Chapter 11

chapter eleven

Last September

It was mid-morning when Logan Delaney drove down his parents’ street a little over the speed limit, his head ducked low so as to avoid eye contact with friendly neighbours out washing their cars or walking their dogs.

If the Volvo was in the driveway he might circle the cul-de-sac and keep going, because he wasn’t in the mood for solo conversations with the parents. He preferred to have his siblings around to take some of the heat. Being an only child must be hell.

The Volvo wasn’t in the driveway so he pulled in. He got out and shielded his eyes as he looked up at the house gutters clogged with leaves from the liquidambars.

He checked the vintage-style letterbox – a present from Troy, naturally – in case there was any mail to bring in.

He wore paint-stained track pants, an old t-shirt and runners. He hadn’t shaved and he was a man who looked like a criminal when he didn’t shave. His hair stuck up in tufts. His mother would say he looked like a hobo. He was a big, solid guy and he knew he should dress more respectably because women sometimes crossed to the other side of the street if they saw him walking behind them at night. He always wanted to shout out his apologies. ‘Oh, that’s exactly what you should do, Logan, in fact you should run after them shouting, “I mean you no harm, fair lady!”’ his sister Amy said once, and then she’d laughed so much at her own joke he’d been morally obliged to throw her in the pool. Troy’s rooftop pool: it had an infinity edge.

His mother had asked him to do the gutters in that way she had of asking without really asking.

‘Oh, gosh, Logan, you should see the leaves in this wind! What’s going on? Climate change? They’re just rocketing down,’ she’d said on the phone last week.

‘You want me to do the gutters?’ Logan had said. Climate change. His mother threw certain phrases around at random to make sure they knew she was up to date with current affairs and listened to podcasts.

‘Your dad says he’s perfectly fine doing them.’

‘I’ll swing by next week,’ he’d said.

After Logan’s dad celebrated his seventieth birthday with a torn ligament and a complicated knee reconstruction, the family had begun playing with the idea that Stan was ‘elderly’. It was a nurse who first used the word. ‘Elderly people can suffer confusion and short-term memory loss after anaesthetic,’ she’d said as she checked their sleeping father’s blood pressure, and Logan saw all of his siblings jerk their heads in a mutual shocked shift of perspective.

‘It’s like seeing Thor in a hospital gown,’ Amy had whispered. Their dad had never been sick, apart from his bad knees, and seeing him diminished and acquiescent in that hospital bed had been distressing, even though their father suddenly opened his eyes and said very clearly to the poor nurse in his startlingly deep voice, ‘Nothing wrong with my memory, sweetheart.’

He had fully recovered and was once again winning tournaments with their mother, but the ‘elderly’ idea had persisted. Dad shouldn’t climb ladders. Dad needs to know his limitations. Dad needs to watch what he eats. Logan wasn’t sure if they were all jumping the gun. Maybe they enjoyed it. Maybe it made them all feel like they were finally grown-ups, worrying about an elderly parent who didn’t really need their concern yet. Maybe there was even satisfaction in it: Thor toppled at last. Although Logan wouldn’t be surprised if his father could still beat him in an arm wrestle, and he had no doubt at all that he could still beat him on the court. His father knew his strengths, his weaknesses, his strategies. Logan was powerless against all that knowledge. Ten years old again: hands sweaty, heart thumping. Jesus, he’d wanted to beat his dad so badly.

It had been two years since they’d been on the court together. ‘Go have a hit with your father,’ his mother would invariably suggest when he visited, and Logan would make up an excuse. The subversive idea had begun to creep up that he might just never play again. It felt like treason and yet who would care, who would even notice?

Their mother would notice.

Since his father’s operation, Logan had begun doing odd jobs around the family home, whenever he thought he could get away with it without his father getting angry. He slid in and out like a ninja. Change a light bulb here and there. Get up with a chainsaw and cut back the overgrown branches around the tennis court.

He couldn’t work out how his father felt about it. ‘You don’t need to do that, mate,’ he’d said last time he’d caught Logan changing one of the court lights. He clapped him on the shoulder. ‘I’m not dead yet.’

That day Logan had a hangover and his father actually did look to be in far better health than him, ruddy-cheeked and clear-eyed, yet another doubles trophy on the sideboard.

