20

Tara

Our house was in chaos.

My mother was crying in the kitchen, loudly declaring that I had finally succeeded in destroying her life. My father was pacing the living room, a phone pressed to each ear, trying to reach his lawyer so we could find the proper legal representation – a criminal lawyer – for Christian. Out on the street there were more than a dozen journalists milling all over the pavement, real old-fashioned journalists who kept stuffing notes through our letterbox and ringing the landline – how the hell did they get the number? – as Skyla did her best to fend them off.

And I was having an argument with Marlon.

I took a breath as I sat on his bed, hearing the baying mob outside our front gate, jabbering excitedly among themselves, and my mum weeping and wailing downstairs. Marlon folded his arms across his chest and scowled. On the bed between us was his dog-eared copy of The Call of the Wild.

‘Listen – you can’t go through your childhood and read just one book, Marlon.’

‘But I love this dog! I love Buck! I love him!’

At the foot of the bed, Buddy bobbed his head and looked as forlorn as a Lab could ever look. Buck is kind of great, Buddy seemed to say.

‘Baby,’ I said. ‘Marlon. Look, I know you love this book—’

‘I implore you!’

I placed the tip of my finger against his solitary dimple.

‘I’m going to kiss you right there,’ I smiled, but he pulled away furiously.

‘Well, actually I don’t want to be kissed there! I don’t want to be kissed anywhere!’

My mother came into the room, dabbing at the smudged mascara around her huge blue eyes. She sat on the edge of her grandson’s bed, tugging at the hem of her miniskirt.

‘Goodness,’ she said to Marlon. ‘What a fuss about nothing. Here.’

She picked up Marlon’s favourite book and began to read at random with all the emotion of a speaking clock. ‘But especially he loved to run in the dim twilight of the summer midnights, reading signs and sounds as a man may read a book, and seeking for the mysterious something that called – called, waking or sleeping, at all times, for him to come …’

Marlon grinned triumphantly. I stood up to go. ‘You can’t have just one book,’ I said.

My mother turned on me with a viciousness that shocked me.

‘Oh, why don’t you leave us alone!’ she said. ‘You cause so much trouble, Tara!’

The tears started up again as she settled to reading her grandson his bedtime story, her voice finally showing some emotion, even if it was only for herself. Her mouth tightened into a thin straight line, a facial expression I remembered from the worst times of our relationship, those years when I was entering my teens just as my hot mum was reluctantly entering the end of her reproductive years, the great eternal and bitter divide between mothers and daughters. It was all coming back to me now.