The Hope Flower

by Joy Dettman

  About The Hope Flower

  From the bestselling author of Mallawindy and the Woody Creek series comes a story of love and survival.

  Lori Smyth-Owen isn’t your average teenager – as you’d expect from the only girl in a family of twelve. Or they were a family, until their father took his own life to escape his bed-bound wife, too obese to leave her room.

  But for Lori and the remaining brothers, there is no escape from their volatile, mentally unstable mother. They raise themselves away from the gaze of the authorities, realising that though abandoned, they are now in charge. They can control everything, including their mother’s food intake.

  In time, their mother emerges, after losing two-thirds of her body weight. But does she bring with her the seed of hope for a better future, or will all hell break loose?

  ‘The texture of the writing as well as the mind-boggling plots give her books a fatally addictive attraction’ Saturday Age

  Thank you Nicole Harris, a stranger

  who made me smile. You have been

  looking over my shoulder, urging me

  on for most of this crazy year.

  contents

  About The Hope Flower

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Contents

  Chapter 1 – junk mail

  Chapter 2 – matty-duty

  Chapter 3 – mrs nguyen

  Chapter 4 – bendigo

  Chapter 5 – improvements

  Chapter 6 – roman holiday

  Chapter 7 – love from daddy

  Chapter 8 – hate

  Chapter 9 – gok

  Chapter 10 – the door

  Chapter 11 – mister terrence clay

  Chapter 12 – getting rid of mavis

  Chapter 13 – peace

  Chapter 14 – the marital bed

  Chapter 15 – the motel

  Chapter 16 – the waiting

  Chapter 17 – that wet saturday

  Chapter 18 – greg

  Chapter 19 – normal

  Chapter 20 – eleven

  Chapter 21 – nipples

  Chapter 22 – the funeral

  Chapter 23 – ashes

  Chapter 24 – the lucky dip

  Chapter 25 – she used to dance

  Chapter 26 – ants

  Chapter 27 – the post office

  Chapter 28 – progress

  Chapter 29 – diamonds

  Chapter 30 – lisa

  Chapter 31 – plan b

  Chapter 32 – mister terrence clay

  Chapter 33 – feral

  Chapter 34 – designer genes

  Chapter 35 – freedom

  Chapter 36 – eliza doolittle

  Chapter 37 – war

  Chapter 38 – the hosing

  Chapter 39 – futures

  Chapter 40 – henry’s replacement

  Chapter 41 – holidays

  Chapter 42 – e.t.

  Chapter 43 – mail

  Chapter 44 – the final straw

  Chapter 45 – the borrowers

  Chapter 46 – no more mavis

  About Joy Dettman

  Also by Joy Dettman

  Copyright

  Newsletter

  junk mail

  It was printed in large red block letters on white vinyl, POST NO JUNK MAIL, but for the second time this week, Mick’s new letterbox was stuffed. She was standing beside the green bin, sorting the genuine mail from the junk when she heard his footsteps on the east-side veranda. There was shade around there in the afternoons and at 108 Dawson Street, shade had been hard to come by this past week. Today’s sky was white hot and tomorrow’s was going to be worse.

  ‘If there’s a Bunnings amongst that lot, don’t chuck it, Lori,’ Mick called, as she was about to drop his precious catalogue. He could lose a night in drooling over power drills and angle grinders. He could lose a weekend in wandering around the massive green shed that company had recently opened out on the highway. There was no space left in town to build anything new.

  ‘There should be some council by-law prohibiting the stuffing of letterboxes with junk when their owners go to the trouble of buying and sticking on signs,’ she said, then the lid of the bin slammed down and she joined him in the shade of the veranda. ‘They’ve got by-laws for everything else.’

  ‘The temperature hit forty-three today at two, according to Nelly,’ Mick said, looking longingly at Nelly’s house. She lived opposite in a little white house surrounded by greenery and green and grey striped outdoor blinds, then last Christmas she’d bought herself an air conditioner. Nelly wasn’t young and definitely wasn’t a summer person. Nor was Mick. He was a redhead and they hadn’t evolved to deal with Willama summers.

