The Hope Flower

by Joy Dettman

  ‘Like hell,’ Lori said.

  She had no knowledge of the city. Alan had a little, though no one suggested he go. Mick had some knowledge but without his bike he was crippled, and Vinnie? He’d push her under the first available tram.

  ‘You’re the logical choice, Splint,’ Martin said. ‘You’re getting on well with her.’

  She was, maybe because Mavis needed her personal hairdresser. She hoped that she’d stay fixed, but hope is a fragile, flighty thing that comes and goes. Trust is different. It’s solid and slow growing and it lives in bone – and every time Lori thought about spending two days alone with Mavis, every bone in her body screamed ‘No’.

  But the invitation to that party had arrived, with Leonie’s handwritten stipulation (No Jeans). Not that Lori would find that a problem, not since Doctor Jones’s funeral. Mick, who’d seen more of that old dude than the rest of them, had wanted to go, as had Lori. She hadn’t felt Greg’s loss. She might have celebrated it. But every time she looked at a pill or picked up her mobile, she felt the loss of Doctor Jones, as did half of Willama. As did the sky that day. It had howled its tears down on one of the largest crowds ever seen inside and outside of the church. They’d broadcast the service so those outside could feel they’d been there. That rain had disguised a lot of tears.

  Nelly had shown her how to make false hems on the trousers of Henry’s dark suit. Mick had looked like a man in it. He was going to wear it to the party, as Lori planned to wear her black funeral dress, though with beads or something to brighten it.

  She’d looked at colourful dresses at the op-shop and at the discount warehouse but seen nothing she’d want to wear to a party. Buy yourself something nice, Martin had written on his card. In Melbourne she might find something nice for that fifty. The internet too had offered her multiple reasons why she should go. When she googled city branches of the Commonwealth Bank, she’d found oodles of them. Mavis enjoyed tossing the bills at Martin. She might have got over her bad mood but hadn’t forgotten about her stolen chequebook. Set free in the city the least she’d do was alter her PIN.

  diamonds

  On the first Monday night of the school holidays, Nelly, with Eddy’s assistance, pierced holes through Lori’s lobes with a sterilised darning needle. It wasn’t painless, but when she crossed back over the street that night, she had over a thousand dollars in her ears – and her wallet felt safer. When she’d removed her fifty the other night, she’d dropped one of those studs, and panicked when she hadn’t found it immediately. The tissue they’d been wrapped in had disintegrated.

  She didn’t show Mavis what she’d done, didn’t tie her hair back to show anyone, and when she mixed salty water to bathe her ears, she did it in private. She was bathing them in the laundry when Mavis came out to ask what she was supposed to wear to Melbourne.

  ‘Your black dress and that grey cardigan. I’ll buy you a jacket.’

  ‘I hate that bloody dress. I need decent jeans and a sweater that doesn’t look like it came from an op-shop.’

  An hour at the shops could be a relatively safe way to find out if she could stand being alone with her. ‘Are you capable of walking over to the shops?’

  ‘Call me a taxi,’ Mavis said.

  ‘You’ll need to walk in Melbourne. We’ll cut through the new arcade.’

  Mention of the new arcade worked and by one-fifteen, a lemon delicious pudding in the oven, Mick instructed to take it out when its top turned golden brown, Mavis in full make-up and her hair newly styled, they left the house and headed up that gravelled road.

  Way back, Lori used to dream about shopping with her mother – or with Wendy Johnson’s anorexic mother, who, to a younger Lori, had epitomised perfection. Her legs had looked like broomsticks threaded through skin-tight black jeans, she’d worn earrings that hung so low they’d brushed her narrow shoulders, she’d had long, dark, dead-straight hair and was the total reverse of Mavis. On two occasions, Lori had attached herself to the Johnsons, or stalked them, pretending she was with them.

  Mavis’s legs were not broomsticks and she was dragging her feet by the time they reached the arcade coffee shop’s outdoor chairs, where she flopped. Lori went in and ordered her a cappuccino. They were still sitting when the Johnsons turned the pharmacy corner, Wendy’s mother’s hair blacker than ever though not as long. She looked more anorexic and ten years older than she had a year ago – and the reason why she’d aged so fast was in the stroller. She was pushing it.

  ‘She’s had another one,’ Mavis said. ‘She’s my age.’

