by James Roy
‘Is your finger okay?’ I asked.
‘Yeah, it’s fine. They always say that you should never use knives for anything other than cutting.’
‘Well, you did use it for cutting – cutting your finger!’ I said, and he gave a really short chuckle.
I kept rubbing his shoulders, and they kept relaxing. ‘That’s so good, Betty,’ he said. ‘Man, this job . . .’
A letter was on his desk, lying on his computer keyboard, and at the top of the page was a name in fancy green writing: Hector & Prince, the Professional Litigation Experts.
‘What’s “litigation”?’ I asked Dad, which made him groan, and somehow made his shoulders get a bit tighter again.
‘This,’ he said, tapping the letter. ‘What’s happening to me is litigation. The owners of Feine Wurst reckon I said some nasty things about their food. But that’s not entirely right, because I said some nasty things about the service as well. Oh, and the way the place was decorated – I seem to remember I had a bit of a go at that, too.’
‘How many stars did you give it?’
He held up his sore finger.
‘One?’ I said.
Dad shook his head. ‘Half.’
‘Half! What did you say?’
‘You want me to read you the review?’
‘Sure,’ I said. I mean, I love Dad’s reviews. They’re usually pretty funny, especially when they have only one- or two-star ratings. And this one got half, so it was going to be a beaut, as Dad would say.
‘Okay, bear with me . . .’ he said, and he put the letter aside and started clicking on his computer until he found the review. ‘Okay, here it is. Ready? Oh, and you can keep rubbing those shoulders if you like – that feels amazing. Ready?’
‘Ready,’ I said.
He began to read. ‘“On occasion, one of my favourite movie reviewers would refer to poorly made films as ‘showers of offal’. I would not have been surprised to have found exactly that in the kitchen of Feine Wurst, the new German-Austrian eatery in the CBD. Tucked away in a small cobbled laneway, this poky little joint purports to be a tasty slice of Bavaria. Sadly, I think I could get a tastier slice of Bavaria in the frozen goods aisle of my local supermarket, without having to pay the cost of a service on my BMW for the privilege.”’
‘We don’t have a BMW,’ I interrupted him. ‘We have a Toyota.’
‘It’s a thematic thing, Betty. German food, German car. Bear with me, okay?’
‘Okay. Sorry.’
‘“From the moment one ducks one’s head to enter the low-beamed cuckoo-clock-themed dining room, it feels like you’ve been transported back over half a century to a smoky Munich beer-hall, except for the absence of the smoke, or the burlesque stage. Such a feature, should it be introduced, might in fact improve the place, especially once the food arrived. To be honest, an army of lederhosen-wearing skinheads singing a Sound of Music medley would have improved the place once the food arrived.”’
‘Dad, this is a really mean review,’ I said.
‘I’d prefer to call it a “fair” review,’ Dad said. Then he cleared his throat and went on. ‘“I chose to begin with the double-baked miniature dampfnudeln stuffed with liver, followed by a bread soup, with kangaroo blood sausage providing a local twist. While I’m a huge fan of blood sausage, which I’ve eaten in bread soup many times in Munich, Vienna, Prague and most points between, to pair it with the Skippy variety in this way seemed a little clumsy, even sycophantic on the part of the head chef, Dieter Heckner.”’
‘What’s that word mean?’ I asked.
‘Sycophantic? Sucking up. You know, because we’re in Australia and all that.’
‘Sucking up by putting one of our native animals in a sausage?’ I pulled a face – this seemed like a very strange thing to do.
‘Carrying on . . . “The miniature dampfnudeln were exactly as described; that is to say extremely miniature, and stuffed, although I found very little liver. When I asked if I could try the weisswurst, I was served a distinctly Teutonic glare and informed that it was poor form to order weisswurst after midday. Apparently, if a place still has weisswurst after noon, it was never good enough to eat in the first place. I washed this first course down with a cheeky little Augustiner, and since I personally witnessed it being poured from the bottle, I knew that at least my beer would be safe to consume.”’
