by Joy Dettman
And what a time to die. They’d lost Christmas Day. The presents were like some sort of snide joke. And the tree had been a mistake. Christmas trees were for kids and he didn’t have any.
His mother had loved Christmas. They’d always had a tree and she’d spent hours decorating it. She should have lived forever. Life is for the living, she had always said. Worrying about what is going to kill you will wipe you out faster than any little surprise fate has got in store for you. It sure had a surprise written in for her, and tonight was bringing it all home again too.
‘Bloody top-heavy tractor,’ he said. ‘Why didn’t she leave that paddock for me? I told her it was too steep, to leave it for me.’
Maybe half the tears leaking down his face tonight were for his mother. The other half were probably for himself. He didn’t know what he’d done wrong or what he hadn’t done right, but he sure as hell had done or not done something.
Things went on in Sally’s head that he’d never understood. It was like she was trying to think too far ahead, like she was trying to see tomorrow before it got to today, so she could recognise the problems in advance and fix them before they happened.
These last months there’d been nothing between them, and a man got used to female company. He’d found himself looking around, and he didn’t want to look around. Karen Matthews and her lemon meringue pies were even starting to look okay. Talking to her on the phone today had been a relief. And Deb. She’d wanted to come around, but he’d put her off until tomorrow.
Sally hadn’t called anyone. Who was the bloke she was supposed to have in Melbourne? Where was the useless bastard now? Whoever he was, whatever he was – if he was – he wasn’t doing her any good.
I wonder if she’s got his phone number in her handbag. I’ll have a look in her bag and give the bastard a call, get him up here where he ought to be, he thought, and he bit deep into the lemon, his eyes still following the small figure. Just a dark silhouette against the backdrop of his land. Little girl lost.
She belonged here, where he could look after her. She needed looking after. Not that what he felt for her had ever been what you might call protective love, brotherly love. Even when she was fourteen, a wild little bugger with a bugger of a mouth on her, he’d loved her.
I should have married her when she was eighteen. Should have hid her pills and got her pregnant. That’s what I should have done, he thought.
She was still singing, still belting out that sobbing rhythm. He couldn’t hear the words. His mother had said once that there was something in Sally’s voice that raised goosebumps on her soul. He’d never been much into souls but her song was raising goosebumps on his arms tonight. He bit into his lemon and sniffed.
Near ten she returned to the house. He heard her turn on the television, and he looked through the window, watching her, wanting to hold her and howl. So little of her, she looked like a porcelain doll tossed onto the couch, all played out.
That city bastard and her mother have sucked the life out of her, he thought. This is going to finish her off. Two tears tumbled, and he swiped at his tears with a lemon-juice hand, then rubbed them with his shirt-tail.
Had he possessed the gift of words, he might think, ‘ethereal’, only on loan to me and Lakeside, but he wasn’t much of a hand with words, so he stood at the window loving her, wanting her safe in his bed, but knowing now that he might just as well try to trap the north wind in a Foster’s stubby.
In the kitchen, a silent search amid the chaos of her shoulder bag could not unearth a name or phone number.
‘Useless bastard,’ he muttered as he walked outside to tie up the dogs. They were pleased to go to bed, and he wanted his. He crept to the lounge room door, peeped in, hoping to see her asleep on the couch. She was sitting there, her elbow on the arm of the couch, a cigarette in her hand, her eyes following the flashing of the television screen.
Nothing he could say. Nothing he could do. He went to bed. His door was open. His eyes were open and all night the television played on.
Dry Eyes
The rain had come in the night, and this morning the sky looked grim. Sally made coffee, emptied the ashtrays into the stove, moving silently, pleased that the house was still her own. It was rare for Ross to sleep past 6.30 and the hands of the clock now pointed to 7.45.
No more hospital. She didn’t ever have to go back there. Not today. Not tomorrow. Not ever. Nothing to do – not like when Mrs Bertram had died and left her slippers where she’d last kicked them off, just inside the bedroom door, left her make-up in the bathroom, her book propped open beside her bed.
