by Joy Dettman
‘You ought to go up to the hospital and see if your eye is all right,’ Mick says.
‘I’ll cut her bloody mad eating head off if I hang around here, Mick. I know I will. I’ll get the axe and cut her bloody head off.’
Greg is grabbing stuff, tossing it into the back seat and boot of Mrs Roddie’s little Datsun, which he’s backed up against the verandah. She always leaves that car on the street since she got her new fence and gates, due to she can’t be bothered opening her new gates. He’s got her keys too. Maybe she left them in her car, or maybe he pinched them from her house. She’s old and goes to bed with the chooks and it’s after midnight.
‘Move it, you fucking moron,’ Greg says, grabbing a pillow and blanket.
Vinnie finds a pair of worn-out sneakers, grabs his own pillow and blanket, his old school bag and he’s out, in the car. He’s going, and he’s not even old enough to leave school.
They drive east, Lori and Mick standing at the gate, watching until the tail-lights disappear into the dark. Gone off to someplace, just as far away from Mavis as Mrs Roddie’s old Datsun will take them.
Half of the beds are empty. The brick room is empty. Henry’s world is disintegrating.
D-i-s-i-n-t-e-g-r-a-t-i-n-g.
Lori takes the vegetable knife from her sock and puts it back in the cutlery drawer.
Ridiculous
Foggy mornings, misty days and the year just keeps on getting older, colder. The house is cold, school is cold, life is cold. It’s ridiculous.
Lori likes that word, uses it a lot. She tells Crank Tank she’s ridiculous. Tells Mick he’s ridiculous wanting to go to school, because Mavis has gone mad and the whole world has gone mad and he’s pretending it’s normal – like hiding condensed milk in the potting shed is normal, like it’s quite normal hiding the bread Martin buys in Nelly’s freezer.
And Alan, he’s ridiculous too; he’s spending half his life crying and saying it’s his fault about Henry. And how can Lori agree that it is? He’ll probably go out and hang himself too, or he’ll die of coughing; Willama germs are attacking him again so Lori can’t start attacking him. She gets him a Panadol, makes him gargle with salty water.
He’s given his germs to Matty already, and now he’s trying to share them with everyone else, like coughing them all over the school lunches Mick is trying to make with frozen-solid bread, which they should have got out of Nelly’s freezer last night but forgot to do.
That’s the trouble with kids trying to run a house; they don’t know how to do stuff, and they don’t understand that fixing one problem makes two more worse things happen. Like Jamesy, he let the half-starved chooks out of their pen so they could eat grass and rotten apples on the vacant block, but they preferred Henry’s garden, ate everything above the ground then they headed for the laundry and pecked holes in two big plastic bags of rice Henry had stored in there, which no one knew he’d stored there until they started treading in it when they tried to do some washing.
Rice doesn’t seem to agree with chooks. A few of them die from overeating it, but a few start laying eggs again. The kids find them in the laundry, on the east verandah, in the potting shed. Mavis uses them for her custard, when she’s got milk. She uses the kids’ condensed milk one night because she knew all the time where Henry used to hide it, so there is no condensed milk to put on the porridge and the kids don’t like it much even with milk; Mick’s porridge is either burned or half cooked.
He and Lori go together to get Mavis’s money from the bank now and they do the shopping together, and always buy heaps of porridge, not that anyone ever liked it much, but Mavis hates it. There is not much she hates, except baked beans and vegetables. They buy heaps of home brand baked beans. Anyway, after the condensed milk disappears from the shed, they have to start leaving it at Nelly’s place with the bread and margarine. Mavis calls them thieves. Maybe they are thieves. They feel like thieves, ridiculous ones, hauling stuff backwards and forwards over that road.
Lori gets the whip around her ears one night when she tells Mavis that she’s acting like a nutcase who should be locked up in a nuthouse. That whip hurts like hell and leaves a mark, like she’s been branded from her ear across to her nose, which is a good enough reason for not going to school. What’s the use, anyway? She’s an alien at that high school, wandering some lost planet, ten trillion miles from the sun.
