by Joy Dettman
He mowed the top half of Henry’s block later. His mower stopped him by running out of fuel.
No lights came on in his house that night. Lori and Vinnie found him sitting in the dark on his front veranda. They gave him a sandwich and a mug of tea, and then stood around until he ate it, when he started talking about his wife.
‘Sixty years this Easter and she goes and lets me down like this,’ he said. ‘I been paying off a fancy ring for her. She always wanted a flamin’ diamond ring. Sixty years of putting up with her nagging about diamond rings and she goes and does this to me.’ This being a stroke, and according to Nelly, a stroke she wasn’t going to survive.
They couldn’t make Bert go inside, so Lori went over the road to get Nelly. She turned on Bert’s lights, then sat down to listen to him. If anyone could get him inside, Nelly would.
Wherever he’d slept last night, at daylight he was out, his chainsaw attacking the overgrowth in his driveway.
A different week that one. Every day the kids expected to come home to the news that Mrs Matthews was dead. She was on life support. Merve, Vinnie’s boss, was Bert or his wife’s thirty-second cousin. He started knocking off early and spending an hour or three clearing greenery from Bert’s driveway. In all, he and Vinnie took four loads of branches to the tip, and you could barely see any difference, and still couldn’t see Bert’s house.
Then a reply came from Mister Terrence Clay’s office. Eddy’s conniving had gained Mavis an initial consultation on the eighth of July, three months away.
*
Mrs Matthews made it to her sixtieth anniversary, on life support. Poor old Bert got his photograph in the Gazette, putting that diamond ring onto her finger, while their kids and grandkids stood behind them.
The school holidays commenced at Easter time, and this year, Mick had a paying holiday job at the bike shop. The tourists were back in town. A few school kids had holiday jobs. Eddy tried again to get work at Dick Smith. He loved that shop, but tourists weren’t interested in computers and electronics. He would have had more luck at one of the take-away shops.
Leonie and Paul caught the bus to Melbourne to spend a week with their grandmother. Cathy Howard went with them. Her married sister lived a kilometre from their grandmother’s street. Shana, another one of Lori’s schoolmates, went further. She flew to India with her homesick grandmother.
Lori went to the supermarket and was almost run over by a crazy tourist while negotiating the Bridge Street roundabout. At the best of times, it was a health hazard, and Easter wasn’t the best of times. Bridge Street fed traffic onto the bridge, and today there was a constant stream of traffic on it and not all of it tourist traffic. Every local golf enthusiast in a fifty-kilometre radius wanted to watch a handful of golfing celebrities hit golf balls, or hoped maybe to see Willama’s mayor make a fool of himself. They were playing in pairs today, the mayor playing with some overseas celebrity he’d probably bribed to come to town with an offer of free five-star accommodation at the club motel where only millionaires could afford to stay.
Dawson Street looked like a car park. Bert’s driveway cleared or not, his family preferred to park in the street. Those visiting that mess of townhouses on the corner had no option other than to park in the street.
It was close to dinnertime. Eddy was forking white pill powder into a heap of mashed potatoes when his mobile rang. People who phoned at mealtimes either don’t want to talk or are calling from overseas to con you into giving them access to your computer. Eddy answered the call but didn’t stop what he was doing.
‘You have called the number of Edward Smyth-Owen,’ he said, like a bored answering machine. Then no more answering machine voice or boredom. ‘Yes,’ he said, and he dropped his mashing fork and splashed potato onto the floor. ‘No. No. She’ll be delighted . . . Yes. Any time that suits you will be fine by her . . . Yes . . . Yes . . .’
‘Who?’ Lori mouthed.
He shook his head and took his mobile into the central passage.
Lori followed. ‘Who?’
He raised his hand for silence. ‘She’d given up all hope,’ he said to the phone. ‘We’re so grateful . . . Yes . . . Yes. Whenever you can fit her in . . . Thank you so much . . . Thank you.’
The call might have lasted two minutes but when it ended, Eddy stood for as long, staring at his mobile.
‘Who?’
‘I’ve done it,’ he said, head shaking.
‘What have you done?’
