by Joy Dettman
Then school is due to start again and Vinnie is not going to go and that’s that. He say this to Martin and Donny when they come around on the Saturday with a few books and pens and stuff – and a ridiculous high school dress and new shoes for Lori. They buy a pile of stuff to make the school lunches too. Except Mavis eats most of it, so after that the boys keep what they buy at the flat, and on school mornings Donny brings the lunches around before he goes to work. He always did make the best sandwiches, like meat and salad and even mayonnaise.
Lori’s school uniform is ridiculous; the skirt keeps trying to get caught in the bike chain. She hates dresses. Hates the leather shoes that burn her feet. Hates high school worse than she hated sixth grade. Now there are a dozen teachers to hate her instead of just one. It’s like she’s in some crazy nightmare and she can’t wake up. She hasn’t got the right school books, the ones she has got were Mick’s and Vinnie’s and probably Greg’s, and they are past their use-by date. She’s always in trouble for not having the new edition, and she’s lost all the time because she has to change rooms all day. Can’t concentrate on anything. Can’t keep her mind in the classroom even when she finds the right one. Keeps looking out the window, wanting the day to be over so she can go to the cemetery, which is not far from the high school.
Mick hates going there; he tells her it’s no use going there every day, but he can’t fight for what he wants so he sits on the back of her bike and goes where she takes him, then he waits with her bike, his face pale, his freckles looking like coffee granules scattered over pale paper.
‘It’s no use, Lori,’ he says.
Nothing is any use, is it? Even the flowers. One day she brings Henry one of his own flowers from the potting shed, a beautiful orange thing, almost as big as a saucer, but it gets crushed in her school bag and it’s nearly dead by the time school is over. She still waters his pots most nights, and Alan still waters them but they don’t do it together.
Lori can’t stand being anywhere near Alan. Like, if he hadn’t said, ‘Pass the salt, Dad,’ then Mavis and Greg wouldn’t have started laughing and Martin wouldn’t have –
A c-a-t-a-s-t-r-o-p-h-i-c chain got started by that effing word and it killed Henry, and if Lori goes anywhere near Alan, then she’s going to scream that at him, so she’s staying away from him. And Mavis too. She was old enough to know better. And mongrel Greg too, who is always looking at Lori with his druggie eyes, like looking at her stupid boobs in their stupid bra that make them even more obvious because they are getting more obvious. She looks like an effing girl in that effing dress.
She’s got Henry’s smallest vegetable knife, though. She takes it to bed with her, puts it under her pillow. She’ll get Greg if he comes near her. She’ll cut his eyes out, cut something off so he won’t go looking for any girls. Ever. She takes that knife with her when she goes to the river, just in case he follows her. It’s not a big knife. The handle is wood and it fits down the inside of her shoe and the blade stays hidden beneath her sock, but it means she can’t go barefoot any more.
The pension gets paid into the bank each fortnight, so if they run out then they know exactly when there will be more coming. Mavis signs withdrawal forms which Greg takes to the bank and they give him the money, like they used to give her child allowance money to Henry, except Greg keeps some of it. Mavis doesn’t care. Actually, she doesn’t seem to care about anything. Like, she always used to nag the kids about going near the busy road up at the corner, and now she sends little Neil to the milk bar for chocolate and bags of lollies and even cigarettes, and he has to cross over that road. Mick and Vinnie tell him not to go or he’ll get run over, but Neil likes going because he always gets his own bag of lollies. Mavis is going to turn him into another Greg if she’s not careful.
Anyway, because of Vinnie not going to school, the people start coming after Mavis again, official people in posh cars, who sort of high-step over the mess. A counselling lady from some church or something comes to talk to Mavis about bereavement and the normal cycle of grief and she arranges for another lady to come one day a week to help clean the house, just until Mavis is able to cope with her situation. That cleaning lady, who is almost twice as old as Mavis, takes one look at the kitchen, which is the best room, and decides to retire, leave Willama, maybe leave Australia even.
The whole house is starting to look like a dog’s sicked-up breakfast, and who cares? Not Lori, she’s never there except to sleep. Due to having to stay away from Alan and Mavis and Greg, it’s easier if she stays away from everyone, pretends she can’t see or hear them if they talk to her, like she’s dead, except she’s one of the bike-riding, walking dead, a modern-day zombie.
