The Hope Flower

by Joy Dettman

  Henry’s wheelbarrow, parked near the potting shed door, told her where she’d find Alan. Her most direct route from the backyard was over the old front gate, which now kept the chooks out of the home yard and allowed Mick easy access in to feed them. He was the only one who opened that gate. The rest of them climbed it.

  Chooks came running. She shooed them back before opening the wood and chicken-wire gate, built and hung by Mick and Bert. It kept the chooks out of the potting shed and away from a field of pumpkins Mick had planted. That field of green was dotted with large golden flowers that might become pumpkins for a bulldozer to harvest.

  Alan was at the back of the shed, up to his elbows in potting mix. He didn’t look like Henry but his hands did, and more so when covered with soil. He hadn’t heard her enter and for minutes she stood watching those hands at work.

  ‘It’s amazing what kids learn when they’re not aware they’re learning,’ she said when he turned. The little kids who’d followed her in were not silent, but they’d been taught respect for Henry’s cathedral. Without need for instruction, they walked single file down to where the bags of potting mix and spare pots were stacked, where Lori and Alan used to sit while Henry had worked and sung in his mulch-scented shed.

  Alan showed them a begonia, a blaze of red flowers. Henry would never have allowed so many to bloom on one plant. He used to nip off most of the buds so his begonias could put all of their effort into one or two perfect blooms. A pity he hadn’t done the same to his own buds, Lori thought. Then she sighed for those three little kids who would have been the buds nipped off, and knew the world would have been a lesser place without them.

  There was always a change in the light when someone lifted the shade-cloth curtain door. It was Jamesy. He never came in but stood as a crucified Jesus, his hands nailed to the doorframe, a cynical Jesus. His face was changing, beginning that moving puzzle that would alter it from boy to man, though nothing would ever alter the cynicism of his smile, and his eyes matched his smile today.

  Martin used to tell a bedtime story about Jamesy’s birth, how he’d come by his lopsided grin. He’d slipped out of Mavis a month before he should have, while she’d been sitting on the outside loo.

  Having already lived a few previous lives, when he realised he was being sent back to live another one, he saw that water and did a swan-dive, face-first into porcelain. Being her ninth and another boy, there’d been a fair chance she’d flush him, but she fished him out by a leg and started screaming and Nelly came running. She rinsed him off before giving him mouth to mouth, and he must have smelt her garlic breath because he started protesting, which was when we noticed his front teeth. Most of us had sense enough not to grow teeth until we were eight or ten months old, due to as soon as we started biting back, Mavis cut off our food supply.

  She’d never fed Jamesy, who’d had more wrong with him than being born early with teeth. He’d spent a month or more in the hospital nursery, and according to Martin he had come home already amused by the world he’d landed in.

  Lori would have been two and a half at the time. She had no memory of him as a baby. She had no memory of him until he’d grown big enough to join her in the crawl space beneath the table, the only space in the kitchen before the extension was built. He used to squat there for hours, half smiling.

  Tonight, his hands freed from the nails, he was coming in, very carefully, as if the floor was red-hot burning embers and his feet were bare. Lori thought he was making his way down to the trio sitting on the bags of potting mix, but he only went as far as the window hatch.

  That shed was twice as long as it was wide, just a common old wooden shed until Henry paid someone to make it uncommon, replacing its roofing iron and three walls with sheets of fibreglass. The window hatches might have been a part of the original shed. He’d tacked shade cloth to their frames, and had never opened them except for when the shed had become too hot for his plants. Today wasn’t hot. Jamesy wasn’t thinking of the plants’ comfort when he opened the west-side hatch and propped it wide.

  ‘She’ll sell that next,’ he said. ‘That’, the house. When open, that west-side hatch offered a framed view of their house.

  ‘And she’ll get more for it because of Vinnie’s labour and Martin’s money,’ Lori replied as she walked to his side to watch Mick measuring up the east-side veranda. ‘What’s he planning now?’

  ‘A place for the plants,’ Jamesy said. ‘He’s talking about tacking shade cloth up to the veranda post. He’s talking about pulling down the chook pen and rebuilding it near the fig tree.’

