by Joy Dettman
They give her boiled chicken breast on Saturday, with a huge serve of green beans, cabbage and celery, onion and potato all boiled up together with the chicken breast. She never liked vegetables but she eats every scrap now. They give her a small half of a roast potato and two thin slices of roast lamb on Sunday, with just a dribble of gravy and a pile of salad, which is mainly cucumber and lettuce and celery, because the diet book says that these three have pretty much no calories. She gets fish on Monday, European carp, stuffed with Mick’s onions and Nelly’s lemons. She eats it and seems . . . seems sort of satisfied.
It’s November before they introduce Vinnie to a paintbrush. He’s more than willing to help slap a bit of paint on the kitchen ceiling, he’s been going on about feeling seasick since the first day he was able to lift his head up and look at that blue. He reckons it brings back memories of the day Greg pinched a boat and they ran out of petrol in the bay, got picked up by two fishermen four hours later.
The pension money has sort of mushroomed since they posted off Mavis’s pension form, and the paint was on special at Kmart, proper ceiling paint, which doesn’t drip as much; either that, or Vinnie knows how to put it on without dripping it. It takes three coats of white to cover that blue, and he sure paints slow; he also finds the last packet of Valium and Lori’s ex cigarette fund in the jar on top of the cupboard.
‘The thieving mongrel.’ Five pills are missing. When she counts the money, she knows a fifty has gone.
They don’t say anything to Vinnie, because they want him to paint the kitchen walls before he takes off; the postcard border is falling down and when you get a scratch on a bright blue wall, the white shows through so it looks even more scratched. Also, they haven’t spent a penny on clothes for him, except for his Kmart shoes. He’s still wearing Henry’s lopped-off trousers and underwear, which look so bad he’s got no desire to leave the house, so he couldn’t have spent their fifty yet.
He’s not one of them. He ran while Mick and Lori had to stay, and he’s been with Greg too long, that’s the main trouble.
They call a meeting in Henry’s potting shed, decide to open a bank account in Lori’s name for the ex cigarette money and for what is left over in Mavis’s account each fortnight, sort of put it away safe for emergencies.
Banks. They’ve got thieves’ hearts and computer brains. Because she’s only a kid, Mavis has to sign the forms before she can open an account. Bloody forms, bloody notes to teachers. They are the bane of Lori’s life.
Knowing Mavis’s attitude to money, they can’t tell her about putting her pension money into Lori’s name, so everyone has a go at the signature. Vinnie is keeping quiet. Maybe he knows that they know he knocked off their fifty. He’s on his knees painting the kitchen cupboards black and he’s keeping his head down, painting slow, painting careful.
Jamesy does the signature best. It’s only a squiggle, a big M that sort of runs into Sm O and a tail. They are going to get him to do it, and if any questions get asked, they’ll say Mavis had a fall and sprained her right wrist. Then Vinnie stands up, looks sort of guilty. He puts his brush on a sheet of newspaper and comes to sneeze over Lori’s shoulder, then he picks up the pen and make the M Sm O squiggle.
Perfect.
The forging mongrel! He can barely write his own name! They turn on him, accuse him, and he gets back down on his knees, starts painting again, slow, careful.
‘Greg used to make me do it. I never done it in Melbourne because the banks wouldn’t give it to me,’ he says.
‘So you learned to pinch money instead. We know you knocked off our fifty, and Mavis’s Valium – which are more precious than money. And you’d better not try forging that signature again,’ Lori says, ‘ . . . unless we ask you to.’
They let him off his knees to sign the bank forms, then he gives them the fifty.
‘I only wanted some jeans. Every time I bend over in these bloody things they nearly cut off my b – ’
‘We don’t have swearing in our house,’ Neil says.
The Hope Chest
It’s not all easy. Vinnie has his moments and so does Mavis, but it’s pretty easy. Lori is feeling hopeful when she and Mick go to the op shop to get Vinnie’s jeans. They find a pair that are half okay, and a blue tracksuit that should fit him. Then Lori finds another one, a giant’s tracksuit, bottle green, but barely used. She takes it too, for the future, for Mavis, maybe next winter.
