The Facts of Life and Death

40

DADDY HAD CHANGED, and Ruby didn’t know why.

When they drove up the hill in the mornings, he snapped at Ruby, ‘Don’t hang on my seat like that!’ and when she asked Mummy for more pudding he said, ‘You’ll get fat. Ter.’

Fat. Ter.

Fatter.

She felt fractured. Didn’t he love her any more? She must’ve done something wrong – but nothing she did could make it right.

She sat with Daddy and watched Extreme Fishing and Man v. Food and brought him Mummy’s phone without being asked, and fetched wood from the woodpile, even though it was full of spiders. She even brought Panda downstairs and sat him on the easy chair, to let Daddy know they were ready when he was.

But he barely spoke to her, and twice that week he went on the posse by himself, leaving her alone in the house.

And Ruby no longer felt safe in the house.

It was almost November and the forest was at its most overbearing – pendulous with leaves and seeds and dripping rainwater, and, however loud she turned up the TV, Ruby could never block out the sound of the rustling against the back wall of The Retreat; the itchy squeak of branches against the windows; the creak of beams, like the masts of an old ship. Mice scratched and scrabbled behind the damp plaster, and Mummy came down early one morning and stepped on a toad halfway down the stairs. The big spiders had moved indoors in force, and Ruby didn’t even dare to sit on the rug, where their camouflage was complete.

There were cracks in the walls that Ruby had never seen before. Or if she had, she hadn’t remembered them. And the crack that had always been in the corner of her room, over the bed, seemed to have got longer. And wider.

Sometimes something in the roof or the walls gave a short, sharp report, like a cap gun – as though something was snapping, letting go, breaking free. At night she would wake from blood-soaked dreams to feel her ears ringing with something they’d heard in her absence. And when she lay there waiting for a repeat performance, The Retreat held its breath and waited until she’d dropped back into a fitful sleep before cracking its knuckles and grinding its teeth.

But worst of all was the bathroom window that Daddy was too lazy to fix.

As the wind swung around to the north and picked up its winter cold and strength, the high whine became howls of pain and low groans, like somebody dying upstairs, while downstairs nobody talked about it. It was too obvious to talk about; too loud to mention – there would only be a row.

So they suffered in the opposite of silence.

The next Cowboy afternoon, Ruby went into the little shop and spent her week’s pocket money on a tube of glue and a Gazette.

‘You on a diet?’ said Mr Preece, even though she noticed that he had to reach over his own belly to ring up the sale.

She passed the empty paddock with barely a glance, and hurried down the hill.

On her bedroom floor she tore the newspaper into strips and put them in a bowl full of warm water to soak.

Later, when Daddy had left, and Mummy was downstairs with Nanna and Granpa, she got to work.

They had made pâpier mâché once at school, but she couldn’t remember the exact recipe. They’d moulded masks over balloons. Ruby’s was of a mermaid, but she was much younger then.

She squeezed the water out of the soggy strips of paper until they became a pulp, which she squirted with glue and then fed into every gap she could find in the bathroom window frame.

She found plenty – some with her eyes and some just by feeling the air cooling her wet fingertips. The ghostly keening grew smaller and more distant as she worked the pulp between the wood and the glass, using her ruler to push it in and tamp it down.

She kept listening for Daddy’s return. She wanted to finish before he got back. Once she thought she heard the car and panicked a bit, but it was a false alarm.

When she’d filled in all the gaps she could find, she squirted glue into them too, to seal the paper. Some glue got on the window, and when she tried to rub it off with toilet paper, the paper stuck to her fingers, and to the glass.

And to the carpet.

But the noise of the wind grew smaller and smaller until finally it ceased.

Ruby stood in the bathroom and listened to the silence. It was only now that it had stopped that she realized how that sound had become part of her life – a ghostly undercurrent that had grated through her head for years.

She shivered. How had they all put up with it for so long? The thought of hearing it ever again made her feel ill.

She decided to do the same for the crack over her bed.

Halfway through the Gazette, Ruby tore through the face of someone she knew. She stopped.

Ruby laid the two bits of newspaper back down together and adjusted them carefully so they aligned.

It was a picture of that girl who had given her the five-pound note. The caption reminded Ruby that her name was Steffi. Next to that was a photo of the girl in the big pink dress, and then one of a pretty girl with long blonde hair, whose name was Jody.

She read the story.

Ruby was agog. She had seen Steffi! She was completely confident about that. She’d left the shop after giving Ruby a fiver and that man with the bushy sideboards had stabbed the tyre soon afterwards. He could have murdered Steffi!

Then she noticed something she hadn’t the first time round. At the foot of the story was a small photo of a plain silver loop. The caption said: Similar nose ring.

Ruby’s mouth popped open in surprise.

It was the earring she’d found in Daddy’s car! The one she’d stuck in her diary!

With excitement buzzing in her tummy, she pulled her diary out of her pony backpack and flicked through the pages.

The earring was gone.

Ruby touched the place where it had been with her fingers. This was definitely the place. There was her writing… I found this treshure… but all that was left was a rough white patch on the page to show where the sticky tape had been ripped off and had taken some of the blue lines with it.

She looked in her backpack in case the ring had fallen out in there, but it was nowhere.

She remembered that Mummy had seen her diary. Maybe she’d taken the earring back. Except that Mummy never wore earrings, and the earring didn’t match anything Ruby had seen in the rumpled bag of jewellery in the back of the wardrobe.

Ruby checked the newspaper photo again. She couldn’t be sure without actually having the earring in her hand, but it looked like the one she’d found.

She went very still. If it was Frannie Hatton’s nose ring, why was it in Daddy’s car? Why had he lied to the policeman the night Steffi was killed? Why had he kept the gun a secret from her? And what other secrets did Daddy have?

Ruby had all questions and no answers.

And one was bigger and more painful than them all.

Why doesn’t Daddy love me any more?

Tears scorched her eyes.

Then Ruby got up, took her diary from her pony backpack and hid it under her mattress.

She wasn’t even sure why.