The Hope Flower

by Joy Dettman

  ‘For frozen pies? We can’t sit her down to a pie and chips.’

  ‘That’s what I meant about your pudding,’ Mick replied. On dinner duty tonight, he’d already opened three packets of pies, had already placed them on the oven tray. ‘Everyone likes pies.’

  ‘Everyone in this house maybe, and we’ll need thirteen not twelve, and we haven’t got thirteen chairs.’

  ‘Jamesy’s cleaning up the old stool,’ he said.

  It used to seat three small backsides in Henry’s time. It seated readers now and other escapologists who needed to hide on the east-side veranda, and it probably provided homes for a hundred spiders. Lori looked for the insect spray. It was missing. She smelt it when she rounded the east-side corner where Jamesy had upended that old stool and was currently poking at cobwebs with a stick. She didn’t interfere, just watched him and thought about the night of Thirteen.

  Jamesy had seen that baby. He would have been around Neil’s age and it hadn’t appeared to concern him. Lori couldn’t forget it, maybe because it had become entangled with the memory of Henry’s final day.

  Only an overdue period that day. Only a cluster of cells that must have begun its splitting into twin girls, but as with everything else, those cells had gone mad once Henry hadn’t been around.

  ‘Do you know where the tablecloth is?’ Mick called through the ever-open bathroom window.

  ‘That tablecloth won’t make your pies look any better,’ Lori said.

  She and Jamesy were carrying the stool in through the front door when a car turned into their driveway. It wasn’t a taxi but Mavis got out of it, and that big dude she’d been speaking to was behind its wheel.

  ‘Ta, Steve,’ Mavis said.

  ‘See you around,’ the big dude said.

  ‘I told you so,’ Jamesy said.

  lisa

  She was part Asian and she had that beautiful straight Asian hair Lori had always envied – and she was tiny enough to make Lori feel like a monster.

  Donny looked better, or just happy, or just smiling to show off his new front teeth. It wasn’t only his new teeth that looked better, though there was more to worry about than how Donny looked. Mavis wasn’t fond of Asians. She eyed Lisa for a second or two, then told her she looked like a kid of sixteen. Lori had been expecting worse.

  She did look young but was old enough to have been teaching for a year before she’d moved in with Donny. She’d shared a house for that year with a girl Donny worked with. They’d heard a little about her before Christmas, then a lot more when the lease was up on that shared house. They hadn’t heard that she was part Asian.

  They’d brought in the usual load of supermarket bags, loaded with the usual, but they’d brought chips and dips too, and a huge bottle of Coke and two of wine – and a packet of plastic wine glasses. Donny knew the state of the glassware in this house.

  They’d brought something else they didn’t show until the bags were emptied, until Martin was opening the wine. Lisa was wearing an engagement ring.

  Donny was too young as Martin had been too young, and he could have chosen a better time to buy that ring. Martin looked sick for a second before the cork popped and almost hit him.

  If Lisa’s size had made Lori feel like a monster, then Vinnie’s entrance in his white overalls made Lisa look like a midget.

  Donny offered him a plastic glass of wine. Vinnie went to the sink to pour himself a glass of water.

  Mick drank wine. Lori tasted the glass poured for Vinnie then passed it to Mavis who’d already emptied her glass.

  Dips and chips on the table, the little kids took their designated positions on the stool, Timmy closest to Mavis, but always relatively safe from her. Matty, who’d never been safe from her, they’d seated on the far end of the stool, with Neil in the middle.

  Everyone sat when the meal was served, everyone elbow to elbow with someone, Lori rubbing elbows with Donny, which allowed her to see why he looked improved. He had eyebrows. In his lifetime he’d never possessed visible eyebrows but someone must have dyed them or he saw too little sun to bleach them. His hair was darker. He’d had it brown-tipped, and it was longer than usual.

  She looked at Lisa. They’d seated her at the far end of the table, for obvious reasons. It was strange seeing a stranger sitting there, but a stranger who didn’t turn her nose up at Mick’s pie and chips.

  ‘I don’t want only half a pie, Lori,’ Matty started. She closed his whine fast by swapping plates.

