Jacinta Takes a Walk
Copyright© 2025 by BarBar
Interlude 3: Anthea Binter
After school on Monday, Tabitha walked from the high school to Fred’s primary school and waited for him there, then the two of them walked home together. They’d been doing this all year, but for the first time in a while, the two of them didn’t walk home in a sullen silence. Instead they chatted as they walked, reviewing the conversation between Tabitha and her father from the previous evening, and then telling each other about their day.
Bandit was as excited as always to have them home, but Anthea seemed flustered when she greeted her two kids. She gave them both a hug and a snack and sent them off to put their school things away. Tabitha stayed in her room, but Fred came back to talk to his mother. She was emptying the dishwasher which had been set going that morning before she’d left for work.
Fred took the baskets of utensils and stood in front of the utensils drawer, sorting them into their different compartments, while Anthea pulled out the plates and stacked them and put them away. Fred chatted away about his school day and seemed unaware that his mother looked unusually tense.
Having finished with the dishwasher, Anthea took out a cloth and started wiping down the bench. Fred continued his story for a moment, but then stopped and looked at his mother with a curious expression on his face.
“Mum, is something wrong?”
“No, honey. Everything’s fine. Why do you ask?”
“You’ve wiped the same bit of bench three times while I was talking.”
“Oh,” said Anthea. She looked at the cloth in her hand and hung it back on the hook inside the cupboard door where it lived when not being used.
“Sorry, honey. I was listening to your story.”
“Okay,” said Fred.
Tabitha emerged from her room wearing her leotard over a pair of tights, and with a jacket over the top. Her hair was tied up in a bun.
“I’m ready, Mum,” said Tabitha.
“Oh, yes, of course.” Anthea picked up her car keys.
“Fred, I have to take Tabitha to her lesson. Will you be okay for fifteen minutes?”
Fred smiled. “I’ll be fine, Mum. Just like I’ve been fine every other time. May I turn on the TV and watch some afternoon cartoons?”
“Of course you may,” said Anthea. “Don’t make any plans with your friends for later. We’ll be busy.”
“Okay,” said Fred.
Anthea and Tabitha walked out the door and went to Anthea’s car.
“That goes for you as well, Tabitha,” Anthea said. “Don’t make any plans with your friends for after class.”
The two of them got into the car and did up their seatbelts.
“Why?” asked Tabitha.
“Why what, honey?” asked Anthea, as she started the car and reversed down the drive and onto the street.
“Why can’t I make plans for after class with my friends?”
“Because we’ll be busy,” said Anthea.
“What are we doing?” asked Tabitha.
“I’ll tell you after your dance class,” said Anthea.
“Are we going out for dinner?”
“I’ll tell you after your dance class.”
“Is it a surprise?”
“I’ll tell you after your dance class.”
Tabitha pouted.
There was quiet in the car for a moment.
“How was your day at school?” asked Anthea.
Tabitha grunted. “How would you feel if I said I’d tell you after my dance class?”
Anthea shrugged. “I wouldn’t mind. I’d have to remember to ask you again later, that’s all.”
Tabitha was frowning. “Sorry, Mum. That was rude. I’m trying to stop doing that. School was good. I made a new friend. His name is Marcus. He has Down Syndrome, but I don’t know what that means. I saw Jacinta at lunchtime. She seems okay. She tried to embarrass me in front of my friends and it kind of worked. But then I realised I was being stupid and after that, I was okay.”
Tabitha continued to chat about her different classes in school until Anthea pulled into the carpark outside the dance studio. They were immediately behind a minibus with “St Helena Open Residences for Teens,” in bold print on the rear panels.
“Hey, look,” said Tabitha. “That must be from SHORT.”
Anthea glanced at her daughter. “I’ll pick you up here straight after class. Have fun.”
Tabitha jumped out of the car and ran over to talk to the talk to the two girls getting out of the minivan. They were both slightly older than Tabitha and a little taller. They both had their hair in the same type of bun. One of them was blond and the other had black hair.
“Hi,” said Tabitha as she walked up to them. “Do you guys live at SHORT? I’m friends with Kalayah, but most people at school call her Kala.”
