by Joy Dettman
She was measuring how much chain she had when he moved. Slid down then, pulled the quilt high and watched him through near-closed eyes.
He opened the firebox and packed it in with that curly rod thing. It was long, and looked heavy. Watched him push wood into it then walk to the door and open it.
She saw earth, a tree trunk and green, and glaring sunlight before he dragged the door shut behind him and the outside world was gone.
Heard him out there and not caring whether he could hear her or not, she tugged on the chain, dragged it to the right, jerked it up. The screws didn’t move.
Every sound seemed amplified now. She could hear water splashing, hear the creaking of the old joints of his house.
In Sydney, when Grandpa’s house had creaked, he used to say, ‘The old girl’s arthritis is playing up today.’ His house had been full of furniture. This one was almost empty. It had the same brown roller blinds as Grandpa’s, but his had spent their days rolled up behind curtains. No curtains here, and the blind over the sink was down.
And he was coming.
His door scraped when it opened. He was carrying a bucket she didn’t recognise as her cage bucket, but it must have been the same one. It had a lid. He put it beside the table leg, where her chain would probably allow her to reach it at a stretch, then he turned around and went outside again.
That bucket was white and it had three yellow ducks on it. In the dark she hadn’t seen its colour or the yellow ducks.
And he was back, and this time he propped the screen door open with a wheelbarrow. She didn’t look at him or at what was in his barrow. She looked over him, at the world she couldn’t get to.
He carried in a laptop computer and made space for it on the table, carried in two loaded supermarket bags, wood, ice too, then he went outside and came back with an office chair, then a big suitcase that looked heavy.
RENOVATORS OPPORTUNITY
They’d crept down the driveway not long before midnight and had been in bed five minutes later, and when Marni’s head hit her own pillow, it knew it. That was all she knew about coming home.
Her mother was washing out the inside of the fridge when Marni wandered out at ten, too late to go to school, and because their fridge was empty, they caught a tram to the Kmart Plaza, then paid a taxi to carry their shopping home.
They were unloading supermarket bags onto the nature strip when Marni saw the For Sale sign to the left of Mrs Vaughn’s letterbox.
It hadn’t been there last night, or this morning when they’d walked away, or if it had been, they hadn’t seen it. There were photographs of two rooms, and below them it said: Renovators opportunity, four bedrooms, large lounge/dining room …
‘He putting her in a home.’
They hadn’t seen her. They’d knocked on her door before they’d gone out. She hadn’t opened her door, so they’d decided not to disturb her.
Self-contained bungalow, Marni read. There was no photograph of their granny flat, which wasn’t worth photographing, but nor were most of Mrs Vaughn’s rooms – though the two they had photographed looked better than they did in reality. Maybe they’d airbrushed them.
Sarah emptied the overflowing letterbox. She found two snail-nibbled bills in with the junk mail, both addressed to Mrs Vaughn. She dropped the phone bill into her handbag, black, small, bought new for their holiday, then picked up four of the heaviest supermarket bags and left the rest for Marni.
No rap on the corner window as the junk mail was redelivered to the green bin. The Hyundai was parked in its usual space.
They packed their poor little fridge, stuffed their cupboards, filled the box where they stored potatoes and onions, fixed the phone bill to the fridge door with two magnets, and with everything in its own space except the cigarettes and Mrs Vaughn’s bill, Marni knocked at the old lady’s back door, though no longer expecting it to open. It didn’t.
Every item of clothing they’d taken with them needed washing. Their self-contained bungalow had never stretched to supplying laundry facilities, and the house for sale or not, their rent was paid and they needed the washing machine. Since the week Marni had to climb in through the bathroom window, she’d known where to find an emergency key to the front door, so she ran around and got it and unlocked that door, and if Raymond didn’t like it, she didn’t care because she didn’t like him.
The house looked weird without Mrs Vaughn in it. The chair near that corner window looked lost. And the bedroom was different. Someone had swapped Mrs Vaughn’s old blankets and bedcover for a quilt and new pillows.
