The Silent Inheritance

by Joy Dettman

He stayed for an hour, showing Marni how to use his new iPhone, a magical thing with a touch screen that could find their street and his, and show only Blackburn and Burwood Highway between them. He googled London and showed her a hotel where he’d spent two nights four years ago.

  The television was on; it usually was. Only Sarah was watching it when the TattsLotto balls started tumbling out.

  ‘I forgot!’ she said, and rose from her chair because the first number out was one of theirs. Then out came sixteen, another one of theirs, and she ran outside.

  Marni didn’t. She slid from her seat on the table to stand before the screen, holding her breath, knowing that her mother’s sore throat, caused by Barbara Lane, had just cost them a car, a house and two brand new iPhones.

  It hadn’t. The next number to roll out, a thirteen, wasn’t one of theirs, nor were any of the others.

  You can’t call to a deaf person, and even if you hunt them down in the dark, they can’t lip-read. There were ways around that problem. She flicked the outside light on and off until Sarah came in from the dark.

  ‘How many?’ she asked.

  ‘Two, and that’s all we ever get. Change our numbers, Mum.’

  ‘We know them,’ Sarah said.

  ‘Mum knows hers too,’ Bob said. ‘She’s been taking the same ones since the first TattsLotto draw and she’s never won more than sixty dollars.’

  ‘We got twelve dollars at Christmas time,’ Marni said. ‘And thirty once.’

  Bob had a quick pick in Powerball, which had jackpotted to almost twenty million.

  ‘What would you buy if you won it?’ Marni asked.

  ‘I’d spend six months in Peru,’ he said. ‘What would you buy?’

  ‘We don’t buy Powerball, but if we did and we won, I’d make Mum retire and get a cochlear implant,’ Marni said.

  They played millionaires in a room that was little more than a squat for the homeless, Marni, who’d given up her chair to Bob, perched on the table, beside their antique laptop. Their television was new, and currently showing a huge man having his stomach banded.

  ‘How come invalid pensioners can afford to buy enough food to stay as fat as him?’ Marni asked.

  ‘Subsidised housing. Charity handouts,’ Bob said.

  ‘Turn it off,’ Sarah said.

  ‘It’s interesting, Mum. Was anyone in our family fat?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What about my father’s family?’

  ‘Operation make me feel sick, Marni.’

  Maybe it made Bob feel sick. He said he supposed he ought to be getting home, and when the door closed behind him, Marni told her mother that she liked him, that he was like a normal person.

  ‘You like his phone.’

  ‘I love his iPhone. And I want a sim card, but I like the way he talks normal to you. Are you ever going to get married again?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind, or not if you married someone like him.’

  ‘Go to bed.’

  ‘It’s Saturday and I’m almost thirteen. If you got married again, you might have more kids.’

  Sarah switched channels, to a commercial. It was Murphy’s Law that every time you switched channels you got a commercial.

  ‘Can we get one, and bundle our phone?’

  ‘We paying for the school camp this month.’

  ‘I don’t want the camp. It only lasts for ten days. I’d have that mobile forever.’

  APPEASEMENT AND AGGRAVATION

  David left the office at midday to fly to Sydney. Barbara left at two twenty to have a light trim and her roots done. Like Danni, she’d been born a natural platinum blonde. Age had darkened her hair, but since returning to Australia she’d had it returned to its original shade, which meant having the roots done every six weeks. In Sydney, she’d had her hairdresser trained, but the fool down here had cut too much off her fringe, and she’d ended up screaming at him like a fishwife.

  She’d had her nails done at the same place; they, at least, were worth the money. She’d chosen the colours to match her bedroom, peach pink with a gold flower on each nail, and she admired them again when she hit the remote to turn on the air conditioner.

  ‘Danni.’

  No reply. She never replied. Needing to show her nails to someone, she climbed those stairs. And she wasn’t up there, not in her room, study or bathroom.

  Downstairs again, and she was growing to hate those stairs, but she got her mobile and picked out a fast text.

  I told you I’d be home early. Where the hell are you? A reply came back, a brief reply.

