by Joy Dettman
They phoned in an order for two cooked chooks, chips and coleslaw, then Lori, Neil, Timmy and Matty drove in that twin-cab ute to the barbeque chicken place to collect their order – and they carried in more than their dinner. Martin had emptied the caravan fridge and benchtops. He’d packed up his clothing too. He was moving back home.
That was the night they started planning their move to St Kilda, Eddy and Watts joining them on speaker phone. The tenants would be out of Eva’s house by the end of November but it would take a few days for Eva’s stored furniture to be moved back in. Also, Mr Morris had given them dates for three Pygmalion performances, on the Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights of the first week in December, which meant they couldn’t leave Willama until the Sunday.
Martin slept that night in Eddy’s vacated bunk, beneath Alan, opposite Neil, Jamesy opposite Alan. They heard snarling from behind the plaster wall but no bed thumping.
No mail on the Friday or on Monday, but Tuesdays were Nelly’s at home days and when she saw Lori lift the lid of the letterbox, she called across the road.
What she’d done might not have been legal; nor was Mavis stealing their mail. Nelly had retrieved three envelopes, all addressed to Mrs M. J. Smyth-Owen.
Lori didn’t rip her way into them as she used to. She eased them open. The first was from Centrelink. They hadn’t cancelled Mavis’s pension but may have been getting around to doing it. They’d made her an appointment at their office at nine-fifteen on the first of November.
‘As if she’ll keep it,’ Lori said, tossing the page towards Nelly. ‘She’s never out of bed before eleven.’ Nor was her boyfriend these days – and Lori still hoped that he was leaking spinal fluid.
The other envelopes held little of interest. The new rate bill was expected and massive. The council, attempting to justify their new increase, had included a pile of junk about the many services they provided, plus their new valuations of the house and block.
‘Ridiculous,’ she said and shoved the lot at Nelly.
The last letter was from Mavis’s friendly finance company, welcoming Mavis’s business. They’d change their tone when her first payment didn’t arrive.
Lori rode over to town, to the library to make copies. She was sealing the originals into their envelopes when her mobile beeped.
It was Eddy. Can one of you get up to Dick Smith before they close and pick up a laptop. We need you plugged in up there.
Like to suggest what we use for money? Lori replied, wishing she’d brought her glue stick. The rates envelope refused to re-seal.
She was at a newsagency counter, paying for a glue stick when her mobile beeped again.
Watts paid. I told my old boss that one of you would pick it up tonight.
She used the glue stick, gave the post office a miss and rode around to Dick Smith where she parked her bike and stood a while, raising nerve enough to front up for a free laptop. But the boss dude recognised her and the laptop was waiting, sealed into a box on a shelf behind the counter with her name on it, or with the Smyth-Owen name on it, and for maybe the first time in her life she was pleased to claim that name.
‘How’s the boss enjoying city life?’ the dude asked.
‘Good,’ Lori said. Maybe he was. Maybe he wasn’t. You can’t glean a lot of information from texts.
‘It’s loaded, as per his instructions. You’ll be right to get it home?’
‘I’ve got my bike,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’
The box wasn’t heavy but was awkward and her bike basket not deep enough to hold it steady. She walked it to Nelly’s, one hand holding the box and the other holding the handlebar. Many hands assisted in the ripping it free of its packing while Nelly stood back, eyeing it as she’d eyed the microwave. She wasn’t into new technology.
It was similar to Eddy’s but slimmer. Alan turned it on and checked out its programs, which were similar to Eddy’s but not identical. The one thing you could rely on with technology was that there was nothing you could rely on. Eddy’s laptop had to be at least three years old.
No internet connection at Nelly’s. They were urging Vinnie to come home early when a taxi beeped over the road. Mavis must have been out of cigarettes or wine. Sex was supposed to burn up calories and Mavis wasn’t getting any. She’d put on more weight.
‘Is she pregnant?’ Nelly asked.
‘Just fat, I think,’ Lori said. ‘She hasn’t been with him long enough to be showing.’
‘Unless she was with him in Melbourne,’ Nelly said.