The laundry was as they’d left it. Marni opened the back door, and Sarah brought in their load of washing.
It was agitating, before Marni placed their landline phone on the charger and noticed a message flashing, only one.
‘It’s Raymond, Mum. He says the house is being auctioned and we’ve got thirty days to vacate the premises.’
‘What?’
‘Wait.’ Marni replayed the message, this time listening to every word. He didn’t mention his mother. ‘It’s Raymond Vaughn,’ she said. ‘He says that we’ve got thirty days to find another place to live – and he left that message five days ago, so now we’ve got only twenty-five days.’
‘Check email,’ Sarah said.
Their new computer, a fast and furious beast, spat out seven messages, two from Raymond Vaughn.
He hadn’t put his mother into a nursing home. She’d died in her bed. His second email was a repeat of his phone message. Mrs Carter was required to vacate the premises in thirty days – now twenty-five.
‘He probably poisoned her. She was like she always was when we left – and when I phoned her, she was worse than she always was.’
‘She taking heart pills a long time,’ Sarah said.
‘Can we buy a house in twenty-five days?’
Sarah shook her head.
Mrs Vaughn’s death cancelled the last of their holiday, and it was impossible to imagine that old lady being gone. They could smell her in the house, and when they emptied their first load of laundry into her tumble dryer, they almost expected her to walk through that door yelling about them wasting electricity. The dryer drank electricity like a camel drank water.
‘It smells like she’s still here,’ Marni said. The walls had absorbed too much nicotine in their fifty years of life. They were stained by it, her ceilings too.
Her ashtray had gone from the coffee table beside her chair. It used to overflow, spill butts and ash. Every door was a dirty brownish beige, as was the carpet.
A renovator’s opportunity? There wasn’t much else a real estate agent could say about that house.
They locked the front door and hid that key beneath a terracotta pot that in Marni’s lifetime had never held a living plant, but like the two rusting iron chairs no one sat on, it had retained its space on the old lady’s front porch.
*
Marni went back to school. Sarah went back to her driving lessons. She’d paid in advance for ten, and had to get them done before 24 April.
She drove freeways, drove the route she might be asked to drive when she went for her test, then on Friday, she ended her lesson in the Forest Hill car park, aware that she needed to do something about moving some of that money, which couldn’t be as embarrassing as attempting to claim Jillian Jones’s fifteen dollars.
A woman greeted her at the Commonwealth Bank. Sarah showed her hearing aids and told her that she wanted to get two bank cheques and invest some money. The woman offered her a printout of interest rates, explained that the amount of interest was dependent on the amount invested. She didn’t want Sarah’s card but told her to take a seat.
Six chairs in a row, three of them in use. Sarah made it four, and there she sat for twenty minutes before an Asian male invited her into a small office. She showed him her hearing aids, then began back at the beginning.
And he couldn’t understand a word she said and she couldn’t understand him.
She
took her notepad and biro from her bag. I want to invest five hundred thousand for one year. You advertise 4.5 per cent interest.
He read the note, then spoke as he might to a child attempting to buy a block of chocolate when she had money enough for a musk stick. She’d dressed for her driving lesson, not for a bank, and she needed a haircut. Should have had her hair cut first, should have worn her office clothes, and lipstick. Business people had more respect for well-dressed clients.
She pushed the card across the desk to him, hoping it may buy his respect. He swiped it, and, hot and sweaty from her hand, it worked well enough to raise his eyebrows, for him to stand and excuse himself – then leave her sitting alone for five more minutes.
He wrote his own note when he returned. I suggest you make an appointment to speak to our financial adviser.
No thank you. I want to invest five hundred thousand for one year. Also I want two bank cheques for five hundred thousand.
It took many notes, his and hers, but half an hour later she walked away with her investment receipt, two bank cheques, and the promise of a chequebook and second bank card within five business days. Bank cheques cost ten dollars each. In future, she’d write her own.