  ‘It’s Wendy’s,’ Lori whispered.

  ‘She’s your age!’

  ‘Not much older.’

  ‘Don’t you go making that same mistake,’ Mavis said. ‘Take a tip from me and get yourself on the pill before you go sleeping around –’

  ‘Then why didn’t you? And shut up, Mavis,’ Lori hissed.

  That was the reality of shopping with Mavis; she was loud and didn’t give a damn what she said or where she said it, and there were two women sitting at a nearby table, strangers though, or strangers to Lori. Even in winter, holiday makers came to Willama.

  Wendy Johnson disappeared into a boutique and left Anorexia to drag the stroller up a step and inside.

  Lori started willing Mavis to drink her coffee faster when an elderly woman propped on her walking frame to stare. She must have been the mother of one of the couple she was with and the man recognised Mavis and stopped in his tracks.

  ‘That’s not you, Mavis?’ he said. His wife didn’t stop. She took the elderly woman’s arm and urged her and her walking frame on.

  ‘It’s all they left of me, Norm,’ Mavis replied.

  ‘You’re half the woman you used to be.’

  ‘That’s a bloody insult if ever I heard one,’ Mavis said, and she laughed and he laughed. Lori didn’t. She escaped into the coffee shop with Mavis’s empty mug.

  The shopping trip became more difficult when Mavis sighted a multicoloured jacket in the window of the boutique Wendy and her mother had gone into. It was a dusty pink with maroon and blue patches that looked like patchwork and it was utterly gorgeous.

  ‘See if they’ve got that in my size,’ Mavis said.

  ‘Nothing in that shop is under a hundred dollars,’ Lori said. She had a hundred in cash to spend on jeans, sweater and a shower-proof jacket. ‘We’re going to the discount warehouse.’

  ‘That’s as bad as the op-shop. I said decent jeans.’

  ‘They’re selling stretchy jeans for nineteen dollars a pair this week.’

  ‘And made in bloody China.’

  ‘Everything’s made in China, even brand-name jeans,’ Lori said, and she walked on.

  Mavis didn’t, but like Matty when he realised he wasn’t getting what he wanted, she eventually followed, and complained about the smell. Lori continued down to a table of jeans. Eventually Mavis followed.

  They had two shades of blue jeans and black. Lori found a pair of dark blue, size eighteen. Mavis wanted black. She picked up a pair of sixteens.

  ‘They’re too small, Mavis.’

  ‘I’ve lost more weight. Have they got fitting rooms?’

  They had cubicles with curtained doorways, which Lori wouldn’t have been seen dead in. Mavis wasn’t as modest. She was in one of a trio, undoing her jeans before Lori pulled the curtain. With a lot of grunts and cursing, she got into the sixteens, then wanted Lori to help her pull up the zip.

  ‘They’re too tight,’ Lori said and walked away with the dark blue.

  Mavis did up her own zip and left the cubicle wearing skin-tight black jeans. Lori sighed and walked back to pick up the washed-out pair before leading the way down to a table of sweaters, also made in China.

  Mavis wanted a red size sixteen, to match her shoes. Lori chose a blue-green size twenty. ‘It will match Eva’s opal earrings.’

  She led the way to a rack of showerproof jackets, and about all you could say for them was that that they were cheap.
Mavis took one look and headed for the exit, in the black jeans, their price ticket still on their pocket. Lori chased her to rip it off, but by the time she’d queued and paid, Mavis had gone missing.

  Knowing where she’d find Mavis, Lori headed back to that arcade boutique – and found her attempting to talk the assistant into taking that jacket off the mannequin and allowing her to try it on. That boutique catered for slim, beautiful people, and the assistant, one of the slim and beautiful, looked embarrassed.

  ‘It’s not showerproof,’ Lori said. ‘You need showerproof.’

  ‘How much is it?’ Mavis asked.

  ‘A hundred and forty-five,’ the assistant said.

  She had a rack of gorgeous dresses that probably cost more, which Lori barely glanced at. You can train yourself not to look at what you know you can’t afford.

  They found a parka they couldn’t afford in the main street. It was black with a tiger-striped fabric lining and lined hood and it cost sixty-two dollars, but once Mavis tried it on, she wouldn’t take it off. She was like Matty. Lori had taken him shopping to buy boots he couldn’t fill with sand. He’d wanted to wear them home. Perhaps kids who had kids too early never grew up. Wendy Johnson had been a mother before her sixteenth birthday, but it was her mother who mothered that baby.