‘Hooked Mister Terrence Clay. He’s coming around here.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous?’
‘He is. Tonight.’
‘Who’s coming?’ Mick asked.
‘That Richard Gere dude,’ Eddy said. ‘Between seven and half past. He’s got to be at a dinner at eight. Shiiiiiiiit. I’ve done it.’
‘Who’s Richard Gere?’ Neil asked. He hadn’t watched that late-night fat documentary.
‘A doctor who looks like the actor in Pretty Woman,’ Lori said. ‘And Eddy has got rocks in his head.’ She turned towards the brick room’s new door, undercoated white by the company that had made it. The six-centimetre strip of timber Mick had glued and nailed onto its bottom was non-undercoated. ‘He’ll take one sniff out there and run.’
And it wouldn’t only be her sweat and the stink of her loo he’d run from. The brick room looked like a hang-out for the homeless. Its ceiling bulged, the bit over the loo was hanging down, her recliner chair was fit for the junk heap. ‘You’re stark raving mad if you think you can take any normal person out there.’
‘People who carve up bodies for a living aren’t normal,’ Eddy said.
‘Phone him back and tell him that you’ve been wasting his time.’
‘After the effort I put into hooking him?’ Eddy asked, and he reached for the jar of Xanax powder. He’d already dosed the pumpkin. He dosed it again.
‘She’ll pass out if she eats that!’
‘That’s the idea,’ he said.
They delivered Mavis’s meal at six-ten. She ate it. They watched the clock’s hands move around its face while waiting for that pumpkin to do its work, and when it did, Eddy braved that room to tell her about a Melbourne doctor, a skin specialist that Doctor Jones was sending around to see her.
‘He might be able to fix your itching disease, Mave, but to do it, he’ll need to examine you, so you’ll need to shower.’
Big chance. She’d been wearing a washed-out bottle-green tracksuit for a week and the mention of her itch had her lifting its top to scratch beneath it. She didn’t move from her chair.
‘We’ll put a chair in the shower recess so you can sit down while you shower,’ he persevered.
It wasn’t going to work. Mavis was nodding off.
They woke her up. Lori ran her a bath and Vinnie hauled her out of her chair and dumped her fully clothed into a half-full tub, liberally dosed with shampoo and Dettol. She screeched but they closed the door and left her to soak clean. She couldn’t get herself out of it. They allowed her to soak until fifteen minutes before Mister Terrence Clay was due to arrive, when Lori, dodging wet blows, removed the plug and allowed Mavis to drain.
You do what you have to when you’re the only female. You might match Mavis curse for curse, but you keep well clear of her fingernails. You might curse Henry too, if silently, because he’d had no right to only produce one female.
Lori got a semi-dried Mavis semi-clothed. Vinnie hauled her into the lounge room where he dumped her on a green chair. Lori turned on the television and found Home and Away. And after their effort Mister Terrence Clay didn’t come at seven or at half past. Most of the kids had given up on him when the rumble of a motor preceded a low canary-yellow sports car down Dawson Street.
It parked on Henry’s sweep, its driver got out, checked the numbers on Mick’s letterbox, then walked towards the veranda. Kids watched from several vantage points until Lori hunted them into the central passage. She didn’t hunt Eddy – or Vinnie. He wanted to get a better l
ook at that sports car.
That passage had always been an excellent place to listen. They heard Eddy greet his catch. ‘Mum is so grateful that you’ve taken time out of your busy schedule to see her.’
‘Mum?’ Neil hissed.
‘Shut up!’ Lori hissed.
They heard the screen door slam and knew that Mister Terrence Clay was inside their house. They heard him bulldusting, and in a bulldusting contest he might have scored higher than Eddy, who turned the television off or muted it.
‘Mum’ didn’t complain. ‘Mum’ might have been incapable of connecting her tongue to her teeth.
Eddy introduced her as Mave. Mister Terrence Clay congratulated Mave on her weight loss. He told her that very few people with her problem had the willpower to achieve what she’d achieved without medical intervention. She didn’t reply. He asked about her general health, then asked about her medication, at which time Lori stopped breathing, expecting Mavis’s ‘What bloody medication?’ but Mavis believed he was here about her under-sag disease and replied accordingly.