Later that same day his father had asked about how his ‘career plans were progressing’ and Logan, who had no particular career plan except to stay employed, had felt himself squirm like a kid. His father seemed to always be observing Logan’s life the way he used to observe his tennis. Logan could sense Stan’s desire to call him to the net, to point out his weaknesses, to explain exactly where he was going wrong and where he could improve, but he never did criticise Logan’s life choices, he just asked questions and looked disappointed with the answers.

The slam of his car door sounded loud on the quiet street. He could hear the twitter of magpies and the sarcastic caw of crows from the bushland reserve that backed onto his parents’ tennis court. It reminded him of the rhythms of his parents in conversation. His mother chattering, his father’s occasional deadpan response.

Logan didn’t go inside. He walked straight down the side of the house to collect the ladder from the shed, past the drainpipe where they all had to stand to practise their ball tosses. A hundred times in a row, day after day, until they all had ball tosses as straight and reliable as a ruler’s edge.

He wondered where his parents were, how long he had before they returned, and if his father would be angry or relieved to see this particular job done.

Troy wanted to pay people to help out their parents. A gardener. A cleaner. A housekeeper.

‘What . . . like a team of servants?’ said Amy. ‘Will Mum and Dad ring a bell like the lord and lady of the manor?’

‘I can cover it,’ said Troy, with that very particular look he got on his face when he talked about money: secretive, ashamed and proud. None of them really understood what Troy did but it was clear he’d landed on a level of impossible wealth that you were only meant to land on by working really hard at your tennis. Somehow Troy had gone ahead and found another way to drive the fancy car and live the fancy life, and now he played tennis socially, with bankers and barristers, and without, it seemed, any hang-ups, as if he were one of the private school kids who got private lessons at Delaneys not because they had talent or a love of the sport but because it was a ‘good life skill’.

Their father never once asked Troy about his career plans.

Logan opened the shed and found the bucket, gloves, scraper and ladder. Everything was in its place. His friend Hien said the first heartbreaking sign of his own father’s Alzheimer’s was when he stopped putting his tools back in the right place, but Logan’s dad’s shed looked as pristine as an operating theatre.

Even the glass of the shed’s small window sparkled, revealing the Japanese maple at the side of the tennis court that was just beginning to leaf up for spring. In autumn the leaves turned red-gold. Logan saw himself as a kid searching through a soft crunchy carpet of leaves for a rogue tennis ball, because tennis balls cost money. He saw himself storming past that tree the day he first lost against Troy, the same day his father told him to watch Harry Haddad demonstrate the kick serve that Logan hadn’t yet mastered, and maybe part of him already knew he never would master: he simply didn’t have that instinctive understanding of where the ball needed to be. He was so worked up that day he threw his racquet as he walked towards the house, almost hitting some poor kid waiting for her lesson, who had to jump aside with a little squeak of fear.

That was the day Logan understood that his younger brother might be better than him and also, more importantly, that Harry Haddad was a prodigy, and had something essential and wonderful that all the Delaney children lacked.

He turned resolutely away from his memories and back to his father’s immaculate workbench.

Troy was a fool to think they could pay someone to come and do jobs around the house that their father had always done himself. Stan would find that demeaning, extravagant, unmanly. Logan had been in the car with his father once when they’d driven past a man in a suit standing on the side of the road casually scrolling through his phone while a roadside assistance guy was on his knees changing the tyre on the man’s Mercedes. Stan had been so offended by the sight he opened the window and roared, ‘Change your own tyre, ya big fucken’ pussy!’ Then he’d closed the window, grinned sheepishly, and said, ‘Don’t tell your mother.’

Logan wouldn’t let another man change a tyre for him but Troy sure as hell would, and he’d enjoy it too. He’d amiably chat to the guy while he did it. The last time they all got together, for Amy’s birthday, someone asked Troy what he’d done that day, and he said, without shame or embarrassment, ‘I had a pedicure.’ It turned out, to everyone’s amazement, that the bloke got regular pedicures. ‘Oh darling, I could have done your nails for free, saved you the money!’ their mother had said, as if Troy needed to save money, and then everyone briefly and unfairly lost their minds at the thought of their mother on her knees trimming Troy’s toenails, as if Troy had actually asked her to do it.

Troy was the only Delaney to have ever experienced a pedicure. Their father would rather have pins stuck in his eyes, Joy had ticklish feet, Amy thought pedicures were elitist and Brooke said they caused bacterial infections.

Troy didn’t care. Troy was his own man.

