by Joy Dettman
She didn’t die. She escaped into the bush while the druggies were fighting over who got the last hit of ice. The novel ended before the cops arrived, but the reader knew they were close, and knew too that the granny was going to survive and that she’d fly to England and find her son. Though she hadn’t met him, Lori knew him, and she wanted that meeting. There had to be a sequel.
She wiped her fingers clean then turned to the front of the book to see if the author had written other novels. Juliana Conti had written seven novels before Designer Genes, which had been first published in 2005, which meant that she could have written more than seven. She’d google her later.
She was glancing through the book when Martin came in to stand close to the stove. ‘I would have spent a more comfortable night in a freezer,’ he said.
‘Move into her room. She’s not coming back, Martin.’
‘How do you plan on keeping her out, Splint?’
‘I allowed her to make a total fool of me. I promise you that she won’t do it again.’
‘You can’t evict people from their own houses.’
Lori closed the book and placed it on the cabinet. ‘Was Henry the greatest fool on earth?’
‘Hooking up with her?’
‘Putting this house in their joint names.’
‘It’s what couples do –’
‘They were never a couple. She was a parasitic growth that got her roots into him and kept sucking out his sap until he dried out and blew away.’
Vinnie was next out, clad as usual in t-shirt and jeans. There was enough of him to generate his own heat.
‘Yo,’ he said as he walked through to do his daily warm-up at the woodheap. Every morning he chopped enough wood to last the day. Every morning, after his warm-up, he returned to the kitchen with an armload he dropped to the hearth. On most Sunday mornings he made porridge. They moved away from the stove to give him access.
Eddy was next out. He was working today. They ate in relays. Porridge, if left on the hob and given a stir and a dash of hot water occasionally, was good for hours.
They didn’t see Eddy until six that night, when he ate fast and disappeared again.
‘He’s gone up to the bus stop,’ Lori said.
He returned alone. ‘I should have gone with her,’ he said. ‘What actually happened down there?’
‘You’re looking for a reason not to feel a fool. I had all day in Melbourne to come to terms with it. She fooled all of us.’
‘Something must have happened.’
‘It did. She pulled off the greatest con on earth.’
He didn’t believe her. He wanted a reason, so she got the camera, flicked by Nelly’s house, by the city shots to the one of Mavis she’d taken at the restaurant.
‘Jesus,’ Martin said. ‘She looks . . .’
Sometimes you can’t find the right words, but pictures don’t need words. She flipped back to the laughing shot of Mavis, taken in the hotel room.
‘I thought she was laughing with me. She was having hysterics because I was so easy to con,’ Lori said.
‘Something must have happened to make her turn,’ Eddy said.
‘It did. She dragged me into a posh restaurant, ordered one hundred and thirteen dollars’ worth of steak and wine, and after I paid the bill and left, she sat on and spent your money on gorging.’
She told her story in detail, told about the fridge full of alcoholic drinks, about the basket full of junk food, told about the Xanax powder and the aspros.
‘Did she take them?’
‘I watched her empty the glass, and when I tried to wake her the next morning she was worse.’
‘You’re certain she took them.’
‘Ask me that again and I’ll do my block, Eddy. Her mood change had nothing to do with pills. It was getting her hands on her birth certificate that fixed her. She had unquestionable identification. All she had to do was play nice until her appointment with Clay – and to con you into loaning her three thousand dollars’ worth of gold chain. And if you’d gone instead of me, you would have been the one she’d turned on, so consider yourself lucky that you didn’t go. Now shut up about her.’
*
The yellow bankcard, now useless, went to school in Lori’s wallet on Monday morning but didn’t return home that afternoon. She called into the bank where she handed it to a teller and explained how her ‘mother’ must have dropped it on her way out to the car on Thursday morning, how she’d left in a hurry.
