The Hope Flower

by Joy Dettman

  As any good teacher knows, a little information on an interesting subject will make a student hungry for more. Like Timmy, Lori had read anything she could get her hands on, and during the resurgence of the twin saga, she’d got her hands on plenty. For a time, she’d believed that the Mrs E. J. Smyth-Owen had something to do with Eva being Mavis’s sister. It was one of Eva’s letters that explained why she’d been a Mrs Smyth-Owen.

  Mr Watts believes that if we take this matter to court, the fact that Henry is still my legal husband, and that he signed documents that made me legally responsible for the twins’ welfare when they were placed in my care . . .

  Lori’s sixth year was a major learning year. At Christmas time when she received a packet of colouring pencils and a pair of school shoes instead of a doll that talked, she learnt that Mavis was an excellent liar. That same Christmas, she learnt to hate those twins. Eva posted Henry a photograph of them, dressed like the royal family and sitting on Santa’s lap, clinging to huge teddy bears.

  She’d hated them more when Henry started addressing envelopes to Masters Alan and Edward Smyth-Owen, and every one of the letters he’d sealed inside those envelopes had started with To my precious sons, and every one of them ended with Love from Daddy. To Lori, it had seemed as if those twins were Henry’s other family, his clean, well-dressed royal family that his first wife was keeping safe from his second.

  What Lori had felt for Henry hadn’t been a squirming, pitying love, but the type that makes you want to be close enough to breathe the air he expelled, the type that makes you find reasons to touch him, and wanting so badly for him to write To my precious daughter or Love from Daddy in one of the books he’d given her for birthdays. He’d written other stuff, but never Love from Daddy.

  She rolled to her back, spread her limbs and tried to slow her breathing to match the breathing of the sleeping boys, but that room full of stagnant heat wouldn’t allow her to breathe, or breathe slowly.

  It was one-fifteen by her mobile when she rose and crept across the passage to the lounge room’s open door. She could see the shape of the air conditioner, or the white of it against the dark papered wall. She glanced back towards the dressing table where she’d placed the fuse, with her mobile and wallet.

  There was little space between her single bed and the queen bed, only sidling space. She sidled, found the dressing table with her hand and felt carefully for the fuse. It was such an insignificant little thing but could mean the difference between bliss and hell tonight – if not for Mavis. Ten seconds after she pushed it back into the meterbox, Mavis would be back in the lounge room with the door closed.

  She stood for a minute, crushing the corners of that fuse into her palm, wanting to feel its power or to find her own. She’d saved that money, had shopped mean to save it, and Mavis had the audacity to call it her air conditioner. If Eddy hadn’t taken her cigarettes away when they’d put her on that diet, she would have been burning any extra money, not saving it.

  The passage boards creaked beneath Lori’s meagre weight as she crept out to the kitchen, then through it to Mavis’s open door.

  She was doing her chainsaw impersonation, and an inch at a time Lori closed that door, then a millimetre at a time she eased up the outer slide bolt. Unused in over twelve months, it didn’t want to slide into its keeper, or not until she lifted the door a little. It made a noise as it slid, but it went in.

  There comes a time when you have no choice but to fight fire with more fire. That was how they’d saved the golf club, with controlled fire. The council workers, the mayor and a few of the businessmen had cut down trees, bulldozed scrub and burnt a firebreak wide enough to defend, then for most of one day they’d defended it. The middle pages of the Gazette had been full of photographs of the blackened heroes who’d saved the golf club. A few farms had burnt. A lot of stock had died, but Willama’s Easter golf tournament wouldn’t be cancelled.

  hate

  Mavis Jean Buhler/Smyth-Owen lay on her bed hating. Hating the heat, hating the world, hating the sweat that stung the inflamed skin beneath her breasts, hating her cow-udder breasts and that nest of little bastards who’d sucked them dry then locked her away from the cool.

  She could hear that heartbeat motor pumping out cool she couldn’t get at, and she screeched to get at it, pounded on the door to get at it.

  ‘Open this bloody door!’

