Chapter 28

chapter twenty-eight

Last October

As soon as Amy got off the phone from Logan she went downstairs wearing nothing but a t-shirt and bumped straight into Simon Barrington, who should have been at work at this time. The house was meant to be hers during business hours. Her young flatmates all had sensible young person corporate jobs, which was the way she liked it.

‘Sorry!’ Simon flattened himself dramatically against the wall and averted his eyes, as if they hadn’t had sex last weekend. This was the problem with sleeping with your flatmates. It put everything out of rhythm, and with everything going on with her family right now, she wanted things to remain in rhythm.

‘We had sex last weekend,’ she reminded him, to put him at ease. The sex had been vigorous and wholesome, as sweet and delicious as apple crumble. She didn’t think she’d ever slept with such a clean man. Even when dishevelled and drunk he’d smelled of soap and clean laundry.

This didn’t seem to put him at ease at all. He blushed. He actually blushed. He was a darling.

‘Yeah, I’m sorry about that,’ he said. He paused. ‘I mean I’m not actually sorry about it.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Should I be sorry about it?’

Amy sighed. ‘Why aren’t you at work right now, Simon Barrington?’

‘I resigned,’ he said. ‘I’m making some big life changes.’

‘So you’re not going to be an accountant anymore?’

He looked taken aback at the thought. ‘Oh, no, I’ll still be an accountant. Just not for that particular practice. I’m going to take a few months off. Clear my head. Maybe travel.’

A shadow of a frown crossed his face.

‘Do you like to travel?’ she asked.

‘Not much,’ he said. ‘Anyway.’ He took a deep breath and clapped his hands together in an adorably geeky way. ‘What are you up to?’

‘I’m getting my jeans out of the dryer and then I’m going to visit my parents. There’s a strange woman living with them right now. My brother thinks she’s up to something.’

‘What, you think she’s a scammer?’ said Simon.

‘Well, so far all she’s done is cook really excellent food for them,’ admitted Amy.

‘But you’re trying to work out her end game,’ said Simon.

‘Exactly,’ said Amy. ‘My parents are extremely innocent.’

‘All parents are innocent,’ said Simon. ‘My parents nearly fell for that latest Tax Office scam, if you can believe it.’

‘Oh no,’ said Amy, who had nearly fallen for it herself. Thankfully she’d called Troy when she was on the way to the bank to withdraw money to pay her apparently unpaid taxes. It’s a scam, you idiot, he’d shouted from America.

‘I can give you a lift over to your parents’ place if you like,’ offered Simon. ‘You don’t drive, do you?’

He said this with interest rather than implied criticism. Some people couldn’t get over her lack of a driver’s licence. It was like her dad’s refusal to own a mobile phone. People took it personally.

‘I’ve never been behind the wheel of a car,’ said Amy. ‘I’m pretty sure I died in a car accident in a previous life. Possibly involving a bridge.’

She really did think this. She had fragmented memories of a crash. Water. Glass. Screaming. It may well have been from a movie.

‘Were you driving?’

‘What?’

‘In your previous life,’ said Simon. ‘Were you behind the wheel?’

‘Oh,’ said Amy. ‘I think so.’

‘So you have been behind the wheel of a car,’ said Simon. ‘Just not in this life.’

‘That’s right,’ said Amy. ‘You’re very . . . accurate, aren’t you?’

He had actually been very accurate, even when drunk.

‘I have good attention to detail,’ said Simon. ‘I’m thorough.’

‘You are,’ said Amy, straight-faced. ‘Your attention to detail is scrupulous.’

He held her eyes for just long enough to show he got it, and then he said, ‘I could give you my accurate opinion on this potential scammer.’

‘Your accurate accountant’s opinion?’ said Amy.

‘That’s right,’ said Simon. ‘I don’t have anything else to do right now and one of my goals for the next few weeks is to improve my spontaneity.’

‘Why?’ asked Amy, interested. She had always been advised to pull back on her spontaneity.

‘You know I was meant to be getting married this April? When my fiancée was explaining why she’d decided to end the relationship she had a list of . . . you know, things about me that didn’t work for her. And one of them was my lack of spontaneity.’

