Need to talk about Phyllida. Can you come into the shop and bring coffee?
He wonders what she means. What about Phyllida needs to be discussed over coffee in her bookshop? He loves the bookshop;loves the childhood memories it elicits of safety and adventure and David, the best friend a boy could have had. Phyllida had been the loving and calming maternal presence he had missed in his own home; always feeding them, always fun.
He considers Sienna, staring at her phone, typing with her thumbs. She won’t want to go to the bookshop. He will ring Lottie later.
He bends down to retrieve a puddle of red fabric from beneath a rack of clothing. It is a costume cape and he ties it around his neck, lets it flow down his back. He turns to catch his reflection in the milky mirror of a mid-century dressing table, then sticks out his arms in front, as if flying. ‘Superman to the rescue!’
Sienna glances up from her phone and flicks her pigtail over her shoulder. ‘How long you gonna be?’
His arms drop to his sides. ‘I thought you might like to walk around with me. We could find something funky.’
‘If you’re trying to bond with me by using words like funky, it’s seriously cringe.’ She looks back down at her phone, grunts, types something.
He feels himself deflating, the rolls of his stomach folding and sticking like uncooked pastry.
‘Would you prefer to go to your nan’s? I can drop you off.’
‘Mum says Nan is toxic. She says I shouldn’t take her calls. We don’t really talk to her.’
Roddy sinks down on the chair next to Sienna’s. ‘What time does your mum’s shift finish?’
‘Eleven tonight,’ says Sienna, not looking up. ‘I can stay home by myself, you know.’ She laughs at something on the screen then holds the phone away and takes a photo of herself stickingout her tongue. There is a flurry of thumbs as she types. She eventually looks up. ‘Just drop me home. Mum left me food in the fridge.’
‘Would you like to go to McDonald’s?’
She grins up at him. ‘Sick!’
Roddy blinks. ‘So, that’s a yes?’
‘Yeah! Of course. Mum never lets me get Maccas.’
‘Oh.’ Roddy stares at the shelves, notices a jug painted with orange and cream geometric shapes. It looks vaguely like a Clarice Cliff piece and he wonders if by some miracle it is.
‘Don’t worry,’ says Sienna. ‘I won’t tell her.’
‘You can’t keep secrets from your mum.’ Roddy has been friends with Donna since school, but this relationship with Sienna feels new and slightly terrifying, even though he was one of the first to meet newborn baby Sienna in the hospital. Visits to their house had been rare when her father was still around, because, well, the man was a dick. So Roddy’s catch-ups with Donna had been mostly over coffee, squeezed in around her hospital shifts and his Southern Highlands visits to his Aunty Mary or Phyllida in her bookshop.
A few months ago, Donna had told him wearily that her dickhead husband had left town with another woman, that Sienna was leaning into a teenage-attitude phase with determined gusto, and to top it off Donna had to evict the weed-smoking tenant in their garden flat, which left her with the extra stress about how to pay her mortgage. Roddy had offered to take over the lease. He was moving back to the Highlands anyway to escape the madness of Sydney. The offer to take the flat had seemed obvious; he hated seeing her so anxious.
Donna had cried tears of gratitude. ‘I mean, sure, Shane was a useless dickhead,’ she had told Roddy when they were assembling his bed in her garden flat later that month, ‘but at least there was someone around to save Sienna if her electric blanket caught fire, or if she chopped off her finger cutting up marshmallows.’ Both had seemed unlikely scenarios, but Roddy hadn’t liked to probe.
A trickle of sweat slides down his arm now as he regards Sienna. ‘No secrets from your mum. You have to tell her. That’s the deal.’
‘Whatever.’ Sienna stands up. ‘Let’s go then. It’s boring here.’
He wonders again at the masochistic part of him that always feels the need to solve other people’s problems at his own expense. Donna’s flat is too hot and too small, and her daughter is proving a challenge. His mother had constantly warned him that his need to please others would bring him undone eventually.‘You need to stand up and be counted, Roderick. Show some spine!’
Roddy picks up the orange and cream jug, checks the underside to make sure it’s not a forgotten treasure. No marking. He replaces it and follows Sienna outside.
The heat of the carpark bitumen hits them hard. Sweat pools in the folds of Roddy’s stomach and he swears he’s going to lose ten kilos this year. They lower themselves onto the baking seats of his car and wind down the windows.
‘This car’s ancient,’ says Sienna. ‘It’s kinda great.’ She kicks at the empty burger wrapper in the footwell that Roddy had meant to throw out yesterday. ‘Stinks a bit, but.’
‘You can clean it for me if you want.’ He grins. The idea arrives like an unexpected cold can of beer in the desert.Brilliant. Life-saving!‘I’ll pay you ten dollars an hour.’
‘Wow.’ Sienna eyes him scathingly. ‘What a tight-arse.’
He grimaces. He is sure ten dollars is about what teen casuals get paid per hour at fast food joints. ‘Twelve dollars?’
