Free The Best Thing by Margo Lanagan

glistening down onto
our
couch. And the expression on her face (she’s gaping at me over Dad’s shoulder)—well, you wouldn’t want to meet a person again after seeing them look like that. Mega-doses of guilt and fear! She hardly looks human.
    All this I take in in half a second, closing the door behind me.
    ‘Is she gone?’ says Dad in a little peeping voice, muffled in a cushion.
    ‘No,’ gasps Ricky, still staring at me over the foot she’s got in the middle of Dad’s back. She’s panting, and so’s he,
from their exertions
. I’m breathing hard too; the room sounds like an aerobics class with the music turned off.
    ‘Melanie, get out,
darling
,’ says Ricky.
    I should stay. I should sit down on the other couch and watch them pull apart, get their clothes together, cover up the horrible old
bits
they’ve been using, all in a big hurry, babbling explanations, or possibly in an awful silence. I
should
.
    I run upstairs instead and sit in my room, my blood thundering. After a minute, Ricky knocks. ‘Melanie?’ She’s still got that edge of threat in her voice, as if
I’m
the one in trouble. I say in a very
icy
voice, ‘Get out of this house.’
    I feel a fantastic explosion of virtue inside myself as I say it.
Nothing
I’ve
ever
done can be as bad, half as bad, as what Dad has done. No humiliation I’ve ever felt can be as devastating, as un-get-overable as what those two must be feeling. Beside these grown people and their gigantic mistake, I’m a mere apprentice, just
toying
with the edges of silliness, of harmfulness. So there’s this joy that falls with the hammerblows of harm that cancel it out—a joyless joy, a hard, cold relief.
    ‘You have to under
stand
, Melanie—’
    ‘Come on, Rick,’ Dad says at the foot of the stairs. ‘I’ll drop you off home.’ He must know it’ll be hopeless talking to me.
    You have to understand!
Boy, do I understand! All of a sudden quite a few things are a whole lot clearer. I go over and over Dad’s behaviour, and Ricky’s for the last few months, watching it all fall into place—her dropping by, Dad staying out late, Mum wondering what the fuck’s going on with him. Mum! God! How can I tell her? How can I not? When I think of Mum, that’s when I have to get up and leave, get out of that house, that ‘family home’. I’m running down the stair carpet I helped them choose; past the couch we got last year (we all sat in a row on it when it arrived, smiling self-satisfaction); past the phone table Mum sanded back and rubbed endless layers of shellac onto (I remember her serious face as she stood there looking at it, not wanting to admit it was finished, restored).
    I’m nearly frantic by the time I get to Pug’s. I knock and knock, but no-one answers, and I’m just about to sit down andstart crying when I realise it’s training time. I fly across Erskineville Road to the Club, hurry upstairs. It’s like stepping inside someone’s body—all the blows thudding around me like a pulse, and the wet, wet heat on my face.
    Pug, oh Pug. You’re there, a shining body fitting the gap in front of my eyes. You don’t see me—I’m a fly on the wall. You look so serious I cross the room in my mind, dodging Justin at the bag and two other guys skipping rope. I swear I feel my arms slither right around you from over by the wall—I’m loving everything of you right down to the way you sniff, showing your top teeth in a dog-snarl. I needed to see you so
badly
, and now I sit just inside the door, and let myself fill right up with you. You push the day and the afternoon, that whole other life, right out of my head.
    . I don’t tell Pug anything. I’m just with him, silent, recovering.
    Okay. Now I won’t see him until he steps out into the ring on Thursday night. Flutter, flutter. As if I didn’t have enough to panic about.
    Normal life, the gruesome things it can hide. If Mum would only give her frustrated cry, ‘What is
wrong
with you two?’ I could