  Then Lisa did something totally unexpected, something that made Lori look deeper than her size and the black silk curtain of her hair. Lisa had seen what Lori had seen, Matty’s satisfied smirk in Timmy’s direction. They’d seen Timmy’s reaction, seen his wide dark eyes turn too fast away from Matty’s plate to his own. He made no demands, never had, and tonight he received his just reward.

  ‘I can’t eat a whole pie,’ Lisa said. ‘Will you swap with me, Timothy?’

  She may have bought his adoration forever. She bought Lori’s respect.

  Not Mavis’s, although she emptied her mouth and washed it out with wine before asking Lisa how long she’d been in Australia.

  ‘My mother came by boat from Vietnam as a five-year-old,’ Lisa said. ‘Dad is a second-generation Italian-Australian.’

  ‘Some races integrate. Some think that they’re still in their own countries,’ Mavis said, and she drank more wine.

  It had been a long time between drinks. She’d had a glass of beer the day that Henry died but nothing since. Tonight she’d tossed down two fast wines, her own then Vinnie’s, then helped herself to what had remained in the last bottle. It had affected her. You could tell by her eyes.

  ‘Look at that bunch of Jews that have to wear black hats and those front curls down to their shoulders. It’s like a warning, like saying, “Stay away”. When I was a kid I used to wonder if they put that side hair in rollers at night or if those curls were a genetic thing.’

  No one replied. They passed the sauce, passed the salt down the table, hoping Mavis would shut up.

  ‘And look at the Muslims. Little kids go to their Muslim schools with their heads covered. If that’s not teaching them early that they’re different then I don’t know what is.’

  ‘I’d agree that people don’t need labels,’ Lisa said, then turned to Lori. ‘I grew up with four brothers and could never get a word in edgewise. You wouldn’t have had a hope, Lori.’

  ‘She’s not always this quiet,’ Martin said.

  ‘That’s what I mean,’ Lisa said. ‘She can’t get a word in edgewise.’

  ‘She rules the bloody roost,’ Vinnie said, and Lori breathed and looked around the table.

  Three females tonight. Someday in the future there might be more. If Martin ever got his divorce, he was too good-looking to stay single. Mick might eventually stop dodging Cathy Howard, and even Vinnie, fast becoming a football hero, might find himself a girl.

  ‘Have you been in touch with Karen recently?’ Donny asked.

  ‘Through her solicitor,’ Martin said.

  ‘She rings me,’ Donny said. ‘She told me that she wanted to try marriage counselling.’

  ‘When you need to bring a third party into a marriage, it’s too late. Drop it, Don,’ Martin said.

  Don? It sounded wrong but somehow matched his new teeth and eyebrows – and his new-age attitude.

  ‘Is Don. Is good,’ Lori said, and they laughed and Mavis drained her third glass of wine.

  plan b

  ‘Give her enough rope and she’ll hang herself,’ Vinnie said last night when the conversation turned to Mavis being set loose in Melbourne. Alan may have preferred a different metaphor but otherwise agreed. Mick agreed that given enough free time alone in Melbourne, Mavis would get herself a new chequebook. He shared Lori’s memories of that last chequebook.

  No one other than Eddy suggested that Lori go with Mavis, but a few times now, Martin had said it would be an experience for her.

  Deny it she
may but a part of her wanted that experience, though more than that, someone needed to be with Mavis to keep her away from banks.

  She’d bought her a handbag, a fake tiger-skin bag from the op-shop. It didn’t exactly match the lining of the jacket, was obviously secondhand, but Mavis loved it. It had slots for her Medicare and health cards, had a compartment for her appointment letters and birth certificate, had a zipped purse section for money.

  They’d have to give her big money if she went alone, and knowing her, she’d blow the lot before her first appointment, which was in Hawthorn. All Lori knew about Hawthorn was their football colours. The Friday appointment was going to include scans and blood tests, at a hospital not far from the city centre. Professor Hicks was a heart specialist.

  Mavis had been playing the comedian last night, making jokes about Professor Hicks, calling him Professor Hicksville. She’d been . . . pleasant to live with, except for the second time Lori took her shopping for new make-up when she’d tried to slide a fifty-dollar bottle of foundation between her padded melons.

