by Joy Dettman
Lighting the stove meant hot water for a shower for Ali-oomph. They heard him hawk and spit and blow his nose in their cubicle, which no longer concerned them. The hotel around the corner had a budget motel behind it. Martin booked and paid for a room twice a week. The kids showered there – and Lori came home from her shower with motel biscuits and teabags.
Eddy, who had been working five days a week during the holidays, showered late on the final Friday before school went back, and when he came home he told them that he’d left his job and he wouldn’t be returning to the high school.
‘Watts enrolled me to do the final term down there,’ he said. ‘I’ve booked a seat on the bus this Sunday.’
‘Where will you live?’ Alan asked.
‘With him – until the tenants move out, then you lot are moving,’ he said. ‘We voted.’
Their house used to be run on democratic lines, but voting, like everything else, had gone out the window, or it had for Lori and Mick and Vinnie.
‘He’ll go,’ Mick said. ‘Holiday visas are only handed out for a limited amount of time.’
‘And if he doesn’t, Mick?’ Eddy asked.
‘Then we’ll rent one of those old places over the west,’ he said.
‘Who’d rent to a mob of parentless kids, Mick? You’re too many,’ Eddy argued.
‘We could move into Spud’s until they pull it down,’ Neil said. ‘It’s got a wood stove and a table and one bed.’ He’d know. He’d climbed through Spud’s bathroom window the other night and come home with four mugs and his jean pockets full of cutlery. Desperate for cutlery, they hadn’t nagged him about stealing, and who were they to nag anyway? They’d stolen Spud’s fig tree and his roses, and both rosebushes were growing new leaves.
‘Rats that don’t swim from a sinking ship end up going down with it,’ Jamesy said.
Lori didn’t say a word, just stood looking at a plague of rats trapped in a barrel that any rat would attempt to break out of. Eva’s house was big. It had a modern kitchen. It had three toilets and no rent and no rates to pay – and an indoor laundry – and freedom for her from those raping black eyes.
They had to go.
*
Two cockerels lost their heads on Saturday morning. By midday they were seasoned and waiting to cross over the road to Nelly’s. The brick room smelt of raw chook but the interlopers were about, so they had to finish packing Eddy’s case and cartons behind the locked door.
He’d packed Lori’s copy of The Borrowers. A bowerbird, Eddy, or he was with anything that once belonged to Henry. He carried Henry’s wallet and driving licence and an old shopping list written by Henry’s hand. The handwriting on the flyleaf of The Borrowers was Henry’s but that book belonged to Lori, so she reclaimed it and handed it to Timmy. He’d have it read in two days and that kid was six years old. Given half a chance, he could be anything. And what chance would he have if they remained here?
A second tray, packed full of potatoes and pumpkin, was waiting beside the plucked chooks by two-thirty when a taxi beeped out the front. Mavis and her rapist were going out. They had no routine you could rely on. They might stay out for an hour and return with take-away and wine. They may stay out until midnight, but for a time, the kitchen was their own, so Mick lit the stove and Lori sent the little kids outside to keep watch and to get some sun on their skin. Willama had given them a perfect day for Eddy’s going-away party.
At three-thirty and no sign of a taxi, Lori slid the chooks into the oven. She knew it well and wasn’t familiar with Nelly’s, and her oven was smaller. At four-thirty the tray of potatoes and pumpkin joined the chooks, and by five the kitchen smelt like Christmas.
They had an emergency plan. The new and an old pair of oven mitts were ready on the table. If the watchers in the front yard yelled ‘Taxi’, those two roasting pans would go out the back before the taxi’s passengers were in the front door.
Five-thirty when a car drove in.
Mick was at the sink window. ‘His family has come to get him,’ the super optimist said, then super sleuth Neil came at a run from the front of the house.
‘It’s them,’ he said. ‘He’s driving it.’
‘A hire car,’ Mick said. ‘He’s going up to Sydney.’
They were too slow. The smell of Christmas must have wafted out the front door as Mavis opened it. Lori had a pair of mitts on, but fool Eddy hadn’t worried about oven mitts. With only a folded tea towel to protect his hands, he’d removed that dish of chooks.
