by Joy Dettman
She can remember the long bus ride, and busy Spencer Street Station, and the tram that wasn’t quite a train. And she can remember the colour of the ocean, and the house where Mavis used to live when she was a girl. It was big, made of red brick, sort of cool, and quiet and posh behind its tall fence. She can remember the garden too, and the trees, and the magic green moss on the footpath and the stillness that swallowed her up as the heavy gate closed. Everyone stopped talking then because that gate had locked them into another world.
Lori must have been around six, the twins about five, and Mick seven; he was in the old pusher – due to his bad leg and not being able to walk far. He hated it too. And Mavis, she wasn’t so gigantic big then, and she’d been happy, laughing and mucking around, excited to be in Melbourne again and finally getting those twins back home where they belonged.
Aunty Eva refused to give them back. She said they were not at home, and she wouldn’t even open the security door and let everyone in to wait. Mavis said she was going for the police, and then Aunty Alice, who isn’t really an aunty, went driving off with the twins in the back seat of a posh white car.
Except for the photographs Henry used to bring home from Melbourne, that was the only time Lori saw those twins as real living boys. Alice had to get out of the car to open the gates and Mavis started running so Lori had run after her. Mavis couldn’t get the car door open but Lori saw those twins. They were identical, straight, dark auburn hair, big wide blue eyes and twin navy and white shirts. She had felt a sad pulling feeling in her stomach that day as the car had driven off, like there was a bit of elastic tied around her insides, sort of joining her to those brothers like it went right through that door, and as the car had driven further up the road, that elastic got pulled so tight, it hurt. But that elastic must have got broken, because down at the tourist centre today, she had been close enough for those twins to almost fall over her and she hadn’t even felt a tug.
She rolls onto her side, hears a mosquito, hopes it flies off to suck on one of the little ones. They’re asleep. They won’t feel the sting. Then it lands, right near her ear. She slaps it, squishes it, and her head starts thinking again of elastic. That’s probably what is wrong with Henry, like his life-force elastic got cut from his real people when he was only one year old so the elastic sprang back and got all curled up inside him, and it has been rolling around inside him ever since.
It’s pure awful when you come to think about it. It’s so awful it makes that hurting, pulling feeling in the pit of her stomach come back hard, like that elastic is stretching out, like it’s searching all the motels in Willama, looking for the end bits that broke off.
Or maybe it’s just a bellyache from Henry’s stew. Probably there was a poisonous bug on his silverbeet tonight.
The Birthday Party
Mavis is looking pleased with herself today. She fed Matty until he was tiptop, overflow full and now she’s helping Henry cook the birthday dinner, or sort of supervising and tasting, adding a bit of this, and a bit of that.
‘Henry, get me the ground ginger and crush me a bit of garlic,’ she says.
Garlic and ginger taste awful, except when Mavis uses them, then you can’t taste them, just their flavours. There was a time when she could make the most super fantastic stews and gravies and she still makes the best roast potatoes; she’s made a baking dish full up with her crispy roast potatoes today, and Lori counted them, counted them when they went into the oven and again when Henry turned them over, and there are enough for her to get two pieces. She hopes she’ll get two.
Mavis smells of baby powder and deodorant, due to Henry helped her have a shower after he finished stuffing the two chickens. The shower is over the bath and Mavis can’t step into it any more, so Henry bought her a shower spray thing he connects to the two taps, then he sits Mavis on a special stool with two short legs and two long ones which he stands half in and half out of the bath. Water goes everywhere so Henry and the floor get as wet as Mavis.
He helps her get dressed too. Today she’s wearing her best tent dress, light material, sort of pink and yellow and white swirls. It’s pretty. She looks pretty. Her hair has dried all high and fluffy and she’s wearing lipstick and blue eye shadow which makes her eyes look big and sad. Lori keeps stepping close to her as she passes, keeps walking around her so she can smell the sweet lost smell of Mummy.
The kitchen looks good too; everyone had to put their junk away and Martin mopped the floor and doused the room with air-freshener, then tucked the tartan blanket over Mavis’s couch. All the brothers are home, except Donny. He had to work. Even Greg is staying around the house; cooking like this only ever gets done on Christmas Day and he’s not going to miss those roasted chickens and potatoes.