If Mummy had died back in September, I might have cried, she thought as she eased the firebox open, added wood, then eased it shut. I could have gone to the flat and touched her frocks, picked up her old shoes. Nothing left to do. No more tears to cry.
Only a few frocks hanging in the sleep-out wardrobe; and the shoes.
She took her coffee to the sleep-out and she picked up the shoes, rolled them in the frocks and carried them to the kitchen wastebin, forcing them in. Forcing them down.
Rusty barked, and Fred, the kelpie, joined in. Ross always let the dogs off the chain as soon as he was up and about, and they knew that someone was about. She crept from the back door, listening to the squeal as she eased it open, to the sigh as she closed it silently behind her, then carefully dodging mud and puddles, she walked down to the dogs.
They knew she wasn’t their top dog, but they wagged their tails and cut their barking to growling yelps. She unclipped chains, patted heads and they bounded behind her to the back door, tails wagging expectantly.
There was a bag of dog chow in the laundry. She poured a measure into their bowls, which they eyed suspiciously before wolfing.
‘Too much?’ she said. ‘Or too little?’ Rusty shook his head, so she topped up their bowls and returned the bag to the laundry. Then across the mud to the tin shed, where she stood looking at the pile of junk in the corner while the dogs checked it out for mouse invasion.
It was all hers now, her own lovely big pile of unlovely junk. All hers to haul around the country on her back.
‘Worthless junk.’ She kicked the gruesome green lounge suite. The old chest of drawers she smoothed with her palm before sliding a drawer open. Empty. Daddy had bought it second- or third-hand. He’d painted it white to match her bed. She looked at the fridge. Old, but still going strong – or it had been in September. Did fridges die from lack of use? But it had never become accustomed to working overtime. She touched its white enamel. It felt gritty, and she wiped her hand on her jeans. She’d been wearing the same clothes since she left Melbourne. They probably stank. She smelt her armpits. A bit sweaty, but no-one had their head under her arm.
She looked for the box containing Grandma’s china. It had no value either – just beautiful junk, but this morning Sally needed to touch beautiful, the only beautiful she’d ever had in her unbeautiful life.
The box had been marked. They’d all been marked. On the side of the top carton it was printed in green. GOOSE GIRL. Up on the old laminex table, she reached across and hauled the china down. Heavy, it almost toppled her, but she got it to the floor intact and she squatted over it, searching out the china goose girl, feeling the shapes beneath the newspaper, yawning and wanting to lie down, put her head on the box and sleep.
Not brave enough to sleep, not yet, she took a deep breath, shaking off drowsy as she continued feeling the newspaper parcels until she identified the shape of the arm and the hat and the beak. She yawned, shrugged her shoulders and unwrapped the newspaper, smiling as she handled the goose girl, touched the goose. She felt out the china lady with the parasol, the line of glue beneath her chin. Poor lady, murdered by the furniture movers. Her hand identified the china man; he and the parasol lady were a matching pair. The two unwrapped, she held them side by side, as they had stood side by side for fifty-odd years. She made them kiss, or butt heads.
‘How did you do it, Glenda?’ sh
e said.
‘That’s for me to know and the pathologist to find out, Bren.’
The game stopped abruptly.
They needed a bath, both of them, dust and newsprint stained their faces. Have to give them a bath in dishwashing detergent, a toothbrush to get into the crevices. But not today. She wrapped them up in their newspaper and packed them in the carton, china Mummy on top. They wouldn’t get up to any games, not with all of those petticoats, and the newspaper. How had they ever got together to breed their wild goose girl?
She smiled then, thinking of that first time the china was packed into cardboard boxes. Her mother must have been young then. Twenty-eight. She couldn’t remember the twenty-eight-year-old face. Just the weeping. She could remember that. And the screaming. She’d never forget that. They had no money to buy tombstones for their dead, Mummy had said, so they had to sell the house. Give it to Carol Rigg.
