by Joy Dettman
matty-duty
Eddy’s laptop had a program specifically developed for the making of rosters. He made new Matty-duty rosters each month, so the teachers wouldn’t become suspicious again about kids always taking sickies on the same days each month. He’d also compiled a twenty-odd-page file he’d named Absentees – notes for school which only required a name before one could be printed out for Vinnie to sign. The high school five now suffered regularly from sprained ankles, gastro, a variety of viruses, twenty-four-hour bugs, sick mothers and you name it, though never on Tuesdays. Nelly did Matty-duty on Tuesdays.
On the week of her birthday, Lori copped an ‘Eddy virus’, which was a block of three days, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. She was going to use one of those days to get Mavis clean.
Never an early riser, it was well after eleven before the loo, then the brick room television announced that Mavis had arisen. Lori moved Matty from the kitchen to the lounge room, got his Lion King video playing, told him not to move or to touch the computer, then proceeded to arm herself with the necessary equipment.
She held her breath when she opened the brick room door, held it while in double quick time she connected the old shower spray to the washbasin taps, then went out to exhale and breathe in the space between the brick room and the kitchen.
‘I feel like an egg for breakfast,’ Mavis said.
‘Have a shower in here and I’ll cook you one,’ Lori replied. The brick room’s cement floor was too rough for her to slip on, and it had a definite slope down to the loo corner. Martin was a bricklayer, not a cementer. He wasn’t much of a designer either. That room was almost three times as long as it was wide.
‘I told you to put my bloody chair in the bathroom and I’ll shower in there,’ Mavis said.
‘I told you that I’m not Henry,’ Lori said. ‘You can get yourself clean enough in here.’ She’d done it before, so Lori closed the door and left her to it. The air coming out of that room was toxic.
She stood in the narrow passage listening, waiting for the sound of running water. She stood until she heard the complaint of the recliner chair as Mavis flopped down into it to watch television while waiting for her egg on toast.
It was Henry’s fault that she was so useless. He’d done everything for her. When she’d become too big for him to get in and out of the bath to shower, he’d sawed an inch off two legs of a backless kitchen chair so he could stand it half in and half out of the tub. He’d get her sitting on it, squirt her with liquid soap, then spray and sponge her clean in much the same way as he’d sponged and sprayed his car, which Lori was never, not ever, going to do.
‘Where’s my egg?’ Mavis yelled when her midday movie broke for a batch of commercials.
‘I told you that when you have a shower, I’ll cook it,’ Lori called back.
The Lion King video played for around two hours, as did Mavis’s midday movie. She hadn’t showered so hadn’t eaten, and when her show ended, out she came, wrapped in a cloud of noxious gas.
At times it was safer to be out of that house than in it. Matty knew it. He was waiting beside the letterbox when Lori came up the drive with her bike.
They rode over to Coles. Every day they needed to buy bread and milk and today they needed butter and potatoes, and a bag of potatoes large enough to feed everyone was heavy.
The boys were home, or were sitting in a row on Nelly’s fence when the shoppers returned, Matty buckled into an old seat on the back of Lori’s bike, her handlebars loaded with supermarket bags, her bike basket full.
‘She’s in the kitchen gorging,’ Alan said, which explained why they were on the wrong side of the road.
‘She’s punishing me for not frying her an egg for breakfast,’ Lori said.
Her gorging was ugly to watch. She didn’t bite, chew and swallow as normal people bit and chewed. She hammered anything available into her mouth, damn near choked on it, but loaded in more and kept loading it in. It used to upset Henry. He used to stand in the kitchen attempting to reason with her. Her kids learnt early that you can’t reason with unreasonable people, so they stayed away until she ate herself into a semi coma or lost the lot down the loo.
There was something seriously wrong with her head, though not permanently so. Had she been full-time crazy, someone would have put her away, but she could be so humorous at times, could be almost pleasant to live around – occasionally.
‘We need to do something about getting her showered,’ Mick said.
‘I’ll take the hose into the kitchen if one of you will volunteer to squirt her with shampoo,’ Lori said.
