Mental shopping list:
Industrial-strength bleach
Carpet deodoriser
Toilet brush
Cheese grater and every other essential kitchen item, including cutlery, crockery, cooking utensils and the rest … too numerous to put on this list
Bed linen and towels so I can give back the stuff I’d borrowed from Sam
A television
A vacuum (urgent because of the hideous filthy carpet that suggests the person who lived here before me liked cats … lots and lots of cats … and probably died here and was eaten by said cats)
Everything else required to exist like a basic human being.
My little Studley home was a bare canvas on which to begin painting my new life. I could reinvent myself. It was like some brand new, glorious adventure, I thought as the champagne kicked in. I was a single, independent woman with the world at my feet. Nothing was impossible. I could do whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted, and I didn’t have to be held accountable to anyone. Particularly a husband! Ha. It was going to be great. Truly awesome. For the first time in my life I actually had a bed (well … a mattress) I could legitimately invite strange men into. Once the boys started going to Billy for weekends, as we’d planned, the world would be my oyster. It really didn’t take much cheap champagne before the rose-coloured glasses started fogging up with steamy thoughts of handsome strangers.
The walls of the unit were all painted the blue of a cloudless sky, or a public lavatory. While a slash of dusky sunlight and a waft of trees were visible from the bedroom and sunroom, the windows in the living room, kitchen and bathroom stared voyeuristically into the matching windows of the identical building next door. I pressed my face against the glass to see if I could see into anyone’s bedroom but, alas, people had curtains or tattered sheets hanging up for privacy. Curtains. I also put them on the mental shopping list.
I shut my eyes and listened to the boys giggling, the sound of a siren wailing along the Bondi esplanade and the groans of life from the building around me. The faint but distinctive smell of cockroach droppings hovered above the stink of a melting pot of everyone’s early-dinner flavours – from garlic to curry to cabbage and burned oil – which seeped through the open windows. This was home and it was sweet. Well, quaint.
A knock at the door made me jump. My very first knock, on my own front door. The corridor was dark and narrow and behind the panels of frosted vintage glass, a vague shadow moved like a lava lamp. I assumed it was the pizza-delivery person but it was my friend Bobby from up the road. She lived in a really nice apartment closer to the beach. She held up another bottle of champagne with a broad grin plastered across her face.
‘Happy house-warming.’
‘There’s not much to see but isn’t it great?’ I smiled, letting her in, closing the door and waving my arms around theatrically.
The extra person in my house made it seem smaller, as if the walls had taken in a deep breath.
‘Hmmm,’ she said, wasting no time wrestling the cork out of her bottle.
Clinking ten-cent Vinnies glasses – cheers – we stood in the middle of the empty living room, nodding, surveying.
‘It’s got potential,’ Bobby managed.
We looked at one another and laughed.
‘I know it’s a shit-box but it does have potential!’ I said.
Glancing over to the stained and chipped wall I could imagine a long, soft green leather couch instead of the one that Kate’s dog used to sleep on. An antique side table with a chandelier lamp and a scrum of first-edition books. A Chinese rug and a coffee table with sleek picture books of Manhattan and The Bonsai. A large-screen television and a VCR so we could watch videos. A tiny table with wrought-iron chairs so we didn’t have to eat on a towel on the floor, picnic-style. In my bedroom I’d have a swathe of deep reds and purples, furs and incense, like an exotic harem tent.
The pizza man arrived and we all had a slice of pizza. There wasn’t a lot to go around but the champagne had filled my belly quite well. As I sat cross-legged on the floor, drinking bubbles, eating soggy, doughy, cheesy, scrumptious pizza, Ben gave me a big smile, wiping a smudge of tomato paste from his cheek with the back of his hand.
‘It’s cool, hey, Mum? Our own place.’
I nodded back. Bobby’s eyes popped behind her glass and I warned her with a look to let us have this moment, this delusion.
Billy came to collect the kids for their first weekend-access visit the next Friday afternoon. He was less optimistic when I told him my plans for the place.
