A Trick of Light by Deborah A Rogers

Author:Deborah A Rogers [Rogers, Deborah A]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780473263416
Publisher: Deborah A Rogers
Published: 2013-09-27T05:00:00+00:00

Sixteen

WHEN I AM five, my family go to the neighbour’s pool for a swim. My mother lies on the sun-lounger, shiny with oil. Next to her, my naked baby brother happily kicks the air. Under the tree in the shade, my father reads the Sunday paper and scratches his calf with his big toe.

I am not allowed in the pool without an adult so I must stand at the water’s edge as my sisters’ splash each other and dive for rubber rings.

“Watch her, Terry,” calls my mother.

My sisters are breathless with fun as they jump on beach balls and make them pop out from under their bellies. I decide I should have a go too, adult or not. I leap onto the red and white ball but it shoots away and I sink like a stone.

It is not what I expect and I claw at the water but cannot get traction. I am sucked further and further down and my knees soon scrape the rough concrete bottom. Then, here is my father’s arm, wrapped around my chest, hauling me up. I can feel his heart beating into my back. We push up through the water and break the surface.

Someone is coughing, crying. Me.

My father kisses the side of my face, his breath warm in my ear.

“It’s okay,” he says. “I got you.”

*

On the nights when my father does not go out, he likes to play card games. He teaches me and Celia 500. We bet with each other. Celia is very good and often wins the pool. There is a Chinese version of 500 and Celia teaches us that. Sometimes we play until 2 o’clock in the morning and I am very tired the next day for school.

My father tells us funny stories while we play. He tells us about a time when he woke up from a nightmare and thought there was a fire and ran out of the apartment in his undies and the door locked behind him. He had to go downstairs half-naked to get the spare key from the security guard but the guard wasn’t there, so my father came back upstairs and tried to sleep outside the apartment door. He couldn’t sleep though because he needed to go to the toilet, only there wasn’t any place to go, so he was forced to use the long upright ashtray near the lift. When he was finished, he went back to his apartment door and curled up and tried to sleep but couldn’t because he was too uncomfortable and cold, so he knocked on the apartment door across from his, and luckily a man answered and let him sleep in the spare room for the night.

But lately the card games and funny stories are getting less.

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