The Hope Flower

by Joy Dettman

  The taxi driver’s expression was priceless. ‘What the hell have you done to yourself, woman?’

  ‘You’re still driving, you miserable old bugger,’ Mavis said, and she got into the front seat beside him.

  ‘You been visiting Jenny Craig?’ he said.

  ‘I’ve been telling everyone for years that it was glandular. A bloke in the city finally listened,’ Mavis lied.

  Okay, so she hadn’t been cured of lying, but Lori had learnt to live with that, and a lot of what she said to that dude was the truth.

  ‘I had two heart attacks after the operation. They had to bring me back one time with their paddles,’ she said, then topped that truth with a ray treatment lie.

  ‘I was as bald as a bat for a while,’ she said.

  Lori paid the fare out the front of the post office while Eddy walked Mavis up six wide steps to the entrance. They were queuing when she walked in, and that queue brought back memories of when she and Mick used to queue to pay the bills. They paid them online now but a lot of older people didn’t. Lori stood back, watching the miracle of Mavis sign for her envelope.

  She had it open before they were out the door and it stopped her. ‘Shit,’ she said.

  They got her outside before Lori reclaimed her, only to read what was on that aging paper. And her birth to Eva was no family myth. It was there, in forty-two-year-old typewritten print. Mother: Eva Mary Buhler. Father . . .

  ‘Bloody Andrew McMaster?’ Mavis said. ‘That sleazy bastard!’

  ‘Who is Andrew McMaster?’ Lori asked.

  ‘The old bitch’s brother,’ Mavis said. ‘And that lying bitch had the effrontery to blame my father.’

  It was close to five o’clock but there were people around, and Lori wanted to get her home. Eddy wanted to know if she meant Uncle Andy, from Brisbane.

  ‘You know the bastard?’ Mavis asked.

  ‘I know of him. His wife used to send Christmas cards,’ Eddy said. ‘From Aunty Valma and Uncle Andy.’

  ‘From Brisbane?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  They were halfway down the steps when Neil’s teacher came up them. She’d been Lori’s teacher six years ago and may never forget her. She didn’t speak – nor did Lori, who took off towards the taxi rank.

  The post office was on a corner, diagonally opposite the National Bank. The taxi rank was around the corner from that bank, which meant two busy streets to cross over. Lori crossed over the first where a table of shoes outside an expensive shoe shop caught her eye. Today at school, Leonie had told her and a few others that she and Paul were having a combined birthday party this year. They’d been born three weeks and twelve months apart. She’d turn sixteen and Paul seventeen.

  ‘It’s going to be a dress-up affair,’ she’d said. ‘No jeans allowed.’

  Everyone who knew her knew why it was going to be a dress-up affair. She and Cathy wanted an excuse to wear their brand-name factory outlet dresses. Lori didn’t own a dress. She didn’t own a pair of shoes fit to wear with a dress but she had Martin’s birthday fifty in her wallet and the shoes on that bargain table had been reduced to thirty dollars. They were leftovers, a few of them nice, but either too big or too small. It didn’t pay to have average-sized feet when you shopped at bargain tables.

  Mavis and Eddy crossed the first street. She watched Eddy attempt to direct Mavis towards the pedestrian crossing, but she’d seen Lori, or smelt shops, so she kept coming, the birth certificate envelope still in her hand.

  ‘You’ve got big feet,’ Lori said and offered her a red shoe. ‘Want to try it on?’

  ‘It’s red,’ Mavis said. ‘Find me a black or a brown pair.’ They had a size ten black clodhopper. Lori offered it.

  ‘You know what you can do with that.’

  ‘They’re last season’s leftovers,’ Lori said, and showed her the original price, like $89.98. Eddy was looking at the crossed-out price on the red shoe. He’d been nagging about buying her decent shoes she could wear to Melbourne, and he loved a bargain.

  ‘Just try it, Mave.’

  ‘I’m not wearing red shoes,’ she said. She’d moved to the window, not to look at shoes but at her reflection. ‘I don’t even look that fat,’ she said.

  ‘You’re not,’ Lori said.

  ‘You’re as tall as me.’

  ‘Probably.’

