by Joy Dettman
Gave me a lot of complexes, Martin thought, though he rarely said what he thought between these walls and didn’t that evening. ‘You’ve excelled yourself, Sylvia,’ he told his mother-in law. ‘It’s a beautiful piece of lamb.’
She was taller than her daughter, weightier, but scared stiff of her. Cook, cleaner and laundry maid, Sylvia Kelly was expected to keep her mouth shut, and was safer when she did. It hit him then, like a horse kick to his lower stomach, that he was well on his way to becoming his mother-in-law – or Henry, safer when he kept his mouth shut. Head down then, he ate. Until Sylvia opened her mouth again and put her foot in it.
‘Don’t let your brother waste money on hiring a car, dear. Mine could use a good long run.’ It certainly could. She’d done twelve thousand kilometres in it in three years, though it was the wrong time to mention that fact.
‘He’s not going to Melbourne in your car, in my car or in a hire car, and if he does then we’re finished,’ Karen warned.
She’d wanted sex without a condom two nights ago but was threatening eviction tonight. He filled his mouth so he couldn’t reply, and Sylvia should have followed his lead.
‘All I meant, sweetheart, was that it would be foolish for them to hire a car when mine will be sitting in the garage.’
Her chair crashing to the floor, Karen was gone, as was her apologetic punching bag. Reg continued his meal. Martin didn’t. He excused himself and took his plate out to the kitchen where he ate the last of a perfect meal while listening to Karen toning up her verbal muscles on the punching bag that never swung back.
Sylvia found him stacking his plate in the dishwasher. She took charge of it, told him to go to Karen. ‘She’s very upset, dear.’
He went upstairs, knowing what was expected of him, to crawl for an hour, then they’d have sex, and he wasn’t in the mood for either. There’d been times recently when he’d been certain that Karen started arguments just to get him into bed without a condom. Vinnie’s window did it, though at the wrong time of the month. Tonight was probably the right time, and if a kid was ever born to him it wouldn’t be by default.
The top floor of the house was their ‘apartment’, three rooms and a bathroom, no kitchen, no laundry. Their bedroom wasn’t large, nor was the room they’d furnished as a private sitting room. The last of the three was spare, earmarked in recent months as a nursery. Martin owned little in that house other than his clothing and a large flat-screened television, bought so he could watch the football while they had their anti-football nights downstairs. He turned it on and sat flicking the remote until he found a nature show that was becoming interesting when Karen came in and turned it off at the power point.
‘I’m watching that.’
‘We need to talk,’ she said.
‘We’ve talked. I’m not giving in. You’re not giving in,’ he said and he got out of his chair to turn on the power.
‘Turn that thing off!’
‘Sit down and watch it. You might learn something.’
‘You’re not going to Melbourne, Marty.’
‘I said I’ll go, and I’ll go.’ He kept his voice low. His boss had been responsible for the great acoustics in this house, though he’d built it to Reg Kelly’s plan. Five years ago, Martin thought, which could seem like yesterday or twenty years ago. That was when he’d met Reg Kelly’s daughter, while he’d been shovelling mud, when she’d been a flirty little blonde, home for the school holidays and flaunting her city merchandise in tiny shorts and bra top.
The first time he’d taken her out she’d taken her bra off, more into action than conversation back then. He’d thought that he’d fallen head over heels in love. She’d had a streak of jealousy a mile wide, had hated his friends, but he hadn’t thought much of her bunch either, and who’d needed friends? They were in love, or had been for the first years, had been getting along okay until she decided that she wanted to give her parents a grandkid.
At some stage of the night the documentary ended and one of the Rocky movies started. He slept in the chair – and woke to the early morning news. The house sleeping, he turned off his television, crept downstairs and out via the laundry door. A few early birds, two cowed dogs and umpteen moron sheep watched the red ute drive away.
