Page 70 - 2017 WTP Special Edition

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her iPad. Here we go again. utmost. So not-a-sinner knew, not the school, and
—Gone viral, Anika announces, displaying the video.
not us, and none of her friends. Not until she was found by her mother on the floor of the bath- room.
There I am, clear enough, no denial, down on one
knee, scrubbing Rosie’s chin. There’s the jaca-
randa. There’s the too-tinny machine-gun rattle Indeed. welting from the car-stereo. There’s me, starting
to stand, casting those shadows on Rosie. There’s
me, on the first clatter of noise, crab scuttling sud-
denly backwards. There’s Rosie falling. And they
all still claim she was tripped by my foot. They all
still claim I kicked her over. Regardless, say what
you will. There’s Rosie sitting on the pavement,
alone, the lip wobble gathering to a wail that
shudders down the full frail length of her. Two
meters back, there’s me, at the base of the jaca-
randa tree.
—You pushed her over, says Anika —What if that had been a real attack?
—They’re just kids, says Rita. —But what’s wrong with them?
—It was real, I say —it felt real.
—Dad, says Thomas —was that just out there?
I hear the front door latching open, and Thomas speaking, from behind the nib wall.
And Thomas is pointing through the front wall, over my head. Rita slumps into the bean bag, like the legs have been hacked from beneath her.
We all listen as Thomas leaves, to the gate of the courtyard latching.
—Why Jim, she says —would you not just walk in the door and tell us what happened?
—Here, give me that, I say to Anika.
—Was that just out there, asks Thomas?
But Anika won’t let me take the laptop from her. She scoots around by the back of the settee with it.
Then Anika is replaying the video. She’s pulled to
a squint by the pixilation. She is studying in detail,
my every twitch, the precise concatenation, and I
can almost see her, extrapolating backwards from
there, into every blow-up we’ve ever had. I can
tell, just by the shape of her sitting, with the arms
in the lap and the rocking and the whatnot, that —Dad, says Anika now, —what did you promise she’s not just watching the video. She’s trying to Rosie to keep quiet. What did you promise so she’d unpuzzle something, about me, no doubt. So that keep your secret? What did you promise her dad? she might understand herself. She is trying to des-
ignate the irrationality that led her, aged fifteen,
to attempt the duration of a teenage pregnancy in
dark baggy t-shirts and utter secrecy. And if Anika
sets her mind to something, it’ll be done to the
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Anika stops circling away from me, and her stop- ping circling make me stop following. She looks at me, and there’s this silence, claggy and unbreath- able, like the silence of a packed elevator when
Haven’t you done enough, Jim?
Thomas draws this long melodramatic, daytime- TV, sigh, and crosses the hall to get a hoodie from his room.
I stand up.
—Why is nobody asking about the little shits that did this, I say —Is that not the better question?
—You can’t blame the kids, he says —we haven’t had our chance yet to screw the world.
—What did they look like, asks Rita.
—I don’t know, I say —they were all got-up. One was the cut-out of Thomas.
And I’m starting to feel foolish stalking Anika in circles around the settee.