by Joy Dettman
She did something about the ants. Hit them hard with insect spray, screwed the lid onto the ant-filled jar and pitched it into the bin, pitched an ant-riddled banana skin after it – and the remains of a loaf of bread. She called for newspaper then to wipe up glass, ants and jam from the hearth.
‘She needs supervision,’ Mick said when he walked in.
‘Which she had before Martin stuck his nose into our business,’ Lori snapped, reaching for more newspaper.
She’d come home thinking homework – and work experience. She’d been confronted by that this morning, and by half a class full of kids who’d already organised places to do their work experience. She was still squatting, washing the hearth, when Timmy came from the front of the house with the tongues of Mavis’s sneakers and a handful of red frizz.
‘There’s mess all over our bedroom, Lori.’
‘Shit!’ she said and followed him back to their room, where she released a few more choice expletives before heading out to the brick room to commit murder – but went no closer than the doorway. Mavis was sprawled in her usual position, bare feet on the table and rats had been at her hair.
What can you say? What could you say to a mental case who would do that to herself? Nothing. Lori’s slamming of the door may have said all that was needed.
The other boys came in, one by one. No one thought about dinner or homework or the time, or not until Martin drove in when they realised that it was after five. He’d left this morning with a screaming banshee buckled into his passenger seat. They’d expected to hear the banshee before Old Red’s motor. No banshee, only a slightly embarrassed green-haired Martian, clutching a roll of finger-painting paper. Or half of his curls were green, as was a good third of his navy tracksuit, but he wasn’t bawling, so they took his paintings, which were predominantly green, and they praised them.
‘Tell Lori about Angie’s truck,’ Martin said.
‘Her school have got a truck for putting sand in,’ Matty said. ‘And it’s got a lifting thing so the sand comes out.’
He’d got a lot of that sand in his shoes and when Lori removed them in the bathroom, the floor copped most of it. She got him into the bath and left him talking to Martin about Angie’s school while she went out to the kitchen for the dustpan and brush, and when she returned, the bathroom door was locked and the shower was running.
Five to five-thirty was Martin’s rostered time to shower and shave, but he wouldn’t. It felt wrong to Lori for that little boy to be sharing a bathroom with a grown man, but she backed away, thinking about the first time she’d had to help Mavis step over and into the old tub to shower. She’d done it, but with her eyed closed, or averted, and the thought of sitting in that bath while Mavis showered made her nauseous.
It was nausea that drove her back to the brick room where she pointed her finger like a gun. ‘Anyone who’d do that to themselves needs locking up,’ she said. ‘I’m going to phone that triple zero dude.’
‘Shut up. She’s going to beat him,’ Mavis said. She was watching her quiz show between her bare feet, watching a female contestant take the lead away from the champ. Lori shut up for the three minutes it took the champ to lose all but seventy-five thousand dollars – and he looked as sick as Lori felt.
Mavis laughed. It was a throaty, full belly laugh no one had heard in years.
‘That hair would make a cat laugh,’ Lori said. ‘Have you even bothered to look at what you’ve done?’
‘You knew I needed a haircut when you had those scissors out last night,’ Mavis replied, preferring to cast blame than to accept it.
‘You’re more than capable of demanding what you want.’
‘I don’t beg.’
‘No. You just leave your filthy mess for us to clean up, and I’m dialling that number.’
‘Fuck off. I’m trying to listen.’
No one fed or medicated her that night. She wouldn’t have eaten what was served. Mick opened four cans of baked beans while Jamesy made and buttered multiple slices of toast. Lori didn’t eat at the table. She made a baked bean and cheese sandwich, then shared it with the big computer’s keyboard while attacking her science assignment and printing it.
She opened Eddy’s ‘Me’ poem, deleted two-thirds of it, filled in a few of the gaps with stuff she might have been able to live with and at nine, called Mick in to decipher the Chinese symbols she’d copied in maths. He did okay at maths and was a better teacher than Bird-brain, Mr Finch, who she’d loathed on sight. It was after eleven when they went to bed, but she had stuff to hand in tomorrow.
