somebody’s got your address from somewhere, missy, and I want to know where. This boyfriend thing is going to be nipped in the bud right now. Do you hear me?”
Cathy bit her tongue hard to halt the advance of tears and clenched her thighs together, desperate not to wet herself further.
“Caught you, haven’t I, miss? Mrs. De Finca told me about it at the plaza.”
So that was it. She’d been out to the plaza and run into Mrs. De Finca! It was impossible to know what Mrs. De Finca had said to set her off. It could have been a disagreement between the two about the length of hems this season or which way a daughter should be taught to iron—starting with the sleeves first or leaving the sleeves to the end. Or it could have been something that one of Mrs. De Finca’s daughters did that she didn’t do. Or the reverse.
It didn’t matter, really. In the end, her mother would have stormed across the parking lot of the shopping plaza, thrown her parcels into the back seat, and jetted her car out into the traffic, driving in a rage, grinding the gears of her Volkswagen, talking loudly to herself all the way home.
Cathy slowly hooked a hank of hair behind one ear and bent down to remove her shoes, carefully avoiding putting any extra pressure on her bladder. A foot away from her face the tip of the yardstick twirled on the plastic runner. She watched it from her bent position. It rose and fell with her mother’s words, ticking nastily, leaving small pocks in the plastic’s surface.
“How is it that Louise De Finca knows you’re up to something if she didn’t hear it from Sandra? Huh? Answer me that? How do you think I felt, standing there, listening to that woman tell me about your antics? That woman was laughing at the whole family behind our backs because of your behaviour!”
Tick, tick, went the yardstick.
Cathy pushed her shoes carefully to one side with a stockinged foot and straightened slowly, keeping her eyes down. Very soon, she would pee down her legs onto the plastic.
Her mother had advanced as far into the room as she could, and now she manoeuvred herself into a position that left Cathy no option but to cross in front of the twitching yardstick.
“Get your little arse up to your room right now, miss.”
Tick, tick. Time was up.
Cathy dashed past the twitching stick. It caught her, landing regular stinging whacks on the backs of her calves as her mother chased her through the main floor of the house to the foot of the stairs. Through the blur of tears, she noticed a buffet drawer hanging open as she passed through the dining room.
The sound of the phone ringing in the downstairs hall of the Mugans’ suburban household was lost amid the overlapping claps of thunder outside and the loud spraying of wind-driven rain against the windows. The maple trees in the backyard flailed violently as the wind tore at them, ripping away their silver-backed leaves and driving them in helpless wet, green clumps against the downstairs windows, making sudden dull thwacking sounds against the glass. All around the house tree branches repeatedly raked and beat against the roof; the sound travelled through the empty attic like a restless knocking from another world.
When the lights flickered momentarily, died and revived, Adele lost her rhythm and halted in mid-sentence. Her bright red face was wet with perspiration and her heavy bosom heaved up and down rapidly. Only as she paused did she notice, for the first time, the dishevelment that lay around her on Cathy’s bedroom floor. Glancing critically at it, she called Cathy a dirty pig and ordered her to clean up the mess. Then she spun out of the room in a dissipating eddy of rage.
Cathy crouched behind her open bedroom door, listening, despite the thunder, making sure that the footsteps really were dying away down the hall. When she was certain that they would not be returning, she quickly pushed the door across the blue shag carpet and pressed it silently into place. She controlled the doorknob carefully, letting the glass ball spin beneath her hand in short, hesitant measures, so that the latch would slip noiselessly into the socket.
It was the hairbrush that had caught her under the left eye, right on the cheekbone. She should have remembered to hide it. Staring at her reflection in the dresser mirror, she took inventory of her other injuries. Her hair was dishevelled and matted to her face. There was a partial print of the hairbrush on her left cheek, and a long superficial scratch down the side of her neck where a sharp fingernail had passed by. Her tongue investigated tiny craters in the wall of her mouth, tasting salt in the stinging raw flesh where her teeth had gone through the back of her lip again. The nail on one of her fingers must have caught on something and pulled back upon itself because it was no longer attached to the nail bed beneath it. She saw blood on the end of her finger and pink, meatlike flesh under the torn flap of nail. Two toes on her right foot screamed with pain when she moved them; one of her knees wouldn’t support weight easily and hurt when she tried to bend it. In an effort to prevent a book from being shoved into her stomach, she had raised her knee swiftly, ploughing it into the wooden footboard of the bed. The exposed skin on her calves above her drooping knee socks, like the skin on her forearms, was dotted with red welts. She knew that beneath her uniform her back looked the same.
Outside, the storm slowly dissipated. It continued to rain steadily, but the wind died down and the thunder retreated. After taking off her wet underwear and hiding them in a corner of the closet and pulling on a pair of pyjamas, Cathy opened the window that stood at a right angle to the foot of her bed and stood quietly, listening to the rain, feeling the cool breeze puffing through the screen and across her burning cheek. After a moment, she turned to her desk, picked up a pencil that lay on top of a geography book, and bent to peer beneath the desk drawer. When she located three parallel pencil marks on the rough unfinished underside of the drawer, she pressed the pencil against the wood and made a single swift short stroke. Four years down; three years to go. Then she straightened, replaced the pencil, and lay down on her bed.
There wasn’t much noise downstairs now, only an occasional slam of a kitchen cupboard door and the faint haze of audience laughter from the television. Soon the early evening news would be on. But it would blare out into an empty living room. Cathy knew that shortly her mother would take something from the fridge, the jar of olives, perhaps, and closet herself somewhere else.
Cathy wasn’t sure where her father was at the moment. Driving home slowly through the rain, or working late somewhere. She’d lost track of his schedule.
Because of her injured cheek, she could only lie flat on her back. She lay still with her injured finger resting carefully on top of her other hand. She would not be able to move it all night, lest she catch the nail and tear it further.
Her head rested directly above the hiding place of her stolen movie magazines. She lay absolutely still, breathing quietly, wishing that it were safe enough to bring one of Angela Gordon’s pictures out of its hiding place. It didn’t matter, though. Angela would have seen everything. She sensed her sitting beside her on the bed, looking down at her closed eyes.
“What happened this time?”
“I don’t know. I just got off the school bus and she was waiting for me. I think she thinks I have a boyfriend.”
Angela crinkled her nose in disapproval. Then she settled herself on the foot of the bed, propped up against the wall, with one hand resting gently on Cathy’s foot.
“This okay?”
“Ah-huh.”
