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.