No-one would ever call Troy ‘passive’, even though he was the one passively getting his toenails done like a fucking emperor.

‘You didn’t even try to stop me,’ Indira had said when she called from the airport.

‘I thought this was what you wanted,’ Logan said. She’d said ‘she couldn’t go on like this’. Like what? It was never made clear.

‘But what do you want, Logan? You’re so bloody . . . passive!’ She was crying as she spoke, crying so hard, and he was so confused, he didn’t understand what was going on. She was the one leaving the relationship, not him.

Then she’d hung up, so the word ‘passive’ was the last word she’d said to him, and it kept echoing in his head until he’d become obsessed with it, examining the word and its implications from every angle. He’d even looked up the dictionary definition and now knew it by heart, occasionally muttering it to himself: Accepting or allowing what happens or what others do, without active response or resistance.

What exactly was the problem with accepting and allowing what happens, or what others do? Wasn’t that a Zen, sensible way to lead your life? Apparently Indira’s last boyfriend had been ‘domineering’. Logan never domineered. He never stopped Indira from doing anything she wanted to do: even leaving, if that’s what she wanted, if that’s what made her happy. He wanted her to be happy.

So maybe no-one could make Indira happy. He wasn’t going to demand she stay.

‘You don’t want me enough,’ she’d said at one point, maybe a week before she left, and he couldn’t speak because of the stomping sensation on his chest, and so he’d said nothing, just looked at her, until she sighed and walked away.

‘You don’t want it enough, mate,’ his father had said to him once on the way home in the car after Logan first lost a match to Harry fucking Haddad. Logan remembered sitting silently in the passenger seat, not saying a word, but thinking to himself: You’re wrong, Dad, you’re wrong, you’re wrong.

There was clearly something wrong with the way he communicated his own desires, which was ironic seeing as he taught communication skills.

I wanted it too much, Dad.

He put the gloves and the scraper in the bucket and hefted the ladder under one arm. He blinked in the sunlight as he left the darkness of the shed.

‘Good morning,’ said a female voice, and he nearly dropped the ladder. For a moment he thought it was Indira, as if he’d made her materialise just by thinking about her, but of course it wasn’t Indira.

A strange woman was sitting on the edge of his parents’ back veranda, her hands cupped around a mug of something hot, which she blew on as she looked up at him.

She had smooth, fair hair cut at sharp angles that swung either side of a skinny, ratty face. Her jeans were so long she’d had to fold them almost all the way to her knees. She wore ugg boots that looked a couple of sizes too big for her. They rolled loosely around on her feet like a child wearing grown-up shoes. Her grey hoodie had a pink logo across the front.

‘I didn’t mean to scare you,’ she said. She smoothed her hair back behind her ears and two straight pieces swung free, so the tips of her ears poked out.

‘Who are you?’ The fright made him as rude and brusque as his father.

‘I’m Savannah.’ She gave a little circular wave of her hand, as if she were being introduced while sitting at a table of his friends at a pub.

He studied her. A tiny jewel in her nose caught the sunlight. He felt a familiar childish sense of grievance he instantly tried to quash. This was the way it had always been: strangers strutting about his backyard with their racquets and designer shoes as if they owned the place, but you had to be polite and friendly because they paid the bills. Once, Brooke caught a kid going through her schoolbag that she’d dumped on the back veranda and helping herself to a banana that Brooke hadn’t eaten at recess.

‘Who are you?’ The girl imitated his tone, her head on one side.

‘I’m Logan,’ he said. He rested the ladder against his leg. ‘This is my parents’ house.’ He tried not to sound childishly defensive, as if he needed to prove that he had far more right to be here than she did.

‘Hi, Logan.’

He waited.

‘I’m staying with your parents,’ she said finally.

‘Were you a student?’ asked Logan.

‘You mean tennis?’ said Savannah. She smiled. ‘No. I’m not sporty.’

She put on an oddly genteel accent when she said sporty, as if she were saying, I don’t eat caviar.

‘So you’re . . .’

‘Your parents have gone out to pick up new glasses for your dad,’ said Savannah. ‘Bifocals. They were ready to be picked up yesterday but they ran out of time because the GP ran late for your mum’s appointment and then they got stuck in terrible traffic.’

Again, he couldn’t interpret the subtext. Why was she giving him all the detail? Was she mocking Logan’s mother, who weighed down every conversation with tangential detail? Her children were the only ones allowed to tease her about this.