  Lori had to send Mavis back to the coffee shop to sit down before she could use the card to pay for the parka. She used the card again at the pharmacy and by the time she got back to the coffee shop, Anorexia was sitting with Mavis, Wendy’s baby asleep in its stroller and no sign of Wendy, which Lori was thankful for. She hadn’t acknowledged her existence since primary school.

  Her baby was a boy she’d named Cody. He was around four months old and even without that name, everyone at school had known that Cody Lewis was his father. Wendy had left school before the Christmas holidays. Cody hadn’t, and he’d returned this year to do year twelve.

  You learnt a lot other than maths and English at school. Everyone knew that Cody’s parents had demanded DNA tests, as everyone knew that as soon as Cody started work, he’d have to pay child support. A few boys with brains might have learnt to keep a packet of condoms in their pockets.

  ‘Was it cancerous?’ Anorexia asked.

  ‘My surgeon said it was riddled,’ Mavis lied. ‘He thinks he got it all.’

  ‘If you’re going to get it, they say the thyroid is the best place,’ Anorexia said.

  Terry Clay had removed a lot of Mavis but not her thyroid. Why thyroid? Lori was wondering, until she saw why – until she saw what had happened to Mavis’s sagging neck. Mavis lifted her chin and pulled down the neck of her shirt to show a slightly crumpled pink line Clay had hidden in a natural throat wrinkle, which Lori stared at, as interested as Anorexia.

  ‘I had two heart attacks after the operation. They had to use those paddle things on me,’ Mavis said.

  ‘My god,’ Anorexia breathed, then added, ‘I can’t get over how well you look.’

  She had innocent eyes. They believed every word of Mavis’s lies – as had Lori the day she’d heard Mavis telling Anorexia about the doll she’d put on lay-by for Christmas. Still hated herself for believing that lie, which she had, right up until Christmas morning.

  ‘Are you ready to go, Mavis?’ Lori asked.

  ‘I haven’t finished my coffee.’

  ‘You keep growing, love,’ Anorexia said, but Mavis hadn’t started yet on her ray treatment and her hair falling out.

  ‘I’d keep it short if I were you. It suits you,’ Anorexia gushed.

  Interesting, but sad too, listening to a good liar at work. Interesting to see Mavis beside a woman of similar age and be forced to admit that of the two, Mavis looked the more normal. She might have made three of Anorexia, but her skin – having seen no sun in years and having recently been stretched – looked years younger.

  Three boys who’d known Lori forever eyed the woman they used to call a humpback whale, eyed her twice then three times while Lori stood at a distance waiting. An elderly woman, who knew Anorexia, stopped at their table, and called Anorexia by her given name. She was about to join them when Wendy came out of the pharmacy’s side door, and Lori put distance between herself and that table.

  ‘Are you ready?’ Wendy said. In kindergarten she’d had Anorexia bluffed, and getting pregnant at fifteen had changed nothing. Anorexia got to her feet, took charge of the stroller again and the elderly woman changed her mind about a coffee, so Lori returned to the table.

  ‘Are you ready, Mavis?’ Lori asked.

  ‘Who fathered that kid?’ Mavis asked.

  ‘A year-twelve dude.’

  ‘Why didn’t they get her an abortion?’

  ‘Why didn’t you ask Anorexia?’

  ‘Her name is Anna.’

  ‘I know.’ Lori swapped the bags from her right hand to her left. ‘Are you ready?’

  She didn’t budge. ‘Your father drove me to an abortion clinic when I was fifteen.’

  ‘Get on the local radio and broadcast it,’ Lori said and she walked towards Bridge Street.

  Eddy would have questioned her about her abortion. He was into psychoanalysis – not that his questioning had turned up a lot of new information, apart from finding out that the photograph of Mavis in the lounge room had been part of a prize for winning a bathing beauty contest when she’d been sixteen, which might have been true and might not have been. That was the trouble with liars. When they told the truth, you didn’t believe them.