Lori had rubbed it into the dirt to disguise Vinnie’s Mso squiggle. She’d ground it into the concrete footpath with the heel of her shoe, but the teller, still able to read its numbers, keyed them into her computer. She told Lori that Mrs Smyth-Owen had already reported that card lost and that she’d be issued with a new card and PIN within five business days.
Lori’s wallet felt different without it. She felt different without it. Martin shopped for the basics on his way home from work. He bought more than the basics on Friday. He brought home a lump of beef and a small bottle of green peppercorns. Lori had spoken long about that steak with pepper sauce.
The internet told her how to make it, which she did while the lump of beef roasted, roasted slowly. When it finally stopped bleeding when she stabbed it, she made a pan full of gravy as per Mavis, then mixed the two sauces together. And roast beef with peppercorn sauce gravy, served with a pile of mashed potatoes and pumpkin, tasted a whole lot better than that restaurant meal, and it cost less than one scotch fillet steak.
freedom
Designer Genes returned to the library the day Lori googled its author’s name. To date, Juliana Conti had written ten novels. One of her later books could have been a sequel.
She found one of her early novels on the shelves and ordered two of her later novels – as Henry used to order books – and the woman on the computer remembered his name.
‘You’re Henry’s daughter,’ she said, and Lori smiled, proud to admit to that relationship in the library.
That evening, Eddy wouldn’t let up about Mavis. He phoned the hotel to see if she’d returned for her empty case. He googled Melbourne refuges for women. Lori told him to try a few posh hotels in Brisbane, which his chain and Eva’s opals would be paying for. Vinnie suggested he try a few St Kilda brothels.
‘What’s a brothel?’ Neil asked.
‘Where she’s flogging her ar–’
‘Shut up, Vinnie –’
‘Flogging her what?’ Neil asked.
‘Eddy’s arty-farty gold chain,’ Alan said. He’d teased Eddy about wearing that chain. Neil knew arty-farty and settled for that.
‘Going off those pills suddenly will have thrown her brain into chaos,’ Eddy said.
‘Chaos is her normal, and mention those pills again and I’ll feed you what’s left of them.’
Martin might have believed her. He flushed the lot down the brick room loo that night, and god help the sewer rats.
They burnt too much wood in wintertime. The open fire was lit each day after school and the kitchen stove burnt day and night. Lori and the mobile boys did what they could to save on wood bills. They wandered the bush by day gathering piles of fallen timber, then by night pitched those piles over the side fence. Vinnie, their super scrounger, came home with news of free wood out near the golf course where a few trees had been felled. Martin, never a scrounger, refused to drive him over the bridge to collect it but he offered Red’s keys, if Vinnie wore his glasses.
‘Bloody glasses,’ Vinnie said. He wore them. He and Alan brought home three ute loads of free firewood that night.
Scrounging is like any addiction, like smoking, like drugs or drinking. Once you start you can’t stop, or Vinnie couldn’t. He was back to raiding hard-waste collections and loaded skips. Every night he came home with something – kitchen chairs, large plastic pots, a roll of green plastic trellis, a grey slatted window blind. Martin could have stopped that scrounging if he’d agreed to install that big window so Vinnie had somewhere t
o hang that blind. It was dirty, but in perfect condition. Dirt washes off.
Everyone was interested when he carried home a weighty old wood and wrought-iron screen door. It had no flywire in it, was too wide and not tall enough to fill the space where the ribboned curtain hung, but he came home the next night with lengths of timber tied to the ladders on top of his boss’s van. That timber got Mick’s interest. He rode up to Bunnings to buy flywire and a sheet of clear plastic for the door.
They did it that weekend, built a timber frame the door would fit into, then fixed the frame to the bricks and weatherboards with angle brackets. It stuck out from the wall and it had a little roof they attached to a rafter and the walls. It looked okay too, after it was painted.
Having a back door altered the personality of that narrow passage. It turned it into a part of the house instead of a continuation of the backyard. It also altered the brick room’s personality. It finally became a fourth bedroom, Martin’s bedroom, and it smelt of his shaving foam and deodorant.
