Rose Leopard by Richard Yaxley Page B

capacity to be dependable. How she must have agonised when she realised that Kaz believed so whole-heartedly in our love.
    â€˜The children will need their family,’ she said softly. ‘They’ll need the, I don’t know, security of all of our love.’
    I nodded.
    Bernice sighed. ‘They are always welcome,’ she told me, and we both knew that my absence from her sentence was deliberate. The light flitted sideways and her unmasked face spoke volumes to me: I reared my daughter as careful and controlled — you encouraged carelessness and now she is no longer with us. I hold you responsible.
    â€˜You are not responsible,’ says Stu now, sitting here with me on the veranda.
    â€˜I might be,’ I tell him. The embers of self-doubt are easily fanned into fires of self-damnation and I’ve had two and a half months to consider and reconsider my actions.
    â€˜Bullshit. I’ll bet she doesn’t really think that. Vince, it was bad luck. Rotten karma. You are not responsible’
    â€˜But I didn’t take it seriously. It was just a cut — or so I thought.’
    â€˜Come on, you heard what Garten said. Streptococcal Toxic Shock — one chance in a hundred thousand! Rarer than a pregnant dodo. Mate, you are not responsible!’
    We are silent for a moment. Inside, Shimeoc the Arch Droid has finally recaptured Conquistadon and Amelia is carrying my sleeping children to their beds. I stare at the shimmering constellations, locate Sirius easily then Orion.
    â€˜Find Perseus,’ I command, pointing vaguely east. ‘He killed Medusa, didn’t he? Very bodacious, don’t you think? Slaughtering a Gorgon is an especially bodacious act.’
    Stu sighs like an old shell.
    â€˜Find Perseus,’ I tell him once more.
    Frannie did speak to me about my options, later that same day. There was a grey closeness about the afternoon that had settled uneasily over us. She was clipping Kaz’s roses but delicately, as if she was scared of being pricked by the thorns or stained by a single granule of that thick black soil. She chose a number of flowers, snipped their stems precisely, slid each one into a bucket of water.
    I watched, fascinated. Frannie’s movements have always seemed so deliberate, planned well in advance. She has always looked the same age — somewhere indeterminate, between the late somethings and the early something elses — worn the same styles of clothing, never been seen without the same systematically applied mask of make-up or been smelled without the same citrus perfume. Once I asked her to get rid of her perfume because I was scared it would seep into my clothes, even my skin, and we’d get caught. Sometimes, on hot days, she reeks like an orchard after a storm; a smellscape of blasted, weeping trees, split fruit, nectar and syrup leaking across the earth’s cracks.
    â€˜I thought I would place these around the house,’ she said to me, absorbed by the task. ‘Her favourite flowers; one in each room. As a sort of symbolic gesture, I suppose’
    I nodded. No doubt it was sincere enough but at that point in time I didn’t really care much for symbolic gestures. I was more interested in getting our ‘discussion’ over and done with.
    â€˜Bernice said you wanted to speak with me’
    She looked up, totally composed, face betraying nothing. After a moment’s consideration, she leaned down and placed the secateurs next to the bucket.
    â€˜As a family,’ she said, ‘we need to think about the children. I know it’s early, but their futures are paramount. Something like this … the sooner we can get them settled into useful routines, the better off they’ll be.’
    I had been leaning against the brick wall. Her presumption that my children’s current routines were somehow not useful made me move closer. There was an old tyre swing hanging from a tree; I straddled it,