She starts doing it with the teachers, and when Crank Tank, who is her English and her social science teacher, asks her why she still hasn’t got the right book, Lori just looks straight through her. And when she gets sent to the vice principal, she looks through her too, then instead of going to her next class, she goes to the cemetery and comes back later to dink Mick home.
There is a new lady with Mavis and her counsellor today. She’s a dietitian and she’s going to get Mavis on a diet. Mavis is doing her glandular thing, as if she thinks people can’t see the lolly papers on the floor and the block of chocolate in her tent pocket with her Minties – as if she thinks she’s fooling anyone.
Maybe she is. Those ladies sit at the table working out a diet plan full of fruit and celery and carrots, the stuff Mavis calls rabbit food, and Mavis nods, looks at the clock, nods, walks them to the door, watches them leave in two cars, then she’s off, walking up to the hotel for a counter meal or two. She goes there a lot since she got the pension.
Martin and Donny are still bringing food around, but it’s not fair that they have to pay for it seeing as Mavis is now filthy rich. That’s what Martin says. He can’t get anywhere near inside the house, but he stands at the back door, trying to talk sense.
‘For Christ’s sake, will you let us help you, Mavis? Let us cook the kids a decent meal and clean this bloody house up for you. You can smell it from halfway up the street. And Vinnie has to go to school. And you’ve got to keep those two little kids off the bloody street. One of them is going to get run over.’
Mavis does the usual, tells them to get out, but she eats their food, eats Weet-Bix and keeps on eating them until the milk is all gone. She roasts their potatoes at midnight and Lori can smell them roasting in her dreams, in which Henry is cooking them. Then the dream turns into a terrible nightmare because he’s not in the kitchen, he’s in that hole and he’s turned all green and she’s in there with him. She wakes up screaming, and she’s out of bed, and she’s never going to sleep again in case that dream comes back.
She creeps out to Mavis, needing to cry so bad her whole body is shaking with it, needing to hold on to someone who is warm and alive. And she tries, creeps close, touches Mavis’s arm.
‘Get back to your bed and get out of my bloody sight,’ Mavis says.
Lori gets out of everyone’s sight, gets out of her own sight. She rides down to the river and she stays there. She’s sitting on the clay bank when the sun comes back to Australia and she’s still sitting there when it starts packing its bags for England. She’s just sitting there, watching the grey water flow.
Alan finds her. She’s not going to talk to him, never, ever again. He howls and runs off, and a bit later Nelly comes walking down that track, catches Lori playing with her vegetable knife, sees her hide it beneath her sock. She sits down on the dirt like she’s a kid, doesn’t mention the knife.
Lori stares at the grey water, letting the sun-flecked ripples blind her eyes and silence the world – but nothing can silence Nelly. She doesn’t care if she’s talking to a zombie, she keeps doing it, keeps sitting there until the sun gets so low it starts painting the tops of the trees red. She’s saying anything that comes into her head, like it doesn’t matter if Lori is listening or not. She’s saying stuff about how the world is full of grief an
d always has been. She’s saying that in the olden days, people talked it out, talked to the butcher, and the grocer, the postman, and their neighbours, so they didn’t need grief counsellors filling their heads with airy-fairy shit that screws them up worse than ever. Then she starts talking about Henry’s singing, and how she always used to go out and weed her garden when he was singing in the shed, just so she could listen to his song.
She says she knows that Lori loved Henry, knows how much she’s missing him. ‘But like it or not, he’s gone, Smithy, and he’s not coming back. All the kids are missing him and they are getting worried about you. You’ve got to eat to live, and you need to walk past twice to cast a shadow these days. You’re going to end up getting sick.’
She just talks and talks until the sun is gone and the mosquitoes start biting, and the European carp are plopping around in the river. Lori hits a mosquito, feels the satisfying wet squash, grinds it into her shoulder, and zombies probably don’t feel mosquitoes biting, and zombies probably don’t feel so full up with raging anger that they want to scream sixteen F words at Nelly, one after the other after the other.
