Decline and Fall on Savage Street by Fiona Farrell

Author:Fiona Farrell [Farrell, Fiona]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780143770633
Publisher: Penguin Random House New Zealand
Published: 2013-04-08T00:00:00+00:00

forty-three

THE WALL

SPRING 1990

… the place reverberated to the sound of saws and hammers. The whole back wall was being torn away to make way for a deck. And a barbecue, and maybe a pool. Seriously. They were thinking of putting in a pool. As if they were all about to play Happy Families, Dad in one of those barbecue aprons with the tongs, flipping hamburgers, Sniffy dispensing drinks from the bifold kitchen windows and all of them, the kids, splashing in a pool in their waterwings. They seriously thought that was going to happen. Sniffy had shown them the drawings. Tiny people lay on deck chairs round a blue rectangle where other tiny aliens threw a beach ball.

‘We’re going to open the whole place up, so there’s a flow from the family room to the deck. It’ll be so cool.’ She actually used the words ‘so cool’. She actually used the words ‘family room’.

‘What do you think?’

Lydia had glanced at the aliens at play.

‘Oh yes indeed,’ she’d said. ‘I’d say it would be “cool”. Or perhaps even “fab”?’

She had no opinion whatever to offer concerning anything about this house. At nights when she had to sleep there, she lay in the dark cave they’d allocated her. The last bedroom because she refused to choose, simply shrugged while the others argued over what was fair. She lay in the empty cave, listening to things crawling in the walls behind her head. Little skittery things and things that sounded swollen and soft and furry, amorphous, boneless things, squeezing their way up into the attic above her room. She could hear sharp nails scratching and the heavy lumpen run across the ceiling. Sometimes, half-dozing, she was woken by them and for a few seconds lay wondering what it was and where she was.

She was in the cave, not in her real room: the one with its big bright window overlooking the bay. You could look down from that room to the surfers, seal heads bobbing about waiting for a wave. You could see the beach where people strolled or sunbathed on the expanse of gleaming sand. You could see the mountains in the distance. You could hear the little kids squealing down in the playground and the waves breathing, that soft insistent accompaniment to her whole life. That was her real room, not this horrible dark cave with its purple walls. Sniffy had said she could have it repainted. Lydia could choose any colour, anything at all, whatever she liked.

‘Don’t care,’ she’d said.

Sniffy surveyed the paint chart.

‘What about this?’ she said. ‘Sandcastle. That’s nice.’ Pale yellow.

‘It looks like spew,’ she’d said.

Touché. That little nerve jumped in Sniffy’s neck, the one that signalled she’d made a hit. But swiftly suppressed. Sniffy was still trying to suck up to Dad, still trying to make them all join in some stupid version of that TV series they used to watch when they were kids, The Brady Bunch. All of them seamlessly melding. The others might have given the appearance of compliance: Nick wouldn’t notice anyway.

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