The Golden Child Page 16

  What she hadn’t understood was how this would gradually destroy, one by one, all the things that made her herself – and leave only this great, vast void. She is surprised now that, when she bothers to look, she is still able to see herself in the mirror, amazed that she looks the same, looks normal, that there is nothing in her face, nothing in her eyes, to tell everyone, to give it away. When she moves her lips the right way she still smiles, her eyes crinkle up at the corners just as they always have, a dimple still appears in her right cheek. She is astonished that there is no outward indication of the fact that she has gone missing – there’s no bright Empty sign flickering across her forehead.

  But in truth she has been stripped down until she can’t see the point anymore, not of any of it. She can still solve any equation the maths teacher throws at her without raising a sweat. She can play the piano as beautifully as ever – but she has lost the feeling. Making music doesn’t fill the world with sweetness the way it used to. There is no love in her – not a flicker for her parents, not even for her baby brother. And maybe it’s a relief. Because at last, at long last, she doesn’t care whether the girls at school want to be her friends or not. She doesn’t care what they think about her, or say about her, or even write about her.

  None of that matters anymore. There is nothing to look forward to, nothing to hope for.

  Why don’t you die? whoever was responsible had written. End the misery.

  Well, why not?

  ANDI

  IT’S SOMETHING ANDI WILL DREAM ABOUT FOR THE REST OF her life, a moment that she will find herself reliving over and over again, years into the future. This scene will be the one that lingers, the one that will stay with her as no other moment, before or since, of happiness or pain, ever will.

  Late afternoon on a Saturday. Almost evening. The house dim and cooling quickly as it always does at this time of year. Gus has fallen asleep in the pram on the way home from an afternoon walk, and though she knows that she will pay for it later – no 7.30 bedtime for this baby tonight – Andi wheels him into a corner of the room, checks he is safely strapped in and warmly covered and leaves him to it. She takes the opportunity to lie down in front of the TV and snooze for half an hour. Saturday is takeaway night, so there is no meal to prepare, nothing else she should be doing . . . bliss. The house is an uncharacteristic oasis of quiet as she dozes off: Steve in the study, reading; Sophie in her bedroom doing God knows what.

  Andi falls asleep quickly and wakens with a jolt when one of next door’s dogs starts barking. She must have had just the right amount of sleep because she feels, not that horrible wave of thick exhaustion that usually overwhelms her if she falls into a deep slumber during the day, but amazingly alert, full of an unaccustomed (for this hour, anyway) energy. And she is starving. She checks the pram, where Gus is still miraculously out to it, and then wanders through the house, looking for the rest of her little family, flicking on lights as she moves from room to room.

  ‘Hey,’ Andi calls out, her voice low so as not to disturb Gus, ‘where is everyone? What’s happening?’ There is a brief muffled response from Steve (everything is muffled in this house), who is obviously still in the study, but not a peep from Sophie. She clomps up the stairs, not in any sort of hurry, slightly disoriented in the half-dark. Flings open her daughter’s bedroom door without bothering to knock. ‘Sophie. Soph,’ she calls, ‘what do you reckon, how about we have Indian tonight? We could even . . .’

  The words freeze on her lips. She has expected to see what she always sees – Sophie sprawled in the middle of her bed, clutching her iPad, blankets piled up around her, and her bed a sort of island surrounded by a mess of books and papers and music and clothing. Sophie’s horizontal storage unit, as Steve likes to call it.

  Instead, her daughter’s room is impossibly tidy. Her bed is made, the floor around it entirely bare, clothes and papers packed away. Even her desk is clear: her school books piled tidily, pens and pencils neatly upright in their holder.

  Sophie lies sleeping in the centre of that perfectly made bed, wearing her new black velvet eisteddfod dress, her auburn curls fanned out on her pillow, her hands folded on her chest. Her daughter, pale and motionless, like a latter-day Sleeping Beauty.