‘Well, nice to meet you,’ said Logan. ‘I’ll get on with it.’ If she didn’t want to say who she was, he didn’t care. He lifted the ladder. ‘I’m cleaning out the gutters.’

‘Go for it,’ said the girl grandly. She tipped her head back to enjoy the sunlight on her face.

Logan turned to walk towards the side of the house. He stopped and looked back at her. ‘How long are you staying for?’

‘Indefinitely,’ she said, without opening her eyes. She grinned.

He felt a jolt of surprise almost like fear. ‘Indefinitely?’

She opened her eyes and regarded him thoughtfully. ‘I was joking. I just meant I’d like to stay here forever. It’s so peaceful.’ She inclined her chin at the tennis court. ‘I guess you all grew up to be tennis champions, then?’

‘Not really.’ Logan cleared his throat.

‘You were pretty lucky to have a court in your backyard.’

He assumed her thin harsh undertone related to money. These days only wealthy people had backyard tennis courts.

‘Back in the sixties every single house in this street had a court,’ he said, and he heard himself parroting his old man except his father’s point was that the tragic disappearance of backyard tennis courts to make way for apartment blocks heralded the end of Australia’s golden age of tennis. It meant working-class kids like Stan no longer spent their childhoods whacking a tennis ball but hunched over tiny screens.

Logan’s point was: Don’t you dare think I grew up rich and privileged just because this bush neighbourhood got gentrified.

Logan’s dad had grown up in this house, and they didn’t know much about his childhood, except that it wasn’t happy and he spent hours on his own, working on his serve on the tennis court his own father, Logan’s grandfather, had built before Logan’s grandmother ‘kicked him to the kerb’. Whenever she said that, Logan used to visualise a humorous image, like a children’s book illustration, of a grandpa in a rocking chair, with a surprised open mouth, hands on his knees, flying through the air, but he assumed it hadn’t really been that comical at the time.

Before Logan was born, his grandmother moved in with her older sister to take care of her while she died, which she took an inconveniently long time to do. Apparently Grandma then sold this house to Logan’s parents at ‘a very cheap price’. It turned out to be an expensive price, though, because Logan’s mother then felt permanently beholden to her mother-in-law and she could never convince Logan’s dad to tear up the purple floral carpet in the living room because it would offend Grandma. Even after Grandma was long dead.

When the tennis school started making money, pretty good money thanks to Logan’s mother’s entrepreneurial streak, the house was renovated and extended. The original dingy dark little Federation bungalow became a light-filled family home, but the purple carpet remained, a constant point of contention. Joy looked away when she vacuumed it. The rest of the house was Logan’s mother’s preferred arts and crafts style. A lot of timber and copper. (‘It’s like living in a bloody woodchopper’s house,’ his father once said.)

‘We were the only ones on the street who didn’t replace our tennis court with a swimming pool,’ he told the girl, who saw only the respectable present, not the complicated past.

‘Would you have preferred the pool then?’ she asked, head on one side.

There were times when they all would have preferred the pool, especially back when it was a clay court and he and Troy had to spend hours maintaining the damned thing, watering it, rolling it.

She said, ‘At least your parents could walk out the back door and be at work, right? That must have made life easy.’

It meant that Delaneys Tennis Academy had swallowed up their lives.

‘Yes, although when the tennis school really took off they leased four courts and the clubhouse around the corner. The place with the smiley tennis ball sign?’

He interrupted himself. She didn’t care about the smiley tennis ball. It seemed clear she wasn’t a previous student or a club member. If there wasn’t a tennis connection, then who the hell was she? ‘I’m sorry, but how do you know my parents?’

She scrunched up her face as if trying to remember the right answer.

‘Are you a friend of Amy’s?’ he guessed. She had to be.

‘I’m wearing her clothes!’ She lifted up one straight leg to show the too-long jeans. ‘She’s much taller than me.’

‘We’re a tall family,’ said Logan. He felt protective of Amy, as if this girl had made fun of her height. Amy was actually the shortest in the family.

‘Except for your mother,’ said Savannah. A bit of her hair got stuck in her mouth and she blew it away with an irritated puff. ‘Your mum and I are exactly the same height.’ She removed an elastic band from her wrist and pulled her hair back into a ponytail with one practised movement. ‘This hair is driving me crazy. I got it cut yesterday. It’s all smooth and slippery. Your mum got me an appointment with her hairdresser.’