‘You can’t polish a turd,’ he offered.
I glared at him and bit my tongue … but it was hard. After all, I could have lobbed the perfect comeback!
Whenever you buy a family pass to the zoo, on a boat, a theme park, anywhere, the standard family pass means two adults and two children, and the pass fare becomes cheaper when you buy it that way instead of each person on an individual ticket. Well, not that I could afford any kind of family ticket to anything back in those days, except the doctor, because he bulk-billed, but those family tickets were no longer really applicable or appropriate to my family set-up. I use this analogy because the single-parent family suddenly became inapplicable and inappropriate in many broader situations as well. In so many subtle ways, society made me feel like ‘less’ of a family for not fitting into the correct configuration.
Many social settings were organised around couples, and the friends Billy and I formerly had divided like the Red Sea into friends who stayed friends with us individually and friends who didn’t. I’m not sure where this analogy is going but somehow I ended up feeling like I was in the middle of the empty sea; the parted bit, the barren bit that smelled like dead fish, with the waves all peeled back and recoiling from me. I had my friends, Sam and Bobby, who’d been my mates very independently of Billy. Sam had come first, but Bobby had been my friend for a handful of years by now, and was not close to Billy. She didn’t like him and he didn’t think much of her. They were jealous of each other’s relationship with me. I don’t say that like I was some Christmas cracker they played tug-o-war with; they just were two completely different people and I was the only thing they had in common. She was a bolshie, outspoken feminist, successful, and the independent single mother of an older teenager, and he was a politically incorrect clown who’d enjoyed razzing her up. Kate I barely knew, apart from a couple of kids’ birthday parties, but I had decided I liked her. And I was very grateful for the hand-me-down furniture. The boys loved playing cubby houses on the bunks, draping sheets from the top one to make a dark little hideaway on the bottom.
But all the couples I’d partied with for the last few years disappeared when Billy and I broke up, like people out of a lift after a rancid fart bomb had been dropped. Single mothers got labelled. It wasn’t fair but it was what it was. The general consensus seemed to be that single mothers were drunks on the make, looking for a brand new daddy for their squalling brats. Former male friends began looking at me with less-detached curiosity, possibly assessing the level of my desperation. Married women friends tried to cloak their white-knuckled paranoia whenever I so much as acknowledged their husbands. I had no idea who had stuck by Billy, if anyone, but before too long I realised I had been cut adrift.
I found myself with just a small coterie of mothers for support and friendship, but for those first few months it was largely the boys and me, at home, or us catching public transport for hours every day to drop them at day-care, and me cleaning, cleaning, cleaning! Goddamnit, I smelled permanently like Domestos. People sitting near me on the bus must have been able to pick me for a cleaner because of the heady fumes I exuded. My hands were already getting calluses and, bonus, I was becoming more and more of a perfectionist around our own house.
We had very little in the apartment though surely and steadily I was adding little treasures found at op shops
and random bits of furniture from the footpath in Bondi, dragged back to my little cave, like a cave-woman hauling a mammoth carcass home. There was the chest of drawers I had to scavenge drawer by drawer, a coffee table, a white ceramic bust of Nefertiti, an original painting of a woman who looked like she had three arms but probably wasn’t meant to (a school art project gone wrong?), a four-slice toaster that worked perfectly, and a television. I had to get Mote, the Nigerian drum player from over the hall, to help me carry that up the one rickety flight of stairs. There was a strange purple line running across the screen but otherwise it worked just fine. I spent my days wandering the perfumed halls of homes lifted from the pages of Vogue Living and came home to alleyway chic.