‘That new cream has got cortisone in it,’ she said.
Eddy, never stuck for something to say, changed the subject.
‘It was something of a miracle, watching Mum lose that weight, watching her ability to move around improve daily,’ he said.
‘Do you know your weight, prior to the commencement of your diet, Mave?’ Mister Terrence Clay asked.
No one knew, or not since Neil’s birth when she’d weighed in at around thirty stone.
He asked about photographs, obviously meaning before-diet photographs. She or Eddy must have pointed to the young Mave photograph hanging over the fireplace, which apart from the hair, no one in their right mind would have believed was Mavis. Mister Terrence Clay was commenting on it when an alien phone rang, like played a melody, which he cut short.
‘I’ll be there shortly,’ he said, then lied to Mavis about being delighted to have met her. He told her to keep up the good work, that she’d be hearing from his office, then he left. No examination. No nothing. He might have spent five minutes in the lounge room.
The screen door slammed before the kids came out of hiding. They saw Clay dodge around Vinnie to get into his car, heard the rumble of its motor, then swarmed out to watch its taillights disappear around the corner. They looked like Christmas decorations.
‘He said his office would be in touch,’ Eddy said.
‘With the bill,’ Vinnie said. ‘That car must have set him back a hundred thousand.’
getting rid of mavis
They heard nothing from Mister Terrence Clay, or not before school went back, Lori in her winter uniform, a blue tartan skirt which wasn’t long enough. She’d bought herself two pairs of black tights to wear beneath it so on the first day back she looked like everyone else.
Looks count for nothing. While Cathy and Leonie raved about the city and the tram they’d caught out to a street full of factory outlets where they’d bought brand-name frocks for half the price they would have paid at a boutique, Lori thought about pills and Mavis, who was becoming easier to live around.
Shana spoke about India and her grandmother, and how she’d been so relieved to get on the plane to fly home, she’d howled.
Every conversation was about dresses and boyfriends and planes and futures. Lori didn’t own a dress, didn’t want a boyfriend, had never been on a plane and had no future. She’d been born with a sign stuck to her forehead that said HENRY’S SOLO FEMALE. DON’T PASS GO.
She was wasting her time at school and Mr Morris knew it when he asked her how Alfred Doolittle had been delivered into the hands of middle-class morality. And who the hell was Alfred Doolittle, and what the hell was ‘middle-class morality’? They were discussing Pygmalion, which she still hadn’t read.
She was on her way to her bike, thinking about leaving school, thinking about applying for a carer’s pension, when Eddy called her name. She stopped to wait for him.
‘He’s had a cancellation. I got a voicemail message from him. He wants to do her next Wednesday.’
‘What?’
‘Terrence Clay. He wants to operate on Mavis, in Melbourne next Wednesday.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘He’ll do it at a public hospital where he donates his time to the underprivileged,’ he said.
‘She’s not underprivileged and how do you think you’ll get her down there? Call him back now, you idiot, and tell him you’ve been wasting his time.’
‘It’s fated. From the start, it was fated,’ he said. ‘Us seeing that fat dude documentary. Clay coming up here to play golf. Martin will drive her down.’
‘She’d kill him before he got as far as Bunnings.’
‘Then Donny,’ Eddy said.
Lori got on her bike and pushed the pedals fast to get away from him and his crap, but he kept on her tail, yelling his crap all the way home.
Jamesy was on dinner duty. In the main he cooked stews that were basically Henry stews but with a can of out-of-date spaghetti or beans or some weird out-of-date canned stew, which gave his meals different textures and flavours. On his cooking nights he always cooked bug stew – silverbeet. It grew wild, grew summer and winter. They ate a lot of silverbeet.
Eddy phoned Donny when the dishes were washed, because Lori refused to. As soon as he mentioned why he was phoning, Donny told him he had to work next Tuesday, which might have been true, though Lori wouldn’t have blamed him if it wasn’t. Mavis had done her best to break him after Henry died, which was why he’d moved to Albury.
