by Joy Dettman
Lori and Alan dug up half a dozen of Nelly’s wisteria suckers to plant along the north side of the laundry. The bikes lost their leaning place but were found a new place on the west-side veranda.
Mavis’s July bank statement arrived on the Thursday. It was printed proof of life and proof too of where she’d been spending that pension money. It enraged Lori. It aged Eddy. In the time it took him to read aloud that list, his eyes changed from smart-arsed boy to cold-eyed killer.
Kids raised in that house had learnt early to put aside disappointment and to get on with life. Eddy hadn’t been raised there. He seethed, he boiled and cursed, and when Lori came home from the op-shop with a fake gold chain to wear with her funeral dress to the party, he pitched it into the green bin. She retrieved it, washed it, and whether it turned her neck green as he suggested it would, to her it looked real enough, and there was more of it than Eva’s chain.
The black dress looked okay too. She was pinning her hair high when she heard a car drive in. The jolt in her stomach said taxi, said Mavis, but she heard Donny’s voice and Lisa’s, and she breathed again. Minutes later, Martin called to her.
‘Two minutes,’ she said around a mouthful of hair pins.
‘Now,’ he said.
She came out, holding her hair up, but allowed half of it to fall when he tossed a Myers bag at her and something red and black and gunmetal grey slid free.
It was a dress. She righted it, looked at it, and just looking at it made her eyes water.
‘I thought it looked like you,’ Lisa said, watching her expectantly.
‘It’s gorgeous.’
‘We expected to be here earlier,’ Donny said. ‘There was an accident fifty K’s out and we couldn’t get through for near on an hour.’
‘It’s . . . it’s gorgeous.’
It was what she’d imagined buying in Melbourne, something with colour, a simple style. She couldn’t stop shaking her head.
‘It’s a good match for those shoes too,’ Lisa said.
Silver-grey sandal shoes, with little heels, bought from the op-shop for five dollars. That dress would have cost more than fifty. She’d looked at a few in Myers.
Lisa followed her back to the front room. She closed the door while Lori unclipped the fake gold chain, stripped off the funeral dress and slid into colour.
‘It’s perfect –’
‘Not too short?’
‘No way!’ Lisa said. ‘Have you ever tried straightening your hair, Lori?’
‘Once or twice, but there’s too much of it.’
‘I used to do it often for my friend. Her hair is much like yours,’ Lisa said. ‘I borrowed her straightener. It steams it and irons out the crinkles.’
Trust is a funny thing. You either do or you don’t. Lori had liked and respected Lisa the night she’d swapped her whole pie for Timmy’s half. Tonight she trusted her and she started removing pins.
Martin would have paid for that dress. He knew she’d given her dress money to Mavis. Also, when he’d lived at home before, he’d spent a lot of time attempting to turn her into a girl, but Lisa had chosen it, and chosen something so perfectly right Lori couldn’t believe it. She felt girly and a little embarrassed when she led the way into the bathroom.
The party was supposed to start at eight but before Lisa tamed that wild mass, the kitchen clock said eight-twenty and Mick was pacing. He stopped to stare when they opened the bathroom door.
Everyone stared at Lori’s hair and lipstick – and how could she have refused to add a swipe? She couldn’t, not after the work Lisa had put into that hair. It wasn’t a curtain of silk, would never be a curtain of silk, but it was straight and without its crinkles it was halfway down her back.
She didn’t notice Eddy lining up his mobile, or not until Martin started lining up his own. He wanted a shot of Lori and Mick together, so they posed, Mick wearing Henry’s dark suit that smelt of dry-cleaning fluid.
Donny drove them the block to the party, and what can you say about teenage parties except that it was in a cleaned-out garage the whole family must have spent all day decorating with balloons and streamers. The music was too loud to talk, the girls were wearing dresses and only three of the boys had worn jeans.
‘Where did you buy your dress?’ Leonie asked.
‘Myers,’ Lori yelled above the music.
‘Who did your hair?’ Cathy asked.
‘Lisa, Donny’s fiancée.’