Could have been. Could have been with anyone – and if she was pregnant then that was the best reason in the world to move. Anything that mongrel might have planted in Mavis would never be one of Lori’s pack.
Didn’t know where they’d find him when they took their laptop home. He wasn’t in the kitchen. They left Mick keeping watch for taxis at the letterbox, set Jamesy to watch the central passage while Alan got the laptop online. It took a while before emails started coming through to [email protected], a lot of emails, though Lori was only interested in two, one from Eddy and one from Watts. Andrew Barron had sent one, to Martin. They didn’t read any of them, not online. Lori unlocked the brick room and they plugged their new laptop into the printer, and as each page emerged hot, she read it.
And learnt stuff she hadn’t known, how Watts and his uncle had been involved with the Buhler money since Mavis’s father had moved his business from Brisbane to Melbourne, how after he’d died, Watts and his uncle continued to manage that money for Grandma Hilda, then for Eva. She found out too that when Henry had been married to Eva, he’d worked for Watts and his uncle, and that Henry and the uncle had been in a musical group.
According to Watts, they did a few shows together. They did My Fair Lady one year and someone made a video of it, which Watts found when he was packing up his uncle’s stuff. Anyway, to cut a long story short, he kept it and I found a place online that can transfer old tapes to disc. It takes a while, but I posted it yesterday and with luck, a few weeks from now, I’ll get to hear Henry sing. He played Freddy. Watts’s uncle played Pickering . . .
Lori knew Freddy and Pickering. She’d heard of My Fair Lady, as had Timmy, who was overly familiar with Nelly’s home-recorded videos. He said that he’d read My Fair Lady on one video when he’d been looking for Harry Potter. Never a big talker, when he spoke, people listened. Lori put Nelly’s copy of My Fair Lady on her back burner while reading Watts’s email.
As an eleven-year-old, she’d likened him to a ferret, because of his brown suit, spiky ginger moustache and ferret eyes. But as everyone knew, put one of those fighting, biting, beady-eyed little weasels down a rabbit hole and it would drag that rabbit out, dead or alive. Walter Watts had his rodent teeth into Mavis. Before passing that single page on to Mick, she’d stopped thinking ferret and started thinking, Mr Walter Watts, guardian angel of the desperate.
For forty years, his allegiance had been to the Buhler money and because it now belonged to the twins, so too did Watts’s allegiance. He was building an evidence file. He had the receipts and dental photographs from Eddy’s brush with Mavis’s elbow. He had word-of-mouth information about Mick’s hip operation and his months of rehabilitation but he wanted dates and details. He knew about Matty’s pneumonia, knew that the three little kids had been removed from Mavis’s care for a time.
Lori had better than word of mouth. She’d been in the kitchen the night Mick was carried away. She’d run with a red-hot and barely breathing Matty over to Nelly one frosty dawn, but the dates and details had become lost in the general quagmire of no Henry. Martin might remember. The only reason the little kids had been returned was because he’d had one of his break-ups with Miss Piggy – and been fool enough to go back to her.
Doctor Jones’s old files would have those dates. Lori was weighing up the pros and cons of giving Watts the surgery number when Mavis returned, when too late, she remembered the envelopes she’d meant to repost. She had put them down somewhere, pro
bably on the table or the bench, or the cabinet.
Fridge opening, slamming when he limped out, and he must have mentioned wood.
‘It costs bloody money,’ she said. ‘And I’m not bloody made of it.’
She had enough to buy bottles. They heard the clink of them. She had enough to buy take-away. They heard the clatter of plates and cutlery. Then silence until the lounge-room television started playing when Lori crept out to the kitchen to get those envelopes and put them in their letterbox.
They weren’t on the table, benchtop or cabinet. Mavis must have taken them.
They’d had a few theories as to why she’d taken a sudden interest in mail. Mick said that Ali-oomph was expecting a letter from the Immigration Department. Jamesy disagreed. He said he was hiding out from them, like why else would a not yet thirty-year-old man hole up with her? Neil said that he was expecting a letter from one of his wives. He’d recently learnt the Muslims could have four wives.
