Page 16 of Unnecessary Drama

‘Should I call an ambulance?’ Jesse says. ‘It could be your appendix bursting.’

‘No!’ An ambulance. How ridiculous. You need to be screaming in pain for an ambulance. I am only in lightly writhing, soft-moaning pain.

‘What then?’ He sounds frustrated but he puts his hand gently on my arm, and it feels surprisingly warm and soothing.

‘I’ll just lie here until I feel better.’ My voice is shaky.

‘I’m not sure that’s the best plan.’

‘Well it’s my plan. So get on board.’

‘Okay,’ he says. I curl into a ball and deep breathe, and he sits next to me, and I can hear him breathing in tandem with me, his hand on my back. It’s extremely comforting to know I am not alone out here, to have his hand on me, but I don’t want him to know that. I don’t want to feel that. I want to hate his hand on me, I want to hate his very presence, I want to be strong enough to not need anyone right now, but especially, especially not him.

I squeeze my eyes shut as tight as possible and count to thirty. By the time I reach thirty, the pain seems to be receding a little, and then a little more.

‘It feels a bit better,’ I say. I’m too scared to move.

‘Okay. Here’s what we’ll do. My car is parked not far away. I’m going to run and get it, pick you up and drive us home, okay?’ he says.

‘Okay,’ I say. ‘That sounds good.’ I know I should say thank you, for being with me, for getting your car, for not dismissing my pain, for checking my pulse, for comforting me, for not leaving, but I can’t quite bring myself to. It’s too much, to be lying on the ground in a public place and then to have to be grateful to him. This does not make us even. I do not forgive you.

11

I have changed outfits four times for this dinner with Dad. Which, when you consider the fact that my pelvic pain has remained fairly intense all afternoon and I am walking around with a heat pad pressed to my stomach, is the equivalent of changing outfits ten times or more. I texted Dad a list of restaurant options, all of which look nice and trendy but are reasonably priced, in case I need to pay. I won’t need to pay—he’ll pay, I’m sure he’ll pay—but I like to be prepared, just in case. Everything with Dad is just in case.

He didn’t reply to any of these messages. Then I offered to pick a place and make the booking. Still no reply. It’s mid-afternoon now and we have no plan, no restaurant, no time. I need to know where I’m going, figure out how I’m going to get there, what I’m going to wear, look at the menu online ahead of time and decide what I will eat. I imagine this is what dating is like when you’re an adult. Or maybe even now, as a semi-adult. Just desperate hopeful text messages, sent out into the ether, and nothing. Being ghosted by your own father is surely worse than being ghosted by a date.

I text Lauren, who replies with, ‘I told you not to do this dinner,’ and ‘It’s Dad, none of this is surprising.’ Which is not helpful, but it’s also soothing—that she knows, that someone knows. I remain stubbornly hopeful.

Lauren and I talk about Dad, but only in small ways, making fun of him, gently nudging against our issues, but never really delving into it all in a meaningful way. Lauren doesn’t enjoy delving into things as a general rule. But sometimes I want her to, sometimes I wish we could share every memory, every screwed-up thing, get it all out and recorded and signed off on, stamped and official, into the Dad files, and then we put it away, close the book on it, maybe start a new chapter.

When I was seven, and Lauren was nine, a few years before he moved away, Dad came to pick us up from a birthday party. It was an after-school party for a friend of Lauren’s, and I had been allowed to tag along. Dad had been out for a long work lunch, and when he got there, he was wearing sunglasses, and his nose was red, and he was slurring his words a little. A few of the other mothers noticed, and they got together in a huddle, and then told Lauren and me that Millie’s mum would drive us home, and they wouldn’t let Dad take us in the car. Dad was angry, and there was a scene. Not a big scene. He didn’t swear or scream. In fact, he was kind of sweet and charming about it at first. That was his thing—when he was drunk, he was funny and appealing, people tended to like him. But not on this day. The charm didn’t work. He got annoyed, then he got nasty. I could see it in his eyes, the flash of concealed anger. He said they were being over the top, that they were out of line, that we were his kids, he was fine, he’d had a glass of wine with lunch. But the mothers held the line, and when Millie’s mum dropped us at our house, Dad said nothing to her and nothing to Mum. It was like it didn’t happen.

There were so many moments like this that we just absorbed, never mentioned to Mum, never talked about.

I brought that one up to Lauren once, when we were teenagers, and she said she vaguely remembered, maybe. I couldn’t get over that. ‘How can you not remember?’ I said. ‘I remember,’ she said. ‘Of course I remember. I remember that time and all the others. I just don’t want to dwell on any of it.’ ‘Dwelling is healthy,’ I assured her. She didn’t think so.

So, we don’t talk about it.

At 4 pm, Dad messages me to say that he has made a booking at a restaurant on the other side of the city. An upscale, expensive steak house, the kind of place that has $55 steaks and their accompanying sauces on the menu and nothing else, the kind of place I definitely can’t afford and will be difficult to get to and doesn’t really fit with my complicated relationship with red meat (I don’t eat it except when I’m craving a burger or a cheap sausage in bread). But there is a plan at least. An inconvenient, annoying plan, but a plan nonetheless. I need to look on the bright side, to manifest a positive outcome. I imagine Dad and me laughing over hunks of meat.

I take some painkillers, and now I’m sitting on the couch, heat pad on my abdomen, convincing myself I am not really in pain, not desperate pain anyway, when Harper and Penny walk in.

‘I bought us a lamp from IKEA!’ Harper says. ‘And this blue-and-pink striped pot, or maybe it’s a vase. I’m not really sure what it’s for but I like the look of it.’ She pauses and looks at me. ‘Are you okay?’ she says, seeing the heat pad.

‘Fine, I just have some cramps,’ I say. ‘I’m getting ready to have dinner with my dad.’

Jesse appears in the doorway. ‘It’s more serious than she’s saying. It might be her appendix,’ he says, as if I can’t hear him.

‘It’s fine.’ I frown at him.

‘You collapsed at the Tan,’ he says, glowering back at me, arms folded.

‘Collapsed!’ Penny gasps.

‘He’s exaggerating. I sat down on the grass, that’s all,’ I say. Jesse’s insistence on making this a big deal is making me determined to prove that it isn’t. You’re wrong, and you don’t know me.

‘Brooke, that sounds serious,’ Harper says. ‘You shouldn’t go out.’