  ‘We’ll have a plant and chook sale before we leave,’ Lori said.

  ‘Vinnie won’t move,’ Alan said.

  ‘If we can talk Mick into going, Vinnie might,’ Lori said.

  She didn’t want to go, just knew she had to. The day she’d caught that bus home, she’d sworn to never again set foot in Melbourne. There was no never again. Given certain conditions, you do what you have to. If there was a bright side to their leaving Willama, it would be that Mavis would lose most of her pension when she had no dependent kids to support. She probably knew it, which was the reason why that auction sign was standing.

  Lori had returned to her search for sap suckers, Alan to his watering, when Jamesy started singing, his head and shoulders out of the window hatch, his song not for the flowers but directed at the house.

  It was one of Henry’s songs from Camelot, though he wasn’t singing it as a love song. He was flinging its words across the block, almost laughing at the bit about the more congenial spot.

  Congenial? That house was a warzone.

  He could sing though. They’d heard him in the shower once or twice, singing modern rubbish songs. Like his face, his voice was changing. Of course his voice wasn’t as good as Henry’s, but he was thirteen years old and one day he might be as good. He mixed up a few words, but he sang them in tune, and hearing them again made Lori’s eyes water.

  And maybe Mick’s. He came to the door before the song ended, and just seeing all of them in that shed made Lori remember the night they’d all come running in here to hide their eyes from the sight of what had been dangling in the old chook pen. Matty was on her back that night, his gripping little arms choking her while he’d bawled in her ear – bawled because she’d been bawling, as had Mick and everyone else.

  Had Jamesy? Had he ever cried? Maybe he’d learnt early that bawling hadn’t matched his permanent half-smile.

  His voice was a cry when he sang the bit about the rain never falling until after sundown. Lori turned her back then to shake her head and blink her eyes free of tears, for Jamesy, because whether he cried or not, he felt stuff, felt for that house, which had been their Camelot for a month or two.

  He turned when he was done, offered a mock bow and looked for a way out.

  ‘You can sing,’ Lori accused. ‘You’re seriously good, Jamesy.’

  ‘So are canaries,’ he said, then pushed by her, bumping pots. One thudded to the floor, spilling its dirt and greenery.

  Silence for a moment then in Henry’s cathedral. Stillness in that old shed until Alan picked up the plant and gave Lori a flower with no stem, a big beautiful orange bloom.

  ‘She asked me about a letter from the Immigration Department,’ Mick said. ‘That must have been what they’ve been waiting for.’

  The flower hiding her face, Lori asked, ‘What did you tell her, Mick?’

  ‘That I hadn’t seen it.’

  She nodded, sniffed the bloom, some type of begonia. It had no perfume. Orchids had no perfume. Nelly’s little pink roses did, and her daphne and the gardenia she had growing in a pot beside her front door. Some nights the perfumes of her garden almost made you drunk.

  Alan took the plant down the back, where he settled potting mix around its disturbed roots.

  ‘Will it die?’ Neil asked.

  ‘Growing is encoded into its DNA,’ Alan said.

  ‘I’ve been measuring up the side vera
nda,’ Mick said. ‘There’s space enough between the chimney and the front veranda for this lot. I could tack a bit of shade cloth up. Those shelves are all movable.’

  ‘You’ve got growing DNA encoded into you,’ Lori said. ‘The parasites will eat you alive, Mick. We have to go, and somewhere inside your head you know it as well as the rest of us. You know too that once a developer gets his hands on this block, he’ll make her an offer for the house. They love corner properties with dual access.’

  ‘She has to live somewhere,’ Mick said.

  ‘City hotels have maids who make your beds and provide clean towels every day. She’ll have money to burn for a while. You’re outvoted and so is Vinnie. We’re all going, Mick.’

  ‘He’s determined to get back into the team next year.’

  ‘A Melbourne team will grab him. He’s good,’ Alan said.

  An axe on wood silenced them. They walked to the door and saw Jamesy swinging the axe, felling the Auction sign.

  ‘That won’t do any good,’ Lori yelled.