‘Dad. Seriously.’
‘What?’
‘It’s really mean!’
‘Honey, you’ve read my reviews before. You know that if I say something is bad, it’s because I think it’s really bad. I don’t lie.’
‘But this bad? Really?’
‘Yes!’
While he was reading to me, he’d seemed pretty pleased with himself. But then, after I’d told him that I thought the review was mean, he didn’t look quite so proud.
‘So what are you going to do?’ I asked. ‘Are you going to say you’re sorry?’
‘No, of course not!’ he said, really firmly, but his expression seemed all wrong. In fact, it felt to me like he wasn’t all that sure himself. ‘You can’t back down in this game.’
That seemed like an odd thing for him to say, since most of the games Dad plays, like Scrabble and Upwords and the Shop Game, make him smile, and sometimes even laugh. As far as I know, they never make his shoulders go all tight.
CHAPTER 21
While Mum was unpacking the groceries I sat with Richie, who was watching some really colourful kids’ show. (It’s got five people who sing what sounds like the same song over and over, talk to each other as if they’re stupid, and act as if they haven’t had enough sleep.) All the shopping bags were piled up on the kitchen bench, and Mum was putting things away in the fridge and the cupboards, and complaining about the way the checkout girl had put cold food in with cleaning products and cans in with bruisy stuff like bananas.
‘Lizzie,’ she said, ‘I need you to come here and do something. Here, you’ll need this.’ And she held out a box of laundry detergent.
‘What do I need that for?’ I asked. I mean, I don’t even know how to use the washing machine!
‘I’d like you to take it and put it away in the laundry for me, please.’
So I did.
On the shelf above the washing machine was the last box of detergent, and it felt very light. After I’d checked inside and found that it was almost empty, I took it out to where Mum was trying to find enough space in the freezer for a couple of trays of meat and a carton of ice-cream.
‘This is empty,’ I said, opening the lid of the detergent box to show her. ‘Is there even enough in there to do a load of washing?’
Mum shook her head. ‘Not really. Just throw it away,’ she said. ‘In fact, you could –’
‘Yeah, yeah, I know – you want me to empty the kitchen bin, again. If you guys like it being emptied a million times a week, why don’t you do it yourselves?’
As soon as I’d said it, I knew that I’d gone too far. Mum hates it when I talk back.
But she doesn’t hate it as much as Dad seemed to right then, because he walked into the kitchen just in time to hear me say it.
‘Lizzie!’ he said. ‘Don’t you dare talk to your mother like that!’
‘Sorry, Mum,’ I said straight away, but that wasn’t good enough for Dad.
‘Say it like you mean it!’ he said. Actually, it was almost a shout. ‘And meet her eye when you say it!’
‘Meet her eye?’ I asked, because that seemed like an especially weird thing to say.
‘Lizzie, you know perfectly well what that means.’ (Actually, I didn’t.) ‘Look at her!’
‘Sorry, Mum,’ I said, again, looking at her this time.
‘Okay,’ Mum replied. Her voice was a lot calmer than Dad’s. ‘Okay. I was actually going to ask you to bring in the wheelie bin from the street.’
‘Oh,’ I said, suddenly feeling pretty stupid. ‘Sorry, Mum.’
‘Thank you, Lizzie. Off you go.’
> It was completely quiet in the kitchen while I was leaving, although I think that maybe Mum and Dad were saying something to each other with their eyes. And just before I reached the front door, I heard Mum say, ‘Marty, that’s exactly the kind of overreaction I was talking about.’
As I reached the wheelie bin where it was parked beside our driveway, I suddenly felt strange, and when I looked at my hands, they were shaking, just a tiny bit. I wasn’t sure why that was, but I did wonder if it was because of the way Dad had talked to me. When he was shouting at a coffee machine it was pretty yuck, but when I was the thing he was shouting at it felt extra yuck.