Dead people didn’t need tombstones, but Sally had needed that house and her school and Raelene. She had needed her bedroom and her swing-set and the passionfruit vines. And Mummy could still get bookings. The telephone never stopped ringing for Glenda Jean, because the terrible news had got in all the papers and the newspapers called Mummy a great talent.
Raelene’s mother and father had come in one night to calm Mummy down. They knew all about insurance. Raelene’s father had worked for AMP, and he said how it would be a pity to lose the house. He said that if Mummy went to the bank and explained her situation, he was sure that they’d wait for their money until the insurance came.
Please, Mummy. I want to stay in our house.
Too many memories, my precious girl.
‘Precious girl, bullshit! I was Daddy’s girl. Always. I followed him around like a shadow. And you hated it.’ She stood in the shed but she wasn’t seeing the shed, she was seeing the past, remembering, remembering it all.
Exhaustion had taken the edge off old hurt, allowing her to wander the painful places with dry eyes. A cleansing place to wander in the early morning, rain thundering down on a low tin roof. She stayed in that place too long, stayed there until the dogs barked, lifted their ears, until Rusty nudged her knee, and yelped: We’re off. Top dog’s up.
Almost nine o’clock. Ross never slept this late – probably would have slept later if the phone hadn’t called him from his bed. He was sitting in the lounge room in his pyjamas, speaking on the cordless phone.
He’d made the calls yesterday. Mrs Jenner, Mrs Hudson, Deb and Karen. Gina. Not too many. Sally stood in the passage trying to decipher this morning’s one-sided conversation.
Ross knew she was out there. He lowered his voice, trying to guard his words, but he had to repeat them. ‘With her husband. Yes. The same grave. In the same grave. Yeah. That’s what she said. Yes.’
She fought a fresh packet of cigarettes open, lit one. Smoke sucked in. Smoke blown out. Orange embers and grey ash circling as they crept up the white cylinder. She walked into the kitchen.
She felt so calm this morning, calm in a way she had never felt calm before. She’d been worried about Christmas Day and what she was going to do if her mother had refused to leave the hospital. Always and forever it had been, what am I going to do? How am I going to fix it?
No more fixing.
She shouldn’t be feeling like this, thinking like this. She should be howling, letting Ross and Deb comfort her. Should be.
He completed his phone call. The receiver was in the kitchen and she heard the click-click of disconnection, that click-click, like old coot Ron’s dentures, then Ross walked in.
‘She’s already got her name on Daddy’s tombstone. Will there be any problems?’
A huge smile of relief lit Ross’s face and his voice mirrored the same relief. ‘All taken care of, love. All done. You don’t need to worry about it.’
She took her handbag from the top of the fridge and opened her purse, placed ten clean green notes on the table. Enough there for a holiday. Probably not enough for a funeral. She had a few hundred dollars in her Commonwealth account, and she dug deep into the bowels of her bag until she found her old bankbook, which she placed on top of the notes.
‘Put it back in your purse. Just sit down and take it easy today. Deb is coming over to see you at two.’
‘Good,’ she lied.
He’d picked up her car yesterday, paid her motel bill, collected her mother’s personal effects from the hospital. He’d put her case in his room, placed the chicken in the fridge, the pudding on the bench. All under control. Ross’s control.
She turned to the sink, picked up the frying pan. White grease had solidified in the bottom of the non-stick pan she’d bought so he wouldn’t need to use grease. She scraped the grease onto paper, wrapped it and placed it in the bin. So she’d lost Christmas Day. So they’d have it a day late. Chicken and roast potatoes, pumpkin and peas. Pudding and brandy sauce, the order now for two. She was hungry this morning.
‘I had a call from Sleiman. He said that when the shock wears off, it might hit –’
‘It hit and ran, Ross.’ She looked at his eyes, knowing he wouldn’t understand, but she said it anyway. ‘It feels sort of peaceful. She got what she wanted for Christmas, and it’s like . . . it’s like I suddenly realised it’s not my fault.’
‘Of course it’s not. Did you get any sleep last night?’
She shrugged. ‘What did you do with the bag you brought back from the hospital?’
