Apples Never Fall

no name

a plastic mannequin of a girl.

But just before she disappeared into the void, before she dissipated like dry ice, a new personality clicked conveniently into place.

She had thousands of hours of television at her disposal to call upon. Hundreds of characters. Lines of dialogue. Facial expressions and useful gestures. A dozen ways to laugh. A dozen ways to cry.

“Ah, don’t feel bad about it,” she said. “Everyone forgets there was a sister.”

She was a new Savannah. Surname not specified. Dry sardonic cool girl. Could be the heroine or the villain. Could be the one to save the day or rob the bank. The viewer didn’t know exactly what she had planned.

Joy said, almost to herself, “I knew I knew you from somewhere! That very first night!” She looked down at the photo album on Stan’s lap and then up again. “We only met the mother a handful of times.” She corrected herself. “I mean … your mother.”

Joy’s eyes searched her face. “Your parents divorced, didn’t they? You went with her. Harry stayed with his dad.”

Also my dad.

For a moment she was Savannah Haddad, with a mum and a dad and a brother, but the second her brother first held a tennis racquet, everything changed. The Haddad family was sliced cleanly in two as if by a sword.

Joy said, with a perplexed little smile, “I guess you didn’t knock on our door that night because you ‘had a good feeling about this house’?”

“It was my birthday,” said Savannah.

“Was it?” Joy put a hand to her heart as if she would have ordered a cake if she’d known, and Savannah thought of the sideboard crowded with framed photos of birthday celebrations, as if every birthday was worthy of celebration.

She saw a girl dressed so carefully and idiotically for a birthday dinner in a fancy Sydney restaurant, waiting for her boyfriend who never showed up, who never answered his phone. That girl knew her boyfriend had just forgotten. He got distracted. He loved his art more than her, just as her brother had loved his tennis more than her, and her father loved Harry’s tennis more than her, and her mother loved her collection of bitter resentments more than her, and nothing would ever fill her hunger. She would always be hungry. Always.

When she got back to the apartment that day she took off her good clothes and put on the oldest, dirtiest ones she could find, and she made Dave pasta, and she was fine, she forgave him, she said, “I should have reminded you this morning,” although she’d reminded him the previous night.

She drank her wine and because she had not eaten all day in preparation for the special restaurant meal, it went straight to her head, and she floated free of her body like she often did, and thought, Who is that girl sitting with that boy?

Then the news story came on the television, and the pasta blocked her throat as her brother’s face filled the screen.

Harry Haddad was announcing his comeback on her birthday.

Three years earlier he’d been everywhere. She couldn’t turn on the television without seeing his face. She would get in the car, switch on the radio, and hear his voice. She once saw footage of him signing a tennis ball for a fan and thought, I GAVE him that signature. She was the one who worked out how to link the two Hs in Harry Haddad with a flamboyant curl when they were kids. It was basically her signature. She had a right to use it. She’d started a business selling tennis balls, T-shirts, and caps signed by Harry Haddad, and she’d done quite well out of it until somehow Harry’s “management team” got word of it and it all came crashing down.

Since his retirement her brother had begun to fade from the public consciousness, from her consciousness. Unless she looked him up, which she had learned not to do, he didn’t exist, but if he played professionally again, he would once again be everywhere: on her phone, on her television, on her computer screen. She would slam up against her past, over and over again, like slamming her head against a wall, like kicking a locked door.

You are the failure, he is the success, your father got the good one, your mother got the dud, we are the poor ones, they are the rich ones, we are stuck on the ground, they are flying high.

She had been so stupid to think she could ever be a normal girl who was able to go to a fancy Sydney restaurant on her birthday with her Irish artist boyfriend.

The pain had begun in her stomach and radiated out. All she’d wanted was to escape the pain, and then she’d tripped over that damned guitar case and banged her head and it had really hurt and there was blood in her eye, the pain was everywhere, and the memories were refusing to stay locked up safe and sound, they were flooding like poison through her body and brain, and all she could think was that she had to get out of that apartment, and away from those boxes and the boy, and it occurred to her that she should go back to where it started, as if she could travel back through time and stop Harry taking that first lesson, or if not that, at least make sense of it, or if not that, make that family pay for what they’d started.

When she’d got downstairs, there was a cab dropping off a happy, drunkenly swaying couple at the apartment block, and she’d got in and asked the driver to take her to the Delaneys Tennis Academy, which she knew was just up the road from the house where her brother had his private lessons. As soon as she saw the sign with the smiley-faced tennis ball, she’d been able to direct the cab driver to the house without hesitation.

The part about finding cash in the pocket of her jeans was nearly true. It was a credit card. Not one that belonged to her. It was a souvenir from a previous incident. She wasn’t sure it would work, but she tapped it against the cab driver’s machine and the word “Approved” appeared like magic.

“I was thinking I might throw a brick through your window,” she told Joy. She’d thought some low-level vandalism might be helpful. Cathartic. It had worked in the past. “But I couldn’t find a brick. I couldn’t even find a stone.”

“What?” said Joy.

“Well, it was a loose plan,” said Savannah.

Joy looked like she might burst into tears.

“You need to leave,” said Stan. He stood. He was still a big, intimidating man. “You need to leave our home.”