Miss Understood

by James Roy

  ‘I hope he stops singing before then,’ I said.

  About ten minutes later, I was ready to go. What I mean is, I was dressed to go, and I’d brushed my hair, and put a muesli bar and a juice box in my bag. So I was mostly ready to go.

  Unfortunately my tummy wasn’t ready. It was all churny, like when I was waiting outside Mr Hilder’s office all those times, but because I didn’t have to ask the office ladies every time I wanted to use the toilet, I went about three times before I even got my shoes on.

  ‘You good to go, Betty?’ Dad asked me.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, even though I’d promised not to tell any more lies.

  ‘I wonder if you should run over to Miss Huntley’s place and see if she needs a lift,’ he suggested.

  I didn’t actually run across the road – I walked, after checking for traffic. But when I knocked on Miss Huntley’s door, there was no reply.

  ‘She must have already gone,’ I told Dad when I was in the car. ‘She does leave pretty early.’

  ‘Never mind,’ Dad said. ‘Maybe when you see her you could mention that we can give her a ride next time.’

  ‘Dad, can I ask you something?’ I asked as we reached the tiny roundabout at the end of our street.

  ‘Of course,’ he said, turning down the volume on the radio. ‘What’s on your mind, Betty?’

  ‘Why were you grumpy last night?’

  ‘Was I grumpy last night?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘You were really grumpy. I know that sometimes I forget to do things like the bins, but it’s never on purpose. Sometimes I just forget. Don’t you ever forget anything?’

  He took a deep breath, which is something he does when he’s trying to think of the right thing to say. Then, after he’d been thinking for a bit, he looked at me. ‘Yes, I do sometimes forget things, Betty.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘I forgot your mum’s birthday last year.’

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ I said. I remembered that, and it wasn’t a very good day, with Dad jumping in the car and rushing up to the shops while Mum was in the shower, and then coming back with a bunch of droopy, daggy flowers. Plus he’d accidentally bought a sympathy card instead of a birthday card, which he’d chosen because it had the same coloured flowers on the front as the tired old bunch he’d bought. The message inside was so bad that I memorised it word for word: I know how hard it must be, after so many years. Thinking of you at this difficult time.

  I smiled as I remembered Mum trying to be nice to me and Richie while she was cross with Dad.

  ‘It was pretty funny, you know,’ I said. ‘I never thought Mum would actually throw a vase inside the house.’

  ‘Well, it wasn’t funny for me,’ Dad answered. ‘But you see? I forget things too. And yes, people get grumpy with me as well when I forget things. I remember one time when I did a review for a new medieval-style restaurant in Melbourne, and they told me that they were going to serve me their signature dish, which was a duck and trout terrine with truffle oil venison or something bizarre, and I told them how much I loved it, and I promised that I would mention it in the review and say how amazing it was. But then I forgot, and they were pretty cross, mainly because they’d ordered about a thousand ducks, ready for all the people who were going to read my awesome review. So yes, I get in trouble too.’

  ‘But it was just the kitchen bin,’ I said. ‘All you had to say was –’

  ‘I say it all the time, Betty! But you’re right, I was probably more abrupt than I needed to be. I was having a bad night, I guess. Ooh, I like this song!’

  He turned up the radio and began to sing about someone not being able to read his cocoa face.

  ‘Dad. It’s not “cocoa”. It’s “poker”.’

  ‘Don’t care,’ he said. ‘I prefer my version. Sing with me, Betty!’

  But I didn’t. I was way too nervous.

  We arrived at Helping Hands about ten minutes earlier than we needed to. There was no hint of movement in the shop, and the sign on the door said that it was closed.

  ‘Do you want me to wait with you?’ Dad asked me.

  ‘Nah,’ I said. ‘I’ll be fine.’

  ‘Was it the singing?’ he asked, and I just grinned at him. ‘Got your phone, Betty?’

  ‘Yep.’

  While I waited for the shop to open, I sat in the doorway and watched people, which is kind of fun if you’re a bit bored. Plus it was a weekday morning, and I wasn’t going to school or anything, so that was pretty cool.

