NINE

~TIME MAY CHANGE ME but I CAN’T TRACE TIME ~

The following year was the first that Daveed…changed.
I was part of the reason. I’d gotten older - a preteen, practically. Now I stood taller than most of the boys in my class - although they quickly out paced me later - and my face was less round. I got my period. My hair had darkened over the years and grew in wild curls that I hadn’t mastered.
Zoya, being a year and a half older, was in high school by this point. Every woman in my family had gone to the same Catholic girls’ school in an ethnic suburb of Melbourne. Our Parish had financial ties to that college. Father H and Daveed created some kind of deal so that Zoya would receive both scholarships to attend. At her primary school graduation I heard someone comment, their voice high with the helium balloons we took from the ceremony, “I wonder who got the scholarships this year? They didn’t even announce them.”
And thus begins the secrets about money.
The truth was that we were in no position for Zoya to attend a rich, private school. Daveed hadn’t held down a single job for as long as I could remember, and although he was somehow able to read the text in the video games he increasingly spent time playing, he claimed not to be literate. Our income was based on the presumption of Daveed’s incapacity, Mum’s child support and…well, me. I’m disabled. These were the days before the NDIS. I would receive an annual sum of several thousands of dollars that was to be put into a locked interest account, opened for me on my eighteenth birthday. I never saw a cent. I have no way to prove it.
As an adult I’ve constantly had one number in my head: 542.98. It was while writing this that I realised that was our fortnightly income. Daveed would leave bills piled on the kitchen table until he instructed us not to answer any phone calls. His feeble attempt at meal prep was of such poor nutrition that I was constantly in and out of the outpatient ward for gastrointestinal issues. One doctor commented that if Daveed hadn’t taken me to the Royal Children’s on a particular night for my stomach pains then I likely would’ve had to have surgery.
When I was little we would go on family outings; the Moomba Parade, the Victoria Market, the Zoo. They became more and more rare as time passed. The last time Daveed ever took me and Zoya to the movies we watched 17 Again. We never had cable but my aunt did, so we were at the exact right age to adore Zac Efron. Daveed bought us popcorn and candy and honestly, it was a really nice day. One of the few.
Until he overheard me talking to Mum.
She called that night, as always, and asked me to tell her about my day, like always. I was in an unusually talkative mood as I described the day, then I told her about the movie. It was about a middle aged man who is transformed into his seventeen year old self to right past mistakes. I told her about how funny I thought the movie was, and then Daveed turned the corner. A storm brewed on his expression. I tried to say goodbye to Mum as casually as possible before turning to face him.
“Did you really tell your mother about the movie?”
“Yes?” I answered. A newfound resignation entered my lungs, like my body was saying oh. This again. If he wanted to know what I talked about so badly, I thought, then why wouldn’t he just buy another line already? I found his “secret” casket tapes of his phone calls with Mum years ago. Bit of an overkill, no? “It’s got the guy from Friends in it, I told her she’d like it.”
His dark eyes flickered like the depthless sea. “You told her to watch it? You told her to watch a movie that has a teenage girl trying to kiss her dad?”
In complete honesty, it hadn’t even occurred to me. The scene had been so brief, so benign, that I forgot about it after it passed. I wanted to ask him why that particular scene stood out, why he was being so defensive about it, but an ancient silence stopped me. Instead he backhanded me.
Once the outings stopped the paranoia kicked in. He would pace a trench in the vinyl kitchen floor and monologue about Santos and Emil, about Paloma, about how my mother was the worst thing that ever happened to him. Feuds between our entire extended family broke out all at once, much like the European Powers in 1913. One month I had my aunt who had always treated me like her own daughter, I had my cousins who had been raised alongside Zoya and I. The next they were gone, a tether snapped without thought or care.
Daveed stopped showing up to school events, especially if I was being celebrated in any way. He would make me promise not to tell Mum or my step dad about special occasions on the pretence that he would attend and didn’t want to see them, then bail on me at the last minute. Teachers and the parents of other students would ask me how he was, and I would say he was good, like he wasn’t at home in unwashed clothes, on a mattress from the garbage tip, losing himself in video games. Like I wasn’t watching the rest of the kids with their families. Like I wasn’t screaming inside.
He had the grace to get us a dog, though. A dog that he’d exchanged for some firewood with our Polish neighbour. They’d called the dog Borba - meaning stupid in some language, but I knew that he wasn’t. He was ten, partially deaf, and jumped at the sight of water and brooms. Zoya was away from home more and more often, and Daveed began leaving his room less and less, and that left me and Borba.
He was this mangled looking white Maltese terrier. The hair around his snout looked like a beard, and his front teeth stuck out permanently. These huge brown eyes like Falkor that were everything good in the world, and he was the best boy. We ran around the yard playing what I called the Adventures of Borba and Selene, and in my minds’ eye we were mystery detectives. Borba was very resourceful, a real Sherlock Holmes.
The last time we went to the park as a family we took Borba. I stood up on the playground as Daveed leaned in the shade of a tree, loosely holding Borba’s leash. I silently watched as he cocked his leg and peed right there on Daveed’s sandal. He looked down with a grimace as he shook it off. Borba went over to lay in the sun, as if he knew Daveed couldn’t do shit in public. It made me smile.
Daveed opened the gate during a storm and drove out without shutting it. Borba chased after us in the rain, terrified of the sounds of thunder. I got home and tore through the yard, the house, our street, desperate to find him. Daveed told me to wait until morning and we’d go to the pound. I could hardly stand the hours until then.
Somehow Borba was at the pound. We walked up and down the kennels, Daveed and Zoya lagging behind as I dashed through them. Why were they taking their time? We knew what Borba looked like, hurry up.
And there he was. Fur dulled by being soaked recently, ears drooped, eyes down. I dropped to my knees at the locked cage and cried as he jumped up and licked all over my face through the bars. Normally I never let him but my God the relief.
The vet gave Daveed a stern talking to - as stern as he ever got anyway - and I sat in the backseat with Borba. My arm slung over his back, Daveed laughed as he told me that he and Zoya were looking at the other dogs with the intention of pretending a “better one” was Borba. They were standing before a poodle when they heard me several rows down, and the vet obviously would know it if they lied then.
“Why wouldn’t you want Borba?” I asked, glancing between the back of their heads. “He’s our dog.”
“He’s annoying,” Daveed replied, taking the corner. Zoya exclaimed, “Indicator! Remember!”
I truly do not want to know what he’d do to a dog he hated.
As punishment Daveed decided to hammer a chain into the fence and attached it to Borba’s collar. He could go into his kennel, get to his bowls, and that was about it. Daveed told Zoya and I not to untie him, or there would be consequences.
Eventually Daveed stopped buying him food.
Borba grew thinner and thinner. I tried to space out the food we did have for him but I still feel like I could have done something more. Like I should have done something more. That dog loved me more than the dog in my house ever did.
I snapped.
I should’ve been at school but I barely went to school that year since I discovered Daveed wouldn’t make me. God knew where Zoya was. I thought Daveed was in his bedroom like always when I walked out into the yard and unclipped the chain shackled to Borba’s collar. He looked up at me from where he laid half out of his kennel.
“What are you doing?”
I turned to my father. I felt no movement on my face as I said, “We are not keeping him on the chain anymore. Not anymore.”
Daveed’s eyes scanned my face, my stance in front of Borba. Whatever he saw, he respected it enough to nod once, ever so slightly, and go back inside.