‘I’ll rub her down with the broom,’ Neil said.
Mick ignored him. ‘There are people who come in to shower the disabled.’
‘District nurses,’ Eddy said, as if they didn’t know.
‘She’s not disabled,’ Lori said.
‘She thinks she is,’ Mick said.
‘Doctor Jones could organise someone,’ Eddy said.
He probably could. He probably would. That lanky old dude had been Henry’s ‘go to’ since forever, but he was seventy or more now and Lori loathed troubling him.
She’d been forced to last September when Greg, number three kid, who no one had heard from in three years, flicked Mavis’s switch over to the dark side, or what he’d done had flicked it.
Two cops came to the front door with very recent news of Gregory Smyth-Owen. He’d been arrested in Melbourne and charged with two counts of manslaughter.
Cops turn up in their smart uniforms, pass on their news as if they care, then drive away to the next job. Kids have to ride out what comes later.
Anyway, Lori had ended up using Eddy’s mobile to phone Doctor Jones, and she’d said ‘urgent’. He’d arrived fifteen minutes later, with three bodyguards.
It was the first time he’d seen Mavis since they’d reduced her to human size, and for a second his eyes almost popped out from behind his glasses – until his glasses flew.
It took all three of his muscle men to get Mavis down on her bed and to hold her there until that old dude tamed her with whatever it was that doctors sucked into their hypodermics. She’d been flat on her back, snoring, before he’d commented on her weight loss.
‘The willpower of that woman,’ he’d said. His three helpers had nodded their agreement. Two of them had been to the house before, not to get Mavis down, but to get her back onto her feet when she’d crashed, which she’d done a few times back when she’d been mammoth sized.
Her loss of weight had nothing at all to do with her willpower. It was Eddy who deserved that credit.
‘You’ve got a maximum security cell out there,’ he’d said the first time he’d seen their brick room. He hadn’t been wrong about that. It was a solid mass of bricks with a cell-sized window, a loo and a washbasin. ‘Desperate circumstances call for desperate solutions,’ he’d said. Genetically he was one of them, but from the age of two to twelve, he’d been raised by Aunty Eva. She’d raised Alan for seven years, though little of her had rubbed off on him. What people referred to as the formative years must have been those between the age of nine and twelve, because by the time Eddy came home, he’d become a posh-talking, smart-arsed stranger they could have done without.
‘You’re enabling her,’ he’d said when he’d seen what they’d fed her. He may have been right, but it had been their ‘enabling’ that had enabled them to live with her. Initially only Lori, Jamesy and Neil had gone along with his ‘solution’, but in time the others came around. They’d all refused to let Eddy go home the next time he’d run out of money. He’d started the business of the diet and he’d damn well see it through.
They’d had ongoing problems with Eva and old Alice, her partner, or they had until Eddy talked the two women into going on their long-delayed world tour. They’d been gone for months before their tour took them to Argentina where their bus rolled off a mountain.
Mr Watts, Eva’s solicitor, organised their return, as boxes of ashes. T
hey’d had a combined funeral – for their ashes, in Melbourne, which Mavis could have gone to. Eva was her only sister. Lori had paid forty-two dollars for a black dress and twenty-five for a pair of shoes for her to wear to it. Wasted money. Mavis spent the day of her sister’s funeral watching television in the brick room. Mick said they’d institutionalised her.
They’d done something to her. Until the Greg business, she’d rarely left that room and when she had she’d been docile. Nelly said that Mavis had lost so much of herself she hadn’t been able to recognise what remained. Lori had barely recognised what remained. As pleasant as Mavis may have occasionally been in the past, she’d never been docile.
They’d tried to get her out of the house, had told her that she needed to get some sun on her skin. She hadn’t argued, just gone back to her room and locked herself in. They’d expected some reaction when she found out that her family home, her father’s money, plus Eva and Alice’s travel insurance had been willed to the twins – as had Walter Watts, Eva’s solicitor. He was now the twins’ appointed trustee. They’d thought she’d react to Walter Watts the day he drove the twins home after the funeral, Eddy wearing his posh new funeral suit, the top button of his shirt open to show off Eva’s heavy gold chain. Mavis hadn’t stuck her nose outside to get a look at Watts.
