by Joy Dettman
Lori had been that guilty party. She’d taken Mavis’s mobile charger the same night, so she couldn’t phone the bank and order a new chequebook.
‘That was close,’ Nelly said as a streak of lightning opened up cracks in an all-black sky, thunder’s rumble accompanying it, sounding like warring gods rolling their barrels of ammunition into position.
‘We’re in for a beauty,’ Bert said. He was out, looking west. ‘I hope there’s rain in it. My tank’s down to the bottom rungs.’
Some people treat aloneness as a best friend. Others treat it as an enemy. Bert, who’d never spent a day alone in his life, or hadn’t before his wife had her stroke, would talk to anyone who walked by, the postman, the junk mail deliverer, even Mrs Roddie’s mutt.
Henry used to sing a song about people needing people but he hadn’t lived by those words. He’d gone to work, come home, cooked dinner, swept the floors, had a shower and gone to bed. He and Nelly had flowers in common. She’d taken an interest in his pot plants and he in her garden, but neither one had needed people.
Nelly hadn’t needed a husband and a bunch of kids. She’d inherited Henry’s. It hadn’t been a sudden inheritance, not like the twins inheriting Walter Watts. It had been slow, like Lori coming home from school one day and finding Matty and Timmy watching television in her lounge room, then the school lunches she’d started cutting, then Lori and Mick hiding their emergency food on her front veranda.
Before Martin reported Mavis to the Child Welfare department, he and Nelly had been keeping the last five of Henry’s kids alive. One way or another the rest of them got away, as had Martin, though he hadn’t moved far.
Mick never would have left if Mavis hadn’t wrecked his crippled leg. Alan hadn’t wanted to go. He’d been sent away, sent back to his twin and Eva by Martin before he’d phoned the welfare mob.
‘There’s nothing more I can do,’ he’d said. ‘You’ll be looked after,’ he’d said.
An almighty crash of thunder made Lori jump. It didn’t pay to allow your brain to start remembering the past. There’d been too much bad after Henry died. She shook it off and went indoors to check that the televisions were turned off. Henry used to turn them off when they had bad storms.
Another crash of thunder sent the little kids running for cover but didn’t stop Mick’s weeding, or not until he saw a veil of grey moving in from the west. They were in the kitchen when the hail hit, some of it almost the size of golf balls. If Martin was driving through that, it would make a mess of Miss Piggy’s Honda.
Lori could have been in that car. Eddy had a showy facade of confidence, but he hadn’t wanted to spend the night alone with Martin. Mick couldn’t go, Vinnie wouldn’t go, Jamesy would have but was still a kid in years. That had left Lori and Alan. They’d tossed a coin and Alan lost. Not that Lori would have minded losing. Not that she would have minded seeing a bit more of Melbourne than a house and a hedge and an ocean.
It was impossible to believe that Mavis had once called that big red-brick house home. It was harder to believe that anorexic Eva had been Mavis’s sister – and impossible to understand why Eva hadn’t smashed that young Mave photograph after what Mavis had done to her.
Kids pick up a lot of information they don’t understand. Lori had heard plenty on that bus trip home from Melbourne. She hadn’t understood a lot of it, but Mavis had been livid, probably because she’d wasted her own money on two empty seats she’d booked for the twins’ return journey.
‘She only married you because you were too green to realise that you’d been the third wheel in her ménage à trois,’ she’d said.
Born with a book in her hands, Lori had read many words she hadn’t understood. She’d understood ‘chauffeur’, had known that Alice had been Eva and Grandma Hilda’s chauffeur. By putting two and two together, she’d come up with her own meaning for that ‘third wheel’ and ‘ménage à trois’. It had been the brand name of that posh car Alice had escaped in with the twins.
She’d heard ménage à trois again when she’d been eight or ten and she’d asked Henry its meaning. He’d told her it was an ugly expression he hadn’t wanted her to repeat. A year ago, Eddy explained its meaning, and Lori still blushed when she remembered asking Henry.