Of course, then Mick can’t go to school either so they end up stuck in the house all day, and it stinks of Mavis and Matty, who is now sicking up every time he coughs. It’s Friday when he ends up in hospital. He’s really sick, and no one knows it until Lori carries him over to Nelly early in the morning when she is freezing cold but he is red-hot burning up and can’t breathe. Bert Matthews drives him and Nelly up to the hospital, which needs Henry’s Medicare card but no one can find it.
Martin comes to the fence that night; he still brings food and money on Fridays, and what’s the use of bloody Fridays? ‘Matty could have died,’ Lori says, accusing Martin for nicking off to rotten Karen and her posh house. ‘He’s got pneumonia and he could have died. And we can’t find the Medicare card and living like this is ridiculous.’
He comes back on Saturday and he’s got more food and two mobile phones, which he got on some cheap deal, two for the price of one. He gives one to Mick so he can get in touch if there’s an emergency.
‘Hide it,’ he says.
That’s another case of fixing one problem and making it double. Henry had the phone cut off when the pizza place started doing home deliveries. Henry knew what he was doing, because Mavis is like a dinosaur dog that knows there’s a brontosaurus bone buried someplace and she wants to party. She upends the house searching for that phone but she can’t find it – until Alan, silly, trusting, coughing Alan, gets the phone from inside a boot, from under a sock, from under Mick’s bed, and he gives it to her so she can ring the hospital and check on Matty.
She checks on Matty, then she checks if the pizza place still does home deliveries, then the phone goes into her pocket and no one is going to get it back. Which sort of proves that she’s not really nuts, just insane.
It starts in for real then. She rings a taxi to buy her a carton of cigarettes, and she always smokes more when she has a whole carton. She rings up the bank and asks about chequebook accounts. A man comes to bring her the forms. The kids have seen him before at the bank.
‘In your housebound situation it will be more convenient for paying the bills,’ he says.
Paying what bills? The rates haven’t been paid since before Henry died, and if Martin hadn’t paid the electricity, they wouldn’t have any lights.
Martin picks Matty up from the hospital a few days later, with his bottle of antibiotic medicine, so Mick tells him about the phone.
‘Shit. Shit, shit, shit, shit. What am I going to do, Mick? What can I bloody well do?’ He pushes Matty into Lori’s arms. ‘Keep him warm, Splint. Give him that eye-dropper full four times a day,’ he says and he walks back to his ute saying ‘shit’.
The postman delivers Mavis’s book of cheques, plus a bank card and a heap of other stuff in a black wallet. The letter says that the bank is delighted to open up its vault for their rich friend Mrs Mavis Smyth-Owen – not in those exact words, but that’s what they’ve done, because the Willama taxi drivers start making a fortune. Mavis is ringing them and talking to drivers at the front door every night; they are delivering stuff and driving away with her cheques.
Martin doesn’t come the next Friday so Mick asks Mavis if she could please write out a cheque for the supermarket so he can get some food. She won’t. She won’t even write a cheque for Henry’s woodman when he drops off a final load then comes to lean a while at the back door. Mavis owes him a heap of money, because for months he’s been taking pity on her. That’s what he says. And he says that he’s not into subsidising those who have got the money to waste on cigarettes, so until he gets paid what he’s owed, there won’t be any more wood delivered.
She tells him what he can do with his pity and his wood. It sounds splintery.
No baked beans left at Nelly’s, the porridge is all gone but there is plain flour and Jamesy finds two eggs in Henry’s potting shed. Mick makes pancakes and the kids eat them with tomato sauce, but by Saturday night the tomato sauce is gone and they’re sick of pancakes so they go out to the laundry and half fill a saucepan with rice, which has almost as many black bits in it as white. There were always mice in that laundry and now the rotten chooks have opened up holes in the bags and the bloody mice have got in.
Then it’s Sunday. They ring Martin on Nelly’s phone and find out why he didn’t come on Friday. He’s on his way home from Melbourne. He took Karen down to see a show and to buy her an engagement ring.
‘Put Nelly on,’ Martin says, and he sort of sighs.
