans: the hole in my side is gone, but a phantom pain is in its place. On the surface the graze is healing—it hurts somewhere deeper than that. I can’t wait to get back to the estate, even if it’s not my real home. I don’t understand any of this anymore.

  Dad keeps checking to see where I am; he’ll check again tonight to make sure it’s me under the blankets and not a pile of pillows. I’m pretty sure I’ve now graduated from grounding to full home detention with a GPS tracking bracelet. I’ll need to work on my disappearing act—he’s not going to let me out of his sight.

  *

  Last night, when I finally fell asleep, I saw Mum wandering through the new house, smiling and clapping her hands, until there was a low rumble outside and a truck crashed through a wall and carried her away, screaming.

  I know it was a dream. This time I could tell the difference.

  Cody’s working on the car again. He’s under orders to keep his eye on me while Dad’s at work, and he’s not happy about it.

  ‘Want me to get you a drink?’ I say snidely. ‘It must be beer o’clock.’

  ‘It’s only eleven,’ he says. ‘Ask me at twelve and quit making such a mess.’

  I’ve got Grace Removals packing boxes spread out all over the floor of the garage. Dad chose the company because of the name—I remember his finger scrolling through the Yellow Pages, coming to rest on the ad like he was grateful the universe had made at least one decision easy, when everything else was so hard.

  I lift down another box. They’re clearly labelled, but I’m opening all of them to be sure.

  Grace: Foley/kitchen. Grace: Foley/dining. Grace: Foley/garage. I’m trying to find the ones with family photos, and failing. So far I’ve found Mum’s clothes and a whole lot of kitchen appliances we didn’t know what to do with, plus Cody’s old school exercise books. I’m not the only problem child. He was barely literate in high school. It’s no wonder he gets along with Gummer so well—Cody’s books are filled with doodles of cars and monsters, too.

  ‘Cod-face, do you know what happened to all the family photos?’

  A low grumble comes from beneath the car. I think he said no.

  ‘Does Sacred Heart have a yearbook?’ In the movies, you can look through yearbook photos and find out everything you need to know about a person.

  This time I get a definite no, accompanied by a greasy middle finger.

  I discover yet another box of kitchen gadgetry. I could dice a carrot a thousand ways with the stuff I’m stacking up next to me, and the last two boxes are just old cooking magazines from Mum’s subscriptions—either Dad has the photos packed away somewhere else or we left far more behind than I thought.

  It takes twice as long to pack everything away as it did to make the mess.

  ‘Hey, Cody?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Are there any more moving boxes?’

  ‘I don’t know!’

  ‘Want some lunch?’ I wait precisely three seconds, long enough for Cody to slide out from underneath the car to give me the affirmative, before flipping him the finger. ‘As if.’

  For a moment he seems about to say something but decides against it.

  I head inside, feeling mean.

  It makes sense that Dad wouldn’t leave precious things like photos to the mice and the damp—they’d be somewhere safe and dry, like the spare-room office or the linen cupboard.

  I check both, but there’s nothing.

  Dad’s bedroom is the smallest. His single bed is unmade, his clothes strewn all over the floor, and the narrow built-in wardrobe behind the door is tightly packed with heavy workwear and shoes. And one moving box.

  Grace: Foley/Farm.

  I haul the box out and peel away three layers of tape. I fold back the flaps, half-expecting mountains of paperwork to do with running the farm, but that’s not what’s inside. There are photos and ornaments, mosaics that Mum made from broken pottery she’d dug up from the garden, her jewellery, lotions and make-up. At the bottom, a stack of video tapes from parties, birthdays and holidays. The photos are of the farm and our family when we were four, all familiar, except one: an aerial image showing the entire farm, the dams mud-coloured smudges, the house a rectangle of grey.

  I run my finger around the fence-line boundaries—they’re barely visible in the picture, but I know them by heart. How is it possible to miss a place as much as a person? Or maybe it’s just that I can’t imagine one without the other—Mum and the farm, the farm and Mum.

  There’s nothing in the box that I haven’t seen before, but Dad might as well have labelled it ‘Pandora’. It’s like he gathered all the objects that might tip me over the edge again, sealed them up, and buried them—a sleeping bomb, everything smelling of cut grass and Mum’s brand of perfume—but seeing our lives exploded on the floor hurts less than I expected. Somehow, that makes me even sadder.

  I put everything away, in order. Tucked between the last two photos, I find a yellow envelope. Inside, a bundle of newspaper clippings about the accident and the trial. About Mum.

  Breathless, I take the envelope to the kitchen and lay out the clippings on the counter.

  The papers used a cropped photo of the four of us taken about a year before she died: we were all sitting on the couch, and the camera was on timer delay. In the original, Cody, Dad and I were just blurs on either side of Mum, who was the only one patient enough to keep still until the shutter clicked. With us cut out of the image, it was a perfect portrait of her. But in reality it wasn’t perfect at all.

