by Joy Dettman
They had a wall of crockery and glassware. She was looking at a stack of dinner plates and considering carrying their weight home when she picked up the top one and found out it was plastic. They looked like china and were only forty cents each so she took all six.
Loved this place. Never once in her life had she walked out that door with empty hands. She’d found an old sewing machine in here one day, for two dollars. It was as heavy as lead. She’d had to borrow a Woolworths trolley to get it home, but it had repaired a lot of stuff since.
She was on her way back to the counter when she found what looked like a brand-new, old man’s grey hand-knitted cardigan. She’d come in here to buy something to wear home. It looked warm but had five dollars on it. It wouldn’t fit Mavis; the boys wouldn’t wear it but Bert might, and who cared. She needed its warmth and its newness so she placed it with her bundle on the counter.
The bra raised two pairs of eyebrows. Lori didn’t have enough breast to fill a ten A.
One of those white-headed women made a quantum leap. ‘How is your mum doing these days, love?’
‘Okay,’ Lori said, a blatant lie.
‘Someone was saying that she’d been in hospital.’
‘She was for a while,’ Lori said.
‘She’s well now?’
Most people love information. Lori was searching for a little to donate when her mobile beeped. It didn’t recognise the number of the caller and for a second she thought of the dirt-bike riders.
Where are you? someone had texted. A dozen or more kids from school had her number. They could have passed it on – or had their mobiles stolen. She didn’t reply.
And it beeped again. It’s me, Splint. I bought a new phone and got a new number. Where are you? It’s getting dark.
He’d probably been down at the river looking for her. Most of them knew that if she wasn’t in the potting shed or at Nelly’s, she’d be at the river. He might want to control her but only because he cared – and he always had – before Miss Piggy.
I’m at the Salvos op-shop, she replied.
Stay there. I’ll pick you up.
The jeans raised those old ladies’ eyebrows again. Like most in town, they would have heard the story about how Mavis Smyth-Owen had grown herself into the house – not into size eighteen jeans. Both of those women were around seventy, one had grandkids, but there she was standing behind a counter – maybe because she had nothing better to do, but maybe because she cared about people.
‘Mavis has been dieting,’ Lori said. ‘She had two heart attacks.’
They wanted more, but Lori’s wallet was out. She’d totalled up her purchases. She’d spent seventeen dollars and forty cents. Their old register was still adding up when she placed two tens on the counter.
‘That’s near enough,’ she said and got out.
She didn’t shop there because she needed charity. If Mavis’s pension and Watts’s support payment were added to Martin and Vinnie’s wages, then Henry’s house might have been the richest in Willama. She shopped there because they always had what she needed – and she needed that cardigan.
She was buttoning it, her bags at her feet, when the grannies came out. They must have been waiting for her to leave so they could close up, and in that freezing street, she felt her face begin its burn.
‘I’m sorry I held you up,’ she said to the one locking the door. The other one was unlocking a white car.
‘We’re closing early, love,’ the woman said. ‘Are you all right to get home with that load?’
‘My brother is picking me up,’ Lori replied.
The world was full of fake caring, but those women cared enough about a kid standing alone with her bags on a darkening corner to wait until Martin’s ute pulled into the kerb. Lori lifted her hand to the women before opening the ute’s door.
‘You bought out their shop,’ Martin said as she placed the loaded bags at her feet.
‘I’m going to get that dressing gown off her tonight.’
‘You shouldn’t wander off and not tell anyone where you’re going. We thought you were with Nelly until she sent the kids home.’
‘I managed to make the right decisions before you came home,’ she said. ‘I took Matty out of childcare because he screamed night and day for a week – and you may as well know now as later that I’ll do the same if he starts it again.’
‘He’s manipulating you,’ Martin said. ‘And he dominates young Timmy.’
He did. She couldn’t deny that. And Nelly knew it too, which was why she’d played Harry Potter today.
