Silver

Chapter 20 - then

A waiter swiped my father's identity card, to register drink one of his allocated two daily drinks. My father must've been nervous. He never drank wine when we'd had lunch together before. He ordered the marinated spring lamb kebab and I ordered the wagyu mince beef burger and then my father changed his mind and ordered the minute steak, but I could see that he was still unsure.

His hands were clasped together on the table when he said, 'what did you think of the Moore house?'

I decided to speak to him at last, but only because he was paying for lunch.

'Disappointing,' I said. 'It was similar to that other house we saw in Mt Eliza. I was expecting something more. It's the same old blocky architecture, too assertive for its location. It should have been more discreet.' I could equally have raved about the steel spiral staircase that wound up to the top floor of the house like a curly ribbon. But I was in a critical mood instead.

That's not what my dad really wanted to talk about here anyway.

'So why are you forcing me to get married now?' I asked, straight up to him.

'Sylvie, we're not forcing you to do anything,' he said, lowering his voice and pleading with his eyes for me to be calm and sensible. 'I didn't think you'd have such an issue with this. Millie's getting married soon, isn't she?'

The mere mention of Millie made my stomach flip.

'So what?' I said.

'So ... well, your mother and I thought it was time for you.'

'But Marion didn't have to get married until she was eighteen,' I regretted the whine in my voice. I was trying to negotiate like an adult here.

'What is it that you wanted Sylvie? What were you expecting?'

I paused. It was hard to articulate what I wanted. It's the same as I can't articulate the way I see colours when I answer my birthday is the 12 August. The colours just appear. It was the same here. I couldn't tell my dad exactly what I wanted, because it was just a feeling ... a feeling that I wanted something different.

'I just wanted another two years,' I said.

'To do what?'

'I don't know. To finish school. Maybe go overseas for a year.'

A waiter brought dad his Pinot Noir. I'd noticed there were eight Pinot Noirs from the Mornington Peninsula on the wine list, but my father ordered the one from South Africa.

'You can do all that with your husband,' he said, before taking a sip of his wine.

'What if I wanted to do it on my own?' I could hear myself sounding like a child. It was there in my voice and the slurping sound I accidentally made when I sipped my lemonade.

'Sylvie, what is it that you want?'

'I want love,' I said, finally.

He used his middle finger to pick at skin beside his thumbnail, a perpetual habit of his. Just as the scab heals, he picks it off again.

'But it's not either or,' he said.

I couldn't tell him that I did think it was either or. I saw his relationship with my mother as completely loveless. But I could never tell him this. Even my sister and her husband, they'd only been married a couple of years, and I didn't see any affection between the two of them. All I heard were conversations about whether one of them had remembered to call the insurance company or organise that lock guy yet, or watered in the lawn seed. It was a relationship based on the everyday practicalities of life and it filled me with dread.

'What if I can't stand my husband? What if the very sight of him makes my skin crawl?' I asked.

'That's a normal fear,' my father said. 'Everyone would feel that.'

'Were you scared about marrying mum?'

'Of course I was. I was petrified. I guess it's just like when a woman gives birth to a baby, she doesn't know what kind of a person that child is going to become. But she loves that baby just the same. That's what it's like with an arranged marriage. You don't know what kind of person you're going to get, yet if you're open to anything, you're open to loving them.'

Our meals arrived. I could see in my father's face that he wished he'd stuck with the lamb kebab.

'You're lucky Sylvie, you don't have to go through your twenties and thirties and even forties establishing a career and searching for a life partner. Your grandmother was 49 when she had me. Can you imagine? It took her that long to find someone half decent. And even then she compromised with my father. They were completely different, they had no interests in common. And they were too old. By the time I was eighteen, they were nearly seventy.

'Things are much better these days,' he continued, passionately. 'There's more success in matching two people's data sets than there is in two desperates getting together. And, people are having children younger, the children are healthier, there aren't as many complications, not such a strain on our health system. Parents are young and fit, as they were always meant to be, and they can keep working. It keeps the economy stronger. They had to encourage it. The population was going backwards after the pandemic. The country was suffering from de-population. It was unsustainable.'

Getting married and having children had become another efficiency, like the permissible two standard drinks a day at a liquor-licenced venue. These efficiencies were all about easing the strain on the health system and stimulating the economy.

'Don't you ever want another drink dad?' I asked, pointing at his Pinot Noir.

'But I can have another drink.'

'But what if you wanted to have a third drink?' I asked.

'Well, I can buy two bottles of standard drinks at the bottle shop a week. I could have another drink at home,' he said.