Then a posh car is in the drive and Aunty Eva is getting out of the back seat and that rangy greyhound lady and a fussy little ferret man are getting out of the front. Lori watches from a distance. The little ones aren’t into watching from a distance, they are swarming around Henry’s feet, staring at the visitors, who look scared to move far from their car.
The twins don’t want to get out, and who’d blame them? Eva has got them dressed up like they are going to a funeral, and their faces look as if they’re going to a funeral too. They are staring at Henry’s house, sort of cringing back from it, rubbing against the car, probably scared stiff that house will fall down before the funeral is over.
Until one of them sees Lori leaning against her favourite verandah post. He whispers and they both stare at her, so she does to those twins what she does to the schoolkids when they whisper – gives them a look at her middle finger. It isn’t as if they are really her brothers, or they won’t be after today. They’ll just be posh cousins, and she doesn’t have to like cousins who get every single thing they ever want.
Henry likes them. He’s smiling and treating them like lost treasures dug up from Egypt, sort of touching their heads, patting their shoulders. Then he kisses them!
He doesn’t kiss anyone, not even Mavis, or not when anyone can see. Lori’s eyes narrow. She’s just discovered something and she doesn’t like what she’s discovered. She’s just found out exactly who Henry is singing about when he sings that ‘My Precious Son’ song in the potting shed. She’s going to hate that song now for ever and ever more. Like, whose sons does he think the rest of the brothers are – Spud Murphy’s?
After a bit of posh talking to Eva, Henry walks her around to the back door, which is safer than walking her through the front door, unless you know which of the verandah’s broken floorboards you have to dodge. Lori knows which ones to dodge; she races through the house, down the passage to the kitchen where she stands with Mavis, watching the visitors walk by the louvred windows.
The ferret with the bottle-top glasses is stepping close to Eva’s heels. He’s got a briefcase with him, and he’s hanging on to it tight and taking stupid prissy little steps like he’s about to enter a rabbit burrow, full of killer rabbits.
The greyhound lady, who is Aunty Alice, hasn’t got much hair left and what she’s got looks mangy. She’s old. She used to be Eva’s high school teacher and she was about thirty-five when Eva was sixteen – that’s what Mavis says. Her name is Miss Blunt, which is absolutely the wrong name for her, due to her nose and teeth are chisel sharp. She probably taught science, probably cut up frogs and rats and her nose got pinched extra long through wearing a peg on it when she had to cut up smelly things. And she probably sharpened her teeth every night with a file so she could bite the heads off dead rats then spit them at the students and that’s how her teeth got stained yellow – by rat juice. She’s dressed like a man, drill trousers, check shirt, but she’s sure making the front of that shirt stick out.
‘I see she brought her chauffeur,’ Mavis whispers, putting on a posh voice and smarmy expression. Lori giggles, pictures old Alice in a chauffeur’s uniform.
That’s what she’s supposed to be. She went to live in the bungalow behind Grandmother Hilda
’s house when Mavis’s father died, because she could drive the car and Grandmother and Eva couldn’t. That’s their story, though Mavis says something entirely different at night when she’s talking to Henry in the bedroom. She says heaps of things that Lori can’t quite work out – like about her father, who died of a stroke when Mavis was only twelve. She loved him, and she’s got a wedding photograph of him, with the bit showing her mother ripped off. If he hadn’t died of a stroke before Grandmother Hilda died of her heart, then Mavis might have got all the money instead of Eva.
Henry is such a well-mannered man usually, but he’s totally ignoring Alice, who looks as if she’s been blackmailed into coming here. She’s walking slow behind the ferret, lighting a cigarette, blowing twin streams of smoke and showing all of her snarling teeth. Lori shows her teeth to Mavis, snarls, and Mavis smiles, gives her a wink, then draws her away from the louvres because Eva and the ferret are coming inside.
‘You’d remember Mr Watts, our solicitor, darling?’
‘Not a face you’re likely to forget in a hurry, Eva,’ Mavis says. She’s more interested in the twins, sort of gives them a big smile. ‘Okay, which of you is which? And no trying to trick me.’ The twins take one look at her then shrink back behind Eva, so Mavis stops smiling and walks to the stove where she tastes the gravy, adds pepper, tastes it again, a big spoonful taste which doesn’t even smear her lipstick.