‘You and Mick have done a magnificent job of holding that bloody place together but I’m home now, Splint, and I’m staying home, so let go of the reins for a while and be a kid while you’ve still got time.’
‘You’ll go eventually.’
‘I’m going nowhere. That’s a promise – or not until you finish school – and I mean finish year twelve.’
‘That could take a while. I’ll end up repeating this year.’
‘It’s not half over yet. I know what you’re capable of when you put your mind to it.’
She smelt spaghetti bolognaise before she opened the back door. Eddy wasn’t rostered on to cook tonight. She knew why he’d cooked. He never apologised, not verbally, not to anyone, not for anything, because he was always in the right whether he was or not. But he knew he’d gone too far with his involvement of Vinnie in his passport scam. His bolognaise was his apology. Vinnie, and everyone else, loved it.
The shower was splashing. She did an inventory of heads as she dumped her load on the table. According to Eddy’s bathroom roster, which most of them stuck to, Vinnie should have been in the bathroom between five-thirty and six. He was leaning on the mantelpiece watching pots boil and readying his gastric juices.
The brick room door was open, both lights were on. Mavis wasn’t in there.
Jamesy replied to her question before she asked it. ‘She’s been in the shower for an hour.’
‘Vinnie put her in there and locked the door,’ Neil said. ‘Now she’s trying to use all of our hot water.’ He was into the bags, looking for what she might have bought for him. Matty was clinging to her leg, winding up for another childcare onslaught.
‘You start bawling again and I’ll put you out in the laundry and you’ll get no bolognaise,’ she said. ‘Put that back, Neil.’ He’d unearthed the black bra and was tested its cups as earmuffs. A lot of Eddy had rubbed off on him. Lori exchanged his earmuffs for the plastic plates. ‘Give them a wash. They came from the op-shop,’ she said. He was tall enough now to wash dishes.
‘Did you buy something for me?’ Matty asked.
‘All you need is a haircut.’
She gathered Mavis’s new secondhand clothing and took the lot through to the bathroom, unlocked the door and walked in. Henry’s dressing gown that used to smell of deodorant and shaving soap and him was on the floor. She placed the op-shop clothing on the vanity unit, then picked up the dressing gown – and received a hit of Mavis sweat, and her screech.
‘Leave that where it bloody is.’
‘There are new clothes on the unit,’ Lori said. She picked up the laundry hamper and got out.
Smelt of dead socks in the kitchen. The odour was not emanating from the hamper but from the packet of grated cheese Eddy always served with his bolognaise. He called it by its correct name. The rest of them called it dead-sock cheese.
In the laundry, she considered soaking Henry’s dressing gown, but if it came clean it would never smell of him again. She got the washing machine started then took that gown around to the green bin and dropped it in. Maybe she’d be sorry later. Maybe she wouldn’t. There comes a time when you have to let go.
They were seated, their forks busy, when Mavis came out. She’d got into the jeans and the black sweater and every eye in the room turned to her. She hadn’t sat with them at the table for over a week so Neil had started using her chair. He moved when she kept coming. She didn’t
flop down. She took her time in sitting.
No one looked at her. No one wanted her there but Mick passed her her meal and she started shovelling and sucking it in.
Martin had learnt how to eat spaghetti in the correct way, with a spoon and fork, and after the first forkful, he told Eddy that he’d paid twenty-five dollars for a lesser plate of bolognaise at his local pub.
‘Wait until you taste his chicken-leg curry,’ Alan said – which was his acceptance of Eddy’s non-apology, and Lori sighed. It looked as if their war might have been over.
They were an odd pair, joined by appearance and Eva’s money, but not close. They had no common interests. Alan said often that Eva had never treated them as individuals. He’d shaken her off him as a dog sheds muddy water, whereas too much of her mud had soaked into Eddy. But he’d eaten out often enough with her to have developed tastebuds, which everyone appreciated.
Mavis was wiping her plate clean with her finger before realising that she’d eaten off plastic.
