by Joy Dettman
‘You smell like a rotten one. Get up, have a shower and turn that heater off.’
Shouldn’t have said that, but if she was fit enough to leave her bed to change the channel on her television, she was fit enough to shower.
Matty was sleeping. She’d squirted a double dose of baby Panadol down his throat half an hour ago. He was too old for baby Panadol but at least it had stayed down.
Didn’t poach an egg. She was thinking about frying one when her mobile rang again.
The thing about forgiving people is that they do forgive. Donny didn’t mention Henry’s grave or any grave. He’d been googling crematoriums.
‘Will Mavis agree to cremation?’
‘If I cook her an egg, she might. I’ll text you.’
She fried her two eggs, served them on two slices of toast, made her tea, held her breath while dumping the lot on Mavis’s table and was back at the door before mentioning cremation.
‘You took your time about it,’ Mavis said, about her breakfast – or about Greg’s funeral.
‘You’re not the only one who’s sick. Are you okay with cremating Greg?’
Mavis was out of her bed. She wanted those eggs. ‘Just get it done,’ she said.
She said just get it done, Lori texted. She added the Melbourne phone number for the place where Greg had been for a week then forgot about him until the kids came in from school, until Eddy went out to the brick room to crawl again. He was making Mavis a mocha coffee when Lori’s phone rang again. It was Donny.
‘I’ve organised it at the Springvale Crematorium on Tuesday morning. Tell Martin I’ll drive over after work on Monday night and we’ll leave at daybreak.’
‘If he’s not dead by then.’
So Saturday, Mavis’s first week home had disappeared. Vinnie was happy. The injured football players still unfit to play, he got to play his first game with the seniors and Lori escaped the house with Neil to watch Vinnie kick seven goals, and not against the lowest team on the ladder either. He was so visible that every player on his team kicked to him, but he’d had to mark that ball and to put it between the goalposts – which he’d done three times during the last minutes of the match.
He didn’t come home until midnight and Mick’s cockerels woke him too early. Two lost their heads before breakfast. They’d become soup by dinnertime, and Matty kept down a cup of strained broth. Even Mavis ate soup that night, in bed.
Martin attempted to send Lori to school on Monday. He was out of bed but not well enough to go to work, and leaving him and Mavis alone together could have been fatal. She lit the fire in the lounge room, made up the spare bunk for Donny, fed all three soup for lunch and made another omelette for dinner.
Donny didn’t arrive until after ten that night. He went straight to bed, and before six the next morning, Vinnie, Martin and Mick squeezed with him into his too small Mazda, Martin still coughing.
Tuesdays, always Nelly’s Matty-duty days, he put up a fight to go over the road. Lori went over to borrow a bunch of Nelly’s home-recorded videos, commercials and all. She lit the open fire, made up a bed on the couch for Matty, squirted another double dose of baby Panadol into him and left him to watch Pinocchio while she sat at the computer, attempting to deal with an English assignment until Mavis started screeching at eleven.
‘Get out of bed, have a shower and I’ll make your breakfast,’ Lori said.
That was how the war of the worlds began, though not until after midday when Mavis got out of bed to use the loo and Lori stole her blow heater – at the worst possible time.
She was about to escape with it out the front door when someone knocked on that door. It was probably god sellers or an estate agent, but she opened it.
‘He hasn’t been to work for a week,’ Miss Piggy accused.
Never before had she polluted her high heels on their veranda. Shock can silence you for a second or two.
‘He’s at Greg’s funeral, in Melbourne.’
‘What time will he be back?’
‘Late,’ Lori said, the heater under her arm, its cord trailing.
‘Tell him I need to speak to him,’ Miss Piggy said.
‘I reckon he’s already got that message,’ Lori said.
‘Well tell him again! And tell him too that if he doesn’t call me tonight then he’ll have more trouble than that,’ she said.
That was approaching. That was screeching about her heater. Lori closed the front door on Miss Piggy. Shouldn’t have. Should have joined her on the veranda, but Matty was on the couch in that landlocked lounge room. She backed into it as that came towards her in her Woolworths pants and sweat top that had looked bad the day she’d got herself into that outfit and after being slept in for a week, looked – and smelt – worse.