  On my way.

  Her own mirror agreed that the brainless swine had cut too much off her fringe. The colour was perfect. She combed her hair, checked the comb for fallout. No fallout.

  David would notice her nails. He noticed everything – and he’d be out of town for two days – and she couldn’t stand that bloody office without him – and she could have flown up to Sydney with him. She’d suggested it, suggested dropping Danni off to her grandfather up there.

  ‘School,’ he’d said.

  He didn’t like Danni, and she didn’t like him. He hadn’t known about her until two months into the relationship. Barbara had never advertised the fact to anyone that she had a half-grown kid. He’d told her that he had four kids before she’d come clean about Danni.

  ‘I see them at weekends,’ he’d said, which she’d understood to mean that he was divorced and had custody of his kids at weekends. She’d never met them when she’d flown down to spend weekends at his Docklands unit.

  It was on the twenty-third floor and it had a view of the bay, and boats. She could have been happy living there. Five times she’d flown down before her mother died. She’d been in Melbourne the day her mother had the stroke that killed her.

  And her father had blamed her for it, or blamed her divorce, and her involvement with David, the only light in her life. Being with him had been like walking out of a dark cave full of blood-sucking bats into sunlight. He was everything she’d ever hoped to find in a man – or he had been before she’d moved to Melbourne.

  He was different now and Danni not only hated him, she hated Barbara, and her school, where she’d picked up with a slut of a girl who was allowed to run wild.

  Nothing was as Barbara had imagined it would be. She’d never seen herself stuck out here in the suburbs, going to work every day – just to appease his bloody wife.

  Danni said that he’d set her up as his mistress. She said he had plans for mother and daughter threesomes – and had got a slap across the mouth for that one.

  She didn’t need to work. She’d got money enough from her settlement to live on. It was David who needed her to work.

  Knowing people too well ruined relationships. In Sydney, she hadn’t known about his spider phobia. Barbara could squash one beneath her shoe without flinching. He wouldn’t even stay in the same room to watch where it went while she got something to squash it with.

  She had a phobia about turning forty and being alone. She had a phobia about having a stroke and dying paralysed with a twisted face. She had a phobia about working in a bloody circus, surrounded by David’s freak show.

  From day one she hadn’t been able to look at Rena, the circus fat lady, or Shane. She couldn’t stand Sarah Carter. She was educated, knew what she was doing, but sounded like a retard, and retards gave Barbara the creeps. When she had to communicate with her now she did it via email, and this morning she’d sent her three, asking for the code for the Geelong store, and that bitch hadn’t replied to one of them. And when Barbara had complained to Bob Webb, who used to be helpful, he’d told her that her computer had access to the same information as Mrs Jesus Christ Carter’s.

  ‘I can’t find them if she won’t tell me where to find them, can I?’

  ‘Try communicating directly with her,’ he’d said.

  And he wouldn’t have had the guts to say that if David had been in his office, and if he wasn’t going t
o be in his office for two days – she wouldn’t be either.

  Couldn’t stand being there without him.

  ‘It won’t be forever,’ he said when she complained, but every day was forever, and if he didn’t stop appeasing his bitch of a wife soon, Barbara was packing up and going home.

  Home to where? To her father? She couldn’t stand living with him. She’d have to, unless she spent her divorce settlement on a unit and furniture, which, if she did, wouldn’t leave her enough left to live on, or not enough to live the way she liked to live.

  Appeasement: Appearances: Aggravation: Affair: Adulterer.

  He’d probably taken his wife and kids up to Sydney, which was why he wouldn’t take her and Danni. He’d probably sleep with his wife tonight, to appease her, so she wouldn’t sell her half of the business. He liked being the sole ringmaster of his bloody circus.

  And the front door slammed. ‘Where have you been? Do you realise what time it is?’ Barbara yelled, because she needed to yell at someone, because her fringe was too short and that kid had stuffed up her life. ‘And if I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a dozen times not to hang around that shopping centre with that little slut.’

  ‘You told me to buy something for dinner, too, and I had to buy Sam a present.’

