“Can I get you a lemonade?”
“I’m fine, Dad. Go away.”
He knocks again.
The door opens a crack, her face swollen and red with fury. The rest of her, though — there’s not as much of it.
“What?”
“I’ll take you to the doctor, love. Look at you — you’ve lost weight.”
“No, Dad!”
He’s surprised how she reacts. Marnie loved the doctor as a girl. When Em got sick she went along to every appointment, stroking the glossy magazine covers in the waiting rooms, keeping copies of the scripts and receipts in a neat folder. Sometimes she went in his place, missing school to accompany her mum. Em seemed to sense how Alf hated the hospital. He felt like the walls were closing in on him, bright white above hard clicky floors. Like the words the doctors used were sharp little barbs placed to puncture his veneer as a husband, as a father. To peel it back, exposing the failure he really was beneath.
“I’m feeling better.”
“At least let me in.”
She looks behind her, then steps aside, gripping her phone in her hand. There are piles of clothes everywhere, small mountains of fabric piled against the blue walls. There’s a poster of an airbrushed boy band above a corkboard of photos, mostly of her and Em. Crumpled tissues like small squashed flowers. The room smells sour, like unwashed flesh.
“At least open a window. C’mon, love.”
She does. She has lost weight; he can’t help but be relieved to see it. But she looks pale. He sits at the edge of her bed.
“What can I do, Marnie?”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m yer dad. What can I fix for you?”
“I’m fine,” she says, but she clearly isn’t, because her chin quivers. Tears have already started streaming down her face, and she wipes at them with a dirty fist. “I’m fine.”
And then she tells him.
Everywhere they keep asking for the mum to turn herself in. “We’re here to help. You need our help.” But it’s too late for their help now.
The help would have been good before, she says, when it started. When she bled through her sports uniform at age twelve, and the whole class laughed, and the gym teacher just told her she should look after herself better. Who was there to show her how? When the boys said she was too fat to fuck, and she proved them wrong the only way she knew.
Brayden didn’t talk to her at school, but he texted. He liked green jelly frogs, he was always eating them at the bus stop. When they snuck into the rifle range after dark, he held back the wire-cut fence so it didn’t scrape her bare legs. When they spread out her jumper to lie on, he said the rustling sounds were rabbits. Not snakes.
The birth is still a blur. The pain that started mild kept on building through the night until it was so bad she was sure she’d die, she’d be torn in two. Then it finally came, the gory mess of it, like someone bled to death in her sheets. The second lot of cramps and the sloppy hunk of meat which came at the end of the cord. The fucking bread knife, would you believe, to cut the blue of the cord, stumbling to the kitchen all torn and bloody holding the hot little slippery thing in her arms. The crying that wouldn’t quit. She had to fix it. No one could know. Wrapped it tight, stopped the noise, covered it until it stopped. No one could see. She’d take it away. Cover it up. Hide it somewhere. No one would know. The beach just there. Afterward she found herself stuffing her bedsheets into a bin liner. Was it even her? Shoving the bag into the red-lidded rubbish bin. She put fresh linen on the bed, scrubbed the lino where she’d dripped on the kitchen floor.
Did she feel anything?
Dizzy. Sand in her nails, all week finding grains of it in her hair. Cramps which left blood in her underpants, so much blood. She was scared to buy the maternity pads so she bought regular and wore them two at a time. Tits hard and hot and sore.
Alf says, “I wish you’d told me.”
“Will the police come get me?”
“If they do, we’ll deal with it. I’ll be right here.” He puts his hand awkwardly on her shoulder, which is still shaking. She half leans into him. She will live with this — the knowledge of it — always.
That night he dreams of his wife, her body washed up on the sand. Marnie clawing the bloated corpse. He wakes up, shorts wet from sweat. He thinks about the call he would need to make. The words he would have to say. He holds his hands over his face and weeps like he didn’t when Em died.
Alf sees on the news that a local woman, a mother of three, has unofficially adopted the dead baby, named her Lily Grace and given her a burial in a local cemetery. The real mother has failed to come forward, despite repeated requests and investigations. There have been many leads but all have come up empty. This other woman organized a memorial service where they released butterflies from a cage, carried pink balloons, and suspended the tiny white coffin into the grave on pink satin ribbons. Inside the coffin, the reporter says, the infant’s body is flanked by a teddy bear, dressed in a gown made from a gently used wedding dress. This other woman is interviewed, wearing black, saying, “I wanted to do something for the girl.” For a minute Alf wonders which girl she means. He turns the telly off. It’s time he stopped watching the news.
There are nights where the surf is louder than others, crashing so close it sounds like it’s hitting the building they live in, as if it might pound down their door, pool beneath their beds, carry them away.
There are nights when cats yowl in the streets, fighting, mating, their cries like those of human babies.
Those are the nights he wakes in terror. Opens the door to her room. Marnie sleeps — almost peacefully — in the glow of the streetlamp. He pulls the curtain shut.
There is no baby. Never was.
In the Court of the Lion King
by Mark Dapin
La Perouse
I was two-out in a one-man cell in the hospital wing at Long Bay, sharing a shitter with Roman Vasari, the only other innocent bloke in the place. It was a greasy Monday in December and I was awaiting trial for the murder of my best mate Jamie — who, as far as I knew, wasn’t even dead. An angry screw escorted me to the door of the cell where the Lion King lay in his underpants, too fat to stand. The Lion King pretended he hadn’t seen me and he pulled at his cock, then he looked up and asked, “Do you know who I am?”
“You’re the Lion King of La Perouse,” I said.
His cellie handed him a chicken leg. The Lion King accepted it with his cock hand.
“Where are you from, eh?” he asked me.
“I grew up in WA,” I said.
He nodded, as if he had known. Or as if he had known I’d say that. He wiped his lips with the back of his hand. “I sent for you,” he said to me, “because I heard there was a white man called Chevy in a cell with Vasari. You’re as white as fucking pavlova, but your cell plate says, Chevapravatdumrong. How does a pavlova get a name like that?”
“My dad’s Laotian,” I told him.
He laughed, as if I’d said he was a Martian. “And what the fuck is a Laotian?”
“Laos is a country next to Vietnam,” I said.
“I know where Laos is, you stupid cunt.” The Lion King picked shreds of chicken from between his teeth. He scratched around in his pants. “So you’re not white?” he said, eventually.
I shook my head.
“And you’re not yellow?”
I dropped my eyes.
“And Blind Freddy can see you’re not fucking black,” he said.