  Mavis had told him about living with four kids in a caravan. That much was true. Martin and Donny could remember their caravan days. They could remember the day they’d moved into Dawson Street, could remember the day Henry came home from the hospital saying ‘sister’ instead of ‘brother’, remember the twins’ birth, and the day Jamesy did a swan-dive into the outdoor loo.

  Lori possessed none of those memories. Her first recollection of Jamesy was of a tiny gnome with a twisted grin, squatting on his haunches in the space beneath the kitchen table. Until the day she’d gone on the bus to Melbourne, her only flesh and blood memory of the twins had been coin-sized moles on a pair of scrawny backsides. Henry used to pull down their napkins to check which twin he’d been feeding.

  She remembered Neil’s birth. He’d turned up one morning in the queen bed. Timmy had arrived while she’d been at school, but she’d watched Matty’s birth.

  ‘Get me a towel,’ Mavis had yelled. Henry had got her a few before clearing the kitchen of kids. He’d squatted then between monstrous legs to catch what slipped out.

  A lot had happened around that time. Mavis had agreed to sell the twins for fifty thousand, which to an eleven-year-old had sounded like a fair price. 108 Dawson Street, bursting at the seams, no brick room, the lounge room a fourth bedroom Lori had shared with the little ones – and Matty had never stopped wailing.

  Eva and her entourage came to dinner, Eva wearing a thousand-dollar dress and a fake smile, old Alice and her snapping nicotine teeth and looking more male than female, apart from oversized boobs, little ferret Watts with his briefcase and that pair of smirking royal family twins.

  They’d stopped smirking when Mavis grabbed Alan. His kidnapping led to the worst year on record, to the year Henry hung himself, the year Mavis went eating mad, the year the older boys left town.

  Everyone had expected Greg to end up in jail but not to die there. Everyone would have noticed that Doctor Jones had been losing weight but no one had expected him to die. No one had expected Martin to give up his cushy lifestyle. Life was like one of those crazy rides they had at the Willama Show. You paid over your money, buckled in tight then hung on and screamed until the ride ended.

  Bridge Street traffic stopped her mind’s wandering. She glanced behind her to see if Mavis had followed, and she hadn’t. She was standing in front of the coffee shop, talking to a big dude Lori recognised. He’d been at Doctor Jones’s funeral and had looked familiar there. Seeing him with Mavis told her why he’d looked familiar
. He’d been one of the dudes who had come to the house to hold her down so Doctor Jones could zap her.

  People are so forgiving – or they have short memories. He was smiling at her today and she was flashing her flirty eyes at him. Too far away, Lori couldn’t hear their conversation, but from Mavis’s actions, Lori knew that she was feeding him her thyroid cancer story. She pulled down the neck of her shirt, touched her hair – and his expression suggested that he believed her every lying word.

  Like a pair of birds in springtime, they were doing their mating dance. Preening, heads bobbing, the female stepping forward, encouraging, but making no direct move, the male hoping to jump her feathers, but wanting to win her agreement before he jumped.

  And alarm bells started jangling inside Lori’s skull, chiming Thirteen. And Jamesy’s prophecy started hammering inside her skull.

  ‘Get her looking halfway back to decent and she’ll find a Henry replacement.’

  She would! In those black jeans and jacket she looked better than halfway decent, and Lori knew for sure that Clay hadn’t removed her breeding parts. She wasn’t yet forty-three. She’d have time to replace Thirteen, have a Fourteen, a Fifteen and a Sixteen before menopause cured her menstruation permanently.

  Dodging a truck, Lori ran across Bridge Street, over the railway crossing and down the gravelled road, the shopping bags slapping her thigh and urging her to run faster. She was running from the image of Thirteen lying dead on the brick room floor.

  ‘Where is she?’ Mick asked when she pitched her bags onto the table then went to the sink for water.

  ‘Picking up a bloke. Picking up one of the dudes who used to come here to pick her up – or hold her down.’ She drank. ‘Or run over crossing Bridge Street. Take your pick.’

  ‘Trouble?’

  Couldn’t answer that. She had no trouble of the type Mick might expect, and it was no use mentioning Thirteen to him. He hadn’t seen that alien baby, so she drank water and looked at the lemon delicious pudding, which smelt delicious.

  ‘Just as well you made that,’ Mick said. ‘Donny phoned Martin just after you left. They’re on their way back from Melbourne and he’s bringing his girlfriend up here for dinner.’