  ‘It doesn’t take two hours to buy a present and something for dinner.’

  ‘Try catching a bus sometime, Barb. Try walking. It burns up kilojoules.’

  The cowboy she’d divorced had called her Barb – or barbed wire – and that kid could do his accent to a T.

  ‘You put on his accent just to annoy me. You’ve been back here long enough to lose it, and my name is Barbara.’

  She’d never called her Mum. Couldn’t speak when he’d taken her home to America, and by the time Barbara had gone over there to get her, she’d forgotten she had a mother. She’d called the cowboy Daddy, called his parents Nan and Pop.

  *

  Danni ran upstairs to her bathroom. It had a lock on the door and she’d got a text just before she’d come inside, and knew what it would be about.

  We’ve got a court date, Monday 22 April, Dano.

  I can’t stand it until April.

  You can stand it. You’re as tough as old boots.

  If you get me, will we be able to go home?

  Wherever we are, you and me are home, Dano. Hang strong.

  Love you.

  Ditto Daddy. xox

  FRIDAY 15 MARCH

  ‘He’s got the hots for you,’ Jackie said. Bob Webb and Sarah’s altered relationship hadn’t gone unnoticed in the office.

  ‘He living near me. I pay for petrol,’ Sarah defended.

  He picked her up at the kerb each workday morning, dropped her off in Mrs Vaughn’s driveway each night, beeped his horn in reply when the old lady hammered on her window – and refused to take money for petrol. Last Friday she’d put a twenty-dollar note in his glove box, and would put another one in it tonight – which didn’t alter the fact that Jackie was right, that Bob wanted more from her than a business relationship.

  Marni called him her boyfriend – and Sarah felt like one of Gramp’s cows being herded towards a place where it didn’t want to go.

  It would be an easier place, for Marni. It would be a place where Sarah could spend money on both school camp and a mobile phone and not worry about her bank balance, but after the easier always came the harder, which no one showed in romance movies, which always ended when brides in beautiful dresses and handsome grooms drove off into the sunset. It was what came after the sunset that you had to live with.

  And Jackie knew all about it, too. She’d been married twice, the first time for twelve years to the father of her four kids, who’d almost finished paying off their house when he’d died of pancreatic cancer. She’d been working at Crows when she’d met her second husband, online, a rich businessman who, like Crow, had businesses in every state, or so he’d said.

  He’d lived with Jackie and her kids between his business trips, then when she’d married him, he’d wanted her to mortgage her house and put the money into his business.

  She’d been in love, but was no fool. She’d found out that there were no businesses and that he’d owed a fortune to everyone so she’d divorced him, then the courts made her borrow a hundred thousand dollars on her house to give to him. And she dared play matchmaker?

  She started it again at lunchtime, in the tearoom, so Sarah picked up her lunch and took the lift down to the street where she ate while walking up to buy her TattsLotto ticket. Being picked up and delivered home by Bob had changed more than one of her routines.

  Five dreamers queued there to hand over their money, hope on some faces, annoyance on others. She was annoyed at herself for not being brave enough to stop buying her Saturday system seven. One man, full up with hope, handed over a fifty-dollar note to pay for his dream, and how could anyone afford to waste fifty dollars on gambling? That’s what buying those tickets was, just wasting a few dollars in the hope of finding that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

  She handed the Indian man the right money in coins, and her numbers and registration card, then watched his narrow brown hands count her coins before he wiped her card. His hands went still and he said something. She looked at his face. Maybe the price had gone up again.

  ‘Pardon?’ she said, and he said words that looked like, You have a win. His hand wasn’t out for more money. She smiled, knowing that if she’d had a win it hadn’t been in last Saturday’s draw. She and Marni had watched it, and not one of their numbers had come out. She could have won something the week Crow gave Barbara Lane the job. Anything could have happened that week.

  He spoke again, and his mouth may have said Powerball. She never bought Powerball. It cost more than Saturday Lotto, and even if all of her numbers came out, she’d need to have picked the right Powerball.