‘She wrote a list of things that didn’t work for her?’ asked Amy.

‘She liked lists,’ said Simon. ‘It was something we had in common.’

‘She sounds just lovely,’ said Amy.

‘You sound like my sister,’ said Simon.

Amy looked at him. He radiated good health, as if he’d just stepped out of a bracing cold shower after a run. His t-shirt was crisp and clean.

‘Do you iron your jeans?’ she asked. He was so exotic.

‘Of course,’ he said.

‘Okay,’ she said.

‘It’s okay that I iron my jeans?’

‘No, that is definitely not okay. I mean, okay, you can come with me to meet the scammer. The possible scammer. She may also be a nice girl who is down on her luck. It’s up to us to make that call.’

‘I’ll keep an open mind.’ He looked pleased.

‘I’ll just go put my unironed jeans on,’ she said.

‘No problem.’ He courteously waved his hand to let her pass him on the stairs.

She was a head taller than him, so now that she was on the step below him they were eye to eye. He had bushy old man eyebrows and good honest tax-paying eyes.

‘Before I do that,’ said Amy. She moved a fraction closer.

‘Before you do that,’ repeated Simon, and there was a catch in his voice.

It was like the satisfaction of striking a match first go. She saw the understanding spark and shine in his eyes.

‘We could work on your spontaneity,’ she said.

‘We could,’ said Simon.

‘Just very quickly,’ said Amy.

So they did that.

*

An hour later, Amy stood at her parents’ front door and rang the doorbell that didn’t work, just in case it had been fixed, and then, without waiting, because she knew it would never be fixed, knocked hard with her knuckles.

She looked at her clean, delicious flatmate, standing next to her in his white t-shirt matching his white teeth, with his buzz cut and broad shoulders and glasses, like a door-to-door missionary or the nerdy best friend from a teen vampire movie. Her mother would ask Simon lots of probing questions, and Simon would be the type to answer them in polite comprehensive detail, and her mother would remember that comprehensive detail for years after Amy had forgotten Simon Barrington’s very existence.

He was a distraction from the visit’s main purpose, which was to subtly collect as much biographical data about Savannah as possible, particularly as it related to the alleged assault.

You brought your flatmate? Why? She could just hear her sister and brothers, that careful patient tone they sometimes used, as if she were an explosive device that could detonate at any moment.

‘Is this where you grew up?’ Simon asked, looking about him.

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘Happy childhood?’ asked Simon. He looked at the big pots of flowers, the shiny clean terracotta tiles and the stone figurines in the carefully tended garden beds. ‘It looks like the setting for a happy childhood.’ He touched the tip of his runner to the base of the statue by the front door. It was a blank-eyed little girl in a bonnet holding an empty basket.

‘What happened to her eyes?’

‘The crows took them,’ said Amy.

‘She looks like a demon child,’ commented Simon.

‘I know,’ said Amy. ‘I always think that!’ Maybe she and the accountant were actually soulmates.

The door opened the tiniest crack.

A low, husky voice said, ‘Can I help you?’

For a second Amy wondered if she’d somehow come to the wrong house, anything was possible, but then the door swung open just to the length of the security chain, and Savannah stood there, wearing not Amy’s old clothes but a long-sleeved paisley shirt tucked into three-quarter-length black pants that Amy was pretty sure belonged to her mother. It was worse seeing Savannah in her mother’s cast-offs than in her own.

‘Oh, hi, Amy,’ she said. ‘How are you? Your mum is asleep at the moment.’

When Joy collapsed on Father’s Day, it had been Savannah who caught her and carefully laid her on the floor. Joy’s head had ended up resting on Savannah’s lap, and one could hardly say, Get out of the way, strange girl, that’s my mother, her head should be resting on my lap.

‘That’s okay.’ Amy had talked to her mother a few times on the phone since she’d got out of hospital and she knew she’d been napping. ‘I won’t wake her. What’s Dad doing?’ She waited for Savannah to hurry up and release the security chain.

‘He fell asleep in front of the television,’ said Savannah, and she stuck out her lower lip to convey Aww, isn’t that adorable? ‘I think he got a real fright when your mother was in hospital last week, so they both have some catching up to do.’

