The Hope Flower

by Joy Dettman

  If we remember MOVE ON SOON

  Before they hear we’re out of tune.

  The road had split in two while her head was down, the bus now locked into one of three lanes of traffic all heading in the same direction. To her right there were hills with fields of houses growing on them, as if someone had spread house spores over those hills and like mushrooms, the houses had pushed up through the ground in the night.

  Mavis was attempting to get her attention, so Lori stood and moved carefully along the narrow aisle, dodging feet and elbows.

  ‘Are we close?’ Lori asked.

  ‘Still miles out,’ Mavis replied. She moved across to the window seat so Lori could sit beside her. She hadn’t bothered with make-up this morning, but looked fresh-faced and happy. ‘I’ve been out here somewhere to a party,’ she said. ‘Eleven of us came out one night in one car. I was pregnant with the bantam and I drank myself sick and danced all night, hoping to shake him out of me. I had a ball for a few years – too few. Did I ever tell you that I lost my virginity to one of Eva’s gardeners when I was thirteen?’

  ‘Stop it, Mavis!’

  She laughed and pointed to that looming grey city visible in the distance, and Lori felt sick, homesick, carsick, or plain scared stiff sick. She felt worse half an hour later when those grey buildings started crowding in on her. Afraid she was about to vomit, she unzipped her red bag, but the bus made a few turns then pulled into a bay and Mavis wanted out.

  They weren’t the first off, nor the last, and when Lori stepped down to concrete, she felt like a rabbit stepping into a greyhound’s pen. ‘Do you know where to find a taxi rank?’

  ‘A tram goes straight past the hotel,’ Mavis, one of the greyhounds, said. The rabbit didn’t argue. It was mesmerised by the buildings, the noise, the people.

  They had to wait for the case to be unloaded. Mavis had wanted to bring it but she didn’t want the responsibility of dragging it. Lori dragged it across a city street, hauled it up and onto a tram.

  You needed tickets to ride on trams. They had their bus tickets. Mavis said they’d do, then said, ‘Off,’ before anyone asked to see their ticket.

  Lori followed, the case’s wheels grumbling behind her.

  She dearly loves to get involved in problems that just can’t be solved. She wasn’t loving this. She shouldn’t have come. Didn’t know where she was or where she was going, but tailed Mavis into a hotel foyer where she stood well back while a fake smiling dude flashed his fake white teeth.

  ‘You have a booking for Smyth-Owen,’ Mavis said, her voice more ‘Eva’ than her own. In certain situations, she’d always been able to ‘out-posh’ the posh. Her parka looked relatively posh, given the weather conditions. Her Woolworths pants didn’t.

  She came away from the desk with two cards, one she handed to Lori, what for, Lori didn’t know. Mavis hit an arrow on the wall and the lift doors opened.

  ‘Get in.’

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Up,’ Mavis said.

  The lift might have taken her body and the case up but it left her stomach on the ground floor. Why the hell Eddy had booked a room on the eighth floor Lori didn’t know, but she followed Mavis again and Mavis followed the door numbers down to a corner and then down a long corridor. She stopped at 822 and used that card to open their door. As it swung in, Lori dropped the case and ran to the bathroom, where she lost her large cappuccino, the vanilla slice, her porridge and probably last night’s Gok.

  ‘Are you pregnant?’ Mavis asked.

  ‘That’s your habit,’ Lori replied. Shouldn’t have said that, not down here, but she’d expected a ground-floor room in something that looked like a hotel. She was in a concrete prison in the sky. She washed her face, washed her hands, flushed the toilet a second time and found Mavis with her head halfway into a small refrigerator. She came out with a bottle.

  ‘That’s not paid for,’ Lori said.

  ‘Open it for me.’

  What can you do when you know that you’ve got no escape for two long days, that you’re eight floors above the earth and you can’t get down to it without Mavis? You open her bottle. That’s what you do. You taste it too, and while you’re opening and tasting, she’s opened a packet of potato crisps. There was a basket on the bench, full of junk food.

  ‘They’re not paid for either! Martin paid for our beds and breakfasts, not for wine and junk food.’