  It was a fairly typical morning, I guess – people going shopping, or taking their kids to school (poor things). A man walked past me with a newspaper under his arm and a tall takeaway coffee in his hand. He muttered something about kids wagging school and clogging up the footpath, and I guessed he was talking about me.

  I stared at the back of his head. I wanted to say something. I wanted to go, ‘You didn’t trip over me, and you don’t even know why I’m here, so what difference does it make to you?’

  But then I imagined him saying, ‘If you’re not going to school, why don’t you get a job?’

  And I would then say, ‘I do have a job, here, at the charity shop. See you next time you need to buy another pair of baggy second-hand trackie-dacks.’

  Then I imagined him stomping away, because there’d be nothing he could say to that.

  (Do you ever think that imagining what you could have said is better than actually saying it? I do.)

  Suddenly the shop door rattled behind me, and I turned around, expecting to see Miss Huntley standing there. But she wasn’t. It was a different old lady, quite a bit taller than Miss Huntley, and with her straight grey hair tied up. I used to play a game on Dad’s computer, where you had to make people live their lives, and you’d make their houses, and they’d start out young and go to school and get jobs and buy stuff, then they’d get old, and then one day they’d fall over in their kitchen, and they’d go all see-through and floaty, and then their friends would cry and be all sad for a couple of days. The old lady out the front of the shop looked like one of the people that I made, just before she went all see-through and floaty.

  So I was a bit surprised when she said something, and the words she used were real words, and not the weird garbly words the people used on that game.

  ‘Can I help you?’ she asked.

  ‘You’re not Miss Huntley,’ I said.

  She didn’t seem surprised to hear this exciting news. ‘No, I’m Mrs Gardiner,’ she said. ‘And you are?’

  ‘I’m Lizzie,’ I replied.

  ‘Oh, the girl.’ She glanced up and down the street like we were meeting in secret or something. ‘You’d better come in, then. Ivy’s just called – it turns out she’s not coming in today.’

  ‘She’s not? Is she okay?’ I asked, as my tummy churned even more.

  ‘She didn’t say. Come in quickly. We aren’t open quite yet, and we don’t need anyone thinking that we are. Quickly!’

  I followed Mrs Gardiner into the shop.

  ‘Close the door,’ she said, walking away between the racks of clothes. ‘I don’t suppose you want tea.’

  ‘I’d love some tea,’ I said.

  She stopped, and turned around. ‘You would? Really?’

  ‘Yes, please. I love tea.’

  ‘Well, we’ve only got low-fat milk,’ she said.

  ‘That’s okay. And one sugar. Please.’

  She hesitated. ‘White with one. I’ll be right back.’

  ‘I hope you’ve got enough cups,’ I joked, spotting the long glass shelf that ran along one wall. It was loaded with cups and mugs that people didn’t want any more. ‘I don’t know where you’d get a cup from at this time of morning.’

  Mrs Gardiner frowned at me like my brain was made of cement. ‘We’d just use one of those,’ she said, pointing at the shelf. ‘We’ve got so many cups.’

  ‘Oh,’ I replied. What else could I have said? That I was making a joke that she didn’t get? That I wasn’t an idiot, b
ut a smart girl with a sense of humour? ‘That’s a good idea – you could definitely use one of those cups,’ I said.

  ‘I know. That’s why I said it.’

  While Mrs Gardiner busied herself out the back of the shop, beyond the orange curtain with STAFF ONLY written above it, I wandered around looking at all the stuff. Someone had divided it into sections. Men’s trousers and jeans, women’s slacks and jeans. Men’s shirts, women’s blouses. Sweaters, jackets, shorts, T-shirts. Children’s clothes, shoes, hats. Kitchenware – casserole dishes and cups and saucers and serving spoons and salad bowls and mixing jugs and brass kettles and saucepans. Records and videos. I didn’t see many DVDs, but I saw plenty of those huge video cassettes – learn to speak Italian, learn to knit a sweater, learn how to bend yourself into a pretzel shape when you’re pregnant. I flipped through the records and CDs. I hadn’t heard of any of the people on those record covers, and judging by their pictures, I began to understand why no one buys record players any more.

