by Joy Dettman
‘Get me an aspro,’ she panted, and flopped.
‘You take aspros with food,’ Lori said, daring a second brief glance. Seated, with less of her visible, if you discounted the nipples, that clinging sweat top showed how normal-shaped she was.
‘Then get me a banana and a bit of milk to eat with it. My heart is racing like a traction motor.’
The carving knife now breaking through the plastic wrapping of a bulk-buy tray of minced steak Lori had been unable to squeeze into the fridge or freezer, she didn’t jump to obey.
‘I need an aspro. They told me to take one every day.’
‘They told you to take blood-pressure pills every day too,’ Lori said, plus one of Clay’s version of Xanax, a blue version, which wouldn’t match pumpkin or apricot jam or anything else. Why the hell he’d had to change them, Lori didn’t know. She dumped the steak into Henry’s biggest saucepan, set it on the stove, then removed Clay’s after-surgery instructions from the side of the fridge and slid them down the table towards Mavis.
‘The second page lists the pills you’re supposed to be taking, and the first page tells you to walk.’
‘I haven’t got the strength of a day-old pup. Lifting my arms up to wash my hair nearly killed me. Get me that bloody aspro!’
‘Your arms won’t get any stronger while you sit there being waited on,’ Lori said, but she washed her hands, washed the knife, dried it, slid it back into its self-sharpening sheath then reached for the pills.
‘I don’t want that hospital crap. Get me a soluble aspro.’
‘Martin was late getting the car home yesterday because he had to hang around waiting for that crap –’
‘Do I give a shit?’ Mavis asked.
‘I doubt it.’
They had a family pack of soluble aspros. Lori peeled one, dropped it into a glass of water, chose the ripest banana and slid it down the table. She started popping pills from their bubble packs, the salmon-pink blood pressure, a green and red capsule-form antidepressant, the blue Xanax and a small creamy-white pill that, according to the internet, was a mild antipsychotic. She placed them beside the glass, and one by one, Mavis flicked them away with her middle finger and thumb.
The capsule missed the open saucepan by millimetres; the blood-pressure pill hit the window, then disappeared into a sink half full of water, the antipsychotic went somewhere. Matty picked up the Xanax.
‘So have another heart attack. Have a stroke while you’re about it. You’ll be able to share a hospital ward with Bert’s wife,’ Lori said. She claimed the Xanax and returned to the stove where the melting capsule smelt like poison. Lifting the hotplate, she scraped what remained of the antidepressant into the coals, then stood stirring the meat until it released enough fat to take the vegetables, or to take half of them.
‘You’re supposed to fry the onions separate when you make a stew,’ Mavis said.
‘You make the next one. Back in the annals of ancient history, you used to make good stews.’
Mavis accepted the compliment with a phfft. She had the newspaper and flipped a few more pages while Lori opened two cartons of eggs.
Mick colour-coded his egg cartons, green rubber bands for fresh, yellow for middle-aged and red for old, which didn’t mean old, just meant not fresh. She needed to use the red-banded or Spud Murphy’s dogs would get them. She wasn’t fond of those dogs.
Cracked a dozen into Henry’s deep roasting pan before gaining Mavis’s interest.
‘What the hell are you making with all of them?’
‘An omelette,’ Lori said as Matty came from beneath the table to check the eggs for signs of chicken. He’d watched a few peck their way out of eggs.
‘Use the frying pan,’ Mavis said.
‘A baked omelette,’ Lori clarified, then broke in six more. The shells went into the chook bucket. Chooks ate anything. She scooped the remaining diced vegetables in with the eggs and started mixing the mess with a fork.
‘That’s a frittata, not an omelette,’ Mavis said.
‘I call it a baked omelette.’
‘Well I’m telling you the right name for it.’
‘Your right name for what you used to make. I make baked omelettes.’
‘You think you’re running the show now, don’t you, you lanky little bitch?’
‘I think I’m cooking dinner,’ Lori said. ‘But you’re welcome to take over.’
