by Joy Dettman
They’d left Willama at five-thirty and were unpacking their bags at the motel by nine-forty and Eddy was only interested in a shower. They’d had a reasonably easy drive but he was sweating. His nose didn’t appreciate the smell of his sweat.
He claimed the bathroom while Martin locked the car and Alan tested the television. The water was still running when one of them knocked on the door. Two minutes later he unlocked the door, deodorised and dressed for bed in gaudy boxer shorts and a t-shirt.
‘Any hot water left?’ Martin asked.
‘Plenty.’
Two beds in the main room, a double and a single, and Alan, un-showered, already in the double. For most of their lives the twins had shared a room, though never a bed. The thought of crawling in beside his twin seeming incestuous, Eddy peeled the quilt and sheet back from the foot end and chose a pillow.
‘You watching that?’ he asked. A cop show was playing.
‘No,’ Alan replied. He pointed the remote and as the television silenced, he rolled to his side and settled his pillow for sleep. Eddy slid between the same sheets and turned his back on the stink of Alan’s feet and the rattling of a small refrigerator.
He wasn’t going to sleep. It was late enough now but he was still seeing roads, still attempting to relate them to his maps. They’d had one near miss. Eddy had expected to die headless but the Honda stopped bare centimetres before it went under the back end of a transport.
Martin’s shower was fast. He turned out the light and felt his way to the single bed. Eddy had learnt a lot about him tonight. He’d learnt that like Mavis and Vinnie, Martin could string together a worthy bunch of expletives. He’d learnt too that he was shit-scared of his wife. When they’d stopped at a town to eat, he wouldn’t allow food or drinks in the car. Hadn’t wanted them to mar his wife’s upholstery.
Eddy had met her, as had the rest of them, out at the kerb. She’d been in the ute that day and hadn’t got out of it. Back then he hadn’t blamed her. Lori had. She’d named her Miss Piggy before the ute was out of sight and she hadn’t used her given name since.
Tossing and turning now from the single bed and a sigh or two. Eddy couldn’t turn, not unless he wanted to smell feet. He was on his back, attempting not to stare at a green light he assumed to be a smoke detector when Martin whispered.
‘Anyone still awake over there?’
‘I’m still seeing roads,’ Eddy replied.
‘I’m still hearing that Yank voice telling me where to go.’ The GPS spoke with a Yank accent. ‘Any idea of the time?’
Martin didn’t wear a watch. Eddy did. Eva had bought matching watches for his and Alan’s twelfth birthdays. They had lights, and for a second, the meagre glow of Eddy’s lit the room.
‘Ten fifty-eight.’
‘We’ll need to get away by seven-thirty. How far are we from the hospital?’
‘Five kilometres.’
‘How’s your bed?’
‘It would be better if the fridge wasn’t in my earhole.’
‘Can you turn it off?’
They didn’t need it on. It rattled when it started up, rattled when it turned off, and when it turned off, you listened for its start-up rattle. It needed levelling, so Eddy got out of bed to level it.
‘It’s in an alcove and it’s got no wriggle room.’
‘Pull out its plug,’ Martin suggested.
‘I can’t find a plug.’
Martin got up, turned on the bathroom light and together they walked the fridge out of its tight space. The plug was behind it. They pulled out two plugs, one of which turned off the television’s standby light. They couldn’t kill the smoke detector light, or the outside light glaring in though their window.
‘What’s the definition of motel?’ Martin asked.
‘Short-term accommodation for travellers,’ Eddy said. ‘Old Alice made me look it up once. It didn’t mention comfort.’
They were on the corner of two highways, so the growl of traffic was constant, though more soothing than disturbing to Eddy. He’d grown up with that growl and hadn’t known how much he’d missed it until his time as an unwelcome guest in Watts’s home. Willama was dead silent at night, except when Spud Murphy’s dogs started howling.
He dragged up a length of quilt to wrap Alan’s feet, turned to his preferred sleeping side then attempted to settle his mind.
‘You’re their toy,’ Alan had said when he’d been returned unwillingly to St Kilda. ‘You’re not real. Nothing is real down here.’
