by Joy Dettman
They called it the laundry. It was a shed full of junk with a dirt floor and a washing machine and a stainless-steel wash trough installed beneath a gap in the south-side wall. Rain blew in if it was coming from that direction. If enough blew in, it turned the floor to mud, which had happened often enough for the washing machine to bed itself in. Its white paint had bubbled where rust was working its way up. To date it hadn’t affected the machine’s function, due mainly to it never being still long enough for its mechanisms to rust. Every day someone did a load.
She lifted its lid, checked that it was full enough, added a good shake of reject shop laundry powder, turned on the tap and the power, slapped the lid down then hit the button marked Heavy Load. That’s all there was to doing the laundry. If the rain stopped, they’d hang that load on the line in the morning. If it didn’t, they’d peg it onto ropes strung from the shed’s rafters. At 108 Dawson Street they’d learnt to live around the elements – as they’d learn to live without the front bedroom if Mavis decided to reclaim her queen bed, which would mean that Lori would get the brick room and its en suite, or she and the two little ones would.
Martin had built it for her. ‘She’s growing up, Henry,’ he’d said. ‘She’s going to need her own space soon.’ She’d spent a lot of her years attempting to be one of the boys, but Martin always knew she was a girl.
For two months the brick room had been hers, and she’d loved having her own space until she woke up one night with Greg on top of her, attempting to pull her pants down.
When you’re raised around someone like him, you learn early to fight dirty, to bite, kick, go for the eyes with your fingernails while screaming blue murder. She’d done a bit of damage to his diseased face and his reproductive organs before Martin and Donny came running in to finish him off.
There’d been a lot of walls, doors and beds between the front bedroom and what had gone on in the brick room that night. Henry might have wondered why Lori’s bed returned to the lounge room, but by that stage of his life, Martin and Donny had been shielding him from too much truth. No one had bothered to tell Mavis, who wouldn’t have believed them anyway.
If the hospital hadn’t got her heart started, would I have cared? Lori asked herself. I might have, though only for Eddy’s sake. He would have blamed himself forever, like he still blamed himself for Eva and old Alice’s deaths. A dozen, maybe two dozen times he’d said that if he’d stayed with them in St Kilda, they wouldn’t have gone on their world tour.
Greg was still the topic when she returned to the kitchen, or the cost of funerals was.
‘Donny and Martin paid for Henry’s,’ Mick said.
‘Donny’s got no money to waste,’ Lori said. ‘The last time he was up here he said that fixing his teeth was going to cost him thousands. Give the mongrel to the state.’
‘I thought Donny would have phoned,’ Mick said. ‘I suppose Martin told him.’
‘If his wife didn’t kill him before he could. He must have said twenty times that he needed to get her car home by midday. He would have been an hour late,’ Alan said.
The television was playing one of their cop shows, which no one watched because they were all the same. Tonight the kids were sweating on the commercials, which usually started with the news headlines.
Ten past ten, still no Mavis and Eddy on again about Eva and Alice, or about their cremations and how he’d tossed their ashes together off the St Kilda Pier, so they could continue their world tour.
‘Cremations are cheaper,’ Alan said. You could find out anything on the internet.
It was ten-thirty when Eddy unplugged the laptop and took it into the bunk room. It lived in there when not in use.
‘Don’t you wake those little kids,’ Lori warned.
When he didn’t return, she thought he’d gone to bed – until she heard the passage boards creaking. She took off and grabbed Eddy’s sweater as he opened the front bedroom door.
‘I’m just checking that she’s alive,’ he hissed, half in, half out, the narrow beam of his penlight torch directed on a large bare foot.
‘Her feet are more swollen now than when she left,’ Lori hissed. ‘Shut that door!’
‘It’s fluid. It will move when she starts moving around. We’ve got to keep her moving,’ he said.
‘Like walk her over to the bank and order a new chequebook?’
‘She won’t. I keep telling you, she’s rational.’
‘She didn’t sound it when the cops were here.’
‘When has she ever liked cops?’
‘Out,’ Lori hissed. She’d heard a voice that hadn’t come from the boys or the television.