  Other moments Andi won’t be able to recall – they’ll be lost in the fog of shock, buried deep. She won’t really remember, though she’ll know because Steve will tell her – and because what else would she have done? What else would any mother do? – that she immediately tried to rouse the still child, a gentle hand on her shoulder at first, a whispered Soph? She’ll know that her failure to rouse her was synchronous with her noticing the empty pill bottle placed carefully (and oh so considerately!) on the bedside table. She’ll know, too, that her next attempt to rouse her was more insistent, that she shook her daughter, tentatively at first and then more roughly. She will know that by this time, as the reality of what she was seeing began to filter through, as panic set in, that she had begun to yell, to scream for help, all the while shaking, lifting, pulling frantically at her unresponsive daughter.

  She will know, because Steve will tell her it was the first thing he saw when he entered the room, that in her terror she made an attempt to resuscitate her daughter, that when he entered the chamber of horror Andi was attempting mouth to mouth – true love’s kiss – that she was trying to force oxygen into lungs that were still breathing, and Steve had to pull her away, make her leave – Get the phone, he told her, call an ambulance. Somehow she managed to leave the bedroom and descend the treacherous flight of stairs. That she made it to the bottom without tripping or stumbling was a miracle in itself. That she found the phone and made the call, dialled triple zero, managed to give a coherent account of the situation – name, address, age, calamity – was another sort of miracle. Years, days, moments later when the paramedics arrived with their flashing lights and their calm authority and Steve relinquished their daughter’s limp form into their care, lowering her onto a stretcher to be carried away, she clutched at Sophie, clutched first at her daughter’s immobile face, then her arms, her hands and finally her feet, as they fed her pale, still body into the waiting van. Steve had to prise Andi’s hands away, so that they could shut the door.

  But Andi remembers none of this. She will never recall anything beyond that first moment when she knew, in her head as well as her heart, when she understood beyond the evidence of her eyes, that Sophie’s peaceful repose was no normal sleep.

  That like Sleeping Beauty, her daughter might slumber for a hundred years, and without a miracle she might never wake at all.

  PART THREE

  ANDI

  WHY DIDN’T YOU KNOW?

  It’s the million-dollar question. The one everyone’s so carefully not asking her: the police, other parents, teachers, doctors, her family, even Steve. It was her responsibility, after all. She’s the mother – she’s supposed to have her finger constantly on the pulse of every member of her family’s emotional and physical needs. It was down to her, her job to know these things. And so, too, her fault.

  Why didn’t you know?

  There are other questions, too. A relentless barrage of unanswerable questions that come at her as she sits, hour after hour, day after endless day, stroking her daughter’s pale and unresponsive hand, her eyes glued to Sophie’s face, alert to all the machines and monitors and tubes that prove to her that even if she isn’t showing any signs of consciousness, her daughter is still alive, and that therefore there is hope.

  So much she doesn’t know.

  Why didn’t she know about Sophie’s unhappiness? She knew, she had always known, that Sophie’s social life was challenging: even in infants’ school her daughter was a bit of a square peg in a round hole. Her musical talent, the focus that arrived seemingly from nowhere and singled her out from a very young age, despite Andi and Steve’s efforts to keep it low-key, normalise it.

  But it was in no way normal. Both she and Steve were awed and humbled by their daughter
’s prodigious talent. Her teachers were impressed, but of course they had seen children with similar talents and their matter-of-fact acceptance of it made things easier. It might last, it might not, but in the meantime they had a responsibility to support her efforts, to provide whatever she needed.

  So there was the obvious singularity of her talent, but there were other differences too – for Sophie, fitting in, being just like all the other kids, was never going to happen. Because Sophie was too everything: as well as being too talented, she was too clever, too sensitive, too modest, too good. And too plump. She was slow at running, clumsy at ball games, afraid of being hurt, hampered by occasional asthma. Despite her confidence playing the piano – and even as a seven-year-old her self-assurance at the piano, alone on stage for an eisteddfod or concert, was beyond her parents’ understanding – her confidence among her peers was fragile, easily shattered.