‘You’re breaking young Alan’s heart, Smithy, and you’re not being fair to any of those boys. They’ve got to deal with losing their dad – ’
‘Don’t you say that fucking word to me,’ Lori yells. It makes Nelly flinch, like maybe a snake bit her. She shuts up for a second.
It sort of makes Lori flinch too, but inside. She’s never said that F word, not out loud, but it sort of felt like it came out by itself, like it was the only word strong enough to let out some of the chewed-up hurting that’s eating her insides. Anyway, who cares? Nothing is the same as it was before. The whole world has changed and that F word is coiled up ready on her tongue and waiting its chance to strike again. ‘No fucking thing in this whole fucking world is fucking rotten fucking fair, Nelly.’
‘Too true, Smithy. It’s a fucked-up unfair fuck of a world, and once we learn that then we’re halfway to growing up.’ She pats Lori’s shoulder, leaves her arm sort of loose around her shoulder for a long time, then she gets up and walks off home. Lori sits on, saying F words to the stars, and the moon, to the river of water rustling by, to the mosquitoes she murders, until Mick comes limping down the track.
‘Full moon,’ he says, standing there on his good leg. It’s a hard walk for him even when he can see where he’s walking, and it’s a harder walk back due to the rise. He needs a new brace. Mavis has received letters about it, which she’s got no interest in, like she’s got no interest in the bill letters with the windows.
‘Why did you walk all the way down here for?’
‘I felt like it,’ Mick says.
‘You did not. You can hardly walk with that stupid fucking thing. You’re just checking up on me, that’s all. Nelly told you where I was and you thought I was going to drown my fucking self, didn’t you?’
‘Alan couldn’t drown you that night. Good swimmers can’t drown, and stop saying that. You sound stupid.’
‘Get on my fucking bike,’ she says and she dinks him home.
Home? That’s a fucking joke.
Leaving Home
Mavis doesn’t go to bed at night. She makes custards and pancakes while the television goes on and on, then when the kids get up and start whingeing for breakfast, she goes to bed to get away from them. Vinnie looks after the little ones during the day, mostly.
Not on Thursday. Lori and Mick ride around the corner into Dawson Street and see Timmy and Neil being hunted home by Bert Matthews, who is holding bawling Matty under the armpits, holding him at arm’s length due to he smells. Lori tries to take him, but Bert doesn’t want to give him up. Anyway, what happens next isn’t good; Mavis has to get out of bed to take delivery of Matty at the front door.
He hasn’t got any clean nappies. Lori finds a cot sheet and Mavis is trying to pin it on but Matty won’t lie still. His poor little bum is red raw from crawling around in that shitty nappy all day and he’s only a baby, and the safety pin Mavis is trying to use isn’t big enough. She’s yelling, maybe embarrassed about Bert Matthews bringing him home, or maybe because of the terrible smell, then she starts slapping into his poor little sore bum, just holding one of his legs up and slapping so hard, like she’s loving it.
She’s always looked like a monster. Well, she’s turning into one now. That’s what she’s doing.
‘You leave him alone.’ Lori snatches Matty’s top half, slides him across the table. ‘You leave him alone. It’s not his fault that Henry’s dead.’ Mavis throws the cot sheet at her, and the pin, then she goes back to bed.
It’s Matty who makes Lori stay around that rotten house, not Mick or Alan. It’s poor little bawling Matty, who is still bald and still can’t walk. He traps her. She takes him over to Nelly’s and borrows some antiseptic cream, uses half the tube on his poor sore bum, then she sends Jamesy to the supermarket to get Donny to buy a big pack of cheap disposable nappies and some cream for a sore bum.
Jamesy is such a weird sort of kid; he’s lost Henry too but he’s never said one word about it. He always spent a lot of his life sitting on Nelly’s fence, and that’s where he’s living these days, when he’s not at school. He just sits there quiet and smiling his twisted grin, watching the house over the road, like he’s waiting for it to fall down.
And it’s falling. It’s falling. It’s caving in fast. Someone has dropped a bomb on their little country. No proper meals at night, no clean clothes for school, no clean beds to sleep in, unless Martin and Donny take the washing to the laundrette. Everything that was isn’t any more.