  ‘That motor must drive her mad,’ Lori said. The cooling half of Nelly’s air conditioner was attached to her lounge-room wall and whisper quiet. Its motor wasn’t quiet. She’d had it installed in the shade of her front veranda, diagonally opposite Lori’s bedroom and it drove her mad at night – maybe mad with envy.

  She’d sorted four envelopes from the junk, two business sized, two card shaped, then, perched on the edge of the veranda in a little shade, she checked the back of one of the business sized, which appeared to be genuine mail until she saw Vickery Real Estate stamped on it.

  ‘There ought to be a law about that too,’ she said and returned to the green bin to toss it in with the rest of the junk mail.

  Mick had replied to the first of Vickery’s letters. It had been about a cash buyer, interested in purchasing their house. He’d wasted a stamp on posting it before they’d found out that identical letters had been delivered to every house in their section of Dawson Street. It was real estate fishing, that’s all, like if you drown enough worms you eventually hook a fish.

  Vickery’d hooked Mrs Dawson. For all of Lori’s life that old lady had lived alone on the far corner in a well-cared-for old house surrounded by trees and shrubs and lawns. Everyone had expected a family to move in when she’d moved out, but along came umpteen trucks and bulldozers and a tree-mincing machine, and within days, her house, trees and lawns had been carted away in the trucks. Six double-storey townhouses now stood wall to wall on that corner block, and a whole community of strangers and little kids lived where one old lady used to – and they parked their spare cars and a truck in the street.

  The second business-sized envelope was genuine and by the feel of it there was more inside it than a Commonwealth Bank statement.

  ‘It’s come,’ she said, ripping her way in. They’d been sweating on a new bankcard. Their old card was due to expire on the eighth of March.

  ‘Yellow,’ Mick said, his hand reaching over. She removed the card, stuck to the computer print-out with blobs of silicon, then handed him the letter. He’d read every word of it, then file it. She had all she needed.

  The two card-shaped envelopes were addressed to her; she didn’t need to open them to know who they were from. Donny’s had a stamp on it. He lived in Albury. Martin lived on a farm half an hour away, but he worked most days in Willama and would have hand-delivered his card at lunchtime – and there was a fifty-dollar note inside it.

  ‘I could have chucked that out with the junk mail!’ she said.

  ‘Which might teach you not to chuck everything,’ Mick said.

  ‘I’ll bet you fifty bucks that most people do. I’ll bet you too that a ton of important mail gets chucked every week.’

  ‘The bank says we can continue using the same PIN,’ he said.

  ‘They’d have people protesting in the streets if they made everyone change their PINs every time they issued new cards,’ she said.

  Buy yourself something nice, Martin had written on his card – as if she went anywhere to nee
d something nice. Donny had written Have a good day – like every supermarket employee was trained to say, Have a good day. He’d enclosed a twenty-dollar Woolworths gift voucher, which would have meant more to his pocket than Martin’s fifty. Bricklayers made a ton more money than supermarket employees, plus Martin paid no rent and he wasn’t paying off a car.

  She returned to the bin with the envelopes and Donny’s card, not because she liked him less than Martin but because the large 15 on its front was silver glitter and there was more glitter inside it. A lot of people have phobias. She had a phobia of anything that reminded her of Christmas tinsel, which might have been irrational but nonetheless was real. Even touching the gift card made her skin crawl, though she didn’t pitch it. She took it across their dead lawn to the garden tap and to the hose permanently attached to it. It had a gun head, and the water spraying from its gun today was hot enough to make a cup of tea. She sprayed it at the sun until it felt cool enough to wash the glitter from her hands and card, then because Mick looked red hot, she gave him a spray.

