‘That’s okay, Doctor Heath,’ Sandy said. ‘I’m nineteen, twenty next week.’
I smiled and offered her one of my dolls. She knew exactly what to do with my toys and played with me on the floor. I liked her a lot and I told my dad so that night. I asked if Sandy would be able to come to see me again. Dad said she might come to live with us. I was delighted.
After a day or so, my dad went back to work at the hospital and I started to wonder when my mum would come back. Dad didn’t seem to want to talk about it so I asked Sandy. Sandy said my mum had gone away and it might be a while before I saw her again. I didn’t understand why she’d gone away just because I took a long time to get dressed. I’d taken as long to get dressed other days and she’d never gone away.
I was so confused, I started to cry. Sandy hugged me and said I could stay home from school, ‘Just for one day’. We made pancakes and ate them with crispy bacon and Sandy’s special syrup. It was the best day off school I’d ever had. In fact, it was the only day off school I’d ever had.
That night, when my dad came home from work, he tucked me into bed and read me a book. He read my favourite: A Witch Got On At Paddington Station. I was resting my eyes when he finished. He kissed my forehead and turned off my lamp then told me repeatedly, ‘It isn’t your fault.’ I didn’t understand what he was talking about but he sounded upset so I decided not to ask.
11
In the light of day, the new dress, shoes, bag and jewellery seem to have lost their lustre. As I pack them back into their covers and cases, resigned to returning them to Gregory, I replay that conversation and keep seeing the pained look on his face as he told me about his past.
His father owns Sea People International. This is a hostile takeover.
That’s why he’s paying over the odds for something he doesn’t want. That’s why Lawrence indirectly keeps control in Sea People. He’s doing on paper what Gregory is doing in his mind: keeping watch over his nemesis.
Jack’s words come back to me. Do not fuck this up. The opportunity I could have by keeping Eclectic Technologies and Gregory as a client is enormous. It’s a career game changer.
I slump down onto the edge of my bed and cradle a pillow. But that’s just not me. Gregory was right, a hostile takeover isn’t illegal but he’s doing it for all the wrong reasons. It’s underhanded. He’s plotting with Lawrence and Williams to take what his father most cherishes. I’m not that lawyer. I’m not that person.
My moral compass points in one direction and that isn’t the direction of operating in the grey, blurring the lines of what’s right and wrong in the eyes of the law.
Gregory wants revenge and I just don’t think I’m the person to help him take it.
But I’m torn up over this man I’ve known for less than two weeks.
That look on his face is plaguing me.
I fall back on the bed and drop the pillow over my face, as if hiding from the world would make this all go away. I could make this disappear. I just tell him I won’t act for Eclectic. Simple as that. I’ve seen corrupt lawyers. First, they dump time on a matter to be paid by a client. Next, they change documents without telling the other side. Then they’re paying people off to get what they want. Acting for Gregory would be the first step down a slippery slope.
‘But I want to help him,’ I mumble into the pillow, crushing it harder to my face to stop the words.
With my only intention being to spend the day with my dad, I pull on my oldest and most stretched pair of jeans, and an equally comfortable, oversized knit jumper. I contemplate make-up but decide washing my face, cleaning my teeth and tying my hair in a rough knot will do.
After tapping on his bedroom door, I slip into Dad’s room. He’s still sleeping but I take a seat in a wicker chair by his bed and watch him. Sleep is the only time I can guarantee he’s at peace, not hating his life stuck in this bedroom with the demon in his mind stealing him from his old life.
I watch the rise and fall of his chest and the intermittent flickering of his eyelids as he dreams. He used to do everything for me. I can’t imagine growing up with a parent who hated his own flesh and blood so much, he’d let his little boy see his mother being beaten. The two people who are supposed to love him and cherish him beyond all reason, fighting, destroying his life. Making him grow into a man whose past follows him like a dark shadow and dictates the kind of person he wants to be years later.
The thought of any man raising a hand to a woman disgusts me. Holding my knees to my chest, I lean my head on the side of the chair, somewhere between awake and asleep, that window of irrational thought. The dangerous place where nightmares are a reality.
I envisage myself in my dad’s hospital as a child, in his office, standing on a pink, plastic stool in my dungarees and light-up, pink shoes, trying to reach his desk. He’s young and healthy. A stethoscope hangs over the shoulders of his white coat. His skin is golden and his hair still has traces of dark brown interspersed with grey strands.
Years away from the pale, aged man sleeping in front of me. I’m handing him bandages which he’s packing into an already full storage cupboard, when a male nurse dressed head to toe in pastel green bursts into the room and yells that there’s an emergency. I follow my dad as he runs down the blue and white corridor.
I remember the day as if it were yesterday, except now we’re in an operating theatre and this isn’t my true memory at all.
A woman who’s been badly beaten lies on an operating table, bleeding heavily, utterly helpless. Tubes rest into the creases of her mouth, pulling it wide and open. Her purple eyes are swollen shut.
Dad shouts orders into the commotion but the room falls silent. As I dream the hospital drama unfolding, a noise builds in my ear until it’s loud enough for me to recognise as soft sobs. In the corner of the theatre, a little boy sits on the floor, his knees pulled into his body, his head tucked under his hands. ‘Mummy, please be okay, Mummy,’ he sniffs, with a hint of South African twang.
The boy has blood on his shirt. He looks up at me through deep, brown irises, the same irises that pleaded with me as I left the charity gala last night. Tears stream down the boy’s beautiful, young face.
‘Please don’t let her die,’ he cries.
My lungs jump to action with a thick, jagged breath and my chest aches so bad, I raise my hand to it. Looking at my dad, still sleeping despite my panic, I know that he’d do everything he could to help the little boy.
When I eventually leave my dad and head downstairs, Sandy has made my favourite: pancakes with maple syrup and crispy bacon. She sets a plate with four pancakes in front of me on the breakfast bar.
