The Good Daughter Read Online Free Page B

you should act.’ His voice drops to low and menacing in an instant. ‘Get back from me. Touch me and I swear to God …’
    ‘You’ll what? You’ll —’
    ‘Say it and you’ll regret it.’
    ‘Is it when a woman stands up to you? Is that the trigger?’
    There are sounds of a scuffle, a bird-like cry from his mother, the cutlery drawer shoved closed, or someone shoved against it. Zach closes his eyes.
    ‘Try for a second to think of your son instead of yourself,’ his father says. ‘He handled it better than you. He’s stronger than you are.’
    His mother’s voice cracks as she speaks. ‘You didn’t tell him everything …’
    ‘I put up with you,’ his father draws out slowly. ‘I buy the tablets, I put up with the weeks in bed, I pay for the latest course or part-time degree you can’t live without – I do all that. No-one else is going to do all that. You’re weak. And you’re all the weaker because of these little flare-ups of strength you think you get. Go to bed, Joanne. Zach and I cope fine without you – and you made it that way, so don’t go sobbing about that too. I was up in the middle of the night with my son before you’d even come home from hospital, remember. Mark your own son down as another one of the things that belongs to me.’
    His mother begins to cry. It becomes muffled. Zach pictures her hands covering her eyes, that way she hides behind them, cries at the table, cries at the washing line, cries while weeding the garden, her dirty hands flat over her face. A moment taken to sob and choke out apologies to herself, to anyone who will listen, not bothering to get up and leave, not when it is so much a part of her every day, not when she’ll sniff and keep on with whatever she was doing.
    A sheep is bleating somewhere in the paddocks. A sheep is always bleating. The sliding door is pulled back and Zach starts forward again, as though only now arriving.
    Zach’s father is not a big man. He is lean like many farmers – tall and brown-haired. He reminds Zach of that generic settler – those men leaning against horse-drawn carts in old photos. Any one of those faces in sepia-tinted shots taken in the main streets of towns when they were wide and dirty – long bodies and folded arms, men with an adolescent way about them but with hard gazes fixed down the camera lens. Some days that sepia tint seems to have coloured his father’s hair, coloured his clothes – he can be standing in the yards, dust rising around him, a rust-coloured sun setting behind him, a sheepdog at his feet, and you’d swear you’d stepped back in time.
    His voice, though, is modern: deep and rounded. A city voice. Educated. He likes to talk. A silent father has always struck Zach as a perfect father: present, but without the running commentary and constant advice. Anything would have to be an improvement on a father who says what he thinks all the time.
    ‘Zach, I didn’t know you were back.’
    ‘Just got back now.’
    The sound of a door closing in the house has his father turning to listen. It gives Zach a chance to compose himself, to breathe in deeply and try to steady his racing heart. He works to keep his face impassive as his father turns to him.
    ‘How’d you go with the pump? Get it fixed all right?’
    ‘The intake pipe must be blocked. I’m going to go back with the bike and waders.’
    Zach’s mother is crying in the bedroom now, wailing, that manic state she sometimes works herself into, behaviour that would have a man committed. His father puts his hand on Zach’s shoulder and turns him around; he steers him out the door, through the rose garden, under the wisteria arch. The crunch of their boots on the pebble path drowns out the sounds of his mother sobbing. His father’s arm goes around him, pulling him in, squeezing him as if to say, I know you, son, we’re one and the same, you and I .

6
    Desperate for a cigarette, Rebecca finishes cleaning the house– mostly writing