  The little kids, who’d been playing in a small blow-up pool down the end of the veranda, ran to join in the game so she gave them a spray before handing the gun head to Timmy, only because he wasn’t demanding it. He turned it skyward to rain on them and she returned to Mick, who was appreciating the humour of Martin’s now wet card. He always gave humorous cards, unless his wife bought them. She would pick up the first card she saw.

  ‘Would it have killed him to call in after work and give it to me in person?’ she asked.

  ‘It might have,’ Mick said.

  She unzipped her uniform pocket, removed her wallet, slid the new yellow card in beside the old blue card, then slid the twice-folded fifty and Donny’s gift into a second slot.

  ‘What are you going to buy with it?’ he asked.

  ‘A new uniform,’ she said, giving her skirt a tug. It didn’t cover the required amount of legs that wouldn’t stop growing. ‘Crank-tank got stuck into me again about it.’

  Mick smiled. Crank Tank, Miss Tankard, had been cowering Willama’s high school students for twenty years, and was nothing to smile about. Mick didn’t have a lot to smile about but he did it often and every part of his face smiled. He had beautiful eyes, blue in some lights, green in others, and his long lashes were wasted on a man. Also, he’d missed out on the curse of the frizz, and the redhead’s freckles, or all bar a light sprinkling across his nose.

  There were more redheads than dark heads in the Smyth-Owen family. Lori was one of the dark ones, but had copped the curse of the frizz. There was nothing to be done with it other than shear it off or allow it to grow long enough to tie back. She’d chosen the long option. Each morning she wet it, combed it back hard and held it back with an elastic band. The rest of it exploded into a bunch of frizz when it dried.

  Neil, eight, with the carrot-red frizz and freckles, had claimed the hose, and as three bike riders turned into the driveway, he gave them a spray. Jamesy was as dark as Lori but his hair had less frizz, the twins were an auburn red, no frizz. They’d done the shopping today, because it was Lori’s birthday. On birthday nights, someone always shopped for chips and dips and Coke and some sort of cake.

  ‘Your teabags are still not on special,’ Alan reported as he continued down the drive. Eddy, his twin, who was carrying the bread and knew not to crush it, dropped his bike and two shopping bags to take off after the hose bearer.

  Until last September, he and Alan had looked identical, or to other than family they had. Eddy now wore his hair in a man bun, which made life easier for Alan. In personality they were the direct opposite of identical – as if when their original cell had split into two, the gene containing the morality DNA had all gone Alan’s way.

  You could have a bit too much of that gene. At times Alan and Mick had too much of it. Donny had far too much of it, though having none at all made Eddy hellishly hard to live with at times. He had a brain like a walking computer but not a skerrick of space left on his hard drive to download common sense – which was Aunty Eva’s fault, not genetic.

  Matty, just gone four, the youngest of them and currently wailing for his turn with the hose, was the reason Mick hadn’t gone to school today. There were five Smyth-Owens at the high school and four days a week one of those five took a sickie to look after him. They’d tried him at a childcare centre but he’d screamed blue murder for a week, and when Lori told the woman who ran the place that he wasn’t coming back, she’d looked relieved. He was a wilful little bugger.

  She tossed him over her shoulder, copped a spray from Neil, yelled at him to turn the hose off, then walked Matty’s wail down the driveway to the backyard.

  From the front, their house looked like a place people might have cared about. Its paint was new, its front yard and verandas were kept clear of junk. Their backyard was a different story. The woodheap’s sprawl began where the driveway ended, which was convenient for their wood man. He could back his trailer straight in, unload and drive straight out. The laundry shed, directly opposite the woodheap, had never been introduced to paint and was too far gone now to make that introduction. Mick had given up attempting to hold its boards on with normal nails. He glued them on now with liquid nails.

  They had a rotary clothesline behind the laundry and six raised garden beds in a row, with something growing in every one of them. The tomato plants looked close to death but were still producing, as were the exhausted zucchinis. They always had onions and carrots and usually lettuce. Mick was the main gardener. His vegetables may not have looked as good as those sold at the supermarkets but they were free.