‘Put it down!’ Lori commanded.
He’d never done as he was told and never would. He’d never stuck to Lori’s no seeing, no speaking rule either, and he smiled and stepped towards his ‘Mave’ as she approached the passage doorway.
‘Smells good, ah?’ he said, displaying two crispy-brown chooks.
‘Put them down now!’ Lori said. She knew the weight in that dish, knew its heat too. ‘Put them down, Eddy!’
‘You could have had your share, Mave. That’s all any one of us ever wanted,’ he said. ‘We would have cooked for you, cleaned up after you.’
‘There’s plenty there,’ Mavis said, but she stepped back when he altered his grip on the pan and chicken juice and fat spilt as the chooks slid.
‘Plenty for all but you’ve got more chance of wearing them than sharing them tonight,’ Eddy said. The heat of that pan too great for a tea-towel, he moved back to the stove and dropped the pan, spilt more fat, then fat smoking, chooks sizzling, he ran.
*
‘Why did the chickens cross over the road?’ Lori said as the two pans made their careful crossing, a trail of kids behind her.
‘Did any of you see which way Eddy went?’ Alan asked.
‘He doesn’t want to go,’ Neil said.
The chicken pan resting on Nelly’s fence, Lori rested her wrists for a second and looked at that house and tonight she hated it. Tonight she would have urged Vinnie to burn it down.
A dozen times he’d threatened to. He’d been threatening to decapitate Mavis since he’d grown big enough to swing an axe. He’d had the opportunity to knock her head off with his crutch the night after her mongrel had opened the brick room door but he was no murderer, and nor was Lori, who had threatened as many times to poison her.
Not once had Eddy threatened violence, but he was the one who’d do it. Had Mavis kept coming for her share of those roasted chooks, she would have worn them, not because he hated her but because he’d failed in his attempt to create a mother out of nothing. She’d beaten him. He’d never failed, not at anything. That’s why he was going.
No sign of him when they dissected the chooks, or when Lori made a pan full of gravy. No sign of him when Bert walked over the road with two bottles of beer and two of lemonade, or when Lori washed the dust from Nelly’s mother’s best glasses while the boys set up a wobbly card table and Nelly’s little outdoor table. She didn’t have enough chairs but enough made the trip over the road before Eddy arrived late at his party – and he’d been howling.
He wouldn’t look directly at anyone, but he lifted his glass of pale amber liquid. ‘To Melbourne,’ he said, and everyone clinked a glass with someone, and every glass contained a dash of beer, even Matty and Timmy’s lemonade had received a dribble. Vinnie, Martin and Bert drank it straight, but that night twelve became drunk on beer and lemonade, or on determination to make Eddy’s final night in Willama memorable.
e.t.
Two-and-a-half years ago, when he’d arrived with his large case, he hadn’t planned to stay. He hadn’t unpacked that case for months. It was heavier this morning. His cartons had been sealed well with duct tape and labelled clearly. His laptop had been zipped into its bag and his overnight bag was bulging. They needed Martin’s ute to transport that load to the bus stop, but the ute was blocked in by Ali-oomph’s white Hyundai.
Martin was about to phone Sean to do the transporting when Neil came from the front of the house with a set of car keys and an alien wallet. Vinnie took
the keys then disappeared. Lori opened the wallet that had not one Australian note in it. She removed two cards, one an alien driving licence. The writing was alien but the numbers weren’t. They had to be his date of birth, and if they were, he wasn’t yet thirty years old. She passed it around.
Martin glanced at it then went out to move his ute. The Hyundai was gone.
They loaded Eddy’s luggage while keeping an eye out for Vinnie, who shouldn’t have been driving. The white car was an automatic. He wouldn’t need to use his bad knee but he was supposed to display P plates.
‘If he’s been picked up, he’ll lose his licence,’ Martin said.
Eddy’s bus left at eight-thirty. At a quarter past, Martin was in his ute waiting to go, so Lori went in to get Eddy.
She found him in the lounge room that stunk of the interlopers. ‘You have to go, Eddy.’