“We know Kala,” said the Chinese girl with a smile. “There’s only eighteen of us at SHORT so we all know each other.”
“Nineteen,” corrected the blonde girl. “There are nineteen of us now.”
The Chinese girl nodded, agreeing with the correction.
“Cool,” said Tabitha, as the three girls together started walking into the studio. “I also know Jacinta Mells. She only moved into SHORT this weekend.”
“Yes,” said the Chinese girl. “She’s the one who made it nineteen.”
Anthea had watched her daughter effortlessly approach the two other girls and strike up a conversation. Anthea shook her head, unsure if she had that much confidence when she was twelve.
The drive back home seemed to go quickly for Anthea. She tried to remember what Tabitha had said about her school day, and realised she’d barely registered any of it. She’d made a new friend and met up with Jacinta at lunch, but beyond that, nothing.
Anthea shook her head, annoyed with herself. Last night, she’d made a little resolution to pay more attention to what Tabitha said, but had failed at the first hurdle.
Back at the house, Fred was stretched out on the couch with his eyes glued to the TV. The three cats were all either lying on him, or snuggled tightly into his side.
Anthea left him there and went into the kitchen, where she started preparing two salads, a garden salad and a potato salad. Bandit came to sit beside her and watch what she was doing. Every movement of her hand was watched carefully in case it resulted in a titbit of food being dropped for him to hoover up. Occasionally he got lucky, either by accident or by design.
About twenty minutes later she heard the TV switch off. Fred wandered into the kitchen. He lifted himself onto a stool at the counter.
“What’re you doing, Mum?” he asked.
“Making salads for dinner,” Anthea answered.
“Can I help?”
Anthea looked around, while she thought. “There are carrots in the fridge. If you could slice off their ends and peel them for me, that would be awesome. Then give them a rinse and grate them ready to add to the garden salad. Thanks honey.”
The two of them worked together to finish preparing the salads, then Anthea carefully packed it all into plastic containers. She packed the containers into a cooler bag, and added several more containers from the fridge.
“Are we going somewhere for dinner?” asked Fred.
Anthea winked at him but didn’t answer. Then she looked at the clock. “We have a few more minutes before we have to go and collect your sister. Once we’ve fed Bandit and the cats, it will be time to go.”
Bandit had to be fed in the laundry with the door closed, while the cats had their dinner in the kitchen. Having Bandit around, the cats had learned to eat their food quickly rather than grazing at it. If they didn’t eat their food immediately, he would gobble up anything they hadn’t eaten as soon as he was let out of the laundry and they would go hungry.
Fred waited until the cats had finished eating before going to let Bandit out of his isolation.
Anthea trotted around and checked that all the doors were locked and that the pets had plenty of water. Then she fetched a carry bag from her bedroom and the cooler bag from the kitchen. She handed the cooler bag to Fred, for him to carry.
“Okay, Fred,” she called. “Into the car. It’s time to pick up your sister from her dance class.”
She closed and locked the front door and then put the two bags into the boot of her car.
Fred watched all of this. “Do I need to take anything?”
He asked that after Anthea had locked the door, so she wasn’t prepared to give him a choice.
“No, I have everything we’ll need in those two bags. Jump in the back and we’ll fetch your sister.”
Fred was quiet during the trip to the studio and Anthea was content to drive in silence. They were a couple of minutes early, so Anthea found a place to park and settled in to wait. As they were waiting, Anthea saw the SHORT minibus pull in and park. She pointed that out to Fred, and Fred recognised the name as being where Jacinta was now living.
“Is Jacinta in the dance class?” asked Fred.
“I don’t think so,” said Anthea. “Tabitha talked to the two girls who got out of the minibus and neither of them seemed to fit the description you gave me of Jacinta.”
“Oh,” said Fred. “I wonder how many people live there.”
“I don’t know, honey,” said Anthea. “I don’t think I even knew the place existed before Jacinta told us that she was staying there.”
