Read Online The Family Men by Catherine Harris - Free Book Online Page A

a security deposit as well.
    Her mother thought she was going to the cinema then staying overnight at a friend’s (Laura’s, or was it Cassandra’s? One of them. She always got them mixed up. It didn’t matter; they were all basically the same in her view, average height, thin build, dirty blonde hair obscuring their insolent faces), choosing to accept it as the truth, the movies a vastly preferable occupation to the waitressing job her daughter had been banging on about, casual shifts with some nameless catering company. “Who staffs their evening functions with teenage girls? Serving themselves up as part of the dinner menu, because that’s what it would amount to – you know that, don’t you? – young girls in short skirts balancing t-bone steaks between their bosoms. Coffee, tea, me? Not on your life. As long as you’re still young enough for me to forbid it then forbid it I will. And fifteen is still young enough for me to insist on a few rules around here. So no, you may not.”
    â€œBut Mum—”
    â€œWill not! What would people think?”
    And so the girl had lied. Mentally cycling through the dance sequences again, rehearsing the transitions, the hardest steps, the ones most likely to trip her up, no one caring much what she did otherwise, Greta saying at one of their lessons, as long as she smiled and vaguely kept up with the group. Secretly practising for weeks in front of the mirror at home, pouting and smiling as she looked over her shoulder, imagining the applause as she executed a pretty turn or bent over to adjust her stockings, it never occurring to her that there could be more to it, that afterwards she’d be doing anything other than banking her pretty cash.
    *
    It’s what a father might have explained, if she’d had a father, the type to put her straight, to lay down the law. Or in Harry’s case, a mother, Diana not being one to mince her words, much as at times he wishes she would, especially when he is acting as his parents’ go-between. “It’s your fucking ego,” she says down the phone, Senior’s voicemail capturing the minute quaver, despair sublimated as disgusted fury. “Your unquenchable thirst for attention.” She’s long refused to speak to journalists, can’t believe Alan has fallen back into that trap, doing interviews again, worse than a thirteen-year-old girl, his susceptibility to flattery. “In all these years haven’t you learnt anything? You tell that little shit not to bother me again or he’ll be speaking to my solicitor, unless of course you want me to issue a comment, which I’d be very happy to do,” Harry dutifully passing along the message as Alan twitches around the garden in his shorts and gumboots, a smouldering fuse waiting to go off.
    Parlaying his energy into weed pulling, spreading fertiliser, turning the topsoil, applying moisture-trapping mulch, but no end in sight. Bent over the parsley, dropping to one knee, winded, like he’s taken a foot in the solar plexus, saying, “Goddammit, can’t she leave it alone?”
    Magical thinking of the first order. But that is the way his father has always been when confronted with the truth.
    Harry has tried denial, telling himself that he doesn’t buy half the stories bandied around about his dad, but in actual fact he does. Everybody does. That is the problem. Predisposed as he is to disclaim it, most of the time one barely has to dig, allegations about the drugs and the women and the alcohol lying about on the surface of his father’s reputation like fabled nuggets during a gold rush. Beneath the scuttlebutt and scandal sheets, the denials and rationalisations, there is always something there. It might not seem like much, a speck, a skerrick, a flake panned from the cleanest looking riverbed, but it is rare that a story about his father finds its way to the public domain without having