Small Blessings

by Emily Brewin

  Without warning, Petey bellows, a big scary sound that almost makes her drop the jar. She rushes over but can’t make sense of what he’s saying. He’s scrunching the remains of his sandwich to a mushy pulp in one hand and the matchstick creatures end up on the floor.

  ‘Calm down, mate,’ she croons, wanting to hug him but knowing it’s the worst thing to do. This is the part she hates, trying to make sense of the problem. It could be anything. Last week it was the flavour of the new toothpaste, or the smell, she never got to the bottom of it completely. Just chucked the entire tube in the bin, kissing $2.95 goodbye.

  He slows to a sob, his words becoming clearer until she realises he’s talking about Churchill. He doesn’t want to leave him behind when they go on holiday.

  Jesus. Sometimes the bloody dog drives her crazy, or at least the fuss he causes does.

  ‘C’mon. Mum’s got class soon so you can go visit him.’

  It does the trick.

  She stops short of wiping his face and hands him a tissue instead.

  The sobs fade then disappear. Soon he’s fine again but the outburst has left her in tatters, as always, and she almost considers skipping class.

  At TAFE she sits at the back and stares at her classmates’ heads, ignoring Skye’s entreaties for her to move up front.

  ‘Nah,’ she says, ‘I’m feeling a bit off.’ Skye looks wide-eyed and sympathetic for all of two seconds then begins gossiping to the girl next door. The girl chats back enthusiastically, unlike Rosie. Skye says getting conversation out of her is like squeezing blood from a rock.

  Once Danny arrives, they discuss the novel and what the strange echo Mrs Moore hears in the Marabar Caves represents.

  ‘I think it represents a hearing problem,’ Skye calls out. ‘She needs to get her ears checked.’ Everyone laughs, except Danny.

  He looks at Rosie, sitting quietly.

  ‘What do you reckon?’

  She’s only been half listening, the scene with Petey playing on repeat through her mind. She can already picture the tantrum she’ll get when she tells him once and for all Churchill can’t come to the Gold Coast with them.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The echo Mrs Moore hears in the caves. What do you think it is?’

  She shakes her head, not in the mood to be put on the spot.

  ‘You wrote about it in your essay.’

  He’s getting frustrated but it’s not going to make her talk. How can she possibly explain the effect the caves’ tendency of reducing everything to a single echo, boom, has on Mrs Moore? That it makes her realise it’s the same with life, everything is one, even good and evil are the same. It made her dispirited enough to kill her in the end, but Rosie finds strength in it.

  It made sense, sitting at her kitchen table, the laminex peeling in small brown shreds beneath her paper.

  ‘Pathos, piety, courage—they exist, but are identical, and so is filth. Everything exists, nothing has value.’ She read the words and felt an overwhelming sense of relief, as if someone had released a valve.

  They spoke to her. Said, in the scheme of things, it was impossible for her to truly fuck up. Good and bad are just flip sides of a coin. She wouldn’t have Petey without Joel. Maybe life’s all about perspective, or hindsight.

  She wrote that in her essay, in a roundabout way, but she’s not about to share it now. Not with Skye staring at her open-mouthed and the rest of the class waiting with bated breath.

  ‘I said, no,’ she says loudly, and Danny turns to someone else without batting an eyelid.

  She spends the rest of class forgetting her new philosophy, telling herself she’s useless. She can’t go to uni. She’ll only fuck it up like she does everything else. She stares at the back of Skye’s pretty head and hates her for her chatty assurances. What does Skye know anyhow? Skye’ll be the last person in the class to get a tertiary education. Maybe staying at Dulcy’s store is the way to go. At least she’s making some cash there. It’s a lifetime until Danny lets them go.

  ‘Stay behind a minute, Rosie.’

  He catches her off guard. The others file out, Skye lingering long enough for Danny to shoo her out too.

  Rosie stops slumping and sits up to collect her things. Danny makes her nervous, with his cool shoes and hipster hairdo. She can tell he prides himself on being left of centre. It’s a skill she has, a hangover from the old days. Plus, he has a Vote Greens sticker on the back of his car. He would definitely make a good scam.