  They’d set up the motor down the end of the east-side veranda, between the lounge-room chimney and her brick wall, had set its back against the weatherboards so they vibrated with every thump, so that vibration would continue around the corner to her bedhead. She’d been dreaming good dreams when that thump-thump, thump-thump had stopped being dance music and woken her.

  Hated that locked door. Hated her lack of control over those bastard kids, her lack of control over her own money, over her life and the blood of her ‘womanhood’. She’d woken in a bloody bed.

  ‘Fucking bloody womanhood,’ she screeched. ‘Fucking pair of bitches.’

  Those dead bitches hadn’t warned her. That first time she’d woken in blood, she’d dressed and run down to hide behind the garage, expecting to die, howling about dying before she’d lived. The gardener found her cowering there. He’d told the housekeeper, some breed of northern European who’d spoken little English.

  ‘Is your womanhood,’ she’d said. ‘Is your promise you will have baby when you grow.’

  She’d interrupted the old bitch, expecting her to deal with the problem, but the old bitch had been too busy dealing with wedding dresses and caterers to care. The housekeeper dealt with it.

  There’d been other housekeepers, other gardeners. Mavis had learnt a lot from one of the gardeners.

  That pair of bitches tried to lock the gate after the horse had bolted. They’d locked her in her upstairs room. She’d climbed out twice before falling and buggering her ankle. They’d locked her in the pantry after that. It had no window and no light switch, or not on the inside. You can do a lot of damage in a pitch-black pantry. You can scream yourself hoarse too.

  No light in this room. Brief flashes from the television screen, and she wouldn’t have had those flashes had her aim been better. She’d pitched her clock at a commercial. Hadn’t killed it but had killed her clock. She didn’t know the time. Didn’t know for how long that thumping had been going before it infiltrated her dreams.

  She liked her dreams. It was her waking that was nightmare, her waking behind a locked door to the knowledge that the air conditioner her money had paid for was blasting its cool air on that nest of little bastards.

  She had known for years that the bantam bastard had been getting her pension. Had found out two weeks ago that he was withdrawing the money Watts paid in, on the day it was paid in. Those bloody kids thought he was Jesus bloody Christ because he spent a bit of it on them. He was getting more than a bit. She knew to the cent how much she was paid each fortnight.

  ‘It’s my fucking money,’ she screeched at that heartbeat thump, as her closed fist thumped the weatherboards behind her bed. ‘Open that bloody door!’

  ‘Shut the fuck up,’ the moron bastard moaned, but having woken him, she thumped harder.

  And he turned off her fan and television.

  Pitch dark then. No light outside that rectangle of window. Nothing. A black nothing and that thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump.

  gok

  At six, Lori woke chilled to the bone. She sat and looked at the bundle of little boys who hadn’t been prepared to touch last night but had somehow found the warmth of each other and their quilt. From her bed she pointed the remote control. The air conditioner silenced, and she snuggled beneath her own quilt until the smell of porridge seeped into a crazy dream.

  Vinnie made excellent porridge and plenty of it. He didn’t eat it from a cereal bowl. He used a mixing bowl, which he was still scraping when his boss beeped out the front at eight-ten. At eight-thirty, Lori strapped on her backpack, hunted Neil and Timmy to sch
ool, hunted Matty out to the backyard to Alan and his worms and fishing lines. On Alan’s Matty-duty days they sometimes had fish for dinner. At eight thirty-seven, her backpack on, the fuse, wallet and mobile in her pocket, Lori slid the bolt on the brick room door then got on her bike and rode. The high school was down the bottom end of town, a good kilometre and a half from Dawson Street.

  No one wanted to come home that day. Lori expected a wrecked kitchen and air conditioner, but the house was as they’d left it, the green door closed and no television playing.

  ‘She’s still stuffed from yesterday,’ Jamesy said.

  Alan’s dinner duty usually coincided with his Matty-duty days, but they hadn’t caught enough fish for dinner so he started on one of his Goks. He was an inventive cook. That was all you could say about his meals, other than that Vinnie never ate at home when Alan’s name came up on the dinner roster. Tonight’s meal consisted in the main of mouldy cabbage. They watched him trim off the mould before he chunked it. He chunked three onions and a wrinkled apple, opened a can of Donny’s out-of-date mixed vegetables, a packet of his out-of-date curly pasta, tossed the lot into the biggest saucepan with plenty of oil and water, and placed it on the stove. A few of his messes were inedible. Jamesy had named them ‘Gok’, due to whenever anyone asked Alan what the hell he’d put into the saucepan, he always said, ‘God only knows.’ Tonight’s Gok, with added salt and pepper, a few sauces and a decent dose of curry powder was . . . was edible.