‘I’m not one of the bloody kids,’ she said, and she pitched the plate at the door.
‘We’re running short on china,’ Lori replied, a fact – and an accusation.
‘Tell that thieving bastard to buy you more. He’s getting my money.’
‘You’d mean the taxpayer’s, Mavis,’ Martin said.
‘Stop!’ Lori said.
‘You’ve been getting at it for years –’
‘And you were doing such a fine job of managing it –’
‘Stop it. Both of you. Just stop now,’ Lori said.
Then from midway down the table, a giant roared and thumped the table with a closed fist. Half-full and empty plates jumped and the kids grabbed their plates and moved away.
Not Timmy. He lost the last of his spaghetti. Mavis frisbeed his plate at Vinnie.
His near vision might have been bad but there wasn’t a thing wrong with his reflexes. He caught that plate mid-air and frisbeed it back, and they saw why he was playing football with the senior team. He scored. Had that plate been china, he might have knocked her off her chair.
Given normal situations, Vinnie epitomised the BFG, but there were other types of giant, and the ruination of a truly excellent dinner had roused that other type.
He turned on Martin then. ‘Just because you got your life up shit creek, don’t think you can come back here and stir that crazy bitch up every time you’re in the same bloody room,’ he said.
Martin took off out the back door and for a second Mavis looked pleased, until Vinnie turned his attack on her. ‘Get out to your bloody room or I’ll put you out there.’
‘Don’t you try to tell me what I’ll do, you moron bastard –’
Should not have said ‘moron’, not to Vinnie. She and Greg had said that word too often. The kids saw what was going to happen. They scattered as Vinnie hit her with his shoulder in her ringbarked region, lifted her and her chair, and ran her out and down to the junk heap, or Lori expected him to toss her on top of the junk. But he ran her to where the fence had been propped up with the mattress, and he tossed her over it.
Every neighbour would have heard her. The old couple who lived behind that fence turned their outside lights off and no doubt locked their doors.
‘She’s got no shoes on,’ Eddy said.
‘You go crawling after her and I’ll pitch you bloody further,’ Vinnie warned.
Mavis’s chair was back in the kitchen. She’d dropped it. Vinnie didn’t clear the table that night. He showered and went out somewhere. Eddy delayed his crawling until Vinnie had left, then he disappeared with his penlight torch – and returned without Mavis.
‘I knocked on the oldies’ doors. They wouldn’t open up.’
‘They probably called the cops to pick her up,’ Neil said.
‘I put Xanax in her bolognaise,’ he admitted. ‘She’ll freeze if she nods off out there.’
Lori put her parka on, pulled her beanie low, picked up the big flashlight and went down and over the back fence to check the old couple’s yard and verandas. She was flashing the light around their front garden when the wife opened her door a crack and threatened to call the police.
‘I’m looking for Mavis,’ Lori said.
‘I seen her go out our gate. You make sure you close it behind you,’ the old lady said and closed her door.
If her feet hadn’t turned to ice blocks, Mavis might have walked around to the police station. She’d threatened often enough to report Martin for theft. It was only three blocks away from the Johnson Street corner. Lori walked towards that corner, flashing the torchlight to both sides of Johnson Street. It ran parallel to Dawson and she’d always hated it – because of one of its residents. She was nearing the home of that resident when she found Mavis sitting on a low brick fence, three houses back from the big old corner house four generations of Johnsons currently called home.
‘On your feet,’ Lori said, spot-lighting her quarry.
‘That moron bastard hurt my scar.’
‘You hurt his feelings. Fair is fair –’
‘I want him out of my house. I want both of those bastards out of my house.’
‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, and you probably want your bloat and your whip back too, and to play queen bee, sting anyone you feel like stinging, but it’s not happening. You’re a drone, Mavis, and not worth the food you eat. Get home.’
‘Get my shoes.’
‘You got up here without them. You can get home without them,’ Lori said, and stepped back to the shadows as lights came on at the Johnson house. She couldn’t see the faces at the windows but knew they’d be there.