Nelly talks for a long time, and it must be costing her a fortune to talk so long to a mobile phone, but later, when she hangs up, it probably costs her even more because she makes toasted sandwiches and packet soup and syrup dumplings, which they eat with ice-cream. Her food tastes so good and there is so much of it but Lori and Mick feel bad. They are beggars now. They are bludgers. Henry hated bludgers.
And that’s life. And the weather keeps getting colder and there’s not even any hot water because there’s no wood for the stove. Alan can’t live without hot water; he takes Matty’s pram over the road to the bush and picks up enough wet wood to get the fire going. Then it’s every day. It’s finding wood, it’s finding food, and it’s waiting for Mavis to use up all her cheques so she has to send Lori and Mick to the bank again.
Except that doesn’t happen. The stupid bank sends her a new chequebook before the old one is even finished.
Tuesday. Long way to Friday. Mavis is smoking, staring at the television and her green tent is filthy. She doesn’t see Mick when he limps into the kitchen, tries to rub the frown lines from his brow, tries to rub the ache from his back.
‘We need money for food,’ he says, waits, his good foot on the floor, one hip high, the other low. He’s grown so tall. If he doesn’t get a new brace soon, his hip and back bones are going to grow so crooked he won’t be able to walk at all. He moves, blocks her view of the television.
‘Get out of my way, you twisted bloody little thief,’ she says, and she stuffs two mints in her mouth, moves her head so she can see around him.
He moves too. He’s going to make her look at him. ‘You’re the thief,’ he says. ‘You’re getting money from the government so you can look after your children and you’re not looking after them. How much money do you think you’ll get when they put us all in homes?’
He turns to walk away, and Mavis puts out a foot and trips him. Oh sure, she tries to grab his arm when he starts to fall, but it’s too late for that. Mick’s got no balance, he never did have any balance and she knows it. Everybody knows it and that’s why no one is allowed to thump him. His braced leg goes one way and he goes the other, goes down hard. There is a sort of non-Mick-like moan, a sort of surprised turn of his head and then he’s flat out on his stomach and he’s not moving.
Jamesy picks up the broom. It’s not much good for sweeping, most of its hair is gone, but it’s good enough for what he wants it for. He’s smiling and belting at Mavis with it, belting at her shoulders and trying to get her head, belting her fat thighs while Alan runs for Nelly.
She calls the ambulance then comes running into the kitchen, finds Mick sort of fainted, still on the floor, finds Jamesy with his weapon and he’s not retreating, finds Mavis, standing back, wild eyed and staring at the floor where Lori is kneeling, trying to put Mick’s braced leg back in a straight position and he isn’t helping; he’s ghost white and floppy, his eyes sort of opening, then closing again. Nelly tries to wake him up with a wet tea towel, and when she can’t, she tries to lift him, but it’s like he’s dead.
Lori just holds him, both arms around him. She’s heart-jumping, head-crawling, sick scared. This is Mick. This is pure good person lovable Mick who never hurt anyone in his whole life. This is Mick and he’s hurt bad.
The little ones are howling, Matty is coughing and howling. Nelly ignores them, turns on Mavis and goes at her like a sardine with a dirty mouth attacking a humpback whale. She’s still going at it when the ambulance men walk into the shambles of Henry’s kitchen.
They get Mick’s brace off, get him on a stretcher, start asking questions.
Mick fell over. Mavis didn’t see it. His boot must have slipped.
Nelly is saying something different and peppering what she’s saying in her usual way.
Nelly is a lying, troublemaking old bitch, Mavis says. Always has been.
The ambulance men don’t know who to believe, due to what Nelly is yelling sounds like she might be a pure troublemaking old bitch. The men look from one to the other, look at Lori.
She has to sleep in this house tonight. Where will she sleep if she tells that Mavis tripped Mick? Where will the little ones sleep?
The ambulance men will call the cops and the cops will take the kids away and put them in homes so Mavis doesn’t abuse them. That’s what police do on television. Lori has seen too much television, read too many newspapers, stood outside too many doors. And she’s heard Martin and Nelly talking about kids’ homes. If she dobs now, that’s it, so she stands, her back against the door, stands dumb, stands shaking her head.
