Someone! Aha!
‘Whose place?’
‘You don’t know him.’
Him. The masculine, singular pronoun. Aha again. Push her a bit further.
‘Well, maybe Voula and I could get the pizzas and a couple of movies and put Damien and Soph to bed, and then when you came home we could still go out.’ There was some talk of how Ben Nguyen might be going to have a party.
‘Well . . .’ Scratch scratch scratch. ‘I mightn’t be home in time for that . . .’
Bullseye!
‘You’re going on a date!’ Callie teased, like Soph and Damien teased Callie when she (once in a blue moon) did.
‘Nonsense!’ Mum dumped the pan in the rack and pulled the plug out. The water gurgled away nastily, bits of grey egg hanging in filaments on the surface. ‘Must do something about this drain . . .’
Callie wasn’t about to let her mother change the subject. ‘Mum’s got a boyfriend, Mum’s got a boyfriend . . .’ She danced a Damien-chant. ‘Here, this has still got a bit of egg around the edge!’
‘Stop that! And scratch it off with your fingernails, what do you think they’re bloody for?’
‘Pick your nose with?’ Callie suggested, and got flipped with the sponge. Still, Mum was smiling as she attacked the trail of egg that ran from one end of the kitchen to the other. Damien’s method was to crack the egg on the south side of the bench, dribble it up to the north end, tip it in the bowl, then dribble the shell back to the compost bucket, over in the east of the kitchen. Repeat seven times. Then whip contents of the bowl vigorously, finally slurp the bowl westwards, towards the stove.
‘Honestly, I don’t know why you bother,’ Callie said, as she said every time it was Damien’s turn to cook. There was such a thing as taking feminism too far.
‘He’s got to learn,’ as Mum also said every time. ‘I’m buggered if I’m going to raise a boy who can’t lift a hand. I mean, think of his wife.’
Callie tried, but couldn’t. Anyway, all this was just a diversionary tactic.
‘So what’s he like?’
‘Who?’
‘Someone.’
Mum seemed mystified. Callie nudged her memory. ‘You know – “Someone”. The someone. The one and only someone. The one you’re planning to spend the night with on Saturday.’
As Callie said it, she realised the implications. She’d just meant ‘spend time with’, but now sharp specific questions came into her head. Would they use a condom? Mum was always going on at her. Would he . . . Stop it, Callie.
‘Stop it, Callie,’ Mum said reasonably. ‘Fair’s fair. I don’t pester you about your boyfriends.’
‘Don’t get much chance,’ Callie muttered, finding herself suddenly swamped by a nasty wave of jealousy. To punish herself, she scraped the egg-gunk out of the sink with her hand.
‘Snap out of it, Cinderella.’ Mum held the compost bucket for her. ‘Now, will you or won’t you? Because if you won’t, I’ll send the kids over to Kaye’s.’
It really was important, Callie could see. She rinsed her hands, and now she felt all kind and motherly. My little darling, out for her big night, I hope he’s nice to her . . .
It’d been a long time since Mum had gone out with a man, and longer still since she’d had a boyfriend. As Mum said, not many blokes wanted a woman with three children. Now Callie came to think of it, there hadn’t been anyone Mum had really fallen for since they’d left Damien and Soph’s dad.
‘Sure,’ she said. ‘I’ll tell Voula.’
Tuesday, Mum went on a diet: one hard-boiled egg divided between two brown Ryvitas, with tomato on top and a lettuce leaf on the side.
‘Here, do you want to lick the spoon?’ Callie offered as she served up the macaroni cheese.
But Mum wouldn’t be tempted, and ate standing up at the bench, then dashed off to bed with a book till all the melty-cheesy smells had gone out the window.
On Wednesday afternoon when Callie came home from school, The Dress was draped over the kitchen stool, with the biscuit tin on top, and a note stuck onto the top of the biscuit tin:
Dear Cal, Could you please take this to the Dry Cleaners for me. Tell them it MUST be back by Fri arvo AT THE LATEST. (They’re shut Sats.) Will be late tonite – aerobics – Have defrosted a bol sauce (in sink) – just do some spag, and lettuce for greens – don’t worry about me.
Love, Mum.
ps Make D have a bath and eat his lettuce!!
pps Don’t forget to keep the docket!!!