The kids had. They’d watched him help Eddy unload the car boot, which had been packed with stuff from the St Kilda house, such as old Alice’s laptop, such as a large framed photograph of sixteen-year-old Mavis. And photograph albums and cartons of books and a box full of Eva’s jewellery, real jewellery, like diamond ear studs and gorgeous opal earrings, and twin gold baby bracelets with Edward and Alan engraved on them, and pearls, a double row of real pearls.
Mavis recognised those pearls later. ‘They belonged to the old bitch,’ she’d said. ‘Get them out of my sight.’
That was the first spark of life they’d seen in her.
mrs nguyen
The last thing Doctor Jones always said as he was leaving was ‘Call me if you need me.’ They had two numbers where he could be reached, his surgery number and his mobile.
Watts had bought the twins a mobile phone to share. Eddy carried it. He used it to phone the surgery before school on Friday. The receptionist knew about Mavis Smyth-Owen. Everyone in Willama knew about her. Before becoming housebound by her obesity, she’d been notorious. She put him through to Doctor Jones.
Mavis, now classified on some governmental file as an invalid pensioner, was eligible for subsidised anything, though it took the old doctor a week to find someone desperate enough to take on the job of showering her, a Mrs Nguyen, who didn’t speak a lot of English, which may have been how she’d been conned into taking it on.
Lori expected trouble the morning she introduced them. Mavis was anti everything, which included anti-Asian, but having got her own way about the showering chair, she complied, and by ten-thirty on the first Thursday in March, she’d been showered, shampooed, deodorised, had her under-sag disease plastered with anti-itching cream and was back in her brick room – when Mrs Nguyen started washing the floors.
She was a gem.
At ten o’clock on two Thursdays and a Monday, she arrived to do Mavis then the floors – before the novelty wore off – for Mavis, not Mrs Nguyen.
‘Tell her to come at a reasonable bloody hour or not to come at all,’ Mavis said on that last Thursday.
Eddy attempted to change Mrs Nguyen’s arrival time but she had other commitments at the times Mavis might have considered reasonable.
You give up. You have to. You go to school, not to learn anything but to escape for six hours to where the world smelt clean. Home was again the essence of rancid sweat boiled up with public loo. Home was attempting not to watch Mavis lift a sagging boob to scratch beneath it.
You want to run so far and so fast but you know that if you do, you’ll eventually have to turn around and come back, so why bother running? You can hide in fiction if you’ve got a good book. Lori hid on Saturday, on the east-side veranda, on the old kitchen stool she’d hidden behind the lounge-room chimney, but the book was Pygmalion, a play she was supposed to write about for school. She had Mr Morris this year for English. He was new and different and he hadn’t taken a dislike to her yet, though probably would, because she couldn’t stand his choice of ‘good literature’.
And how was anyone expected to concentrate on the story behind a play when the names of the speakers and the stage directions kept interrupting the dialogue? She couldn’t, and needing to hide in order to read didn’t help. Every time she heard footsteps on the veranda, she lost her place.
Mick found her and offered more interesting reading material, a Harvey Norman catalogue open at a page advertising split-system air conditioners.
‘They’re as cheap as dirt, Lori,’ he said. ‘We’ve got too much money in that account. We need to spend some of it.’ Pensioners weren’t supposed to stockpile government money. When Mavis had been smoking two or more packets a day, they hadn’t been able to stockpile it.
He spoke of BTUs, which meant nothing to Lori. She understood centimetres.
‘It’s bigger than Nelly’s, and she said that hers guzzles electricity.’ It also cooled her house. You could feel it as soon as you stepped through her back door. ‘And whichever room we put it in, Mavis will be stuck in it all day,’ she added, attempting to hand back the catalogue.
‘Not if we get it installed on the kitchen wall opposite her door. It’s got enough BTUs to cool her room.’ Mick took the catalogue, then started back along the veranda.