Jamesy is staring at her. Alan is coughing and staring at her. The little kids are crying and staring at her as the ambulance men take Mick away.
One by one they have left her. It started at Christmas with Henry. One by one until all of the big ones are gone. Now Lori is the biggest; she’s twelve and three months and all the kids are staring at her as if she’s really the biggest.
Big happened too fast. She’s not big enough.
Her ears are ringing and her head feels as if someone put a bike pump in her ear and blew her head up so it’s twice its size. She’s hot and she’s cold and a thousand thoughts are darting backwards and forwards between her ringing ears and she can’t make one darting thought join up with the next. She’s got to ride up to the hospital. Stay with Mick. Can’t leave the little ones. Should have said something. Should have told on Mavis.
Henry! Henry! Henry!
Matty is crying, pulling himself up on her jeans, reaching his little arms up. She looks at him, lifts him, walks outside with him.
Henry!
Late. Winter, after five o’clock late. Cold. Ice coming up from the cold earth. Smell of winter’s wind cold. Too cold for Matty, but she’s walking off to the river with him on her back, his little hands choking her, his little bum wetting her. She’s walking, head down, not seeing, not feeling, not thinking.
Alan and the other kids follow her, so she turns up another track, runs from them, but you can’t be Cathy Freeman when you’re wearing a Matty backpack. The kids keep running after her, all the way to the bridge.
Someone must have been fishing up there because a European carp has been tossed up on the bank. They’re like pest fish, those carp, no good for anything except messing up the river. It’s a big one, though. Lori stands, watching it flap, gasp for air, try not to die. A lot of carp get tossed on the bank and Henry used to say it was cruel to let them flap themselves to death. She always kicks them back in the water; the poor things want to live so much.
Not Henry. He wanted to die, so let it die. Mick’s going to die, so let everything die. Who cares?
Alan is coughing and looking at the fish. ‘Henry said they’re no good to eat. Are they poison?’
She slides Matty to the ground and stares at that fish. It’s coughing too, or trying to suck in air to live.
‘They’re not poison,’ Jamesy says. ‘Some people eat them.’ He picks up a stick, moves the fish further away from the water.
Maybe the time comes when there is no such thing as Henry, no such thing as Henry’s more. There is just less, and less, and less until there is nothing.
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Lori watches the fish grow weaker. She’s going to stand there and watch it die, just to see how long it takes for it to give up, for it to just lie still and be nothing.
Jamesy is looking at her. ‘They’re not poisonous, Lori.’
No air to reply. She stands looking that fish in the eye, wanting it to stop gasping.
Jamesy goes running off through the trees, but he’s back in minutes and he’s got Henry’s big stew saucepan, one of Mavis’s lighters, the sharp vegetable knife, an onion, some silverbeet that’s gone to seed and an empty condensed milk tin full of rice that is half mouse dung.
The fish has stopped its gasping but Jamesy finishes it off while Alan pours the rice into the saucepan and picks out the black bits. Jamesy hacks the fish’s head off, guts it, pulls its skin off then hacks it to bits, hacks at the bones while Alan builds a fire, burns his fingers with Mavis’s lighter. Lori is not saying a word, just watches Jamesy drop his hunks of fish on top of the rice, watches him cover the mess with silverbeet leaves and hunks of onion, pour in a condensed milk tin of water and put the saucepan on the fire, which is more smoke than flame. She’s standing, trying to be dead, until the mess starts to warm up and it stinks worse than stiff dead socks.
‘You can’t eat that, you morons. It will kill you.’
‘They’re not poison. It will be fish stew.’
The stink is like . . . like something terrible. ‘You can’t eat it, I said.’ She puts Matty on her back and walks away from the stink, leaves them stirring it.
No one eats the stewed fish. Maybe the birds will. It gets poured onto the mud.
‘We should have roasted it in mud,’ Alan coughs. ‘It looked like proper fish.’ He coughs, sounds as if he’s trying to cough his heart out through his diseased tonsils.
‘If we had some oil we could have fried it,’ Jamesy says.
‘I don’t like that stinky rice,’ Neil says. ‘I only like Vinnie’s rice with milk.’