I lifted the lid of the bin and was about to drop the empty laundry detergent box in when I saw something that made me pull my confused face. In the bottom of the bin was another box of laundry detergent, open at the top, which meant I could see that it was completely empty. I frowned at the box; how fast did Mum go through that stuff?
‘Mum, how fast do you go through laundry detergent?’ I asked as soon as I’d returned the bin to its spot at the side of the house and gone back inside (and had checked that Dad wasn’t there).
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘A box every couple of weeks, maybe. Listen, Lizzie, about what just happened –’
‘Do you remember the last time you threw away an empty box?’
She shook her head. She seemed kind of impatient. ‘I’m not sure why I would remember something like that, to be honest. Why?’
‘Just . . . It’s just that there was an empty box in the bin already.’
‘Are you sure?’
Of course I was sure. ‘Yeah, I saw it myself.’
Mum shrugged. ‘Maybe your dad had a box in the garage. Sometimes he uses it to clean his oily hands after he’s been playing around with the car.’
‘Yeah, that might be it,’ I said, even though I wasn’t all that convinced. ‘Mum, I think I want to go for a walk.’
She got a strange expression on her face then, sort of like she had a sore back or something. ‘Lizzie, he didn’t mean anything by it, you know.’
‘Who?’
‘Your dad. When he shouted.’
This was a surprise. I hadn’t even been thinking about going for a walk because of hurt feelings and shaky hands. I had a completely different reason for wanting to go for a walk, but sometimes someone gives you an excuse that you don’t even have to think up on your own. That’s why I said, ‘Yeah, I know, but I just need to be alone right now.’ (I think I got this from a movie or something.)
‘Lizzie . . .’ Mum said, and she started to come in my direction, but I turned and walked away towards the front door. ‘Lizzie, it’s not his –’
‘I’ll be back soon,’ I said.
The Greengrove 300 next door was open. It usually was during the day, with people going in and out, taking photos, writing little notes, reading plans and brochures, pointing at different features and scratching their chins and thinking. That’s why it was so easy to get in – because the front door was wide open.
On the wall just inside the front door was an alarm panel, and high up in the corner of the main living room I saw a little security camera. That made sense – they probably didn’t want people coming into the house to look at how big the kitchen was and walking out with the microwave.
I walked slowly through the house. There was only one other person in there – a lady was sitting on the couch in the living room while she read a brochure and looked around, mainly at the high ceiling, I think. She glanced at me very quickly, but for some reason she didn’t seem all that surprised to see a girl wandering through the place. I guess she expected my family to be right behind me or something.
But they weren’t – it was just me, going through the living room, past the kitchen and the bathroom. I kind of knew where I was headed, and that was towards the room at the far corner of the house, where I was sure I’d seen a crack of light in the window. And where Muppet had been just as sure there was something.
It was just a regular bedroom like a young boy might have, with a bedside table, a small desk and a red office chair, and a single bed with a Superman doona. The bedding was smooth, and when I pulled the wardrobe door open, I found exactly what you’d expect to find in a wardrobe in a bedroom in a display house – nothing. There was a small plastic bag on the floor in the corner of the wardrobe, but apart from that, it was empty.
Next I checked in the desk drawer. Nothing in there either except a bit of dust, and one of those funny L-shaped screwdriver-thingos you get at Ikea.
Out in the living room, I heard the couch lady sneeze twice. But then the house was all quiet again. The curtains were wide open, and I could see into the backyard, and the spot where Muppet had been woofing like mad. Maybe there wasn’t anyone living here, I thought. Maybe when I thought I saw the light, it was someone closing the place up for the night, and they just happened to flick the switch off as I looked in that direction.
I walked out into the hallway and turned in a slow circle. If there was going to be a sign of anyone living in this house it would be in that room – the one I’d just been in. So I went back in and looked around again, even checked in the drawers and the wardrobe again. I got on my hands and knees and checked under the bed this time. Nothing at all.