He’d received real letters. Every week or two an envelope had landed in the letterbox with Alan’s name on it. Eddy, who’d never received a letter in his life, had tormented the hell out of him about his diseased letters. A few that arrived had looked diseased.
He’d read them when Alan hadn’t been around. He’d read every word about ‘Mick’, about ‘Matty’, about ‘Mavis’ – names that had meant nothing to him. He’d read about a ‘rehab centre and a new brace’. Hadn’t known why ‘Mick’ had needed a new brace. Hadn’t known Nelly or Lori. Just names on paper to him and he’d told Alan so.
‘They’re not fake like you, and as soon as Mick gets home, I’m going home,’ Alan said.
‘Just try it, Sticksville, and I’ll dob.’
‘You would too, you dobber. That’s why I’m going, because you’re a dobber and no one up there dobs.’
It was the first time Eddy had been called a ‘dobber’. It wasn’t the last. When you were being given the third degree by old Alice’s snapping teeth, it was easier to dob fast and get it over with.
He hadn’t dobbed when Alan started planning his escape. He’d blackmailed him instead, threatened to dob unless they went together. It was the most fun he’d ever had in his life. He’d been James Bond, making one of his great escapes, the teeth-snapping bloodhound on his tail. They’d taken the long way home, to confuse the bloodhound. Hadn’t arrived in Willama until nightfall and Eddy couldn’t believe what he’d seen when he got there. His twin, his own flesh and blood, pining for a pig pen? Eddy couldn’t believe that he’d been remotely related to any one of that deadbeat herd – or to the reincarnation of Buddha slumped on a filthy couch, pumping out smoke instead of incense.
He’d known about someone called Mave, about a girl in a photograph that had hung forever on Eva’s study wall. He’d liked that girl with her mane of wild red hair and big cheeky blue eyes. She’d died of some terrible disease when she’d been seventeen, according to Eva. That mound of smoke-breathing masticating horror on the couch had the same hair. Her kids had referred to her as Mavis, but that couldn’t have been his Mave.
Her size had hypnotised him, as had the way her herd of kids had kept placing sacrificial offerings before her. He’d been offended when they’d given her a packet of his favourite choc-mint biscuits and hadn’t even offered him one. He’d helped himself to two and that smoking mountain on the couch had erupted.
Someone dragged him outside. He would have headed for home then had there been a way to get there. There hadn’t, not until morning. He had to make the best of what he’d landed in so he’d tailed them out to the street where he’d found out what Alan had been pining for. It had nothing to do with the pig pen or that flesh factory. It was the freedom. Until that night, Eddy had no concept of freedom. He had school time, study time, shopping time, theatre time and bedtime. Those kids had bushland at the end of their street and at the end of the bush they had a river that made the Yarra look like a gutter.
They had laughter too, something else he’d known little about. He learnt a lot beside the river, and later he’d done stuff he wouldn’t have believed possible, like walk down a main street eating a hamburger out of paper, like digging for chips through a hole they’d poked into a scalding hot parcel. They might have been the best chips he’d ever tasted, not that Eva and Alice had been big on chips.
He’d extended his planned few days’ holiday. He would have extended it again if not for running out of money. He couldn’t live without money.
The kids or Martin had paid for his ticket home.
It hadn’t been the same though. He’d learnt too much from that herd. They’d messed up his thinking. His Mave hadn’t died of some terrible disease. Henry hadn’t been poisoned by the Russians while working for the secret service in London and his ashes spread around the pine tree in the backyard. Henry Smyth-Owen, father of the multitudes, had worked in a real estate agent’s office, had hung himself to escape that flesh factory, and been buried in the Willama cemetery. He’d seen the proof of it. He’d seen his father’s name on a metal plaque.
Old Alice’s snapping teeth had done their best to nag him back onto his leash. Eva had attempted to buy him back to her side, but he’d wanted more of those kids, more of their freedom, and he’d wanted to turn that flesh factory back into his Mave.
He’d replenished his wallet, helped himself to a packet of Eva’s Xanax, then instead of walking into school one morning when Alice dropped him off at the gate, he’d waited until the car was out of sight, then caught a tram into the city where he’d bought a bus ticket back to Sticksville – two years and a few months ago.
