by Joy Dettman
Martin glances at Mavis. No one can cart that tonnage around and expect to live. He’s thinking, when she’s gone, Alan might be more than pleased to go back to Eva. What’s the alternative? They’re only kids. If Donny would come home, then between them they might be able to keep this place together, but Donny isn’t coming back.
The house is a shambles. Lori has done a good job of feeding the hordes, but the house – there’s junk from arsehole to breakfast time and it smells bad. Matty is still a baby, Timmy’s not much more.
Karen says she never wants to have kids. Maybe that’s why he fell in love with her, and there is no way that she’s going to consider having any of these kids living with them when they get married.
She’s the greatest thing that ever happened to him. No one has heard of Mavis Smyth-Owen in Bungala, and since he moved there, he’s been calling himself Martin Smyth; now he’s changing his name by deed poll because he doesn’t want to saddle Karen with the Smyth-Owen name. He’s not proud of that name, not proud of his roots, and he sure as hell hasn’t told her the BIG family secret. That’s one of the reasons he’s never brought her home – her old man would throw a fit if he ever found out about Henry’s touch of the tar brush.
‘Christ,’ he sighs and he sits down. Eddy has claimed the chair that used to be Mavis’s. He looks like being a handful and Lori doesn’t need the trouble. ‘How long do you reckon on staying?’ Martin asks.
‘When’s the next bus out?’ Eddy replies, reaching across the table, helping himself to two biscuits. He doesn’t know about Lori’s food rationing. She snatches the packet, deals out the remaining biscuits like dealing cards.
Mavis has got her own packet on her tray, chocolate coated mint slices, and Eddy’s favourites. He grabs two before she scoffs the lot.
‘Give them back,’ Lori warns as Mavis tries to get a foot under her. And the sheet falls from her lap.
Eddy starts laughing while the rest of the kids scatter. He’s laughing, choking on biscuit crumbs, his eyes running. Like, what the hell is going on here?
Then Mavis screams. It’s crippled animal screaming, wild bear caught in a trap screaming. She’s screaming at Martin, at Eddy, blaming the world because it’s the world that built her that trap.
‘Oh, fucking great shit. This is unreal,’ Eddy says. He’s stopped laughing, though, and home is looking very good. Old Alice is even looking good. He walks slow to the brown curtain, crunching on biscuit, walks through, finds his way out, the animal scream following him.
Most of the kids are grouped under the streetlight, except for Alan; he’s heading for the river. That’s what he’s missed, that’s what he wants and that’s what he’s going to have, and tonight. It’s not the Thames he’s never seen but was expected to lie about seeing, it’s not even the muddy old Yarra, it’s his and Lori’s river.
Eddy looks at the crowd beneath the streetlight. They don’t want anything to do with him, and if they don’t want him then he sure as hell doesn’t need them, but he’s stuck here for the moment, so he takes off, runs after Alan, catches him up.
Jamesy leaves the group beneath the light and he follows the twins, Neil follows him, so Lori chases Neil. Mick starts walking, which is better than listening to Mavis. She’s bawling now, and it’s worse than her screaming. Martin waits a while, watches a while. He’s got Matty on his shoulders, Timmy at his knee.
‘Where the hell do you think you’re all going?’ he yells to the herd, strung out like Brown’s cows along a moonlit path.
‘Swimming,’ Jamesy yells back. He’s caught up to Alan and Eddy, and Alan reckons he’s going for a swim.
Martin crosses over the road and Matty wriggles down; as soon as his feet hit the dirt, he’s off, after Lori. ‘Get back here,’ Martin yells. ‘All of you. It’s too late.’
‘Too late for what?’
‘Oh, shit.’ Martin follows them down the track and they all go swimming, in the moonlight, in the clothes they are wearing. Alan duck-dives deep, testing his brand-new underwater watch. Then Eddy tries to outdo Alan and he gets carried downstream because he’s only used to swimming pools and the beach, doesn’t know about currents. He panics, yells, tries to turn around and swim back. Alan and Martin go in after him, and Martin is a speedboat cutting though the water. He saves him, pulls him ashore two hundred metres downstream.
Those waiting at the bend hear Martin’s laughter. Maybe he’s only laughing with relief, but it’s so good to hear that sound again. It’s ages since they’ve heard that sound.