Every big family needs a scrounger, just as they need a fix-it man. Mick and Vinnie hadn’t lost their places. Only Lori had lost her place. She’d been the money manager, the mean-arse protector of Mavis’s pension, and on the first pension day of no Mavis, it hurt like hell knowing that money was being wasted.
‘We need to report her to Centrelink,’ she said.
‘Running out of money was always the fastest way to bring her home,’ Martin said. He was the Mavis expert. He’d always told them stories. He told them stories about Mavis now, once the little kids were in bed. Eddy might have doubted a few. The others didn’t.
Eddy still wanted to go on the China trip but only if Alan went. It was obvious to Lori why he wanted Alan to go. Eddy was super smart but a smart-arse at school and no one likes a smart-arse.
‘We’ll lose the deposits,’ he argued.
‘I told Watts to cancel my trip weeks ago. You told him not to. It’s on your head,’ Alan said.
It was the mention of Watts and money that triggered an idea in Lori’s mind. Mavis didn’t receive Centrelink money for the twins’ upkeep. Watts paid for them – with Eva’s money, which Mavis would receive at the beginning of August.
‘Tell Watts that you need him to pay your support money into Martin’s account,’ she said.
Martin shook his head at that. ‘Karen’s shark is going after everything I’ve got. Tell him to pay it into Vinnie’s car account.’
Alan compiled the email, with half a dozen advisers looking over his shoulder. It flew away at nine-ten, just a few lines about major financial problems and a line about Mavis absconding and the kids being solely dependent on Martin and Vinnie for all living expenses. It mentioned that Vinnie was eighteen and ended with how if their August support payment could be paid into Vincent’s account it would go a long way towards alleviating the current financial problem.
Alan added his unedited footnote, unedited and unseen by Eddy before it flew. Eddy and I would like you to cancel both China trips. If you do it tomorrow, you might get back a part of the deposits.
Walter Watts must have been sitting late at his computer because a bare minute after that email flew, Eddy’s mobile rang. Watts hadn’t rung about the China cancellations, the lost deposits, or the altering of banking instructions. He wanted to know when Mavis had absconded.
Eddy started on his murder theory but Lori snatched the phone from his hand. ‘We think she’s gone up to Brisbane. She found out recently that her birth father was still alive up there’ – or he was when she’d absconded though he mightn’t be by now. Martin took charge of the phone but only to put it on speaker. From the centre of the table then, Walter Watts’s posh voice joined their conversation, and later he put Lori in the witness box, or he questioned her as if she had been sworn in.
She told him how Mavis had left her on the eighth floor of a Melbourne hotel, how she’d had to find her own way to the bus stop, and if she made it sound harder than it had been, too bad.
He asked if Mavis’s disappearance had been reported to the police.
‘I keep telling them we have to,’ Eddy said. ‘She could be lying dead in some gutter.’
It was the gutter bit that started Vinnie’s laughter. He didn’t do it often but when he did it, everything else had to stop, and when he could, he told Watts exactly what was what.
‘Your baby Jesus here is the only one who wants that crazy bitch back, so stay away from the cops and Centrelink. If she loses her pension, she’ll be back here bludging on us again,’ he said.
The following day, Watts sent an email telling them he’d altered his banking instructions and that the support money would now be paid into Vinnie’s car account, which he never withdrew from so didn’t have a PIN – or didn’t know it, though before that first payment went in, he rode over to the Westpac Bank with Lori where he changed his numbers to those familiar to Lori, and when it was done and she checked his balance at an ATM, he told her to hang on to the card.
‘I promise I won’t touch a cent of your car money,’ she said.
‘Knowing you, I’ll probably make money on the deal,’ he said.
Her wallet felt much better for that red card.
