I had asked Dad if I could borrow his hanky one Sunday when my nose threatened to drip all over my Bible, and he stuck his hand in his right coat pocket and out came … nothing. I wiped my nose on the hem of my dress, not because my sleeve wasn’t available, but because I didn’t want him to see my lip tremble and a tear squeeze out of my eyes.

Realising he didn’t have a hanky felt like a huge shock. It felt as though someone had hit me hard in the stomach. Who did he have to love him and take care of him now? We hardly saw him, and he was so alone all those nights after work. Who was feeding him and washing his clothes and asking about his day? People often told me I looked like my mum except for the red hair. I wondered if this was why, when Dad turned to me sometimes, his face seemed so sad, and he quickly looked away. I wondered that morning, not for the first time, what would happen to us all if Mum took too much longer to come home.

CHAPTER 19

Ruthy was coping by writing and writing and I was picking great sores in my head and Caleb was beside himself.

He said he kept wetting the bed and that made Aunty Maisie cross, and she had taken to insisting he wear a big nappy at night like the ones she put on Grandpa. This made him cry and cry. He said she didn’t say mean things to him or smack him, but she was like a strict sergeant major and just roared out rules and commands to be obeyed, and he was always frightened. She made him eat porridge for breakfast, which he hated, and once he chucked it up on her new breakfast banquette, which she’d had reupholstered with orange and avocado flowers on it. This made her very angry. She gave him a rag and told him to clean it up and then made another bowl of porridge and put it in front of him when he had stopped puking.

She slicked down his cowlicks with too much sugar in the water, and he said he looked as though he had horns when he went to school. He rushed to the long drinking troughs at school and stuck his head under a tap most mornings to try to fix them, but that meant water sloshed all over him and down the front of his clothes. Bruce Wauch and Barry Plover called out, ‘Wilson’s a wetter! Wilson’s a wetter!’, and his friend Lincoln punched Barry at recess time and told him to lay off or he’d piss on his sports shoes when he wasn’t looking. So Caleb stopped trying to tame the mess with water and decided to try to trim the sugar-starched horns himself with crimping scissors from the art classroom. This was, to say the least, an unsuccessful strategy, and Aunty Maisie had a fit when he went home with jagged hair and bald patches at his forehead and crown. She marched him to a local barber who shaved almost all of his beautiful snow-white wavy hair off, and he wet the bed again that night despite the nappy. Aunty Maisie said he was an evil boy who did it deliberately, despite him promising and promising that wasn’t true.