Alice has got rid of her cigarette. She comes in last. Mavis ignores her too. Henry is still fussing around his twins. They are not talking to him either and his face is starting to get that tight grey worried look. He gives up, takes the gravy spoon from Mavis’s hand while there is still some gravy left in the pan, then he checks on his roasting chickens.
The solicitor sits down, chooses a chair as far away from the stove as he can get. He doesn’t know it, but he’s got the chair next to Mavis’s. No one ever wants to sit on that chair because Mavis pinches your food, like when they have fish and chips, she eats half your chips – so does Vinnie. No one wants to sit next to him either.
The briefcase gets put on the floor, and Lori giggles, because it disappears under the table. Neil has got it and he’s trying to open it. The solicitor reclaims it, places it under his chair, guards it with his feet and keeps on talking about the weather and stuff. Henry knows Mr Watts; when he first married Eva, he used to do office work for him.
Mavis sits, so Eva sits on the other side of her solicitor. She’s smiling, trying to carry on as if she’s pleased to be here, like saying happy birthday, and saying what a tall girl Lorraine has grown into and how wonderful it is for them to be together again.
Alice coughs, sounds like one of Murphy’s dogs, and that’s what smoking does to your lungs; she’s going to do more of it, though, because she’s seen Mavis’s ashtray, a tall metal thing; it’s been emptied, wiped clean, so it’s gasping for a butt. Alice sits on the couch and doesn’t use all of it – doesn’t use much of it. God, she’s skinny. So is Eva, only Eva is fluffy skinny, like her dress is sort of gorgeous and she’s got almost shoulder-length blonde hair and make-up plastered like mortar on brick. She’s soaked herself in perfume too, which smells better than Vicks.
Everyone is dodging around the twins, who don’t know where to go. No one is telling them, so they stand near the couch, their heads swivelling on skinny necks. They are truly identical, not like the Morris twins at school, one fat, one skinny. These two are like the same person. If one stares at something, so does the other, as if their eyes are connected up to the same brain. They stare at Henry. They stare at Lori, stare at the sea of brothers. They frown at Matty, still sleeping in his pram beneath the louvres. They stare at Timmy. He’s standing beside the pram watching the interloper sleep. That pram belonged to him until two weeks ago.
Neil, who is the image of Mavis with his mop of frizzy red curls, gives up on getting that briefcase and goes after the twins. A while back he discovered he could wriggle his ears while poking out his tongue and crossing his eyes. It’s nothing personal, but he does it now, and the twins back away, in step. They even move together; they must only have one brain between the two of them.
Mavis gives Neil a toe in the backside and he dives under the table while Henry adds bean water to the gravy, adds a bit more then has to stir in more Gravox to thicken it again while Lori studies those twins.
‘Sit down, boys,’ Alice says. ‘You’re underfoot.’ Eva hasn’t spoken to them yet. ‘Sit,’ Alice repeats, and the twin heads swivel again, like where are they supposed to sit? They’re looking at the couch, at the chairs, then they back along the wall, to the open door and sit side by side on the floor, their backs against that door, making sure it doesn’t blow shut and lock them in. They are pretty much Lori’s size, except they look well fed. They’ve got round faces and their old-fashioned funeral pants are sort of tight around the tops of their legs. They sure look out of place in this kitchen.
Martin squats in front of them, and in one action four round knees get tucked beneath two round chins. ‘G’day,’ Martin says. ‘So who’s who?’ They don’t answer him. Maybe they can’t talk. ‘I reckon you’re Alan, the mollydooker, and you’re Eddy. Am I right?’ They cringe, don’t know what a ‘mollydooker’ is. He keeps it up for a while but he can’t get a word out of them.
Mavis is staring at them now. She’s eyeing Eva too, sort of like a cat eyeing a rat, sort of disdainful, like the cat isn’t hungry at the moment, thank you, but she’s got that rat right where she wants it.