At that moment, a cloud of teenagers in various forms of dance wear boiled out of the studio. Tabitha was in the middle of the group and immediately looked around for Anthea’s car. She spotted the car and gave a quick wave before turning to exchange hugs with all of the girls around her. That took a moment, because she was friends with many of the girls and couldn’t bear to hug some and ignore others. A separate group of older girls emerged at the same time and the two girls from earlier made their farewells and headed over to the SHORT minibus.
Eventually, Tabitha left her group and trotted over to the car. She slid into the backseat of the car and raised her eyebrows when she saw Fred sitting there.
“Buckle up, sweetie,” said Anthea. “How was your dance class?”
Once the seatbelt was done up, Anthea pulled out of the carpark and started driving while she tried to listen to Tabitha’s story.
Tabitha was talking almost as soon as she was in the seat.
“Jodie wasn’t feeling well. She normally takes our class. So we combined with the older girls. And Lorna, she normally takes the older girls, Lorna did a combined lesson with all of us. It was so much fun. Instead of doing our usual routines, she taught us the choreography for that Golden song from the Kpop Demon Hunters movie. Kpop dancing is such a different style. It’s so much fun. But the hand movements are really precise and so fast. And nearly every move is an isolation, like of your head, or your shoulder, or your hip. It’s really tricky, but so much fun. So anyway, by the end of the class we were all doing the dance at full speed and I think it looked pretty good.”
“I wish I could have seen that,” said Fred.
“Lorna was saying that they might look at including it in our next concert as a mass number with all of us and the older girls together. That would be awesome if we did that, and then you’d get to see it. We’d have to practice it more to get it right, though.”
“Cool,” said Fred.
Tabitha looked out the window, and then looked puzzled. “This isn’t the way home, where are we going?”
“It’s a nice afternoon,” said Anthea. “I thought we’d go for a drive.”
“Mu-um,” complained Tabitha. She turned to Fred. “Freddy, do you know where we’re going?”
“Nope,” said Fred. “I didn’t ask.”
She scowled at Fred, then turned back to her mother.
“Mum, you promised to tell me what’s going on after my dance class. Well, it’s after my dance class, so what’s happening.”
“You guessed right earlier, honey. It’s a surprise,” said Anthea. “I promise you’ll find out soon.”
Tabitha glared at her mother. “Grrrr.”
Anthea pulled the car into a carpark, facing into a park. In front of the car there was a soccer pitch. A bunch of youngsters were running around on it playing a game of soccer. There was a scattering of parents standing on the sidelines cheering for their kids. There was a gap in the spread of parents in front of their car, so they had an uninterrupted view of the soccer game.
Anthea pulled out her phone and looked at it, then turned off the engine. “We’re a tiny bit early, so let’s sit and relax for a moment. We can watch the soccer game while we wait.”
“So, what’s the surprise?” asked Tabitha.
“If I tell you, it wouldn’t be a surprise,” said Anthea. “Fred, those kids look about your age. Do you think any of them go to your school?”
Fred leaned forward so he could see more clearly, his seatbelt unwinding to allow him to move.
“Mu-um,” said Tabitha.
“Sweetie, there’s a reason I’m not telling you anything. It will make sense later, I promise.”
“I’m wearing my leotard, Mum,” said Tabitha. “I don’t want to go anywhere like a restaurant or visiting people dressed like this.”
“Oh, don’t worry,” said Anthea. “I’ve put a bag in the boot. It has everything you’ll need. You could take your hair out of the bun, while we wait. I think it’ll be better if it’s down.”
Fred turned to his sister. “She really did put a bag of stuff in the boot. And a cooler bag with dinner. We made a garden salad and a potato salad while you were in class.”
Somewhat mollified, Tabitha reached up and started pulling out the hairpins and ties that were holding her hair bun together.
“I need my brush to do this properly,” muttered Tabitha.
Anthea reached into her handbag and pulled out Tabitha’s hairbrush. She handed it back to Tabitha. Tabitha stared at it for a heartbeat, then took it and started brushing out her hair without saying a word.
After watching the game for a moment, Fred shook his head. “I’m not sure if any of them go to my school, or not. But that girl with the purple hair is pretty good. And so is that blond boy who is wearing number 7.”