‘Oh,’ said Amy. Her father was a veteran snoozer. He always dozed in front of the television. He’d be awake any minute. ‘Well. I’ll still come in and –’

‘Now is not such a good time,’ said Savannah.

Now is not such a good time? Did she really just say that?

Amy felt many emotions on a given day: desire for inappropriate men, nostalgia for long-ago days that never actually happened, great rolling waves of happiness and sadness, bouts of high-level panic and low-level anxiety, but rage was an emotion with which she was not familiar, so it took her a moment to identify the feeling whooshing through her veins.

Was this girl really going to block her from entering her own childhood home?

‘Hi there.’ Simon leaned in front of Amy. ‘I’m Amy’s boyfriend. Sorry to be a pain but could I come in and use the bathroom? I’ll be very quiet if everyone is asleep.’

He didn’t really think he was her boyfriend just because they’d slept together twice, did he? She gave him a look. He winked.

There was a beat. Of course Savannah knew Amy was single. She knew everything about Amy’s family although they knew virtually nothing about her. Savannah tapped a fingertip against her lower lip, almost as if in parody of Joy, who did the same thing to indicate scepticism.

If Savannah denied Amy’s ‘boyfriend’ this valid, ordinary request, she would kick down the door.

‘Come in.’ Savannah opened the security chain with an upward flick of her finger, opened the door and stood back, as if she lived there, which technically she did, but temporarily. Supposedly.

There was just nothing guest-like in her behaviour.

Steffi, the traitorous hound, sat at Savannah’s feet as though she were Savannah’s beloved pet, and politely cocked her head at Amy like they were meeting for the first time.

Once again, Amy registered how the house felt perceptibly, but pleasantly, different, as it had on Father’s Day. It was like it had been styled by a clever real estate agent for inspection by potential buyers. There were flowers on the sideboard in a vase that Amy had never seen before. All the family photos on the wall were the same but they’d been straightened, or dusted, or polished so that all those familiar shots of their childhood were suddenly thrown into sharp relief.

Simon held out his hand to Savannah.

‘Hi there. I’m Simon Barrington,’ he said in a loud, showy voice, completely unlike his own. ‘So pleased to meet you.’

She took his hand. ‘Hi. I’m Savannah.’

‘Savannah . . .?’ He kept holding her hand, waiting for her surname, like someone’s embarrassing uncle.

‘The bathroom is this way,’ said Savannah.

‘I’ll show him the bathroom,’ said Amy, and she knew she sounded thirteen. Then she said, ‘Well, but you know, what actually is your last name, Savannah?’

Because how were they going to secretly investigate her if they didn’t even know her last name? Did their parents even know it? They may never have even asked and had probably never bothered to Google her, just blithely believing every word she had to say.

‘It’s Pagonis,’ said Savannah. ‘Savannah Pagonis.’

The cut above her eye had completely healed, and she was wearing just a touch of make-up, and there was a kind of creamy, settled confidence to her, as if she were wearing her own clothes in her own home and Amy and Simon were unwelcome guests who she would soon be sending on their way. Amy’s mother’s clothes didn’t look wrong on her. They looked exactly right. She was a younger version of Joy. She could be Joy’s daughter. Joy had probably dreamed of a pretty feminine little daughter like this. Amy and Brooke had talked about this over the years: how their mother sometimes made them feel huge,like big lolloping orangutans.

‘Oh, that’s unusual. How do you spell that, Savannah?’ asked Simon. It was like watching an accountant perform in an amateur community production. He was terrible, but so adorably committed.

‘P-a-g-o-n-i-s,’ answered Savannah, eyebrows arched.

‘Huh,’ said Simon. ‘Is that, let me guess, Greek?’

‘Apparently,’ said Savannah shortly.

‘Savannah Pagonis,’ repeated Simon. ‘I bet people never spell it correctly. I hope your middle name is something simple. Like Anne? Marie?’

Amy looked at him admiringly. His delivery remained forced and theatrical, but the strategy couldn’t be faulted.