A big lady is looking at a maroon dress, and when she puts it down, Lori picks it up fast, holds it high. It looks a lot smaller than Mavis’s tents, but she tosses it over her arm and searches on. There’s a bra in a box that looks as if it might fit an elephant. She grabs it, then buys two perfectly good T-shirts for Vinnie.
‘I don’t suppose you’d have any really huge knickers, would you?’
The op shop lady digs deep, finds another giant bra but no knickers. Then she goes to the men’s side and offers three brand-new, still in their packets, men’s boxer short underpants, stretchy grey ones with elastic waistbands. Lori holds a pair high, measures them with her eye. Mick gets embarrassed, walks out and leaves Lori to it.
The saleswoman doesn’t even charge for the two bras. Maybe she thinks they won’t fit. ‘They’ve been here since Adam was a boy,’ she says. ‘Glad to find a use for them, love. How is your mum going these days?’
‘Still housebound.’ Lori gives her ten dollars and won’t accept the change. If that woman can be charitable, so can she. She’s got a pile of money in her account and Mick is getting worried that the bank people will start wondering where it’s coming from – he still thinks people run banks.
Eddy keeps telling them that they have to stop being so mean with money. They got a heap of back pay, which he wants to use on painting the roof and the weatherboards. Which is ridiculous. That would be a huge job. Anyway, Lori and Mick are too scared to spend that bonus, just in case the pension people have made a mistake and they ask for it back.
They are walking by the curtain shop when Lori sees some material that would be perfect for lounge-room curtains. It’s shiny greeny-brown stuff and it’s reduced from nineteen dollars a metre to twelve. She wants it, like, six metres of it. The window is long but not wide. They buy it and buy cotton to match, and some wooden ring things to put on the top. And a rod, a gorgeous thing with plastic antique knobs at each end.
Eddy stirs her about spending money, tells her that it probably cost as much as roof paint, red roof paint, and how come she can have curtain material without asking anyone and he can’t have roof paint?’
‘You don’t know your limitation, that’s why,’ she says.
‘And neither do you. You should have bought those ready-made ones from Kmart.’
‘They were the wrong colour. Anyway, Nelly said before that she’d help me.’
She does too – she does the brainwork and Lori does the stitching. For two days those curtains get carried backwards and forwards over the road, but when they are done and hung, they look just brilliant. That room looks pure brilliant – as long as you don’t look too closely at the wallpapering, which is not actually brilliant. One day they’ll have to replace it because one bit along the verandah wall is always rolling down and half falling off and they have to keep gluing it back.
‘So, we’ll paint the outside next. White,’ Eddy says.
‘It’s not worth it.’ Mick is sick of the stink of paint. ‘Those boards are so rotten they’d drink paint by the bucketful.’
‘Paint is like glue,’ Eddy says. ‘It will glue the boards together.’ No one takes him seriously. Painting those old boards would be a huge job.
Except Vinnie. He takes him a bit seriously, like he argues with him about having a red roof. He wants a green roof. Vinnie has gone paint happy since they gave him his first brush. He and Eddy have just finished the bathroom, which looks truly awesome, or would look awesome if they could afford some vinyl for the floor.
Anyway, a couple of nights later, Eddy takes t
o Mavis’s brick wall with the leftover bathroom paint and he paints swastikas all over the multicoloured bricks, paints ‘Lori, the dictator’ across at the back, ‘Lorraine the pain’ on the side.
‘It improves it,’ Vinnie says. ‘The bloody thing has always looked like a diseased boil on an old dame’s bum.’
November is almost over when Eddy goes off one Friday afternoon and spends Eva’s fifty on ten litres of white outdoor acrylic. She’s still paying that weekly fifty into his account at the Commonwealth Bank – probably forgot to tell her accountant to cancel it before she left for Paris.
She writes every week or two, or sends postcards, the message always the same, like: ‘To my darling sons. We miss you so much’. That sort of thing. Alan hardly looks at the cards, like he won’t look at her money, though the account is in both names. Eddy writes to her and he still calls her Mum. They are so different. They are not even like brothers, let alone twins.