“That’s nice, dear,” said Anthea, trying to sound interested and failing miserably.
He sat back in his seat and let the seatbelt tighten back around him.
Tabitha finished brushing out her hair and handed her brush back to her mother.
“Thanks Mum,” she said.
Anthea took the brush and put it back in her handbag.
At that moment, Anthea’s phone chimed to indicate an incoming text. Anthea glanced at the text and then put the phone away. “Okay, let’s go.”
She started the engine, and pulled out of the carpark. After driving for about five minutes, Tabitha started recognising landmarks.
“Are we going to Uncle Alex and Aunty Viv’s place?” she asked.
“Your sister is staying there while she’s house-sitting for Uncle Alex,” said Anthea. “We wanted to include her.”
“Oh, okay,” said Tabitha. “That’s good.”
Anthea pulled into the drive and parked the car. “We may as well go inside while we wait,” she said. “And Tabitha can get changed at the same time.”
They got out of the car, and Anthea opened the boot. She took out the cooler bag and handed it to Tabitha, then grabbed the other bag to carry herself. With the boot closed, she locked the car and dropped the keys into her handbag.
“Let’s go,” said Anthea.
The front door was closed but not locked. Anthea opened it and ushered her children inside before closing it again. She led them into the kitchen and told the two youngsters to sit at the table while she transferred the contents of the cooler bag into the fridge. She glanced at the clock and turned the oven onto a low heat to warm up.
With that done, Anthea turned to her children. A look of worry crossed her face but was quickly hidden.
She took a breath. “Your father and I had a long talk last night and we realised that we’d missed out on something important. We decided we wanted try and recapture that, so that this time we could share it with you.”
Tabitha and Fred both looked at her with confusion.
Anthea lifted the second bag onto the table and unzipped it.
“We wanted to go swimming with you,” she said. “Here are your bathers.”
She upended the bag and shook it. Nothing fell out. The bag was completely empty.
“I told you that I had everything you would need in the bag,” said Anthea. “I didn’t lie.”
She picked up a handful of nothing from the table and gestured as if to hand it to Tabitha.
“There you go, sweetie. These are your bathers for the afternoon.”
Tabitha was staring at her mother in shock.
Fred stood up and reached for his shirt. “Fred, wait, please,” said Anthea.
Anthea took hold of Tabitha’s wrist. “Tabitha, your father is waiting in the pool. He’s already wearing the same type of bathers as these.”
Her other hand waved the nothing in front of Tabitha. “Go easy on your dad. He’s very nervous. This goes against everything he’s been taught his whole life.”
Tabitha was shaking in disbelief.
Anthea looked at Fred. “Fred, honey, your dad’s not the only one who’s very nervous. Do you think you can support me as well as you supported your sister last night?”
Fred nodded and began to undress. Tabitha still hadn’t moved.
“Do you need me to help?” said Anthea. She took a hold of Tabitha’s jacket and held it while Tabitha slid out of it. Tabitha came alive and started slipping out of the other things she was wearing. Leotard and tights and so on were quickly discarded.
Anthea only had to slip off her shoes and slip out of her dress and she was ready.
“Oooh,” muttered Anthea. “I think I’m shaking more than Tabitha.”
Her arms had automatically wrapped around herself, one arm across her breasts, the other hand held over her groin.
“Don’t worry, Mum,” said a naked Fred. He reached up and took her hand, which forced her to stop hiding her breasts. “Everything is going to be great. You’ll feel better once you’re in the water.”
Tabitha was now ready. She glanced towards the back of the house and then looked uncertainly at her mother.
“Go on,” said Anthea. “Dad’s waiting.”
Tabitha took off running down the hallway. Fred led a nervous Anthea after her at a slightly slower pace.
Tabitha flung the rear sliding door open and ran over to wrestle with the gate. Peter was already in the water and sitting on the underwater ledge so that only his head and shoulders were above the water.
“Daddy?” called out Tabitha.
“I’m here, sweetie,” said Peter.
