by Joy Dettman
Or maybe it can.
Lori is changing – or some of her attitudes are changing. Right from when she was about seven, she’s always been ready with a nasty reply when she thought the kids at school were having a go at her; and with Karen that night, she was pure nasty, which sort of still comes natural, but she’s trying now to force herself to stop being naturally nasty – and bossy, because . . . well, maybe because of what Martin said that night, but more because . . . well, actually, because of Paul Perkins.
He’s nearly sixteen, and a few months back he decided that Mick was his best friend. And also, he’s got a sister, Leonie, who is sort of trying to make Lori a best friend, due, probably, to the fact that she hasn’t got any friends, not in Willama. They’ve only been in town since late October and they live in the East, not close, like neighbours, but in the next street back from the town. There are just the two of them in the family, and they’ve probably never had anything to do with big families and little kids. Not that they ever come inside the house, though they used to call by on school mornings and all ride to school together, and some evenings now they knock at the door and they all go down to the swimming bend together.
They play with the little kids, help watch them, and Paul, well, he sort of mucks around with Lori, treats her as if she’s a girl, the moron. She’s got new black bathers she bought for the swimming sports – which she won, the one hundred metres, the four hundred and the relay. Anyway, those bathers sure make her look like a long-legged, long-necked girl. A lot of boys stare at her now and sort of hang around her and Leonie, which is the reason Eddy wrote what he did on the wall that day.
She tells them to eff off and she should tell Paul to eff off too. She would, except for Leonie. Lori likes the idea that she’s got a friend – seeing as she hasn’t really had one since first grade. She should tell him to eff off, though. But . . . but if you like people then you like them and that’s all there is to it . . . and he’s . . . he’s likeable.
He’s almost good looking, no pimples, and he doesn’t laugh at Mick’s crazy bike, and lately Mick has got game enough to take his brace off in front of him and hop down to the river for a swim; he’s a good swimmer, due to that rubber leg doesn’t bother him too much in the water, but he’s never taken his brace off before, not in front of anyone except family. That’s another reason Lori doesn’t tell Paul to eff off; she doesn’t want to spoil things for Mick.
That’s what she tells herself, but it’s not really true. Like the other night, he grabbed her around the waist when she was trying to race him across the river and she got this stupid yucky weird feeling in her stomach and started wondering what she’d do if he ever tried to kiss her and what it would be like if he did kiss her and . . . and other stuff.
What a moron, she thinks, watching Mavis dip her finger into the gravy, taste it. A lot of the flavour came out of a packet of Gravox, but it tastes heaps better than Henry’s gravy.
‘What are you waiting for?’ Mavis says, licking her finger.
‘Nothing.’
‘At least it tastes like food for a change. Where’s me rabbit food?’ She almost makes a joke.
‘I’ll get you some if you’d prefer it.’
‘Stop standing there, staring at me like I’m a bloody monkey in the zoo.’
‘You’ve lost a ton of weight, you know.’
Mavis makes no reply, just picks up her knife and fork, starts eating, but she sure has lost a ton. She’s thinner than that time they went to Melbourne, thinner than Lori can ever remember her.
‘There’s pudding and custard later.’
‘Enough to fill my back tooth, I suppose?’ Mavis says.
After New Year they buy a good solid lounge chair at a garage sale and they have to wheel it six blocks home. Lucky it’s got castors. People look at them as if they are crazy, and a mob of kids starts poking fun, so Eddy says it’s for Mick to sit on when he gets tired of pedalling his bike, then Mick gets off his bike and says, ‘I’m tired already,’ and he sits on the chair. They all kill themselves laughing as they push him along for a block or two.
They make a medicated custard for Mavis that night for supper, because they want her sleeping on her bed. Also, it was such a struggle getting that mouldy old couch in, it’s not going to be fun getting it out. They wait until she’s in bed, then they creep in, leave Mick at the door, to bolt it if he has to. They’ll go out the window.
