‘I know about the drugs, if that’s what you’re talking about, and I don’t care, alright.’
‘Sunny, just for once, why don’t you do what you’re told?’
‘You don’t understand. You don’t understand anything. He’s my friend. He’s the only friend I’ve got right now.’ The realisation of that brought hot tears to my eyes. It was a sad, pathetic truth.
The hardness in Kevin’s face fractured momentarily. ‘Sunny, I’m just trying to be a good father.’
I opened my mouth to speak, my face aching with anger.
‘And before you say it,’ he said firmly, ‘I am your father. I’m the only one you’ve got – I’m all you’ve got – whether you like it or not.’
‘Well, I don’t like it! I hate it! I hate it! And I hate you!’ I pushed him, trying to shove him out of my room, and shut the door against him.
He pushed back, but I kept shoving until I could only see a section of his face; it was red, flushed with emotion, his eyes shiny, bloodshot.
‘Get out!’ I screamed.
He pushed at the door one more time, then suddenly his eyes glazed over. He squeezed them shut and then let go. With the force of my weight the door slammed loudly and I flew to my bed, just in time to hear a loud thud and feel the wall vibrate. He’d be sorry he did that; you couldn’t punch a hole in tongue-and-groove walls. They were tough.
I buried my face in the pillow and felt Matt’s roll of paper under my stomach. I sat up and, with trembling fingers, smoothed out the creases, unrolling it carefully.
Ponies and rainbows.
The ute’s horn sounded in the yard. Kevin was waiting in the Toyota, the engine running. We’d hardly spoken in the last twenty-four hours but he’d made it very clear that we were going to the appointment with the counsellor, come hell or high water. I got in the car, put my earbuds in and leant against the window. The music filled my head and when I closed my eyes I could almost be somewhere else.
I didn’t want to think about the fight with Kevin. It just made me angry. I had built a fortress around myself and it was propped up by the outrage of how dare he try to run my life!
In reality I hated fighting with anyone. When I’d fought with Mum it had been pretty easy to patch things up. The words ‘Here, I made you a cup of tea’, spoken by the more guilty party, were usually enough to do it. But with Kevin, I felt as though every exchange drove another long nail into the coffin of our relationship.
I couldn’t help it; every time I looked at him, I thought about what he’d taken away from me. I wished he’d never come into our lives. We were fine before Kevin, Mum and me. At least I was. I knew Mum got lonely sometimes, but she was alright. We had things worked out. We were a team. We didn’t need a third wheel. It was too hard this stepdaughter/stepfather thing. He couldn’t do it and neither could I, especially now.
But there was something else there, lingering inside me. I just kept remembering the look in his eyes just before the door slammed. I don’t know how you would describe that look. Defeat? Despair? Profound incomprehension? I knew something needed to be fixed between us, but I didn’t have the strength to fix it. I just didn’t know how.
Dave was who I needed. A real father.
After the fight, Kevin had stayed in the garage for the rest of the day. I’d gone out to the flame tree and had tried texting Matt, but when he didn’t reply after fifteen minutes, I knew he wasn’t going to. I’d headed back into the kitchen and dropped the phone onto the table. It seemed pretty clear that Kevin had ruined everything. Slumping into a chair, I’d listened to the drone of a power tool coming from the garage and watched the rainforest behind the house wavering in the heat.
Kevin had no right to interfere in my life and tell me what to do or who I could see. He’d said that he was the only father I had, he was all I had, but that wasn’t true and he knew that. I’d grabbed up my phone and opened the email I had drafted to my father. I still wasn’t happy with the wording. I didn’t even know how to start it. Dear Dave. Dear Dad. Hi. Hello. G’day. Nothing sounded right so in the end I deleted it.
I’d desperately needed something to take my mind off things so I had started leafing through Mum’s cookbooks. I found a cake Mum had made once, the basic vanilla sponge. Needless to say, hers was not a triumph. But it didn’t look too hard, so I searched through the cupboards and found everything I needed: flour, sugar, eggs, butter. Luckily, Leanne had restocked us quite well.
I set the oven to one-eighty and began. Sponges can be tricky, because you have to separate the eggs and stuff, but I’d watched Mum enough to know the drill. Soon I was carefully folding the batter into the fluffy egg whites, combining it gently so as not to lose all the air. I poured it into a greased tin and slid it into the oven.
When I’d pulled it out forty minutes later, I’d felt a sense of triumph at the perfectly smooth mound of yellow cake. As soon as it had cooled enough, I pried it out of the tin. It was perfect: golden and light. I sliced through the delicate top to reveal the soft insides of the cake: light yellow, soft and springy. It’s the whipping of the egg white that does this, infuses the cake with impossibly tiny pockets of air.
The piece of cake had stared up at me from
