by Joy Dettman
Willama West is what people call the poor side of town. Land is cheap there, due to it being so far from the town. They’ve got an old hotel and a few rough-looking shops and old buildings close to the bridge, but the new estate is about five kilometres further out and well away from the river. Anyway, that’s where the market is. A heap of young families have built new houses in the west, and every Sunday now they have a market where you can buy fruit and vegetables almost half price. People sell old car parts and old shoes and second-hand clothes. Anything. Everything.
The kids are looking through a stall full of used books when they find a how-to-diet book. It’s a bit moth-eaten, but it’s only twenty cents. They buy it, and Eddy buys one of Stephen King’s. They get some picture books for the little kids then walk on. At one stall they find two second-hand school tracksuits for Neil and a pair of almost new leather boots that will fit Timmy. They buy potatoes and Eddy wants cobs of corn and celery; they buy cheap disposable nappies for Matty, who still needs them at night, then they load all the stuff on the bikes and start back over the bridge a lot slower than they came across, their bikes loaded up like packhorses, so Mick is walking. He’s reading from that diet book too.
They learn a lot. Like Mavis needs vitamin pills and sugar substitutes. They’ve been giving her the medication and they’ve cut her down to three meals a day, plus supper, but they’ve been feeding her far too much fat and sugar. Even low-fat ice-cream is not allowed. Also those stews, and all the oil Lori uses when she bakes potatoes, are definite no-nos.
‘No more baked potatoes. We have to start boiling them, and no more chips. If we’re going to do it, then we might as well do it properly,’ Mick says.
They buy a heap of diet stuff that week, including skinny milk; the book says women of Mavis’s age need a lot of calcium. They look at the sugar-free mints Eddy has been feeding her by the packet; each mint has got about twelve calories in it. And choc-mint biscuits! They usually give her two with her night-time cocoa. She’s not getting any more, even if they are on special. They buy strawberries, apples, sugar-free chewing gum and diet crackers. The book says she can eat strawberries and chew chewing gum until it comes out of her ears.
In the next days that diet book takes over their lives. They become experts on what’s good and what’s not. Like grapes, even though they are fruit and good for her, a dieter can’t eat them by the bunch. They are full of sugar. And bread – a dieter can have only four slices per day, and if she has a potato or rice, then she only gets three slices of bread. There’s new stuff to cook in the book too; it’s got a heap of diet recipes in it with coloured pictures of how they are supposed to look, like a pink pudding made of low-calorie jelly beat up in half frozen low-fat yoghurt. Eddy makes it one day while he’s on duty. And there’s chicken pieces that you take all the skin and fat off, then boil up with zucchini and celery, carrots, onions, curry and stuff, and it tastes like the best food, and there’s hardly a calorie in it. They all diet on chicken stew night.
No one has ever eaten celery before, except Eddy and Alan, but you get a heap for two dollars and it’s got almost no calories. Lori starts putting it in all of her stews, and if you can make stews out of chicken and minced steak, then you can make them out of anything, fat sausages, baked beans, pasta. Tomato and Worcestershire sauce were Henry’s favourite flavourings for his stews, and curry, so all that stuff goes in with a bit of ground ginger, because Eddy found the jar of ground ginger when he was cleaning out a cupboard and Lori didn’t know what else to use it for. The pasta stews turn out excellent, but the pink sausages that swell up to twice their size get to be the most popular stew. Everyone loves it. Mavis only gets one sausage, because of the fat, but they give her a ton of raw celery, cut up with apples and cucumber and sprinkled with Weight Watchers dressing. She eats the apple and throws the cucumber and celery at them, usually while it’s still on her plate, but they keep giving it to her, because it makes her plate look full and also, the diet book says, dieters have to learn new eating habits whether they like it or not.