I spent hours outside, guarding Borba, and started reading more; I watched Twilight as the films released and loved the novels with a fervour I never felt before. When I was through with the saga I grabbed the closest recommended series in the Kmart catalogue - a novel about fallen angels and reincarnation. I read that a million times. Then it was another book and a new author until I had a list of sequels I eagerly awaited. I found worlds of vampires and werewolves and faeries and it was…
…it was more than I could’ve ever hoped to find.
Those books meant more to me than anything else. They were an anchor, a home, a lifeline I never knew. These characters faced such incredible hardship, faced the worst of odds against the most cosmic of beings, and yet everything worked out okay. They retained their humanity and more often than not found a love rooted in such a deep understanding that nothing could break it.
I wanted to be like them.
Eventually I got bored enough to go back to school towards the end of Year Five. The students asked me where I’d been but my teachers never really did, and they never asked Daveed. They certainly did not ask Mum. I have another number in my head, the one I saw printed on my school report at the end of that year. Absent days without reason: 158.
I missed half of the school year, they didn’t call my mother once, and I came back like nothing had happened. I was still ahead of the class which I think is because of Horrible Histories and how much I read. That year I was the highest ranked Year Five student for literacy in the National Assessment Program - got a little certificate and everything. And yet I could’ve been dead and that school would have let my body rot for months.