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One Less Person

The car needed petrol, but I couldn’t be bothered to drive another ten minutes to a service station. I felt it inhale and exhale rapidly like it was having an asthma attack, so I turned the radio up, thinking that if I couldn’t hear the metallic growl, nothing was wrong. The time read 6.05 pm, which meant I was late for dinner. Mum would’ve already chucked it in the freezer or to the dog. I drove past Anna’s house. A string of fairy lights hung on her balcony; a remnant of the Christmas in July party last week. She did say she wasn’t going to take it down. She thought it made her old terrace house look nicer, which we all kindly agreed it did.

Anna loved to throw parties, partly because she was one of the first to get her own place after school. She moved in with Wardy and Tori a week before graduation to an area closer to uni. For their housewarming, they invited the whole year 12 to ‘de-flower Caroline’. That was the name of the street but also the name of our classmate. She took it in stride, although I heard she slept with someone that night in the spare bedroom. I wouldn’t know. I wasn’t invited.

“Maybe, like, next time?” said Anna after I asked her about the party. She spoke with an upward inflexion that made her sound unsure about everything. Even her name.

Next time didn’t come around until eight months later, after everyone at uni had already gotten to know Caroline more than they had gotten to know me. And whether or not that was Anna’s doing, well, that’s an easy guess.

“Fine, you can come tomorrow. Dress up as someone wintry, like Santa or Elsa, but not Elsa because Tori is dressing as Elsa,” she said. Then, after seeing the look on my face, she added, “It’s Christmas in July.”

That evening, I went to a costume shop in Surry Hills. The place smelled like cheap glue and old plastic. I shuffled through each aisle, touching every shiny object and soft-looking fabric before settling into the costume section. For a second, I worried that Anna had lied to me and I was going to be the only one wearing something outrageous, but she didn’t have the intelligence to come up with such a ploy. (She used the word frenemy in class once, unironically, to describe Tori. No one else seemed to be baffled by an 18-year-old talking like a school bully in an American coming-of-age film, so I pretended I wasn’t either.) I ended up choosing a sexy snowman outfit — a tight white dress with large black buttons, a top hat and a rubber carrot nose.

The last time I was invited to a party (properly, anyway, not out of guilt from someone’s mum or teacher), I was fourteen. It was Luigi’s last day at school. He was an Italian foreign exchange student who had been with us for six months and was well-liked — maybe more than he expected. After briefly convincing mum that it wasn’t ‘that kind of party’, I was dropped off at the pizzeria up north. When I arrived, he gave me a big hug with two kisses on the cheek and exaggerated lip-smacking. I sat in the middle of classmates who barely knew me, but I knew them well. No one talked to me that night, though someone did at least acknowledge my presence — she called me a nutcase then threw a discarded crust at my chest.

At Anna’s house, the snowman costume wasn’t received as well as I had hoped. Turns out, most of the girls had gone to the same store and bought the same outfit. A group of them stood against the wall and blew kisses as Tori took a Boomerang for her Instagram Story. I realised how ridiculous it looked, so I took off my carrot nose and stuffed it in my bag.

“How did you get in?”

I jumped. Wardy had appeared next to me, holding a glass of rosé. He was wearing white bell-bottom jeans and a silver mesh top. I could see his nipples, covered unevenly in blue glitter.

“You scared me,” I said.

“Ha! That’s rich.”

I pointed down the hallway. “The door was open. I just walked in.”

He squinted dramatically and pursed his lips, then nodded. “All right. That checks out.”

I wanted to keep the momentum of the conversation before he returned to the crowd. “What are you dressed as?”

He spun and flicked an imaginary tress of hair. “I’m a snowflake, duh.”

I often sensed that Wardy was the only one who truly felt sorry for me. Not because he was made to, but because he was a genuinely kind person who happened to fall into Anna’s orbit. He probably knew what it felt like to be different, but he was good different. The kind that made people like you even more. When we were nine, he came to school with a pink lunchbox in the shape of a dinosaur. He had made it himself. A dinosaur, because he still wanted the boys to play with him, and pink, because he wanted the girls to know that he was secretly one of them. And I felt kind of angry at the whole situation. He was, after all, as much of an outcast as I was until that point. But the ease with which he had graduated from that title made me a little jealous. Every time I saw that dinosaur lunchbox, I wanted to throw it out of the window. I think I tried to, at one point, but a teacher caught me and made me apologise. Not to Wardy, but to the lunchbox.