  ‘Then pay for it,’ she’d said when Lori thwarted her attempt to walk out with it. ‘It’s my bloody money.’

  ‘Most of it is supposed to feed and clothe your kids and pay your bills,’ Lori had replied. ‘Choose a cheaper brand and I’ll pay.’

  Mavis had always shoplifted. Years ago she’d got out of a shop with a necklet she’d slid into Neil’s nappy, and dozens of times she’d opened bags of lollies in a supermarket and scoffed the lot before they’d queued at the checkout. She’d do it in Melbourne. They had security people down there and Lori wasn’t going to be with her when she was arrested.

  We’re three. We’re her and she and me, plan B, and we’re not PC. That’s what she’d handed in to Mr Morris who hadn’t handed it back yet – not that she ever wanted to see it again. She remembered every crazy line of that ‘Me’ poem. She was like three people, like who she was at home, who she tried to be when she was out, and who she wanted to be – and all three of them wanted something better than a black op-shop funeral dress to wear at Leonie and Paul’s party.

  She was in the laundry checking Matty’s maroon tracksuit for finger paint when Mavis came out wanting her hospital case.

  ‘You’ll be away for two days, Mavis. You won’t need a case.’

  ‘I’m not sitting on a bus for hours in tight jeans,’ Mavis said.

  ‘They’ll fit into an overnight bag.’

  ‘I’m not wearing them crushed either, or my new sweater. I’ll need plastic bags too.’

  ‘You know where they’re kept,’ Lori said then reached up to the top of an old wardrobe and lifted down that green case. It was dusty, but Mavis took it, dust and all.

  The laundry was their halfway station between the house and the junk pile. The old desk from the kitchen was in there. The small television wasn’t. Martin had set it up in the caravan. A door-less wardrobe had been in its corner for as long as Lori could remember. It was definitely junk or woodheap material but too well built in by other junk to ever get out.

  Eddy was at work. He was working every day this week and would make big money. Mick had taken Henry’s dark suit to the dry-cleaners. It smelt musty, he said. The day he’d worn it to Doctor Jones’s funeral, Lori had smelt Henry on it. But he was gone; his suits and shirt and ties now belonged to Mick and he could do what he liked with them.

  She twisted the earstuds in a circle, because Nelly had told her to twist them regularly. The right one had healed well, the left, the ear she slept on, hadn’t.

  Mavis hadn’t noticed them yet. Martin had. He’d told her she had close to a carat in each ear, and Matty, who’d been told a dozen time that he’d grow carrots in his ears if he didn’t let people wash them, had wanted to see her carrots.

  Nelly suggested dabbing the sore lobe with methylated spirits. She done it once and it had stung like hell. She was considering another sting when Meggsie came slinking out from behind the caravan.

  ‘Meggsie,’ she called softly. Then squatting low, she reached out a hand. ‘Here, kitty, kitty. Here, kitty, kitty.’

  Maybe he remembered that kitty-kitty call used to mean food. He stopped to look at her. She had nothing to give him, and if she moved to get something, he’d leave.

  ‘Where are you living, Meggsie?’

  He shook his head at that, then stretched. It was him. He’d grown longer, grown heavier.

  ‘Here, kitty, kitty.’

  He was about to take a step towards her when the brick room door slammed. Like greased lightning he was on the woodheap, over the fence and gone.

  It was him, though, and he remembered her.

  She was squatting a metre out from the doorway when a narrow beam of sunlight broke through the clouds and shone into the laundry. She stood then, not blocking its pathway. It was like a road of light with speckles of sun fire dancing on it, a road that ended in the corner of the laundry. Maybe it was Henry, pointing his finger towards an old red shoulder bag, hung from a nail in the corner. For the moment that beam of light played there, Lori was swept back to her preschool days when she’d followed that red bag around the shopping centre, way back before Mavis had become a mountain, before Lori had taken to a pigtail with the kitchen scissors.

  Maybe that beam of light was Henry reaching down from wherever he was. Maybe he was telling her that he wanted her to go with Mavis. That bag was big enough to hold a change of underwear and something to sleep in – and a dress if she found one.