Maybe they are all stronger than they were a year ago, but mainly, they didn’t have Vinnie then. His muscle makes the difference, makes it easy. He’s up one end, Alan and Lori at the other. They lift that couch, tilt it so it goes through the door, then stand it on end to get it through the narrow walkway between kitchen and brick room. Easy. It’s out. They all yell, ‘Pitch it,’ and it gets run down to the junk heap, gets pitched.
Vinnie picks up the new chair as if it’s nothing, carries it above his head and sets it down in the northeast corner, and suddenly that brick room looks a whole heap better. He’s getting to be worth having home; maybe they’ll raise his pocket money – if they need to.
Something very funny happened to Vinnie on Boxing Day. Something no one expected would ever happen to Vinnie. Because he’s the biggest, it’s natural for the neighbours to think he’s responsible for the paint job, which, to a large degree, he is. Anyway, this guy came knocking at the door, and he asked Vinnie if he was interested in a job. He’s a painter, married to the daughter of the old plumber bloke who did the guttering, and his offsider is in the Albury hospital, being treated for something. He said to Vinnie that he was looking for a young bloke who’s proved he isn’t scared of a bit of hard work and who is handy with a paintbrush. He can’t offer full-time work at the moment, but it might work out full-time in a couple of months. Then he started talking money.
Vinnie got all embarrassed and he went bright red. ‘Yeah, I like painting better than plumbing. Right. You’re on,’ he said. So it looks as if he might get a bit of work, which will mean he won’t need pocket money. And also, he won’t be able to look after Matty when the kids go back to school. You win some, you lose some. It’s good that it happened, though, good for Vinnie’s self-esteem or whatever, and good for Henry too – wherever he is. He’d be so proud to think that some guy had sought out one of his sons, when heaps of kids in town haven’t got jobs. Lori even feels a bit proud.
The painter told Vinnie he’d need white overalls, so they bought him a brand-new pair. The op shop had no white overalls. He hasn’t taken them off since he got them, except when they are on the clothesline; he’s trying to wear that brand-new look out of them. He’s plastered up the cracks again in some of the worst window frames, and he’s given them another coat of paint. He’s the best window-frame painter, due to working on the theory that it’s easier not to paint the glass in the first place than it is to scrape the paint off.
Eddy might have eventually made the kids do the house even if Vinnie hadn’t come home, but Lori knows they wouldn’t have done it so well – probably would have slapped on one coat and said that’s good enough. You have to give credit where credit is due.
And you have to give credit to Mavis too. She still has a few choice words to say about her meals, but she eats what they give her, and they are pretty certain that she’s trying to use that treadmill at night. They haven’t actually caught her walking it yet, but Mick says he heard it once and heard her cursing it.
She was supposed to be dead months ago – probably would have been if Eddy hadn’t come home – but there she is tonight, sleeping on a single bed and not using all of it. She doesn’t look much bigger than a lot of other women who are walking around town.
They are still admiring Mavis’s new chair, still watching her sleep, when Vinnie says, ‘How long was she in the pen before I come home?’ He’s leaning against the doorframe, his curls brushing the top. They are all leaning someplace.
‘It will be a year in March,’ Lori says.
‘I’d like to kno
w how much she’s dropped. She is metamorphosing before my eyes,’ Eddy says. ‘I am God. I am the creator.’
‘Give her another couple of months and she’ll be crawling out that bloody window,’ Vinnie says. ‘There’s still a lot of her, but it’s soft. If she got determined, she’d squeeze it through.’
‘Yeah,’ they murmur. Then Mavis licks her lips, rolls over, looks at her new chair as half of the kids skedaddle to the window and Lori prepares to close the door.
‘Get me a set of scales, you mob of crazy little buggers, and we’ll find out how much I’ve dropped.’
Eddy is gone and back again in seconds with Donny’s old scales. He slides them across the cement floor and they don’t go far enough. She comes close to collect them, and she carries them back to the new space near her chair. The door is wide open and they crowd at the door, and just inside the door.
‘Nick off,’ she says.
‘I’ve got a vested interest in this.’ Eddy edges down to the basin. He wants to see. He’s got to see this.