He didn’t miss his mobile until lunchtime. He’d had it last night. It would be jammed between the cushion and the side of the recliner, and might remain hidden until he got home. He had a peaceful day without it, and when he packed up his tools, he didn’t want to go home to that house and her and his message bank full of her. So he went home instead, home to where he’d never received a kiss of greeting, where no one had ever said ‘love you’, but to where pleasure oozed from the half a dozen faces that greeted him when he walked in unexpectedly.
They herded him into the room he’d built, which didn’t look a lot like the room he’d built. ‘Christ,’ he said. ‘What happened to my ceiling?’
‘It’s been falling down since you glued it up,’ Lori said. ‘Bert fixed it and Vinnie painted it.’
‘Who put the lights in?’
‘A dude who knows you. He had to run another wire back to the fuse box.’
They’d moved the washbasin down behind the partition he’d once planned to build. They’d painted his multicoloured bricks a pale yellow, had hung a mirror. With the overhead light and a plastic shade, their en suite looked like an en suite.
‘Power points too. That must have cost you.’
‘He said he’d charged us mate’s rates,’ Mick said.
‘And I’d hate to be his enemy,’ Lori said.
Vinnie led him out to look at the window, still leaning against the loo wall. ‘Tell them it’s doable,’ he said.
‘Anything is doable. You’d need to support the rafters. They’re sitting on bricks.’
‘Bert knows about stuff. He said he’d give us a hand,’ Mick said.
They discussed Bert over dinner, or discussed his wife, discussed Jamesy’s stew and his silverbeet. No one mentioned Mavis.
Fifty percent of the eyes around the dinner table watched Martin expectantly when he searched his share of silverbeet for foreign bodies – and found a slim slice of sultana one of the kids had added to it. That trick was an old one, and after identifying it, he told the little kids about the night he’d found an earwig in his share.
‘That’s why we call it bug stew,’ Lori explained.
‘I don’t like bug stew too,’ Matty said.
Martin laughed when Vinnie started clearing the table. He had a unique method that required multiple slices of bread. Each plate was given a wipe, with bread, the bread dispatched, the cleaned plate stacked on the sink and another selected for cleaning. No one hurried Vinnie, just watched half a loaf of bread disappear.
Eddy turned the conversation back to Mavis. Martin listened, wondering if any one of those kids cared about her, or if caring for her had become a bad habit they were unable to break. He glanced at Neil. He was going on for nine, Martin’s age when Henry sold the caravan. There’d been four younger kids by then, Mick newborn, Donny, scared of his own shadow, Vinnie, making no attempt to talk and Greg, a three-year-old, and the only one of those kids Mavis had given a damn about – and Martin had known why, and hated her for it.
Henry had never attempted to justify what she’d done but on a few occasions he’d attempted to explain it.
‘She was looking good and sounding totally sane when I was down there,’ Eddy said.
‘Due to her near-death experience,’ Jamesy explained. ‘She grabbed hold of Jesus’s shirt tails as he was pushing her back from the pearly gates. One touch and she turned into Saint Mavis, according to him.’
‘It’s not just according to me, smart-arse. She talks to her roommate. And you should have seen the way she interacts with the nursing staff.’
‘Which reminds me,’ Martin said. ‘Karen’s mother said we could use her car on Saturday. I’ll have to do the driving, though, Vin. My name is listed on her insurance
policy.’
Picking Mavis up would mean Vinnie missing his football match. ‘No need for me to go then,’ he said. ‘Eddy knows his way around that shithole better than me.’
‘You must have spent twelve months down there,’ Martin said.
‘Washing bloody cars, not driving around the street in ’em,’ Vinnie said. ‘I got to go. Got to tell my coach I’m available.’
Martin watched him go and thought of Greg, the brains behind that duo who’d taken off for the city when they should have been at school. Greg had ended up in prison. Vinnie was on his way to becoming the next Willama football hero.
And me? Don’t answer that, Martin thought.
He drove home after ten and only the dogs greeted him. The kids had pressed a carton of eggs on him as he was leaving. He broke the lot into the dogs’ bowls – and they licked his hands in appreciation of their late supper.