She hadn’t broken Martin and never would, but the odds of him driving her to Melbourne were nil to none. He hadn’t spoken to her since a few months after his marriage, hadn’t set eyes on her in six months.
‘You phone him,’ Eddy said.
‘My battery’s flat.’
He phoned him, then pushed his mobile at Lori. He’d never had a good relationship with Martin.
She took it and could hear a television playing in the background. Martin sounded impatient so she gave him an abbreviated version of why she’d called. ‘Doctor Jones referred Mavis to a city specialist,’ she said. ‘We need you to drive her down there.’
‘You’re not getting involved, Martin,’ Miss Piggy said. She was closer to the phone than the television. Lori heard her clearly.
‘I can’t do it, Splint,’ Martin said. ‘Sorry.’
‘You can’t do it because your wife just told you you can’t,’ Lori said and hung up.
‘She’d die on the operating table,’ Mick said. ‘Doctor Jones said years ago that her heart wasn’t strong.’
‘No heart was strong enough to irrigate her fat,’ Eddy said. ‘She’s lost most of it.’ He was silent for a moment, then added, ‘He might get her down there for us. He was going to send her to Bendigo in an ambulance.’
‘For shock treatment, not cosmetic surgery,’ Alan said.
‘We could try him. And getting her back into shape will do her more good mentally than shock treatment,’ Eddy argued. ‘He’d probably like to stay involved. Remember his face the first time he saw her after she’d lost that weight?’
No one would ever forget his face that night. His glasses had almost fogged up with emotion. ‘The willpower of that woman,’ he’d said, after she’d been zapped. His weightlifters would have agreed. She’d fought off three of them for a time.
‘That baby-faced dude on television said that Clay and those others had changed his life. If they could get Mavis looking halfway as good –’
‘As if she’d agree. As if any normal hospital could handle her,’ Alan said. ‘They won’t medicate her meals.’
‘Clay knows every pill Jones has ever prescribed for her,’ Eddy argued. ‘I posted those printouts of her medical life story when I posted the referral. He knows exactly what he’ll be dealing with. And if we told her that he could get her back to looking normal, she’d want to go.’
‘You’re doing it for yourself
,’ Lori said. ‘You want a mother but one who looks like Eva, and even if you got her looking half as good as Eva, do you think Mavis would thank you for it?’
Nothing had been settled when they went to bed. Lori couldn’t sleep. She had Pygmalion, that baby-faced dude, Mavis, money and Clay on her mind. It was after midnight when she crept out to the brick room where she stood for minutes, staring down at the shape in the bed.
People are allowed to dream in the dead of night. When no one is watching, they’re allowed to think what if, like what if Mister Terrence Clay could trim her back into shape, and what if he achieved even half as much for Mavis as he had for that young dude . . .
And what if he got her looking and feeling so good she walked over to the bank and got herself a new chequebook?
*
At breakfast, a Vinnie’s porridge breakfast, he sided with Eddy about involving Doctor Jones. He would have sided with anyone who’d come up with a plan to get rid of Mavis, but his agreement and Jamesy’s was enough to have Eddy phoning the surgery, and whether he had a patient with him or not, that old dude took his call.
He was in a hurry. ‘Leave it with me, Edward,’ he said, so Eddy left it with him, left it for a day and then some before Vinnie came up with his own plan.
‘I’ll hire a car and drive her down there if you zap her good before I leave, if Bert will come for a drive with me.’
He’d been driving his boss’s work van for six months, with L plates, but needed a licensed driver in the passenger seat. Bert had a current licence; his wife was off life support. He liked Vinnie and he might appreciate a day out of that house.
An express mail envelope arrived from Clay’s office. It contained papers Mavis had to fill in and sign. Eddy filled in the spaces, Vinnie did the Mso squiggles where required and it was returned in an express mail envelope. Still no call from Doctor Jones. Eddy looked into the hiring of a car. He found out how much it would cost to hire one for a day but also that an L-plate driver couldn’t hire one. Bert, who might have been prepared to go for a drive, refused to sign his life away on a hire car.