The kids had settled into a routine of going to Bill’s place every second weekend, although sometimes he was away on tour with artists like Prince and Rod Stewart and Elton John. My days had become not-such-exciting tours of the rich-but-not-so-famous of the Eastern Suburbs as I scrubbed bathrooms, soaked designer shirts in laundry tubs, starched collars, arranged flowers and mopped expanses of polished floorboards. The work wasn’t too bad. Rich people didn’t have much grime to deal with and I liked working in mansions. I played the ‘imagination game’ and pretended, while I cleaned, that these were my houses. I really believed that one day I would live in places like the Double Bay terrace, the Vaucluse three-storey house with harbour views or the Bondi penthouse with panoramic expanses of ocean and sky pouring through the glass walls.
Whenever I went home to Cockroach Palace, I would scrub and spray away the decades of decay and grot and try to polish that turd into a diamond, but mostly I walked around the tiny unit with my eyes half-closed, so that everything appeared in soft-focus. I invested in cheap lamps from Lifeline to throw better lighting over the paint-flaking walls and cleverly draped some material instead of curtains, lending the place a bohemian feel. I stole flowers from gardens on the way home from the bus stop and housed them in old glass jars, setting them on the mantelpiece of the long-bricked-up fireplace. One of my clients donated a pastel Chinese rug they were going to throw out. Rich people’s cast-offs were always very welcome.
Soon my apartment was looking homely enough and life was not too bad. I rarely had more than a handful of dollars left over at the end of the week after rent and I had to work on paying my bills on payment plans of small weekly instalments – life was lean – but we were happy.
The boys and I could walk to the beach and make sandcastles. It had become too cold to swim, although we watched the wrinkled geriatrics throw themselves into the frigid sea, laughing at their insanity. Someone told me they called themselves the Bondi Icebergs. I thought that sounded like a recipe for pneumonia. Perhaps they were in training to be cryogenically frozen after death.
On weekends Bobby and I would throw bread at seagulls while the kids cartwheeled and tumbled like weeds down over the slope of green grass leading to the beach. Some Friday afternoons she’d bring a couple of glasses and champagne. I didn’t have many friends but the ones I had were good ones. My childfree weekends were girls’ nights out if I could afford it and girls’ nights in if I couldn’t.
The ache I felt from having pushed Billy away and the loneliness at night after I’d put the boys to bed was easing. I wrote in my journal. It had become my companion. Ben lost his first tooth today, I wrote, before stealing out to my purse to shake it up, hoping for coins. That first tooth, sadly, only got him a lousy IOU from the tooth fairy as it was the day before pension day and I had nada. Nothing. I always budgeted down to the wire – and by wire, I mean dollar – and being a first lost tooth, I hadn’t planned for a fairy visit. I didn’t even know what the going rate was. I rang Sam, but being a Jehovah’s Witness, she didn’t do such things, and Bobby’s daughter was a teenager, so she had no idea. Kate suggested two dollars and I figured that, given the disparity in our incomes, I’d settle for one dollar, so I wrote a little mock-cheque for a dollar and left that in place of the tooth under the empty glass.
The next morning, Ben was thrilled, waving his very first cheque.
‘I will just take it to the bank this morning while you’re at Butterfly Gardens.’ I smiled. ‘And they’ll take that and give me the money and I’ll give it to you this afternoon.’
‘Super.’ He nodded. ‘I’ll buy some lollies from the shop on the way home.’
‘I want lollies! I want lollies!’ Toby began to holler angrily. ‘Not just Ben.’
‘You didn’t lose your tooth.’ Ben bristled, pulling down his lip to show the gristly space on the bottom of his jaw in the middle. ‘You have to lose a tooth and you’re too young anyway so you can’t unless you bang it and knock it out and then it will just bleed everywhere.’
‘I want to lose a tooth.’ Toby began to cry, pulling at his little pearly whites. ‘I want lollies.’
I bundled him into my arms, soothing him. ‘I’ll get you some lollies too.’
‘But that’s not fair—’ Ben began.
‘You can buy your own lollies, Benny, and I’ll get some for the two of you so you still get extra,’ I explained, hoping this whole lolly caper was not going to get out of hand.
‘I want extra too,’ Toby said, struggling out of my arms, dropping to an army roll on the floor.
