The Hope Flower

by Joy Dettman

  ‘Martin got a passport when he went to New Zealand on his honeymoon,’ Neil said. The subject had swung from China to passports. Eddy’s was being passed around the table.

  ‘I would have left that bantam bastard in England if I could have got one,’ Mavis said. She’d been silent and her silence had been good.

  ‘Anyone can get a passport,’ Eddy said.

  ‘That pair of bitches never registered me,’ Mavis said.

  They’d heard that lament before and tonight, Lori wasn’t allowing it. ‘Your name wouldn’t be on the electoral rolls if that was the case. You used to go with Henry to our primary school every time there was voting.’

  ‘You know everything, don’t you, you lanky bitch.’

  ‘I know that the government wouldn’t be paying you a pension if your birth hadn’t been registered. When people lie, they need to at least get a few facts right.’

  Warm enough now, Mavis was on her feet and ready to fight, though maybe too tired to bother. She swiped junk from the cabinet as she walked by it but continued out to her room to slam her door.

  Jamesy closed the kitchen door and you could feel the easing of tension. It eased sufficiently for Matty to start again on childcare.

  ‘Get to bed.’

  ‘I don’t want childcare.’

  She carried him to bed when she put the hairdressing box away. It lived on top of the wardrobe. There were other boxes up there, one full of birth certificates and early photographs. She allowed Matty to look at photographs while she searched for Mavis’s birth certificate. It wasn’t in that box, nor was Martin’s. The others were there, and Henry’s name was on Greg’s – whether it should have been or not.

  ‘Who is her?’ Matty asked. He’d found a version of Lori, a preschool version, her long curls tied high with bows. She was smiling.

  ‘She grew into me,’ Lori said, taking that postcard-sized smiling kid who might have been born to become someone. Couldn’t remember sitting still for that camera. Couldn’t remember that spotted dress, the long white socks, the girly shoes.

  Henry would have been of a similar age to that pigtailed Lorraine when he’d been adopted by his ‘wonderful parents’. For a second, Lori wondered who pigtailed Lorraine might have grown into had some wonderful couple adopted her.

  Matty recognised the surly brat with her boy’s haircut in a school photograph.

  ‘You had long hair and short hair and long again,’ he said. Given individual attention, he was a good kid. The only person who had regular individual attention in this house was Mavis. She demanded it, and if Matty had become demanding, he’d learnt that from her.

  ‘Get to sleep now. I’ve got a pile of homework,’ she said. The photographs packed away, the box back where it belonged, she turned off the bedroom light and turned on the lounge room’s, turned on the big computer and opened a flash-drive file.

  One of her overdue assignments was a poem entitled ‘Me’. Eddy had written her a twenty-line rhyme. She might be able to use a few lines of it.

  I’m Lorraine Louise Smyth-Owen and I don’t know where I’m going . . .

  He’d got that right, but she was going to school tomorrow and Matty was going to childcare.

  she used to dance

  It was the silence that woke Mavis. There’d always been noise, voices, the skittering of feet, the clatter of china, the slamming of doors. Habit turned her eyes to a chipboard chest of drawers where her clock used to sit, ticking her life away. Used to, and for an instant, she forgot why it was no longer ticking beside Greggie’s box of ashes – not that she had any use for clocks. Morning was when she got out of bed; night was when she crawled back into it.

  ‘You’ve got the bladder of a camel,’ one of the nursing sisters used to tell her at the hospital. She’d trained it not to disturb her sleep and it was disturbing her.

  The television would tell her the time, or what was playing on it would, and without need to move from her bed, she turned it on at the power point and was hit in the earholes by a screaming commercial. At the hospital she’d had a remote control to silence their bloody commercials.

  The carpet was still a surprise to her feet when she rolled from her bed and limped to the television to turn the selector dial until she found a midday movie. Content with that, she opened the sliding door. They hadn’t continued the carpet in the en suite and its cement floor was cold. She’d worn a layer of skin off her soles last night, cut her heel on something, stubbed her toe on an uneven patch of footpath. It was her stubbed toe that had stopped her.