Tuesday, and for the first time in his life Matty came out to breakfast dressed and with his shoes on, on the wrong feet, but at least he’d tried. He yelled about having his hair combed but that was normal, then he raced Martin out to the ute. He wasn’t going to the dreaded childcare but to Angie’s school.
Lori didn’t go as willingly. Her first period after lunch was English, and as she walked in, Mr Morris held out his hand for her overdue homework. She gave up that poem, then spent the rest of the afternoon considering suicide by Xanax, except they didn’t have enough left to do much more than give her maybe a twenty-four-hour sleep, which she needed. She might have closed her eyes for two hours last night.
They’d have to phone Doctor Jones, but if he saw what Mavis had done to herself, he’d commit her – and she’d laughed last night. Granted, she’d laughed at the poor dude who’d just lost two hundred thousand dollars, but from Mavis, a laugh was a laugh.
Doctor Jones had given Eddy scripts the day he’d gone to the surgery for the letter of referral to Clay. He might do it again. One way or another, they had to keep getting those pills into her.
She looked for Eddy in the locker room when the school day ended, looked for him in the bike shed. She found Alan. He told her there was a meeting about the China trip. Eddy would be there. He was as determined to go as Alan was not to.
Doctor Jones’s surgery was midway between the school and Woolworths. Lori glanced at the building, then made a swift decision. They’d need Xanax soon as well as Zoloft. No doctor in his right mind would choose to call at 108 Dawson Street if he had a choice.
The surgery hadn’t changed since the last day she’d followed Mavis in there, nor had the woman who sat behind a sliding-glass window.
‘My mother, Mrs Smyth-Owen, needs new scripts for Xanax and Zoloft, rather urgently. We were wondering if Doctor Jones could write them for her,’ Lori said.
‘He’s in hospital,’ the receptionist said. ‘Your mother will need to see one of the other doctors.’
‘She’d prefer to wait –’
‘I doubt it,’ the receptionist said. ‘Doctor Ling does house calls.’
Doctor Ling sounded Asian. Mavis hadn’t liked Mrs Nguyen. ‘She doesn’t need a home visit, only the script.’
The receptionist must have had Mavis’s details on her computer. She poked at her keyboard for a second or two. ‘Her Melbourne specialist altered her medications,’ she said. Lori was unaware that doctors communicated with each other.
‘She has trouble swallowing his capsules. She said to ask Doctor Jones if she could go back on the Zoloft. She’s been taking them again since she came home.’
The receptionist wrote a note, told her to give the surgery a call tomorrow, then turned to a dude who’d followed Lori in.
Woolworths had teabags on special. She bought three large boxes, which equalled six hundred cups of tea. It sounded like a lot but wasn’t when divided by eleven. She’d buy three more tomorrow if they had any left.
There was no one about when she parked her bike, no smell of insect spray or floor cleaner. The television was playing, Eddy was plugged into the internet, Timmy sitting on the floor under the louver windows reading and no sight or sound from Mavis.
‘Watts says he’s got her birth certificate,’ Eddy said.
‘Mavis’s?’
‘So he says.’
‘How come he’s got it?’ Lori asked, and
started unpacking bags.
‘It must have been in with Eva’s personal stuff. He took charge of everything when he closed up the house,’ Eddy said and unplugged his laptop to take it to their printer. Minutes later he returned with a printout of the email. Lori read it. Half of it was about the China trip but the bottom lines mentioned certificates. According to Watts, he also had Eva and Henry’s marriage certificate.
‘Why would she say she couldn’t get a passport?’ Mick asked.
‘Because she’s a pathological liar,’ Lori said. ‘She told Mrs Johnson one day that she’d put a doll on lay-by for me for Christmas. I believed her until I woke up on Christmas morning and found a pair of school shoes and a packet of colouring pencils on my bed.’
‘Eva was a pathological liar,’ Alan said. ‘That time when Martin sent me back there, I was supposed to lie about having been living with my father in London.’
