Chapter 5: Gareth Chancelor, Friday Evening

I don’t think the bank got their money’s worth from me that day. I couldn’t concentrate on my work and I had to check each job I did three times to catch all the mistakes.

During my lunch break I called my sister, Maggie, and told her all about what had happened last night. She made all the right noises though she did suggest I might have been in the minority by refusing Jen’s offer. She thought that a lot of fathers probably wouldn’t hesitate to accept if they were in my position. I’m not convinced. I don’t know for sure. I suspect that in most families it wouldn’t come up so the father wouldn’t even think about the question. Maybe some of them might fantasise about something like that with their daughters but in the same way I occasionally fantasise about movie stars. It’s fun to think about but nobody would ever expect anything like that to happen.

I do know that some fathers molest their children. I’m sure that happens more than gets reported. The idea of that sickens me. But I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about having a grown daughter practically throw herself at you asking for – or even demanding – sex. I can’t imagine that happens often. I reckon that in this day and age, by the time a girl is grown, she should’ve got over any childhood fantasies about her father and found a boy her own age to lust after.

Maggie also said that it was another example of Estelle trying to ride over the top of me and that she was glad that I was finally taking a stand. Maggie has never really been a fan of Estelle and she has always been encouraging me to be much more firm about putting my point of view and make sure that my opinions are taken seriously. The way Maggie talks, you would think I was really henpecked, but it’s never been like that. I’ve always stood up for myself when something important has come up. I just don’t sweat the small stuff.

I spent the afternoon getting more and more uptight about a confrontation with Estelle. I’m not really a confrontational sort of guy. I much prefer to smooth out the troubles and find ways for everybody to be happy, but I was starting to realise that this meeting wasn’t going to be like that. To be honest I had no idea what I was going to say or even what I wanted to gain. I’ve learned from work that this is not a good way to go into an important meeting. So I grabbed a sheet of paper and started making notes about what I wanted to happen.

I had arranged to slip away from work a little early because of Jen’s party but the opportunity to sit down and have a face-to-face talk with Estelle had gained a higher priority. When I finally folded and tucked the paper into my pocket a disappointingly large amount of it was still blank.

I stopped at the shopping strip on the way home and called into the Pharmacist. I waited until my friend, Zac, had finished serving a customer and then sidled up to him.

“Well?” I said.

He handed me the packet of Jen’s pills. “They aren’t placebos,” he said.

I sighed in relief. “That’s good news.”

“Not so good, actually. They aren’t birth control pills either.”

“What?”

Zac handed me a set of printouts, stapled together.

“I had to go to the hospital and use their equipment to get this. Skip all the scientific garbage. Go to the last page and read the summary.”

I flipped over as instructed and read. Zac waited silently.

Once I had finished, he raised an eyebrow. “Any questions?”

Estelle’s car was already in the carport so I knew she’d beaten me home. I took a deep breath and headed inside. The first thing I did was go looking for the girls. I thought they would be downstairs in the big basement area that we converted into an open recreation room. The house is on the only hill in Emmerton. It’s not much of a hill either, it’s more of a rise in the ground level. The highest it gets is about level with the top of the rest of the houses. Everywhere else in and around Emmerton is flat. Our house sits on the little hill so that the front door is level with the road which runs along the top of the hill, but you go downstairs into the rec room and it opens out at the back at ground level where we have a pool and decking and so on and so forth. I called down the stairs and heard their response so I went downstairs to greet the girls. I tried covering my nervousness with jokes and a breezy confidence – I don’t know how successful I was.

The rec room looked ready for the party. The girls were sitting together on one of the sofas with their arms draped casually around each other. I quickly found out that Bonnie knew all about the events of last night and was squarely in my corner. Except that Bonnie was adamant that Jen still wanted to have sex with me, despite all the trauma of last night. I still couldn’t wrap my head around that so I put her off with some double talk.

I thought maybe it was better if Estelle and I could talk without the girls listening in so I asked them to stay downstairs while we talked. Then, with a heavy heart, I went upstairs for what was likely to be the most difficult conversation I’ve had for a very, very long time.