And the rat knows it too, it’s getting flittery, jittery. Like Eva can’t sit still for a second. She’s fiddling with her hair, her sleeve, glancing at the twins, at Henry, who is getting more meat off those two roast chickens with his knife than Mavis could get off them with her teeth. She’s done the weather bit and now she forces her mouth fast into a fake smile and asks Henry when he learned to cook. She hasn’t tasted his cabbage yet or she wouldn’t ask. Then the smile gets sucked back fast into wrinkles and her cheeks look like one of Bert Matthews’s wormy apples that’s been off the tree too long. She looks at Mr Watts, at his briefcase. It’s probably got the adoption papers in it and maybe some money for Mavis. Eva gave her money before when she thought she might get the twins; that’s how Henry had enough to pay for getting the kitchen extended.
‘Are those two brain damaged?’ Mavis says.
Eva flinches, looks where Mavis is looking. ‘Very bright. Both exceptional students, darling. And your boys?’ No one mentions girl. No one sees girl.
From her chair at the head of the table Mavis has a good view of the room. She’s got her back to the louvres and she’s the closest to the back door, so she’s feeling any breeze that might stir. She’s eyeing the bread now and wanting a slice or six. Can’t do that today so she lights a cigarette instead. It’s a contagious disease, because Greg goes outside to have a stolen smoke and old Alice takes out her packet, lights up. Eva doesn’t like the smoke. She stands, walks to the pram where Matty is pig-grunting and getting ready to bawl again.
‘You dear little pet,’ she says. ‘He is gorgeous, Henry.’ He’s not gorgeous. He’s probably the fattest, ugliest, baldest baby in Willama. ‘What did you name him?’
‘We give them numbers up here,’ Mavis says. ‘He’s Number Twelve.’
Eva reaches out a finger to touch Matty’s fat little leg. He bawls. She steps back but he keeps on bawling.
‘I can smell him from here. Change his napkin, and put him on our bed,’ Mavis says. She’s talking to Martin but Eva flinches, moves back to her chair fast, looks at the hand that might actually have touched the shitty baby, looks at the sink, purses her lips, then takes a handkerchief from between her boobs – which are pretty much not there – pretends to wipe her nose, rubs the perfumed hanky across her palms while stretching her mouth and cheek wrinkles flat. She glances at Alice, her eyes talking a secret, silent language. They are like Greg’s eyes, pale blue and glinting greedy.
The twins haven’t moved;
they’ve got to be retarded. Or maybe Alice is a mad scientist who’s got a laboratory where she does lobotomies. Lori watches a lot of television and videos. Once Martin hired One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and by the time everyone got to see it it was nearly worn out, but by then Lori knew all about nuthouses and lobotomies and she was only about seven.
Mick walks in and Eva stares at his rubber leg in its metal contraption. Her mouth and cheeks screw into their puckered pout as she watches his throwing walk.
Then the twins stand. Together. Walk to her chair. Together. ‘How much longer do we have to stay here?’ one says, and the other one adds, ‘When are we going to the party?’ No wonder Henry wanted to kiss them. They talk like posh poms.
Eva aims a single kiss between the two clean heads. ‘Be good, darlings.’ She’s not real. She’s a television actress mother who always wears beautiful clothes and never gets them sweaty.
Lori is feeling sweaty. Mavis made her put on her best T-shirt, but underneath it she’s wearing a singlet that belongs to Neil. It’s skin tight and cutting into her armpits, but flattening those pink bumps. She’s standing in her favourite spot beside the fridge, looking down at those bumps and thinking maybe she should stick a pin in them and let the infection out. That’s what Greg does to his pimples, except for every one he squeezes, he gets two more.
Henry wipes sweat from his forehead with a tea towel as he counts plates, counts chairs. ‘Get the old stool from the verandah, boys, and the little chair from our bedroom, then set the table.’
It’s an extension table, metal legs and wood-coloured laminex on top. It’s long enough. Martin and Vinnie organise knives and forks while Henry scrapes saucepans, scraping out every bit to the mess of plates all lined up on the sink and bench, and when they are packed with vegetables and chicken, the boys pass them around the table.
Lori takes her position on the old stool, which is against the west wall. She likes to sit with her back to a wall. Vinnie hands her a plate of chicken scraps and cabbage, a mound of orange pumpkin, watery beans, watery gravy – and only one quarter of a roast potato!
