‘Maybe. She said we could if I want. But she doesn’t seem very . . . I don’t know. I think if I’d never contacted her, she would have been happy.’
‘She wrote to you for over ten years.’
‘If I don’t look like her . . .’
Taylor pushes her hair behind her ears. ‘Don’t.’
I close my eyes. ‘I must look like him.’
***
I find my dad doodling in a notebook. I wonder if it’s the same one I’d flipped through in the pavilion, but I can’t see the cover and there’s no way to know. He’s lying on his stomach on the top bunk with his feet kicked up and he looks so young that at first I don’t recognise him. Then he glances up at me. He suddenly looks so tired and worn out. Jube is back at Fairyland and sticking close to Dad. He’s curled on the floor near the base of the bunk and wags his tail when he sees me.
I think about how he saved Jube.
‘I found out about Kelly’s letters,’ I say.
‘What letters?’
‘The ones Kelly’d been writing to me.’
‘She’d been writing to you?’
‘Mum hid them.’ I bite my lip. ‘No. That’s not right. Mum was keeping them safe, that’s all.’
‘She always told me that Kelly never wrote,’ he mutters. He sits up on the bunk, hunching so his head fits beneath the ceiling. ‘How many?’
‘Fourteen. Fourteen letters. I . . . I met her today.’
I wait for Dad to ask me why I hadn’t told him, but he doesn’t.
‘You met her, eh? That must’ve been . . . weird.’
‘Yeah, it was. I guess.’ I back slowly out of the room. ‘I’ve got to get to work. Just thought you’d want to know.’
There’s more I want to say, but I don’t know how to say any of it. I’ve been so fixated on all the ways he’d stopped being my father. I sort of realise, shutting the bunkroom door, that I’ve forgotten things, too. I don’t know how to be his daughter anymore, either.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Dad’s new job is in sales, doing the sort of stuff he was doing at his last job. His last job had been selling plumbing equipment and this new one is working in a camping store. It doesn’t seem real. We stare at him across the camping table and everyone stops eating their pasta.
‘A job job?’ Taylor says.
‘Yeah, of course! A job job.’
Taylor raises her eyebrows at me and I raise mine back at her.
‘That’s cool,’ Taylor says, and Dad smiles so widely that I can see a filling in his tooth that I’d completely forgotten about.
Mum prods at her pasta with her fork. ‘If you see Kelly again, we can tell her that.’
I startle. ‘What?’
‘Tell her your father is a sales consultant.’
‘I didn’t think I was seeing her again.’ There’s a bit of an edge in my voice and I sense Taylor glancing at me.
Mum just smiles. ‘Just if you do. You can tell her that about your father.’
I poke at my pasta.
Later, I hear him and Mum getting insect spray from inside, quietly agreeing that his wage will go entirely into her account. It’s a small thing, really. But given all the lies and excuses and arguments over the last couple of years, it seems almost magical. For the rest of the night, Mum smiles at Dad a lot and looks tearful, and I wonder if she’s happy because everything can start moving back towards normal, or if she’s trying not to cry because she knows that, very soon, it’s all going to fall apart again.
***
Dad is just getting up from the hammock when I arrive home after work in the early evening. It’s grown windy and restless while I was in the kitchen at the River Pub, and I have to wipe dirt and dust from my eyes as I walk.
‘What were you talking to Muriel about earlier?’ Dad asks. Jube is sitting by the hammock, watching people walking past along the road.
I startle. ‘Nothing, why?’
‘Just saw you talking, that’s all.’ He shrugs and we stare at each other.
‘She was telling me about her new veggie patch. Why?’ I ask.
‘Nothing. No reason. Just, wondering what you’ve been up to, that’s all.’
‘Well, that’s all,’ I say.
‘Okay.’
‘Okay.’
It’s not until I’m inside and collapsing on the bed in the hot room that I realise it’s the first thing Dad’s asked me for as long as I can remember.
***
That night I doze on the bed after dinner. As it gets dark, the wind picks up even more and it starts to drizzle again. Taylor paces around the house like a restless, trapped animal.
Suddenly, there’s a yell and the sound of something smashing, much louder than anything else we’ve heard since we’ve moved here. We all rush out into the windy, dark night. There are a few other people, but not many. Most have stayed in their caravans.
The noise is coming from the house.
‘Shouldn’t we go in there?’ Taylor asks.
‘No, it only makes it worse,’ says Trisha calmly.
‘Should we call the police?’ Muriel asks Trisha. They’re standing outside Muriel’s cabin with their arms crossed, waiting.
Trisha shakes her head. ‘Won’t do any good. He never touches him – just yells and makes a ruckus. Besides, he always blames Matt when the cops show up.’
‘If they show up,’ Muriel mutters, and when Matthew bolts out of the house a little while later, she tries to put an arm around him. He shrugs her off and runs towards the river.
‘Poor boy,’ Trisha says, and everyone goes back to their cabins.
***
I can’t settle on anything and I suppose it’s because everyone’s acting as though what happened is perfectly normal. And it’s not. It’s not.
It’s not okay and it feels wrong that people are pretending it is. I have to believe it’s pretence. I have to believe that people don’t actually think that it’s okay. That they’re just pretending to for some reason that I’ll never really understand.
I sneak out when Mum and Dad shut the door to the bunkroom and Jube follows me out of the annex. He falls into step beside me and comes with me across the grounds and onto the flood plain. For some reason, it reminds me of a cemetery. My breath catches. Whenever we drove past the cemetery at night when I was a kid, Taylor and I would both close our eyes and hold our breath because we thought spirits could attack you otherwise.
For a moment, I feel dizzy, but then I force myself to breathe. I force myself to squint into the darkness. I have a torch, but I don’t turn it on until I’m nearly at the bank of the river. Jube wags his tail at me and then cocks his leg on a tree.
‘Matt?’ I call.
There is a stirring. I have to force myself to breathe.
Jube growls deep in his throat. I think of some of the men I’d seen in the other really dilapidated cabins. I think of my self-defence corkscrew and I run. I lock the door of the cabin behind myself and only when I’ve calmed down a bit do I see that I’ve let Jube in with me. I sit down in one of the camp chairs and stare out into the night.