They sit on the bank later, watching the moon float across an ocean of stars and they slap mosquitoes while Alan tells everyone the story of the night he almost drowned Lori. It wasn’t funny that night but it is a bit funny now. Also, it makes Eddy feel less like the smartarsed fool he is. He could have drowned.
Their laughter starts small but it grows until they are choking with it. It’s forever since they laughed together; even the sound of it sounds funny, so they laugh at each other’s laughter and every time they gain control, someone starts it up again by saying something crazy, something that’s not even funny. It just seems funny. It’s mad, and it’s fun and they haven’t felt this good since Henry died.
Then Eddy starts with his posh ‘shiiiiit’ again. He’s looking in his wallet, which was in his pocket, which had his return ticket in it. It’s wet. And the wallet is full of money!
‘Where did he get that?’
‘Eva gives it to him. He just tells her he needs a new CD or something and she gives him a fifty – then gives me one so it’s fair.’
‘Have you got that much too?’ Lori says.
‘No, he’s got all of it. Just as well it’s only Eva’s money, or it would have been mush too,’ Alan says. It isn’t funny, all money is plastic, but it is funny too – or the dry way Alan says it makes it funny, like it’s got extra plastic on it because it’s Eva’s. Anyway, funny or not, they all start laughing again, all take a note or two and wave them in the air to shake the water off.
Eddy is laughing with them now and Lori looks at him, thinks she might get to . . . to almost half tolerate him. He’s the one who brought the laughter home.
‘I feel like a hamburger,’ Eddy says, his notes reclaimed, his return ticket tossed.
‘You look like one too,’ Jamesy says.
That joke was old when Elvis Presley was a boy, but they’re rolling in the sand with laughter, holding their stomachs and trying to slap mosquitoes. The noise is wild. Tourists camping over the river probably think there is some drug orgy going on.
‘Where do you buy a hamburger in Sticksville? Have they heard of hamburgers yet in Sticksville?’
Jamesy wants a hamburger. He’s never had a proper one from the takeaway, only McDonald’s. ‘They make better hamburgers here than they do in the city, Twitpill.’
‘Prove it, Sticksville.’
‘Put your money where your big mouth is, Twitpill.’
They can’t go home, don’t want to go home where their laughter will die stone dead, so they walk back up the track to the road, and they follow it south, their clothes drying in the night’s oven-heat. They go over the railway line and straight up the road to the takeaway where Eddy shouts hamburgers, with onions, egg and lettuce, and real meat. He pays with a clean-washed fifty dollar note.
The little ones are falling asleep on their feet. Lori lifts Matty onto her back. He goes to sleep, his head on her shoulder, his hamburger in her hair. Martin puts Timmy on his shoulders, Alan holds Neil’s hand and they walk the deserted main street, drunk on food and laughter.
It’s half past twelve when they get home. Mavis is snoring on the couch and Alan’s new watch is truly water- and shockproof.
12:30 it blinks.
Brother Stranger
Alan has come back to them in duplicate and his other half has turned into a walking, talking madman with no return ticket. He’s like Spud Murphy’s dogs, chained up all their lives, but God help the neighbourhood when
they get off the chain.
Eddy is off the leash now and there has to be some place for all the years of chained-up energy to go. He’s at it day and night. He’s their brother-stranger, but that coiled-up life-force elastic is shooting out of him and it’s roping them in, one by one, and the weird thing about it is they don’t know why – except that he’s a posh-talking, big-mouthed maniac with no conscience, and all the kids seem to do these days is laugh.
Like he rings Eva from the post office and tells her that Mavis said she’d buy their ticket home next Friday. ‘Good news to report, Mum. She’s decided not to keep us after all, so just relax and let Alice enjoy the break.’ He says that last bit for Alice’s benefit, because he can hear her teeth gnashing on the other end of the line. He’s talking posh to Eva while showing his own teeth, his lips sort of snarling like a mangy greyhound. Lori gets the giggles again, has to cover her mouth and run.
They go to the main supermarket after the phone call and Eddy buys four packets of choc-mint biscuits which he presents to Mavis instead of putting them in the tin trunk.
