Читать книгу The Styx - Patricia Holland - Страница 20

It’s wild out there today. The sea is going sideways fast. It looks like a wall again, higher than the person standing on the sand. The tide rushes the water in, the wind rushes it sideways, and the sand’s sweeping sideways too. I feel in the midst of ethereality. Grains of sand float, fleet, sideways across the tidal flats, across the bay almost to me. A time-release video sped up. It’s beautiful. Also, freaky.

My parents told me things I shouldn’t have heard. People often forget, not realise, not care maybe, that I can hear, understand. And I can hear what people say on the other end of the phone. My hearing is that good.

My father was away in Thailand with his chief crony, Psycho Silas. My mother rang their Bangkok hotel suite, and Silas answered. While she was small-talking the “hello, how are things” to him, I saw her face freeze, her eyes shrink to dead. I could hear her heart, and then I couldn’t. I think it stopped too.

“He’s in the other room doing naughty, naughty things to a little brown-skinned girl we picked up in a bar,” Silas told my mother. He was obviously high, drunk, excited, all three probably.

My mother had been lonely I think, and only rang to see how things were going; for a chat.

My father was on a “fact-finding” mission into the live cattle export trade, and a few weeks before, when he started planning it, he said to my mother, “Do you want to come too?”

Her face lost energy, just slightly; her eyes shrank, hollowed, just slightly. She looked a bit taken aback, hurt that he hadn’t taken it for granted they would go together—like other couples.

“I’m sure we’ll be able to find someone to look after things here,” my father continued, “but it’s just the program …” He was referring to the artificial insemination program. “We’ll have to get someone who understands cycling heifers, they’re so touchy. And there’s the issue of what to do with Soph.”

My mother had been such an easy mark. He had known she’d offer to stay behind, to take care of things so he could go without the drama and worry of finding someone suitable to take over. I don’t think she would have left me anyway. I know she wouldn’t have.

They had gone through so much, finding out about my disability. The horror of such a horror is too much for anyone. Too much for her, too much for him, and so beyond too much for me. Fortunately, at the time of finding out about my Rett, no one told me about it, and I didn’t have enough knowledge at that time to put what I heard into context. Back then, I hadn’t put it all together. About Rett Syndrome that is.

“You deserve a break,” my mother said to my father about the trip. “I’ll stay and look after things here.”

My father replied quickly, far too quickly. “I’ll ask Si to come with me then.”

As soon as he spoke, my mother stared at nothing. I could tell she knew she’d been stage-managed. Her eyes had looked bruised.

Over the phone, in Bangkok, Silas’s voice rose with an excited, spiteful tinge. It smacked of how he resented my mother. “He’s always been a little too smitten with the dusky, Rose.”

Silas cackled more than a laugh’s worth, as we both heard my father splutter at him, “Don’t tell her that!”

Although I only heard my father faintly, and I certainly wasn’t fully aware of it then, to my mother, his response said so much. It said it was true. It said there was collusion against her. It said that their doing something like that was a normalised situation. It said her marriage was a sham and that she was not a credible entity. It said she should be careful. And it said that he knew he would have to be too. It was a game-changer, my mother’s diaries told me, years later when I accessed them.