  ‘No ticket,’ she said. The queue behind her growing, the Indian man processed her numbers.

  ‘Good luck,’ he said.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, and walked back the way she’d come, eating grapes and looking at the sky. Mystical Melbourne was in for a storm. It would wash the heat away – or make it humid and hot. You never could tell with Melbourne’s weather.

  They were still in the tearoom, Jackie, Rena, Shane and two part-timers. Sarah was making a coffee when Bob came in, so she made two – and she caught Jackie’s wink to Rena. Bob took his coffee back to his office. Sarah sat opposite Rena.

  ‘She’s eighty-two and still thinks she’s running the show,’ Rena said.

  She spent a lot of time talking about her mother-in-law. Jackie spent a lot of time running down the conman she’d shed – and judges. Sarah never offered personal information. She’d told them she’d lost her parents in a car accident, that she’d lived in Perth with a foster family until she’d married at eighteen. They knew that Marni’s father had died of a brain tumour, but that was all they knew.

  Everyone knew that Barbara Lane and David Crow had had a lovers’ tiff. She’d taken another day off this week.

  ‘He’s got her pregnant,’ Rena guessed, and Jackie laughed. In the smaller space of the tearoom, when sitting at her side, Sarah could hear Jackie’s laugh.

  ‘She came in late,’ Shane said. ‘He took her to lunch.’ Some mouths were easy to read. Shane’s wasn’t, but he had an expressive face, which made reading him easier. ‘His wife knows about her,’ he said.

  ‘She knew about Eve,’ Jackie said.

  Eve was the blonde before Barbara. She’d worked in HR and had made a lot of noise the morning Crow’s previous manager had walked her out of the office.

  Shane knew that Eve now worked for the estate agent who’d sold Crow the house Barbara Lane lived in. He knew that Eve had sent Maureen Crow an email about that house. He knew that the day Eve had been walked from the office like a thief, she’d vowed to get back at Crow.

  And Sarah knew more than Shane. Bob was a gossip in the car.

/>   ‘Just between you and me,’ he’d say. Or, ‘This goes no further.’ Once he’d said, ‘This is for your ears only,’ then realised what he’d said, blushed and added, ‘I forget that you can’t hear a word I say.’

  Marni said that. ‘I forget that you’re deaf, Mum.’

  Lynette Clark used to say the same thing.

  Bob returned to the tearoom to wash and dry his mug, and place it on the shelf.

  ‘He’s house trained too,’ Rena said to Sarah. ‘A house-trained man is a rarity, love.’

  *

  At four thirty that Friday afternoon, a taxi delivered Barbara home. She paid with a company cabcharge. She’d used a cabcharge this morning and it hadn’t taken that driver as long to process it.

  Snatched the ticket when he was done and ran. Unlocked her front door and gave it an almighty slam behind her, flung her handbag at the couch, then howled.

  Fridays were her days. They went out to dinner on Fridays, then David drove her home and stayed with her until Saturday afternoon.

  ‘Lying bastard,’ she howled.

  And the air conditioner wasn’t on, and that bloody house he’d bought was a sweatbox without it, and she couldn’t find the remote.

  ‘Danni. Where did you put that bloody remote?’

  She found it with the television remotes. Pointed, pressed, then pitched it at the couch and walked upstairs, yelling Danni’s name.

  She wasn’t at her computer, wasn’t in her room. Barbara slammed both doors and almost lost her footing on the way down, and who needed a bloody house with stairs you spent your life climbing, looking for a twelve-year-old bitch of a girl?

  She was stripping to shower when she remembered David’s pills. He left a packet in her bathroom cabinet, Xanax, his sleeping pills. That’s what she needed, to sleep and forget about him and his bloody wife and everything else. She popped one from its bubble wrap, washed it down with a handful of water then stripped to her briefs and crawled into bed, unshowered and smelling of him.

  She’d thought he’d had something big to tell her, thought he’d taken her out for an early lunch and ordered champagne so he could drop an engagement ring into her glass, like she’d seen once in a movie. She wanted a ring, had expected something more than an afternoon in his bed.