  Andi recognised this in her daughter, accepted her outsider status as inevitable, as a part of being Sophie. Andi would pick up the pieces, sure, when there were problems or dramas – when Sophie came home crying after a bad day at school, when she wasn’t invited to a party that she desperately wanted to attend – but Andi never gave her daughter strategies for survival, never involved counsellors or psychologists, never wanted to make a song and dance about it. She assumed that the situation would improve, that Sophie would work it out eventually. She assumed it was no big deal.

  She trusted that what they said about resilience was all true: whatever doesn’t break you makes you stronger. But maybe Sophie just broke.

  Why didn’t she see depression and despair in her daughter’s eyes? How did she miss the hints that must have been dropped over the last few months, clues to what was going on and how Sophie was feeling? Where were the tummy aches, the missed school days, the uneaten lunches, the crying jags? Professionally, Andi has always considered herself a good observer, someone with the ability to look beneath the surface, reach her own conclusions. How could she have been so complacent, how could she have relied on evidence she should have known was contrived?

  Yet even with the benefit of hindsight Andi still can’t see that there were any significant signs. Was she just too vague, too spaced out by those new mother hormones to notice? And what would she have done – honestly – if she had been aware that something was happening, that Sophie was being bullied? What has she ever done? Sophie would have known from experience that there wasn’t much point discussing it; that her mother would avoid making any sort of fuss, that Andi’s advice would only be a variation on the advice she’s always given: try to toughen up, try to ride it out, try to ignore them. It was advice given out of love, surely, but wasn’t there an element of impatience too, of wanting her daughter to grow up, to sort it out for herself?

  What did she not hear? Were there odd conversations that she dismissed mid-sentence because she was too busy, too tired, too distracted by the all-consuming duties of new motherhood? Had Sophie tried to confide and had she rejected her overtures? Andi knows that by some measures she has been slack. But Sophie is so good, so uncomplaining, so conscientious – her marks consistently high, her behaviour exemplary. Andi actually missed the first year seven parent–teacher night – Gus had had one of his rare bad days and she was dead on her feet. Steve was on shift, miles up the valley, and he couldn’t get back to mind Gus, or to go. What will they tell us anyway, she’d asked Steve over the phone. Sophie was performing well in all her subjects and had no problems with discipline.

  Steve was doubtful. Maybe it was a good idea to meet the new teachers, he suggested; sometimes they’ll tell you things in person that they don’t want to discuss on paper. But ultimately it was Andi’s call – she was Sophie’s mother. And mothers always know best. Except when they don’t.

  She has since gone through Sophie’s most recent report, desperate for any sort of hint, reading between the lines for any suggestion that things weren’t as they should have been. But there is nothing there either. Sophie works hard, Sophie always gets her work in on time, Sophie is a lovely girl. Sophie’s work is always of the highest standard. The only minor negative in pages full of praise: Sophie is sometimes unwilling to contribute to class discussions. But as this is due to a lack of confidence, rather than subject knowledge, I feel certain this will change as Sophie gets older.

  She assumed that everything was okay because Sophie told her that it was. It was convenient to accept her daughter’s assurances. Andi needed peace, quiet, time to concentrate on Gus – and that’s what Sophie, always so accommodating, never any trouble, gave her.

  And then, there it is – the horrifying possibility. The one that’s been staring her in the face the whole time, the one that’s almost unbearable for any mother to look at: what if Andi’s contribution was something more than just a case of not noticing? What if the effect of Gus’s birth, of Andi’s redirected focus, was more profound than any of them realised? Andi assumed that the distance between her daughter and herself was an ordinary thing, a necessary part of growing up; that Gus’s arrival probably made little difference at a time when apron strings were designed to be stretched. But what if Sophie had felt usurped, discarded? She feels sick when she remembers how the two of them have observed out loud, more than once, how much easier a baby Gus is than Sophie, how much less fraught the whole experience has been the second time round. They didn’t mean anything by it, of course they didn’t. But what if Sophie, always sensitive, took it to heart? What if her daughter felt less precious? What if she felt unloved? Oh, God, what if?