  My hands shake as I pick up each clipping. I can’t imagine Dad doing this: sitting at the table, trawling through the pages, cutting carefully around the pictures of her face. It seems too sentimental—or calculated—for him. And I can’t imagine why he would keep the pictures of Dominic Aloisi. One shows Aloisi leaving court, a jacket over his face; another is a full head-shot. He looks much older than a man in his early forties: greying dark hair, thick brows and lips, dimpled chin, a blank expression.

  I grip the paper so hard it tears through the middle of his face. My brain’s buzzing—Aloisi is familiar i
n some way. Recently familiar, not just recognisable because he stars in my nightmares since Mum died. All the chopped-up photos—these images are only half the picture. Hannah Holt’s Missing photo was the same: an irrelevant person cut away, leaving only an arm around her shoulder. But the people around us are relevant—without them a photo has no story, no background, no context, like the newspaper portrait of Mum.

  I put the clippings away. What else is Dad hiding from us? Or is it just from me? I’m already having trouble recalling Mum’s face from the picture on Susannah Holt’s fridge—is that why Dad kept the clippings, so he wouldn’t forget?

  Upstairs, a floorboard creaks. The kettle starts to whistle. I don’t remember switching it on. The air ripples like a stream and I’m shivery all over.

  I grab a pen and notepad from next to the phone, and it’s just like before: my vision blurs until I see dots on the paper, the pen moves erratically, and the lines appear as if my subject is posing in front of me.

  The first is a quick sketch of Mum’s face, young again. She looks like me. I work over the top, adding lines and shadows, and she immediately ages by twenty years or more.

  I tear off the sheet and begin again. Now it’s Hannah Holt—fresh-faced, braces on her teeth, and then as I saw her in my room that night when she was lying on her side, her features fuller, wrinkles on her neck, hard lines around her mouth and eyes. More like her mother.

  Rip.

  The pen keeps scratching away. I’m fighting it, making the lines wobble, bruising the paper, but an image starts to take shape. It’s Dominic Aloisi—a likeness of his newspaper picture, right down to the blank expression.

  I think I’m done but there’s more. I start again underneath. The pen slows, making careful marks with gentle shading, and the much younger face of a boy appears: black hair, dark and empty eyes. He’s smiling. There’s something strange about his teeth.

  A wave of revulsion twists my stomach and I drop the pen. I arrange the drawings in a straight line, scanning the faces: Mum, Hannah, Aloisi, the boy. And I remember where I’ve seen him before.

  Dad’s old-school: he still keeps paper receipts impaled on a spike on his desk, a manual book-keeping system, and a folder full of business cards in the top drawer. He’s had the same shabby green address book for years—as messy as his truck and the rest of his life may be, he’s meticulous about keeping that little green book up to date.

  I run my finger down the index letters: G. For Grady, for grandparents, for gone away. Terry and Jean Grady.

  Before Mum died and they moved, we saw them every few months, usually for dinner at the Swanston Golf Club. They drank too much and complained about everything—our manners, Dad’s job, Mum’s mistakes, my wild hair, Cody’s dirty fingernails, the service, the weather, the price of milk. They were always overdressed, pushing food around their plates, sucking wine through their teeth. They didn’t seem to like each other very much. I loved those dinners—I’m sure they gave Mum a glimpse of her other life and reminded her why she left it. At least that’s how it seemed when we got home.

  My grandparents’ new phone number is written neatly under the old one, which has been crossed out. The area code tells me they’re in the same state—not as far away as Dad led us to believe. I pick up the landline phone and dial the number. Calling them feels like a kind of betrayal.

  It only rings once before my grandmother answers. ‘Hello?’

  ‘Grandma, it’s Grace.’ I wait for that to sink in.

  Long seconds of silence. ‘Grace. Yes, hello.’ She sounds out of breath. ‘Is there something wrong?’

  ‘Nothing’s wrong,’ I say. ‘It’s just…it’s been a while.’

  ‘Does your father know you’re calling?’

  ‘No.’ I twist the telephone cord around my finger. ‘I thought it was time.’

  ‘Well…’ She draws the word out. She sounds pleased that he doesn’t know.

  ‘I’m sorry I haven’t been in touch. I mean, I wanted to, but…’

  ‘Your mother would turn over in her grave if she could,’ she drawls.

  ‘I know.’ I leave it at that. Any more and I’ll blow it. How can I ask her the questions I have swirling around without ending the conversation before it begins? ‘I miss her so much.’

  There’s the clinking sound of glass on teeth, and a loud gulp as she swallows. ‘Your grandfather has gone on a fishing charter. Imagine! He hates fishing. Could never stand the water. I don’t understand it.’

  Does he want to get away from you?

  ‘I’ve been going through Mum’s old photos. It makes me feel better.’