‘Abortion’ was another word she’d never come across in kids’ novels. She’d found its meaning in Henry’s dictionary, though it had taken a while longer for her to work out why Mavis blamed Henry for not allowing her to abort Martin.
He’d been born in Brisbane. It was on his birth certificate. Adelaide was on Donny’s, Broken Hill on Greg’s, Mildura on Vinnie’s. Mavis might have been doing a survey on public hospitals until Mick decided to arrive early, while they’d been camping at a Willama caravan park. Mick put an end to Mavis’s preferred nomadic lifestyle.
Eddy raved on about how well Mavis was getting on with her ward mate and how pleasant she’d been to the nursing sisters. That was who she’d always been, pleasant to strangers and a monster at home. Touring around in a van would have offered her a country full of strangers.
According to Martin, when they’d lived in the van, she’d gathered friends quickly and when enough of them became enemies, Henry had hooked up the van and moved on – until Mick’s leg needed on-going medical care and easy access to Melbourne specialists.
A clever man, Henry, trained to be an accountant before the days of computers, a reader of weighty books, but he’d never worked out why supermarkets sold packets of condoms as he’d never woken up to the fact that windows he could see out of could be seen in through. Lori had watched Matty’s birth through the louvers – and lost interest fast when she’d seen his boy parts. She’d wanted a sister.
Number Thirteen’s cells had started out to be a sister. They must have been attempting to split into two around the time Henry hung himself. Without him in it, the entire world had gone mad – as had those splitting cells. Both Lori and Jamesy had seen Thirteen. The older boys had been long gone. Doctor Jones and the ambulance men had seen what slipped out of Mavis that night. They’d wrapped it up fast and taken it away, though not before Lori’s retina had photographed it. From the navel down it had been a sister. From the navel up it had been an alien. No one mentioned that alien baby. Lori didn’t know if it had been buried or preserved in a jar of alcohol.
The hail turned into a cloudburst. Bert’s tank would have filled in minutes. Still no sign of the red Honda, or of Jamesy. He had a best mate over Nelly’s back fence where he spent a lot of his weekends. He’d come home for lunch. It was lunchtime now, ten minutes past midday. Miss Piggy wasn’t going to be happy with her lapdog. For most of her life, Lori had wanted a sister. If Martin had married Jan Dobson, she might have ended up with a sister-in-law.
The little ones, bored with the rain, had gone inside to watch television. Lori was back on the veranda watching the guttering overflow when a white car turned into the street and continued down, spraying up sheets of water. The bottom end of Dawson Street couldn’t handle the torrents pouring down from the top end.
She expected that white car to turn into someone’s driveway but it kept coming. A few drivers used Henry’s sweep when they realised they’d run out of road. The driver of that car used it, but not to turn around. He drove in, drove in level with the front veranda.
And there were two uniformed cops in it. And Lori’s stomach dropped down to her sneakers. She knew why Martin was late. He’d smashed Miss Piggy’s car and killed the lot of them.
She lived a millennium in the time it took for the cops to get out and dive for shelter, by which time she knew that Martin hadn’t smashed the Honda. It came splashing in behind the cop car.
‘Is your mother in?’ the older of the two officers asked.
‘She’s in the car,’ Lori said, watching the car, watching Alan and Martin spring from opposite doors, run around to its rear, drag out the luggage and run wet to shelter.
She couldn’t see Mavis. The windows were foggy, or she couldn’t until
Eddy got out and held the door wide, when Martin tossed a case down, then opening a pink floral umbrella ran to protect his wife’s upholstery.
‘Slide across, Mavis?’ he directed.
‘It’s raining,’ she said.
She must have been able to see the cops, must have known that they’d be here about her Greggie – or they could have been here about Vinnie in that minibus?
‘I’m running late,’ Martin said, which was the worst thing he could have said. Knowing that he wanted her out would only make her more determined to stay in.
It never rains but it pours, as Nelly liked to say. The minibus pulled in behind the Honda and Vinnie got out of it.
Ignoring the rain and the cops, he shouldered Martin out of the way, reached into the back seat, hauled Mavis out backwards and might have dumped her on her backside in the mud if one of the cops hadn’t braved the rain to assist him.