  Andi sits and sits and waits and waits, barely conscious of anything but the soft pinging of the monitors, the flickering lights, the slow rise and fall of her daughter’s chest. Oh, there are no answers, no reasons, no excuses. All she has is hope – but that’s as faint as Sophie’s breath, as tangled as her fluttering lashes.

  DizzyLizzy.com

  Secret Women’s Business?

  We used to laugh about it sometimes, me and my girlfriends, the ones with busy corporate husbands, the way we had no idea what it was they actually did to bring in the bacon. Easy enough to understand what a doctor does, or a teacher, or even a lawyer, but some of the others – the analysts, technicians, consultants – man, were we clueless.

  ‘F— knows what Terry does,’ my friend S once admitted over drinks. ‘He’s something in management. I think. Or maybe it’s IT now. When I met him he was a lawyer and I was a lawyer, and I had a handle on it – but now?’ She shrugged. ‘Who knows.’ She drained her champagne, poured another.

  ‘Then again,’ she added drily, ‘I have a feeling that he’s just as clueless about what I do.’

  ‘What you do?’ For a moment I thought I’d missed something important, that she’d started working again without telling me about it.

  ‘I mean what I do at home all day – you know, with the kids, the house, running the whole show. It’s probably just as big a mystery to him.’

  At the time it seemed like she’d hit on something profound. And maybe she had.

  But now that I’m working too, certain things have changed. I remain, I have to say, pretty clueless about what D does. He’s an engineer so he engineers things, right? And I reckon he’s probably pretty clueless about what it is that I do in my job too. If he asks, I tell him that I talk to people, make phone calls, write stuff.

  But, I’m relieved to report, our household has now entered the twenty-first century, and what goes on at the coalface is no longer secret women’s business. You know, all the nuts and bolts of running a household: how the washing machine works, what the girls eat for lunch, where the dishwasher tabs are kept, where a clean sports uniform might be found . . . all that vital information has finally been shared.

  And let me tell you, like any long-held secret, it was a relief to get it off my chest.

  29

  EXPATTERINGS:

  @OzMumInTokyo says:

  Oh, Lizzy. More envy from me. We’re definitely in the dark age
s here. Sigh. XO

  @BlueSue says:

  Good for you, Lizzy. We’ve never quite got there – though I have to say my DH tries. I’ve managed to get him to help with the washing now that he’s retired, as well as the occasional bit of gardening, which would have been impossible when he was working. I hope that the next generation has better luck. I wonder sometimes if boys’ mothers need to work extra hard, though. I have a feeling that, despite feminism, women still favour their male children in that regard.

  @GirlFromIpanema replied:

  Yeah, if there’s a problem, it’s gotta be women’s fault, right? Faaaaark.

  BETH

  IT IS ONE OF THOSE DAYS. FIRST, THE OFFICE IS IN CRISIS MODE. There has been negative press about Drew in one of the Sydney dailies – a pre-election state leadership spill is brewing and some comment he made years ago about the current premier has resurfaced. Beth has forgotten all about these sorts of work days: when the overarching mood is unpleasant, everyone prickly and short-tempered; when the worst aspects of all seem to be on public display. Until today her time at work has been almost only pleasure – most of the staff are smart and friendly, and quite beyond her expectations, a real camaraderie has developed between her and Drew. It’s not just the easy rapport that comes with familiarity, all those shared memories of people and places, although no doubt that also plays a part. Beth’s surprised to find she really likes – and trusts – him. And the day’s events reinforce her respect. In the end, against the wishes of all his advisors, and the party, Drew decides to lie low, to say nothing. He offers no qualifications; no excuses.

  Beth plays only a very peripheral role in the day’s drama – answering calls and running errands, ordering lunches and coffees when requested, but even so she feels exhausted and oddly despondent. It has been a long time since events outside the family have had any sort of an emotional impact, and she isn’t sure that she really welcomes the experience.