by Stephen Orr
‘Yeah, but you’ve got a big car boot.’
‘All discontinued lines.’ Bill looked at me. ‘What’s he talking about, Henry?’
I shrugged. ‘Don’t know.’
Dad repacked and replaced the box on the shelf. On the way out he showed Bill some of the collection’s highlights: guns, knives, a pyjama cord used as a garotte, and a vial of arsenic.
We drove home through suburbs devoid of life. People had become plaster busts, sitting at bus stops in a catatonic state, dropping their heads and closing their eyes as they walked through hot northerlies with their shopping.
Fans, air-conditioners, cold baths and wet flannels on the back of our necks, anything to get us through the rest of the day. And then night: heat slowly lifting from the earth. The sound of bagpipes, trains and other people’s air-conditioners. At one point Dad threw down his paper and said, ‘That’s it, we’re getting one.’
‘What?’ Mum asked.
‘A Kelvinator.’
‘We can’t afford that.’
‘I don’t care. I’m sick of being so bloody hot.’
There was a hard, urgent knock on the front door and Janice’s voice. ‘Mister Page, are you there?’
‘Come in,’ Dad called.
A few moments later Janice was standing in our lounge room, red-faced, panting. ‘Mum says come quick.’
‘What is it?’
‘Dad.’
We all got up to go but Dad turned to me and said, ‘Stay here.’ He took Janice’s hand and pulled her towards the front door. Mum followed them out, leaving the fly-screen door open and calling for them to wait. I stood at the open door and listened. I could hear Bill’s voice, loud and muffled above a fan of hot air through the cypress in our front yard. A tide of dry, dead gum leaves blew down the street, breaking like shells as they were dragged along the bitumen.
I couldn’t stand it. I ran across our front yard, jumped the knee-high box hedge that separated us from the Rileys, crossed their drive and knelt down below their kitchen window. Then I slowly stood up, peering into the kitchen. Bill was standing with his back to me, leaning against the sink. He was holding a beer in his hand. Liz was sitting on the floor nearby, crying, rocking with her head between her knees. Mum went and sat beside her.
‘Have you seen the way she keeps this house?’ Bill asked Dad. Then he turned on his wife, stepping forward and raising his voice. ‘Bloody pigsty. Shouldn’t have to live in a pigsty. You got kids in there, you’re meant to be their fuckin’ mother.’
Then he looked at Dad again. ‘She hasn’t got any self-respect.’
Dad nodded his head in agreement. ‘Not too good, eh? Best thing is, we get out of it, leave them to it.’
Bill stepped forward again. ‘Too bloody busy at your mother’s. How’s about if you stayed here a bit? I gotta go off every day. Think I wanna do that? Think I enjoy fuckin’ . . . pillow cases?’
Mum helped Liz stand and led her out the back door. Bill came towards her, screaming insults, spitting and dribbling, and Dad stood between them. Bill moved against him but Dad didn’t budge. ‘What y’ doin’?’ he asked.
Dad looked at the window and met my eyes. ‘Home,’ he said, firmly.
‘Go on, Henry, get home,’ Bill echoed.
I squatted down, thought for a moment and then retraced my steps towards the safety of our lounge room. I collapsed into Mum’s threaded armchair, clutched the armrests and waited, listening to the seconds tick away on our station clock. A few minutes later Dad brought Bill into our house. He led him down the hallway and into the kitchen. I turned down the television to hear them. Bill raised his voice to complain about Liz and Dad raised his to counter. ‘Christ, you go on when you’re pissed, Riley. You think she’s hopeless, you should live here a few days.’
‘Your lady runs a tight ship.’
‘Bullshit.’
Until it was the volume of a normal conversation, until Dad changed the topic completely. ‘You know how much trouble I could get into for taking you there today?’
‘A few old clothes?’
‘Evidence.’
It was all too much. I ran next door. I found Janice sitting in her room on her bed, her arms around Anna and Gavin on either side.
‘What happened?’ I asked.
‘Nothing,’ she replied. ‘Go home.’
I stood in the middle of her room, motionless, speechless. Janice leaned against a wall that was bare except for a crack, some peeling paint and a magazine photo of the Three Stooges: Mo in the middle, Larry and Curly looking at him.
