by Joy Dettman
They’d allowed self-planted pumpkin seeds to grow. Last year half a dozen took root on the compost heap. Their vines had gone mad. They’d harvested forty-seven monster pumpkins, which had been fate. Pumpkin camouflaged Mavis’s blood-pressure and Xanax pills.
She was still snoring when the meal was served, but as Henry used to do for late eaters, they placed her medicated meal over a saucepan of boiling water and left it to keep hot on the hob. He’d taught them a few useful things.
Matty, who usually liked sausages and mashed vegetables, wasn’t eating. He’d been born a bawling bald-headed butterball baby but had grown into a bawling skinny little boy, who badly needed a haircut.
Henry would have sheared him. He’d perfected one style, short back and sides. Lori used to line up for her shearing until Martin put a stop to it. Thereafter she’d spent hair-cutting nights envying every head Henry touched, envying the way his gentle old hands had lifted the boys’ chins. She’d watched and envied long enough to learn a little about cutting hair. Neil and Timmy still wore his specialty cuts. Not Matty. Her hands refused to mutilate his ringlets.
‘I thought he’d do okay in jail,’ Vinnie said, harking back to Greg. ‘He used to sell his ar–’
‘Shut that up, Vinnie,’ Lori said.
He looked at her, shrugged. ‘Yeah well, anyway, I thought he’d do okay inside.’
‘He used to sell what?’ Neil asked.
‘Nothing,’ Lori said.
‘When you tell Vinnie to shut up it’s always about sex.’
‘He used to sell ice. It’s a drug.’
‘He didn’t start to say ice, anyway, you can’t get drugs when you’re in jail – and you can’t get knives either, or all of the murderers would kill each other.’
Matty changed the subject. He slid from his chair to disappear beneath the table, where he scrambled over legs and feet to Lori’s knees.
‘Neil said I have to sleep with her,’ he howled. ‘I don’t want to sleep with her.’
‘It’s Neil who’ll be sleeping with her. You and Timmy are going to sleep in the bunk room,’ she said.
‘You said that bunk bed is mine when I’m nine,’ Neil said.
‘I said that if you stop tormenting Matty, it might be your bed,’ she said. Moving her chair back a little, she hauled Matty up to her lap to play aeroplanes with his meal. He’d open his mouth to a loaded spoon ‘zooming’ towards the hangar. He was too old for that game. Timmy had been more self-reliant as a two-year-old.
‘We had to wait around for the hospital pharmacy to fill her scripts,’ Alan said.
They’d given her a form of aspro she was supposed to take with meals. She might swallow them. The aspros were supposed to keep her blood thin enough to go through the stents. Clay had taken her off Doctor Jones’s antipsychotic drugs and prescribed different breeds of antidepressant and Xanax, and the Xanax only when necessary, and it was blue.
‘Did she take any Xanax on the trip home?’ Mick asked.
‘We didn’t even stop to eat,’ Alan replied.
Mick had slept for fourteen hours straight the night he’d come home from the rehab hospital. He, Matty and the twins were the only kids who’d had hospital experience. Matty when he’d almost died of pneumonia, which was why Lori played aeroplanes.
‘Vroom, vroom, vroom.’ The loaded spoon went in again and came out clean.
Had I been the type to keep a diary, she thought, its pages would have been full of Mavis and Matty, and today’s entry no different – apart from Greg.
I should feel something . . . or something other than relief – and annoyance at his timing. All morning she’d been imagining leading Mavis into the brick room and watching her reaction. It hadn’t happened, because of Greg.
‘Have you seen her walking?’ Mick asked.
‘I saw her half carried in from the car,’ Lori said.
‘She can walk,’ Alan said. ‘Martin stopped at a public toilet halfway home. She got out of the car and walked into it and back.’
‘Terry Clay’s after-surgery instructions say she’s supposed to walk every day,’ Eddy added.
‘Like walk over to the bank and close her account,’ Lori said, and her mobile beeped again. Martin again. Matty’s plate clean enough, she slid him down to the floor before reading the text.
How is her mood?
She’s caught some sleeping disease. We haven’t seen her since you left.
Call me when she wakes up.