‘Sorry we got off on the wrong foot last night,’ he says. ‘Call it jet lag, Mave.’
She calls it a few other things, calls him a few other things too, but accepts his biscuits. He finds the bald broom and starts sweeping the floor, sweeps around Mavis like he’s not even scared of her. He gets on his knees, sweeps under her couch, shooting out butts and lolly papers which have been there since Henry died. He empties her ashtray into the stove, feeds the flames with lolly papers, feeds them with a stiff dead sock too, and a pair of holey underdaks and anything else he finds on the kitchen floor.
That stove is like a new toy to him. He’s never seen a wood stove before, never seen a kettle, never seen an axe before, never chopped wood before and he hasn’t got a clue how to do it either, but he’s a good cleaner. He even cleans the bathroom, pretending he is Eva’s cleaning lady, who can hardly speak a word of English.
‘You have a . . . a da whoosh, whoosh, whoosh . . . for bath? Yes?’ His accent is perfect, his miming of a scrubbing brush a scream. Lori finds Henry’s scrubbing brush in the laundry and Eddy uses it on the bath, because he’s not having a shower in that bath just to come out of it with legionnaire’s disease. That’s what he says, with an accent. ‘Is germ. Yes. Is everywhere germ. Is nottink but germ in diss pigpen. I getting a vera bed disease from all diss germ. Yes. What you thinkink, ah?’
It’s not like the same room when he’s finished with his scrubbing brush; everyone had forgotten that the bath and basin were white.
The next day it’s not only odd stiff socks that disappear, it’s most of the socks and the little kids’ sneakers too. They get tossed into the green bin and Eddy comes home from the shops with an assortment of cheap sandals. While he was cleaning the bathroom he found Henry’s bottle of Condy’s crystals in the shaving cabinet. He mixes the stuff up in a bucket of water and makes all the little kids stand in it for five minutes. They think it’s a game, and they come out of that bucket with brown feet and orange toenails. They don’t care. They’ve got new sandals. Those little kids would damn near sell their souls for something that smells new.
Alan knows what Eddy is doing, and why he’s doing it, because Alice did the same delousing routine to his own stinking feet when he first went back to St Kilda. ‘She tossed everything I took back. Even my books went in the bin. The orange wears off after a while,’ he says. ‘It’s some sort of chemical that kills foot bacteria, or something.’
Lori’s eyes widen. She stares at Eddy and his purple water, then she claims it, and claims the Condy’s crystals. For the next week all of the kids, Mick included, have to soak their feet in the purple brew, and each night every shoe in the house gets a spray inside with white vinegar, due to Alan said that’s what Alice did to his new shoes.
The stink of dead socks leaves the house like magic. It’s gone. Totally. Gone from the bedrooms, even. Lori spends a lot of time sniffing, testing the air. Not a whiff, so no more Vicks VapoRub stuffed up her nose. She’ll probably get a cold now.
Eddy is a pure smartarse with a germ fetish, that’s true, but it’s so interesting watching him, and sort of seeing life new through his eyes. Every night he wants to go walking. He’s never walked anywhere, never seen a bush track and walked it by moonlight, he’s never stood under a streetlight before and watched the moths commit suicide, never done anything before.
He doesn’t go home on Friday. He rings Eva and tells her that Mavis meant the next Friday, then on the Saturday, he shouts the kids a day of playing tourists. They are wasting money but it’s only Eva’s, so it’s not real, not like the pension money; still, it’s real enough to get them into seeing stuff they never saw before. Eddy turns them all into fake tourists with his fake money and suddenly they can see a bit of what the tourists see.
Everything is new to him. Even a snake on the river track is new; he’s never seen one outside a zoo. For hours he watches that sluggish snake shedding its skin, then he takes the skin, holding it as if he’s found a true treasure, and his eyes, which might be the same shape and colour as Alan’s eyes, don’t look anything like Alan’s eyes. They sort of look awestruck.
‘You’ll get a snake disease,’ Lori says.
‘Just wait until the kids at school see this,’ he says. ‘Nobody has ever had anything like this. This is better than camping in Tasmania.’