They half carried her to shelter, and she wasn’t silent about being manhandled. It wasn’t the homecoming Lori had been visualising, but she opened the screen door and held it wide.
Vinnie freed himself in the passage, shook Mavis off him like a dog shaking off fleas, wiped his hands on his saturated t-shirt then returned to the veranda where Martin was speaking to the other cop.
The one who’d helped carry Mavis in was attempting to direct her towards the lounge room, but because he wanted her to go left, she shook his hand off and went right, went into the front bedroom where she flopped down wet onto the little kids’ quilt. He was here to speak to her and not fussy about where he did it.
Cops have a tone they use when delivering bad news that they must learn at the academy.
‘Your son,’ he said.
Donny, Lori thought.
Time becomes elastic. It can stretch long between one breath and the next, or it could for Lori. Then he said the magic words and she breathed and time shrank back into place.
‘He was involved in an altercation at the prison . . .’
Mavis only had one son in prison.
‘Is he all right?’
He did his ‘I’m very sorry’ bit again, then added, ‘He was pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital . . .’
Mavis didn’t collapse. She didn’t howl. She attacked the messenger, verbally. ‘You useless mob of bastards! You couldn’t even keep him safe in jail.’
Her vocabulary hadn’t been improved by her near-death experience, but her mouth spitting those words had. She’d left home with a codfish mouth, bullfrog jowls and a turkey wattle throat. Her mouth looked . . . looked improved. And she had a jaw. In Lori’s lifetime Mavis had never had a jaw.
‘He’s a nineteen-year-old kid,’ that mouth said, and said more.
It didn’t say that her beloved son had been a druggie and a thief as well as a murderer. Lori, who was staring at the cop’s back, wasn’t thinking about a brother being dead but about what his death meant, like he’d never again come back to Willama. And thank god for that much.
The cop turned to her. He asked about relatives, asked for the name of their GP.
‘She’ll be okay,’ Lori said, which was probably a totally wrong response when you’ve just heard that your brother is dead. Although if anyone deserved to be dead, it was Greg. He’d run a red light in a stolen car he’d had no licence to drive, had been doing a hundred and forty in a sixty K zone, been high on ice and he’d killed a mother and her daughter who had been obeying the road rules. And to be honest, Lori was so relieved that he was dead that she felt nauseous. She’d been scared stiff of that white-eyed mongrel.
The cop let himself out and Lori closed the door behind him, to keep Mavis’s insults in.
‘You need to get out of that dress, Mavis,’ she said. She was wearing the black dress bought for Eva’s funeral, and it was saturated, as was her hair.
‘Get those bloody shoes off my feet,’ Mavis replied.
Lori looked at the black shoes, also bought for the funeral. She looked at the feet and the ankles above them, which looked worse than when she’d left home. One shoe strap appeared to have grown into a swollen instep.
There was little space between the beds. She sidled between them, sat on her own, then bowing down before the goddess of fire and brimstone, undid both buckles and dragged those still new shoes off uncommonly clean feet.
‘They had no right to put him in with hardened criminals,’ Mavis said.
Where else do you put hardened criminals, other than in with others of their ilk? Lori thought.
‘He was nineteen years old.’
‘At Christmastime,’ Lori said, the shoes in her hand. ‘Come out to your room and get into something dry, Mavis.’
‘I’ll sue the useless bastards,’ Mavis replied.
She was dripping on the little kids’ quilt – her quilt until Henry died – and for months after he’d died. The mattress was new. During her lockdown period, after they’d moved the little kids out of the lounge room, they’d bought that mattress from Harvey Norman, Mavis’s weight having created a hollow in the old mattress.
There were three pillows on that bed, and while Lori placed the shoes back into their box, Mavis stacked the pillows, hauled her swollen legs up and onto the bed, then lay back to wet the little kids’ pillows.
She wasn’t going to move, not unless Vinnie moved her, and if there was one thing worse than a healthy Mavis it was Mavis with a cold. Her years of smoking hadn’t done her lungs a lot of good. Lori stripped her own bed of its quilt, tossed it over Mavis and went out to the veranda to hear what she could.