If she goes off her head I’ll call you after I call the cops, Lori replied.
Vinnie claimed Matty’s plate. He wiped it clean with bread, ate what he wiped, ate his leftover sausage in buttered bread with tomato sauce. His gut had always been an unfillable sinkhole.
They had no wash-up duty roster. It was something that had to be done and most of them helped with it, one washing, two wiping and the others putting away what was wiped. Lori washed that night, which meant watching a terrorist interview in reverse, or watching its reflection in the window. There was a streetlight near their end of Dawson Street but its glow didn’t reach around the corner, so outside the sink window the world was black enough to reflect a reporter and his cameraman. They’d been smuggled into terrorist territory to interview a dude wearing a mask. What he was saying wasn’t suitable for little kids, but having spent their lives with a live-in domestic terrorist a bit of televised terrorism wouldn’t do them a lot more harm.
She finished the last saucepan, except for the pumpkin saucepan still keeping Mavis’s meal hot. She wiped down the sink, wiped the table, tossed the cloth at the sink before creeping through the house to listen at the front bedroom door. No snoring behind it. Assuming that Mavis was awake, she opened the door. She wasn’t awake. She’d rolled to her side. She never snored if she slept on her side.
Three years ago, she couldn’t roll. Three years ago, she couldn’t lie flat or she’d choke. Towards the end of her morbidly obese period, she hadn’t gone to bed but slept where she’d sat, on the old kitchen couch.
There appeared to be less of her than the ambulance men had taken away. According to Clay’s diagrams, he’d tossed a lot of her sags into the bin. Also, for at least a week of her stay in hospital, she’d had a tube down her throat so she wouldn’t have been able to eat.
Way back, way, way back, Lori used to pretend she had a slim, beautiful mother who wore tight black jeans and long dangly earrings, who’d take her to the shops and buy her beautiful things. She’d grown out of that pretence after Henry hung himself – which had been Greg’s fault, and Mavis’s. They’d turned that last Christmas Day into a kill Henry day, which Lori didn’t often allow herself to remember. When she did, she saw Henry as an injured old antelope, cut off from his herd with two rabid wolves ripping out his guts before he’d been dead.
There are cells in most brains that instinctively know right from wrong. Mick had too many of those cells, as did Alan. Eddy wasn’t totally lacking, but Greg had missed out entirely. Henry’s long lectures had never got through to him, and Lori may have known why – because he had no Henry DNA in him. Martin had said so once when he’d been verbally warring with Mavis.
Greg had never warred with her. He’d lied to her, stolen from her too, stolen from Henry, from the neighbours. He had been such a convincing liar, Henry had believed him.
Vinnie, who couldn’t tell a lie to save his life, had been accused of lying, by Henry, when he’d dobbed on Greg for sniffing glue. He’d learnt his lesson by the time Greg started smoking dope, started stealing and selling Mavis’s Valium at high school. His expulsion had been a foregone conclusion to the kids, long before it happened, though not to Henry. It broke him.
There are measurements of good and bad. Not one of the kids had ever hoped for perfect, but when Henry had been alive, life had been relatively livable. The bad set in on the day he’d hanged himself. During the reign of Mavis and Greg, life became so hopeless that Lori had considered hanging herself, or curling up down the bottom of
her yowie cave and dragging the dirt in.
When Greg stole Mrs Roddie’s little Datsun and took off with Vinnie to Melbourne, Lori had hoped that things might improve, but some bleeding-heart outsider made hopeless worse by setting up poor housebound widow Mavis with a chequebook.
That was when the bad hit bedrock. Mick asked Mavis to write him a cheque for the supermarket and she’d stuck out her foot and tripped him. He had no balance and everyone knew it. He’d crashed to the floor, his bad leg and brace at an angle no leg should ever have been. Two ambulance men carried him from the house.
With Mick gone, with Alan packed up and sent back to Aunty Eva, Lori had been left with bellowing, shitty pants Matty, skinny little Timmy, Neil and Jamesy, who might have been close to nine years old. She’d been twelve.