  ‘He paid for nothing. He’s paid for nothing since he got his hands on my pension – and onto bloody Watts’s support payments too. He’s withdrawing that money on the day it’s paid in.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘It’s on my bank statements. I can show it to you if you need proof.’

  Lori didn’t require proof. That statement would show where the money had been electronically transferred to. She turned her back and opened a fake leather folder full of junk mail, advertisements for restaurants and places of interest – and instructions on how to phone down for room service or to dial an outside number. She glanced at Mavis, busy flicking a remote control until she found a Foxtel movie. She sat down then, with her chips and wine, and Lori helped herself to the phone instructions, folded them small and slid them into her pocket, then did the same with the mini bar and junk-food pricelist.

  The room-service menu was a time bomb and printed on heavy cardboard that wasn’t foldable. She took it to the single bed, then one eye on Mavis, slid it between the base and mattress of that bed. Mavis would choose the double bed.

  She didn’t move until the movie ended, and when it did, she made a second selection from the fridge, passed it to Lori to open and made her second choice from the basket of treats. Two hundred dollars wouldn’t last a day in this room, and twenty of it was already gone. She’d withdrawn enough to pay for McDonald’s meals and taxis.

  No use mentioning it. She handed Mavis the open bottle, watched it, a bag of mixed nuts and the case go into the en suite, watched the door close before she went to the fridge to do a rough calculation of its contents.

  Martin had paid for that room in advance, with his card. The hotel would have his card’s number, and he already had Miss Piggy and her solicitor after his money. She had to empty that fridge.

  Her red bag wouldn’t hold what was in it. She glanced around for something that might, a pillow slip maybe – or the rubbish bin. It had a plastic liner. She removed it, eyed the bathroom door, then did it, silently, emptied the fridge and the basket of junk food, then the bag in her hand, the bin held to her breast, she looked for a place to hide them. There was nowhere, not in the room. She opened the door, hoping to see someone who looked as if they worked in this prison. No one.

  Mavis had followed door numbers from the lift. They’d made one right-hand turn. If she walked back the same way she might see a sign for stairs. Big hotels had stairs. She’d watched Towering Inferno, a film about a fire up the top of a multilevel hotel. It had stairs, and so thinking she stepped out to the corridor.

  And that bloody door closed silently behind her and she couldn’t open it.

  That’s when she panicked, on the wrong side of that door, with a bin and a bag full of Mavis’s gorging supplies. If anything was going to flick Mavis’s switch, it would be the sight of her standing out there, bottles clinking, junk food rustling. She ran down to the lift where a middle-aged dude on a mobile was waiting for its doors to open. He glanced at her load, but whoever was on the other end of his mobile was more interesting.

  She stepped in behind him. He hit the G button. Lots of buttons, a keypad of numbers, mostly numbers. G had to mean ground, not that Melbourne had any, but seconds later the doors opened back where Mavis had pressed that wall arrow, and she was out and back at the desk facing that dude with the fake white smile.

  ‘My mother and I don’t need alcohol and junk food in our room. We’re in eight twenty-two,’ she said. Her hands then free, she dug into her pocket for the price list. ‘I’d like to pay now for two small bottl
es of wine and a packet each of potato crisps and mixed nuts. Also, we need the phone disconnected to our room . . . please.’

  ‘Guests are under no obligation to take advantage of the items provided,’ that fake dude began.

  ‘They’re under no obligation to have their rooms stuffed with them either,’ Lori said, but an older dude had joined them, so Lori spoke to him. ‘I’d like it put into your computer that we don’t want our fridge restocked. We’ll be here for two days.’

  The fake dude started again on his obligation bit, but Lori interrupted. ‘My mother is an alcoholic.’

  A key word, ‘Alcoholic’. The bag and bin disappeared and the younger dude took her money and signed her price list. She pocketed her change and ran for the lift where a woman and two men were disappearing behind a closing door. They stopped the doors for her, but they were only going to six. She had to ride two floors alone, but it stopped and the doors opened. There were a few new buildings in Willama that might have had lifts but they weren’t the type of buildings Lori went into. Her heart was thumping when she followed the door numbers back.