“Anyway, I don’t see you out very often,” he said, knowing full well why not. I suppose he was trying to make conversation, which was nice of him.

“Yeah, I thought I’d make an exception. Being Christmas and all.”

He laughed, although I didn’t know whether he meant it. It looked like he did. “Do you want a drink? It’s over there.”

He motioned at a table with rows of eskies and plastic cups. When I turned to him, he was already talking to someone else and looked like he was having a much better time. I made my way to the esky labelled ‘BEER’ and took one out. A girl drunkenly knocked the bottle as I was drinking from it, and it rattled against my front teeth.

I eeled into the backyard. It had been transformed into a cornucopia of fairy lights, streamers, and empty cups. A girl was sitting on the ground with her phone and yelling at someone to tell her what to play. She was also dressed as a snowman.

Anna spotted me first. She got up from her chair and screamed my name. The rest of the table whipped their heads to look at me, and then after realising I was not of interest, continued with their conversation. She seemed genuinely happy that I came, which I knew was the result of the bottle of tequila she was holding. When I reached her, she pulled me into a bear hug and introduced me to everyone.

“This is who I was telling you about!”

She wasn’t excited to see me. She was excited to show me off.

Anna pointed at each person and rattled off their names. They were strange-sounding names tainted with privilege (the rich all thought their kids deserved better than the monikers of the middle class). One of the girls, a curvy blonde with fake lashes, offered the empty chair beside her. I sat down and got a whiff of cigarette smoke from the boy named Hugo. They were all waiting for me to say something, but Anna had already begun.

“We met when we were, like, in year one?” she said. “And obviously I didn’t know anything back then …”

“So not much has changed,” said Xanthe. The group laughed, and Anna feigned anger before taking a sip from her bottle of Sierra.

“Anyway, after sports day, my mum told me …” She lowered her voice to a whisper and everyone leaned in, naturally, “… ‘that’s Newton Sharpe’s daughter’.”

I knew some of my classmates had bandied the name about when I wasn’t around, but only Anna milked it at every social function, or so I heard. (Considering I was the subject of her favourite discussion, I found it unfair that I was never invited to take part in them.) They didn’t know that the name had lost all its power over me, although it was fascinating to see people dangle it during conversations like a feather teaser. They’d always expect me to pounce, and when I give them nothing, they’d retreat and look for something more interesting to play with. Another bear they could poke with a long stick.

Anna continued. “And then a couple of years later at the library, I came across an article about him. So I told everyone because they needed to know who they were hanging out with.”

During lunch, years ago, she went to every table and told anyone who was willing to listen (and everyone was willing to listen to Anna). When she got to mine, I knew exactly what she was going to say before she opened her fat lips. I finished lunch by myself that day, and every day after that. I imagined myself having a heart attack in the middle of class and wondered if anyone would help me then. A week later, I fell down a flight of stairs and sprained both my ankles. No one even looked.

“Do you remember him much?” asked Bridget. She was dressed as Mrs Claus, which, for some reason, eased the gravity of the question.

“Sort of.”

“Do you have framed pictures of him at home?” said one boy, attempting to be funny. Someone chuckled. It was Anna.

“No, mum threw his stuff out when he was sent away.”

“I can’t imagine that,” said Hugo, blowing another puff of smoke my way. “Like, knowing that my dad’s a criminal.”

They all spoke so casually as if they knew him personally. I could’ve said something smart and made him feel bad, but I never played that card. If I did, they wouldn’t be bothered. That’s Newton Sharpe’s daughter, they’d say, what else do you expect? So I always had to be the girl who defied the stereotype — meek, cheery, malleable. Mum always told me I was nothing like him. Sometimes I felt like she only said that to stop me from becoming like him.