Matt Dolan asked her if she was going to try out for the part of Eliza on Monday, and when she said, ‘No way,’ he said she should and that he was trying out for Henry Higgins. She danced with Paul, or stepped from foot to foot with him, on concrete, and he told her she looked like Angelina Jolie. After an hour or so of stepping from foot to foot in secondhand shoes, her smallest toes were ready to fall off, but she punished them again with Tim Buchanan, who she’d known since first grade.
‘Is it safe?’ he said. She’d belted him up in second grade when he’d tried to kiss her, but he was easy to talk to.
She was sitting with him on a blanket-covered workbench, her shoes half off, when Leonie and Paul’s mother brought out more food and a camera. She took a photograph of them sitting side by side.
What can you say about teenage parties, except that Mick might have finally stopped dodging Cathy Howard? He danced, or stepped from foot to foot with her.
It ended though. Mick found her back on the bench at midnight. ‘Donny’s waiting out the front,’ he said.
She’d felt like Cinderella when she’d arrived but by midnight, her feet felt like the little mermaid’s who’d swapped her tail for feet, and shoes in her hand, she scooted out the back door and was halfway out to the street when Tim Buchanan called, ‘Wait up, Lori.’
‘What?’
‘Do you ever go anywhere?’
‘I’m here,’ she said.
‘I mean . . . like the movies. That new Star Wars is coming.’
‘I might see it.’
‘With me?’
‘Is it safe?’ she asked, then continued alone out to Donny’s car, wondering if she’d made some future date with him – not that she’d mind, not really. He was one of the decent dudes.
eliza doolittle
It was Matt Dolan’s fault. He’d taken Drama this year, though maybe not for the same reason as Lori. He’d tried out for Henry Higgins, as had a few of the others, but he deserved to get that part.
According to Mr Morris, they were going to perform that play in the school auditorium, in hired costumes, in front of people he expected to pay for the privilege of watching a mob of year-ten kids make fools of themselves, which Lori wanted no part of.
She’d sat through half a dozen girls who wanted to be Eliza Doolittle, Lori not one of them, Mr Morris not even looking her way until Matt Dolan stuck his nose in.
There was something about that teacher she couldn’t help liking. So when he pointed at her, she read the bit he chose, where this street girl cum flower seller had to put on a posh accent at an afternoon tea party. It was utterly unbelievable but apparently funny when she got to the bit where Eliza started telling a story about how her aunty got done in. She could do an Eva voice. She used to torment Eddy with it, and Mr Morris smiled at her and said, ‘Well done.’
That was it, or it was until Wednesday, until he read out the names of the kids who’d be in his play – and he called her name as Eliza.
She could have said, ‘No way.’ She’d never even read the play, or not in its entirety, but instead of protesting she felt . . . felt chosen. She’d never been chosen for anything, not even as a class monitor.
She read Pygmalion on Sunday, in the brick room while Vinnie painted the back porch and the doors, which meant she couldn’t get out and that no one could get in – and she didn’t mind the way that play ended. It was real.
There were complaints in the kitchen when she came out. Vinnie wanted to continue his painting in there.
‘No more,’ Martin said. Lo
ri added her vote to his.
‘It looks like crap,’ Vinnie argued.
It didn’t look good but had at times looked worse. Vinnie might not have seen it looking worse. Because he was driving the ute more often and had to wear his glasses, he forgot at times to take them off, which meant that they were paint speckled but also that he was seeing more.
He put his glasses on to study his photograph in Monday’s Gazette. He’d kicked seven goals on Saturday and against the top team. He was this week’s hero, which didn’t stop his complaints about the kitchen.
‘It will take me two days. I’ll do the painting at night. It will be dry by morning,’ he argued.
‘No more paint,’ Lori said.
‘Heil Hitler,’ he said. Then on Wednesday, they heard him ripping down the wallpaper in the lounge room.
It had been nobody’s first choice, just cheap enough to afford, a bamboo and ivy jungle, hung by novice paper hangers over cracked and smoke-stained plaster. Two of the sheets had been attempting to peel off since day one.
‘Jesus, Vinnie!’ Lori moaned, knowing he’d get a shock when he saw what was beneath the paper, but Eddy, the main paper hanger, was on a chair helping him strip those walls.