Callie picked up the garment. It was brown and black and cream, with a low waistline, and was made of some silky material. It was known in the family as The Dress because it was the only one Mum had. She wore it to weddings, funerals, christenings, job interviews, Speech Night, and the annual office party. A hand-me-down from Kaye’s posh sister-in-law, The Dress made Mum look taller and slimmer, and generally more swish than a single mother of three. Yet Callie didn’t know if Mum was making the right decision. It’d look a bit overdone if the date turned out to be a bowl of noodles at the Saigon Palace around the corner.
Honestly, why didn’t she ask him where they were going, Callie fussed as she grabbed a couple of biscuits and hurried out the door with The Dress.
‘It’ll be back by this time tomorrow,’ the woman at the dry cleaners reassured her. ‘Don’t worry, love!’
Callie remembered Mum’s note: ‘Don’t worry about me.’ She knew Mum just meant about the spag, not to cook any for her, but it was the sort of thing Callie always said to Mum. Don’t worry about me: when Callie was off to a party and hadn’t arranged a lift home. Don’t worry about me: when a TV ad about teenage drug use or road accidents came on . . .
‘I’ve lost the docket already!’ Callie panicked.
‘In your purse, love,’ said the dry cleaning woman. ‘Now don’t you worry . . .’
‘No,’ Callie agreed. And bought herself an icecream on the way home to remind herself that she was the child and Mum was the mum.
She boiled up the spag and heated the sauce, lost the battle of the lettuce and bribed Damien into the bath with the promise that she and Soph would do the washing up.
‘Why me?’ Soph complained. ‘Just because I’m a girl! It’s not fair!’
‘It certainly is not,’ Mum agreed, arriving home in her tracksuit and starting to potter about with lemon-grass tea. ‘Damien can do yours tomorrow.’ But then her militancy turned to flusters. ‘Did you take The Dress? When’ll it be back? Have you got the docket?’
‘Yeah,’ said Callie. I am not, I am not going to get into a fuss about this. Honestly, the woman is infectious!
But later, when Damien’s light was off and Soph was reading her last chapter and Callie and Mum were sitting over another pot of lemon-grass, Callie found herself voicing her doubts.
‘You’re right!’ Mum said. ‘Oh Cal, you’re so right!’
And on Thursday afternoon when Callie got home there was a note on the fridge:
Might do a bit of late nite shopping – don’t bother about tea – will bring something.
Love, Mum
Callie had already picked up The Dress on the way home. It shimmered inside its plastic wrap like a just-hatched cicada. Callie hung it on Mum’s door.
Of course, Mum didn’t even notice it. She bustled in with a bag of barbecued chook and potato salad and coleslaw, hiding the other bag beside the dresser as she whipped the dinner onto the table. ‘Do a bit of lettuce and tomato for me, will you please, Cal? No dressing.’ And she let the kids watch some stupid game show instead of the ABC News.
This time, as soon as Damien and Soph’s lights were off, Callie was ready.
‘Well, young lady . . .’ she said, mimicking Mum when Mum was mimicking the Wicked Stepmother. ‘Just what’ve you got in that bag?’
Mum was shy, but at the same time only too eager to show off her spoils. She brought out the David Jones bag, and pulled out a pair of jeans.
DJs? Callie thought. If only
she’d asked, I’d have sent her to the discount place! But Mum already had her work slacks off and was modelling the jeans around the dining table. Unlike Callie, Mum was short and a bit plump, but they looked OK, even if they did drag on the floor.
‘Course I’ve got to take them up a bit!’ Mum forestalled criticism. ‘But tell me truly. Do they make me look fat?’
(Mum, you are fat, well, a bit, and if you look fat, it’s because of you, not the jeans . . .)
‘No.’
‘Sure?’
‘Sure I’m sure.’
So Mum hopped up on the table and Callie got the scissors and cut off the last two inches of the legs. And Mum hopped down and took the jeans off and got out the cotton and started hemming, just in her knickers.
‘After all,’ Callie went and spoiled it, ‘if he thinks you’re fat, then he’s not worth worrying about . . .’
Mum stopped. ‘So they do make me look fat!’
‘No they don’t!’
‘Well, why did you say it?’
Because that’s the sort of thing you say to me when I’m going out and I’ve got pimples and . . .
‘Just keep hemming. They’re great.’