‘Get into the shower!’
‘Give me my bloody heater,’ Mavis said, making a grab for its dangling power cord.
It tailed Lori behind the coffee table, while Matty, who’d been lying on the couch, now stood on it ready to go one way or the other. He being the easier target, Mavis went for him.
Lori didn’t swing that cord to connect, just to make her keep her distance, which she didn’t do. The plug connected with bare flesh where Mavis’s trouser elastic had slid down and her sweatshirt had ridden up.
The shock of pain, or perhaps of being hit, stopped her in her tracks and gave Lori time and space to grab Matty and to get him outside and over the road. Contagious or not, he and Lori spent the afternoon of that Tuesday with Nelly. One by one and two by two, the other kids joined them there, apart from Eddy, who went home to crawl. He was back within minutes.
‘Why stir her up by taking her heater?’ he asked.
‘Why buy that heater without discussing it with the rest of us?’ Lori countered.
‘And with my money,’ Alan added.
‘Because none of you would have agreed to it –’
‘Because she didn’t need it.’
They stayed at Nelly’s until the Mazda returned, Vinnie in the driver’s seat, looking like The Hulk squeezed into a kid’s pedal car. Just as well he was a hulk. He lifted Mick out of the passenger seat and carried him inside. Martin extricated himself and carried Mick’s brace and boot. Donny got out of a rear door, got behind the wheel, made a U-turn and was gone. He had a three-hour drive before he went to bed tonight.
Mavis was in the kitchen when Vinnie carried Mick through to the bathroom but was gone when Lori got the bag of salt, the bottle of eucalyptus and two Panadol pills. If Mick’s brace was off, she knew why. Mick never complained about pain. He lost all colour from his face, and you could read agony in his eyes and in the way he spoke. Why he’d put himself through hours of agony for Greg, Lori did not know, nor did she ask.
He soaked in hot water for half an hour before calling Vinnie to help him into bed. No one ate until he was in bed, when Lori served baked beans. Mavis didn’t eat. She refused to look at baked beans.
They were washing the dishes when she came out demanding her Greggie’s ashes, and any movement of her unwashed body raised waves of stink. Vinnie hadn’t appreciated his day in that too small car. He hadn’t pulled the plug when he’d helped Mick out of the bath. He didn’t mess around. He hit her with his shoulder at waist level, carried her screeching down the central passage, dumped her into cooling water and locked the bathroom door from the outside, just in case she managed to get herself out of the tub.
They heard water running. She must have been heating her bathwater.
‘In the old days, in asylums, they used to strap the crazies into hot baths to calm them down,’ Jamesy said.
They left her soaking for an hour before Lori pulled the plug and left her to drain while fetching towels. She pitched her green tracksuit at her when she and the tub looked dry enough, by which time, Spud Murphy’s dogs were harmonising with her.
Vinnie took his time getting her out of the tub and dumping her on her bed, where Eddy medicated her with two blue Xanax, crushed, dissolved then
added to a glass of water that contained two soluble aspros. She didn’t pitch it at him, didn’t notice that the water may have been slightly blue.
Martin, who’d watched the entire operation, didn’t do his usual nag about drugging people, or not until after the medicating, not until Mavis was snoring.
‘I could be jailed for that. So could Vinnie,’ he said.
‘We’ve lost track of the times Doctor Jones has zapped her with a hypodermic,’ Lori said. ‘What’s the difference?’
They found out that night there was more than a colour difference between the salmon Xanax and the blue. The blue pills were fifteen milligrams, the salmon only five, but those extra milligrams brought them peace.
*
Eddy phoned the crematorium before leaving for school on Wednesday, phoned twice, waited on hold twice before being put through to a woman who told him that his deceased’s brother’s remains had been tossed to the four winds, by which time Mavis, who’d gone to bed too early on the previous night, had been up and rampaging.
He’d attempted to do the right thing. He’d made her toast, had poached her an egg, made her a medicated coffee, needing her calm before passing on the sad news.
