Page 58 - 2017 WTP Special Edition

So, I get in from work, banjaxed, and kick off the of person. And he slides these deadpan eyes now, boots. Like any hallway, we’ve a row of coat from beneath the black hoodie, across the rim of hooks and a shoe rack, but that’s where the nor- his laptop. Drops them, no warmth whatsoever. mality ends. In the kitchen, Rita is dabbing one of
her herbal tea-bags in a glass of hot water. Lately, Rita has a different herbal for every knuckle in her day, honey-lemon in the mornings, rooibos at midday, and camomile towards evening. My wife is not herself since we got here. Out of nowhere, she’s started to hound me about sustainability and reducing our carbon footprint. She’s started telling me I need to divide the soft from the hard plastics, the food scraps from the rubbish, telling me I oughtn’t to let onion into the composting.
Beside him, Rosie, our three-year-old grand- daughter, is kneeling on a chair by the table. Her face is hovering a bare inch above her iPad, flick- ering blue.
—We should think about solar, she said recently. —We live in a rental, I said.
Rosie is wearing both tutus this evening, the green beneath the pink. Her nose is near dabbed on the screen of the iPad. And straight up, my humour for the night is set.
Lately, she keeps a lunch box of food scraps sitting on the draining board. It’s like an urn of recent meals. On top of that, she rarely leaves the house. This day is no different, I get in the door and she’s wearing the tracksuit from earlier.
I find Anika in her room. All shower-reddened flesh and towels, stooped over and flailing through a mound of clothes. One towel wrapped around her, another wound on her head. And
Drive-By
—How was work, she asks? the attic, the posters of the boybands she’d out-
Right now, she’s chopping a banana skin into slivers.
grown, they’re all back up on the walls now. Kian from Westlife, is back in his sleeveless black t-shirt, with the buttery smile, pouting above her headboard.
—What are you doing?
—Composts better, she says.
—Where’s Anika, I ask?
Anika is our eighteen-year-old.
—She’s getting ready to go out, says Rita. —Again?
—How was your mother today, I ask. —All right, says Anika —just quiet.
I lift the lids on some saucepans and it’s pure disheartening. Rice, steamed broccoli, sausages; no love.
Anika finds what she’s looking for. She lifts a slip of material to the light. I lift one of Anika’s uni- versity books from the cupboard, leaf a few pages and settle on one of those skinless anatomical diagrams. The one that bares all the ligature and muscle of the body.
Thomas, our twenty-year-old, is at the table. He neither looks up nor says hello. He’s not that kind
Anika is studying midwifery.
—Are you keeping up with all this?
I shake the textbook at Anika. She shrugs.
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Rosie is Anika’s girl, but that’s a whole other story.
I find myself stood at this discomfited angle to her. I try not to start with the state of the room. When we moved to Australia, Anika culled noth- ing, couldn’t be dissuaded, all the old toys from
Henry Plunkett