  She was thinking about factory outlets when that beam died as fast as it had been born. The red bag was still hanging there, and Lori stepped over and between junk to lift it down.

  It was dusty and cobweb woven. She wiped it clean with an old t-shirt and took it inside to give it a spray with Mortein, which did triple service. It got rid of any likely tenants, polished the vinyl and lubricated the main zip. Its shoulder strap had been permanently dented and marked by that rusty nail, but at five o’clock, she left Alan steaming the strap over the spout of the kettle while she rode around to Coles for bread, milk and two hundred dollars – not that she was saying yet that she’d go with Mavis, but if she did, the bankcard would stay home safe with Mick.

  Eddy booked her a seat online, and by eight on Wednesday night, he’d printed off a bunch of city maps and was marking them, marking where the hotel was located, where the bus pulled in and where to catch a tram out to Bridge Road when Mavis came to stand beside Lori. Maybe she was pleased that her personal hairdresser was going with her. She did something she hadn’t done in years, put a hand on Lori’s shoulder.

  ‘I’ll need to get up early,’ she said.

  ‘The bus doesn’t leave until eight-thirty,’ Lori said, and even to her, her voice sounded weird. Please god, please god, please god, she prayed silently.

  They waited until Mavis was in bed to organise her medication, to measure individual doses of powdered blue Xanax into miniature snap-lock plastic bags, three bags, one for each night and one for emergencies. Vinnie, watching the exercise, told Lori she’d get nicked for drug trafficking, then added, ‘Watch her, Splint. Don’t trust her as far as you can kick her.’

  He’d kicked six goals last Saturday.

  *

  The bus was air conditioned and Mavis was the first to board. Lori watched over the green case until it was loaded. Their tickets had seat numbers, which Mavis had ignored. She’d taken a seat behind the driver. Lori found her seat, then the door slapped, the bus was away and driving into a foggy landscape Lori didn’t know, and she didn’t know why she was driving into it.

  They stopped to pick up two passengers at a small town, and then drove on again, deeper into the fog. From time to time it lifted, but there was little to see other than trees and a sheep.

  She had a taste of Mavis on the loose at the halfway mark where the bus made a stop for twenty minutes, time to use public toilets or buy morning tea at a bakery. Mavis headed for the bakery, Lori for the toilets. When she returned, Mav
is was at the counter and the woman on the far side was refusing to make two cappuccinos before they’d been paid for.

  ‘Eddy gave you money,’ Lori said, handing over a ten-dollar note. Mavis had ordered large coffees. The woman wanted more, as did Mavis. ‘And we’ll have two vanilla slices,’ she said, which meant another ten-dollar note – and how do you protest in a crowded bakery? You don’t.

  They boarded again, half of that twenty-dollar morning tea sitting heavy in Lori’s stomach, or maybe it was the knowledge that she was locked into something she couldn’t control.

  She dearly loves to get involved in problems that just can’t be solved . . .

  That was a line from her ‘Me’ poem, which she would have preferred to forget but couldn’t. She’d always had a rotten brain for remembering rhymes and the lyrics of songs.

  ‘Write a poem about yourselves,’ Mr Morris had said, then he’d printed ME on the whiteboard and underlined it. He was new this year, a bearded, long-haired hippy type who’d known nothing about Lori or her family. She’d liked him until that stupid poem. Must have printed off a dozen drafts before printing the final draft and editing it with a pencil.

  ME

  We are three. We are Her and She and Me, Plan B and not PC.

  She bought a padlock for our tongue, She couldn’t afford when we were young.

  It keeps Her safe from what we blurt. Along with that program.

  PROTECT ALERT.

  She purchased it a while ago, online she says. Perhaps it’s so.

  It’s like an antivirus thing. It snatches threats before they’re in.

  They’re quarantined. They’re locked in tight –

  until the middle of the night.

  She dearly loves to get involved in problems that just can’t be solved

  Though most advice just turns out bad and then it leaves Her feeling sad.

  It’s best by far to let them wail, then no one blames Her when they fail

  And safer too to sing along, for that’s the way that most belong