Loving, Faithful Animal Read Free

head is a ghost trap. It’s all he can do to open his mouth without letting them all howl out. Even so, you can still see them, sliding around the dark behind his eyes like a Balinese puppet show. At night he ’ ll let his guard down. Too bad for everyone. Now he’s out there somewhere. Wasting his New Year’s Eve in a shabby, forgetful room that has bedsheets for curtains, a mattress soaked in other men’s fevers. You’ve seen those rooms. How is that better than being at home? Those sad seedy places that Mum has dragged him out of before, you and Lani waiting in the car. Bored brainless in the backseat, sucking barley sugar, reading stolen doctors’-waiting-room magazines— 20 Ways I Beat The Change!! —not understanding how she always hunted him down eventually. Not understanding why she hunted him down at all. Weeks of nothing, then the phone would ring one morning with a tip-off, and she’d be thrown into action. Saying to forget about school, I need you both today. Needed for what, exactly, neither of you could say—to hold on to a fistful of change for the parking meter, keeping watch for the inspector? She’d do her lipstick in the rearview mirror and fluff up her hair— Okay, girls, cross your fingers —before clipping up the stairs of a mean-looking building.
    Silly bitch, Lani would say, after Mum had been swallowed up by the rooming house. It’s so embarrassing; he ’ s just going to belt her around again.
    Watching her in those moments, with her clotted mascara and worn-down heels, it was impossible to imagine her ever being young, impossible to imagine swimming trophies and a modelling portfolio with Vivien’s. Most of the proof of that life was elsewhere—pawned or held ransom up north , which meant The House I Grew Up In, which meant Grandparents. These people who were only feathery handwriting in birthday and Christmas cards, padded envelopes containing presents of glittery stationery and books you’d read years ago. The word Merewether crouched in the return address like a dangerous spider. That Merewether mansion , Dad called it—though it wasn’t, Mum insisted, really wasn’t a mansion—that’s where everything was.
    All she had to show now were an arctic fox coat and a photograph of her in the driver’s seat of the famous green Corvette, a few years before she sold it to pay off a loan. The Corvette is gleaming, cicada-coloured, its cream panels like wings and the soft top folded down. You’re there, a slight swell under her orange kaftan, baby Lani sitting up in her lap like a doll. In the photograph, you cannot tell what is coming. And neither can she. She is laughing behind her Audrey Hepburn sunglasses, oblivious to the time when she will use them to hide bruises and nights without sleep.
    This is Exhibit A in the Museum of Possible Futures; the life that might have rolled out smooth as a bolt of satin, if she had just swung her slender legs up into that beautiful car and driven as fast as she could in the opposite direction, leaving the man with the camera far behind. Your father, he could keep the photograph.
    But she did not drive away. Instead she sold the car and spent every night of her life trying to lead your father out of the jungle, out of the mud, away from the cracks of invisible rifles, strange lights through the trees.
    When Lani was five or six, old enough to understand what the shouting meant when you did not, she would climb into your cot to curl around you like a shell— Big C little c —and tell you it would be over soon. She’d hum whatever songs she could think of—advertising jingles, songs she’d learnt in school—to drown out the shattering of plates, the thud that might be your mother’s head hitting the wall. Then it was you climbing into your sister’s bed, welcome for a year or two. Top to tail, sardines on toast, till she got tougher and