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Sport 10: Autumn 1993

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Reen likes to visit Teresa; her aunt is a tricky woman, a live, sunny presence on the one hand, a crisp, darting, biscuit-barking chatelaine of her suburban domain; on the other hand, slowed down, coiled and brooding, she spews dark visions, she may lash out, acid-tongued, full of loathing. Reen enjoys her aunt's benevolence but also the shock of those other moments, the fright and surprise.

Reen sits with Teresa on her orange-buttoned couch, eating Yo-Yos, watching Days of Our Lives; they are absorbed by Julie and Doug, their misunderstandings, their bad luck, their eternal marital vicissitudes.

To cheer herself up Julie has streaked her hair.

'Nope,' Teresa says, 'don't like those streaks, she was much better black.'

'Like me.' She pats the side of her head, gives a sly smile.

In fact the silver is outpacing the black in Teresa's hair. Reen looks at her page 78 aunt; she is becoming more Latin as she ages, her features more angular, the pits beneath her dark eyes rough and black as coal. She is tatting as she watches television, her thin body poised over her work; when Vince is absent, Reen notices, Teresa's serpentine movements ease, a stillness settles on her; at these times, sitting alongside, Reen finds her restful as sleep.

Julie is dreaming about Doug, temporarily separated from her by the scheming Laura; in this tender moment from the past Doug strokes Julie's brow, soothes her with love-talk.

Do you sometimes forget, Reen asks her aunt, that Doug used to be married to Julie's mother, they had a child? Teresa rolls her eyes, remembering.

And speaking of the past, Reen has a question for her aunt.

She has calculated, she has totted up the years, she has slotted in all the stories, this ladder of events rises clearly in her head, and something is missing. There is a gap in Tommy's life, an empty stretch of time, two years Reen has figured, two years unaccounted for.

Reen is sharp, now. She is a sensory scythe, she thinks, slicing through her family, their games, their exchanges. She is so alert she vibrates, she hums. She hears loud meaning in her parents' silences, she sees unrealised expressions hovering behind their features, she smells a secret hanging between her mother and father, her uncle and aunt. So now she is sleuthing, she has read the detective stories and she knows what to do: Go to the source, pick your man (or woman), milk them slowly. Or go at them hard. Hit them with the facts. Bludgeon them into confession.

Reen looks at her aunt. She is mysterious at times, a keeper of secrets, her harsh, beautiful face closed and knowing. But at other times she will turn slowly, eyes narrowing, and pour a sticky stream of revelation into your waiting ear.

In the end it is easy enough.

In her dream Julie is kissing Doug; she tosses restlessly on her bed at the sweet agonising memory. Reen splits a Yo-Yo with a knife and scrapes off the icing, licks it from the knife. Those years, where was Tommy? Reen asks Teresa, involuntarily, the words sliding from her mouth unbidden; she doesn't look at her aunt now, disowning the question the second it is born.

Teresa is the same, she stares at Julie, up from the bed now, wandering the apartment in a daze, kimono hanging, her hair tousled. In the second before her aunt answers sudden thoughts burst loudly in Reen's head.

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He was in prison.

He was a defrocked priest.

'He was married to somebody else,' Teresa says, inserting her needle, busy with a complex knot. Reen takes a look. Teresa's eyes are slits, her lips thin and working.

'Don't ask me why they've never told you. Bloody ridiculous.' Her voice rises sharply.

'It's that stupid Tommy, and he'll kill me if he knows I've told you. Won't even let Rose talk about it. Poor Rose, all these years, she gets so mad.'

Reen stares at Julie who stares at a photo of Doug, tears brimming in her big blue eyes. Reen is shocked. Seek and ye shall find, Rose says, and you won't always like it. Her head is full and hot.

Divorce, she thinks, that's why he won't talk, divorce, the unspeakable word.

'Did they, did they, you know, divorce?' she asks Teresa.

'Nothing like that,' says Teresa. 'She died in a car accident, head-on collision. There was a baby, a little boy. He died, too.'

It is the thought of this brief, long-ago brother that disturbs Reen most. She sees him flung through the windscreen, hurtling through the air, like the baby in the TV ad, but this brother carries on through the night, disappearing into infinity, lost to the future, Reen's future.

'What was his name?' she asks, looking at her aunt finally, feeling the dumb surprise on her face.

'Marco,' says Teresa. 'It's a shock all right, isn't it? She pats Reen's knee. 'Still, it's gone now, all in the past, though Tommy he could never talk about it. Never let on that you know.' Teresa frowns down at her handiwork, taking the needle in and out, in and out.

'Poor old Tommy,' she says, 'he came home after the funeral to Mama and Poppa. Cried for days. Drank himself silly. And there was the, you know, you know...'

'That cat,' says Teresa.

Reen watches the credits roll on Days of Our Lives, listens to the wobbly fifties theme music, thinks about the cat.