She opened the packet of powdered milk, measured three large spoonfuls into a jug, added water and gave it a mix. Her baked omelettes required milk or something. She’d used stale yoghurt and water once. Eggs weren’t fussy. They accepted any sort of bread too. She’d saved the crusty ends for her omelettes, saved them in the fridge. She had six ends. She added two slices of bread to the pile and told Matty to break them small and to toss them into the pan.
‘Not crust,’ Matty said. ‘I don’t like crusts.’
‘They dissolve,’ she said and dared another glance at Mavis’s gun barrels. ‘Didn’t that bra fit you?’
‘I don’t need bras with these.’
‘Your nipples do. They look like puppets talking to each other.’
‘What’s nipples?’ Matty asked, breaking the bread but not the crusts.
‘Did you chose their size or did Clay?’
‘I didn’t choose to bloody near die of what he did to me,’ Mavis said. ‘My side is still sore.’
‘He got rid of your itch.’ And a lot more. Her transformation would have been as documentary worthy as that of the baby-faced dude.
Her head bowed, one hand holding her hair back, Mavis was reading. Lori watched her while adding salt and pepper, while dunking pieces of crust, while thinking that Eddy’s promised ‘normal’ might have been relatively close to right. Warring with Martin had been normal back in Henry’s time. Mavis had always been a bitch to him, but during her ‘normal’ times she’d been a humorous bitch.
She used to torment the hell out of Henry with Eva’s voice. She’d been able to mimic her perfectly. She used to be able to mimic one of the Current Affairs women, and some nights when that show had been boring, she’d turn the volume down and do her own Current Affairs broadcast, and have the kids in stitches. If Henry had put down his mop or broom and laughed –
He hadn’t been a laughing sort of man, hadn’t been a loving man either, and he’d never learnt to read Mavis’s danger signs. Her kids had. They’d got out of her way fast before she’d blown. Not Henry. He’d stood on with his mop or broom and absorbed the blast.
Lori got the cheese and grater, got a plate to grate onto. She always covered her omelettes with grated cheese. When they’d had their own tomatoes, she’d added slices before adding the cheese. No tomatoes today, not at eight dollars a kilo.
The oven was too hot. Nelly’s electric oven had temperature settings. If she wanted it hot or just warm, all she had to do was turn a knob to the required number. With a wood stove, you had to leave the oven door open to cool it, or put more wood in to heat it. But too hot or not, she slid the pan in, closed the door and returned to her stew.
Too much fat oozed from cheap minced steak but a handful of rice soaked it up. She added a palm full, added curry plus four cloves of garlic, skin on.
‘Peel it,’ Mavis said.
‘It peels itself,’ Lori replied. She loathed peeling garlic, and once cooked it did peel itself, or you could squeeze its insides out of the skin.
‘You know everything, don’t you?’
‘My teachers wouldn’t agree with you,’ she said. That’s what conversation was, a backwards and forwards thing until one conversant ended it – one way or another.
Mavis ended it. She’d found the piece about Greg.
‘Did you read this shit they wrote about your brother?’ she asked.
‘They got the facts right,’ Lori said.
Mavis gave her the evil eye. She had expressive eyes, they could be killer or blank, but even her evil eye looked better. Everything about her looked better, other than her nippl
es.
‘I’ll sue the bastards,’ she said.
‘Which ones?’
‘The bloody prison for putting him in with murderers.’
‘Where else do you put murderers?’
‘It was a bloody accident and he was your brother!’
‘And he killed two innocent people,’ Lori said, and added a dash of Worcestershire sauce to her stew, because Henry used to. She added a heavy dose of tomato sauce, for the same reason. She could make a Henry stew with her eyes closed. They always tasted the same but no one complained about their sameness.
Eddy was the best cook, only because he downloaded his recipes from the internet and then did exactly what the recipes said – multiplied by five. He made incredible stir-fries, made curried chicken legs with coconut cream, made spaghetti bolognaise out of cheap minced steak that everyone would kill for.
‘He was nineteen years old and now he’s gone,’ Mavis said, still on Greg.
‘The woman he killed was thirty-six and her daughter only sixteen.’