They moved the lounge suite out to the veranda. It was a grass green, and also nobody’s first choice. As with the wallpaper, Eddy had bargained for it at the Sunday trash-n-treasure market. They lifted young Mave down from her hook and leant her beside the couch, and if someone stole her for her fancy frame, Lori would have rewarded them for not bringing it back.
It took a week of nights. It took a lot of filling of cracks and sandpapering before the smell of paint started permeating every room again, but Vinnie transformed the lounge room. He painted the ceiling white, and the plaster between the ceiling and timber panelling a pale dusty green. It looked classy, looked serene until they carried that grass-green lounge suite inside and hung young Mave – only because that space looked bare without it, though even she looked better when not surrounded by bamboo and ivy. She looked better still when Alan came from the potting shed with a bunch of orchids he’d stuffed into an antique bottle-green jar that had been on a laundry shelf for years. No one knew its origin but with those orchids in it and set in the centre of the mantelpiece, if not for the computer desk and the junk that had to live on it, that room would have looked perfect – which only made Vinnie more determined to renovate the kitchen.
‘I know a dude who’ll put new Laminex on those benchtops for the price of the Laminex,’ he said. ‘I can do the walls and ceiling in a night, and if you mob give me a hand with the cupboards, I’ll be done in two days.’
He never went shopping. Lori bought his jeans and t-shirts and overalls, but he shopped for the black marble-look Laminex and new vinyl floor covering that matched the timber panelling in the lounge room and front passage.
They gave in. They helped him. Martin’s account shrank by a few thousand dollars but he didn’t care.
The wisteria suckers told them it was springtime. They started growing a foot each day and Mick found a use for the roll of green plastic lattice Vinnie had brought home. He fixed it to the laundry wall. He and Lori were using Henry’s never-ending roll of green gardening twine to tie the longer wisteria tendrils to the lattice when Eddy flung their screen door wide enough to hit the brick room’s window.
‘Open it gently!’ Lori yelled.
‘Is she totally out of her mind?’ he asked.
There was only one she. They never said her name. ‘Is that a rhetorical question?’ Lori asked.
‘She went to Watts’s office yesterday and asked him what he was doing with her support payments.’
What can you say to that? Only that Mavis was a mental case. Lori cut another length of twine and tied another tendril.
‘He’s reported her to Centrelink.’
‘We told him not to!’
‘He’s done it,’ Eddy said.
‘Then bloody hell to him!’ Lori said. ‘Double bloody hell to him.’
*
It didn’t happen that week. Every night around bus time they clock watched, they listened but she didn’t come home.
She didn’t come on Saturday when every Smyth-Owen, apart from Donny, went to the football to watch the new town hero play. Willama won again, not all thanks to Vinnie, but he kicked the winning goal and he got his photograph again in Monday’s Gazette.
Sean’s parents’ thirtieth wedding anniversary was on the following Saturday. Their kids had organised a surprise party and Martin had to be there on the dot of six. Vinnie’s team had an away game. The kids delayed dinner for him, a truly excellent gravy beef stew, then delayed it longer while he showered.
They were serving the meal when they heard the front door rattle. It might have been the wind.
It wasn’t. Those holding saucepans in the kitchen froze when they heard the rumble of wheels on the west-side veranda. Every one of them was staring out the sink window when she walked past it.
‘Vinnie!’ Lori yelled, shoving her mobile towards Mick. ‘Phone Martin,’ she said, then ran to lock the screen door.
They came to stand behind her, behind the security of wood and wire and wrought iron. They heard Mick’s two words to the phone, his ‘She’s home,’ before they saw the distortion of her through flywire and the heavy-duty plastic Mick had stapled to that door to keep out the wind. They saw her distorted hair and her parka and its fake tiger-skin-lined hood and her swollen legs and ankles she’d poured into orange and brown striped clown trousers.
Mick had fitted another one of his big slide bolts to the top of that door. She rattled it, shoved a case at it, a red case to match her flattened red shoes. She demanded that the door be open but not one of the kids behind it said a word, or not until Vinnie came barefoot and still wet from the shower.