‘You guessed it, it’s Marie,’ said Savannah. ‘Do you want me to spell that too?’

Could he really have guessed it that fast? Or was Savannah just going along with it to shut him up?

‘It’s my mother’s name,’ said Simon. ‘Marie is very popular as a middle name.’ He opened his mouth to ask another question and Amy took him by the arm. Next he’d be asking for her date of birth and tax file number. If Savannah did have evil plans, Amy didn’t want her feeling compelled to fast-track them.

‘The bathroom is this way,’ she said.

‘Wait, is this you?’ asked Simon in his natural voice. He’d stopped in front of a photo of Amy triumphantly holding up a tiny trophy with both hands, racquet resting against her thigh, big Wimbledon-winning smile, even though it was just the Under 9s regionals.

‘Yes, that’s me,’ said Amy.

‘You were so cute,’ said Simon. He kept standing there, examining the photo. ‘I didn’t know you played tennis!’

‘Yep,’ she said.

‘I play a bit of social tennis,’ said Simon. ‘We should have a game sometime. You’d probably beat me.’

‘I would definitely beat you,’ said Amy. She pointed down the hallway. ‘Second door on the left.’

Simon looked at her blankly, forgetting his ruse to get inside.

‘Bathroom?’ Amy reminded him.

‘Ah yes! Thank you, Amy!’ He returned to his loud, overly enunciated tone.

When he left, Amy and Savannah looked at each other. It was the oddest feeling. Amy was in the home where she grew up, with photos either side of her attesting to this, and yet she still felt like Savannah was the host. She couldn’t seem to find the right balance between two indisputable facts: Savannah should feel grateful to Amy because her family had given her shelter in her time of need. Amy should feel grateful to Savannah because she was taking care of her parents, and doing a better job than any of the Delaney children ever would or could.

‘I’ll just pop my head in the door and see if Mum is still asleep,’ said Amy.

A complicated expression crossed Savannah’s face. ‘Sure. I’ll get back to the kitchen. I’m in the middle of making minestrone. Sing out if Joy needs anything.’

Sing out if Joy needs anything.

Because I am the one who can provide your mother with everything she needs.

‘Sing out’ was a Joy phrase. This girl was a mini Joy.

The besotted dog pattered off on Savannah’s heels.

Amy resolutely turned her head the other way as she walked past her old bedroom where Savannah now slept. Selfish! Childish! No-one else in the family still considers any room in this house ‘their bedroom’! She heard the toilet flush as Simon completed his fake bathroom visit.

She pushed open the door of her parents’ bedroom. It smelled as it always had: a comforting mix of her mother’s perfume, her father’s deodorant, and the old-fashioned furniture polish still used by Good Old Barb and Amy’s mother when they cleaned together.

Her mother lay on her side facing away from the door, the covers pulled right up over her shoulders. Her hair – which brought her so many compliments – was mussed against the pillow. Amy tiptoed to the end of the bed. Her mother was asleep, breathing steadily, one hand curled up near her lips so that she seemed to be kissing her knuckles. She had told her children this was because she had sucked her thumb as a child, and it still gave her comfort to have her banned thumb close to her mouth.

The lines on Joy’s face looked like crevices. Amy breathed fast as that old familiar terror gripped her. All children feared their parents dying. Except Amy had once been so consumed by her fear that she hyperventilated, and had to breathe into a paper bag, and the babysitter had to call Joy and Stan to come home fast because this kid was weird.

She wondered what would have happened if her mother haddied when Amy was a child. How could the reality of grief be worse than her imagining of it, when she had imagined it so very, very hard? How would she cope now, when her parents inevitably did die, as parents inevitably did, and you had to be so grown-up and mature about it? How did people cope with ordinary predictable tragedy? It was impossible, insurmountable . . .

‘Amy?’

Her mother opened her eyes and sat up. She put on her glasses from her bedside table, smoothed down her hair and smiled. ‘Amy? You’ve caught me napping.’

‘It’s good that you’re napping, Mum.’ Amy breathed slowly in and out. Her mother wasn’t going to die for decades. ‘You’ve been in hospital. You should be resting.’

