Girl Next Door - Alyssa Brugman [50]
It would even have been better if she'd said, Silly duffer, that's not how you do it. Actually, no. That would have been worse. To this day I have no idea how you get off on the washing machine – not that I dared try again, but in the months afterwards I hypothesised.
Instead Mum looked shocked and disgusted. Then she turned away, murmuring, 'Excuse me,' the way you do when you inadvertently open the door when someone is on the loo. She could at least have had the courtesy to forget about it, but even now, years later, she never says the words 'washing' or 'laundry' to me.
I know rationally that what I did was in the normal range of behaviour, but her black-banning any words that might in any way bring up associations kind of makes me feel as though she'd caught me boiling puppies.
All that self-esteem stuff she talks about is such total crap, because instead of offering me a way out when it really mattered, she left me with my shame and mortification. That's what she does. Mum opens her mouth, and in all the places where she can confide something real, she says I look good in pastels, or she admires my spatial awareness, and when she doesn't open her mouth at all she's reminding me that she remembers every single stupid and humiliating thing I have ever done.
Mum comes back inside and sits at the table next to me. We're in a closed Chinese restaurant in Parramatta with some guy we just met, who is totally ignoring us anyway. Tonight we'll go back to the caravan and possibly be beaten up.
I take a deep breath. Although she knows I know, I'm still having trouble putting the words together, mostly because I can't picture her being intimate and messy, and intimately messy with someone, and especially not with Declan's dad. My mum wears rubber gloves to take the rubbish out. When they talk to each other, which I have hardly ever seen them do, they talk about council rates, concrete stencilling and options for solar pool heating.
But I need to say something. I think about when the boys brought the cot in to the garage, and how Declan's dad freaked out. And then I go further back and remember when Declan's dad brought her home from the hospital, and how she clung to him. I remember Dad telling me that it was complicated. What did he say? He felt 'intensely conflicted'. No shit!
I want her to tell me, or at least not not talk, in that pineapple-on-your-head way.
She's sitting at the table opposite, smoothing the tablecloth with one hand and pretending to watch television.
I say to my mother, 'Hey, do you remember that day with the washing machine?'
She blanches. 'I don't know what you're talking about.'
In the car on the way back to the caravan park I have this brainwave. If Declan's dad and my mum got together we could just go and live in Declan's house, which is almost exactly the same as our house – same colour, same shape, same room configuration almost – just different fittings, and a few metres to the left.
Declan's dad earns a packet. I could go back to school. A school. You couldn't drag me back to Finsbury. In essence our lives would be the way they were.
Almost the way they were.
It seems hard on Declan's mum to be shunted out of the picture, but once she knows that her husband is a cheating bastard, surely she would want to leave? Mum already knows that he's a cheating bastard, and besides, it turns out she's a cheating ho, so they'll suit each other.
Alternatively, Declan's dad could leave and we could move into wherever he goes. I think a terrace in North Sydney or a unit in Kirribilli would be nice, and also close to work for him. Mum too, assuming that she'd go back full-time. She needs to build up a nest egg for when Declan's dad cheats on her and his new girlfriend moves in with her kids.
It would solve two problems. Declan would be my stepbrother, and so he could never hit on me again. It would be icky. We could pretend that the thing that happened didn't happen, but not in a taboo