  He sits on the table in front of her, one leg crossed over the other. ‘Your essay.’ He hands it back.

  She’s not going to check the mark in front of him if that’s what he wants. ‘Thanks.’

  He doesn’t move.

  ‘I’ve gotta get my son.’

  He nods slowly but doesn’t budge. ‘It was good, Rosie. Really good.’

  She begins packing her bag but can’t deny the tremor of excitement at the base of her spine.

  He leans forward, not too close but close enough to smell his aftershave or deodorant. It’s spicy and a little bit sweet. ‘Just give yourself a pat on the back before you tell me to piss off.’

  She can’t help laughing and it’s good, the way her whole body gets lighter.

  ‘Okay,’ she smiles as she swings the pack onto her back. ‘Piss off.’

  He dismisses her with a grin and a wave of his hand. ‘Until next week.’

  And just like that, bad becomes good again.

  Isobel

  WHISPERS CUT THROUGH THE AIR, close but not close enough to make sense of them. It was hot and her school uniform itched. The finely striped dress barely let the air in and the long white socks irritated her skin. The uniform hadn’t got any more comfortable in the three months since she started at Nottingham.

  She gazed through the door into the empty classroom as the whispers took shape then turned a little to see who was talking. A few girls away, Jennifer Mason stared back, making a show of talking from the side of her mouth to Marianna.

  Isobel smiled hesitantly. Jennifer was her friend, not a friend like Gab or Bernie from primary school, but she let Isobel hang out. At break times she sat awkwardly with Jennifer’s group, eating her vegemite sandwich as fast as she could. The others had salad rolls and shop-bought biscuits in their lunch boxes, and discussed shopping trips to the city.

  Jennifer stopped whispering and flicked her blonde ponytail. ‘I should come to your house, Isobel.’ Marianna grinned beside her.

  Isobel dropped her textbook. She’d told her mother to cover it in clear contact but she’d used baking paper instead, sticking the corners down with masking tape. She’d worked extra shifts at the factory that week to pay for school camp and hadn’t had time to get the proper stuff.

  ‘Okay.’ Isobel crouched then fumbled to get hold of the book from between the other girls’ feet.

  ‘In Altonaaa.’ Jennifer dragged the end out so it sounded silly.

  Isobel stood up. Her classmates’ faces were a blur. She knew their names but making friends wasn’t easy. They’d been at Nottingham together since kindergarten. Some of them thought Altona was in Sydney. She hadn’t bothered correcting them.

  It became obvious in her first few weeks at high school that coming from the western suburbs was nothing to crow about anyway. Not when the others talked about housekeepers and gardeners as if they were pieces of furniture. And Jennifer Mason, she learnt early on, was Nottingham nobility. Not only was her mother chair of the parents and friends’ association but they owned a holiday house on the Morning-ton Peninsula and went on trips overseas every summer.

  Suddenly, the school dress Grace had bought her, new but not really, screamed, ‘I’ m not one of you’. She crossed her arms to hide it and the book. But she couldn’t hide everything. Her hair was unrulier than the other girls’ and she didn’t have Derwent pencils for art.

  None of these things had mattered at primary school. She’d been top of the class despite her scuffed-up sandals. It never mattere
d that her dad was a fitter and turner at Mobil or that her mother worked at the cable factory in the next suburb on. The other kids’ parents did the same. At Nottingham, though, the mothers rarely worked and the fathers carried briefcases instead of eskys.

  ‘I heard they pump sewage into the bay there,’ Jennifer continued pleasantly.

  A few girls giggled and she wished she hadn’t told the lunch group about her family’s beach picnics.

  Isobel shrugged, her face burning.

  ‘I went once,’ a voice piped up from the back of the group.

  Jennifer glared at a girl with thick crimped hair called Alexis. The lunchtime group bitched about her. Her parents were artists, which made her weird, but even worse, she was Greek and had a funny accent.

  ‘It was nice.’

  Isobel kept her arms crossed tight across her books.

  Jennifer shot Alexis daggers then turned back to Isobel and said, ‘Come sit with us in class.’