Joy waved her hand dismissively. ‘I took my last antibiotic this morning. I’m fine now. I just get tired in the middle of the day. Come here.’ She patted the side of the bed. ‘Give me a hug.’

Amy went and sat next to her, and her mother hugged her fiercely.

‘You look especially beautiful today, darling. I wasn’t so keen on the blue hair at first but now I think it really makes your eyes pop.’

‘Thanks, Mum, although I guess they’d pop more if my eyes were blue. You should dye yours blue.’

‘Narelle is in charge of my hair, and I don’t think she’s keen on blue.’ Her mother stifled a yawn. ‘Why are you here, anyway? Where’s Savannah? Where’s your dad?’

Savannah before Dad.

‘Savannah is making you soup, and Dad is asleep in front of the television.’

‘He has this idea in his head that he never naps,’ said her mother. ‘He just “briefly closes his eyes”. Will you please pass me my hairbrush?’

Amy got up and passed her the heavy silver embossed hairbrush that had always sat on her mother’s dressing table since Amy was a child. Her mother had received it when she won a district tournament as a teenager, back when ‘brush and comb’ sets were common prizes for female competitors, while the men got cigarette cases. Amy still coveted that brush. It looked like something a princess would use.

‘You visited the hospital. You didn’t need to come again.’ Her mother used swift movements to brush her hair back into its smooth white bob, so that the frail old lady vanished, to be replaced by Amy’s trim, senior citizen mother, wearing a long-sleeved cherry-coloured jersey. She threw back the covers to reveal her vulnerable little legs in tracksuit pants. ‘Have you seen Brooke? How do you think she’s coping with this separation? I couldn’t tell when she visited. Do you think Grant left her for another woman?’

‘No,’ said Amy. ‘But I think he’ll move on to someone new with lightning speed.’

‘Do you remember when Brooke was a little girl?’ said her mother. ‘And every year she fell in love with a new boy in her class?’

‘I do,’ said Amy. ‘She was very cute.’ Brooke used to write love letters to boys. It was hard to imagine now.

‘I was just thinking about that,’ said Joy. ‘For some reason. She used to be so passionate and then it felt like growing up just . . . flattened her. Those damned migraines.’ She frowned and put a hand to the side of her mouth and whispered, ‘I feel like Grant kind of flattened her too.’

Amy put a hand to the side of her own mouth and whispered, ‘Me too, Mum.’

‘We might get her back,’ whispered Joy.

‘We might,’ whispered Amy.

Joy’s eyes danced and she spoke again at her normal volume. ‘Anyway. Thank you for coming. I know how busy you are but you don’t need to worry about me because I’ve got Savannah!’

‘Yes, you do,’ said Amy, deflating.

‘She’s doing everything! I don’t need to lift a finger. I’m treating her to a shopping day tomorrow to thank her.’

‘A shopping day.’ Amy shuddered at the thought. ‘That’s nice of you.’

‘It’s not nice of me! It’s the least I can do for her. Do you know – I can’t remember the last time I cooked a meal?’

She said this as if it were something to be marvelled over.

Amy couldn’t remember the last time she herself had cooked a meal either, unless heating up leftover Uber Eats in the microwave counted. Brooke had mentioned that their mother was obsessed with the fact that she didn’t have to cook anymore.

‘It’s like she’s had this secret loathing of cooking all these years,’ Brooke had said. ‘Once Savannah moves out we’ll have to do something about getting her help.’ She’d paused. ‘If Savannah ever moves out.’

‘How much longer do you think Savannah will be staying for?’ Amy asked her mother.

‘Oh, gosh, we’re not even thinking about that right now. I need her,’ said her mother. ‘For example, who would have cooked for your father when I was in hospital?’

As if that – her father’s dietary requirements – was the most significant thing about her hospital stay.

Amy said, ‘Well, I guess we would have. Or he could have got takeaway, or he might even have cooked for himself.’

‘Very funny,’ said Joy. ‘Anyway, I’m sure she will want to be on her way soon. I don’t want to take advantage of her. She’s doing so much now that I feel like we should actually pay her some sort of a wage.’