  I wandered over to the book section. So many books! Romance books, mystery books, travel books, skinny vegetarian cookbooks, fat country-style roast cookbooks, books about sailing, books about castles, books about the kinds of people I’d seen on the record covers. Kids’ books, grown-ups’ books, books for babies, books about babies, books about animals, books about knitting.

  Then there was bric-a-brac. I wasn’t sure what bric-a-brac was (and I’m still not), but that’s what the sign above that section said, and in the baskets and tubs I found little dolls made out of corn husks, and snow domes from places with names like Maine and Anchorage and Lightning Ridge. There were postcards and picture frames, wooden boomerangs and plastic ukuleles, beer coolers from Broome and Birdsville, bottle openers, silver souvenir spoons. I was starting to think that maybe bric-a-brac was another name for stuff that people bought, then gave away when they’d forgotten why they bought it in the first place.

  Pretty soon Mrs Gardiner was back with my tea. ‘Here you go,’ she said, holding out a steaming cup. ‘White. With sugar. We don’t have any biscuits.’

  ‘That’s fine. Thank you. So, do people just get sick of stuff, and give it to Helping Hands?’ I asked her.

  ‘Sometimes,’ she said. ‘They don’t like their clothes any more, or they’re cleaning out their house and figure they could just donate all their books, for example.’

  ‘Or their souvenirs? Why would someone give away their souvenirs?’

  ‘Maybe they want to forget they ever went to those places,’ she suggested. ‘Now, we’ve had a whole lot of clean laundry just come back. When you’ve had your cup of tea, how do you feel about sorting some clothes?’

  ‘I can do that,’ I said, because I could.

  I spent the rest of the morning taking clothes out of cardboard boxes and sorting them into different piles: ladies’ clothes, men’s clothes, children’s clothes. A few bits of underwear had slipped in there by accident (I didn’t really like handling those) but everything else was all right, and I only had to ask for help a couple of times, with cardigans that looked like they should have been ladies’ cardigans, but were actually for men.

  A few more people came in to help part-way through the morning – a lady called Pat whose nose whistled while she breathed, as well as a man and his wife – their names were Mr and Mrs Stirling. Mr Stirling had a terrible cough that was so loud and violent that I thought he was going to blow his entire face right off, while Mrs Stirling was almost completely deaf, and I couldn’t work out whether she’d gone deaf because of his cough, or if she was just plain lucky.

  It did feel a bit weird, hanging out with only old people, but it was fun helping customers in the front part of the shop. Sometimes people would ask if we had this or that or something else, like jeans in a certain size, or any straw gardening hats, or a certain kind of jug, and I would have to go out the back through the STAFF ONLY curtain (I liked that bit – it made me feel important) and look through all the stuff we were sorting.

  Around the middle of the day, Mrs Gardiner came over to where I was tidying up the puzzles and games in the kids’ corner. ‘I suppose you’ll be going home now?’ she said. ‘It’s after twelve-thirty.’

  ‘Is it? I guess I will, then,’ I replied.

  ‘Do you need to call your parents?’ she asked. ‘You can use the phone out the back.’

  ‘It’s okay,’ I told her. ‘I have my own phone.’ And just to prove that I was telling her the truth, I pulled my phone out of my pocket and showed it to her.

  And that was when she kind of rolled her eyes and said something about me being too young to have a mobile phone.

  ‘It’s for emergencies,’ I said, which was half-true, since I’ve never had a proper emergency to call anyone about on my phone, and I also use it to call people like Jenni just so I can have a chat.

  ‘Very well,’ she said, looking past me at one of the customers. ‘So, when are you back?’

  ‘When do you want me to come back?’ I asked her.

  ‘Ivy Huntley is here again on Saturday. You could do another morning then, if you like.’

  ‘Thanks, I’ll check with Mum, but I don’t do school on Saturday anyway, so it should be fine,’ I said. ‘Oh, can I ask you something, Mrs Gardiner?’

  ‘Of course,’ she said, but she still seemed distracted.

  ‘Did I do an okay job today?’

  ‘No,’ she replied, looking right at me while she said it, which made me feel really self-conscious.

  ‘I didn’t?’