  And Mavis was holding their door open. ‘Where have you been?’

  ‘Reconnoitring,’ Lori said, looking for gun-barrel nipples beneath the blue-green sweater. No sign of nipples. She was wearing her bra – and Eva’s opals and Eddy’s gold chain, to hide the scar in her throat wrinkle. That sweater had a V neckline.

  ‘You look seriously good,’ Lori said, wishing Eddy could see the culmination of his conniving. He’d transformed her, with Clay’s help, though it was Eddy who’d hatched the entire plot, from the lockdown to Terrence Clay.

  He could see a photograph of his finished creation. She’d brought the camera, to photograph the city, but for five minutes they laughed and played photographer and celebrity. It was going to be okay.

  mister terrence clay

  His surgery was in a residential street, in a house. Lori had been expecting a multilevel brick and glass building, not a house of similar vintage to Henry’s. Nothing about Melbourne was as she’d expected, not the cost of a taxi, not the traffic, nothing. But she tailed Mavis into a front passage much like Henry’s and that was where the similarity ended. The front bedroom had been turned into a glass-fronted office. Mavis checked in. Lori checked out the room opposite, a waiting room where four women waited.

  They looked up expectantly as she entered. Plenty of chairs and a table of magazines. She never bought magazines but glanced through a few while queuing at the supermarket, and recognised one with William and Kate on its cover. She’d seen a recipe in it for a Cherry Ripe slice a month ago.

  Chose a chair in a corner, found the recipe and was keying it into her mobile when Mavis came and sat carefully beside her. She didn’t sit easily in her black jeans.

  ‘Who are you writing to?’ she asked.

  ‘Just copying a recipe. You can read it out for me if you like.’

  ‘It’s a thankless job cooking for that lot,’ Mavis said, but she read the recipe. Lori sent it to Eddy’s number. She’d told him she’d phone when they arrived but she’d had other things on her mind.

  The four waiting women became three. Clay wasn’t the only doctor working at this place.

  They were midway through a third recipe that sounded similar to a few of Alan’s Goks when Richard Gere materialised in the doorway.

  ‘Mave?’ he said. It was almost a question, and when Mavis stood, he looked pleasantly surprised.

  Lori waited alone then, or waited with three strangers, waited long enough to complete that recipe and complete one more before her battery called a halt. She’d need what power remained in it to phone a taxi.

  They came out at four twenty-five, Mave and her miracle man. They walked to the office windows where he told his office women to make Mrs Smyth-Owen an appointment in January. Then he offered his hand, told Mavis to keep up the good work and returned to wherever they’d come from.

  Days are short in July, the nights cold, and Melbourne’s sky was threatening to soak them, but Mavis wanted to catch a tram.

  ‘It will be an experience for you, Splint,’ Martin had said. It was a lost in space experience, but Lori photographed it. She photographed the tram, which like some ancient city god held up a kilometre of nose-to-tail traffic while they crossed the road to get on board.

  No tickets, no seats, or not until Mavis landed on a businessman’s lap when the tram took off. He gave up his seat to her, which he might have been relieved to give up. The old dude sitting beside him needed a bath.

  Crazy things those old Melbourne gods, they stopped and started, picking up passengers from gutter or tower, drunk or sober, young or old, then before their mixed and matched riders could grab a pole or handle, those old gods attempted to make a dent in Melbourne’s population.

  ‘He said that I’d exceeded his expectations,’ Mavis said.

  ‘I don’t think he recognised you when he came to the door.’

  ‘He photographed me. I had to strip down to my knickers.’

  You don’t speak about stripping down to your knickers when you’re surrounded by strangers and Lori turned away, hoping to silence her. And that tram seemed to be going the wrong way.

  ‘He helped do up my bra,’ Mavis said.

  ‘Shush!’ Lori hissed.

  ‘They don’t know me from a bar of soap.’

  A few heard her. The dude who looked as if he needed a bar of soap leered at her, or at Eddy’s gold chain. And Mavis winked at him. With no space to disassociate herself, Lori had to stand and cringe, and her expression must have said what she was thinking.