‘It looks nice,’ said Logan automatically. He was well trained. Sisters.

‘It cost a lot,’ said Savannah. ‘Your mother paid, which was really nice of her.’

‘Okay,’ said Logan. Was she testing out his reaction to this information? He didn’t care if his mother wanted to pay for some girl’s haircut. He saw now that the hairstyle was very similar to his mother’s, as if her hairdresser worked from a template.

‘You got the day off from work?’ she said.

‘I work odd hours,’ he said.

‘Drug dealer?’

He smiled tolerantly. ‘I teach at a community college.’

‘What do you teach?’

‘Business communications.’ He waited for the inevitable reaction.

She raised her eyebrows. ‘I would have guessed you taught . . . I don’t know, some kind of trade, like house painting.’

He looked down at his pants. The yellow splashes were from when he and Indira had repainted their kitchen a sunny yellow that neither of them ended up liking. The blue splashes were from when he helped paint Brooke’s clinic. He couldn’t remember where the green flecks were from.

He’d actually done house painting for a couple of years after giving up tennis. Followed by plastering. Then roof tiling. ‘What about building as a career?’ his dad had said hopefully, trying to parlay all these different jobs into something more substantial. He wouldn’t have minded if Logan had stuck with house painting but he couldn’t stand the fact that Logan kept working for other people. Self-employment was the way to impress his father.

‘What about a degree, darling?’ his mother had said. Neither of his parents had degrees. His mother said the word ‘degree’ with such respect and humility it broke his heart.

When Logan was seventeen he had turned down a tennis scholarship to an American university. He often wondered what his thinking had been. Was it because he knew his father didn’t see an American scholarship as a valid path to success in tennis? ‘If you want to make a career of tennis, then focus on your tennis,not study.’ Or was it fear? A bit of social anxiety? He’d been an awkward teenager. He remembered thinking he wasn’t enthusiastic enough for America. He spoke too slowly. He was too Australian. Too much like his dad.

He did do a part-time communications degree eventually. God knows why he did that. But that degree was enough to get him this job teaching business communication skills and it suited him. He had no special interest in the subject itself, but he enjoyed teaching. It was fine. A steady job with good hours. He actually thought he might do it forever.

‘Do you enjoy your chosen profession?’ asked Savannah. Was she laughing at him? Also, was she deliberately avoiding answering his question about how she knew his parents or had she just got distracted? He wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of asking again.

‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Anyway. Better get on with it.’

‘Do you want some help?’ She slammed the mug down on the porcelain tiles next to her and he winced because the mug was his mother’s favourite, the one that said, There’s no place like home: except Grandma’s!

‘Careful with that mug,’ he said. ‘It’s my mother’s favourite.’

Savannah picked up the mug with exaggerated care, got to her feet and placed it on the table where Logan’s father sat to do the crossword on Saturday mornings.

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I just grabbed it from the dishwasher.’ She picked it up again and studied it. ‘No place like Grandma’s. Except your mother isn’t a grandma, is she?’

‘It belonged to my grandmother,’ said Logan. Troy had bought it for their mother’s mother as a Christmas gift, and she’d loved it. Of course she had. Troy was famous for buying the best gifts. Her love of the mug had been inexplicable because their mother’s mother had never been especially grandmotherly. Whenever they visited she was always keen for a departure time to be specified upfront.

The girl stepped off the veranda onto the grass and walked over to him. She stood a little too close, and Logan took a step back. Amy called people who did that ‘Space Invaders’. The Delaneys were not touchy-feely people. Except for their mother. She was a hugger, an arm-patter, a back-rubber, but Joy had always been the exception to the Delaney rule.

Savannah looked up at him with too much interest. Her eyelashes were long and white, like a small native animal’s. She had a pointed, freckled nose, thin, chapped lips and a flesh-coloured Band-Aid above one eyebrow. Logan was taller and bigger than most people, but this girl was so small and fragile-looking she made him feel enormous and foolish, as though he were dressed up as a football mascot.

‘Do you want to have children?’ She looked at him intensely. Was there something a little wrong with her?

‘Maybe one day,’ he said. He took another step back. ‘What happened there?’ He indicated the Band-Aid.

‘My boyfriend hit me,’ she said, without inflection.