When you hit bedrock, when you’ve got kids grabbing at you all day, expecting to be fed, you focus on something. Her focus had settled on the chequebook, the bogeyman that had blown her family apart. She’d killed it, or stolen and shredded the cheques. She’d stolen Mavis’s mobile charger so she couldn’t phone the bank and order a new chequebook.
Hadn’t known about the bankcard, not when she’d flushed those shredded cheques, not until she’d emptied out the rest of what had been in the black chequebook folder. That old blue bankcard had been tucked into a slot, a piece of paper wrapped around it with four numbers printed on the paper. Because of Nelly, Lori had known about PINs – and anyone fool enough to keep their numbers wrapped around their card had deserved to be robbed.
Only Jamesy and the three little ones had been with her, or they’d been on the far side of the street, the first time she’d prodded those numbers into an ATM, her hand shaking so hard her fingers couldn’t hit the right numbers. She’d done it though, on her second try, and when that machine spat out a twenty-dollar note, she’d snatched it, then done it again.
If she lived for a thousand years, she’d never again experience the surge of power that had flooded her every muscle and nerve. Money meant survival. Money meant food and dry shoes, meant life.
Having access to that account changed her in many ways, and changed Jamesy. As a two-year-old, he’d been an old man. They’d been thieves together, she and Jamesy. He’d kept watch while she’d hit out-of-the-way ATMs at night.
Mick hadn’t approved when he’d finally come home, or not at first, not until he’d seen the overdue rates bill. Mavis had owed Willama Council over two thousand dollars. It was that bill that altered his attitude.
They’d started paying it off a bit at a time before Alan and his twin turned up. Of course everyone had been pleased to see Alan. They could have done without Eddy. He’d been like Spud Murphy’s dogs, chain-mad, and god help Dawson Street when they’d got off their chains – and god help them with Eddy off his chain. Lori hadn’t been the only one who’d breathed a sigh of relief when he’d caught the bus back to Eva.
It might have been three weeks or a month later when he’d returned, in the dead of night. He’d woken her with the beam of his torch directed at her eyes. Then with that torch, he’d led her out to the brick room where he’d spot-lit Mavis, sitting slumped on the loo. For a second or two Lori had believed that she was dead.
She’d been dead asleep. That idiot had drugged her, or he’d crushed a packet of Eva’s Xanax and mixed them into the custard powder, then waited outside in the dark until Mavis self-medicated.
That’s what he’d said. ‘I didn’t drug her. She made the custard.’ Forever, she’d been making her midnight custards.
Later, when the boys came out, Eddy had accused them of murdering his natural mother with junk food and cigarettes, which they might have been guilty of doing. Every week Lori had given Nelly a pile of money to buy cartons of cigarettes. Every day after school, they’d bought a dozen potato cakes or a pile of chips for Mavis. Food and cigarettes had made her live-with-able. She’d been too big to get into a car to go to Henry’s funeral. She’d been a lot bigger by the time Eddy came home.
‘Have you ever considered what is going to happen to you lot when you succeed in murdering her?’ he’d asked that night.
They’d known exactly what would happen. The outsiders would come pouring in again and Henry’s kids would end up spread all over Victoria.
‘We’re putting her on a diet,’ he’d said.
‘As if Henry didn’t try to a hundred times,’ Lori said.
‘You’ve got a maximum-security cell out there. We’re going to lock her up and teach her to eat greens.’
During those few seconds when Lori had believed Mavis to be dead, her head had gone into overdrive. She’d seen Matty and Timmy adopted, seen Jamesy being treated like a kid, seen feisty little Neil tamed with drugs. Maybe she’d agreed to Eddy’s plan too readily. Mick and Alan hadn’t, but Jamesy had, which made the vote three against two.
The money they’d saved on not buying cigarettes brought Mick and Alan around, but because they’d stopped asking Nelly to buy cigarettes, she’d known that something big had gone on at 108. She’d never been a dobber. She hadn’t even told Martin, who’d been too involved in getting married to care anyway. He found out after he returned from his honeymoon, by which time the lockdown had been beginning to work, not noise wise, but weight wise.
