Читать книгу Almost Japanese - Sarah Sheard - Страница 7

*

One night, my parents had a dinner party, and before the guests arrived my father decided to paint the front door. While my mother and I glided about the kitchen, polishing glasses, sorting out the cutlery, turned bread out of pans, brushed butter onto food, my father began methodically spreading newspapers over the front porch. He unscrewed the Medusa’s-head door-knocker, dropped her in Brasso, and began to paint. The dog discovered the opened can of black enamel and nosed the lid off the edge of the porch into the garbage pail, by which time the light was starting to fail, so my father rigged a bulb on a long extension cord from the living-room, down the front hall, through the porch and out the door. Just a little too late to catch the panpipe rill of black enamel hardening along the bottom of the door.

I lit the candles. My mother retreated upstairs to dress. The dog, intoxicated by the fumes, began dancing and growling at the umbrella-stand. Dad printed a caution sign and strung it up across the porch, but it was unreadable in the gloom and the first guest ducked the string, pushed open the door and discovered the paint on his palm just after he’d embraced my mother.

After the clean-up, I stowed solvent and rag in a can at the top of the cellar stairs where an inebriated guest, searching for the bathroom, inadvertently opened the door and drop-kicked the can downstairs into the loaded laundry basket.

*

The empty Chrysler, family car, coasts past us down the driveway like a dream. My father lopes after it, his arms like a sleepwalker’s, reaching for the wheel through the open window, but the car glides out of reach and he stops in the forsythia shadow to watch the double doors of the garage crumple inward like wet biscuit.

When I open my eyes again, my mother and father are disappearing through the perfectly-shaped hole in the wood.

This was the third, and last, time the car ran away.

*

My father wasn’t sure about a private school. He didn’t want his daughter turning into a conformist. But it was the uniform that made me want to go. Kilt, blazer, tie-pin, knee-socks, black oxfords. Like a business suit. That, and the fact that it was so close by. I could come home every day for lunch.

And no boys.

Thirteen. No blood yet.