‘Let’s just get these stitches,’ she said, and she got out of the car and slammed the door.
47
TULLY
‘Why wasn’t he wearing a nappy?!’ Sonny cried, when he found Tully on her hands and knees, scrubbing the rug. ‘It’s going to need to be professionally cleaned now. This is going to cost a fortune.’
‘Maybe not,’ Tully said, sitting back to survey the damage. ‘I think I’ve got most of –’
‘God, Tully. It’s just one bloody thing after another with you!’
‘It’s not like I took a dump on the rug!’
‘You were in charge of him!’
‘How was I supposed to know he was going to crap on the rug?’
After she’d recovered from the initial trauma, Tully had tried to find out the answer to that question herself. She hadn’t yelled or even voiced frustration; she’d merely squatted down to Miles’s level and said, ‘What happened, buddy?’
‘I not know,’ he said.
‘An accident?’
He’d looked at her with the sweetest, most earnest expression. ‘Not an accident.’
Tully nodded. ‘Sometimes people do things on purpose and they don’t know why. Sometimes even I do that.’
‘You do?’
She nodded. Then, in the most classic example of child randomness, he threw his chubby little arms around her neck.
Tully wasn’t sure what she’d done right, but for some reason, she felt proud of that parenting moment. She hadn’t felt anything resembling pride for months. And now Sonny had come along and ruined it.
‘You know what?’ she said. ‘Forget it. You’re here now – you deal with it!’
She threw down the sponge, stood up and walked out the door, even as Sonny shouted after her that he was sorry. She needed to get away. There was too much on her mind. Dad had another wife before Mum. Dad might be an abuser. Mum might have been saving money to get away from him. It felt like everything that she’d trusted to be real and true had turned out to be a mirage and now she didn’t know what or who to believe.
So she drove to Bunnings.
As she entered the hardware store, it was as if she’d slipped into a parallel universe. She was above herself, watching as she perused each aisle. At her last session, Dr Shearer had asked her to describe the feeling she got before she stole something. To her surprise, she’d managed to articulate it fairly well.
‘It’s like that moment when, after being on keto for three weeks, someone walks past you in a food court carrying a baked potato with sour cream and bacon. You can try to think of other things, but thoughts of that potato haunt you day and night. You can try to satisfy yourself with a bit of chicken or an egg, but you know you’re kidding yourself. The fact is, the moment you saw that potato, a clock started ticking until the moment you’d eat it. In most cases, it’s better to just eat it and be done with it.’
Now, in aisle 37, Tully stood in front of a wall of spray paint. She wanted all of it. Everything. She wanted . . . the baked potato.
Her mind was a tumble dryer of thoughts and feelings. The obvious answer was that Rachel was wrong about Dad. Indeed, her theory was nothing more than a cobbled-together jumble of insinuations from less-than-credible sources. But there was some stuff that was hard to explain away. Like the fact that Dad had kept his previous wife a secret. If she really was his wife.
Tully took one tin of spray paint and shoved it into her bra.
As she walked the aisles, memories filled her mind – snapshots, really – of moments with Dad. Moments when he’d been short with her. Moments when he’d pitted her against Rachel for no apparent reason. Moments when he was unnecessarily mean, or rough, or unfair.
Tully strolled down the next aisle. Garden lamps. Two of them went into the legs of her stretchy pants. She still couldn’t breathe. A tin of chalk paint went up her jumper. A Phillips screwdriver down the back of her shirt. A packet of thumbtacks into her pocket. Some 3M hooks in her undies.
People around her were watching, obviously. She looked like a Michelin man, bulging with goods. Tully didn’t care. A little boy around Miles’s age pointed at her and laughed, and his mother grabbed his arm and dragged him away. Tully didn’t care about any of it. All she cared about was the release. The sweet, sweet release of potato after weeks of chicken. Nothing else mattered until she’d finished the last bite.
When she couldn’t physically carry another item, she strolled towards the exit. When the manager approached, she wasn’t even surprised or upset.