  ‘Bastards,’ she said, then listened to the movie while her camel bladder emptied. It was well after midday. They played the same movies over and over again until you couldn’t stand the sight or sound of them. That one was half over.

  Couldn’t stand the sight of herself in the mirror they’d hung over the washbasin. It was the one they’d removed from the old bathroom, always the cruellest bastard in the house and with that light globe overhead, it showed too much. She threw the washcloth at it and returned to the bedroom where she turned the channel selector again, seeking something she hadn’t seen before. She’d seen that bunch of starving black kids before. Twenty times a day a sanctimonious mongrel told her how she could save their miserable lives for only ten dollars a month – or to pay for another commercial. She turned the selector until she found a pommy dame advertising non-stick frying pans. You could burn milk in them then wipe them clean with a paper towel. She’d burnt a lot of milk in her time, so she watched that advertisement to its end then turned the television off. That frying pan had raised thoughts of eggs on toast.

  ‘Are you out there?’

  No reply. That smart-arsed bitch of a girl never replied. She’d be out there somewhere, so Mavis yelled louder.

  An expert on nothing other than the sounds of this house, she knew its every creak and rattle. Knew every squawking bird.

  ‘Go north, you bastards,’ she yelled at two crows, squabbling on the laundry roof. She’d gone north one winter, not far enough north.

  ‘Are you out there?’ she yelled. Only the crows replied.

  She moved to the antique panel heater they’d given her. It offered no warmth unless she sat on it. She’d never felt the cold when she’d had her insulating layers of fat.

  Hadn’t been able to wear jeans either. She’d worn them last night for the first time in twenty years. They were on the floor beside the bed, where she’d kicked them off. She’d slept in the sweater and smelt op-shop all night. Would have slept in the jeans if their zip hadn’t cut into her scar.

  Used to live in jeans, not worn-out crap from an op-shop but the best money could buy. A lot of water had run under a lot of bridges since she’d worn the best of anything.

  She had to bend at her scar to pick up the jeans and bending hurt, as did fighting her feet into the legs of those jeans. But she got them on, got them up and got the zip up – and more easily than it had done up last night.

  Looked at the sneakers then. They knew she couldn’t reach her feet to do up bloody laces and they’d bought her shoes with laces. Had she been wearing shoes last night, she wouldn’t have been here today.

  Picked one of them up and stripped it of its lace, pitched its lace then did the same to the second sneaker. She pulled the tongues forward as far as they’d go, placed the shoes on the carpet and slid her feet in – and they might have been viable without the tongues.

  There were scissors in the kitchen drawer, and a sharper pair in the haircutting box. Opened the door then and scuffed through to the kitchen.

  It was warm; the kettle was boiling; they’d left three slices of bread and a crust on one of their bloody plastic plates, had left her a mug with a teabag in it. And jam, a scrape of it. She didn’t want jam. She wanted eggs.

  No frying pan out. It would be in the bottom cupboard and she’d need to bend down to find it. Couldn’t be bothered, so she dropped two slices of her allocated bread into the toaster, took the mug to the stove
where she had to place it down so she could use both hands to lift that kettle.

  She had no strength in her hands, and they knew it, but they filled the kettle so full it spurted water over the mug and the stove. Stood watching that spilt water roll into bubbles then dance across the hotplate, before disappearing into puffs of steam.

  ‘That’s me,’ she said. ‘I danced for a while then disappeared into a puff of nothing.’

  She’d danced that last New Year’s Eve. She’d drunk herself sick, aware that she’d been pregnant again and hoping to god she wouldn’t be come morning. Couldn’t shake him out, couldn’t sweat him out, vomit him out. She’d been four months gone and bloating up the day she’d become desperate enough to go to Henry’s office. He hadn’t argued the first time she’d asked him to drive her to that clinic.

  The toast jumped. She removed it, found butter and milk in the fridge. A dozen or more times she’d told them not to buy those three-litre bottles. A while ago, she’d dropped one, not accidentally. It hadn’t taught them not to buy them.

  The remote control was on the windowsill. It was larger but similar to the control she’d used at the hospital. She pointed it, hit the power button and was hit in the eye by that same bunch of starving black kids, life-sized kids on that screen.

