There was silence. Holly and Ruby looked flabbergasted. This was never part of the shepherd’s pie routine. It wasn’t meant to be serious. They weren’t a family who yelled and thumped tables.
Ruby’s lip trembled. Her eyes swam with tears.
‘It’s okay, Ruby,’ said Clementine.
Ruby ducked her head and covered her face with her hands as if she were trying to hide.
‘Oh God, Ruby, I’m so sorry, sweetheart,’ said Sam from the kitchen. He sounded close to tears. ‘I just got frustrated. I’m very sorry. Very, very sorry.’
Ruby lifted her tear-stained face and sucked noisily and deliberately on her thumb.
‘That was actually a very loud voice, Daddy,’ said Holly shakily. ‘It hurt my ears.’
‘I know, I’m sorry. Who wants ice-cream?’ said Sam. ‘Lots of ice-cream!’
‘What? They can’t have ice-cream for dinner.’ Clementine, whose chair faced away from the kitchen, turned around to look at him.
‘Sure they can,’ said Sam feverishly. ‘Why not?’ He went to the freezer.
‘They should at least have a bread roll first,’ said Clementine.
‘I want ice-cream!’ howled Ruby, suddenly recovered and furious, waving her pink, waterlogged thumb in the air for emphasis.
‘Me too!’ said Holly.
‘Bloody hell, Sam,’ said Clementine. ‘They’re not having ice-cream for dinner.’
Their parenting these days was all over the place. They veered from excessive leniency to excessive strictness and back again.
‘They’re having ice-cream,’ said Sam. He put the tub of ice-cream on the bench and pulled off the lid. He was frenzied, agitated. It was like he was on drugs. ‘Who cares if they have ice-cream for dinner? Seize the day. Live for the moment. Life is short. Dance like no one is watching or whatever that crap is.’
Clementine stared at him. ‘Why are you being so …’
‘Where’s the ice-cream scoop?’ said Sam, his head down as he looked through the cutlery drawer. ‘The one with the polar bear –’
‘It’s lost!’ shouted Clementine. ‘Like everything else!’
chapter sixty-four
The morning after the barbeque
Dakota felt her unhappiness before she opened her eyes. It was like her whole body felt different, flatter, heavier and yet emptier, as if something had been sucked out of her. Yesterday, she had done something terrible, disgusting and irresponsible. She had played with a beautiful little girl like she was a doll and then she’d just tossed her aside when she’d got bored with her and gone to play with something else and the little girl had nearly drowned. She thought about the lady on the corner who was having a baby. Dakota and her mum had run into her at the shops just last week, and Dakota’s mum had suggested that Dakota could babysit one day when she was older and the lady had been, all, ‘That would be great!’ and everyone had been all smiley, smiley, not knowing that Dakota was so irresponsible she could never ever be a babysitter, she would let the baby electrocute itself or get burned by an iron or pull a saucepan of hot, bubbling soup over itself or –
BANG!
Dakota jumped. There was an awful banging, crashing, smashing sound coming from the backyard. She threw off her covers and ran to her bedroom window. She got up on her knees on the window seat and pulled back the blind.
Her dad was standing in the fountain, except all the water was gone so there was nothing but ugly muddy ground. He was swinging a big metal bar like a baseball bat at the giant monument in the middle of the fountain. Dakota was reminded of some old footage she’d seen on TV once from a war or a revolution or something where hundreds of people were using ropes to pull down a giant statue of a man, and they all cheered as it slowly toppled.
Except in this case it was just one person: her dad. And she’d never seen him look or act like this: angry and silent and violent, as if he wanted to kill someone or something. She watched the marble head of an angel baby go flying through the air, and then she couldn’t stand to watch anymore. She ran back to her bed and hid under the covers like a little kid trying to hide from a thunderstorm.
chapter sixty-five
‘Where are we going, Mum?’ said Dakota for the third time from the back of the car.
‘Maybe that new Japanese restaurant I was telling you about this morning?’ said Vid hopefully from the passenger seat. ‘That’s over this way, isn’t it? Best tempura in Sydney, apparently. Did you make a reservation? I bet you made a reservation, hey? As a surprise?’
‘We’re not going to a restaurant,’ said Tiffany as she drove through a roundabout, keeping an eye out for road signs.
She knew exactly where she was going because she’d renovated a few properties around here. She’d done nicely with them too. It was so easy to give the hipsters what they wanted: their little hipster hearts reliably exploded over an original (looking) decorative ceiling.