Free Forbidden Fruit by Ilsa Evans Page B

Thailand for the year, or even just emails, flying backwards and forwards and bridging the gulf. Instead, my sister and I had sat down each Sunday to pen short missives that said little. Hello daddy, how are you. I am fine. In return we received postcards every month or so, and birthday presents that usually arrived a few days after the actual date, and a Christmas parcel that always held a writing set each and a diary with a tiny silver key.
    By the time I was ten, however, the postcards had petered off and at some point after that Yen stopped making us write our weekly letters. Perhaps even she realised it was like flogging a dead horse. A few years later, gradually, and largely unnoticed except in retrospect, the Christmas and birthday presents became cards alone. These remained our only contact over the years, conveying snippets of information like Big storm hit the Cornish coast yesterday! or Tom just got his licence – we’re all very nervous!
    This was the man who was due to touch down at Tullamarine airport at five-forty on Friday morning – an event for which my mother was even taking the day off work, a rare phenomenon. Both Petra and I had offered to accompany her but she refused, rather curtly. Instead, they would come to my house for breakfast, after which my father was going to ‘help the police with their inquiries’. I suspected this was behind Yen’s monopolisation of his first hours; she wanted to discuss things with him before he spoke to anyone else. I also suspected that they both knew exactly who the blonde woman was, and that somehow she was linked to the events of that last Anzac Day weekend. And I very much doubted that they were going to share any more than was necessary, least of all with Petra and me. In fact, if you looked at our familial history, we had been treated as the proverbial mushrooms, kept in the dark and fed sustenance of the faecal variety. Although I suppose at least that way we didn’t see what we were eating.
    This analogy occurred to me on Thursday morning primarily because I was eating mushrooms at the time, on toasted rye, sitting on a dining-room chair that I had dragged out to the decking. I put the remains of my meal to one side and picked up my coffee, wrapping my hands around the mug as I stared out at Charlotte. Gusto sidled over and filched a mushroom from the plate, chewing briefly before spitting it onto the decking. He backed away, as if concerned it might follow.
    My father was involved, he had to be, though hopefully not as the actual murderer. Otherwise surely he would have remained stubbornly on the other side of the world, preparing to fight extradition, rather than voluntarily winging his way across the seas.
    I didn’t know how I felt about his return. Perhaps I was lucky that he had left while I was still so young, because it was his absence that had become my norm, gradually evolving into a casual complacency about our skeletal relationship. There was no father-sized gap that pulsed at the edges of my life, or daddy issues that propelled me towards older men with protective personalities. Not like Petra, who had had two long-term relationships with men who were much older. True, there was some residual resentment, just a little, gritty and a touch sour, but that was only natural.
    The sliding door shot open, bouncing in its frame, and Quinn emerged. Her hair curved up to the right, like surf, where the remains of last night’s ponytail wobbled cartoon-like. She shaded her eyes to peer at me. ‘Why’re you out here?’
    ‘Just enjoying the sunshine.’
    ‘Blech.’ She gazed around the backyard. ‘They’ve gone.’
    ‘Excellent observation.’
    ‘Did they take her with them?’
    ‘No, they left her here for us to dispose of. It’s the law of finders keepers.’
    She gave me a disparaging look and then picked up one of my rye crusts and nibbled it. ‘Do you know what you need out here? One of those egg chairs. You know, they hang from a