He’d pulled off his plan too, or damn near. At the hospital, he’d seen something of that photograph in Mavis’s eyes when he’d handed her a bunch of flowers.
‘That’s a first,’ she’d said. ‘That mean old bugger used to grow these in his shed. He never picked them, never brought one of them into the house.’
‘Eva always had flowers inside,’ he’d said.
‘Pfftt,’ Mavis said, then tossed the flowers onto her bed and turned to the window to stare out at the city skyline.
‘It looks bigger,’ she’d said. ‘Taller than when I knew it. I wanted to move down here when we sold the van but he stuck me in that bloody backwater.’
She’d spoken about Greggie being locked up somewhere beyond the city skyline. Greg was the only brother Eddy hadn’t met, so he’d asked her about him.
‘He was the best of the lot of them. He’d do anything for me – and was the only one who would.’
Her description didn’t match Vinnie’s: ‘He’d sell his arse for a hit of happy juice.’
Or Lori’s. ‘He was so saturated with evil that it started bursting out through his skin when he was fourteen. By the time he left home, his face had looked like diseased minced steak with two balls of ice pushed into it.’
On the trip down, Martin had spoken about Mavis and Greg. ‘When Henry brought Mick home from the hospital, Mavis refused to look after him. She’d sit outside with Greg on her lap while Mick screamed inside to be fed. Henry ended up putting Mick into childcare.’
The box of photographs on top of the front bedroom wardrobe backed up Martin’s story. There were a dozen shots of Greg, as a baby, a toddler and small boy. There were a few photographs of Martin and Donny but not one of Vinnie or Mick, or not until they’d started turning up in school photographs, Vinnie a head taller than his classmates and skeletal little Mick with his brace and crutches.
Baby Lori was in that box, frilly. There was one of her as a smiling little girl with long curls tied high with yellow ribbons. Her curls, smile and ribbons had gone missing before she’d started showing up in school photographs.
Eva hired professional photographers to document every year of ‘her’ boys’ lives. After they’d lost Alan, Eddy had posed alone. When he looked at his solo photographs today, he knew it was he who’d been lost, lost in London, lost in Madrid, lost in Paris. At times he still felt lost.
Lori knew who she was, or thought she did. ‘You can’t find what you’ve never lost,’ she’d said. ‘You can’t get back what you’ve never had, Eddy. Kids have to let go of stupid dreams and get a grip on what is real because real is all they’ll ever have.’
She’d told him this morning that he was dreaming the impossible dream, that he’d turned Mavis into his glorious quest.
‘She’s like that brick room. The partition wall was supposed to fix it by hiding the loo, which it did. It looked seriously good until they fitted that door and no one could see where the loo was to use it. Half of the emergency fund went on paying the electrician. He fixed the problem of no light but too much light showed up every fault, so Vinnie plastered the faults and painted them. Then he decided the bedroom needed a decent window. He thinks that’s all it needs, but all it will do is offer a framed view of the rotting laundry wall. When faults are built into a structure, be it human or otherwise, you can’t fix them, so stop kidding yourself.’
And who was she to talk. When he’d left tonight, she’d been on her knees, helping Vinnie roll someone’s secondhand carpet over the brick room’s cement floor. She had her own impossible dreams.
the waiting
She’d bought a geometric-patterned quilt cover and pillow slip, a combination of colours that connected the colours of the room, the timber-like brown of the partition wallboard, the blue-grey carpet they’d glued over the cement last night, and the yellow walls and white ceiling. The smell of paint and carpet glue was strong but the room looked and smelt so clean.
She slid the en suite door for the pleasure of sliding it. Had Mick been whole and Bert twenty years younger, they might have been apprentice and master builder. That door slid so smoothly you could barely hear it. They’d covered up most of the exposed copper water pipes with the mirror that used to hang in the old bathroom, and below it were two shelves they’d made out of junk-wood. It looked like an en suite, complete with twin power points and a plastic light shade. There was a second pair of power points beside Mavis’s bed. The hole through from Mick and Vinnie’s bedroom had been filled in and painted over. Mavis was in for one hell of a shock.
