Chapter 41

chapter forty-one

For just a moment the man and woman seemed to cower, their lined faces slack-soft with shock, as they looked up at Savannah from where they sat side by side on her bed, in her bedroom, except that it was clearly no longer her bed or her bedroom. This was no longer her room. No longer her home. What did she expect? That she could take a hammer to this delightful life and yet find it still magically intact? It was always meant to be temporary. Everything was always meant to be temporary.

After Troy transferred the money (she would have accepted half as much) she’d considered never coming back, abandoning her possessions, but she’d felt an insane desire to spend one last night here, to be the Savannah that Joy saw, to experience one last time her fierce gratitude when Savannah placed a meal in front of her. Food was never just food for Savannah, and it clearly wasn’t just food to Joy.

Joy recovered first, straightened her back.

‘You’re Harry’s little sister,’ she said. ‘I forgot there was a sister.’

Joy looked at her with wary, searching eyes, as if trying to see her properly, and Savannah felt her personality slip away and she stood on the precipice of that terrible endless void.

She was nothing

no feelings

no thoughts

no name

a plastic mannequin of a girl.

But just before she disappeared into the void, before she dissipated like dry ice, a new personality clicked conveniently into place.

She had thousands of hours of television at her disposal to call upon. Hundreds of characters. Lines of dialogue. Facial expressions and useful gestures. A dozen ways to laugh. A dozen ways to cry.

‘Ah, don’t feel bad about it,’ she said. ‘Everyone forgets there was a sister.’

She was a new Savannah. Surname not specified. Dry sardonic cool girl. Could be the heroine or the villain. Could be the one to save the day or rob the bank. The viewer didn’t know exactly what she had planned.

Joy said, almost to herself, ‘I knew I knew you from somewhere! That very first night!’ She looked down at the photo album on Stan’s lap and then up again. ‘We only met the mother a handful of times.’ She corrected herself. ‘I mean . . . your mother.’

Joy’s eyes searched her face. ‘Your parents divorced, didn’t they? You went with her. Harry stayed with his dad.’

Also my dad.

For a moment she was Savannah Haddad, with a mum and a dad and a brother, but the second her brother first held a tennis racquet, everything changed. The Haddad family was sliced cleanly in two as if by a sword.

Joy said, with a perplexed little smile, ‘I guess you didn’t knock on our door that night because “you had a good feeling about this house”?’

‘It was my birthday,’ said Savannah.

‘Was it?’ Joy put a hand to her heart as if she would have ordered a cake if she’d known, and Savannah thought of the sideboard crowded with framed photos of birthday celebrations, as if every birthday was worthy of celebration.

She saw a girl dressed so carefully and idiotically for a birthday dinner in a fancy Sydney restaurant, waiting for her boyfriend who never showed up, who never answered his phone. That girl knew her boyfriend had just forgotten. He got distracted. He loved his art more than her, just as her brother had loved his tennis more than her, and her father loved Harry’s tennis more than her, and her mother loved her collection of bitter resentments more than her, and nothing would ever fill her hunger. She would always be hungry. Always.

When she got back to the apartment that day she took off her good clothes and put on the oldest, dirtiest ones she could find, and she made Dave pasta, and she was fine, she forgave him, she said, ‘I should have reminded you this morning,’ although she’d reminded him the previous night.

She drank her wine and because she had not eaten all day in preparation for the special restaurant meal, it went straight to her head and she floated free of her body like she often did, and thought, Who is that girl sitting with that boy?

Then the news story came on the television and the pasta blocked her throat as her brother’s face filled the screen.

Harry Haddad was announcing his comeback on her birthday.

Three years earlier he’d been everywhere. She couldn’t turn on the television without seeing his face. She would get in the car, switch on the radio and hear his voice. She once saw footage of him signing a tennis ball for a fan and thought, I GAVE him that signature. She was the one who worked out how to link the two ‘H’s in Harry Haddad with a flamboyant curl when they were kids. It was basically her signature. She had a right to use it. She’d started a business selling tennis balls, t-shirts and caps signed by Harry Haddad, and she’d done quite well out of it until somehow Harry’s ‘management team’ got word of it and it all came crashing down.

Since his retirement her brother had begun to fade from the public consciousness, from her consciousness. Unless she looked him up, which she had learned not to do, he didn’t exist, but if he played professionally again, he would once again be everywhere: on her phone, on her television, on her computer screen. She would slam up against her past, over and over again, like slamming her head against a wall, like kicking a locked door.

You are the failure, he is the success, your father got the good one, your mother got the dud, we are the poor ones, they are the rich ones, we are stuck on the ground, they are flying high.

She had been so stupid to think she could ever be a normal girl who was able to go to a fancy Sydney restaurant on her birthday with her Irish artist boyfriend.