She eyes him, then steps on the scales, pushes them to the limit and then some. ‘They’re bloody mad,’ she says. ‘They’re sitting on the twenty. Twenty what?’
‘That’s a hundred and forty, plus twenty. One hundred and sixty kilos.’
‘What’s that in stones?’
‘Divide by seven then take away a bit,’ Alan says. ‘It’s around twenty-three stone.’
‘It’s not.’ She’s shocked, but her face looks alive. ‘You’re mad,’ she says. ‘It can’t be.’ She stands on the scales again. ‘It’s not on the twenty, it’s on the seventeen.’
‘A hundred and fifty-seven. You’re a bit under twenty-three stone,’ the mathematician says.
‘Jesus! I must have gone close to forty at my peak!’ She’s got this wide-eyed, mouth-drooping look of sheer amazement on her face as she gets on the scales again, and stands there, holding her sack-dress close while looking down at her feet. ‘Christ. I was twenty-eight stone when I got pregnant with Neil and the doctor didn’t know how I did it – or how Henry did it.’ She’s still looking at the scales. As she gets off, they sort of gasp, shudder back to zero. She moves them with her foot, moves them against the wall, sort of claims them, lovingly, then she goes to her new second-hand chair, sits down, tests it. Claims it too.
‘You should be up riding your treadmill instead of sitting all day. You’d burn the fat off twice as fast and it would help tighten up your saggy skin,’ Lori adds.
‘I’ll give you bloody saggy skin, and I’ll get all the exercise I need on you, you lanky little bitch. What are you feeding yourself on? Long soup?’
The Countdown
The department of community services lady arrives in town early one Monday morning in March while the kids are at school, and she didn’t have the decency to let anyone know she was coming. Vinnie’s job is haphazard. Last week he worked five days, this week nothing. It suits him, though, and suits the kids, saves them missing too much school. Anyway, he’s supposed to be looking after Matty, but he’s watching a DVD on Greg’s stolen player and Matty is not watching it with him when the kids get home from school.
‘Where is he? You’ve let him wander off again!’ Lori yells.
‘I didn’t.’ He starts to tells his tale of woe. ‘A woman came from the department of something – ’
‘And you let her take him – ’
‘No, no. I had to let her in, though.’ The kids are staring at him. ‘I took her in the lounge room, like you said I had to if they come, and I tried to make her sit down but she wouldn’t, then while I was sliding the bolt – like you said I had to if they come – well, Matty come running to me, and she followed him.
‘Anyway, Mavis is walking her treadmill and she sort of gives the nosy bugger one of her looks. “Haven’t you got anything better to do all day than chase me around?”, she says. “There’s people with problems out there, you know.” Doesn’t get off the treadmill. Just keeps walking to no place. Walking slow, and watching Play School on television. “You’re looking well, Mrs Smyth-Owen,” the dame says. Mavis gives her a look, then walks a bit faster, like she’s showing off. Then the dame says, “The house is a credit to you.” Mavis just keeps walking.’
‘What did they do with Matty?’
‘I couldn’t lock the door before I got rid of the nosy bugger, could I? I couldn’t, so I let her out, then run back, and the silly little bugger is in there with Mavis, sitting on her bed and watching Play School.’
‘She could have got out.’
‘She didn’t seem to want to. She was walking. She must have walked for fifteen minutes – twenty minutes. Or more.’
‘Shit.’
‘Shit, all right. Anyway, I tried to make Matty come out, then Mavis gets off her treadmill, so I slammed the bolt home and left him in with her. Nothing else I could do.’
Lori runs to the window. They all run out behind her. Matty is all right, but he starts bawling when he sees Lori, like he knows he’s done something wrong.
‘Stop your bawling, Matty. We’ll get you out,’ Lori says. Matty isn’t stopping, he’s bellowing. They think about a medicated custard, but Mavis was never much interested in bawling little Matty. She swaps him through the window for a bowl of popcorn and her Diet Coke.
‘Her did put my dum-dum down da loo,’ Matty bawls, his eyes accusing the dummy thief. ‘Her did make it go away. Whoosh.’
