by Joy Dettman
He and a big old hammer drill followed Vinnie back, and that drill plus a tungsten bit ate into Martin’s cement floor like a rat gnawing holes into cheese. Bert took over then, as he’d done when he’d caught Mick and Vinnie discussing the building of a new chook pen. The following morning, he was back, his dilapidated old trailer hooked up to his equally dilapidated Toyota. He drove Mick, Vinnie and the bankcard up to Bunnings and they damn near cleaned out Mavis’s account.
‘I couldn’t stop them,’ Mick said, his hand smoothing a sheet of wallboard, like loving it and so pleased that he hadn’t been able to stop Bert and Vinnie.
A loud weekend followed, a weekend of sawing, drilling, hammering and there was no less noise when Vinnie rode off to play football. Mick and Bert had the framework bolted to the floor and rafters before he came home, and with only that framework up, it improved the dimensions of the tunnel.
They gave Vinnie a birthday party on Sunday night and invited Bert. His table manners encouraged a few of the kids to improve their own. He ate his share of apple pie and ice-cream before leaving to visit his wife, who wasn’t improving even if Bert had convinced himself otherwise.
Weekends and weekdays become one when you get to eighty-three, when school and work are forgotten memories. They heard him coming on Monday morning, heard him trundling his old wheelbarrow down the drive. He’d loaded it with tools that included a killer electric saw, and he was wearing a ragged pair of chippie overalls. They fed him a bowl of porridge then Vinnie went to work. Eddy was on Matty-duty, but as he was in Melbourne, Mick chose to do his turn, in the main so he could keep an eye on Bert.
That killer saw was screaming when Lori left for school. She expected to return to a yard full of bloody fingers or a headless Matty. In all it was a bloody day. After lunch when she was called to the headmistress’s office, she was certain Mick had lost an arm or that Mavis was dead but the headmistress only asked about Eddy, who hadn’t been at school in a week.
When put on the spot Lori used what she had to. ‘Our mother had a serious heart attack. She’s in a Melbourne hospital. Eddy is down there with her and Mick had to stay home today to look after our little brother – while Mum is away.’
‘Mum’ had been very visible – and audible – around Willama before growing too big to walk over to the town. A few years ago, rumours started circulating about her having grown herself into that house. The headmistress wasn’t the sympathetic type. Her mouth had difficulty in saying, ‘I hope the news is good.’
No fingers, limbs or blood in the backyard that afternoon. Matty playing in sawdust was good news, as was the inside of the brick room. Those sheets of wallboard had been screwed to the frame and Bert was up his ladder, screwing the ceiling back into place.
There was little money in the account but they had eggs by the dozen so Lori made one of her baked omelettes for dinner. Bert ate his share. After what he’d achieved in that room, the least they could do was feed him. He looked tired but didn’t once mention his wife. He mentioned putting in a second shower in the northern end of what he now referred to as the en suite.
There was space enough behind that partition for a second shower cubicle. They needed a second shower cubicle but were broke until next pension day.
‘We could use a bit of what’s in the emergency fund,’ Mick said.
‘We’ve spent all that we’re spending, Mick.’
Bert eyed her for a second before turning towards the brick room. ‘I was thinking shower up the north end and your pedestal washbasin between it and the toilet.’ He didn’t give up easily. Mick did, though after they’d eaten, he and Vinnie started looking at the basin currently positioned beneath the window in the now bedroom end of that room.
Half an hour later, Jamesy was up the manhole checking out the pipes that delivered water to the basin’s taps.
There was too much yelling about dangerous electrical wiring, about stop taps, about copper pipes to notice that Eddy was home, and when they noticed him, he expected everyone to drop what they were doing to listen to his latest news on Mave. The kids were more interested in getting Jamesy down. Their ceilings were high. Vinnie had to stand on a chair so Jamesy could get his feet onto his shoulders.
He came down with good news, though. The plumber’s apprentice who’d connected those pipes had used copper piping all the way, which according to Vinnie was pliable and thus movable. They’d need a weekend to do that moving, a weekend without water or the stove, due to the pipes running up from the stove to the hot water reservoir in the ceiling.