They ate canned stew on toast for dinner, on their knees, around the little kids’ bed. Then Lori left the boys to wash up while she went over the road to find Nelly’s copy of My Fair Lady.
They watched it together, Nelly spinning through the commercials, and it was Pygmalion with songs. Most of the lines were the same. The first time she’d picked up that book she’d loathed it, but she loved the movie – and imagined herself wearing similar costumes. She found out too why Henry used to sing that song about the street where you live. Freddy sang it in the movie.
the final straw
It happened the following Thursday. As Lori turned the Dawson Street corner, she saw a crowd on the footpath out the front of Henry’s vacant block and a wave of dread made her lose control of the bike. She saved herself. Stood then, one foot on the kerb, balancing her loaded handlebars while staring at what was behind the crowd, an Auction sign.
Placed her bike and load on the nature strip and joined the staring group.
‘Developers will start putting in their bids before sundown,’ Nelly said.
‘I’ll be blocked in by bloody units,’ Bert said.
‘She can’t sell it,’ Mick said.
‘She can do what she likes with it,’ Lori replied, and silently cursed Henry for the trusting fool he’d been. Age makes you know things you don’t want to know, but any man with a modicum of common sense would have had a vasectomy after Martin and Donny. Any man with a modicum of common sense wouldn’t have got his seventeen-year-old sister-in-law pregnant – then compounded that mistake again, again, and again.
He used to rave for hours about his wonderful life with his wonderful parents, but they must have been fools. They’d crammed him full of trust, good manners and useless information but with not an ounce of common sense.
Raising yourself might kill trust forever but it equips you to handle the muck life chucks your way. Lori left the group to walk through cow-paddock grass to the potting shed, where she unhooked and opened its shade-cloth door.
‘I’m not like you, Henry,’ she said. ‘I don’t care about your stupid plants. What did they ever give back except useless flowers that die?’
Shelves and shelves of useless plants, shelves down both sides of that shed and a double row down its centre. A few were flowering, the green of that place sprinkled today with orange and pink, yellow and red. She looked at a waxy red lily. It had a name she couldn’t remember. Okay, it was unique, and so what? The orchids’ flowers were unique but they were dead on their spikes and the plants again looked like weeds.
‘I’ll have a plant sale when she sells your block, Henry. How will you feel about seeing all of your precious babies carted away to new homes – like you left us to be carted away? We buggered up your plan, didn’t we? We’re like your orchids, weeds in a pot, our roots so entangled it would take an axe to split us up.’
The scent of him was still in this shed. She was inhaling him when the light altered. Mick’s clomping boot gave no warning of his approach when he walked through grass.
‘We just built those chook pens,’ he said.
They had, last Christmas holidays, to Bert’s design, back when he’d had a wife who’d come to the fence to call him home for lunch, for afternoon tea. No one called him home now. He’d eventually sell, as would Mrs Roddie, though maybe not while Milly was alive.
‘It’s progress,’ Martin had said about those townhouses. He’d said the same about the units his boss was currently building too close to Bert’s back fence.
‘You can’t stop progress, Mick,’ she said, and she squashed a green sapsucker between her middle finger and thumb.
Mick stood for a time watching her search for more parasites, then the light altered again and he was gone.
She heard the gate into chook territory open, heard the cackle of chooks trapped behind that gate and fence, and wondered why Henry had never built such a fence. Apart from a few young escapologists, his chooks had spent their lives in prison. Mick’s ranged free over the bottom half of that block.
No green where they ranged. They ate anything above ground and then raked the dirt clean of seeds. Nothing attempted to grow in the chook yard. Maybe they craved greens. They went mad over Bert’s rotten apples and Mick’s excess silverbeet and weeds from Nelly’s garden. Every time they sighted movement near their fence, they expected greens. If she opened that gate, they’d get rid of Henry’s plants.
She’d get rid of the chooks and plants before December. She’d put an advertisement in the Gazette. RARE PLANT AND CHOOK SALE.