‘Get back to where you came from,’ he said.
They gave way to him. He could deal with her. He slid the bolt, forcing her back with the door, but she recovered her balance enough to ram her case at his bare feet, until he wrenched its handle from her grasp and pitched it towards the woodheap.
There was war in the backyard then, a loud war. The neighbours a block away would have known that Mavis was home when Vinnie pitched her fake tiger-skin bag after the case.
She must have worn out its zip. It sprayed its contents, which were of value to her. She cursed and screeched but backed off to collect what had been sprayed.
‘Get over to Nelly’s,’ Lori said to Neil, and when he didn’t move, she spoke to Timmy. ‘Take Matty out the front door and stay over the road until she’s gone.’
He went. She gave Neil a push to follow them before she followed Vinnie out to the yard.
Plenty of light out there. It escaped through that wall of louver windows, escaped through the brick room window and more filtered up from the old couple’s security lights. There was enough light for Mavis to find her bag, enough for Lori to recognise a small red packet, unsighted on this land since Eddy had tossed that last packet of cigarettes into the stove – and was it any wonder that Mavis had needed Watts’s support payment.
Her mind on the price of cigarettes Lori didn’t see Mavis reach for the axe. Vinnie, who wasn’t wearing his glasses, wouldn’t have seen her swing it. He felt it. He reeled backward into the louvers, and glass cracked and clattered to the new vinyl floor.
Mavis was going in for the kill with the axe when Neil came at a run down the drive, armed with Henry’s old garden rake. He stopped her. He tripped her with it, and she landed on her clown pants on the woodheap. The shock of her landing silenced her.
Such a fine warm night, such an incredible gravy beef stew waiting to be served in such a good-looking kitchen, a suddenly silent night until that new silence was broken by a siren. Someone had called the police, Nelly, Martin, or the old couple.
Alan and Jamesy were out. Vinnie had been hurt. He was leaning against the louver wall gripping Alan’s shoulder, Neil standing like a
warrior between him and the fallen enemy when the siren stopped and two cops came down the drive, a male and a female and she bigger than the male.
They carried their own lights. They spot-lit Mavis, still sitting on her bum on the woodheap, the axe beside her. They spot-lit supersized skinhead Vinnie and they made their own fast interpretations.
‘Get on the ground,’ the female yelled.
‘It wasn’t him,’ Lori began.
‘Drop your weapon and get on the ground!’
‘She’s got the weapon. She hit him with the axe,’ Neil said, still gripping his own weapon. Two of a kind, he and Vinnie, but not a thing wrong with Neil’s eyes. ‘He didn’t do one thing to her. No one ever does anything to her. She just tries to kill everyone for no reason.’
The female cop wasn’t interested in what feisty nine-year-old kids had to say. ‘Get on the ground!’ she yelled, and Vinnie started obeying, or he started playing mudslide down a mountain. Alan and Jamesy tried to catch him, or to soften his fall, but how can you stop a mudslide? They lost interest in the cops because when their BFG’s mass subsided, he released something between a wail and a moan. It wasn’t Vinnie. He was badly hurt.
Lori hadn’t seen where the axe had hit him, hadn’t seen if it was the head or the blade that had connected, and her back to the cops and to Mavis, she squatted to feel his jeans for blood.
The cops got Mavis onto her feet. The male walked her inside – to look for injuries. He might have found a bruise if she dropped her pants, though Vinnie hadn’t caused it. Lori tried to tell the female cop that Vinnie had done nothing. She wouldn’t listen. She wanted to handcuff him. He needed his hands, one to support him, and one to stop Lori touching his left leg.
‘She’s chopped off his leg with the axe,’ Neil said. ‘Her fingerprints will be on it.’ He watched too many cop shows, but was flogging a dead horse.
‘He needs an ambulance,’ Lori said. He was shaking. Their BFG shaking? ‘I think she’s broken his leg.’ She’d felt no blood, but there was something seriously wrong with him. Vinnie didn’t sit down in the dirt. Vinnie didn’t sit down – except when he was eating.