  Eddy wasn’t. He’d turned fourteen in March and was half a head shorter than them.

  ‘Shit,’ Mavis said, and she walked on.

  They followed. Eddy’s aim had been to get her out of the house and to get her walking. She was walking.

  If Terry Clay could see her today, he’d want to make a second documentary, except he’d have no before videos. A Mavis documentary would have as much impact as that of the baby-faced dude – if they’d thought ahead. They’d been too busy attempting to survive.

  ‘What the bloody hell happened here?’ Mavis asked. She’d stopped near the doorway of a relatively new pharmacy. It had taken over most of what used to be Willama’s central department store.

  ‘They rebuilt this corner when they built the arcade,’ Lori said.

  ‘What arcade?’

  Lori pointed to the right. ‘It opened around twelve months ago.’

  ‘There used to be a lane there. It used to come out in Bridge Street.’

  ‘It still does, but now it’s full of little shops.’

  ‘Shit,’ Mavis said. She walked to the corner and turned down the arcade, Eddy walking beside her. Lori lagged behind, listening to them.

  ‘So Uncle Andy raped Eva?’ he asked.

  ‘They were all mad mongrels. Uncle Bertie had a go at me when I was four or five but I wet my pants – and these sneakers are burning my feet. Where’s the taxi rank?’

  ‘Diagonally opposite the post office,’ Lori said.

  ‘Bring one up here.’

  ‘You can sit down in the shoe shop,’ Eddy said. ‘You’ll need something comfortable to wear in Melbourne, Mave.’

  ‘Not those bloody red ones!’

  ‘Who looks at your feet?’ Lori asked.

  The promise of a chair and bare feet got her into the shoe shop, and while the woman went out to her back room to find the mate of that red size ten, Eddy got the left shoe onto Mavis’s foot. Five minutes later she walked out of the shop in red shoes while Lori paid the woman and took charge of the mutilated sneakers.

  There was a coffee shop down the end of the arcade. They had outdoor chairs and when Mavis sat on one of them, Lori ordered her a mug of cappuccino. She left her and Eddy sitting while she walked down to a barbequed chicken place to buy a chook for dinner, not that one chook would go far between eleven, but it would go far enough when its meat was added to Eddy’s stir-fried vegetables.

  They walked Mavis over the Bridge Street pedestrian crossing, walked her over the railway lines, walked her half a block more before she sat on a fence and demanded a taxi.

  ‘Martin will be home by now. I’ll get him,’ Lori said.

  ‘You’ve got phones. Call me a taxi.’

  ‘For two blocks? The drivers would blacklist you. I’ll get Martin.’

  Mavis’s description of what Martin could do to himself being unfit for general consumption, Lori walked on alone. Eddy had started this. He could deal with it.

  She was stripping the meat from the chicken when they came in. Mavis flopped, but didn’t kick her new shoes off. Eddy dropped two aspros into a glass of water, found two choc-mint biscuits – which he kept hidden from the little kids in his case under his bed, which he chewed on some nights in bed – according to the chocolate stains on his sheets.

  Mavis shed a few crumbs on her birth certificate. There was little on it but she studied that little while at the other end of the table, Eddy began his mad-man dinner preparations. The internet had introduced him to root ginger and to water chestnuts. They came in a tin, which he needed Mick to open.

  Like a chef in some posh hotel kitchen, he needed many assistants. ‘Three
onions,’ he ordered. ‘Wash me four sticks of celery.’ He spoke to Mavis between giving out orders, spoke about London and how he’d nagged Eva about visiting his father, who according to Eva had lived in London, for his health.

  The four sticks of celery became a bowl of measured green slices.

  ‘Four cups of rice and two-and-a-half times as much water,’ he said to Mick, then he julienned three carrots and scooped them into another bowl while Mick measured rice and water into the biggest saucepan. Eddy added the correct amount of salt.

  ‘She swore me to secrecy one night,’ Eddy said while peeling garlic, which his assistants refused to peel. ‘She told me that Henry worked for the secret service, that he was currently swapping prisoners with the Russians.’ He sliced the root ginger and garlic into shreds. ‘She told me that if we went near him or breathed a word about where he was, we’d put his life in danger. I thought he was some sort of James Bond.’