Tabitha entered the water with an inelegant splash and immediately started swimming towards her father. She swam with her head up so she could watch him, as if he would disappear if she took her eyes off him.
Behind Tabitha, Anthea and Fred reached the pool. Anthea took a breath and held her nose as she stepped off the edge to fall feet first into the water. Fred was tempted to do a bomb, but decided at the last minute to simply jump in and tread water to stay with his mother.
Tabitha had reached Peter and flung her arms around his neck, sobbing with unconstrained emotion.
“Daddy, I can’t believe you’re doing this. I’m so happy,” she gasped out between the sobs.
Peter awkwardly moved her body around to his side, so that she could cling to him without bumping into his privates. Tabitha’s reaction had surprised him and reminded him starkly of the reality of what he was doing. He was in a pool, while completely naked, with his completely naked young daughter. It took every fibre of his being not to immediately jump out of the pool and run for a towel.
Peter was realising that he hadn’t thought through what to do in the very real likelihood that his young daughter might accidentally come into contact with his privates. This was very different from when the same thing happened while wearing bathers. With bathers on, such contact could easily be ignored by him and not noticed by his daughter. But without bathers, he was feeling very exposed and vulnerable, not to mention his concern that his daughter might notice.
To be honest, since agreeing to this plan with Anthea, Peter had been more worried about the possibility of a natural reaction happening to him while he was exposed like this, and how that might impact on his young children. In practice, between the chill of the water and his high level of anxiety, he was beginning to think that the possibility of a reaction happening might be close to zero.
On the other side of the pool, Anthea and Fred were treading water close to each other. Fred had a big smile on his face.
“Do you see, Mum?” he said. “It’s better in the water, isn’t it?”
Anthea looked around. With only her head above the water, she did feel a lot more protected. She gave Fred a little smile. “Yes, it is,” she managed to say.
She glanced over at Peter and Tabitha. “We better see if your father needs rescuing.”
Together they swam across the pool to where Peter was sitting on the underwater ledge in the shallower section of the pool. Tabitha was clinging tightly to Peter’s side with her arms wrapped tightly around his neck. It looked a little awkward, mainly because Peter was holding her off to one side, rather than allowing her to nestle into his lap.
Anthea slid in next to Peter and pried one of Tabitha’s arms loose from her father’s neck.
Tabitha released her father and latched herself around her mother’s neck, continuing to sob.
“Mum, I’m so happy you’re doing this,” she cried.
Anthea was better able to cope with her weeping child. For one thing, she didn’t have to cope with the male “problem” that Peter was dealing with. For another thing, her maternal instincts to comfort her child completely overrode her concerns.
Fred moved around behind his father, and attached himself to his father’s back with his arms draped over his father’s shoulders.
“This is good, Dad,” he whispered. “I’m happy you’re doing this, too. It’s fun. You’ll see. Once Tabs gets over the shock, we can start to have fun in the pool like we always do.”
Fred left the group and swam over to the ladder. He climbed out of the pool and ran to the shelter where he quickly found the ball they’d played with on Saturday. He ran back and jumped into the pool with a huge splash.
Once he surfaced, he called out, “Hey Dad. Catch.” He threw the ball.
Peter almost reflexively caught the ball. He slid forward off the bench and threw the ball, then swam over into deeper water so that he could stand on the bottom and keep most of his body under water. The pair threw the ball back and forth a few times.
Tabitha was now sitting on Anthea’s lap, while Anthea sat on the underwater shelf. Tabitha had regained some control of her emotions. They were now both watching Peter and Fred play with the ball. Peter threw the ball towards Tabitha but it landed a little short. Tabitha slid forward and into the water and came up with the ball. Now all four of them played catch. Tabitha barely needed to swim, she was almost floating above the water with the excitement.
When a ball went astray, and Peter had to climb out of the water to fetch it, he quickly threw it back into the water with his back to everyone. Then he turned and scurried back to the pool with both hands hiding his groin. Nobody commented. They simply resumed the game.
A few throws later, another ball went astray. This time it was Tabitha’s turn to climb out and retrieve the ball. Nobody commented when she made no effort at all to conceal any part of herself as she did so.
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