  Rosie

  ‘COME SIT ON ya old man’s knee, Roses.’

  Rosie frowned at him from her spot at the table. ‘You’re not my old man,’ then took another sip of lemonade. She sucked until there was nothing left and the old biddy at the bar told her to stop making that God-awful noise.

  There were only three of them in the bar. Vera was in the room next door, playing the pokies

  ‘Keep an eye on her, Keith,’ she’d said as she left. And he was.

  He was Vera’s latest, but there’d been so many, Rosie hardly paid attention anymore.

  The pub was different on Friday mornings. Usually she could hardly see the other side for the smoke and the blokes from the tip up the road. The beer mats smelt the same though, sour. She lifted one to her nose then dropped it again, bored out of her brain.

  ‘Ya can take the day off today. A little holiday,’ Vera had said from bed that morning, too late for school, while Rosie stood at the bedroom door with her bag.

  ‘Crawl in,’ Keith said, pushing the covers down. He was in his undies and it made Rosie laugh out loud then squirm when he winked at her.

  ‘Don’t be daft,’ Vera squawked, pulling the blankets back up. She turned back to Rosie. ‘Go put some toast on or somethin’. And bring us a cuppa.’

  At the bar Keith pulled a packet of smokes from his top pocket and lit one. ‘Get us another beer, Kaz,’ he said to the woman behind it with too-red cheeks.

  Rosie could feel him watching her as he sucked on his smoke. It made her want to pull her bare legs under the table and cross her arms over her chest.

  The woman at the bar handed Keith his beer and he slurped the foamy top from it.

  ‘Go get another lemonade,’ he called at Rosie again. ‘My shout, but ya hafta order it yourself.’

  Rosie contemplated her chewed fingernails on the table in front of her then glanced at the gaming room. Vera’s back was just visible, stiff as a board in front of the slot machine as if she were concentrating very hard. It was going to be a long day.

  Rosie pushed her chair out slowly and wandered towards Keith.

  ‘Here.’ He held up a five-buck note. ‘Come get it.’

  She stared at him across the long row of beer mats on the bar. The coarse, brown moustache over his top lip made her skin itch. She knew he was checking out her boobs, two braless humps under her t-shirt.

  ‘I don’t bite.’ He held the note out further but inched it away as she moved closer. He stank of sweat and there was a dark tuft of hair sprouting from the top of his shirt. He laughed when she lunged at the money and suddenly his big hairy hands were gripping the top of her bare thighs, giving them a squeeze.

  ‘Rosie!’ Vera stood at the entrance to the gaming room.

  Keith let go of her and the money, and she scuttled back to the table with it, slippery in her hot hands.

  Vera glared at her then walked over to Keith and plucked the cigarette from his mouth, putting it in her own. She sucked back slowly, eyes closed, while Keith gawked on. When she finally opened them again, she looked at Rosie and, blowing out a solid stream of smoke, told her to steer clear of the bar.

  Isobel

  SHE SITS IN THE LUMPY CHAIR beside her mother’s bed and tries not to think too hard about why she’s here again when she’s spent half her life running away from the place.

  It could be the pregnancy or Marcus’s indifference to it or the gnawing desire to get out of the house, but maybe not. Some mornings she wakes, fighting a feeling she’s being dragged backwards. Scenes from childhood fill her up and wash her out, leaving a murky streak of regret in their wake. And suddenly her mother is everywhere.

  Lately, it’s her hair. When she peers in the bathroom mirror she notices it greying at the temples like Grace’s did. Usually she dyes it, ash-blonde, on the recommendation of her stylist, Harry, but lately she’s let it go.

  She leans back in the chair and watches her mother sleep, her white hair spread out wildly across the pillow, despite Kate’s efforts to tame it.

  Her father had relented, finally, and accepted some help. Now Kate comes once a day to take care of showering and to help her father administer pain relief. She’s young and enthusiastic and behaves as if the illness isn’t all-defining. This morning she’d chatted to her mother as if they were old friends while Isobel sat on the sidelines counting days in her diary. Five weeks pregnant and she still hasn’t found the courage to tell her parents.

