with her husband, Richard.
That night, after a bath, another feed, and the singing of many lullabies by Auntie Danni, Kathy went to sleep, and thankfully slept right through the night. Eliza, however, did not. She kept getting up to check on the grownups in the lounge room, and on her sister. She eventually got into her aunt’s bed with her, and Danielle was too tired to argue.
At about three o’clock the next afternoon, Eliza, having refused to go to nursery school, announced loudly from her window seat sentry post, “It’s Mummy, she’s back. Daddy, she’s home.”
“Thank god,” muttered Richard, and rushed to the door to seize his wife in a crushing embrace, meant to convey that he could not do without her and please don’t go away again. Lisette kissed him and held him, telling him she was sorry. She kissed Eliza and the baby, then she and Richard went up to the bedroom for a while, to talk. Danielle shook her head, and sat at the kitchen table to write a list of instructions, entitled “How to look after a baby”. She had a feeling it was going to be needed in the near future.
A week later there was a lot of shouting coming from the study. Eliza sat with Kathy, shutting the door and singing some songs she had learned at nursery school. A great fear started to build in her tiny three-year-old body, and she could hardly sing for it, but being the eldest she had to look after her sister. Luckily she couldn’t hear what her parents were saying.
“I’ll take the downstairs bedroom and you can just move her in! It would save her phoning and hanging up all the time. It’ll be no trouble for her to take Eliza to school with her. We’ll all be winners!” Lisette was behaving in a way that always made Richard uncomfortable, since in his family peccadilloes were considered to be just that, and not mentioned at home. “And by the way, you’re shitting in Eliza’s nest,” she added.
“I’m sorry,” said Richard, automatically. “She’s just a fan. You know how these women get. I’ll talk to her and tell her to stop.”
“If you’d stop sleeping with them, maybe they wouldn’t get the way they do!”
And much more along the same lines.
Then Lisette ran away again. A few days later, she returned, collected the baby, and left for good. Richard MacLean, able to understand and express on stage and screen any feeling you care to name, was a Grade A moron in the emotion department when it came to his wife. Neither of them knew anything about post-natal depression or why living with a handsome, brilliant, temperamental, faithless actor would cause a woman to go off the deep end after the birth of her second child.
“I really am at a total loss,” confessed a heavy-eyed Richard to Kirsten, who looked as though she had recently finished her A levels, but in fact had reached the advanced age of twenty-four. He’d just had another traumatic evening trying to get Eliza to go to sleep, or even to stay in bed. He wasn’t a cruel father, but he was tired, so he tried yelling at her. She immediately curled herself into a tight ball on the floor in the corner of the drawing room and closed her eyes, apparently asleep. “She won’t go to bed, she won’t stay with a baby-sitter or go with my sister. She never used to be like that.”
Richard ran his hands through his hair. “When she finally goes to sleep in a chair and I take her upstairs, I’ll wake up in the morning with her in my bed.” A couple of nights ago, Richard had put Eliza to bed and locked his bedroom door, which took a lot of resolve because he was a bit of a softy. In the morning he found her stretched across the doorway, sound asleep, and he felt like an absolute monster, of course.
Richard loved his little daughter, but the poor sod had absolutely no idea what was going on. Put simply, Eliza, at three, had lost her mother and her baby sister, and was acting out, something fierce. Anybody, well, almost anybody, could see she was refusing to go to bed in case her only remaining caretaker disappeared in the night like the rest of the family.
“Get her a pet,” Kirsten advised him, with the simplistic wisdom of the young. “Cats are good,” she continued. “They’re self-cleaning and they bury their droppings.” Richard, in a state of advanced sleep-deprivation, had no fight left in him, and so decided to shop for a moggie on the following day. He obtained, from the veterinarian’s clinic, an ordinary female tabby cat, about seven or eight months old, nothing unusual except for her large, round, brilliant green eyes. They called her Mehitabel and she slept with Eliza, followed her around, and allowed her all manner of familiarity which she wouldn’t tolerate from anyone else. Calling her for dinner was a tongue-twister, so sometimes they just yelled “Belly-Belly-Belly!” And gradually Eliza adjusted.
Victoria (when a serious talking-to was imminent) Eliza (the default condition) Annie (when she was good) visited her mother and sister at preordained intervals and was told to be on her best behaviour. At such times Kathy pulled Eliza’s hair and scribbled on her books. Such behaviour during reciprocal visits met with instant and painful consequences, as nature intends. Eventually, though, the visits became less regulated and hence more tolerable.
* * *
Although this story isn’t about the supernatural, both father and daughter had the look of the Sidhe, with that unearthly beauty which can both fascinate and repel, causing the suggestible to believe that faerie kind and humans can and do mate, producing offspring that are unholy and probably dangerous. Eliza was independent, argumentative, slim, and dark-haired, like her father. Unfair though it was, and as much as he tried to hide it, Richard preferred her to her softer, more compliant sister. Eliza knew her father loved her but there was no doubt that his preoccupation lay with other matters at times, principally his work, and his love life.
Richard wasn’t averse to monogamy, unless he was married, so he only had one woman at a time, changing partners once or twice a year. Apparently the Post-it note stuck to each of their foreheads showed the use-by date clearly enough. Due to the turnover, there was no point in Eliza’s regarding them as potential mother figures. In any case, they were mostly in his bedroom or in the kitchen fixing a snack and wearing either her father’s shirt or the Emperor’s New Clothes. Apparently having a man walking around naked in front of his own little daughter could be grounds for summoning a social worker, but having his girlfriends flashing the gifts God gave them was no problem. Eliza was quite blasé about the naked human female form after all this.1
1 She was curious to see her father naked, just for completion, however he obstinately remained fully clothed at all times in her company, so she was forced to ask some of her little classmates to show her their willies. This got her into trouble of course.
In the fullness of time, Kirsten went the way of the others. She did not take it well and, eventually, with great reluctance, Richard took Eliza out of the nice, friendly, new-age nursery school where some of his friends in the profession took their children. Her new nursery school had a fee structure which assured the desired exclusivity, and consistent progression all the way through her school years. Eliza, however, was distressed at the premature change, and Richard realised, to some extent anyway, what Lisette had meant about shitting in Eliza’s nest. He made a mental note never again to seduce a woman, no matter how comely, involved in his daughter’s education.
Eliza grew up with the firm belief that, mostly, if you wanted anything done you had to do it yourself. This included buying clothes and school books, and putting dressings on wounds. On one occasion, she phoned a taxi to take her to hospital to have her broken arm set, returning home, while the hospital staff had their backs turned, in time to feed the cat. Mehitabel was a constant in these times of continually shifting role models and thankfully she came from a line of long-lived felines with good road sense.
*