Estelle was sitting at the kitchen table with a coffee mug in front of her. The coffee jug was still half full. I grabbed my usual mug and poured myself a coffee as well. Then I sat down opposite Estelle with a sigh. I sipped my coffee and looked at Estelle.

Estelle waited until I was taking a second sip of coffee before she started talking.

“You said we had to talk. I’m here. You’re here. Why aren’t we talking?” she snapped.

I swallowed the coffee in my mouth and carefully put my mug down.

“Estelle, do you understand why I’m upset with you at the moment?”

“You’re upset with me?” she seemed genuinely surprised. “You’re the one who completely ruined everything. I don’t know why you’re blaming me.”

“Estelle, I know about these,” I said quietly. I tossed the packet of Jen’s pills onto the table.

Then I dropped the chemical analysis next to it.

She launched into a verbal assault that was astonishing in both its ferocity and its complete randomness.

She started talking at a mile a minute about everything under the sun. As far as I could tell, according to her, everything was my fault. It was an extraordinary rant and I sat back and watched her go. I would usually be trying to mollify her when she was like this but today I sat back and let her go.

After the rant had gone on for some time without so much as a pause to draw breath, I tried to interrupt and get things back onto the topic at hand but that only set her off again. Estelle isn’t normally like this, but it happens occasionally and when it does there isn’t much I can do to stop her.

When it became obvious that she wasn’t going to wind down anytime soon, I stood up and walked out of the kitchen. All that did was cause Estelle to raise her voice and keep yelling. I got half way down the hall and then I stopped myself. I was doing what I always do. I was running away from the problem. That wasn’t going to cut it this time. I turned around and walked back into the kitchen. I sat back down at the table. Estelle didn’t even pause. The only sign that she knew I’d even moved was that she was now shouting loud enough for me to hear from the bedroom.

I heard a step behind me and saw Jen and Bonnie come into the room.

“So, how’s the big discussion going?” Jen asked me with a wry expression on her face. I could barely hear her under Estelle’s shouting.

“Not so good,” I answered. “I think I need your help.”

“Sure Dad,” said Bonnie. “Let’s go.”

The girls sat down at the table and looked at Estelle.

As soon as Estelle saw the girls, she wound down her rant and looked confused.

“Hey Mum,” said Bonnie. “Do you know what I think?”

I suspect Bonnie meant it as a rhetorical question and intended to keep talking but Estelle launched again.

“Of course I fucking know what you think,” said Estelle, pointing a finger at Bonnie. “You don’t like my rules. We have rules for a reason and you never worry about whether the rule is right or not. You see a rule and decide you have to argue about it.”

That was only the start, of course. Estelle kept going and going, having a spray at each of us in turn. It was bizarre to say the least. The f-word came out several times. I’ve never known Estelle to swear in front of the children before, let alone swear at them, so I was even more shocked.

Jen saw her pills sitting on the table and picked them up. She looked at me in surprise, trying to figure out why they were in the kitchen. I flipped the analysis over to the last page and pointed to the summary. She read through it and her face showed total horror.

She looked at me. “Is this for real?”

I nodded at Jen. “Absolutely.”

I glanced over at Estelle who was still ranting – I suppose I was expecting to see her frothing at the mouth or something. The only thing I could say for sure is that Estelle appeared unconcerned that Jen and I had started ignoring her. Bonnie, on the other hand, was glaring at Estelle with undisguised fury.

Bonnie abruptly stood up and went over to a drawer that contains odds and sods. She pulled something out and went to stand behind Estelle. Estelle ignored her because she was getting stuck into me at the time.

“Dad,” said Bonnie in a low voice. “Will you hold her hands?”

I looked curiously at Bonnie as I tried to figure out what she was up to.

Bonnie glared at me. “Dad! Do it now!”

At that point I decided to just do it. I didn’t know what Bonnie was up to, but if she had some idea for getting through to Estelle then she was one up on me. I reached over the table and took a hold of both of Estelle’s wrists. She was flapping her hands around as she talked so it wasn’t as easy to do as it sounds but I managed. Then I brought her hands down and laid them flat on the table between us. Estelle stopped talking immediately and stared down at her captured hands in surprise.