  Mavis laughed at that, an open-mouthed laugh, as if he’d just told her the greatest joke on earth, which he had. If there’d been a direct opposite to James Bond, it would have been Henry. He couldn’t remove a dead mouse from a trap. He’d flinched at the sound of a trap snapping down on the mouse’s neck.

  Vinnie shifted the conversation. He came in with the news that Doctor Jones was dead. For the past week, Vinnie and his boss had been painting an extension to the hospital’s nursing home. They’d been in the right place at the right time to hear that news and it stunned everyone, stopped all movement and silenced Mavis for a time. Then amazingly enough, she spoke to Vinnie.

  ‘What killed him?’

  And more amazingly, Vinnie replied. ‘Cancer. They’re saying up there that he worked until he dropped, and when he dropped, he willed himself to die before his son came home and saw what was left of him.’

  Had anyone known he had a son? They’d known he’d had no wife. They’d known that he’d spent half of his life at his surgery, that he’d driven a modern silver-grey Commodore.

  Mavis knew about the son. ‘He’s a doctor too. He married someone from England. He had a daughter, born with the same heart condition as you pair,’ she said to the twins. ‘She died young. That’s how he knew what was wrong with your hearts when you were born. Saving your lives meant more than it should have to that poor old bugger,’ Mavis said.

  progress

  Mrs Collins’s house, two doors up from Nelly’s, of similar age, condition and style to Henry’s, sold at auction for three-hundred and nineteen thousand dollars. It had lawns, front, back and sides, shrubs and a few nice old trees – not that the buyer was interested in the house or the trees. He wanted the big block of land they stood on.

  Nelly’s block was larger. She had no big trees and her house was smaller, which would mean less work for the bulldozers. She told Lori how her father had bought that house with the eighty-five pounds he’d got when his grandmother died.

  Mavis had gone to the auction, in full make-up, with her hair newly washed and styled for the occasion. And she raised more interest than the auctioneer until the bidding began.

  That night, Nelly came to the back door with the receipt for her house. Mavis didn’t speak to her but she did add to the conversation. ‘Henry paid sixty thousand for this place and his block,’ she said.

  Nelly didn’t stay, but she came back again on Tuesday, damn near shooting sparks. ‘Spud bloody Murphy just told me that he’s selling out to the same bloody lot who bought old lady Collins’s house!’

  And Mavis replied directly to her. ‘Did he say how much he got?’

  ‘Three thousand more than old lady Collins,’ Nelly said, and the shock too great, she had to sit down. ‘He told me and Bert just now that he’s buying into one of those new nursing home apartments behind the hospital.’

  No one could blame Mrs Collins for selling. She was dead. They could blame Spud. He, Nelly, Bert, Mrs Roddie and a few more had made a pact never to sell, and if any one of them caught Spud out on the street, he’d end up in intensive care.

  Nelly stayed for twenty minutes that night, discussing developers and what those developers were likely to do with the adjoining properties.

  ‘It’s progress,’ Martin said. He had to approve of progress. His boss, who used to employ half a dozen men, now employed twice that number – and they’d started pegging out a block of units behind Bert’s place.

  ‘What’s Spud going to do with his dogs?’ Mick asked. He’d be the only person within a kilometre radius likely to ask. He was the only person, apart from Spud, who could get within ten metres of those chain-mad blue heelers. Perhaps they saw his brace as a form of chain. More likely their stomachs recalled never tasting an egg before Spud’s week in hospital with a blister – a blister on his lung.

  Eddy had little interest in auctions, house prices, Spud, or his dogs. Watts’s pocket money payment now due, Eddy had no card to access his account. This month, the twins’ pocket money was to be paid into individual accounts. Alan had little use for money. Eddy couldn’t live without it and he accused Alan of burning their replacement cards, accused Lori of tossing the cards out with the junk mail.