By the time Vinnie hitchhiked home, Mavis had been moving well. But having not seen a cigarette in six months, when they’d locked him in with her – just to let him know that his size wasn’t going to allow him to rule the roost – they hadn’t thought to check what he’d had in his pockets: Greg’s bag of weed. She’d got stuck into it and it hadn’t agreed with her, though after a night of vomiting, she had seemed to settle down, or Vinnie’s size had been enough to settle her down.
He’d spent eight or so days in lockdown. Mavis spent close on thirteen months behind that good old green door. She’d been in there the day the letter arrived from Watts telling them about the bus crash in Argentina.
It was the excuse they’d needed to release her, and the Mavis who’d walked out of the brick room bore little resemblance to the one they’d locked in. She’d been docile. They’d put her docility down to finding out that her only sister was dead. It had nothing to do with that. She could have gone to the funeral but she’d spent that day in the brick room watching television.
Watts drove the twins home, his car boot loaded. Eva’s house was to be emptied and sold or rented so Eddy had helped himself to what he’d wanted, or to what he’d thought Mavis might have wanted. She’d shown no interest in anything he’d brought home. She’d shown little interest in food until last September when, like today, two cops had arrived.
If Lori closed her eyes now she could replay that scene, Mavis standing there in her green tracksuit. The two officers in their uniforms, then one saying, ‘Your son was involved in a fatal accident.’
‘Fatal’ meant ‘dead’. Lori had frozen until the cop said, ‘Gregory.’ Mavis had stood statue-still until one cop said that Gregory was to be charged with two counts of manslaughter.
That was the instant the real Mavis returned from wherever she’d been. It was in her eyes, her stance, her voice. The cops hadn’t hung around. They hadn’t seen her pitch Matty at the wall of louvers.
She’d been like a prize fighter, woken out of a coma and thinking she was still in the boxing ring. That was the night Eddy almost lost his two front teeth, when they’d pack-attacked her to keep her off Matty.
Doctor Jones and his three helpers arrived fifteen minutes later. He’d tamed her and returned night and morning for the week Eddy was away. Mavis’s flabby thigh must have looked like a pin cushion before Eddy came home with a mouthful of metal and plastic. He’d missed out on the talk about Bendigo. It might have been Doctor Jones’s threat to send her by ambulance to the Bendigo psychiatric hospital that calmed Mavis. She wasn’t crazy mad. She wasn’t depressed either, she was just killer mad because every news broadcast for days had been about her precious killer son.
Lori closed
the door and turned on the lounge-room light. She had homework to do and a pile of it. She’d chosen to do Drama this year because it was a known bludge, had taken Health and Human Development for the same reason, and Food Tech. She’d had to do Maths, English and Science, and she loathed Maths. Did well enough in Science and English and had stuff she was supposed to hand in for both on Monday.
Their big old desktop computer and new printer lived in the lounge room with their secondhand lounge suite and a good coffee table Vinnie had carried home from somewhere. He was the world’s best scrounger and considered the council’s hard-waste collections to be his free trash and treasure market. Most of their viable kitchen chairs had come home on Vinnie’s shoulder.
The lounge room had an interesting carved timber mantelpiece with a worn-out oval mirror and a space above it perfectly sized to take the photograph of young Mave.
Last September Lori had wanted to smash it. Its frame stopped her. It was gold and black with moulded patterns on the corners and sides, moulded flowers and leaves and swirls. She loved the frame but could barely look at that photograph.
greg
At nine-forty they gave up waiting for Mavis to vacate the queen bed and put Matty and Timmy into the spare bunk bed. Too long promised to Neil, he had no intention of giving it up, so he got in down the bottom end. Freed then of the little ones, the talk in the kitchen returned to Greg.
‘It doesn’t seem real,’ Mick said. ‘Like it didn’t when Henry died.’
‘It’s nothing like when Henry died,’ Lori said. ‘Don’t you dare liken his death to Henry’s. I’m glad he’s dead.’
‘I only meant . . . you know what I mean. That he’s never coming back.’
‘Good,’ she said.
‘How old was he when he got started on drugs?’ Eddy asked.
‘Drugs, as in shooting up?’ Vinnie asked.
‘Fifteen,’ Lori said. ‘And it’s a pity he didn’t OD the first time. And shut up about him or I’ll say worse,’ she said, and she went out to the laundry to get a load of washing started.