I was standing back in the hallway and was about to leave when I looked down and saw four indentations in the carpet, like the legs of a chair would make. But why would anyone have a chair in the middle of a hallway?
That was when I looked up.
CHAPTER 22
Have you ever been thinking about someone, and then you came around the corner and there they were? Well, this feeling was a bit like that, because when I looked up, I saw something hanging out of the little manhole hatch thing that they put in the ceilings of houses. This thing was pink and white, because it was the corner of a pink and white stripy bag like you can buy in junk shops.
Boy, that was a surprise! It didn’t mean that the person who’d been in that house was definitely the guy with the piratey moustache who I’d met outside the Helping Hands shop, but the clues were starting to add up.
As I went back outside, all the different possibilities bounced around in my head. Maybe he worked for HomeFest, and on the night that I saw the light in the window, he’d been locking up the house. But that didn’t explain the pizza boxes and beer bottles in the bin. Or the laundry detergent.
Perhaps the beer and pizza had been for some kind of event they’d been holding in the house, I thought. Dad was always being invited out to different openings and launches – maybe HomeFest had been having something like that. Or maybe the pizza boxes and beer bottles had been put in Miss Huntley’s bin by a neighbour that morning, and not someone from the Greengrove 300 at all.
But none of those possibilities explained the pink and white bag that had been stuffed lazily into the ceiling of the house. Or a man waiting on the corner for a pizza delivery on a cold evening.
Or the laundry detergent.
Yes, it was all very peculiar.
That night, at dinner, I had a couple of questions for Mum. (I would have had the same questions for Dad as well, except he was out reviewing a restaurant, and there was no point asking Richie or Muppet, so I just asked Mum.)
‘All those display houses . . .’ I said.
Mum waited for me to go on.
‘No one lives in them, right?’
‘You mean at the moment?’ she asked, shovelling some mashed pumpkin into Richie’s mouth. ‘No, they’re empty display homes, and that’s all. At least, they are until someone like your father decides that it would be a bargain to buy an ex-display home adjoining the display village.’
‘Why couldn’t someone live in them?’ I said. ‘I mean, is there a rule about it?’
Mum frowned. ‘I can’t imagine why there would need to be a rule about it. It just doesn’t make sense to let someone live in a house that they want to display each day. Why do you ask?’
; ‘Oh, no reason,’ I said.
‘There must be a reason.’
And of course there was a reason. But I didn’t want to tell her that there might be someone living next door, because I had some investigating still to do, and since I am an obedient child, I couldn’t afford for her to say I couldn’t investigate. Because if she did, then I wouldn’t, if that makes sense.
So instead I decided that I would say something else.
‘So how do they stop people taking stuff at night, if no one’s living there? You know, like burglars?’
‘I imagine they lock the doors,’ Mum replied. ‘They probably have alarms as well, and maybe little cameras.’
‘They do,’ I said, before I had a chance to not say it. ‘They do? Yeah, I guess they do,’ I quickly added. (Nice save, Lizzie, I thought.)
‘And security guards,’ she went on. ‘You know that little white and yellow car with the orange lights on top that drives around the streets?’
‘Yes, I do,’ I said, because I did. But that little car had suddenly made my theories a bit more complicated.
‘Are you worried that we’re going to be burgled?’ Mum asked me.
I shook my head. ‘I just wonder about stuff sometimes,’ I said. ‘But not that.’
Let me tell you something unusual about our house. I don’t mean it’s an unusual thing about our house – I mean it’s an unusual thing to tell people. But it’s important. When you climb up on our upstairs toilet seat, you can see straight down into next door’s backyard. That was where I was standing later that evening when I saw some light in the corner room of the Greengrove 300. I was pretty sure I did, anyway.
Mum was getting Richie ready for bed, so I didn’t have much time. What I needed to do was to quickly go downstairs, out the back and around the side of our place, duck through the unlocked side gate and sneak along the back of the house next door.