  ‘No, you did a great job. See you Saturday?’

  ‘I’m looking forward to it,’ I said, because then I was.

  CHAPTER 18

  While I was waiting out the front of the shop for Dad to come and pick me up, I saw something that was kind of weird.

  It was a man.

  Now, I know that’s not weird, because you see men all the time. And sometimes you see men wearing ties, sometimes you see men with moustaches, and sometimes you see men carrying stuff around in big black garbage bags. But I reckon it’s a bit unusual to see a man in a tie – a gold tie – and a moustache carrying one of those big black garbage bags down the footpath.

  I stared at him. He looked very familiar to me, although I couldn’t remember where I recognised him from. And when I saw the way he was staring at me, I decided that I must have been familiar to him too. Unless he thought that I was weird as well. Or he might have thought that I was rude, just staring at him. Which I guess I was, except I didn’t mean to stare – I was only looking. And there is a difference.

  But then something else happened. The bag began to split. You know how they say that things sometimes feel like they’re happening in slow motion? Well, this actually was in slow motion, because as I watched, I saw the side of the bag start to go all tight and shiny, as if something hard and a bit pointy was pressing against it, and then it got even shinier and tighter, and then the plastic popped and began to tear, but slowly, as the pointy corner of a box of some kind made the hole wide, and then the clothes inside the bag made the hole even wider. And then, because the man hadn’t noticed yet, the hole just kept stretching (still in slow motion) until a box of laundry detergent (the same brand that my mum uses) and a whole bunch of clothes pushed all the way through and flopped out onto the footpath.

  That was when the man noticed, and he said a word that I might have heard before (but I wasn’t quite sure) and he crouched down and started trying to stuff the clothes back into the hole. But I knew they wouldn’t stay in there, no matter how hard he stuffed them in, and I guess he must have known that too, because he gave up, and kind of hung his head, and I think if there hadn’t been a girl watching him he might have actually cried.

  I put my phone away and went over to help him. I didn’t have a bag to put his clothes in, but I still thought I could help. ‘We’re still open,’ I said.

  He looked up at me, all confused. ‘What?’

  ‘The Helping Hands shop – we’re
still open. I work there,’ I said.

  ‘Why would I want the . . . Oh, I get it,’ he said. Then he smiled, which made two dimples that were kind of hidden under the ends of his piratey moustache. ‘No, I’m not taking these clothes to the charity shop. I’m taking them home. To where I live, I mean.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I thought you were . . .’ And I pointed at the shop.

  ‘Oh, no, I’ve just come back from the coin laundry.’ Then he sighed. ‘You know that shop you work in?’

  I nodded. ‘Helping Hands.’

  ‘Right, Helping Hands. You wouldn’t have a spare plastic bag in there, would you? You know, a big one, like this. Only it would be good if it was stronger than this.’

  ‘We have heaps of plastic bags,’ I said, because we did – practically all the clothes and things people brought in to donate came in plastic bags of some kind or another. ‘Would you like me to get one for you?’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  ‘Wait here,’ I said, even though it probably wouldn’t have mattered if he had come into the shop with me.

  ‘I’ll be right here brushing the dirt off my clean laundry,’ he said, laying a pair of jeans over his knee and spanking them.

  Mrs Gardiner seemed surprised to see me come in again. ‘You’re back,’ she said, as if I didn’t know.

  ‘Can I get one of those leftover plastic bags from out the back?’ I asked her.

  She gave me this very confused look. ‘What for?’

  ‘A friend,’ I said, even though he wasn’t really one of those. ‘His bag broke.’

  ‘Um . . . I suppose that would be all right,’ she said, and she just kind of nodded towards the STAFF ONLY curtain.

  When I got back outside with the big pink and white stripey bag (the kind you can buy at junk shops), the man with the gold tie was sitting on the bus stop bench near the front door. He had all his clean clothes beside him in two neat piles, and he looked up as I came out of the shop. ‘Oh, you are a superstar,’ he said. ‘Thank you so much.’

  ‘You’re welcome,’ I said, just as Dad pulled up. ‘Well, this is my ride, so I’ll see you later, I guess.’