Truly Madly Guilty(40)

Dakota had not properly understood until recently how her brain was a private space with only her in it. Yesterday she’d looked at her teacher and screamed the F-word in her head. Nothing happened. Nobody knew she’d done that. Nobody would ever know.

Everybody else probably worked this out when they were like, three years old, but it was a revelation to Dakota. Thinking about it made her feel as if she were alone in a circle-shaped room: circle-shaped because her head was circle-shaped, with two little round windows, which were her eyes, and people tried to look in, to understand her, by looking through her eyes, but they couldn’t see in. Not really. She was there, in her circle-shaped room, all on her own.

She could say to her mum, ‘I love my window seat,’ and if she said it just the right way, not so enthusiastically that she made her suspicious, her mum would think she meant it and she’d never know the truth.

So if Dakota could do that, if Dakota could think shocking, kind of angry, hard thoughts like, I don’t give a shit about window seats, then probably grown-ups had shocking, angry, hard thoughts too, which were probably much worse because they could watch R-rated movies.

For example, her mum might say, ‘Good night, Dakota, I love you, Dakota,’ but inside the circle-shaped room of her brain her real self was thinking: I can’t believe you are my daughter, Dakota, I can’t believe I have a daughter who would do what you did.

Her mother probably thought the reason Dakota had turned out to be such a disappointment was because she was ‘growing up with money’, although funnily enough she didn’t actually have any money, except for some birthday money in a bank account she wasn’t allowed to touch.

Dakota’s mum did not ‘grow up with money’ (neither did Dakota’s dad, but he didn’t go on about that; he just really loved spending it).

When Dakota’s mum was Dakota’s age she’d gone to a ‘rich kid’s’ party and fallen in love with her house. It was like a castle, she said. She could still describe everything about that house in pretty boring detail. She’d especially loved the window seats. She was obsessed with window seats. They were ‘the height of luxury’. For years and years her mum had dreamed of a two-storey house with marble bathrooms and bay windows and window seats. It was a really architecturally specific dream. She had even drawn pictures of it. So when she and Dakota’s dad had talked to the builders about this house they’d said: Window seats, please. The more the better.

The funny thing was that Dakota had once said something to her Auntie Louise, who was one of her mum’s big sisters, about how their family had grown up ‘poor’, and her auntie had burst out laughing. ‘We weren’t poor,’ she said, ‘we just weren’t rich. We had holidays, we had toys, we had a great life. Your mum just thought she didn’t belong out here in the lower-class suburbs.’ Then she’d gone and told the other aunties, who’d all teased her mum, but her mum didn’t give a shit, she just laughed and said, ‘Whatevah,’ like she was an American girl on a TV show.

Anyway, Dakota still tried her best to love and appreciate her window seats but she wasn’t very good at it. She got, like, one out of ten for appreciation.

The blind was down and she didn’t want to risk opening it and waking up her mum, so she pulled it over her head like a tent.

It was raining outside, so she couldn’t see much. Harry’s house was just a blurred, spooky shape. She wondered if Harry’s ghost was in there, muttering angrily, kicking stuff with the toe of his foot and occasionally turning his head to one side and spitting in disgust, Why did it take you people so long to find my body? Are you stupid or what?

She wasn’t glad he was dead but she wasn’t sad either. She didn’t feel anything. There was just a big nothing feeling in her head about Harry.

She’d told her mum the truth when she’d said there was nothing on her mind. She was trying to make her brain like a blank piece of paper.

The only thing allowed on her piece of paper was school stuff.

Nothing else. Not sad thoughts, not happy thoughts, not scary thoughts. Just facts about Australia’s indigenous culture and global warming and fractions.

It was good that she was going to the new school next year. They had a good ‘academic record’. So hopefully they would stuff her brain full of more facts so there wouldn’t be any room to think about it, to remember what she’d done. Before, she’d felt a bit nervous about starting somewhere new, but now that didn’t matter. Remembering her old worries about making friends was like remembering something from when she was only a really little kid, even though the barbeque had only happened back at the end of term two.

Her parents still loved her. She was sure of this. They probably weren’t thinking secret angry thoughts.

She remembered her dad the day after, standing in the backyard, swinging that big iron bar over and over like a baseball bat, his face bright red. It had been terrifying. Then he’d come inside and had a shower without saying a single word, and her dad liked to talk. Things had to be serious for her dad not to talk.

But then, after that, slowly, her mum and dad had returned to their normal selves. They loved her too much not to forgive her. They knew she knew the hugeness of what she’d done. There had been no punishment. That’s how big this thing was. It wasn’t kid stuff. Not like, ‘No TV until you tidy your room.’ Actually Dakota had never got many punishments, or ‘consequences’. Other kids did heaps of little wrong things every single day of their lives. Dakota just saved it all up and did one giant wrong thing.