Neil moved prematurely into the bunk room that night. It was their best bedroom in winter and their worst in summer, due to sharing the kitchen chimney. He and the middle-sized boys wouldn’t have felt the frost that night. The water pipes felt it. They froze solid. Martin had to steal a bucket of water from Bert’s tank. But on the bright side, heavy frosts sweetened Nelly’s oranges, and after school, she came over with a supermarket bag full.
She visited often now, visited whenever she felt like visiting, and sat for as long as she felt like sitting. No one mentioned she who was missing, who wasn’t being missed.
Since forever, the life and moods of Henry’s house had been dictated by the moods of she who wasn’t being missed, and life without her was so good. People laughed when they felt like laughing. People sat around the table at night playing cards and memory games instead of watching television.
Nelly wasn’t the only neighbour to visit. Bert walked down to look at their back door; Mrs Roddie came down looking for Milly, her mixed-breed miniature mutt that had to be part Chihuahua and part bullmastiff; Milly had Matty bailed up in the outdoor loo.
Sean Dobson came around one night to talk to Martin about where they were working the next day. He ended up staying for Eddy’s curried chicken-leg dinner and a game of cards.
Then August came and the twins’ support money came and Lori spent a hundred and eighty dollars of it at Woolworths, then thirty dollars more on new school shoes for Jamesy. His feet wouldn’t stop growing.
Life got better when Martin handed her a second bankcard, a yellow and grey one that could access over fifty thousand dollars.
‘Use what you need,’ he said. ‘And add a few hundred each week to your emergency fund.’ She knew why. He’d agreed too early, too easily to splitting his savings with Miss Piggy and his wages were paid directly into that account, not that half of that fifty thousand was enough for her and her solicitor. They wanted a portion of his superannuation and half of the value of Old Red.
Since his marriage he’d spent big money on restoring that ute back to better than showroom condition. They looked up similar veteran utes that night, and a few were worth big money. Miss Piggy or her solicitor must have looked them up online.
‘I’ll let it rot before they get their hands on it,’ Martin said.
It had an oil leak when he’d moved home which he’d spoken about having repaired. He let it leak now, just kept topping it up. He’d done nothing about a small dent in his passenger-side door and he’d stopped washing it every weekend.
In the beginning of that divorce mess, he’d believed that Miss Piggy’s assets eclipsed his own by thousands, but she had no assets. Her car, bought for her by her father, had been registered in his name. She had a hairdressing salon, but it had been set up by he
r father to keep her in Bungala, and it never made enough money to pay him rent. He was demanding back rent now. They were out to bankrupt Martin, and he didn’t care.
He came home on Saturday morning with a leg of lamb and a jar of mint jelly for Neil’s ninth birthday celebration dinner. Then because the weather girl promised them a fine weekend, he attacked the south-side brick wall, Vinnie at his side until he had to leave to play football but by then they’d removed half of the wall.
‘How did you go, Vin?’ Martin asked when he returned.
‘Good,’ he said, and that was all he said.
The brick room had been painted white on the outside and pale yellow on the inside, but the ends of the bricks they stacked against the fence told the tales of their varied origins. A lot had come from Mrs Roddie’s red-brick fence, but there were browns, cream and pink ends too. Most of the browns and the pinks were identified as Greg’s contributions. He’d stolen a good few bricks from building sites.
They’d got Mick’s window frame fixed in before the leg of lamb was done and on Sunday morning, Sean and his father came around to help lift and support the window until it was fixed in tight. As expected, it offered a very fine view of the rotting laundry wall and the bikes leaning against it. But they could plant something out there to cover that wall, and maybe hold it together for a year or two more. While they admired the new view, Vinnie started knocking out more bricks. His original plan had been to fit the small window frame into the en suite’s eastern wall, and before Sean and his father went home, it was in.
It looked better. There was natural light where there’d never been natural light. There was wind that night, a cold August wind blowing through the little window and out through the broken pane of the new window. It blew through until the glass man arrived on Tuesday to make the brick room habitable.