They’re now giving her the Valium in her cocoa, the Aropax in apricot jam, the fluid pill in Coke. She only gets one fluid pill every second day, due to the last time Eddy gave her two she was up all night, and also due to the fact that they can’t get the potassium pills into her because they are hard as marbles, and if they crush them with Henry’s hammer, they taste like yuck. The book says bananas are full of potassium, so she gets a banana on her fluid pill day. They still need to make her a medicinal custard if she’s throwing one of her rages, and that adds the calories up. So do bananas. They are all experts on calories. That diet book has got every single bit of food listed on six pages at the back, like a whole slice of bread has only got seventy calories and a little chocolate biscuit has got about ninety-nine. Also butter – one tiny teaspoon of it has got thirty calories. Mavis is going to have to learn to eat her toast without butter.
There’s no regular attack on the door any more, and the abuse is probably halved at certain times. Like when the quiz shows are on, she turns her abuse on the intellect of the contestants.
The kids used to love watching the quiz shows. They stand outside the window listening one night and Mavis would have beat the lot of the contestants. She’s not dumb and she’s not mad, just sick in the head about something. God knows what.
It’s weird, though, how she has taken over their thinking. For months Lori and the kids stayed out of her way, tried to pretend she wasn’t there. Now it’s Mavis this and Mavis that; everyone is doing it. Like, the nights are starting to get cold, so on the Saturday, when they see one of those sealed oil heater things at a garage sale, they buy it for Mavis, then Mick finds an old extension cord with four power plugs and he takes off the skirting board in his room, drills out a square in the bottom of the outside weatherboard, from his side, not Mavis’s, and after a lot of wriggling, they manage to poke the power plug through to the brick room, then plug its end into Mick’s power point, which will give Mavis a power point for her television and her heater with two left over. They are actually getting organised.
It’s late on the Friday evening, just past dusk but not quite dark, when they see the top of Nelly’s head trying to creep past the west window. Lori races out back, heads her off before she gets around the corner. And she just hates doing it too, because Nelly has been so good to them.
‘What’s going on over here, Smithy? Something is going on.’ Her voice is loud, it’s always loud, and Lori wishes she’d learn to whisper.
‘It’s better if you don’t come in, Nelly.’
‘Yeah, I’ve latched on to the idea that you don’t want me coming in, all right, but what I want to know is, why you suddenly don’t want me coming in.’
‘It’s just . . . just better if you don’t. For Mavis. I was going to come over and visit you and ask you if I can please sew up the bum of Jamesy’s tracksuit.’
‘There is nothing going on in my house that I don’t want you to see, Smithy.’
‘There’s nothing going on here either. Not really . . . or not much different to what’s always been going on.’
‘You could have fooled me.’
She goes after a bit and she’s not happy. The kids talk a long time about if they should tell her what they’ve done, and what else can they do but tell her?
‘Fix the gate,’ Mick says.
‘What good is that going to do?’
Not much. Most of the picket fence has been used for firewood, though the rails are still there and the gate itself is okay.
‘We have to tell her.’
‘And she’ll tell Bert Matthews and he’ll tell his wife and she’ll tell Australia.’
‘We’ll do something. Tomorrow we’ll do something.’
They start early by removing the gate from the corner post. It’s one of those big old-fashioned gates, made of pipe and wire, and wide enough to get a car through. It’s also heavy as lead, but they haul it down to the second-last
verandah post on the west side. The hinges are rusty and useless but they’ve got no gatepost to hinge it to, anyway, so they find some wire in the potting shed, choose a fence-post almost opposite the verandah post and they wire the gate between them; it’s not as if they ever want to open that gate, just close a gap. And it’s done in an hour and when it’s done, the old gate stands up strong, but it’s not going to stop people from walking down the verandah, so they start on the fallen lattice, which isn’t as easy.
Wood is funny stuff. It might look rotten but most of that lattice isn’t too rotten and in the places where it is, Mick strengthens it with wood glue, front fence pickets and a few screws from his collection, then he wires it to the same verandah post, wires it to the old support against the west wall and, just for good measure, wires it to a verandah rafter. And there is no one not equipped with wire cutters or an axe who is going to get down that side of the house.