Eddy used to lie until they’d cured him of it, or pretty much cured him. He reclaimed the printout from Mick and took it out to the brick room. Lori followed as far as the doorway.
And maybe Mavis hadn’t lied about it. That email moved her from her chair and her surprise looked real – and her hair looked worse than it had yesterday.
‘That bitch looked me in the eye and she told me my father hadn’t wanted the world to know that he’d raped his fourteen-year-old daughter.’
‘Which is perfect proof of the damage lying can do,’ Lori said.
Watts’s email had also said that he’d scan and email it, which wasn’t good enough for Mavis. ‘Tell him to post me the original,’ she said. ‘He’s got no right to it.’
‘He kept it safe for you,’ Lori said, for the first time in her life aligning herself on Walter ferret Watts’s side.
Mavis ignored her. ‘To post it certified mail.’
‘Tell him that Mavis said thank you very much for not pitching it in the green bin,’ Lori countered.
Then Mavis said something so out of character it almost floored the lot of them. ‘I’d thank you very much if you’d have a go at straightening this bloody hair.’
She sounded . . . normal. She sounded as normal as Martin offering to swap an early morning trip to the supermarket for a stitched-up seam in his work shirt. But Lori’s mind started creating scenarios, like Mavis grabbing the scissors, although, apart from her rat-chewed hair, she looked better – and her eyes looked different.
‘You haven’t left much for anyone to do anything with,’ Lori said.
She got the scissors, dragged a chair into the en suite, prayed again that Doctor Ling would write those scripts. Those stronger Xanax, the Zoloft and the blood pressure pills could have been working.
Standing so close to Mavis was weird, touching her, combing her hair . . . it raised memories she didn’t need. Life hurt. She’d lectured Eddy a while ago about brainless expectations, but how do you actually kill hope? It was there, like a virus that lives in your nerve endings, though it didn’t stop Lori from expecting an elbow in the ribs each time she hit a tangle. There was no elbow, not tonight. Mavis sat silent and unmoving.
‘I need to wet it to straighten it.’
‘Do what you have to,’ Mavis said.
There was something wrong with her – or right with her.
The first snip of those scissors sounded loud to Lori’s ears. They were almost talking to her by the time she’d straightened the neckline. There was plenty of hair at the crown, not a lot over her ears and nothing at all to work with over the brow. She did what she could to the sides and back, and was almost ready to call it done when she thought of her blow dryer and its circular brush. She’d bought it months ago when she’d decided to straighten her hair. It hadn’t worked for her. She had too much to straighten. Currently, Mavis didn’t have enough, except at the crown. She straightened it then blew it forward to create a gappy fringe.
‘You’ve got good hair to work with. It stays where it’s put,’ Lori said.
It did, and when she put her tools down and Mavis lifted her chin to look at the reflection in the mirror, Lori, now standing well back, stared at what looked like some framed lost portrait of The Mother, unearthed by Eddy from beneath a pile of junk – until the image moved, until it spoke.
‘Shit,’ Mavis said. She didn’t say ‘thank you’ but said something more genuine. ‘You ought to go in for hairdressing.’
There was a lump of something stuck in Lori’s throat, a lump of hope maybe, or some cancerous tumour.
‘What’s it look like at the back?’
‘Good. I’ll get you that little mirror.’ She needed water more than a mirror, and drank a glass full before searching the middle drawer of her dressing table for a circular mirror on a stand that Mavis used to prop on the kitchen table when she put on make-up, which she hadn’t done for years. The mirror had worked its way down to the bottom but was still there. She put the scissors away before returning to the brick room, where she had to move kids away from the doorway and move Eddy out of the en suite.
‘It looks good,’ he said.
‘It’s a better cut than Henry used to do,’ Mavis said. She took the mirror and held it so she could view the back of her head, and it must have raised memories. ‘Did you pitch out my make-up bag?’
‘It’s somewhere,’ Lori said.
‘Get it for me.’
Lori didn’t move to obey. ‘Could you get my old make-up bag for me please, Lori,’ she corrected.