  Mavis usually smelt food and came out for her share. Not that night, and when Eddy attempted to deliver it, he couldn’t open the door.

  ‘I should have removed that inside lock,’ Mick said, and that was all that was said. They had a good night. They played two videos in the cool lounge room.

  Nelly did Matty-duty on Tuesday. He was out of the house and over the road before Vinnie left for work. He loved Tuesdays. They left four slices of bread on the table for Mavis, left a banana, butter, enough jam in a jar to spread four slices of toast and two teabags beside a mug and a plate.

  The bread dried out, the teabags were where they’d left them, the mug and plate hadn’t been used, and her door was still locked when they came home. Lori went to the window, where she lifted the shade-cloth blind with some trepidation, half expecting to find Mavis dead on the floor. She was stretched out on her bed but not snoring.

  Eddy wanted to phone Doctor Jones. ‘She’s probably had a stroke,’ he said.

  ‘A lion can sleep for a week after gorging on a wildebeest,’ Jamesy said.

  ‘Snakes only need to eat every few months,’ Neil said.

  ‘She’s got water,’ Lori said, and she returned to the kitchen to start making dinner.

  She could get a minced-steak stew simmering in the time it took the boys to peel enough potatoes. Mavis on her mind, she forgot the garlic – Nelly’s cure for everything.

  The plates were spread, the potatoes mashed, the pumpkin drained when she returned to the window with a tennis ball. Her head and shoulders through the gap she tossed the ball and scored a direct hit to Mavis’s shoulder. She didn’t move.

  ‘There’s something wrong with her,’ she said to Eddy. ‘You’d better phone him.’

  Doctor Jones was at the hospital. The receptionist booked Mavis in for a home visit in the morning.

  Mick had Matty-duty so Lori swapped with him, aware that Mick would tell the truth about how long Mavis had been on that bed. She needn’t have worried. That old dude didn’t come that morning. Like Lori, he’d had enough of Mavis. It was almost five o’clock when he knocked on the front door.

  He knocked on the green door too and called her name, then went to the window, watchful for deodorant spray.

  No spray that night, no cursing, no nothing, so he stuck his head through the gap. By torchlight he diagnosed breathing, then head out, he added, ‘Catatonic depression.’

  Back when Henry had been alive, Doctor Jones had named Mavis’s every problem ‘depression’. He’d been prescribing antidepression and anti-anxiety pills to her for much of Lori’s life. He’d prescribed them when she’d refused to feed Matty, when he should have been prescribing them for Henry.

  ‘How long has she been in her room?’ the old dude asked when he was back in the kitchen, where Eddy was doing his madman dinner preparations.

  No one said ‘Sunday’, not even Mick. They could only be ninety-nine point nine percent certain that she hadn’t been out of her room since Sunday.

  ‘We got worried about her yesterday when we couldn’t wake her,’ Lori said. It was a partial truth; that was when Lori had started worrying.

  ‘We need to get that door open,’ the old dude said, and he reached for his mobile to call up his reinforcements. He was waiting for someone to pick up when Vinnie came home, still wearing his white overalls.

  ‘What’s doing?’ he asked. He wasn’t asking about every bowl they owned being on the bench or table.

  ‘Vincent,’ Doctor Jones said, eyeing him from his oversized sneakers to his shaven head, which brushed the top of the doorjamb. ‘Well, my word,’ he said, and he put his phone away. ‘We need to get your mother out of that room, Vincent.’

  Vinnie looked as if he could knock that door off its hinges with his elbow. He measured around two hundred and two centimetres in height, like six foot seven in the old measurements, and that had been six months ago, the last time Eddy stood on a chair to measure him. He’d grown out of his sneakers since, so the rest of him had probably grown – and he would have looked taller if he hadn’t taken offence to his carrot-red frizz and started shaving his head more regularly than he shaved his face. He wasn’t one of those long skinny dudes, either. He was solid from the ears down, and he looked dangerous – which he wasn’t, except on the football field where anyone who ran into him bounced off.