He was holding that green jar and the black remains of dead orchids and while Lori watched, he emptied the dead stalks and slimy green water onto the ash and butts in the open fireplace.
‘Come on! You’ll miss your bus!’
She was looking at the closed front bedroom door when she heard glass crack and clatter to the floor. He’d pitched the jar at the glass protecting the young Mave photograph. Smashing that glass not enough, he lifted the frame down from its hook, kicked young Mave free, then her flirty head propped on the brick hearth he stamped her into the jigsaw puzzle she’d ever been.
Alan saw the last of that mutilation. ‘Martin’s going. He said he’d try to hold the bus for you. If you’re going, Ed, you need to do it now.’
Eddy kicked the pieces then looked at his watch. ‘Shiiiiiit,’ he said, and he ran, Lori behind him.
She was lightning on legs, according to Miss Gilbert, the sports mistress. Eddy would have been lucky to outpace Neil. She caught him at the townhouse corner, and he was howling again, his nose running.
‘Kids go away to school all the time,’ she said. ‘Shana is going to do her last two years at a school in Melbourne.’
‘Fuck off,’ he said and wiped his nose with his wrist.
She’d seen his tears before, had been told to fuck off before. The day Eva and Alice had come to the house to take him home, during Mavis’s lockdown period, he’d howled.
He could have gone with them that day but had chosen to stay. He wanted to stay today, but as Lori now knew, life wasn’t about what you want but about what you had. At the end of November, they could have a house and no Mavis, so she walked silently at his side to the final corner. No bus waiting for him but a group of hopeful passengers waiting for it.
‘It’s late,’ she said. ‘You’re meant to go, dude.’
‘I look rotten –’
‘You always look rotten,’ she said, and mock punched his shoulder.
He wiped his nose and face on the lining of his classy jacket while Lori studied a big old house that for the past twelve months a Melbourne couple had been attempting to bring back from the dead. Maybe they’d do it one day. Maybe they’d give up and return to Melbourne.
‘There’s a perfect example of what you tried to do with her,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘Fix the unfixable.’ She pointed at a propped-up veranda. ‘A house can be brought back from the dead if it’s structurally sound. Ours is. I remember the dude who built our kitchen extension telling Henry so.’
‘Rub it in that I wasn’t there.’
‘Everything isn’t about your deprived childhood. I’m talking about houses, and that old place. It’s got rotten foundations. You did more than anyone could ever have imagined with Mavis but she’s rotten to the core. No matter what anyone does to her surface, until the day she dies her rot will keep working its way out.’
‘And I’m just like her.’
‘Bullshit, you are. You’re like Mick, a fixer. Okay, you mightn’t know one end of a screwdriver from the other, but you’re a people fixer.’
‘You’re the one talking bullshit.’
‘Okay,’ she said.
They were crossing over the road to join those waiting for the bus when she asked him if he’d come home the weekend Pygmalion was supposed to be performed.
He didn’t reply.
‘It’s your fault that I’m going to be making a fool of myself in front of a full auditorium. The least you could do is be there.’
‘What did I have to do with it?’
‘Only everything. Until you came home every teacher I ever had hated my guts, but I got picked to play Eliza Doolittle. Do you think that ever could have happened if not for you?’
‘She would have been dead and you lot spread all over Victoria.’
‘Yeah, and I would have run away from a dozen foster homes by now. You’re always hearing on television about how people had their lives turned around. You turned mine around, so look on yourself as Jesus. You came when we needed you and now you’re going to prepare a place for us – or whatever it is they say at funerals.’ Mrs Matthews’s long funeral service had been chock-full of god stuff.
The bus passed them before they joined Martin. ‘It’s your lucky day, mate,’ he said.
‘Or something,’ Eddy said.
‘We won’t be far behind.’
‘Try telling that to Vinnie and Mick,’ Eddy said.
‘A lot of people end up doing a lot of things they don’t want to do,’ Lori said.
The cases and cartons were packed into the luggage hold, its door slammed down and locked, the driver was back behind the wheel when Lori offered her hand. It was all she could do. Her mouth knew that if it attempted to say ‘Goodbye’ she’d start leaking at the eyes and that her leaking would start him again.