Anyway, that same night Eddy gets the ladder out and he and Vinnie start painting the bricks. Vinnie, who still catches every bug that’s going around, sneezes between careful brushstrokes, saying amid sneezes that Eddy should have bought roof paint first, due to they’ll splatter the white walls with the green roofing paint, and, anyway, they need new guttering more than a painted roof or walls.
It’s true. The guttering is mainly rusted out, and the downpipes are all down. Not that they can do anything about that. That’s work for a plumber.
‘I wonder where that Jeff bloke is.’ He sneezes. ‘You remember, Mick? That bloke that connected up the pipes and stuff when me and Martin built this bloody abortion.’
‘I dunno,’ Mick says. He’s not much into talking to Vinnie.
‘I could probably put a bit up myself,’ Vinnie says, looking at that roof, sort of rubbing his head, which has now gone back to a mess of carrot-coloured curls.
‘It could hurt,’ Lori says. She’s not happy about those painted bricks.
Vinnie doesn’t get it, he’s still sneezing and talking guttering to Eddy, who is still sloshing the paint on.
Those two started out wrong but they’ve pretty much got over it. Maybe they both feel a bit on the outer. Eddy gives way as Vinnie climbs up the ladder and walks around on the roof for half an hour. And he finds out why the wallpaper keeps coming unstuck over the lounge-room window. The roof is leaking. One bit of iron is bent up and rusty. He fixes it too, or him and Mick work out how to fix it. They get another sheet of corrugated iron from the junk heap down the back and swap it over, then the next time Lori sees them, they are looking for her new measuring tape so they can measure the house for new guttering.
Nelly, who is working in her garden, sees them and she comes over to where the fence used to be. She never comes any closer. It’s like she knows what’s going on now, like maybe Martin told her. Anyway, she tells them they’ll need new bargeboard on the west wall.
‘Bargeboard?’ Mick says.
‘The wood bit the guttering sits on, Smithy.’
‘We’ll have to pay someone.’
‘Jesus!’ Lori moans.
‘He was a carpenter,’ Eddy says, sloshing a swastika on the front weatherboards, sloshing beneath it, ‘Lorraine Louise, give me a squeeze’ – due to something that happened at school the other day, the eavesdropping moron.
Anyway, Nelly heads for home and rings up the bloke who did her new guttering ten years or so back. He’ll come around and give Mavis a quote. Eddy is in the shower, trying to wash paint out of his hair, which Lori put there, while she was sloshing paint over Eddy’s bloody graffiti. Anyway, it wasn’t her that he should have been writing about. It was Leonie Perkins.
As it turns out, the plumber is five foot nothing, wears a hearing aid and looks about eighty, but he says he’ll do the job if Vinnie can do the wrecking work and lend a bit of a hand with the lifting; he’ll order the stuff and the bargeboard and he’ll come around on Saturday and do it for cash in hand, which is illegal with the GST, but he’s on the pension, so it’s got to be cash in hand.
‘We don’t have a problem with that,’ Vinnie says.
Lori and Mick ride over to the bank to withdraw the deposit money. It’s going to cost a fortune but the old bloke says if Mavis is stuck for cash, she can pay him off a bit at a time. They’re not stuck for cash, it’s just that they don’t want to use the back pay. ‘We’ll live off the land, Mick, eat what’s in the cupboards and freezer. Live on eggs and baked beans, get the kids down to the river for some fish, get home brand porridge instead of cornflakes. It will be all right.’
Vinnie is good at wrecking. He and the mobile boys are on the roof pulling the old stuff down when they find another sheet of roofing iron gone warped, which Henry had weighted down with bricks. Vinnie tosses the bricks overboard and nearly kills Neil, who dodges in the nick of time and only gets half a brick on his big toe. He’ll probably lose the nail. While Neil goes bellowing off to nurse his wound in front of the television, the rest of them head for the junk heap looking for another bit of corrugated iron.