The two-foot gap between the brick room and vacant block fence won’t be so easy to close off, so they eat an easy lunch, feed Mavis a boiled egg, which she hates, and a pile of greens, which she hates more, but that’s okay; the electric drill is noisy and it’s complaining louder than her about having to chew a hole into a brick wall. It’s not a big drill, probably only meant to drill wood, but Mick gets three holes in the mortar joints, then he hammers in blue plastic plugs and screws on a length of four-by-two, which used to be part of the rail that held the pickets. He screws up a frame between the vacant block fence and the wall, then screws on overlapped sheets of corrugated iron which totally seal that space. It’s so successful, Lori suggests they extend the vacant block fence the same way, at least the bit between the brick room corner and the old laundry, which might stop Bert Matthews and his wife from seeing the kids passing food through to Mavis.
There is still a pile of corrugated iron on the junk heap, which used to be the walls of Henry’s potting shed before he got the fibreglass. It’s hard, noisy work, and it takes the rest of the day, but they extend the length of two fence-posts, screw and wire a rail along the top of them, supporting it with any bits of old timber they can find on the junk heap, then they fix corrugated iron to posts, rails and fence palings and it’s done. The wind probably won’t blow it down, and as long as it doesn’t, no sticky-nosed neighbour under nine foot tall is going to be looking over that fence again.
It’s funny, though. They worked all day just to keep people out, but when it’s done, they see what they have achieved. They’ve made themselves an escape-proof back yard where the little kids will be able to play safely. The big ones are all getting sick of rounding up those wandering little buggers.
It’s better. It’s so much better. Everything is better.
Except Mavis. She’s getting worse – like, she doesn’t want her steamed European carp and the two tablespoons of peas and rice, so she throws it at them, and half of it doesn’t make it through the window.
‘That was your dinner, Mavis, and you’re not getting anything else. And if you don’t pick that fish up off that floor, then it’s going to stink as bad as you do. Have a wash,’ Lori yells, which doesn’t help matters.
At nine they have to give her a double medicated cocoa, due to they gave her an apple but no sharp knife to peel it.
As if they’d give her a sharp knife! She’s dangerous enough with a fork.
One Thousand Calories
Due to Eddy’s reduced circumstances he’s fallen in love with the Willama West market. Most of his allowance is spent there; he absolutely refuses to step inside the op shop, which is Lori and Mick’s favourite place. They saw a sewing machine in there the other day and thought about buying it too. A ton of stuff needs sewing up and Mavis’s tents are falling off her, and they can’t ask Nelly to make new ones. Like, you can’t dodge people, build a fence to keep them out, then go over the road and say, please, Nelly, can you sew this for me? You just can’t do it – or Lori can’t. Won’t.
They don’t plan to go to the market on the Sunday, but when the rain starts falling, Eddy starts nagging, so Lori rides off with him around two. The best time to get bargains at that market is at the end of the day when the stallholders want to pack up and go home, and if you add rain to that, then boy, do you get some bargains.
And it’s fate, because at that first stall, Lori finds two dress lengths, one bright blue, navy and green floral and one orange and pink striped floral. They’re dirt cheap and they’ve got dress length pinned onto them. She grabs both and pays fast.
At the same stall, Eddy, who won’t go pure feral, finds three second-hand sheets, two pillowslips, an almost brand-new feather doona and its cover, then he stands bargaining in the rain until the lady says he can have the lot for twelve dollars. And for someone accustomed to being so rich, he sure likes to get a bargain.
‘All of that stuff probably belonged to some old dead person,’ Lori says. ‘She might have died in bed, and you’re going to sleep in her sheets and under her doona.’
‘As long as she’s not under there with me,’ Eddy says, piling his stuff on the handlebars of Jamesy’s bike.
They get some cheap vegies and fruit, get four second-hand mugs and two dozen pairs of socks. They find a second-hand sweater for Lori and Eddy gets it for fifty cents. He mightn’t be much good to shop with at the supermarket, but he’s super brilliant to shop with at this market. They save a fortune.
