“Look at them.” He gestured. “Aren’t they perfect? They’re tidy and neat. They’re well-mannered and sweet. They play princess and tea parties. They’re gentle and kind. They don’t swear. They don’t fight. Despite everything they’ve gone through, they never lash out at anyone. Proper little girls”—he turned back to me—“like your mother and I had always hoped for.”
And there was the twist in my gut.
My father shrugged.
“We understood you don’t get to choose,” he said. “You get the kid you’re dealt and you do your best with what you’re given. But can you really blame someone, after all those years of dreaming and hoping, those nine months of wondering, not to feel a little disappointed when what they get is plain, sulky, lazy, careless? When they don’t get what they hoped they would?”
I tried to turn the tight, hot feeling in my chest into rage, but it refused. It sat like concrete, weighing down on my stomach, choking the air from my chest.
“But it wasn’t just that.” My father waved a hand reassuringly. “Believe me, if it was just that I’m sure we could have pretended better. Got on with it, without you becoming aware of how we really felt. But there was that… you know, that other thing.”
I frowned. My father looked surprised.
“Wait, you don’t know?” He raised his eyebrows and put his hands on his hips. “You must have known. Didn’t you see it, even back then? That there was something not quite right with you.”
He shook his head with surprise. Then a thought seemed to come to him. He walked over to the girls with that stuttering quickstep he always had when he was thinking. He took their hands.
“Come here, princesses.” He led them further up the cliff, then looked over his shoulder to me. “I’ll show you what I mean.”
I followed them up to the cliff edge, numb and hollow. He placed the two girls, standing side by side, backs to the wind at the edge of the cliff.
“Pose just there, girls,” he said to them. “We’re going to make a picture so Tammy can understand something.”
He turned back to me. His hair shimmered and shook around his head, battered by the growing wind. My eyes kept flicking from him to the girls. They were a little too close to the verge for comfort.
“You know, I could read it on your face that day. So could your mother, that’s why she kept you so far away from us. We’d both known there was something wrong with you, but that day we realised we’d underestimated how bad it was. We could both see it in your eyes—before the graduation gifts and the giving up your room and everything else you accused me of, so you can’t blame it on all that. Right from the very first time we stepped up to take care of these poor innocent girls, you had the overwhelming desire to do this.”
With a quick, sharp shove, he pushed Lucy off the cliff.
I thought I’d be desensitised by now, after the stapler and the hammer, but nothing quite prepares you for hearing a little body crack on rocks far below you.
Vomit flooded my mouth instantly. I fell to my knees and heaved.
“I know,” my father said. “It’s sickening. I was sickened that day when I saw the desire in your face. I thought, I knew there was something wrong with her, but I never thought she was… well…” He gestured toward me, as I emptied my stomach onto the grass.
“It’s not real,” I muttered, chanting to myself, trying to make some sound over the horrible crack that kept echoing in my mind. “This isn’t real this isn’t real this isn’t real.”
“It feels very real, though, doesn’t it?” said my father.
Then he shoved Laura-Ann off the cliff.
I heaved again. My body convulsed with sickness—stomach and soul.
“No,” I sobbed between mouthfuls of bile. “What the fuck?!”
“Why are you saying that?” My father tilted his head. “This is what you wanted. This is what you’ve always wanted.”
The worst part was that he was right.
It took me years to find the words for it, but I’d spent a lifetime measuring myself against those perfect girls, and then every perfect girl who’d come after. The glossy-haired, sporty teens at school. The preppy student who’d confidently chat with the lecturers at university. The chatty women at my office always surrounded by friends. The confident, coifed director at my last position. It had all started here. And I had twisted myself into knots hating them, all the perfect girls, for decades.
“I didn’t mean it. I was a kid!”
“Child or not, you had despicable desires in your heart.” My father leaned close to me. “You are so full of spite. You put on a good face, professional, calm, but anyone with any sense can see it. It bubbles away just under the surface. Your finger rests on the trigger of it, ready at a moment’s notice. That’s why we kept you at arm’s length. The strain of it all took its toll, of course, on your mother, on our marriage. It wasn’t just that we preferred those girls. It was you and all that sickness you carry around with you.”
He laid his hand on the grass next to me. Next to the blade of my axe.
“Look. You came to your neighbour’s house and what did you choose to bring?”