  ‘You look the dead spit of your disapproving father,’ Mavis said. ‘Take that bloody rubber band out of your hair. You’ve been looking decent lately.’

  Lori didn’t have a hand free to take it out, had she wanted to. The tram’s stops were as dangerous as its starts. She cringed and shuddered when that unwashed dude brushed by her as he got off, but whether he was diseased or not, she claimed his window seat.

  The tram was going the right way. She could see the city skyline, could see the bruising of the sky between two tall buildings where the sun was attempting to fight its way down to rest. No earth in Melbourne for it to rest on, only concrete, only bitumen, only wall-to-wall buildings, but she photographed the dying of that day and she got a beauty she showed to Mavis, who wasn’t much interested in buildings and sunsets. She wanted to see the shots Lori had taken in the hotel room, fifty percent of which were worth keeping. Three were really good.

  ‘Can you make prints of these?’

  ‘Eddy downloads them into his laptop.’

  ‘I said print.’

  ‘There’s a photographic place near Coles that has printers people can use. Eddy would know how they work.’

  ‘Get that one done, and the one before that last one,’ Mavis said.

  Lori knew which one she meant. She’d caught her laughter. It wasn’t one of the best but Lori knew why Mavis wanted a print. It was the young Mave grown older, it was her cheeky eyes and her jaw.

  Light rain was falling in the city but their parkas were showerproof and they had hoods. Mavis leading the way, they crossed over with a crowd to the shelter of the far side then walked, pace for pace, like a mother and daughter while that hope weed got its roots into the marrow of Lori’s bones. She knew that she needed to eradicate it before it bloomed and shed seeds, but those buds of hope were exotic things and tonight she wanted them to bloom.

  Even the city looked good. Night had taken its grey away and turned it into a place of light and colour. The black roads, wet from the rain, looked to be made of silver that reflected every light. Her camera in her parka pocket, Lori reached for it to trap that silver street and its reflections, the greens and reds of it, the gold and one of those old gods, no longer ugly when given light.

  All movement down here was dictated by lights. They’d crossed over a road with the green and were turning left when Mavis reached for the elastic
band and dragged it free of Lori’s hair – and pitched it over her shoulder.

  ‘I need that!’

  ‘You haven’t been wearing it tied back lately. You’ve got beautiful hair. Show it off.’

  ‘Is there a McDonald’s down here? I need a toilet.’

  ‘You could have gone at the doctor’s,’ Mavis said, and she stopped out the front of a posh restaurant. ‘It’s still here!’ she said. ‘I expected it to have disappeared like everything else.’

  ‘It’s too expensive.’

  ‘It used to have a toilet. Take that parka off. You look like a schoolkid.’

  It was her school parka, windproof, showerproof and warm, with a school insignia, and Lori had no intention of taking it off.

  ‘How far are we from the hotel?’

  ‘Just down there a bit. We used to come to this place,’ Mavis said and she opened the restaurant’s door.

  ‘It’s too expensive, Mavis!’

  ‘I saved you money on a taxi, and take that bloody thing off,’ she said and was gone – into that dimly lit place of tablecloths and sparkling glassware and black-suit-clad waiters.

  When you’re lost in space you’ve got two choices; you either stick close to the navigator or float off into the stratosphere. Lori removed her parka, finger-combed her hair, and followed the navigator, now playing Eva, to a black-clad male.

  Three times in her life Lori had seen Eva. The first when she’d been seven and Eva safe behind the locked security door Mavis had been attempting to kick in. She’d been eleven the day she’d eaten dinner with her and her entourage, Eva dressed like a movie star and speaking like a Willama snob – a breathless snob.

  ‘Is there . . . nothing the . . . doctors can do for you . . . darling? Well, goodness me. Look at the time. Mr Watts, would you be a . . . darling and get . . . those papers.’ She’d turned into a bargaining fishwife after Mavis kidnapped Alan, or after she’d dragged him screaming into the bathroom. ‘I’ll write you a cheque for fifty-five thousand now. I’ll make it sixty-five –’