  It may not but it was more interesting to watch than plants being re-potted. The small trio skedaddled out the door.

  Felling that sign wouldn’t do a scrap of good. Vickery’s office window was jam-packed with photographs of houses and properties, and tonight or tomorrow a photograph of Henry’s block would join them and be uploaded to their internet site.

  It did a bit of good. It brought Mavis and her limping mongrel out.

  ‘Put that bloody axe down,’ Mavis screeched.

  Jamesy’s rhythm didn’t alter.

  The support poles of those signs are only lightweight pine and the axe was razor sharp. Two more swings and Jamesy danced back, yelling, ‘Timber.’

  The sign fell face down on the footpath, and Nelly, watching the show from Mrs Roddie’s gate, applauded until Milly took offence at Mavis’s bum and belly-hugging floral pants.

  ‘Milly. Milly,’ Mrs Roddie called. ‘Milly! You come back here now!’

  Little dogs have false images of their size. Milly went for a swollen bare foot. The foot fought back, used Milly as a football, but she bounced, rolled over then returned to the attack until Nelly ruined her game. She scooped her up, carried her yapping back to Mrs Roddie’s gate and dropped her over it.

  Jamesy was smiling with both sides of his face, so Mavis turned her ire on him. ‘You twisted-faced little bastard,’ she snarled, before returning to her mongrel.

  the borrowers

  If Vickery came looking for his sign that weekend, he’d need to look for it on the far side of the levee, though getting rid of it did no good at all. People still came. A group of strangers with kids lifted the shade-cloth door and peered into the potting shed, but Alan was in there so they went no further. Jamesy painted KEEP OUT signs. He stapled one to the shade-cloth door, tacked another to the wall and wired one to the chook gate.

  Two businessmen spent a lot of time on the block, then more time staring at the house, until Neil and the little ones went out to stare back. Those same two men were back on Sunday morning. Lori rode by them when she returned from the supermarket.

  She’d bought the makings of a gravy beef stew. Back when life had been semi-normal, dinner preparations hadn’t begun until an hour before dinner. Back when life had been semi-normal the kitchen had been the hub of the house. It was a thoroughfare now, except in the early mornings. Anything that required cooking was cooked on the stove in the mornings and reheated at night in the microwave.

  Back when life had been semi-normal, if you opened the refrigerator doors you’d find the freezer half full and the fridge section packed solid. You might not want to live without a fridge and freezer, but it can be done. Butter and cheese softened on warm days but neither one lasted long enough for that to be a problem. Canned food and long-life milk required no refrigeration. Supermarkets offered an interesting range of canned meals.

  They boiled bulk potatoes and pumpkin in the early morning. Vegetables reheated well in the microwave, as did rice.

  The carving knife and kitchen scissors now living in the en suite, Lori did most of her food preparation out there. While cutting the gravy beef into bite-sized pieces, she thought about that room’s many lives and odours. When it had been brand new and Lori’s private space, it had smelt of wet cement and mortar. When Donny and Martin slept in it, they’d used a lot of air freshener. After they moved into their unit, the brick room had become Greg’s stinking flop house and Mavis’s private loo. Then he left, and thereafter, only Mavis had used its loo – until Eddy came home.

  ‘You’ve got a maximum-security cell out there,’ he’d said.

  What they’d done to Mavis had been illegal, but when you’re a kid and you’re drowning, you don’t think about legalities or consequences. A drowning kid would grab hold of a crocodile’s tail if it was floating. Lori had grabbed hold of Eddy’s plan with both hands.

  She’d learnt a lot. Even today she remembered the calorie content of most foods. Every food imaginable had its calorie count in a falling apart diet book Mick had found at the trash-n-treasure market. It had recipes too.

  Back when it had been printed, they’d suggested tossing meat lightly in flour before browning it in a little oil.

  She spooned too much flour into a plastic bag, added seasoning, curry, ginger, pepper and salt, then called Timmy in to hold the bag open while she transferred the meat into it.

  ‘It’s like a little kitchen now,’ he said.