When I was little, I brought home a Father’s Day card, handmade with macaroni and glitter, and mum had to give me a lecture on why I shouldn’t celebrate Father’s Day. She explained everything, slowly, pronouncing every word carefully as if I’d misinterpret them for something less serious. As I grew older, she started telling me more stories disguised as offhand dinner-talk. (“Oh, you know, when your father was found guilty of murdering those two women in Perth!” or “Last time I cooked this was before your father went on that spree of his in Coogee.”) I’d pretend I wasn’t listening, so I wouldn’t ask any questions. I’d be able to look them up easily anyway, which I never did. Once, on a bright Sunday morning, mum looked out the window and said, “It’s the anniversary of his death, you know. Should we do something? A picnic?” She had always been unperturbed about the whole thing, which made me downplay the severity of my father’s history until I started school. Suddenly, everyone was an expert just because I shared the same surname with Australia’s most famous psychopath. And I suppose they enjoyed telling me things I didn’t know about my father, so I let them.

“Me neither,” said another girl. She looked like a Disney princess, but definitely not Elsa. “I’d be so scared I’d turn out like him.”

“There’s a school of thought,” said Bridget, “that your temperament is determined by genetics. So in the argument of nature versus nurture, nature wins, every time.”

“She’s studying psychology, that’s why she’s going all therapist on you,” explained Hugo.

Anna was now sitting on the lap of a boy dressed as a Viking. His arm was draped over her bare thigh. She sloppily shushed the crowd with her hand and then raised a finger to her lips. “I think,” she said to me, “the phrase ‘like father, like daughter’ exists for a reason.”

Xanthe rolled her eyes. “It’s ‘like father, like son’, you idiot.”

“Or ‘like mother, like daughter’,” added Bridget.

Anna dismissed the comments with the flick of her bony wrist and directed her attention toward the Viking. I heard someone yell at a girl to change the music, at which moment Tori came out with a bubble machine. Everyone else at the table, except for Anna and her Viking, migrated to the centre of the backyard. Red and yellow fairy lights flashed dimly to the beat of the music, casting pulsating shadows on the ground. I watched them dance; arms up, hips swaying, eyes closed. Wardy joined the little circle and was greeted with girlish shrieks and swift side hugs. When the song changed to something more upbeat, I decided they didn’t need me anymore. Anna was already devouring the Viking’s tongue like it was barbecued meat, so I walked out and caught the bus home.

My car was desperate for petrol now. It was beeping and blinking like it was going to explode. I checked the GPS for a service station and quickly drove into the empty lot. I turned off the engine, got out of the car, and was filling the tank when a police car drove in — siren and all. The vehicle parked right outside the store and two officers walked out with their hands resting on their vests.

One of them pointed at my car. “That yours?”

“Uh-huh,” I said.

He made his way towards me while the other officer turned to go inside the 7/11.

“It’s nice. Did you restore it yourself?”

“No, my cousin did.”

The officer walked around the car and inspected it like he would a suspect. He grazed the hood with his hand and gave it two soft pats.

“I’d kill for one of these,” he remarked. “Did you buy it online or…?”

“It’s my dad’s.”

“He has good taste.”

It was nice hearing someone compliment my father. For a moment, it felt like he was just another suburban dad with a 1972 Pontiac Grand Prix. The kind of man who would brew coffee in the morning and make a show about reading the newspaper, then kisses his wife goodbye before going to work in one of those tall buildings in Barangaroo.

“I’ll let him know.”

I hung the pump back in its place and told him I had to pay inside.

“You go ahead. I’ll just be here, creeping on your car.”

I laughed — like most people would when an armed individual cracks a joke. In the convenience store, I saw the boys in blue congregate around my car. After the spotty teen slid over my change in coins, I jogged back and said a quick goodbye to the men before driving away. I watched them get smaller and smaller in my rear-view mirror until they were gone.

I could smell it, and I was certain that they could too. But to them, there was nothing they needed to worry about. I was a girl taking her dad’s prized possession for a spin on a Friday evening. If only they knew who that girl was, or who her dad was, or who was in the trunk — a young woman hacked into six different pieces, laid bare over a black tarp.

There was a beautiful, celestial glow illuminating the road on my drive home. The streetlights had just woken up from their slumber and kids were riding colourful bicycles on the sidewalk. I thought of the night I was at Anna’s party, of how presumptuous everyone was. They all wanted to say it, but only Anna was drunk enough to. Like father, like daughter. If everyone thought that I was just like him, might as well fill the role everyone wanted me to be. No one’s going to be surprised when they find out. They’ll say, “I’ve always known. It’s in her blood.”

Originally published August 30, 2022

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