Mavis drank tea at breakfast time. Eddy vacated the brick room dripping medicated coffee. The carpet caught the overflow.
His uniform was soaking in the laundry when they vacated the premises. The library opened at ten. They were first in the door. Lori paid for time on a computer but Eddy did the search for the unwanted ashes of a loved one. You can buy anything on the internet – except a loved one’s ashes.
He’d tossed Eva and Alice’s into the ocean, so knew what they were supposed to look like, and at the library, he came up with a plan, one that would require a post-it box. Lori paid for it, she paid for lunch at McDonald’s, and for half a dozen videos at the Salvos’ op-shop, which stopped Matty’s whinge. Everything now was on disc, so people were throwing away their perfectly good videos. In the lounge room at 108 Dawson Street, they had a dual player.
Eddy had never seen The BFG. In many ways he’d lived a very disadvantaged childhood. He didn’t get to see it that afternoon. Mavis was still rampaging and Nelly played bingo on Wednesdays.
Bert was home. He didn’t argue about them raking the ash out of his wood stove. He lent them his wife’s flour sifter and one of her freezer bags. When the sifted wood ash didn’t look quite right to Eddy, they scoured the chook yard for dried-out bones then borrowed Bert’s hammer and his back shed.
They had ‘Greggie’s’ ashes before the rest of the kids came home. The plastic bag had his name on it; the post-it box was addressed to Mavis and it might have had enough used stamps. They didn’t give it to her, not that Wednesday. They spied on her.
She must have been feeling the cold. She was in the kitchen, wearing Henry’s tartan dressing gown, spreading bread and wolfing one slice while spreading the next.
She ate like a snake, her jaws appeared to unhinge to take in its too large prey, then her throat swelled as she forced those folded slices of bread down. The loaf was on the table, the tub of butter was half full. She had jam, had bananas and she had to get rid of the lot. There was no sense to her gorging. She’d never been hungry in her life. Had it been Vinnie with the food addiction, Lori might have understood. He’d told stories about eating out of garbage tins during his time in Melbourne. Mavis had lived in an almost mansion and on their housekeeper’s days off, they’d eaten out at posh restaurants. She’d told a story once about how her father had spent twenty thousand dollars on Eva and Henry’s wedding, how he’d paid a hundred dollars for a pair of jeans for her – when she was twelve. She’d had it all until her father died. Maybe that was her problem.
There could have been another reason for today’s gorging. After Mavis’s enforced bath, Lori had found proof that Clay hadn’t sterilised her. Martin used to believe that the production line of kids had been about the money the government had paid into Mavis’s account, but Lori knew that money had only been a fringe benefit of Mavis’s control over menstruation.
The washing machine agitating, she was leaning on its lid when she saw a cat slink through the blocks of light escaping through the wall of louvers, a pale ginger cat that could have been Meggsie. She hadn’t seen Meggsie in three or four years, had believed that he was dead.
‘Meggsie. Meggsie,’ she called softly. The cat stopped and looked her way, just for an instant. Then as Meggsie used to, he sprang up to the woodheap and onto the top of the paling fence, where he did his tightrope walk. It was him! She used to love watching him do that.
‘Clever kitty,’ she said. ‘Here, kitty, kitty, kitty.’
But he was gone, over the fence and into the night.
‘Let him die, Smithy,’ Nelly had advised the day Lori brought him home as a near dead, week-old kitten. ‘He’s a feral. You’ll never tame a feral,’ she’d said.
Nine-year-old kids believe little of what adults tell them. Donny, who might have been fifteen, had been close enough to a kid not to believe, and he’d always been as soft as butter. He’d had an afterschool job at Woolworths back then, and he’d come home the next night with a doll’s baby bottle, complete with a plastic teat. Before Meggsie’s eyes had been fully open, he’d learnt to suck on plastic.
He’d been born knowing how to use his claws, though it had taken a lot of bad scratches to convince Lori that Nelly might have been right about never taming ferals.