  It should be a simple, joyful announcement the way it was in films, she and Marcus holding hands, delivering the news to her parents. Then a celebratory drink perhaps, not for her, of course, but her father loved a beer.

  ‘It’s about time,’ her mother might say, holding out her arms to embrace them.

  Five years earlier, when Marcus had wanted a baby, when she and Bernard had accidentally created one, it might have been this way.

  She stares into space, a small child with Bernard’s thick lashes taking shape in her head again. And although it’s madness, grief snatches her breath away.

  Grace murmurs in her sleep. Her hair was grey by the time she was forty. It was dramatic and embarrassing, as usual, and gave the girls another reason to make fun of her. Nottingham mothers were supposed to be coiffured and understated, not woolly-topped and scarlet-lipped like hers.

  The peacock-patterned cushion Kate brought over last week to brighten up the room slips off the bed onto the carpet.

  ‘Mum?’

  Isobel leans forward as the winter light filters through the camellia bush at the window, peppering her mother’s bony cheeks. In sleep, it’s difficult to see her clearly, to sense the infuriating grit behind all that beauty.

  And just like that, the urgency to be here is gone again, replaced by a renewed dislike of the frilled curtains at the window and of the diamond-patterned paper on the wall. She closes her eyes and places a hand on her stomach, imagining the baby suspended inside. She will be a different sort of mother.

  When she opens them, Grace is watching.

  ‘Darling,’ she manages, moving her head slightly on the pillow.

  Isobel glances at the hairbrush on the dresser. It used to have a matching hand mirror with tiny pink roses on the back until she and Lachlan broke it in a tug of war.

  ‘Are you okay?’

  In an instant, she’s a child again, watching her mother trying to conceal her weariness from work, a silent plea in her voice for Isobel to tell her things are all right because she hasn’t got the energy to hear otherwise.

  Isobel stands up and walks the room, ticking off its contents in her head: the curtains, the dresser and the large walnut closet in the corner. The ancient watercolour of Altona Beach on the wall, her mother’s striped beach umbrella just visible in the distance.

  ‘When you were small, you used to tell me secrets,’ her mother says haltingly from the bed. ‘Little things, like which dolly was your favourite, or that you wanted to be a nurse one day like Aunty Wilma.’

  Isobel watches in the dresser mirror.


  ‘I loved those secrets.’

  She reaches out and takes the hairbrush, contemplates it, almost puts it down again before recalling the dreamy sensation she got when it ran through her hair.

  Her mother’s eyes shut as the brush touches her head. The room empties until the only thing left is her breathing and the soft swish of the bristles; one hundred strokes before bedtime.

  With each stroke her mother’s breath slows, until it’s safe to whisper some of the things she’s held onto for years. Secrets so tightly bound in love and frustration she barely knows how to unravel them. The meanness of the girls at school, the abandonment she felt at being made to stay, the wall she built with her anger, how hard it is to let it fall, even now, when she desperately wants it to.

  She rushes on about the hormone injections, and how the pinch of each one made her feel like a failure. She lets the warmth from her mother’s body worm into her heart then tells her about the baby.

  Grace opens her eyes and in that moment the dreaminess returns, claiming Isobel back again.

  Rosie

  CHURCHILL LEAVES A TRAIL of white hair across her black jeans before sitting up on his haunches for a treat. He looks like the fat dates rolled in desiccated coconut she buys from the fruit shop on Smith Street, and it’s hard not to laugh at him. Sometimes it’s easy to see why Mr Granthall loves him so much, Petey too, for that matter.

  ‘You stupid mutt,’ she says, rubbing between his ears.

  It’s three days since they visited Mr Granthall and Petey is all over Churchill like a rash.

  ‘Love you, love you,’ he says over and over, pressing his cheek into the side of the dog’s fat head.

  She tried to keep him away for a while, with maths games and a visit to the zoo. But it didn’t work. Absence makes the heart grow fonder. Churchill is his best mate and as soon as they hit home he wanted to see him. Sometimes she thinks he prefers the dog to her. It hollows her out.