He thought her answer was going to be something mundane – in fact, he had no interest in the answer, he was just deflecting attention – and consequently, in his shock, he responded without thinking.

‘Why?’ The word was out of his mouth before he could drag it back. Why? It was like asking, What did you do to deserve that? His sisters would tear strips off him. Victim-blaming! ‘Sorry. That’s a stupid thing to ask.’

‘It’s okay. So, he came home from work, when was it? Last Tuesday night.’ She stuck her hands in the pockets of Amy’s jeans and circled the toe of her boot in the grass. ‘He was actually in a pretty good mood that day.’

‘You don’t need to tell me,’ said Logan. He held up a hand to try to stop her. He didn’t want details, for Christ’s sake.

‘It’s okay, I’m quite happy to tell you,’ she said, and he’d asked the stupid question, so his punishment was to endure the painful answer.

‘We were watching TV, just chilling out, and then this news story came on about domestic violence, right? I thought, Oh great, here we go. Those stories . . .’ She shook her head. ‘I don’t know why they have to keep putting those stories on TV. It doesn’t help. It makes it worse!’ Her voice skidded up.

Logan squinted, trying to make sense of what she was saying. Was she saying a story about violence against women inspired it?

‘Those stories always put him in the filthiest of moods. Maybe they made him feel guilty, I don’t know. He’d say, “Oh, it’s always the man’s fault, isn’t it? Never the chick’s fault! Always his fault.”’ She put on a deep, jock-like voice to imitate the boyfriend. Logan could almost see the guy. He knew the type.

‘So anyway, I changed the channel as fast as I could, I was like, “Oh, I want to watch Survivor!” and he didn’t say anything, and then I could feel it, he was just waiting for me to do something wrong, and the minutes went by, and I started to relax, and I thought, Oh it’s fine, and then, like an idiot, like a fool, I asked if he’d paid the car registration.’ She shook her head at her own stupidity. ‘I wasn’t trying to make a point. I honestly wasn’t.’ She looked up at Logan through her sandy eyelashes as if she were trying to convince him of her innocence. ‘I just said, “Did you remember to pay it?”’

‘Sounds like a valid question to me,’ said Logan. He’d never experienced physical violence in a relationship, but he knew how a question could be misinterpreted, how a simple request for information could be flung back in your face.

‘Well, it infuriated him,’ said Savannah. ‘Apparently I was being passive aggressive.’ She shrugged and put her fingertips to the Band-Aid over her eye. ‘So it all sort of spiralled from there, the way it always did, and next thing you know, he’s yelling, I’m crying . . . just pathetic, really. Embarrassing.’ She looked off to the side, her hands on her hips. She smelled of cheap perfume, hairspray and cigarettes, like the girls he used to kiss on summer holidays, behind the amenities block at the Central Coast caravan park. The smell triggered a surge of feeling that Logan hoped was nostalgia for that time, not desire for this girl. It was inappropriate to think about kissing this small fragile abused girl. It made him feel complicit with the arsehole boyfriend.

‘Anyway . . . whatever . . . so that’s what happened.’ Savannah hitched up Amy’s jeans around her waist. ‘He’s history. I left, hailed a cab, and I’m never going back.’

‘Good,’ said Logan, and then a series of thoughts clicked into place.

He said, ‘Does your boyfriend know you’re here?’ He imagined his mother flinging open the front door, in that way she did, always so pleased for company, a smile on her face, to be greeted by some yobbo with a vendetta. He didn’t wait for an answer. ‘How do you know my parents anyway?’

‘I don’t,’ said Savannah. ‘I knocked on their door at random.’

‘You what?’

‘Logan!’ His mother slid back the glass door leading onto the back veranda and put her hands to her cheeks, as if she couldn’t believe it was him, as if she hadn’t seen his car in the driveway and would therefore already have had plenty of warning that he was here. Her voice had that marginally posher accent she reserved for non-family members. Actually, it was worse than usual. She sounded almost drunk with excitement. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘I’m doing the gutters, Mum,’ said Logan. ‘Like I said.’

‘Oh, you don’t need to do that,’ said his mother. ‘Your father has it under control.’ She came over to them and put her hand on Savannah’s back as she spoke. ‘I see you’ve met Savannah.’ She looked at Savannah and then back at Logan. Her eyes sparkled. ‘She’s staying with us for a while. She’s staying with us for as long as she wants.’ She patted Savannah gently on the back in rhythm with her words.