‘You’re too big to have dum-dums now,’ Lori says.
‘I want my dum-dum. I want my dum-dum.’
‘What do you want me to do? Stick my arm down the loo and get it out for you?’
‘I wanna nuvver one. Not dat yucky one.’
‘What would you like best? One new dummy or three lollipops?’
‘One-two-free ollypopts.’
It’s hard to believe that a whole year has gone since Eddy came home. Time has moved so fast. Lori turned fourteen on the twelfth of February, but the distance travelled between thirteen and fourteen is huge. She’s done so much, learned so much. She’s in year nine.
Timmy started school this year, though he won’t be five until June. He looks too small, but he’s a good little kid and not giving the teachers any trouble. The worst is over. Matty is three and he’s dry most nights. Two more years and he’ll be at school. In less than one year Lori will be fifteen. That has always been her aim, just to get to fifteen.
Who will Mavis be in one more year? She won’t be in that brick room. She shouldn’t be in there now. They have to stop bolting that door, but how do they stop? When do they stop? Lori used to joke about it, say Mavis was serving a twelve-month sentence for self-abuse, like March to March, but March has come and they are still locking that door.
If she’d just yell at them, tell them to open that bloody door, they probably would now, or maybe they’d have a good reason not to open it, but she doesn’t yell about it. She seems content with her scales and diet food, her books and her television. It’s as if she wants to be in there. Maybe they’ve given her social phobia.
She’s reading, reading anything they give her, and she’s a fast reader, like, she’s gone through all of their Stephen Kings, now they’re getting books for her from the library. She’s washing her hair more often and having showers over the baby bath. It’s like she’s rediscovered independence.
By the end of March the scales won’t reach one hundred and forty kilos. Mavis tells Mick when he drops off her dinner at the window. ‘They’re stopping at one thirty-nine,’ she says. ‘That’s over two less than last week. What is it in stones?’
‘It’s dropping off you,’ Mick replies, and checks his conversions with Alan. They all go out and praise her, like they praise Matty when he has a dry nappy in the mornings, which works better than looking disappointed when he doesn’t.
‘Thousands of people are bigger than you. Mrs Daws from over the back of Nelly’s has got to be over twenty stone and she’s not as tall as you,’ Alan says.
&n
bsp; ‘If you were really close to forty stone, then you must have been dropping two kilos a week, Mavis,’ Lori says.
‘I ought to strip the hide from your bloody bones.’
I ought to, not I will.
The fact that she’s talking to them, sharing her weight loss with them, is more than they ever expected. They took her cigarettes away, fed her on rabbit food, called her the enemy and declared war on a rampaging dictator. Now the enemy is communicating. Negotiations, though, don’t always lead to peace treaties.
They put a few new boards down on the front verandah and tack up a sheet of clear plastic so it falls over the brick room window, lets in the light but blocks the wind, and they look at Mavis’s dwindling proportions in context with that window, look at the summer tents, made in October, sacks by March.
Lori washes the maroon dress she bought at the op shop. She irons it, hangs it in Henry’s wardrobe and finds an old woollen cardigan there. It’s maroon, with a pattern on it. She can remember it, remember it tickling her face. She washes and presses it, then offers it through the window. Mavis puts it on over her flowing tent. And it fits – fits easy.
That cardigan brings back a heap of memories. Mick remembers it. ‘We can’t do this any more, Lori,’ he says.
‘She’s not complaining,’ Eddy says. ‘I want to get her down to normal size.’
‘Like, Lori’s weight?’ Jamesy says.
They laugh, look at Lori. She’s five foot eight, which is almost as tall as Mavis, but she’s all hair, legs, arms, neck, and enough breast. She washed her hair tonight and it’s gone frizzy, so she looks even more like that photograph of Mavis at seventeen. Her eyes are different, but her chin is the same, and her nose, and she’s definitely got Mavis’s hands.
Paul Perkins told Leonie that Lori was a real babe and Leonie told Lori. It was sort of embarrassing, but nice too, though she made a joke of it.
