by Joy Dettman
And thank god Martin came. He took one look at Vinnie who was breathing hard and shaking harder. Martin dialled triple zero.
That cop listened to Martin and by torchlight may have recognised Vinnie as Willama’s football hero. He didn’t look heroic. Jamesy had wrapped him in the quilt from the brick room which was doing nothing for his shivering. It had become a shudder.
Through the broken louvers those in the yard heard that liar in their new kitchen – lying about having spent a month in hospital, about her heart attacks and her stents and how her son had made her walk home from the bus stop.
Such a brainless lie and so easily disproved, though not immediately. Mavis had always been into the immediate.
There was immediate gratification in the lighting of a cigarette. She must have had a spare packet in her pocket. Lori smelt the stink of nicotine wafting out through those broken louvers. There was immediate gratification in food. The plates on the table had received their share of mashed potato and most of the pumpkin had been served. Only one plate had received a little stew. No fork within her reach, Mavis ate with a knife while lying, or she ate and smoked and lied until Eddy joined her and the male cop in the kitchen.
He had Mr Watts on speaker phone.
‘Our solicitor wants to speak to you,’ he said, offering his phone to the cop.
People listened when Walter Watts spoke. He didn’t converse. He did a summation to the jury, spoke highly of eighteen-year-old Vincent, apprentice painter, who, since the parent had abandoned the minor children in July, had been supporting his siblings – which wasn’t entirely fact but did alter the cop’s perception of the parent, who put her knife down to suck on her cigarette.
Watts had the facts and the dates, and midway through his summation, Mavis mashed her cigarette butt into pumpkin, picked up a second plate and a fork and disappeared into the central passage, like maybe she’d heard enough of Walter Watts’s character assassination.
He hadn’t said enough. He spoke of the parent’s ongoing child abuse, of her abandonment of her young daughter in a city hotel. At no time did he mention Mavis by name nor refer to her as anything other than the parent, and his posh voice made that word sound worse than the c word. Lori could have listened to him all night, but the paramedics came.
They took Vinnie away, a trail of kids behind them. They watched their BFG football hero being loaded into that ambulance, and it brought back memories of Mick being loaded, of Henry being loaded, though Henry’s face had been covered. Vinnie’s wasn’t.
‘I’ll follow you up there,’ Martin said. There’d be forms to fill in at the hospital, and with or without his glasses, with or without the painkiller they’d shot into him, Vinnie wouldn’t have had a hope of filling them in.
The cops stayed at the house. The kids didn’t. They went over the road to sit on Nelly’s fence.
‘What are we going to do?’ Mick asked.
‘Poison her,’ Lori said. Would have – if Martin hadn’t flushed those pills.
‘She’ll eat your stew,’ Jamesy said.
‘Can you get it?’ Lori said.
He and Alan returned with it, though no one ate stew that night. They ate chips and potato cakes in Nelly’s kitchen while the parent sat in Vinnie’s perfect lounge blowing smoke.
war
Eleven o’clock when the lights went out over the road. They found her in the queen bed.
You can’t reclaim lost territory, not when you’ve lost the greater part of your army – Vinnie had been admitted to hospital – but you can disturb the enemy’s rest by turning on the light, by making as much noise as possible while they dragged Lori’s bed out of that room, while they emptied drawers and slammed them, and did the same with wardrobe doors and drawers. They stripped the front bedroom bare of Lori and the little kids, and of Henry’s boxes and the camera. Then they slammed the door and left the light on.
The stink of her smoke was strong in the front of the house, and the stink of her shoes. Lori pitched them out to the front lawn and tossed a plate after them. She’d mashed seven butts into the remains of mashed potato.
‘We’ll have a for sale sign on the front lawn by Monday,’ Jamesy said. His prophecy silenced them, but they set up Lori’s bed in the brick room and remade it.
Nowhere to put anything, no wardrobe, one chest of drawers and those drawers not large enough and currently full of Martin’s clothing.
They emptied them, took them out to the caravan where Lori checked out a tiny refrigerator. It was working and it had nothing other than ice and two small bottles of beer in it.
