"Pet" by Catherine Chidgey

An audio book.

Justine is visiting her demented father in a home, with her daughter Emma. The helper Sonia looks familiar.

Justine was school age (at a Catholic school) when her mother died. She's mildly epileptic. Her best friend was Amy, whose mother came from Hong Kong. Amy gets picked on. They fall out. Her favourite teacher was Mrs Price whose husband and daughter died in an accident. She became teacher's pet. When she collected Mrs Price's prescription, the chemist says he can no longer provide the pills. They're morphine. Justine know that morphine's still in her house, so she gave the pills to Mrs Price. We get brief forewarnings of trouble ahead. Her father owned an antiques shop. He drank. Justine helped there. Mrs Price offers her a cleaning job. Things are being stolen at school. Amy's suspected by her schoolmates. Justine did nothing to help Amy, though she had evidence that Mrs Price was stealing. Her father started going out with Mrs Price.

I like the cryptic/poignant messages in invisible ink that her mother left around.

Amy fell off a cliff. She left a note whose contents we don't discover until later. Amy's parents blame Mrs Price and also Justine.

When Justine was first pregnant, she had an abortion without telling Dom (who wanted a family). The second time she had the child and didn't regret it.

The stealing starts again. She and Dom are friends at school. Dom's parents are campaigning Pro-Lifers. There's a locked room in Mrs Price's house. When Justine finds the key and looks in, she sees lots of the stolen items. She has a siezure and passes out, either inside the room or after she locked up again. She's found by Mrs Price. With the marriage a week away, she's told she's going on a honeymoon cruise with them. She makes the headmaster look into Mrs Price's locked room. It's all but empty. She sees Amy's note, which makes her think that Mrs Price killed Amy. Mrs Price tells her that she (Justine) killed Amy then had a siezure - Mrs Price says she made it look like suicide to save Justine. Justine kills Mrs Price in self defence.

Sonis looks familiar because she's Mrs Price's daughter.

I liked the writing. A little too much of the plot (the empty spare room, the identity of Sonia) is predictable.

Other reviews

• Catherine Taylor (Chidgey’s examination of sexual politics is ruthless, with the girls crudely ranking each other in terms of prettiness and thinness and avidly watching beauty contests on TV. At school, the children are primed for a morbid fascination with death, from the cruel treatment of the classroom’s pet salamander to the shocking events that play out later in the novel. Lessons on the Indigenous history of Australasia, meanwhile, simply reinforce colonialism. Amy, from a Chinese family, is systematically bullied and ostracised. ... Less successful is the rather camp acceleration of the plot into high-octane thriller territory, and the book’s too-neat denouement, set decades afterwards in 2014. Despite this, Chidgey’s grasp of the slipperiness and self-delusion of memory – from Justine as an increasingly unreliable narrator, to her father’s later dementia – is faultless.)
• Meredith Boe (The novel makes many connections under the theme of memory. Justine’s mother lost memories as she was dying, and thirty years after the heart of the story takes place, Justine cares for her father who has dementia. Justine doesn’t remember what happens right before a seizure, and because stress can cause them, some of the book’s most pivotal moments happen within these spaces of lost memory. )
• Hephzibah Anderson ()