He gripped her hand and she gripped his and wished that morning that she was Leonie. Her friend would have hugged him and kissed his cheek. But Lori was who she was, so kept gripping his hand until he drew his free. Then without a word, he turned and boarded the bus.
And it was too much like E.T. boarding the spaceship that arrived to take him home. ‘Phone home,’ she called before the door slapped shut.
‘Coming, Splint?’ Martin asked.
Shook her head. Signalled with her hand for him to go, then stood watching the bus until Eddy’s face appeared at a window midway down, and with one finger, he pointed at his eye then his heart and he mouthed, ‘Ouch.’ He’d watched E.T. as often as the rest of them.
Martin was in Old Red but she ran by it. She was running blind, and not for home. Didn’t want to go there. Didn’t want to go near Dawson Street, so continued down the bus-stop street towards the bridge until the bitumen reached that gravelled road when she ran diagonally across it, up and over the levee and into the trees.
No track there to follow but enough trees to hide her tears – and they wouldn’t stop coming. She had a reservoir of water in her ceiling and no tap to turn it off. It was still dripping when she found her way through to the river downstream from their swimming bend, where she found a stump to sit on, and there she sat staring at the river until that bus would have been beyond the next small town.
She knew that road now. She knew where the bus would stop on the way, knew where it would end its journey, knew too that she and the rest of them would be riding it when the school year ended. Maybe that was why she was howling – because today was the beginning of the end, the end of that river, the end of Willama, the end of everything.
A reservoir eventually runs dry. When hers stopped dripping, she walked down to the river to wash her face.
Rivers had no say in where they ended up. ‘Go with the flow,’ Eddy used to say. For most of her life she’d tried to swim against the current and got to no place fast. He’d pointed her in the right direction.
They’d pointed him too. He’d come to them a total smart-arse, spoilt rotten brat of an only child, super intelligent, a spendthrift with no survival instinct. They’d given him some concept of the value of money, had taught him a bit about surviving. He’d teach them how to s
urvive in Melbourne.
Martin would get work down there. She’d seen those fields of houses that must have taken an army of brickies to build. Vinnie would get work painting them. Mick might get into a teachers’ college. She might get into the cop academy.
Checked her mobile when she knew that the bus would be approaching the halfway mark. She could see that town, could see fresh-faced Mavis, standing at the bakery counter ordering cappuccino and vanilla slices. Wondered if she’d found her young Mave’s jigsaw face yet.
Watts was going to meet Eddy’s bus. He’d give him a bed until the end of November. Only two months away.
Couldn’t shake the image of his face at the bus window or his E.T. ‘Ouch.’
Henry had been an E.T. but no spaceship had ever arrived to take him to safety when his world turned toxic. He’d had to find another way to escape Mavis’s lethal fumes. This morning she understood why he’d done it.
*
The Hyundai was back in the driveway when she returned. No sign of Vinnie or the kids. She walked by the car, peered in through the kitchen’s long window. No one in the kitchen. No movement in the backyard but the television was playing in the brick room so she tapped on the window.
‘Password,’ Neil asked from within.
‘Open it.’ Her voice was password enough. He slid the bolt. She stepped in fast and bolted the door behind her.
‘I just saw him pinching our eggs again,’ their super sleuth reported before returning to the open en suite window. ‘He’s down at the junk heap now looking for wood so he can cook them.’
That window was hinged at the top. It used to open with a wind-out chain thing to prevent it from opening wide. There are certain items that work more efficiently when adjusted than when brand new, or they did when Mick was the adjuster. Its chain and winder long gone, it opened now to its full extent and was held open with timber props. Microwave cooking and the boiling of their electric jug created a lot of steam.
The glass man had fitted opaque glass into its frame, but with it propped high, that gap offered an unrestricted view of the potting shed. If you stuck your head out and looked between the outdoor loo and the paling fence, you had a view of the peppercorn tree and a little of the junk heap. He was down there, attempting to break up a chest of drawers with Mick’s garden spade, due to the axe now living over the road on their woodheap.