  ‘Yes, you took it hard, didn’t you?’ she says. ‘I hope your father got you the help you needed. It would have been better for you if I could have been around—it’s not like I haven’t dealt with it before. It’s your grandfather’s side—the women were all a bit flighty. It hasn’t skipped a generation yet.’ She gulps and swallows again. ‘And it didn’t help that your mother was stuck out there, away from her friends and family.’

  It crosses my mind that my grandmother knows more than she’s letting on. ‘Did she have many friends? I never saw any apart from our neighbours.’

  She grunts. ‘Well, she was cut off, wasn’t she? She said that was what she wanted, but I knew better.’

  ‘So, her friends? I found an old school photo and—’

  ‘How could you?’ she interrupts. ‘I have them all. She said she didn’t want them. Your mother wasn’t sentimental about things like that.’

  ‘I saw a copy,’ I lie. ‘I was doing a project on the missing girl, Hannah Holt. Do you remember? They were in the same class once. Were they friends?’ I suck in my breath and hold it. My finger has turned an alarming shade of blue.

  ‘No, that’s not right,’ she says. ‘They were in the same class three years in a row, but they weren’t friends. Hannah Holt was a good student. Your mother preferred a different kind of company.’

  She’s talking about Dad. He never finished school; he was working the farm by the time he was my age and he started seeing Mum when she was just eighteen. I bite my lip to keep from answering back.

  ‘I’d like to have some of her photos if that’s okay, Grandma.’

  She sniffs. ‘I could have some of them copied, I suppose, but I’m rather busy right now.’

  ‘Please? I just need…more of her.’

  She lowers her voice. ‘Your mother was never one to face things head on, Grace. Her solution was always to run in the other direction, like when she left school early and took up with your father. Why would she cut off all contact with her parents and her friends? Ask yourself that. Better still, ask him.’

  I mutter a goodbye and hang up, slowly unwinding the cord to let the blood rush back into my finger. I can’t shake the feeling that I’ve just been stuck with a poison dart.

  Only two more days left of the holidays. It feels as if I’m stuck in a labyrinth with moving walls, no exit, and no way of retracing my steps because the entrance has mysteriously shifted.

  Dad was gone before the sun came up. Cody has just left for work. Diesel lives outside now, as if he can’t bear to be anywhere near me. I have nausea and jitters all the time, so bad I can barely hold my spoon or swallow my cereal.

  I wash the dishes and tidy the kitchen with the radio turned up. Chores keep me moving; when I stop, I get dizzy. Music drowns out the creaks, groans and rattles of the house. The whispers. Sunglasses help ease the ache behind my eyes, but I can only wear them inside when there’s nobody else around.

  On my way out, I stop when I catch my reflection in the hallway mirror. I wouldn’t pass anybody’s inspection. My cheekbones could be blades under the skin. My hair is greasy at the roots, frizzy on the ends, and I have a new rash, a mass of purplish dots across my chin and throat. There’d be no taking Kenzie and me for sisters anymore—not unless she was the before picture and I was the after.

  I’m decomposing—a cadaver, rotting from the inside out.
And it feels like I’m running out of time.

  I dress in old loose jeans and a shapeless black hoodie to cover my bones, lock the house, and jog to the bus stop. This time the bus is empty. I have the back seat to myself. At the next stop, two kids get on but they’re too busy with their screens to pay any attention to me. I write her name on the glass in the mist of my breath—Hannah, HANNAH, hannaH—wishing my name was the same backwards and sideways. Am I her? I don’t feel like me anymore; Grace Foley doesn’t fit.

  No, I’m not her either. I’m just empty.

  I get off at South Swanston shops and wait fifteen minutes while a techie fits a new screen to my phone. She watches me as I wander the displays, as if I might be a shoplifter. I had a friend who used to do that—shove bottles of nail polish down the front of her jeans. She used to say nobody would have the nerve to ask to check down a girl’s pants.

  Amber. That was her name. I clutch at the memory with relief.

  The new screen is so clean and shiny it reflects the perfect blue sky above. I’m going to need it. I’ll be putting my freedom at risk by doing what I’m doing, but the alternative is the labyrinth.

  I have an angled view into Susannah Holt’s kitchen from the gully behind the house, ten metres away. It’s only eleven. There isn’t a cloud in sight, but I’m wishing for rain clouds or a dust storm. I want cover. I hide behind the tree below the crow’s nest. Very still, listening.

  There’s no movement inside the house for almost twenty minutes. I dare to move, and grasp the trunk of the tree; it’s surprisingly easy to climb to the first fork in the branches about two metres above the ground. From there it gets harder. I have to swing my legs, scissor-style, to monkey along to the next horizontal branch. I lever myself with one of the ladder rungs on the trunk, but it crumbles, and I’m left dangling. I drop to the ground, exhausted. I don’t have the muscle. My arms are dead weights and I have a fresh graze on my wrist.

  I hear a noise, like a squeaky wheel.

  I freeze, and my heart thuds. Susannah Holt is hanging washing on the line in the backyard; if she turns even slightly, she’ll spot me over the fence.