‘And you’re an unfeeling bitch of a girl –’
Lori sighed, wearied by making conversation. She added water to her stew, put the lid on, picked up the after-surgery instructions and placed them back under their magnets on the fridge.
‘Do you even know that you’ve got a follow-up appointment with him in July?’
‘He told me.’
‘That’s six weeks away. You should be outside walking, not sitting.’
‘Pass me that remote,’ she said. Matty had found a vet show with his channel surfing.
‘He’s watching it,’ Lori said.
And Mavis moved. Lori thought she was going after the remote, then saw why she’d moved. Nelly’s gardening hat was walking by the sink window.
‘You bring that stickybeaking midget bitch in here and I’ll throw her out,’ Mavis warned.
‘It would be exercise,’ Lori said.
She went out the back to talk to Nelly, who wasn’t likely to come inside, not today. Matty forgot his vet show. Nelly had been a fixture in his life since Henry’s funeral. She’d been a fixture in Lori’s for three times as long.
‘What’s going on with Martin?’ Nelly asked. At times her curiosity got the better of her good manners. Lori didn’t reply, or not until they were in the laundry where she spilled what she knew, about the divorce, about borrowing Sean’s father’s caravan.
‘Our brother got dead because he killed some people,’ Matty said.
‘Go and find Neil and Timmy,’ Lori said.
‘Why did he killed some people?’
‘He had an accident in a car he was driving too fast,’ Lori said.
‘Vinnie might drive Martin’s car too fast.’
‘He drives properly,’ Nelly said. ‘Go and find your brothers. Look. Mick’s home. Go out and see what he bought.’ She too wanted to speak uncensored.
Mick had punnets of something. He and Vinnie had raised six good-sized garden beds well above ground level, edged with corrugated iron and whatever else they’d been able to find. Gardening wasn’t the optimum occupation for someone who couldn’t kneel down to plant and weed. Henry used to kneel for hours – probably praying for salvation.
The smell of burning fat sent Lori running for the kitchen and sent Nelly down to see what Mick was planting.
‘Did Terry Clay cut out your smelling glands too?’ Lori asked, snatching the saucepan from the stove, taking it to the sink where she added water before daring to stir. The rice had soaked up the fat; it had browned a little but hadn’t burnt. She added more water before returning her stew to the stove.
‘What did that stickybeaking old bitch want?’
‘What does she ever want, Mavis?’ Absolutely nothing – except information, which she filed and kept in storage. She had no understanding of computers but had a storage system equal to none. Ask her anything about anyone and the answer was at her fingertips.
‘She came over here to get a look at me.’
‘I hate to tell you, but you’re not the be all and end all of her life. She asked about Martin. And would it have killed you to move that saucepan when you smelt it burning?’
‘I can’t lift my arms above my head to wash my own bloody hair –’
‘The stove isn’t above your head.’
‘I know what I’m capable of doing.’
The caravan, coming in reverse down the driveway, sent Lori running to fetch a shirt from the brick room. She tossed it at Mavis, told her that her nipples stuck out like pumpkin stalks and to cover them before the boys came in. Then she went out to watch the caravan turn before hitting the woodheap. She expected it to turn again and continue down to the back corner, but instead it kept backing towards the laundry. Martin was behind the wheel, Vinnie directing him and clearing a pathway between kids.
‘Park it down in the bottom corner,’ Lori yelled.
‘He’ll need the laundry’s power point,’ Vinnie said.
‘The washing machine needs the laundry’s power point!’
‘There’s a power board in one of my cartons,’ Martin yelled. ‘See if you can find it for me, Splint.’
the funeral
At 108 Dawson Street, in any given twenty-four-hour period, far too much happened to recall. Given a week of twenty-four-hour days it was easier to recall what hadn’t happened than what had. Greg hadn’t been buried. Martin hadn’t gone back to his wife and Lori hadn’t been to school.