She stopped patting and said, ‘How’s Indira?’ with a penetrating look, as if she suspected something about the break-up, but how could she possibly know?

Logan said, ‘She’s fine. Oh, she wanted me to give you this.’

He pulled the tiny, now rather ratty-looking gift from his pocket. Indira had asked him to give it to his mother weeks ago and he kept forgetting.

‘Oh, Logan!’ His mother put a hand to her chest. She looked absolutely thrilled.

‘It’s not anything –’

‘She didn’t want to be here?’ said Joy. She looked around her as if expecting Indira to pop out from behind a hedge. ‘To see me open it?’

‘It’s just a little –’

‘Logan’s partner is a very special girl,’ Joy told Savannah. ‘Very special. I wish she was here!’ She patted her hair, once again looked suspiciously around the backyard before she ripped off the paper. ‘Oh!’ Her face fell. ‘It’s a . . . fridge magnet.’

She turned the magnet back and forth, examining it as if for a secret message. It had a yellow flower on it. Logan had no idea why Indira had bought it for his mother or why it had caused that momentary expression of anguish. What had she expected it to be?

‘It’s so pretty,’ she told Logan. Her eyes were bright. ‘Indira knows I love yellow gerberas and that stupid magnet we got in London keeps falling off the fridge! That’s why she got it. She’s so thoughtful. Please thank her. Well, I’ll be seeing her on Sunday, so I can thank her myself!’

You won’t be seeing her on Sunday, thought Logan, but obviously he wasn’t going to tell his mother about the break-up in front of this strange girl. He changed the subject fast. ‘So I was just hearing how . . . Savannah knocked on your door?’ He cleared his throat. ‘At random? That’s . . .’ Did Brooke know about this yet? Brooke was the youngest in the family, but the most sensible and certain.

‘She said she had a good feeling about this house,’ said Joy. She smiled guilelessly up at Logan. ‘She said it felt safe. Isn’t that a lovely thing to say?’

‘Yeah, it is, so I was just asking Savannah if her ex-boyfriend knew where she was staying.’ Logan met his mother’s eyes. Joy liked to put on her dippy act but she wasn’t stupid.

‘He doesn’t know where she is,’ said Joy. ‘And he’s got no way of finding out.’

‘Don’t worry,’ said Savannah. ‘He can’t track me down. I didn’t even bring my phone when I left.’

‘Yes, and we’re going to find a time to go over to her apartment to pick up Savannah’s things when he’s at work,’ said Joy. She spoke as if she were planning a lunch.

‘You’re not going there, Mum,’ said Logan.

‘Oh, yes, I’ll probably stay in the car. Your dad will go inside with Savannah. Just to be on the safe side.’ His mother looked up at him, brightly, craftily, and Logan felt himself slide inevitably forward on the course of action his mother had already set for him.

‘I don’t think Dad should go either,’ said Logan. He sighed. There was no way out. He looked at Savannah and tried to make himself sound gracious, not sulky. ‘I’ll take you.’

‘I don’t need anyone to come with me,’ said Savannah. ‘I really don’t.’

‘Your brother can go too,’ said Joy to Logan. ‘Safety in numbers. That’s a good idea.’ She said it in a warm congratulatory manner as if it were Logan’s good idea. ‘You and Troy can help Savannah scoop everything up and get out of there quick smart and that will be the end of that!’

Would it be the end of that? ‘Isn’t Troy in America?’ asked Logan.

‘He flew back this morning,’ said his mother. ‘You can all three go over to Savannah’s place tomorrow once he’s over his jet lag.’

Troy would be appalled. Logan’s mood lifted fractionally at the thought.

‘You should go around eleven, I think. Avoid peak hour. You’ll have time before you teach your two pm class.’

Logan wanted to say, Maybe I’m doing something else tomorrow morning, Mum, but then his mother would demand details.

‘No. That’s okay. I appreciate the offer but I’ll go on my own,’ said Savannah, and Logan wanted to laugh because she had no idea how pointless it was to resist once his mother had decided something was going to happen. ‘Once your mother has momentum no-one can beat her,’ Stan always said, and he was talking about tennis but every single thing Logan’s dad said about tennis could also be applied to life.

‘I’ll go on my own,’ said Savannah.

‘No you will not, darling,’ said Joy. Steel in her voice.

Game to Mum, thought Logan.