His in-laws were in bed. Karen’s car wasn’t in the garage. She’d be at the local, showing him how little she cared that he hadn’t come straight home from work. He showered, got into bed and was asleep when she jumped him. It isn’t easy to refuse an uninhibited woman when she’s going for your most vulnerable parts, but she smelt of alcohol and cigarettes, so he held her off.
‘Did you drive yourself home in that state?’
She was uninhibited in more ways than sex when she’d been drinking. ‘Who do you think you are to question what I do? You were nothing until I picked you up out of the gutter. You had nothing, and if not for me and my family, you’d still have nothing because that’s all you’ll ever amount to. Nothing.’
‘And you’re a drunk,’ he said. ‘Sleep it off.’
Her parents would have been awake by the time he headed back to town, or to six kilometres out of town. His mobile told him the time was two thirty-five when he parked his ute beside Sean’s parents’ elderly caravan. In recent months he’d spent a few nights in it. He might have spent the first eight years of his life in it. Sean’s father bought his van at around the same time Henry had sold his. It could have been Henry’s. Kids don’t remember details, except the pump over the sink and the red laminated table that used to fold down to make a bed, and Mavis and Henry’s double bed, still hidden behind a curtain, a different curtain. He could remember the orange and blue floral that had shielded kids’ eyes but not their ears. He’d learnt a lot in that crowded table bed.
He slept the remainder of that night behind green curtains, slept heavy until Sean’s mother woke him. She would have seen Old Red from her kitchen window. He straightened the clothing he’d slept in, ran his fingers through his hair, then opened the door and was greeted with a pat on the cheek.
She wasn’t fat or slim, wasn’t young or old, didn’t dress well or badly, was who she was, day in and day out, and to Martin she’d been an oasis of sanity since Sean’s tenth birthday party.
‘Same old same old, love?’ she asked.
‘Same old same old,’ he replied.
‘You were too young to tie yourselves down, you silly little buggers,’ she said. ‘Come in and get some breakfast into you. You’re fading away to a shadow.’
He hadn’t eaten at her table for a few months, a kitchen table, not as big as the kids’ but always room for one more at it. Six Dobsons sat around it that morning, Mum, Dad and four of their five kids. Sean, their only son, had started his bricklaying apprenticeship the same year as Martin, with the same boss. They were still with him.
Like his mother, Sean was the type you ended up spilling your guts to. He’d heard about Mavis’s heart attacks and cosmetic surgery, so his family had also heard about it. That was the way they were. They were close-lipped, though. They hadn’t spread the news all over town.
‘I’m picking her up on Saturday morning,’ Martin said, tucking into eggs and bacon. ‘Sylvia offered to lend me her Commodore.’
‘I ought to get a lift down with you and see Jan’s unit. She’s been at me since she moved in to get down there,’ Sean’s mother said. Janet was the one Dobson who’d got out of Willama, was one Dobson Martin didn’t want to see, or felt safer not seeing. He’d hung around with her at high school. They’d been together until – until Karen.
‘I’m not planning to stay there long,’ he said. ‘Just down and back. Young Eddy is coming with me. He knows the city.’
The trip home might go easier with Sean’s mother sharing the rear seat. Mavis had always been able to put on a pleasant face for outsiders. So that was the plan on Thursday morning. Martin had a good day until he drove home and heard the weather forecast for Saturday.
Lori texted at eight. Eddy’s found a motel five minutes from the hospital. If you drive down on Friday night he says that you can pick Mavis up and get home before the storm hits.
Then Sean’s mother phoned and suggested a similar plan. She’d spoken to Jan. She had two spare beds for him and Eddy. ‘I’ll share with Jan,’ she said. Her call started Karen’s storm.
‘If you go anywhere near that moll, then don’t come back to me,’ she warned. She hated Jan, hated the Dobsons and anyone else Martin had known before he’d known her.
He was standing in the kitchen watching Sylvia unload the dishwasher when a set of car keys almost clipped his ear, hit a cupboard door and landed on the tiled floor near Sylvia’s feet. She picked them up and placed them on the bench.
‘And you get it back here by midday on Saturday, and go anywhere near those Dobson deadbeats and your life won’t be worth living,’ Karen said.
