‘Stan,’ she said quietly.
‘What?’
She sat back next to him on the bed and dumped the open album on his lap.
‘What?’ he said again.
‘Look who it is,’ she said.
‘It’s her,’ said Stan. ‘Savannah. Obviously. When she was a kid.’
‘Yes, but look who the boy is.’ Joy slid her finger over to the child sitting next to Savannah: the big eyes, pudgy cheeks and shock of hair.
Stan stiffened. ‘That’s not . . . it couldn’t be, why would it be?’
‘It is,’ said Joy. ‘It’s Harry Haddad.’
‘But why is Savannah with Harry?’ asked Stan.
‘She’s Harry’s sister,’ said Joy.
‘I don’t remember a sister,’ said Stan.
‘You only met me once,’ said a voice and they looked up to see Savannah standing at the bedroom door.
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.