The boys had taken her bike and load home. The neighbours had gone. She stood a moment, staring at the auction sign while wondering if Mavis had received one of Vickery’s ‘fishing’ letters or maybe read the council’s new valuations, or knew that she’d be losing her pension.
The Hyundai hadn’t moved since he’d driven it home. She looked at the damage she’d done with the rake, then walked across the lawn to look at Spud’s rosebushes. Both had buds. She stooped to smell the largest of them. No perfume, or not yet.
Stood staring at the front door. It was open. Wasn’t sure why she did it, but for the first time in weeks, she opened the screen door and stepped into the house as a cat entering a lost dogs’ home – and it smelt like a lost dogs’ home, or smelt of nicotine and sweat and stale Chinese take-away.
They didn’t see her for the moment she stood in the passage, mourning the lounge room Vinnie had made look serene. It was a pig pen today, empty bottles on the hearth, shoes on the floor, clothes, junk mail and that bloated pig sprawled on the couch, her feet on the coffee table. And him, sprawled on one of the chairs, a glass of wine in his good hand, a cigarette between the fingers of his plastered hand.
Not once had Lori broken her no speaking, no seeing rule, though at times ten thousand unspoken words had choked her. They were a rabble in her head that afternoon, demanding out.
A thousand times she’d planned what she’d say to Mavis. A thousand times she’d practised saying it, but that rabble refused to line up on her tongue.
Something came out. A lie from nowhere came out. ‘Martin just phoned. He said to tell you that you need to get your . . . new partner and his passport down to the cop station now or they’re coming around here to get him.’
That got her feet off the table, got her looking Lori’s way.
‘When?’ she asked.
‘He just phoned me.’ It was like Pygmalion, like the words had been written and were waiting for her to speak. ‘They sent him a letter a while ago and he didn’t reply to it.’
‘Who sent him a letter?’
‘The Immigration Department.’
‘They don’t know where he is.’
Her mongrel must have understood Immigration Department. He was on his feet needing Mavis’s translation.
‘That bantam bastard dobbed you in,’ she said.
He’d understand ‘bantam bastard’. ‘Dobbed’? Maybe not.
‘What have you got in common with him, Mavis – other tha
n sex and smoking and those bottles?’
‘There was no bloody letter.’
‘You’re the one who has been getting the mail. Maybe if you cleaned up your filth, you might find it.’
‘How would the cops get that bastard’s phone number unless he dobbed him in?’
‘Ask them when you take your “partner’s” passport down there,’ Lori suggested, and wondered why she felt so calm. She might have been born afraid of Mavis but there was no fear left in her. They were in that landlocked lounge room. She had the open front door at her back.
‘Eddy would have spent Eva’s last cent on trying to turn you into his mother and you traded him in on that. You’re a nympho. No wonder your mother and Eva hated the sight of you.’
Lori got out then and for something to do, rode out to Matty’s childcare centre. He didn’t want to see her or her bike. Martin had been picking him up in the new ute.
‘Why can’t Martin come?’ he asked.
‘Because I came,’ she said. ‘And one complaint out of you on the way home and you’ll walk.’
He’d turn five next February. He’d slipped out of Mavis the week before Lori’s eleventh birthday. By her twelfth, she’d been changing his napkins. Next year, had dreams come true, he would have been walking to school with Neil and Timmy. There was no next year now. There was no next week. There was today, and if tomorrow came, there’d be a tomorrow.
‘I like cars, not bikes.’
‘Until you’re big enough to be useful, you don’t get a vote,’ she said.
The auction sign was a slap in the face when she rode by it, which she’d be doing until the middle of November, unless it sold before the auction. It should have mattered more than it did. It would have two months ago, but they were leaving anyway, so who cared?
She rode by the Hyundai and raked it on purpose with her bike pedal, rode around to the laundry, now looking green on its south side. It wouldn’t bloom this year and by next year the laundry and house would be gone.
Leant her bike where the caravan used to take up space, then walked down to watch Mick poking holes into soil and placing green shreds into each hole. He believed in tomorrow’s onions. Lori didn’t.