‘Is it?’ he asked.
He could have refused Karen’s keys but refusing them would get Reg involved, and one way or another Reg would make certain that Sylvia’s Commodore remained in the garage. Also, the Honda was a nippy little car, and in city traffic, you needed nippy, and it had a built-in GPS – but insufficient space in its rear seat for Mavis and Sally Dobson.
It was close to nine when he phoned her and apologised. He phoned Lori then and asked her to ask Eddy to book accommodation at the motel. ‘Tell him we’ll leave when I finish work,’ he said.
*
At four-thirty on Friday, Martin changed out of his work clothes in the unit he’d earmarked as his own the day he’d first seen the plans. There were four units in the block, well distanced by double garages, and from day one he’d wanted the rear unit. It had more garden space and it could have been his. He had a good deposit and had already spoken to the bank about getting a loan.
By five he was on his way to Dawson Street. There were traffic lights now at two intersections, but in his lifetime that was about all that had altered in the main part of the town – that and the Bridge Street roundabout. He got through it, crossed over the railway lines to the east side of town, an old area, a stagnant zone until a couple of years ago. It was changing now. Old houses were disappearing and being replaced by new, or by units. In a month or two he’d be working on a block of six units behind Bert’s house, boxes on top of other boxes. He smiled at the thought of buying a second-level rear box so Karen and Mavis could wave to each other from their bedroom windows.
A left turn into Dawson Street. Until a year ago, that corner had been greenery and flowering shrubs and roses reaching over and through a white picket fence. It was a solid block of grey townhouses now, identical townhouses, tossed together fast by a city developer.
They’d sold, and for big figures. He knew one couple who’d bought there. The other buyers were strangers. There was work in town for those who wanted it. Every year Willama’s population swelled, while the small surrounding towns died. Bungala was dead, Woody Creek was dying. Sean’s father had been born there. He’d got out early. A few of his relatives hadn’t. For two years, one of his brothers, who wanted out, had been attempting to sell his relatively modern house, and for a pittance.
Down this end of Dawson Street progress hadn’t yet pushed its way beyond that corner. As Martin cruised towards 108, he named most of the weatherboard houses still squatting on their quarter-acre blocks i
n defiance of progress. The Thomases were in their sixties. They wouldn’t sell. Mrs Davis lived alone. She might. Pat and Ron Collins wouldn’t. They’d inherited that house and done a lot of work on it. Mrs Wilson lived alone, as did Mrs Roddie, as did Spud Murphy and now Bert. Henry’s block, wide, long and tauntingly vacant was between Bert’s tree-hidden house and Henry’s.
The day they’d moved in it had looked in worse condition than it did today. That rabble of kids, led by Vinnie, had painted it, painted its roof too. Christ only knew how one of them hadn’t fallen off and broken his neck.
He glanced at Nelly’s house as he pulled in to the kerb out the front of 108. As a kid, it had seemed right to him that the smallest woman in the street should live in the smallest house. He’d outgrown Nelly in primary school, outgrown her in height. She had the heart of a giant. He’d asked her once why she had no kids of her own and she’d told him that she’d never found the time to look for a man who deserved her.
‘You’ve got an extra,’ Alan greeted him.
Martin turned to his voice. He’s been expecting Eddy but it looked as if both were coming. Both had overnight bags. He wasn’t displeased. Eddy was still something of an unknown quantity.
‘He lost the toss,’ Eddy said, throwing his bag into the back seat, then sliding into the front passenger seat. No discussion, and no argument from Alan on the seating arrangements. He slid into the back with the bags.
‘Lost the toss for the front seat too?’ Martin asked.
‘He’s got the maps,’ Alan replied.
the motel
Eddy’s knowledge of the city and his downloaded maps of the suburbs had been made redundant by technology. Karen’s GPS led them direct to the motel, where he’d booked a twin room. He was grateful for the technology. Having spent a lot of time claiming to know the city like the back of his hand, Eddy hadn’t been looking forward to having his knowledge put to the test.