‘You don’t want to look at that now.’
‘I do.’
He walked to his room and returned with a plastic bag; she emptied it onto the table.
An unopened Christmas present, a watch, a wedding ring and small diamond engagement ring. Pretty nighties, a dressing gown, a large handbag half-full of death certificates and photographs, a purse containing ten dollars and two melting pills.
She removed the ten-dollar note, then handed the purse to Ross. ‘You’d better give it to Sleiman.’ He took it, glanced at the pills and at the colourful stains on the fabric lining. She searched on.
Scraps of paper. A small address book. Old photographs, several of them black and white. There was one of a man holding the hand of a little girl, both faces scribbled over with a red biro.
The yellowed envelope emptied onto the table, she sifted through death certificates. Grandma’s was there, and Bernice’s. Daddy’s, the boys’. Marian’s? Red words covered that one. Slut. Whore. Rot in hell.
Her mouth open, she stared at the name, remembering the day, mid-May. She’d paid her bond on the flat. Ross and old Charlie Glen were going to help her move in at the weekend. She’d driven home from Melbourne on a high and found Mummy on an equal high, sitting at the table, laughing over the death notices in the newspaper. Slut. Whore. Rot in hell scribbled across that page too, in red biro.
My stepmother. I sent him a congratulations card. Posted it today, care of the funeral home. They’ll see that he gets it, the evil old swine. I’ve ordered a copy of her death certificate too!
Ross was staring at the red words. Quickly Sally folded the paper and walked to the stove, pushing it into the firebox, watching the red biro burn. Her mother had liked red biro. Black had not been strong enough to express her hatred. Her hand shook as she added wood to the flames, then she turned the oven control to ‘Hot’ and set about releasing the Christmas chicken from its plastic while Ross repacked her mother’s bag.
Onions found, peeled, cut. No tears. She made breadcrumbs for the chicken stuffing and she found the mixed herbs in the rear of the deep pantry. She found a slim skewer in the knife drawer. Old skewer, Mrs Bertram’s skewer, used on every chicken ever cooked in this kitchen.
‘You don’t have to put on a brave face for me, love.’
‘The chicken is thawed,’ she said. ‘If we don’t cook it, it will go off.’
‘It doesn’t matter if it does. I prefer to eat homegrown anyway.’
‘Poor dead supermarket chook, never pecked on green grass and bugs, stuffed
from birth with hormones, fake fattened for Christmas. Look at the poor thing, its legs spread wide, still waiting to be stuffed. It’s all a farce,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘This travesty of prime chickendom. Tender and tasteless. And your plastic peanut butter is a farce and her church funeral too, and me going along with her church funeral. And agreeing to opening up Daddy’s grave so she can prove in death what a wonderful, loyal widow she was.’ She shook her head, shrugged.
‘I don’t know what you mean, love.’
‘I know you don’t. We slept together for eleven years, didn’t we, and you never knew me.’
‘Of course I did. I do. I love you.’ He was on his feet.
‘You love some fake picture frame with its fake photograph that you picked up at the reject shop one day and hung on your wall because it was fake pretty. It isn’t my photograph. There aren’t any photographs of me, and I’ve got to go home, Ross.’
‘You’re not going anywhere. You’re staying here until the funeral.’
‘I can’t be real here, Ross, and reject or not, I want to be real.’
‘You’re saying silly things, love. You’re not yourself. Take a couple of Aspros and lie down for a while.’
‘I am myself, and you don’t know me. And if you did, you wouldn’t want to, so it’s better if I go home.’
‘You’re not driving in this mood.’ He picked up her car keys, put them in his pocket, and she dropped the chicken into the sink, the skewer into the drawer; she washed her hands and walked into his mother’s room, closing the door behind her.
Tranquillity by Proxy
Mrs Bertram’s room looked as it had eleven years ago, except for the dust and the insects. Insects crept in through the rusting flywire screens of this room that no-one used and no-one cleaned. There was a smell of dust on the crocheted quilt and half a dozen dead blowflies on the windowsill.