  ‘A very little kitchen,’ Lori replied. It contained most of what they needed. They had to boil the jug twice to make enough cups of tea, had to wash up in the hand basin, but only until December. In St Kilda, they’d have a modern kitchen – and Eddy’s cooking again. They craved his cooking.

  ‘We’re like The Borrowers,’ Timmy said. ‘We have to hide from the people who own our house.’ He’d finished that book.

  ‘Not for much longer. You and Matty will have your own bedroom in St Kilda.’ As would she.

  ‘And Vinnie can play football for them.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  He and Martin were picking up Old Red this morning. Vinnie had asked for his car account card last night, determined to pay for the repairs.

  The stove, burning since seven, fried the meat fast, caramelised it. By nine-ten it was waiting in the biggest saucepan for its caramelised vegetables. Words are like cold germs, very contagious. A while ago, that diet book and everyone else had browned their meat. Then one cooking show had started saying ‘caramelise it’, and now every show said ‘caramelise’ – like every cop and politician said, ‘We’ll leave no stone unturned.’

  By ten, the stew was simmering and with luck would simmer until eleven. The potatoes, bubbling in another saucepan, felt soft enough. She’d peel and mash them when they cooled down.

  At ten-thirty, Old Red and Whitey returned to Dawson Street in convoy, Vinnie behind the wheel of Whitey. It was an automatic and easier for him to drive with one good leg. They swapped cars out the front. Martin drove off in Whitey to buy a birthday present, and the keys to Old Red burning a hole in his pocket, Vinnie wanted to drive.

  He’d got rid of his brace but his knee was still bandaged and would be for a month or two more. His football coach had taken over his knee’s rehabilitation, as determined as Vinnie that Willama was going to win the premiership next year.

  ‘Can you handle the clutch for me, Mick?’ Vinnie asked.

  Mick said yes – whether he could or not.

  The kids stood out the front listening to Vinnie’s instruction, then watched a very bumpy take-off. They appeared to have their feet coordinated by the time they turned the corner, so Lori and Alan went inside. Not the little ones. Neil, who’d inherited Eddy’s bike, was showing off on it, and through the sink window, Alan and Lori watched him hit the levee at speed and go up and over it.

  It was a temptation to bike riders. For a week or two it had tempted Lori – until she’d come off her bike one day and taken off too much skin.<
br />
  No pushbike rider had yet ridden back. From personal experience Lori knew why. There was no way you could get sufficient run-up on the far side to make it over the top, though if any kid could it would be Neil.

  Not today. They saw him walk the bike to the top, mount it and come hurtling down to be lost to view.

  He’d lose his freedom in St Kilda. Lori would lose hers. She’d lose the first real friends she’d ever had, and Nelly, though she’d said she’d visit.

  Mavis’s mongrel’s cough moved them from the window to the stove, not that his cough meant he’d come out to the kitchen. He was moving more freely, but if Mavis wasn’t around, he usually kept his distance.

  They heard the front screen door slam. Heard him blow his nose on their lawn. Heard him walk down the east-side veranda to urinate against the paling fence. Neil had seen him do it. They heard the slam of the door as he came in, then, ‘Marrrfiz,’ his approximation of her name. ‘Marrrfiz.’

  She’d bring him out to the kitchen. The kettle was boiling. They had a few supplies in the fridge.

  Lori tasted her stew, added a little more salt, then with the lid on, she carried the saucepan out to the brick room. Alan came behind her carrying the potatoes.

  ‘How do you spell diarrhoea?’ Jamesy asked.

  ‘What are you writing?’ Alan asked.

  ‘An end of the world scenario. They’ve all got the super shits and the computer won’t spell diarrhoea.’ It was a reliable old computer though its brain was too small to accept the internet. Eddy used to talk about adding extra brain until he’d got his laptop.

  Alan spelt diarrhoea, had to spell it twice before Jamesy keyed it in correctly.

  ‘Who is it for?’ Lori asked.

  ‘Crank Tank.’

  She deserved it. She gave everyone nervous diarrhoea.

  They read what he’d written and were laughing at the thought of Crank Tank reading it when they heard the Hyundai’s motor complain. It hadn’t been started since that mongrel had driven it home and it made a lot of noise about starting.