She sat up and turned to him. ‘Okay.’
His face was ashen, despite the fire’s glow. He squeezed the tips of his left fingers between his right thumb and forefinger, systematically, over and over again, his brow knitted together into twin valleys between his eyes. He’d crossed his legs and it struck Netta how vulnerable he seemed. Like a little boy preparing to confess something he knew he’d be in trouble for.
‘I used to live in Pete’s house, when I was a kid,’ he began. ‘With my mum and Mav.’
This information still felt impossible to Netta—that the road to this moment had been paved decades before. ‘What was she like, your mum?’
Mo’s expression was unreadable. ‘She was … everything.She was wonderful and terrible and talented and wasted. She was an incredible painter. An artist.’ He lifted his eyes to meet hers. ‘She was also an addict. I didn’t realise it at the time, but now …’ He tucked his chin into his chest, his mouth reduced to a thin line.
‘Was it … bad? For you and Mav, with her addiction?’
He nodded. ‘Sometimes it was, but sometimes she was amazing. When she was good, she was, like, radiant.She had this gravitational pull that just drew people in. People wanted to be in her orbit. She was smart and funny and really beautiful. She dyed her hair mad colours and had a piercing here.’ He pointed to his septum. ‘And she had tattoos all over her arms—flowers and leaves, a butterfly. She used to let me colour them in with texta.’
Netta’s heart bloomed at the visual of little Mo, earnestly colouring his mum’s arms. ‘Is that why you have so many?’
‘Maybe, yeah. My first one was for her.’ He lifted his jumper and pointed to the tight cluster of flowers in the middle of his chest. ‘Jasmine. That was her name, but everyone called her Jazz.’
Netta brushed the tattoo with her fingers. ‘Right on your heart.’
‘Yeah.’ He let the jumper drop.
‘What was it like when things were bad?’
‘She’d just, I don’t know, vanish.She’d still be there, but she was gone. She’d stay in her room for days on end and sleep a lot. I had to look after Mav when she was like that. He was still so little.’
‘How did that make you feel?’
‘Scared. Angry.’
‘Wasn’t there someone who could’ve helped? Another adult?’
Mo shook his head. ‘Mav and I don’t know who our dads are. Our birth certificates only list Mum’s name. And Mum was an only child and her parents were gone by the time things got really bad.’
‘You could’ve told a teacher.’
Mo moved his gaze from the wall to Netta. ‘No, I couldn’t. I knew what would happen. They would’ve reported it and Mav and I would’ve been taken away from Mum, so I just stepped up as best I could.’
‘So, the diary?’
‘It’s proof.’
‘Of what?’
‘Of what she was really like. I wrote in it when she was in her bad spells, and I was eleven, so I didn’t exactly hold back. I can’t let Mav see it. Ever. I’ve never told him the truth about her. I don’t want him to know what she was really like when he’s grown up thinking she was perfect.’
Mo swallowed hard. ‘It’s also proof that it was my fault Mum died.’ He dropped his face into his hands and took three long breaths. ‘She read something—something awful—that I wrote about her, and then she killed herself.’
The weight of his admission swung between them like a pendulum.
‘Oh, Mo.’ Netta wanted to wrap her arms around him, to comfort him. ‘You were just a little boy. It’s not your fault.’
He shook his head violently. ‘Itwas, Netta. I was so angry with her because she hadn’t turned up to watch me perform at school. She’d promised me she’d come. I was so nervous and I just wanted her there, you know?’
Netta nodded.
‘When I got home, she was smoking weed in the lounge room with some loser guy. She didn’t even ask me how it’d gone. I went into my room and wrote something terrible about her in my journal. The next day when I got home from school, it was open on that page on my bed, so I knew she’d read it.’
Netta touched his knee. ‘What did you write?’