Anyway, Callie thought as she unpacked her History assignment sheet, I don’t know that I want you to look good. What if he’s a creep, and he moves in, and I hate him . . .? She tried to remember what it’d been like when Mum had started living with Damien’s and Soph’s dad, but Callie had only been five then, so it probably hadn’t meant much. But now she suddenly saw the neat pattern of the family’s life thrown out of kilter. Four people, after all, was a solid, manageable sort of number. Like in the Chinese history they’d done, there was the Gang of Four. And even the Famous Five only had four people in it. At the moment, there were two castes or classes in the hierarchy of the family: her and Mum, and the kids. Whereas if he came in and made it five – Callie knew what’d happen. There’d be him and Mum, and the kids – and then her, by herself, all alone, with no one to back her up. And Mum wouldn’t need her for company any more, wouldn’t let her stay up late, gossiping and playing music . . .
Mum bit off the cotton and stuck the needle into the reel. ‘Cheer up, it might never happen.’
Callie quickly rearranged her face. ‘What?’
‘Whatever you’re worrying about.’
‘I am not worrying.’
‘Good.’
But now that Callie wanted to avoid the topic of Saturday night, Mum brought it up again. ‘I was thinking, you and Voula can sleep in my bed, and when I come in, I’ll have your bed. That’ll save Voula from sleeping on the couch.’
You mean, that’ll keep us out of the way, and the couch will be empty if you bring him home for coffee and canoodling . . .
OK, Mum had started it – ‘What’s his name?’
Callie’s mother seemed suddenly to need to put her CDs in order.
Callie could see her mother mouthing the alphabet. H-I-J-K-L . . . Billie Holiday. Janis Joplin. Chrissie Lennox.
‘What’s his name?’
Finally . . .
‘Roger . . .’
Callie tried to get an angle on it. Roger . . . Roger . . . Roger the tax-dodger! He’d be on more than a hundred thousand a year, no risk. A man in a suit! A man in a blue pinstriped suit with a bit of a beer-gut! No, a wine-gut, and he’d play squash and go jogging to keep it down. Sleaze, Mum . . .
Oh well, at least he wouldn’t want to move into this place. And Mum’d be sure to reject him on ideological grounds, sooner or later. Callie studied the topics for next week’s assignment. They were doing a unit on urban development. Talk about bor-ing!
‘Cal . . .’
‘What?’
‘Nothing.’ But Callie’s mother looked pink now, as if she wanted to keep on talking.
It’s that stage of being in love, when just saying what colour garbage bin they have keeps you happy, Callie thought. Better ask her something. ‘Where’d you meet him?’ Mum never went out, except with her women mates.
Mum gave up on sorting, dumped Janis on loud on the CD player and shyly murmured, ‘Work . . .’
Uh-uh, a wine-gutted social-worker jogger on fifty thousand a year. Mum worked behind the counter at Centrelink, telling old-age pensioners where to get a bus pass, helping school leavers fill out their first dole form, advising invalids how to get the rent subsidy. Mum saw herself as a subversive in the system. And now she’d fallen for some jogging bureaucrat . . .
‘You’d like him, Callie,’ Mum volunteered.
Callie was very busy, choosing her topic. ‘A case study of the history of concrete in Australia.’ That sounded suitably masochistic. ‘Don’t expect me to look after the kids tomorrow afternoon,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to go to the library. And can you turn that thing down!’
Mum jabbed at the switch and Janis died in the middle of asking the Lord to buy her a Mercedes Benz. ‘Pardon me for breathing,’ Mum said, as Callie always said when Mum yelled at her. And she flounced out of the room before Callie could ask her the difference between concrete and cement.
Concrete (said the dictionary in the library the next afternoon), adj. 1. constituting an actual thing or instance; real; a concrete example. 2. concerned with realities or actual instances rather than abstractions: concrete ideas . . .
(But ideas were what Callie was trying to avoid.)
4. made of concrete: a concrete pavement . . .
(Yes, I knew that . . .)
n. 8. an artificial stone-like material used for foundations etc., made by mixing cement, sand, and broken stones etc., with water . . .
(OK, OK, but what’s cement?)
Cement, n. 1. a material used for making concrete for foundations . . .
. . . v.t. 8. to unite by, or as by, cement: a friendship cemented by time . . .