‘Moo,’ I said.
‘Go home!’
I turned and walked into the hallway. Liz was still in the backyard, sobbing, and Mum was still trying to talk her through it. Janice got up off her bed and slammed the door. There was nothing to be done, so I headed home.
They would’ve sat there for hours, I suppose. Janice, holding her brother and sister tightly. Watching over them. Protecting them. Soothing them. Striking the best deal. Trying to be reasonable with an unreasonable world. Holding things together when Liz was off sooking and Bill was on the turps. When she was the only one Anna and Gavin could rely on.
Bill loved the taste of beer. He’d hit Liz a few times. Once, the morning after a particularly bad night (after he’d slept at our place, as usual), Dad warned him that Liz could have him charged. Bill laughed. ‘With what? Being married? I should be given a prize.’
Bill lived for his nightly longnecks. Dad should’ve remembered that in the evidence room. But that was Dad, always trying to show off: detective with fridge full of beer and room full of gruesome stuff. Look at me, Bob Page, CID, sheriff of the western suburbs.
That night Mum stayed next door. Bill slept in my bed in his clothes and I slept with Dad. When we got up the next morning Bill was gone. He’d made my bed as best he could (although Mum later stripped and washed it). He’d taken his car full of linen and set off for work. To show all of us that he wasn’t so bad after all.
A few hours later I was alone in my room, my eyes drifting across the rough plaster walls, sticking in a crack that seemed to lengthen and widen every day. I’d filled it with homemade playdough and Dad had come along and removed it, saying it had to be fixed properly. It was on his list, he said. The list of things that could wait – until next week, next month, next year, until he died and someone else moved in and did it.
I sat on the floor painting my model of a Stuka. I’d done a decent job. Most of the joins were glued tight. The pilot was smiling, even if half of his face was painted leather-brown. There were a few bits left over but there always were. Bits no one could see anyway: the rudder pedals, the joystick, the pilot’s legs. Dad would come in and look at these bits and say, ‘What about this? Poor bastard, just about to dive-bomb a convoy and . . .’
Bits no one would miss: bombs.
And then I’d remind him of the push-mower he’d put together. ‘Maybe it’s a spare spring,’ he’d said, staring at the leftover part. ‘After all . . . it works.’
As Mum looked at him with her arms crossed. ‘It must go somewhere.’
‘You tell me!’
I painted the underside of the Stuka white. As I folded my legs I knocked the tin of paint and it spilt over the newspaper I’d laid across Mum’s discount Axminster. Once, when I was painting a Spitfire, I spilt a whole bottle of gun-barrel grey on her carpet. I tried to clean it with a rag but it smudged. So I waited a few hours, got a pair of scissors and tried to trim the grey fibres. Then there was a sort of grey crater that she discovered anyway. She blew her top and locked me in my room for a whole afternoon. When Dad got home he came in and looked at the crater. ‘Mum wants me to discipline you,’ he said. Then he noticed the model. ‘Hey, that’s looking good . . .’
As Mum listened on and thought, Hopeless bloody husband . . .
The stain’s still there, to this day, reminding me of Mum, and how she handled things. Of how she was unconcerned about world wars but devas
tated by a carpet stain. And how Dad, in comparison, just took things as they came, suggesting we bring the mower into my room to finish the job properly. He’d seen a whole world of children’s bodies and decapitated lorry drivers, and had worked out what really mattered.
He stuck his head through my door. ‘Nice Stuka. Where are those damn Poles?’
I looked at him, confused.
He smiled. ‘Gotta go to work.’ He came over and kissed me on top of the head. Then he paused, breathing deeply, as I smelt the fresh oil in his hair. ‘Man of my life,’ he whispered. ‘Man of my life,’ I repeated.
‘Best in the world.’
‘Best in the world . . . Dad.’ I shook my head.
‘What, you’re too old now?’
‘It’s dumb.’
He smiled, and ruffled my hair, and was gone.
I was left with another day of school holidays, another eight hot, stew-scented, fly-blown hours full of familiar things: jigsaws that were finished in five minutes flat, The Magic Pudding, again, and Schubert’s March Militaire on my Nippergram. This was my favourite piece of music, played again and again, until the hiss was louder than the music, until the crevices in the vinyl had opened like the ones in the mortar.