It’s not that night or even the next that Lori raises nerve enough to go over to Nelly and ask if she’ll sew up two new tents for Mavis. Eventually she has to go, due to the buttonholes on both shoulders of Mavis’s last petticoat tent now being ripped. Most of the time she’s wearing a blanket cape, which is lucky, and no one looks at her much, they just sort of drop the food and run.
Twice Lori gets as far as the road, turns around and comes back. Eddy says he’ll do it, but she can’t let him go over the road because he’s too confident and too posh talking and Nelly will know he’s not Alan and she’ll know they are trying to fool her.
Finally she heads off, knocks at Nelly’s door. It was always a good place to knock, always a safe place, but tonight Lori feels like a criminal.
‘What are you doing here, Smithy?’ Nelly says, flicking her outside light on but not opening her fly-wire door. ‘I thought I was number one enemy.’
‘You know you’re not and you never will be.’
‘Yeah? So what’s with your gate and barricades?’
‘It’s just . . . just we have to keep the kids off the street.’ It comes out in a rush and sounds like a lie and Lori can’t look at Nelly’s eyes. She’s standing there, the floral material still folded stiff in her hands, like it’s been folded in a trunk for thirty years.
‘And what’s with young Alan? I seen him out front with the kids the other day, then I seen him again walking out the front door. Am I seeing double, Smithy, or are you trying to fool a crafty old dog?’
Lorry shakes her head. ‘I wondered if you could please make Mavis some tents, please, Nelly.’
‘So, she’s still alive then. Bert Matthews thought you’d buried her. He reckons that’s why you built your barricades.’
‘Of course she’s alive.’
Nelly opens her door, takes the material. Lori stands back, looks at her feet. ‘What have you done with her, Smithy? You’ve done something.’ Just a shake of her head, a step away, a quick glance across the road. ‘You know I’m not as silly as I look, don’t you?’ Nelly says.
‘I know you’re not.’
‘That’s a back-handed insult if ever I heard one.’
‘I didn’t mean . . . it’s like . . . I mean, you know what she’s been like, and you know I’m not as silly as I look either, Nelly, and things over the road aren’t as mad as they look either, and not as bad as they were either, and it’s sort of . . . sort of better for us . . . and for you . . . if you don’t know what we’re doing over there.’
‘I don’t know, and that’s the bloody trouble. But I’d like to know. She
’s still alive, though – if I’m making new tents for her. At least I can tell Bert that much.’
They stare at each other for a few seconds, but Lori is saying no more. ‘What are you standing out here for?’ Nelly says and she walks into her sewing room, Lori tailing her.
‘You don’t have to do them now.’
‘It only takes me five minutes.’ She sets up her ironing board, presses the creases out, almost, then she’s cutting one bit in half. She cuts a bit of a U for the front neck, then sits Lori at her sewing machine. She can use that machine, has been using it for yonks and she doesn’t break the needles any more. She sews up the sides of both tents then gives the chair to Nelly so she can do the tricky bits.
It takes more than five minutes, but not too much more. Nelly is starting to make buttonholes across the shoulders when Lori reminds her that Mavis won’t be doing any more breast-feeding. Nelly looks at her, nods, stitches up one shoulder, and halfway across the other one, makes two buttonholes at the edge of the neck, then sews a hem around the neck, sleeves and skirt, finds some buttons in her button tin, sews them on with a special machine foot, stitches a square onto the front for a pocket and in less than an hour, Mavis has got two new tents.
‘Ta for that, Nelly. Seriously, ta.’
‘Seriously, what’s with the gate and the fences? You’re locking me out, I know that much, but who are you locking in, Smithy?’
‘We’re all right. True. We’re better than all right, better than for ages. The chooks are laying like crazy and you know the money we owed the council for last year? Well, Mick has paid it all. And we haven’t had to get you to call the doctor for ages. So whatever we’re . . . whatever we’ve done over there has got to be better.’