‘My feet are freezing.’
‘They won’t get any warmer while you sit there. You’ve got ten seconds to move or I’ll phone an ambulance to take you to Bendigo.’
‘It’s my bloody house and I’ll say who lives in it.’
She was too loud. ‘It’s our house and we’ve let you live in it because a few of us felt sorry for you. You’ve killed our pity. You’ve murdered it stone dead. One. Two. Three.’
‘I hate your guts.’
‘You hate your own more. Four. Five. Six.’
Everything you read or watch about child-raising tells you to never make a threat you’re not prepared to keep. Mavis might have been forty-two but she had the self-control of a two-year-old, and Lori’s mobile was out before she reached the count of ten.
‘Are you moving?’
‘Fuck off, you Henry bitch.’
Lori dialled triple zero. She didn’t expect her call to get straight through, but within seconds a woman was asking which service she required.
‘Ambulance,’ Lori said.
‘Put that bloody phone down!’
‘Get home.’
‘Get my bloody shoes.’
A male voice was on the line, wanting to know the problem. ‘My mother has mental issues,’ Lori said. ‘Her doctor is . . .’ Mavis was up and moving towards the light. ‘She’s up,’ Lori said. ‘She’s . . . I’ll have to go. I’m sorry to have troubled you.’
As the crow flew, they weren’t far from home. On foot, they were a block and a street away, and too much light on the Johnson Street corner. Without Vinnie, there was no way to get her back over the fence so in sheepdog style, Lori hunted Mavis past the Johnson house and around the corner where Eddy met them.
He was sympathetic. ‘Your feet must be freezing, Mave,’ he said.
And Lori’s mobile rang, and it was someone from that triple zero number. She left Eddy to get Mavis home, and afraid of what she’d stirred up, attempted to explain to a stranger why she’d phoned that number. His voice suggested that he thought she’d been playing games, so she reeled off the names of Mavis’s medications then told him that the situation was now under control, and that she’d call back if . . .
Mavis was still on about money, or about the support money Watts paid into her account each month. She must have got her hands on one of the bank statements before Mick filed it.
It would expose the guilty party, or show the number of the account Watts’s payments were transferred into, electronically, the day they landed. Those monthly payments were what kept Lori’s emergency account healthy.
Eddy took Mavis into the kitchen, pulled a chair close to the stove and opened the oven door to allow more heat out. Mavis flopped. She looked exhausted.
There was space between the stove and the table where Alan was plugged into the internet and Mick was leafing through the new Bunnings catalogue. They moved down to the far end when Lori brought out the hair-cutting equipment.
She lifted Matty onto the table, shrouded him with the hair-cutting sheet then trimmed two centimetres from each curl – and mourned each sun-bleached ringlet that fell. Next year she’d be forced to shear him and when she did there’d be another redhead in the house. His roots were red.
Down the far end of the table, Eddy leant over Alan, reading an email from Watts, who’d paid deposits for the school’s China trip weeks ago. Alan had told him to cancel one of the trips.
‘He won’t get that money back. What’s wrong with you, anyway? It would be an experience.’
There wasn’t a lot wrong with Alan – apart from his cooking – and after what he’d lived through, he should have been more mixed up than Eddy. He did well at school, not as well as Eddy who was too smart for his own good, which could be blamed on old Alice. She used to be a maths and science teacher and when she’d had only Eddy to tutor, he’d copped a double dose. He’d got a hundred percent last year in maths. Lori had scraped through with fifty-six. If he hadn’t been her brother, she wouldn’t have associated with him.
Henry used to know everything. In a good mood, Mavis used to call him a walking encyclopaedia. In a bad mood she’d called him a know-all bastard.
She was watching when Lori packed the hairdressing equipment back into its box, was probably expecting a trim. She needed a haircut. Lori used to cut it every month or so during Mavis’s docile period but wasn’t going near her tonight with sharp scissors.