He had a leg-throwing walk. He wore a brace that went from hip to boot. Every morning of his life when he got out of bed, he strapped it on and didn’t unstrap it until he went to bed at night – and he never complained about wearing it. Lori had dressed this morning in shorts and a singlet top, and her feet were bare. He wore jeans and boots, summer and winter.
‘How much will we have left in the account after we pay the power bill?’ she called after him.
He knew to the cent. He knew to the day when that bill had to be paid. He looked nothing like Henry but had inherited every strand of his reliability DNA.
Their power bill was never high. In wintertime they paid more for wood than for electricity. Wood cooked their meals, wood heated the water in their ceiling reservoir and, in winter, wood kept them warm.
‘Will they install it for that price?’
‘Probably not. I’ll find out,’ he said and went inside to find Eddy and his mobile. Lori followed him.
They ended up ordering that unit, then paying for it over the phone, and of course installation was extra, but the store gave Mick the phone number of an installer, so they phoned him too.
Two huge cartons were delivered to the front veranda on Monday. They were still breaking into them when Martin popped in, or popped in as far as the front veranda. He never went inside. Mavis had declared war on him after Henry died.
‘It would be more use to you in the lounge room,’ he said. ‘If you install it on the chimney wall, it will blow through to the passage, cool the front bedroom and seep through the rest of the house.’
‘It won’t reach the brick room,’ Lori said. ‘And she’ll reclaim the front room.’
Currently, Lori and the three little kids slept in the front bedroom.
Martin didn’t stay long. He never did. Alan owned an expensive watch that doubled as a stopwatch. He’d been timing Martin’s visits since before Christmas.
‘Six-and-a-half minutes,’ he reported when he drove away.
They discussed him and his wife with Nelly that night when they went over the road to find out how many BTUs her air conditioner pumped out. She agreed with Martin, though for a different reason. She said they got too much heat on their west-side kitchen wall, that their east-side lounge-room wall was the logical place to put an air conditioner. She’d had hers installed on the east side.
Tuesday being Nelly’s Matty-duty day, no one w
as rostered on to be at home, and when the installer phoned to say he’d be there at seven, Eddy elected himself to stand guard. No one fought him for the privilege.
They had one power point in the lounge room with a four-point power board plugged into it, and they needed all four of its plugs for the desktop computer, the printer, the big television and its video/DVD player. But they unplugged the lot, spoke about buying a second power board to plug into the first, then went to school.
As it happened, their air conditioner sucked too much power to be plugged in. The electrician half of the installers had to crawl up the bathroom manhole and run a new wire back to the fuse box, which he’d done before midday. By the time the kids returned from school, Martin was proven right. Refrigerated air had trickled out to the central passage and even into the kitchen. The lounge room and front bedroom were iceboxes – and no sign of Mavis.
‘Where is she?’ Lori asked.
‘Sleeping,’ Eddy replied.
No one worried about her. No one worried about dinner. They sat in their icebox lounge room, on couch, chair and floor while E.T. played. It was nearing its end before Mavis came to the door, looking like something left over from an indestructible rubbish collection.
‘What’s he spent my bloody money on now?’ she asked. She meant Martin. She believed him to be the one accessing her pension account, and as he didn’t have to live with her, they allowed her to blame him.
‘It was on special at Harvey Norman,’ Mick said.
‘That motor hammers against my wall and it’s blown my light globe.’
‘It’s not the globe, Mave,’ Eddy said. ‘The electrician had to disconnect your light. He said that the way it was wired up was illegal.’
Everything about the brick room was illegal. Having a toilet in a bedroom was illegal, just as the building of that room had been illegal. The Willama council had laws about what people could do on their own land.
What Mavis was wearing should have been illegal, and as she walked into the chill, kids scattered. She owned shirts, owned skirts, owned dresses, but was wearing the clothing she’d slept in, a pair of men’s grey boxer-short underpants and a rag of a t-shirt, which moulded her sagging boobs. And the legs of those underpants, stretched out of shape, allowed a portion of her belly apron to protrude when she flopped down on the couch.