The pain had begun in her stomach and radiated out. All she’d wanted was to escape the pain, and then she’d tripped over that damned guitar case and banged her head and it had really hurt and there was blood in her eye, the pain was everywhere, and the memories were refusing to stay locked up safe and sound, they were flooding like poison through her body and brain, and all she could think was that she had to get out of that apartment, and away from those boxes and the boy, and it occurred to her that she should go back to where it started, as if she could travel back through time and stop Harry taking that first lesson, or if not that, at least make sense of it, or if not that, make that family pay for what they’d started.

When she’d got downstairs, there was a cab dropping off a happy, drunkenly swaying couple at the apartment block, and she’d got in and asked the driver to take her to the Delaneys Tennis Academy, which she knew was just up the road from the house where her brother had his private lessons. As soon as she saw the sign with the smiley-faced tennis ball, she’d been able to direct the cab driver to the house without hesitation.

The part about finding cash in the pocket of her jeans was nearly true. It was a credit card. Not one that belonged to her. It was a souvenir from a previous incident. She wasn’t sure it would work, but she tapped it against the cab driver’s machine and the word ‘Approved’ appeared like magic.

‘I was thinking I might throw a brick through your window,’ she told Joy. She’d thought some low-level vandalism might be helpful. Cathartic. It had worked in the past. ‘But I couldn’t find a brick. I couldn’t even find a stone.’

‘What?’ said Joy.

‘Well, it was a loose plan,’ said Savannah.

Joy looked like she might burst into tears.

‘You need to leave,’ said Stan. He stood. He was still a big intimidating man. ‘You need to leave our home.’

‘I never did it,’ said Savannah. ‘I just thought about it, but it was so cold out there, on the street, and I was bleeding, and I felt really dizzy, so then I thought, to hell with it, and I knocked on your door, and I felt quite faint, and then . . . well, then you were both so nice to me. So very, very nice. It was strange.’

They were so kind and loving and welcoming. They treated her as if she were a daughter returning home. She was fed and bathed and put to bed, and because they treated her like a girl in need of help, she became a girl in need of help, and another girl’s story from a documentary about domestic violence slid into her memory and became the truth.

‘But why?’ said Joy. ‘Why would you want to throw a brick through our window? What did we ever do to you? I don’t understand.’

She’d put on a little weight since Savannah had begun feeding her. So had Stan. There had been pleasure in watching their faces smooth out as Savannah increased their calorie intake. She was like the wicked witch in Hansel and Gretel, fattening them up before she ate them.

‘I just hated this house so much,’ said Savannah. ‘I hated all of you so much.’

Joy gasped in surprised pain at that, as if she’d burned herself.

‘We don’t need to hear this,’ said Stan.

‘Be quiet, Stan, we do so need to hear it,’ said Joy fiercely.

She was so tiny but she could instantly quell that giant man with her quick, snippy remarks. Savannah found her inspirational. She already knew that she would keep some of her speech patterns for future use: What the heck? Oh my word! Heavens to Betsy!

‘Explain it to me,’ Joy said to her. ‘Start from the beginning.’

Savannah took a breath. Was it even possible to untangle the multitude of memories that had led to this particular moment in this bedroom?

‘I was the one who bought the raffle ticket,’ she said. That was the very beginning, if she threaded her way back to the start.

‘Raffle ticket?’ Joy frowned. ‘You mean the ticket for the free private lesson? The one Harry’s father, your father, won?’

‘I gave it to him for Father’s Day,’ said Savannah. ‘I bought it at a shopping centre with my own money. My brother said, “That’s a stupid present.” You would think when the ticket won my father might have given me the private tennis lesson, not my brother. Imagine that. Harry might never have picked up a racquet if I hadn’t bought that ticket.’

‘Do you blame your parents’ divorce on us?’ asked Joy. ‘Is that what you’re trying to say?’

‘We’ve heard enough. You need to leave,’ said Stan. ‘You lied to Troy. About me.’

People made accusations of lying with such triumph: as if pointing out a lie won the game, as if you’d just shatter with the shame of it, as if they’d never lied themselves, as if people didn’t lie all the time, to themselves, to everyone.

‘Did I?’ said Savannah archly. It was always possible to plant doubt. Most men carried the guilt of their gender. You just had to apply a tiny flame to the kindling. She’d seen the terror fly across his face when she walked around the house in nothing but her towel. He felt compromised the moment he looked at her.

‘Stop this!’ shouted Stan. A woman’s lie could terrify but so could a man’s shout. It made her want to hunker down and put her hands over her ears.

She pressed on. ‘You remember what you said to me?’

He’d never said a single inappropriate word, he’d been unfailingly kind, he’d been nearly as fatherly as Joy had been motherly, but Stan’s fatherliness was a flimsy façade Savannah could smash with ease, not with a brick but with a lie, which was why she had to do exactly that, to prove it wasn’t real. Look how easily she’d flipped him from affection to hatred. Love was never real no matter how authentic it seemed.

She said, ‘You remember what you asked me to do?’

(Not him, but another man, not her, but another girl. There was another girl’s awful truth at the heart of her awful lie.)

He loomed over her, savage with rage. ‘Stop this, stop this, stop this!’