Feast by Emily O’Grady

Author:Emily O’Grady [Emily O’Grady]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2023-04-06T00:00:00+00:00

‘How are you really?’ Shannon asks. It’s the day after she arrived. That morning they walked for a long time and both have blisters on their heels. Neve has made tea and they are on opposite ends of the sofa in the library, their socked feet lightly touching. ‘Are you having an okay time?’

‘I’ve told you already,’ Neve says. ‘It’s fine. It’s good.’

‘Is Dad spending time with you?’

‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘Enough.’

‘I’ve barely seen him.’

‘You haven’t even been here a whole day.’

Shannon recognises something snarky in her daughter’s voice, but when she glances over, Neve’s face is empty. Shannon thinks back to when Neve was in primary school. She hated school camp, and every year Shannon would get a call late at night from Neve, who would be inconsolable, crouched in the bathroom whisper-crying into the phone. Shannon loved getting those calls. She anticipated them; the absolute confidence that they were coming made her giddy. She loved hearing her daughter’s raw distress, the opportunity to properly soothe her. Neve showed little emotion at home towards either of her parents, but knowing that there was this fierce part of her that wanted to be somewhere familiar made Shannon feel hitched to Neve. So often she thought that Neve could just drift away at any moment, but those phone calls were proof that despite Neve’s apparent ambivalence towards her, at her core her daughter loved her, needed her. Until now, at least.

‘What about Alison?’ Shannon asks. She met Alison briefly for the first time that morning. It was anticlimactic. She looks more like Patrick in real life than in pictures on the internet; far more eccentric, far less polished. It’s only after seeing Alison in person that she can understand it, her and Patrick. She seems unknowable, unpredictable; deeply, uncomfortably odd.

‘What about her?’

‘She’s stunning, isn’t she?’ Shannon takes a sip of tea. ‘I mean, I knew she would be, but in person she’s gorgeous.’

‘I guess so.’

‘She’s weird, though, right?’

‘All actors are weird.’

‘It’s not that,’ Shannon says. ‘She’s awkward.’

Neve shrugs. ‘Maybe she’s jealous.’

Shannon snorts. ‘What would she be jealous of?’

‘Of you, obviously.’

Ridiculous, Shannon thinks, and looks to the fireplace: the burnt logs in the pit, grey flecks of ash. ‘She’s lovely. She is, really. A bit unsocialised, though.’

She wants to latch on to something hefty, something with a bit of meat to it. With Patrick, their few, brief interactions have been jokey and membrane-thin. She’s been trying to figure out how to talk to him properly. It is why she’s here: to address it head on, hold him accountable. ‘Do you know where Dad and I met?’ she asks Neve.

Neve shrugs, scratches her nose. ‘In Wantarra.’

‘Yeah,’ she says, ‘of course. But do you know how?’

‘Swimming, I think. Or something. I don’t know.’

Shannon’s voice comes out in a register higher than she is familiar with. ‘How’d you know that?’

‘I don’t know. You must have told me.’

‘I don’t think I told you that.’

‘Dad then,’ her daughter mumbles. ‘I don’t know.’

Shannon sips her tea. She is grateful that Neve has never seemed curious about her and Patrick, about how they met.

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