‘Nelly,’ he hissed and closed the door.
She was in the kitchen in her worn-out maroon dressing gown and gardening shoes, and for a small person she could make a lot of noise.
‘I just heard on the radio about your brother,’ she said. ‘Where is she?’
‘Asleep in the front room. We don’t want to wake her,’ Lori hinted.
Nelly lowered her tone a few decibels then told them what she’d heard, which wasn’t a lot more than they already knew. They hadn’t heard about an as yet unnamed inmate, also involved in an altercation. ‘He’s in hospital, under guard,’ Nelly said. ‘I was damn near asleep until I heard your brother’s name.’
Smyth-Owen would be all over the papers by tomorrow and Lori wondered how many kids grew up loathing their family name. From her first day at school she’d been dogged by Smyth-Owen. Greg’s fault and Mavis’s. Back then they’d had a landline telephone and Mavis had spent half of her life on it, blasting hell out of most of Greg’s teachers.
Wendy Johnson started school on the same day as Lori, and without a brother to ruin her reputation, she’d been the teacher’s pet. She’d had a beautiful anorexic mother, who twice a week had volunteered at the canteen and given Wendy lunch orders. From day one, Lori had coveted Wendy’s name, her long blonde pigtails, her bracelet with the love-heart clasp, her lunch orders and her mother. By grade two, she’d hated her enough to rip the ribbons out of her hair and flush them down the loo, to chase her home from school one day, to get her down on someone’s nature strip and get that gold chain bracelet with its love-heart. Would have kept it too if Henry hadn’t hated thieves. She’d pitched it into the gutter and ground it in with the heel of her shoe – and she’d got into huge trouble at school for doing it.
They’d been in grade six the year Alan started at the primary. He hadn’t deserved the Smyth-Owen reputation, nor had Mick. Because of his brace, he’d always been a protected species of Smyth-Owen. Lori had been planning to do something about her reputation when she got to high school, which hadn’t happened, and not because of Greg or Mavis. When your father hangs himself on Christmas Day, even if you’re camouflaged in a baggy school uniform, you still stand out from the crowd. Every teacher at the high school had known who she was.
Eddy coming home, the locking up of Mavis, had forced Lori’s change in attitude and also dramatically improved her marks, or Eddy had. He’d done most of her homework. Then Leonie and Paul moved to Willama and their parents bought a house less than two blocks from Henry’s. Changing schools so often, because of their father’s work, had taught them how to make friends fast, and their proximity to Dawson Street had helped. They’d started riding to school with her and Mick, then started hanging around with them at school. Both Paul and Leonie had collected other friends since, but they’d never dropped Lori and Mick.
‘He looked a bit like Martin,’ Alan said.
Lori switched her wandering mind back to the moment. ‘Who looked like Martin?’
‘Greg.’
‘He looked nothing like him. He was dark like him, that’s all, and around the same height, but he had crazy horse white eyes and a face full of puss-topped pimples – and he probably wasn’t our full brother anyway.’
‘Who says?’ Jamesy asked, interested in family gossip.
‘Martin did once, when he was
warring with Mavis – and whether he was or he wasn’t, I’m sick and tired of talking about him!’
‘That’s why she liked him,’ Vinnie said. ‘Because he wasn’t Henry’s. Shit, ah?’
‘So Lori says,’ Mick said.
‘Martin said it, not me, and who cares. He’s dead.’
‘Remember how she used to send him around to the hotel to ask someone to buy her a packet of cigarettes,’ Jamesy said.
‘And he’d spend her change on the way home and never get into trouble,’ Alan said.
‘Remember the day you pinched his bag of jelly snakes,’ Jamesy said to Vinnie.
‘And got her bloody whip across my face for me effort,’ Vinnie said.
‘She had an old electrical cord,’ Alan explained to Eddy. ‘It used to hang over that hook behind the door, where she could reach and whip it in one action.’
‘And she didn’t care which one of us she hit,’ Jamesy said.
A girl on screen was about to be raped or murdered in bed and all conversation ceased while the killer/rapist climbed in through a rear window. She was alone in a house surrounded by trees.