Eddy was given his time then. He told them that Mavis was eating well – as if that was good news.
‘How long have we got?’ Vinnie asked.
‘Maybe a week,’ Eddy said.
‘Shit,’ Vinnie said.
They had to use Nelly’s backyard ‘dunny’ the following weekend, had to carry buckets of water from across the road all day, but with Alan and Jamesy in the ceiling pulling, and Mick and Vinnie below pushing, they got those pipes up, got them pointed in the right direction, and got them down again where they were needed. Late on Sunday, Bert’s old hands reconnected them, and without a leak. Eighty-three years of living sure teaches knobbly old hands a whole heap of skills.
The en suite needed a door and the fitting of it presented a problem. If they swung it in, to the left, it would hit the washbasin; if they swung it in, to the right, it would hit the toilet; if they swung it out instead of in, they’d lose more bedroom space.
They had one minor catastrophe when Matty tested the basin taps. The drainage pipe hadn’t been reconnected, but the floor sloped down to the loo corner so the water pooled around the loo, and if you looked on the bright side of that mishap it was that they got the drainage pipes connected up in double quick time. Vinnie knocked a brick out of the east-side wall, pushed one end of a plastic drainpipe through the hole and the other end through a gap in the paling fence. It wasn’t legal but the block belonged to them and they weren’t going to complain about a bit of soapy water draining onto it.
Bert and Mick ended up sliding the en suite door, which slid well but created a major problem when it was closed. The whole idea of the partition wall had been about hiding the loo, which it did very well, too well when that door was closed. No one could see where the loo was to use it.
‘It needs a window,’ Vinnie said.
‘It needs an electrician,’ Bert said.
‘We need to start getting this room ready for her,’ Lori said.
As it happened, there was no need to worry about getting it ready. Both Smyth-Owen mobiles were turned off when the hospital phoned. Both received voicemail messages, telling them to contact the hospital.
Mister Terrence Clay had bitten off more than he could chew when he’d taken on Mrs Mavis Smyth-Owen. She’d been back into surgery, not to have more dead skin cut away but to have two stents inserted into her heart’s sagging arteries. She’d had a second major heart attack, which was perfect timing for Vinnie.
He and his boss were painting a big old renovated house near the high school and its owners had replaced most of its windows. One of the old windows came home roped with the ladders to the roof-rack of the boss’s work van – and that wasn’t all they brought home. They unloaded a birdbath. It was green with mould and its basin was broken, but the three naked cherubs supposed to hold it up were intact. They set it up in the centre of the dead front lawn, the broken section of bowl facing the veranda, and from the footpath it improved the look of Henry’s house.
‘That window is too big,’ Lori said.
‘It’s going into the bedroom end,’ Vinnie explained. ‘We’ll move that useless little bugger into the en suite.’
He and his boss were propping the window against the outdoor loo wall when Merve, the boss, eyed Lori.
‘What’s happened to you?’ he asked.
‘She grew,’ Vinnie said.
‘She done that, all right,’ his boss said, then stood staring at her while
rubbing at his lopsided nose. He had the look of a retired prize fighter who’d led too many times with his nose. ‘Who do you look like, love?’ he asked.
‘Myself,’ she said.
‘Yeah,’ he agreed and rubbed some more, maybe attempting to straighten his nose’s lean. ‘You’re the dead spit and image of someone else too.’
‘Henry.’
‘Maybe, and that actress dame with the Heinz variety of adopted kids. Can’t think of her name.’ He saluted then with his rubbing finger and went on his way, and Vinnie went into the laundry to get Mick’s measuring tape.
‘You’re not knocking down a wall, Vinnie,’ Lori said, following him. ‘It’s finished and now we’re stopping.’ He continued measuring, and Mick started writing down what he measured. ‘She’ll come home sooner or later and have nowhere to sleep. You have to stop. Both of you have to stop.’
‘We need to be able to see in there,’ Mick said.
‘Phone an electrician. I’ll pay from the emergency fund – if you both stop when it’s done.’