Spud Murphy has been leaning on his fence, watching and yelling out stuff. He yells out that he’s got some roofing nails so Mick limps over the road to get them, and ends up falling in love with Spud’s oil drum full of nails and bolts and nuts and junk. He doesn’t come back for an hour. It looks as if Mick has found a new friend.
Anyway, for two days there’s banging and tearing tin and Mavis yelling at everyone to shut the bloody noise up because she can’t hear the television. Lori tells her that the guttering is so bad they’ve got to get it fixed. She also tells her there is a bloke coming around to do the spouting at the weekend. She offers Mavis a packet of chewing gum and Alan’s Jurassic Park. Mavis takes them, makes no comment. Maybe she’s plotting her freedom.
They’ve got a two-Valium custard ready to go, but the plumber bloke comes near dawn and they can’t wake her up just to zap her again, and maybe she won’t wake up for a while, or the plumber won’t hear her above the noise he’s making. He’s turned his hearing aid off and he’s deaf as a post without it.
By the second day, the kids have all got stiff necks from looking up, following Vinnie and the old bloke’s progress. His name is Mr Wilson and he looks half dead this morning, doesn’t even comment on the illegal brick room, which is now painted white, which improves it – like, it’s not so in-your-face when you step out the back door.
Lori is leaning against those white bricks guarding the window and nursing yesterday’s Valium custard, which they didn’t need to use, while Vinnie and the old bloke work their way to the corner, and around the corner. No custard required this morning, either. It goes back in the fridge. Vinnie helps himself to it for morning tea, the bloody idiot. He’s half zonked for the rest of the day, like falling off the ladder while he’s holding stuff, like almost dropping the bargeboard when he’s lifting it for the old bloke – and almost dropping him too. And by late afternoon, Mavis could have used that custard. She’s screeching about the noise again, and the old bloke, who has worked his way right around and back to the front verandah, and is now sitting on it, his hearing aid turned on while he’s having tea and a smoko, lifts his head.
‘She can’t get you, ’cause she can’t get out the door,’ Neil assures him.
‘Grown herself in, eh?’ the old bloke says, nods, almost nods off. ‘I heard about that happening once to a feller.’ He looks at the house, shakes his head, feeling guilty about the new guttering. ‘They had to knock the wall down to git him out.’ He sighs, thinks about standing but changes his mind. ‘I seen your mother once, you know. She was no lightweight back then. Life’s a real bitch, sonny,’ he says, ‘and then you croak.’ And he’s up, feet under him, and he looks about ready to croak.
They watch his every step, and at six-thirty he’s still moving, though the later it gets the slower he moves – and how he keeps on moving they don’t know, but he gets it done before it’s pitch dark; he even gets the new downpipes in. Then he won’t
take all the money, just what it cost him for materials. They keep pushing it at him, wanting him to take it and go while he still can, but he’s standing there, sucking on another smoke.
‘You’re a good kid,’ he says to Vinnie. ‘You too, lad,’ he says to Mick, who is still shoving the money at him. ‘You’re all good kids. And you tell your mother I said so, too.’ And he shuffles off to his truck, the kids following close at his side, wanting to take an arm, help heave him up. Then he’s in and the old motor’s roaring. Mick drops a bag holding a dozen eggs and the rest of the money onto the passenger seat and hopes he or his wife notices the money. ‘Thanks,’ the kids chorus. ‘Thanks very much, Mr Wilson.’
He drives off into the night but they stand on just staring at their new guttering. Not a lot of light left to see by, but the house seems to be standing taller, as if that old bloke has given it back a bit of pride. Eddy is not pleased the guttering turned out green. He didn’t know it would be coloured and no one knew it was going to be green. Except maybe Vinnie. He’s standing with them, yawning instead of sneezing, and maybe it’s not the Valium; he looks as tired as the old bloke.
‘You told him to order green,’ Eddy accuses. Vinnie yawns again, doesn’t deny it. ‘I wanted red guttering, a red roof.’
‘I want me dinner,’ Vinnie says. They walk back to the verandah.
‘A green roof will look good,’ Alan says. ‘It will look cooler than red.’