Eddy had texted before they left the hospital. Had they got out of Melbourne when they’d expected to, they might have been home by now, but nothing had ever gone as expected with Mavis.
Lori checked her mobile again for messages she may not have heard. She hadn’t heard them because none had come. For almost a month she’d been charging her mobile on the kitchen bench, which was convenient. That convenience would end today.
Didn’t want it to end. Life without Mavis had been so good.
Vinnie’s football coach had her number. He’d phoned early, to tell Vinnie that two of his senior players had been injured in a car crash on their way into town and that he needed Vinnie to play today with the senior team. It was an away game. None of the kids would get to watch him play his first senior match, but if a mountain could walk on air, that was how Vinnie had been walking when the minibus picked him up.
Life was a series of accidents, of what ifs and if nots, like, if Vinnie hadn’t initially told his coach that he wouldn’t be able to play today, he would have been playing with the seconds. His place had been filled. He would have had a rest day. Then that accident. And if Vinnie hadn’t given his coach Lori’s number, he wouldn’t have been able to contact Vinnie this morning.
Eleven-twenty when he’d been picked up. Eleven-forty now. Martin was supposed to have Miss Piggy’s car back at the farm by midday, which wasn’t going to happen.
Lori walked through the house to the front veranda, where she stood looking at the bird bath. Mick had repaired it with the leftovers of a bag of premixed concrete they’d bought when they’d replaced the old letterbox.
Nelly saw her and waved. She was hosing her hanging baskets. Her veranda roof was low and her hanging baskets lower, but as with everything else she’d planted, they flowered. She’d planted azaleas between her cement driveway and west fence, and at certain times of the year that fence became a wall of colour.
Lori could almost remember the day Nelly’s driveway had been cemented. She could remember her old fence being replaced with bricks. They’d looked wrong against her house but were a perfect height to sit on.
Henry hadn’t replaced his fence. Lori and Jamesy had used the last of it as firewood during that first winter of no Henry. His bonsais might one day become a hedge fence. Lori liked hedge fences.
&
nbsp; The shape of one bonsai always reminded her of Henry. He’d bound its main trunk with copper wire, then twisted it into a shape no tree should ever have been – as he’d been twisted by circumstances into a shape he’d never been meant to grow into. Had he got his roots down into good soil, who knew what he might have become?
He’d been a non-person in Willama, a man strangers might have described as a small, elderly office man who’d spoken with an English accent and had rarely been seen out of a suit. He’d owned three. One had come from the op-shop. She’d found it hanging on a rack with a five-dollar price ticket on it.
The op-shop ladies might have described him as a silent man. The library ladies would have said that he was a prolific reader. They used to order books in for him, but not one of them had known the true Henry, who had only ever emerged after sundown in the potting shed where he’d seemed to stand taller, to stand straighter when surrounded by flowers.
Lori had gone with him once to an orchid show and she’d watched him count out thirty dollars for something that to her had looked like plastic bags with dead stuff in them. On the way home, she’d asked him why he’d wasted so much money on them, and he’d smiled his little Henry smile, patted her head and said that money was never wasted when you spent it on hope.
‘What time are you expecting them back?’ Nelly called from across the street.
Lori shook Henry from her mind. ‘Now,’ she replied.
Nelly had seen the finished room last night. She never came inside when Mavis was at home. They’d had a few epic wars, which Martin used to liken to a humpbacked whale with a mouthful of sewerage attacking a sardine with a dirty mouth. Compared to Mavis, Nelly was sardine sized. Mavis used to be five foot ten and might have weighed forty stone at her worst.
‘Eddy was saying last night that she’s walking well.’
‘Eddy spends his life wearing rose-tinted glasses,’ Lori said, and that’s all she said about Mavis’s walking. She was scared stiff of her walking, scared she’d walk over to the bank and change her account details. The bottom end of Dawson Street was five minutes from the Commonwealth Bank, and as far as Mavis was aware, Martin was the one who’d stolen her chequebook.