Then for a second Eva was in the en suite, except it was Mavis’s lips that moved. ‘Would you be a . . . a darling, Lorraine, and fetch me my . . . make-up bag?’
It’s hard to stop laughter. Mavis used to get the lot of them laughing so hard some nights with her Eva acts, their stomachs had cramped. Not tonight. Lori got out of that room in time. She found the make-up bag, a pretty floral thing, full of lipsticks, eyebrow pencils, nail varnish, junky earrings all dusted with spilt face-powder. There were three pairs of earrings in one of its side pockets that weren’t junk. The day after Eva’s funeral, Eddy had come home with a pile of jewellery. He’d given Mavis the earrings and Lori had taken charge of them, had wrapped them in a tissue and zipped them into that side compartment. The opals were real, long fingernail size, all greens and blues with flashes of red and gold, and almost perfectly matched. There was a pair of real gold hoops and a pair of diamond studs. From day one Lori had coveted those studs, so much so that last September, she’d found out how much the big pharmacy charged to pierce ears. The same day, she’d looked at the price of a similar pair in a jeweller’s window and changed her mind about wearing fifteen hundred dollars’ worth of diamonds to school.
She still coveted them, and before delivering the make-up bag to Mavis, she wrapped the studs in a new tissue and tucked them into her wallet with Martin’s birthday fifty.
*
Vinnie didn’t eat at home that night. Alan was on dinner duty and he outdid himself. He’d boiled rice and pumpkin, onion and carrots together with a packet of out-of-date chicken noodle soup and the end result looked fit for the chook bucket. They didn’t call Mavis, but she must have smelt something. She came out of her room wearing make-up, and with her new hairstyle, she didn’t look like Mavis.
She still sounded like her. ‘What’s this shit?’
‘A poor relation of chicken and pumpkin risotto,’ Eddy replied.
‘Where’s the bloody chicken?’
‘Still running around the chook yard,’ Jamesy quipped.
And for the second time in two days, Mavis laughed.
the post office
Hope was like that creeping plant, which for years had attempted to overgrow Nelly’s back door. She cut it back every winter but come spring, its tendrils started reaching again. When it bloomed, you knew why she refused to hit it with weedkiller.
Spring was months away, but hope was blooming again in Lori, and Doctor Ling added fertiliser to its roots. She wrote those scripts, and every night, one way or another, they medicat
ed Mavis. Whether it was the pills, the haircut, the make-up or the promise of her birth certificate, she was back and more normal than she’d been since Henry died.
She’d never been a candidate for sainthood, had never been a loving person, but she was moving instead of sitting, reading instead of watching television. She read Lori’s Pygmalion, read Mick’s Of Mice And Men, then picked up Timmy’s Harry Potter. And she was walking. Maybe they could thank Vinnie’s dumping of her over the back fence for that.
She developed an obsession with the letterbox. Every day it was empty when Lori rode in from school, empty of mail and junk mail. She opened her bank statement, opened the electricity bill and left them on the table with the junk mail.
Watts’s letter didn’t arrive, and it wouldn’t. Eddy, the knave of ulterior motives, had told him to post it to the post office, and on Friday, he told Mavis it had arrived but she had to go over to the post office to sign for it.
‘I could have signed for it here,’ she said. ‘Why the bloody hell didn’t he post it here?’
Never stuck for a fast answer, Eddy. ‘It’s the original, Mave. He probably thought it would be safer. I’ll call you a taxi.’
She’d been walking around the yard and the house, even venturing around the bottom corner, but he wanted more. And she didn’t even argue about it. She went out to her room to put on her make-up, then to yell about what the hell she was going to wear.
Lori chose a blue shirt, then offered the grey op-shop cardigan. It was too big for her and figure-hugging at the back on Mavis but it was long enough to cover the bum of her Woolworths pants and actually looked okay. Eddy threaded laces into the mutilated sneakers and he tied them for her before phoning the taxi. She was out at the letterbox waiting for it when it came.