Greg had been a feral. He would have been thirteen the year Lori turned nine, and like Meggsie, had never taken well to captivity. Henry and Martin used to track him down as she’d tracked down Meggsie. They’d fed Greg. She’d fed Meggsie. Both had eaten what was given, had stolen what they could, and then run off again into the more exciting dark.
Wind blew cold on Lori’s face, but a drying wind. If she could get the washing hung tonight it would be dry by morning. Melbourne’s forecast for tonight was for gale force winds. Greg’s ashes would be happier blowing free than sealed in a plastic bag.
ashes
Mavis didn’t question her wood ash and crushed bone mix. It stopped her gorging but didn’t improve her mood. She wanted Martin gone and he wouldn’t go. And Eddy was being a pain. He’d lost the right to carry the twins’ pocket money bankcard the day he’d bought that blow heater when Lori and Alan had taken it from him, physically. He wanted it back.
Not that one cent in that account belonged to him. He blew his share a day or two after Watts paid it in. Alan saved his and Eddy wanted to blow the last of what was in that account on a pair of shoes for Mavis.
He and Alan rarely fought but when they did, everyone knew about it and it didn’t end fast, and with Mavis the way she was, they didn’t need more fighting.
‘She’s got her hospital flip-flops and those brand new sneakers, and we’re not wasting any more money on her,’ Lori said.
‘She needs something she can put on that will stay on,’ Eddy argued.
Life wasn’t good at 108.
Then Martin went and made it worse. He came home from work on Thursday night and he said the dreaded ‘childcare’ word to Matty. Of course Matty started bellowing, which started Mavis screeching.
‘You’re going whether you bawl or not,’ Martin said, ‘and your sister is going to school.’
She hadn’t been to school for two weeks. She’d googled ‘carer’s pension’.
The night didn’t improve. Alan was on dinner duty. He served up a mess of silverbeet, onions and rice and was emptying out-of-date cans into his mess when Eddy emptied a full jar of chilli powder into it, which started a new war, which was still raging when Martin took a call from his mother-in-law. He ran outside with his phone so she wouldn’t hear the bedlam he’d escaped to.
So Friday. Eddy left for school but didn’t get there and didn’t come home at four, at five or six, and when he did, his man bun was gone and his hair had been cut in an identical style to Alan’s.
‘Where did you get the
money to do that?’ Alan asked.
‘Where do you think?’
He’d found the card Lori had hidden on a rafter in the outdoor loo.
It had taken almost twelve months for him to grow his hair long enough to tie back. They had their theories as to why he’d cut it. Neil suggested he’d spent the day shoplifting and when the cops picked him up, he’d given them Alan’s name. No cops knocked on their door. They got the card again and this time Alan burnt it.
They found out what Eddy had done once he was in bed and they plugged in the laptop. He’d sent Watts an email from Alan’s email address and he’d signed it Alan. He’d told Watts that he’d posted a photograph and the necessary documents to update his passport, Alan’s passport, which Mavis wouldn’t have signed, which meant that Vinnie must have. Eddy’s passport had been updated two months ago when that ten-day trip to China had only been a suggestion.
Until his eighteenth birthday, Vinnie had signed everything, or forged Mavis’s squiggle on whatever had required her squiggle. He signed the back of the yellow bankcard, their absentee notes for school, papers about the twins’ support payments, Mavis’s pension papers. Teaching Vinnie how to do that Mso squiggle was the one useful thing Greg had ever done in his life. But signing papers for a passport, now that he was no longer a minor?
‘You were told never to do it again, Vinnie,’ Lori said. ‘You were told in April that you were old enough now to charge, and signing papers that will end up in some government office were the worst possible things you could have signed.’
‘I bloody signed nothing,’ Vinnie said.
‘Since when?’
‘Since you bloody told me not to, Hitler.’
He didn’t lie, never had, so she turned her attack again on Eddy. ‘Did you sign it, you moron idiot?’
‘I kept the ones he signed when he signed mine. I changed the date. Satisfied?’ Eddy said.
‘As if that’s any different! You’ve conned the Australian government!’
‘We’ve been conning them for years. Where do you think her pension stuff ends up?’ he asked.