(Not if I can help it . . .)
Eventually Callie worked out that concrete and cement were like one of those horrible philosophical things that the kids’ dad used to bamboozle her with. ‘All As are B but not all Bs are A’, or however it went. (Soph and Damien’s father taught philosophy at university.) Concrete was cement but cement wasn’t necessarily concrete . . .
Concrete poetry, the dictionary suggested. That sounded better. She imagined a big concrete (cement?) mixer whirling out poems. My luv is like a red red . . . no.
Or what was that thing you read about the Mafia doing – giving someone a concrete overcoat. She imagined Roger in one, lying at the bottom of the harbour.
And so before Callie had actually found anything, it was time for the library to close. ‘Here are some books that may be useful,’ said the librarian Callie had asked for help when she’d come in. ‘Just time to stamp them. Have a nice weekend.’
When Callie got home, Kaye had arrived with a bundle of tops, and she and Mum were in the front bedroom, playing dress-ups.
‘What do you think, Cal?’ Kaye yanked a T-shirt a bit further down over Mum’s hips. ‘Don’t you think it suits Jan?’ The T-shirt was black, with lacey bits around the edges.
‘Very slimming,’ Callie said in her sarcastic voice.
Mum took her seriously. ‘Do you think so?’ But she whipped the T-shirt off. It was like when Callie asked Mum about something, and Mum told her she looked nice, and Callie immediately knew that whatever-it-was was exactly what she didn’t want to wear. ‘I think it’s a bit young for me,’ Mum said. ‘Could you check the roast on your way through, love?’
After tea, Callie lay on her bed in the room she shared with Soph, and put her headphones on, so she couldn’t hear the murmur of the girls next door. Despite her diet, Mum had had a couple of beers. ‘You’ll be sorry tomorrow,’ Callie thought at her.
And she was, Callie could tell. Black coffee and a poached egg for breakfast, and not even an attempt at the crossword. Sunglasses to go to the supermarket, and as soon as lunch was over she gave Soph and Damien money to go to the pool.
‘That’ll tire them out nicely for you
and Voula,’ she said virtuously, and in case Callie sneered she whipped out her purse again and sent Callie to the video shop. ‘Get a movie for yourselves, and one for the kids,’ she said. ‘But no watching them till I go.’
The local video place was just a back shelf of the sports store. Hopeless. Callie finally settled on The Blues Brothers and Casablanca. Hard to keep a couple of old favourites down. On the way home she watched a cement (concrete?) mixer for a while, pouring poetry out onto the driveway of the new bottle shop. A bit up near the footpath had been smoothed and was nearly dry, so she delicately drew a heart with her finger and wrote Mum L Roger 4 Ever TRUE.
‘Hey, whaddaya think you’re doing!’ The concrete-smoother swung round and shook his trowel at her, and she ran all the way home like a little kid.
Mum was in a bubblebath with a cup of tea and the review pages. The radio was tuned to Classic FM. ‘You know,’ Mum said when Callie came in to use the toilet, ‘I don’t really care if tonight doesn’t work out. It’s just been so much fun to get ready . . .’
But Callie just pushed the flush button and didn’t believe her.
Five o’clock: countdown.
Mum got out of the bath and couldn’t find the hairdryer. Her hair was long and fine and it looked dreadful unless she blow-dried it immediately. She and Callie tore the house apart till they found the dryer under Soph’s pillow.
‘I’ll kill her I’ll kill her, this time I swear to God I’ll kill her!’ Mum muttered. Already the straggles had set in.
‘When’s he coming?’ Callie yelled over the scream of the dryer.
‘What?’
‘Coming to get you!’
‘What? Oh . . . I said I’d meet him at that pub near work.’
‘Didn’t want him to see us, eh?’
Mum turned the dryer off for a second. She looked a bit apologetic. ‘Well . . . You know what Damien’s like.’
‘What?’ Damien asked as he came in the back door. ‘What’m I like?’ He hadn’t bothered to change after the pool, and was just in his togs, with a soaked towel clutched around him like a cape. His skin was goosey and withered.
‘Cold,’ Mum said. ‘Cal, run a bath for him would you? Yes I know you’re not dirty, but you’re – just get in the bath!’ She turned the dryer on again to drown him out.
Listening to Mondrian Page 8