‘What girl would choose to live alone in a place like . . .’ Lori began, then swung around on her chair.
‘Open that door or I’ll wet my pants,’ Mavis said.
As one they were on their feet. Several hands reached to open the door. They hadn’t heard her approach – as that sleeping girl hadn’t heard the killer/rapist approach. Whether she lived or died, they wouldn’t know – or not until that movie was played again. Mick turned the television off as Lori turned on the light in the brick room.
All morning she’d been imagining Mavis’s reaction. She reacted.
‘What the hell have you done with my loo,’ she asked, but Lori, walking ahead, had opened the sliding door and flicked on a second light globe. ‘Bloody hell!’ Mavis commented. It wasn’t an awestruck gasp but sounded sufficiently surprised, though she shook off her surprise fast to add, ‘So that bantam bastard finally finished it.’
normal
Dependent on Mavis’s mood, Martin had always been the cock sparrow or the bantam bastard. He was of average height for a man. Mavis had never been average. She’d had pet names for most of them. Mick had been Gimpy or the gimp, Lori the Little Henry bitch, though she’d outgrown the ‘little’ and become the Skinny Henry bitch.
She joined the boys in the kitchen and every one of them was standing, looking slightly stunned.
‘She’s got shape,’ Jamesy said.
‘Shape’ when applied to Mavis sounded ridiculous. In Lori’s lifetime, Mavis had never had shape, or not of the type Jamesy meant, but there was no denying that fact. The black dress she’d slept in, though crumpled, had looked like a dress.
‘I am the creator,’ Eddy said.
‘It’s the bodysuit,’ Alan said. ‘Martin had to pay three hundred dollars for it. It’s supposed to hold her two halves together.’
The sound effects coming from the en suite suggested that Mavis might have been struggling to remove her bodysuit.
‘She’s lost a ton more weight,’ Lori said. That dress proved it. The day she’d brought it home from Kmart for Mavis to try on for size, it had clung to her swinging boobs and belly apron. Tonight it fitted as its designer had intended. And her batwings had gone.
Like sightseers waiting to get a second glimpse of royalty, they stood together at the open kitchen door, stood listening – as they used to in the bad old days when each time she’d heaved her massive bulk out to the loo, they’d expected her to crash down.
Vinnie, who had disappeared, had only gone into his room to get his glasses, needing proof of what he’d seen.
The cluster in the doorway separated when the loo flushed. Mick went to the stove to move the kettle over the central hotplate and to lift the saucepan lid from the meal they’d saved for Mavis. The others remained near the door, listening to water splashing into the hand basin, to Mavis cursing when her first attempt to open the en suite door failed. Lori was about to walk out to release her when that door slid.
‘That must have cost me a pretty penny,’ Mavis said as she walked into the kitchen, walked like a . . . like a normal person. She looked . . . normal.
They gave way to her. She flopped down to her chair.
‘We saved you some dinner,’ Lori said.
‘I haven’t eaten since seven o’clock this morning,’ Mavis replied. ‘And I’m as dry as a wooden god.’
No mention of Greg? Did she think she’d dreamt those cops? Lori looked at the meal they’d saved. The vegetables had dried out a little around the edges but the sausages looked okay.
Mick was making her a mug of tea. ‘We’ll need more teabags tomorrow,’ he said.
Lori wouldn’t be buying them. She was never showing her face again in this town, but she served Mavis her meal. She passed the sauce dispenser, did a count of the remaining teabags while Eddy sat down to the left of his creation, only the corner of the table between him and Mavis’s leaning elbow, her left elbow. It was her right elbow that had loosened his teeth. It was in use, feeding a sausage into her mouth.
‘Stop staring at me,’ she said.
‘You look fantastic, Mave,’ Eddy said.
Fantastic was a mild stretching of the facts, but she looked so much better.
‘Anyone for coffee?’ Mick asked, his voice sounding as dry-mouthed as Lori’s felt. She raised a hand. Other hands rose. They rarely drank coffee, except when they ran out of teabags. Lori only bought one brand, which she stockpiled when they were on special, and they hadn’t been for weeks. The reject shop sold cheap teabags. She’d tried them, but only once.
