‘I have a question for you.’
‘Go for it.’
‘Do you …’ I started. Paused to get my words in order. Heard a sharp sigh from over there. ‘What?’
‘Do you have a boyfriend?’ she said. Her voice was tight. ‘That’s the question, isn’t it?’
‘No.’ I laughed. ‘Why would it be?’
‘I don’t know.’ She gave another sigh, like a train trying to get up a hill. ‘It just seems like every time I meet a new adult the only two questions I ever get areHow’s school?andDo you have a boyfriend?’
I put my head back, shifted position. My knees were giving me hell from all the running. ‘I’m not trying to find out about some teenage dirtbag boyfriend, Bridie, I’m trying to find out about you.’
‘Oh. Okay,’ she said. I could hear her smiling.
‘Do you have, like, a …’ I still couldn’t find the right words. ‘Like, a …vision… about what you want to do? And how you want to live? In the next … I don’t know, decade? Or whatever?’
‘You mean, like, what do I want to do for a job?’
‘I mean everything.’ I rubbed my head. ‘I’m just trying to say … when you imagine yourself in ten years. Twenty years. Are you … are you … what? A healthcare worker in Nigeria? Are you an airline pilot in Japan? Are you a vet in Sydney? Are you homeless and living under a bridge? What’s the plan? Do you think you’ll have kids? Do you want to get married?’
‘That’s a shitload of questions, Dad.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Did you just decide you were going to ask me every question you’ve been thinking about for the past five years all at once?’
I laughed. There was so much laughing lately. She was so fun to talk to. ‘I didn’t realise they were all tied together until I started pulling them out.’
‘Well, I think I want to stay nearby, long term,’ she said. ‘I like Sydney. I don’t know if I’ll have kids but if I did I would want to be near you and Mum.’
‘Okay,’ I said gently, careful not to punch the air with joy.
‘And something with animals suits me,’ she mused.
‘Of course.’
‘But I don’t know about going full-on down the veterinary science route. There’s a lot of hard work there. Crazy hours. And so much death. I mean,somuchdeath!’
‘Right. Okay.’
Her voice became light, almost feathery, floating with possibility. ‘There are, um, people who manage wild brumbies? In the outback? They trap them, study them, figure out which ones can be domesticated. I’ve talked to Mum about maybe going and doing that for a while, after the HSC. Managing the brumbies. Maybe I could build up some equine skills and knowledge, before coming back to Sydney and settling down and doing something with horses at home.’
I put my hand on my chest, trying to smother the growing sparkle of terror at the idea of my beautiful teenage daughter surrounded by lonely horse trappers twice her age and huge, feral horses, in a landscape so sparse and desolate it might as well have been outer space. ‘That sounds awesome!’ I flat-out lied.
‘You think so?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Hmm.’
The silence fell. I was walking the razor blade between sleep and the desire to close the gaping wounds of wonderment in my heart. To know my daughter again. This almost-woman who had once been a tiny girl attached to my side like a limpet on a rock, trembling in the big bed between Georgia and me, having crawled in there during a thunderstorm. ‘So I haven’t turned you off marriage, then?’
‘What?’ She laughed. ‘Oh, nah.’
‘Because what happened between your mum and me, that’s not normal. That was my fault.’
‘It was and it wasn’t,’ Bridie said. I gripped onto those words tightly, holding them to my heart, afraid to open my palm and look too closely at them. ‘I mean, sure, it was an awful mess,’ she went on. ‘But I think she’s going to be okay. Mum.’