  ‘How many fools do you guilt into giving up their ten dollars a month?’ she asked a wide-eyed baby before giving him the flick. Flicked to a panel of four discussing a paedophile priest, charged with doing a bit more than giving his congregation Holy Communion. His accuser, a male, was sitting with them, having his five minutes of fame.

  She’d cried rape the first time she’d gone to Henry. He’d had no reason to believe her and good reason not to. He’d sacked a gardener a few months prior to that first abortion. He’d held her off one night while telling her that she’d be a beautiful woman one day and that she must have respect for herself. She’d told him she’d have more respect for him if he sacked his wife’s chauffeur. Should have said more.

  She buttered her toast, poured and scooped jam from the jar, then sat down to her breakfast, the mantelpiece clock watching her, telling her she was breakfasting at one-thirty, breakfasting around hair that crawled on her face and neck like a nest of cockroaches.

  It had been halfway down her back, she’d been standing at the window, dragging a comb through it the night Henry woke up to his socialite wife and her chauffeur. She’d laughed when she’d seen his car drive down to the garage three hours before he’d been expected home. On Thursday nights he used to go direct from work to a rehearsal and get home at around eleven. He caught them at it that night. Must have heard them in old Alice’s unit, over the garage. A pure soul, old Henry. He would have gone up those stairs two at a time to see if old Alice was okay.

  Mavis was smiling when she bit into her second slice of toast. Stopped smiling fast to spit. She’d got a mouthful of hair with the toast.

  ‘Bloody shit and hell to her,’ she commented, thinking of the sharp scissors and last night. That smart-arsed little bitch could have cut her hair. One hand holding the cockroaches back, she finished her toast, stood and scuffed through the house to the front room to get her scissors.

  They belonged to her. She’d had her hair cut at a Brisbane salon and helped herself to those scissors, slid them handles first into her jeans pocket, and when she’d got back into the car, their points had stabbed her in the belly. She’d yelled, grabbed and poor old Henry had thought that she was losing his little gift from God.

  They’d driven up to Brisbane with nothing other than their cases. He’d had money back then but had been too mean to spend it. She’d nicked what she’d needed and she’d needed scissors. She’d needed nail varnish, had needed make-up, had needed a lot of things.

  One of the sisters at the hospital had commented on her fingernails. They’d grown longer down there. She’d had a perfect set of ten until she’d ripped one last night doing up that zip.

  ‘A place for everything and everything in its place,’ Henry used to say when they’d lived in the caravan. She’d never found her place, had never wanted a place. She’d got stuck, stuck with him, stuck in this backwater, stuck with his little gifts from god. He’d wanted the first half dozen. For a time she’d got a kick out of posting photographs to Eva, rubbing in the fact that she’d done something Eva hadn’t been able to do – or not more than once.

  The dressing-table mirror showed more than her face. It showed a bulky black sweater that looked too big. It had been a lot of years since anything had looked too big on her.

  She turned to look at her reflection in profile. Her boobs looked young. And washed out or not, those jeans held her bum and thighs together. She lifted the sweater to look at her boobs. They looked good, solid, apart from the scars, which would fade, or according to her pretty boy surgeon they would. She looked higher at her rat’s nest hair. She hadn’t combed it in days. Her arms wouldn’t take the punishment.

  There was nothing to cutting hair, not if you had sharp scissors. She used them first to trim her ripped fingernail, then removed her shoes and used the scissors on vinyl. They didn’t appreciate being asked to chew through those tongues, but they got rid of them and without them, her feet slipped easily into the sneakers.

  She started on her hair next, felt out the nest tangle at the back of her crown and the scissors chewed blindly through it.

  Sharp scissors and a wandering mind are not reliable companions, but Mavis was back in that Brisbane hairdressing salon, saying ‘shorter’ to the girl who’d originally held those scissors.

  Her hair had been long the day she’d gone to Henry’s office and told him she needed another drive to the abortion clinic. She hadn’t expected his response. He’d turned yellow and shrunk low on his chair. The possibility that he’d been responsible for her predicament was so remote, she’d given no thought to it. Plus, he’d been trying for five years to get Eva pregnant, and he’d been too maudlin drunk to do much of anything the night that little bantam bastard happened, the night when there’d been more than rehearsal-interrupt-us. He’d interrupted his butter-won’t-melt-in-her-mouth wife and old Alice getting up to whatever they’d got up to on rehearsal nights, Mavis watching from her window.