But wonderful anyway. I sat painting, imagining Mr and Mrs Himmler dancing together in their Cedar Street living room, humming Schubert’s melody as they held their bodies stiff and attempted their best landler. As Heinrich suddenly realised they were being watched from the front door by their milkman, smiling at them through the flywire as he measured milk into jugs. As Heinrich closed the door with a Hmph and a click of his heels. As I started to realise I’d been spending too much time around Janice.
Mum showed Anna and Gavin into my room and said, ‘Janice has gone to her friends for the day.’
I looked at her as if to say, So?
‘Liz is busy at the shops.’
I put the lid on the white paint and looked at Gavin. ‘Don’t touch this, it’s wet.’
Mum disappeared and Anna came and sat beside me on the floor. ‘I have an idea,’ she said. ‘We could make some money.’
‘How?’ I asked.
Twenty minutes later we were sitting in chairs at the street end of our driveway. Anna had used my white paint and the back of the Stuka box to make up a sign: Lemonade, One Penny. She’d filled six empty lemonade bottles with warm water from the rainwater-tank and lined them up on the footpath. Then she’d brought out a bag of lemons and a knife. She’d cut a few in half and squeezed some juice into each bottle. She’d taken a few mugs from our cupboard and lined them up ready. Then she’d made me get my Nippergram, bringing it outside to our Thomas Street shop and connecting it via four extension cords passing through my bedroom window.
And there we were, as Schubert clanged and hissed away, waiting for someone to stop and part with their hard-earned money. The first was Rosa, coming outside to sweep leaves from her path. She saw us and waddled over, broom in hand. ‘Is that real lemonade?’ she asked.
Anna, thinking she was clever, replied, ‘A special type.’
‘Ah. How’s it special?’
But Anna couldn’t say, pulling up the sleeves on her jumper (as she did every few minutes) and saying, ‘If we told people, they’d make their own. Then we’d be out of business.’
‘I filled the bottles,’ Gavin added.
‘Did you? Well, in that case . . .’ She reached into her pocket and found a penny, handing it over. Anna took it with a smile and handed it to Gavin who checked its authenticity and then put it in his pocket. Anna opened a bottle and explained to Rosa why her lemonade didn’t fizz. ‘We have the gas removed, so it doesn’t make you burp.’
‘Oh,’ Rosa replied, taking the mug and tasting it. ‘Best I’ve ever had. Come on, you’ve got to tell me how you made it.’
Gavin stood up. ‘No, sorry.’ Folding his arms, lifting his head in the air and shaking it. ‘It’s a secret.’
‘Please?’
Gavin was caving in. He looked at his sister. ‘No,’ she insisted.
Rosa looked at me and winked. ‘Can I take your mug, Henry? Con will want to taste this.’
‘Sure.’
‘I’ll drop it back,’ she said, turning, crossing the street, calling back, ‘I wish I had the recipe.’
Gavin was still adamant. ‘No, I’m sorry, Rosa, Anna says not to.’
A few minutes later a frail old lady with matchstick legs came hobbling along. Her hair was talcum-white and her face was made up like the china dolls above the Housemans’ fireplace. Although it was stinking hot she wore a long, heavy dress. She had a scarf around her neck, a pearl necklace and crucifix earrings that dangled just above her shoulders; she wore stockings to cover her roadmap veins and stiletto heels that kept slipping out from under her, threatening to twist her ankles. She stopped and looked at our lemonade. ‘One penny. What is it?’
‘Lemonade,’ Gavin replied proudly.
‘It most certainly is not. Is it even safe?’
‘It’s safe,’ Anna defended, standing, defiant, the way she’d seen her sister do a thousand times.
‘You can’t just sell that. You’ll make people sick. Where are your parents?’
‘If you don’t want it, don’t buy it,’ Anna said.
The old lady started hobbling up our driveway.
‘It’s lemonade,’ Gavin called after her.
She knocked on the door and spoke to my mother. Pretty soon there were raised voices and the door slammed, and then re-opened, and Mum called out, ‘Mind your own business, you old bag.’