‘We’ll starve her out,’ she said.
They made up the caravan bed for Martin, got the two little kids into his brick room bed before starting on their fridge. The caravan fridge wouldn’t take a lot of what they carried out of the kitchen; the caravan benches did. They couldn’t empty the freezer, but what was in it wouldn’t offer immediate gratification.
When Martin finally came home from the hospital, he had photographs of Vinnie’s kneecap, which was facing west when it should have faced north. He’d taken five photographs before a young doctor and his assistants forced it back into its rightful position, then braced it so it would stay there. They’d drugged Vinnie, so he’d stay in a hospital bed.
A knee specialist would need to look at his scans, according to the young doctor, which he wouldn’t do until Monday, and no way would they keep Vinnie in bed until Monday.
‘We can’t bring him back here if she’s here. Crippled or not, he’ll kill her,’ Martin said.
Crippled was not a good word to say in Mick’s hearing, though when the news is bad you don’t waste time looking for politically correct words.
‘The doctor told me that he’ll probably need a knee reconstruction if he’s got any hope of playing football again.’
The grand final was being played next Saturday and if Vinnie couldn’t play, Mavis would be dead before next Saturday. He’d never asked for much, had never wanted much, but he and a few thousand more wanted that premiership.
Mick had disappeared. He’d said little that night, had stood back watching while the others had lifted and carried. Martin’s ‘crippled’ might have been the final straw so Lori went out the back to look for him, just in case he’d decided to hang himself.
The light was still on in the laundry. He’d find rope aplenty in there, though no space to get his feet off the ground. And he wasn’t thinking about suicide. He had a bucket full of screws and nuts and nails and he’d found the old slide bolts he’d removed from the brick room’s old green door before it had been cut up for kindling.
‘The new window is too big, Mick,’ Lori said. ‘She’d be out minutes after we locked her in.’
‘She’s not getting in,’ he said. ‘Have a look around for Henry’s padlock.’
Henry’s padlock, because he’d used it daily when they’d had a front gate, when they’d had a front fence. He’d done his best to keep his kids off the street, though most of his kids had learnt to climb the gate or squeeze between rotten pickets on the same day they’d learnt how to run. The street had always been safer than home.
Lori found the padlock, stored logically enough on the top shelf, beside the mouse traps. A methodical man, Henry, he’d tied its keys to it with his green gardening twine.
It was well after midnight before both slide bolts were fitted to the new door, one on the inside and one on the outside. It was close to one o’clock before Lori crawled into bed, her head only a wall away from Mick’s and Vinnie’s beds – Martin’s tonight.
She couldn’t sleep. She couldn’t get Vinnie, football or Jamesy’s prophecy out of her mind, or Vinnie’s labour in making the house look so good. For Mavis’s benefit? For developers to bulldoze?
Bloody interfering Watts, she thought. They’d told him not to report her to Centrelink, though it had been pure joy listening to his character assignation.
‘He’s our solicitor,’ Eddy had said when he’d
passed his mobile to the cop.
When you couldn’t see his ferret face, their solicitor sounded bigger, sounded as tough and as smart as the solicitors in the movies. And tonight, although she still hated him for interfering, she also felt a grudging respect for him – and for his profession. Cops carried guns and handcuffs, but solicitors had words as sharp as swords.
Sleep came before daybreak. The city came with its dark buildings and its streets full of shadow people. In dream she had Eddy’s maps but no light to see the names of the streets she had to cross over to get home, and her legs were wooden, and the shadow people had guns.
Gunshots woke her and she turned to the little ones, sitting side by side in the bed a foot from her own, skinny little Timmy with his straight dark hair and oval face and round-faced Matty with his red ringlets, sharing two propped-up pillows – and they looked like miniature versions of Mavis and Henry.
