‘Come on, Weseley tell me.’

‘Just promise to be calm when I tell you, till we work something out.’

‘Okay, okay,’ I hurried him.

‘Right.’ He spoke slower now, studying me as he spoke. ‘She said that this had happened before. That your mum was prone to depression and that she regularly goes into states like this where she withdraws from everybody-’

‘That’s bullshit!’

‘Tamara, listen. And she said that your dad and your mum kept it from you all of your life and so you weren’t to know about it. She said your mum was on antidepressants and that the best thing to do was to leave her alone in her room until the depression passed. She said that’s what they always did.’

‘Bullshit!’ I interrupted again. ‘That’s a lie! That’s a fucking lie! My mother has never been like this before. She’s, she’s-uughh, she’s a lying bitch! How dare she say that Dad never told me? I would know. I was home with them every day. She was never like this. Never!’

I was pacing, I was shouting, my blood was boiling. I felt so angry I wanted to tear the sky down. I felt so out of control, like there was nothing I could do to make everything okay again. I questioned myself. Was there some way that I could have missed Mum’s behaviour? Had she been like this before and I couldn’t remember? Was I such a terrible daughter that I could so easily be put off? I thought about the weekends away-were they somewhere else? I thought about her faint smiles to Dad, the fact that she was never overenthusiastic like other mums, the fact she never gave anything away. No, that meant nothing. She just wasn’t emotional, she never cried, she wasn’t sentimental, but it didn’t make her depressed. No, no, no, how dare Rosaleen say that my father had lied when he could do nothing to defend himself. It was wrong. It was all wrong.

Weseley tried to take hold of me and calm me down but I was screaming, that much I can remember. And then I remember Sister Ignatius finally coming to, standing and coming towards me with open arms and that sweet, sad, but older, so much older face than a few minutes ago, that was now so sad and pitying that I could hardly look at her.

‘Tamara, you have to listen to me now…’ she was saying, but I didn’t want to hear. I thrashed and squirmed away from them. And then I remember running, running so fast while I heard them shouting my name. I fell a few times, felt Weseley behind me, then grabbing me. I screamed and kept running, faster and faster thinking he was on my heel. I don’t know when he stopped running, when he decided to let me go, but I kept on going despite feeling an ache in my chest and finding it hard to breathe. Hot tears ran from the corner of my eyes and straight back to my ears, my speed not giving them opportunity to fall down properly. I ran out of the woods and straight onto the road, and the roar of an engine and a screech of tyres and a long car horn sounded in my ear and I froze. I absolutely froze. I waited to be hit, for the bumper to crash into my side and for me to go flying up over the windscreen, but it didn’t happen. Instead I felt the heat of the grid beside my leg, so close, too close, and the dark part of me in the shadows felt it wasn’t close enough. Then the vehicle door opened and there was shouting. A man. My hands were over my ears, I was crying over and over, unable to catch my breath and I could hear my name being yelled over and over. Angry, aggressive, accusing. Like it was my fault.

Finally it got softer and arms were around me and then I was being rocked gently, the noises died down, and I realised I was in Marcus’s arms, the travelling library was beside us and I was sobbing uncontrollably onto his shirt.

I finally looked up at him. His face was concerned, afraid.

‘So where should we go now? Paris? Australia?’ he asked softly, smiling.

‘No,’ I sobbed. ‘I want to go home. I just want to go home.’

I was silent in the bus on the way to Killiney. Marcus had tried to ask questions but gave up after a while. I finally stopped crying, my body stopped shaking and now only trembled a little. I felt weak from the emotion, tired from it all. I finally wiped my eyes with my snotty tissue one last time, and took a deep breath and exhaled.

‘That sounds better,’ Marcus said, looking at me as we stopped at red lights. ‘So, are you going to talk to me now?’

I cleared my throat and smiled at him. ‘Hello, Marcus. I want to get really drunk.’

‘You know what, that’s exactly what I was thinking.’ He smiled mischievously and pulled the bus over outside the off-licence as soon as the lights were green. ‘You’re a woman after my own heart,’ he said before closing the door and running into the shop.

I should have told him then. Again. My age that is. I could have saved a lot of heartache. Less than three weeks to go till my seventeenth birthday and that was probably still too young for him. I’m not quite sure what I was thinking, if I was really able to think at all. I felt numb, and wanted to be more numb. I didn’t want to feel, I didn’t want to have to think. My life felt so out of control that I wanted to lose control of me too. Just for a little while, at least.

We were only an hour away from Killiney. An hour was nothing, but it was a world away for me. I’d been ripped away from my home, my place; I felt like my identity had been taken away with it. I don’t think some people know what it’s like to be taken away from their home. Sure, you can be homesick, or you can move away and miss an area. But we were forced to move. Some bank, some place that had nothing to do with warmth, with memories, with families, had chased my father, had tormented him so much he’d taken his own life. Then, after they’d done that, they’d taken our building of memories, our sense of place, the foundations of our family. And while we were cast out, forced to live with family members we barely knew, it just sat here, huge and empty, with a For Sale sign nailed to the boundary wall like two fingers being held up to us, while we had to sit outside and watch it like strangers, without being able to return.

‘Do you still have the keys to this place?’ Marcus asked as we weaved through the windy roads that led through the area.

I nodded. Another lie.

‘Hey, slow down there, Tamara.’ He looked at me knocking back my third can of beer. ‘Leave some for me,’ he laughed.

I finished it and burped loudly.

‘Sexy,’ he laughed, keeping an eye on the road.

If you ask me now, I’ll honestly say that’s the first moment that I consciously decided what I wanted to do. Of course I can blame him for putting it in my head, but really it was me. Perhaps I’d known from the second I ran out onto the road and he put his arms around me that we’d end up at the house and I’d end up on the floor with him in my bedroom. Maybe I’d decided it the first day I met him. Maybe I did have it all planned. Maybe I was more in control than I thought. Or maybe, the third beer had played havoc with me in my emotional state. I pointed out places to Marcus as we drove, telling him stories, telling him the names of people who lived there. I didn’t wait for responses. It wasn’t really relevant if he answered or not. I was saying them for me. My voice felt like it was coming from elsewhere. I didn’t feel like me. I didn’t really care who I was any more. I had given up pretending to be the person I’d kept trying to be, the same as Zoey and Laura, the same as everybody else around us, as though by being that way we’d get along in life so much better. Well, it wasn’t working. It wasn’t working for Laura, it hadn’t worked for Zoey and it most certainly hadn’t worked for me.

We pulled up outside the house. I told Marcus to park the bus down a nearby laneway so that it wouldn’t be seen from the road. The last thing we wanted was for the neighbours to come looking for books. The house wasn’t visible from the road. The large black gates, with cameras, locked between the tenfoot walls were enough to dissuade any burglar. Dad had put so much time and effort into those gates: drawn plans up over and over again, asked me and Mum what we thought, so proudly walked me to the entrance to ask my opinion and I had never answered; told him I never cared. I hurt him all the time.