Even the stars in the Willama sky are newfound treasures he’s just dug up from Egypt. He buys mosquito repellent and he soaks everyone with it, and all the kids sprawl on the front lawn, just looking at stars, tracking satellites and planes and not getting eaten alive by mosquitoes. The next day he finds Henry’s hand mower in the potting shed and decides to cut the lawn so they can roll on it without rolling in prickles. It hasn’t been cut since Henry died but Eddy gets it looking nearly like a lawn instead of a cow paddock. He’s got energy to burn. He’s one of those electronic toys on the television battery commercial that never go flat.
Then on his last night in Willama he’s wearing his snakeskin as a headband; they are all sitting on the verandah watching the stars when he tells them that he could get to love the life they’ve got; he makes it sound as if their freedom is something so special. They’ve never thought much about their freedom. They didn’t even know they had it.
‘Who’s free when they’ve always got a kid stuck around their neck?’ Lori says. Matty is stuck to her knee, not her neck at the moment, but he’s always stuck to her some place when she’s at home.
‘You gotta serve time in the pen to know what getting out feels like, babe,’ Eddy says. He sounds like Marlon Brando, doing his part in The Godfather. They laugh again, look at him, love him a bit – just a bit. Don’t want him to go home tomorrow but he’s spent all of Eva’s money so he’s going, and without Alan, who refuses to even consider the possibility.
They walk Eddy to the bus depot and even Lori shakes his hand. He’s wearing his city clothes and his snakeskin headband, and maybe old Alice is going to have a fight on her hands if she tries to toss it in the bin. They watch him walk up the steps, then the door closes and they stand a long time, waving him goodbye, waving the bus goodbye, then they walk home, sort of sad, sort of missing him already.
It’s lucky he went, really, due to the next night it happens. It’s around twelve o’clock and the kids are in bed when Lori hears moaning. The television is never turned off and for a while she thinks the moaning is coming from the television, but it goes on and on and on, sort of getting higher.
It’s Mavis. She’s flat on her back on the floor again, gasping, dripping sweat and blue-white in the face.
‘Someone get Nelly,’ Lori yells, and Jamesy is out, running in his underdaks over the road to bang on Nelly’s bedroom window until he wakes her. She calls the doctor and after a bit the men come again, six of them, including the doctor. They use the door again, get Mavis up; lucky that Mick didn’t put that door back on its hinges.
Mavis doesn’t say a word, doesn’t say thanks. Maybe she hasn’t got air enough to say it, but the doctor is saying she’s probably had a heart attack. ‘We’ll have to see if we can get you to the hospital for tests,’ he’s saying.
She’s standing between two of the men and she’s panting air and shaking, all of her is shaking, and it’s like a localised earthquake, shaking the men who try to walk her to the passage door, and God knows how they think they’re going to get her up to the hospital. And God knows what’s going to happen to this place if they do take her.
Mavis can’t get her balloon feet moving. She’s standing there, looking as if she’s dying, then she gasps, ‘Get out,’ and she heaves an arm free, takes a step back. They can’t hold her, can’t force her to go forward. They look at her, give up on her as they watch her step back again, then flop down onto her couch.
Lori sees the doctor out. He talks about pills, like, ‘Is your mother taking her pills?’ Lori shakes her head. The doctor looks at Mick, standing on one leg behind Lori, looks at the others. ‘Call me in the morning if she’s no better,’ he says.
She’s no better, but no worse. She’s slumped on the couch, covered by the quilt someone tossed over her when the doctor left. Lori puts two fluid tablets, two Valium and an Aropax with a cup of tea and a big glass of water on Mavis’s tray. Mavis drinks the tea, ignores the pills, which she bumps to the floor later. Alan picks them up so the little ones won’t eat them.
‘Watch her. If she can’t get up to go to the loo, get Nelly to call the doctor,’ Lori says. She’s got to go to school because Mick isn’t going to miss school just because Mavis is dying.
‘I want to go to school too,’ Alan says.
‘It’s no use you getting enrolled. You’ll have to go back to Eddy. It’s stupid staying in this place. She’s going to fall down one night, we won’t hear her and she’ll die, then what do you think is going to happen to all of us? We’re not old enough to stay here by ourselves, and Martin sure as hell won’t be coming home. Go over to Nelly today, ring Eva, and go home, Alan.’