  She was more concerned about the yellow bankcard. Mavis was walking very well in her new red shoes. She’d walked up to the corner to look at the cluster of townhouses, had walked halfway to the railway crossing and back, and Lori knew that one day soon she’d walk over to the bank and report her stolen card. She never mentioned it, but that didn’t mean she’d forgotten about it. She ate at the table with Martin, but that didn’t mean she’d forgiven him.

  Mick had his seventeenth birthday on Wednesday. Donny posted his usual card and Woolworths gift voucher, Martin gave him his usual fifty-dollar note, Lori gave him a thirty-dollar Bunnings gift voucher and Alan gave him one for twenty dollars. Mick needed a decent electric drill.

  ‘You thieving dog,’ Eddy said, knowing what had happened to the new bankcards.

  ‘You’ll get yours when you’ve got enough money in the bank to pay me back what you owe me,’ Alan said. He hadn’t complained when Eddy had cleaned out the account during Mavis’s hospital period, but wasting his money on that blow heater was another matter entirely.

  They’d become very different men. Alan walked away from confrontation. Eddy ran head-first into it. He jumped Alan in the central passage that night and they fell together to the floor. Eddy couldn’t fight his way out of a brown-paper bag. Alan was on top when Lori broke them up with a jug of water, which didn’t improve Eddy’s mood.

  It improved on Saturday night. He came in smiling, told Alan where he could shove both bankcards, then told the rest of them he’d got a weekend job at Dick Smith.

  He was half computer. He lived and breathed them. Since that store opened its doors he’d been spending half of his weekends there. Being paid to be there could have been as close to paradise as it got for Eddy, and with Mavis now fixed, he’d needed a new project.

  She seemed fixed. During the months between Eva’s funeral and Greg’s arrest, they’d believed that she’d been fixed. She’d been easy to live around, though maybe too easy. This time was different. On nice days, she read in the sun, and she was cooking too, not entire meals, but she’d made an incredible onion gravy one night, from onions, not from a packet, and for Mick’s birthday dinner, she’d made perfect seasoning for two cockerels who’d lost their heads.

  She was still emptying the letterbox and enjoyed pitching the bills at Martin. She didn’t pitch a letter she received from a Professor Hicks, a heart specialist, who wanted to see her at ten o’clock on the Friday after her Thursday appointment with Mister Terrence Clay.

  Both of those dates were circled on the calendar that night, both were during the final week of the school holidays, which was accidental but excellent timing. Or it was until Eddy came home one night and told them he’d be working full-time during the school holidays.

  ‘I’ll tell them that I can’t work those days,’ he said, so no one worried. He’d been loo
king forward to his trip to Melbourne, and they had bigger problems that week than Mavis’s appointments.

  Martin’s new mobile number had stopped Miss Piggy and her father’s harassment, but they’d hired a city solicitor to harass him.

  When he’d first moved back home, he’d spoken about a fast and amicable divorce. By late June, Miss Piggy’s solicitor was demanding a list of his assets.

  He had no assets, other than money in the bank. He’d filled in the document, posted it back and forgotten about it, until Sunday morning when they found a mess of unidentifiable rubbish dumped on their front lawn.

  It wasn’t unidentifiable to Martin. He recognised the sleeve of his wedding suit, then pieces of the matching trousers. He recognised books, or pages of books, recognised his smashed laptop, and every gift he’d ever given to Miss Piggy, plus a week of household rubbish.

  They cleaned up the mess, filled their bin and Nelly’s, and then they raked every inch of the lawn, hoping to find an engagement ring. They didn’t find it.

  Mid-week, Martin received another letter from Miss Piggy’s solicitor. Then on Saturday, Eddy came home from work and told them that his boss was taking his wife and kids up to Queensland for the school holidays, which was probably why he’d given Eddy the job.

  ‘I won’t be able to take those days off,’ he said. ‘I’ll alter the dates of the appointments.’

  He tried to, or he phoned Clay’s office and was told that Terrence was booked solid for three months.

  ‘I’ll go by myself,’ Mavis said. She’d know Melbourne better than Eddy, but could they trust her to go alone?

  ‘You started it. It’s your job to finish it, Eddy,’ Lori said later.

  ‘I just got that job. You go with her if you don’t trust her to go alone,’ he said. ‘We’ll only need to pay for one room.’