Donny gives up first. He’s got himself a job at a supermarket in Albury. ‘I’m sorry, kids. I’m sorry,’ he’s saying. They’re all standing at the front fence, except Greg, except Martin. ‘I can’t do anything, can’t watch this any more and not be able to do anything. It’s killing me. No one can do anything with her, and it’s killing me, and killing Martin too. I’m sorry.’ He gives Mick some money then he turns and walks away. Lori knows he’s howling. He’s hardly stopped howling since Henry died.
Martin goes a month later. Everyone has known for ages that he wanted to move in with Karen. It’s like getting that flat was a halfway station and now he’s moving on, thinner, weaker since Henry died. Smaller, pale, he never smiles.
‘Don’t go leaving yet. She’ll come out of it after a bit. She always comes out of her mad moods after a bit,’ Vinnie says.
‘I can’t afford to keep paying the rent and paying her bills too. I can’t do it. And if me and Donny aren’t around, then the welfare might have to step in and do something with her. I can’t, kids. She’s off the planet.’ He takes the electricity bill so he can pay it before he goes. The electricity people are threatening to cut off the power. Martin doesn’t know about the woodman’s bill because he just knocks at the door and asks for his money.
It’s about two weeks later when the cops come knocking on the door. They’ve got Greg with them because he got caught in a stolen car. The lady cop wants to speak to his mother, who has walked up to the hotel. Vinnie tells the cop where to find her, and Mavis comes panting home, not worrying about Greg’s stolen car, just looking for some lollies she hid on top of the cupboard over the sink. Vinnie ate them. He’s the only one tall enough to see up there. She goes crazy, like they are the last lollies left in the world and she’s got to have them.
‘Give me some money and I’ll get you some more,’ Vinnie says. She doesn’t want other lollies, she wants the ones he ate and she’s going to claw them out of him. She gets a grip on his face and she rakes it with her nails, from his brow to his cheek.
‘I should have scratched your eyes out instead of combing your bloody hair, you bastard,’ she screams.
‘You’ve gone crackers. You never combed my hair in your life. You were too busy combing little Greggie’s hair. You’ve gone around the twist, Mavis.’ He’s backing off, though, fending her off. He gets out to the front verandah but
she’s still after him, screaming crazy stuff about redheaded bastards, like she pure hates his guts.
Spud Murphy is out at his gate, watching, listening. Bert Matthews is watering his nature strip. Nelly is weeding her lawn.
Poor Henry. He would have hated this. Proud Henry.
Not too proud to hang himself, to let all the neighbours and his kids see him hanging there. Not too proud for that.
‘Where am I supposed to go?’ Vinnie yells, one hand holding his eye in – probably.
‘Get out of my sight, you perverted bastard, before I scratch the other one out.’
Night comes before Vinnie creeps inside, his face white except for her claw marks and his eye. Mick lifts the closed eyelid and what is behind it looks like a blob of blood. She’s probably cut his eye with her beautiful long fingernails. He’ll probably go blind in that eye.
The little kids are in bed, Mavis is staring at the television, Mick is leaning against the bedroom door, pale and silent. ‘She’ll forget about it in the morning,’ he says.
‘She won’t bloody be here to forget about it. She’ll be dead in the morning. They mightn’t be able to do anything with her, but I will,’ Vinnie says, still holding his eye in. ‘I’ll do her. Knock her bloody crazy head off, Mick. That will cure her.’
Then Greg comes to the door, stands behind Mick. He’s supposed to go to court in a couple of weeks and Mavis is supposed to go with him, which she won’t be able to do unless she hires a furniture van and a forklift to get her into it. ‘Want to fuck off out of this shit hole,’ he says. ‘I got a car but it needs fucking petrol.’
Vinnie looks at him. ‘The bank’s shut.’
‘Won’t be tomorrow, moron.’ They are talking another language. They are talking about something the kids don’t understand. ‘We got enough in it to get over the border.’
‘I’m coming.’ Vinnie is hurting, he’s shaking and he can’t find his other boot to leave home in. It’s probably under one of the beds, but he’s gone way past the stage of thinking straight as well as seeing straight.