  ‘Brainless bitch,’ Vinnie said, then out he went to the woodheap to get the axe.

  They gave him space to swing it. It took three swings to split the board that held that old door to its hinges. A kick did the rest.

  Depression comes in a variety of forms, and as far as Lori was concerned, was a ten-letter word used to name something that could never be named. Mavis shook off catatonic and slipped into manic. She bulldozed at Doctor Jones, would have bulldozed over him if Alan hadn’t pulled him out of the way.

  The watchers watched Vinnie take her down, not with the axe, which she deserved, but with a tackle. They hit the bed together before hitting the floor, where she fought him with her fingernails and language not fit for human consumption, but anyone who decided to take on Vinnie was doomed to failure. He straddled her on the floor, got a grip on her wrists and rode a bucking, screaming bronco until Doctor Jones stabbed a syringe into a flabby thigh.

  You could see the fight go out of her, and when it did, Vinnie dismounted, as he might have dismounted a twenty-foot crocodile, like very carefully. He shook himself, went to the washbasin, washed his scratched face, his shiny dome and his arms up to the elbows.

  ‘Crazy bitch,’ he repeated then returned to the kitchen, Doctor Jones behind him.

  ‘You’re not yet eighteen, Vincent?’

  ‘End of April,’ Vinnie said.

  ‘Is Martin still in the area?’

  ‘Bungala,’ Vinnie said.

  ‘Donald?’

  ‘Albury.’ A man of few words, Vinnie.

  Doctor Jones didn’t ask where Greg was living. Everyone in town knew where that druggie mongrel was living – where Lori hoped he’d live for the next twenty years.

  ‘This can’t continue,’ the old dude said. ‘Your mother needs treatment. Do you have Martin’s phone number?’

  The kids looked at Lori. She had Martin’s number on her mobile. She wasn’t giving it up. Mavis locked in a mad house would be more ammunition for Martin’s pig-snout wife to chuck their way. If there was one person in the world Lori loathed, it was Martin’s wife – and it wasn’t jealousy or envy either. It was pure personality.

  Also, it
wasn’t only Miss Piggy and her family knowing that Mavis had gone mad that would be a problem. It was the outsiders, the teachers, the kids at school knowing.

  ‘We wouldn’t have troubled you except we thought she might have had a heart attack,’ Lori said.

  ‘She’s never liked the heat,’ Eddy said.

  Doctor Jones wanted to examine his patient while she was defused and to do that he needed light. They turned on the power board, donated the desk light from the lounge room, which was perfect when you were working on the old computer but was like a cruel spotlight on Mavis. It showed the atrocious mess her loss of weight had left behind. While she was sitting, while she was standing, a few of her sags were supported, but flat out on the floor, every part of her looked as if it was melting.

  He knelt on a pillow to draw blood from inside her elbow and stayed down to strap his blood-pressure cuff around the crumpled flab of her left batwing. He shook his head at the figures showing on his machine, then pumped up that cuff again while questioning Lori about Mavis’s general mood.

  ‘Normal,’ she said, which wasn’t a lie. Her mood had been normal for Mavis. He asked about the Xanax pills. ‘She takes them from time to time,’ Lori said, which also was no lie. She took them in Eddy’s mocha coffees when necessary, such as the four days of the bathroom and the morning of the air conditioner installation.

  ‘The antidepressants?’ he asked. Lori shook her head. ‘Blood pressure?’ Another shake of her head. ‘We need her back on her blood pressure pills,’ he said.

  ‘We’ll try to,’ Lori said.

  ‘You’d be fifteen, Lorraine?’ He’d delivered her. He knew her given name, which never sounded as bad when he said it.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Doing well at school?’

  ‘I get through,’ she said, thinking of the Spanish Inquisition. ‘I’m in year ten this year.’ And she was going to fail maths, and probably science, which she’d missed again today.

  He started writing on his prescription pad, just the usual, then one unusual.