  In the bottom east-side corner of the backyard, beneath an overhanging peppercorn tree branch, where Henry might once have attempted to prop up the back fence with a wrecked wardrobe, a mound of junk had grown. The old mattress from the queen bed now propped up that crumbling fence. If they’d had finicky neighbours, they might have complained about it, but the old couple who lived behind them rarely ventured into the chaos of their own backyard.

  Most of the residents down this end of town were as old as their houses. The Smyth-Owen horde was out of place and had been now for sixteen years, since the original owner of 108 had died of old age, according to Nelly, who had been born in her house sixty-two years ago so knew everything there was to know about their end of Dawson Street. She knew why Henry had been able to afford to buy 108 plus the vacant block next door. The land down the end of their street used to be flood prone.

  It was a good old house, had been surrounded by verandas until Henry had the kitchen extended. Lori could remember the old kitchen, when there hadn’t been enough space in it to swing a cat. That extension had absorbed a third of the back veranda and was now their most live-in-able room, due to its south wall being seventy-five percent louver windows. They caught any breeze that was blowing.

  They used to get a cross breeze in through its east-side back door and out through the west-side sink window until Martin decided to practise his bricklaying skills on bricking in the remainder of the back veranda. Step out that back door these days and you were hit in the face by his brick eyesore – a boil on the bum of a grand old lady, according to Nelly. It was a suppurating boil at the moment, due to Martin having compounded his mistake by installing a second loo in the corner – and no ventilation, or none other than one small window that had probably started its life in someone’s bathroom. As the boys trooped inside with the shopping, Lori walked down to that useless little window where she lifted the corner of its makeshift shade-cloth blind.

  Mavis was behind it, sprawled on her recliner, her bare feet propped on her tiny dinner table, her legs spread so she could see the television screen between her feet. She’d placed her pedestal fan so it blew directly on her.

  During the last two years, she’d lost around two-thirds of her body weight. She wasn’t slim but apart from her sags, was human sized.

  Kids don’t spend a lot of time considering the consequences of their
actions, or Lori and Eddy hadn’t when they’d decided to put her on an enforced diet. She’d been dying of obesity, according to Doctor Jones, so they’d done something about it – done it the only way they could. Had done it for very different reasons too – Eddy because he believed he could turn water into wine, Lori because she’d known what would happen to the kids if Doctor Jones was proven right.

  When you take a person’s cigarettes away from them and then cut their daily calorie intake by eighty percent, it doesn’t make them happy, but it works. They’d given no consideration at all to what was going to happen to Mavis’s leftover skin when its supporting fat melted away.

  She’d developed a severe case of deflated balloon syndrome. Every inch of her had crumpled and sagged. Her upper arms were swinging batwings, her cheeks had sagged down to her jowls, her jowls to her neck, neck to her boobs, boobs to her belly, belly to her knees, and her bum had to be seen to be believed. The last time she’d showered, she’d slipped on the wet vinyl while stepping out of the bathtub, which meant that Lori had seen the lot, up close and very personal.

  Hauling her tonnage around for so many years hadn’t done Mavis’s joints a lot of good. Once she was down, there was no way she could get herself up. Lori hadn’t been able to get her up. She’d ended up dressing her on the floor so she could call Vinnie in to lift her. And clothing her had been like clothing a wet jellyfish.

  Mavis hadn’t showered since. There were consequences to that, too. The heat caused her to sweat, sweat irritated the skin disease she’d developed beneath the worst of her sags, which meant she spent half of her life scratching – and didn’t care who was staring at her when she scratched – or where she scratched.

  The bankcards, the blue and the yellow, belonged to Mrs M. J. Smyth-Owen. Once a fortnight she received a pension and allowances for her dependent kids. In all, she’d produced thirteen, except Thirteen had been born with brains enough not to take her first breath. Mavis had about as much motherly instinct as one of those turtles you see on television documentaries that haul themselves onto land, dig a hole, lay a few hundred eggs, then haul themselves back to the ocean for a feed.