She called three electricians and took the cheapest quote, which didn’t stop Vinnie. When Martin popped in on Saturday, Vinnie showed him the window and his chalk marking on the outer brick wall, and maybe three minutes later, Martin’s wife, waiting out the front in her little red Honda, beeped its horn.
She was one of those dumpy pig-snout blondes who thought they were better than everyone else because Daddy had money enough to send her to a Catholic ladies’ college. She’d changed Martin, had changed the way he dressed as well as the way he lived. When he’d lived at home, he’d been Lori’s favourite brother. He was Miss Piggy’s lapdog now and he’d been to obedience training. When she beeped, he almost panted to obey.
‘Four point seven-five minutes,’ Alan said.
Eddy caught the bus back to Melbourne on Saturday morning but was home again on Sunday night. Watts, having lost patience with his house guest, had put him on the bus.
He was full of Mavis, and happy for a change. ‘She’s totally normal,’ he reported. ‘She was pleased to see me.’ They didn’t believe him. ‘Seriously, she’s normal. She told me she’d had a near-death experience with her last heart attack, the bright light, the voice telling her to go back.’
‘Henry,’ Jamesy said. ‘Be gone, depart ye demon,’ he said, mimicking Henry’s English accent, and they laughed at him, laughed loud. No one wanted Mavis to die. They didn’t want her home either. For the first time in their lives their muscles weren’t permanently geared up to move fast. For the first time in their lives they could say what they thought without needing to censor those thoughts.
They laughed when Eddy spread a bunch of diagrams over the table, body printouts Mister Terrence Clay had drawn on with a red biro.
‘He’s bloody ringbarked her,’ Vinnie said, and they laughed at that.
According to the red biro, Clay had cut Mavis where her waist may once have been, then again below her hip line. He’d crossed out what had been between those red lines. He’d red-lined her swinging boobs, red-lined her batwings, red-lined her brow.
‘It’s called a brow lift,’ Eddy explained.
‘What does she look like?’ Lori asked.
‘Swollen, squinty eyed, bruised, but they had her walking with one of those frames when I went in.’
‘She wasn’t killing them?’
‘I tell you, she’s normal. She’s nice to the nurses and she was to me too. She talked about when she lived in Melbourne, about beach parties, just normal stuff –’
That was old stuff to most of the kids. They’d heard a lot about Mavis’s ‘good life’ in Melbourne before Henry had got her pregnant with Martin – and her idea of ‘good’ had been umpteen boyfriends and wild parties and spending more time away from home than at home.
They laughed again when Jamesy added two blue biro lines plus stitches to the brow lift line. Years ago, Martin bought a copy of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Every kid in the house had seen McMurphy’s lobotomy scars.
Too much laughter in this house, and bottled for too long, that night the cork hit the ceiling. The kitchen rocked with laughter until Eddy started showing photographs he’d taken with his mobile. He’d been out to Eva’s house. He’d been out to his old school.
‘Watts was on again about us going back there as boarders,’ he said to Alan.
‘I’m not going anywhere,’ Alan said. ‘That goes for that school trip to China too.’
‘You’ll change your mind,’ Eddy said and showed views of the beach and a view of St Kilda pier.
‘Did they say when they’re letting her out?’ Vinnie asked.
‘She has to have more scans and they want her to be moving around without her walker before they release her,’ Eddy said. ‘Next weekend maybe, Clay said.’
‘Bloody hell,’ Vinnie said. Electricity or not, he wanted to install that window.
‘She won’t thank you for it,’ Alan said.
He wasn’t doing it for Mavis. He was doing it for the house. ‘That bloody room was never finished,’ he said.
No one had expected Vinnie to become who he’d become. Mavis used to call him the family moron and if he hadn’t outgrown her so early, he may not have made it to adulthood. Henry had expected nothing from him but had been kinder. He’d blamed Vinnie’s difficult birth for his learning disability. A big baby, he’d grown too huge to get his head turned in the right direction. A Mildura doctor had to drag him out, bum first, for which Mavis had never forgiven Vinnie. She’d slid the rest of them out faster than Henry had slid them in.