That was the moment Bonnie was waiting for. She reached around from behind Estelle and slapped a wide piece of Gaffer tape over Estelle’s mouth. Bonnie held Estelle’s head still while she smoothed the tape into place. Then she let Estelle’s head go and stepped back. That Gaffer tape is strong. Estelle’s mouth was effectively sealed shut.

I watched what was happening in a combination of surprise and horror. I remember wondering how our family had come to this. And the most shocking thing was that I was helping.

Estelle was making a muffled screaming sound from behind her closed mouth. She whipped her head around, trying to dislodge the tape but that didn’t work, of course. She was struggling to free her hands as well, but I held on tight.

Bonnie then got Jen to take one of Estelle’s wrists from me and hold it down beside the leg of her chair. Bonnie wrapped several layers of tape around wrist and hand and chair leg. That wrist wasn’t coming loose in a hurry. Then they repeated the same exercise with the other wrist. Finally Bonnie wrapped a long piece of tape across Estelle’s chest and around behind the back of the chair. She did a couple of complete circuits, pinning Estelle to the seat.

I was sitting there, watching in astonishment as my ten year old daughter effectively gagged and immobilised my wife. I think I was in shock. I simply sat there and watched it happen. I even contributed by pinning Estelle’s wrists to the table so they could get started. A lifetime of staying calm stopped me from doing anything else but sit there and let it happen. I know I should have stopped Bonnie. I know I should have let Estelle’s hands go so she could free herself. But I didn’t. I didn’t do anything.

When they were done, Bonnie and Jen went back to their seats and sat down. Estelle was still trying to scream and yell through the gag.

“Mum, shut up,” said Bonnie, rather forcefully. “If you don’t quit making that noise, I’ll shove my dirty socks into your mouth and tape it shut again.”

Estelle went bright red at the proposed humiliation, but she did stop making the noise.

Bonnie nodded in satisfaction. “I’ll try again. This time you can’t shout at me so maybe I’ll get to finish.”

Bonnie bit her lip and then started again as if the previous interruption had never happened.

“Do you know what I think? I think that you don’t listen to us, any of us. Today has been ridiculous but even normally you don’t listen. You assume you know what we think so you make your decisions based on that. Sometimes you’re right. Sometimes you’re wrong. When you get it right, nobody complains so everything is okay. When you get it wrong, if I complain, you assume I’m being a whiny little kid and make it sound like it’s my fault. Dad and Jen don’t complain so much – not about the small stuff anyway. But if it’s something big, they ignore you and do their own thing and then you get angry and assume they’re doing it to annoy you. Well they aren’t. They’re simply doing what they want to do but you don’t know that because you don’t listen.”

Estelle started trying to speak through the gag. She may’ve been trying to point out how Bonnie was wrong, but we’ll never know because we couldn’t understand her.

Bonnie’s only reaction was to kick her shoes off, reach down and strip the socks off her feet. She dropped the two little socks on the table. I could see little rings of dirt around the ankles where her shoes had been. Those socks had done hard duty all day and showed it.

The socks being dropped onto the table silenced Estelle. She stared down at the socks and then at Bonnie with her eyes bugging out. Then she looked over at me and then to Jen and then back to me. She didn’t see much sympathy from any of us.

“Things have to change around here,” said Bonnie. “And the first thing that’s going to change is that you are going to listen to us – really listen. And if we have to keep you taped into that chair until you start, then that’s what we’ll do.”

Jen leaned forward and took over from Bonnie. “You need to know how angry everybody is. Dad, me, Bonnie, we’re all angry and most of that is directed at you. Nod your head, Estelle, if you understand that all three of us are angry with you.”

Estelle had been looking at Jen as she talked. Now she glanced around the table at me, then at Bonnie, then back to me and then back to Jen. She tentatively nodded her head.

“That’s good, Estelle,” continued Jen. “Now we’re getting somewhere. Nod your head if you know why we’re angry with you.”