‘Just get dressed,’ I sighed.
I had to deliver them to day-care and pay my fees, catch two buses back to Rose Bay and get a job done before catching another bus to Clovelly for another two-hour clean, and it was cold and rainy and I didn’t feel like going anywhere. I was nursing a sore ear and had been for a couple of days. Outside the rain was ominously loud and I thought of the one skeletal, half-broken umbrella I possessed and the long walk to the bus stop.
‘I want extra lollies,’ Toby screamed out of nowhere, like someone was skinning him alive. ‘Extra lollies. Or I will pull my tooth out!’
He started stomping his feet hard and it wasn’t long before the very sensitive neighbours from downstairs began swearing loudly.
‘Stop it, Toby,’ I hissed, but that seemed to just encourage him until I had to pick him up under one arm, which was no easy feat as he was getting big, and carry him back to my room. I dropped him onto my mattress and glared at him. ‘Do you want the trolls from downstairs to come up and get us?’
That shut him up.
It was evil and unconscionable and I knew parents shouldn’t do it but when you are desperate, a very poor disciplinarian and stuck between a rock and a hard place, using terror as a tactic can be a very handy last resort. It worked just as well in international politics and if prime ministers and presidents could do it, then I figured so could single mothers.
I rarely saw the downstairs neighbours during daylight as they were junkies who dressed in stained tracksuits and spent their lives inside smoking pot and shooting up whatever they could get their hands on while watching daytime television. I could hear the gurgle from their bongs through the floorboards so I could only imagine how loud a stompy-footed toddler must have sounded overhead. I could even hear most of the dialogue from Days of our Lives if I was ever home during the day. ‘The trolls’ became a convenient shared enemy to unite us and keep the kids just nicely terrified enough to be good when threatened, which of course I only did very occasionally. Well, not often anyway. Not every day.
That afternoon, ‘cheque’ cashed, the kids were all lollied up, watching Ren and Stimpy on the television while I cooked up some stir-fry chicken. Another one of my hotplates had died on the stove so I moved the saucepan over to the only one that still worked. We all went to bed early together in my bed. My ear still hurt and I wondered if I had some impacted wax, because I wasn’t feeling sick, just sore.
I put a warm compress to my ear as we lay in bed and Ben read us a story, making it up as he went because he couldn’t officially read more than a fistful of words. It was funny. He was funny. Toby helped out and added to the narrative,
which made it even funnier, until we were all in hysterics, crying with laughter.
‘Ow,’ I blubbered, holding my ear.
‘Liam told me spiders can nest inside your ear,’ Ben told me, suddenly serious.
‘What?’ I asked incredulously.
‘It’s true. His mum had a sore ear and went to the doctor and there were spiders living in her ear.’
I couldn’t sleep that night and had dreams of a spider crawling out of my ear – and it wasn’t that cute one from Charlotte’s Web either, but a nasty, big, hairy ten-eyed beast. I woke up with a killer headache like a deranged and starving rat was trapped inside my skull and I had a fever that blistered the inside of my arteries.
I was too sick for work. Too sick to navigate my way to the child-care centre on public transport. Too sick to even fight it when the boys scrambled back to their bunks to finish the last of the lolly haul for breakfast. The rain smashed against my window and the old glass rattled. Thunder rolled in, shuddering through the walls of the unit.
I fell asleep and let the kids fend for themselves. I could hear them slip a Rug Rats video into the machine and I spent all morning with those nasally characters shaking me in and out of my delirium like an acid trip in an American kindergarten.
I couldn’t swallow. My sheets were drenched and my pores were dripping sweat that smelled like a blend of off fruit and bleach.
When I finally woke and looked up through eyelids like a veil of fire, I saw Ben and Toby standing there holding out a glass of water and a piece of dry toast, smiling at me, saying, ‘We made you lunch.’
I cried hot salty tears and washed down the soggy balls of flour through a throat that was swollen with poisoned ear gunk.
Madness, Mayhem and Motherhood Page 5