Never a bawling baby, Lori had been barely aware of Timmy until he’d learnt to run. He was a good kid. Matty who had slid out bawling, hadn’t stopped since – and who could really blame him for that. Mavis had never wanted him, had rarely fed him. After Henry died, Lori had inherited him and his shitty bum, and she’d resented her inheritance. He’d grown on her, or once he’d stopped messing his pants he had.
‘There are better things to watch than that,’ she said.
‘It’s nearly finished,’ Matty said.
the hosing
Over breakfast, Neil related his dream about a chainsaw monster and not one of the eaters wondered why. The inner walls of old timber houses are thin and Mavis’s snore would have penetrated concrete.
Martin took a call from the hospital while they were eating. Vinnie was demanding to be released. They couldn’t bring him home. He’d kill her with his crutches.
Bert would give him a bed, but he lived too close. They were considering a few of his mates, considering phoning his football coach when Merve, his boss, phoned. One of his nieces nursed at the hospital. She’d told him about Vinnie’s knee. He lived far enough away from Dawson Street and he had spare beds. He had a wife too.
There was mumbling in the background before he came back on the line. ‘Bring him around to us,’ he said.
They packed a garbage bag with Vinnie’s clothing, his shaving gear and glasses.
Martin left before ten and was back by eleven, but not planning to stay. He loaded the two little ones into his ute and took them with him out to Sean’s. He couldn’t take Neil, and being left behind started him complaining anew about his lost sock savings and the bike he could have bought by now.
They didn’t want him on a bike, not yet. He had no fear. Kids who ride bikes need a little fear. They spent the day at Nelly’s and at three they knew that Mavis had bought herself a mobile.
‘She’s going to start doing it again,’ Lori said, start phoning taxi drivers again to shop for her, but when the driver beeped his horn, out she came, with her handbag.
Gone then, and when the taxi left Dawson Street, the kids went home.
Her red case, which had spent the night near the woodheap, was missing. She must have taken it inside. Lori had tested the axe blade on it this morning when she’d gone out early for wood. It had taken a few swings to cut through woven nylon, but she’d persevered. Interested to see how much damage the blade had done to what was inside it, she went into the front room to see a pile of clothing Mavis had emptied to the floor. Her blue-green sweater was amongst it, and her Woolworths pants, and a pair of blue floral pants. No denim. She’d outgrown her jeans. Had bought new knickers, lacy red, and stretchy black with lace panels. Who bought fancy knickers except those who expected someone to see them?
They heated up last night’s stew, fried up the potatoes and pumpkin Jamesy and Alan had scraped from plates last night, and they watched and listened for taxis. The stew would have tasted better last night, before every car they heard had them eating faster. No need for speed that night. She didn’t return, or hadn’t by nine when Martin brought the little kids home and got them into bed.
‘I was just telling them that we’ve got an option,’ Eddy said to him when he came in and made a mug of tea. He’d been pushing his ‘option’ for an hour, Eva’s house. It had three bathrooms, central heating, six bedrooms, a study they could turn into a seventh bedroom, and a unit over the garage. It had tenants living in it at the moment, but Martin looked interested.
‘We’re not living in Melbourne,’ Lori said.
‘If she’s here, I’ll go,’ Jamesy said.
‘We’ll starve her out,’ Lori said. ‘If she brings any food into the house, we take it. Right?’ No one said no. ‘And we stop wasting wood on the stove. We freeze her out – while we’re at school.’
The stove burnt late that night. No one went to bed until after eleven, and when Lori slid into her bed, she was up on an elbow every time she heard a car or a rattle. She felt too close to the night in that room with that square of window looking her in the face. They’d sprayed and washed Vinnie’s scrounged slat blind. It stopped kids from looking in but not the moon and she wasn’t accustomed to its light at night. The front bedroom drapes might have been old and dusty, but they’d been lined and if pulled together they’d made that room pitch dark.
She was catnapping when she heard the en suite door slide open, and half awake she was out of bed and at the main door.
‘It’s only me,’ Neil whispered. ‘She’s home and so is Vinnie. He’s in there banging her head against the wall and she’s moaning.’
‘How did you get in?’
‘The little window’s open. He’ll make his knee worse, Lori.’