Jamesy, built for speed, had been the most eager of them to get out. He’d got his head pointed towards freedom a month before he should have, and when she’d gone to the loo one morning, he’d made his escape, face first into porcelain. According to Martin, he’d been small enough to slide down the sewer had she flushed it.
the marital bed
Martin was at work, a brick in one hand, a trowel full of mud in the other, when his mobile rang. It would be Karen. She’d called five times already this morning.
They’d argued last night. The hospital was releasing Mavis on Saturday. She couldn’t travel on the bus, wasn’t sick enough to send home in an ambulance, so the kids expected him to pick her up. He would have preferred to travel with a rattlesnake in his passenger seat.
Couldn’t say that to Lori when she’d phoned last night, not with Karen listening. He couldn’t lie either. He’d never been able to lie to that kid. He’d come up with an excuse that carried a basis of truth, had told her that during the last two years, Old Red hadn’t travelled further than Willama and back, that he wasn’t confident it would make the return trip to Melbourne.
‘Then borrow your wife’s car,’ she’d said.
His mobile beeped while he was driving down to the town to buy lunch.
Ask Sean to drive you. Tell him that we’ll pay for his petrol.
The kids knew Sean Dobson. Lori had been impressed by his new twin-cab ute. At Christmastime, he and his mother gave her, Jamesy, their bikes and a load of shopping a lift home from the supermarket. Old Red carried only one passenger.
I’ll get back to you on that, he texted, and when his mobile rang he expected Lori’s voice.
It was Karen.
She and her family knew that Mavis had been taken by ambulance to a city hospital, but didn’t know why. Willama’s fat lady having cosmetic surgery would have become the new family joke, which it was, though he didn’t want them laughing about it. He hadn’t lied to them. They knew she’d had two heart attacks, had two stents placed into her arteries, and last night Sylvia had been sympathetic. It was her sympathy that started the argument.
‘You know the city so well, sweetheart,’ she’d said. ‘Why don’t you go together?’
‘Put her in my car? And you learn to keep your nose out of our business, Mum,’ Karen said.
Once started, she was impossible to turn off. Her moods could last for days and Martin
wasn’t looking forward to going home to more of the same when he packed up his tools for the day.
He was unlocking his ute when his mobile rang, and any delay appreciated, he took the call.
‘You said you’d get back to me,’ Lori accused.
‘Sorry, Splint. I got involved.’
‘Yeah, well, I’m only ringing to let you know that you’re off the hook, and also to rub in the fact that Vinnie just went for his licence and he got it on his first try.’
‘The tester too scared not to give it to him?’
‘That’s sour grapes because it took you three tries,’ she said. Henry used to call her his little rose between the thorns. As with the best of roses, Lori’s thorns could be sharp. ‘Anyway, why I’m really ringing is to tell you that he’s going to hire a car and Eddy will go with him to show him the way, so you can –’
‘Don’t let him do it!’ he said. ‘He’ll kill both of them.’
‘He’s just proven that he’s a better driver than you were at his age.’
Martin’s three attempts to get a licence was a detail he preferred to forget. Lori, only nine at the time, hadn’t forgotten. She never forgot anything, nor did she forgive.
‘Melbourne traffic is a different story to Willama’s. It’s bumper to bumper down there and they drive like maniacs. Don’t you let him do it, Splint.’
‘Will you go with them if we pay for the hire car?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Now I have to go home.’
He told Karen and her parents at the dinner table, hoping the news might go down easier with roast lamb, and as an added precaution, he told them that Vinnie was hiring a car.
‘I told you that you weren’t going anywhere near her, Martin,’ Karen said.
‘She’s had major surgery, Kaz. Someone has to bring her home.’
‘They sent her down in an ambulance. They can bring her home the same way.’
‘She’s well enough not to need an ambulance –’
There wasn’t a lot of Karen. When she stood beside him, he felt tall, but what there was of her could be threatening. ‘What has she ever done for you? You tell me one thing that she’s ever done for you.’