Echolalia by Briohny Doyle

Author:Briohny Doyle [Doyle, Briohny]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781760899622
Publisher: Penguin Random House Australia

14

After

After they’d almost hit that kelpie out by the Diggers Hill lookout, Pat had been reluctant to get in a car with Clementine again. The girl drove like she wanted to take out the world. Or maybe it was just Pat she was hoping to be done with.

The dog had been snuffing along the side of the road. Pat spotted him twenty metres ahead and warned her granddaughter, but she didn’t hear, or wasn’t listening. When Clem finally saw the animal she turned her whole body toward it and Pat had to throw herself onto the wheel to correct their course. Without missing a beat Clem had crossed her hands over her chest, her gaze blank, fixed straight ahead, her foot on the accelerator. It might have been the most terrifying thirty seconds of Pat’s life, straining across the cabin, her shoulder wedged against the girl’s rib cage, trying to keep them on the road, yelling at her to stop.

Eventually Clem took her foot off the pedal and the car came to rest on the verge, Pat panting, white knuckled and shocked. When she eventually sat up and summoned the courage to look at Clem she saw an expression she’d not seen for years. It was a hard mask set between spite and childish disbelief. The same face she’d worn when, at six years old, she’d broken all the porcelain teacups. And at nine, when Pat caught her digging in the back paddock, realising that for years all the missing things from the house had been buried out there like hidden bodies.

In the car, Pat had demanded an explanation.

‘What the hell are you trying to do?’

Clem actually shrugged then, her face so full of contempt that Pat lost control and slapped her hard across her pale cheek.

That was three years ago, but it had been a defining moment in the decline of their relationship. There’d been a course of lessons booked with an instructor afterwards but Clem hadn’t shown up, so Pat was surprised when she’d called to request another go. The text message read, ‘I’m better. Promise.’

Pat wanted to know what exactly she was better at but Clem hardly asked for anything and so Pat never refused.

‘Where shall I pick you up?’

‘Shoreline Cafe.’

‘I can come to your dad’s?’

‘Shoreline Cafe.’

Now, waiting five minutes too long, Pat fixes her eyes on the pinched skin on the back of her hands, at rubbish on her phone, at anything but the stretch of boggy marsh ahead.

The owner of the cafe delivers her coffee in person, commenting on how long it’s been and then, seeming instantly to remember why, casts his eyes down awkwardly as Pat answers with benign pleasantries. When he’s gone Pat’s eyes rove involuntarily across the landscape. Before, there had been an influx of desert hens on the lake – some plump little bird from South Australia – but they were gone again now.

Pat tells herself she’s looking for new birdlife, but her eyes come to rest on a thin woman picking methodically across the muddy pan, toward the far bank.

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