‘Well, staying in the city doesn’t mean you can avoid us forever,’ she says in a sing-song voice that, in a horror movie, would make her a villain. ‘The Seftons aren’t the only ones who can afford an investment property. We’re looking for a place in Perth.’
I drop my dessert spoon; pistachio foam flicks across the tablecloth like a grass stain on footy shorts. ‘Wait, what?’ My throat is seizing up. ‘You’re moving here? To the city?’
My heart is racing. I’m in fight-or-flight mode.
‘We’re looking at a two-by-one in Dianella,’ Dad says. ‘Close to lots of thefamiglia. There’s a home open in a couple of weeks.’
My mother sips her coffee delicately. ‘Well, we miss you, darling,’ she says. ‘If you’re not going to move back home now uni’s done, we’ll bring home to you. We can’t miss out on your life forever.’
‘But – what about Robbie?’ I ask, putting on a fake air of selflessness. ‘He’s still in Gero. And you love being nonni to Bianca.’
‘We’re not moving here fully, silly!’ my mother says cheerily. ‘Our flat would be apied-à-terre. Any time we come to Perth, we can stay there. And meantime, you’ll live there, to take care of the place for us.’
Every fibre of my being wants to breathe a dramatic flamethrower into their faces – like a Charizard absolutely losing his shit. No way. I can never live with my parents again, not even part-time. It would kill me. This is a nightmare scenario.
But any fire in my belly is quickly extinguished. Fighting my parents will only make them more determined to vanquish me. If I stay as still as possible, play dead, they might change their minds.
‘Well, I thought you’d be more excited!’ my mother scowls.
I plaster on my smile. ‘Wow. Yes, no, this is exciting. Sorry, it’s been a big day.’
‘Living part-time in Perth will be such fun!’ my mother insists. ‘I could walk to the Coventry Village markets. And there’s this quaint little trattoria where the pasta is measured by the metre, have you heard of …’
I nod and smile for forty more minutes of pleasant monologue from my mother, but I am no longer in my body. My soul is floating above my head in a cloud of doom, totally dissociated, looking at the city lights a hundred metres below and thinking about the jump.
I head to the toilets before we leave C Restaurant. There’s a text from Jack. It’s a photo of his dick, cock ring around his nuts, veins throbbing and the head of his penis engorged with blood, a deep, shiny, pre-cum-coated purple.
Want this inside you?he asks.
More than anything, I reply.
When I get home, Sabrina is on the couch in a knitted Baby Yoda jumper. She’s picking at a charcuterie board and watching an episode ofSeverance. In that show, the characters have severed their identities, their personalities bifurcated surgically so their public work selves and private life selves are totally divided. The red-headed woman on screen is so desperate to escape this dystopian arrangement she’s tried to hang herself in an elevator.
Sabrina doesn’t pause the episode when I walk in. It’s not until I lock the front door that she says coolly, over the top of theSeveranceepisode, ‘How was dessert?’
I have the sense of walking into a battlefield without armour, and no clue where the archer’s arrow is going to sling from.
‘Fine,’ I manage. I shuffle into the kitchen and place my awardsand parchment scroll on the bench. I have a sudden compulsion to throw them all in the bin.
Sabrina finally pauses her show. ‘I hope your parents didn’t hit you with any more homophobic stuff. That was messed up. I’m so sorry.’
Theoretically, this is nice, but it’s a bit rich when she’s the reason things got tense.
‘Nah, we’re cool,’ I reassure her. ‘Just how my family is.’
I go to walk to my room, but Sabrina adds, ‘That’s reallynotokay. It’s one thing when you were closeted, but they know who you are and they don’t seem to accept it …’
I pause. ‘It is what it is. They’re Italian. Catholic. Small-town. Different generation.’
Sabrina scoffs. ‘No. Age is no excuse for prejudice.’
She’s in debating society mode.Third speaker for the negative team, Sabrina Sefton, reporting for duty, Miss Collard. She was always in that role: no new information, just pure rebuttal. Sabrina is great at confrontation.
I was always in the more placid first speaker role: conflict gives me the heebie-jeebies.
I shrug. ‘Well, whatever. I only see them a few times a year. No biggie.’
Between my post-graduation abyss, and my parents’ news, I’m not in the mood for an argument. I head to my room, hurl my mortarboard and robe to the ground, and shove my certificates into a container full of other junk I’ll never look at again.