Donny had donated their large can of coffee. The can of condensed milk Mick was opening was from their own emergency supplies. Mavis eyed it as he removed its lid with an old electric opener, which had only ever worked for Mick – and Henry, who had raised Matty on condensed milk. Shortly after his birth Mavis went on one of her food benders and when she’d discovered that the chocolate she’d eaten upset Matty – turned his napkins green – she’d eaten more chocolate. If she’d found a can of condensed milk she hadn’t bothered with the opener. She’d get Greg to puncture two holes through the lid. He’d have a suck, then she’d flop down to her couch and suck that can dry. The can Mick opened must have brought back sweet memories. She eyed him as he scraped the last of the milk into mugs, eyed him until he tossed the rinsed can into the kitchen bin, when she turned on her sausage, stabbed it and maybe wished her fork was going into Mick.
She’d never cut sausages, just impaled them, rolled them in tomato sauce, then bit, chewed, swallowed. Her table manners hadn’t been improved by her hospital stay. Watching her meal disappear was mesmerising, her jaw bones working overtime.
She looked better. Give her a haircut, put a bit of make-up on her face, run an iron over that dress and she’d look even better.
‘Get her looking halfway back to decent and she’ll find a replacement Henry,’ Jamesy had said the night Eddy started his conniving . . .
And probably end up having more kids . . .
Though maybe not. Mister Terrence Clay might have sterilised her during the ringbarking operation. According to Vinnie, the yellow Lotus he’d driven here last Easter had been worth huge money, which meant that he must have been a major league taxpayer. If the opportunity presented itself, wouldn’t any major league taxpaying surgeon sterilise a major league pension recipient? If he was given the opportunity.
‘What did that cost me?’ Mavis asked, pointing towards the brick room with her last portion of sausage.
‘Getting the power connected cost the most,’ Mick said. He was too truthful, so Lori interrupted.
‘An electrician who knows Martin did the wiring. Bert Matthews helped Mick and Vinnie do the rest.’
Mavis’s eyes found Vinnie. No longer wearing his glasses, he was propping up the mantelpiece, drinking coffee. It must have been excruciating for Mavis to have pro
duced a son capable of manhandling her. He’d done it a few times. Today he’d hauled her out of Miss Piggy’s car as easily as he might have hauled a bag of chook pellets out of the back of his boss’s work van.
‘Have you heard any more about Greggie?’ she asked.
She remembered. ‘No,’ Lori replied fast, a partial lie, but tonight a lie was safer than the truth.
‘Turn the television on,’ Mavis said. Having done her sleeping, she was ready for some television time.
‘It will wake the little kids. They’re in the bunk room,’ Lori said.
Bunk room only a wall away from the kitchen, Mavis eyed that wall. She’d produced those kids, hadn’t set eyes on them in almost a month and had no desire to. She scraped up the last of her potatoes and sauce, stood, picked up her mug of tea and took it out to her brick room where she had her comfortable recliner chair and her own television – and carpet tonight beneath her bare feet.
‘Shit, ah,’ Vinnie breathed when the kitchen door closed. There were a few sighs of relief.
Mick stoked the stove and closed it down for night burning. Lori placed Mavis’s plate into the sink to soak overnight, then minutes later they separated – the twins and Jamesy into the bunk room, Vinnie and Mick into the back room and Lori into a room that still held the scent of Mavis plus a whiff of hospital soap.
She shook her quilt well before spreading it over her sheet, and sixty seconds later, her mobile plugged into its charger, she was in bed.
The lingering scent in that room may have raised her dream of Mavis. They were in the kitchen. Mavis, wearing one of Mrs Matthews’s coverall aprons, was making an apple pie and writing on it with twists of pastry.
Dream writing is always confused, but in her dream Lori moved closer, close enough to read Love from Mummy.
She woke before getting to taste that pie, woke with her eye sockets full of tears. She never cried, not these days. Why such an unrealistic dream had been able to raise those tears, she didn’t know. It had, and so that she wouldn’t dream again, she got out of bed.