Too late to hear much of anything, or not firsthand. The cops, having used their allocated bad news time, were in their car. Martin had to move the Honda to let them out so he kept going, leaving the rest of them standing on the veranda.
‘No football?’ Alan asked.
‘Their bloody oval is a lake,’ Vinnie said. ‘We would have thrashed ’em too.’
‘Did they tell you how it happened? Greg?’ Lori asked.
‘Someone stabbed him in the throat,’ Vinnie said. His brow and head looked paler than usual. He’d spent a lot of time with Greg in Melbourne. Eddy looked disappointed that he’d never get to meet him. Neil wanted to know where the other crim had got the knife to stab him with.
‘When people get locked up in cop shows, the cops take everything and put it all in a bag and the crims don’t get it back until they’re let out,’ he said. He watched too much television.
Lori walked away from the boys, walked down to the end of the veranda to watch a river of water running across their drive, tunnelling beneath the fence to continue on to Dawson Lake, her name for the dusty low-lying area between where the bitumen and gutters ended and the levee began. Water could pool there for weeks and when it did, it cut off her access to the gravelled road and the river.
She’d escaped over the levee the last time cops had come to the door. A cold and windy September day but no rain. The next day hadn’t been as cold but she’d been imprisoned by Gregory Smyth-Owen’s infamy. It had been spread all over the Gazette’s front page, and they’d got hold of a school photograph of him. He’d been on the television news, had been in the Melbourne papers. She couldn’t take that again.
Mick wasn’t too concerned. That white-eyed mongrel had spent years attempting to kill him. Matty hadn’t known him. He wanted to watch Ice Age. They went inside then and Timmy slid their Ice Age disc in – to shut him up. He’d spent a lot of his life shutting Matty up.
‘He nicked that from an old queer,’ Vinnie said, of the DVD player. ‘He got his wallet too. It and three hundred and fifty bucks –’
‘Keep that sort of stuff to yourself, Vin,’ Mick said.
The older kids knew where their DVD player had come from, it and their camera. They’d hitchhiked home from Melbourne with Vinnie. The younger kids didn’t need to know.
The city cops had been after Greg that day. He’d taken off over a side fence and left Vinnie holding the bag, literally holding it, so h
e’d taken off with it in the opposite direction, which had happened to be the right direction for him. He’d been safe at home, very safe, locked in the brick room with Mavis before the Melbourne cops had arrested Greg, a minor at the time – and some damn fool judge had given him probation. He’d been on probation when he’d run that red light.
Neil, who’d watched Ice Age one too many times, attached himself to the older group that day. It was he who raised the subject of funerals.
‘Do they bury crims at the jail?’
‘No,’ Eddy said and was about to give one of his lectures when Lori interrupted.
‘Do they still do paupers’ graves?’
Alan, who was almost as mean as her, went into the bunk room to get the laptop.
Google told them that if a family couldn’t afford to bury a ‘loved one’, they could release the body to the state for a free cremation or burial. There was another option. The deceased person could leave instructions to donate his body to science, though his family couldn’t make that decision for him.
that wet saturday
Martin sent a text at four-thirty. Mavis was sleeping. He texted again at six and again Lori replied: Still sleeping. They cooked vegetables. Vinnie stopped pacing to fry umpteen sausages. Most of the older kids had watched Henry ruin enough sausages to learn what not to do. He used to serve them black or half raw and sometimes both.
Much of what they’d learnt about cooking had come from doing the opposite to Henry. For example, they never burnt potatoes and never cooked a green bean. For half of every year they’d eaten Henry’s broad beans, young and green and hairy or shelled and then boiled until they’d resembled grey and diseased kidneys. Very hardy plants Henry’s broad beans, and prolific. Their seeds had staying power. Three years after Henry planted his last bean a few escapologist beans dared to raise their heads above the dirt line. The kids, even Mick, never allowed them to live long enough to unfurl more than two leaves.