  She’d seen Eva’s chauffeur, with benefits, leave on foot. Eva must have thrown one of her fainting fits because Henry had come running inside to get the old bitch to deal with her daughter. He might as well have asked the neighbour’s dog. He’d relieved her of her apricot brandy and run with it out to the garage to revive his wife. That was all Mavis had seen until later, when she’d looked out that window and seen him toe-dancing on the back lawn, a noose around his neck. Had he chosen a branch capable of holding his weight, her life might have gone in a different direction.

  She’d taken out a chair for him to stand on until she’d loosened the noose and slipped it over his head, and by the time she had, she needed a brandy.

  They’d shared the last of the bottle, sip for sip. Never a drinker, poor old Henry, not a man to show emotion, had been howling drunk when it happened. Come morning, she’d barely remembered it had happened.

  He had. ‘Forgive me,’ he’d said that day in his office. ‘I was not myself.’

  ‘It’s not yours,’ she’d said, or it was highly unlikely to be his, but that moralistic old bugger had been a numbers man, and to him, the numbers added up.

  He’d told her that day that he’d booked his flight home to London. He’d bought her dinner at a restaurant. While she ate steak, he’d suggested she accompany him on the flight, that his little gift from god could be born in London, that after the birth, he’d pay her flight home. He’d been close to forty, had no living relative and had probably married that queer bitch to have kids. Mavis hadn’t wanted his kid or anyone else’s, but had seen his offer as a chance to get away from the trio of bitches at the house.

  ‘You’ve got a deal,’ she’d said.

  She’d needed permission to fly. She’d needed her bir
th certificate and the old bitch’s signature to get a passport. Henry drove her home on the Saturday morning. She’d got no signature or birth certificate. A smart man, Henry, but green as grass.

  ‘My father raped me when I was fourteen years old and he refused to have his shame recorded on that little slut’s birth certificate,’ his socialite wife had said. ‘She doesn’t exist,’ she’d said, and he’d believed her.

  They hadn’t gone to London. He’d driven her and his little gift from god up to Brisbane and left them in a cockroach-infested unit while he’d gone to work. Within weeks, she’d been crawling up the walls with the cockroaches, dead certain that his gift from god would come out wearing Asian eyes.

  It came out the dead spit of Henry, without the glasses, and that poor silly old bugger had clutched it to him and howled.

  ‘Shit!’ she said, meeting her eyes head-on in the mirror. ‘Bloody-shit-n-hell.’ She’d cut too much from the brow area and what little she’d left behind had springs in it.

  ants

  On fine days, the east-side primary school was anything from ten minutes to half an hour from Henry’s front veranda. Little kids dawdled and found important things to do on fine days. They could be home in five minutes on miserable days, and as the afternoon of Matty’s first day at childcare was both wet and miserable, Neil and Timmy may have broken the record. They were in the kitchen when Lori tossed her bike against the laundry wall and removed her particularly heavy backpack which she’d stuffed with books. She’d got a new English assignment today and she already owed Mr Morris her ‘Me’ poem, which she’d chickened out of handing in. She’d brought her maths book home too, and a page full of symbols she’d copied from the whiteboard, and for all they meant to her they might have been Chinese. Mick might understand them.

  ‘Ants,’ Neil greeted her when she tossed her backpack down.

  They were everywhere, though in the main, feasting on the hearth, in and all over a smashed jar of plum and raspberry jam. There was a black trail leading out of a crack in the chimney, along the bottom of the cupboards and up to the sink, where a few thousand more swarmed over the empty apricot jam jar or had overdosed on the blood-pressure, antipsychotic and the blue Xanax pills Lori had dissolved in hot water before stirring the paste into the apricot jam. Where there was a will there was a way. Mavis would take her old Zoloft tonight because what was inside those red and green capsules tasted vile. They had enough Zoloft to last for ten days and as Mick kept on saying, they had to do something.