Vinnie couldn’t walk on two crutches and his boss lived up the south – and if Vinnie had somehow managed to get home, he wouldn’t have been wasting time hammering her head into a wall. Lori, who’d spent most of her life sleeping in the lounge room, had learnt a lot before she’d been six years old. She’d learnt what the moaning and bed-thumping meant.
‘Lock this door behind me then get into my bed,’ she ordered and crept out. She was in the front passage, hearing the oomphing of male sex when Neil crept up behind her.
‘I told you to lock that door,’ she hissed.
‘I did,’ he hissed. ‘I got out like I got in.’
The front door wasn’t locked, nor the screen door snibbed. She opened both, silently. Neil asked no questions but held the screen door wide to stop it slamming. A dew-wet lawn is cold on bare feet. She wasn’t thinking of feet. She was thinking of Spud Murphy’s blue heeler attempting to rape Mrs Roddie’s little Milly. She was thinking of Bert’s garden hose. It had cooled one lover’s ardour. The moon on the wane but the streetlight lit their lawn where the garden hose coiled like a serpent. It had a gun head, with a trigger, and by feel and streetlight, she found its head then turned on the tap as far as it would go.
The hose was barely long enough to reach the front bedroom door, and to get sufficient length. She needed one hand to pull, but she lined it up, two fingers on the trigger then hissed, ‘Open that door.’
She hadn’t told him to turn on the light. He shouldn’t have turned on the light. He was too young to see such things. No one was old enough to see such things and no one can, or not without such images burning into their retinas forever, like the instantaneous boobs and bum of it, a brown hairy bum – and the bald brown head between globular white boobs that looked like a third but suntanned boob that had lost its nipple. She hit that image with a hail of icy bullets, and as he was on top, he copped the worst of the initial spray.
It stopped his bucking and oomphing. It sent him diving overboard where, like Meggsie used to do, he turned in mid-flight, crouched and ready to attack his attacker. And she got him between the eyes, got him in the yellow slash of teeth between his beard and moustache.
Martin wrenched the hose from her hand. Jamesy dragged her back from the doorway and Mavis’s wet client ran naked out the door, with his boots and a bundle of clothing. Mavi
s might have gone after him to get her money if Martin hadn’t closed the bedroom door, then held it closed. He’d seen enough of her, as had Neil and Jamesy. Mick and the twins didn’t see her nakedness, her ringbarking scar, but she woke them and probably woke the neighbours.
There is always spray-back from a hose. The singlet top Lori slept in was wet, not that she’d noticed, though Neil did. He offered her a towel. She grabbed him instead of the towel and she held his head to her wet t-shirt, maybe attempting to crush that god-awful sight from his brain.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry.’ Sorry he’d seen such a thing. Sorry that he’d see more such things. Sorry she’d run for the hose and not the axe. And that kid put his arms around her and clung to her as hard as she clung to him.
He climbed through the en suite window when she took his towel and he unlocked the door so she could change into dry clothes. She didn’t. Just stood in the en suite shivering and staring at the floor, seeing number Thirteen lying there, an alien baby with four eyes and a gaping hole where its nose should have been. It had brain enough not to gasp in life.
There’d be another one like it, then another and another one. Maybe the Smyth-Owen name would get into Guinness World Records as the first DIY caesarean when that fecund bitch split open at her ringbarking scar.
Standing, shivering, her mind racing, her retinas replaying that slash of teeth, the murder in his eyes, his hairy back and bald boob head –
‘A taxi just picked her up, Splint.’
Another one would bring her home, and another one, and another one and they’d keep on bringing her home.
‘Are you okay in there?’
Was she okay? Who was okay in this house? Who’d ever been or ever would be okay?
She lied. ‘I’m getting dressed.’ She was wishing that Mavis had caught some killer dirt disease during the year of her lockdown, that she’d died of obesity before the lockdown, died of a heart attack at the hospital. She hadn’t and never would. She’d made a pact with the devil and Henry had known about that pact. That’s why he’d hung himself.
