interruptus. Seeing her always makes me want to go, What the hell? Who invited you?
I first thought of her being Silent-but-Violent like a super-stinky fart when I met her. Me twenty-five and her thirty-one, but her body better than mine would ever be. Dad loved her as instantly as I hated her. She was into Christian Dior’s Poison in those days – believed in ‘layering’, using the bath gel, body lotion, deodorant, and parfum until every honey-blonde bronzed-and-toned (nothing was ever untoned) bit of her was smothered. I could smell her coming.
She’s moved on from Poison, mixing it up these days so I can’t smell her coming any more. Now she just bursts into the room in a puff of whatever the fragrance of the day is. Still gives me that sick in my throat. I know I should be used to her by now; it’s been thirteen years. But a fart is a fart. And in my books, she will always be Silent-but-Violent Violet, my very own stinky step-momster.
I can’t breathe when she is around.
“And the twins?” I checked, half-expecting one of them to creep out from somewhere in the car. Thing One and Thing Two. Charlotte and Sebastian. They look like Violet, except for the darker hair, and they like to sit as close to Dad as they can, sometimes on his feet under the table when we go out. Ridiculous. They turned six a month ago; you would’ve thought they would have grown out of it already. I can tell them apart now that Sebastian has a boy’s cut and they are choosing their own clothes. They used to have matching shoulder-length hair (“Chestnut, can’t even mix that up,” Lucio said when I showed him Violet’s profile pic of the four of them) and wore the Petite Maman range that is all navy stripes and tan and leather trim. They never speak to me, always to Dad or Violet. They call me ‘Her’. I haven’t seen them since Christmas when Dad got Charlotte two snow machines that spurt foamy snow so she and her friends can pretend to be in the Frozen movie whenever they want. Sebastian got a tree house. Have you ever seen a tree in the ground-floor gardens of Clifton beach apartments? A crane put it in.
“No, I first wanted to talk to you privately about some things,” he said. Here was the further source of my troubles. I am a Daddy’s girl more than I have Mummy’s thighs. Strip away the great haircut, obsessively good skin care, fantastically expensive clothes, and murderously beautiful shoes, and you would be left with a reasonably soft-edged nearly midget-sized human (all right, perhaps I exaggerate, but whichever way you skin it, one metre sixty-five is not tall). We are both a fortnight of bad eating and no gymming away from fat and spotty. But as he is a man – people mind less. And at sixty-four, with a sexy forty-four-year-old wife, a three-storey apartment in Clifton and enough money that no one genetically or romantically linked to him ever has to work, well, I’ve found that people definitely mind less. At least he earned it all; I don’t deserve what I have. That realisation had been the start of my depression. Poor me, I mocked myself through years of therapy, what a problem to have.
“Violet said she might bring the kids later when we’re done.”
This was a change. Violet always made herself part of every conversation.
We drove in silence, and I wondered if he was going to try to talk me out of marrying Owen. Again. Bad prospects, bad genes – that about summed up what Dad thought of Owen. I tried not to see anything racist in my parents’ reaction to Owen’s dad, but when Kari first suggested that they’d have preferred a heritage of tanned Italian to tinted Capetonian for more than passport reasons, I couldn’t truthfully deny it. And after Kari had pointed it out, I’d kept my ears open, but there was never anything either of my parents said directly that I could jump on. They always said they wanted whatever would make me happy, and if that was Owen, then so be it. You make your own choices, Lily my girl, is where Dad always ended up. And I chose Owen. Fuck ’em. I don’t care what they think about prospects or genes. My parents have to suck it up.
At La Belle Dad chose a table all the way in the back of the café, ordering two flat whites before we sat down. He started the minute after the waitress brought our coffee.
“Violet and I are,” he wheezed a little through his nose, “having a bit of trouble. It’s not financial or anything like that. It’s a relationship thing. It’s been coming a while, but it’s pretty much settled now. She wants a divorce.” He waved his hand as if to shoo a fly.
I looked at his lips move like he was speaking a language I didn’t understand. I hated Violet, but I never wanted them to split up. He’d always seemed happy with her, and the four of them looked like a perfect family.
“What about the twins?”
“Yes, that’s the thing. Now there is an issue with the kids’ au pair that couldn’t have come at a worse time.” He saw my face assuming that he had been the issue with the au pair, and added quickly, “Nothing like that, she needs to go home; her mother has cancer of something and it’s not going well.”
He sipped from his cup. We must have been sitting there for longer than I realised, as the coffee’s surface already had a little skin on it. White specks stuck on his top lip. If you looked quickly, it was as if the white specks at his temples had decided to relocate to his lip.
“It’s a difficult one. But I need you to help me out,” Dad said. Direct and to-the-point, don’t waste time on small talk.
“Of course.” It didn’t occur to me to ask what it was he needed.
“I need you to watch the kids. I’ve convinced Violet to wait two more weeks before we set a date for the divorce. I’m going to try to make her see me like she used to. I think these days she is tired of this old guy.” He shrugged, his shoulders sagging, his stomach going a little too round. “I think I make her feel old. I don’t know if there is someone else, could be … I don’t know if it’s going to work, but it feels like I’ve got to try, for the kids mostly. They’re young still.” Not a grown-up like you were, he meant. “I’ve got two Friday nights out somewhere. She won’t leave the kids for longer than a night, and we can’t go anywhere in the week because the kids are grade one now. It’s a ball ache but two Friday nights is what I get. If it works, then we live to fight another day. If it doesn’t, then my antenuptial kicks in.”
“I’m sorry, Daddy.” I meant it. How could Violet do this to him? It was her worst stinker ever. “I had no idea things were bad between you. Have you been for counselling?”
“Yes, all that and more. From before the twins already. I thought our having children would help us settle. Doesn’t work – learned that lesson twice now.” He turned his mouth down at the corners. “Last straw for her was some airy-fairy couples’ crystal heal-yourself bullshit that she wanted us to do. Only thing it did was convince her I’m stealing her energy,” he said, rolling his eyes at ‘energy’. “But ja,” he seemed to remember why he was telling me. “What I need from you is to take the twins for two Friday nights. I know you feel awkward being at our place, so they can come stay with you. They travel easily and will probably miss us less if they are not at home without us.”
I was in shock. I never realised my dad knew how I felt at his house. And he was always the one to sort out my problems, never whispered his to me. There was no ways I could say No. Same as Owen, he never asked me for anything. And now he wanted me to take his kids.
I said Yes. If I was in my car, I probably would have crashed it again.
Charlotte, Sebastian, Courtney, Chiara. Owen. Me. In the house that Kari and Dirk built. Didn’t sound like a fairytale beginning or ending to me.
10
“Have you and Owen talked to her yet?” Kari’s first words echoed in my bathroom. Her eyes scrunched at me, black hair a wild animal that filled the screen of my iPhone. It was seven in the morning for her, eight for me. I knew I didn’t look any better, even if my hair wasn’t as big. Facetime is never kind, even when I do have my face on.
“Bloody hell, no, there hasn’t been a gap. She’s been working all hours and Owen has been running around getting Chiara into a school. We’re aiming for tomorrow morning – Courtney is off work and Chiara will be at school.”
Kari