Port Mungo by Patrick McGrath

brother’s face as he told me this. Off she’d go across the white sand with a bottle of beer hanging from her fist, and despite everything, he said, he loved her.
    I let this pass without comment.
    So Jack raised Peg almost entirely by himself. He was at the same time pursuing his work with a ferocious discipline, and a pattern emerged: him pouring more and more of himself into his painting, her coming and going and doing less painting with each passing year, and Peg growing up a careless free spirit, running wild.
    I have vivid memories of Pelican Road. I was of course very curious to know Peg, having heard so much about her in Jack’s letters. When I was down there she was a shy girl of eight with the long limbs and narrow, pointed features of a true Rathbone, and already quite a character. My first evening, after I’d had a wash and then warily settled myself in an old cane chair on the deck over the river, she hung back in the doorway, peering at me, shifting her weight from foot to foot and frowning.
    —You’re very white, she said at last.
    I detected the faintest trace of an English accent, but it was almost totally submerged in the lilt of the patois. She seemed to decide I was harmless, and approached me. Gingerly she touched my hair.
    —Aunt Gin?
    —Yes Peg.
    By this point the child had quite overcome her shyness and got herself half seated in my lap, and was picking at my earrings with her long, brown, dirty fingers. I worried there were lice in her hair.
    —You want to go out on the water?
    She pronounced “water” like “matter.”
    Jack appeared on the deck with a bottle of rum and two dusty tumblers.
    —Darling child, Gin does not want to go out on the water, in fact I don’t think I want
you
going out on the water.
    He turned to me and said they’d recently lost a child to a crocodile. Peg grew excited at this and with her strong dirty fingers she forcibly turned my face away from her father and towards herself and told me about the boy seized by the croc—“right near this house, man!” Her face was inches from mine, her eyes wide.
    —That boy, she whispered, he one bloody mess.
    —Peg, why don’t you bugger off now, said Jack.
    —Okay, Jack, she said, in a weary tone she must have learned from her mother. I’m going to bugger off now. Later, Aunt Gin.
    —Later, Peg.
    Then, quite deliberately, watching me as she did it, she took a cigarette from her father’s pack, lit it, and let it hang from the corner of her mouth as she exhaled smoke through her nose. Jack appeared not to notice. She left the deck backwards, still with the cigarette hanging from her lips, holding my eye and making peculiar wriggling gestures at me with the fingers of both hands. Once in the gloom of the house, with a shout she darted off, and we heard her bare feet pattering down the stairs.
    —Remarkable child, I said.
    —I worry about her in that boat.
    We gazed out at the sluggish river, which gleamed in places in the last of the sunlight, and probably harboured hungry crocs at that very moment. I rather enjoyed watching my brother being a father. He seemed good at it, rather like our own father—affectionate, distracted, indifferent to petty matters like smoking, watchful in a vague sort of a way—and Peg, I thought, seemed to require no more than that. Later that same night, undressing for sleep in my shed of a bedroom at the back of Vera’s studio, I suddenly became aware of a figure standing in the doorway. An oil lamp gives out only the weakest illumination, and I was startled to see a motionless figure where a second before there had been none. I gave a little scream. It was her of course.
    —Peg! What are you doing there?
    —I want to see your white skin.
    I was astonished.
    —Well, I’m sorry, my dear, but I’m rather modest in that department.
    —Can’t I watch? Jack doesn’t mind.
    —I’m afraid not.
    —Okay. Later, Aunt Gin.
    —Later, Peg.
    She melted into the darkness. Jack