‘Like a live-in housekeeper?’ said Amy.

‘Imagine that,’ said her mother dreamily.

‘The thing is, if you wereemploying a live-in housekeeper, you would get references, so I’m just thinking –’

‘Well, obviously I’d neverget a real live-in housekeeper!’ said Joy.

‘I’m just saying that we don’t really know that much about Savannah,’ said Amy, and she lowered her voice and looked towards the door.

‘I actually know lots about her,’ said Joy. ‘We’ve had some long chats while I’ve been recuperating. Do you know – and I find this just so interesting, so fascinating!’ Joy’s face lit up. ‘Savannah has something called highly superior autobiographical memory.’ She ticked off each word on her fingers as she said it. ‘She can remember whole days in her life with a degree of detail that you and I, ordinary people, would find impossible.’

‘Really?’ said Amy sceptically. She bristled at the way she had been lumped into the category of ease ‘ordinary people’. She herself felt she could remember events from her life in quite significant detail, thank you very much. ‘She’s actually received a diagnosis of that?’

‘Well, I don’t know, I don’t know if you get diagnosed with it, I don’t think it’s an illness,as such, although she did say it’s both a blessing and a curse, because while it’s nice to remember the good events, she said she also remembers the bad ones, and, as we know, she has not had a normal happy life – poor girl.’

‘Huh,’ said Amy.

She took the hairbrush that her mother had left sitting on the bed in front of her and replaced it carefully on the dressing table, then she went and quietly closed the door and sat back down again.

‘What is it?’ Her mother sat up straight and propped a pillow behind her back. ‘What’s happened? Has something bad happened?’ Panic flooded her face. ‘Dammit, I thought that new counsellor was helping? I thought you were good at the moment!’

‘I’m fine, Mum,’ said Amy testily. Why did her mother always assume there must be some crisis or other in Amy’s life? She registered the irritated ‘dammit’ that accompanied her mother’s panic. Her mother would never shout, ‘Stop being so ridiculous, Amy, pull yourself together!’ like she had done when Amy was a kid – she now knew all the correct supportive modern things to say about mental health – but Amy knew that there was an unconscious part of her that still wondered if Amy did indeed need to just stop being so ridiculous and pull herself together. Amy was like a defective household appliance that would never be replaced but that everyone knew could break down at the most inconvenient of times.

‘So what is it?’

‘Logan called me today. He saw a re-run of a documentary on television, and it was about domestic violence, and the girl on it told almost the exact same story that Savannah told him about her boyfriend – he said it was virtually word for word.’

Her mother knitted her brow, baffled. ‘So, what are you saying? I don’t –’

‘It just seems like too much of a coincidence,’ said Amy.

‘But I still don’t understand. Are you saying this girl on the television knows Savannah?’

‘What? No! I’m saying maybe Savannah saw that show herself and thought, That would make a good story, and if she really does have this “superior memory” thing, I guess that’s why she could remember it so well.’

‘There was no “story”, Amy,’ said Joy, coldly, furiously, totally unlike the helpless sleeping old lady of moments ago, more like the mother of Amy’s youth who had ‘had it up to here with you lot’ and ‘was at the end of her tether’. ‘I bandaged up that injury myself.’

‘I’m not saying her injury wasn’t real, but maybe the cause of the injury –’

‘You’re accusing a woman of lying about domestic violence.’ Amy’s mother’s eyes were bright. ‘That’s outrageous. You’re a feminist! Have you heard of the I believe her movement?’

Oh God, she was simultaneously so with it, and so naïve.

Amy said, ‘Mum, it just seems like a really big coincidence –’

‘That poor girl is in my kitchen right now making my favourite soup,’ said Joy. ‘Do you know how much effort goes into minestrone? How much chopping? It’s extremely laborious! Let me tell you, Amy, I believe her.’

She was ready to march the streets, a placard held high. Somehow their positions had reversed. Amy was the middle-aged cynic, her mother the zealous idealistic teenager.

The bedroom door swung open and her father was there, holding a mug of something steaming.

‘Hi, sweetheart,’ he said to Amy. ‘Does the young bloke sitting in the kitchen belong to you?’