Still disbelieving that a bank was allowed to charge ten dollars to give her her own money, she walked down to the Bank of Melbourne, where she planned to invest one of the bank cheques in Marni’s name, and to open an account with the other one in Jillian Jones’s name. It was her maiden name. She had that old card and her birth certificate as identification, and Marni’s birth certificate with Jillian’s name on it – and her parents’ marriage certificate.
The woman wanted her card.
‘I want to get one, please,’ Sarah said.
‘Pardon?’
Again she showed her hearing aids. Again she removed her notebook. I don’t have an account here. I want to open an account here and invest five hundred thousand dollars for twelve months.
‘Do you have a passport?’
Didn’t tell her that she wasn’t booking an overseas flight. Wanted to, but shook her head.
‘A driver’s licence?’
Soon she’d have a licence, but not yet, and she sighed, reclaimed her notepad and gave up. She was on her way out when a second woman tapped her on the shoulder.
‘Come through,’ she said.
Another office, another chair, a better speaker. ‘You require identification to open a new account,’ she said. ‘Do you have a passport?’
‘No.’
‘A driver’s licence?’
‘Soon,’ she said and giving up on Jillian Jones, she offered Sarah Carter’s Commonwealth Bank card, her learner’s permit, Medicare card, phone bill, library card, video shop card, then to the pile she added her bank cheques.
Money talks, Gramp used to say, and Sarah Carter had too much of it, which, unless she admitted to having, she couldn’t give away. Desperate now to use a toilet, she gave up on the idea of locking money away for Marni. Sarah Carter locked one bank cheque away for twelve months at 4.45 per cent interest, and the other for three years at 4.75 per cent, with accumulative interest – which in three years’ time would have made about seventy thousand dollars, and the thought of it made her more desperate to use a toilet.
*
Frederick Adam-Jones had made it to the toilets in the nick of time. He had bowel cancer, self-diagnosed, and his mother’s Alzheimer’s, self-diagnosed, his heart was on its last legs, and he couldn’t go to his GP to get his ills diagnosed because he’d want his blood, and Freddy suffered from DNA paranoia. He didn’t count sheep when he couldn’t sleep, he listed the places where he’d shed DNA.
He was shedding his wife too – or she was shedding him. She’d taken her pillow and gone to the spare room last night, and when he’d followed her there, afraid of having a heart attack and dying alone, she’d got out of that bed and gone into a second spare room – with twin beds.
‘I can’t sleep with you tossing around like a fish on a hook, Freddy. I have to get up at five o’clock in the morning,’ she’d said.
He’d thought she’d cancel her trip to Greece when they’d found out where their shit of a son had got the merchandise he’d been kicked out of school for selling, when they’d had two uniformed police with guns on their hips knocking on their door at midnight, demanding to speak to Rolland Adam-Jones. Cheryl couldn’t stand to sit still, or hadn’t since they’d moved to Camberwell. She’d been away more often than she’d been at home.
Thank Christ that boy had been at home, in bed, and the only reason he’d been at home in bed was because his mother had locked every door and window before taking the keys with her to bed.
Two of Rolland’s rat pack hadn’t been at home. The police caught Steve and Mick red-handed in the backyard of the Vermont house where they’d gone to tend their crop in Cheryl’s fernery. That house, vacant since Freddy had moved his family to Camberwell, was no longer vacant. The new owners recognising the greenery as something other than ferns had phoned the police.
At six this morning, when Freddy left to drive Cheryl to the airport, Rolland was sleeping soundly. At seven fifty, when he returned, that shit of a kid’s bed was empty – as had been the notes section of Freddy’s wallet, which he hadn’t discovered until he’d opened it to pay for sixty dollars’ worth of petrol. Had to put it on his card, on credit, so he could sign for it, because he had too much on his mind to remember his new PIN.