Those who were supposed to know such things said that stress could lower a person’s immunity to disease. The stress of leaving his wife when added to almost knocking down the laundry while parking the van, and maybe the stress of Lori nagging because his van stole the natural light in the laundry, was too much stress for Martin’s immune system to handle. He was sneezing before Lori served her baked omelette. He ate his share with toast, slept in the van, and he went to work on Monday, but knocked off early and put himself to bed.
Mavis was the next to be felled by his virus. By Tuesday night her cough sounded like a dying dog’s, then Matty had started coughing. By Wednesday night it was easier to name those who hadn’t succumbed to the disease than those who had. Vinnie, Lori, Eddy and Neil hadn’t.
Illness never affected Mavis’s appetite, only what foods she could eat. She could eat poached eggs and bulk cough lollies, not the nasty-tasting type that may have eased her cough but Butter Menthols, which tasted like lollies. Eddy bought them for her. She could eat hot custards and canned peaches. Eddy made her custard. He shopped for her canned peaches.
She demanded more warmth than her old panel heater provided, and on Thursday Eddy spent Alan’s pocket money on one of those electricity-guzzling little blow heaters. He’d ripped it out of its box and plugged it in before anyone realised what he’d brought home.
Lori repaired its box and then attempted to get the blow heater. It was going back to Harvey Norman.
Try giving a mad dog a bone then taking it away from him. Mavis left her sickbed to fight for her heater, which she did with her fingernails. Lori ended up with claw marks from her ear to her jaw.
So Friday. Martin coughing in his van, Matty vomiting in the front bedroom. They needed a doctor. Eddy, Mick, Jamesy and Neil were at school. Alan and Timmy were coughing in the lounge room where the open fire burned. Lori had been thinking about phoning the surgery since Matty had vomited all over the bed. She was in the laundry soaking his pyjamas, sheets and quilt cover, and thinking about Doctor Jones, when her mobile rang. It never rang. It rarely beeped.
‘Hello!’ she said.
It was Donny, and he’d only phoned her because Martin’s mobile was flat, due to Lori having stolen his charger, because sick or not, Miss Piggy wouldn’t leave him alone and nor would her father.
‘My calls keep going through to his message bank,’ Donny said.
‘He’s sick and his battery is flat.’
‘Karen phoned me last night. What’s going on with them?’
‘He
’s left her. What do you want him for?’
‘I need to know what’s happening about Greg’s funeral. I’ll have to get time off.’
‘Nothing is happening. Everyone up here is dying of some bug.’
‘Was he thinking about putting him in with Henry?’ Donny asked.
‘What?’
‘Are you going to bury Greg in Henry’s grave?’
‘You actually dare ask me something like that?’
‘Like what?’
‘Like inflicting that diseased druggie mongrel on Henry.’
‘He’s dead, Splint.’
‘Yeah, and suggest that to me or anyone else again and you’ll end up sharing his hole.’
‘You’re starting to sound like her, Splint. Get a grip on your tongue.’
‘Yeah? And you’re starting to sound like one of those new-age forgiving types who’d paint a target on his shirt so the snipers had something to aim at. If you can’t see anything wrong with suggesting we weigh Henry down forever under that mongrel, then there’s something seriously wrong with your brain. Forget about getting your teeth fixed and get your brain seen to,’ she said, then disconnected the call.
She started the washing machine, added a dash of disinfectant, then washed her hands and arms with it before walking around to check on Martin.
‘Need anything?’
‘A couple of Panadol,’ he said. Then, ‘Why aren’t you at school?’
‘Who’d get your Panadol if I was?’
She popped two from their bubble wrap, found the Vicks, smeared a little around her nostrils then returned to the van, where she offered him a dab of Vicks before handing over the pills and water.
‘Do I need to phone Doctor Jones?’
‘It’s just a virus. He can’t do much about a virus.’ He started coughing again so she got out to the fresh air, plastered a little more Vicks up her nose, for its germ-blocking and smell-blocking properties. Mavis was screeching.
Vicks VapoRub didn’t have a hope against the stink of boiled-up sweat and public loo. She closed the brick room door other than an inch or two gap.
‘You screeched?’ she asked through the gap.
‘I feel like a poached egg,’ Mavis said.