Victory! The defiant march played as the old girl walked back down the drive. ‘I could report you,’ she said, but Anna just stuck out her tongue. The woman walked off down the road, stumbling as she went, at one point dropping her bag as we broke up laughing.
A day full of familiar things, dragging on like an arithmetic test, the numbers staring up at me like a Japanese phonebook. Gavin sat on our nature strip picking the flowers off strawberry clover. Anna went home to make lunch for us, returning with sandwiches with the bread cut thick and jagged, the ham old and sweaty and the cheese in thick chunks. We sat and ate and drank sweet Tropicana cordial from a mixing bowl, avoiding our lemonade, still warming on the hot concrete.
At one point I asked Anna, ‘Were you scared last night?’
She looked at me defensively. ‘No.’
‘It’s okay, we took care of him.’
‘So?’ Again, mimicking her sister. ‘We were okay, we didn’t need you.’
‘But Janice came and got Dad.’
No reply. Gavin took a handful of clover heads and threw them at me. ‘We were okay,’ he said.
‘Sorry.’
And then silence, as we waited for customers that didn’t arrive. ‘Come on, Anna, that’s enough,’ I said.
‘No.’
‘It’s been two hours.’
‘Go home then.’
‘I have to watch you.’
‘We don’t need watching.’
She was angry, determined, hot beneath her jumper.
‘I’ll sit here,’ I said, moving under a tree.
No reply. She sat silent, still, in the middle of our driveway, determined to sell the brown lemonade. Gavin came and sat in the shade with me. ‘I know French,’ he said.
‘Comment vas tu?’ I asked.
‘French. Je suis Gavin.’
‘Very good. Je suis Henry. J’habite along Thomas Street. Et tu?’
‘Je suis Gavin.’
And then Bill pulled up in his Austin. He got out and walked over to us, smiling. Gavin and Anna made no attempt to run to him, to greet him, as they usually did. He read our sign and said, ‘Fantastic.’ He took a few pennies out of his pocket and handed them to Anna who handed them to Gavin. Soon the little ones had forgotten, again. They stood and watched as their dad unscrewed a bottle and drank the warm water. ‘Beautiful,’ he said, wiping his mouth, and they both smiled.
‘I
filled the bottles,’ Gavin said.
Bill messed his son’s hair. ‘I could tell.’
‘And I put in the lemon,’ Anna offered.
Bill pulled his two children towards him and held them close. ‘You’re a credit to your old man,’ he said, in a sort of awkward admission of love and devotion. Then he looked at me and asked, ‘Has Henry been helping?’
‘I’ve been watching them,’ I replied.
But there was no thank you. Typical. Once a drunk always a drunk. Lacking grace and gratitude in equal measure. Didn’t he know I had better things to do? Instead, he knelt down beside his children and said, ‘Come inside, I have something for you.’
Some sort of bribe, no doubt, I thought. Buying them off with a Yo-Yo or an all-day sucker. Until next time. And when would that be, tonight, tomorrow, and would they forget again, and forgive? I looked at Bill and felt disgusted. How could he just come home like this, without a word of explanation or apology? And how could Anna and Gavin fall for it, when they were so hostile to me? Still, that was life, I figured: people choosing to believe in renovated truths – legless pilots flying Stukas, mortar cracks getting filled, dads on the wagon.
Bill led them back to their house, pulling them by the hand, stopping to get a couple of parcels out of his car. I was left with the lemonade. ‘What should I do with this?’ I called.
No reply. So I returned to the shade and drank the last of the Tropicana cordial. I couldn’t work out human beings. None of them acted rationally (except Dad, Con and a few others). I wondered whether I should try and become prime minister, to make some laws, to sort people out: no promises you can’t keep, no moods, no taking things out on other people, no grog. Make sense. The list went on and on. Like the one in Dad’s head, doomed to be forgotten.
Andrew Arthurson rode past my house, looking at my lemonade stall and calling out, ‘What’s that?’
‘It’s not mine, it’s Anna’s.’
‘Sure. Is that real lemonade?’
‘It’s water, she was pretending.’
He turned and rode past again. ‘So how’s yer mum?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Everyone knows about your mum.’