Should have been at the office by ten. He’d called in sick, and he was. He’d poked his card into an ATM, hoping his fingers would remember his PIN, and when they hadn’t, and he’d had to drive to the bank, to queue, and show his licence before they’d give him two lousy thousand, and his bowel was in spasm before the money was in his hand.
His heart missing beats since he’d found his wallet bare, he stood looking at himself in the washroom mirror, looking at a dead man standing – looking at a fat, bullfrog-eyed old bastard, waiting for his heart to give up and stop – until he saw tomorrow’s headlines.
BARRISTER DROPS DEAD ON PUBLIC TOILET FLOOR
With what might have been his final breath, he swung that door wide and burst out to the corridor—
And damn near killed another one.
She wasn’t wearing yellow and was half his weight. He grasped her upper arm to save her and held on tight because she was alive and he was dead, and he didn’t want to be alone.
‘Sorry,’ she said. Then grasped the hand that held her. ‘Uncle Bill?’ she said.
He wasn’t anyone’s uncle. He had two thousand dollars in his wallet and he made a grab for it.
‘I am Jillian,’ the woman said. ‘We live with you. In Brisbane, in your caravan. Long, long time before.’
He didn’t know her. He didn’t own a caravan, hadn’t been to Brisbane in fifteen years, but with his wallet safe in his pocket, he pushed his Alzheimer’s aside long enough to remember that Bill lived in Brisbane, that he and his wife had been pulling a caravan down the coast of Western Australia when he’d got the news that their mother was dying. Good old reliable Bill, who’d flown home from Broome to hold his mother’s hand – and she wouldn’t have known who was holding her hand or if anyone had been holding her hand.
That’s what Freddy had told himself. Frog-eyed Freddy who hadn’t gone near her, who was a self-serving bastard who deserved to drop dead but wasn’t doing it, and his heartbeat had settled back into its rhythm.
‘Frederick’s the name,’ he said. ‘You’d be Joe and Stephanie’s girl?’ Her speech marked her as deaf. He remembered the day Joe and Stephanie’s baby had been diagnosed as deaf.
‘Sorry,’ she said, backing towards the door of the women’s toilets. ‘You look the same. Like Uncle Bill. I am very sorry.’
Disappeared then, and Freddy walked on, a finger on the pulse in his throat.
Then it hit him. The property. The missing girl. The bastard with a penchant for garbage bags.
That woman could have th
e information he needed, and he turned on his heel and walked back to watch that door until she came out – and her expression told him she wished he hadn’t waited.
*
On a good day, Frederick Adam-Jones could talk a man without legs into buying a pair of shoes, Cheryl had said that a while back. He could sell snow to an Eskimo, pork to a Muslim. She’d said that too.
It took him five or ten minutes to talk a deaf woman into drinking a coffee with him, and she only agreed because he’d told her he’d been at her parents’ wedding, that he’d known her as a toddling infant.
‘Joe and Steph lived with the family until—’ Until Joe had learnt that his perfect female version of baby Jesus was imperfect.
She’ll never be any good.
‘I have … appointment soon.’
They were seated with their cappuccinos in the food court when he asked if she was living at the farm.
She frowned. ‘We live here – not far. I am Sarah Carter now.’
‘You have children?’
‘My daughter. Marni,’ she said, and he told her he had a son, Rolland, and a wife, currently on a plane to Greece, then asked if her daughter was deaf, and when she shook her head, he asked about her husband.
‘He die, a long time before.’
‘Are you employed – working?’
‘I am senior payroll/account officer,’ she said, and said it well, and proudly. ‘I work for Maureen Crow, in the city.’
Freddy knew all about the Crow mess. Smyth was still totalling up hours in splitting that company down the middle.
‘You’ve done well,’ he said. ‘Your father became the family gypsy, after he left the farm.’
‘Gypsy,’ she said. ‘Yes.’
Freddy searched his mind for something more to say that might keep her seated. ‘Another coffee?’
